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Art over Anthropology
Paul Wood
Aboriginal Art by Howard Morphy, London: Phaidon Press, Art & Ideas series, London,
1998, 447 pp., 259 col. plates, 21 b. & w. illus., £14.95
A year ago I was sitting, sweating and hot in a European sort of way, on a beach of
dazzling white sand near the Aboriginal settlement of Yirrkala in North East Arnhem
land; in fact, I was sitting at the edge of my world. I held a proof copy of this book in my
hands, riffling through its extraordinary range of colour illustrations: a twenty-thousandyear-old rock engraving; a `colour polaroid bubble-jet print' from 1995 by Destiny
Deacon; a large, apparently abstract painting, over twenty feet wide and ten feet high in
acrylic on canvas, the collective work of thirty-four artists from the desert community of
Yuendumu; a stick-like carving called a Toa, with an oval hole at one end, which proves
to be a representation of an empty space, an abandoned place; Judy Watson's delicate,
almost monochrome etching of wavy lines, wobbly circles and organic-looking shapes
that turns out to be based on material from European ethnographic museums and is titled
our bones in your collections. As I looked through the pictures, I would offer occasional
comments to the book's author who sat beside me. Howard had been carrying the proof
copy of his book around Australia for ten days now, showing it to artists and curators,
colleagues and friends as our unlikely caravan of film producer, producer's assistant,
cameraman, sound recordist, academic consultant (him) and presenter (me) criss-crossed
the continent making a film about Aboriginal art. About a quarter of a mile away from us,
across the shining sand, dotted with lumpy, red volcanic rocks and fringed with dusty
green Casuarina trees, a tall man strode into the sea carrying two enormously long and
slender spears. For nearly an hour he alternately stood stock still and cast about in the
water, moving backwards and forwards, waist-deep sometimes, up to his chest at others,
apparently at one with the ocean. It could have been the dawn of time, and he a figure
from Genesis, his body and spears silhouetted against the blue, as it might be between
heaven and earth. But. But. Although the beauty and the mystery were real enough, these
terms of reference are not. They are the reflexes of a European culture given to
mythologize its others in clicheÂs of purity and timelessness. This was not Gondwanaland;
it was contemporary Australia. That was a four-wheel drive behind us full of cameras and
microphones, and Yirrkala is ten minutes down the road from a bauxite mine of such
gigantic proportions that its workings threaten the entire Gove Peninsular. More to the
point, we were not looking at a figure from Eternity. The messenger from the Dreamtime,
Howard informed me, was Mandawuy Yunupingu, a member of the leading Aboriginal
rock band Yothu Yindi, who had toured Europe and America, playing amongst other
venues, at the closing ceremony of the Atlanta Olympics. Now he had tired of the touring,
and returned to Yirrkala to live again in the traditional way. Aboriginal life is a laminate,
a process of negotiation along the edges of different worlds; and what goes for Aboriginal
life in general, goes for Aboriginal art in particular.
Some might think this familiarity disqualifies me from offering an objective account of
Howard Morphy's book. I, on the contrary, believe it proves my credentials, I used it. For
a month roving across Australia, not to mention the period of study and preparation
before going and the much longer period of assembling the film afterwards, it was a
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resource and a constant stimulus. I have met some of the Aboriginal artists whose work
Morphy discusses. I have by now seen a lot of Aboriginal art of all types in places ranging
from national galleries and museums of modern art in major cities to petrol stations in the
outback. I remain acutely aware, however, that I am scratching the surface of a subject
which is, in itself deeply strange and difficult, and which, considered in relation to what
we are used to calling art ± the Western canon ± which poses some of the most acute
theoretical problems in contemporary cultural debate. Morphy's book aspires to, and in
my opinion achieves, a cogent and comprehensive introduction to this vast field. There are
more specialized studies (such as Luke Taylor's account of the `x-ray' art of Western
Arnhem Land; Nigel Lendon's genealogy of the Wagilag Sisters story); and there are
general surveys (such as Wally Caruana's informative contribution to Thames and
Hudson's World of Art series).1 But if you want a theoretically aware, politically informed
introduction to the entire field of Aboriginal art, a work which combines the inclusive
overview with the incisive detail, it is hard to imagine Morphy's book being bettered.
What is `the field of Aboriginal art'? Cultural tourism for the jaded cosmopolitan?
Worthy ethnography for sentimentalists? Political correctness to shove in the face of
liberal guilt? Yes, maybe all of that. Go to Uluru for the first and see if you can see the
sunset past the white tablecloths and champagne glasses decanted from the Japanese and
American tour coaches. Go to Redfern in Sydney for the last, and what your step; listen to
a bear-like redneck in some roadhouse slagging off the drunken Abos, and before you
open your mouth, remember that he does not like Poms either. The closest I came to a
sense of what was at stake was in the Aboriginal hamlet of Dhurubutjpi. David Manman
Wirrpanda, the community leader, delivered a speech of welcome in which he spoke of
living in two worlds, the Yolngu world and the Balanda world. (`Balanda' means white, or
European. It is derived from `Holland', for the Dutch were the first Europeans to map this
northern coast, on their voyages to and from Batavia, a hundred years before Cook.) He
said that in the future, Yolngu and Balanda must work together `as a team'. This is
anything but the platitude it might seem at first. There are those who work with
Aboriginal people, and with Aboriginal art, who espouse a kind of extreme green-ism,
which regards Arnhem land as Eden and all things Western, including notions of progress
and socialism, as alibis for raping the world. David Manman's statement is not of that
order. The bore-hole, the airstrip, the solar panels and the telephone are not going away.
But on the other hand, from our ± Balanda ± point of view, what does it mean to work `as
a team' with a Yolngu perspective? `Art' is an historically contingent category, not a
transcendent universal. All societies produce some form of visual culture, but the concept
of `Art' as such is specific to Western societies of the past two hundred years. If we are
now using the concept to apply to the products of other cultures, and doing so moreover
in ways which are not commensurable with modernist conceptions of `primitive art', then
we have to address how the category is changing. It is not a matter of adding more
members to the class `art', and slapping ourselves on the back in honour of our liberal
inclusiveness, so much as a matter of thinking again what art is, and what it does, in
contemporary societies. At stake are questions of the degree of autonomy of art; the status
of the aesthetic in contemporary art; the political dimension of art; questions of art's
commodity status; the relation of the Western canon to the visual culture of other
societies.
Howard Morphy's book is mercifully free of the jargon and prejudice which can
afflict discussion of non-Western art (it is also self-conscious and reflexive about just such
categories). Morphy surveys the history of Aboriginal culture, from the remotest past to
the contemporary. One of his most important themes, in fact arguably his central one,
concerns the consequences of that culture's negotiations with other cultures it has
encountered throughout history ± Macassan, Japanese and, of course, European.
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Historically, Morphy sets contemporary Aboriginal art in relation to a tradition stretching
back for many thousands of years to paintings found on the walls of rock shelters in
Kakadu and elsewhere. He discusses the recently rediscovered nineteenth-century pictures
of William Barak and Tommy McRae. He offers an extensive discussion of the curious
and compelling Hermannsburg paintings which grew from the work of Albert Namatjira
in the 1930s, relating both Namatjira's fame and his subsequent tragedy to the
assimilationist politics of the period. And he offers a comprehensive and theoretically
informed survey of the entire range of contemporary Aboriginal art practice. This includes
unravelling the complex representational codes of bark painting from Arnhem Land. It
includes acrylic painting from the central and western deserts, encompassing substantial
discussions of prominent individuals such as Emily Kngwarreye and Rover Thomas, as
well as offering a nuanced history of the emergence of modern desert painting at Papunya
in the 1970s. There are informed discussions of the work of leading contemporary urban
artists, examples of which have been seen in exhibitions in Europe and America since the
late 1980s, including Trevor Nickolls, Judy Watson, Gordon Bennett, Tracy Moffat, and
Robert Campbell. Morphy also complements these extensive discussions of the variety of
Aboriginal art with an assessment of the role of art in Aboriginal society in general,
introducing crucial conceptions such as the Dreaming, and the status of art in Aboriginal
society as a form of knowledge. Morphy writes of Aboriginal art: `the debates that have
surrounded its public emergence in Australia, the breaking down of categories that
followed its movement from the [ethnographic] museums into the art galleries, have
followed it to Europe and America.' He concludes: `The category ``Aboriginal art''
challenges the traditional boundaries of the Western art world.' Different arts have
different local histories; it is time we moved beyond `a hierarchical structure that reflects
only the European perspective on world art'.
Paul Wood
The Open University
Note
1 Luke Taylor, Seeing the Inside ± Book Painting in
Western Arnhem Land, Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1996, and Wally Caruana, Aboriginal Art,
London: Thames and Hudson Ltd., 1993.
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