Remote Avant-Garde: Aboriginal Art under Occupation 9780822374602

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REMOTE AVANT-­G ARDE

Objects/Histories Critical Perspectives on Art, Material Culture, and Representation A series edited by Nicholas Thomas

REMOTE AVANT-­G ARDE

Aboriginal Art under Occupation Jennifer Loureide Biddle

Duke University Press | Durham and London | 2016

© 2016 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper ♾ Interior design by Mindy Basinger Hill Typeset in Minion Pro by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Biddle, Jennifer Loureide, author. Remote avant-­garde : aboriginal art under occupation / Jennifer Loureide Biddle. pages cm—(Objects/histories) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-­0-­8223-­6055-­1 (hardcover : alk. paper) isbn 978-­0-­8223-­6071-­1 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn 978-­0-­8223-­7460-­2 (e-­book) 1. Artists, Aboriginal Australian—Australia—Northern Territory.  2. Art, Aboriginal Australian—Australia—Northern Territory.  3. Aboriginal Australians—Australia—Northern Territory— Government relations. i. Title. ii. Series: Objects/histories. n7402.n67b53 2016 704.03′991509429—dc23 2015031595 Frontispiece: June Walkutjukurr Richards, We went to the Mission and we used to paint differently, 2007. © Warburton Arts Project. Image courtesy of Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art. Cover art: Pantjiti Ungkari Mackenzie posing with Niningka Lewis’s Tjanpi Film Camera, npy Women’s Council car park, Alice Springs, 2007. © Tjanpi Desert Weavers, npy Women’s Council. Photo by J. Foster. Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the unsw Art & Design, University of New South Wales (formerly College of Fine Arts), which provided funds toward the publication of this book.

CONTENTS List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments xiii Introduction The Imperative to Experiment 1 One Humanitarian Imperialism 21

PART I BILITERACIES Two Tangentyere Artists 41 Three June Walkutjukurr Richards 77 Four Rhonda Unurupa Dick 91

PART II HAPTICITIES Five Tjanpi Desert Weavers 109 Six Warnayaka Art: Yurlpa 139 Seven Yarrenyty Arltere Artists 159

PART III HAPPENINGS Eight Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route 181 Nine The Warburton Arts Project 197 Epilogue (Not) a “Lifestyle Choice” 217 Notes 221 Further Resources 233 References 235 Index 257

ILLUSTRATIONS FIGURES I.1. Milpirri 2012, Lajamanu, NT 4 I.2. Milpirri 2012, Lajamanu, NT 5 I.3. Wanta Steve Jampijinpa Patrick and performers, Milpirri 2012, Lajamanu, NT 5 I.4. Tim Jampijinpa Newth, Myra Nungarrayi Patrick, and David Japaljarri McMicken, Milpirri 2012, Lajamanu, NT 6 I.5. Artists at work, Warnayaka Art and Cultural Aboriginal Corporation, 2011, Lajamanu, NT 8 I.6. At practice for Milpirri 2011, Lajamanu, NT 15 1.1. Billboard, Mascot International Airport, Sydney, 2013 29 1.2. Gordon Bennett, Cornfield (with scarecrow), from the Bounty Hunter series, 1991 34 2.1. Margaret Boko Nampitjinpa working in the Tangentyere Artists studio, 2013 42 2.2. Rhonda Napanangka working in the Tangentyere Artists studio, 2013 45 2.3. Sally M. Mulda working in the Tangentyere Artists studio, 2013 47 2.4. Exhibition: Selfies: Representations of Self and Town Camp Artists, Tangentyere Artist Gallery, Alice Springs, NT, 2014 51 2.5. Jane Young, Little Rocks in the Simpson Desert, 2013 53 2.6. Recycled bottle top and tin lid earrings created by various artists, Tangentyere Artists Gallery, 2012 54 2.7. Doris Thomas working in the Tangentyere Artists studio, 2013 57 2.8. Rhonda Napanangka, Second Hand Shopping, 2010 59 2.9. Margaret Boko Nampitjinpa, The Story of Mingkiri the Mouse, 2011 63 2.10. Margaret Boko Nampitjinpa working in the Tangentyere Artists studio, 2013 65

2.11. Margaret Boko Nampitjinpa, White Kids and Black Kids Jumping on Cars, 2011 67 2.12. Sally M. Mulda, Policeman: Mother and Father Drunk, 2013 70 2.13. Exhibition: Selfies: Representations of Self and Town Camp Artists, Tangentyere Artists Gallery, Alice Springs, NT, 2014 73 2.14. Sally M. Mulda, They Are Drinking Beer at Bush, 2012 73 2.15. Sally M. Mulda working in the studio, 2013 75 3.1. June Walkutjukurr Richards, Pretty Flower, undated 78 3.2. June Walkutjukurr Richards, Mirrka price, undated 81 3.3. June Walkutjukurr Richards, Carpetbagger, 2008 82 3.4. June Walkutjukurr Richards, Breaking our backs, 2008 84 3.5. June Walkutjukurr Richards, Gimme, 2008 86 3.6. June Walkutjukurr Richards, New Idea, 2008 87 3.7. June Walkutjukurr Richards, The Explorers, 2006 88 4.1. Rhonda Unurupa Dick with her grandmother, Mary Katatjuku Pan, at the inaugural Desart Art Workers Photography Award 2012, Araluen Arts Centre, Alice Springs, NT 93 4.2. Rhonda Unurupa Dick, Panel 1 from the series My Great-­Grandmother’s Country. My 2 Grandfather’s Mother’s Birthplace, 2012 97 4.3. Rhonda Unurupa Dick, Panel 2 from the series My Great-­Grandmother’s Country. My 2 Grandfather’s Mother’s Birthplace, 2012 99 4.4. Rhonda Unurupa Dick, Panel 5 from the series My Great-­Grandmother’s Country. My 2 Grandfather’s Mother’s Birthplace, 2012 101 5.1. Nora Holland posing with a half-­made basket, “like being on television,” 2010 110 5.2. Kanytjupayi Benson (deceased), Shirley Bennett, Nuniwa Donegan (deceased), Margret Donegan, Melissa Donegan, Janet Forbes, Ruby Forbes (deceased), Deidre Lane, Elaine Lane, Freda Lane, Janet Lane, Wendy Lane, Angela Lyon, Sarkaway Lyon, Angkaliya Mitchell, Mary Smith, and Gail Nelson, Tjanpi Toyota, 2005 111 5.3. Nyinku Kulitja teaching at Tjanpi weaving workshops at WOMADelaide Festival, 2007 113 5.4. Pile of purchased baskets at npy Women’s Council bush meeting, 2003 115 5.5. Tjanpi workshop in Tjanpi Corner, Alice Springs, NT, 2006 116 viii | Illustrations

5.6. Nyukana Baker, Basket, 2012 118 5.7. Kunbry Pei Pei, Basket, 2008 119 5.8. Mary Katatjuku Pan dancing with her burned tree sculpture on her head in Pitjantjatjara country near Amata, SA, 2012 120 5.9. Tjunkaya Tapaya working on her large blue bird for Paarpakani (Take Flight), Pitjantjatjara country near Amata, SA, 2011 121 5.10. Yaritji Young working on her bird for Paarpakani (Take Flight), Pitjantjatjara country near Amata, SA, 2011 123 5.11. Paniny Mick, Paarpakani (Take Flight), 2012 124 5.12. Minyma Punu Kungkarangkalpa (Seven Sisters Tree Women) sculptures, Pitjantjatjara country near Amata, SA, 2013 125 5.13. Paniny Mick with her bird made for Paarpakani (Take Flight), Pitjantjatjara country near Amata, SA, 2011 126 5.14. Kanytjupayi Benson, Early Camp Crockery, 1996 128 5.15. Carson Biddle with her Tjanpi sculpture produced during workshop, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2013 129 5.16. Milyika Carol, Malpiya Davey, Pantjiti Lionel, and Niningka Lewis, Station Scene, 2009 130 5.17. Judith Inyika Chambers, The Big Green Tractor, 2014 131 5.18. Tjanpi Punu, completed works in Pitjantjatjara country near Amata, SA, 2012 133 5.19. Nancy Jackson and Eunice Yunurupa Porter parading with Tjilkamarta Minyma Kutjarra Mumu Wati Ngirntaka Warta at Warakurna in Ngaanyatjarra lands of WA, 2013 135 6.1. Yukurrukurru (various), acrylic on board, Yawulyu as Intergenerational Art, Lajamanu, NT, 2011 140 6.2. Left to right: Yulurrku Nangala Kelly, Apajai aka Raphaelia Napaljarri Kelly, Lily Nungarrayi Hargraves, Lynette Napangardi Tasman, Molly Napurrurla Tasman, Rosie Napurrurla Tasman, Jennifer Nampijinpa Biddle, Myra Nungarrayi Patrick, Reide Japanangka Marshall, and Carson Napanangka Biddle, Lajamanu Warlpiri Women’s Yawulyu exhibition, opening night, Sydney, 2007 141 6.3. Lynette Napangardi Tasman, Wapirra Jukurrpa, 2007 142 6.4. Rosie Napurrurla Tasman, Kalajirri Jukurrpa, 2007 143 6.5. Molly Napurrurla Tasman, Ngurlu, 2007 144 Illustrations | ix

6.6. Three generations of artists at work on Liirliirpa Yurlpa (in process), Warnayaka Art and Cultural Aboriginal Corporation, Lajamanu, NT, 2011 145 6.7. Rosie Napurrurla Tasman, Ngurlu (in process), Sydney, 2007 146 6.8. Rosie Napurrurla Tasman, Ngurlu Yukurrukurru (in process), Lajamanu, NT, 2011 148 6.9. Rosie Napurrurla Tasman, Ngurlu Yukurrukurru (in process), Lajamanu, NT, 2011 150 6.10. Lily Nungarrayi Hargraves, Ngalyipi Jukurrpa, 2007 152 6.11. Rosie Napurrurla Tasman, Ngurlu Yukurrukurru (in process), Lajamanu, NT, 2009 153 6.12. Rosie Napurrurla Tasman, Ngurlu, 2007 154 6.13. Lajamanu Warlpiri Women’s Yawulyu exhibition, opening night, Sydney, 2007 157 7.1. Marlene Rubuntja, Three Women from Yarrenyty Arltere, 2014 160 7.2. Yarrenyty Arltere Learning Centre, set for Little Dingi, with Tristam Malbunka’s Grandmother, 2012 161 7.3. Lorretta Banks with Marlene Rubuntja’s sculpture Little Dingi, on set at Yarrenyty Arltere Learning Centre for Little Dingi, 2012 163 7.4. Behind Yarrenyty Arltere Learning Centre with Marlene Rubuntja’s Little Dingi and friend (untitled), with Tristam Malbunka’s Grandfather, on set for Little Dingi, 2012 166 7.5. Dulcie Sharpe, Bush Banana Kunga, 2011 167 7.6. Rhonda Sharpe, I Saw Me and I Was Beautiful, 2012 170 7.7. Rhonda Sharpe, They Came from Nowhere, 2013 175 7.8. Rhonda Sharpe, Orange Alien, 2013 176 8.1. Completed canvases laid out on the red earth at Well 36, Kilykily, August 2007 182 8.2. Artists Nora Wompi, Bugai Whylouter, Kumpaya Girgaba, and Nyangapa Nora Nangapa, Kunawarritji, 2008 183 8.3. Paruku ipa artists work on their collaborative canvas, Paruku, 2007 185 8.4. Kenneth K. J. Martin and Paul Oceans filming, Well 36, Kilykily, 2007 186 8.5. Friday Jones and Kaye Bingham at Forrest’s Fort, Well 9, July 2007 187 8.6. Eubena (Yupinya) Nampitjin painting, Well 36, Kilykily, 2007 189 x | Illustrations

8.7. Morika Biljabu and Nicole Ma film Jakayu Biljabu painting, Well 36, Kilykily, 2007 191 8.8. Muni Rita Simpson pointing to a water hole on the canvas, Minyipuru (Seven Sisters), 2007 192 8.9. Women painting at the Kilykily painting workshop, Well 36, 2007 193 8.10. Child uses the One Road interactive, Perth, 2011 194 8.11. Exhibition visitors use the One Road interactive, Perth, 2011 195 9.1. Cyril Holland, Wanayowarra, 1992 204 9.2. Cyril Holland, Tjuntjunmarrarra Tjipilpa, 1992 206 9.3. Elizabeth Holland and Christine West, All the early days rockholes, 2001 208 9.4. Tjingapa Davies, Right Way to Have a Kurri, 1991 209 9.5. Elizabeth Holland, Wati Kutjarra at Talitjarra, 1992 214 9.6. Exhibition installation shot: Tu Di Shen Ti—Our Land Our Body, Tianjin Art Museum, China, 2013 215 9.7. Exhibition installation shot: Tu Di Shen Ti—Our Land Our Body, Tianjin Art Museum, China, 2013 215

PLATES (following page 46) 1. Doris Thomas, Thats Goanna, 2011 2. Margaret Boko Nampitjinpa, Tjulpu and Tjitji, 2013 3. June Walkutjukurr Richards, The Aboriginal Broadcasting Corporation, 2006 4. June Walkutjukurr Richards, We went to the Mission and we used to paint differently, 2007 5. Rhonda Unurupa Dick, Panel 3 from the series My Great-­Grandmother’s Country. My 2 Grandfather’s Mother’s Birthplace, 2012 6. Rhonda Unurupa Dick, Panel 4 from the series My Great-­Grandmother’s Country. My 2 Grandfather’s Mother’s Birthplace, 2012 7. Pantjiti Ungkari Mackenzie posing with Niningka Lewis’s Tjanpi Film Camera, Alice Springs, 2007 8. Nyurpaya Kaika-­Burton with her bird for Paarpakani (Take Flight), Pitjantjatjara country near Amata, SA, 2011 9. Nyurpaya Kaika-­Burton, Paarpakani (Take Flight), 2012 Illustrations | xi

10. Triumphant artists with their finished works made for Paarpakani (Take Flight), Pitjantjatjara country near Amata, SA, 2011 11. Molly Napurrurla Tasman, Yurlpa (in process), Lajamanu, NT, 2011 12. Rosie Napurrurla Tasman, Ngurlu/Kurlukuku/Lampurnu (Mulga Seeds / Diamond Dove / Breast Milk Drops), 2007 13. Rhonda Sharpe, The Night Birds, 2012 14. Dulcie Sharpe, Grandmothers can rest too, sometimes, 2012 15. Sally Rubuntja and Marlene Rubuntja, See how we stand, proud with our arms open!, 2013 16. Sally Rubuntja and Marlene Rubuntja, Woman with arms up because she is proud!, 2013 17. People looking at the artworks displayed at the Nyarna, Lake Stretch Artists Camp, August 2007 18. Cyril Holland, Tjillawarra Kirritji Warra Warra, 1992 19–20. Cyril Holland at work, Mitjika Rock Shelter, 1992

xii | Illustrations

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My first thanks to the artists and community members represented here, for entrusting me with their work, and the Art Centre directors, managers, and art workers who facilitated this project, including, from Tangentyere Artists, Margaret Boko Nampitjinpa, Sally M. Mulda, Rhonda Napanangka, and Louise Daniels specifically, as well as Liesl Rockchild, Sue O’Connor, Sia Cox, and Jo Byrne; Yarrenyty Arltere artists Marlene Rubuntja, Dulcie Sharpe, Louise Daniels, and Louise Robertson specifically, as well as Sophie Wallace; from Tjanpi Desert Weavers, Nyurpaya Kaika-­Burton, Katatjuku Mary Pan, Iluwanti Ungkutjuru Ken, Niningka Lewis, Euince Yunurupa Porter, Judith Inyika Chambers, Yaritji Young, and Janet Forbes specifically, as well as Michelle Young, Linda Rive, Clair Freer, Karina Menkhorst, and Jo Foster (especially); Tjala artists Rhonda Unurupa Dick, Katatjuku Mary Pan, Nyurpaya Kaika-­ Burton, and Frank Young specifically, as well as Skye O’Meara; Warnayaka Aboriginal Arts and Aboriginal Cultural Organisation artists Molly Napurrurla Tasman, Rosie Napurrurla Tasman, Lily Nungarrayi Hargreaves, Myra Nungarrayi Patrick, Lynette Napangardi Tasman, Yulurrku Zina Nangala Kelly, Lava Nangala Kelly, and Gwenyth Napanangka Tasman specifically, as well as Louisa Erglis and David Erglis; Warburton Arts Project artists and Gary Proctor specifically, as well as Albie Viegas; Carly Davenport, Tim Acker, John Carty, and Curtis Taylor, previous team members of Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route, and Molly Hewitt of form. To Wanta Steve Jampijinpa Patrick and Lynette Napangardi Tasman I owe specific acknowledgment not only for translations, poetics, and correctives but for enduring commitment to me, my family, and my research. To Desart Inc. executive officer Philip Watkins and Michele Culpitt (senior program manager), for formal collaboration underpinning this research through the public platform Same but Different: Experimentation and Innova-

tion in Desert Arts, and to Lisa Stefanoff, who codeveloped this initiative with me, I am deeply indebted, as well as to all of the participants of the seventeen community art organizations who presented their works at the Same but Different forums in Alice Springs in 2012 and 2013. While the Same but Different initiative and the nationally touring program Desert Animations that has accompanied it are not the subject of this book and can be sourced directly elsewhere (see Cultural Studies Review 21 [1], 2015), I nevertheless remain indebted to the deeply generous undertaking of this collaborative platform for the development of my thinking and writing. To paw (Pintubi Anmatjere Warlpiri) Media, Susan Locke, David Slowo, and Jeff Bruer, and Nick Lee of Central Australia Aboriginal Media Association (caama) for recording these events for further research and outreach purposes; and to Bronwyn Taylor, Melissa Kramer, and Parris Dewhurst at Desart Inc., for their administrative support of the greater Same but Different platform, my thanks. I am extremely fortunate to work in an academic environment where research is taken seriously. To the National Institute for Experimental Arts (niea), specifically, to niea director Jill Bennett, along with colleagues David McNeil, Chrisoula Lionis, Anna Munster, Michele Barker, Brenda L. Croft, and, more recently, Doug Kahn, Sarah Kenderdine, Mari Velonki, Laura Fisher, and Veronica Tello, I am grateful. Professional staff at niea Kathy Yeh, Rachael Kiang, Elena Knox, and, previously under the Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics (ccap), Shivaun Weybury, provided invaluable assistance to the research and writing of this book. Colleagues Jennifer Deger, Anna Gibbs, Faye Ginsburg, Ute Eickelkamp, Diana Young, Tess Lea, Djon Mundine, r e a, John von Sturmer, Shelly Errington, Hetti Perkins, Terry Smith, Josie Douglas, Chery L’Hirondelle, Chris Salter, Lisa Slater, Lilly Hibberd, Emelia Gelatis, Margaret Levi, Steven Gilchrist, David Howes, Anna Nettheim, Stephen Muecke, Ian McLean, and Beth Povinelli generously provided insight at various stages of my thinking. Fred Myers inspired this project on more than one basis. Research assistance for this book was provided by Phillipa Roberton, Els van Leeuwen, Philippa Barr, and Sudiipta Dowsett. Alison Groves worked image magic. Ellen Oredsson and Sophia Benjamin provided bibliographic assistance and Sylvia Colegrove of Rhubarb, copyediting. Caroline Marsh read early (and late) drafts, providing exactly the feedback I didn’t know I needed most. Elspeth xiv | Acknowledgments

Probyn’s critical commentary on these chapters pushed my thinking and my writing. Tim Newth and David McMicken, directors of Tracks Dance Company, share personal and professional background stories to this book that matter, as does Christiane Senn. My children, Reide and Carson, Sophia and Stuart, have grown up over the course of the research and writing of this book. To them, to Jack Marshall and my extended family, thank you, no matter what. Roger Benjamin has been a champion cheerleader for this book and for me. And to my father, Bruce Biddle, and my aunt, Katherine Biddle, who got what I was modeling before I did myself, I remain indebted. Ken Wissoker, Elizabeth Ault, and Liz Smith at Duke could not have provided closer attention or better advice. My thanks to Nicholas Thomas for his vital initial feedback. This book would not have been possible without an Australian Research Council (arc) Future Fellowship (2010–14), which generously provided not only the resources for field and collaborative research but the time required for its undertaking. The former College of Fine Arts (cofa) at unsw (now unsw Art & Design) Staff Grants and Conference Funds provided further assistance. The Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (­a iatsis) funded Yawulyu as Intergenerational Art: A Pilot Study (2010), and a previous arc Discovery Project provided resources for the Lajamanu Warlpiri Women’s Workshop (research underpinning chapter 5). Portions of this book have appeared partially or in earlier drafts: chapter 3 in “Art under Intervention: The Radical Ordinary of June Walkutjukurr Richards,” Art Monthly, no. 227 (2010); chapter 8 in “Making (Not Taking) History: Yiwarra Kuju The Canning Stock Route,” Art Monthly, August 2012; chapter 5 in “A Politics of Proximity: Tjanpi and Other Experimental Western Desert Art,” Studies in Material Thinking 8 (2012), http://www.materialthinking.org /papers/88. Chapter 6 appears as “Notes on the Hapticity of Colour,” in Diana Young, ed., Colour (London: Sean Kingston, forthcoming); republished with permission of the publisher. Chapter 9 appears in the second Tu Di Shen Ti— Our Land Our Body (2013) catalog, under the title “Provocations from the Margins: The Production and Curation of the Warburton Arts Project”; republished with permission of the publisher.

Acknowledgments | xv

REMOTE AVANT-­G ARDE

INTRODUCTION

THE IMPERATIVE TO EXPERIMENT It was an unseen thing and now it is a seen thing. Wanta Jampijinpa Pawu-­Kurlpurlurnu | Ngurra-­kurlu: A Way of Working with Warlpiri People

In this book I trace, with great excitement, an emergent body of aesthetics that I call remote avant-­garde: new and experimental art of the Central and Western Desert of Australia, including the town camps of Alice Springs.1 Remote Avant-­ Garde tracks trajectories of tradition taking shape today: from the stop-­motion animation and still-­life sculpture of Yarrenyty Arltere to the digital landscape portraiture of Tjala Arts artist Rhonda Unurupa Dick and the Desart Photography Award, the grass and fiber artistry of Tjanpi Desert Weavers, the ochre experimentations of Warnayaka Art, the biliterary poetics of Tangentyere Artists’ town camp artists, and the acrylic witness paintings of June Walkutjukurr Richards. These art forms and practices may not look like acrylic Jukurrpa (Dreaming) paintings that have become representative of desert Aboriginal tradition. Yet they are produced by the same communities (as well as by newer art communities) and, in fact, by many of the same artists (as well as by their descendants). This demonstrates a lived, intergenerational continuity between earlier art practices and emergent aesthetics taking shape today that is vital, including the imperative to experiment itself. The fact that Indigenous heritage requires “remembering the future,” or what Hetti Perkins and Victoria Lynne (1993) called, over two decades ago, “insurgent acts of cultural reiteration” that revivify as they reveal tradition for the first time, needs itself to be re-­remembered, as it were, in relation to a new wave of contemporary desert practices taking shape today.2 The Western Desert art movement is now recognized as what Robert Hughes

called the “last great art movement of the 20th century” (in Henly 2005), spectacularly transforming the national and global art stage over the past four decades, from Michael Nelson Jagamara’s masterful mosaic Possum and Wallaby Dreaming (1988) at the new Australian Parliament House to the Hetti Perkins and Brenda L. Croft Indigenous curatorial design commission for the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris (2006).3 In the wake of this aesthetic revolution, no small surge of research and scholarship has followed (Johnson 1994, 2008; Perkins and Fink 2000; Myers 2002b; Bardon and Bardon 2004). However, very little has been written about aesthetic developments that have taken shape since. This book seeks to address this lack. Remote Avant-­Garde models Aboriginal art as “art under occupation.” As I discuss in chapter 1, since 2007 a new Australian government policy called the Northern Territory Emergency Response (nter)—or, more simply, the Intervention—has seen the targeting of remote Aboriginal communities as sites of severe social dysfunction, abject poverty, perversion, and disadvantage. In this climate and, specifically, in the absence of a historical record or responsible media representation, art provides primary evidence to the contrary. This book argues for a positive (but not naive) reconfiguration of the so-­called remote, identifying the critical importance of contemporary art practice both as a primary means for self-­presentation and as material ways of doing and being in place otherwise silenced, marginalized, or disavowed. Art in this context is not a luxury or a leisure-­time pursuit.4 Art under occupation is art as survival: how to keep hands, eyes, ears attuned to ways of sensing, knowing, seeing, making; whose very realities are under occupation, subject to relentless assault, dismissal, disavowal on a day-­to-­day basis.5 How to remain responsive to and responsible for intangible heritage, at-­risk vernacular languages, iterative participatory practice bound to place and to others, in a context where not only are the rights to remain in traditional homelands under threat,6 but the right to be Aboriginal in place is itself the subject of attack? This book profiles emergent aesthetics in the context of national emergency. It asks how qualities of attachment, belonging, and endurance—cultural and linguistic life-­sustaining capacities—are reproduced against any number of everyday violence/s of disavowal and impasse. Elizabeth Povinelli (2014) figures emergent Indigenous mediations as “artefacts at the precipice of the figured,” highlighting at once the struggle, on the ground as it were, and the pre2 | Introduction

carious conditions of visibility itself: what she calls “the effort of emergence and the endurance of the otherwise.” If my focus remains throughout this book on the uncertain conditions of aesthetic possibility under the nter Intervention, it is because the kinds of “slow death” (Berlant 2011) or “slow violence” (Nixon 2013)—what Tess Lea (2014) figures as seeping, relentless, “water that leaches through structural cracks” attrition of the crisis-­ordinary for Aboriginal people and communities today—it is because the fact of the nter Intervention, of the condition of occupation itself in Australia, remains unregistered and undersignified and is fast becoming normalized. To put it more pointedly, in Giorgio Agamben’s (1997) terms of occupied life and aesthetics, following Demos (2013), how can one represent aesthetically a life severed from representation politically? These arts stage the promise and failure of the nation-­state, what Agamben calls the “naked” or “bare life,” in which sanctioned “zones of indifference” suspend the reach of law and thus reveal the very foundations of neoliberal promise—equality, freedom, justice—to be a ruse. The rights of Australian citizenry are not guaranteed to remote Aboriginal people, as the nter Intervention makes patently clear (see chapters 1 and 2). The “remote” is not, however, only a target of government intervention. It is a term equally dominant and equally problematic (if for different reasons) in the field of art. Margo Neale (2010, 34) identifies this model as a pernicious dichotomy within Aboriginal art appreciation, divided by types of Aboriginal art and artists along “a north-­south axis of authenticity . . . in the belief that only Aboriginal people living in remote communities are ‘real Aborigines’ . . . leading authentic cultural lives with attendant authentic cultural expressions.” The remote/urban dichotomy not only renders urban Indigenous art inauthentic and/or invisible (Croft 1993; Browning 2010) in comparison with the high-­end market of so-called “authentic” remote Aboriginal art; it presents remote art and artists as locked in time and tradition, invariably reduced, in the more vulgar version of this paradigm as Neale sketches it, to “museum artifacts.” This book identifies emergent remote art forms that challenge this taxonomy directly. Counter to the dominant Aboriginal art history that separates the traditional remote from the progressive urban, this book models a remote avant-­garde yet to be appreciated by existing frameworks. The demand for “remote” authenticity and traditionalism has erased the possibilities for the kinds of arts profiled here, producing impossible standards and an imaginary blinkerThe Imperative to Experiment | 3

Fig. I.1. Milpirri 2012, Lajamanu, NT. © Tracks Dance Company. Photo by P. Eve.

ing that in no way reflects the realities of contemporary Indigenous lifeworlds. This demand is mirrored directly in the art market’s predilections for works of high traditionalism (that is, acrylic Jukurrpa, Dreaming, paintings) and the very cramped space left for any other kinds of art. Australian art journalist Nicholas Rothwell depicts recent art from the Central and Western Desert as “a fateful journey away from its origins in ceremony and law” (Rothwell 2013) and, more recently, as an art movement whose lights “one by one . . . have gone out” (Rothwell 2014). The art in this book insists otherwise. Rather than a “dying sunset” model of once-­was traditional glory, emergent arts are actively developing new trajectories of culture and tradition that may not yet exist. As Wanta Jampijinpa Pawu-­Kurlpurlurnu (Pawu-­Kurlpurlurnu, Holmes, and Box 2008, 2) says of the newly conceived, experimental, Lajamanu Warlpiri ceremony Milpirri: “It was an unseen thing and now it is a seen thing.” My use of his phrase as an epigraph here and elsewhere (Biddle and Stefanoff 2015) indicates specifically what it is that I track throughout this book: how Aboriginal tradition is revealed through experimental practice. 4 | Introduction

Fig. I.2. Milpirri 2012, Lajamanu, NT. © Tracks Dance Company. Photo by P. Eve.

Fig. I.3. Wanta Steve Jampijinpa Patrick and performers, Milpirri 2012, Lajamanu, NT. © Tracks Dance Company. Photo by P. Eve.

Fig. I.4. Tim Jampijinpa Newth, Myra Nungarrayi Patrick, and David Japaljarri McMicken, Milpirri 2012, Lajamanu, NT. © Tracks Dance Company. Photo by P. Eve.

Milpirri shares with other experimental initiatives the fact that as an aesthetic, it belies categorical definition: is it festival or ceremony, dance or theater, traditional or postcontemporary? Milpirri combines traditional Jardi-­Warnpa ceremony with hip-­hop, break dancing, and high theatrical visual design. A radical Lajamanu Warlpiri experiment since 2005, in an intercultural partnership with Tracks Dance Company that dates back to 1987 (the longest sustained community art partnership in the Central Desert), Milpirri refuses to tour or expand beyond its base, its ground, at Lajamanu (see Newth, McMicken, and Biddle 2015). What Milpirri looks like for its one night every two years changes; new traditions, new revelations, emerge in country, on place, in intercultural collaboration; through bodies, hands, voices, and sensate intertwinings in what is ultimately, no doubt, a highly unlikely and deeply unwieldy form. Milpirri relies on experimental participatory experience and encounter to reveal Warlpiri heritage for the future.7 This is a model I am deeply indebted to and adopt in the approach developed across this book in exploring the vital role of experimentation in new aesthetic formations taking shape across the Desert today. For “Aboriginal histories of the future”—as Faye Ginsburg and Fred Myers 6 | Introduction

(2006) call the vital work being undertaken by Indigenous artists, filmmakers, and other key cultural producers today—to take shape, not only are “a myriad of cultural resources” required but also a harder to quantify dedication to long term, sustained collaborative struggle and fierce intercultural imagination (29). The challenges facing Indigenous communities and the remote art sector require the building of what Carly Davenport Acker (2015) calls “convergences”: new pathways and partnerships across the arts and media creative industries, including academic research; pathways that are, in this sense, tracked formally for the first time by this book.

i I need to stress from the outset that this book is not a survey. There is no field of remote avant-­garde that can be pointed to or simply bundled up by these pages. Any number of other books could readily be shaped in any number of different ways, given the sheer variety, quality, and dynamism of emergent arts taking shape. Where I can throughout the book, I have indicated further references to work I have not, alas, been able to include by direct discussion. What is profiled here is select, partial, particular; not an exhaustive or inclusive account but rather snapshots stolen and stilled momentarily only, as it were, from what is a far greater, more complex, and in-­flux terrain of experimental tradition. What I have written about reflects the limits of my own funding, capacities, and scope, as well as my implicated and attached professional and personal history in particular Indigenous lifeworlds, where social relationships and prior knowledge are primary and obligatory conditions of research. What I feel I can, should, and am authorized to write about, in direct commitment to the artists, communities, and projects these works belong to, is as much a part of the so-­called field I am following, in this sense, as the works themselves, as they carve out new territories, assembled here for the first time. The question I face in writing this book is how to engender visibility of these new and emergent art forms without reducing their radical gesture.8 These artworks are materially embedded and embodied, what Fred Myers (2002, 338) calls the defining “inalienability” of Western Desert aesthetics. In any number of ways, the art in this book does not safely or securely produce the one thing that the art object is, ultimately, said to possess: the very distinction from—its The Imperative to Experiment | 7

Fig. I.5. Artists at work, Warnayaka Art and Cultural Aboriginal Corporation, 2011, Lajamanu, NT. Photo by J. Biddle, courtesy of Warnayaka Art and Cultural Aboriginal Corporation.

apartness as an object-­form—the subjects who produce it. This book explores the importance of this material inseparability politically, aesthetically, affectively. Desert art is less representational than performative, in keeping with the traditions from which it derives. It is not primarily discursive or verbal (or if discursive, the vernacular narrative specificities that drive these works have been sidelined, dumbed down, or replaced by something else—issues explored in part I). These arts do not lend themselves easily to the ruthless abstractions and alienating tendencies of academic theory; even if they are, in Roland Barthes’s (1975) sense of it, highly “writerly” (as opposed to “readerly”) aesthetics, that is, they incite analysis, writing, because they rely upon and demand response as part of their participatory demand. This is no aesthetics of illustration. These are primary affective ontologies: ways of doing and being and sensing in Indigenous-­specific, practice-­based 8 | Introduction

modalities of collaborative process and collective assemblage; aesthetics that require completion through encounter. If my analysis privileges the work of affect, it is because these arts themselves privilege affect.9 Affects are messy, impure, unbounded, and this is why they matter. They move faster than and differently from ethical or politically correct proposition and posturing; they cross and confound bounded ideals of nation-­states, identities, place. They trump and outwit any amount of theorizing or any singular model of aesthetics, and provide no small platform, accordingly, from which to model the kinds of complex, embodied-­perceptual capacities of Central and Western Desert art forms and practices. This book develops directly from my previous research for breasts, bodies, canvas: Central Desert Art as Experience (Biddle 2007) on experimental developments driven by female artists over the course of the Western Desert art movement. Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Kathleen Petyarre, Dorothy Napangardi, and others radically transformed what was then an emergent field dominated by male artists whose more iconography-­based aesthetics had come to typify the art of the remote Western Desert. These female artists undertook a certain “feminization of the Dreaming,” drawing upon female-­specific historiography in which marks and designs come directly from the bodies of women in women’s ceremony called yawulyu (in Warlpiri) or inma (in the Western Desert languages of Ngaanyatjara, Pitjantjatjara, and Yangunkatjara; see further chapters 4 and 6). The art of female artists became more affective, harnessing the traditional impetus of female-­specific capacities to radically intensify the aesthetic force of what Western Desert art was capable of “doing”; a strategic development in response to Whitefella outsiders who historically have failed to hear or get the greater point of the work. The move to so-­called abstraction evinced by female artists during this period intensified the originary visceral effects of Jukurrpa, the Dreaming. The primary Ancestral potencies of Jukurrpa, also called kuruwarri (marks, traces, essences, and presences found in country, and reproduced by women on the body in ceremony and, in turn, on canvas today), were heightened by a marked movement away from the site-­specific icon or story toward a more generic inscription, a move that made specific knowledge (of country, Ancestor, site) arguably less important than the very force of affect itself. The canvas instead became a site to encounter, a corporeal basis of human-­Ancestral lifeworld conThe Imperative to Experiment | 9

nectivity, a material re-­marking and remaking of Ancestral inscription-­turned-­ canvas to skin to country. The responsibility of Aboriginal artists to remake, to re-­mark, the world in Ancestrally derived and responsive terms today is palpable across all of the arts within this book, despite or even because of the very high degree of formal inventiveness. These arts utilize a diversity of multilingual and multimodal platforms. What language, any language, can be mobilized and harnessed to the task today? As the chapters explore, traditional affective-­based, corporeally located Indigenous arts are becoming more affectively intensive in response to emergent imperatives of cultural survival and frontier transversality (see Biddle 2012).

ii Well, back at home in Martu country, we keep telling people our stories, and our culture to anthropologists and archaeologists mainly, people who are coming and critiquing Jukurrpa (Dreamtime Cosmology). And I think that is where we need to be careful. We need to tell the same things in art today—that we are living the Jukurrpa. It’s not for outsiders to critique it, but we are completely immersed in it. And that’s how, you know, people from outside should see that too. Curtis Taylor | Yarljyirrpa

The premise of the book is that the emergent field of remote avant-­garde cannot simply be added to the greater cumulative canon of modern or contemporary art. Perceptibility, in this case, is no straightforward task of simply making present what is new in desert art. Jacques Rancière (2006, 2011) argues that the revolutionary work of aesthetics operates at the most primary level of politics, redistributing relationships between the visible and the sayable, the known and the unknown, words and things. Experimental arts of the desert are not, in this sense, an obvious avant-­garde but are more subtle, dispersed, antispectacular even. This book evolves a series of microanalyses of what remain to date largely indecipherable art practices in order to enable an ordinary-­life understanding of what is activated, made present, or known by these works for the first time. 10 | Introduction

An archival or provenance-­based approach to these works is inadequate. These works cannot be reduced to what Frantz Fanon (1963) originally called “custom”—formulaic illustrations or information “about” the culture and people from which they derive. These arts are produced in concrete entanglement with complex lifeworld circumstances and competing demands. The forms are unpredictable, unruly even (that is, at least in relation to art market demands), which explains in part their lack of art historical appreciation to date. Not only do these works fail to comply but they instigate ways of thinking, feeling, being that cannot be readily assimilated. These arts are less “mass-­cultural” in their provocations, even if they intensify or congeal in “consistency” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) as they at once approach and exceed the formal category of art. Remote Avant-­Garde is not art history. It does not seek to present a chronological account of artistic developments nor an inventory of who has produced what, when. These works write a historiography of a kind that isn’t mappable back onto a chronological or teleological version of progressivist history. Each chapter presents microhistories that write back to, as the works do themselves, historical and cultural contexts that would otherwise disallow the very conditions of their emergence. This book is equally not anthropology alone. While this project is unabashedly anthropological—it privileges the people, places, contexts, and perspectives of remote art production as what matters most; the life lived of Indigenous realities, atunements, attachments—nevertheless my approach is not strictly nor solely ethnographic. How people live and govern discrete meanings in a localized, bounded place is a model and a reality at risk itself in the contemporary conditions of the Australian nation-­state, as much as it is challenged by the global circuitry and demands of the arts industry. As an ethnographer, I needed to develop new methods and means to approach the research and writing of this book’s undertaking. Nor is my analysis a strict object-­oriented-­ontology. I do not “follow the object,” as Bruno Latour (2005) or others might. Nevertheless I share a commitment to taking the object form as primary.10 These arts are deeply social facts and active agents in disciplines dominated by either subject-­centric analyses (anthropology) or object-­focused chronology and description (art history).11 My task here is less to bring together these two fields than a different task altogether: how to keep the art alive in the terms in which it presents itself. The Imperative to Experiment | 11

Djon Mundine (2013) calls Aboriginal art an aesthetic of “moral and political insistence.” Such insistences are not secondary to what these works otherwise achieve. That is, I privilege here an analysis of the experimental art object as both encounter and event. Put simply, I argue that the experimental success of emergent desert art is due to its vital materiality.12 This vitality, as it is produced and consumed in an active participatory sense, engenders implicated relationships between object and subject, art and audience, encounter and experience. This book explores the vital materialities of contemporary aesthetics, as the works themselves demand. The artworks in this book are big, not necessarily in size but existentially— microtactics and minor strategies that require a certain shift in pace, posture, orientation in order to be apprehended. The enviro-­somatic facilitations of art to sustain and transmit “aesthetics of being”—not to possess the art object as much as to surrender to its terms, as Christopher Bollas (1987) figures the suspension of time and the radical transformative capacities at work in the aesthetic encounter—requires time itself.13 To allow for, attune to, take up, and yield to what is in fact on offer in these works is no quick grab and go, though all too often, over the past years of researching this project, of hanging out, conducting research in exhibitions, museums, and art markets as much as in Indigenous communities of the desert, I have come to realize just how quickly White art connoisseurs as well as the more general public assume that it is simply up for grabs. If my writing pays concrete and formal attention to specific works, if it focuses situated and sustained attention in terms that might otherwise be dismissed as “too much detail,” it is for this reason. It is rare to find individuated Aboriginal artworks analyzed in detail, in the way that works of European grand masters are, ipso facto, throughout art history (and no doubt, any of the artworks analyzed here could indeed, and should, be analyzed in far greater detail than the cursory job I perform). But my strategy is intentional, to stay as close to the works and their workings as I can, to slow down to a pace commensurate with what they incite and command. The kinds of subtle, nuanced, and highly aestheticized politics taking shape require a subtlety of both research and writing that can, without grandstanding or flag waving (as these arts don’t themselves), attend to what are demanding sensorium alterities and deep defiances of dominant codes of appearance; a

12 | Introduction

mode of analysis, in short, that can at once keep up with, open out, and pointedly not reduce what the works themselves achieve. As a non-­Indigenous person writing about Indigenous representations that, more than anything, are in fact about the very rights to self-­present, I am acutely attuned to developing a method that might not make my own voice louder than the works themselves. Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012, 202) advocates care in the research of Maori and other Indigenous peoples’ “intellectual, theoretical, and imaginative spaces.” She stresses the agency of “search” in “research” for what a decolonizing methodology must undertake: the struggle involved to “constantly imagine and reimagine, to create and recreate our world” (203) against ongoing, systemic colonial and imperial violence. If I search to adequately model contemporary Central and Western Desert art in this book, if I keep open, keep alive, and stave off, the invariable resuturing that the work of interpretative certitude, pronouncement, or analytic quieting does, it is for this reason: to do justice to, to bear witness to, what is at stake in the attestations the art assembled here itself instigates. In profound debt to the artists and community art centers represented here, this book reproduces a high number of Indigenous-­owned and Indigenous-­ produced art images, in order that these works are understood as primary, my text secondary, in what is ultimately not a level playing field, in terms of the representational equation this book represents. These images might at once ground, activate, infiltrate my more discursive lines of flight (I hope), as much as they might affect, infect, animate, in fact, your own engagement (I hope), as active readers in response. Images of artworks in galleries, in preparation, in postproduction, in country, in ceremony, in art centers; images to make present, keep literally in the frame, on the stage, in the white walls of exhibition space, as much as on the white pages of this book, the facticity of Aboriginal bodies, hands, lives at work in the making of Indigenous futures taking shape today. Martu filmmaker Curtis Taylor states that Martu are “living the Jukurrpa,” and that “it’s not for outsiders to critique.” I adopt this posture in a more performative politics of writing about these works. My aim is to provide a certain preliminary platform or scaffold-­approach only, through which these works can, in effect, perform themselves.

The Imperative to Experiment | 13

iii Culture First. Desart Inc.

Our art makes more than a living. It is living. Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair brochure, 2014

The works in this book were produced in remote desert community art centers (with the notable exception of Tjanpi Desert Weavers, “an art centre without walls,” chapter 5, and some of the art produced for Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route, chapter 8). Community art centers are where almost all Aboriginal art today is produced across the Central and Western Desert. Community art centers are independent organizations, Aboriginal owned, directed, and run, located in almost all major remote Aboriginal communities across the Aboriginal traditional homelands of the desert. The majority of Aboriginal communities in the desert have populations below five hundred residents (Yuendumu would be one of the largest, with approximately a thousand community members). The languages that are spoken in these communities are vernacular Indigenous languages; languages that belong to country, its sites, and its flora and fauna, which are said to “speak” the same languages as people do themselves (see Rumsey 1993). These languages are some of the strongest remaining and, simultaneously, the most vulnerable Indigenous languages globally, actively in use as first languages in everyday transmission to younger generations and increasingly at risk from a greater national agenda of English-­only education (see chapter 2 for full discussion of why Indigenous Australian languages are at risk today). Community art centers are often described as the interface between Indigenous culture and the art market, the first point of inclusion of artists within the global economy. But art centers provide far more than simply a local, collective, studio-­to-­market space for art production. They provide one of the only sources of non-­government income for Aboriginal people in remote communities (Attorney-­General’s Department 2015)—and therefore actively defy the 14 | Introduction

Fig. I.6. At practice for Milpirri 2011, Lajamanu, NT. Left to right: Rosie Napurrurla Tasman, Biddy Napanangka Walker, Molly Napurrurla Tasman, Jennifer Biddle, Shelia Napaljarri Walker, and Kumanjayi Napaljarri Kelly. © Michael Erglis, J. Biddle, and the women present. Photo by M. Erglis, courtesy of Warnayaka Art and Cultural Aboriginal Corporation.

perception of remote people as without income opportunities, or the so-­called lack of engagement of Aboriginal people in employment and professional development in remote homelands (daaf 2014). They provide one of the few institutional places in which the workplace itself is actually driven by, concerned with, and governed by traditional law and culture and is open and accessible to all members of the community regardless of their skill or educational background (daaf 2014). This fact would be specifically in contrast with the other major institutions that characterize remote communities: the school, the shop, the clinic, the church, the police station. Art centers are, as Hetti Perkins (2014b) attests, vital sociocultural hubs of remote community lifeworlds that directly support and enhance health, vitality, happiness: “Art centres build community

The Imperative to Experiment | 15

pools, set up aged care and dialysis services, work with schools, help with sorry business, the list goes on and on.” There are currently forty Aboriginal art centers in the Central and Western Desert alone, with six located in Alice Springs (see chapters 2 and 4), and no fewer than one hundred incorporated art centers across Australia (Acker, Stefanoff, and Woodhead 2013). The model of the remote-­based community art center historically originates with both the founding of the missions in Yirrkala in Arnhem Land in the 1950s and, specifically, a Yolungu-­run beachfront stall in the 1960s that would later transform formally into Buku Larrnggay Mulka in 1975 (daaf 2014). However, in the desert regions of Australia, the first community art center was Ernabella Arts (1948) at Pukatja, established originally as a craft room run by the Presbyterian missionaries before becoming, in 1974, the Aboriginal-­run organization it is today (Eickelkamp 2001). However, the very fast rise of contemporary desert Aboriginal art centers began with the founding of Papunya Tula Artists Pty. Ltd. in 1972, that would see in less than three decades the Papunya Tula or Western Desert art movement develop into the global art industry it is today (see chapter 2), with the virus-­like spreading of art centers across the desert developing almost as fast as the art movement itself, taking off, west, north, and south from Papunya. Art centers have in a profound sense now mapped the desert, with the recognition of communities such as Papunya, Yuendumu, and Hermmansburg, now known as global signifiers of Aboriginality because of art. Desart Inc. Art Centre’s Location Map literalizes the importance of this original cartography, making visible what Aboriginal art and artists have themselves made visible over the past three decades through art centers (Desart Inc. 2015). In turn, a burgeoning tourist industry now transports potential clients to select remote communities in order to view and purchase art directly from the artists in community (this included a bus tour to Alice Springs Aboriginal Art Precinct for the first time in 2014).14 The development of the Aboriginal arts industry at the community level has been supported by the advocacy of what are now six key bodies across Central and Northern Australia. The Association of Northern Central and Arnhem Aboriginal Artists was founded in 1987, followed by Desart in 1992 (the key industry body for Central and Western Desert community art centers), and Ananguku Arts in Adelaide (representing artists of South Australia), and the more recent umi Arts in Cairns (a creole word meaning “you and me”) in 2005, along 16 | Introduction

with Indigenous Art Centre Alliance, representing far northern Queensland, Tiwi, and Bathurst Island artists and communities. I list these key bodies and their foundational dates in order to convey the degree to which remote Aboriginal art is today an industry: regulated, supported, sustained not only by the art market itself, but by grounded, regionally based, often government-­funded Aboriginal arts organizations. In stating this, however, it is crucial to recognize that as an industry, what is being produced, marketed, and sold by Aboriginal art centers is in no sense a commodity form alone. Indeed, as I argue throughout this book, the arts produced today in remote Aboriginal art centers and across the communities of the desert remain tied to the bodies and places in which they are produced in material ways that, as I develop, are crucial to the aesthetic work they achieve.

iv Remote Avant-­Garde is not a metatheoretical book. The nine chapters that follow represent models of highly differentiated kinds of affective intensification taking shape through formal experimentation, each providing original instantiations of memory, collectivity, and history in the making. Five of the eight chapters provide detailed performative analyses of individual artworks. The other three analyze, respectively, a new pan-­regional art movement (Tjanpi Desert Weavers, chapter 5), the “making, not taking” of history (Yiwarra Kuju, chapter 8), and one art center’s experimental trajectory from the local to the transnational (Warburton Arts Project, chapter 9). Chapter 1, “Humanitarian Imperialism,” presents an analysis of the nter Intervention, the background context for the emergence of all of the works in this book. The chapters are uneven: varying length and differing voice, tone, and tenor are utilized as my writing moves across what are, in fact, radically variant art forms, practices, genres, and scale that require divergent analytic platforms and perspectives in order to do justice to what the works themselves require. More unlike perhaps ultimately than they are alike, the chapters themselves jostle up uncomfortably and differentially at times, as well as sympathetically relational at others (as certain desert-­specific historical pasts repeat and converge in current trajectories). My aim is to keep the works activated; to make them move and resonate and to reveal, arguably, what they do themselves. Chapter 2 is the The Imperative to Experiment | 17

longest because there is virtually no art history or ethnographic analysis of the aesthetics of Alice Springs town camp artists represented by Tangentyere; this is a history that also sets the stage for Yarrenyty Arltere Artists of Larrapinta Valley Town Camp, in chapter 7. The book is divided into three sections. Part I (chapters 2–4) is on what I identify as “biliteracy” or “biliterary” experimental tactics. Part II (chapters 5–7) explores experimental hapticities or touch-­based visual aesthetics. Part III (chapters 8 and 9) presents contemporary happenings or events, on-­the-­ground initiatives that have become national and international curatorial platforms for experimental art to take shape. These three sections are structural devices, thematic only and in no sense exclusive. The language maintenance platforms and activation of vernacular collectivities of the arts highlighted in part I are deeply at work across all the arts presented by this book. Equally, a “haptic visuality” characterizes all of the arts presented here (not only those highlighted in part II). The kinds of localized ingenuity yoked to national and international capacity-­building platforms profiled by chapters 8 and 9 represent the kinds of initiative required today to support, maintain, and facilitate the “history of Aboriginal futures” (Ginsburg and Myers 2006); initiative that is, in fact, present in all the practice-­based arts profiled. Finally, my analysis is deeply Warlpiri-­centric. It is derived from and based upon twenty-­six years of field research with Lajamanu Warlpiri, who taught me what I know—if only at the surface-­level appreciation I can ever have as a Whitefella outsider—of the importance of making and remaking Jukurrpa. While I bring new research to bear upon the works presented here, my bias remains. To make that bias overt: I utilize Warlpiri terminology, concepts, and vignettes, even when discussing non-­Warlpiri art (only chapter 6 is solely devoted to Warlpiri women’s experimental innovation)—no doubt a slippery (if not suspicious) slide for the more ethnographically rigorous. This is not, however, to project a neo-­Warlpiri-­desert dominance or a pan-­desert essentialism. My intention is in no way to reduce what are very real differences between and across Central and Western Desert languages, territories, and trajectories of contemporary art and culture. The emphasis I develop across this book in fact highlights how specific, how not shared, not pan-­regional, indeed, not Warlpiri, the majority of experimental initiatives are today. Thus in bringing a certain Warlpiri-­centrism to my analysis, my intent is rather to acknowledge what 18 | Introduction

Aboriginal people have themselves taught me: that knowledge is earned and owned; indebted, enabled, and restricted; obligating and accountable. It does not belong to me. The fact of my prior history, relatedness, and knowledge of Warlpiri has been a major facilitator (as well as sometimes a difficult detractor) in undertaking the research for this book. I need to acknowledge my debt and the generosity of Ngannyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara, Yanguktjarra, Arrernte, Pintupi, Anmatjere, Luritja, Warumungu, Martu, and, indeed, Warlpiri artists and community members, for their tolerance and appreciation of my capacities and my failings both, given this history.

The Imperative to Experiment | 19

ONE

HUMANITARIAN IMPERIALISM When is it that living in a remote Indigenous community, speaking an Indigenous language, might be seen as an advantage rather than an impediment? Mick Dodson | director, National Centre for Indigenous Studies and professor of law, anu, launching the University of New South Wales Indigenous Policy and Dialogue Research Unit

It is difficult to write about crisis, emergency, trauma, without evoking it. If affects are ultimately judgments, as Teresa Brennan (2004) crucially noted— bodily responses that take a stance, literally—then to write about trauma is to invoke judgment. Affects are anything but neutral, as Silvan Tomkins (1963) first modeled. Primarily energetic forces that enhance or deplete, affects switch on or off, are good or bad, positive or negative. Judgment, even if only a momentary shift in attitude, orientation, or posture, takes place. This first chapter is about trauma, affect, and the visual in relation to the Australian Northern Territory Emergency Response (nter)—also known as the Intervention or Stop the Gap, articulated into a fully fledged ten-­year national framework and passed with bipartisan Parliament support in 2012, now called the Stronger Futures policy—the context of national crisis that underpins the conditions of emergence of all of the artworks in this book. My interest is in how it is that visual images (nonart and art both) operate in the public sphere to engender collective feelings, sentiment, and active response. Following the work of Lauren Berlant (2011), Nigel Thrift (2004), Brian Massumi (2002), and others, my concern is with how the public sphere has, over

the past decade, become less a place for information exchange or rational debate than a site of identification-­based politics. Berlant (2011, 224) argues that a new mode of participatory citizenship and obligatory practice based on affect—an “affect of feeling political together”—defines the contemporary. Political allegiance is no longer secured by policy, platform, or party but by “affective binding”: modes and structures that generate immediate and proximate “feel­ ingful” attachments; investments and actions that bind the individual to the body collective by the operation of affect. The title of this chapter, “Humanitarian Imperialism,” flags a new postwar mood in this terrain. Humanitarian imperialism is not, of course, my own term but one I borrow from the works of Jean Bricmont (2006) and Noam Chomsky (2008), among others. Put simply, humanitarian imperialism refers to the new imperial political right—if not obligation—to intervene by economic sanction, policy framework, or military force on the grounds of averting the abuse of human rights. Human rights ideals are increasingly utilized to adjudicate national and international relations, replacing more traditional First World notions of freedom, democracy, and justice. Banners of protection, safeguarding, peace building, and restitution now cluster around tropes of care and compassion (particularly in relation to children) to justify political, economic, and military intervention. Purported abuses of human rights champion a moral right to intervene, where “right” becomes “righteous,” in a certain “we know better than you do and only we can give you ultimately what is best for you” sense. According to the new logic of right, the suffering and trauma of others— “humanitarian crises”—incite a legitimate imperative to respond to injustice with altruistic force; an ethical and honorable society is shaped by responding to, and ameliorating, the pain and suffering of others. The new politics of human rights and the “right to intervene,” which, at least in principle, emerged historically as an assertion of the “power of the powerless,” has since become an agenda of the “power of the powerful” (see Whyte 2012). Humanitarian imperialism is, in this sense, a new public expressive mood, both symptomatic and productive. It is symptomatic of the contemporary because it provides indexes of complex social processes, condensing and rearticulating what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) call “blocks of affect,” that is, precognitive intensities, sensations, and orientations that aggregate and assemble collective bodies sympathetically. Humanitarian imperialism is productive be22 | Chapter One

cause such a mood does not represent social process but actively participates and produces its terms. It is the call to action that operates at once at both a public and a personal level that I am most interested in here; how the force of “feeling political together” operates to produce shared, deeply felt wounds as well as healing, that work collectively to compel action. That is, I am interested in the workings and structure of what I call humanitarian instrumental trauma as it has served to engender affective action in relation to the nter emergency. How is it that images—­concrete, material—can make us “do” something through feeling? And specifically, what, in turn, might Aboriginal images mobilize or set in motion, or what might they do differently themselves?

i In 2007, the Northern Territory government released a commissioned report from the Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse, The Little Children Are Sacred, describing crisis levels of child sexual abuse in remote Aboriginal communities. This led to the national Australian Commonwealth Government seizing, by compulsory acquisition, seventy-­ three remote Aboriginal townships and communities directly, originally deploying over six hundred soldiers and detachments to “stabilize and normalize” what was constructed as an emergency national humanitarian crisis. The nter Intervention targeted the (purported) “shock and awe” (Altman and Hinkson 2012) dysfunction of remote Aboriginal community life, including pornography rings, rampant child sexual abuse, alcoholism, criminality, domestic violence, unemployment, welfare dependency, infant mortality, overcrowding, and other statistically measured indicators of Aboriginal inequity and delinquency. The remote communities targeted were not only all of the major Aboriginal communities of the Northern Territory, Arnhem Land, and Cape York but included the Aboriginal town camps of Alice Springs, Darwin, Katherine, and Tennant Creek. It needs to be stressed that the nter Intervention does not target the entire Aboriginal population of the Northern Territory or, indeed, of Australia as a whole. Rather, the Intervention specifically targets geophysical places in which not only are Aboriginal people in the majority, but Aboriginal ways of living are Humanitarian Imperialism | 23

most visible—highlighting the dependency of the nter Intervention on visibility itself and, in turn, the kinds of countervisibilities at stake for emergent remote Aboriginal art. The deployment of Australian Defence Force military police to targeted remote communities ceased formally in October 2008. However, since that time an increasing number of institutions, agencies, and government personnel (under federally funded nter new statutory laws and agreements) have now replaced established Aboriginal local councils and Traditional Owner authorities of self-­governance. Local Aboriginal councils and authorities in the remote sector had been in development since the 1970s when, following the original granting to Aboriginal people of Land Rights and equal pay, and to Aboriginal children the right to learn in their own Indigenous languages at school, Aboriginal self-­determination first became a national Australian policy priority. What the nter Intervention effectively ended was four decades of localized Indigenous control and community-­directed management. Aboriginal “self-­ determination” is no longer a national policy or priority (Altman and Hinkson 2012; Maddison 2009). A marked increase in police presence and powers throughout remote Aboriginal Australia has followed. The introduction of new national statutory reform legislation has resulted in transformations in health policy and its priorities (including the introduction of mandatory child protection “checkups”); the compulsory leasing by Aboriginal people of Aboriginal lands, and of housing in traditional Aboriginal countries; the appearance of new training, housing, land, and resource offices, with their officers, in all remote Aboriginal communities; and tenancy and truancy commissions with explicit powers to regulate welfare expenditure, oversee training and development, curtail purchase and consumption of alcohol, and ensure attendance at school by all Aboriginal school-­aged children. The right to remove Aboriginal children from their families, under new national protectionist legislation, has once again been made legal national policy. Child removal rates have tripled in the Northern Territory since 2000, and the Productivity Commission’s report Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage in 2014 showed a disproportionate yearly rise in the number of Indigenous children removed from their families for care and protection purposes since the national Apology to Australia’s Indigenous People in 2008 (McQuire 2014; Sleath 2015). 24 | Chapter One

In the face of such draconian humanitarian intervention measures, Aboriginal literacy remains a more subtle imperial initiative, one that is rarely challenged because of its pervasive affective assumptions and force—and, as I argue, more devastating because of its all-­persuasive logics. The sovereignty of Indigenous aesthetics—that is, to speak, to write, to read, and indeed to live life in vernacular terms today—is directly at risk in national Australian literacy platforms and policy specifically. Literacy is itself a recognized human right—part of the un Charter since 1958—and unesco’s decade-­long campaign to combat global disadvantage figured “Literacy as Freedom” (2003–13). In this context, to even imagine feeling good about Aboriginal illiteracy is anathema. And herein lies the rub. How is it that Aboriginal illiteracy has become assumed, feared, acted upon—tethered, as if in a magic wand way, to the greater humanitarian agenda of combating poverty, marginality, malnutrition, and unemployment, despite the fact that literacy has not been shown to be a solution to any of these factors directly (Olson and Torrance 2001) and, moreover, despite the fact that Aboriginal illiteracy has not, in fact, been proven?

ii Let us resolve over the next five years to have every Indigenous four-­year-­ old in a remote Aboriginal community enrolled and attending a proper early childhood education centre or opportunity and engaged in proper preliteracy and prenumeracy programs. Let us resolve to build new educational opportunities for these little ones, year by year, step by step, following the completion of their crucial preschool year. Let us resolve to use this systematic approach to building future educational opportunities for Indigenous children to provide proper primary and preventative health care for the same children, to begin the task of rolling back the obscenity that we find today in infant mortality rates in remote Indigenous communities— up to four times higher than in other communities. Kevin Rudd | prime minister of Australia, “Apology to Australia’s Indigenous People,” House of Representatives, Parliament House, Canberra, February 13, 2008

Humanitarian Imperialism | 25

The long-­awaited, fiercely advocated Apology to the Stolen Generation, which was finally delivered in 2008, changed little for remote Central and Western Desert Aboriginal people. In his formal apology to the thousands of Aboriginal people who had, under Australian government state and national policies, been forcibly removed from their families to be raised in missions or adopted out to non-­Aboriginal families, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd not only failed to revoke the 2007 nter Intervention but subtly enshrined its continued need. Defined in terms of comparative norms, Aboriginal people, in his account, are failing to meet national benchmarks in a country priding itself on providing “a fair go for all Australians.” Aborigines represent what he called “a gap that needs to be lessened” in mortality rates, health, literacy levels, educational achievement, and employment outcomes. Rudd evinced no sense of an awareness of Aboriginal lifeworlds, or ways of doing and being that might, in fact, have their own measures of what it means to be human, to be Australian even, nor any sense that the aspects of “obscene disparity” that he pinpointed—literacy, education, employment—might, in fact, be representative of contemporary Aboriginal culture as strategies of resilience, resistance, and survival, to combat the continuing policies of assimilation purportedly under redress. Rudd insisted that future policy must “begin with the little children”: early childhood intervention programs in education and health, and preschool accelerated literacy and numeracy programs. In response to national pressure, the Northern Territory minister for education, Alison Anderson, instigated an unprecedented mandate. Without consultation, and in the face of decades of hard-­won Aboriginal bilingual educational practice, she proclaimed, in October 2008, that for four hours per day, teaching in all Northern Territory schools was to be in English only. Overnight, this legislation effectively put an end to the culturally appropriate, Aboriginal language–­supported, bilingual or two-­way education that had distinguished remote Aboriginal schools for almost three decades (and in Ngaanyatjarra and Pitjantjatjara lands since the 1930s, under United Aboriginal Missions [uam] schooling; see Eickelkamp 2001; chapter 3, this volume). Anderson, one of Australia’s most senior Aboriginal parliamentarians (and speaker of no less than six Indigenous languages herself, according to her Wikipedia page),1 was quoted as saying, “Indigenous children should be taught in the same way as students in

26 | Chapter One

Sydney. . . . I am not suggesting we abandon our traditional culture or language but teaching them should not be done in schools, it should be done after school and on weekends, and during the holidays” (Hind 2012). Thus, the right of Aboriginal children to learn in their first and primary language, an Indigenous language, is now officially no longer recognized in Australia—this despite the fact that the right of Indigenous communities to maintain and strengthen their languages, and to determine how their children are to be educated at school, is now formally recognized as a human right by the United Nations, developed in the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, passed by the General Assembly in 2007, and, in fact, signed by the Australian government in 2009 (Simpson, Caffery, and McConvell 2009). The year 2008 also saw the first national standard and testing measures for pan-­Australian literacy and numeracy, the National Assessment Program—­ Literacy and Numeracy (naplan), rolled out by the federal government. For the first time, naplan instigated national benchmark standardized testing across Australia for all children, regardless of their ethnic, economic, or English as a Second Language or English as a Foreign Language status. All Australian children are now tested throughout their schooling in years three, five, seven, and nine. The program assesses and ranks literacy and numeracy as a diagnostic and remedial tool, to test whether children are meeting national literacy and numeracy benchmarks and, if so, how. The results of pan-­Australian testing now compare student performances, and thereby the success of schools, across the entire nation. Students and schools are ranked comparatively according to their performative success, on the basis of standardized literacy and numeracy indicators alone—rankings that are now regularly and publicly posted on the new government-supported web platform My School (www.myschool.edu.au). The results of the first naplan test in 2008 showed that Aboriginal children in remote communities had the lowest national test scores of all Australian children. The consequence of these results was not only the cessation of bilingual education but also the introduction of early numeracy and literacy programs into most major remote Aboriginal communities (the First Steps Program), with mandatory attendance required by all Aboriginal children under the age of five in remote communities. Aboriginal literacy, specifically, is a targeted aspect of a greater national push for a brighter, better-­educated future for “all Australi-

Humanitarian Imperialism | 27

ans.” It is a national aim of the Stronger Futures policy to achieve measurable improvements in Aboriginal numeracy and literacy rates and to double their current numbers by the year 2016.

iii Figure 1.1 shows a billboard image; large, prominent, public. This particular photograph (taken on my iPhone) was shot from the multilane highway on the way to the International Terminal at Mascot Airport in Sydney, a highly visible and nationally significant site (as the official Olympic airport since 2002, the entry and exit point to the greater Australian nation-­state). I have, however, seen the same image on bus stop shelters and their moving advertisement slide shows, across inner-­city Sydney. The ubiquitous nowhere and everywhere daily facticity of the billboard/bus shelter itself makes for distinctive affective terrain (and I include my iPhone snapshot here intentionally to ensure its more prosaic affect). Affective conditions are, in fact, heightened by the immersive and blanketing effect of collective familiarity, habituation, and expectation: as Shouse (2005) puts it, the “background intensity of our everyday lives (the ongoing hum of quantity/quality that we experience when we are not really attuned to any experience at all).” The image presented here is not of a traumatized subject: no abuse, dysfunction, or abject state is depicted (as compared, specifically, with the runny-­nosed and/or fly-­ravaged Aboriginal children’s faces synonymous with the media version of the contemporary remote). The fact that the image is a photograph itself instigates a “no uncertain truth” claim; photographs, by necessity, we know from Roland Barthes (1973), regardless of their source, claim an unsurpassed relation to historical empiricism and the documentary fact. The material indexicality of the “really once was” of the photograph catches, captures, and holds for us as proof a performative “look see” of witness, pointing to a past truth that, in this case, is threatening to become future in an unchallengeable logic of instantiated inflection or “affective-­fact” making, as Massumi (2005) calls it. The ambiguity of humanitarian campaigns has been noted in association with their role in supporting interventionist measures globally (see, for example, Whyte [2012] for discussion of Amnesty International, Médicins Sans Frontières, and

28 | Chapter One

Fig. 1.1. Billboard on Qantas Drive near International Terminal, Mascot International Airport, Sydney, 2013. i-Phone photo by R. Benjamin.

other ngos regarding their commitment to intervention in order to prevent suffering and abuse). Is this advertising government policy or something else? The fact that this particular humanitarian campaign coincides with nter policy, and that it specifically utilizes statistics derived from 2008 naplan results, makes for dense ambiguity. Ambiguity is ripe for affect (see Massumi 2005). Arguably, here, the very ambivalence of this image adds to its potency. Humanitarian campaigning blurs the boundary (even at the best of times) between the rights of the abused and the right of the privileged to intervene on behalf of the abused; where the factors of whose power, whose agenda, whose trauma it is, ultimately, serves to fuel incentive. What we see, in fact, is an individuated child, not so much genderless as sexless. The fact that he or she cannot even be gender identified (is this a boy or a girl?) ensures that he or she cannot possibly be sexualized—a crucial factor, given the context of the nter. The Little Children Are Sacred Report of 2007, which initiated the Intervention, focused on the reporting of widespread child sexual abuse. That this child, while Aboriginal, is neutralized is not arbitrary. Humanitarian Imperialism | 29

She or he is, instead, a generalized and generalizable Aboriginal and can represent a more generic Australian child accordingly. She or he is not named, not individualized by nominalization, but presented as the neoliberal citizen is or ought to be, an everyone rather than a someone. The child wears a yellow T-­shirt (the color we now appreciate, post–­Olympic fever, as one of Australia’s national colors) and thus actively adorns, and is adorned by, the nation; clothed, protected, provided for and by, and folded back within, the greater nation-­state. The child is distinctively Aboriginal and this matters. That she or he does not look traumatized is important. No operation of Schadenfreude here (the pleasure gained from another’s misfortune), at least not in any straightforward sense. The subject here is not a victim. Rather, whatever the agenda, it is, in fact, the opposite of suffering, pain, trauma—happiness and happiness making. This happiness is rendered infectiously as our own. Silvan Tomkins (1962) argues that the smile is the most sympathetically contagious of all facially caught affect; it is almost impossible not to smile back, not to feel friendly, warm, reciprocally inclined, to those who smile at us; the autonomic responses of the face, particularly, being already oriented and readied in relation to others, and habituated to correspond, reciprocally, with others. In short, the image alone already incites transmissible affect because it is in this sense abstract and generalizable and smiling; it makes us smile and feel good ourselves, because, not despite the fact that, it is content-­less (a generalized Aboriginal, even Australian, child smile). It is the text that tells us something is amiss. Larger and more dominant than the image, all in capitals: that is, in font-­literate terms, the text has authority and command. It tells us how to read or “anchor” the image (as Roland Barthes [1975] classically wrote of the role played by news captions in securing or anchoring the larger play of possible meanings that photographic images always have): “if 80% of sydney kids couldn’t read, would you lend a hand?” This is a complicated sentence for one that appears to be short and concise. It takes the interrogative rather than the declarative sentence form—a question rather than a statement. Or at least it appears to. For whatever interrogative value it has (that is, the less certain or more open status the question has in relation to the fact) is belied by the use of the statistic. Statistics quantify; they present facts. One thing is not speculative here. “if,” it says, followed by a statistic of 80 percent, telling us, then, that this is no speculation but a fact. An affect fact, linked to Aborigines and in turn, to a responsibility that is “ours.” 30 | Chapter One

No event as such; everything is implied. And this is what makes it so affective/effective, a generalized sense of trauma, of abuse. Trauma is, arguably, not a problem defined ultimately by the status of the original event but, rather, a problem with memory itself. As Cathy Caruth (1995) argues, it is not necessarily the event itself that constitutes trauma; rather, it is the difficulty or impasse of the memory of the event. And it is this, of course, that makes trauma a disorder of memory and, in turn, a problem for memory as much as for history, in which immediacy and the past take the form of belatedness and incomprehension as much as continual return because, in fact, we have forgotten to remember something and/or we cannot forget. Here, “80 percent” becomes precisely what we need to remember, what we cannot forget. This is instrumental trauma making at its best, or even its worst—an insistence on the fact that we are not remembering a trauma we should remember, one which, should we continue to forget, will take shape in the future: what if it were our kids, here, now? How could we have forgotten 80 percent of children/Aboriginal children are not able to read? What would we have to do to actively remember, to do something, to take a stand and actually to lend a hand?

iv Do images exist which can subvert the function they are expected to provide? John von Sturmer | “Aborigines, Representation, Necrophilia”

In relation to the emergency Intervention in the Northern Territory, and the humanitarian literacy campaign that has ensued, bound together as they have become, von Sturmer’s pointed question, though asked over two decades ago, could not be more urgent today. If I told you that the nter was founded on spurious grounds, that the so-­ called staggering rates of sexual abuse reported in The Little Children Are Sacred are still unsubstantiated, that this report and its authors, in fact, refused to disclose its sources or provide evidence for its original accusations (Altman and Hinkson 2012)—would it make any difference? Or that out of the health checkups of eight thousand children across Central and Northern Australia, over the Humanitarian Imperialism | 31

first five years of the nter Intervention, not one resulted in criminal prosecution; no abuse cases were brought to trial, no pedophilia rings uncovered, no evidence of rampant sexual abuse, in fact, revealed? If I tell you that the nter Intervention is failing according to the government’s own statistical measures; that the Intervention’s targeted and measurable outcomes have in fact worsened since 2007; that unemployment and child hospitalizations have escalated and, worse yet, self-­harm and suicide rates have doubled during the same period (Altman and Hinkson 2012); that, specifically, Aboriginal school attendance has declined and literacy rates decreased (Simpson, Caffery, and McConvell 2009; Underwood 2012)—would it matter? In particular, were I to tell you that (as Aboriginal linguists and educators have documented at length) naplan is itself a discriminatory test, measuring the skills and competencies of speakers of English as a first language (Wigglesworth, Simpson, and Loakes 2011; Piller 2012); that naplan cannot, in fact, test the kinds of language and literacy skills that remote Aboriginal children may or may not possess because it does not test for, or in, the languages that children learn and speak in remote Indigenous communities (and in which, under bilingual programs in NT, they have been first taught to read and write). Again, if I were to tell you of vernacular Indigenous languages, such as Pintupi, Ngaanyatjarra, or Arrernte, which children in remote communities learn and speak as their primary day-­to-­day language before they begin formal schooling, or Aboriginal Kriol, which even more children in remote Australia learn and speak as an equally unique, full, and distinctive Aboriginal lingua franca—would it make any difference? If I were to cite the linguistic and educational research that has shown that naplan tests what are essentially foreign language literacy skills for remote Aboriginal children; that is, it tests for Standard Average English (sae) literacy only, and that it does so in culturally specific terms, assuming, for example, knowledge of paperboys, mailboxes, and parking meters, among other cultural concepts alien to remote Aboriginal children (Piller 2012); were I to fact-­check-­report here, between naplan results and the anlf statistics directly, as Wamut (2013) has, in order to prove that the statistic of 80 percent is itself misleading; were I to stress, as have Aboriginal teachers, linguists, and educators (including submissions made to Federal Parliament; see Priest 2011), that the government needs to recognize that naplan testing and evaluation are discriminatory, that Aboriginal literacy cannot be measured by or expected to 32 | Chapter One

meet the benchmarks of sae without specialized English as a Second Language or English as a Foreign Language programs and that there is urgent need for recognition and support of bilingual education and bilingual literacy in the Northern Territory, lest the decisions taken under the nter should “spell the death of the remaining endangered Indigenous languages in Australia” (Simpson, Caffery, and McConvell 2009, 6; see Nicholson et al. 2012)—would it m ­ atter? Were I even to put the case, point-­blank crude though it may be, that the statistic of the so-­called 80 percent of Aboriginal children who cannot read or write might in fact be read (in a certain counterstrategic move) as evidence of Aboriginal languages spoken by Aboriginal children today across remote Australia? That so-­called literacy failure might indeed be a sign of Aboriginal language persistence and maintenance today; that Aboriginal children, people, are not speaking and do not write sae because they live and speak Aboriginal languages and use Aboriginal forms of writing—would it change anything? The conditions were present; the climate poised; proof or evidence has been neither necessary nor sought, either then or now. Nor is proof the point. As Brian Massumi (2005) demonstrates, in relation to the supposed anthrax threat in the post-­9/11 United States, the real issue in the “if, then” syndrome of affect’s distinctive circuit is that threat and anxiety have preempted proof—fait accompli. The warning of Franklin Roosevelt’s famous dictum “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself ” has a hollow ring of truth in a not-­uncertain return of the repressed in the contemporary where affective facts reign. Thus, the issue is not a matter of providing evidence to the contrary but, rather, how to find ways in which other figures, other images, other circuits of proximity, contagion, infection might be mobilized. In place of evidence or proof, arguably, a re-­aestheticization is required—that is, to put it crudely, how to fight affect with affect.

v The relationship between colonial conquest and literacy has heralded no small history in Aboriginal art, perhaps most overtly in the work of Gordon Bennett.2 In Bennett’s 1991 series of six watercolors, including Cornfield (with scarecrow) (figure 1.2), giant children’s abc alphabet blocks loom, at once large and threatening, and domestic and seemingly innocuous, indifferent ultimately, to the Humanitarian Imperialism | 33

Fig. 1.2. Gordon Bennett, Cornfield (with scarecrow). From the Bounty Hunter series, 1991. 37 × 27 cm, watercolor on paper. © The Estate of Gordon Bennett. The Paul Eliadis Collection of Contemporary Australian Art. Photo by P. Andrews, courtesy the Estate of Gordon Bennett.

violence of colonization taking place—as if to illustrate that the effects of colonialism are nowhere more brutal and, simultaneously, disavowed than in the name of the alphabet itself: writing, the civilizing mission, education, literacy. The so-­called writing down of Aboriginal languages, the creation of orthographies, of print alphabet form for languages assumed to be without writing, and the teaching of literacy to people assumed to be preliterate is here inseparable from colonialism. This is a point whose contradiction I have explored elsewhere at length, specifically in the context of the celebration of Central and Western Desert art and artists for their works of “oral” authenticity (Biddle 1996, 2000, 2007). Almost never, in the Aboriginal literacy debate, is Aboriginal art appreciated as being itself a unique form of cultural writing that may have no small impact on what it means, or how it is, that Aboriginal people in the Central and Western Desert may or may not be becoming alphabetically literate.

vi Aboriginal people, my tribe—Warlpiri—they can look at the picture and they can see. They can read it like you read in a book. Michael Jagamarra Nelson | in Vivien Johnson, Michael Jagamarra Nelson

We painting these Dreamings on the school doors because the children should learn about our Law. The children do not know them and they might become like white people, which we don’t want to happen. Kumanjayi Japaljarri Stewart | in Warlukurlangu Artists, Kuruwarri: Yuendumu Doors

When some other Yapa community come and have a look at your painting there, they just talk that one, they read that one. They know which way it started and where it finished and which one is sacred site. Same as paper again. Kardiya can’t read it. No. (laughing) They got to look that paper. They got to read from a book not from a painting. Kumanjayi Jampinipa Robertson | in Judith Ryan, Paint Up Big

Humanitarian Imperialism | 35

Contemporary artists are continuing the developments of Emily Kngwarreye, Dorothy Napangardi, Kathleen Petyarre, and others (Biddle 2007), masters of the desert who experimentally developed forms of abstraction and abandoned more classical iconography to harness intercultural efficacy, not as a rejection or withdrawal from tradition but, rather, in order to hone its more crucial affective capacities; to strategically generalize and intensify the potency of Jukurrpa for non-­Aboriginal people who, historically, have failed to hear (Biddle 2003). This incapacity to hear has reached a crisis condition of national deafness under the nter Intervention. The canvas is not, in this sense, simply an artistic medium of choice. Historically, the canvas—and originally, pointedly, the walls of Papunya and Yuendumu school itself; a writing back, as it were, to the institutional site of literacy, of enforced education itself, as Kumanjayi Japaljarri Stewart makes clear—has provided perhaps the only stage for writing for Central and Western Desert people. It is a literal page where the very same capacities that Aboriginal people are not deemed to possess (literacy, writing, history) have, in fact, flourished. Acrylic painting on canvas has been where the writing of histories, the creation of archives, the garnering of recognition, the earning of income, the assertion of incontestable rights to land, have taken shape. Thus, crude though it may seem, it nevertheless needs to be said that the transformations taking shape today on canvas—and elsewhere across the arts in this book—are not secondary to, or departures from, this vital historical trajectory but are, rather, the very site, the very place, where this history can be encountered. These emergent “histories of the now” insist on genealogies of histories and identities that confront and collapse imagined safe distance between the past and today; the so-­called remote and the here and now. The immediacy of the temporality of these works is perhaps their most disquieting quality. Their presence casts doubt. They interrupt a national amnesia that would have colonial history belong firmly in the past, and that would prefer to remember Aboriginal art—and, indeed, Aboriginal forms of speaking and writing—as remote and traditional. These arts stage arguably what Kobena Mercer (2008, 16) has identified as the “analytic . . . and creative opportunities made possible by the contradictions of the colonial encounter.” And, no doubt, the lack of art appreciation of these works to date results from their disturbingly nearby difficult aesthetic demand. “Inconvenient art,” as Sue O’Connor (in O’Connor, Boko, Daniels, 36 | Chapter One

and Mulda 2015) has called the work of Tangentyere art (see chapter 2); dense multimodal concurrencies of codes that jar with, jostle up, and mess with more than one visual, spatial, and temporal logic. The artists whose works are presented in this book utilize literacy and writing in differing ways in their art practice to different ends. And my fear is that in bringing these strategies together within what is another stage of writing (the formal chapters of this book), a certain homogenizing or levelling out of very different strategies—and palpably visceral, variant affect—might result. Thus, the first point to be made is simply this: these works pluralize and complicate any singular perspective on the now. Their instigation of new grammars in mixed and multiplatform new media indicates not a resolved but a contested terrain of vexing, pressing, acute experimentation aligned with political necessity; illegal alphabets and illegitimate instigations on innumerable grounds; outlaw associations more akin to graffiti writers and street artists seemingly (in part I particularly) than to the great traditions of Western Desert art from which these works and their producers derive directly. This aesthetics looks like, feels like, in this sense, the immediacy of the lifeworld it presents. This art moves between existent graphological formalisms, misappropriating as well as reappropriating alphabetic writing signs, conventions, and meanings, as much as it reappropriates and extends the paintbrush, the finger, the haptic and affective terrain of sand paintings, body designs, and the narrative historiographic traditions of acrylic painting. This is not a generic literacy, in short, but one specific to Central and Western Desert painting and its history. That a minor avant-­garde literacy might be associated with painting and other experimental mediums, that what can be said, written, in one language cannot be said in another seems an obvious point. What we might be witnessing, as these works attest, is not a generalizable literacy that would see Aboriginal people writing in a singular, sae alphabetic literacy, such as the naplan-­based Australian literacy program insists on—a so-­called civic literacy that would have all Australian citizens reading and writing in exactly the same way. Rather, this is Indigenous-­ determined inscription, writing, that heads markedly, determinably, in other directions for a reason.

Humanitarian Imperialism | 37

TWO

TANGENTYERE ARTISTS Some people say that Art Centres were set up by white people and are for white people. To me that’s not true. Some people don’t know the difference between an art gallery and an Aboriginal Art Centre. Number one—Aboriginal Art Centres belong to us, to Aboriginal people. Art Centres are places where you can paint, people come and talk story, a lot of people come together. It’s a happy place for everyone. We don’t have violence in our Art Centres. You can feel comfortable to sit down and talk about art and culture or if you have a problem. The Art Centre is for the community and not for private people. Art Centres do all kinds of work programs to support families and culture. Jane Young | senior Tangentyere artist and Desart Inc. chairperson, 2012

Tangentyere Artists represents artists living and working in Alice Springs town camps. Unlike an imaginary ideal remote art center, in which it is assumed that one language, one identity, one country is shared by artists working within one art center, the artists of Tangentyere instead come from diverse backgrounds and countries, representing a large number of distinct vernacular traditions, backgrounds, and countries: Eastern, Central, and West Arrernte, Alyawarr, Anmatyerr, Kaytetye, Warlpiri, Ngalia, Luritja, Pintupi, Pitjantjatjara, and Yankunytjatjara (O’Connor, Boko, Daniels, and Mulda 2015). Four hundred artists are registered members of Tangentyere Artists, an Aboriginal-­run and -­directed Alice Springs Community Art Center. Artist participation on any given day is between eight and twenty people. These numbers

Fig. 2.1. Margaret Boko Nampitjinpa working in the studio, 2013. © Tangentyere Artists. Photo by Tangentyere Artists.

reflect the lived reality of town camp constituencies: typified less by fixed populations than by highly mobile residents who have ongoing commitments to and responsibilities for, and who travel regularly between, traditional countries and more remote communities outlying Alice Springs. Multiple challenges are faced by Alice Springs town residents, including high-­frequency cultural responsibility of hosting family members from remote communities due to ill health or hospitalization. The primary reason for both short- and longer-­term migration of people is to access emergency care, aged care, and renal care facilities, none of which are available in remote communities. Training, development, and educational requirements are additional reasons, given that there are no secondary schools in remote communities. Increasingly, welfare and employment demands are high motivators for urban migration. The cessation of local, community-­based employment and training programs in remote areas under the new nter Intervention policy means that a higher ­percentage of Aboriginal people must now seek employment outside of their home communities. Grog (alcohol) is also a leading rationale for transmobility and migration.1 The majority of Aboriginal communities are “dry,” meaning that no alcohol can be bought, sold, or consumed in them. Historically, this restriction has led to the town camps of Darwin, Katherine, and Alice Springs being highly identified with grogging.2 The conditions outlined above, and the sustained state of “emergency” that town camp residents currently face, are well documented elsewhere and are not themselves the subject of this book.3 In flagging these conditions, my aim is to set the stage only for what paintings themselves do, as they move to evidence life today from the perspective of Aboriginal artists who actively identify themselves as Alice Springs town camp residents. How is art itself staging emergent lifeworlds in the town camps of Alice Springs within the context of the greater nter emergency? How does aesthetic emergence relate to emergency? To this end, two further preliminary points need to be identified in order to allow appreciation of the emerging aesthetics of Tangentyere artistry as it develops within this compacted context. First, language: how to speak in what language, when, and to whom? One of the most marked aspects of Aboriginal vernacular “oral economy,” as Michaels (1986) first called it, is that knowledge is not known, shared, or equally accesTangentyere Artists | 43

sible to anyone or everyone. Rather, knowledge is authorized, disciplined, and regulated by complex differential rights to know, to speak, and to hear, based on age, gender, and other complex authority-­based structures (see Sansom 1980; Michaels 1986; Biddle 1996). The way painting itself is taking shape within the contemporary cannot be separated from this economy. Tangentyere artists are refined linguistic polyglots. All of the senior artists speak two, three, or more Indigenous languages, as well as Aboriginal English and/or Aboriginal Kriol. The artists are acutely attentive to, are seriously interested in, and utilize complex code-­switching capacities to a marked degree on a day-­to-­day basis. They are highly conscious and politicized about language, words, signs; many have been teacher-­linguists themselves in communities or in town and have assisted or acted as facilitators of language programs or cultural activities at schools, learning centers, the Institute for Aboriginal Development (an adult education facility in Alice Springs), the Central Lands Council (the Alice Springs–­based organization for the management of land rights), or the church (where bi- and multilingual scripture, Bibles, choirs, and hymnals are commonplace); or hold memberships in any number of Central Desert organizations, including being inaugural board members of Tangentyere Council itself. Jane Young, a senior Tangentyere artist, is currently presiding chair of Desart Inc. (the major industry body for Central and Western Desert community art organizations). This is not bi- or multilingualism by choice: what Simpson, Caffery, and McConvell (2009, 10) call “elective” bilingualism, in which a choice to learn (to add on, as it were) a second or third language is made by individuals for reasons of opportunity, pleasure, or advantage. Rather, this is bilingualism by necessity, what Simpson, Caffery, and McConvell call “circumstantial” or “involuntary” bilingualism, where a second or third language is learned not through individual choice but because it is required for entire groups of people in order to survive.4 These forms of bi- or multilingualism by necessity do not simply reflect the ability to speak two or more languages of equal status. Rather, they involve deeply inequitable relationships between languages and the people who speak them. Thus, that the kinds of literary poetics I identify below should be taking shape among town camp resident artists is not, in this sense, surprising. High-­ level multilingual dexterity is required by town residents in order to communicate regularly between people and groups who base themselves collectively be44 | Chapter Two

Fig. 2.2. Rhonda Napanangka working in the studio, 2013. © Tangentyere Artists. Photo by Tangentyere Artists.

yond the boundaries of country-­based affiliation or shared linguistic heritage. While this highly nuanced and advanced linguistic proficiency might be recognized and appreciated by linguists and anthropologists, it is less well appreciated, even intolerable, in relation to the staunchly monolingual policy of the Australian government and the requirements of compulsory Standard Average English (sae) education today (see Nicholls 2005; Clyne 2006; Simpson, Caffery, and McConvell 2009). The development of what have been called “communilects” (and “metrolects,” more recently) by linguists (Pennycook 2010), and “interaction idiom” by anthropologists (Sansom 1980; Brenneis and Myers 1984), is common throughout the history of Aboriginal languages; two of the current major languages of the Western Desert, Martu and Luritja, in fact each began as a communilect: a mixture of elements of various Indigenous languages that combine to form a common language that can be understood by all, developing and expanding from a pidgin to a creole, and thence to a lingua franca, over a period of only a Tangentyere Artists | 45

few decades, when groups of people with different linguistic backgrounds are forced to live together in one community for long periods of time. Aboriginal Kriol is one of the most important and highly ingenious Indigenous communilects. Kriol is now a primary and everyday language for the majority of Aboriginal children living in remote parts of Australia, with census figures showing as many as 250,000 speakers of Kriol today (out of approximately 455,000 current speakers of Indigenous languages in Australia (Disbray and Loakes 2013, 288). While Kriol varies across the diverse communities in which it has developed (Wigglesworth and Simpson 2008; Harkins 1994), it is more similar, structurally and formally, to vernacular Indigenous languages than it is to English. Kriol reflects, and inflects for, distinctions made by the vernacular languages of the regions in which it has developed, hence its highly regional variation and locally determined ingenuity. That is, Kriol, like the vernacular Aboriginal languages from which it derives, possesses grammatical and semantic structures that are radically different from, if not at odds with, English, even if it might (in its lighter versions) sound similar to English (because it shares some lexical and phonological similarities). No formal recognition of Kriol as an Indigenous language exists within official Australian policy for education or literacy. If under current nter Intervention policy Aboriginal vernacular languages are faring badly, Kriol has historically fared far worse. Its low prestige, if not disavowal (despite any number of local initiatives and educational interventions at the community level), derives from negative, naive, and ill-­informed assumptions about so-­called nonstandard contact languages and “inappropriate,” “improper,” or “deviant” English usage (see Harkins 1994; Rhyden 1996; Wigglesworth, Simpson, and Loakes 2011; Disbray and Loakes 2013; Eades 2013). It is within this context that Tangentyere artworks, which utilize Aboriginal Kriol as well as vernacular literacy, need to be understood. What needs to be said, obvious though it may seem, is this: the kinds of linguistic ingenuity evinced by these paintings do not arise from loss, deficiency, or lack of traditional language skills. High mobility and transmigration do not mean leaving behind country, culture, language; they do not mean abandonment or loss of tradition in a greater totalizing sense.5 Rather, they require, by necessity, highly creative and experimental strategies of intralingual and biliteracy competencies 46 | Chapter Two

Plate 1. Doris Thomas, Thats Goanna, 2011. 55 × 40 cm, acrylic on canvas. © the artist and Tangentyere Artists. Photo by Tangentyere Artists.

Plate 2. Margaret Boko Nampitjinpa, Tjulpu and Tjitji, 2013. 195 × 120 cm, acrylic on linen. © the artist and Tangentyere Artists. Photo by Tangentyere Artists.

Plate 3. June Walkutjukurr Richards, The Aboriginal Broadcasting Corporation, 2006. 462 × 593 mm, primed cotton canvas over wooden stretcher. Warburton Collection. © Warburton Arts Project. Photo by G. Proctor.

Plate 4. June Walkutjukurr Richards, We went to the Mission and we used to paint differently, 2007. 44 × 57.5 cm, acrylic on canvas. ccwa 880e, Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art, The University of Western Australia. © Warburton Arts Project. Image courtesy of Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art.

Plate 5. Rhonda Unurupa Dick, Panel 3 from the series My Great-­Grandmother’s Country. My 2 Grandfather’s Mother’s Birthplace, 2012. 26 × 26 cm, digital photographic print on archival paper. Edition of ten. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Tjala Arts.

Plate 6. Rhonda Unurupa Dick, Panel 4 from the series My Great-­Grandmother’s Country. My 2 Grandfather’s Mother’s Birthplace, 2012. 26 × 26 cm, digital photographic print on archival paper. Edition of ten. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Tjala Arts.

Plate 7. Pantjiti Ungkari Mackenzie posing with Niningka Lewis’s Tjanpi Film Camera, npy Women’s Council car park, Alice Springs, 2007. © Tjanpi Desert Weavers, npy Women’s Council. Photo by J. Foster.

Plate 8. Nyurpaya Kaika-­Burton with her bird for Paarpakani (Take Flight) made during artists’ camp held in Pitjantjatjara country near Amata, SA, 2011. © Tjanpi Desert Weavers, npy Women’s Council. Photo by J. Foster.

Plate 9. Nyurpaya Kaika-­Burton, Paarpakani (Take Flight), 2012. For Deadly: In-­Between Heaven and Hell, Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Institute, SA. 1,700 (length) × 450 (height) × 1,450 (width) mm, raffia, minarri grass, wool, poly-­raffia, bush turkey feathers, secondhand fabric, and wire. © Tjanpi Desert Weavers, npy Women’s Council. Photo by M. Brady.

Plate 10. Triumphant artists with their finished works made for Paarpakani (Take Flight) at the end of the artists’ camp, 2011. Left to right: Nyurpaya Kaika-­Burton, Yaritji Young, Paniny Mick (obscured), Ilawanti Ken, and Naomi Kantjuriny. © Tjanpi Desert Weavers, npy Women’s Council. Photo by J. Foster.

Plate 11. Molly Napurrurla Tasman, Yurlpa (in process), Warnayaka Art and Cultural Aboriginal Corporation, Lajamanu, NT, 2011. Ochre and binder on Belgian linen. © the artist and Warnayaka Art and Cultural Aboriginal Corporation. Photo by J. Biddle.

Plate 12. Rosie Napurrurla Tasman, Ngurlu/Kurlukuku/Lampurnu (Mulga Seeds /  Diamond Dove / Breast Milk Drops), 2007. 50 × 24 cm, oil and ochre on prepared wood. Lajamanu Warlpiri Women’s Yawulyu Workshop, Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics, College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales. © the artist, courtesy Warnayaka Art and Cultural Aboriginal Corporation. Photo by C. Bender.

Plate 13. Rhonda Sharpe, The Night Birds, 2012. 50 × 55 × 18 cm (overall), recycled blanket, feathers, and synthetic polymer paint. © the artist and Yarrenyty Arltere Artists. Photo by S. Wallace.

Plate 14. Dulcie Sharpe, Grandmothers can rest too, sometimes, 2012. 50 × 63 × 30 cm, recycled blanket wool, cotton, and natural pigments. © the artist and Yarrenyty Arltere Artists. Photo by S. Wallace.

Plate 15. Sally Rubuntja and Marlene Rubuntja, See how we stand, proud with our arms open!, 2013. 60 × 60 cm, etching. © the artists and Yarrenyty Arltere Artists. Photo by S. Wallace.

Plate 16. Sally Rubuntja and Marlene Rubuntja, Woman with arms up because she is proud!, 2013. 67 × 60 × 18 cm, recycled blanket fabric and embroidery thread. © the artists and Yarrenyty Arltere Artists. Photo by S. Wallace.

Plate 17. People looking at the artworks displayed at the Nyarna, Lake Stretch Artists Camp. Canning Stock Route bush trip, August 2007. © form, Canning Stock Route Project. Photo by T. Acker.

Plate 18. Cyril Holland, Tjillawarra Kirritji Warra Warra, 1992. 1,820 × 1,840 mm, acrylic polymer on 15–18 oz. cotton canvas. Warburton Collection. © the artist and Warburton Arts Project.

Plates 19 and 20. Cyril Holland at work: Mitjika Rock Shelter (artist’s father’s birthplace/ country) on Nyi Nyi (zebra finch), Tjitjarri (× 2) (small quiet desert python) Dreaming and Kunnatja (mythic hail), 1992. Photo by G. Proctor, Warburton Arts Project.

Fig. 2.3. Sally M. Mulda working in the studio, 2013. © Tangentyere Artists. Photo by Tangentyere Artists.

to take shape on frontier borders, as these works attest: if anything, arguably, a heightened rather than a diminished appreciation of language as itself a marker and a maker of community. Second, place: the biliterate communilect developed by Tangentyere not only makes communication possible, it makes community. Alice Springs is Arrernte country (and the majority of Aboriginal residents living in Alice Springs town camps today are Arrernte). Alice Springs is not, Tangentyere Artists | 47

therefore, a neutral, free, or new place, nor are town camps as a place or identity simply up for grabs in representational terms.6 The country, sites, and significance of Alice Springs are owned by Arrernte, whose rights and authority to represent are incontestable and inalienable, as Aboriginal people recognize. Although Arrernte-­specific histories representing Alice Springs and its environs predate the acrylic Western Desert painting movement by at least three decades, the status of this art has suffered historically from its own assumptions of “nonauthenticity” and “not really proper Aboriginal art” because of its markedly postcontact form (Hardy, Megaw, and Megaw 1992). The Hermannsburg school of watercolor painting was established in the 1930s by Albert Namatjira, who was the first Aboriginal person to become an Australian citizen, as well as arguably the most famous Aboriginal artist today, and whose legacy remains vitally productive for Arrernte.7 Namatjira, under the guidance of Rex Battarbee and Pastor Friedrich Albrecht, began what became the first major school of remote Aboriginal art by painting Arrernte watercolor landscapes.8 Arrernte community and family descendants of Namatjira continue today to paint in the Hermannsburg school of traditional watercolors at Ntaria (Hermannsburg) as well as at Ngurratjuta Iltja Ntjarra / Many Hands Art Centre in Alice Springs. The influence of the Hermannsburg school is (also) apparent in the figurative sculptures of Yarrenyty Arltere Artists (see chapter 7). That these two community art centers are some few blocks away from the Tangentyere Art Center gives some sense of the pressingly close realities of such complex and entwined desert traditions. It wasn’t until the 1990s that Hermannsburg watercolors began to be appreciated as Jukurrpa, that is, as major artworks of attachment to and responsibility for, as well as rights to, Ancestral lands, and not simply as crossover or assimilationist landscape paintings (Green 1992; Morton 1992). The status of Arrernte watercolor paintings today remains far lower than what Green (1992, 21) calls “the hegemony of the dot,” which, since the groundbreaking Magiciens de la Terre exhibition in 1989, has monopolized global ideals of Aboriginal art, from Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s inclusion in the Venice Biennale in 1997 to Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri in dOCUMENTA (13) in 2012: avant-­garde defining events that, notably, excluded Arrernte watercolor works. In a context where Arrernte rights to represent Alice Springs are sovereign, the position of Tangentyere Art Center, which serves to represent all Alice Springs town camp residents (including non-­Arrernte Aboriginal residents), 48 | Chapter Two

becomes complicated. We know from the history of both the Hermannsburg and the Western Desert art movements that the right to represent, as well as the design forms of representation, emanate from country itself and from the complex forms of authorization that allow, and indeed compel, people to reproduce Ancestral marks as their own today on bodies, boards, canvas. If authority, as well as the right to represent, are invested in country and in Ancestral rights inherited by descendants today, and if complex and contingent styles of painting already demarcate historical trajectories and political alliances, then the difficult question that Tangentyere Artists faces is who or what can authorize new collective forms of Alice Springs–­based representation? It is here that the productive capacities of tradition are vital. Arguably, Tangentyere art demonstrates how experimentation reveals tradition. Importantly, this is not tradition as salvage. The biliteracy, biliterary innovations taking shape today are anything but Ancestral in the sense of what Myers (2004) calls “designs held by those who went before.” Rather, this is the harnessing of the capacities of tradition: of the tangible imprintational force and efficacy of kuruwarri marks; of the primacy of Ancestral embodied heritage capacities, to make a place materially alive and to enliven it with localized activity, ritualized iteration, and Aboriginal presence; to imbue it with living memory. The material and pragmatic importance of Jukurrpa is not a fixed or final canon (Biddle 2007). As Myers (2004, 251) puts it, signs don’t have intrinsic meaning but are “signifiers made to have a signified in social action.” Named, known sites and places are not simply places of significance for just any reason. They are places of significance because they were where Ancestor activities, corporeal intertwinings, subject to object “transformations” of bodily matter-­ made-­material, took shape. These are sites where significant things happened; where, for example, water was made or found, hunting was particularly plentiful or vexed, where perhaps yirninti trees or yarla grew, where ceremonies were held, and so forth. They are sites and places to which people return today (when they can) for camping, hunting, ceremonial purposes, for the same reasons as did their Ancestors. That is, the great sites, places, and designs of Jukurrpa are significant not merely because things happened there in the past. They remain significant today for the possibilities they provide for human activities in the present and future (see Myers 2002, 2004). Sites are thus made materially significant by repeated practice. Potent places of immanence are thus made alive Tangentyere Artists | 49

and attached to bodies, memories, and human lifeworlds today by embodied iteration. The fact of community-­based arts practice on and in country has been vital to human-­Ancestral obligation and its ongoing productive capacities today. Aesthetic reiteration makes purposeful Aboriginal lived space alive with the potency of Jukurrpa: a “remembering forward,”9 as it were, that works backward to create a past that is lived in the present; what in fact the tradition of Jukurrpa best teaches—the binding together of person and place, materially, responsibly, collectively; a productive capacity of tradition that has seen, in less than four decades, the transformation of what were originally government-­enforced settlements or missions into recognized Aboriginal community homes.10 This “culture-­making,” as Myers (1994) has called the vital capacities of Aboriginal art today, not only makes space into place (Casey 1997) or actively produces what Appadurai (1990) calls “ethnoscapes”: new located geographies and territorialisms made by practice-­in-­place in the mobile and migratory aesthetics of the global contemporary. In this context, however, Aboriginal art in Australia inaugurates prior rights and preexistent claims of Indigenous first nations peoples and territories. Australia is not a postcolony. It is a frontier settler-­ colony (see Moreton-­Robinson 2003; Bird Rose 2004; Altman and Hinkson 2012). “Invasion is a structure not an event,” as Patrick Wolfe (2006) describes it. The forms of colonization may have diversified and diffused in the contemporary, but as the nter Intervention and the aesthetic strategies developing in response attest, colonialism is very much alive today in the Australian present.

i Tangentyere Artists is part of Tangentyere Council, a greater representative body incorporated in 1979, which lobbies on behalf of town camp residents across the spectrum of land rights, housing, employment, and other legal and health services as part of the greater social services it delivers—lobbying that has intensified under the nter Intervention (Tangentyere Council 2008, 2012).11 Tangentyere Artists as a community art center was founded in 2005, three decades after the first Aboriginal Western Desert community art center of Papunya Tula Artists Pty. Lyd. was established in 1972. The rationale for the establishment of Tangentyere Artists drew directly upon what had, by then, become the evidence 50 | Chapter Two

Fig. 2.4. Exhibition: Selfies: Representations of Self and Town Camp Artists, Tangentyere Artist Gallery, Alice Springs, NT, 2014, showing Tangentyere Artists (paintings) and Yarrenyty Arltere Artists (sculptures). Photo by S. Pearce, courtesy of Tangentyere Artists.

of the benefits of remote community art centers—not solely the provision of an income base for Aboriginal people, but the far more important, if difficult to quantify, “critical question of cultural survival, identity, livelihood and individual and community wellbeing” (Acker, Stefanoff, and Woodhead 2013) associated with remote Aboriginal art centers and aesthetic practice today. Tangentyere was established relatively late in the history of the Western Desert art movement, following on from the 1980s, which saw the development of an international Aboriginal art industry for the first time (Altman and Taylor 1990; Myers 2002; Altman 2003; Genocchio 2008), including private Aboriginal art galleries in Australia and overseas, as well as a lucrative secondary art market (Wilson-­Anastasios 2008). In this densely productive and rapid period of development, distinguishable artistic and aesthetic styles of painting, associated with specific art centers or geographic communities, have emerged.12 An emphasis on diversity and specificity, rather than simply a pan–­Western Desert art frame, has become a marked and marketable aspect of post-­2000 art production, one Tangentyere Artists | 51

perhaps specifically heightened by the collapse of the Aboriginal art boom in the 2007–8 gfc (Global Financial Crisis), which has tightened the market and increased competition accordingly (Wilson-­Anastasios 2010).13 That the artists of Tangentyere might be uniquely sensitized to the capacities of place-­making traditional practice in this context is hardly surprising. The experimental forms that now distinguish Tangentyere first took shape in 2008, explicitly in response to a request to produce new works on the concept of “home” for a solicited exhibition of works at Birrung Gallery in Sydney (Tangentyere Artists 2015). This opportunity—the question of home itself— produced not just Jukurrpa-­based paintings of the artists’ more remote traditional countries, but paintings of town camps and of Alice Springs environs. Over the subsequent five years—under the directorship of Liesl Rockchild and the tutelage of assistant coordinator Sue O’Connor and arts facilitator Sia Cox, non-­Indigenous art workers whose capacity to support and facilitate experimental initiatives needs to be understood as being vital to these developments, not under erasure as non-­Aboriginal art workers have been historically (see chapter 4)—­Tangentyere artists developed, for the first time, means to engender, activate, and reveal traditional town camp aesthetics. The deeply impacted question of home, in short, provided the impetus to articulate the complexity and contiguity of home (ngurra, waltya, apmere) for town camp residents. The importance of practice cannot be underestimated. During this period, intense intellectual and resourceful audacity has been harnessed to purposefully refabricate tradition. Under the direction of artist Louise Daniels and her family, Tangentyere undertook a certain “urban renewal” or “border aesthetics,” refashioning recycled tin sourced from town camps into experimental art-­ object form, including wearable jewelry and sculptural-­painting innovations. Tangentyere is now renowned for these unique forms of arts diversification, which include works of acrylic produced on abandoned hubcaps, license plates, flour can lids, and exhaust pipes, directly utilizing found-­object forms and materials scavenged from home bases of Alice Springs town camps. The artists’ work explicitly embraces willful misuse and make-do, activating and transforming waste management practice within the camps themselves (as much as on canvas), in which the detritus of industrialism and modernism is taken as seriously as Ancestral detritus, and, arguably, reveals the capacity of Jukurrpa itself to embrace contemporary material signs of Aboriginal occupation. What 52 | Chapter Two

Fig. 2.5. Jane Young, Little Rocks in the Simpson Desert, 2013. 46 cm diameter, acrylic on recycled plastic hubcap. © the artist and Tangentyere Artists. Photo by Tangentyere Artists.

else are kuruwarri marks in this sense, if not traces, castoffs, reminders and remainders of what were Ancestral activities and object forms that, equally, dot and circle the landscape today? Tangentyere artists hunt and forage today for recycled tin as much as for traditional Western Desert seeds and beads—what Warlpiri call, generically, yirninti, the acacia, eucalyptus, and gum fruits species (see Hamby and Young 2001)—seasonally specific and locally plentiful beads and seeds that are dried, painted, pierced, and strung as necklaces, bracelets, and earrings, alongside works of recycled pressed tin, which are also washed, painted, pierced, and strung as necklaces, bracelets, and earrings into Tangentyere contemporary two-­way art forms: both unearthed from, and thus reconnecting with, practice-­ based material iteration in the town camps of Inarlenge (Little Sisters), Irlperenye (Old Timers), Mpwetyerre (Abbots), Hidden Valley, and beyond. In short, what is remarkable is that the art of Tangentyere has, in less than a decade, begun to refer not just to artists who were from town camps but to works of vital aesthetic materiality, that is, art from and of town camps themselves. The unique hybrid communilect or metrolect that now typifies their work represents the complex and compelling demands of what town camp aesthetics Tangentyere Artists | 53

Fig. 2.6. Recycled bottle top and tin lid earrings created by various artists, Tangentyere Artists Gallery, 2012. © Tangentyere Artists. Photo by Tangentyere Artists.

might become in both intra-­Aboriginal (Arrernte and non-­Arrernte protocol) and inter-­Aboriginal, that is, intercultural, terms (between Aboriginal and non-­ Aboriginal). The place of Alice Springs is not a mere backdrop to linguistic and literary innovation.14 Rather, it is a vital factor. That Tangentyere artists paint with inordinately high finesse at once across and between and beyond what Arrernte watercolor figuration provides—the iconography of the Western Desert and the space of multiliteracy—needs to be situated within this compacted context, replete with inter- and intra-­nuance and demand from more than one tradition of inscription, more than one form of writing. Tangentyere artists utilize the Arrernte phrase “Anwernkenhe Ayeye” (the story belonging to us); a phrase that needs to be appreciated within this greater sense of the sheer energetics and dynamics of endurance making required by language, by literacy, by art, by necessity, in this context. In this sense, the artists of Tangentyere have not abandoned or migrated away from home countries. The artists are not, in this sense, in exile (even if this 54 | Chapter Two

might be the broader aim of the nter Intervention—the permanent evacuation of traditional owners from remote homelands). The condition of their aesthetic is about and from the paradox of “home”—what dwelling, being, acting, meaning, and making place can be in contingent, indeterminable, conditions of migration, movement, and marginality; high volatility, surveillance, uncertainty—as much as it is situated in the place of, in the plenty of, Arrernte country, today.

ii Doris Thomas’s Thats Goanna (2011, plate 1) is irrefutably a masterwork of traditional painting executed in the best of formalist terms that the post-­Emily art era (see Biddle 2007) of Western Desert painting history commands. This painting does not present iconographic or cartographic specificity of country or place as such (at least not such that outsiders can discern) but is a more generic high Dreaming (Jukurrpa) painting. Three-­dimensional effects are enacted by treating the canvas not as a flat surface but as a porous screen of fleshly imprintable penetration achieved by layers of application. Black, centralized kuruwarri marks (Ancestral marks, traces, imprints) of concentric circles are repeated across the canvas and are outlined, made animate, by dotting and lines that themselves appear to move three ways at once: from left to right, to write horizontally across the canvas/page; up and down a vertical vortex; and in and out of dimensional space. An immersive, transitional undulation and animation are enacted (from background to surface and back again). To complete a totalizing effect, no empty space is left across the canvas; the Dreaming continues both before and beyond the seemingly temporary terms and frame of the canvas edge. What halts this otherwise highly traditional Jukurrpa painting is words, inset here not unlike the kuruwarri marks themselves: black letters outlined, animated, in bright blue (see further below on the question of the color blue), nearer the bottom of the canvas page; not so much centralized or framed as simply immersed, presented within the Dreaming depicted. All in capitals, and markedly at odds with the otherwise predominant code, these are more words shouting as if to ears deafened: thats goanna. The painted words thats goanna rupture an otherwise sacred space, that is, a space occupied by the art consumer’s expectation, experience, and desire Tangentyere Artists | 55

for a Western Desert painting as a space of uninterrupted, silent contemplation. A deeply preemptive, deeply affective intervention, Thats Goanna wards off in advance the inevitable ritualized exchange between Aboriginal artist and non-­Aboriginal (art advisor, consumer, market): painting a story for money. The posture of short-­term attention span required for the purpose of art market transaction, the ever-­present, dogged exchange demand: “Oh, and what is the story for this painting? What Dreaming is that?” A dumbing down, no less, in advance, to befit the terms the exchange really requires, that is, fast, simple, tagging information only. A gestural intervention and strategic formalism both: pointedly proliferating meaning, identity, and identification at once to what or rather who is otherwise not present or under erasure in the canvas, on this page, and on each and every canvas that is produced by the remote art sector today; that is, outing, by enacting and acting out, calling out, in advance, what is the silenced presence of the non-­Aboriginal consumer, who dictates, in fact, the entirety of the performative. The opposite of didactic, Thats Goanna neither lectures nor moralizes. If anything, it operates in countersyncopation to oral discursiveness. Its move is specifically against the panoptical explanatory impulse not only of the art market but of the documentary, of journalism and the anthropological gesture, all at once. Literally a response and in response, Thats Goanna appears as almost a logical progression from one of the most marked historical developments within the Western Desert painting tradition, one specifically undertaken by women artists, over the last two decades. A marked shortening of the Dreaming story currently, and a move to single-­word titling or the use of “Untitled” in Western Desert paintings, is now common (Biddle 2003, 2007). This shift was encapsulated by Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s work and her concomitant refusal to “tell” the Dreaming stories of her paintings both. Her infamous sweeping hand dismissal spoke reams, as it were, when she was asked (as she and all Desert artists inevitably are, time and time again), “What Jukurrpa, Dreaming, is this you’ve painted?” “Awelye, Dreaming, whole lot.” Thats Goanna bespeaks perhaps the most unspeakable crime yet in the Aboriginal art economy success story. Who speaks Aboriginal languages well enough to translate; who can take or has taken the time to learn, to listen, to understand, what is required to speak to, to engage with, to translate on behalf of Aboriginal people? Where are the Aboriginal art history scholars, as 56 | Chapter Two

Fig. 2.7. Doris Thomas working in the studio, 2013. © Tangentyere Artists. Photo by Tangentyere Artists.

John Carty (2014) pointedly asks, who learn an Indigenous language in order to study Ngaanyatjarra, Warlpiri, Pintupi art, as scholars in droves learn French and German in order to study French and German impressionism, abstract modernism, whose linguistic traditions and competencies are understood to be necessary tools for their aesthetic appreciation? How is it that Aboriginal art, Marcia Langton (2000, cited in Myers 2002, 340) demands, shouldn’t have to be studied, researched, in the way Renaissance painting and other master canons of Western art have to be, that is, historically, comparatively, linguistically? Where are the university language programs, the postgraduate or master’s programs, devoted to Yolngnu Mata, Pitjantjatjarra, Martu? Warlpiri have a word for this posture: warungka. Warungka is a form of social deafness, a madness small children and the elderly both can suffer equally: the incapacity to hear because one’s own thoughts are too big and crowd out the possibility of hearing anyone, anything, else. Kardiya (white people) are called this, warungka, not in a judgmental or mean sense, as one might expect, Tangentyere Artists | 57

but rather as a flat, descriptive fact. Warungka is feared, also, interculturally and is, at least in part, the reason that Dreaming stories are not really proffered any longer, not in their proper long form as they used to be, at least in my experience. Warlpiri say, “You can’t tell Kardiya the truth about Jukurrpa. They’d think we were warungka [mad]” (see Biddle 2007). The affective force of Thats Goanna is self-­proclamation, self-­supplementation, in this sense. A titling made by the entitlement of the artist directly, literally, to put on the screen, to stage on this very page of history, this historical discursive “offstage” reality: the writing of the de rigueur Dreaming story that accompanies each and every painting that leaves the desert for art galleries of London, Paris, New York; a making of sovereignty from what has not, in fact, been a sovereign space. This highly playful, cringe-­inducing painting directly addresses the consumer and what is, in fact, his or her determinative relationship with the history of Western Desert art, thwarting the possibility of an imaginary authentic engagement with Aboriginal painting that is not already mediated by the market, the gallery, the art world. The absence of the apostrophe that would indicate that thats is an abbreviation (of “that is”) in “proper” written sae serves, in this case, to further underline and to stage a confrontation between two forms of writing, neither of which belongs solely to one tradition. The auditory facticity of the vernacular shouts here, and not only moves to identify Thats Goanna as an Aboriginal title, written by the artist’s hand in Aboriginal Kriol (the standardized form of which does not use the conjunctive apostrophe, and in which one can also write simply “thas,” as Margaret Boko Nampitjinpa does in her paintings presented below), but equally instigates a high performative declarative. Pointedly, this painting is not articulating “That is goanna”—what the conjunctive apostrophe would graphologically make this phrase mean if it were a phrase in sae. “That is goanna” would suggest a separation of word from image: subject (that) from subject complement (goanna). The copulative verb form “is” thus operates to link or tie, point to, what are, grammatically, two different entities. But Thats Goanna is a singular performative; its effect is to make one enunciation declarative. Rhonda Napanangka’s Second Hand Shopping (2010, figure 2.8) depicts what, at face value, is the most pedestrian of subjects, what perhaps could not be further from the sacred, the über-­feminine of the everyday: shopping. Splayed out 58 | Chapter Two

Fig. 2.8. Rhonda Napanangka, Second Hand Shopping, 2010. 30 × 30 cm, acrylic on canvas. © the artist and Tangentyere Artists. Photo by Tangentyere Artists.

across the canvas, as they might be along a clothesline to dry or on a blanket at a market to be inspected, are, one by one, equal space, equal size, proportionate, an array of (singularly similar-looking) domestic clothing items. Also (for this is a complicated semantic field) sporting objects and accessories: a ball, hockey sticks, and, are they Nike shoes—the yellow checkmark on each; what could more strongly signify globalization and the market economy?15 In Second Hand Shopping, words perform a precise one-­to-­one identificational tagging function—image to word, perfect mimicry, the most banal of literacy contracts: the picture dictionary. The discursive dominance of the picture dictionary, as attested here, as the communicative modality between Aboriginal and non-­Aboriginal people, within the domains of both art and education, must not be underestimated. Not only has the techne of iconographic decoding and translation charts historically accompanied the sale, exhibition, and cataTangentyere Artists | 59

log or coffee table interpretations of desert art throughout the art movements— from Nancy Munn’s Walbri Iconography to Geoffrey Bardon, to the provenances attached to paintings today (see chapter 4)—but over the last decade picture dictionaries have become the preferred form of Central and Western Desert language dictionaries.16 Recontextualized within this context—and indeed, this painting insists that we must follow the networked dramatization between art and literacy, as it does itself—the crucial affective aesthetic of this painting proliferates. From icons of the Desert to icons of consumerism, the mimicry here is almost unbearably in-­your-­face banal. An alienating space to encounter, at least for us Kardiya (Whitefellas) to be told, shown, what we know already; to be treated, as it were, like children, by being shown, told, one by one by one, ruler pointed as if to chalkboard, or finger to primary reader, what we patently know already. And perhaps this is the point: what literacy (education, translation, writing Dreaming stories, “whole lot”) has been to Central and Western Desert Aboriginal people—showing, telling, teaching, what is already patently known. As Christine Nicholls (2004, 71) has said of the work of Melbourne-­based Indigenous artist Destiny Deacon, here “performing the subjugated and compliant native becomes a position that is in fact the opposite of submissive or yielding.” For secondhand shopping items are not neutral objects, nor is this collection of Aboriginally identified things “traditional.” Imagine if this painting (and the work makes us imagine this) were composed, instead, of boomerangs, coolamons, grinding stones, ochre, clapsticks? Second Hand Shopping insists that classificational systems may indeed typify Indigenous knowledge— with, it seems, no small wink to Lévi-­Strauss, totemism, structuralism, the obsessive predilection for taxonomies, dictionaries, typologies, as much as to the collection of the art connoisseur, the archaeologist, the museum. Objects can and do indeed serve to stand for, represent, Aboriginal culture, people, identity. Here, however, objects construct Aboriginal identities, as everywhere in the global capital marketplace: conspicuous consumption; object choice; commodity fetish; highly differentiated selection, arrangement, combination; and the promise of becoming more, better, best through what you own. But here, the tethering is not to free choice (as, indeed, market realities never are) but more to what Paul Gilroy (1993, 71) might call “vital memories of the slave past.” Secondhand shopping is, after all, secondhand choice. Castoffs, discarded. Detritus not 60 | Chapter Two

of Ancestral bodies and their activities that were, and are, emulated by humans under the law of Jukurrpa (including by the painting of such activities and Ancestral objects, in the contemporary) but of Whitefella bodies, activities, and traces: consumerism, opulence, abundance, waste. Here, the clothes appear like paper doll cutouts—a resonance both depersonalized and global: of dolls more “real” than Aboriginal people; of clothes and outfits and fashion that might better represent (or appeal more to) non-­ Aboriginal people than Aboriginal people’s own bodies; of dolls who can only ever be dressed, assimilated into, preexistent cutout (Western) forms not of their own making. But notably, this art does not feel oppressed or look impoverished. Riches of the poor perhaps, but Second Hand Shopping does not represent Aboriginal poverty (a poverty of which we, as outsiders, are at least provisionally aware). This is a far more lyrical, allegorical, and vital materialism. Pace Rancière (2011, 25), this is not the presentation of “the poor man dressed in rags” but, rather, a more Flaubert-­like gesture of “the lice devouring him.” That is, it is not the fact but the quality of the fact that matters. The provocation here is the interweaving of the documentary mode with its more figurative realization: the reality of secondhand shopping as an Aboriginal-­specific, purposeful activity and a cherished set of objects, no less, presented as if Jukurrpa, Dreaming, itself. Here, the tactile, sensuous, redolent work of Jukurrpa as an incarnate force and effect is evoked. Secondhand clothes are made sentient, human-­like, responsive and respondent by the work of Jukurrpa, as the carefully dotted surface of each item serves to animate what are otherwise dead objects. Here, canvas becomes a site of care itself, the work and the workings of a purposeful site of female-­specific responsibilities for the care, the nourishment and protection, of the bodies of others, by and through the work of art itself; the work of Aboriginal female bodies, hands, to animate, to bring to life, country, persons, objects as fiercely alive and enlivening as in any traditional painting; underscoring the embodied experience of being Aboriginal in terms that are not just on the surface of the canvas. Responsibility for the keeping and making of country, canvas, and the bodies of others alive, literally, through the potent capacities of art making is not an abstract idea but one adorned (in the senses of both transformed and put on) in the everyday. Here perhaps the specific bounty of Alice Springs itself is equally signified, Tangentyere Artists | 61

because it is not depicted, just as in high Jukurrpa paintings place itself is not represented but, rather, the Ancestral/human activities that created it. Here, a significant site is made by everyday emulated human activities of female care ritually enacted; female-­specific responsibilities that are increasing today (see chapters 4–7); a place made capable of delivering up, as is country itself, what is required reciprocally for the healthy making of Aboriginal lifeworlds today; where the best “hunting grounds” are for—the Dreaming-­site-­specific space of—secondhand shopping. Margaret Boko Nampitjinpa began painting in 2007 when she joined Tangentyere Artists. Originally raised at Jay Creek Reserve, located in her father’s country, she has lived most of her adult life either in Jay Creek or in Alice Springs. She was a finalist in the 2011 Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (natsiaa) and the 2014 natsiaa Salon de Refuse, and exhibits widely nationally. Her unique story-­board paintings distinguish her oeuvre and have been described as “journalism” (O’Connor, Boko, Daniels, and Mulda 2015), “documentary” (Lisa Stefanoff, personal communication, 2013), and “witness” (Galatis 2012). Compositions in triptych, sometimes split panel, of so-­called secular pressing everyday encounters, events and moments recounted directly or recollected from memory where what was becomes what is through the social process of repetition and mark making, the making and sharing of publicly available purposeful forms that in telling become what is (known, knowable, shareable). However, the more forensic inclinations of the documentary are not what one encounters in Boko’s works. What these works do is qualify the notions of pure documentation as recounting or “dry facts,” as Enwezor (2003) describes it. What is told is not dissociable from the conventions of its telling, ultimately (see Demos 2013, 98). The Story of Mingkiri the Mouse (2011, figure 2.9) is not a promotion of plentitude nor an idealized vision of precontact cultural heritage. This is a world in which kids go to school; in which teachers read and teach in Luritja, a vernacular Western Desert language; where children clearly enjoy school, sit on discarded bedsprings like trampolines outside in the sun, and, in fact, emulate teachers, and the act of reading itself, in their play. In this painting about reading, what is read—words—are painted exactly as icons are in classical Western Desert painting. Here, white dots outline the word to create an individual animation of each letter (not of the whole word), indi62 | Chapter Two

Fig. 2.9. Margaret Boko Nampitjinpa, The Story of Mingkiri the Mouse, 2011. 90 × 30 cm, acrylic on canvas. © the artist and Tangentyere Artists. Photo by Tangentyere Artists.

cating that the letter itself is recognized formally as the iconic basis, the primary mark or law, as it were, of alphabet writing. Like the individuated icons elsewhere in Desert paintings, letters turn into words, into signs proper, through the work of pixelation, by dotting, which imprints and punctuates a flat surface into an enlivened and lively three-­dimensional undulating vibrancy—­perhaps rendered even more so by the green background to the letters in the first frame (red dots) changing to its converse, red background to green dots, by the third and final frame. Like kuruwarri marks, letters become, through this process, the thing itself (revealed and realized) as well as foreground and background both: what moves, undulates, recedes, and comes forward. These are not, in short, “dead flat words.” Their animation makes for traditional rewriting of English literacy into Kriol, into Luritja: a sounding of the vernacular; of hearing and speaking and writing Aboriginal Kriol expression; a literacy that makes sound and literacy both shimmer, quake, sound out, animate, come alive. thas afunny story: as if sound itself could belong to words; immersed with imagery, neither one nor the other dominating, but contingent, contagious, the co-­occupation of a compositional space without contestation. A secular story of pointedly bilingual teaching. me! i’m the teacher i read you she reading with only this language luritja. Less a story about Mingkiri—or so it seems to outsiders at least, who don’t know Mingkiri and his/ her country, who don’t have the kind of knowledge Luritja insiders might bring to their appreciation of this work—than about a peaceful day, perhaps in counTangentyere Artists | 63

try, somewhere, with the kids not inside learning, but outside, playing. A somewhere, at any rate, that does not look like or feel like a schoolroom. No dysfunction or threat: Aboriginal-­directed bilingual education is here “real good” in the remote somewhere, anywhere, of this painting. And so too is parental/ grandparental care persistent: Go To sleep! thats not morning! palya—as much a performative within the story as a reference here to the maternal care of children: sleep, specifically—for what else (or so it seems) than that children should sleep well in order to get up and go to school again the next day? Multiperspectivalism as well as multitemporality: reminiscent of yawulyu or inma performances, of the painting up and marking of the body that is told simultaneously through song, in women’s ceremony; narratives that are painted, sung, and performed not in straightforward logical narrative succession, but as classic Dreaming narratives are likely to unfold, from various perspectives and temporalities at the same time. The oblique conjurings and partial disclosures of kuruwarri marks, song cycles, and Jukurrpa narratives, even when combined, ensure that designs remain tied both to their storytellers’ levels of authority and to the listeners’/participants’ capacities to know, hear, and bring the remaining story to fuller knowledge (as they hold it). That is, this is a profoundly participatory mode of recognition that requires affective response. A shifting of narrator voice occurs three times in quick succession in this painting: from the witness “I” who is telling the story, to the witness who is watching the kids telling the story, to the kids’ voices themselves, and back again, commanding the kids Go To sleep! at the end; a definitive punctuation to a story no doubt, to what nevertheless belies straightforward narrative. Night turns to day, turns to night again—a story of a story of a story, at once, but not sequenced, as one might expect, between the three panels, with transitions or action sequences splayed out chronologically. Ambiguity distinguishes this work, thwarting expectation, perhaps specifically, of other generic literacies this work conjures equally: the episodic storytelling of the comic book or graphic novel (see chapter 7). More complex and fluid boundaries both are required between word and image than anything like illustration or storytelling. These paintings insist that word and image are not reducible to one another, not approximate translations. Rather, these paintings are more what Mitchell (1996) has described as irregular, heterogeneous, and often improvised boundaries between “institutions of the visible” and “institutions of the verbal.” They 64 | Chapter Two

Fig. 2.10. Margaret Boko Nampitjinpa working in the studio, 2013. © Tangentyere Artists. Photo by Tangentyere Artists.

call upon and rely upon the reader/audience to make meaning actively, to make connections between verbal and visual affective codes that both are and aren’t given by the painting itself. What this work does is not reducible ultimately to content, meaning, or narrative. Rather, its “irreducibly synthetic” form (Deleuze in Bennett 2012, 76) operates through realms of the sensory: temperature (can hot pink be anything but hot weather?); motion (the movement both between and within scenes); temporality (the shifting between verb tenses); paralingual content (content normally occurring in the auditory register of spoken language is made legible; words dynamically dazzle and “volume up” by capital form, by exclamation marks, and by animate dotting); mood (the feel-­good of searing colors and sunny-­day clouds). This painting is less a “where” or “when” or even an “event” than an atmosphere (see Stewart 2010; Bennett 2013); a density of mood and manner that can only be grasped by “feltful” reception through a highly literate and receptive body. This is a painting that relies upon audience participation and response to complete the affective and communicative circuitry (partial, multimodal, synesthetic) of its inchoate and biliteracy presentational form. It requires witness—a body individual and body collective, whose affective response becomes itself a form of responsibility to actively participate in the completion of the work. White Kids and Black Kids Jumping on Cars (figure 2.11) is a snapshot bio-­ picture; experience itself seems to emanate directly from a fact. Again, words are made icons, kuruwarri mark–like: blackened background with white pixelation to animate their potency. Note the use of white dots is here extended not to outline the road but to make realistic the dividing line of the road (complicating and ambiguating the usage of dots and thus revealing something more than what we already know, already assume, about the tradition of dotting in the Western Desert painting tradition). The so-­called country itself is here punctuated by the road that is itself made of, and articulated by, the same white dots that otherwise animate traces of Ancestral presence. In this sense, roads, here, become just as much icons of the desert and Aboriginal history as the ubiquitous concentric circles. This road creates both a stage and a boundary. Here, an otherwise untold micromoment of life lived in the margins of Aboriginal remote is manifest: where car carcasses dot and dominate the landscape as much as Dreaming An66 | Chapter Two

Fig. 2.11. Margaret Boko Nampitjinpa, White Kids and Black Kids Jumping on Cars, 2011. 105 × 40 × 3 cm, acrylic on recycled metal. © the artist and Tangentyere Artists. Photo by Tangentyere Artists.

cestral remains; where abandoned cars stockpile and become makeshift children’s playgrounds; where the cars themselves could not be more representative of the contemporary mobility and built-­in obsolescence of contact history and of the unbridled insistence of Aboriginal people to move. Homelands, outstations, the “remote” itself, all are signifiers of Aboriginal resistance to frontier colonial settlement, from UsMob’s and No Fixed Address’s Wrong Side of the Road (1981) to Warlpiri Media Association’s Bush Mechanics (1995) to Ivan Sen’s Mystery Road (2013)—badlands, border lands; lawlessness. The road in this sense embodies at once radical refusal, prior territorial tenure, and the screaming fact of obligated responsibilities to be present continuously and repeatedly in more than one place, in order to be responsible for, responsive to, country and others in their distinctive, distributed, emplaced demands (a material vitality immortalized by the Tjanpi Toyota [see chapter 5]). For Boko, the abandon of child’s play is possible only in the margins of what has been the futile attempt to settle Aboriginal Australia in one place, and the failure to keep children insulated from the real pleasures such so-­called unsafe worlds provide. Here, such a world is not a symbol of deprivation or travesty but a veritable trampoline fun park for kids who are, pointedly and unambiguously, black and white. The words white kids and black kids jumping on cars are classic iambic pentameter, the traditional poetry and verse metric form for the evocation of natural speech rhythms in English literary history. Iambic pentameter Tangentyere Artists | 67

is, of course, the preferred form of Shakespearean prose, as well as of nursery rhymes, written, as it were, to be read aloud. white / kids and black / kids jump / ing on cars, and it can’t be arbitrary here, the pause between jump and ing, as if to substantiate the rhythmic pause to operate visually (or is it the other way around?). The rhythm of words literalize the rhythm of jump ing itself, up and down, stressed/unstressed, and with neither a (differentiated) capital to indicate the sentence beginning nor a period to end the piece, the sense is continuous and extensive and the making of a “forever common” aphoristic fact. This happens, is happening: a world in which black kids and white kids may be distinguished but become conjoined in this doubling of life and poetry, historical event and biographic witnessing; conjoined in play as much as they are in aesthetics; bound to a performative event doubled by the performative that Boko stages for their game. The staging of children as being without adults is a recurrent theme in emergent art (see chapters 5 and 7). But these children are not unnoticed or unheld in the broader Winnicott (1953) sense, where the maternal “holding in mind” is understood as being as important as “holding physically.” That is, how could this scene be witnessed if Boko had not been present to oversee its occurrence? That the shape of the road itself creates here a safe-­holding space for play is important in that this safe-­play-­space is what Warlpiri call parraja (coolamon) shaped—round, flat, container-­like, the shape of a traditional Western Desert infant carrier—equally suggestive of a holding space, safe, embodied, proximate. That Boko has inserted her own signature, the words of her name, margaret boko, here inside the “safety” of the road-­bordered coolamon, her name smaller than the other words but no less pixelated, no less animated by the Dreaming and its authority, as the very words themselves are witness of, insists that she herself is present, is part of the scene literally, as she makes us witness in turn. The use of her name is specifically marked because Central and Western Desert acrylic painters, Tangentyere Artists included (as all of the other works here attest), do not sign their works, in keeping with the collectivist-­oriented traditions, and the external collectivist law, from which the works derive. Tjulpu and Tjitji (2013, plate 2) debuted in the 2013 Desert Mob exhibition at the Araluen Art Centre in Alice Springs. Everything coming up alive: flowers, plants, animals feeding, water holes brimming, shade trees aplenty; houses as happily nestled in place as are the camels, kangaroos, wild turkeys grazing. 68 | Chapter Two

Everywhere you look there is more, and the painting makes you peer up close and pay attention in order to discern what might otherwise be just a generic Aboriginal “remote.” The sky is no less teeming with life. White plastic bags (replete with handles) dance, fly, are caught playfully by birds, accompanied by text that reads tjulypu playing around with a plastic bag, as if to ensure, by restating the obvious, that the audience really gets what the painting is about (because maybe they don’t, won’t, can’t, in a historical context of structural “deafness”). Delightful as it is, this is a serious painting. Documenting a profoundly sentient landscape, as William E. H. Stanner (1972) first described the Aboriginal lifeworld, this is a place rendered palpably alive—the plenty of the contemporary as humans live out and live on life in Ancestral homelands and in Ancestral terms. Here, plastic bags are not (only) an icon of late global capitalism: what Tim Morton (2013) might identify as the “dark ecology” of “hyper objects” that transcend local belonging and threaten the very possibility of the life of the human species at the end of the Anthropocene; hot subject of ecological landfill debates and wildlife campaigns to change global consumer consciousness and unbridled capitalist consumption. Here, plastic bags are signs of healthy Aboriginal lifeworld; incorporated into a replete, humanized, world in which they remain as traces of lived, human, purposeful activity. Boko’s bags make the point that there is no “nature” distinct from “culture.” Country is preoccupied, already inhabited, socialized, humanized always, by those who came before. Plastic bags in this sense are veritable reminders and remainders in country of human inhabitation in the present in specifically Aboriginal terms. Here, the “tidy town” mentality of governmental policy, the obsession with litter, with squalor, the fear of dirt, disease, dysfunction of Aboriginal communities as indeed of Aboriginal bodies themselves, all of which conjoin, in this painting, is directly evoked. And playfully refuted. Boko (Desart Inc. 2013) says of her work: “This painting is about Tjulpu— that’s birds playing with plastic bags, and Tjjitji—that’s kids playing around with humpy house. Sun going down. Little Sisters Town Camp.” Boko points us to a second story. Almost indistinguishable from the veritable feast of the world it is staged within are found the words tjitchi playaround with humpy house. Compositionally, tjulpu and tjitji are thus rendered equivalent Tangentyere Artists | 69

Fig. 2.12. Sally M. Mulda, Policeman: Mother and Father Drunk, 2013. 90 × 30 cm, acrylic on canvas. © the artist and Tangentyere Artists. Photo by Tangentyere Artists.

(i.e., both birds and children “playaround”). And indeed, on very close inspection, tiny human figures can be found depicted in this work, indistinguishable almost from the flora, fauna, plants, animals. It is less humans that matter here than the signs and traces of their activities; the ways in which their distinct ways of being, of doing things, in place, can be made to be seen. In her review of Desert Mob 2013, Kieran Finnane (2013) singles out Boko’s achievement in Tjulpu and Tjitji as a statement of the fact that “Tjitji are ok”; that the children in Alice Springs town camps (such as Little Sisters Town Camp) are not suffering malnutrition, are not abused, sick, in need of nter Intervention. Immediate and potent, the positive and affectionate experience here is immersive and contagious both: less a depiction than an envelopment of us, as the children themselves, within healthy existential life at play. Sally M. Mulda has recently turned to painting what have been formally identified as, and exhibited under the title of, “Intervention Paintings,” figuring in Djon Mundine’s exhibition Ghost Citizens: Witnessing the Intervention at Cross Art Gallery, as well as in Right Now, at Boomali in Sydney’s Balmain. Shortlisted in 2011 for the prestigious natsia awards, Policeman: Mother and Father Drunk (2013, figure 2.12) is redolent with vernacular: the rhythm of spoken language and movement itself conjoin within the painting; the sound as much as the image itself almost crowding each other out in the complex performative of this scene. Here, “Pliceman” and “Plicewoman” are not figured directly; only their cars 70 | Chapter Two

symbolize their presence. Cars stand for the threat, the violence, posed by the scene. Aboriginal people, however, are figured, but singularity implies one big mob. They have no cars but are on foot, defenseless; no rowdy resistance, no fighting; only one man (on the right) gestures unfairness, perhaps in arm-­raised protest; to the left, a woman sits under a tree, comforting a baby. Sue O’Connor (in O’Connor, Boko, Daniels, and Mulda 2015) describes Mulda’s work as unjudgmental, unbiased, telling it like it is. Brutal facticity: black bodies, no camouflage possible, pressingly close realities of public Aboriginal sociality, grogging, surveillance, and the hypervisibility of lived difference. The painted words (unadorned, unanimated) that tell this story are not, however, black or blue, but red, the sign of ambulances, blood, stop signs. They are more like print literacy of the kind Aboriginal people encounter all too frequently in the contemporary: forms, records, administrative nightmare; not animated or enlivened or captured by tradition, but brick wall–like, no-­getting-­past. The words themselves are dense vernacular poesis and markedly Kriol specific. Gender agreement between the nominal and pronominal (he/she, his/ her) is absent; conjunctives are not distinguished (“you are” becomes your, not “you’re”); tenses shift between what are, in sae, present- and past-­tense verb forms (take, was, said, will, was), a common device in, for example, Warlpiri, operating here to allow for what is both a storytelling account, tied to memory, and an oral account, as it makes this scene a witness proper—a performative presentation not only of what took place, but of what is taking place now and in the future, all at once. This is writing of pathos, of a poignancy that only high literary aesthetic modes (the novel, the poem, the literary biography) can achieve. pliceman take a man to jail she was relly drunk plicewoman said your drunk woman. i will take your to jail. little baby was crying for is mother and father

For sae speakers without knowledge of Indigenous vernacular or of Kriol specifically, the affect here is, no doubt, confronting. The words resemble Standard English and yet don’t comply. Nonstandard spelling, grammatical weirdness, disorder, chaos; the abject, itself, hovers close by. Worse (or is it better?), the Tangentyere Artists | 71

use here of what can only appear to the sae reader to be bad English might, dramatically, convey what relly drunk actually sounds like: words slurred, mumbled, incomprehensible; what in fact, in turn, Aboriginal people sound like to the ears of the majority of Whitefellas—thus strengthening the case for the charge of dysfunction, deviancy, illiteracy, and thereby justifying the very rationale for the nter emergency. Mother and Father Drunk takes no small risk: not so much in the representation of the facts it presents as how it presents these facts—these “same” facts, after all, have made and do regularly make headlines. Rather, it is the quality by which the “facts of the matter” are made to matter that is critical. Here, an instigation of distinctively literary figuration is enacted, written by, and in the hands of, Aboriginal experience itself, in which life lived by the ordinary person becomes as invaluable as that of any hero, as Jacques Rancière (2011) describes the revolutionary terrain of literature. Here, an indistinguishability between actions and life course is enacted, a complex double moment of the order of fiction and the order of empirical reality. Subjective experience becomes objective fact and is at once made common, as it is to the historian, the journalist, and the novelist, as language, writing, rules out the possibilities of differentiating between so-­called subtle subjects and vile subjects, between activities worthy of being related and otherwise obscure, passive lives (Rancière 2011, 175). In Policeman: Mother and Father Drunk, as Rancière (2011) might describe it, “no heroic singularity emerges to cover up what hidden poetic power banality contains.” Notably, no single person is named by Mulda’s words or individuated by her imagery. Here is depicted the most radical aspect of literature itself: the making audible and making visible “speaking beings participating in shared world” (Rancière 2011, 4). The lived qualities of the bodies of Aboriginal people drinking in the Todd River, living in Alice Springs town camps: real people, real life, not dismissible victims; not “flotsam and jetsam” (Merlan 1995) or histories of forgotten people fallen from grace but speaking and acting subjects who are, in fact, enacting distinctive ways of doing and being in place, apprehending a world that may not pointedly be of their own making but nevertheless a world peopled, present, vital, owned; as if “written on the very body of things themselves” (Rancière 2011, 11). Mulda’s They Are Drinking Beer at Bush (2012, figure 2.14) is a visually searing composition of high intensity. Layers of acrylic evince timeworn execution. 72 | Chapter Two

Fig. 2.13. Exhibition: Selfies: Representations of Self and Town Camp Artists, Tangentyere Artist Gallery, Alice Springs, NT, 2014. Photo by S. Pearce, courtesy of Tangentyere Artists. Fig. 2.14. Sally M. Mulda, They Are Drinking Beer at Bush, 2012. 60 × 55 cm, acrylic on canvas. © the artist and Tangentyere Artists. Photo by Tangentyere Artists.

The necessity of what Warlpiri call maparnijaku, spreading, coating, anointing; what, historically, Warlpiri and other desert artists have done to the canvas—to coat it, thick and dense, time and again, with paint prior to painting the kuruwarri marks (or icons). The canvas is pretreated in this fashion, as both the body and the ground are in ceremony, in order to clear the canvas (body, ground, screen) from any previous inscription and to open it up, make it receptive to human mark making anew (see Munn [1973] 1986; Biddle 2007). Maparnijaku announces and allows significant imprintation—a mark made in, not on, a surface—to proceed. Here, this labored process has been extended more than once: in turn, a black maparnijaku background, followed by blue, followed by hot mango orange turning red (the colors of what Mulda calls “bush”); a literal erasing and clearing, performed any number of times, left present, made part of the work itself. Here again, people, Aboriginal people, are one mob: not threatening nor threatened but relaxed and at ease, with a subtle relaxed accuracy of posture, cross-­legged (under the trees), reclining (on a car hood), in what seems to be a nothing-­out-­of-­the-­ordinary day of being in the bush—of hunting, camping, being present in country as Aboriginal people are, turquoise beer cans close by. Silence is a marked aspect of Aboriginal languages, highly variable and deeply semantic (see Liberman 1982; Harris 1990; Eades 2013). If silence could be painted, might it look like this? In marked contrast, the torrid nature of the words stutters and screams; words that have clearly been worked, reworked, and worked again. A scene of writing under erasure: a battle zone; pencil eraser rubbed out: the inevitable smearing, tearing of paper—what we literate sae speakers know only too well, that the attempt to correct and write over a mistake always fails, always leaves evidence. What cannot simply be written screams louder than what is, finally, pronounced. Caught against any number of forces of erasure, self-­censorship, impossibility. An impasse already fueled perhaps by Noel Pearson’s (2001) wrath that drinking and violence are figured in the national media as intrinsically “Aboriginal” and, in turn, Aboriginal culture itself is blamed as the source of contemporary dysfunction (see Sutton 2009). How, in this context, can Mulda bear witness to what? That maybe DRiNKiNG beer at bush might be a vital, purposeful part of what it means to be Aboriginal today? Or is this painting model-

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Fig. 2.15. Sally M. Mulda working in the studio, 2013. © Tangentyere Artists. Photo by Tangentyere Artists.

ing (for it cannot be reduced to a preexistent repertoire of iconography, nor to a simple adding-­on of the new) what the Tangentyere Council program Mwerre Anetyeke Mparntwele, Sitting Down Good in Alice Springs (Memmott 1993), models—strategies for appropriate “ways to grog”? “This is us, this is the way it is,” as Kieran Finnane (2014) has recently described the work of Tangentyere artists (and Mulda’s work, specifically). But note, Mulda paints They Are Drinking Beer—not Us, not We. Here, the surveillance posture of the documentary conjoins with a kind of deferential and noncommittal witness, as is appropriate within Aboriginal contexts (Sansom 1980; von Sturmer 1981), where not identifying, or at least not identifying too closely, with what is presented is crucial, lest one become, oneself, identified with the subjects of the recounting. Mulda holds our gaze, our presence, to account for what is more than one “burden of representation” (Julien and Mercer 1996). We are made to look, stare, at what is an all-­too-­vilified image of Aboriginal “dys-

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function”; at what, in fact, we never really see at all, so ubiquitous is it. And yet it is precisely our gaze that has produced the topic imaged. A space, a scene, of shame ultimately—not of Mulda’s shame (this is not a painting that transmits affect) but of what can only be an exploration of the very conditions of surveillance itself.17 Mulda’s work, in this sense, can barely survive its own emergence.

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THREE

JUNE WALKUTJUKURR RICHARDS I was born in the bush at the Kaltjiti. . . . I remember always when I’m around in the bush with blue flower, purples flowers and I feel good, when it was like that in the mission time. How we had all the flowers everywhere. We pick all the flowers together and bring them home and give it to the missionary lady so they can put it in a vase. Everything was pretty, real pretty. The missionary lady told me so. My parents put me in the Home. It was good there but it was locked. . . . I went to school in Warburton and grew up speaking Ngaanyatjarra and English. They must have thought we stopped using our language but we always speak it and in English when we need to. June Walkutjukurr Richards | Western Australian Indigenous Art Awards, 2008

June Walkutjukurr Richards (1951–2012) was born in Mirlirrtjarra (Warburton Ranges) and lived and worked in the remote community of Warburton in Western Australia for most of her life. She grew up in the uam (United Aborigines Mission) at Warburton. The mission established the original settlement that would come to be called Warburton in 1933. This time, place, and experience would prove crucial for the development of Richards’s biliteracy aesthetics, as the uam taught bilingual literacy; that is, they actively taught Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara, and Yankunytjatjara literacy, as well as English literacy, a practice undertaken by the missionaries throughout the Anangu npy (Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjara, and Yankunytjatjara homelands) during the early colonial period (see Eickelkamp 2001; Edwards 2008). June Walkutjukurr Richards was a founding member of Tjulyuru Arts and the

Fig. 3.1. June Walkutjukurr Richards, Pretty Flower, undated. 418 × 296 mm, primed cotton canvas over wooden stretcher. Warburton Collection. © Warburton Arts Project. Photo by G. Proctor, Warburton Arts Project.

Warburton Arts Project when it was first established in the 1990s (whose proactive history in experimental community initiatives I discuss in full in chapter 9; initiatives that underpin Richards’s own development). She was a major contributor to the Ngaanyatjarra Dictionary Project as well as a writer, publishing the bilingual children’s reader Eagle’s Nest: Warlawurru Manngutjarra in 1997 (Richards 1997). In 2008, she won the prestigious Western Australian Artist Award at the Western Australian Indigenous Art Awards. In 2011, she was paid high tribute by the master painter, Tjanpi Desert Weaver artist, and stateswoman Eunice Yunurupa Porter, for inspiring her own development and that of greater Ngaanyatjarra history painting (Rothwell 2011). Independently from, and prior to, the work of Tangentyere artists, Richards developed a distinctive repertoire of biliteracy and biliterary techniques arguably unsurpassed in desert art history. More than one history, more than one response, has given shape to the claim that remote Aboriginal people are not literate, or that desert people didn’t and don’t possess writing.

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One of the first of Richards’s works to gain public acclaim was The Aboriginal Broadcasting Corporation (2006, plate 3), featured in the Yours, Mine and Ours exhibition of 2007, a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the abc (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), which undertook a visual arts exploration of the vital role played by the national public broadcaster for various Australian audiences and communities over the past five decades.1

This is about the Aboriginal Broadcasting Corporation. My people, they sit straight when they in the interview. I always watch them. They hold the paper up straight and read. The person interviewing reminds me of one person who comes here all the time. Have a meeting and go back. Meetings like, government meetings, I met him before in Laverton when he was at other meeting. I can’t remember his name. He’s been at the government meetings, any other meetings. Interview, ngurrkanytjarra, it’s a very special thing, picking out strong persons, selecting a person to talk— for the Aboriginal Broadcasting Corporation. They might be questioning me. The abc. June Walkutjukurr Richards | Artist Statement for Yours, Mine and Ours: 50 Years of ABC TV

This scene is no simple recount. Less a reconfiguration of any singular event of a real historical past, this is more an anywhere-­everywhere interview in the Aboriginal remote (“they might be questioning me”). This memorializing of the abc turns to temporalities in which the historical past is coterminous with contemporary imperative: the Indigenization of the national media. This painting stages Indigenous-­specific media history and Aboriginal activism; a history that, since 1986, has seen the establishment of remote media organizations across the desert, following the founding of the original Warlpiri Media Association (now paw or Pintubi Anmatjere Warlpiri Media), which was the first organization to produce Indigenous media made by Indigenous people in an Indigenous language (see chapter 7). At the same time, Warlpiri Media established the first formal media protocols for remote communities, putting into place rules, regulations, and sanctions ensuring that all media seek formal permis-

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sion and consent prior to entering remote communities and documenting any content on Aboriginal land (films, photographs, interviews), giving Aboriginal community members rights of permission, appraisal, veto, copyright, and other legally binding media control of their images and their circulation, for the first time. In turn, these protocols were adopted, developed, and extended by other remote Indigenous media organizations, land councils, and community bodies throughout the 1980s and 1990s, including the development of Ngaanyatjarra Media.2 This critical period of Aboriginal self-­determination, of media control, is arguably what this painting is about. Richards’s witty subversion here of just one word in the established acronym transforms the national Australian Broadcasting Corporation (abc) into the Aboriginal Broadcasting Corporation (abc)—an organization which does not, of course, exist but whose very possibility (created by Richards’s intervention) not only evokes the very real stakes in the history of the drive to indigenize the national media but reveals the ruse of national representational democracy and equalitarian participation for Aboriginal people directly. What Chrisoula Lionis (2014) might call “humour noir,” black humor, the Aboriginal Broadcasting Corporation is less absurd then brutal sobriety; a (so-­called) national media industry and history that is anything but “Aboriginal.” In this representational economy, as Richards puts it, unlike the journalist, “My people sit up straight. . . . They hold the paper up straight and read.” In Aboriginal English and Desert Kriol, “straight” and “strong” (also) mean true, right, and factual (as opposed to warunga, manyu manyu, gamon: mad, crooked, bullshit). The stakes in media, in reading, are not the same for black and white. Nor is the abc (not only an acronym for the national media but also the first three letters of the alphabet) a neutral or level playing field. In Richards’s later works, words will become the work itself. Any and all references to person or place through figuration are absented. With no recognizable signs of desert, native, or traditional signification, the classical geospatial “incarceration” of people in place in art history (as well as the nter Intervention geospecific targeting of “remote” Aboriginal Australia) is belied. Here, a profound antiessentialism is instigated. New alliances forge multiple agendas within the same historical space. These works of high biliterary dexterity refuse the historical division that has seen the delegation of tradition to elders, and the issues of literacy, writing, and education to the young—what Eric Michaels 80 | Chapter Three

Fig. 3.2. June Walkutjukurr Richards, Mirrka price, undated. 610 × 710 mm, primed cotton canvas over wooden stretcher. Warburton Collection. © Warburton Arts Project. Photo by G. Proctor, Warburton Arts Project.

(1994) called the division between the old and Blackfella business and the young and Whitefella business—the same division that historically has seen a majority of elders working in community art centers recognized as major artists, and only younger community members, children, being the subjects of nter Intervention literacy programs. June Walkutjukurr Richards was in her fifties when she produced the paintings discussed here, and clearly, masterfully literate. Her art of words only on acrylic cast doubt on the evolutionist assumption that Western Desert art is prior to, or a primitive form of, writing. These are works of irrefutable writing proper: English words, English orthography, English grammar, recognizable letters, readable words. Or is this writing proper? Mimicking and menacing at once, as Homi Bhabha (1994) has described colonial mimicry; mimicry designed to imitate that nevertheless gloriously, intentionally, fails to comply and thus renders difference visible through the very means by which difference was supposed to be assimilated. In no sense arbitrary vocabulary items or random samples, rather, these June Walkutjukurr Richards | 81

Fig. 3.3. June Walkutjukurr Richards, Carpetbagger, 2008. 46 × 66.1 cm, acrylic on canvas. Warburton Art Collection. © Warburton Arts Project. Photo courtesy Art Gallery of Western Australia.

painted words, terms, phrases, and idioms are pointed and honed. A precise, chiseled, semantic field of words as art that are of art. These expressions bespeak the history of desert art production, market, and demand: greed, possession, profit mongering. Visible and stealth-­like witness to otherwise unspeakable, unutterable, silenced histories of Aboriginal experience, Ngaanyatjarra voice. The Western Desert art movement may indeed be the fastest-­growing art movement of the twenty-­first century and is no small cause for national celebration—but not without cost. Unapologetic, Richards’s works are a sharp response but appear as if non sequitur: statements, not questions, flat unadorned facts. Nowhere else and a sense of cauterization—caught, captured, containment—screams. The affect here is thick and instantaneous, poignant and funny. Richards’s art hurts, wounding as it hits—an unhealed colonial history not over, not past. Carpetbagger (2008, figure 3.3): the pejorative term used across the desert art sector by Aboriginal and non-­Aboriginal people both, to refer to independent art dealers and brokers who, notoriously, have undercut Aboriginal artists’ 82 | Chapter Three

profits (and undercut market value and trade regulations in the industry) by the dodgy acquisition of paintings—not through Aboriginal owned, managed, and accredited art centers that ensure that profits return directly to the artists and the community, but directly from Aboriginal artists. Carpetbaggers pay far less to Aboriginal artists than they receive themselves in profits as they sell the same works on the independent secondary market. Carpetbaggers are reputed to have put people up in town and kept them painting for weeks, months, with scant remuneration, in conditions synonymous with enforced labor in sweatshops (see Genocchio 2008; Acker, Stefanoff, and Woodhead 2013). One word in English, simplicity thickening the sensory “hit”: is Carpetbagger a silent witness to this history or a hailing accusation? And yet there is somewhere else. For the English literacy that Richards deploys in this series is not always sae (Standard Average English). In Breaking our backs (2008, figure 3.4), a linguistic Third World zone of Aboriginal lifeworlds is brought to life: Kriol, Aboriginal English, Ngaanyatjarra literacy, bilingual education—double-­tongued duplicity; slippery, messy, and messing. Necessity and play vie with each other: the two strategies of the minoritarian, as Deleuze and Guattari (1986, 25–26) have described it, in which the “polylingual nature of one’s own language is used to oppose the oppressed quality of this language to its own oppressive quality.” No longer does the proper sense of the word dominate but, rather, the figurative degree of its written form is exposed, bent, and reworked. The full text reads, “Breaking our backs straining our eyes and our mara—knees and ankles paining.” Here, one letter, t, makes all the difference: “paining” or is it “painting”? The making of a verb form from a nominal form: why can’t “paining” come from “pain” if “painting” comes from “paint”? And how close is the relationship between these two words? The play is deliberate and deadly—the malleability of writing itself, the ludicrous rules of English spelling, revealed. The ingenuity of vernacular literacy here is to make English resound more fully its own capacities. “Paining” is not bad or pidgin English; it is, in fact, a proper English verb according to the Oxford English Dictionary; if rarely utilized in written or spoken sae English. The implicit promise of bilingual education, that vernacular literacy will and should lead only to proper sae English literacy, is pointedly questioned. For here, the Ngaanyatjarra word mara appears alongside sae words within an June Walkutjukurr Richards | 83

Fig. 3.4. June Walkutjukurr Richards, Breaking our backs, 2008. 87.3 × 41 cm, acrylic on canvas. Private collection. © the artist and Warburton Arts Project. Photo courtesy of Art Gallery of Western Australia.

otherwise word-­perfect English expression. Vernacular literacy is not insufficient or a stepping stone to something else. The fact that mara is readable and recognizable but not understandable (at least, to outsiders) subtly insists not only that Ngaanyatjarra already possesses writing proper, but that the travesties of translation, subtitles, even the de rigueur supplemental story for Western Desert paintings are irrelevant, if not insulting.

And when you put dots and bright colours in, it covers all the story and people cannot say “What’s that?” June Walkutjukurr Richards | commenting on her painting In the Mission (2001), in Tjulyuru Regional Arts Gallery, Mission Time in Warburton

The importance of accent, of pronunciation, of sound, is integral to the word and not secondary to its proper form. Gimme (2008, figure 3.5) is not bad or pidgin English but a hyperreplete contraction of the verb-­object relation “give me (this, that)”—a fast, furtive command. In languages of the Central and Western Desert there are no polite forms or markers as there are in English— no “please,” “thank you,” “would you be so kind?”—but command forms only. Gimme attests to ongoing vernacular traditions while making vibrantly evident, within that tradition, the poverty of a language not its own. Grammatically, Gimme lacks both a subject and an object. Who is speaking to whom? And of what? A mirror held up and an image reflected, refracted, cracked: the insatiable demand of the art market for more (better, different)—Gimme; and the desert artists’ demand for adequate return, recognition—Gimme; an economy of inequitable exchange ultimately because of, not despite, a shared language. Color is crucial. Merleau-­Ponty (1994) identifies color as a “primordial character” of perception in art, not secondary to the art historian’s emphasis on line, figure, or form. Color wields “world making” because it incites the phenomenology of sensation, lived experience; the feel, tangibility, and quality of things are matched as they are made by color (see chapter 6 for further discussion). From any range of possible color choices—for Richards’s art is past the explosive palette possibilities that the last decade has seen in women’s desert art: elephant pinks of Queenie McKenzie, neon oranges of Eubena (Yubina) Nampijtijin—it June Walkutjukurr Richards | 85

Fig. 3.5. June Walkutjukurr Richards, Gimme, 2008. 66.1 × 71.5 cm, acrylic on canvas. Private collection. © Warburton Arts Project. Photo courtesy of Art Gallery of Western Australia.

is blue that is determinative in New Idea (and in Breaking our backs . . . ). Blue is effective in the first instance because it is not the color of these more warm and “feminine” colors that might yet be acquainted with landscape and naturalism both: sunsets, ochres, hues of red desert earth. Blue is effective because its likeness turns to another tradition of mark making and to an equally fixed history that aligns color with culture, as if it were nature. The blue of ink, of ballpoint pens; the tool of trade of the mass literate; five-­and-­dime blue-­collar affordability—cheap, disposable, replaceable. Could there be a more perfect commodity than the ballpoint, befitting all that liberal democracy and literacy promises in making writing available for everyone everywhere. Hastily written and furtive both, Richards’s words announce themselves subject to this code and not.

I made different works with new ideas. These ideas are for people to think about why we are painting. We put new ideas so they can see how we put words like Carpetbagger and Mirrka Price and Gimme to think about our work. I did it for all of us, not just me. June Walkutjukurr Richards | Artist Statement provided by the Warburton Arts Project and Tjulyurru Regional Arts Gallery for the Western Australian Art Awards, 2008

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Fig. 3.6. June Walkutjukurr Richards, New Idea, 2008. 45.9 × 61 cm, acrylic on canvas. Warburton Collection. © Warburton Arts Project. Photo courtesy of Art Gallery of Western Australia.

There is nothing here that isn’t Aboriginal, isn’t vernacular. The immediacy of these works in the cramped space of the preframed canvas is not a white page, but bespeaks the collective. Richards says, “I did it for all of us, not just me.” New Idea (2008, figure 3.6). Full stop. New Idea, like “flash,” another of my favorite so-­called Aboriginal English words: that moment of pure recognition, bull’s-­eye accurate, “Ngulanaaw, there it is, that one now!” Not invented or owned but simply present, revealed, in the making as it is identified: mine, yours, ubiquitous. New idea, isn’t it? To paint English words same color, same way, same difference, you Whitefella mob might understand, no translation, no right to correct, write over, write more better, white linguists, white pages. New Idea equally insists that conceptual art is traditional (too, yet, always), thus belying the spurious categorical distinction that separates urban from remote Aboriginal art history, and, indeed, modern art from Aboriginal tradition. We went to the Mission and we used to paint differently (2007, plate 4) was completed the year preceding June Walkutjukurr Richards’s winning of the Western Australian Art Award. More than one version of this painting exists today, if “version” is the correct term for what is a marked tendency of reiteration across contemporary Central and Western Desert painting practice. What I have identified elsewhere (Biddle 2002, 2007) as an “imperative to repeat” compels the making and keeping of Ancestral-­human dependency alive, attenuated, June Walkutjukurr Richards | 87

Fig. 3.7. June Walkutjukurr Richards, The Explorers, 2006. 612 × 1,482 mm, primed cotton canvas over wooden stretcher. Warburton Collection. © Warburton Arts Project. Photo by G. Proctor, Warburton Arts Project.

and animated through iterative painting practice today, as much as it may bring “new ideas” to life through practice, as Richards’s work insists. The mimicry in this work could not be clearer: staunch black and white alone, the context of literacy, of schooling, as Richards and other npy desert women would have experienced it in the 1950s and 1960s; the Masonite chalkboard and the neat purposeful clarity of the handwriting itself directly emulate and evoke the teacher, the missionary. And yet not, for the historical reference is not finalized in a temporally fixed past. The sentence “We went to the Mission and we used to paint differently” has deep semantic ambiguity. The “when” of the occurrence is itself elusive. Is “we used to paint differently” referring to the period before the mission (pre-­missionary)? Or to the painting that Anangu were taught “differently” by the missionaries, during this period (missionary paintings)? Or indeed, does the “when” refer to the now, when Richards herself paints differently, now that this history is past (post-­missionary)?

I made paintings about the missionaries: Mr & Mrs Senior Green, Mr & Mrs Siggs, Mr Pirie, Mr Thornhill, Mr Moorhouse, Mr Wade-­ku son and Mrs Southwell who looked after us but was a little bit nasty. There were a

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lot of missionaries around. These were the main people who stayed. I also made paintings about strangers and visitors who come to our country: The explorers, The government people, The policeman, The tourist, The art dealer and the Aboriginal Broadcasting Corporation. June Walkutjukurr Richards | Artist Statement provided by the Warburton Arts Project and Tjulyuru Regional Arts Gallery for the Western Australian Art Awards, 2008

Richards recounts a precise litany of “strangers and visitors who come to our country,” in which, notably, the missionaries are (and aren’t) exempt. Unlike journalists (above, who “have a meeting and then go back”), missionaries are the “people who stayed,” who are remembered by name. How Richards remembers the past here is less by year, or fixed, chronological date, but is bound instead to place, to what took place in place (people who came, stayed, went, or not).3 The singularity of the so-­called historical event (“We went to the Mission”) stands as an über-­signifier that is less a past-­perfect singular than a present-­ continuous of this personified and heavily trafficked place; a place known and remembered and made itself by (repeated) invasion. “We went to Mission and we used to paint differently” bespeaks a “past that is not yet passed” (as Lila Abu-­Lughod [2007] describes postmemory in occupied Palestine). A testimonial trajectory conjured by one sentence alone in a masterful harvesting of the lesson best learned then as now in the vexed space between literacy and painting, colonization and art. Richards’s oeuvre, in this sense, bespeaks the opposite of anomie, the traumatic loss of language, of connection to the traditional past, that Durkheim ([1897] 1951) first associated with modernism and rapid social change. This work’s affective force is contemporary certitude. It engenders “empathic connection” (Bennett 2007) because it is at once as incomplete as it is replete with pointed Ngaanyatjarra politics of writing.

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FOUR

RHONDA UNURUPA DICK The work may look different to the work from the old people in the future. Young artists are trying new things with photography and computers. But there is culture in all of these works. Strong culture. The different voice is clear and it will always be clear—an Anangu voice. Frank Young | senior artist and former director of Tjala Arts, Sydney Morning Herald

It’s good to see young people coming in and doing strong work at the art centre. We can see that our young ones can take over their tjamu and kami’s (grandparents) culture and look after our stories in this way. Mary Katatjuku Pan | senior artist (and grandmother of Rhonda Unurupa Dick), Tjala Arts

Rhonda Unurupa Dick’s digital photographs burst onto the Australian art scene in 2012, premiering at the inaugural Desart Aboriginal Arts Worker Prize, and winning her both this title and the prestigious Dreaming Award for a young and emerging artist at the National Indigenous Art Awards in 2013. Rhonda has exhibited at Alcaston Galleries and Aboriginal and Pacific Arts. In 2014, she was the official Tjala photographer for the South Australian Museum’s Heartland exhibition, and her work was shortlisted for the prestigious National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award (natsiaa). In 2014, she completed a tour in South Korea, with five other Central and Western Desert Indigenous new media artists, as part of Desart’s IndigiSEOUL initiative: an international residency-­based exchange with Korean experimental artists to support remote Indigenous new media artistic professional development.

Rhonda is Pitjantjatjara from Amata, a community of approximately three hundred Aboriginal residents, in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands in South Australia, four hundred kilometers south of Alice Springs. She is twenty-­seven years old and began taking photographs professionally at the beginning of 2012, when she was first employed as an arts worker for Tjala Arts, the community art center at Amata. Her success underscores the importance of both community art center initiatives in the development of experimental arts taking shape today, and locally networked platforms with high national profile, such as Desart’s Aboriginal Art Workers Photography Prize and Exhibition, which can support, model, and showcase on-­the-­ground community capacity building.

i We don’t have a vocabulary to describe what a sacred thing looks like in photography. Stephen Gilchrist | judge, Desart Art Workers Photography Prize, Alice Springs, 2013

The inaugural Desart Art Workers Photography Prize in 2012 was the first national exhibition to profile remote Central and Western Desert photography. It thus claimed photography as a remote art form, actively intervening in the north-­south, urban-­remote divide of the national artscape that, historically, has seen photography as belonging solely to so-­called urban Aboriginal art and artists (with groundbreaking works by Tracey Moffatt, Brenda L. Croft, Michael Riley, and Christian Thompson, to name just a few so-­called urban Aboriginal photographers who have received international acclaim since the 1980s). In the art world, exposure to remote photography and new media art have, to date, been almost nonexistent. As local evidence attests, however, photography is not new to the desert. Nor is it incompatible with or, even worse, detrimental to tradition (see Deger 2006a, 2006b; Kral 2012). Youth service programs across the Central and Western Desert, such as Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (npy) Women’s Council, Waltja, Calus, Deadly Mob, and the Mt Theo Program, have supported young people in their creation of digital portraiture 92 | Chapter Four

Fig. 4.1. Rhonda Unurupa Dick with her grandmother, Mary Katatjuku Pan, at the inaugural Desart Art Workers Photography Award 2012, Araluen Arts Centre, Alice Springs, NT. Photo by J. Biddle.

for over two decades;1 mobile phone, laptop, and iPad interface platforms have seen pioneering technological development take shape across the remote Indigenous sector during this period (for example, Miyarrka Media’s Gapuwiyak Calling: Phone-­Made Media from Arnhem Land; Big hART’s Yijala Yala Project neomad, 2011–14, an online graphic novel–­iPad app developed by schoolchildren in the remote Western Australian community of Roeburn; and the digital animations of Yarrenyty Arltere Artists [see chapter 7]).2 Desart’s ingenuity (under the directorship of executive officer Philip Watkins) was not only to create a premier stage for remote photography but to Indigenize the exhibition process in its entirety (from remote art production to curation). Desart recruited high-­profile Aboriginal artists and curators to judge the selection and to mentor remote Aboriginal art workers to cocurate the exhibition,3 activating, directly, a vital network for Aboriginal professional development, a network that has itself in the past operated to break down barriers between Aboriginal peoples and so-­called urban-­remote dichotomies, as well Rhonda Unurupa Dick | 93

as providing younger and emergent remote artists with mentoring from established senior artists and curators—a formalization of Indigenous mentoring that has operated throughout the history of the development of Aboriginal art.4 The Desart Art Worker Photography Prize did not, however, create a space to display any and all remote community photographs (a space Facebook and other prodigiously utilized Indigenous cyberspace terrains have already provided, even if unevenly distributed and resourced across what remains the digital divide of disparate access to networks and to facilities in remote Australia [see Ginsburg 2011; Kral 2013]). What Desart inaugurated was a stage from which Aboriginal art workers, who are themselves working in remote community art centers, could enter the domain of what Fred Myers (2007, 125) calls the greater discursively determined “social field of Aboriginal art.” This social field is dominated by non-­Aboriginal people. Apart from the Aboriginal artists themselves (who are producing the art), almost all other participants in the remote art sector are non-­Aboriginal, as Acker, Stefanoff, and Woodhead (2013) attest. From art center staff, gallerists, agents, dealers, and marketing experts to collectors, scholars, anthropologists, and art historians, the field is defined, in fact, by non-­Aboriginal experts (though the past decade has seen a significant increase in the number of Indigenous curators, researchers, and art writers). In an attempt to redress this imbalance and increase the (low) number of local Aboriginal people employed, Desart had already established, in 2008, the Desart Aboriginal Art Worker Program, providing training, mentoring, and employment in the arts industry through art centers across the Central and Western Desert (supported by the Office for the Arts, Arts NT, and the Australia Council for the Arts). Paid employment for Aboriginal art workers in remote art centers has more than doubled since this initiative began, despite the noticeable downturn in art sales in the sector following the global financial crisis (gfc) in 2007, and the decrease in funding and, therefore, the number of jobs available in remote communities under new nter policies during this same period (Attorney-­General’s Department 2015). The importance of Aboriginal art workers cannot be underestimated. In community lifeworld terms, in everyday practice, it has been non-­Aboriginal personnel who have negotiated the complex interface between artists, artworks, and the demands of the broader art market. Almost all managers or art advisors

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(as they have historically been called in the Western Desert art movement) in remote community art centers have been, and are still today, non-­Aboriginal.5 Both boss and employee, as their difficult and double-­sided but vital role has been described by Myers (2007), it has been non-­Aboriginal people who have developed the techniques and devices that have provided the basis for what Myers calls the “making of Aboriginal art” into a global phenomenon—no simple matter of secondary documentation or providing canvas and paint. It has been non-­Aboriginal people who have advised and supported, and who have facilitated and formalized what has become, in less than three decades, a radical new form of art. In order to achieve what Paul Carter (2009, 103) has called the “metamorphosis of traditional painting forms into highly prized contemporary art,” certain devices or “techne” were required “for making non-­Indigenous sense of the artists’ work” (129). These techne, in Carter’s terms, have, in fact, been determinative. The now-­dominant model (originally developed by Geoffrey Bardon at Papunya in the 1970s) of archetype identification of icons by reproductive sketch, photograph, and narrative story, has itself translated and transformed, actively brokered, initiated, and named, the art of the Western Desert. This so-­ called secondary process of documentation and archive, Carter (2009, 104) argues, “did not naively reproduce what already existed but invented something new.” What might techne look like if produced, as it were, from the inside by insiders, not through non-­Aboriginal outsiders? What might knowing an Indigenous language, being related, being responsible, do to so-­called documentation, the making and taking of provenances, the writing of so-­called Dreaming stories, the generation of “something new” itself ? If the very fact of Bardon’s invention of the iconographic techne of translating paintings has been erased from the history of the “making of Aboriginal art,” as Carter (2009) argues (see Biddle 2007; Myers 2007); if, in fact, the problematic status and the consequences of this techne have themselves become the very subject matter of emergent experimental artistry, as Tangentyere Artists (chapter 2) and June Walkutjukurr Richards (chapter 3) attest by their radical reclaiming of the canvas in direct response; then what might be the result of Indigenous art workers’ own capacities to intervene today in the making of Aboriginal art?

Rhonda Unurupa Dick | 95

ii The significance of Rhonda Unurupa Dick’s photographs needs to be understood within this context. Dick’s 2012 Desart entry did not document an artist “at work” painting (at least, not in a strictly studio-­based sense). Nor do her photographs solely portray the workings of the art center, remote Indigenous country landscape, or contemporary community life (all of which were subject matter for other entries in the Desart Art Workers Photography Prize in 2012 and 2013). Rather, as an art worker, she produced high Jukurrpa compositions herself, emulating and extending, at once, what the Western Desert art movement has itself achieved historically, while pioneering technological finesse in Anangu Pitjantjatjara digital aesthetics. That is, rather than simply taking a secondary, or documentary, approach, Dick took the camera directly to an experimental intergenerational exploration of her own making of Jukurrpa. Her series of five digitally enhanced photographic panels, titled My Great-­ Grandmother’s Country. My 2 Grandfather’s Mother’s Birthplace, interchangeably utilize Jukurrpa marks and Pitjantjatjara handwritten literacy; a deft and poignant biliteracy that could not more forcibly make the point that writing is known, owned, practiced, by remote Aboriginal people, thus casting doubt on the so-­called nter Intervention facts (chapter 1) that younger Aboriginal people are not achieving literacy and arguing against the requirement that literacy can and must only mean Standard Average English literacy. Rhonda’s images privilege Pitjantjatjara two-­way unique literacy: iconographic and alphabetic. Neither form of writing is translated within the frame of the work itself (the works are, however, accompanied by English translations, at least of the Pitjantjatjara alphabetic text, which are reproduced below). Her work thus speaks in Pitjantjatjara language directly to Anangu Pitjantjatjara, undermining the assumption that Western Desert art is produced only for non-­Aboriginal, market-­aimed purposes. She utilizes vernacular biliteracy to speak purposefully to her community in and through her work about what (as her work makes us appreciate) is in fact pointedly Anangu Pitjantjatjara business. She speaks also, specifically, of her own responsibility as a younger Anangu Pitjantjatjara artist today: making and keeping language and culture vitally alive and enlivened, attached to the bodies and places and practices from which it derives and to which it is beholden. Rhonda Unurupa Dick’s work achieves affective intensification two ways, as it were, because it is not translated. This ensures, on the one hand, that it can and 96 | Chapter Four

Fig. 4.2. Rhonda Unurupa Dick, Panel 1 from the series My Great-­ Grandmother’s Country. My 2 Grandfather’s Mother’s Birthplace, 2012. 26 × 26 cm, digital photographic print on archival paper. Edition of ten. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Tjala Arts.

does speak to Anangu Pitjantjatjara and, on the other, that it speaks, equally, to outsiders, who, since they are not able to read or understand readily what she has written, must witness the very fact of what matters most: traditional writing, the work of mark making itself, of inscription as a performative; that is, the repetitive hard labor of intentionality and intensity of writing that excludes non-­ Aboriginal intervention; an encounter with mark making itself as Indigenous-­ specific force, sensation, affect. The vital point here is what this work does rather than what it means (in the Deleuzian-­derived sense; see Deleuze 1993, 2003). It is the mastery of digital photographic techne that makes this work high Jukurrpa. The very fact that the digital enhancements are self-­evident is critical. This is not surreptitious postproduction digital manipulation, in which Photoshop alteration and simulation are hidden or masked. Here, the very mutability Rhonda Unurupa Dick | 97

of the digital image, its very capacity for manipulation, is made evident. The fact that handwritten words and icons have been imprinted, inscribed, scratched out even, sheer traces of human handiwork conjoined with mechanical reproduction, could not be clearer. What matters here is how the digital techne provides the means for Anangu Pitjantjatjara truth to reveal itself. The digital photographic revolution has not severed the historical reliance upon photography as a reliable index of prior reality (Kember 2003; Lister 2003). Rather, as Dick’s work attests, it provides the possibility of indexical mediation that mirrors materially the very workings of Jukurrpa itself. This series of photographs repeats a material marking that has effected the transformation of the canvas itself into a material medium that can engender the efficacy of the Dreaming. It is not what but how marks are made that has enabled canvas to become a performative site for the work of Jukurrpa. The marks made on canvas today repeat original Ancestral imprintation of country—not because they look like, copy, or transfer Ancestral marks but because they literally, materially, repeat originary Ancestral mark making through human practice. The marks of Jukurrpa, of kuruwarri, are not icons (signs that look like what they represent), but indexes (signs that remain existentially tied to what they represent; see Biddle 2000, 2002, 2007). If art is to engender the efficacy of the Dreaming, as contemporary painting practice attests, and as Dick’s work instigates, it must reproduce Ancestral marks as indexes. Jukurrpa or kuruwarri marks are indexes, not icons. They are physical marks, traces, of Ancestral presence or essence. In Warlpiri, kuruwarri also means cicatrice, birthmark, freckle, scar, or boil (see Biddle 2007)—marks that equally make present Ancestral traces of relatedness of and relationship to contemporary human bodies. Jukurrpa and kuruwarri marks are material signs made, left over, by Ancestors as they roamed the same country that Pitjantjatjara, Warlpiri, roam today—camping, hunting, defecating, creating the landscape, the flora, fauna, weather, and the people as they are today, during the time of the Dreaming. This is not a geographically bound, naturally given landscape as we Whitefellas understand it, but country already animated and made vital by fleshly, bodily remains of Ancestral body parts, excrement, and traces. Even if disengaged from the bodies of Ancestors, these marks, traces, essences do not cease to retain presence and potency. They have power to rejuvenate country, control fertility, regulate the social, cause and cure illness, to name just some of 98 | Chapter Four

Fig. 4.3. Rhonda Unurupa Dick, Panel 2 from the series My Great-­Grandmother’s Country. My 2 Grandfather’s Mother’s Birthplace, 2012. 26 × 26 cm, digital photographic print on archival paper. Edition of ten. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Tjala Arts.

their potential effects. This is why great care is taken in their reiteration; why the law-­like procedures of indexical imprintation undertaken in high Jukurrpa paintings, as indeed, in ceremony, in their reactivation of original Ancestral potency is left largely to the elders, who have knowledge and authority to regulate and ensure that the potency of Jukurrpa, of the Ancestral realm, is appropriately (re)produced. During the Dreaming, Ancestors roamed an as yet unmarked and unmade landscape that had a surface not unlike skin: a somatic surface that feels, that imprints, that scars; boundary and border of what is essentially animate. It is not just a recognition of this aliveness that contemporary acrylic paintings produce but an evocational material remaking of an enlivening potency unique to an intimate appreciation of the country’s incarnate sensibilities (Biddle 2007). The techniques of painting turn canvas to skin to country in the contemporary. The sense of movement, of animation, the mesmerizing quality and three-­ dimensional effects of contemporary Western Desert painting are purposefully achieved through these techniques; the surface of the canvas rendered identiRhonda Unurupa Dick | 99

cal to the original surface of the country/skin. Through the complex applications of acrylic layering and dotting techne, a mutable surface for imprintation is achieved. In this sense, it is not simply the content or subject matter of Jukurrpa signs that makes and keeps them potent. Rather, it is the labor of specific humans today in repeating and remaking Ancestral marks as indexical that ensures (by re-­creating as originary) a primary potency. Canvas becomes—like skin itself—the same stuff as country, porous and open to inscriptive force and effect, and thus as capable as Jukurrpa marks become in this process, of radiating this potent indexical intensity. It is this very making of a contact zone between the Ancestral and the human, an original somatic interface, that is palpably reproduced in the photographs of Rhonda Unurupa Dick. Here, layering and the working of a so-­called given surface allow for an ontological primacy of emergence. Her mechanical reproductions (already indexical witness) are (digitally) rendered mutable. The surface of the photographs is enhanced literally by and through handmade, human-­made, marks. Notably, this inscription—writing—is scratched, imprinted, indexically written into what is rendered porous, thereby transforming what is considered a fixed and final surface into an enlivened, imprintable, space of exchange, transformation, and substantiation. In Panel 3 of the series (plate 5), Jukurrpa iconographic marks move between a female body and the water/ground, where an Ancestral figure emerges. Though simultaneous in real time, a strong narrative component is evoked, as the repeated semicircles, as in a classic women’s sign painting drawn in the sand, shaped as they are, suggest movement downward and across, as if from human body to the ground/water/figure that emerges, as it were, in recognition, in greeting, in response. In Panel 5 (figure 4.4), larger-­than-­life honey ants march across the landscape right to left, as if on highways, roadways, invisible perhaps to outsiders but present to Anangu Pitjantjatjara people. Event and testimony conjoin; the efficacy of the index provides for emergence. Gilchrist (personal communication, 2013) may indeed be right to say that “we have no vocabulary to describe what the sacred looks like in photography,” but these images provoke potent sensation. The body, a body, figures predominantly in two of the five panels. But it is not just anybody that My Great-­Grandmother’s Country. My 2 Grandfather’s Mother’s Birthplace images. Grandmother (we can only assume it is Grand100 | Chapter Four

Fig. 4.4. Rhonda Unurupa Dick, Panel 5 from the series My Great-­Grandmother’s Country. My 2 Grandfather’s Mother’s Birthplace, 2012. 26 × 26 cm, digital photographic print on archival paper. Edition of ten. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Tjala Arts.

mother’s body that is figured, deducing from the title) is not presented in full portrait style (as she would be in a more standard portrait). Rather, she is emplaced physically within the scene in highly specific, and highly differentiated, ways, in two of the five panels: by her bare feet in Panel 3 (plate 5), and by her hand in Panel 4 (plate 6). Feet and hands are not arbitrary body parts. Feet make tracks, traces, imprints as they move people now as they moved Ancestors; foot marks and their tracks of animals, flora, fauna, weather differentiate people, animals, places today; interchangeable human shapeshifters, footprints and their traces are the primary physical stuff of Ancestral kuruwarri marks, much as they “track” community life today. Tracks of people’s footprints can be individually identified; who has been where, when, identified yet as the vital stuff of Indigenous known and tracked communal territory. Hands make, inscribe, and reinscribe these tracks on canvas, the body, in handwriting itself; the very stuff that makes emergence in this work possible. Hands “speak” in the multiplatform communicative capacities of the Western and Central Desert. Rdaka rdaka (literally “hands” in Warlpiri), the complex, Rhonda Unurupa Dick | 101

complete, unique Indigenous sign language of over three thousand vocabulary terms of Central Australia in which, through hand gesture alone, entire conversations can be held when required for ceremony, on occasions of death, between certain kin, or as a primary intra-­Aboriginal communilect itself, is evoked directly here by Panel 4 (plate 6).6 Here, a hand-­specific gesture is caught, carved out of space, poised and performative, as if the hand itself is literally speaking; the imprinted words written here not across the top of the panel, as a title might be, but on the body, accentuating the arm of Grandmother herself, as she reaches out to another body, a receptive body, her country. This is not just any country, any place. These photographs are of specific country, named not by a sociocentric, cartographically fixed place-name but by what linguists call the egocentrism of Indigenous kinship (see Biddle 2002), in which who is speaking determines who is spoken about, according to highly specialized relational distinctions (“My” Great-­Grandmother’s; “My” 2 Grandfather’s Mother’s). We outsiders are, in turn, made privy to these distinctions and, importantly, find them complicated, complicating what we see—is this the same place and person, or a different place and person being referred to in the second title (or something else altogether)? This complexity operates strategically and directly against simplistic reduction or the dumbing-­down all too often encountered in translation (see chapter 2). In short, country is itself named (made visible) by a complex and specific kinship relation-­to. Intergenerational deference is performed. Rhonda does not picture herself or another Anangu of the same age, nor does she picture her mother or father, aunts or uncles. She pictures her grandmother (great-­grandmother) in and on her birth country: a highly significant intergenerational deference to her elder, female, paternal-­lineage kin, and to country itself, at one and the same time. Authorization of the Ancestral realm, of Jukurrpa, is not owned and shared by anyone or everyone; seniority, although not the only determining factor, is a major prerequisite in the complex of regulations and restrictions that determines who can represent Jukurrpa today. What this biliteracy writing tells is not a Jukurrpa story as such (as would be common in a high Jukurrpa painting of the kind that her grandmother, Mary Katatjuku Pan, for one, regularly paints at Tjala art center). Rather, what this artwork tells is far more generic: a mutual and reciprocal intergenerational relationship and responsibility epitomized by deferral to Grandmother. Grandmother’s country “knows we are here” (Panel 2, 102 | Chapter Four

figure 4.3) and “lets us know it has seen us” (Panel 4, plate 6); a performative testimony (in age-­appropriate terms) of the fact that Grandmother’s country claims her (Rhonda Unurupa Dick), authorizing, in turn, her claim to represent this place, her grandmother’s country. Country is not abandoned nor unoccupied today; people frequent country to hunt, camp, perform ceremony, be present, recognize, and be recognized. Taking photographs and being present (and, in turn, making this presence evident to others) are vital modes of caring for country today. Parabolic mirrors and shadowgrams: everything bounces, mirrors, reflects. Invisible light sources flood and saturate. Does the water look blue because of the reflected sky (Panel 2, figure 4.3), or is this the blue of clothing or of skin itself (Panels 3 and 4, plates 5 and 6)? What is original, what is copy, intertwine. Ethereal white glowing inside out (Panel 1, figure 4.2); nothing is natural here; nothing not already alive and enlivened by the human; nothing unmediated. Here, the indexicality of the photograph, as Rhonda Unurupa Dick employs it, does not capture a landscape, but presses itself close, intimate, a form itself of relating to—and being with—country, so enlivened by recognition it almost appears to breathe, redolent with sentience. Beyond Barthes’s “punctum” or Benjamin’s “aura,” this is an evocation of the enliving potency of the photograph’s indexicality as much as it is an intimate appreciation of country’s incarnate sensibilities. The mastery of the digital here makes visible and present what are otherwise intangible aspects of Pitjantjatjara realities. Fear of the loss of the real in the digital era is no fear for Anangu Pitjantjatjara. Here, on the contrary, the unique capacities of the digital provide the very means to reveal tradition. As Deger (2006b, 2007) argues, the indexical nature of the photograph creates links to intangible aspects of Indigenous lifeworlds, collapsing real, virtual, and Ancestral temporal and spatial connections. The capacities of digital surface imprint and animation techne make interrelationships between the Ancestral (human) and the contemporary (human) at once visible and present, visceral and performative (see Biddle 2001, 2003, 2007). X-­ray-­like, revealing an underneath and an inside and bringing this forth, at once, what cannot be seen by the human eye alone. A new mediation of tradition because tradition is itself already mediated in the same terms—that is, indexical marks whose presence awaits and is primed for human-­mediated, human-­activated capacities. Rhonda Unurupa Dick | 103

These panels subvert and attest to the fact that the camera is not a colonizing technology. Nor is it a simulation machine, whose manipulative and illusionist powers threaten to sever any material interface between vision and image (see Lister 2003, 224). Rather, the digital camera’s specific indexical capacities provide for the very work of Jukurrpa and its law of iterative, intergenerational-­ appropriate practice. These works point to the profound work of Anangu Pitjantjatjara culture revealing itself to those who know and recognize it best. The indexical techniques of digital aptitude are not incompatible with tradition but, indeed, provide the means by which a primacy of Ancestral indexical traces can be re-­created through human labor, and the obligation to reproduce the past in the present fulfilled.

We are telling the stories with our cameras now. We’re doing this because Anangu Tjukurpa or the stories of our Dreaming, they are not fairy tales. They are the stories of our country, they are true stories, and we live amongst these stories every day. These stories live in the trees and the hills, they live in our dreams and other hidden places; they are passed from Anangu to Anangu. These stories are in our country and they are in our blood. Rhonda Unurupa Dick | Tjukurpa, Ngura, Kupilitja-­nguru, 107Projects, March 2015

RHONDA UNURUPA DICK, MY GREAT-­G RANDMOTHER’S COUNTRY. MY 2 GRANDFATHER’S MOTHER’S BIRTHPLACE (2012) Transcriptions and translations of the Pitjantjatjara text to English from the photographs, provided by the artist with her work. Panel 1 Ngura nyangatja ngayuku untalpa-­ku ngura. Ngayuku Tjamu

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kutjara-­ku scratched out words ngunytju. This country, is my great-­grandmother’s country. My 2 Grandfather’s mother’s country. Panel 2 scratched out words Ngura nyangangku Nganampa walytja tjuta Ngurkantankupai Ngurkantara paluru walpa Pulka wala tjunkupai Nganana ngura-­ngka scribbled out Wirkankunyangka The wind has come because country knows we are here. Panel 3 (no text) Panel 4 Ngayuku walytja tjuta ngura nyanga palula tjungu, manta nyangatja munu nganampa kurunpa kutjutu ngaranyi. My family is so connected to this country. So every time we arrive the country lets us know it has seen us. Panel 5 Tjinguru nganana ngura Nyangangka, nganana Tjinguru kapi walytjatjara Alatjitu nyina-­ku, munu Rhonda Unurupa Dick | 105

Mai munu kuka pulka Tjara alatjitu nyinama If we were to stay here tonight the water would come and we would find lots of good food, the country will always look after my family here.

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FIVE

TJANPI DESERT WEAVERS The country that we live on is an incredibly sacred land, but it is full of stories and those stories are still as strong today as they ever were. We live on that country and we like to bring those stories to life, through these sculptures. . . . Nowadays there are many different ways in which we transmit those ancient stories because we really held those stories strong. We grew up with them. We want to keep them, and we are keeping those stories strong. So the transmission of all those stories and law now, come back through different ways. For instance, one way is to do paintings, and we do a lot of paintings and tell these stories through those paintings, but this sculptural way is a whole other new way, and the way we do this, is, we go out into the country to the actual place where the stories take place, where those Dreaming tracks move through the country. We go there and we find the materials. These sculptural pieces here are filled up with the story from the land. Our children watch us doing this and they learn directly from us. They are all getting to know the stories now, but in a really different way. Nyurpaya Kaika-­Burton, with Katatjuku Mary Pan and Niningka Lewis | Artists’ Talk for String Theory, Museum of Contemporary Art, August 2013

Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (npy) fiber artwork, known as Tjanpi, is not normally characterized as experimental art. In fact, these artworks may appear, at least at one level, as innocuous works of traditional women’s handicraft: baskets, bowls, figurative soft sculpture—benign if not banal objects in both content and form. This does not, however, deradicalize the ges-

Fig. 5.1. Nora Holland posing with a half-­made basket, “like being on television,” 2010. © Tjanpi Desert Weavers, npy Women’s Council. Photo by J. Foster.

ture contained in their form, that is, the capacity to engender an encounter of tangible lifeworld exigencies, providing a speculative analysis of the banal, the everyday, as itself a radical site of Indigenous-­specific ontological experimentation and politics.1 How has Tjanpi—an introduced experiment in women’s fiber art practice— become traditional art? In less than two decades, since its experimental beginnings in 1995, Tjanpi has spawned a major Western Desert art industry. Tjanpi 110 | Chapter Five

Fig. 5.2. Kanytjupayi Benson (deceased), Shirley Bennett, Nuniwa Donegan (deceased), Margret Donegan, Melissa Donegan, Janet Forbes, Ruby Forbes (deceased), Deidre Lane, Elaine Lane, Freda Lane, Janet Lane, Wendy Lane, Angela Lyon, Sarkaway Lyon, Angkaliya Mitchell, Mary Smith, and Gail Nelson, Tjanpi Toyota, 2005. 190 × 120 × 420 cm, desert grass, jute string, steel, aviary mesh, found hubcaps, number plates, and steering wheel, recycled wooden planks. © the artists and Tjanpi Desert Weavers, npy Women’s Council. Photo by T. Purich.

Desert Weavers (a not-­for-­profit Indigenous social enterprise of npy Women’s Council, an advocacy and support organization for Aboriginal women living in remote communities across the Western and Central Desert) supports over four hundred artists from twenty-­eight communities across three states, who are today producing Tjanpi baskets, sculptures, and seed jewelry. In 2005, ten years after its inception, Tjanpi Desert Weavers won the highest national Indigenous art accolade, the prestigious National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award (natsiaa), for its five-­meter-­long, life-­sized, open-­tray-­back truck (what is called in Australian English a “ute”), Tjanpi Toyota (Kanytjupayi Benson with Tjanpi Desert Weavers from Blackstone; figure 5.2). Tjanpi Desert Weavers currently has an extensive exhibition program (see further below) and is represented in national and international art collections, both public and ­private. Tjanpi Desert Weavers | 111

i. THE IMPORTANCE OF THE SECULAR Tjanpi is not, of course, the only introduced experimental art form to have taken off, both geographically and aesthetically, “like a grass fire” across the Western Desert—as Margie West (2007, 23) describes the spread of Tjanpi from its introduction at Blackstone in 1995 to its spread today across npy communities and homelands today, traversing several hundred thousand square kilometers. It needs to be noted here that this was the same period of time during which mobile phone technologies first went viral across the desert. What new public intimacies and assemblages of handheld technologies and techniques can travel with people whose lifeworld is defined by mobility, transmigration, movement? What networks are activated, and demonstrated by this activation; what technologies and techne can work in this context, be successful for both community artists and the demands of the art market, given the complex and competing demands of ways of doing and being that characterize the contemporary? In this sense, what Tjanpi production created for the first time is a pan-­n py collectivity, a map or distinct assemblage of peoples, places, events, things. A new public identity was forged by Tjanpi. Anangu npy homelands were already known for their handicrafts (Purnu wooden sculptures, and the woven rugs of Ernabella) but are, arguably, even better known for Tjanpi art today (McLean 2009). Equally important (though unremarked in Tjanpi art history to date) are the boundaries of Tjanpi production. Minoritarian arts, by definition, reterritorialize as they reconfigure established borders. The frameworks of traditional Aboriginal alliances, as von Sturmer (2010, 16) notes, are the “opposite of inclusiveness; not them but us.” Tjanpi weaving is not practiced in areas to the north or east of npy country, areas that include Warlpiri, Anmatyerr, Pintupi, and Arrernte peoples. Warlpiri women specifically say, “We Yapa [Warlpiri/Aboriginal/human beings] don’t do that; we don’t make Tjanpi,” even though it is clearly not the case that they can’t technically make Tjanpi, as was revealed by exchanges between Ngaanyatjarra and Warlpiri at the Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair in 2011. Some two decades earlier, the Papunya Tula art movement (itself an experimental art) went viral in a way that parallels the Tjanpi art movement. The introduction of high Dreaming forms to canvas for the first time was slowed at any number of points by fierce debate concerning the secret or sacred nature 112 | Chapter Five

Fig. 5.3. Nyinku Kulitja teaching at Tjanpi weaving workshops at WOMADelaide Festival, 2007. © Tjanpi Desert Weavers, npy Women’s Council. Photo by J. Foster.

of revelation, particularly in npy communities (see McLean 2009; Biddle 2007, for a comparison with Warlpiri). Tjanpi, by contrast, began as an experiment in nontraditional subject matter (basket making) with nontraditional materials (imported fibers). That is, it began as an explicitly secular practice, with secular materials and secular intent. Thisbe Purich, employed by npy Women’s Council to facilitate women’s center activities in the Ngaanyatjarra lands, began to encourage coiled weaving at Blackstone in 1995, using jute string to bind and stitch locally found grasses. Later, the popular raffia would become the preferred binding material of Tjanpi production. The use of imported fibers, and of additional store-­bought or found wools, cottons, strings, unraveled jumpers, and bits of plastic and wire (all of which have made their way into Tjanpi), as well as the use of recycled tinned meat cans, Masonite boards, old paintings on canvas or board, and discarded fan covers as bases for baskets, demonstrates a strategic and utilitarian ethos in utilizing whatever is at hand—found, imported, available. This practice might Tjanpi Desert Weavers | 113

lend itself to any number of analyses of the necessity for inventiveness of minoritarian aesthetics. That so-­called remote desert artists now purchase the raffia (produced in Madagascar) as a popular material basis of locally produced desert Indigenous art is less a paradox than the brute reality of contemporary assemblage—affirmation of the asymmetrical flows and partisan exchange value that situate Indigenous art within the inequities of global capitalism. Acker and Altman (2006) argue that the market price of Tjanpi baskets (and, in turn, the remuneration any particular Tjanpi artist is likely to receive for her art) has to be determined in comparison with the price of handcrafted baskets produced in Southeast Asia and India. Thus, in the global market, Tjanpi works are located not within the high-­end Aboriginal art market but in the grossly disparate, less valued, and underappreciated market of so-­called Third World craft. Crucially, however, for Indigenous art experimentation, imported materials are less risky. As David Martin (2010) has suggested in relation to Aurukun art production, because nonlocal or imported materials are inherently secular, they possess no direct reference to country, to the transcendental (and dangerous) realm of Tjukurrpa/Tjukurpa and its intensely political affiliations and groupings.2 That is, imported materials are safer because they are free from the dictates of law, Dreaming, Tjukurrpa/Tjukurpa (as Yarrenyty Arltere artists also say of their works; see chapter 7). Margie West (2007) and Thisbe Purich (2007) note that the lack of functional traditions associated with weaving in the desert as opposed to the traditions of functional weaving in the Top End of Australia (such as the traditions of making nets, mats, or bilum by artists of Peppimentarti, Gunbalanya, and elsewhere) has freed Tjanpi women to work more creatively with fiber materials than either their northern or southern neighbors.

ii. LIVENING UP: ANIMATION In relation to cultures that are supposedly nonmaterially inclined, the process of weaving itself has to be considered in more than instrumental terms. Tjanpi forms take shape through repetition: by coiling, wrapping, or stitching, or by a combination of all of these. Wrapping, coiling, and binding perform the double function of wrapping around, tracing a form, and creating it in the first place. That is, wrapping and coiling create presence; they bring into being by tracing what is already there. This technique is not arbitrary. How things are 114 | Chapter Five

Fig. 5.4. Pile of purchased baskets at npy Women’s Council bush meeting, 2003. © Tjanpi Desert Weavers, npy Women’s Council. Photo by T. Purich.

made matters. Here, the experiment that is Tjanpi art finds its apotheosis, for it is arguably not what the Dreaming as law means but how it is made and remade that matters. Tracing or coiling in Tjanpi is a critical technique. Like the rigorous formal terms of mark making discussed throughout this book (see chapters 2, 4, and 7 particularly), the procedural and technical ways through which the revelatory capacities of Ancestral potency are achieved are not random or incidental but engendered by precise repetition and regulation (see Biddle 2007). Outlining— the activation of tracing—specifically makes Ancestral marks potent, alive, and animated. This function is fulfilled in acrylic painting by dotting, and in body paintings by lines that outline, differentiate, create ridge-­like boundaries, and relationally enliven the so-­called surface and mark simultaneously. This subsequent outlining turns a flat, ordinary two-­dimensional mark on the surface of the canvas into a three-­dimensional, textural, and mutable terrain where AnTjanpi Desert Weavers | 115

Fig. 5.5. Tjanpi workshop in Tjanpi Corner, Alice Springs, NT, 2006. © Tjanpi Desert Weavers, npy Women’s Council. Photo by J. Foster.

cestral mark and human mark conjoin, and where the line or trace, or dotting, creates a mesmerizing, undulating vertical movement between the visible world of the everyday and the underworld of the Ancestral realm. Dots and lines push, poke, trace, and thus create a 3d-­like screen that moves, undulates, quivers, or “shimmers,” as Howard Morphy (1989) has famously described the work of raark in bark painting, and as Jennifer Deger (2006b) describes the animation of the (shimmering) screens in the works of contemporary Indigenous screen digital photography and film.3 Raffia and more traditional Tjanpi grasses are said to shimmer: Rapiyanya parparmanu, Tjanpinya parparmanu (raffia shimmers, grass shimmers; Tjanpi Desert Weavers 2012, 289; and see below Tjanpi inma)—indicating the vital importance of the material evidence of Ancestral viscera as it is, at once, found, revealed, and produced today through practice. The lifelike animus of Tjanpi is its distinguishing, if disarming, affect. Nonhuman things, objects, are redolent with sentience.4 Alice in Wonderland–­like teacups come to life; pink and orange and blue bush turkeys are poised to take flight. The sculptural figures of Minyma Punu Kungkarangkalpa (Seven Sisters Tree Women) danced, daily, at the String Theory exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art (mca, 2013) in Sydney. The mca gallery attendants for the Tjanpi Desert Weavers exhibition room of life-­size installation sculptural works delighted in reporting to me how they had never seen viewers engage so dramatically with art. Apparently, the public reaction was physical. People could not contemplate from a distance, stand back, neutrally observe, but took im116 | Chapter Five

mediately to posing and aligning themselves alongside the works physically; copying the movements, postures, and gestures of the figures to the extent that the attendants had (repeated) cause to stop people from embracing, cuddling, sitting on, the artwork. Potent, almost perfect exactitude, it is the vitality of mimicry of the work that surprises, delights, and, indeed, engenders affective mimetic mutuality in response.

We had strong emotional feelings for these women because they are like real women to us. . . . We loved making these sculptures. . . . Being together makes it special for us. We felt a strong bond towards the seven women we seven women were creating. Ilawanti Ungkutjuru Ken | “Artist Statement,” String Theory Linda Rive | interpreter and translator

Larger than life, and almost overdetermined, these works come as close to direct indexicality as possible, in ways that border on the memento mori of the tourist fantasy. Incarnate forms of animals, birds, dogs, and humans index country and everyday life directly (that they are marketed as craft rather than art makes this even more the case). Touching/feeling reversibility (Sedgwick 2003): the handmade by Anangu becomes handheld. Tjanpi objects uniquely unite cultural traditions of labor, somatic memories, and emotional associations woven into the object form, which are felt directly by the consumer. Texture is compelling because it draws us near, proximate, as if by touch, to what is generated by vision alone. Geoffrey Bardon’s (1979) original analysis of Western Desert aesthetics (long before iconography became the defining model) was that it was a “haptic,” not a visual mode. That Tjanpi artworks are rough matters—particularly in comparison with the finer-­gauge, technically tighter, and more structured weavings of the northern Perpermanarti artists or, farther north, Yolngu or Elcho Islands artists. Nalda Searles (in West 2007, 45) has dubbed the distinctively rough and almost hypertexture of Tjanpi “mongrel stitching . . . an unstructured and sometimes raw quality that formally combines coiling, stitching and cobbling.” This question of the roughness of Tjanpi has no small politics (Linda Rive, Tjanpi Desert Weavers | 117

Fig. 5.6. Nyukana Baker, Basket, 2012. Photo © Tjanpi Desert Weavers, npy Women’s Council.

personal communication 2014). As Tjanpi artist Kunbry Pei Pei put it, what White people may consider rough is highly refined ingenuity. Kunbry links the necessity of the quickly cut club, stick, or tool, by hand or with stone tools, as a vital aspect of distinctive ways of being Anangu in country, what she calls “a more traditional thinking and making things”; a way of “thinking and making” to which she pays direct homage in her own Tjanpi production today: “Conversely, I dislike paintings and objects that are overly neat and tight. I dislike fine, tight dots on dot paintings and fine tight stitchwork on baskets. I see it as the opposite to our looser, more free and creative traditional way of life, and also a reflection of the imposition that white people have placed on our lives, controlling and demanding neatness and conformity” (Tjanpi Desert Weavers 2012, 157; Linda Rive, interpreter and translator). What makes Tjanpi works particularly uncanny is that despite (or even because of ) their so-­called roughness, their fidelity to life is unstinting: realism of pose, stance; characterizations of lizards, goannas, cheeky dogs perhaps, a jealous wife; the elaborate and detailed construction of a windmill, or a steering wheel complete with grip covering; alive, emboldened, animated forms. This is not the result of obsessively detailed work, as is characteristic of much so-­called native art, where the devil is in the details. Rather, it is the larger, quixotic pos118 | Chapter Five

Fig. 5.7. Kunbry Pei Pei, Basket, 2008. © Tjanpi Desert Weavers, npy Women’s Council. Photo by E. Diamond.

tures that convince. Garrulous, garish, and gargantuan at times too: dogs might bark, trucks take off. This is an irrepressibly sentient and alive landscape, in which inanimate objects are animated and all things are infused with human/ Ancestral sentiment, characters, and qualities. Shared, felt, and exchanged experiences dominate relationships, but relationships between the so-­called objective world as it was created by Ancestral humans, and the world as it is created again today, in activity, through Tjanpi art, in the contemporary. Over time, Tjanpi art has come to reveal the sacred. Not all, but particular Tjanpi works have become high and specific Tjukurrpa/Tjukurpa. In the history of Tjanpi production, this revelation has taken shape through major artwork commissions undertaken by Tjanpi artists in conjunction with regional and national galleries, which have commissioned large works of Tjanpi sculpture to be produced collectively, in country. Large-­scale sculptures have been individually commissioned since 2003, and, over the decade since, have come to reveal the work of Tjukurrpa/Tjukurpa. During this period, senior Tjanpi artists have undertaken purposeful, project-­based Tjanpi artist camps of at least two weeks’ duration, in local npy country, with further resources provided by Tjanpi Desert Weavers | 119

Fig. 5.8. Mary Katatjuku Pan dancing with her burned tree sculpture on her head in Pitjantjatjara country near Amata, SA, 2012. © Tjanpi Desert Weavers, npy Women’s Council. Photo by J. Foster.

the umbrella Tjanpi Desert Weavers social enterprise, including transportation, food supplies, water, and art materials, as well as dedicated Tjanpi art workers: specifically Jo Foster, over the last seven years, assisted initially by Mel Darr and, more recently, Claire Freer, who have coordinated, facilitated, and overseen art production, and Linda Rive, who has provided in situ interpretation, as well as postproduction assistance with story gathering and translation. For Tjanpi art (as indeed for art elsewhere across the contemporary remote) the development of aesthetic experimentation, and of the capacity for artists to actively take up collective ingenuity through practice-­based artistry, has been enabled by highly conscious, strategic, and dedicated resourcing, not by chance (see Tjanpi Desert Weavers 2012, chapter 9). Major Tjanpi commissions have included the collaborative works of kuru alala Eyes Open, a two-­year collaborative venture (2008–9) involving over fifty Tjanpi artists and the non-­Indigenous artists Alison Clouston and Maria Fernanda Cardoso. In 2011, Tandanya (the only national museum in Australia exclusively devoted to Indigenous art) commissioned what became Paarpakani 120 | Chapter Five

Fig. 5.9. Tjunkaya Tapaya working on her large blue bird for Paarpakani (Take Flight), during artists’ camp held in Pitjantjatjara country near Amata, SA, 2011. © Tjanpi Desert Weavers, npy Women’s Council. Photo by J. Foster.

(Take Flight; see plates 8–10), a series of six sculptural birds, for their 2012 exhibition Deadly: In-­Between Heaven and Hell, and the South Australian Art Gallery subsequently acquired these for their Heartland exhibition (2013). In 2013, the mca commissioned four separate but interconnected bodies of work featuring large sculptural pieces: Minyma Punu Kungkarangkalpa (Seven Sisters Tree Women); Kangkuru Punu Minyma Kutjara (Two Women Sister Trees); Tjilkamarta Minyma Kutjarra Munu Wati Ngirntaka Warta (Two Porcupine Wives and Perentie Man Tree); and Ngangkari Tjukurpa for its exhibition String Theory: Focus on Contemporary Art. What is telling in each of these cases is that Tjukurrpa/Tjukurpa became revealed through a collective aesthetic practice base on and in country. As discussed by Rigney (2009), while on one level the Early Days Bush Family sculptures of Kuru Alala Eyes Open presented a so-­called traditional family scene—­husband, wives, children, grass windbreaks, sleeping camp dogs—it Tjanpi Desert Weavers | 121

nevertheless emerged over the course of their making that these figures were recognizable as Eagle Man and his two wives, Sulphur-­Crested Cockatoo Lady and Crow Lady, a major Tjukurrpa/Tjukurpa for Ngaanyatjarra women. Tellingly, Tjukurrpa/Tjukurpa was not the original aim. Tjanpi Desert Weavers recounted at the Same but Different forum in 2012 that the Paarpakani (Take Flight) bird sculptures were inspired by the combination of a recent Tjukurrpa/Tjukurpa painting of a large eagle catching prey, produced by one of the Tjanpi artists, Ilawanti Ungkutjuru Ken (almost all senior Tjanpi artists are also major painters); the large numbers of birds in country on the Tjanpi bush camps, due to recent bush fires; and, indeed, the likeness of the husband of one of the Tjanpi artists to this hunting eagle, in that he provided fresh meat for the women at camp. Nyurpaya Kaika-­Burton: Munula nyara palula nguru kuliningi, Hey! Kuwari tjana palyala! Tjinguru nganana tjulpu pulka palyanu, Tjukurpa tjara. Tjulpu pulka paluru. Nganana communityngka walingka palyantja wiya, nganana putingka nyinangi, munu nganana parka mantjiningi, tjanpi mantjiningi, punu mantjiningi, munu nganana palula nguru tjulpu pulka tjuta palyanu! Linda Rive (Interpreter): We were so inspired by all the birds that are flying around! We decided, “Hey! Let’s make a whole lot of birds!” So we ended up making huge and important birds, that are connected to the Tjukurpa. We made the most important birds of all. We decided we would not work in the community, near the houses, we would go bush. So we gathered up piles of twigs and leaves, grasses and branches, and from those materials we began fashioning our birds. Niningka Lewis: Nyaa, one week nganana nyinangi ngura palula. Nyangatja tjinguru paintngka palyantja. Nganana nyangatja nyakula palyantja. Kuka tjara. Linda Rive (Interpreter): What got us going on this whole exhibition idea of the birds was this painting by Iluwanti here. That really got us all thinking about the nature of eagles and how they care for their families. We found this particular painting extremely inspiring, and all the birds came out of this particular painting. Tjanpi Desert Weavers | “Paarpakani: Take Flight,” Same but Different, Alice Springs, 2012 (Tjanpi Desert Weavers 2015) Linda Rive | interpreter and translator

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Fig. 5.10. Yaritji Young working on her bird for Paarpakani (Take Flight) during artists’ camp held in Pitjantjatjara country near Amata, SA, 2011. © Tjanpi Desert Weavers, npy Women’s Council. Photo by J. Foster.

Fig. 5.11. Paniny Mick, Paarpakani (Take Flight), 2012. 1,400 (length) × 450 (height) × 300 (width) mm, raffia, minnarri grass, buffel grass, sting, poly-­raffia, polyester fiber, secondhand fabric, wool, wire, plastic garden rake. For Deadly: In-­Between Heaven and Hell, Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Institute, SA. © Tjanpi Desert Weavers, npy Women’s Council. Photo by M. Brady.

The cross-­art, cross-­human-­Ancestral basis of Tjanpi motivated the work of Tjanpi Minyma Tjanpi Punu for the mca. The senior male artists at Amata (a Pitjantjatjara community in the npy lands, where a significant number of senior Tjanpi artists reside) had been painting punu (trees) in preparation for an exhibition at Raft Art Gallery in Alice Springs, Punu-­nguru (From the Trees), in 2013. These paintings led the women to think about and make Tjanpi-­based trees. Additional momentum was provided by an Australian Research Council Project that had recently begun on the npy lands and the National Museum of Australia’s staging of the first outcome of this project, Kungkarangkalpa: Seven Sisters Songline (produced by Indigenous director Wesley Enoch), which brought twenty-­five npy women to Canberra to perform a staged inma (a female ceremony, dance, song) in March 2013. The fact that Tjanpi Desert Weavers has, through supporting on-­the-­ground, country-­based initiatives, resourced by both government and nongovernment funding bodies, with outputs linked to high-­visibility exhibition platforms, created culturally appropriate conditions for Tjanpi to evolve, expand, and, at the same time, become traditional Tjukurrpa/Tjukurpa, is crucial. The very slippages and vacillations between the sacred and the secular, the ultimate inseparability of the sacred from the everyday, the incarnate means by which Tjukurrpa/ 124 | Chapter Five

Fig. 5.12. Minyma Punu Kungkarangkalpa (Seven Sisters Tree Women) sculptures displayed in country at the end of the artists’ camp held in Pitjantjatjara country near Amata, SA, 2013. Artists, left to right: Yaritji Young, Mary Katatjuku Pan, Nyurpaya Kaika-­ Burton, Carlene Thompson, Niningka Lewis, Tjunkaya Tapaya, and Ilawanti Ungkutjuru Ken. © Tjanpi Desert Weavers, npy Women’s Council. Photo by C. Freer.

Tjukurpa is not invented but revealed through process-­based, ritualized, collaborative making and, notably, through inspiration garnered from and across multiple art forms that are themselves operating to reveal new traditional trajectories, do not make for an arbitrary assemblage. Tjanpi art has become incorporated, because it has been found to incorporate law, Dreaming, Tjukurrpa/ Tjukurpa: the revelation of a process of collective purposeful being and doing in country, in place, with others. The sacred is not to be approached directly, at least in my experience. The new may be freed up, but not without its own risks. The risk that modernity poses is that people might become what John von Sturmer (2010, 16) calls “people without history,” no longer beholden, indebted, no longer “proper human.” It is not a small thing, in short, that Tjanpi, as an experimental art form, now can, and does, engender Ancestral visibility and, thus, viability. Tjanpi Desert Weavers | 125

Fig. 5.13. Paniny Mick with her bird made during Tjanpi artists’ camp for Paarpakani (Take Flight) held in Pitjantjatjara country near Amata, SA, 2011. © Tjanpi Desert Weavers, npy Women’s Council. Photo by J. Foster.

I stitch everything together so that the Old Man is as robust as he is in real life. When he has finally taken shape I use grasses and wool to make his wings and feathers, sewing them on in layers. . . . Old Man Eagle is now ready to fly up in the sky and cry out in the wide open spaces. But oh, that’s right—this Old Man Eagle is made only of grass! I can’t help pretending he is real and I laugh as I write this. Working with tjanpi is really inspiring. Nyurpaya Kaika-­Burton | “Ilkari Munu Manta: Sky and Country” Linda Rive | interpreter and translator

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In 2006, according to Thisbe Purich (2007; see also Tjanpi Desert Weavers 2012, 263–95), the newly created Tjanpi inma (the Ngaanyatjarra term for ceremony, dance, song)5 was performed at the npy Aboriginal Women’s Law and Culture gathering: an astonishing canonization in just over a decade for such an experimental art. This inaugural event attested, as Tjanpi artist Josephine Mick (2008, 3) put it, that “Tjanpi has Tjukurrpa too.” Here, as elsewhere in contemporary practice, the Dreaming is not a fixed or static repertoire but, in fact, feeds off the lifeworld of the living—it is not only the other way around. Rapiyanya parparmanu Tjapinya parparmanu Kutanunya parparmanu Rapiyanya tukulmara ngaringu Walka nganampa walkayuringu Kartiyalulanya wangkara wantingu Nyinakatirala tjunkula wanalu Raffia shimmers Grass shimmers Greybeard grasses shimmer Raffia rustles Our designs take shape and colour One white woman said to us Sit your baskets down in a row Tjanpi Desert Weavers | “Inma Tjanpi: Song of the Grasses” (select, one verse) (Tjanpi Desert Weavers 2012, 263) Linda Rive | translation

iii. THE PRESENCE OF WHITEFELLAS The work of Tjanpi Desert Weavers is unabashedly collaborative, flagrantly intercultural. Since its inception in 1995, npy Women’s Council has given the basket-­weaving movement support through non-­Aboriginal tutors, notably Nalda Searles, Thisbe Purich, Philomena Hali, Sandy Elverd, Renita Glencross, and, more recently, Jo Foster, who have brought their own technical skills

Tjanpi Desert Weavers | 127

Fig. 5.14. Kanytjupayi Benson, Early Camp Crockery, 1996. © the artist and Tjanpi Desert Weavers, npy Women’s Council. Photo by T. Purich.

in weaving and art production to an annual ongoing program of workshops and camps held on homelands, and to more day-­to-­day interfaces (West 2007; James 2012). Tutors and workshop leaders from Bachelor College have included Jenny Taylor, Marina Strocchi, and Alison Clouston. The non-­Indigenous Australian artist Fiona Hall undertook a residency with Tjanpi artists from Amata, Kalka, Pipalyatjara, Pukatja (Ernabella), Mutitjulu, and Irrunytju (Wingellina) at an artist camp held to create new work for the 2014 TarraWarra Biennial, Whisper in My Mask; works from this residency traveled to the Venice Biennale in 2015. Collaboration is not contested. Acker and Altman (2006) and McLean (2009) note that the contrast with acrylic painting could not be sharper, given the controversy that, in the past, has raged about the collaborative art of Tim Johnson and Imants Tillers; the legal battles and provenance challenges that have besieged the careers of Kathleen Petyarre and Kumanjayi Possum Tjapaltjarri; the rumors and mudslinging generated by the presence of carpetbaggers, or white art advisors and gallery owners who direct or influence the way the artists paint;

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Fig. 5.15. Carson Biddle with her Tjanpi sculpture produced during workshop held in association with String Theory: Focus on Contemporary Art exhibition, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2013. Photo by J. Biddle.

Fig. 5.16. Milyika Carol, Malpiya Davey, Pantjiti Lionel, and Niningka Lewis, Station Scene, 2009. 1,400 (height) × 1,800 (width) × 1,200 (length) mm, Tjanpi (wild-­ harvested grasses), raffia, jute string, hair string, acrylic wool, emu feathers, cockatoo feathers, sheep’s wool, stone, wood, twigs, leaves, ininti seeds, wire mesh, and wire. Exhibited piece in kuru alala Eyes Open touring exhibition, 2009–12. © Tjanpi Desert Weavers, npy Women’s Council. Photo by Moving Images.

and the policing of boundaries that can make and has made Aboriginal art, in the words of Richard Bell’s (2002) now infamous theorem, “a white thing.”6 Tjanpi not only escapes this tired debate but trumps it. One of the most marked features of Tjanpi practice is the Tjanpi Desert Weaving workshops that the artists hold at almost every major exhibition, art fair, or festival they attend, as well as school-­based initiatives and other forms of public outreach. Here, non-­Aboriginal participants (predominantly but not exclusively women) have 130 | Chapter Five

Fig. 5.17. Judith Inyika Chambers, The Big Green Tractor, 2014. Tjanpi (wild-­harvested grasses), raffia, acrylic yarn, cotton yarn, and plastic buttons. © Tjanpi Desert Weavers, npy Women’s Council. Photo by K. Menkhorst.

the opportunity to learn directly from the artists and leave the two- to three-­ hour workshops carrying their own (albeit small, albeit elementary) Tjanpi sculpture home with them: a radical inclusivity that harnesses the bodies and hands of non-­Indigenous women to the task of making and keeping practice-­ led Indigenous culture-­in-­the-­making alive through collaborative practice. The intercultural, explicitly, is dominant in early Tjanpi art particularly, and in the return in flat wall pieces being produced, such as Judith Inyika Chambers’s The Big Green Tractor (figure 5.17), shortlisted for the natsiaa Art Awards in 2014. What were “illegitimate” sites of colonial inequality and exchange are here teasingly, even provocatively, mimicked and mined for all they are worth. Tjanpi weaving practice includes not only baskets and figures (animals, birds, people, mamu/Ancestors) but things—things with attitude, irreverent imitations and cheeky quotations: Toyotas, teapots, tvs, movie cameras. This is not collaborating with the enemy nor stealing the enemy’s prized possessions as much as it is impertinent license and sheer caprice—an almost raucous audacity that reproduces not just anything or everything, but specific hypersignifiers of modernity: Tjanpi Desert Weavers | 131

what doesn’t rust, decay, or otherwise cease; a posthistorical futurity; not only the more recent, rarefied world of the Ancestral sacred but an everyday reality of contact, colonialism, and camp life. High (not post) modernism—technological things. The march of progress and modernization: transport, water, trucking, how things work, how they move (sculpted blades on Tjanpi windmills look like they should turn). It is the halted still that produces the uncanny hit, like stop-­motion animation in hard reverse. Yet the subject matter is hauntingly eternal-­return. Tjanpi objects are outmoded historical relics—a 1950s tray-­back ute, a 16 mm movie camera, not a Holden Commodore or a digital camera: history itself stopped (or did it start?) in a 1950s “then.” Yet what was then is now, but not nostalgic necessarily. There is something unremarkable about the kind of silent stealth-­like witness that Tjanpi presents, not unlike the way people tell history, their own stories sometimes, often—flat, direct, emotionless, fait accompli. History, as von Sturmer (2010, 18) says, is “something you negotiate around. If you can.” Here is fidelity to truth, yes, but not memorialization. Even though monumental in size and impact, Tjanpi Toyota (Kanytjupayi Benson with Tjanpi Desert Weavers from Blackstone), which won the natsiaa Art Award in 2005 and is on permanent display at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, is not a memorial, because its very wit and performative ephemera belie the event-­ specific sobriety that memorial demands. Tjanpi arts are not so much counterhistory, in providing as they do original witness, testimony, for the first time, to a variety of complex Anangu perspectives, but an indexical insistence on the primacy of mark making as Indigenous-­ specific historiography. History leaves traces. What dots and dominates the landscape, Tjanpi tells us, is our own Whitefella traces, remnants, remains. The gesture here may appear more whimsical insistence than insurgency perhaps, but is no less serious ultimately. It is not only Ancestors who left indelible traces in the country; not only their marks that matter. As Tjanpi artist Niningka Lewis (Tjanpi Desert Weavers et al. 2009, 25) put it: “People came from over the sea bringing camels and donkeys which have multiplied into the millions. This is true. Their animals and things have multiplied everywhere and now there are millions of donkeys, camels, bullocks, sheep and cars everywhere . . . all over our land” (Linda Rive, interpreter and translator).

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Fig. 5.18. Tjanpi Punu, completed works in Pitjantjatjara country near Amata, SA, 2012. Artists, left to right: Paniny Mick, Rene Kulitja, Ilawanti Ungkutjuru Ken (with bird nest), Rene Kulitja (with wood), Nyurpaya Kaika-­Burton (largest tree), Mary Katatjuku Pan, Yaritji Young (colored tree), and Naomi Kantjuriny. © Tjanpi Desert Weavers, npy Women’s Council. Photo by J. Foster.

iv. REMEMBERING THE FUTURE As Thisbe Purich (2009) notes, there was simply a need in 1995 to introduce a new craft that was more culturally appropriate than the normative model of working inside a community art center from nine to five. Such work (art production) might mean leaving family responsibilities at home, working inside and shut off physically from other community responsibilities and activities. Tjanpi, however, could be practiced not to the exclusion of lifeworld immediacy but present and available to it. Tjanpi production is seemingly immediate and interruptible, present and available to lived community exigencies, what Basil Sansom (1980) has identified as the defining requirement of Aboriginal societies—being present, witnessing, to and for others. Described by Hetti Perkins (2014a) as “an art centre without walls,” Tjanpi Desert Weavers is the only pan-­regional art organization across the npy homelands of the Western Desert. While the administrative center for Tjanpi Desert Tjanpi Desert Weavers | 133

Weavers has always been centrally located in Alice Springs, Tjanpi art worker staff travel regularly to, from, and between remote communities, in continuous and varied forms of engagement on the lands and with artists and community members (distributing supplies, needles, collecting finished work, conducting workshops and project-­based bush camps), with a permanent production center in the remote Ngaanyatjarra community of Warakurna only since 2008. Tjanpi art workers, themselves, traverse the roads and communities of the npy lands, an “art center without walls” that is as practice-­base supported and as mobile as the art forms are themselves. Non–­technologically dependent, Tjanpi weavings travel, move, as women’s lives command, across communities, distance, responsibilities, the desert homelands; providing for what Marcia Langton (in Tjanpi Desert Weavers 2012, 9) calls Tjanpi artists being their own bosses. Arguably, Tjanpi work reactivates a certain “nuclear script” (Tomkins 1963) of country, place, and practice: a conjointly female-­specific way of being with one another, and of being in country. A primacy of affective orientations, attenuations, organization, and modes of response are tied to the bodies of others as much as to country itself. Imbrications of habit, affect, and encounter take shape through co-­oriented bodies in “concernful absorption” by which country becomes a place of feeling as much as practice—what Casey (2001) might call a thick place (as opposed to a thin or unpracticed place)—a critical revivification of country for increasingly community-­based contemporary existence. Crucially, Tjanpi was revealed to be made—makeable—not only in and on country but directly from country. Early experiments with Tjanpi utilized locally sourced plant fibers, minarri and wangurnu specifically (Purich 2007, 31), which are often found today as the inside stuffing of figurative forms, with raffia or other fibers (wool, cotton) as wrapping. Grasses, rushes, camel hair, and human hair, collected, cut, dried, spindle spun, spat on, caressed, fondled, held—the viscera of country, person, and above all an enduring, intimate relation between hand, technique, and object—become woven directly into the object form. Traditional Tjanpi grasses may mix up with, vie with, be abandoned for raffia, if not available—“No matter,” said Tjanpi artist Eunice Yunurupa Porter (personal communication, Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair, 2012), when I asked what was the best material to work with.

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Fig. 5.19. Nancy Jackson and Eunice Yunurupa Porter parading with Tjilkamarta Minyma Kutjarra Mumu Wati Ngirntaka Warta at Warakurna in Ngaanyatjarra lands of WA, 2013. © Tjanpi Desert Weavers, npy Women’s Council. Photo by J. Foster.

We have very strong feelings towards our grasses, we love them. They have sustained our lives for ever. So when people ask us about our tjanpi grasses and we say they have tjukurpa, we really mean it. Our grasses have great tjukurpa. The grasses that are important to us are the grasses that are useful for us, or they feed us with their seeds. And they are strong enough to be used to make sculptures. Food grasses and straining grasses and padding grasses and all the grasses that keep us alive, are absolutely vital. We do like to make sure that those grasses are given proper homage. But is really important for them to know that the fibres with which these items are made are of historical value and have sustained Aboriginal life in the desert since the beginning, and that these grasses themselves are of inestimable value. Nyurpaya Kaika-­Burton

Tjanpi Desert Weavers | 135

And every piece of land that people are born and raised on has got a different geology and a different soil so it bears different grasses and different foods and we all know where we were born and where we were raised, and you know, we are all from slightly different country, and you know, there are certain plants that grow better in certain areas, but we are all aware of that. Katatjuku Mary Pan with Nyurpaya Kaika-­Burton and Niningka Lewis | String Theory Linda Rive | interpreter and translator

The high Tjukurrpa/Tjukurpa works associated with commissioned works utilize harvested Tjanpi grasses directly (as Kaika-­Burton and Pan attest). Memory is acted out through social practice, reversing the Western assumption that art is the teleological result of memory and reflection, rather than being itself an instigator in the process. This memory is not archival. Tjanpi does not serve to accumulate historical memory as in an official repository; it is not driven by the compulsive necessity to collect and store, in order to compensate for ever-­receding memory and to ward off death, as Derrida (1996) characterizes Western cultural “archive fever.” Nor is this necessarily a “melancholic identification” historicism of the kind I have elsewhere depicted in relation to Western Desert women’s acrylic painting (Biddle 2007), in which the imperative to repeat is indicative of grief, of loss (melancholy, not mourning), of an ultimately irreparable wound. Tjanpi inaugurates a far more practical and practice-­ oriented object relationality. In its more predominant, prosaic forms (a teacup, this bowl, some baskets), in its radically secular if not irreverent interpretation of the everyday banal, a practice-­based relationship to country is insisted upon. Experimental art—acrylic painting, Tjanpi—provides ritualized forms of caring for country: concrete processes in which country is held in the mind as much as in the hand.7 Country can remain fertile, productive, only if it is looked after, tended to, cared for, fed properly. An incarnate form itself, country will starve without care, is starving now (Biddle 2007); and that means work, ritual, labor, what Warlpiri might call, in English, the business of looking after: a labor of lifelong attachment. Country is dependent upon humans for making and keeping its viscera (species, flora, fauna, social relations, and relationships) animated, enlivened, activated, and attached to lived sentiments and sensibilities. The labor of Tjanpi 136 | Chapter Five

(hunting, camping, and art making) is materially productive in these terms. This then is a memory of what might be called “remembering the future,”8 where a female-­specific responsibility for looking after country, people, and knowledge is acknowledged, supported, and nourished through art making. As I have discussed in previous research (Biddle 2007), this responsibility is increasing, simply for demographic reasons alone, as men die younger and women live longer. I don’t want to romanticize this existential insecurity, as Diane Austin-­ Broos (2011) has identified it: the daily trauma of extremely high rates of avoidable deaths of young men, which finds a smaller number of women now looking after a larger number of both immediate and extended family members. That figurative Tjanpi works present human family figures, especially children, in this context may well be for good reason (note the abundance of mamu and other haunted child figures in New Sculptures by Tjanpi Desert Weavers, Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne, 2011). In the encounter with Tjanpi art, the proximity of this politics, a vital material politics, is inescapable. Tjanpi objects collapse the actual space between art object and viewing spectator in an encounter of participatory command both immediate and temporal. The three criteria Shelly Errington (1994) argues are necessary for primitive art to become fine art (portability, durability, and frameability) are here elided. Tjanpi artworks have no frame, no distance from which they can safely be hung; they are not inert and cauterized spectacle, for ocular purposes alone. Even without directly touching, these works make and bring the world of intimate incarnate association close, proximate, even (for some) too close. Arguably, the ambivalent status of Tjanpi within the high art category, the ever-­reductive question “Is it art or is it craft?,” is about this ­ambiguity.

So here we are in the gallery, together again, responding to place and negotiating a shared space. . . . The room resonates with the undeniable presence of country. There is no escaping its pulse. It is a binding force. Jo Foster | “Camping in Country”

Tjanpi Desert Weavers | 137

Tjanpi is not about something else. It is the thing itself. Unlike acrylic desert paintings, where the historical requirement has been to rely upon a Dreaming story or a supplementary account to tell what it really is, and, in turn, the marked move to make the canvas itself an autonomous encounter, as witnessed in recent acrylic painting practices (chapters 2 and 3) and digital photography (chapter 4), Tjanpi’s unique capacity is unmediated: a potent hit direct to global audiences and markets. Explaining her reasoning for judging the Tjanpi Toyota the 2005 natsiaa Art Award winner, Destiny Deacon (abc 2005) says it was “art you could smell,” identifying in an instant the visceral hit that Tjanpi delivers. Smell, like touch itself, confounds the distinction between subjective human experience and the object that engenders it, human and nonhuman, inside and outside, me and it. Arguably, in this sense, Tjanpi works border on a Kristeva (1982) sense of abjection: compelling and fascinating because they will not settle within the bordered, bounded concept of Aboriginal art. Poised radically to pry open the new (the less well-­appreciated aspect of Kristeva’s abjection), Tjanpi is not remote Aboriginal art in this sense: over there, elsewhere, othered but embodied, alive, present, here and now.

138 | Chapter Five

SIX

WARNAYAKA ART

YURLPA This chapter is about yurlpa, the Warlpiri term for ochre, and what the use of yurlpa in experimental art achieves. What I argue is this: the materiality of yurlpa is important. It provides an immediacy and proximity to enliven Jukurrpa and to keep it attached to the bodies and lifeworlds of its producers in ways that matter. It may seem perverse to act as if the use of ochre in Aboriginal art were a new thing, or include its discussion in contemporary experimental art trajectories. Ochre is, after all, perhaps the quintessential material basis of Aboriginal art and design, be it in ochre-­impregnated rock carvings or cave paintings (stenciled, engraved, painted, or pounded into surface), or on the bodies of people and ritual objects—all of which form, and continue to inform, Central and Western Desert acrylic painting today. Unlike in Northern Australia, where there was a long tradition of utilizing ochre in what first became known as Aboriginal art—bark paintings, hollow log burial sculptures, mimi figures, shields, spears, and other art objects from Arnhem Land and Cape York, where ochre was and still is utilized (now along with acrylic paint and other media) in the production of high art—the Western Desert art movement did not have this ochre-­to-­art trajectory. Central and Western Desert Aboriginal art was established, in the first instance, as an acrylic art practice. It was acrylic paint that was used on the school doors at Papunya in the 1970s, and it was acrylic painting, as a medium as much as a method, that spread virally, as it has since, instigating the Western Desert painting movement as it is renowned today.

Fig. 6.1. Yukurrukurru (various), acrylic on board, utilized for yawulyu conducted for Yawulyu as Intergenerational Art, Lajamanu, NT, 2011. © the artists and Warnayaka Art and Cultural Aboriginal Corporation. Photo by J. Biddle.

While a few ritual objects (ochre on wood) have been exhibited or collected during this period, and important sand paintings executed by senior male Central Desert artists in international galleries of Paris and Sydney, and, more recently, by Papunya artists in Ithaca, New York,1 these works have been exhibited alongside acrylic paintings and understood as being examples of (precursor) traditional practice, or supplementary to the primary master art form of the acrylic-­based artworks of Jukurrpa (Dreaming). Ochre has not established itself in the Western Desert market-­directed art painting movement (with the notable exception of the Eastern Kimberly, where ochre-­infused acrylic painting took signature shape in the work of Rover Thomas, Queenie McKenzie, and other artists associated with Warmun [see Thomas 2003]). Nor has ochre received substantive critical analysis in terms of art history, where, instead, the focus has been on story, Dreaming, iconography, and cartography, that is, on the meaning or content of acrylic Jukurrpa painting. Far less analysis of painting as a form, substance, or a materiality exists in the literature.2 Within this context, in 2007, senior Lajamanu artists Lily Nungarrayi Har140 | Chapter Six

Fig. 6.2. Left to right: Yulurrku Nangala Kelly, Apajai aka Raphaelia Napaljarri Kelly, Lily Nungarrayi Hargraves, Lynette Napangardi Tasman, Molly Napurrurla Tasman, Rosie Napurrurla Tasman, Jennifer Nampijinpa Biddle, Myra Nungarrayi Patrick, Reide Japanangka Marshall, and Carson Napanangka Biddle, Lajamanu Warlpiri Women’s Yawulyu exhibition, opening night, 2007. Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics, College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney. Photo by C. Bender.

graves, Myra Nungarrayi Patrick, Rosie Napurrurla Tasman, Molly Napurrurla Tasman, and Lynette Napangardi Tasman undertook a two-­week residential workshop under a conjointly held Australian Research Council project in Sydney at the Centre for Contemporary Art (ccap), College of Fine Arts (cofa), at the University of New South Wales (unsw), in order to explore directly the possibilities of yawulyu (women’s ceremonial body designs, songs, dance) as the basis of an experimental aesthetic. Note here again the importance of context, resource, and dedicated support for enabling the possibilities of experimentation in tradition to emerge. This workshop was, in fact, a highly conscious, deliberate collaboration, planned long term, nationally resourced and university supported; a collaborative initiative designed to support and develop Warnayaka Art | 141

Fig. 6.3. Lynette Napangardi Tasman, Wapirra Jukurrpa, 2007. 57 × 76 cm, ochre on black paper. Lajamanu Warlpiri Women’s Yawulyu Workshop, Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics, College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales. © the artist, courtesy Warnayaka Art and Cultural Aboriginal Corporation. Photo by C. Bender.

traditional art and its culture-­sustaining basis; an initiative specifically aimed at supporting process-­based and practice-­oriented experimental production (not focused on object-­commodity production, though that was, in fact, how the women chose to utilize it); based on long-­term, established relationships of collaboration and trust that evolved from conscious decision-­making strategies and design; that is, a highly orchestrated context for Warlpiri female-­specific artistic experimentation (the new does not arise from nowhere). What might emerge if ochre were used directly on paper, board, canvas, treated as a medium for painting, for art practice proper, today? What might it mean to reintroduce ochre into the production of the art from which women’s acrylic Jukurrpa paintings were said to derive? I need to clarify here that this did not, however, make for a privileging of ochre in the workshop process, or for the naive reassertion of a dubious authen142 | Chapter Six

Fig. 6.4. Rosie Napurrurla Tasman, Kalajirri Jukurrpa, 2007. 55 × 75 cm, oil pastel on black paper. Lajamanu Warlpiri Women’s Yawulyu Workshop, Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics, College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales. © the artist, courtesy Warnayaka Art and Cultural Aboriginal Corporation. Photo by C. Bender.

tic versus an introduced hierarchy of medium forms. On the contrary, acrylic paints were sourced and made available at the workshop for the women’s use, at their discretion, as well as commercially sourced clay crayons and charcoal, in order to enable exploration of a range of experimental possibilities. The workshop was staged to coincide with the launch of my first book, which explored embodiment and affectivity in women’s acrylic paintings and, specifically, the relationship between yawulyu process-­based body art and its ritualized repetition in contemporary acrylic painting. This book was the result of field research conducted with these same Lajamanu women artists over almost two decades. To this end, the women brought to Sydney ochre of three types (see below). I supplied, at their direction, not only paper and canvas but commercial wooden boards cut to the sizes, shapes, and dimensions of two different traditional Warnayaka Art | 143

Fig. 6.5. Molly Napurrurla Tasman, Ngurlu, 2007. 50 × 24 cm, oil and ochre on prepared wood. Lajamanu Warlpiri Women’s Yawulyu Workshop, Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics, College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales. © the artist, courtesy Warnayaka Art and Cultural Aboriginal Corporation. Photo by C. Bender.

women’s ritual objects: yukurrukurru (carved, wooden, flat, dancing boards used in yawulyu and other ceremonial performances) and parraja (coolamons: large, carved, wooden, shallow bowls for water, seed, or baby carrying, also used in yawulyu and other ceremonies). I sourced, for the purposes of the workshop, glue and binder for the ochre, as well as the now-­traditional store-­bought cooking oil (once emu fat) for the maparnijaku (the coating and greasing of boards and bodies before the application of ochre), rasps for grinding ochre, sand­paper for smoothing and preparing the boards, and paintbrushes, sticks, a range of acrylic paints, charcoal, and clay-­based crayons. At the end of the two-­week workshop, forty artworks had been produced: twenty-­one works on canvas and paper and nineteen shaped wooden board yukurrukurru and parraja.3 At the women’s behest, an exhibition was mounted, titled simply Yawulyu by the women. The women performed yawulyu at the opening of the exhibition at what was then cofa Art Space (now unsw Art and Design), coinciding with the launch of my book, and the evening concluded with the women autographing copies of the newly published book they rightfully claimed as their own. 144 | Chapter Six

Fig. 6.6. Three generations of artists at work, left to right: Margaret Pampirriya Nungarrayi Martin, Judy Napangardi Martin, Denise Napangardi (Tasman) Robertson, Lynette Napangardi Tasman, Nickita (Lava) Nangala Tasman, Molly Napurrurla Tasman, Lily Nungarrayi Hargraves, Myra Nungarrayi Patrick, Biddy Nungarrayi Long, Liirliirpa Yurlpa (in process), Warnayaka Art and Cultural Aboriginal Corporation, Lajamanu, NT, 2011. Ochre and binder on Belgian linen. © the artists and Warnayaka Art and Cultural Aboriginal Corporation. Photo by J. Biddle.

I do not intend to turn now to a detailed ethnography of the workshop nor a comprehensive analysis of the collection itself. Either of these is beyond the scope of one chapter. Nor will I take up a historical account of what has taken shape in the development of Lajamanu art since, including the ongoing use of ochre in painting in both individual and collective works at the community art center, Warnayaka Art and Cultural Aboriginal Corporation (see figure 6.6 and plate 11), specifically in association with the Lajamanu Warlpiri biennial Milpirri. Rather, my intention here is rudimentary and preliminary only, mindful of both the restrictions and the responsibilities, as Warlpiri have taught me, of not revealing everything at once. To this end, I discuss only one artwork from Warnayaka Art | 145

Fig. 6.7. Rosie Napurrurla Tasman, Ngurlu (in process), Lajamanu Warlpiri Women’s Yawulyu Workshop, Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics, College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, 2007. Oil and ochre on prepared board. © the artist, courtesy Warnayaka Art and Cultural Aboriginal Corporation. Photo by J. Biddle.

the Yawulyu collection in detail below, in order to afford the work, as well as the revelatory imperative of practice itself, the depth of detail required to appreciate its importance. Crudely put, the obvious question is: What is it that the use of ochre enabled, as a materiality—form, not content? What does its practice base tell us? What did it tell me?

i. EXPERIMENTATION ENABLED TRADITION The use of the ochre in the workshop enabled certain specification, honing, and revelation of hitherto unknown aspects of major yawulyu-­based Jukurrpa. This was especially the case for Rosie and Molly Napurrurla Tasman, two senior custodians of Ngurlu (Mulga Seed) and/or Kurlukuku (Diamond Dove) Dreaming, who painted, made manifest, versions or segments of Ngurlu for the first time. In turn, the workshop enabled the revelation of a new part of Ngurlu/Kurlukuku 146 | Chapter Six

to be danced, performed, for the first time in public. Thus, experimentation revealed what tradition was and what it might become in the future. The women at the workshop laughed empathetically with me, at me, and in recognition of my own delighted bewilderment, particularly at what I perceived to be the new yawulyu performed at the launch. “You know Nampijinpa,” Molly Napurrurla Tasman kept saying to me, laughing. “You recognize [purdanyani-­ kanpa] Nampijinpa,” she said, as we stayed up late that night, talking and telling and revealing the trajectory of Ngurlu Jukurrpa—what version, what segment, I did not yet know but was made to recognize through this process. I tell this anecdote not to center myself within this process or, worse, to act as if my presence were the (only) fact that matters here. It isn’t. I tell it, rather, to underscore the fact that the audience, the intended recipient of any and all experimentation today, has a determinative effect on what can be and what is revealed at any given moment. The vital issue is, how can the new be revealed when the capacities for the recognition of it may, and invariably will in the contemporary intercultural context, be diminished? How can tradition remain vitalized—and serve to vitalize, in turn—if the audience simply isn’t up to the responsibility on offer?

Warlpiri, like other Indigenous languages in Australia, has no word for “color” (Wierzbicka 2008) or what Young (2011, 359) calls “colour as a property abstracted from things.” What Warlpiri does possess are words in which color is bound up with, bound to, forms of vital materiality. Yurlpa does not really translate as “ochre.” According to my Oxford English Dictionary, ochre is a clay or mineral of “hydrated ferric oxide,” used as pigment throughout the history of Western art and architectural design, “varying from light yellow to brown.” That is, in English, ochre is understood to be an inorganic mineral that comes, as it were, in a range of natural colors (even if such oxides are now manufactured artificially). This is not what yurlpa is. Yurlpa means, as Wanta Steve Jampijinpa Patrick (personal communication, March 2013) translated it, “blood-­stained earth.” Color cannot be disassociated from matter. And matter cannot be dissociated from the primacy of the body. Yurlpa is Ancestral viscera, impregnated bodily residue, country that is literally stained, has been transformed, by blood. AnWarnayaka Art | 147

Fig. 6.8. Rosie Napurrurla Tasman, Ngurlu Yukurrukurru (in process) for yawulyu performed for Yawulyu as Intergenerational Art, Lajamanu, NT, 2011. Ochre and oil on acrylic painted board. © the artist, courtesy Warnayaka Art and Cultural Aboriginal Corporation. Photo by J. Biddle.

cestral beings were human and/or animal, flora and/or fauna, and were, above all else, “sentient,” as Stanner (1965) famously described the Aboriginal landscape; sentient beings who not only had blood but whose blood leaked, dripped, flooded in the course of everyday as well as suprahuman activities—camping, hunting, having sex, giving birth, living on and in the same country as Warlpiri do today; country whose very shape and exigencies are the result of these lived activities, interactions, and encounters. The substantive viscera of blood, semen, sweat, tears, breast milk, snot, hair, and fingernails, as well as their traces, stains, and residues (including, crucially, smell) remain potent in contemporary terms because the same bodily substances (re)create material links between living bodies and localized countries today (as revealed by the photographs, in chapter 4, of Rhonda Unurupa Dick, whose grandmother’s country recognizes her and her family). 148 | Chapter Six

Ancestors inhabited a mutable world made by their travels, actions, and physicality; unbounded bodies entwined with as yet unformed country, rocks, canyons, birds, stars, weather. Homeric and banal moments both of triumph and tragedy, metamorphosis and transformation, created the conditions as a result of which Ancestral bodies as “subject” (as Nancy Munn [1971] first put it) now constitute the “object” form of the landscape. Warlpiri call these essences Jukurrpa and/or, more specifically, kuruwarri— marks, traces, manifestations of Ancestors, of the Dreaming. Kuruwarri marks are palpable, real, what Warpiri call palka—present, manifest, inherent (see the introduction and chapter 4). Wanta Steve Jampijinpa Patrick (personal communication, March 2013) specifically identifies, linguistically, the pa in yurlpa as being the same as the pa in palka, as in the presence, essence, of blood/earth. Yurlpa is hunted and mined (as Warlpiri say in English) in known and named places of great Ancestral importance and intensive activity. One such place, near the Warlpiri outstation Nypirri, is featured in the PAW Media animation My Name Is Danny, from the series Animating Jukurrpa (2011) (see Biddle 2015), where claymation figure Danny, with his parents, hunts yurlpa and returns triumphantly to the screen coated in its red stain: a potent intergenerational attestation to the high value of ochre today. Ancestral essences and their prized and potent vestiges found in country are discernible to those who know—by, in fact, the work of color itself (see further below). The hunting and mining of yurlpa in this sense represents an important, ritualized means of caring for country, keeping country alive and attuned to human intention and activities today: intentions and activities that mimic Ancestral intentions and activities. Ochre is at once of country/Ancestor, and from it, just as Warlpiri understand themselves equally to be. Ochre is potent and powerful because of these material associations. It is rare, highly valued, and the basis for ceremonial and other forms of exchange between women both within and between communities across the Central and Western Desert. The word yurlpa can be, and is, used in a generic sense to refer to ochre (for example, as I requested it when the women were to bring it down from Lajamanu to Sydney for the workshop). But, really, yurlpa refers specifically to what we would call in English red ochre, the predominant ochre used in women’s yawulyu ceremony. Yurlpa is also called yalyu-­yalyu (literally, blood-­blood, according to Wierzbicka [2008, 410]) or blood red. In this sense, yurlpa is explicWarnayaka Art | 149

Fig. 6.9. Rosie Napurrurla Tasman, Ngurlu Yukurrukurru (in process) for yawulyu performed for Yawulyu as Intergenerational Art, Lajamanu, NT, 2011. Ochre and oil on acrylic painted board. © the artist, courtesy Warnayaka Art and Cultural Aboriginal Corporation. Photo by J. Biddle.

itly identified with the female body and with yawulyu as a specifically female terrain of responsibility and care, that is, as I have argued elsewhere (Biddle 2002, 2007), the healthy reproduction of country, person, and place, a gender-­ specific version of what has been called in the literature “increase ceremonies.” Two other types of yurlpa commonly used in women’s yawulyu ceremony were also brought to the cofa workshop: Liirliirlpa/Ngunjungunju and/or kar­ dirri (white yurlpa) and karntawarra (yellow yurlpa). Liirliirlpa/Ngunjungunju and/or kardirri are complex terms to define because they have more than one name and more than one association, according to Molly Napurrurla Tasman and Lynette Napangardi Tasman (personal communication, September 2014). Liirliirlpa/Ngunjungunju and/or kardirri ochre is known to be from (as well as of ) Janganpa Jukurrpa (Brush-­Tailed Possum Dreaming), country that is south of Yuendumu. But Liirliirlpa/Ngunjungunju and/or kardirri also refer to the rows, sand dunes, and ridges specifically of the white clay pans of Mina Mina or Yinarlpalka (Lake Surprise), to the northwest of Lajamanu—explained to me, further, as being the same as the white outline marks on the women’s breasts in yawulyu, which are in turn likened to cicatrices, to ritual scarification (marks and ridges made through the pack150 | Chapter Six

ing of site-­specific country, including ochre, as well as charcoal and animal fat, into specific parts and patterns of the body; see Redmond 2004). As I have explored elsewhere (Biddle 2007), Warlpiri cicatrices are visual and tactile traces of how skin itself is made the materiality of country itself by human emulation of Ancestral imprinting (see Watson 2003, for Kukatja; Redmond 2004, for ­Ngarinyin). Liirliirlpa and Ngunjungunju are not used for the primary kuruwarri signs. White ochre is only used for outlining, heightening, the kuruwarri marks (which are made with red yurlpa or with yellow karntawarra). Similarly, white paint was originally used solely for the outlining and dotting around primary black or dark brown kuruwarri marks (whose dark colors are likened both to the color of the ground and to skin, as utilized in early acrylic painting practice (Biddle 2007). White paint in early acrylic painting practices made the kuruwarri mark visible by outlining it, bringing it into being, animating or enlivening the latent potency by tracing it; materially analogous to the very signs of Ancestral presence in the country today. Liirliirlpa or Ngunjungunju is also called kardirri, the term for white-­body viscera—specifically, for teeth and bone. Thus kardirri—white ochre—in this sense can be thought of as viscera left from what once was alive and what remains poised, potent, ready to be made alive again; hence its animating vital importance.4 Karntawarra (yellow yurlpa) is fat—another term for jarra—specifically, the animal fat that was once utilized for greasing bodies and ritual objects in ceremony, both to ensure that yurlpa should adhere to body and objects, and to create sheen, shine, shimmer, brilliance. This is one of the most important aspects of ceremonial work—to create shine, to re-­create the brilliance of ancestral presence, to make palka-­mani, to bring into manifestation. Fat is, in this sense, the visceral binding required for the healthy-­making relationship of country/place/body/person. It binds together, holds together, as it makes things shine with relational intensity (see Biddle 2001, 2003, 2007). Yurlpa sticks and congeals, like the fatty potency of country itself, and makes for “lustrous aura” (Redmond 2004), as well as leaving marks, traces, material memories, of where it has been (on boards and canvases as much as on bodies, clothes, walls, whatever it comes into contact with), just as the bodies of Ancestors left behind traces, corporeal remainders, and essences, today, in country.5 Warnayaka Art | 151

Fig. 6.10. Lily Nungarrayi Hargraves, Ngalyipi Jukurrpa, 2007. 55 × 75 cm, oil pastel and acrylic paint on black paper. Lajamanu Warlpiri Women’s Yawulyu Workshop, Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics, College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales. © the artist, courtesy Warnayaka Art and Cultural Aboriginal Corporation. Photo by C. Bender.

Fig. 6.11. Rosie Napurrurla Tasman, Ngurlu Yukurrukurru (in process), October 2, 2009, Lajamanu, NT. Ochre and oil on acrylic painted board. © the artist, courtesy Warnayaka Art and Cultural Aboriginal Corporation. Photo by J. Biddle.

ii. EXPERIMENTATION ENABLED HAPTIC VISUALITY This vital materiality of yurlpa is, arguably, manifest in the art produced. An encounter with these works evokes potent and unique sensation that operates against the neoliberal tendency to commodify Aboriginal art and culture. Yurlpa actively ensures what Fred Myers (2002) has called the “inalienability” of Aboriginal art, its inseparability from the bodies and lifeworlds of its producers, in its very form. Ochre incites haptic sensation. Tactile immediacy, proximity, and intensity link human experience directly to the realm of the Ancestral in female-­specific forms of mark making today (see Eickelkamp [2008] for touch in Pitjantjatjara sand stories, and Biddle [2007] for Warlpiri in acrylic painting). Rosie Napurrurla Tasman’s Ngurlu/Kurlukuku/Lampurnu (Mulga Seeds / Diamond Dove / Breast Milk Drops) (2007, plate 12) is one of a series of new revelations of Ngurlu/Kurlukuku Jukurrpa produced over the course of the Lajamanu Warlpiri Women’s Yawulyu Workshop. Arguably, it evokes haptic visuality through the use of the techniques described below. Warnayaka Art | 153

Fig. 6.12. Rosie Napurrurla Tasman, Ngurlu, 2007. 50 × 24 cm, oil and ochre on prepared wood. Lajamanu Warlpiri Women’s Yawulyu workshop, Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics, College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales. © the artist, courtesy Warnayaka Art and Cultural Aboriginal Corporation. Photo by C. Bender.

The Materiality of Surface Unlike the flat, box-­shaped square of the acrylic canvas, the roundness of the parraja shape evokes a certain congruency with the rounded daubs of the paint itself, as if element and background were reciprocal, interrelated and enmeshed; as if mark and surface were predisposed each to the other in form as well as substance. The wood surface is visually porous, the ritualized hand-­to-­object preparation manifestly present in a way that is not evident in acrylic paintings, where the background preparation, even though it, likewise, takes place prior to painting proper, tends to disappear (see Biddle 2007). The yurlpa precoating, or maparnijaku, of the wooden board surface (red ochre dipped in oil and rubbed onto the wood) is discernible, creating a background that “clears and erases” (Biddle 2003; Munn [1973] 1986) the space for inscription and renders it imprintable, able to absorb the mark, permeable like both the skin and country that the board materially emulates in color, feel, and substance.

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The Absenting of Figuration The absence of figural elements shifts perception away from the expectations of story or narrative that otherwise besiege Central and Western Desert art—the “detour and the boredom” that narrative otherwise inflicts on a more existential encounter, as Francis Bacon notoriously complained about the work of narrative in his own painting (van Alphen 1992, 21)—and thus removes the art from the vexed burden of representation, that is, the obligation to decipher Western Desert art in iconographic (narrative) terms. The work, the elements, within this art are what Deleuze (1993, 194) would call, instead, “asignifying”: nonfigurative, nonrepresentational, and nonillustrative all at once. The Sense of Movement The sensation induced is as if stop-­frame film halted; a momentary instant snatched from a larger scene. The board’s edge is neither border nor frame, but seems almost arbitrary; surface is far more important than size or scale. The daubs of paint move, even though now fixed: at first, as if from left to right, less individualized than pathway, like rain running across glass. But continue to look and the paths begin to move from right to left again, as if the direction, the wind, something, has shifted. This movement enacts what Deleuze (1993, 191) might call “the action of invisible forces on the body”—these daubs are generated by something not seen, something out of screen and offscreen, as it were. Yet their landing, their hit, in no sense misses the mark. They (the daubs) are present even in the absence of whatever force or event might have caused them. They stimulate and activate intensification here and now because they resonate with events, experience, taking place elsewhere. This is intensity proper as Massumi (1995) first defined it, as pure affect. Intensity, he argues, is not narratological. It does not result from a logical progression of cause and effect. Rather, intensity must be considered using logic of a different order, a preconscious and involuntary autonomic reaction of somatic excitation and immediacy. This is what Deleuze (1993, 188) means when he says “sensation is that which is painted.” He cites Cezanne’s apples (as does Merleau-­Ponty [1993a]), whose greenness beckons hand to reach and mouth to taste in one seamless evocation. Here, in Napurrurla’s work, what is evoked is the hand-­to-­object intimacy of a

Warnayaka Art | 155

relationship of bodily closeness, where touching and being touched is to sensing and being sensed, the one not possible, by definition, without the other; the connection of close, proximate, pending, pressing, relationship to; evoked as a pure event. The fact that the daubs are, specifically, fingerprints, with their idiosyncratic size and shape, their slightly uneven application and adherence to the board, and in which one can almost discern the actual detail of Napurrurla’s own fingerprint, evokes the primacy of our embodied material interface with others. This work remains fiercely attached and embodied in an avant-­garde aesthetics of the handmade (explored in Tjanpi Desert Weavers, chapter 5, and Yarrenyty Arltere aesthetics, chapter 7; see Dylan Minor in Triantafillou 2010). This art literally embodies the hand directly. It comprises the physically imprinted marks of its maker. This is a work made of visceral traces—­remainders and reminders both, of human agency and handheld intimate relationality between subject and object. It performs as it repeats, a corporeal congruency of human and Ancestral mark making, in which human activity remakes, remarks, Ancestral corporeally made marks. This art provides material witness to the making of country and its significant features, kuruwarri, Jukurrpa, as an interdependent relationship between human and nonhuman mutable materialities, conjoined in a collaborative undertaking. Sonority, Repetition, and Rhythm Fingerprints repeat; they rise and fall rhythmically; they imprint and relax with constancy and consistency. This regularity of both mark and interval creates pace, pulse, beat. Like the corduroy fabric that Sedgwick (2003) describes as sonically feelingful as much as haptically tactile (she describes the “hush hush” of corduroy as being heard as much as seen in texture), this art incites connectivity between visual, sonic, and tactile regimes. Modulation becomes what matters—the primacy of heartbeat, of breath, the suck-­suck pull of lactation (as the title Lampurnu (Breast Milk Drops) suggests), and the stop/still of the feet and the breasts, in turn, in yawulyu ritual, emulates lactation (see Biddle 2006). The rhythm is almost lulling, as if whatever force, the hand here and, in turn, our own syncretic somatic sympathy, were orchestrated by an independent will in the service of an indeterminate yet greater force, relating us to and binding us with what we are seeing. 156 | Chapter Six

Fig. 6.13. Left to right: Rosie Napurrurla Tasman, Myra Nungarrayi Patrick, Lily Nungarrayi Hargraves, and Molly Napurrurla Tasman. Lajamanu Warlpiri Women’s Yawulyu exhibition, opening night, Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics, College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, 2007. Photo by C. Bender.

Color as Differentiation Closer inspection reveals that the imprint daubs are not all karntawarra (fat, yellow), but that a (small) number are yurlpa (blood, earth, red), extending the experience of movement, of relationship, of an intertwining: the codependency of a transformation literally taking shape in front of us. Contrast and differentiation create pattern, contrast, vibrancy. But this is an ephemeral performative. No kardirri, no white ochre outlining is utilized here as it is elsewhere in yawulyu ritual object production, on the body and on canvas, to enhance and stabilize the primacy of an iconic mark. Here instead, the yurlpa daubs create differentiation that is poised, readied, to recede into the background of the yurlpa board, to lose distinction and differentiation altogether (yurlpa is both background and foreground; both red daubs and the red maparnijaku of the board itself ): a more preliminary move, more primary perhaps; a brute performance of the degree to which differentiation is Warnayaka Art | 157

provisional, fragile, dependent. Differentiation of mark from surface, human from ancestral, past from present, is not guaranteed. This is no copy of an original Dreaming story that took place elsewhere, but a profound instigation of the work of repetition required of humans today—the work of art, ceremony, ritual—to keep attachment alive through the necessary interval of practice-­ based differentiation. It is this ephemerality that is, of course, warded off by acrylic art practice, where the permanency of paint and the techne of dotting, specifically, provide a more fixed and stable iterative modality. But, arguably, the imperative to repeat in order to ward off loss is no less acute, intensifying as it must today in aesthetic practice in order to ensure continuing reactivation of human-­Ancestral connection (as the arts across this book attest). Wierzbicka (2008, 417) argues that for Warlpiri, color is a matter of “contrasting patterns, lines, circles, the appearance of movement and the seemingly purposeful and meaningful creative action reflected and encoded in the appearance of things.” That is, color is both a marker and maker of Ancestral signification as materiality. What happened and where is as haptically experienced as it is visually manifest. The vital materiality of kuruwarri marks, of Jukurrpa, relies upon a primary interface of contact and contrast between similar (but not identical) sentient beings, hand to object, toucher to touched, mark to board. In short, color is a quality of mutability (see Young 2011). Variation, contrast, imprintation could not manifest without a primacy of tangibility, tactility, and touch as its basis.

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SEVEN

YARRENYTY ARLTERE ARTISTS We are proud people, we are not afraid to tell people that this place, Yarrenyty Arltere, is our place, making art, making laughing, making strong. We are the Legends. Marlene Rubuntja | Artist, writer, and animator, in Yarrenyty Arltere Artists, “We Are the Legends”

Own this place. Yarrenyty Arltere Art Centre (studio wall), Alice Springs

This chapter is about the Yarrenyty Arltere’s experimental animation Antanette and Tom (2010), in relation to the greater still life aesthetics of their unique multiplatform art.

i The emergence of animation as an experimental art form is marked across remote Aboriginal communities. Over the past decade, community-­based initiatives in animation have included Warlpiri (paw Media), Yolngu filmmakers at both Kunwinjku (Gowzer Media) and Yirrkala (Mulka Media), Yanyuwa (Visualising Yanyuwa Project), Anmatjere/Alyawarr at Utopia (Bachelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education, biite), Martu (Martumili Artists), and Arrernte/Luritja/Warlpiri (Yarrenyty Arltere Learning Centre). Animation uniquely enables the capacity to present (not represent) Aboriginal lifeworlds:

Fig. 7.1. Marlene Rubuntja, Three Women from Yarrenyty Arltere, 2014. 57 × 40 × 58 cm, mixed media (recycled blanket and embroidery cotton). © the artist and Yarrenyty Arltere Artists. Photo by S. Wallace.

making proximate and making ready unique social conditions for cultural emergence, revelation, and encounter. Animation responds to the pressing issue of how distinct Indigenous cultural aesthetics (ways of doing and being) can be kept potent and relevant, alive and enlivened—in a word, animated—through process-­based art practice today. As this chapter explores, if animation is currently burgeoning as an emergent form of remote art practice, it is for reasons. Contemporary animation takes shape as part of a long and distinguished history of experimental Aboriginal media production that began in Yuendumu in the Northern Territory in 1983. Warlpiri began to make media initially as a protectionist movement, to block the penetration of Western television, when the first ausat satellite began to beam twenty-­four-­hour cable television to remote Indigenous communities throughout the Northern Territory and Western Australia for the first time. Warlpiri invented “Aboriginal television,” as the pioneering media anthropologist Eric Michaels (1986) called it, by producing locally made media to counteract the English-­language-­only Australian, British, and 160 | Chapter Seven

Fig. 7.2. Yarrenyty Arltere Learning Centre, set for Little Dingi (animation), with Tristam Malbunka’s Grandmother (sculpture), 2012. © the artist and Yarrenyty Arltere Artists. Photo by A. Warburton.

U.S. commercial television programs that had, overnight, become available— to “fight fire with fire,” as Andrew Japalajarri Spencer (in Michaels 1986) put it. Warlpiri began to make experimental media—narratives, news, and social documentaries—by, for, and about Warlpiri, in Warlpiri language, broadcasting locally produced media for local consumption and, in turn, instigating what is now nearly thirty years of intensive Indigenous screen activism in Australia. As Leah Purcell (Indigenous writer, codirector, and actor in the ground-­ breaking national television series produced in Sydney, Redfern Now), put it, simply: “Black faces, black stories is the point.”1 Within this greater history, animation arguably belongs to what Faye Ginsburg (2012a) has described as a “New Wave” of Australian Indigenous cinema, along with works such as Warwick Thornton’s Samson and Delilah (2009), Ivan Sen’s Tomelah (2011), and Beck Cole’s Here I Am (2011). As Ginsburg argues, it is not because these films are made by Aboriginal people or because they are about Aboriginal content that they matter. They matter because of their capacity to engender the existential. These works are less representations than interventions. Yarrenyty Arltere Artists | 161

They burst into our complacent spectator space and insist on more complex relationships to temporality, to the past, and to the future, with new and compelling impetus for justice. Arguably, the value of these films resides in terms other than strictly financial gain or critical acclaim. These films allow us to see and hear stories, and inhabit places, that bring recognition to what Ginsburg (2012a) calls the “offscreen” lives of subjects in complex and crucial ways: lifeworlds that extend beyond the range of the cinematic gaze and colonial “rights to look” (Mirzoeff 2011) that have otherwise dominated the historical media landscape. They allow for the vital production of what Ginsburg (2002) calls “screen memories,” that is, the culture-­making capacities of cinematic counterhistory and countermemory to purposefully reshape the national archive and collective consciousness. The radically embedded aesthetics of these works ensure that the end products (as well as effects) of Indigenous filmmaking remain tied to the bodies and lifeworlds of those who produce them. In this context, it might seem perverse that it is animation—the definitively fake form of cinematic illusion—that best enables new Indigenous affective resonances of counterhistory, culture, and memory to emerge. What Mark Nash (2008) might call “experiments with truth,” or Jill Bennett (2012) “practical aesthetics,” these films self-­consciously mess with established genres of documentation and self-­evident relationships to the real. Arguably, it is because of, not despite, the fact that these works do not masquerade as realism that they displace our engagements into more complex interplays of affect and resonance. Radically refuting demands for Aboriginal authenticity and stultifying expectations of traditionalism, this art embraces noncompliance as a strategic imperative. By definition, animation debunks claims to serious history writing, to the archive, to the documentary and the somberness of social realism, and it is precisely this debunking that opens up new possibilities. Play is crucial to new lines of flight, Deleuze and Guattari (1986) insist: a defining strategy of minoritarian aesthetics. The works of contemporary Desert animations formally experiment with any number of postdocumentary modalities, presenting “real life” beyond an either/ or of strictly live-­action or wholly studio-­based cinema, bringing a conceptual density to what Demos (2013, 98) calls “an otherwise anachronistic position of the documentary—of truth—as an unmediated procedure or the ‘doubling of life.’” These films qualify any notion of a simply available truth and, specifically, 162 | Chapter Seven

Fig. 7.3. Lorretta Banks with Marlene Rubuntja’s sculpture Little Dingi, on set at Yarrenyty Arltere Learning Centre for Little Dingi (animation), 2012. © the artists and Yarrenyty Arltere Artists. Photo by A. Warburton.

they qualify the naive assumption of an unmediated, self-­present, authentic, or native point of view that might simply be caught or captured by the camera. Make no mistake: these are highly mediated and highly media-­savvy films. The embodied perceptual demands they make refuse reduction, as do the lifeworlds we become caught up in through their viewing.

ii Antanette and Tom (2011) is a difficult film to watch and to identify with for a number of reasons, and this difficulty is important. Film uniquely provides what Vivien Sobchack (1992, 3) calls an “expression of experience by experience,” and the experience here is troubled and troubling. “Unrecorded memories of the senses” (Marks 2000, 5) proliferate, and affective, insistent modalities for remembering other people’s memories are staged. The “invisible glue of affect,” as Massumi (2002, 217) calls it—micropolitical vitalities and visceral impact of forces that escape the confinement of any singular context, that simulYarrenyty Arltere Artists | 163

taneously bind affect to concrete situations and render it transsituational—is itself stressed, distressed, distressing. That the distress is coupled with, bound to, what is also a feel-­good, funny, purportedly simple story of two children on a journey, presented in less than three minutes of real screen time, makes the encounter all the more charged. Where are we? What is this place? Who are they? Who are we? From the opening scene, we are thrown: disorientated and disassociated ourselves as much as the characters themselves appear to be. No signifiers of site specificity, no access to a named or known landmark (at least for outsiders) orientates our viewing. The grass, the ubiquitous dog in the opening scene, the later camp scenes, gesture without pointing to an unidentified, remote Indigenous nowhere and anywhere. Multiple points of view complicate and fracture narrative resolve. Subjects don’t always speak directly to one another. Nonsynchronous sounds don’t coincide. Vertiginous off-­center camera angles switch to looming sharp-­ focus exaggerations; colored lens shots zoom to too-­bright-­to-­see hallucinatory staged soliloquys. The Aboriginal English narrative makes us listen—hard. The characters switch from speaking Aboriginal English to a vernacular (an unidentified Indigenous language, at least, again, for outsiders) that is not translated or subtitled. Linguistic battlegrounds are expressed as they are experienced. Brute and unapologetic, this is a reality hit of the complex multilingual dexterity and highly refined code-­switching capacities that are prerequisites for the everyday, for survival, in town camps of Alice Springs (as I argue in chapter 2). A complex linguistic communilect landscape operates here in the film, as it does in everyday life, to patrol borders and boundaries, to distinguish and differentiate between insiders and outsiders and, in turn, locate people and make for community inclusion and exclusion, all at once. This pointedly creates differential audiences: vernacular-­speaking insiders, who will hear, get, something more, different, and else from this film than non-­vernacular-­speaking outsiders. Breeched tongues, the duplicity and impasse of translation, the fact of being outsiders to this world—the fact that insiders may themselves be outsiders to this world—all seem the point. The film is narrated from Antanette’s point of view, harkening to greater trends in avant-­garde animation of the last decade. According to Susan Danta (2013), the importance of Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1999), Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2007), and Jung Henin’s Approved for Adoption (2011) is the incompre164 | Chapter Seven

hensible violence of persecution, war, exile, and its aftermath, enabled by the narrative perspective of the child. These works do not address their subject matter directly. They engage reality effects by affective intensification that takes shape instead through complex and subtle resonance with real-­world events elsewhere, as Jill Bennett (2012) describes “practical aesthetics.” Profoundly, this is a world of exodus; the condition of exile, of migratory aesthetics. The two main characters—the children Tom and Antanette—are themselves in a position of exodus at the beginning of the film. This is signified on a plurality of grounds. The children are physically displaced from their grandparents, alone in the bush and alienated from the family/group company at the art center; they speak English only to one another, to us, and to their grandparents, not the vernacular Indigenous language that their grandparents speak; their physical features and characteristics are, visually, less well formed and less well defined than those of the other two main characters, the children’s Nanna (grandmother) and Grandfather. Both Tom’s and Antanette’s parents are, notably, altogether absent from the film, although nothing is said or made of this fact as such. Nevertheless, this absent presence saturates the film and was to become the driving narrative of Yarrenyty Arltere’s second and better-­known animation, Little Dingi (2012). Kinship itself, the defining anthropological model of Aboriginal lifeworlds, is marked here as not to be taken for granted. The space of childhood, of family, of cultural transmission itself—of belonging in place and time to others, collectively—is staged as at risk. Arguably, this risk, the rupture to family, the basis of society, is what the film is really about. Unlike the more straightforward counterhistory or countermemory that other current animations undertake (for example, My Name Is Danny or Nyirripi History from paw Media’s Animating Jukurrpa series; see Biddle 2015), Antanette and Tom is more like “postmemory,” the term Marianne Hirsch (1997) has used to characterize memory constructed by the “generation after” rather than by the primary witnesses of trauma, where the inheritance of past events and experiences is still being worked through and is not, in any sense, over or settled. Paradoxically, postmemory is driven by the imperative to create, the need to narrate, what belies representation, resists understanding, and refutes integration. How can occupation be seen? What kind of character—place, shape, form, figure—could colonialism, displacement, dispossession take? What does it, what can it, look like? Yarrenyty Arltere Artists | 165

Fig. 7.4. Behind Yarrenyty Arltere Learning Centre with Marlene Rubuntja’s Little Dingi and friend (untitled), with Tristam Malbunka’s Grandfather (sculptures), on set for Little Dingi (animation), 2012. © the artists and Yarrenyty Arltere Artists. Photo by A. Warburton.

Drawing on Hirsch, Susan Danta (2013) argues that postmemory autobiographical animation (an emergent genre of avant-­garde animation) operates through figurations more silent than spoken, invisible rather than visible, through gestures, postures, and orientations gleaned from cramped, intimate, familial spaces, through interiorities of ordinary lived life—not necessarily through high drama or obvious events as such. Sophie Wallace (Yarrenyty Arltere artists 2015), art coordinator at Yarrenyty Arltere and coproducer of Antanette and Tom, says that the artists express themselves in terms exemplified “more in what they do and less in what they say,” underscoring the importance of action and/or inaction (as I explore below) as a primary mobilizing modality of everyday cultural aesthetic sensibility. Antanette and Tom utilizes, as the basis of its animation, soft sculptural figures created by the artists at Yarrenyty Arltere. These sculptural art figures af166 | Chapter Seven

Fig. 7.5. Dulcie Sharpe, Bush Banana Kunga, 2011. 51 × 60 × 40 cm, recycled blanket and embroidery cotton. © the artist and Yarrenyty Arltere Artists.

ford, in the first instance, no small relief from the stultifying grip of mimetic realism (flora and fauna naturalism) that besieges expectations of so-­called traditional Aboriginal art. These artworks are more future-­becoming-­mutants than anything like totemic-­traditional: aliens, freaks, or are they ghosts? As if “they crawled out of the earth” (Hogan 2012, 245) or arose from ashes, the unworldliness of these characters (in movement and manner, as much as in their looks) could not be less natural: miscreants, detainees, the uncanny; resemblances that don’t resemble; echoes without a source; the return of death as specter; liminal creatures; survivors, but of what? Yarrenyty Arltere’s sculptures are radically unique in Central and Western Desert art. A consciously experimental aesthetic form first undertaken in 2008, soft sculpture as a medium was chosen by Larapinta Valley town camp residents in Alice Springs as a medium for new community creative expression, in order to diversify market practices and to create a localized aesthetic form, explicitly in comparison with the established traditions of both the watercolor paintings in the Hermannsburg tradition and acrylic painting in the Western Desert or Papunya Tula tradition (see chapter 2). Sewing and making soft sculptures is understood to be a safer and preferred practice compared to high Dreaming-­based painting, as artist Louise RobertYarrenyty Arltere Artists | 167

son explained it to me, explicitly because it is understood to be less dangerous. It is not about or from the sacred (Jukurrpa, the Dreaming, Ancestors), which, if younger people get it wrong, can be dangerous on any number of accounts, and which, therefore, is more safely left for older community members to deal with (see Biddle [2007] on Warlpiri; Myers [2012] on Pintupi; and chapter 5 on Tjanpi). This is why younger people like to sew and prefer sewing to painting; why Louise says she likes to sew herself.

They were painters but we are sewers. But we both work with our hands. This is important. We love sewing the same as other people love painting. When we sew it makes us feel really good. We don’t think of anything except what we are making. Marlene Rubuntja | in “Yarrenyty Arltere Artists”

The sculptures are crafted from recycled blankets, castoffs already imbued with intimate histories of other people’s pasts. This material is, in turn, hand dyed before being reused; arguably, its own form of preparing or clearing a new space for inscription (what is called in Warlpiri maparnijaku, as described in chapters 2 and 6). Native plants are hunted locally—eucalyptus, salt bush, mistletoe, puff mushroom—dried, and then cooked up in large vats along with rusted metal objects, matchstick heads, tea, and orange peel. Thus the dye bath itself is composed of residues and remainders of occupation, ecological travesties that won’t quit. Some of these real-­world objects appear in the film itself. We see, on Nanna’s white sheet at the art center, awaiting her use, discarded bits of iron and metal—once-­was glory; occupied territory tool kit–­like specialized equipment. This one held shot literalizes the greater theme of the film: the culturally sustaining and life-­giving capacities that community-­based Indigenous art practice holds for community residents of Larapinta Valley today. Here, we see Nanna poised to make the conditions of her own sculptural becoming possible. In the next shot, we see her sewing, stitching together a soft sculpture, actively creating the conditions for and of herself. The enactment in the film of the children’s choice to travel to the art center is a reenactment of the choice to live

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life in the productive terms of self-­making, lifeworld-­sustaining practice, that the art center offers. Antanette urges Tom, verbally, as she moves to make him move, physically, with her from the bush to the art center: “We can go and watch Nanna making things stronger for our future.” The practice basis of the art of Yarrenyty Arltere is crucial to the affective terrain it evokes. In the process of dying the recycled blanket material, the alchemy of the vegetation combined with the rust, tea, and metallic debris affects a certain battle-­fatigued triumphalism. This unique hand-­dying technique not only stains the material but also produces patterns, patinas, and striations imprinted directly and permanently into the blanket fabric. Like the landscape itself, the blanket fabric becomes (again) traced, laced, marked, and made profoundly redolent with human history. Nothing is natural here; like the Aboriginal landscape itself, this is human-­made, human-­sentient—a timeworn weariness; a haunted melancholic bruised affect; fabric at once both overwrought and neglected; bodies turned inside out; holes, spaces, thresholds of bleed-out. Yarrenyty Arltere sculptures are blackened, smoked, blotchy, stained, distressed— a painstaking and painful vitality. The sculptures are likened indexically to the bodies that made them in this immediate and pressingly close sense— battle-­scarred bodies and lifeworlds in which the cost of surviving under occupation is as viscerally palpable as it is visually painful. The embroidery stitches that adorn each of the sculptures and which make characterization possible (lips, ears, eyes, hair) could not be more incongruous: a swath cut through the somber. The lurid splendor of bright color and gonzo stitching patterns operates in almost violent opposition to the blanket sobriety of the fabric: the shock of the new—untainted, shop bought; the potent possibilities of consumer capital choice; a costume dramatizing that affords a certain cartoonesque (if not carnivalesque) atmosphere to the sculpture’s surface; a dynamic mobilization of competing cotemporalities. The use of what are Yarrenyty Arltere’s unique handmade sculptural figures as the basis of the animated characters in Antanette and Tom engages an avant-­garde realism; a politics perhaps shared by Nick Park’s Wallace and Gromit series and Adam Elliot’s Mary and Max (2009), whose hand-­crafted, hand-­ labored animations cannot be separated from their class politics.2 The handmade has become, as Dylan Miner argues, a sheer act of resistance itself, in

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Fig. 7.6. Rhonda Sharpe, I Saw Me and I Was Beautiful, 2012. 115 × 35 × 20 cm, recycled blanket and cotton embroidery. © the artist and Yarrenyty Arltere Artists. Photo by S. Wallace.

relation to the demand for endless and easy consumption of the mass-­produced commodity and the sleekness of the highly designed product (in Triantafillou 2010).3 Arguably here, the very hands of the makers themselves are not “offscreen” but remain close, proximate, part of the very character and quality of the film. Radically at odds with what William Schaffer (2007; see also LaMarre 2009) identifies as the “invisible hand” in animation—the hand that makes the clay figures, adjusts their poses, or sketches the characters—arguably, here, the hand is (almost) visible in the very forms of the figures themselves, roughly basted together and close-­up held as they are. The characters’ own tenuously haptic terms become our own, and we become, ourselves (only partly and provisionally), stitched to the characters and the narrative flow, unsure and destabilized by what we are experiencing and what to expect. The film is structured by rhythm and repetition, evoking what is more “emotional tones for remembering” (Misztal 2003), which appeal directly to the senses, than anything like narrative certitude. In the opening scene, Tom is playing with a wooden toy that turns up and down, up and down, repetitively. The toy is clearly imported: a handmade wooden toy, whose mechanistic modernism in unblemished Ikea-­esque new pale pine could not be further from the war-­torn aesthetics of Tom and Antanette’s own bodies. This is a sequence that evokes, directly, the incongruity and futility of life under colonial rule; what modernity, education, urbanization have failed to deliver, to children particularly—all gloss, no substance—the repetitious cycle of going nowhere fast; repeated trauma without an event. A potent compression of microvitalism in a primary scene of inaction, crucial to the affective atmosphere that saturates the film—the uncomfortable inertia caused by continuous, repeated, motionlessness (in fact)—a powerful language within avant-­garde animation that is antithetical to the commercial origins of animation as the art of movement, as Danta (2013) argues. The mechanical manipulation of the characters in the film—the almost Parkinson’s-­like shaking of Tom and Antanette’s heads as the wind blows in their hair in the opening scenes; Nanna’s hand stitching, jerking, repetitious jabbing; the rocking chair camel ride at the end of the film—gives ontological priority to movement over stillness, process over structure, becoming over being, transition over stasis. Or does it? For this is an arrested image language, in which stasis is both framed and accentuated by movement. Stasis is made Yarrenyty Arltere Artists | 171

preeminent because of movement that is continuously halted. Stuck, inertia, being held captive, all are figured and felt, visually and literally. “You can’t learn like that with your head stuck in the sand,” Antanette says to Tom, as the screen shot cuts to a slightly out-­of-­focus, overexposed, surreal scene of a buffoon-­like, enlarged-­head figure, seen indeed stuck upside down in the sand, leg-­kicking-­ at-­the-­top ludicrous. All of the soft-­sculpture characters in Antanette and Tom are autonomous art objects, sculptural “real world” objects, in this sense; made in advance of, and having a life apart from, their animate acting as characters in the film. The fact of these sculptures having an independent existence—and, of course, not having one (now that this independence has been doubled, complicated, by their becoming stars of the film)—was itself the schematic focus of a major national installation exhibition by Yarrenyty Artists at the Museum of Contemporary Art (mca) in Sydney (part of the larger exhibition String Theory in 2013), in which the sculptural works from the animations were displayed on formal art platform plinths, spotlight focus on each, highlighting the individuation and still-­ life singularity of the star characters. Nanna and Grandfather, specifically, were positioned as stars in this exhibition, both presented in their original sculptural forms, and were seen returned to the screen in Yarrenyty Arltere’s second animation, Little Dingi, which ran on continuous display in the center of the exhibition.4 This presentation had the effect of making the sculptures seem as if they were stolen from the animation—literally halted in life—thereby amplifying the sense of life stolen that the film is about. As if real life were, in fact, the sculpture’s moving-­life-­story within the animation—a reversal of the so-­called facts of production (that the sculptures were brought to life through their being used in the animations). If animation is defined as a world without humans, where objects come to life of their own accord, then Yarrenyty Arltere’s art is, in this sense, über- or hyperanimation. The uncanny, poised, and readied-­to-­life sense of the sculptural figures frustrates any ultimate resolution between life and death, subject and object, animate and inanimate: an irresolvable tension that typifies Yarrenyty Arltere’s greater aesthetics, in which it is precisely the hyperalive qualities of stillness, radioactive silence, and still life in this classical sense that affords a reality effect. A “faking it with the truth,” as Rose (2004) elsewhere describes it, in which only artifice itself can make sense. That is, only 172 | Chapter Seven

artifice can make sensibly discernible (not “make sense of ”) what is otherwise unimaginable, unfathomable, unrepresentable: what “occupied” life might look like, feel like, to those who experience it today. Loss, death, and the hauntological, yes, but it is hope, finally, that returns in the film. The fiercely feel-­good sensation of the final scene resolves (at least in part) the dilemma. It finds the children having decided to move to the art center, to be with their grandparents, to work, to make a future together. Motion, motivation itself, is engendered by what Thomas LaMarre (2009) calls the “animatic interval”—the space between frames that enables the sense of movement, the mechanical succession of images in real-­time progress. In animation, what occurs between shots is more important than what occurs in any single frame. The stop-­motion interval in Antanette and Tom is not seamless (this is no illusion of movement into depth, the kind of movement animation generally undertakes in order to “thicken” animated imagery to real-­life movement) but instead is elongated and exaggerated even, engendering at once both temporal disruption and a sense of interminable duration—a stuttered, stuttering effect ultimately. The animatic interval here creates a feel of (not only the look of ) inhibition and inaction as it moves both the characters and the narrative forward. The struggle that underlies the children’s quest is made material by this stultified capacity to move, to act, which, equally, heightens the sense of the experience of rupture of the flow of life that dispossession, displacement, marginalization, has afforded. Taking shape against the backdrop of a history in which the snapshot has captured, caught, and contained subjects as victim-­like objects, freeze-­framed by the lens of photojournalism (see Solomon-­Godeau 1994), the animatic stop-­ motion movement of Antanette and Tom instigates (if only just) a capacity to move, to act in the world rather than be acted upon; a certain, if infinitesimal (for the film is anything but grand narrative) repossession of dispossession. This barely-­bringing-­to-­life animation—a certain “bare life” aesthetics (see Agamben 2005)—is evidenced across the multiplatform basis of Yarrenyty Arltere. Yarrenyty Arltere artists work across a range of media (soft sculpture, animation, printmaking); an abundance of materialities staging a singularly haunting irresolve of occupation; wounded, denuded, dystopic; disassemblages; fragments, pieces. Sally and Marlene Rubuntja’s majestic more-­than-­human sculpture Woman with arms up because she is proud! (2013) becomes the patchworked etching See how we stand, proud with our arms open! (2013), composed Yarrenyty Arltere Artists | 173

of sixteen distinctive plates, each pockmarked-­scarred by very-­human-­hand-­ worked natural designs (leaves, branches, grasses, trees, a river; plates 15 and 16). As the artists say of this work: We are proud ladies; you can see how we stand with our arms stretched out, not afraid to tell people that this place, Yarrenyty Arltere, is our place. We are the women of this place, making art, making laughing, making strong. That body is painted with stories and markings, just like real woman, all covered in markings. But look, her arms are open like when people talk at meetings; her arms are open because she is talking for everyone to hear. And see those three trees on her body, Sally and I, two sisters, sit under those trees in the shade, sometimes doing sewing, sometimes just sitting. There is also a river on one side arm, that arm up high so that river can flow down and feed those trees and wash that lady clean. The water stays under those trees and keeps them alive so we can sit under the shade of those trees. So woman can sit under the shade and do more sewing if they want, or they can just sit there and rest and tell stories about the old times and the new times. Marlene Rubuntja | artist statement for her etching with her sister Sally Rubuntja, See how we stand, proud with our arms open!

Rhonda Sharpe’s four sculptures in They Came from Nowhere (2013, figure 7.7), winner of the Wandjuk Markia 3d Memorial Award at the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award (natsiaa) in 2013, become, in a series of etchings produced by the artist the same year, images of alien figures whose bodies and heads are severed and cannot quite realign in their uncanny survival (see Orange Alien, 2013, etching, figure 7.8).

They came from nowhere, these little alien spirits. They all have one name each, Sad, Worried, Frightened and Hopeful. They don’t have a place they come from but they have a place they want to go to. That’s why I keep sewing them: I’m helping them find a home. Rhonda Sharpe | artist statement for They Came from Nowhere, natsiaa (2013)

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Fig. 7.7. Rhonda Sharpe, They Came from Nowhere, 2013. 62 × 80 × 12 cm, recycled blanket, embroidery cotton, wool, and found metal. © the artist and Yarrenyty Arltere Artists. Photo by S. Wallace.

Antanette and Tom is the first of two short animations produced, in succession, in 2010 and 2012 by Yarrenyty Arltere Artists at the Yarrenyty Arltere Learning Centre, the community-­based learning and art center located at the Larapinta Town Camp in Alice Springs (see chapter 2). Larapinta Valley town camp was established in 1975 by artist and Arrernte Aboriginal elder Wenten Rubuntja. Wenten is father of Marlene Rubuntja, who is the scriptwriter, as well as visual artist and voice actor, for Antanette and Tom. Larapinta Valley is one of Alice Springs’s oldest town camps and had the reputation of being the “glue-­sniffing capital” of the Northern Territory (Hogan 2012; Yarrenyty Arltere Artists 2015), where, in 2008, children as young as eight years old were reported to be inhaling gasoline, spray paint, and glue on a daily basis. A decade later, the community has significantly reduced levels of substance abuse, and a new generation of children now regularly attends school. The community attributes much of this success to the development of its arts enterprise at the Yarrenyty Arltere Learning Centre. As Constance Rubuntja put it, “I gave up the grog for art” (Hogan 2012, 257). Yarrenyty Arltere Artists | 175

Fig. 7.8. Rhonda Sharpe, Orange Alien, 2013. 60 × 63 cm, two-­ plate etching. © the artist and Yarrenyty Arltere Artists. Photo by S. Wallace.

I sewed these birds because I love to sew and because I feel safe inside when I come to the art room. Safe from my trouble. When I see my art, I’m proud of myself. I learnt sewing by myself in the art room, from watching and learning. This is where I like to come. Rhonda Sharpe | Telstra natsiaa (2012)

The final scene of the film, in which the children successfully surmount circumstances and mount Grandfather’s camels to ride to the art center, directs the possibility of movement itself, the life-­giving capacity of art, of the animatic, forward toward a hopeful conclusion. Antanette and Tom emerge happy heroes, no less, cowboy-­like riding into the sunset, into the future of community art making, no matter how rocky the ride.

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EIGHT

YIWARRA KUJU: THE CANNING STOCK ROUTE We wanna tell you fellas ’bout things been happening in the past that hasn’t been recorded, what old people had in their head. No pencil and paper. The white man history has been told and it’s today in the book. But our history is not there properly. We’ve got to tell ’em through our paintings. Clifford Brooks | in National Museum of Australia, Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route

Big painting tell you too many stories about that Country. Putuparri Tom Lawford | Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route (exhibition wall)

Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route debuted in 2010 and toured nationally for two years before coming to reside as a permanent acquisition of the National Museum of Australia. This monumental exhibition about history was not really about history, nor even really about a stock route. It was about something far more important and far more difficult yet: the archive itself. What can count for memory in the absence of official record? How do you create memory, a national archive, when there isn’t any? How can intangible cultural heritage be made visible, present, important? If, as historian Keith Jenkins defines it (in Gibbons 2007, 52), “history is dependent upon there having been a past and that there is evidence of some sort to prove it,” then the degree of dif-

Fig. 8.1. Completed canvases laid out on the red earth at Well 36, Kilykily. Canning Stock Route bush trip, August 2007. © form, Canning Stock Route Project. Photo by T. Acker.

ficulty undertaken by this project can be measured. In what language, in whose country, did in fact the Canning Stock Route take place? From whose perspective, for what end, did it matter or does it matter today? The deceptively simple claim of Yiwarra Kuju was that it presented the history of the Canning Stock Route from the perspective of Aboriginal people; that the impact on the local peoples and their country that the stock route trespassed can and should be told by them directly. The Canning Stock Route was a watering route for cattle, originally blazed by Alfred Canning in 1906, reaching across the great Western Desert, running 1,850 kilometers through Western Australia, from Halls Creek in the north to Wiluna in the south. The route was devised to provide water for cattle and literally seems to snake (as the exhibition dramatizes it) across desert sands and salt pans from one water hole to the next, with fifty-­two wells in total (thirty-­seven of which commandeered traditional Aboriginal water supplies); the same country where Western Desert Ab182 | Chapter Eight

Fig. 8.2. Artists Nora Wompi, Bugai Whylouter, Kumpaya Girgaba, and Nyangapa Nora Nangapa in front of the windmill, Kunawarritji, 2008. © form, Canning Stock Route Project. Photo by M. Biljabu.

original communities and art centers now dot and circulate (as the exhibition equally dramatizes). The point is that the Aboriginal side to the Canning story did not exist prior to this project. Yiwarra Kuju does not re-­present history; it created it for the first time. Under the auspices of form and the major public outcome of the Canning Stock Route Project, over an intensive four-­year development period (2006–10), an intercultural project team of twelve community arts experts, anthropologist-­historians, filmmakers, media producers, and translators consulted with seventeen Aboriginal communities and 110 artists, generating 190 paintings and 220 hours of oral history (eighty hours of which were translated for the exhibition), partnering with ten art centers, and mentoring seven Aboriginal curators, researchers, and media makers in order to engender a collaborative national archive, for the first time.1 According to cofounder, cocurator, and project manager Carly Davenport Acker (2015), Yiwarra Kuju undertook fifty-­ eight workshops across a circumference of over 600,000 square kilometers surrounding the 1,800-­kilometer stock route that cuts diagonally across the Western Desert, encompassing the Great Sandy, Little Sandy, and Gibson Deserts. It forged an original alliance of art center and Aboriginal organization partnerships, including Mangkaja Arts and Resource Agency and Kimberley Aboriginal Law and Cultural Centre (Fitzroy Crossing), Ngurra Artists (Wangkajunka), Yulparija Artists (Bidyadanga via Short St Gallery), Paruku Indigenous Protected Area (Mulan), Martumili Artists (Newman, Punmu, Parnngurr, Nullagine, Jigalong, and Kunawarritji), Papunya Tula Artists (Kiwirrkura), Warlayirti Artists (Balgo), Kayili Artists (Patjarr), and Birriliburu Artists (Wiluna). If this seems an exhaustive list, it is so by intention, mimicking, as I do here, the greater attempt of Yiwarra Kuju itself to map what are highly populated and productive places of remote Indigenous life today that are not, in fact, mapped elsewhere. The sheer cartography that art production itself has created appears as even more important ultimately than the mapping of the original stock route itself for Yiwarra Kuju, demonstrating, irrefutably, how vital art centers themselves have become historically. Art centers now map and dominate the very same landscape originally considered unoccupied and barren by Canning, no small ironic twist to an exhibition that makes this territory literally occupied by the very facticity of what Aboriginal art (artists, art centers) alone can provide today. 184 | Chapter Eight

Fig. 8.3. Paruku Indigenous Protected Area artists work on their collaborative canvas, Paruku. Nyarna, Lake Stretch Artists Camp, 2007. © form, Canning Stock Route Project. Photo by T. Acker.

The result is a monumental exhibition, comprising over one hundred canvases, stories, descriptions, photographs, artifacts, films, and interactive media. To try and take all this in at once is an exhausting if not impossible task. And that is perhaps the point. In historical terms, what needs to be remembered here, what must not be forgotten, is big. The sheer size of the exhibition alone is testament to the screaming fact of Aboriginal presence in the now. This is not bite-­sized history dumbed down to a single correct position nor recognizable rhetorical posturing but complicated, subtle, and ambiguous history in the making. Yiwarra Kuju does not only call attention to the highly selective versions of official history and those excluded from it (including the dependency of history on those it excludes—Canning relied on Aboriginal trackers to locate the water sources for the wells he originally sank, tethering them by the neck with chains so they would not escape). It equally insists upon the unique speciYiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route | 185

Fig. 8.4. Kenneth K. J. Martin and Paul Oceans filming while standing on top of a four-­ wheel drive. Well 36, Kilykily, Artists Camp, 2007. © form, Canning Stock Route Project. Photo by T. Acker.

ficity of traditional Western Desert archive—of Aboriginal forms of historiography—in its own terms. While it does not claim this terrain, nevertheless Yiwarra Kuju takes shape in the context of an entrenched history war in this country, in which the recognition of Aboriginal-­specific forms of historiography and cultural memory (oral history, song, performance, ceremony, art) has only just begun to be credited with the same validity as written history proper. Yiwarra Kuju positions painting—acrylic desert art—as historical testimony. Art becomes an authorized and legitimate form of official archive, not secondary to a real history that exists elsewhere. This is critical in recognizing what Aboriginal people have long claimed: that art is law, truth, history. The words of Michael Nelson Jagamarra and Kumanjayi Jampijinpa Patrick (see chapter 1, p. 35) echo the words of Clifford Brooks above in claiming that painting is equivalent to Whitefella writing. That this project gained major institutional recognition and support is crucially important at a time in which the same remote Aboriginal people and communities are under national nter Intervention policy (chapter 1) for in fact not 186 | Chapter Eight

Fig. 8.5. Friday Jones and Kaye Bingham at Forrest’s Fort, Well 9. Canning Stock Route bush trip, July 2007. © form, Canning Stock Route Project. Photo by T. Acker.

being seen to possess writing or self-­determinable history, for failing to achieve minimal literacy and numeracy levels and concomitant claims to remote community deficiency and dys­function. Yiwarra Kuju not only shows otherwise but does so in stunning and momentous terms of complexity, subtlety, and breadth. The artworks on display and the range of style, form, and figure are staggering. Signature works by defining grand masters of the Western Desert / Kimberley border, Rover Thomas, Jarinyanu David Downs, and Eubena (Yupinya) Nampitjin (whose works predate the project, and I wonder, specifically in the case of Rover Thomas’s Canning Stock Route [1989], might have inspired it) are included along with many more major works including pieces by Helicopter Tjungarrayi, Wakartu Cory Surprise, and other younger and emergent contemporary artists, whose works were solicited for the project. Importantly, there is not a singular or unified Aboriginal perspective or a Martu history of Canning that is ultimately revealed by the exhibition, unlike, for example, the 1907 Rabbit Proof Fence—an important comparative because Alfred Canning was also the designer of this equally absurdist geophysical coloYiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route | 187

nial failure (prompting Germaine Greer’s [2010] wrath for Australian history, as well as, unfortunately, a misguided review of Yiwarra Kuju). The fence became important because of the Aboriginal counterhistory incited by Doris Pilkington’s Garimara biography and Phil Noyce’s film that resulted from it in 2002, reclaiming the fence as a symbol of Indigenous resistance, resilience, and survival of the autocracies of the Stolen Generation. Arguably, Yiwarra Kuju brings the Canning Stock Route to national consciousness in similar kinds of ways, but not, however, because it provided a straightforward narrative of historical redemption. Whatever countermemory is presented here, it is pluralized and multiperspectival. Few of the paintings address the stock route directly. Patrick Olodoodi (Alatuti) Tjungarrayi’s tour de force Canning Stock Route Country (2007) is the exception, not the rule. (And even its purported mapping of the same country confounds the situation by its non-­Western cartographic perspectives). What distinguished this exhibition is that it works “up” from the paintings, following the cultural logic and classification they themselves possess, neither imposing from the outside nor forcing the paintings back into Western categories. The exhibition catalog (National Museum of Australia 2010) identifies nineteen different types or groupings of paintings in the collection. But these types are not in fact of the same kind or of the same order of things. Some paintings are of places (titles include Kumpupirntily, Well 33–35, Other Roads); some name Dreamings (with the proper names, for example, of Minyipuru, Natawalu, Majarrka Juju); some name Ancestors (for instance, Jila men, Paruku, and Tjurubalan); some are about sentiment (ngurra, home, belonging) and/or concepts (Jukurrpa, Ngurra Kuja Walyja “one country family”); others yet describe more secular history and activities (such as Droving Time, Conflict); and so on.2 This is no simple taxonomy nor even an exhaustive list seemingly of what Canning really means to local Martu. Not unlike Foucault’s (1970, xv) figuration of Borges’s “certain Chinese encyclopaedia entry” that “shatters familiar landmarks of thought” by its sharp, impossible semantic field of unlike objects of inconsequent alliance, so too does the very number and range of work on purportedly one thing in Yiwarra Kuju confound sensibility. Yiwarra Kuju does not redress official Canning history by presenting a unified counterhistory directly. But equally, the multiple histories it does present are complex, complicated, and not able to be readily grasped. Lest this sound like criticism, 188 | Chapter Eight

Fig. 8.6. Eubena (Yupinya) Nampitjin painting. Well 36, Kilykily, Artists Camp, 2007. © form, Canning Stock Route Project. Photo by T. Acker.

it is one of the greater achievements of the exhibition, at least from my perspective, that (finally) desert art and culture are curated in ways that begin to do justice to their complexity because, not despite the fact that, this may thwart viewer expectation. Actualities of lived life, continuities with traditional precedence and Ancestral frameworks, are what haunted and returned in this exhibition; the inordinate complexities and commitment to country, family, aesthetics, ways of doing and being that aren’t chronologically driven or bound to this history or any colonial past or mapping, that indicate, in fact, a people profoundly not colonized. If anything coheres in this exhibition, it might be this: perversely, maybe the Canning route doesn’t and didn’t matter. Yiwarra Kuju presents its own event in the making as a crucial part of the exhibition format. Brutal curatorial modernism, archive making, becomes part of the archive. The photographs and short films from the field research, counYiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route | 189

try visits, and history-­painting process are not addenda but vital elements here. (An entire chapter would need to be devoted to the work film did in this exhibition, bringing not only an immediacy of presence and experience otherwise absent but a quality of insider intimacy and proximity that generated an entirely different emotional tone for remembering than the exhibition itself.) Voices of artists and community members are literalized by frequent direct quotation, and the sounds of laughter, song, and language (from the films) animate the exhibition space. So too are Whitefella project members made visible in the exhibition catalog, listed, as it were, democratically alongside and in the same format as all the project members are: by photograph, biography, and position; a literal presence-­ing of people within the project and within its own archival practice. This is no seamless unfolding of inevitable consequence but the made, staged, and staggeringly hard work of intercultural contemporary history making. Here, I confess to preferring a certain “making of ” to the final cut: Tim Acker’s photograph(s) of the collection spread out horizontally on and in country (see figure 8.1 and plate 17) where the paintings are not individuated but properly one big mob yet, creating their own inchoate intersections, nestled up and touching, akin to each other and the country they embody and enfold, like custom-­made carpet or skin, undulating and breathing alive as they seem far more this way than when stretched and hung as if cauterized from all this somehow, in display.3 In the exhibition, paintings are hung and framed vertically, individually, with artists’ details and short bios, as well as at least something of the painting’s meaning printed below. The exhibition is “blackout” hyperminimalism, almost cold in look and feel: each painting is hung on black and lit from the front (although as if from behind) and below so that the artworks loom and glow like jack-­o’-­lanterns. This curatorial strategy engenders a certain animation of the screen-­like surfaces of the canvas, identified by many of us writing on Aboriginal art today as inciting potency and presence (see Biddle 2007, 69–75), but nevertheless, in this context, the luminous effect borders on spooky. This may be Indigenous-­driven, explicitly not “white box” curatorial practice, but the atmosphere is a little nineteenth-­century museum, Conradesque “heart of darkness,” considering the more radical critique of this very paradigm that the

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Fig. 8.7. Emerging filmmaker Morika Biljabu and mentor Nicole Ma film Jakayu Biljabu painting. Well 36, Kilykily, Artists Camp, 2007. © form, Canning Stock Route Project. Photo by T. Acker.

Fig. 8.8. Muni Rita Simpson pointing to a water hole on the canvas that she and her two sisters had just begun painting, Minyipuru (Seven Sisters), 2007. © form, Canning Stock Route Project. Photo by T. Acker.

exhibition explicitly undertakes. Would it not have been possible to find a format more in keeping with the greater cultural perspectivalism the exhibition presents, and, specifically, its most pressing question: what if humans aren’t the agents of history and meaning?

The missionaries they concentrated on the kids and that’s what we’re doing here. For this, to start we’re using the newest technology with the oldest culture. Curtis Taylor | Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route (exhibition)

The most successful challenge to the archive, and the savviest curatorial creativity yet, is the interactive media table. Almost six meters long, it takes up almost an entire room in the exhibition. What I love about this table is the degree to which it makes the archive not a matter of inaccessible or precious records 192 | Chapter Eight

Fig. 8.9. Women painting at the Kilykily painting workshop. Well 36, 2007. © form, Canning Stock Route Project. Photo by T. Acker.

from the past—or, indeed, untouchable high works of art. Rather, it makes the archive playful, engaging, open, and serendipitous even (as history may well be). This is participatory engagement and human-­dependent history making; whatever history is, it has to be activated and reactivated by humans in the now and in the know. The table privileges nonteleological repetition over progression. Real-­time events of technological mashup and simultaneity enable Western history and scientific frames (species, photos, newspaper articles, maps) to be opened alongside Dreaming histories (design, story, and/or song), artist biographies, photos, anecdotes; the secular and the sacred here have no problem coexisting as ants crawl by and one continuous purple serpent slithers the whole Canning route table length (Warnayarra he is called in Warlpiri, the Rainbow Serpent, creator of all things). You can’t redirect him, as is only appropriate. You can, however, make your own (note) nonpermanent, ephemeral, Dreaming painting in the touch-­respondent and humanly warm sand surface of the table Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route | 193

Fig. 8.10. Child uses the One Road interactive. Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route, Perth, 2011. © form, Canning Stock Route Project. Photo by T. Acker.

interface, literalizing what Yiwarra Kuju teaches: that all history leaves traces and that, indeed, not all traces make history.

Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route was on display December 17–­April 29, 2012, at the Australian Museum, Sydney. It made its debut in Canberra on July 30, 2010, at the National Museum of Australia, where it stayed until January 26, 2011. The exhibition toured to the Perth Convention and Exhibition Centre in Western Australia November 2–27, 2011, and in Brisbane May 25–­July 14, 2013. Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route exhibition is a joint initiative between the National Museum of Australia and form. This exhibition was supported by the National Collecting Institutions Touring and Outreach Program, an Australian government program aiming to improve access to the national collections for all Australians. The Canning Stock Route Project’s commitment to a greater living

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Fig. 8.11. Exhibition visitors use the One Road interactive. Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route, Perth, 2011. © form, Canning Stock Route Project. Photo by T. Acker.

archive that can serve the artists and community art centers who made up its original project team partnership continues in multiplatform capacities today. In conjunction with the Centre for Digital Archaeology at uc Berkeley (CoDA) and eight of the participating art centers in the project, form has created the Canning Stock Route Digital Futures Project under the banner of Mira (a Martu term meaning “to bring something hidden into the light”), an industry-­first initiative of an online interactive archive (developed in conjunction with the Arts Law Centre of Australia Artists in the Black program) for the housing, storage, and protection of the over 40,000 items of both intangible and tangible cultural heritage produced since 2006 (including images, biographies, stories, and videos). What distinguishes this archive is its differential user platform basis. It allows both a general public access (to some material) and restricted Indigenous access and control (to other material). Individual art centers, artists, and community members

Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route | 195

can access their own archives, upload further and new materials, determine what and which is public or restricted, and ensure that such distinctions remain relevant in the future preservation of heritage, thus ensuring Indigenous-­specific differential rights and authorities to use, as well as cultural and intellectual copyright.4

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NINE

THE WARBURTON ARTS PROJECT Ngayulu-­latju tjungurringkula waarka pirninya palyalpayi, walka, kilarrpa puru kutjupa-­kutjupa. Ngayuku-­lampatju tjumangkatja nyakulatjaku-­yan tjukurrtatja palyantja. Tjiina-­latju pukurltu kulira nyuntulu-­yan manta Australiala ngurra pirniwanalu pitjala kulira nyakulatjaku. Tjiinya ngayulu-­latju palyantja. 这都是我们一起创作的—油画,玻璃,还有各种东西。这来自于我们的故事,我们梦 想时光中的故事。你们从各个不同的地方来看、来思考我们的作品，我们很高 兴。你瞧,这些都是我们创作的。伊丽莎白·霍兰德

We made all of this work together—paintings and different things. This comes from our stories, our dreamtime stories. We are happy for you people from all over different places to look and think about the work we have done. You see, these things were made by us. Elizabeth Holland | “Past, Present and Future Exhibitions,” Warburton Arts Project

I will never forget the first exhibition of Warburton art I attended, in 1993 at the S. H. Ervin Gallery, Yarnangu Ngaanya: Our Land, Our Body, before I had finished my PhD, when I was in Sydney recovering from a car accident (which occurred during my field research). It isn’t the art I remember but the atmosphere: the screaming presence of lifeworld; red dust swirling; digging sticks; hands dipped in oil, ochre; the putting of marks, designs on breasts; the smell of fire, smoke, sweat; the rhythmic rise and fall of voice and of the breasts of the Ngaanyatjarra women as they danced for what seemed like hours; the concentration, intensity, the pleasure. Midceremony—maybe she was Koori, from

here at any rate—she arrived late, stripped, painted up, and began to dance in one seamless motion; her body embraced, aligned, and conjoined with those elderly bodies so fast it took my breath away. (I was jealous, in truth. I wanted to dance. I was what Warlpiri call yirraru, sick with longing, homesick, for Lajamanu, the desert.) This was not a reenactment or a staging. Warburton Arts had trucked a phenomenal sixteen tons of country—dirt, sand—directly down from the Western Desert, over 4,000 kilometers, from Warburton to Sydney, to create, in situ, a ceremonial dance ground. Ngaanyatjarra that night prepared and performed what Warlpiri women call yawulyu and Ngaanyatjarra inma; a women’s Dreaming ceremony. This was far more than merely an inclusion of artists in their self-­representation, an exemplification of tradition, or an experimental mode of what might now be identified as post-­Bourriaud (2002) “relational aesthetics”—the breaking out from the white spaces, from the white-­confined walls of the art institution to the real world, that has now become de rigueur in contemporary curatorial fashion. This performance had more the feel of guerrilla tactics: claiming the very nation-­state of Australia as Ngaanyatjarra (this was in the National Trust Gallery, after all). In retrospect, I see this exhibition as a means for insisting upon what the artworks do themselves: literalizing, in an immediate and proximate way for outsiders, that these works of Ngaanyatjarra aesthetics remain tied to the bodies and lifeworlds of those who produce them—what I have been arguing, in fact, that all the arts in this book ultimately achieve. This is an ontological primacy of an aesthetics that brings to life, literally; that is not representational but existential; art as an encounter with bodies, with visceral affect, with ways of doing and being; less a visual experience than an existential hit. For Warburton, engendering this hit, as it were, has remained nothing short of a strategic imperative. Gary Proctor, the art coordinator at Warburton since 1989, writes of this in strikingly similar terms. As he puts it, the goal is to engender “a space in which Ngaanyatjarra people are present even in their absence” (Proctor 1999, 40)—an extraordinary claim, really, and a serious one. I want to spend the rest of this chapter identifying, if cursorily, how I see this “presence in absence” operating at both the level of the production of art in the community at Warburton itself, and in turn, in its contemporary transnational curation. For the two, ultimately, are inseparable. 198 | Chapter Nine

i It is hard to know how to estimate the significance of a remote community art center, defining itself, at least in part, against market forces and the drive to commodify Aboriginal culture. In this sense, Warburton is singular across the desert and, indeed, across the entirety of so-­called remote Australia. Over the last three decades, art centers have flourished and spread across the desert, following an art movement they equally produce. Almost every major Aboriginal community now has an art center; Desart Inc., the major institutional umbrella body for desert community art organizations, lists forty operating across the Central and Western Desert (see chapter 4 and the introduction).1 Art centers operate as what Nicholas Rothwell (2011) has dubbed de facto “culture bureaus”—crucial community life centers dedicated to the support and development of language and cultural maintenance, among the many other sociocultural and economic functions they serve, which remain grossly unrecognized and underappreciated in Aboriginal art history, including social and emotional well-­being. It would be inaccurate to characterize community art centers in any sense as merely or solely market driven. Desart’s formal industry motto (since 2011) is “Culture First,” a phrase Desart Inc. executive officer Philip Watkins has developed to mean, as Hetti Perkins (2014b) models in her keynote address at the 2014 Desert Mob Symposium, “cultural viability over commercial viability.” Very early in the history of Western Desert art centers, in 1990, the Warburton Collection was established, an initiative whereby the community itself purchases artworks from its members in order to generate a permanent collection of works that remain the property of the Warburton community. This did not obviate the need for Aboriginal community members to market their artworks professionally, as a means of making a living, and, indeed, Warburton Arts Project has undertaken any number of strategies to diversify marketing possibilities (see further below). Rather, the initiative took shape alongside professional marketing strategies, in order to protect and promote what Proctor (2013) calls a Ngaanyatjarra “cultural future.” There are over nine hundred artworks in the Warburton Collection today (not including works of glass and fiber). The figures are staggering. The Warburton Collection represents the largest archive of Aboriginal art owned by Aboriginal people in Australia (Proctor 2011b). It rivals even the larger private collections of Aboriginal art, placing Warburton Aboriginal community members, The Warburton Arts Project | 199

in cultural capital terms, on par with the Holmes à Court, the Laverty, and the Arnott’s collections in Australia, and with the Wilkerson, Kaplan and Levi, and Owen and Wagner collections in the United States, collections that have, over the last three decades, transformed international art appreciation and Aboriginal art history. But imagine this (because this is what the Warburton Collection insists we must do): imagine if Aboriginal art history did not have to rely upon the vicissitudes of transnational art markets and acquisition trends; if collector taste and distinction (in Bourdieu’s sense) were not the criteria; imagine if, when an exhibition were to be mounted on a particular artist or community art period, it did not have to rely upon borrowed or acquired lendings, partial, patchy, or discontinuous as these lendings and the history they can produce will invariably prove to be. What if Aboriginal artists did not have to be consulted; if repatriation (ugly colonial word that it is)—the return of objects, photographs, by linguists, anthropologists, and now art collectors—did not have to be the dominant model? What if to view masterpieces of Western Desert art we had to travel, actually, ourselves, to the desert? What if we could not encounter Warlpiri, Pintupi, Ngaanyatjarra art without being on Aboriginal homelands, hosted by community members, engaging with Indigenous lifeworlds and terms, rather than in temperature-­controlled galleries or the comfort of our own lounge rooms? In an early text on Warlpiri art that attempted to make sense of the sheer volume of art being produced in Lajamanu between 1989 and 1991, I identified how Warlpiri would say of their paintings that they were Kardiya-­ku, “for Whitefella” (Biddle 1996). The point was that people rigorously practiced painting in terms commensurate with the strict law ensuring that only witnessable, correct versions of Jukurrpa (Dreaming) were inscribed on canvas. At Lajamanu, people were rigorous then and are now in keeping the techniques of painting commensurate with the terms of cultural law by which marks were put on the body, in the ground, for ceremony. This meant that painting, by definition, was not, in fact, a sacrilegious or culture-­depleting act, as had been feared and debated at length by other communities during this time, with Lajamanu, for one, actively resisting painting altogether until 1987.2 Nevertheless Warlpiri distinguished, then and now, that painting as an object form (but notably, not as a practice) was produced for outside sale: Kardiya-­ku. 200 | Chapter Nine

From the perspective of the national heritage record, Warburton inaugurated in this initiative what it has taken the Australian consciousness twenty years to grasp: that Aboriginal art is history, archive, proper—not secondary or ancillary to a “real” history, politics, economy, that takes place elsewhere, but the thing itself. It would take until 2010 for the National Museum of Australia to appreciate this fact in the monumental archive-­making project Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route (see chapter 8), in which, for the first time at a major public, institutional level, Western Desert painting was collected as history, echoing a far longer history in which Aboriginal paintings have been utilized in land rights cases as evidence, notably by Yolngu in the Yirrkala Bark Petition of 1963 and by Warlpiri, in their successful legal claim to homelands in 1977 (Hamilton 2000).3 That the National Museum has acquired the Ngaanyatjarra Warakurna History Paintings series produced in 2011 is significant in the same terms: museum, not art gallery; history, not art. But the Warburton Collection, held and housed on country by Ngaanyatjarra, is important in more than just this sense. It provides for reengagement with works in the present. Here, rather than static objects from a fixed past, lie potent possibilities of an articulatory archive of as yet unknown pasts and complex future becomings: art as agent; an evidentiary potentiality; catalysts of activation and activism both. “Radioactive bomb–like” in Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) sense: minoritarian histories and knowledges otherwise silenced or invisible in occupied territory, poised and readied, dynamic, explosive even, for future detonation. Pulpurru Davies, reviewing a painting she had produced some twenty years ago as part of ongoing community archive research (Proctor 2011a), broke into songline verse of the Dreaming originally painted. Fred Ward, impromptu, performed Tingari-­related ceremony and song in a public reengagement with his own work (Gadfly Gallery 2007). Painting has become a means for actively reengaging country and its viscera, taking over, partly, in a postsettlement context, the role that ritual, ceremony once held for the healthy-­making activation of Ancestral potency in the keeping alive of flora, fauna, and people today. Tu Di Shen Ti translates as “Land and Body”: paintings are performative in this sense, enacting complex relationships of people to country, to Ancestors, to one another, to a world in which country is sentient (land and body). Paintings re-­ mark, remake the same marks once left by Ancestors and retain their embodied The Warburton Arts Project | 201

vivacities (Biddle 2007; see also chapters 4 and 7, this volume), making the significance of art kept, held, nourished as a community-­based, locally owned, archive greater yet. Proctor (2011b, 18) states that “Ngaanyatjarra culture is a living culture,” and it is this purpose that the Warburton Art Project serves, as an alive and enlivening archive that operates in relation to the people to whom this history matters most. A risky prospect for sure. Desperate measures for desperate times, perhaps. Proctor (2012a, 21) is adamant that Warburton “be bold and do things differently” and that “imagination is important” to actively insure against the threat that the acrylic art painting movement, pharmacon-­like poison and cure, might represent, and in order that the Warburton Arts Project should safeguard and foster the greater Ngaanyatjarra “poetics” (Proctor 2013). To house and exhibit the Warburton Collection, the Warburton community, in conjunction with the Shire of Ngaanyatjarraku Council, and with support from Rio Tinto, built the award-­winning Tjulyuru Art and Cultural Centre in 2000, an initiative at the time unprecedented in the Western Desert. (Buku-­ Larrngay Mulka Art Centre, built in Yirrkala in 1998, is an important precursor.) All community art centers operate as de facto galleries for community members, traveling visitors, and potential customers alike throughout the Central and Western Desert. Some communities may be fortunate enough to have art centers big enough to have designated gallery space within the same building (along with artist studio space, segregated into male and female art production areas if space permits; storage facilities for tools and equipment as well as artworks; office, archive, and administrative areas; tea- and food-making and storage area, etc.). Other community art centers have had to struggle to find even minimal adequate housing in the resource-­thin realities of the remote. However, that Warburton has managed to prioritize the funding of a gallery proper on homelands (Tjulyuru Exhibition Space), to which it dedicates two exhibitions per year, curated by the Warburton Arts Project from the arts community, thus providing opportunities for Ngaanyatjarra in arts management, ecotourism, and hospitality, as well as the immediacy of community-­based curatorial practice—exhibitions that, realistically, will be seen by far more local Ngaanyatjarra than outsiders (a fact that has earned the ire of at least one national review; Eccles 2008)—is further testament to a community’s keeping alive, literally, its relatedness to its own art history, and, by so doing, making history. 202 | Chapter Nine

A less well-­known aspect of Central and Western tradition are what are crudely translated as “Aboriginal keeping places.” Historically, specific places of significance enabled the storing of items of value in places in country, where, in trust, they might reside for future retrieval and use. To this end, in 1971, the community of Yuendumu built a Warlpiri Men’s Museum (under reconstruction from 2006, to reopen September 2015).4 The South Australian Museum in Adelaide has, for the past four decades, served as an “off-­country” keeping place (of sorts) for a number of Central and Western Desert communities (Anderson 1990). Proctor (2013) describes the overall approach of the Warburton Arts Project as to create a “culturally safe and familial Indigenous art space,” uniquely combining a keeping place with a making place. Warburton is developing an interactive online database for the collection— the website is bilingual in Mandarin and English, another first for the Western Desert—making the visual realities of Ngaanyatjarra present to another world language, culture, and audience for the first time. This generates new cyberterritorializing and deterritorializing possibilities both. In the online, global world, Warburton may no longer be remote—over there, elsewhere, or otherwise—in the collapsing of difference and distance and place itself that defines the contemporary. Yet the vitality of aesthetic is not defused. The crucial three-­ dimensional shimmering, the seemingly alive, visceral depth and mesmerizingly moving qualities of this art, that are so crucial to its distinctive performative, making canvas, physically, the same stuff as skin, as body, as country (as I have argued), may even be enhanced (see Deger 2006b; Biddle 2007)—the dotting of the paintings akin, in this sense, to both the mechanical reproduction of the photograph and indexical pixelation; the illuminating backlight of the screen monitor making works that already radiate, intensify.5 The electronic age has not proved to be the threat to Indigenous traditions that was once feared. The rate of computer and mixed-­digital literacy is very high in remote communities, as the work of Rhonda Unurupa Dick (chapter 4) exemplifies (see Kral 2012). Central and Western Desert artists are leading developments in digitally based new art forms, as the 6,100 digital portraitures and the twenty-­channel sound-­immersive installation of Tu Di Shen Ti—Our Land Our Body indicate.

The Warburton Arts Project | 203

Fig. 9.1. Cyril Holland, Wanayowarra, 1992. 1,850 × 1,870 mm, acrylic polymer on 15–18 oz. cotton canvas. Warburton Collection. © the artist and Warburton Arts Project.

ii The most important moments of historical innovation are not recognized at the time; history invents itself in retrospect. Bruno Latour (1990) calls experiments “an event not a discovery” because successful experiments reveal what will become history only after their emergence. Experiments set in train irreversible convergences of people, objects, forces, and affect; new configurations that destabilize accepted knowledge in ways that become as if inevitable but only over the course of time. That is, experiments invent the history and the conditions that made them possible (not the other way around). The Warburton Arts Project recognized early the importance of what are now 204 | Chapter Nine

called cultural projects, developing new ways in which community members might use art to actively regenerate meaningful relationships between themselves, country, and history—that is, art as life making, practice based, ways of doing and being together in country to reveal anew what tradition was and what it might become for the future.6 Initiatives have included heritage back-­to-­country painting trips; a practice-­ led clay pipe, ochre, and charcoal rock art shelter project (see plates 19 and 20); the introduction of new media, including architectural and domestic art-­glass making; ceramics; fiber and textile arts; recycled and found object work; digital landscape and bioportraiture in photographic media; and experimental soundscapes. Non-­Ngaanyatjarra artists, notably Nalda Searles, whose skill base has been crucial in the development of npy Tjanpi arts (see chapter 5), and experts (such as anthropologist John von Sturmer) have been invited as consultants, indicating an unabashed intercultural savvy and politics, gleaning what (specific) Whitefella expertise might best have to offer, and thus making what Faye Ginsburg has called the (otherwise) “absented Whitefella” in Aboriginal art and media history present in a way that has only perhaps recently been actively embraced on the national public stage.7 As indicative of this shift in climate, I think here specifically of Blackfella Films, under the direction of Sally Riley, inviting the acclaimed English crime writer Jimmy McGovern to cowrite the groundbreaking 2012 Indigenous television series Redfern Now (Blackfella Films 2012). The Tu Di Shen Ti—Our Land Our Body tour was developed by the Warburton community, including Warnarn Campus / Ngaanyatjarra schoolchildren, who were active participants as artists themselves, producing the more than six thousand digital photographs that accompany the tour. The exhibition was formally presented in situ, at the Tjulyuru Exhibition Centre in Warburton, following the first leg of the international tour, ensuring that the Australia-­China network extended back to the local level of Warburton community members directly. Prior experience of working with Aboriginal people and organizations is now a recognized qualification and requirement for jobs in the Aboriginal sector. But how do you quantify the nuance, the character, the quality of commitment required in the dense linguistic zones of the Aboriginal desert, where code-­ switching dexterity, multitasking, and cross-­cultural attention spans are mere signifiers of the real demand? In desert societies, at least in those of which I am The Warburton Arts Project | 205

Fig. 9.2. Cyril Holland, Tjuntjunmarrarra Tjipilpa, 1992. 1,820 × 1,870 mm, acrylic polymer on 15–18 oz. cotton canvas. Warburton Collection. © the artist and Warburton Arts Project.

aware, no knowledge can be acquired without what Émile Durkheim first identified as the “social fact.” Knowledge can only take shape by and through complex forms of knowing and being known, inclusion, relationships, relatedness; the immediacy of being present, readied, enabled to attend to properly; what Warlpiri call, in English, “witness.” Gary Proctor has been advising on art in Warburton since 1989. He returned to Warburton in 2008 to take up the position of art center coordinator, which he inaugurated, making his one of the longest art center coordinator relationships in the context of the remote, where high turnover and burnout are the prevailing contemporary condition. An artist himself, Proctor practices 206 | Chapter Nine

his own art alongside the artists he writes for and with, co-­curates with, co-­ instigates ways of making and doing collectively and collaboratively—what he calls, simply, “a team effort” (Proctor, personal communication, 2013). He voraciously reads art theory and philosophy, and his writing and curation reflect this reach, to make his practice base rigorously commensurate with Ngaanyatjarra cultural expression. What is the opposite of the “milk bottle” approach, when complexity is not—as it invariably is in so much writing about Aboriginal art today—­narrowed down, funneled, homogenized in order to be made easy to pour, swallow, digest?

iii Warburton undertook the first art exhibition that I am aware of in the Western Desert, on the community’s own history of contact, in Mission Time in Warburton (Tjulyuru Regional Arts Gallery 2002). Over a five-­year lead-­in, and influenced by Damian McLean’s input, as well as by the (then) art coordinator, Albie Viegas (Proctor, personal communication, 2013), the community undertook a practice-­led excavation of the recent colonial past, compiling and reconsulting old photographs and archival documents from the period 1933–73 and producing what came to be called “history paintings” in local parlance (see chapters 2 and 3). History paintings, as Warburton artists first defined them, represent a dramatic break, in both aesthetic theme and form,8 from classical dot-­and-­circle paintings of Jukurrpa, to works more secular, figurative, and perspectival.9 A second exhibition, Trust, was mounted in 2003, exploring mining in the region. The significant trajectory of words in art, words as art, a uniquely Ngaanyatjarra literacy-­based aesthetics (reflecting the bilingual education the United Aboriginal Missionaries brought to the npy lands; see chapter 3), was inaugurated at this same time. Elizabeth Holland and Christine West’s All the early days rockholes (2001, figure 9.3) is a crucial painting from this period, and Tjingapa Davies’s Right Way to Have a Kurri (1992, figure 9.4) an important precursor. These works led directly to developments that would, by 2008, see June Walkutjukurr Richards (chapter 3) win the Western Australian Indigenous Art Award. All the early days rockholes (2001) harnesses Ngaanyatjarra words directly to canvas: e. e. cummings–­like poetry across a page; a radical experiment with The Warburton Arts Project | 207

Fig. 9.3. Elizabeth Holland and Christine West, All the early days rockholes, 2001. 998 × 1,440 mm, acrylic on canvas. Warburton Collection. © Warburton Arts Project. Photo by N. Keyzer.

cartographic calligraphy; the placement of words disorienting and thwarting a more prosaic interpretation of this painting as merely a list. Here, words become topographical features. The middle of the painting is divided into almost two perfect halves, by four words: Paralyipatjal and Paakaparkkara (oriented to reading from the left, as it were) and nyanturratjarra and witjintitjarra (oriented to the right); creating an almost mountain-­like ridge or backbone to the canvas and requiring a complete reorientation of perspective (flipping from both left to right, portraiture to landscape) in order to be read. Such orientation is more commensurate, or so it seems to me, with what approaching these “rockholes” might be like from an embodied, emplaced position within country itself; where what becomes significant only becomes so (visibly, verbally) relationally to a perspective of country as known travel itself teaches; a series of well-­known places in succession, correlated with, derived from, and made familiar because of repeated, habitualized movement. This is a knowledge and perspectivalism made known by the work of song, ceremony, dance in cycles that retain mne-

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Fig. 9.4. Tjingapa Davies, Right Way to Have a Kurri, 1991. 935 × 1,279 mm, acrylic polymer on 15–18 oz. cotton canvas. Warburton Collection. © the artist and Warburton Arts Project.

monic traces of movement that repeat (as Ngaanyatjarra do themselves) Ancestral activities of travel, in inma and other ceremonies. It is the circuits between, and perspectives derived from, one place to another as they are encountered and embodied that ultimately orients perspective. An ingenious usurpation of writing and painting both ultimately effect what might be called a performative mapping of Ngaanyatjarra attachment; a mapping unlikely to be found in any formal cartography of Ngaanytjarra lands.10 All the early days rockholes is differentiated by color (purple and yellow, respectively), suggesting that country and its inscription are less individually or even generically shared by Ngaanyatjarra than specifically differentiated, specifically distinguished, specifically owned. The division by two again predominates, a moiety distinction perhaps; what Warlpiri call kirda (or boss/owner) and kurndungurlu (manager) that would require both sides, as it were, for the authorization of this inscription to take shape; a collective endeavor that is less about collaborative sharing or the adding together of different parts than a mode requiring precise collective authorization in order that meaning, writing, take shape. A mode of inscription, in short, that could not be further from the so-­called neutrality of the alphabet and its greatest liberating promise of a universal communicative code. Proper nouns—names—are not, of course, translatable. As Derrida (1985; see Biddle 2000) argues, the proper name represents the limits of translation; the point where the (purported) claim of commensurability between languages fails. All the early days rockholes are brutal proper names in this sense. In the absence of translation, these words become pure enunciatory command. Try saying these words aloud, the painting flatly insists: Yarrngurulitjarra, wiilkarlikarli, Parrkaparrkara, just for a few; long, complex, specialized words; complex, impossible mouthings and tongue twists for English-­only speakers, for sure. In no way taunting, nevertheless the work says, “Just because you can’t understand us doesn’t mean we don’t have something important to say.”11 That these words can’t be translated, that they may only rightly belong to those who can read and pronounce them, recognize their importance, makes visible, noisy even, Ngaanyatjarra voice, in radically new urgencies, forging what Rancière (2011, 14) might call a “new regime of expression” or a “different sensorium . . . a way of linking a power to perceptibly affect and a power to signify.” This painting overthrows at one and the same time the fact that Ngaanya210 | Chapter Nine

tjarra are not in fact il- or preliterate; that painting and artistry are not undertaken by artists who are “primarily oral”; that Aboriginal people are not suffering from human rights abuse in not acquiring national standards of literacy and numeracy. That maybe there is no national crime nor cause for the alarm that has seen, under new nter Intervention and Stronger Futures national policy (see chapter 1), the cessation of bilingual and bicultural self-­determining schooling across remote Aboriginal homelands; that maybe it isn’t the case that Aboriginal people can’t or aren’t acquiring literacy, but that they may be doing so in ways which are commensurate with their own trajectories, needs, and lifeworld, as is attested by informed research on contemporary remote Aboriginal literacies and new media (Biddle 2000; Hinkson 2002; Wigglesworth, Simpson, and Loakes 2011; Kral 2012), and by the arts profiled in this book. There is a simpler claim: that Ngaanyatjarra (Warlpiri, Yolngu) already possess writing, found on the ground, in bodies, on canvas today. The formal graphics of Cyril Holland’s Tjillawarra Kirritji Warra Warra (1992, plate 18), Tjuntjunmarrarra Tjipilpa (1992, figure 9.2), and Wanayowarra (1992, figure 9.1) are more than suggestive in this vein. Will Owen (2007) describes the arts in the Warburton Collection as a “massive Indigenous library.” Proctor (2000, 731) calls the arts in the Warburton Collection “letters for the future,” and this I take to mean in both a pointedly literal and a literate sense.12

iv It is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent. Alain Badiou | “Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art”

I have not seen the exhibition Tu Di Shen Ti—Our Land Our Body: Masterworks of the Warburton Collection. I did, however, attend its modest precursor, Greetings from Warburton, in Sydney, in 2008. I suspect Greetings from Warburton might not have been seen by more than a few hundred people. Warlpiri used to say to me, making sense of my interest in their culture, that “Australians are not nearly as interested in Aboriginal art and culture as Europeans and Americans The Warburton Arts Project | 211

are”—a view supported by the amount of international research conducted historically, as well as by current exhibition practice. In the United States alone, three major exhibitions of Aboriginal art were mounted from 2009 to 2012.13 The fact of international interest is equally borne out by the success of Tu Di Shen Ti and the great interest shown by the Chinese nation-­state in this first exhibition of remote Aboriginal art to tour the greater People’s Republic, with over 550,000 visitors to the exhibition, and over 230,000 hits on the website. Ngaanyatjarra community members, future leaders, and Indigenous schoolchildren attended a number of the openings across the extensive tour, with a professional development program at two venues (Gary Proctor, personal communication, September 2013). The tour began at the Shanghai Art Museum and broke the attendance record, with 85,000 visitors in three weeks, followed by exhibitions in Nanjing, Beijing, Hangzhou, Xi’An, Dong Guan, and Wuhan. A comprehensive bilingual catalog, dedicated Chinese school program, and educational study kits associated with the exhibition ensured local engagement with schoolchildren as the show toured regionally, and the exhibition was extended, by invitation, to a further eight galleries across the western regions of China in 2013, including Harbin, Kunming, and Inner Mongolia. This is unprecedented recognition of an Australian Indigenous exhibition in the greater Asia-­Pacific. It has been rivaled, perhaps, only by Utopia: The Genius of Emily Kngwarreye in 2008, which brought to Tokyo and Osaka the largest single collection by an individual Aboriginal artist for the first time (Ronin Films 2009). The very fact of this internationalism (arguably, indicative of greater interest in Aboriginal art than has been seen in Australia itself, over the past two decades) raises pointed questions. What might the translation of Ngaanyatjarra into a language other than English enable—beyond the confines of a national language by whose very tongue and deed, as it were, Aboriginal people have been dispossessed, misrepresented, silenced? What might the specific traditions of writing Chinese vernacular, a highly aestheticized form of visual pictograms, bring to an appreciation of Ngaanyatjarra forms of inscription, writing, art? What might this mean for vernacular languages and minoritarian traditions of China, for Ngaanyatjarra, and, in turn, for the Australian nation-­state itself? For one Aboriginal community in remote Western Australia, with a population of less than 750 people, to have achieved this degree of global recognition (commended by Australia’s then prime minister, Julia Gillard, and the Western 212 | Chapter Nine

Australian premier both) is no small feat. It is comparable to—if in crucial ways radically divergent from—the original achievement by the artists of Papunya. Curatorial practice has never been secondary to the greater historical ambition of the Warburton Arts Project.14 Greetings from Warburton in 2008 (which I returned to three times over the course of the week—I could not quite believe all it achieved) presented videos of everyday life, re-­creating, as film uniquely does, the feel of community life (not just what it looks like); what Laura Marks (2000, xii) calls the palpably “impressionable and conductive” materiality of intercultural cinema. A stunning film of Brechtian minimalism, shot in black and white, and grainy like television, of young Ngaanyatjarra visiting, by stealth, by night, the prime minister’s Lodge in Canberra: a rite of passage sojourn, it seemed, to our Whitefella-­way “sacred” site, and such a paucity! Gate locked, shut out, and shut off; nothing to be seen, as if demonstrating the truth of what the Australian nation-­state, ultimately, offers Ngaanyatjarra youth—nothing much at all. Works on paper in words, funny, clever, English and Ngaanyatjarra both. Works of words on canvas, and acrylic Jukurrpa paintings from the larger Warburton Collection. Digital and landscape photographs collapsed real, virtual, and Ancestral temporal and spatial connections. Portraits of sexy girls and deadly boys instigated a copresencing of identity formation through relatedness, where relational identification produced individuation (not individualism).15 That these works were exhibited together refutes what remains the dominant trend of Western Desert Aboriginal art exhibition—global market tendencies that privilege yet high Jukurrpa works of acrylic painting over other art; traditionalism and authenticity over innovation and hybridity. Here, there is no sense of a “dying sunset” model of Aboriginal art but, instead, the dynamism and excitement of experimentation and the irrefutability of lifeworlds taking shape through the simultaneity of tradition and the new; a palpable and vibrant intergenerational and intercultural commitment to Ngaanyatjarra language and culture today. Tu Di Shen Ti—Our Land Our Body extends these possibilities further yet, instigating what Proctor (2012b) calls a “fourth wall” in experimental exhibition space—from the thousands of snapshot portraits produced by Warnarn Campus / Ngaanyatjarra schoolchildren, the community and country evocations of the immersive sound environment, the narrative text and genealogies of Ngaanyatjarra written directly on the gallery walls themselves, to the unstretched canThe Warburton Arts Project | 213

Fig. 9.5. Elizabeth Holland, Wati Kutjarra at Talitjarra, 1992. 1,870 × 1,810 mm, acrylic polymer on 15–18 oz. cotton canvas. Warburton Collection. © the artist and Warburton Arts Project.

vas with rough-­hewn edges, which are not always (intentionally) hung straight or at eye level, to the text-­panel boards that feature a mixture of life memory and everyday life stories, written by the artists (not, notably, provenance-­based Dreaming stories, written by outsiders). This thick mix of exhibition elements belies the prevailing minimalist white cube approach to curating Aboriginal art that has predominated in Australian national galleries and museums over the last two decades (Fisher and MacDonald 2014), coinciding with a movement by Aboriginal artists themselves to provide minimalist information or an absenting of extensive Dreaming-­based provenance with their works (as discussed in 214 | Chapter Nine

Fig. 9.6. Exhibition installation shot: Tu Di Shen Ti—Our Land Our Body, Tianjin Art Museum, China, 2013. Photo by G. Proctor, Warburton Arts Project.

Fig. 9.7. Exhibition installation shot: Tu Di Shen Ti—Our Land Our Body, Tianjin Art Museum, China, 2013. Photo by G. Proctor, Warburton Arts Project.

chapters 2 and 4). Equally, this exhibition belies the more ethnographic or taxonomic displays of Indigenous art that characterized the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; criticized for diminishing the artworks’ aesthetic power through its strictly informative role (Fisher and MacDonald 2014). In what can only be described as a radical move of curatorial inclusivity (combined with Ngaanyatjarra inventive harnessing of, as well as perhaps irreverence for, the anthropological mode of genealogical kinship representation), Tu Di Shen Ti recruited young Chinese curatorial assistants (volunteers from local art schools or undergraduates) as the exhibition toured across southern and western China, to write out, copy, genealogies of kinship of the artists and community members, utilizing kinship symbols and charts derived by Ngaanyatjarra, originally written for purposes of the exhibition. The young assistants wrote directly on the walls themselves with pen, to (re-­)create real-­world Ngaanyatjarra Ancestral descent-­based relationships between the paintings, photographs, and storyboards. Tu Di Shen Ti thus actively recruited Chinese to a radical political end; that is, the literal placing in the hands of others the responsibility for reproducing Ngaanyatjarra lifeworlds directly. Tu Di Shen Ti takes its place among leading international trends in exploring synesthetic perception—culturally specific experiences of embodied perception, where the politics of sensory perception becomes itself the object.16 Tu Di Shen Ti privileges sense-­based experience over the optical visuality that has predominated in Euro-­American scopic regimes of art practice and exhibition. It presents “un-­recordable memories of the senses” (pace Marks 2000) that appeal to nonvisual perception and embodied modes of encounter, in order to engender otherwise unknown, unrepresented, even disavowed versions of minoritarian Indigenous history, experience, and event.17 It does so because this history is not available in official historical accounts, nor in current media representations of the contemporary Aboriginal remote. It does so because the senses are radically required to appreciate Ngaanyatjarra aesthetics, taking shape as they do in multimodal and multisensorial interrelationships between voice, narrative, song, performance, and the haptic, in intimate relationships between hand and object, person and place. None of the curatorial strategies of Tu Di Shen Ti are arbitrary. This is a highly crafted exhibition, designed to engender a participatory-­inclusive encounter with Ngaanyatjarra poetics as it is lived today.

216 | Chapter Nine

EPILOGUE

(NOT) A “LIFESTYLE CHOICE” What we can’t do is endlessly subsidise lifestyle choices if those lifestyle choices are not conducive to the kind of full participation in Australian society that everyone should have. . . . In order to get kids to school and adults to work, you’ve got to have a school. If people choose to live miles away from where there’s a school, if people choose not to access the school of the air, if people choose to live where there’s no jobs, obviously, it’s very, very difficult to close the gap. Prime Minister Tony Abbott | on abc Radio, March 11, 2015

The targeting of so-­called remote Aboriginal Australia is intensifying. In March 2015, the prime minister of Australia, Tony Abbott, announced his support for the closure of approximately half of the 274 remote communities of the state of Western Australia, effectively evicting Aboriginal people from unbroken historical connection to traditional homelands where “they’ve lived for millennia,” as the Labor Indigenous Affairs spokesman Shayne Neumann put it, in response to the prime minister (Curtin and Norman 2015). The premier of Western Australia, Colin Barnett, claims that the costs of providing services to remote communities are simply too high, following the withdrawal of federal funding of services to rural and remote Australia and the turning of these costs and services over to state responsibility in 2014. (These same basic municipal services are guaranteed to all Australians, rural and remote, across the country, and include the provision of electricity, gas, water, health care, and education.) Barnett’s defense of his decision to close remote Aboriginal communities in Parliament in March 2015 did not center only on the high

cost of remote service provision. His portrait of the lack of “sustainability” of remote Aboriginal communities was supported by statistics on (purported) child sexual abuse, citing high “rates of gonorrhoea in Indigenous children 10–14” in comparison with non-­Indigenous children of the same age group in which there was (purportedly) not even a single case. “I want every boy and girl in this state to grow up to be healthy and to be safe. I ask you to join me in doing that,” the premier was quoted as saying (see Perpitch, Christian, and O’Connor 2015). In late March 2015, a federal government “Priority Investment” report was leaked that had in fact been prepared four years earlier, in 2010. This report provides an assessment of the 274 remote communities of Western Australia and divides all of them into three grades of viability. The lowest category, “C-­grade,” includes communities in which “sustainable development and opportunities for future growth are limited” (McCulloch 2015). On this list of C-­grade communities slated for closure are Tjukarla, Patjarr (west of Warburton), and Kunawarritji (also called Well 33)—homelands to Martu communities and peoples.1 Acclaimed artists associated with these lands include Rover Thomas (the first Indigenous artist to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale in 1990) and Nora Wompi and Bugai Whylouter, whose works are held in the National Museum of Australia’s permanent archive, Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route (chapter 8; see also McCulloch 2015). In this same high-­risk category of closure is Kiwirrkura, one of two key homeland bases to the Pintupi artists of Papunya Tula Artists Pty. Ltd., the first desert-­based Aboriginal community arts organization, which launched the Western Desert art movement from the remote location of Papunya (NT) in 1972.2 Kiwirrkura is one of many communities to thrive under previous federal and state policy supporting the outstation movement that enabled the reclaiming and resettlement of traditional homelands in the 1980s. That is, the communities under attack and threatened with closure are the very source of globally acclaimed artistic practice, the contemporary importance of which I have tracked throughout this book. And if I call out the names of just some of these communities, cite their vernacular Indigenous place-­ made, Ancestral nomenclature, it is to literally call out and conjure up the presence of these places and people materially, as the art in this book does itself; to signify and make matter and map, at once, places of living, vital communities

218 | Epilogue

of people in the present; people obligated to complex sentient everyday terms of attachment to place by inhabiting it. Real human subjects, thick lived places. The urgencies of the artistry in this book are palpable, ensnared as they are in life-­atrophying conditions as the slow attrition of the nter Intervention and the humanitarian imperialism of “close the gap” policies speed up once again to threaten even further capacities to sustain lived life across the Central and Western Desert. The artworks profiled here do not hark back to a utopian precontact past nor conjure a hopeful escape somewhere else. This is no naive, oppositional, unified field, reasserting a “remote” reality to what, in fact, these arts render far more complicated and contingent in their vital materialities. Concrete, entangled, frontier aesthetics taking shape in a structurally inequitable and volatile present; Aboriginal hands, eyes, ears, tongues give voice to more than one impasse of the present that would deny the existence of tradition and foreclose in advance on traditional futures. These arts (re)anchor people in place in practice-­based, sentient-­specific ways that generate a primacy of attachment in new iterations of tradition. The multiple and diverse reciprocities on offer here make potent and present lifeworlds in the terms they present themselves today.

What if we don’t know how the plants and animals and weather here in Australia speak, what if we can’t listen to the Kingdom of the Emu and Kangaroo? What if we become so ignorant we won’t be able to relate to our own plants and animals and weather anymore? How can I call myself Warlpiri if I can’t speak Warlpiri anymore or do Warlpiri ceremony? Wanta Steve Jampijinpa Patrick | “Pulya-­ranyi: Winds of Change”

(Not) a “ Lifestyle Choice ” | 219

NOTES INTRODUCTION 1. My modeling of experimental arts across this book is indebted to the artists, animators, and community members who participated in the national forums Same but Different: Experimentation and Innovation in Desert Arts I (2012) and II (2013), a partnership between myself and Dr. Lisa Stefanoff in association with Desart Inc., which brought together community art organizations and art sector and research colleagues across the Central and Western Desert in a new public platform, held at the Desert Knowledge Precinct (dkp) in Mbantua (Alice Springs), for exchange, partnership, and engagement. Select publications from Same but Different are available in a special section of Cultural Studies Reviews (see Biddle and Stefanoff 2015). 2. The phrase “remembering the future” is borrowed directly from Melinda Hinkson (2014). I borrow it here (as I do “remembering forward” in chapter 5) because it encapsulates the ways in which Indigenous aesthetics can remember or reveal tradition for the first time; a “future-­remembering” capacity I track through experimentation in all of the chapters that follow. 3. Western Desert art is also called Papunya Tula art, after the first Aboriginal-­directed community art collective, Papunya Tula Pty. Ltd., originally established in 1972 in Papunya, where the acrylic painting movement is said to have begun. 4. I use the term “avant-­garde” not to align Indigenous aesthetics with Eurocentric art history but rather to recruit the term to a radical materialist and practical, as well as new public, purpose (in the purposeful way that words can do very real “work in the world,” as Gluck and Tsing [2009] model). 5. My argument is indebted to Ryan Watson’s (2009) formulation of “art under occupation.” 6. Aboriginal people of the Central and Western Desert of Australia have won legal rights to their land through a serious of state and national laws since the mid-­1970s. In the Northern Territory, Western Australia, Arhem Land, South Australia, and Cape York, approximately one-­third of land is under some form of statutory land rights, or exclusive and nonexclusive native title, following successful land claims and native title determinations. There is considerable debate on how the nter Intervention intercedes

in now-­recognized native title and post-­Mabo land rights. See Altman (2010, 2015) and Altman and Hinkson (2012), as well as chapter 1 and the epilogue, for further discussion. 7. For further reading and resources on Milpirri, see Pawu-­Kurlpurlurnu, Holmes, and Box (2008); Tracks Dance Company (http://tracksdance.com.au); and the recently released Milpirri Winds of Change (Patrick and Carter 2014). 8. See Smith (2009, 2012) and McLean (2011, 2012) for the importance of the contemporaneity of Aboriginal art in reconceptualizing global art history, theory, and curatorial practice today. 9. My emphasis on affect is not intended as a neo-­essentialist generalizing of Indigenous aesthetics, as David Garneau (2013) warns—a warning that Irene Moreton-­ Roberton (2003) intimates (if differently) in her work. Rather, my intention is to focus attention, without reduction, on the agency of so-­called minor aesthetic capacities to generate new kinds of engaged encounter (see Deleuze and Guattari 1986; Sedgwick 2003; Probyn 2005; Bennett 2007, 2012; Berlant 2011; Ngai 2012). 10. I am indebted here to a number of frameworks: Djon Mundine’s (2014) insistence that “I am an archive,” David Garneau’s (personal communication, 2014) model of “curating people, not art,” and Brenda L. Croft’s (2010) figure of Aboriginal art as “Cultural Warriors”; Appadurai’s (1986) “social life of things”; Nicholas Thomas’s (2009) “promiscuity of objects”; Fred Myers’s (2002) “making of Aboriginal culture”; Faye Ginsburg’s (2002) Indigenous “screen memories”; Michelle Raheja’s (2010) “real in reelism”; and Marcia Langton’s (2003) double impasse of the overrepresentation of Aboriginal people and their invisibility. 11. See Biddle (2012), where I model this approach. 12. “Vital materiality” is a phrase from Jane Bennett’s (2010) Vibrant Matter. In borrowing this phrase, my intention is not to harness her greater critique of the Anthropocene or her posthumanist object-­oriented philosophy. The vital materiality that I elaborate throughout this book is based on an appreciation of the sovereignty of Indigenous aesthetics as Aboriginal art and artists define it; a sovereignty, as I understand it, that at once precedes, departs from, and arguably exceeds a strictly posthumanist approach (see Povinelli 2013). 13. For further discussion on the necessity of time in the aesthetic, see the role of attention in Bergson (1991) and intensity in Massumi (1995, 2002). 14. See Desart news page (http://desart.com.au/category/news/); and McFadden (2014).

ONE HUMANITARIAN IMPERIALISM 1. See Alison Anderson, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alison_Anderson (accessed March 2015). 2. Gordon Bennett passed away unexpectedly in 2014 (see Albert 2014). I would like to thank the estate of Gordon Bennett and Leanne Bennett for permission to reproduce his work. 222 | Notes

TWO TANGENTYERE ARTISTS This chapter is indebted to Tangentyere Artists Margaret Boko Nampitjinpa, Sally M. Mulda, Doris Thomas, Louise Daniels, and Rhonda Napanangka. My thanks to Liesl Rockchild (former arts coordinator) and Sia Cox (former arts facilitator), for important early discussions, and to Jo Byrne (current arts coordinator) and Sue O’Connor (assistant coordinator), for close readings of this chapter and image facilitation. 1. “Grog” (noun) and “grogging” (verb) are Aboriginal Kriol/English terms for alcohol and the activity of drinking. 2. In Alice Springs, rates of alcohol-­related deaths and violence are reportedly six times higher than elsewhere, and, since 1989, the average age of death for Aboriginal men in Alice Springs is estimated at forty-­five years, with 80 percent of these deaths related to alcohol (Krein 2011). Rates of youth suicide, a culturally unheard-­of phenomenon in remote Aboriginal societies prior to the 1960s, are markedly on the increase across communities of the Central and Western Desert, specifically, in the town camps of Alice Springs, Katherine, and Darwin; these rates are reportedly directly related to high-­level drug and alcohol use (see Taylor et al. 2013). 3. See Tangenyere Council (2008, 2012), Coughlan (1991), and Foster et al. (2005). 4. A survival strategy of course, all too familiar elsewhere and otherwise, undertaken as it is by numerous stateless nations and peoples today as the global reach of English dominance continues (see Pennycook [1994] 2013). 5. See Sansom (1980), Povinelli (1993, 2002), Merlan (1998), Myers (2004), and Croft (2015) for models of mobility, migration, and diaspora that do not deter so-­called traditional Indigenous knowledge, obligation, and responsibility. 6. The Hermannsburg school style of painting as an Arrernte-­based, Namitjira-­led experimental invention of tradition in the 1940s is well recognized (see Hardy, Megaw, and Megaw 1992; Rubuntja, Green, and Rowse 2002; and, more recently, Nicholls 2013, 135), if less well appreciated, less well researched, than the invention of Aboriginal acrylic painting in the 1970s by the men of Papunya (see the introduction to this volume, as well as Biddle and Stefanoff 2015). Watercolor painting in the desert today is thriving, undertaken almost exclusively by Arrernte artists. What is less well known in this history is that Arrernte paint “two ways”—both figurative watercolor and acrylic icon-­based Arrernte aesthetics, as Wenten Rubuntja’s public artworks demonstrate (see Strehlow [1947] 1968). Rubuntja was one of the most articulate advocates for Alice Springs town camps, as well as one of Alice Springs’ most important Arrernte artists. His civic artworks are part of the urban landscape at Yeperenye Shopping Centre and at the Araluen Arts and Entertainment Centre in Alice Springs. Tellingly, he called acrylic iconography “land rights paintings” (Rubuntja, Green, and Rowse 2002, 170), indicating no small appreciation of the vital role the acrylic painting movement has played in the formal and public recognition of Aboriginal land rights. Notes | 223

7. See, specifically, Big hART’s multimedia Namatjira project (http://www.namatjira .bighart.org). 8. Namatjira’s landscapes were, specifically, of his own countries of Western Arrernte extending to Mbantua (Alice Springs) and Yeperenye (the MacDonald ranges) and what became, arguably, the first town camp paintings of the then settlement of Akngwertnarre (Morris Soak), Namatjira’s own town camp homeland (Rubuntja, Green, and Rowse 2002). 9. Remembering Forward is the name of a book and international exhibition of Aboriginal art (see König, Evans, and Wolf 2010); I borrow the title only in my usage of this phrase. 10. See Holcombe (2004) for Arrnamdurnu (Mt. Leibeg) and Dussart (2004) for Yuendumu. 11. Tangentyere Council (the umbrella organization that represents and advocates on behalf of town camp residents of Alice Springs) begins its depiction of town camp history from the first colonial settlement of what became Alice Springs in 1872: from the dispossession of Arrernte, by white pastoralists, from their home countries of hunting, living, and water (specifically) and, in turn, places of high ceremonial significance of the greater Alice region. While Alice Springs town camps were recognized as early as the 1930s, and formal advocacy began in the 1960s, it was, notably, when the Arrernte artist Albert Namatjira applied for, and was denied, the right to purchase his traditional country of Morris Soak in 1963 that national attention turned to Alice Springs town camps for the first time (“About Tangentyere Council,” accessed August 2015, http://www.tangentyere .org.au/about/). 12. The history of Papunya Tula Artists specifically has, of course, been extremely well documented in the literature (Bardon 1979; Johnson 1996, 2000, 2007, 2008; Myers 2002; Bardon and Bardon 2004; Genocchio 2008; Benjamin 2009; Carter 2009). However, see Acker, Stefanoff, and Woodhead (2013) on the notable lack of research on remote community-­based art centers (excluding Papunya) and the traditional art sector. 13. By 2014, every major remote Aboriginal community in the desert region had seen the establishment of a community art center (with the noted exceptions of Utopia and Docker River). Desart currently lists thirty-­nine registered remote art centers across the Central and Western Desert, including six in Alice Springs: the town camp art centers (under Tangentyere Council), Tangentyere Artists, and Yarrenyty Arltere Artists (see chapter 5), as well as Ngurratjuta Iltja Ntjarra / Many Hands Art and Mwerre Anthurre Artists (Bindi Inc.). Two further art centers have galleries and offices in Alice Springs: Tjanpi Desert Weavers (representing Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara, and Yankunytjatjara weavers; see chapter 4) and Papunya Tula Artists Pty. Ltd. (predominantly Luritja/Pintupi; originally at Papunya and Yayayi, now at Kintore and Kiwikurra). See the introduction and chapter 4 for further discussion of the history of art centers in the Central and Western Desert. 224 | Notes

14. Pennycook ([1994] 2013) makes this point explicitly, that place (as a socialized specificity) is crucial to the complex forms and varying imperatives of new English(es) taking shape globally today. 15. Field hockey is an Aboriginal-­identified, nationally recognized, competitive sport. Indigenous athletes have led Australia to become a force in world hockey today. Des Abbott won a bronze medal for Australia in the 2008 Olympics, and in 1996, Nova Peris-­ Kneebone was the first female, and the first Indigenous Northern Territorian, to win an Olympic gold medal, before becoming the first female Indigenous parliamentarian to be appointed by the Labor government in 2013. 16. The Institute for Aboriginal Development (iad) has pioneered the use of picture dictionary formats in vernacular language educational materials, from introductory storybooks and learner’s guides to detailed dictionaries of the major regional Indigenous languages: Alyawarr, Central Anmatyerr, Gamilaraay/Yuwaalaraay, Kaytetye, Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara, Warumungu, Eastern and Central Arrernte, Western Arrernte, and Warlpiri. Unlike in standard English dictionaries, not only are words translated into other words, but objects, actions, and phrases are visually depicted, alongside written literate words, in order to translate their visual and verbal counterparts. These images and words don’t strictly conform to or reproduce English typologies or categories (e.g., nouns versus verbs) but reflect and inflect for Indigenous knowledges, ways of speaking, and cultural expressions. 17. See Biddle (1997) and Myers (1986) for further discussion on the vital role of shame in Aboriginal societies.

THREE JUNE WALKUTJUKURR RICHARDS This chapter is indebted to Warakurna Artists and Tjanpi Desert Weavers Eunice Yunurupa Porter and Judith Inyika Chambers, who more than once generously discussed with me the early bilingual teachings of the uam missionaries at Warakurna and Warburton. John von Sturmer discussed extensively his involvement at Warburton as guest of the Warburton Arts Project. Albie Viegas, the past coordinator of Tjulyuru / Warburton Arts Project, and Gary Proctor, current coordinator for the Warburton Arts Project, provided important background information. An earlier form of this chapter appeared as “Art under Intervention: The Radical Ordinary of June Walkujukurr Richards,” Art Monthly, no. 227 (2010). Epigraph: June Walkutjukurr Richards quoted in Dufour (2008). 1. Yours, Mine and Ours: 50 Years of abc tv is now a permanent online exhibition; see http://www.abc.net.au/tv/yours/about.htm (accessed March 2015). 2. See Ngaanyatjarra Media, http://ngmedia.org.au (accessed March 2015); Indigenous Remote Communications Association, http://www.irca.net.au (accessed March 2015); and Further Resources, this volume. Notes | 225

3. See Rumsey (1993, 1994), Carty (2010), and further discussion in chapter 8 on how Aboriginal history is more spatial than temporal, remembered by place, not time.

FOUR RHONDA UNURUPA DICK This chapter is indebted to Tjala artists Rhonda Unurupa Dick and her grandmother, Mary Katatjuku Pan, as well as Skye O’Mara, art center coordinator for Tjala Arts. Epigraph: Frank Young quoted in Wilson-Anastasios (2013). 1. For Central and Western Desert photography see, for example, Warburton Youth Arts, http://warburtonyoutharts.blogspot.com.au; Big hART, Ngapartji Ngapartji, http:// www.ngapartji.org; IndigiTUBE, http://indigitube.com.au (all accessed March 2015); and Further Resources, this volume. 2. For Miyarrka Media, Gapuwiyak Calling: Phone-­Made Media from Arnhem Land, see http://miyarrkamedia.com/miyarrka-­in-­brisbane/; and for Big hART Yijala Yala Projects, including neomad, see http://yijalayala.bighart.org (accessed March 2015). 3. In 2012, the judges for the Desart Annual Aboriginal Arts Worker Awards were acclaimed filmmaker and cinematographer Warwick Thornton (director of the Academy Award–­nominated film Samson and Delilah) and Nici Cumpston (curator of Indigenous art at the Art Gallery of South Australia and visual artist), with curatorial mentorship provided by Brenda L. Croft (visual artist, former Indigenous curator for the National Gallery of Australia, founder of the Indigenous Trienalle, and currently senior research fellow at unsw Art and Design). In 2013, Desart expanded the initiative, appointing Carly Lane (curator of the Western Australian Indigenous Art Awards and Second Indigenous Art Trienalle) to mentor six young Indigenous arts workers to cocurate the exhibition, with Stephen Gilchrist (curator at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, and associate lecturer in art history at the University of Sydney) and the returning Brenda L. Croft as judges. 4. Notably, Hetti Perkins and Brenda L. Croft’s curation of The Australian Indigenous Art Commission for the Musée du Quai Branly in 2010, http://www.quaibranly.fr /uploads/media/Australian_Indigenous_Art_Commission.pdf. 5. According to Brenda L. Croft (personal communication, March 2014), Indigenous art center managers historically have included, among others, herself (Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-­operative, general manager, 1990–96), Hetti Perkins (Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-­operative, 1992–95), Djon Mundine (Bula’bula Arts, Ramingining), and Mary Bani (Gab Titui Cultural Centre, program manager, current). 6. See Wright (1980); Kendon (1988), for Warlpiri. For Anmatyerr, see Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education, “Iltyem-­Iltyem: Sign Languages in Central Australia,” accessed March 2015, http://iltyemiltyem.com/sign/.

226 | Notes

FIVE TJANPI DESERT WEAVERS An earlier form of this chapter appeared as “A Politics of Proximity: Tjanpi and Other Experimental Western Desert Art,” Studies in Material Thinking 8 (2012), http://www .materialthinking.org/papers/88. This chapter is indebted to Tjanpi Desert Weaver artists Nyurpaya Kaika-­Burton, Katatjuku Mary Pan, Iluwanti Ungutjuru Ken, Niningka Lewis, Eunice Yunurupa Porter, Judith Inyika Chambers, Yaritji Young, and Janet Forbes for teaching me about Tjanpi at Tjanpi Desert Weavers workshops and artist talks in Darwin, Adelaide, and Sydney (2011–14), and to the participation of Tjanpi Desert Weavers at Same but Different: Experimentation and Innovation in Desert Arts (Alice Springs, 2012; see Tjanpi Desert Weavers 2015). It is indebted to discussion with Michelle Young (managing director, Tjanpi Desert Weavers), Linda Rive (npy Women’s Council and Tjanpi Desert Weavers interpreter and translator), and Jo Foster (Tjanpi art and culture projects manager), who undertook close readings of this chapter as well as extensive image facilitation. 1. The importance of the banal is apparent in “minor affects” (see Sedgwick 2003; Probyn 2005; Berlant 2011; Ngai 2012), as well as in transitional, migratory, and practical aesthetics (Bennett 2012). In the Aboriginal context, the banal has had less attention, with the exception of the work of Musharbash (2004, 2007, 2013), who has targeted the (so-­called) nonmonumental everyday of Warlpiri lifeworlds from boredom to birthday parties to sleep. 2. This chapter utilizes, as appropriate, the preferred Ngaanyatjarra orthography Tjukurrpa and Pitjantjatjara orthography Tjukurpa (as opposed to Warlpiri orthography Jukurrpa), at the request of Tjanpi Desert Weavers. 3. See chapter 7 for further discussion on the rise of animation in contemporary remote experimental aesthetics. 4. Arguably, the way in which the Anangu word Tjanpi is pronounced in English— jumpy, as in the verb “to jump”—helps to heighten for English speakers the degree of animation associated with its referent: can’t stand still, jumping with life. Michelle Young (personal communication) points out, however, that this association is spurious: the result of bad English pronunciation only. 5. The Western Desert languages Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara, and Yankunytjatjara do not possess a term differentiating female-­specific ceremony (song, dance, design), as Warlpiri does in the term yawulyu (see further chapter 6), but a gender-­neutral inclusive term only, inma. This does not mean, however, that there is no female-­specific ceremony (song, dance, design), as Tjanpi inma indicates. 6. Richard Bell won the Telstra natsiaa in 2003 for his Scienta E Metaphysica (Bell’s Theorem), featuring the text “Aboriginal Art: It’s a White Thing” (Bell 2002). 7. Linda Rive (Tjanpi Desert Weavers 2012, 13) describes the active, movement-­based, repetitious rhythm of Tjanpi weaving as taking shape through verbs that originate in Notes | 227

hunting (wakani or spearing, stabbing, as in “to sew”); grinding (rungkarni, as in the kind of circular movement the hand undertakes to grind seeds on a grinding stone; the circular hurling of stones in hunting prey; or the circular repetition when wrapping and coiling a basket or sculpture today); and the following of footsteps, tracking prey or following someone’s teaching (wanara, coiling, following on, one stitch from the next). That is, Tjanpi practice, like the practice of hunting itself, captures, seizes, or realizes what (already) is. 8. See Hinkson (2014) and the introduction, note 5.

SIX WARNAYAKA ART This chapter appears as “Notes on the Hapticity of Colour,” in Diana Young, ed., Colour (London: Sean Kingston Publishers, forthcoming); republished with permission of the publisher. This chapter is indebted to Lily Nungarrayi Hargraves, Myra Nungarrayi Herbert, Rosie Napurrurla Tasman, Molly Napurrurla Tasman, Zina Nangala Kelly, and, especially, Lynette Napangardi Tasman. Wanta Steve Jampijinpa Patrick provided further translation and interpretation. Louisa Erglis, art center manager for Warnayaka Art and Cultural Aboriginal Corporation, provided assistance with images and text. 1. The first Central Desert sand painting undertaken off-­country for international exhibition, in which ochre-­infused warmulu (bush cotton plant) was pressed into a ground base of sand, creating, as it were, a ceremonial sand painting installation in situ for the gallery context, was by senior Lajamanu male artists for D’un autre continent: L’Australie, le rêve et le réel at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1983, followed by artists from Yuendumu in 1989 for Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Georges Pompidou. The most recent international sand painting, undertaken by Papunya male artists for the exhibition Icons of the Desert, was produced in 2009 at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University. 2. For notable exceptions, see Ryan (2004) for an exploration of color as a crucial factor in contemporary art development; Biddle (2007) for an explicit comparison between ochre and acrylic painting; and Benjamin (2009) for a historical analysis of form in early Papunya boards. 3. The range of possibilities explored was great: the majority of the board work was executed in exclusively ochre-­based media; acrylic paint was utilized in only two. Works on paper and canvas sometimes utilized one medium or the other exclusively, but many also mixed ochre and acrylic paint; two works on paper are in crayon. The Lajamanu Warlpiri Women’s Yawulyu collection is currently stored, at the request of the women, in perpetuity, for future use by the community. The Lajamanu Warlpiri Women’s Yawulyu Workshop was supported by the Australian Research Council (dp0558842, Feminist Theory Meets Indigenous Art). Subsequent research has been supported by an aiatsis 228 | Notes

grant in 2010 (Yawulyu as Intergenerational Art: A Pilot Study). Yurlpa-­based painting practices continue to develop at Lajamanu, including a series of ochre paintings developed for the 2012 Milpirri by Warnayaka Art and Cultural Aboriginal Organisation. 4. Kardirri is also a term (not arbitrarily) used to refer to White people. More commonly, however, the term Kardiya (White people, non-­Warlpiri) is used in opposition to the term Yapa (Warlpiri, Aboriginal, proper human beings), a primary distinction that permeates experience and bifurcates the everyday world, from types of food to illnesses to brands of car (see Biddle 2008). Neither of these terms should be confused with karlji or panarranypa (the white clay used solely for sorry [funerals] to adorn the body). 5. There is a fourth form of Warlpiri ochre that is not, in fact, referred to by women or by the term yurlpa—a black ochre that I don’t discuss here, or name, as it is strictly and solely men’s business.

SEVEN YARRENYTY ARLTERE ARTISTS This chapter is indebted to the artists of Yarrenyty Arltere, particularly Marlene Rubuntja and her sister, and to Rhonda Sharpe, Dulcie Sharpe, and Louise Robertson. Sophie Wallace, the art center coordinator for Yarrenyty Arltere, provided close reading of this chapter as well as invaluable advice and image facilitation. This chapter is further indebted to the artists, animators, and community members who participated in Same but Different: Experimentation and Innovation in Desert Arts I (2012) and II (2013), and to Dr. Lisa Stefanoff for her cocuration of the Same but Different platform and the screening program Desert Animations, a select suite of new experimental short works of cinema that toured nationally in 2013–14 (see unsw National Institute for Experimental Arts, “Screening: Desert Animations,” April 4, 2013). 1. As quoted in discussion with Sally Riley and Daniel Browning (Browning 2012). For the series, see Perkins, McKenzie, Blair, and Purcell (2012). 2. See Biddle (2015) for a comparative on this point with paw Media animation My Name Is Danny (2011). 3. See also Dylan Miner, “Artist Statement,” accessed August 2015, http://www.dylan miner.com/index.php?/bio/artists-­statement/. 4. The Museum of Contemporary Art String Theory (2013) exhibition screened Little Dingi inside a purpose-­built shanty that replicated a hut from the town camp anywhere depicted in the animation. That is, a real-­life hut was modeled on a fake animation hut modeled on real-­life town camp houses, thus literalizing the mimetic circuitry of animation to materialize real life and vice versa. In order to view the animation, the audience had to enter the hut, sit on milk crates (the ubiquitous chair of Aboriginal communities), and become housed by a cramped, uncomfortable, and dark interiority, in which, rather than a large screen or whole-­wall spectacular projection (an immersive installation-­type experience that the contemporary art museum is perhaps best known Notes | 229

for), there was simply a small, television-­like, wall-­mounted screen that made the audience peer and huddle up close, both to others and to the screen itself, in order to view the animation: an embodied viewing experience that reproduces television viewing in the so-­called crowded and impoverished housing environments that typify Aboriginal community life today.

EIGHT  YIWARRA KUJU: THE CANNING STOCK ROUTE An earlier form of this chapter appeared as “Making (Not Taking) History: Yiwarra Kuju The Canning Stock Route,” Art Monthly, August 2012. Carly Davenport (cofounder, project manager, and cocurator, Yiwarra Kuju) and Mollie Hewitt (curator and project manager, form) provided close and careful readings of this chapter, including providing further statistics and information on the greater project Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route. Project team members Tim Acker (cofounder and executive project support, Yiwarra Kuju), John Carty (cocurator, anthropologist, and historian), and Curtis Taylor (filmmaker) have all shared with me their perspectives on the project over the past two years. 1. form is “an independent, non-­profit cultural organisation established in 1968 that develops and advocates for excellence in creativity and artistic practice in Western Australia” (see “About Form,” accessed August 2015, http://www.form.net.au/our -­organisation/about-­form/). 2. John Carty (2010, 30–31) develops the insight that Western Desert memory and history take shape through place, not time, in which significant things happen (see also Rumsey 1993, 1994; and chapters 2, 3, and 4, this volume). 3. See Acker’s photographs in Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route (National Museum of Australia 2010, 9, 10 particularly, and 38). 4. See Mira, “Mira Canning Stock Route Project Archive,” 2013, http://mira.canning stockrouteproject.com/; and “About One Road & Mira Canning Stock Route Project Archive,” http://www.form.net.au/project/one-­road-­mira-­canning-­stock-­route-­project/. The commitment to public outreach and accessibility has been extended by the development of two apps for iOS and the web. For downloads, see iTunes, “One Road: Canning Stock Route Project,” October 5, 2013, https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/one-­road -­canning-­stock-­route/id708143626?ls=1&mt=8; and One Road: Canning Stock Route Project, http://oneroad.canningstockrouteproject.com/.

NINE THE WARBURTON ARTS PROJECT This chapter appears as “Provocations from the Margins: The Production and Curation of the Warburton Arts Project,” in Tu Di Shen Ti—Our Land Our Body (Warburton, WA: Warburton Arts Press, 2013); republished with permission of the publisher. I would

230 | Notes

like to thank the artists of Warburton for the opportunity to research and write about the Warburton Arts Project, and Gary Proctor (director, Warburton Arts Project) for close reading and image facilitation. 1. See Desart, “Member Art Centres,” accessed August 12, 2015, http://desart.com.au /artcentres/. 2. See Maurice Jupurrula Luther (1983) for a rationale as to why Lajamanu Warlpiri did not want, and should not want, to take up acrylic painting (see Biddle 2002, 2007, 2012; Nicholls 2011). 3. For the Yirrkala Bark Petition, see Buku-­Larrngay Mulka Yirrkala, “About Yirrkala,” accessed January 2013, http://www.yirrkala.com/theartcentre/about. 4. See Warlukurlangu Artists of Yuendumu, “Men’s Museum,” accessed August 2015, http://www.warlu.com/about/?mensmuseum, and Desart Inc., “Yuendumu Men’s Museum Re-­opening Sunday 6 September 2015,” accessed August 2015, http://desart.com .au/yuendumu-­mens-­museum-­re-­opening-­sunday-­6-­september-­2015/. 5. Elizabeth Holland’s (1992) Wati Kutjarra at Talitjarra (which I’ve not seen in the original)—fleshlike folds of country, zigzag coursing, snake-­like slippery figures, fast moving, depth to surface and back—seems more alive on my screen from the website than it is in the catalog; compare Warburton Arts, http://www.warburtonarts.com /english/index.html, with the hardcopy catalog, Tu Di Shen Ti (Warburton Arts Project 2013, 88). 6. For further discussion, see Biddle and Stefanoff (2015). 7. Faye Ginsburg (personal communication, 2011). “The Absent Whitefella” is the working title of the last chapter in her forthcoming Mediating Culture: Indigenous Identity in a Digital Age. 8. There are important historical precedents for, and exceptions to, the history painting versus dot and circle dichotomy: specifically, the Hermannsburg school of Arrernte watercolor landscape paintings. See chapter 2; Ngurratjuta Iltja Ntjarra / Many Hands Art Centre, http://ngurart.com.au/; and Hermannsburg Potters, http://hermannsburg potters.com.au (accessed March 2015). 9. Distinctions between the so-­called past and the present, sacred and secular histories, are demonstrated as continuous, contagious, complicated in any number of these paintings—part of what makes their historicism crucial. For example, Steward Davies and Tjingapa Davies’s Early Days Mission Time (2001) is in fact a so-­called history painting in the classical tradition of iconographic dot and circle; Dorothy Ward’s What the Missionaries Brought (2001) combines both figurative and Jukurrpa elements. 10. David Brooks has, however, mapped major Ngaanyatjarra Dreaming sites; see David Brooks, “Map of Some Major Dreaming Tracks in the Ngaanyatjarra Lands,” Warburton Arts, accessed October 2014, http://www.warburtonarts.com/english/visitors .html.

Notes | 231

11. This phrase is a reworking of the words of YouTube artist and blog-­activist Amanda Baggs (2007; in Ginsburg 2012b), regarding her own use of speech synthesized text generated from her pc. I’ve generalized what is Baggs’s (and, in turn, Ginsburg’s 2012b) pointed question regarding the silencing of subjects who fail to comply with normative expectations of dominant communication modalities. 12. Proctor (1990) also notes the absence of the words “art” and “aesthetics” in Western Desert languages. 13. Icons of the Desert, Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University, Fowler Museum, ucla, and Grey Art Gallery, nyu (2009); Ancestral Modern, Seattle Art Museum (2012); and Crossing Cultures, Hood Museum, Dartmouth College (2012). 14. Proctor (2011a) describes a cultural ethos that enables each and every person to express themselves as artists; that the reproduction of the world, and its contemporary expression, remains the shared responsibility of all Ngaanyatjarra. There are, in his model, no masterpieces or singular artists in the Ngaanyatjarra world, in this sense, and it is the mobilization of an ethos of this greater collective responsibility that underpins the radical curatorial imperative of Tu Di Shen Ti. 15. This differentiation was first made by Dr. John von Sturmer in his undergraduate lectures on Aboriginal culture, held in the Department of Sociology, unsw, in the late 1980s. 16. See Art Laboratory Berlin, Synaesthesia/2: Space and Perception, January 26– October 3, 2013, http://artlaboratory-­berlin.org/html/eng-­exh-­29.htm; and for cross-­ cultural aesthetic experimentation, see Howes (2004), Chris Salter and David Howes, Displace v. 2.0, 2012, http://chrissalter.com/projects/displace-­v-­2-­0/, and Salter (2015). 17. I draw here on Marks’s (2000) model of “intercultural cinema”; see also Biddle (2007, 2013).

EPILOGUE 1. See Martumili Artists, http://www.martumili.com.au (accessed August 2015). 2. McCulloch (2015) quotes Paul Sweeny, the manager of the Aboriginal-­owned Papunya Tula Artists Pty. Ltd., on what the sale of Aboriginal art has brought to the community of Kiwirrkura (and thus, by extension, what the Aboriginal art sector can return to remote communities in terms of nongovernment industry partnership): “Over the last five years, the company (Papunya Tula p/l) has put more than $1 million from the sales of art into new buildings at Kiwirrkura, including $800,000 for a new artist studio and $200,000 plus for a transportable house. We’ve just made a donation of $98,000 to the western deserts mobile dialysis unit, the Purple Truck, and are about to launch a Trust Fund in Melbourne with the Purple Truck, the Business Council of Australia and Australian Unity.”

232 | Notes

FURTHER RESOURCES CENTRAL AND WESTERN DESERT MEDIA ORGANIZATIONS (SELECT) caama (Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association) http://caama.com.au ictv (Indigenous Community Television) http://ictv.net.au IndigiTUBE http://indigitube.com.au irca (Indigenous Remote Communications Association) http://www.irca.net.au ng Media (Ngaanyatjarra Media) http://ngmedia.org.au paw Media (Pintubi Anmatjere Warlpiri Media and Communications) http://www.pawmedia.com.au py Media (Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Media) http://www.pymedia.org.au

REGIONAL AND REMOTE INDIGENOUS ART ORGANIZATIONS (SELECT) Ananguku Arts (Ananguku Arts and Culture Aboriginal Corporation) http://www.anangukuarts.com.au ankaaa (Association of Northern, Kimberley and Arnhem Aboriginal Artists) http://www.ankaaa.org.au Desart (Desart Incorporated) http://desart.com.au Tangentyere Council http://www.tangentyere.org.au umi Arts http://www.umiarts.com.au

COMMUNITY ART ORGANIZATIONS OF THE CENTRAL AND WESTERN DESERT (SELECT) Tangentyere Artists http://www.tangentyereartists.org.au Tjala Arts http://tjalaarts.com.au Tjanpi Desert Weavers http://www.tjanpi.com.au Warakurna Artists http://warakurnaartists.com.au Warburton Arts Project http://www.warburtonarts.com/english/index.html Warnayaka Art (Warnayaka Art and Cultural Aboriginal Corporation) http://www.warnayaka.com Yarrenyty Arltere Artists https://www.facebook.com/YAArtists

NATIONAL INDIGENOUS ART, MEDIA, AND CULTURE RESOURCES (SELECT) aiatsis (Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies) http://aiatsis.gov.au The Black Book http://www.theblackbook.com.au iad (Institute for Aboriginal Development, Aboriginal Corporation) http://iad.edu.au nitv (National Indigenous Television) http://www.nitv.org.au

234 | Further Resources

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INDEX abject, 138 Aboriginal Broadcasting Corporation (abc), 79–80, 89 Abu-Lughod, Lila, 89 Acker, Carly Davenport, 184 Acker, Tim, 190 Acker, Tim, and Jon Altman, 114, 128 affective intensification, 17, 96, 165 Agamben, Giorgio, 173 Alice Springs: Arrernte ownership of, 48; artists of, 62; Arts Centres in, 16, 41, 46, 68, 93, 116, 134, 159, 175, 224n13; Central Lands Council in, 44; community of, 43, 223n6; environment of, 52; events in, 239; gallery, 124; history, 43, 48, 223–24; Institute for Aboriginal Development in, 44; representation of, 18, 48–49, 52, 61; significance of, 54, 61; town camps, 1, 18, 23, 41, 43, 52, 70, 72, 164, 167, 175, 223–24. See also Tangentyere Artists: Tangentyere Council All the early days rockholes, 207–8, 210 Alyawarr, 41, 159, 225 Amata, 92, 124 Ananguku Arts, 165n16 Anangu Pitjantjatjara, 96–104, 118, 132; aesthetics of, 96, 103–4, 117, 132; languages of, 227n6 Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Land, 92

ancestor, ancestral, 9, 49, 98–101, 131–32, 149, 151, 168, 188, 201; imprintation, 98; mamu, 131, 137; mimi, 139 Anderson, Alison, 26, 203 animation. See Antanette and Tom; digital aesthetics: animation Anmatyerr, Anmatjere, 19, 41, 112, 159, 226n6 Antanette and Tom, 159, 163–73; artists, 175; avant-garde realism, 169; class politics, 160; postmemory and, 165–66; scriptwriter Marlene Rubuntja, 175; sculptures, 166, 169, 171–75, 177; stopmotion/animation technique, 171, 173; story line, 164–65, 169, 171, 177 Anthropocene, 69, 222n12 Anwernkenhe Ayeye, 54 Apology, the, 25–26 archive, 36, 95, 162, 181, 184, 186, 189–95, 199, 201–2, 218, 222n10 archive fever, 136. See also Derrida, Jacques Arrernte, 19, 41, 47–48, 54–55, 112, 175, 223–25 art centres, 14–17, 41, 91, 133 Austin-Broos, Diane, 137 Australian Broadcasting Corporation (abc), 79–80, 217, 225n1 Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (aiatsis), 228n3

Baker, Nyukana, 118 Bardon, Geoffrey, 60, 95, 117 bare life aesthetics, 3, 173 Barthes, Roland, 8, 28, 30 baskets: aesthetics of, 118; basket-weaving movement, 127; found materials, 113; market value, 114; nontraditional, 113; process of making, 227n7; television reference, 110; as women’s handicraft, 109. See also Tjanpi Desert Weavers Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education (biite, Batchelor College), 128, 159 Bell, Richard, 130, 227n6 Bennett, Gordon, 33, 222n2 Bennett, Jill, 162, 165 Benson, Kanytjupayi, 111, 132 Berlant, Lauren, 3, 21–22 Bhabha, Homi, 81 Big hART, 93, 224n7, 226n2 bilingual education, 27, 33, 64, 83, 206 biliteracy, 18, 46, 49, 66, 77–78, 96, 102 biliterary aesthetics, 77. See also chapters 2–4 blocks of affect, 22 Bollas, Christopher, 12 Boko, Margaret Nampitjinpa, 58, 62–70 bowl for carrying, 109, 136, 144. See also coolamon Breaking our backs, 83–85. See also Richards, June Walkutjukurr Brennan, Teresa, 21 Buku-Larrngay Mulka Art Centre, 16, 202 burden of representation, 75, 155 caama (Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association), 223 Canning, Alfred, 182, 187–88 Canning Stock Route. See Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route 258 | Index

Cardoso, Maria Fernanda, 120 Carpetbagger, 82–83. See also Richards, June Walkutjukurr carpetbaggers, 82–83 Carter, Paul, 95. See also techne Carty, John, 56, 230n2 Casey, Edward, 50, 134 Chambers, Judith Inyika, 131 Chomsky, Noam, 22 cicatrice, 98, 150–51. See also Jukurrpa; kuruwarri Clouston, Alison, 120, 128 color, 55, 66, 74, 85–87, 147, 149, 151, 158, 169, 210, 228n2 communilect, 45–47, 53, 102, 164 coolamon (parraja), 60, 68, 144 counterhistory, 132, 162, 165, 188 Croft, Brenda L., 2, 92, 222n10, 223n5, 226nn3–5 culture-making, 50, 162. See also Myers, Fred Daniels, Louise, 52 Danta, Susan, 164, 166, 171 Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair (daaf), 15, 112, 134 Davies, Pulpurru, 201 Davies, Tjingapa, 207, 231n9 Deacon, Destiny, 60, 138 Deadly: In-Between Heaven and Hell, 121 Deger, Jennifer, 103, 116 Deleuze, Gilles, 66, 97, 155 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, 11, 22, 83, 162, 201 Demos, T. J., 3, 162 Derrida, Jacques, 136, 210 Desart Annual Aboriginal Arts Worker Awards, 226n3 Desart Art Workers Photography Prize, 91–92, 96

Desart Inc., 14, 199, 221n1, 224n13 Desert Mob: exhibition, 68, 70; symposium, 199 Dick, Rhonda Unurupa: accolades for, 91–92; digital portraiture by, 1; Deluzian reference to, 97; digital literacy of, 203; digital photography by, 91–92, 96–98, 100, 203; grandmother of, 91, 96, 100, 102–5, 148; indexical nature of art by, 98, 100, 104; Jukurrpa, 96–100, 102; text in art by, 96–97; Pitjantjatjara, 92, 96, 103–4 dictionary, 59, 78, 225n16 digital aesthetics, 96, 100, 103; animation, chapter 7, 93, 103, 132, 149, 229n4; editing software, 96–98, 100; photography. See also digital photography digital photography, 91, 96–98, 100, 103–4, 116, 132, 138; landscape, 1; portraiture, 92. See also screen literacy dOCUMENTA (13), 48 Dodson, Mick, 21 Dreaming. See Jukurrpa Dreaming Award, 91 “dumbing down,” 8, 56, 102, 185 D’un autre continent: L’Australie, le rêve et le réel, 228n1 Durkheim, Émile, 89, 206 Eickelkamp, Ute, 16, 26, 77, 153 Enwezor, Okwui, 62 ephemera, ephemeral, 132, 157–58, 193 Ernabella Arts, 16, 112, 128 Errington, Shelly, 137 Facebook, 94 Fanon, Frantz, 11 Finnane, Kieran, 70, 75 form, 194, 230n1

Foster, Jo, 120, 127, 137 Foucault, Michel, 188 Garneau, David, 222nn9–10 gfc (Global Financial Crisis), 52, 94 Ghost Citizens: Witnessing the Intervention, 70 Gilchrist, Stephen, 92, 100, 226n3 Gilroy, Paul, 60 Gimme, 85–86. See also Richards, June Walkutjukurr Ginsburg, Faye, 161–62, 205, 222n10, 231n7 Ginsburg, Faye, and Fred Myers, 6–7, 18 Greetings from Warburton, 211–13 grog, grogging, 43, 71, 75, 223n1 Hargraves, Lily Nungarrayi, 141, 145, 152, 157 Heartland, 91, 121 Hermannsburg School, 48–49, 167, 223n6, 231n8. See also Namatjira, Albert Hinkson, Melinda, 221n2 history painting, 78, 190, 201, 207, 231n8 Holland, Cyril, 204, 206, 211 Holland, Elizabeth, 197, 207, 208, 214, 231n5 Holland, Nora, 110 humanitarian imperialism, chapter 1, 17, 22–23, 219 iambic pentameter, 67 iconography, 36, 75, 140; Walbiri, 60; Western Desert aesthetics and, 9, 54, 117, 223n6 Icons of the Desert, 60, 66, 228n1 imperative to repeat, 87, 136, 158 inalienability, 7, 153. See also Myers, Fred increase ceremonies, 150 inma, 9, 64, 116, 124, 127, 198, 210, 227n5 Index | 259

Institute of Aboriginal Development (iad), 225n16 Intervention, the. See Northern Territory Emergency Response iPad, 93 Irrunytju, 128 Jackson, Nancy, 135 Jagamara (also Tjakamarra), Michael Nelson, 2, 35, 186 Jay Creek, 62 Jukurrpa, 1, 9, 10, 50, 61, 64; acrylic paintings and, 4, 52, 55–56, 99, 102, 122, 140–43, 152, 200, 213, 207, 231n9; animation and, 149, 165; communicating to non-Aboriginal people, 36, 57–58 (see also “dumbing down”); dangers of representing, 114, 168; dot-and-circle and, 207; lived experience of, 10–13, 50, 52, 61–62, 139; ochre and, 139–40, 146–50, 153; orthography of, 227n2; permission to represent, 102; photographs and, 96–100; representation of, 18, 52, 56, 61, 96–100, 102, 104, 114, 124, 156; significance of, 18, 36, 49–50, 114, 124, 207; watercolor and, 48; weaving and, 119, 121–25, 127, 136. See also Tjukurrpa/Tjukurpa; kuruwarri; yurlpa Julien, Isaac, and Kobena Mercer, 75 Kaika-Burton, Nyurpaya, 109, 122, 125– 26, 133, 136 Kardiya, 35, 57–58, 59, 200. See also kardirri; Whitefella kardirri, 150–51, 157, 229n4. See also Kardiya karntawarra, 150–51, 157 keeping places, 203 260 | Index

Ken, Ilawanti Ungkutjuru, 117, 122 kirda and kurndungurlu, 210 Kiwirrkura, 184, 218, 232n2 Kngwarreye, Emily Kame, 9, 36, 48, 56, 212 Kristeva, Julia, 138 Kulitja, Nyinku, 113, 133 Kunawarritji, 218 Kurlukuku (Diamond Dove), 146, 153 kuru alala Eyes Open (exhibition), 120, 130 kuruwarri, 9, 35, 49, 64, 74, 98, 149, 156, 158; dot-and-circle representations of, 53, 55; footprints and, 101; indexical nature of, 98; language in paintings and, 55, 63, 66; lived experience and, 49; ochre and, 151 Lajamanu, 140, 145, 150, 153, 198, 200, 228n3; biennial, 145; Lajamanu Warlpiri, 6, 18, 231n2. See also Milpirri Lajamanu Warlpiri Women’s Yawulyu collection, 228n3 Lajamanu Warlpiri Women’s Yawulyu Workshop, 153, 228n3 LaMarre, Thomas, 173 Langton, Marcia, 57, 134, 222n10 Larapinta Valley, 167–68, 175 Latour, Bruno, 11, 204 Lawford, Tom Putuparri, 181 Lea, Tess, 3 Lewis, Niningka, 109, 122, 125, 130, 132, 136 Lionis, Chrisoula, 80 Liirliirlpa/Ngunjungunju, 145, 150–51. See also chapter 6 Little Children Are Sacred, The, 23, 29, 31 Little Dingi, 161, 165–66, 172, 229n4 Luritja, 19, 41, 45, 62–63, 159, 224n13 Luther, Maurice Jupurrurla, 231n2

Magiciens de la Terre, 48 mamu. See ancestor, ancestral maparnijaku, 74, 144, 154, 157, 168 mara, 83, 85 Marks, Laura, 213 Martu: artists, 13, 19, 159, 184; country, 10, 218; history of, 45, 187–88; significance, 57; terms, 195 Martumili Artists, 159, 184, 232n1 Massumi, Brian, 28, 33, 155, 163 Mbantua. See Alice Springs McKenzie, Queenie, 85, 140 McLean, Ian, 128 Mercer, Kobena, 36. See also Julien, Isaac, and Kobena Mercer Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 85 metrolect, 45, 53 Michaels, Eric, 43, 80, 160 Mick, Josephine, 127 Mick, Paniny, 124, 126, 133 Milpirri, 6, 145, 222n7, 228n3 Miner, Dylan, 169 minoritarian, 83, 112, 114, 162, 201, 212, 216 Minyma Punu Kungkarangkalpa (Seven Sisters Tree Women), 116, 121, 125 missionaries, 16, 77, 88–89, 192, 207, 225, 231n9 Mission Time in Warburton, 207 Mitchell, W. J. T., 64 mobile technologies, 93, 112 Moffatt, Tracey, 92 Moreton-Roberton, Irene, 222n9 Morton, Tim, 69 Mulda, Sally M., 70–76 Mundine, Djon, 12, 70, 222n10, 226n5 Munn, Nancy, 60, 149, 154 Museum of Contemporary Art (mca), 109, 116, 121, 129, 172 Mutiitjulu, 128

Myers, Fred, 6–7, 18, 49–50, 94–95, 153 My Name Is Danny, 149, 165, 229n2. See also paw Media Namatjira, Albert, 48, 224n8, 224n11 Nampitjin, Eubena (Yupinya), 85, 187 Napanangka, Rhonda, 58–61 naplan (National Assessment Program—Literacy and Numeracy), 27–29, 32, 37 Nash, Mark, 162 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (natsiaa), 62, 91, 111, 131–32, 138, 174, 227n6 National Museum of Australia (nma), 124, 181, 194, 201, 218 Neale, Margo, 3 Nelson, Michael Jagamara. See Jagamara, Michael Nelson neoliberal, 3, 30, 153 New Idea, 87. See also Richards, June Walkutjukurr Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjara, and Yankunytjatjara (npy) homelands, 77, 112 Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (npy) Women’s Council, 92, 109, 225 Ngurlu, 146–47, 153. See also Kurlukuku ngurra (waltya, ampere), 52, 184, 188, 197 Nicholls, Christine, 60, 223n6 Northern Territory Emergency Response (nter): advertising campaign and, 28; artists under, 3, 17, 43, 81, 96, 219; art sector and, 94, 187; background to, 2–3, 21–23; impact of, 24–25, 50, 55, 70, 80; implementation, 24–33, 36, 46, 55; Kriol and, 46, 72; new policy, 221 Nyirripi History, 165. See also paw Media Index | 261

ochre, chapter 6 O’Connor, Sue, 36, 52, 71 offscreen, 162. See also Ginsburg, Faye One Road (interactive table), 192–94. See also Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route Orange Alien, 174, 176. See also Sharpe, Rhonda Paarpakani (Take Flight), 120, 122–24, 126 palka, 149, 151 Pan, Mary Katatjuku, 102, 109, 136 Papunya, 16, 36, 139, 221n4, 224nn12–13, 228n2 Papunya Tula Artists Pty. Ltd., 16, 50, 184, 218, 221n3, 224nn12–13, 232n2 Papunya Tula art movement, 16, 95, 112, 167, 213, 221n3, 223n6, 224n12. See also Western Desert Art Movement parraja. See coolamon Patjarr, 184, 218 Patrick, Kumanjayi Jampijipa, 186 Patrick, Myra Nungarrayi, 6, 141, 157 Patrick, Wanta Steve Jampijinpa, 5, 147, 149, 219. See also Pawu-Kurlpurlurnu, Wanta Jampijinpa paw Media (Pintubi Anmatjere Warlpiri Media and Communications), 79, 159, 165, 229n2. See also Warlpiri Media Association Pawu-Kurlpurlurnu, Wanta Jampijinpa, 1, 4. See also Patrick, Wanta Steve Jampijinpa Pei Pei, Kunbry, 118–19 Pennycook, Alistair, 45, 223n4, 225n14 Perkins, Hetti, 1–2, 13, 133, 199, 226nn4–5 Petyarre, Kathleen, 9, 36, 128 Pilkington, Doris Garimara, 188 Pintupi, 19, 32, 41, 57, 79, 168, 200, 218, 224n13 262 | Index

Pipalyatjara, 128 Policeman: Mother and Father Drunk, 70–72. See also Mulda, Sally M. Porter, Eunice Yunurupa, 78, 134–35 Povinelli, Elizabeth, 2, 223n5 prime ministers of Australia: Abbott, Tony (current), 217; Gillard, Julia (former), 212; Rudd, Kevin (former), 25–26 Proctor, Gary. See Warburton Arts Project Pukatja (Ernabella), 16, 112, 128 Punu, 124–25, 133 Punu-nguru (From the Trees), 124 Purich, Thisbe, 113–15, 127, 133–34 Rabbit Proof Fence, 188 Raft Art Gallery, 124 Rancière, Jacques, 10, 72, 210 Rapiyanya parparmanu, Tjanpinya parparmanu, 116 rdaka rdaka, 101 recycled and found art, 53, 113, 168–69, 205 Redfern Now, 161, 205 Richards, June Walkutjukurr, chapter 3, 95; abc and, 79–80; biliteracy aesthetics, 77–78, 80–88; color in paintings, 85–88; Tjulyuru Arts and, 77; witness paintings, 1 Right Way to Have a Kurri, 207, 209. See also Davies, Tjingapa Rive, Linda, 117, 120, 122, 126–27, 132, 136, 227n7 Robertson, Kumanjayi Jampijinpa, 35 Robertson, Louise, 35 Ronin Films, 212 Rose, Jacqueline, 172 Rothwell, Nicholas, 4, 78, 199 Rubuntja, Constance, 175

Rubuntja, Marlene, 160, 163, 166, 168, 173–74 Rubuntja, Sally, 173–74 Rubuntja, Wenten, 175, 223n6 Rumsey, Alan, 14, 226n3 Salon de Refuse, 62 Salter, Chris, 232n16 Same but Different: Experimentation and Innovation in Desert Arts, 122, 221n sand painting, 37, 140, 228n1. See also Magiciens de la Terre Sansom, Basil, 133 screen literacy, 94, 97–98, 103–4. See also digital aesthetics “screen memories,” 162, 222n10. See also Ginsburg, Faye Searles, Nalda, 117, 127, 205 Second Hand Shopping, 58–62 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 117, 156 self-determination, 24, 80 See how we stand, proud with our arms open!, 173. See also Rubuntja, Marlene; Rubuntja, Sally Sen, Ivan, 67, 161 Sharpe, Dulcie, 167 Sharpe, Rhonda, 170, 174–77 S. H. Ervin Gallery, 197 silence (in Aboriginal vernacular), 74 Simpson, Jane, Jo Caffery, and Patrick McConvell, 27, 32–33, 44–45, 211 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, 13 Sobchack, Vivien, 163 Solomon-Godeau, Abigail, 173 South Australian Museum, 91, 203 Spencer, Andrew Japaljarri, 161 Standard Average English (sae), 32–33, 37, 45, 58, 71–74, 83 Stanner, W. E. H., 69, 148 Stefanoff, Lisa, 4, 62, 94

Stewart, Kumanjayi Japaljarri, 35–36 “still life” aesthetics, 159, 172. See also Yarrenyty Arltere Artists Stop the Gap. See Northern Territory Emergency Response Story of Mingkiri the Mouse, The, 62–66. See also Boko, Margaret Nampitjinpa String Theory, 109, 116–17, 121, 136, 172, 229n4 Surprise, Wakartu Cory, 187 Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Institute, 120 Tangentyere Artists, chapter 2, 78, 95, 224; history of, 50–51; languages spoken by, 44; Tangentyere Council and, 50; town camp aesthetics, 52–53. See also Boko, Margaret Nampitjinpa; Mulda, Sally M.; Napanangka, Rhonda; Thomas, Doris Tasman, Lynette Napangardi, 141–42, 145, 150 Tasman, Molly Napurrurla, 15, 141, 144– 47, 150, 157 Tasman, Rosie Napurrurla, 15, 141, 143, 146, 148, 150, 153–54, 157 Taylor, Curtis, 10, 13, 192, 203 techne, 59, 95–103, 112, 158 text: in paintings, 55, 58–69, 72–74, 83–86, 104, 207–8, 210, 214; in photography. See also Dick, Rhonda Unurupa Thats Goanna, 55–58 They Are Drinking Beer at Bush, 72–76. See also Mulda, Sally M. They Came from Nowhere, 174. See also Sharpe, Rhonda Thomas, Doris, 55–58 Thomas, Nicholas, 222n10 Thomas, Rover, 140, 187, 218 Index | 263

Thornton, Warwick, 161, 226 Tjala Arts, 1, 91–92, 102, 226. See also chapter 4 Tjanpi Desert Weavers, chapter 5, 17, 156, 224, 226–27; affect and, 116; baskets, 111, 113, 118, 127, 131, 136; history, 110– 11; imported and recycled materials, 113; kuru alala Eyes Open and, 120; market value of works, 114; nonAboriginal collaboration, 120, 127–28, 130–31; Paarpakani (Take Flight), 120–24; String Theory, 109, 116–17, 121, 136, 172, 229n4; techniques, 113–15, 117–18; technology represented, 131– 30; traditional materials and, 116, 127, 134–36 Tjanpi Toyota, 67, 111, 132, 138 Tjillawarra Kirriyji Warra Warra, 211. See also Holland, Cyril Tjukarla, 218 Tjukurrpa/Tjukurpa, 114, 119, 121–25, 127, 136, 227n2. See also Jukurrpa Tjulpu and Tjitji, 68–70 Tjulyuru Art and Cultural Centre, 202 Tjungarrayi, Helicopter, 187 Tjungarrayi, Patrick Olodoodi (Alatuti), 188 Tjuntjunmarrarra Tjipila, 206, 211. See also Holland, Cyril Tomkins, Silvan, 21, 30, 134 Tu Di Shen Ti, 201, 203, 205, 211–16, 231n5, 232n14 uam Missionaries, 26, 77, 225 Utopia: The Genius of Emily Kngwarreye, 212 Venice Biennale, 48, 128, 218 Viegas, Albie, 207

264 | Index

“vital materiality,” 12, 61, 137, 147, 153, 158, 219, 222n12 von Sturmer, John, 31, 112, 125, 132, 205, 232n15 Wallace, Sophie, 166 Wanayowarra, 204, 211. See also Holland, Cyril Warburton Arts Project, chapter 9, 17, 77–78; online database, 203; Warburton Collection, 199–202, 211 Ward, Fred, 201 Warlpiri, 41, 112; art and, 57, 74, 112, 151, 153, 200, 211; culture, 1, 6, 18, 19, 35, 98, 136, 145, 148, 160, 193, 219, 227; language, 71, 147, 149, 161, 219; Men’s Museum, 203; women, 112, 142, 198 Warlpiri Media Association, 67, 79, 149. See also paw Media Warmun, 140 Warnayaka Art and Cultural Aboriginal Corporation, 145, 228n3. See also chapter 6 warungka, 57 Watkins, Philip, 93, 199 West, Christine, 207–8 West, Margie, 112, 114 Western Australian Indigenous Art Award, 77–78, 207, 226 Western Desert art movement, 9, 16, 49, 51, 82, 95–96, 139, 218. See also Papunya Tula art movement We went to the Mission and we used to paint differently, 87–89. See also Richards, June Walkutjukurr Whisper in My Mask, 128 Whitefella, 9, 18, 61, 81, 87, 132, 186, 190, 200, 205, 213. See also kardirri; Kardiya White Kids and Black Kids Jumping on

Cars, 66–68. See also Boko, Margaret Nampitjinpa Whylouter, Bugai, 183, 218 Winnicott, 68 “witness,” 62, 206 Wolfe, Patrick, 50 Woman with arms up because she is proud!, 173–74. See also Rubuntja, Marlene; Rubuntja, Sally Wompi, Nora, 183, 218 words in paintings. See biliterary aesthetics yalyu-yalyu, 149 Yankunytjatjara, 41, 92, 227. See also Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjara, and Yankunytjatjara (npy) homelands Yapa, 35, 112, 229n4 Yarnangu Ngaanya: Our Land, Our Body, 197–98. See also Warburton Arts Project Yarrenyty Arltere Artists, chapter 7; aesthetics, 156, 162, 169, 171; animations by, 93, 156, 160–66,

175; avant-garde realism and, 169; influences on, 48; imported Learning Centre, 175; materials, 114; mca, 172; sculptural figures, 166–71. See also Antanette and Tom yawulyu, 9, 64, 140–50, 153, 156–57, 198, 227n5, 228n3 Yawulyu (Lajamanu Warlpiri women’s exhibition and workshop), 144–46 yellow. See karntawarra yirninti, 49, 53 yirraru, 198 Yirrkala Bark Petition, 201, 231n3 Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route, chapter 8, 17; workshops, 184, 230 Young, Frank, 91 Young, Jane, 41, 44, 53 Yours, Mine and Ours (exhibition), 79, 225n1 Yuendumu, 14, 16, 35–36, 150, 160, 203, 224n10, 228n1, 231n4 yukurrukurru, 140, 144, 148, 150, 153 yurlpa, chapter 6. See also Liirliirlpa/ Ngunjungunju

Index | 265