Aboriginal Art Blog

Hetti Perkins opens 2010 Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair

2010-08-13T15:50:00.003+09:30

Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair
Darwin Convention Centre, 12-14 August 2010

The annual Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair provides a unique opportunity for art buyers within the industry and the members of the public to purchase Aboriginal art directly from the Indigenous owned and incorporated art centres. Visitors also get to see the work of emerging as well as established artists, to meet the artists and to find out about the variety of different cultural groups producing art, as well as the range of styles, mediums and products available.

Here is a clip from the opening yesterday:

If you get a chance, go along and have a look and let us all know your thoughts!

Darwin is overflowing with Indigenous art events this weekend. The weather is great and there are plenty of people and tourists around as Darwin comes alive in the height of the tourist season. There are also hundreds of Aboriginal artists from all over Australia in town as well as many of the industries movers and shakers.

Early annoucement of the Telstra Aboriginal Art Awards Winner

2010-08-13T14:17:00.005+09:30

I'm not sure why the announcement has been made prior to tonight's official presentations on the lawns of the NT Museum and Art Gallery at Bullocky Point but the 27th Telstra National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award (NATSIAA) winners have been announced earlier than usual and

Seventy-year-old Jimmy Donegan with his first ever entrance into an art competition has taken out two prizes including the $4,000 general painting award, as well as the coveted $40,000 first prize for his artwork Papa Tjukurpa, Pukara.

Here is the winning artwork:

The media reports lit up shortly after midday and the winners were announced after what Crikey described as an "embargo" that was mercifully lifted after being put in place yesterday.

It was also apparently the worst kept secret around Darwin. Although i just spoke with prominant people within the aboriginal art industry who are in Darwin as we speak and they did not know who the winner was or that there was to be a premature announcement! I informed them after a google alert tipped me off!

See this article at Crikey. The reporter clearly knew who the winners were yesterday and was happy to brag about that. It would have been nice if they could have kept it under wraps until tonight's presentation. The media held off since at least yesterday, why not a few more hours? Was there pressure from the media to have the story out before close of business today? Did the organisers feel pressured to make the announcement at midday or risk the media doing it for them? I have no idea but it seems strange!

I have attended Telstra many times and whilst every year produced many rumours on the day before and in the hours leading up to the event, the "good mail" was often way off!

But I'd like to say, no matter when it was announced , congratulations to Jimmy on his win! I'm happy to see an artwork that embodies what i believe is a true reflection of Aboriginal Art win the big prize!

I think it is a very striking artwork and a worthy winner. I like it a lot but i want to see it in the flesh, and i look forward to doing so very soon!

Another article on the Telstra Aboriginal Art Awards at ABC online.

The SMH announced the winner of the Aboriginal painting award with this article titled Desert man wins indigenous art award not long after 12 today!

Interesting to hear the finer details of the timing of this announcement.

More to come............

Telstra Aboriginal Art Awards Time

2010-08-05T17:53:00.003+09:30

Well the 27th National Telstra Art awards are just around the corner again.

It will be very interesting to see if the award will continue to push controversial boundaries as it has in recent years or if a return to judging the Art on quality only will return, regardless of if it is traditional or something a bit more out there that can stir up some media interest and debate!

Details of the event can be found below.

27th Telstra National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award

2010-08-05T17:50:00.001+09:30

Richard Bell, 2003 winner of the Telstra NATSIAA

One of the nation's premier prizes for art unfolds in the Top End.

Editorial Review

When: 14 August - November 7 2010; Mon-Fri 9am-5pm; Sat, Sun & Public holidays 10am- 5pm
Where: Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin
Tickets: Entry to the museum by donation

While Papunya Tula, or "dot painting", is the best known genre of Australian indigenous art, there is a good deal more to savour than these popular ancestral narratives. The Telstra National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award showcases work that can be arresting, surprising or just plain beautiful.

Now in its twenty-seventh year, this annual event scours the country to select 100 works for review. New Media, bark painting, general painting, 3D objects and works on paper are displayed with a prize in each category. Our awe is reserved, however, for the $40,000 Telstra Award which is granted to the artist of the year's most remarkable work.

Winners of the grand prize frequently go on to enjoy broad acclaim. In 2003, the extraordinary Richard Bell (pictured) took out the top gong for his Bell's Theorem. The notoriously defiant painter wore a lewd t-shirt to receive his prize. No one was particularly surprised. His work, after all, was an explicit critique of the competition. "Aboriginal Art", said the text on his work, "It's a white thing."

Artists do not hold back here to serve up a museum-friendly version of "Aboriginal Art". Likewise, judges for this prize do not withdraw when confronted with difficult work. The upshot for us gallery goers is one delightful shock.

Helen Razer, Citysearch

Event Schedule

Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory

19 Conacher Street, Fannie Bay

Get Directions

When:

Start: 14-Aug-2010

End: 07-Nov-2010

Thanks to City Search

PM's Wife Encourages all Australians to learn about Aboriginal Art

2009-11-01T11:50:00.002+10:30

Interesting comments this week in a speech by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's wife regarding Australians learning more about Aboriginal Art, history and way of life. It is amazing how little many Australians know about the indigenous people of Australia and I think her comments are extremely positive.

Obviously it starts in schools and there is no doubt a broader and more thorough teaching of Aboriginal Art and history would be of great benefit to everyone.

Have a read of the article.

Embrace our indigenous people: Rein
HEATH GILMORE HIGHER EDUCATION
October 30, 2009

THERESE REIN has called for all Australians to become literate in Aboriginal art, symbols, culture and history.

The wife of the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, said the nation needed to understand Australia's indigenous culture better, so it could fully embrace all its people.

Her call was made in a speech to launch the Centre for Youth and Child, Health and Wellbeing at the University of Technology in Sydney this week. The centre's director, Professor Rosemary Johnston, has been urging Australian education authorities to make regional Aboriginal languages, history and cosmology a mandatory feature of all primary and perhaps early secondary education.

Ms Rein, a patron of the Indigenous Literacy Project, is becoming a champion for indigenous issues. Last year she was reduced to tears when she stepped in at a Parliament House function to read the emotional poem of 14-year-old Aboriginal girl's grief over the death of her mother. ''I was speaking with an indigenous person and she told me that she didn't feel like an Australian,'' Ms Rein said in her speech. ''I was shocked because I felt it was such an honour to be an Australian alongside that person.

''We have to understand better our indigenous cultures.''

Her speech this week comes as the intensity over the national curriculum debate rises. A nationwide curriculum is being developed to span kindergarten to year 12, starting with English, mathematics, science and history, for implementation from 2011. A second phase will be developed in languages, geography and the arts.

The NSW director general of education, Michael Coutts-Trotter, said the national curriculum debate was ''red hot and live … This is a highly contested area at the moment with huge debates about how much weight you give the Aboriginal perspective [in the curriculum].

''This is a big opportunity following the apology last year … We want a curriculum that allows Australia to understand and embrace Aboriginal people.''

Professor Johnston said the introduction of a national curriculum gave the chance to equip all children for the challenges of the new millennium as well as enhance the national identity.

''If we are truly serious about writing 'nation' into curriculum, this doubly rich distinctive country needs to have similar discussions - talk-story and listen-story - with Aboriginal elders about Aboriginal modes of learning,'' she said.

Original article at the SMH

Art Sydney 2009

2009-10-24T16:50:00.004+10:30

Art Sydney is under way this weekend at The Royal hall of Industries, Entertainment Quarter, Moore Park.

More information can be found here

Here is a look at Aranda Aboriginal Art galleries stand for this years show.

Aboriginal Art In the Big Apple

2009-10-24T16:28:00.002+10:30

New York is currently playing host to the 'Icons of the desert' Aboriginal Art Exhibition. The Exhibition is being held at the New York University and runs until December 5th. The article below is from the Wall Street Journal and gives an excellent overview of this exhibition in one of the worlds great cities of art.

So if you are going to New York or you are from there, pop down and have a look at a fantastic Aboriginal Art Exhibition!

From a Primitive Present

By MELIK KAYLAN

New York

Imagine that you could travel back in time to meet a Stone Age hunter-gatherer, that you could hand him a paintbrush and ask him to paint something on a board or canvas—not warpaint on his body or daubings on a cave, but a proper picture, one that gave us a glimpse of his inner landscape and his aesthetic universe. This is precisely what happened at Papunya in 1972 near the remote outpost of Alice Springs in the heart of the Australian outback. The products of that early encounter gave rise to the internationally celebrated phenomenon of Aboriginal art, an école of sorts, that we all recognize today. Many of those seminal paintings are now in "Icons of the Desert" at the Grey Art Gallery of New York University. The show, dedicated to those early years, is composed of works from the private collection of John Wilkerson, former president of the American Folk Art Museum, and his wife.

How to look at Aboriginal painting? If we knew nothing else, the sheer joyous vitality of the images themselves—with their dot-pattern chiaroscuros, elemental colors and buzzing lines—would amply satisfy the eye. But as the exhibition shows us, there's a great deal more to know, a host of backstories that deepen and illuminate our sense of the art—and often leave us baffled by its mysteries. The paintings themselves are full of embedded narratives connected to the Dreaming, the Aboriginal genesis mythology—itself a series of disparate narratives, as most genesis mythologies are.

Then there's the genesis backstory of how the art form was born, a pivotal moment of Australian social history when blacks and whites first tentatively bonded through art. The show features videos chronicling the story of the groundbreaking Papunya painters and their "whitefella" mentor, the now-famous Geoffrey Bardon (1940-2003), who acted as midwife to their talent in the early 1970s. Bardon's own life reads like a moral fable: A sensitive schoolteacher and art student, a pioneer spirit, he befriended the Aboriginals, supplied them with materials, encouragement and funding despite resistance from his own kind, and finally suffered a nervous breakdown for his exertions.

Many of the show's paintings have attained iconic status in Australian popular culture. Works such as Shorty Lungkarta's "Tingarri Ceremony," with its multicolored vorticist whorls, and his more austere "Children's Water Dreaming" lay out the basic codes of the art form. In the latter a concentric circle at the core links to similar circles through black lines, and the entirety forms a kind of memory map of waterholes connected by rivulets from the artist's region. A black cross-cum-stick-figure on the upper left is part of a ceremonial object, according to Prof. Fred Myers, a consultant to the show who lived with the Papunya artists in the 1970s as a young anthropology student. Sacred objects feature regularly in Aboriginal painting but are often considered taboo and need to be disguised.

Icons of the Desert

Grey Art Gallery, New York University

Through Dec. 5

Perhaps the show's masterpiece, its most renowned painting according to Prof. Myers, is the intricately webbed and dotted "Water Dreaming at Kalipinypa" by Johnny Warangkula. Complicated and beautiful, the painting creates a line-and-dot pulse effect common to the genre that Prof. Myers compares to the effect of firelight on painted bodies during ceremonial dances. In this and in paintings that give off similar optical illusions, such as Cifford Possum's "Women Dreaming About Bush Tucker," the artists show how "ancestral beings, in their creation of the landscape, entered the ground and traveled beneath its surface before emerging elsewhere," Prof. Myers says.

To the Western eye the visual patterns often seem oddly familiar, and one wonders if any mutual exposure occurred between Papunya painters and, say, Paul Klee or Jean-Michel Basquiat. No one has proved any such cross-pollination yet; certainly the Papunya artists had no access to foreign images at that time, and Paul Klee, at least, came and went too soon. One is left with the baffling conclusion that the poetic déjà vu sensation sparked by works such as Mick Namarrari's "Big Cave Dreaming" and Uta Uta Tjangala's "Medicine Story" is an accident. Perhaps the works simply remind us that our species shares a limited range of coherent visual motifs and that disparate cultures can stumble on them independently.

Shorty Lungkarta, 'Children's Water Dreaming' (1972)

A lot remains mysterious in the genre, not least because Aussie whites and Aboriginals at its inception could barely understand each others' languages. Deepening the mysteries are the confusing codes of taboo and secrecy that the artists suspended temporarily during the first paintings and reimposed soon after. Some customs of the aborigines seem distasteful to Westerners, such as the exclusion of women and children from adult male power rituals. Breaking such taboos can still be punished by tribes with death or excommunication or spearing.

As a result, the exhibition even has a secluded lower floor with a vivid culture-clash backstory. The paintings displayed there, when conceived, had revealed a great deal of the artists' sacred ceremonies. The artists originally thought only the Aussie white man would see the art—which they didn't mind. We, too, are free to see them—but, to this day, women and children from the artists' tribes may not. For this reason, the exhibition catalog includes a detachable insert of those works, which gets removed from any copies sold in Australia. On the lower floor, Mr. Possum's "Emu Corroboree Man," for example, looks like a graphic guide to animist rituals and the use of sacred objects. One could compare the phenomenon to the Eleusinian mysteries of ancient Athens or the Villa of Dionysian frescoes in Pompeii, which were secret in their time and still remain suggestively opaque to us.

In looking at Aboriginal art, we are, after all, looking back at our species in a more primitive state, though it sounds politically incorrect to say so. The asymmetries between the sexes, the guarding of male power with secrecy, the tribally enforced segregation and the like should not detract from our enjoyment of the art. Such things do present a painful quandary to strict multiculturalists who would like all genders and cultures to be interchangeably equal when, alas, many of their favored subcultures don't see things that way. But for the rest of us, the show offers a chance to enjoy a glimpse of how, eons ago, in an ancient landscape, our species was able to find patterns of beauty in nature.

—Mr. Kaylan, a columnist for Forbes, writes on culture and the arts for the Journal.

Link to original article

Renowned Aboriginal Artist Passes away

2009-10-16T23:36:00.004+10:30

Sad news today with the passing of a one of Australia's most prominent and decorated Aboriginal Artists. The articles below go into detail of his achievements but it is certainly safe to say he will be remembered as one of the countries finest Indigenous artists and an absolute master of traditional rock painting.

The family has asked that the name he is most commonly known by not be published and for him to be referred to as Wamud Namok.. We will also respect that wish at this time however i invite readers to email me for Wamud's details as many will know his works but not be familiar with this traditional name.

R.I.P.

Renowned Aboriginal rock artist dies

By Adrienne Francis

A 2004 rock painting by the artist, showing Barrk, the black rock wallaroo, being speared by a mimi spirit. (Warddeken Land Management)

One of the nation's most renowned Aboriginal rock artists has died.

The 83-year old Northern Territory elder passed away on his country at the West Arnhem Land outstation of Kabulwarnamyo.

For cultural reasons, his name cannot be published.

His family has asked that he be referred to as Wamud Namok.

He was one of only two Indigenous Territorians to be made an Officer of the Order of Australia for services to the arts and Indigenous land management.

He worked in the tin mining industry and served in the military during World War II.

He went on to become a consultant to anthropologists, art historians, botanists and researchers.

The Member for Arafura, Marion Scrymgour, says he leaves behind a significant legacy for not only his people but for all Australians.

"He leaves a void," she said.

"His legacy is going to be hard for, he leaves it and that is a fantastic thing that I think you know there was still so much wisdom and guidance that was needed."

The Jawoyn Association says his death is a great loss to Australia and the world.

Wamud Namok was helping the association record the stories of thousands of rock art sites on their traditional lands.

The association's Wes Miller says the elder held a wealth of cultural knowledge and understanding.

"He was one of the last of those old people who've physically walked the country, participated fully and grew up in a very traditional lifestyle," Mr Miller said.

"He lived his lifestyle and culture right through this life.

"And enormous knowledge that he had not only in his country but down in Jawoyn country as well and other places as well."

Article courtesy of the ABC

Aboriginal rock artist dies

16:15 AEST Fri Oct 16 2009

By Tara Ravens

One of Australia's grand old masters of Aboriginal art has died in Arnhem Land.

Bark works by Wamud Namok hang on walls in every major art gallery in Australia and feature in several international collections.

But despite his success in the elite art world, the renowned rock artist was a man of the bush who lived for the land.

The 83-year-old died on his country at the remote West Arnhem Land outstation of Kabulwarnamyo, where he has been preserving the past for future generations for almost 60 years.

"Wamud Namok has been one of the region's most important and loved artists," said a statement issued by the local community on Friday.

"He has been extremely generous with his knowledge, taking on an important role as teacher."

Born on the Arnhem Land Plateau in 1926, Wamud Namok worked in the tin mining industry and served in the Katherine region with the military during the Second World War.

But he also spent much of his life traversing the traditional walking tracks of Arnhem Land.

It was on the rocky escarpment, tropical savannas and coastal wetlands that he met with extended kin, hunted and took place in ceremonies.

And it became his vision to bring his people back to care for their traditional lands.

The statement, issued by Warddeken Land Management, described his knowledge of the land and rock art as "unparalleled".

"(It) represents a link with the past and a particular way of life which has now changed forever," it said.

Wamud Namok is believed to be the last Aboriginal artist to have painted works on the rock walls of western Arnhem Land and his early work, with their intricate and particular X-ray style, can still be found in sandstone shelters today.

In his later years, the ceremony man's knowledge was sought by anthropologists, art historians, botanists and other researchers.

He was also a regular speaker at regional land management conferences.

"Through this spirit of generosity he was able to share his knowledge of the Territory with both indigenous and non-indigenous Australians," said NT Arts Minister Gerry McCarthy.

"His knowledge of Territory history, places, land management and available resources and religious significance has become invaluable."

In 2004, Wamud Namok was one of only two indigenous Territorians to be made an Officer of the Order of Australia for services to the arts and indigenous land management.

He was also commissioned to paint a large mural at Darwin Airport while another painting was used on the Australian 40 cent stamp, issued in 1982.

A funeral will be held in his home of Kabulwarnamyo.

Article from Ninemsn News

Sotheby's Auction House Sold in Australia

2009-10-07T20:04:00.004+10:30

Here is another good article specifically about Tim Goodman's purchase of the Sotheby's Auction house in Australia. I would expect we will hear a lot more about this in the following weeks. Stay tuned!

Fine art of a deal maker

Gabriella Coslovich
October 3, 2009

IF YOU were looking to buy an auction house, you couldn't aim higher than Sotheby's. As prestige brands go, only arch-rival Christie's - owned by French tycoon Francois Pinault, who paid $US1.2 billion for it in 1998 - compares.

Sydney-born auctioneer Tim Goodman is no billionaire (yet), but he has long coveted the Sotheby's name - and the kudos that comes with it. Since his first encounter with Sotheby's as a 22-year-old on work experience at the auction house's fashionable London office in 1974, he has dreamed of working with the multinational.

He has gone one better. In a move that astonished the Australian auction world, Goodman this week bought the licence to Sotheby's Australia, ditching his own company, rival firm Bonhams & Goodman, in the process. The terms of the sale are confidential, but The Age believes Goodman got himself a bargain, snapping up Sotheby's Australia for a figure in the low millions.

That Goodman would so desire the name of Sotheby's says much about the circles he moves in, a world where image and status mean everything.

The selling of art on the secondary market is a trade, but it is a trade that cloaks itself in a fine cashmere coat of exclusivity and noblesse. Auctioneers are essentially salespeople - but what they sell is luxury goods, trophies for those with enough disposable cash to display a Brett Whiteley or John Brack or Albert Tucker on their wall. Auction nights are like select social events, alcohol is served - sparkling, white, red - and white-gloved assistants, generally beautiful and young, delicately bring out art works over which begins an adrenalin-pumping contest for possession. Which is not to say that people don't collect art for the passion of it, but at the highest levels it is ego and competition that keeps those bidding paddles popping up in pursuit of that rare and luscious object everyone wants.

It is no coincidence that Pinault, owner of Christie's, also controls a luxury goods group whose brands include Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, Bottega Veneta and Alexander McQueen. Nor is it a coincidence that Sotheby's Australian headquarters is in the blue-chip terrain of High Street, Armadale. There is an almost geographical hierarchy in the positioning of auction houses - Bonhams & Goodman is situated in slightly less chichi territory, in Malvern Road, Prahran.

But Timothy David Goodman, 56, who has said he had visions of being "the next Kerry Packer", was never going to be satisfied being a minor player in the bullish, macho and image-conscious game of art auctioneering. Three out of four of Australia's most expensive paintings were sold at Sotheby's. The wealthiest and most conservative of art collectors, those who want to be associated with a brand oozing aristocracy and tradition, sell and buy at Sotheby's. Goodman desperately wanted a slice of that action.

He is not the first auctioneer who has made a play for Sotheby's Australia. Others have pursued the brand name - but their timing was not right. With a nose for opportunity, and wounded prey, Goodman made Sotheby's Holdings an offer too good to refuse.

He is driven, determined, autocratic, tough, a man who lives and breathes his business, whose job is his world. This week he revealed the extent of his ambition.

The news stunned the art world for two reasons. It is no secret that Sotheby's Holdings, whose headquarters is in New York, has been profoundly affected by the economic downturn. Shares and profits have plummeted (June-quarter figures showed that Sotheby's profits were down 87 per cent), and the company has been reviewing its operations and regional offices worldwide. If anything, industry observers were expecting the financially troubled Sotheby's to pull out of Australia as Christie's did in 2006. They did not expect Sotheby's to sell the licence to the brand name "Sotheby's Australia". They certainly did not expect Sotheby's to sell the brand to Tim Goodman and the other directors of First East Auction Holdings Pty Ltd.

"Obviously the culture at Sotheby's is somewhat different to what he's accustomed to," says Goodman's fiercest competitor, Rod Menzies, of leading Australian auction firm Menzies Art Brands.

Short, well-padded and ruddy-cheeked, Goodman is one of the few auctioneers in town who does not affect an Oxbridge accent. He takes to the auction stand with an affable, bossy and unashamedly Australian manner and cadence, a robust sense of humour, and a salesman's gift of persuasion.

He plays as hard as he works. By all accounts he is fond of a drink, has a keen eye for the ladies, and has been known to frequent the sorts of gentlemen's clubs where one's social class and alma mater have no bearing. Some find his character bordering on the boorish, others see it as refreshing in an industry rife with pretensions.

"He is one of those great Australian characters," says the loquacious Sydney art dealer Denis Savill. "He's like the John Singleton of the art world. That's a compliment, by the way. John's a friend of mine, but he's a wild one, and I know when to avoid him."

After his year of work experience with Sotheby's in London, a world he described as a Dickensian fantasy land, Goodman returned to Australia in 1975 and became the youngest fine art auctioneer in NSW, working for Geoff K. Gray. When Gray was bought out, Goodman lost his job and struck out on his own. After a varied and at times financially perilous career dealing in art, and running an art gallery, a jewellery auction house and even a publishing venture, Goodman established the Goodman auction rooms in the posh Sydney suburb of Double Bay in 1992.

His self-described "big break" came in 2003 when he was approached by Robert Brooks, chairman of British auction house Bonhams. For the past six years, Goodman has been the chief executive of Bonhams & Goodman auction house, which has been trying to establish itself as one of Australia's main players. But allegiances come cheap in the cut-throat world of art auctions. In buying the licence to the Sotheby's Australia name, Goodman has severed ties with Bonhams and his long-time friend Robert Brooks. Goodman will terminate the licence to use the Bonhams' name on December 22. Sentiment was never going to get in the way of Goodman's dream.

On Tuesday night, a furious Brooks was flying to Australia to sort out the mess Goodman had left him. He has launched action in the NSW Supreme Court to ensure that Goodman continues to use the Bonhams brand in Australia until December 22.

The next few months will be interesting. With three more Bonhams & Goodman auctions scheduled for the year, and two more Sotheby's auctions, where will Goodman's loyalties lie?

Meanwhile, Damian Hackett, an executive director of Deutscher and Hackett, is rubbing his hands at the thought of fewer competitors. "Yesterday I was competing with Bonhams & Goodman and Sotheby's and in the very near future we will be competing with just one of those firms, and that one firm will have quite a different nature," he says. "I will certainly bounce out of bed tomorrow morning with a renewed spring in my step.''

In the art auction world, trust is everything - and Sotheby's art specialists, such as head of Aboriginal art Tim Klingender, head of Australian paintings Georgina Pemberton, and chairman Justin Miller, come with a reputation for integrity and expertise.

Goodman himself this week spoke of his ''enormous respect for the brand, the company and the staff'', adding that "at this time" he had no plans to make any changes to staff.

But it would be naive to think that there will not be cuts, and Sotheby's Australia staff, who were only told of the takeover on Monday, are worried about their futures, and about working with a man whose managerial style is markedly different to that they know.

But something had to give at Sotheby's Australia.

"Sotheby's performance over the last 18 months suggests that it may have been under threat from its overseas masters. Tim Goodman may well be regarded as a white knight," says Sotheby's Australia's former managing director Mark Fraser.

LAST financial year, Sotheby's Australia made a profit of $1.2 million, down from 2007's $5.08 million. Its sales revenue from auctions was slashed by more than half to $24.8 million, down from $49.5 million in 2007.

But all Australian art auction houses have been doing it tough in the economic downturn. The major players, in order, are Deutscher-Menzies, Sotheby's, Deutscher & Hackett, and finally, Bonhams & Goodman. Their greatest difficulty has been competing for quality stock - in uncertain economic times collectors have been holding on to their art, unless forced to sell.

Last year the total turnover in Australian art auction sales was $114 million, down $60.9 million on 2007, a fall of almost 35 per cent. In future years, the total sales achieved in 2007 of $175.6 million may be viewed as a market aberration.

Rod Menzies, of Deutscher-Menzies, says that a contraction of the industry was necessary. "There are too many auctions houses … there is no doubt that one player had to exit this year," he says. "From an Aussie's perspective it's interesting that the two multinationals clearly no longer desire to trade here."

Is that a bad sign for the Australian art market?

"I don't know. I think there have been other issues for Sotheby's and Christie's worldwide. But it's certainly survival of the fittest. I think Tim's got a good chance of making a go of it. I am looking forward to the competition. Tim's a serious competitor and so am I."

Gabriella Coslovich is senior arts writer.

Original Article at theage.com.au

Bombshell Hits The Aboriginal Art Auction Marketplace!

2009-10-07T19:54:00.005+10:30

There has been a Massive shake-up in the Australian Art Auction marketplace with the announcement that Tim Goodman of Bonhams & Goodman has purchased the licence to Sotheby's Australia. This is not an acquisition of the two companies with Tim leaving the auction house that bears his name.

This is a major change in the playing field and there will be many interesting times ahead as Tim and his former partner work out how this changeover is going to work.

There are a number of good articles about this major announcement. I will post them up here on the blog. The first is by Aboriginal Art expert and former Head of Aboriginal Art for Lawson~Menzies and Managing Director of Menzies Art Brands Adrian Newstead. It's a great article by a man who knows the Aboriginal Art Auction market better than most.

Have a read......

Deutscher and Hackett Aboriginal and Oceanic Art Sale looks ‘Back to the Future’.

By Adrian Newstead, on 02-Oct-2009

What a difference a day makes! On the same morning that the Deutscher and Hackett Aboriginal and Oceanic Art catalogue arrived on collectors’ doorsteps, Tim Goodman announced that he had purchased the Sotheby’s Australian franchise. Two unrelated events to be sure, however both are likely to impact on the direction of the Aboriginal art market during and beyond the current economic downturn.

At the peak of the market in 2007 Aboriginal art sales comprised $23.7 million of the $175 million art auction market in Australia. However following poor sales and the closure of Joel Fine Art, the market dived 50%, prompting both Sotheby’s and Menzies Art Brands to reduce the size of their Aboriginal offerings while attempting to lift their minimum lot value to $6000.

The less than impressive results that followed, saw Sotheby’s hold their least successful sales of Aboriginal and Oceanic art since the new millennium while Menzies Art Brands Aboriginal sales shrunk from $9.1 million in 2007 to less than $1million per quarter in 2009.

Aboriginal art has been a centre piece of Sotheby’s Australian success since the mid 1990’s, and the Goodman purchase will have been in part informed by their flagging fortunes. An number of industry insiders have been wondering more and more openly, how much longer Sotheby’s and MAB could continue to recycle high end works with indecent haste in order to maintain market share, without loosing credibility. This has been a particular problem for Sotheby’s given the dearth of high value quality material, and their acceptance of such a narrow band of provenance for Aboriginal artworks.

What any of this has got to do with the current Deutscher and Hackett offering? In my opinion, just about everything!

While the production, scholarship, and quality of the D + H catalogue is as good any that has been presented to the market during the last decade, only two works in the entire sale have a value in excess of $100,000 and only 11 fall between a lowly $20,000 and $100,000.

However the sale turns the general auctioneers rule of thumb that 80% of the value of a sale should be in 20% of the works completely on its head. Here just two works, or 0.7% of the offerings represent 23% of the total value on low estimates.

D + H specialist Crispin Gutteridge has defied conventional wisdom by selecting no less than 259 works under $20,000 of which a staggering 230 are worth less than $10,000. The result is a sale containing 277 individual lots with a total value of just $2.04 million on low estimates.

I cannot remember a sale presented so lavishly with so few works of major importance or distinction. Generous essays of the length generally reserved for works worth in excess of $100,000 are afforded to paintings carrying estimates as low as $20,000.

Estimates are however conservative and, as a result, I expect the sale to kick off with a bang with a 90% + clearance rate for the first 50 lots and up to 85% for the next. Whether this success rate can be sustained thereafter however, will be the acid test for this approach.

The highest priced work in the sale has a very fine pedigree, and is illustrated on the catalogue cover. Yillimbiddi Country, 1988 (Lot 26) by Rover Thomas was originally sourced through Warringari Arts in Kununurra and was shown at the Adelaide Biennale in 1990. It was loaned to the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2000 and included in three different curated exhibitions between 2000 and 2003. When sold by Sotheby’s in July 2003 (lot 127) the painting achieved a price of $376,750 including BP. Carrying an estimate of $350,000 to $450,000 this time around it would appear to be good buying.

The impression of success or failure for the sale depends on the need to get this work away. The failure of this single lot would reduce the success rate by value by 17% and make an otherwise successful result appear mediocre.

In a most unusual move, the second most valuable work in an entire sale, Paddy Bedford’s Mendoowoorrji Medicine Pocket 2001 (Lot 10) is placed very early in the catalogue. The provenance is excellent, as this large work is included in the artist’s catalogue raisonné published by Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, this will be the third time it has changed hands since originally purchased. While it could not be described as one of the artist’s finest major works, it is nevertheless good example. Major paintings by Bedford are very hard to come by. He painted relatively prolifically for no more than 6 years and his paintings are much loved and tightly held.

Only two early Papunya boards appear, and once more they are early in the sale and estimated keenly. Both were illustrated in Geoffrey and James Bardon’s landmark publication, Papunya, A Place Made After the Story.

Johnny Warangkula’s Water Dreaming at Kalipinya 1972 (Lot 7) is estimated at $35,000 to $45,000, and sold for $38,050 including BP when last offered in July 2001 at Sotheby’s (lot 74). While a work on this theme created during the same year holds record price for the artist at $486,500, and another has sold for $206,000 these records were set prior to 2001, and the majority of his best prices were achieved during the 1990’s. The $35,000 to $45,000 estimate is conservative and this work should sell well.

Mick Namarari’s Untitled (Dingo Ceremony), 1971/1972 (Lot 8) is an iconic work that has appeared at auction previously on two occasions during the last decade. It achieved a price of $35,750 against a presale estimate of $25,000 to $35,000 (lot 133) in Sotheby’s July 2001 sale but is recorded as having failed to sell two years later when offered once more at the same estimate. Once again it carries a low estimate of just $25,000 and at this price would seem to be exceptional buying.

Lot 9 however, a very fine work on cardboard, A Pair of Wanjina, by Charlie Numbulmore, (Lot 9) has been in the current vendor’s family since first purchased in 1970 and is entirely fresh to the market. Only 25 works by this artist have ever appeared at auction, and all but one has sold resulting in a 96% success rate. His very impressive figures at sale make him statistically the sixth most successful artist in the secondary art market in the history of the Aboriginal art movement. The catalogue entry includes a very good essay on the Numbulmoore by Kim Ackerman, and estimated at $40,000 to $60,000 this work should be very keenly contested.

Despite the large number of works estimated below $20,000 there are many nice pieces worthy of mention. They include the three works by Freddy Timms, all of which were originally purchased from Frank Watters. These include two of his earliest colour field paintings, and another from his 1999 solo exhibition that focused on the story of the early 20th century Aboriginal rebel, ‘Major’.

Other works that deserve attention are the lovely Jungura and Jambin, 2002 by Rusty Peters (Lot 83) and the large collaborative painting by the artists of Ampilawatja (Lot 99).

Crispin Gutteridge will have been delighted to have secured, the iconic image Sexy and Dangerous (Lot 17) by urban artist Brook Andrew. Andrew has been feted as one of the most successful Aboriginal urban photographic and graphic artists of recent times but, in common with Tracy Moffatt, he has proved, at least in the secondary market, to have been a bit of a one trick wonder. While 18 of the 27 works that have been offered at auction have sold, variations of this particular image hold all of his 4 highest records.

Bonham’s and Goodman set a record price of $84,000 for a copy of Sexy and Dangerous in August 2007 (lot 111). However the next three highest prices all fall between $33,400 and $36,000.

Another artist in the same boat as Brook Andrew in this regard is internationally renowned Tracy Moffatt. With a widely diverse oeuvre Moffatt’s peevish reaction to the fact that works from her iconic Something More series, made as early as 1989, hold 9 of her top 10 results at auction, has been to refuse permission for their reproduction. Hence, Lot 19, estimated at a very reasonable $30,000 to $40,000 is not illustrated in this, or any other, catalogue.

Collectors would be wise not to overlook the works on paper by Kitty Kantilla, whose solo retrospective was held at the Ian Potter Centre during 2007. While Untitled, 2001 (Lot 14), a work on canvas exhibited in the retrospective carries an estimate of $30,000 to $40,000, it is hardly bigger or any more accomplished than the work on paper Jilamara, 1999 (Lot 63) estimated at just $5000 to $7000. Jilamara, 1997, (Lot 67) another fine work on canvas would appear inexpensive at just $14,000 to $18,000.

Amongst the many other works, those bark paintings most worthy of attention are by the North East masters, Mawalan Marika (Lot 33), and Mungurrawuy Yunupingu (Lot 32) and Western Arnhem Land’s Lofty Nadjamerrek (Lot 5).

The sale abounds with paintings from Balgo Hills though the majority it appears, are owned by a single vendor. All were collected in the mid 1990’s and created during James Cowan’s tenure at the art centre. Cowan delighted in using the art coordinator’s residence as a de facto art gallery and after wining and dining visitors he would sell the works directly off the walls of his home.

Unfortunately, while some of the works do stand out, the majority are not representative of the artist’s finest, nor do they represent the most important early period in which they painted. All however appear keenly priced and represent good buying at their estimated values.

This D + H offering makes a most fascinating sale. While commercial galleries appear to have lost customers to the tourist galleries for works under $15,000, and are surviving on fewer sales of high end pieces, this D + H sale may well turn the auction market on its head.

It is more than a decade since so many works with age and values under $10,000 were on offer and promoted through a catalogue of such quality. Its results should be studied closely by industry observers especially Sotheby’s Australia’s new owner Tim Goodman, as they will prove to be the single most valuable barometer of the market yet, as we head in to 2010. With other recent Aboriginal sales failing to excite the market D + H may well be leading us ‘back to the future’

About The Author

Adrian Newstead is an Aboriginal art specialist, dealer, and commentator, based in Bondi, New South Wales. He co-founded Coo-ee Aboriginal Art Gallery in 1981 and until 2002 worked closely with Aboriginal communities throughout Australia. In 2003 Adrian became the Head of Aboriginal Art for Lawson~Menzies, and in 2007, Managing Director of Menzies Art Brands. He resigned from this position at the end of 2008, to return to working once again with artists and art communities.

Link Courtesy of Australian Art Sales Digest

Aboriginal Art in the American Capital

2009-09-27T14:52:00.001+09:30

Australian Aboriginal Art goes to the American Capital with an exhibition featuring some of Australia's leading Aboriginal Artists. Details below:

Washington Museum Exhibits Australian Aboriginal Painting

National Museum Of Women In The Arts, Washington will run an exhibition "Lands of Enchantment: Australian Aboriginal Painting" on view from October 9, 2009 to January 10, 2010. In recent years, Australian Aboriginal art has captured the attention of the global art market.

Collectors and museums worldwide relish the striking color and intricate patterning of Aboriginal paintings created by artist’s in the nation’s central dessert region in particular. The works’ nuanced expressions of Aboriginal history and culture reinforce their significance as rich cultural artifacts.

Lands of Enchantment: Australian Aboriginal Painting presents 26 masterworks by some of Australia’s best-known painters, including Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Dorothy Napangardi, Abie Loy Kemarre, Mitjili Napurrla, and Eubena Nampitjin. These works of art, which have never been exhibited publicly, are drawn from the collection of Ann Shumelda Okerson and James J. O’Donnell of New Haven, Connecticut and Washington D.C. They are avid world travelers as well as passionate educators, and are devoted to sharing their collection with the public and ensuring the legacy of Aboriginal artists.

In 2006, NMWA presented the ground-breaking exhibition, Dreaming Their Way: Australian Aboriginal Women Painters. Since then, interest in Australian Aboriginal art has soared, with collectors working assiduously to acquire desired works and auction sales routinely profiled in arts magazines. Lands of Enchantment builds on Dreaming Their Way by including works by male artists in order to demonstrate the broader context of contemporary Aboriginal painting.

Lands of Enchantment also explores how contemporary Australian Aboriginal paintings are expressive representations of Dreamings—ancient Aboriginal stories about creation and ancestral spirits who inhabited an undatable past called Dreamtime. Contrary to the prevalent Western view that draws clear distinctions between nature and civilization, Aboriginal culture holds that all living beings and elements of geography have been inextricably related through time.

Aboriginal artists have long been noted for their work in traditional media such as bark painting and wood carving. Although these art forms are still practiced, many contemporary artists working in central and north Australia—including those featured in Lands of Enchantment—choose to work with the modern medium of acrylic paint on fabric.

They extend the ancient tradition of drawing ritual designs on the body or into the earth by rendering intensely colored, semi-abstract symbols of plants, animals, and features of the landscape on their canvases. Through these alluring images, the artists seek to share a part of Aboriginal culture. The paintings are also powerful political acts— statements of the Aboriginal people’s rights to the land and assertions of their enduring cultural presence in Australia.

The picture shows Eunice Napanagka Born 1940, Language: Pintupi, Tjukurla - other side of Docker River, 2001, Acrylic on linen, 48 x 66 in., Collection of Ann Shumelda Okerson and James J. O'Donnell, Ikuntji Artists Aboriginal Corporation, Copyright remains with the artist. -- www.nmwa.org

Original article can be found here

New Custom Google Search added to Aboriginal Art Blog

2009-09-24T01:04:00.003+09:30

We have added another new feature to Aboriginal Art Blog to help better increase your ability to use the blog to find out anything and everything you want about Aboriginal Art.

In the right hand column we have added a Google search box so if you want to search anything from the web or from just within this blog you can do so now from any page. Once you enter the search term you will be taken to a custom Google search page where the results will be displayed and you can choose to click on a result or a relevant ad, or you can search again.

You wont have to worry about clicking back to view Aboriginal Art Blog as the search page open in a new browser tab.

This custom Google search engine has been specially modified to help assist better with searches related to Aboriginal art whilst also being able to handle searches on any subject just like the regular Google can.

Give it a try!

Aboriginal Art News feature added

2009-09-23T01:41:00.002+09:30

Aboriginal Art Blog has added a Google News feature. You will see it in the right hand side column. This feature displays the latest news articles that are about Aboriginal Art. They provide a small description with the ability to click on the headline if you wish to read the article in full.

There is also a"related articles" link under some of the news items which allows you to view articles that are related to the featured one.

Feel free to click on the articles for more information and don't worry, you wont be taken away from Aboriginal Art Blog, all articles will open in a new window.

We hope you enjoy using this new feature.

Update on the Wesfarmers Arts Indigenous Fellowship program

2009-09-23T01:08:00.005+09:30

Last month Aboriginal Art Blog.com told you about a unique program to foster indigenous art curating

See the original article here

We have some further information about this very exciting program below.

The Wesfarmers Arts Indigenous Fellowship will focus on the professional development of Indigenous people in roles supporting the visual arts such as curation, marketing, exhibition management, art handling, registration to publishing, imaging services and fundraising.

The Fellowship will encourage the sustainability and longevity of the Indigenous arts/cultural industry by creating opportunities for Indigenous professionals to work throughout the sector. It is a prestigious and professional program that will foster the next generation of Indigenous leaders in the visual arts.

The National Gallery of Australia and Wesfarmers are seeking input from a range of people involved in Indigenous arts professions and education across Australia to help develop the Fellowship program.
Cox Inall Ridgeway has been contracted to run consultation workshops which will be facilitated by respected Indigenous leader Aden Ridgeway.

Please find below a discussion paper on the Fellowship which we will refer to in the workshops:

Overview of Australia’s Indigenous Visual Arts

The value of Indigenous visual arts to the Australian economy is estimated to be $400
million per annum. While there is a significant focus on supporting and nurturing
Indigenous artists to participate in the creation of art, much of the professional support and management (administration, marketing, curatorial) is provided by non-Indigenous people.

In June 2007, the Standing Committee on Environment, Communications, Information
Technology and the Arts undertook an inquiry into the Australian Indigenous visual arts and crafts sector. The resultant report Indigenous Art – Securing the Future included a significant focus on the role of education and professional development in ensuring the sustainability and profitability of the Indigenous visual arts sector.

The report states: “there appear to be some very pressing skills development needs in
this industry, particularly in relation to such areas as business management and
planning, accounting, marketing and governance”.

This sentiment is echoed in Making Solid Ground – Infrastructure and Key Organisations
Review, carried out for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Board (Australia Council for the Arts) in November 2008. The report identified ‘improved investment in people’ as one of ten necessary platforms to support the sustainable development of the arts industry.

The Making Solid Ground report “strongly suggested that there needs to be greater
investment in and improved access to training and professional development
opportunities” for Indigenous people in a range of positions in the arts sector.

However the Senate committee concluded that while “the case for education and training is strong, the preferred mechanisms to deliver it successfully are not clear at this stage”.

The Wesfarmers Arts Indigenous Fellowship

In 2009 a formal partnership was formed between the National Gallery of Australia and Wesfarmers Limited to create a Fellowship Program which would contribute to filling this gap in Indigenous professional development.

The partnership represents two iconic Australian organisations committed to the long
term development, training and mentorship of Indigenous people and will present a high quality professional development opportunity for the visual and Indigenous arts sector.

The Wesfarmers Arts Indigenous Fellowship will focus on the professional development of Indigenous people in roles supporting the visual arts such as curation, marketing, exhibition management, art handling, registration to publishing, imaging services and fundraising.

The partnership will run for five years, and has identified the following objectives to
achieve by 2014:

• Four exceptional Indigenous people will have graduated as Fellows of the
Wesfarmers Arts Indigenous Fellowship at the National Gallery of Australia
• Up to 32 Indigenous people will have participated in the Wesfarmers
Indigenous Fellowship as Associate Fellows at the National Gallery of
Australia

The Wesfarmers Arts Indigenous Fellowship will create opportunities for Indigenous
professionals to work throughout the Indigenous arts/cultural sector.

Ultimately, the program will foster the next generation of Indigenous leaders in the visual
arts.

Consultation workshops

The National Gallery of Australia and Wesfarmers are seeking input from a range of
people involved in Indigenous arts professions and education across Australia to help
develop the Fellowship program.

Cox Inall Ridgeway has been contracted to run consultation workshops to feed into a
suggested Fellowship structure. These workshops will be facilitated by respected
Indigenous leader Aden Ridgeway.

The consultation workshops are designed to provide input to the following areas of the Fellowship:
a) Fellowship program content and breakdown of areas of focus, including
distribution of time across disciplines over the 2 years
b) Effective recruitment strategies and channels to attract suitable candidates
c) Selection criteria and process for fellowship program
d) Associate Fellowship content and proposed structure
e) Mentoring requirements and logistics of a two year Fellowship
f) Identification of additional investment and/or costs required to implement fellowship

In preparation for the workshops, participants are asked to consider the following
questions:

1.
What are the key enablers and barriers to Indigenous participation in your
profession?
2.
What paths have been successfully pursued by Indigenous professionals in your
sector?
3.
What are the aspirations of new and emerging leaders in your field?
4.
What would make your field more attractive to new Indigenous participants?
5.
What role does your organisation play to encourage the development of
Indigenous professionals?
6.
What combination of skills are necessary to your profession?
Workshops are being held in the following locations:

Sydney Monday 17 August
Melbourne Tuesday 18 August
Canberra Wednesday 19 August
Cairns Thursday 20 August
Adelaide Tuesday 8 September
Alice Springs Thursday 10 September
Darwin Friday 11 September
Perth Tuesday 20 October
Broome Wednesday 21 October

Input from each workshop will be developed into a report and provided to workshop
participants. If people are unable to attend any of these workshops, we welcome your
input via phone or email.

Interested participants are invited to contact John Saulo at Cox Inall Ridgeway for further information johns@coxinallridgeway.com.au or 02 8204 3876

Wesfarmers Arts Indigenous Fellowship – Discussion paper
©Cox Inall Ridgeway

Top award for tradition

2009-09-11T23:29:00.002+09:30

After the controversy over the winning artwork at this years Telstra Aboriginal Art Awards, there was far less controversy at the Togart Awards wit the winner being a traditional Aboriginal Artist.

More information below:

Top award for tradition

September 4th, 2009

A TRADITIONAL Aboriginal artist won the $15,000 top prize at the third Togart Award.

Maningrida weaver Anniebell Marrngamarrnga was on hand to collect the award for her striking large Yawkyawk, meaning young woman or young woman spirit.

One of the judges, National Gallery of Australia curator of Australian painting and sculpture post-1920 Deborah Hart, said the judges had some "pretty intense debate" before reaching a decision.

"Every single person, indigenous and non-indigenous, has a very distinctive style and that really stands out," she said.

The winner, and the approach taken by at least one of the judges, is strikingly different to last month's $40,000 Telstra Aboriginal art award.

The winning piece at that show, a large drawing with pencil, crayon and glitter pen, had many observers scratching their heads.

One judge talked about her desire to push the boundaries of what is Aboriginal art.

But rather than pushing boundaries at Togart, Hart said she wanted a winner that would stand the test of time. "Will you look back in 50 years' time and say that's still holding up as a meaningful work?" she said.

"It's not what makes a great impact or what's fashionable - it's what will stand the test of time. It's also the presence of the work, the inventiveness, the way it's made."

Hart said by the look of the Togart finalists the Territory's art scene is in strong shape.

"People are doing their own thing," she said. "Perhaps that's a Territory thing - people aren't thinking they have to follow a particular fashion or trend."

The 2009 Togart award is on show in the Great Hall of Parliament House.

The original article can be found here

Outback art code draws line in the sand

2009-09-11T23:22:00.003+09:30

Interesting article about the upcoming code of conduct for the art market here in Australia. Whilst there are parts of the code that concern me, I believe anything that can improve the industry and rid it off unscrupulous operators could be a good thing. However, just implementing a code will not do this. It needs to be workable, realistic and enforced fairly without agendas from different sectors within the industry adversely effecting this happening.

Whether this can be accomplished is yet to be seen.

Outback art code draws line in the sand

Ashleigh Wilson | August 21, 2009

Article from: The Australian

ART dealers will be able to pay artists with alcohol or secondhand vehicles but will be forced to declare their agreed value under a wide-ranging code of conduct for the Aboriginal art business.

The final copy of the code, obtained by The Australian but still to be signed off by federal Arts Minister Peter Garrett, sets out minimum standards for dealers, agents and artists in an attempt to freeze out unscrupulous operators.

It prohibits dealers from "taking advantage" of artists or their representatives, acting in an unfair, bullying or threatening manner and exerting undue influence. Dealers must act in good faith, which includes not promoting the "dealer's interests to the detriment of the artist".

"A dealer must not engage in unconscionable conduct towards an artist or an artist's representative," it says.

The code, updated from a draft version released in December, still accommodates non-cash transactions between dealers and artists. This includes paying for paintings with used vehicles and alcohol. The original draft would have prevented dealers from remunerating artists "with drugs or alcohol". The reference to alcohol has been removed from the revised code, which states that unprofessional conduct includes paying for work with "drugs or illegal goods or services".

As a result, alcohol cannot be used as payment in remote communities where it is illegal.

Rules concerning alternative forms of payment have been tightened in the final version, which says a dealer must state the "reasonable market value" of non-cash payments in writing.

That provision is enough to satisfy Australian Commercial Galleries Association president Beverly Knight, who had been concerned about the non-cash payments, but now endorses "the code at this current point".

However, Ms Knight said, the code's success depended on who was appointed to a committee to oversee its operation.

The code was a key recommendation of a 2007 Senate inquiry into the Aboriginal art sector, established in response to reports in The Australian about unscrupulous conduct in the business.

Gabriella Roy, who runs the Sydney gallery Aboriginal and Pacific Art, said it could provide certainty to investors.

Ahead of an exhibition that opened last night featuring the work of artists from Tjungu Palya, a tiny art centre near the border of the Northern Territory and South Australia, Ms Roy said she hoped to be able to sign up to the code when it was released.

To sign up, dealers would apply to the Code Administration Committee for approval. They would have to declare if they were under investigation over breaches of trade practices or fair trading laws, or had been convicted of an offence or declared bankrupt.

The committee could remove dealers who breached the code, and publish their names.

Andrew Bolt's take on the Telstra Aboriginal Art Awards

2009-09-11T22:13:00.002+09:30

Andrew Bolt is known for his strong opinions, well here is his unique point of view regarding the recent Telstra Aboriginal Art award winner and the the Fulbright Indigenous Scholarship winner.

Let me know what you think :)

White fellas in the black

Andrew Bolt
From: Herald Sun
August 21, 2009 12:00AM

Danie Mellor and Mark McMillan Source: Herald Sun

AS you see, the two men on the right are from a tribe of people who face terrible racism just because of the colour of their skin.

So you'll be thrilled that both have won a rare opportunity - one offered to their race alone to end such injustice.

The man to the right, Sydney arts academic Danie Mellor, this week won our richest prize for Aboriginal artists - the $40,000 Telstra Award.

Have your say at Andrew's blog

And the man to the left, Sydney law academic Mark McMillan, has won one of our richest prizes for Aboriginal students - the Fulbright Indigenous Scholarship.

If, studying the faces of these two "Aboriginal" men you think this is surely the most amazing stretch of definition, you're wrong.

McMillan has gone one better still: he's also won the Black Women's Action in Education Foundation Scholarship, originally intended to help educate black women, not white men.

But that's modern race politics at our universities and anywhere else where grants and privileges are now doled out.

Hear that scuffling at the trough? That's the sound of black people being elbowed out by white people shouting "but I'm Aboriginal, too". Hark! - is that a man's voice I now hear bellowing: "And I'm an Aboriginal woman."

You see, Mellor and McMillan are representatives of a booming new class of victim you'd never have imagined we'd have to support with special prizes and jobs.

They are "white Aborigines" - people who, out of their multi-stranded but largely European genealogy, decide to identify with the thinnest of all those strands, and the one that's contributed least to their looks. Yes, the Aboriginal one now so fashionable among artists and academics.

Let McMillan himself describe the torture he's faced as a result - the shocking pain of having not been discriminated against for being black.

"I am a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, fair-skinned Aboriginal Australian . . .

"As a child, I grew up expecting everyone to be like me, to look like me - with the blonde hair and blue eyes.

"Clearly, my naive ideas about how Aboriginal people were 'supposed' to look were wrong. But being Aboriginal and fair and blonde was normal to me and I grew up in a world where I was treated 'normally' . . .

"Impeding my growth from that young person into the adult I wanted to become was the profound issue of identity. I was a white black man . . . I was becoming a victim."

You'd swear this was from a satire -- a local version of Sasha Baron Cohen's jive-talking routine as the fashionably aggrieved white rapper Ali G, complaining: "Is it cos I is black?"

But no, this is meant seriously, and serious perks and Aboriginal-only benefits flow as a consequence.

McMillan - whose confusion about his identity leads him also to declare he's both a "proud gay" and a "proud father" - has received all the special help you once thought, when writing the taxman another cheque, would at least go to people who looked Aboriginal, but which is increasingly lavished on folk as pink in face as they are in politics.

This trained lawyer has not just won several prizes intended for Aborigines, but has worked for Aboriginal groups such as ATSIC, and is the Aboriginal representative on several boards, including that of a local land council.

Now he's a researcher at Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning at the University of Technology, Sydney - an "indigenous" outfit run by the very pale Prof Larissa Behrendt, who may have been raised by her white mother but today, as a professional Aborigine, is chairman of our biggest taxpayer-funded Aboriginal television service.

The blue-eyed and ginger-haired Mellor has been similarly privileged, despite having an "American-Australian" father and a mother with only part-Aboriginal ancestry in her otherwise Irish-Australian past.

He now lectures on "Indigenous and Western perspectives of culture and history" at Sydney University and his indigenous art now hangs in most of our national and state art collections.

Nor are Mellor, McMillan and Behrendt atypical or even rare as "white Aborigines".

St Kilda artist Bindi Cole, raised by her English mother, explored her own pain at being too white in a Next Wave Festival show, Not Really Aboriginal, for which she photographed herself with black powder all over her distressingly white face.

Blond Annette Sax, daughter of a Swiss immigrant, also identified herself as a "white Koori", which fortuitously allowed her to make the shortlist for the Victorian Indigenous Art Award, alongside other Aboriginal artists as pale as a blank canvas.

T HE auburn-haired Tara Jane Winch was just as lucky. She needed to write just one book -- and say her dad had Afghan-Aboriginal ancestry - for the Australia Council to snap her up as its Indigenous Literacy Project ambassador.

I've written before of a dozen similar cases, several even more incongruous.

For instance, how can Graham Atkinson be co-chair of the Victorian Traditional Owners Land Justice Group when his right to call himself Aboriginal rests on little more than the fact that his Indian great-grandfather married a part-Aboriginal woman?

Yes, yes, I know. What business is it of anyone else how we identify ourselves? In fact, we're so refreshingly non-judgmental these days - so big-hugs-for-all - that the federal Human Rights Commission wants our laws changed so a man can even call himself a woman, should he feel like it.

Hear it from the HRC itself: "The evidentiary requirements for the legal recognition of sex should be relaxed by . . . making greater allowance for people to self-identify their sex."

Lovely! Soon there'll be no end of white men claiming prizes meant for black women. And don't dare then tell the HRC's anti-discrimination police you object.

Yet I do object, and not just because I refuse to surrender my reason and pretend white really is black, just to aid some artist's self-actualisation therapy.

That way lies madness, where truth is just a whim and words mean nothing.

I refuse also for two other reasons that should be important to us all.

First, of course, is that the special encouragements and prizes we set aside for Aborigines are actually meant for . . . well, Aborigines. You know, the ones we fear would get nothing, if we didn't offer a bit extra, just for them.

So when a privileged white Aborigine then snaffles that extra, odds are that an underprivileged black Aborigine misses out on the very things we hoped would help them most.

Take Mellor's art prize. This white university lecturer, with his nice Canberra studio, has by winning pushed aside real draw-in-the-dirt Aboriginal artists such as Dorothy Napangardi, Mitjili Napanangka Gibson and Walangkura Napanangka, who'd also entered and could really have used that cash and recognition.

DOES this make sense? What's an Aboriginal art prize for, if a man as white and cosseted as Mellor can win it, and with a work that shows no real Aboriginal techniques or traditions?

What's a black Aboriginal artist from the bush to think, seeing yet another white man lope back to the city with the goodies?

Same with McMillan. When a man as white as I, already a lawyer with a job, wins a prize meant to encourage and inspire hard-struggle black students, what must those Aborigines conclude?

And here's my other objection.

Seeking power and reassurance in a racial identity is not just weak - a surrendering of your individuality, and a borrowing of other people's glories.

It's also exactly what we have too much of already.

The noble ideal of Australia, that we judge each other by our character and deeds, and not our faith, fortune or fatherland, is breaking down. We're not yet a nation of tribes, but that's sure the way we're heading.

I've never before seen so many Australian-born people identify themselves by their ethnicity, whether by joining ethnic gangs, living in ethnic enclaves, forming ethnic clubs, demanding ethnic television, playing in ethnic sports clubs, or grabbing ethnic prizes and grants.

Why is that a problem? Because people who feel they owe most to their tribe tend to feel they owe less to the rest. At its worst, it's them against us.

Feel that fracturing yourself?

So when even academics and artists now spurn the chance to be people of our better future - people of every ethnicity but none - and sign up instead as white Aborigines, insisting on differences invisible to the eye, how much is there left to hold us together?

This Years Telstra Aboriginal Art Awards - WOW!

2009-09-11T22:00:00.002+09:30

Well I know it is a bit late due to me being out of action for a few weeks but boy oh boy was the Telstra Aboriginal Art awards interesting this year!

I attended the event as i have on a number of occasions and whilst the event had a very similar feel as it seems to have had for the last few years, the winning artwork for the major prize made this years awards in Darwin very unique.

Personally, I didn't really like the direction the judges went although i think the winning artwork is very good. Whatever you think, there is no doubt the judges continue to keep the Telstra award interesting but i'm not sure if this time they went to far ;)

For those that missed it, here is an article about the awards:

Clash of cultures wins

BEN LANGFORD

August 15th, 2009

TOP GONG: Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award winner Danie Mellor with his work From Rite to Ritual, a dramatic departure from the style of winners in years past

THE winner of the 2009 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award has been announced and is set to be the most controversial in many years.

At a ceremony in Darwin last night, the $40,000 Telstra Award was given to Canberra artist Danie Mellor for his work From Rite to Ritual, a large drawing on paper done with crayon, pencil and glitter pen.

The work is a dramatic departure from recent winners, which have had a style more readily identifiable as Aboriginal art.

It depicts the inside of a Masonic temple that is also playing home to marsupials, birds and dancing Aborigines.

The proud winner said his picture illustrated a clash of cultures, with the temple representing Europeans and the dancing men and native animals representing indigenous culture.

"The structure of the temple is symbolic of the use of architecture that relates to western civilisation, and even settlement and colonisation," he said.

"You have the built structure as opposed to the natural environment of Aboriginal culture.

"It's that tension between the natural and unnatural which I find really interesting to explore."

Mellor, 38, is from the Mamu and Ngagan language groups in Queensland and was born in Mackay.

He is a lecturer at the University of Sydney.

Award judge Elizabeth Ann Macgregor said she didn't mind if the choice was controversial.

She said she and co-judge Carly Lane were looking for works that pushed the boundaries of their category.

"Hopefully it will get people thinking about the issues ... what is Aboriginal art, can it be defined these days?" she said.

The $4000 category prizes went to Yinarupa Nangala (painting), Rerrkirrwanga Munungurr (bark painting), Glen Namundja (works on paper) and Janine McAullay Bott (3-D works).

The 2009 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award is now open at the Museum and Art Gallery of the NT.

Resale royalty scheme for artists - Good or Bad?

2009-09-11T21:43:00.004+09:30

Here is an excellent article about the controversial resale royalty scheme for artists being introduced into the Australian art market. There are numerous pro's and con's relating to this scheme and I expect there to be ongoing controversy and debate surrounding its introduction. I expect there will be some serious teething problems with the scheme and it will be interesting to see if it turns out to be a positive thing for the industry.

I expect I will be writing more on this subject very soon ;)

Flawed vision cops pasting

Michaela Boland | September 04, 2009

Article from: The Australian

THE widow of painter John Brack is ambivalent about it. Wendy Whiteley says in theory it is a good thing. Gallery owner William Mora, who has an enduring interest in the paintings by his artist mother, Mirka, says while he supports the idea morally, the federal government's proposed resale royalty scheme for artists will be difficult to administrate.

Who'd have thought Arts Minister Peter Garrett's plan to boost income for artists and their estates could generate such a divided response, even among those set to benefit most?

"For just about every artist (the legislation) is of dubious value, except possibly for indigenous artists," says painter John R Walker. "It's the old adage about special causes make bad law."

Walker was outspoken against the legislation when it was drafted earlier this year. On the eve of it being signed off by the House of Representatives, as is expected when parliament resumes next week, before what is expected to be a smooth passage through the Senate, Walker is resolute that the resale royalty scheme could harm the very artists it is intended to aid.

"The reason why it's not going to benefit anybody is because when I sell an artwork I get 60 per cent," he says.

Walker argues that if the 5 per cent royalty causes just one person to not buy one of his works, it would take the resale royalty on a dozen paintings to make up for that lost sale.

Garrett intends the resale royalty scheme to benefit indigenous artists in particular, but the industry is divided about the extent to which that will happen. Indigenous artists are, however, likely to be the first to see any possible returns when selling directly through community-owned art centres.

Under the scheme, which will be managed by a central administration, a flat 5 per cent royalty would go to the artist or their estate at the second resale after the legislation is introduced. For existing works, it will not apply to the first transaction after the legislation but for all subsequent sales.

The royalty is uncapped, and will cover works resold during an artist's lifetime and for 70 years after their death. Artists can also elect to opt out of the scheme for individual paintings.

"The legislation won't be backdated," Garrett says in response to some confusion in the industry that legislation could be retrospective to July, when it was scheduled to have been passed.

"We don't know how long the Senate process will take," he says, "but once that bill is passed it will be some months while we (assign a collection agency)."

So future transactions, possibly from early next year, will begin to count as an initial resale, from which point thereafter the royalty will apply.

Tamara Winikoff, executive director of the National Association for Visual Arts, has argued against the second resale clause, which is unique among resale royalty schemes worldwide.

NAVA says the government should have pushed harder to apply the scheme to the first resale of works. The Attorney-General's Department is understood to have advised the government that this model would have been unconstitutional because it would affect the value of property at present held by individuals. "It will mean that it will be many more years before artists see returns flowing through," Winikoff says.

Indigenous artists, who often sell work for far less than it is subsequently sold for, should benefit, she says. And this should happen more quickly, as those initial community centre sales will count as the primary sale. Purchases from the community centres will then count as the first resale and when those buyers sell the works the purchaser will be eligible to stump up the royalty.

But NAVA harbours concerns about the opt-out option of the legislation.

"We fear artists will be leaned on to waive their right; this is at odds with our belief this law was about establishing inalienable rights," Winikoff says.

Walker disagrees, and intends to opt out of the scheme every time he sells a painting: "People who bought my paintings 10 years ago, I have no right whatsoever to expect a return on those paintings now."

But consider the famous case of Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, whose painting Warlugulong sold in 2007 for $2.4 million. The artist received $1200 for it in 1977.

Michael Fox, an accountant with Lowensteins Arts Management, which provides financial advice to the arts sector, is adamant the scheme will damage the indigenous art industry, which is already experiencing softening demand following the boom that peaked in 2007. "It's not going to be easy to distribute money to Aboriginal artists and (this) will lead to a decline to overall sales of Aboriginal art," he says.

Melbourne gallery owner William Mora expects to abandon his gallery's trade in Aboriginal art once the legislation is introduced. He says the market is too fragile to cope with a 5 per cent impost.

"Many of the indigenous art centres are nervous about it," says Beverly Knight, president of the Australian Commercial Galleries Association.

"If they are serious about assisting living artists, take the GST away," she says, claiming this would immediately increase the incomes of artists.

Galleries and auction houses are particularly unhappy about the scheme, in part because they will have to collect the funds.

Sotheby's has argued that because the Australian scheme does not have an upper limit akin to the E12,500 ($21,400) threshold of the British scheme, sales of bigger art works will be transacted in markets where there is no royalty scheme, such as Hong Kong, where its regional head office is located.

Knight expects some rogue traders will be squeezed out of business, others may reinvent as "antiques dealers" to escape the royalty and emerging companies could struggle with onerous compliance regimes.

"It's not necessarily a bad thing but in the arts you've got to encourage the new and the fledgling so you've got to make sure you keep that energy going," she says.

In contrast, one serious collector says he thought 5 per cent was a fair price to pay for the peace of mind that will accompany better record-keeping, which should reduce the likelihood of fakes and better establish provenance.

And Mora says buyers who have hitherto demanded privacy will need to get used to the idea their purchase is now on the public record.

According to an analysis of resale royalties by Access Economics, the estates of Brett Whiteley, John Brack and Fred Williams are expected to be the biggest beneficiaries of the Australian scheme.

Fox also points to claims that in France five families share 75 per cent of the proceeds of its scheme and the top 20 artists in Britain receive almost half of all proceeds there.

Joanna Cave, the chief executive of visual arts copyright collection agency Viscopy, has heard it all before. She was instrumental in the creation of the British scheme before she came to Australia, and she says such figures are untrue and "miss the point".

Research by the British government after its resale royalty was introduced could not find a single buyer who wanted to pay less, she says.

For his part, Garrett is unwavering in his support for the scheme.

"I am very, very confident the desirable benefits (will) flow to artists in the medium and longer term," he says.

"I'm confident we've got the right mix of legislative measures to provide both certainty for the art market and provisions for artists to have rights that thus far they have been denied but Australian authors and composers have had."

Brack's widow, Helen, thinks the scheme will make her family's life more complicated. She already receives copyright earnings and expects this will be "just something else you have to keep track of". Still, her family should benefit considerably.

"It's a very good idea for artists' families in tragic circumstances," she says. "It's a bit disgusting when you've sold something a long time ago for pound stg. 40 and on the secondary market it gets $1 million."

Back in action

2009-09-11T21:38:00.001+09:30

Hi guys and girls,

I have been out of action for a few weeks but am back on board now. I'll be updating the blog more regularly again now.

I look forward to your feedback.

Thank you for reading this blog and sharing in the wonderful world of Aboriginal Art.

ART.TRADE to hold General Meeting in Darwin / AGM in Alice Springs

2009-08-09T17:29:00.003+09:30

General Meeting Darwin:

The Australian Indigenous Art Trade Association is holding a general meeting on Saturday the 15th of August 2009 at 10 am at the Palms City Resort on The Esplanade in Darwin. This coincides with the Annual Telstra Indigenous Art Awards which are being held the night before.

The General Meeting in Darwin will be an important meeting for all working within the Indigenous Fine Art Industry. The meeting will provide an opportunity to get up to date with regard to the new Government inspired Industry Code of Conduct (CoC). President of ART.TRADE Ian Plunkett has been participating in the Industry Alliance Reference Group which has been set up by the Australia Council under the auspices of the Federal Arts Minister to implement the CoC for the entire Indigenous Arts Industry as recommended by the recent Senate Enquiry. It is envisaged that this new CoC will be up and running by the 9th October, 2009.

The meeting will provide members with a chance to get up to speed on the new COC as well as ask questions and discus this major change within the industry.

Annual General Meeting (AGM) Alice Springs:

The Australian Indigenous Art Trade Association's Annual General meeting will be held in Alice Springs on the 5th of September in Alice Springs which will coincide with the Desert Mob festival. This meeting gives members an opportunity to vote for the New ART.TRADE Board as well as discuss a number of important issues and developments within the Aboriginal Art Industry.

About the Australian Indigenous Art Trade Association

The Australian Indigenous Art Trade Association known as ART.TRADE is the national organisation within Australia for persons and organisations experienced in the business of indigenous art. ART.TRADE operates to promote the ethical trade of indigenous and Aboriginal art and to provide a forum where members can discuss issues relevant to the industry.

ART.TRADE had its origins in Alice Springs in 1998 in the coming together of representatives from many different industry groups from all around Australia including community art centres, Indigenous artists, art dealers, galleries, advocacy groups and academics with a view to establishing a framework to build a truly national organisation.

It was felt by many within the Industry that with the growth of Indigenous art both nationally and internationally, the establishment of an Industry Code of Ethics and an Industry Body was long overdue. After several days of debate and discussion from all sectors, a Code of Ethics was hammered out and the Art Trade Association was established in November 1998.

Art.Trade recognises above all that the industry depends upon the creative genius of Indigenous artists producing cultural material and that the long term viability of the industry depends upon that culture remaining strong.

For more information go to the ART.TRADE website

ART.TRADE Members

A Magazine for the Australian Art Collector

2009-08-08T02:02:00.003+09:30

If you are looking for a good Art magazine featuring information and adverts about Aboriginal Art and Aboriginal Art galleries, then have a look at Australian Art Collector Magazine

The magazine was launched in 1997 and is one of Australia’s only magazines for Art collectors. Each issue contains a number of authoritative articles on collecting Australian contemporary and Aboriginal art. Some of Australia’s leading art writers and journalists profile Australian and Aboriginal artists as well collectors, dealers and philanthropists. The magazine also reports on news and current issues in the art world and they also preview important exhibitions across the range of collectable Australian art. Whilst advertising is something readers usually want kept to a minimum in magazines, in the case of Australian Art Collector, the more the better I say. Many of the galleries adverts allow you to view many artworks and gauge who offers what and where they are located. As long as the content is kept up the ads are a bonus in my opinion.

The magazine is available in many newsagents and a list of stockists is available on the website. You can also subscribe directly from the website and save 20%.

Here is their website:

Australian Art Collector Magazine

Aboriginal Art Industry continues to defy the GFC

2009-08-08T01:53:00.002+09:30

I've been saying for quite some time that the Aboriginal Art market has remained strong despite the global financial crisis and the article below is further proof that the market is performing above the expectations of a number of people who comment on the art sector.

Many galleries have experienced good sales and it seems a number of Art centres are also doing well despite the negativity, mainly in the press I might add, in relation to the world economy.

With many believing the worst is behind us (even some in the press, shock horror) the Aboriginal Art market looks set for further growth in the short to medium term.

Aboriginal art flourishes despite recession

7th August 2009, 9:00 WST

The current global financial crisis may be putting the economic pinch on the Australian art market but Aboriginal art centres in the Northern Territory are more than weathering this fiscal storm.

“The global financial crisis is an interesting phenomenon,” said John Oster, executive officer of Desart, the association of central Australian Aboriginal art and craft centres.

“We’ve seen its negative consequences in the top end of the art market but the Northern Territory seems to have escaped many of the effects of the crisis.”

Mr Oster said a marked increase in tourism through central Australia, with many travellers visiting art centres for the first time, was resulting in increased sales.

“Many of (the art centres) are doing very well and we have received reports that not only are sales keeping up with last year but in some cases art centres have reported increases,” he said.

Alan Tyley, who manages the Keringke Art Centre at Santa Teresa, southeast of Alice Springs, says he has seen a marked fluctuation in the central Australian art market since the beginning of the year.

“What we’ve found is that the lower end has been the best performer,” he said.

“The painted ceramics have been moving extremely well where our middle range stock at $500-1000 is very dead, but artworks over $1,000 are still moving.

“The mums and dads who used to buy a bit of art are saving their money, but people who travel still buy gifts and that market is still strong - and the people who had $1,000 to spend still have $1,000 to spend.”

Mr Tyley said art was the bread and butter of most Aboriginal communities and needed continual support.

Mr Oster echoed this sentiment during a recent artist’s camp in Alice Springs convened by Desart, where more than 40 artists and their representatives from 15 different art centres in the central desert region gathered to discuss current market trends and identify areas where improvements can be made.

“One of the things that many art centres have come to in the global financial crisis is a retreat to quality,” he said.

The focus of the camp was to improve the quality of art produced to ensure strong sales were maintained across the region.

“We spent a lot of time working out what is the real quality of the art that they are producing, what are the genuine cultural values that they are trying to convey in their artwork and the quality of the paintings themselves as an art product,” he said.

“It is important to deal with the global financial crisis and other issues with input from the artists and art centre managers and we would like to see that they become part of the solution.”

ALICE SPRINGS

Original Article From The West Australian

Program to foster Indigenous Art Curating

2009-08-08T01:42:00.004+09:30

The lack of Indigenous people running government funded Aboriginal Art Centres has been something that has long concerned me and it is fantastic to see an initiative to address the situation. I think this is a fantastic idea and wholeheartedly support the concept. I look forward to reporting on the success of the fellowship and would like to congratulate Wesfarmers and Helen Carroll-Fairhall on putting this program together. Well done!

NGA to run programs to foster indigenous art curating

Corrie Perkin, national arts writer | July 08, 2009

Article from: The Australian

THE Aboriginal art market generates more than $300 million a year and produces some of Australia's most talented artists.

But when it comes to managing and curating art, only a tiny percentage of Australia's visual arts professionals are indigenous.

For three years, Helen Carroll-Fairhall, manager of the Wesfarmers Arts program, has pondered this anomaly and wondered how her organisation -- a long-time supporter of the arts -- could bring more Aboriginal people into the gallery network.

After months of consulting and planning, the Wesfarmers company and the National Gallery of Australia yesterday announced a $1.25m five-year fellowship program to train and mentor indigenous people in areas such as curatorship, art registration, exhibition design, public programs and gallery marketing and communications. It is the only national fellowship of its kind, and bypasses the normally competitive and demanding traditional gallery entry process.

The fellowship, which starts in 2010, will offer 16 indigenous people a two-week intensive internship at the Canberra gallery. Two interns will then be selected to work and train at the NGA for a further two years.

The program will be repeated in 2012 with a further 16 interns.

Ms Carroll-Fairhall said she hoped the project "significantly improves the representation of indigenous people in the profession, in those leadership and management roles in galleries and in national collecting institutions".

As well, more Aboriginal arts managers would strengthen the indigenous art sector.

The NGA has hired former Democrats senator Aden Ridgeway to consult Aboriginal communities and arts centres, state art galleries and governments on how to maximise the interns' long-term job opportunities.

"I think we have to wait and see what comes out of the workshops and discussions," Mr Ridgeway said. He predicted strong indigenous community support for the idea.

"When you look at the robustness and the dynamism of the indigenous art sector ... it will offer opportunities to those who don't necessarily have the talent to be artists but who might seek opportunities in art management."

Unique Aboriginal Art Exhibition in Melbourne

2009-08-03T21:20:00.002+09:30

Below is an article about a fascinating exhibition being held in Melbourne with some incredibly unique pieces of Aboriginal Art. If you are in Melbourne at the time, it would be a rare opportunity to see such wonderful pieces and well worth a visit.

The most eye-opening show of Aboriginal art ever

August 3, 2009 – 8:50 am, by whchong

Here goes: This is finest show of Aboriginal art I have ever seen.

It is neither the biggest (only 20 barks, and some objects), nor the most varied (it is narrow in range), but the works are unique in historical and aesthetic qualities. Every item is superb. Many are magnificent. And this is the first time – since being collected about seventy years ago – they have been shown in public.

So and therefore, if you happen to be in Melbourne before or on August 23, head straight for the Ian Potter Museum of Art at Melb. Uni. (not the Ian Potter gallery in the city). I have had the good luck to have seen it three times.

The exhibition is titled “The most eye-opening show of Aboriginal art I have ever seen”. No, alright, actually: Ancestral power and the aesthetic: Arnhem Land paintings and objects from the Donald Thomson Collection, curated by Lindy Allen, who has spent the last two decades working with the collection.

It hasn’t had much publicity; there were reports in Crikey on 12 June by Henry Skerritt, and Nicholas RothwellAustralian, 4 June (Henry’s uncut piece here.) Culture Mulcher has been procrastinating writing about it – there are things to say but I’m still mulling, and I want to look more. But there’s not much time left before it closes, so anyone who has a feeling for Aboriginal art should go soonest. in the

To quote Rothwell: ‘For lovers of Aboriginal art, this is an event of the highest significance. It may be compared with the revelation of a roomful of unknown works from the Florentine trecento: early pieces that hold in them clues to the majesty of the bark painting schools of more recent times.’

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Four very particular things to note about this show.

1) The sheer size of the bigger barks. They do not make them like this anymore! Whole trees became canvases (see ‘Djapu minytji’ painting below). And just how did Thomson get these monsters down from the North without damage?

2) A very elderly friend of mine who went to see the show said he was stunned. He remarked on how these evidently pre-Western influenced works already possessed a level of design sophistication that is simply spectacular. For me, the show is an absolute proof of Aboriginal paintings as art of the highest order.

(Which sounds really … duh. But to this day some very art-minded friends claim, in neutral tones, that they just don’t get Aboriginal painting. Which is code for how they think it does not have the same intentionality, or occupy the same conceptual-aesthetic space as “Art” as they know it.)

3) The patterning in these works is literally dazzling. The cross-hatching – called minytji – demonstrates the quality described in the wall notes as bir’yun. (Click here for a pdf of the notes.) This is the source of the sensational power of these pictures. (More below.)

4) The pictures were painted with the simplest hand-made tools. Brushes made with hair bound to a twig. Or made by chewing a stick till the end frayed into a brushy tip. Pigments from rocks, ground between stones. You can see these items displayed in a vitrine.

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Three of the images from the exhibition are posted below; a figures have been inserted to indicate scale. I have also written up some notes here about the making of the pictures, and Donald Thomson’s discovery of the key to getting the pictures.

A 1935 photo (drawn above) of Wonggu Mununggurr sitting in the sand, with his tiny brush and freshly ground colours, making the first of the pictures commissioned by Donald Thomson. He was painting sacred and “just drawing” minytji (designs). In the photo you can see that he has a second brush between his teeth, of the frayed-end variety. And you can tell that his right nipple was pierced.

A drawing of some of the items in the vitrine display, which were collected the day before Wonggu made his first painting for Thomson. The stringbag, about 35 cm long not including handles, contained painting tools. There were pigment, ochres and orchid stem. The orchid stem provided a liquid extract which was mixed as an adhesive for the colour.

These hand-made (quite often on the spot, according to Thomson) brushes amaze me. That tiny brushes like these were used to cover some of the enormous barks on show is a staggering realisation.

Marawat (brush/’hair of the head’): human hair bound on wood with fibre.
Bulmurr (brush/stick): wood with frayed end.
Grindstone for gapang (white pigment), and one for red ochre.
Gangul or buthalak (yellow ochre).
Ratjpa (red ochre) wrapped in bark.
I inserted a ball point to show scale.

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For the Greater Glory of God: sparkle, glitter, shine

This is the nub: (to continue on from point 3 above): this method of cross-hatching, the eye-dazzling designs, goes to the heart of the pictures – bir’yun is described as the sensation of “brilliance” or “flash”. It is ‘the quality of aesthetic’ embodied by the minytji, or cross-hatching design, which is the marr, or power, of the ancestor. That is, the minytji (design) creates the bir’yun (brilliance) that evokes the marr (power) of the likan wangarr (totemic clan ancestors).

From the exhibition catalogue:

The key discovery for Donald Thomson was that ‘the fine quality or aesthetic sought and achieved in painting minytji was not incidental, and that it was driven by the desire to capture the essence of the wangarr and harness its strength and power or marr. In field-notes from August 1937:

The spirit of the whole mintji—it is likened to the flash of a sudden ‘uplift’ when [the men] see the marr of the secret mintji … likened also to anger … the sensation of eyes is—its wangarr itself—they mean the sensation of light … the penetrating flash, the fixed intent stare of the eye—a wonderful mystical concept—idea—here … All mintji—has this light.

‘The word for this ‘light’ was bir’yun, a term that has a gloss in Yolngu language, meaning to sparkle, glitter or shine … i.e. the sparkling sensation of flowering white gums reflected in water.’

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Ad maiorem Dei gloriam – For the greater glory of God – the motto of the Jesuits. And I think that’s pretty much what Wonggu and his fellow artists were doing when they made their minytji designs flash and crackle with bir’yun sparkle. They were aiming to reflect the glory of their ancestral spirits, their gods. They were painting for glory.

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A couple of final notes.

As Rothwell has written, these ‘early pieces … hold in them clues to the majesty of the bark painting schools of more recent times.’

I spoke to Henry Skerritt who elaborated: ‘As I say in the essay, the importance of this exhibition is that it represents the very beginnings of 2D painting in eastern Arnhem Land. Not only is it the first time that the designs are removed from their ceremonial use, but these artists introduce new figurative elements – elements which allow them to explain their grand stories to Westerners like Donald Thomson. The figurative devices introduced in these works – the way they paint spirits and humans, or even things like the use of footprints to indicate travel – reverberate through contemporary Yolngu painting. If you look at someone like David Malangi’s paintings – whose figures were used on the one dollar note – although the figures have a timeless feeling to them – they actually relate back to the the aesthetic inaugurated by artists like Wonggu in these major works collected by Thomson.’

Which is to say, the barks on show are the very beginnings of Arnhem painting as art commodity. Which is shown very well by Howard Morphy in his book Becoming Art: Exploring cross-cultural categories (UNSW Press). As he points out, ‘The major shift in art production has been away from embellished material culture objects towards bark paitings and other objects produced primarily for sale.’

This exhibition shows some of the deep roots, and first shoots of the now enormous forest of the Aboriginal art industry – and that really is eye-opening. But as Skerritt says, ‘Aside from that, these works are simply stunning … that is reason enough to go see them.’

Original Article location and Thanks to Crikey.com