Admirers of Australia’s Indigenous artists have been pushing for a serious, large-scale presentation of their work at a major U.S. museum for decades. The quality of the work undoubtedly warrants it: The best Australian Indigenous (or Aboriginal) art is not only visually stunning but philosophically rich and politically provocative.
When, after a month-long delay caused by the government shutdown, “The Stars We Do Not See” opened at the National Gallery of Art, we finally got our wish. How sad to report, then, that the show is a crashing disappointment.
Instead of being lucid and concise, the story the show tells is incoherent. There are some great things, among them a vast collaborative painting made in 1980 by Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri; a couple of superb bark paintings by John Mawurndjul (Balang Nakurulk) and Jimmy Njiminjuma; and a huge sculpture, woven by 13 women from Maningrida in Australia’s far north, suspended from the ceiling by the exhibition’s entrance.
And yet this exhibition of more than 200 works by 130 artists is inclusive to a fault, so that the impact of its scattered masterpieces is muffled by a surfeit of clotted brushstrokes, clashing color and clumsy presentation.
This show should have been the culmination of a banner year for Australian Indigenous art on the world stage. It comes on the heels of a retrospective at London’s Tate Modern of Emily Kam Kngwarray, perhaps the most celebrated of Australian Indigenous artists.
Soon after seeing that show in August, I traveled to Australia where I saw outstanding group shows at Sydney’s S.H. Ervin Gallery and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and at the University of Melbourne’s Potter Museum of Art. All expanded my understanding of Aboriginal art, renewing my sense of wonder.
The Washington show was a chance to bring all this together and make the case for art that has too often been mischaracterized (as craft or ethnography) and sold short (as art market product).
It could have been an exhibition of stunning solemnity and visual intensity — intelligent, provocative and occasionally funny (I’m thinking of the brilliant works of Kaylene Whiskey and Richard Bell). Instead, it looks arbitrary and unkempt, like someone has emptied their pockets into an airport security tray.
Imagine, if you will, presenting the first international survey of the revolution inaugurated by Fauvism and carried forth by Matisse, the Cubists, Mondrian, Kandinsky and Kirchner by stuffing the show with minor league figures like Raoul Dufy and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Such is the effect of this show.
Is it the National Gallery’s fault?
Only partly. The show is a packaged, traveling exhibit, drawn from just one collection: the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. (After Washington, it will travel to Denver; Portland, Oregon; Salem, Massachusetts; and Toronto.)
Although Myles Russell-Cook, a former head of Australian and First Nations art at the NGV, is named as the curator, the show appears to have been assembled by committee, with low-level ethical considerations — above all, an obligation to represent as many different communities as possible — elevated over sharp aesthetic decisions.
Just as Australian Indigenous culture is not uniform, the art produced by individual artists and groups across generations is not all equally interesting. While Australia’s Indigenous art comes out of a culture that is incredibly old (the Melbourne University survey was pithily titled “65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art”), the majority of the work on display in art galleries was made after 1970. So we should put aside our Rousseau — our often-racist assumptions about “authentic,” “primitive” or “precontact” modes of expression — and be on guard against sentimentality and projection.
Before the British colonized eastern Australia with convicts in 1788, there were something like 600 distinct Indigenous “nations” speaking over 250 languages. And yet the British rationalized their actions by declaring the whole continent “terra nullius.” The land, this legal doctrine declared, belonged to no one.
To dispossession were now added disease, massacres, disenfranchisement, displacement, forced assimilation, the government-sanctioned removal of vast numbers of children from their parents and decades of misconceived policies seeking to rectify the ills that all this caused — among them alcoholism, child neglect and abuse and pervasive hopelessness.
It would be very wrong, however, to imagine that all this intergenerational trauma defines Australia’s Indigenous people. Far from it. Theirs is a vibrant, living culture, their deep traditions and contemporary achievements ever more central to Australia’s idea of itself.
For tens of thousands of years, Australian Aborigines have been drawing and painting on rocks, applying ceremonial markings to bodies and on the ground, and making useful objects, often of great beauty. Early in the 20th century, western anthropologists encouraged Indigenous groups in Arnhem Land, in the Northern Territory, to commit ancient designs onto prepared bark. This eventually led to a flourishing of artistic innovation that, in the hands of artists working out of mission stations and trading posts at Yirrkala and Maningrida, has been nothing short of staggering.
The 1960s and ’70s saw tectonic changes. A land rights campaign gathered momentum after a petition on bark was presented to the federal government in 1963. A referendum in 1967 recognized Indigenous people as part of Australia’s population for the first time. And an Aboriginal flag was created in 1971.
That same year, in a place west of Alice Springs called Papunya, a new kind of painting was inaugurated by a group of male elders.
Papunya was struggling with what the anthropologist Fred Myers has described as “high morbidity rates, riots, violence and despair.” Painting emerged as an emergency response to primal — and entirely rational — fears: “If I don’t paint this story, some White fella might come and steal my country,” Charlie Tjararu Tjungurrayi said.
The results were both ancient and completely new. Originally committed in acrylic paints to discarded composition board, fruit box ends and floor tiles, these early works would flower into what the art critic Robert Hughes described as “the last great art movement of the 20th century.”
Rooted in a conception of landscape that poses a challenge, and even a rebuke, to Western conventions, the paintings quickly grew in size and ambition. Where western landscape painting is rooted in divisions — between titled properties, earth and sky, figure and ground, and description and narration — Western Desert painting integrates all these elements on the same two-dimensional plane.
The works can look like maps, or aerial views, but they combine (as Steve Martin, an avid, well-informed collector of Australian Indigenous art succinctly explained in the catalogue to a recent show) “symbolic depictions of journeys, encounters, vegetation, and complex creation stories called ‘The Dreaming.’”
The Dreaming is more than just a bunch of myths or origin stories. It ties features in the landscape to specific ancestral stories. And it projects various social processes into a symbolic space. In many ways, as Myers has pointed out, it constitutes the invisible foundation of the visible.
This relationship — between the visible and the (sacred) invisible — can be fraught. When the artists at Papunya worked up their early experimental efforts into large-scale paintings, some Aboriginal elders censured them for revealing restricted knowledge. Stones were thrown at the first exhibition of their work, in Alice Springs in 1974.
“The permanence of these works is in our minds,” said a Warlpiri elder, Maurice Jupurrula Luther, in 1982. “We do not need museums or books to remind us of our traditions. … We are not and do not ever want to become professional painters.”
Although the painters clearly felt otherwise, they began to modify their works, hastening the evolution of distinctive, increasingly powerful new visual styles. Some veered toward minimalism. Others embraced exquisite color harmonies and dancing optical effects through lines, dots or zig zags. Others still pursued what amounts to a kind of abstract “history painting,” combining dreamings with historical events.
The weakness of “The Stars We Do Not See” has to do with institutional confidence. A museum as prestigious as the National Gallery didn’t need to take a packaged show from a single, necessarily limited state gallery collection. Once its leaders decided such a show was worth doing, it should have seconded an experienced, independent curator to borrow widely from the best collections.
To seduce and confound a (mostly) uninitiated public, it could have opened with a solemn display of the very best work made in the tradition inaugurated in 1971. It could have filled two or three galleries with a well-spaced display of paintings by such artists as Turkey Tolson, Mick Namarari, Ronni Tjampitjinpa, Emily Kngwarray, Rover Thomas, Doreen Reid Nakamarra and Yukultji Napangati.
To jolt viewers out of the awe such a display would have induced, it could have followed this with a display of the sharpest political art by (mostly) urban Indigenous artists. After that, separate displays might have introduced us to the best bark painting, to weaving and sculpture, and to the most powerful art from a selection of distinct communities in, for instance, the Kimberly, at Yuendemu and on Bathurst and Melville islands.
The NGA show’s organizers have gestured at such a sequence. But the impact of the show’s scattered masterpieces is diluted throughout with desultory works of scant visual appeal. The curators didn’t need to throw in everything to convey the range and variety of Australia’s Indigenous art. A more focused approach needn’t have meant a smaller show. The fundamental problem is that it elevates diversity over quality, rather than seeking a concentrated impact that would lead naturally to a broadening of curiosity down the track.
Still, if this show is an opportunity wasted, it’s also an invitation to the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago or the Metropolitan Museum to take on a similar project with the requisite conviction and rigor.
“The Stars We Do Not See: Australian Indigenous Art.” National Gallery of Art. Through March 1. The show will travel to the Denver Art Museum; the Portland Art Museum in Oregon; the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts; and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.
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