Madayin: Eight Decades of Australian Aboriginal Bark Paintings from Yirrkala Madayin: Eight Decades of Australian Aboriginal Bark Paintings from Yirrkala has recently ended its second instantiation at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center in Washington, DC. Madayin is a complex Yolngu term embedded in ritual practice; in the exhibit, ti is glossed as sacred or beautiful, and throughout, there is much more to the 60 works presented than meets the eye. The painters and their descendants, many of whom pro- vided essays and comments in the extraordinary bilingual catalog, insist repeatedly that they are providing the viewers with "only the surface." As one of the Yolngu co-curators (Wukun Wanambi) records, "to tell you the truth, we can only show you the surface [garrwar] in the exhibition, rather than going deeper and deeper into that ocean of knowledge" (Wanambiet al. 2022, 22).Thisinsistence on partial access is not simply a question of non-Yolngu viewers lacking knowledge, although that is certainly also understood to be the case. Even more than that, Wukun's comment makes clear what many of the contributors repeatedly stress: Yolngu understand knowledge itself as having extraordinary depth, its surface concealing and also intimating forms below that cannot be shared with outsiders. These concerns, including questions about the use of the madayin concept in a new context, are central for the Yolngu co-curators, who initiated the exhibition to both illustrate and protect their own epistemology, cosmology, and system of rights. The exhibition began serendipitously when Yolngu artist Djambawa Marawili visited the Kluge-Ruhe (K-R) Aboriginal Art Collection at the University of Virginia, as part of a 2015 Australia Council for the Arts artist residency. In the catalog, Marawili recalls the effects of seeing his work (his "patterns") in Virginia: I instructed Kade McDonald, Henry Skerritt and the staff of Kluge-Ruhe that we must curate an exhibition that showed the whole story of bark painting from northeast Arnhem Land, from the time of Donald Thomson to the present referring to bark paintings commissioned by Thomson in 1935 which Diambawa had recently seen. (Smith 2022, 11) Following those instructions, exhibition planning began at the Kluge-Ruhe, furthered by a 2017 visit of two more Yolngu elders. As K-R director Margo Smith remembers, once Wukun Wanambi agreed to be the lead curator, Yolngu "shaped the curatorial rationale, developed the exhibition checklist and wrote the exhibition didactics and catalog es- says" (Smith 2022, 14). Under the direction and influence of the Yolngu co-curators, the Universityof Melbourne agreed to allow several of the early barks from Donald Thomson's collecting in the 1930s to be taken overseas. They might have been reluctant to do so for conservation reasons, but Yolngu custodianship took priority. Taking great care of these ancestral belongings, Yolngu representatives arrived in Melbourne to see the barks before they were transported from university storage. Fortuitously, a journalist for The Australian (Aikman 2022) was there to observe as t h eYolngu representatives greeted these works, decorated in ritual gear to sing their manikay for the bark paintings to "make them safe to leave the country." This experiment in co-curation has produced a model of collaborative practice as well as intercultural trust, making a deep dive into the exhibition and its process extraordinarily rewarding for visual anthropologists. The deep dive is enabled by a fantastic and brilliantly illustrated catalog of the works with essays from the artists and other contributors. Significantly, and quite unusually for Indigenous Australia, the Yolngu curators insisted that the extensive Yolngu catalog essays be published in both English and Yolngu; this consensual translation of their remarkable contributions thus provides welcome insights for outsiders and an unprecedented legacy for Yolngu. Additionally, the cata- log includes masterful pieces of visual criticism and cultural analysis from long-time researchers at Yirrkala--Howard andFrances Morphy. Frances Morphy'sessayon "When Two Worlds Meet: 'Translation' and Its Dilemmas" (2022) is a must-read for its illumination and enumeration of the dilemmas-or necessary partiality--of moving oral texts and their assumed metaphorical and cosmological frameworks into a new context and language. Beyond these questions of process, the essential thing about the bark paintings in this show is their striking beauty. The works are drawn from eight decades of the technique, working with many aesthetic registers-including those drawn directly from body painting design, those combin- ing tightly controlled figurative and abstract combinations, and those of varying size and more experimental forms abstracted further from some of the more primary forms in this list. The installation of works by artists across generations and genders and from different clan groups reveals engaging synergies, resonances, and understandings of the sacred sto- ries and rituals on which the painting tradition draws. For me, one of the most powerful examples is the 2019 painting Milngiyawuy/The Milky Way, by Naminapu Maymuru-White. A senior female of the Mangalili clan, Naminapu paints the story that she learned from her father's brother, the famous Narritjin Maymuru, who also painted versions of the Milky Way story (an excellent example of his classic treatment of this subject from 1975 is also included in the show). The Milky Way is, in theMangalili clan's rendering, the destination of the souls of the dead, and this remains the case with Naminapu. However, the form of her painting, its bands of gray and black dots surrounding a sea of four-pointed white stars, focuses more on what thewall label describes as "the shimmering constellations of the Milky Way'' rather than specific dimensions of the story. Indeed, it seems that (some) Yolngunow empha- size the potential of the Milky Way story--now generalized as "stars” -to recognize the unity of peoples of the world, since we all live under that one sky. In this context, rather than emphasize the differentiating features of the right to paint the Milky Way, which belong in this case to the Mangalili clan, Naminapu's Painting approaches a vision of human unity, "all under the same stars," as fellow artist Gulumbu Yunupingu is reported in the wall text for her painting "Ganyu'/ Stars." Naminapu's interpretation thus emphasizes more the generic "transformation from earthly being to spiritual form" (Morphy et al. 2022: 170) and keeping its specific familial and local meanings under the radar. This moving up (and some- times down) in the structures of what Claude Lévi-Strauss ([1962] 1966) saw as a system of classification is exemplary of Yolngu creativity. An artist like Naminapu helps us recognize the power of stories to reach viewers. This bit of the surface offered is, indeed, an invitation to go deeper where and when we outsiders are allowed to do so. It appears that while the women paint the same "stories" as their male relatives, they may be doing so with fewer rights to restricted knowledge and correspondingly freer possibilities of representation (Skerritt 2018). But this is not first and foremost where Yolngu painters have asked us to look. For them and this exhibition, as their comments repeatedly insist, we should attend to the continuity between Naminapu's work and those of her forebears. Despite a departure from some previ- ous representational forms, thevisual powerof this Milky Way paintingreveals an inspiration that presumably underlies them al. And it is spectacular, a painting that I have been unable to get out of my mind. Crucially for this exhibition, indeedcentral to the vision and planning of the Yolngu co-curators, Yolngu insists in the catalog and othercommentary that the newer paintings are the same;they haverefusedany emphasis on a historical trajectory in the paintings over time. When I interviewed Henry Skerritt, the co-curator from the K-R, he told me how he had been sit- ting with the Yolngu curators and looking at the enormous set of possible works for inclusion in t h eshow, which were initially set out in historical order. As Wukun Wanambi pondered the photos, he immediately refused the historical sequence and began to reorder them in terms of what we learn in the exhi-bitionisgurrutu, the Yolngu system of relations (clan, kinship, moiety, Wangarr [Dreaming or song] connections).The paint-ings are thus groupedin terms of clan--patrilineal groups who have distinctive rights overparts of what are often geograph- ically extended travel stories of powerful ancestral figures. Further subdivisions are materialized through the overarching Yiritja and Dhuwa patrilineal moiety groups within which the clans are organized. These are the principal frameworks of the exhibition, both at the Katzen Arts Center in 2023 and at the Hood Museum at Dartmouth in 2022. One enters the exhibition from one of two points, each starting with a different moiety; following Yolngu expectations, neither moiety is identified as primary. The installation follows the moiety groups in estab- lishing connected panels of painting from distinct, identified clans, generally paintings that have connected storylines, for instance, portions ofthe stories of identified ancestral figures as they moved across the land or depicted different dimensions oftheir stories at one place (see Figure 2). Yolngu co-curators linking in this way should not be understood as emphasizing progression through time; rather, their linkage follows their inscription in the shared ancestral stories and places. One can also perceive conceptual abstraction in the works, as in Banduk Marika's Rirratjingu clan painting (2005) of Yalangbara, which is entirely geometrical in her emphasis on the fundamental rectilinear buildingblocks of Rirratingu minytji (sacred designs). Overall, the viewer must confront Yolngu insistence that we are seeing the continuity or the per- manence or their cosmology rather than the surface. Indeed, one might conclude that the work of this female painter (a world-recognized linocut artist, which might influence her geometric choices) hides as it reveals what knowledgeable Yolngu understands beneath the surface. Historical and anthropological mediation enters the ex- hibition in the more darkened room protected from sunlight where the most fragile works are exhibited, a material indica- tor of temporality, but impressively one here comes across a small installation with an enlarged photograph of the striking Yolngu statesman Wonggu Mununggurr as he is painting a medium-sized bark in 1935, one of the first in the collection and itself displayed in a glass case beneath the photo. The pho- tograph was taken by Donald Thomson, a brilliant photogra- pher and anthropologist who commissioned the work from Wonggu, one of Thomson's close interlocutors in his Arnhem Land engagement. This darkened room also contains projections of mov- ing image work filmed by a younger member of the Buku- Larrnggay Mulka Centre cooperative, the artist Ishmael Marika (a descendant of several brilliant bark painters) (Figure 3). This moving image work--showing the relationship of the visual work to song, land, and dance--is all part of one film but shown in the darker room on four different screens coordinated to alternate with different sequences of the same film. The imposing 11-foot image shows a Yolngu man dancing on a beach, which indicates the Yolngu's saltwater location, to the music of his clan songs. The image is deliberately bleached out in ways that make the performer's body and movements stand out with a kind of ephemeral presence. A Timeline at one entry point, apparently not preferred by the Yolngu co-curators who drew attention to continuity through time, introduces the sequence of key moments mark- ing the production of bark paintings, a history that allows the viewer to see the significance of different political imperatives as well as commissions and projects. These have influenced the size of paintings over time, toward the development of the large bark paintings as well as their famous 1962 panels used in pe- titioning the Australian government to oppose the intrusion of mining into Yolngu lands. The timeline also marks those used as part of the Saltwater Project (1987) "to document Yolngu ownership of the sea," undertaken in relationship to a land- mark court case to establish Yolngu ownership of fishing rights to the intertidal zone. Further, the sales of the 80 bark paint- ings produced for this project helped fund the further develop- ment of the Buku-Larrnggay cooperative that supports art and media production at Yirrkala. Madayin is a visual splendor, with more stunning works and instances of artistic invention than can be mentioned. It is equally impressive as an extraordinary model of curatorial collaboration and vision, sharing Yolngu knowledge so that Yolngu can be recognized and make reconciliation. Despite the disturbances and confinements of the COVID-19pandemic, this intervention has made its way into the world. The exhibit will move from the Katzen Arts Center to the University of Virginia and finally to the Asia Society Museum in New York City in 2024, where more people will have the opportunity to see this remarkable work, which will probably never again be shown in the United States.
