An Opening by Stephanie Radok

Author:Stephanie Radok
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: book, AB, ART000000
ISBN: 9781743050439
Publisher: Wakefield Press
Published: 2012-06-15T04:00:00+00:00

AUGUST

a new language

Really, a new language needs to be developed, an energetic and tellingly descriptive way of explaining this new art scenario… a visual-emotional response; to engage the senses and the imagination and to counter the commonplace approach to art of this type with its overkill of didactic wall text.

Djon Mundine

In 1986 I hid two books from the National Gallery of Victoria bookshop under my coat and left the gallery with them. This was not something I usually did and my heart beat hard as I walked away but, though I had no money to buy them, I needed to have those books and I treasure them still. They are Mr Sandman Bring Me a Dream edited by Andrew Crocker and The Face of the Centre: Papunya Tula Paintings 1971–1984 edited by Annemarie Brody. The first was published in 1981, the second in 1985. Curiously each book has the same image on its cover, a painting called Tilpakan (1980) by Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula – the entire image is on The Face of the Centre and the central detail of it on Mr Sandman. The painting is about the Dreaming journey of a poisonous brown snake who painted his body when he arrived at Tilpakan, the waterhole where he lives. Both books are full of the energy, freshness, wonder and sense of discovery and possibility that attended the initial blossoming of contemporary Aboriginal art in Australia in the late twentieth century when it was a new story. It is a story that has since been told many times and will continue to be told and retold. It is a story that is historical yet personal to each person who tells it. It is a story with multiple perspectives and starting points. I don’t want to retell the story but to describe how it affected me, what it made me think and what a revelation it was. Though it is an overwhelming genre now, in the early 1980s contemporary Aboriginal art was just a glimmer on the horizon.

There is tremendous affection towards Aboriginal art and culture on the part of the countless people who think about it, talk about it or work with it. The artists are often charismatic characters, intense and powerful, with complex lives. The individual scholars, historians, anthropologists, curators, writers, art advisers and artists who are or have been involved with them are dedicated to them in a special way. Like anything involving love, Aboriginal art arouses great passion. There are many word-of-mouth apocryphal stories about the artists that circulate or that appear once and rarely again. Two examples took place at the National Gallery of Australia, one when Emily Kame Kngwarreye stopped in front of Blue Poles by Jackson Pollock, frowned, and on being asked what she thought, her response was that she was thinking about her favourite dog back at her camp who was unwell when she left. And upon seeing Mark Rothko’s Black, brown on maroon, Rover Thomas said: ‘Who’s that bugger who paints like me?’

Many

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