Recent biennials in New Mexico and Hawaii, states with sizable native populations, have also pushed for a greater place for indigenous people in today’s art world. In some cases, debates over the presence of Native Americans in museums have come without warning; in 2017, at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, objections from Dakota people to Sam Durant’s public sculpture “Scaffold” led the artist to disclaim the work and approve its dismantlement.
How to move forward, and build a common artistic future on stolen land? As American curators and artists get serious about unwinding the colonial legacies embedded in our views of modern art, another country can offer a primer: Australia, where debates on the “contemporaneity” of indigenous art predate ours by decades.
Two shows in New York offer profoundly different views of art from indigenous Australia and establish the stakes for exhibiting work made very far from our white cubes. At Gagosian through July 3, the radiant show “Desert Painters of Australia: Works from the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia and the Collection of Steve Martin and Anne Stringfield” features 10 artists, mostly of the Pintupi people, whose understanding of time, land and value operates in productive tension with that of the global art world. And, through May 27, MoMA PS1 is presenting an ambitious exhibition by the Karrabing Film Collective, whose members, from the Belyuen community, dramatize the historical disinheritance of their land as well as the daily joys and humiliations of indigenous life.
The locations alone — one a commercial gallery in Manhattan and the other a museum founded as an alternative space in Queens — testify to their different approaches. But both challenge us to consider whether art can disrupt colonial legacies, and raise a question American institutions have been too slow to answer: Can we stop pigeonholing contemporary indigenous art as a critique or an exception to the settler “mainstream” and start appreciating it on its own terms?
Indigenous Australians — the word “indigenous” here encompasses both aboriginal Australians, who are descendants of the continent’s many different native peoples, as well as Torres Strait Islanders — make up about 3.3% of the country’s population of roughly 25 million. That’s nearly double the percentage of the Native American population in the United States. Some indigenous Australian artists have had international careers, notably photographer and video artist Tracey Moffatt.
The ones at Gagosian and PS1, however, did not attend art school and do not live in Australia’s big cities. They live in the sparsely populated hinterlands of the Northern Territory, and their participation in the art world is mediated through non-indigenous agents and collaborators. The paintings at Gagosian have passed through a chain of local advisers, urban dealers and foreign collectors; none here are for sale and most are lent by actor Steve Martin and Anne Stringfield, his wife. At PS1, American anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli, herself a member of Karrabing, provides theoretical ballast in exhaustive books and interviews.
The artists in “Desert Painters of Australia” include Emily Kame Kngwarreye (1910-1996) of the Anmatyerre community, who was perhaps the most accomplished painter of indigenous Australia; her works from the early ’90s depict her country as thick nets of red and pink lines. More recent paintings here, especially by artists of the Pintupi group, feature layered, canvas-filling circuits of solid and dotted lines that appear to shimmer and vibrate. One absorbing work in gray and canary yellow, by Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, consists of eye-straining, interlocking curlicues whose hairpin turns delineate a central form and an outer background.
Both Tjapaltjarri and his relative Yukultji Napangati, whose painting here overlays rivers of black lines with countless stuttering dots, were members of the “Pintupi Nine” — who had no contact with white society until 1984, and who have been inexactly referred to as Australia’s “last lost tribe.” When they moved to the (still remote) settlement of Kiwirrkurra, they began to paint at a community center, following the example of older, forcibly relocated Pintupi artists who won international attention for their acrylic paintings in the early 1970s.
Although indigenous Australia has an artistic tradition dating back 28,000 years, flat canvases were a new medium for these initial painters. They translated old traditions into new media, often utilizing legible symbols and ideograms. These were confident creations that thumpingly opposed the racist view that their creators were ignorant, savage or worse — a prejudice so ingrained that the Australian government forcibly took indigenous children from their parents as recently as 1970.
The artists at Gagosian are their successors, and take a different tack. Highly aware that these paintings circulate in white-dominated spaces, they do not depict ritual knowledge with legible forms but rather layer, abbreviate, distend and obfuscate these forms into patterns that are neither properly “abstract” nor exactly representational.
Tjapaltjarri draws on handed-down knowledge of the geographical, cultural and mystical features of his country, which exist in a timeless realm known as the Dreamtime (or “Tjukurrpa,” in Pintupi). His painting at Gagosian probably maps a salt lake in the desert and draws on a Dreamtime story of its creation. Yet he does not offer all that knowledge on canvas; it remains guarded, taught only to initiates. His decision to share it with the art world, to win both cultural respect and financial reward, comes with a related insistence on holding something back — what Caribbean philosopher Édouard Glissant called a “right to opacity.”
This is the most critical point about the art in “Desert Paintings of Australia.” While deeply rooted in a cultural heritage, these are utterly contemporary efforts by artists fully aware of their circulation in the global art market. Quite like the poker-faced art of Jasper Johns, these beautiful but reticent paintings take on cultural forms that change meaning and context as they circulate. Their different values — personal expressive value, shared cultural value and immediate financial value — jostle against one another, and each performs a balancing act between secrecy and disclosure.
To us, the shimmering ridges and switchbacks in the paintings of Tjapaltjarri or Napangati suggest landscapes and histories, and our pleasure in them derives in part from their inscrutability. To a Pintupi viewer, they function like Homeric epithets — jogging the memory, reiterating sacred knowledge. They do not “represent” the Dreaming, but recall it, even as they slip into financial and intercultural flows that span hemispheres. They reiterate culture for our sake, but first for theirs.
Art makes a substantial contribution to the economies of some small indigenous settlements; an oversupply of iffy paintings led to a boom and, in 2008, a bust. The market is riddled with fakes and tourist tat, and the Arts Law Center of Australia estimates that some 80 percent of “aboriginal” arts and crafts sold in shops is inauthentic. (Several paintings sold at Christie’s and Sotheby’s have also later turned out to be counterfeit.) The country’s more scrupulous dealers work with indigenous-run art centers that offer employment and cultural affirmation to populations that suffer from poverty, ill health, substance abuse and incarceration well above the Australian average.
At Gagosian that reality feels far away, but the contemporary social situation of indigenous Australians is on display at PS1, where the Karrabing Film Collective is presenting its impassioned movies for the first time in the United States. The group’s name — “karrabing” means “low tide” in Emmiyengal — does not refer to a country or tribe, but to a chosen ensemble of friends and neighbors who, since 2011, have blended fictional narratives, documentary disclosures and evocations of the Dreaming into sui generis films. “We just had to make movies,” Linda Yarrowin, a star of several Karrabing productions, has said.
They made their first shorts with crews of white filmmakers who came to Karrabing country. “When the Dogs Talked,” an astute early work on home and displacement, depicts the everyday challenges of indigenous life: A woman leaves an overcrowded house to find her sister, her truck breaks down, and her family risks losing everything.
Now artists in the collective use smartphones to improvise on the fly, and the films have become more dreamlike. “Wutharr (Saltwater Dreams),” their best film, uses psychedelic camera flares and dye shifts to recount a tale of a boat whose malfunctioning may be down to ancestral disapproval, Christian fate or just bad wiring.
Although she would deny it, the key member of Karrabing is Povinelli, an American billed as director on most of its films. She uses her money, and access to elite institutions, to facilitate Karrabing’s advances.
Karrabing’s films slice across distinctions of fine art, cinema and anthropology. In each film, the collective bounces between playing roles and playing themselves, and they’ve crafted a visual style that overcomes the supposed neutrality of ethnographic documentation. Still, the movies can feel less like a collective labor and more like the creative work of an American anthropologist working with evident love and care for the people who now call her a “sister,” but who cannot disclaim her primary role. Certainly the clanging shout-outs to “geontopower” (a post-Foucauldian theory of life) and “speculative realism” (a philosophical tendency briefly fashionable in the art world a few years back) in some shorter Karrabing films imply her authorship.
Both shows are excellent, yet the pricey paintings at Gagosian may offer a more radical challenge to how we think about indigenous lives and contemporary art. Through their surface resemblance to Western abstraction, they effect a thrilling reversal of the rules of our museums and markets, and map a new kind of cosmopolitanism that spans ages and continents. The paintings put our deepest assumptions about beauty and value under constructive pressure, and confirm that indigenous artists should never be satisfied in the role of the outlier or the special case. In Australia and in America, they should wrench the structures of the art world to serve their own cultural purposes.
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“Desert Painters of Australia: Works from the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia and the Collection of Steve Martin and Anne Stringfield”
Through July 3 at Gagosian, 976 Madison Ave., Manhattan; gagosian.com.
“Karrabing Film Collective”
Through May 27 at MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Ave., Queens; moma.org.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.