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Framing the messageNikos Papastergiadisaa Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, University of Manchester,

To cite this Article Papastergiadis, Nikos(1993) 'Framing the message', Third Text, 7: 24, 81 86To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/09528829308576439URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528829308576439

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Reviews

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Framing the MessageNikos Papastergiadis

'ARATJARA: Art of the First Australians' is thefirst comprehensive exhibition of Aboriginal art ina major international gallery. It is eurated by theartist Bernhard Ltithi. The project was conceivedeight years ago during a discussion with GaryFoley, who is a tireless campaigner for Aboriginalrights and culture. Yet, such a project could notsucceed without extensive research and intensivenegotiation. The history of Aboriginal art is rivenwith the scars of colonisation and genocide, andnow stands at the cross-roads of commercialisationand institutionalisation.

The first room of the Hayward Gallery displayeda series of ceremonial masks from the Torres StraitIslands, including one of the ritual masks of theBomai-Malu cult from Murray Island. The artistsare all unknown and date back to about the turnof the century. The making of such masks wasprohibited by the missionaries but the traditionwas not effaced, it was only deflected. After WorldWar II when the islanders participated in thedefense of Australia they constructed headdresseswhich were replicas of kittyhawk bombers. Incontrast to the masks, although continuous withtheir tradition, was a kinetic sculpture by KenThaiday called Whowmerr, the Frigate Bird, 1991.Today they are declared contemporary artworks;never again will they be dismissed as "examplesof the art of a race in a stage of intellectual infancyand which race will certainly die before attainingmanhood" or reduced to only possessing "acertain interest for ethnologists".1 On 3 June,1992, the Full Bench of the Australian High Courtmade a landmark decision: ".. .the Meriam peopleare entitled as against the whole world topossession, occupation, use and enjoyment of thelands of the Murray Islands."2

The Murray Islanders spent ten desperate yearsto secure for themselves the legal recognition oftheir customary law. Their victory was the firstadmission that the legal invention of terra nulliuswas invalid; it was the first time that the court did

not classify oral testimony as hearsay and thereforerecognised the recording of title and ownership ascomplementary to a system of succession; it wasthe first time the court recognised the existence ofa continuing and enduring system of land tenureand traditional law; the resulting judgement whichlegitimised 'common law native title' is the firstrecognition of Aboriginal land rights.

The complex historical question of how anexhibition of artworks is linked to a legal decisionon land rights is one that, at this stage, I want topose rhetorically. What I would like to consideris how are these artworks and this landmark legaldecision represented? Both the exhibition and thelegal case have far reaching implications in ourrethinking of the relationship between art, landand systems of knowledge. What sort offramework will suitably contain the histories andmeanings that are embedded in such objects andpractices?

Nonie Sharp's Stars of Tagai addresses theMurray Islander's case for political sovereignty ina variety of ways and through a complex route.The central theme is an examination of the survivaland the transformation of their cultural identity.She combines the skills of an anthropologist withan engaged cultural critic in order to reveal thepersistence of rules in the process of socialreciprocity and the formation of cosmologies. Heraccount proceeds by interweaving an excavationof historical documents concerning the differentstages of contestation for territorial and culturalsovereignty with the recording of detailed oralstories. This leads us to conclude that an intimateknowledge of the land and a precise awareness ofboundaries is inextricably linked to the moral,geographic and philosophical figurations that givemeaning in that community.

Sharp answers the claim that the indigenousculture was irretrievably destroyed by thecombined brutalities of colonialism, thedissemination of Christianity and the emergence

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of a capitalist economy, by showing that theindigenous categories of thought were nevertotally effaced but subtly woven into everysuccessive pattern of social organisation. Her workis a testament to the syncretic forces that linktraditional and modern knowledge systems.However, the record of the survival of indigenouscultural identity is not a straight narrative. Theinterweaving of voices and commentariesstructurally performs the thematic of reciprocity.Similarly, the approach to the question of identityand the pattern for the accumulation of knowledgeresembles the figure of the spiral which is also seenas the form that both strikes a balance betweenselection and retention and provides dynamism inan oral culture.

Such a transferral of forms and modes is notwithout its problems, for as you start to follow thisintegration of the political into everyday life andwitness the deep interconnection between theintuitive and the rational, or even accept theequivalences and affinities between differentreligious orders, this still has to be maintained infull consciousness of the asymmetry in theseexchanges and encounters. The fact that it is theAborigines who are having to prove theirinalienable right to the freehold of the land is initself an index of the violence of asymmetry. Sharpis consistently facing the limits of her owntheoretical and methodological resources. Hercommentaries and conclusions constantly strainunder the pressures of the vast and difficult issuesthat seethe in the stories that she has assembledin the text. The attempt to represent both theresilience of indigenous categories of thoughtwithin alien institutions and the persistent claimthat continuity includes change as an example ofdialectics is stretching this concept far beyond theconventions of most Marxist imaginings.

For all the difficulties that are produced by thisapproach, it nevertheless heightens our attentionto the multiple vectors and forces that connectprehistories, which are otherwise invisible, to thepresent context in which the claim for politicalsovereignty is made. This complexity is wellillustrated in the words of one of the key figuresin the legal case.

Plaintiff James Rice, for example, spoke about the sourcesof strength at places named after 'sacred ancestors'handed down to him. In telling me how the strength ofhis lubabat or totem was with him in court, he recountedthe sources of many of his nineteen names which beganwith that of his grandfather, includes names (and places)from his grandmother's side, and end with his father'sname.3

The exhibits in the Hayward Gallery presented uswith a panoply of images and objects. Fromceremonial masks to cibachromes, the vastness ofstyles and meaning was muted by a sedatespacing. The curator was faced with a dilemma:how to represent a body of work which spans awhole continent, includes over fifty languagegroups, problematises the divide betweentraditional and modern, and crosscuts the urbanand rural opposition?

The sheer formal diversity and specificity ofAboriginal art challenges the Western paradigmsof surface, perspective and iconography. Thesurfaces used by the artists in this exhibition variedfrom the photographic reproductions of immobileand delible works on rock, ground and body, tothe mobile and indelible masks, sculptures, bark,canvas and even car-door paintings. The form thatis most readily identified as Aboriginal are the dotpaintings from Papunya. However, what is moststriking in these paintings is the artists' cannysynthesis of form, perspective and knowledge.These paintings exemplify that profound intimacywith the historical energy that is embedded in theirrelationship to the land. Reading the landscapefrom a vertical vantage, rather than from thehorizontal, allowed for the flattening of thephysical dimensions and a heightening of themetaphysical. Looking at the land from above,facilitated the situating of desires and fears, andthe circulation of power from possession toabsorption to follow on from a more vertiginousand ongoing plane.

The delicate tissue of transferring sacred imageswhich were constructed for the initiated wasovercome in this exhibition by presenting workswhich were either constructed specifically for aglobal secular audience, or featured the commonpractice of painting over, layering, to such anextent that the sacred/secret symbol is suggestedonly to those who can read through the dot andrarrk painting. 'Rarrk' is the crosshatching patternwhich is the 'signature' of the moiety to which theartist belongs by patrilineal inheritance. Theproblems associated with translation betweencultures which do not have analogousphilosophical concepts or parallel cosmologicalhierarchies are immense. To its credit'ARATJARA' generously and sensitively decodedmany of the symbols and narrated the mythicalscenes depicted in many of the works. Thismythical and symbolic structure is not confined tothe works that would be considered 'traditional'but is also woven into the works of many of thecity based artists. Compare, for instance, Les

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Sally Morgan, Citizenship, 1987, Screenprint on paper, 58.6.x 36.4cm.Courtesy National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

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Gordon Bennett, 77ie Nine Ricochets (fall down black fella, jump up white fella), 1990, oil & acrylicon canvas board, 220 x 182cm.

Midikura's bark painting Petrol Sniffer fromArnhem Land to the canvas painting White Line,Black Death, 1988 by the Melbourne based LesGriggs. Both paintings can be seen as a mementomori about the threat of drugs to Aborigines.Despite the overtness of the message it does notstand there as a mere emblem but issimultaneously framed and driven by the forcefields of the rarrk and the dots. This 'decorative'pattern signifies energy.

Added to the complexities inherent in thedefinition of this 'body' are the contradictionsof the context in which it will be displayed. Prior

to 'ARATJARA' there has not been acomprehensive exhibition of Aboriginal art outsideof Australia. The experiments with 'primitivism'in early modernism bypassed Aboriginal art. Apartfrom a sporadic interest by British anthropologists,Western knowledge of Aboriginal art had to waitfor the circuitous and disparate paths of aboriginalactivists, community art programmes, corporateand institutional purchases. Such paths were firstestablished in the late '60s and early '70s.

'ARATJARA' symbolises one of the manypossible intersections of these paths. Europe hasnot been witness to this complex network of forays

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and encounters. In Europe there is a relativevacuum in the knowledge of Aboriginal art, yetthroughout the '80s the dominant art institutionswere constantly facing the challenge of art fromthe margin. 'ARATJARA' will inevitably be seenas figuring within a pre-existing debate onpostcolonialism, indigenism and the nebulousconcept of 'New Internationalism' that AchilleBonito Oliva used to describe the current shifts thathave framed the 1993 Venice Biennale. This mostrecent inclusion in the pantheon of 'others' ushersforth new questions. What happens when therepresentatives of the dominant institutions havemodified their language in order to signal an

appreciation of the politics of exclusion, and howdoes the cultural critic mobilise this awareness ofneglect into the politics of inclusion andrecognition?

Functionalist arguments about the distortions inWestern knowledge of the other, and didacticstrategies which seek to expose the discriminatorypractices and illuminate repressed works restrather uncomfortably on the virtues of toleranceand the rationalism of integration. There areunspoken assumptions within the discourse onaesthetics that such criteria speak volumes for thesociology of art but say little about the art insociety.

Mavis Holmes Petyarre, Unfitted (car door), 1990, acrylic paint on car door, 102 x 104cm. Courtesy William MoraGallery, Melbourne.

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The problematics of representation wereaddressed in this exhibition by categorising thework first in terms of geographical regions, andthen each space was ordered by a temporaldevelopment. This very specific and precise formof mapping was probably chosen to avoid thestereotypical identification of the work in terms ofa timeless spiritualism. Due regard was given tothe authorship and dating of works. Despite theelegant presentation and the careful spacing of theworks I felt an unease with this form ofpresentation. The crucial and complex patternsthat link traditional symbols with contemporarystructures of feeling and categories of thought werenot sufficiently established. I was left with theimpression that there were two distinct forms ofartistic practice within the category of Aboriginalart; those who live in the traditional communitiesand now 'tell' their stories with acrylic paint oncanvas, and also those who have been socialisedwithin the metropolis and use their art to resistacculturation and to retrieve a lost identity. Yetwhat is most apparent from the contemporaryurban based artists like Gordon Bennett and JudyWatson is that the dynamism of identity was notdiluted as it was mixed nor stunted as it wasurbanised. Bennett's painting The Nine Ricochets(Fall Down Black Fella Jump up White Fella), 1990,displays an array of complex strategies. Bennetttakes the key moment in Australian history,dispossession, and crosscuts it with reference tothe work of a contemporary Australian artist,Immants Tillers. The iconography is constructedthrough the combined lessons from critical theory,decontextualisation, and the connecting force ofdot painting. The most prominent layer of hispainting is the illusionary effect of geometry inbold blood red, a subtle but obtrusive gesture atdeconstructing the grid of appropriation in thedominant culture. This hybrid process of survivaland transformation was not well articulated in the'ARATJARA' exhibition.

The catalogue which accompanies the exhibitionand which has been edited by the curatorreproduced this tension. Bernhard Liithi'sintroduction and the following contribution byJean-Hubert Martin establish a clear lineage,maybe fraught with ambivalence, but neverthelessone which clearly maps out the contours of thecurator's consciousness raising. This is not the waythe Australian contributors see their position in theworld.

There are nineteen other essays in this catalogueand, again, while they are mostly arranged inregional categories, their form of address not only

criss-crosses both local and global concerns, butopens up a Pandora's box of issues anddevelopments it is an inventory of struggle;offering personal polemics within social narrativesof the appreciation of Aboriginal art; outlining themultiple connections, levers and bridges thatfacilitated the entry of 'traditional' artworks intothe international market; reproducing politicalstatements urging for the recognition of Aboriginalsovereignty; providing alternative accounts to theethnographic and demographic studies whichprojected the infantile predicament and forecastthe fatal destiny of the Aboriginal peoples;showcasing particular artist's careers; presentinga critical analysis of the iconography in Aboriginalart and its paradoxical relation to Western artthrough the concept of the other. (In passing Iwould like to register a caution against overloadingthe concept of the other for, by now, it has becomean alibi for non-engagement rather than thedesignation of the incommensurable. Theotherness of Aboriginal art is best articulated whenit is not categorised as somehow other.)

What ultimately transpires from such anexhibition is that the emergence of the 'other' isalways parasitic upon unspoken battles,unsuspecting precursors and curious catalysts. Ifind myself more interested in all the measuredsteps, stumbles and stutters in the encounterbetween Aboriginal and Western knowledge, thanI am convinced by the triumphalist declarationsabout putting Australia on the global map, incultural terms at least. The success of such anexhibition is primarily due to the potency ofparticular works. The attempt to order the worksregionally certainly demystifies as it validates andcontextualises the strong link between land andculture. However, this overall framework is paltryin the face of the juxtapositions and contrastswhich inspire the necessary imaginative leaps thatcan produce the finer meanings and clearerinsights into cultural difference.

ARATJARA: Art of the First Australians, HaywardGallery, London, July 23 October 10, 1993. Theexhibition originated in the Kunstammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf, and will travel to Denmark andMelbourne during 1994.

1 Quoted in Bernard Lthi (ed), ARATJARA: Art of the FirstAustralians, Kunstammlung, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf,1993, p 114.2 Quoted in Nonie Sharp, Stars of Tagai: The Torres Strait Islanders,Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 1993, p 235.3 Ibid, p 248.

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