A celebration of gift and exchange
Northern Impressions: a celebration of contemporary printmaking
Chips Mackinolty, 20 October 2010
"I’ve long been puzzled about a particular aspect of Aboriginal art and its place in the marketplace. It’s nothing to do with Aboriginal art being part of the marketplace—after all it is one of the few areas in which Aboriginal people across much of Australia can have access to discretionary cash incomes. Given the profound material poverty of Aboriginal people, that is no small thing.
Likewise I’ve never fretted over the complex reasons why Aboriginal art and aesthetic has captured significant parts of the marketplace in ways in which few other Indigenous art movements have elsewhere in the world. All power to the artists for having achieved that through the creation of objects of great power and beauty.
The big question for me has always been to understand the ways in which Aboriginal artists themselves have successfully maintained cultural integrity within the marketplace.
How can artists—take John Mawurndjul for example—maintain over so many years a practice that is intensely religious in theme, at the same time so innovative, and at the same time sitting comfortably within a commercial marketplace that is a far cry from his traditions?
Or for that matter, how was the late Michael Riley able to achieve so much through the creation of works of extraordinary beauty, and rigorous cultural and political integrity, while still having a place in the marketplace?
This exhibition has, in a tentative way explained it to me: and it was sparked on re-seeing the beautiful Phyllis Thomas Boab print which is featured here this evening.
And the reason for that was to remind me of an episode near Timber Creek, where boab trees become endemic for the first time as you head west to the Kimberleys.
About three decades ago I was visiting the Girlwi outstation near Timber Creek, buying craft for the organisation that then employed me. While there, a couple of Toyotas turned up from Wadeye, loaded high with a couple of hundred bamboo spear shafts—straightened and stripped with red ochre. I then witnessed an elaborate reckoning of an exchange with people visiting Girlwi from the east Kimberley. Boomerangs and spear heads, hair string belts and ochre were exchanged for the spear shafts.
It was a ritual exchange known throughout the region—from the Daly River well into the Kimberly and south to the northern Tanami—as Winan.
Winan in a sense describes a marketplace, but in a quite different way to European ideas about the gift and exchange that were taking place at Girlwi. There was no capitalist profit and loss happening here, and no generation of Marxist surplus value. The real deal going on was about the volume of the exchange that was going on; and the ritual prestige of participating in such a high volume exchange. It was about the regional religious and political networks that were being enlivened and strengthened on the banks of a dry creek bed, not the dry calculations of a balance sheet.
On this visit, the people from Girlwi took back the boomerangs and spear heads that I had paid cash for, and brought them into the exchange with people from Wadeye for which there was no monetary consideration given or taken.
All the items being gifted an exchanged in winan form the complex relationships of kin, country and ceremony across the region, and were immaterial to the cash I had on offer.
Obviously cash is an explicit fact of life in the contemporary Aboriginal art marketplace, but that doesn’t explain the nature of cultural integrity within the artists’ practice—or the iterative nature of that practice.
When Charlie Tjaruru Tjungurrayi told Andrew Crocker that his motivation to paint was “If I don’t paint this story some whitefella might come steal my country” , he could well have left it at that, and just painted the story a single time. Or when Galarrwuy Yunupingu, a few years later, stated that his countrymen and women’s paintings were “titles” to country—why didn’t Yolngu painters just do it once, and then move on?
My tentative conclusion is that the iterative nature of Aboriginal art practice is what is important—it’s part of tradition of gift and exchange which emphasises activities that are an oft repeated affirmation of commitment to kin and country through ideas, song, music and imagery.
There’s no point, in saying or singing or painting something just once—it is the iterative nature of the practice that confirms the legitimacy of the artist and their work.
And of course printmaking—the kind of printmaking that we see here in Northern Impressions—adds a further dimension to this practice. As multiple originals, prints are gifts that keep on giving in ways that hark back to Winan. It is a multiple exchange—of physical objects as well as entire social practice.
Three of five of the works in this show are from Queensland and Western Australia, but reflect no less the cultural practices of the Northern Territory, whose borders with those two states are seen as entirely arbitrary as can be seen, for example, in the work of Alan Griffiths painting ceremony from Ngarinyman country while domiciled in the Kimberley.
That, in turn, has a bearing on the history of how a collection like this has come to being. Virtually all of the prints have been gifted to the Charles Darwin University in exchange for materials, facilities and assistance provided by collaborators and printers drawn from the Art School and various versions of Northern Editions.
The collaborators and printers—in turn—such as Leon Stainer, have been embedded with the art and cultural relationships of the many, many artists who have contributed to the entire corpus of work held at the University.
Their skills have been gifts to the artists.
There are two non-Aboriginal artists in Northern Impressions, Wayne Eager and Marina Strocchi. They, too, have been drawn into this practice of gift and exchange between themselves and the University and—especially in the case of Marina—have developed a strong sensibility about country. They have become part of the fabric of printmaking at the art school and Northern Editions that stretches back to the early 1990s.
And the artists themselves—whose work you see here this evening?
Their images, and their practice as artists, are gifts to us all—and to all those who will have the privilege of seeing them as Artback tours their work in the year ahead."
