"Crossing the divide" By Nicolas Rothwell 

The Weekend Australian  03 APR 2004, Page B18

Critics are failing Aboriginal art, which needs no special pleading, writes Nicolas Rothwell. He argues for a more informed and honest appraisal

IT has been, as usual, a busy, sensation-filled season in the world of Aboriginal art, with new desert painting schools emerging and landmark public exhibitions going on view. By any standards, two openings were worthy of sustained attention in the national media: the first important display of Bidyadanga paintings, shown in Fremantle, and the debut exhibition of Oenpelli bark painter Don Namundja in Darwin.

But you would search in vain for consistent, enlightening art criticism that surveys such events. The reasons for this absence go right to the heart of the uneasy relationship between Aboriginal artists and their public.

The problems confronting the would-be critic of indigenous art are multiple. How to explore the visual creations of a totally different culture -- or, rather, several distinct cultures, whose traditions and belief systems are not merely foreign to mainstream Australians but also veiled in secrecy? How to assess the art from such a world, and present its stylistic grammar and its variations? Who first decides what counts as a successful, resolved piece? And who then makes the case for its power and appeal across the cultural divide?

As is well known, the Aboriginal art industry (the telling word increasingly used) is worth scores of millions of dollars a year, though most of that money is scooped up by retailers and middlemen. But for all the material value placed on the works of prominent traditional artists, for all the collection building and the classifying scholarship, we seem to feel no desire for an engaged response to Aboriginal painting -- there is little trace of conversation or exchange between artists and viewing audience, no sense that shared ideas or emotions are being set in play by new artworks. Critical discussion, in its true role as a dialogue that flows between the inquiring public and the creating artist, is simply not found in the domain of indigenous art.

This produces bizarre effects. Important works are admired rather than analysed, weighed in the intellect and assessed. Fresh trends or unfamiliar developments in the repertoire of established painters are scrutinised for their striking novelty and their potential investment value rather than for their depth. The reputations of newly discovered artists are built on vogue and have a tendency to be self-sustaining. These are the hallmarks of a speculative bubble.

What role, in this troubling environment, should criticism play? It surely is to guide the viewer, to argue with and contest new art, even as it appreciates, husbands, supports. Take three examples, from three different indigenous art provinces, where criticism has not fulfilled its clarifying function.

On April 9 last year, an exhibition of bark paintings from northeast Arnhem Land opened at Sydney's Annandale Galleries. It bore the title Buwayak, or Invisibility. This was the first public display of a new painting style; demanding, yet charged with beauty. It marked an intellectual and cultural development beyond the finely detailed barks produced by the region's artists during the previous decade. You might have to go back as far as an early 20th-century Picasso show for an opening as charged with visual innovation. To underscore the point, an elaborate catalogue was prepared. Collectors, not surprisingly, pounced. The episode, though, was largely ignored by critics; it was treated as just another turn in the passing parade.

Or consider this vignette from the south-western desert. Irrunytju Arts, a new arts centre based at Wingellina, was plunged into crisis and held a fundraising auction last August in Sydney. Many significant pieces were sold, including several taut, urgent canvases from much-admired traditional painters. Here was fresh work that cried out to be reviewed, interrogated, regarded as active: an immediate response to political upheavals in the little community.

Critical reactions treated the paintings as so many gleaming, charming desert jewels. And that's the part assigned to the desert in modern Australia. It's the mystery place, where dreams are spun and the spirit plumbs murky, primal, authentic depths. What comes back from this realm is valued on the basis of its rarity -- and on the unspoken assumption that the art will be the last of its kind.

If the absence of constructive criticism leaves these works of splendour to speak and fend for themselves in a strange world, it also encourages a kind of breathless, unreflective enthusiasm for paintings that are presented as profound, unmediated -- whatever's blown straight from the Dreamtime into our eyes.

The torrential output of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, most eagerly promoted and collected of Eastern Desert painters, is a spectacular example. It's hard for anyone with a modicum of visual acuity not to see most of this artist's later works for what they are: decorative, averagely painted daubs. The look, though, the all-too-recognisable brand, has been only a small component of their appeal. The Queensland Art Gallery, in its monumental 1998 Kngwarreye retrospective, made this point clear. Tucked amid the endless walls of blurry dots and scrapes was a tiny room containing ceremonial materials lying at the heart of the artist's traditional themes. Enter and understand. It was the Dreaming, then, not the painted surface, that made the work. It was certainly the Dreaming that dominated the exhibition's reviews. And here we're close to the problem that besets criticism of traditional Aboriginal art.

Critics who consider themselves to be friends, part of the enlightened crowd, will tend to view paintings as though from the artist's point of view; they will be prompted to explicate the coded meanings, to read a canvas, in almost anthropological fashion, rather than to judge its effect. Spiritual profundity will be assumed as a given and diligently hunted out. And what could count as a bad painting if the Dreaming's deep? This stance, though, is a species of cultural relativism taken to its logical conclusion. The true task of the critic, faced with the exalted material of traditional Aboriginal art, is to explore the margin between the two worlds; to investigate, to explain how, and how well, the painter succeeds in transmitting the shimmer of beauty and sacred power across the cultural divide.

But this is the fence Australian art criticism hasn't climbed over -- for intriguing reasons.

Debate, even discussion, is pretty well closed off. Cool, critical regard is replaced by an urgent ramp. It's politically ultra-incorrect, of course, for Western critics to be frankly dismissive of any indigenous art -- that would suggest they don't understand the indigenous wellsprings that nourish it.

Judge by formal or received aesthetic standards and you repeat the sins of colonialism. And a generous liking for Aboriginal paintings sends out a potent social message about the enthusiast: it's a reconciliation-minded attitude to adopt.

After all, who with disposable funds wouldn't want to buy a part of the Dreaming and be close, in some small way, to indigenous Australia? The key word here is buy. Almost all of today's traditional Aboriginal art is made as an export product. It records a pre-existent mental patrimony; it has no intrinsic value for the artists. This means that it has come to respond swiftly to the signals of the market where, during the past 10 years or so, a secondary trade has sprung up at breakneck pace. Large fortunes are tied up in traditional paintings. Collectors, private and public gallery custodians, curators, auction-house experts, writers and cultural gatekeepers are all caught up in this whirlwind.

As a consequence, you are most unlikely to read, or even hear, a sharp critique emerging from any of the coterie of inside market-makers who worship at the profitable shrine of indigenous creativity. At every level, the interlock is plain. Private gallery shows are curated and purchased by a circle of friends and associates, experts and connoisseurs. The art trade magazines carry advertising paid for by commercial entrepreneurs whose stables of artists are discussed in the same pages in admiring terms. State art gallery curators can routinely be found in the field, truffling their way through the stockrooms of bush arts centres in quest of the next big thing, their mere presence enough to talk prices and reputations up. This is not a milieu conducive to calm critical reflection.

So what? Isn't that the way the art world is: delirious, money-driven, prone to abrupt fads and fancies? In the case of Aboriginal art, though, something's missing: the sceptical, irony-laden voice of the contemporary scene -- the voice of the critic, engaging in its continuous dialogue.

And what might such a dialogue sound like? Its authors would be familiar with the history, the symbolic and narrative components of the main indigenous schools of art. Perhaps they would know some traditional language as well. They would be steeped in Western cultures, past and contemporary. They would be conscious of the art market's distorting pressure and immune to it. Above all, they would treat traditional artists not just as figures frozen in the Dreamtime but as individuals, as creative figures susceptible to understanding. It's not an impossible critical stance: during his glory days on The Sydney Morning Herald in the mid-1990s, John McDonald occasionally mastered it -- but few other recent media practitioners come to mind.

The tragedy in all this is that Aboriginal art needs no special dispensation, no favours from the wider community. Over the past generation it has proved itself one of the most distinctive creative currents of our time. It is born of the collision between tradition and modernity, and is best appreciated in a double register drawn from those two contending realms.