One more excerpt from Fred Myers’ Painting Culture: Myers highlights the distinctions between the paintings of the Pintupi tribe and the art from Balgo, just south of the Pintupi land: Pintupi culture valorizes some dimensions of painting–a painting’s truth in relation to the Dreaming, the right of expression as part of one’s identity–but gives no […]
Aboriginal art
Aboriginal Art, Sacred Land and Becoming Visible
More on the topic of Aboriginal art through the eyes of Fred Myers: In Painting Culture, Myer quotes Nancy Munn who describes the Aboriginal relationship to their country as an objectification of ancestral subjectivity. Places where significant events took place, where power was left behind, or where the ancestors went into the ground and still […]
From the Dreaming, It Became Real
One of the leading anthropological experts on Aboriginal art and culture is Fred R. Myers. His 2002 book, Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art, explores the Western Desert Aboriginal painting movement through a lens that is more culture based than visual or aesthetic. Myers, a Professor of Anthropology at NYU, spent time […]
Contexts: The Museum vs The Gallery
Howard Morphy is a leading authority on Aboriginal art and the director of the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at The Australian National University. In his article, Seeing Aboriginal Art in the Gallery, he explores a number of issues that I have been writing and thinking about. Here is one idea excerpt: The theory of a […]
Breaking Through Language and Visual Hegemonies
Jim Coleman (of Nightingale at Large fame) made the following comment to an earlier post on Ocularcentrism. His insights are too provocative to lay hidden in the folds of this blog: I wanted to be sure you noticed …the article in the April 16th New Yorker by John Calapinto on the language of the Piraha, […]
Painting, in the Larger Context
In her essay, ‘Moorditj Marbarn (Strong Magic)’, Aboriginal artist Julie Dowling quotes Jean-Paul Sartre who described the role of painting as ‘the painter paints the world only so that free men may feel their freedom as they face it’. Her belief that painting is her means of cultural and personal survival provides an important perspective […]
Reading the Land
Kathleen Petyarre is one of the better known Aboriginal painters, and deservedly so. Her works are both complex and yet sublimely minimalist, suggesting both the macro and the micro view of the land around her. Many of her paintings pay homage to her dreaming ancestor Arnkerrth, the thorny or mountain devil lizard. Kathleen’s paintings, like […]
Explorations in Landscape and Art
As I continue to explore how Aboriginal art expresses a deep and complex relationship to the land, I am also interested in how the art/land relationship shows up in our Western cultural tradition. Ross Bleckner, typically described as an American abstract painter, takes a lot of his imagery from his experience with nature. From an […]
Ocularcentrism
Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula I’ve been back from Australia for two weeks, but my intoxication with Aboriginal art continues unabated. My night dreams and daytime ponderings are populated with images and senses that are not of this hemisphere. For years I have studied Aboriginal art though reproductions. As is the case with any artist whose work […]
Land and Art Down Under
Painting by Dorothy Napangardi Tree trunks, Alice Springs . . . Painting by Johnny Warangkula Todd River bed, Gum tree, Alice Springs . . . Painting by Kathleen Petyarre Simpson Desert, Northern Territory . . It needs to be remembered that Central and Western Desert art works, and the narratives in which they are embedded, […]