Visions of a changing topography

By Nicolas Rothwell
The Australian
13 August 2011

CAN a single exhibition restore confidence to a flagging art market, and a wall full of bright canvases embody an entire culture?


The 300-odd works on view at this year's Desert Mob show, held in Alice Springs at the close of a trying season for the Aboriginal art movement, serve as a tonic and leave little room for anxiety or scepticism.

It's not so much that this 21st annual survey of paintings and sculptures from Central Australian art centres is, as always, strong, but that it is strong in unexpected ways. Its stand-outs are surprises: the order and rhythm of the exhibition emerges from within the pieces hanging in the galleries of the Araluen Centre rather than from some grand, imposed design. Even in this era of intense promotion of Aboriginal art projects in remote areas, Desert Mob retains its unvarnished charm.

The participating art centres themselves a mixed bunch ranging from long-established studios to struggling outposts send in a selection of their works, up to a total of 10. Everything submitted is shown, in a tight display: the similarities between the artists from each community stand out, as do regional stylistic currents and variations.

The art is here on its own terms. Araluen's subtle exhibition curator Stephen Williamson, a former co-ordinator from Warlayirti at Balgo Hills, is in his element, quietly balancing a riot of primal colours. "How alive this movement is," he mused in his low voice at the opening on Friday. "Constantly changing, developing in a new direction, different artists standing out in different years."

The pattern of recent Desert Mob shows has been consistent. A new star art centre emerges and its works are admired and collected. They soon receive blue-chip commercial gallery showings and state institutions now slaves to fashion rush to buy up their stocks: one year the remote Gibson Desert art centre of Kayili, next Tjungu Palya from Nyapari in the Mann Range, the next Mimili Maku from the heart of the Pitjantjatjara lands. This year the pattern repeats with Iwantja Arts, the art centre at Indulkana community, close by the Stuart Highway, on the desert's eastern fringe.

Dallas Gold's Raft Artspace held a spectacular exhibition of work by one of Iwantja's most senior men, Whiskey Tjukangku, earlier this year, and a pair of intriguing, icon-rich canvases by the same artist hangs at Desert Mob, together with a collective men's work in which Tjukangku also had a hand. Ngura, it is titled "home" or "camp" as are so many paintings in this exhibition and it captures a striking vision of the country, red and deep ochre, surmounted by black circlets and barbed, spear-like forms. Such imagery can be found in weathered engravings on outcrops in the southern desert country: it is the mark of an old tradition, a way of seeing the world, now enlivened in acrylic colour on linen canvas for new eyes.

With so great a wealth of paintings and sculptural pieces on view, the spectator rushes to compare and judge. But the sheer profusion of the works, the totality of the exhibition, is its core message. The desert art centres are a managed, artificial archipelago, but the rich variation in the tapestry of the artworks they harvest makes a simple point. All through the desert inland, the show seems to murmur, this is going on. These multiple ways of conceiving and picturing the country still thrive. Along with the income management, poverty and abjection, this is also present. Make of it what you will. The remote communities are not just zones of crisis, then; they are also home to a strange, persisting renaissance. Consider Amata, a small collection of houses in the heart of desert range country and in years gone past a byword for petrol-sniffing chaos. It is now the home of Tjala, one of the region's most successful art centres. Large works by its painters dominate the main gallery of Araluen, and the key canvas is an elusive, hieroglyph-like emblem in reds, blues and deep orange and yellow colours by Wawiriya Burton, an old woman born in the bush and steeped in her traditions. She says next to nothing about the core subject matter of her work; there it hangs like a veil of beauty, something to be astonished by as much as something to gather up and own. It is striking how many of the most potent paintings in the exhibition are by men and women of senior standing in their ceremonial religious realms; how many, too, are by prominent healers. The most lyrical canvas in the show, Wati Ngintaka Tjukurpa (lizard man dreaming), by Harry Tjutjuna from Ninuku Arts is one example: a wash of loosely intermeshing colours reds, pale shades of ochre, pinks, purples and deep night-sky blues, in the midst of which the lizard figure, half-hidden, can be made out.
Here is both the wonder and challenge of the desert art-making tradition, caught by this show in its evolving flight. It embodies a distinct way of apprehending the landscape and this difference, which lends it consummate value for outside eyes, is what makes it almost impossible to decode and grasp. It is a tradition under dreadful threat: even the fact that it needs to be husbanded and preserved speaks of its weakness.

Can it be prolonged, and renewed? Can the tradition be passed on to younger artists, through instruction, workshops and all the other courses outsiders love to provide? Should it be? The masterworks with immediate appeal in Desert Mob 2011 are almost all by elderly artists figures such as Lily Hargraves from Lajamanu in the Tanami Desert, or Tommy Mitchell and Carol Golding from Warakurna Arts in Western Australia and this association of artistry with age is natural.

Painting, in Aboriginal communities with surviving deep culture and language, is linked with ceremonial knowledge systems that are passed on slowly through decades of instruction. Much of the work of cultural transmission goes on far beyond the realm of art centres and publicly funded schemes. Yet the art centre movement is widening its bid to preserve desert life-ways and a symposium held in concert with the opening of the exhibition reviewed the range of programs that have sprung up as part of this campaign.

One of the more startling stages for cultural revival projects is the Alice Springs town camp art centre network, a set of studios where bright-painted landscapes, felt figurines and sculptures constructed from found objects have been produced for several years. A team of dedicated co-ordinators stands behind this school, which increasingly generates works of substance as well as charm.

Perhaps the most compelling pieces in the idiom are being made at the Yarrenyty Arltere art centre associated with Larapinta Valley town camp. Rhonda Sharpe's bird figures stitched together from recycled, stuffed woollen blanket material draw the eye, as does the "bird of colour" by the leading exponent of soft-form sculpture, Constance Robinja.

At nearby Tangentyere Artists, a handful of painters for several years has produced picturesque scenes and topographies of the deserts surrounding Alice Springs. One of them is Jane Young, whose pieces often depict rockscapes from the Simpson. For this exhibition she has recorded a version of her country in reddish paint on a thin cylinder of metal pipe. It is a strangely poignant, suggestive work.

The various camp art centres may not be as easy to brand or market as the far-flung culture outposts of the sand-ridge western desert, but they have their part in the overall movement, for Alice Springs plays host to bush painters marooned by ill-health or family difficulties in town.

Other painters and sculptors are based perforce in the vicinity. Outside town, within the confines of the correctional centre, the little-known Greenbush Art Group can be found. Its floating membership often includes well-connected painters marking time. One of the most impressive of the sculptural ensembles at this year's Desert Mob is from the hand of a Greenbush man Kevin Dixon, whose "found object" animals have a sharp, life-like quirkiness. His bush pig with its upturned snout and his grazing camel, wavering on its pipe-legs, serve to expand the accepted categories for desert art-making once again.

It can happen in strange places, with unexpected materials. The fire catches where you least anticipate it and it burns in unpredictable ways.