The Dealer is the Devil Read online

  “Every rock, every hill, every water, I know that place backwards and forwards, up and down, inside out. It’s my country and I got names for every place.”

  QUEENIE MCKENZIE AT BLACK FELLAS CREEK, OLD TEXAS, 1995

  Johnny Mosquito singing to his country, Jijigujarra rockhole, south of Balgo Hills, WA, 1994.

  THE DEALER IS THE DEVIL

  AN INSIDER’S HISTORY OF THE ABORIGINAL ART TRADE

  Adrian Newstead

  with

  Ruth Hessey

  Brandl and Schlesinger

  The lives of more than 400 artists are touched upon in this book. They include the 100 most important figures in the history of the Aboriginal art movement. It is not possible to illustrate works by each of them here.

  To read detailed profiles and view images of the 10 highest record-setting works by these prominent artists, it is recommended that readers use the Australian Indigenous Art Market Top 100 artists website compiled by the author.

  www.aiam100.com/(the artist name of interest)

  All rights reserved. This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of study, research, criticism, review, or as otherwise permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electrical or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

  The moral right of Adrian Newstead to be identified as the author of this work is hereby asserted.

  Copyright © Adrian Newstead, 2014

  First published by Brandl & Schlesinger in 2014

  PO Box 127 Blackheath NSW 2785 Australia

  www.brandl.com.au

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Author: Newstead, Adrian, author.

  Title: The dealer is the devil: An Insider’s History of the Aboriginal Art Trade / Adrian Newstead

  ISBN: 9781921556432

  Notes: Includes index

  Subjects: Art, Aboriginal Australian.

  Art, Aboriginal Australian – History.

  Art, Aboriginal Australian – 20th century – Economic aspects

  Art, Aboriginal Australian – 21st century – Economic aspects

  Art – Economic aspects

  Art – Collectors and collecting

  Art as an investment

  Cultural property – Protection – Australia

  Dewey Number: 709.994

  eISBN 978-1-921556-44-9

  Substantial Editor: Ruth Hessey

  Copy Editor: Emma Borghesi

  Proofreader: Bronwyn Sweeney

  Designer: Kerry Klinner megacitydesign.com

  Production: Victoria Jefferys writelight.com.au

  FOR JOHN AND LINCOLN AND IN MEMORY OF JOE AND JIMMY

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  INITIATION

  1 Hot-Wired

  2 Old Cowboys

  3 Songlines

  4 Cultural Revival is Survival

  5 Kith and Kin

  BEYOND THE HORIZON

  6 Cave Painting

  7 Artefacts – Eastern Australia

  8 The First Aboriginal ‘Artists’

  9 Early Collectors

  THE DEVELOPING MARKET

  10 Anthropologists, Missionaries and Ethnographers

  11 Early Collections

  12 The Passport to Arnhem Land

  13 Early Bark Painters of Western and Central Arnhem Land

  14 North East Arnhem Land

  15 Queensland – The Sunshine State

  16 Land of the Wandjina

  GO WEST YOUNG MAN

  17 The Birth of a Home-Grown Art Industry

  18 Home of the Honey Ant

  19 Early Desert Masters

  20 Creating a Market – Desert Art’s Takeover

  21 The End of the 1970s – A Snapshot

  22 Origins of Art in the East Kimberley

  THE GOOSE THAT LAID THE GOLDEN EGG

  23 Arnhem Land

  24 Spread of Western Desert Art

  25 For the Love of Artefacts

  26 Don’t Bring Your Love to Town

  27 Across the Tanami – The Emerging Warlpiri Artists

  28 Eastern Desert – Utopia

  29 Balgo Hills

  30 On the Road

  31 Arnhem Land Artists of Renown

  32 Bad Balanda Blood

  33 Urban Art

  34 The Mainstreaming of Aboriginal Art

  35 The Demise of The Company

  36 An Accident Waiting To Happen

  HIGHWAY TO HELL

  37 The Advent of ‘Authenticity’

  38 Star Quality

  39 The Birth of the Secondary Market

  40 Across the Philosophical Divide – The Developing Market Infrastructure

  41 Seriously Collectable

  42 Roving in Thomas Town

  43 Fakery

  44 Authorship

  45 Slander

  46 Independence

  47 Attribution

  48 Toyota Dreaming

  49 Bogus!

  50 Ownership

  51 Fin de Siècle

  ART GOES INTO OVERDRIVE

  52 Fun and Games

  53 Desert Blush

  54 Pride and Prejudice

  55 The Star Has Left the Building – The Rise and Rise of Tommy Watson

  56 Fire, Fire, Burning Bright

  57 Status Anxiety

  58 Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?

  59 Une Guerre de Territoire

  60 Off the Beaten Track

  61 Twinkle Twinkle, Tinkle Tinkle

  62 Auction Wars

  63 Renewing the Dreaming

  64 Reccon Silly Nation

  65 It’s Not Just Black and White

  66 Imagine

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Endnotes

  Timeline

  Abbreviations

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Photographic Credits and Copyright

  Index

  I always talk like this …

  don’t take our country or we shall die …

  how can you buy my grandmother?

  Unkown Pitjantjatjara

  Herrmansburg Choir

  Blackfella, whitefella

  It doesn’t matter, what your colour

  As long as you, a true fella

  As long as you, a real fella

  All the people, of different races

  With different lives, in different places

  It doesn’t matter, what your name is

  We got to have, lots of changes

  We need more brothers,

  if we’re to make it

  We need more sisters,

  if we’re to save it

  Are you the one who’s gonna stand up and be counted?

  Are you the one who’s gonna be there when we shout it?

  Are you the one who’s always ready with a helping hand?

  Are you the one who understands these family plans?

  Stand up! Stand up and be counted!

  Neil Murray/George Rrurrambu

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Adrian Newstead established Coo-ee Aboriginal Art Gallery, Australia’s oldest continuously operating Aboriginal art gallery, in 1981. A former President of the Indigenous Art Trade Association and Director of Aboriginal Tourism Australia, he became the Head of Aboriginal Art for Lawson~Menzies in 2003, and Managing Director of Menzies Art Brands until 2008. In 2011 he was appointed President of the Art Consulting Association of Australia.

  An Aboriginal art consultant, dealer and art commentator, based in Bondi, New South W
ales, Adrian Newstead has 30 years’ experience working in Aboriginal and Australian contemporary art. He is a widely published arts commentator and author.

  The story of the modern Aboriginal art movement is the most exciting and transcendent chapter of contemporary Australian history. Within the space of just 40 years, Indigenous artists transformed the perception of their culture from something of strictly ethnographic interest into one of the great internationally acclaimed contemporary art movements of all time.

  Part road trip, part memoir, part history, part political commentary, The Dealer is the Devil is illuminatingly thought-provoking and provocative. It is an incredibly exciting and fast paced account of the fluctuating fortunes and exponential success of the Aboriginal art movement, with all of the elements one would expect of a complex drama, played out on a national and international stage.

  Political posturing, personal aggrandisement, commercial skulduggery and greed all play their part.

  Front cover photo: Abie Jangala and the author, Lajamanu, 1998.

  FOREWORD

  In the 1980s, a white art adviser working for a remote Aboriginal community in the Australian desert told me about the arrival, one day, of three ‘peculiar characters’ from the east. This community included a number of known gifted men and women artists, and the art adviser paralleled their story with that of the three wise men in the Book of Matthew.

  In the Biblical account, the three wise men were led across the deserts bearing gifts for the Messiah, the boy king revealed to them through a sign, a vision from God. The wise men’s gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh honoured the temporal powers of their society: power and riches (gold), the acknowledgement of God (frankincense), and respect for their dead forebears (myrrh).

  In the contemporary equivalent, the first ‘wise man’ came looking for a particular ‘authentic’ Aboriginal artist. The artist had already been authenticated as a child by a famous anthropologist, and thus was ‘special’; no other Aboriginal, apparently, would suffice.

  The second, a woman in fact, carried two books that she said had told her all she needed to know of Aboriginal society: Marlo Morgan’s Mutant Message Down Under, and a ‘rare’ confidential account of Aboriginal men’s private devotional rituals.

  The third wise man also sought a revelatory authentic experience, but something that he believed he alone would arrive at. He rejected the local Aboriginal men of high degree who were identified to him: they had nothing to teach him, he said.

  • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

  In 2012, the Aboriginal artist-film director Warwick Thornton created a performance installation for Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany, based on Brecht’s Mother Courage theatre work. It featured a modern ‘wagon’ in which a female artist, one of his relatives from Central Australia, was installed, producing small ‘dot type’ paintings one after the other. I interpreted his use of the tale of Canteen Anna1 and her doomed attempt to survive and profit from the current war as an oblique comment on the Aboriginal art trade and contemporary society.

  This left me wondering: ‘Can we Aboriginal people ever really profit from our special cultural position with integrity?’

  Yes I believe so – but in doing so, what values or principles would be compromised? What wrenching of our social structure would need to occur?

  My belief is that in pre-contact times (and today, in a form) art was constructed for social-spiritual exchange, the building of social bonds and responsibilities. Can we ever build meaningful, realistic relationships with outsiders who claim to have shared values today? Only time can tell.

  The most intense awakening to Australian Aboriginal art by ‘Westerners’ has occurred along a path through the 20th and early 21st century, reaching an incredible intensity in the last 30 years. Some say this presents a possible third path in the collision of the two societies, an alternative to the two other paths of obliteration or complete assimilation.

  The writing in this book covers a long period of amazing events, art, artists and characters with a particular feel for these last 30 years during which Adrian Newstead, the author and himself an art dealer, reached his own awakening to Aboriginal art.

  • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

  It could be said there are three stages in the meeting of societies in the European colonial period. Firstly, cursory meetings and exchanges; secondly, the revealing of the true colonial intent and violent interactions; and thirdly, the work of healing missionaries and other guilt-affected liberal groups.

  Postcolonial writer Franz Fanon saw postcolonial cultural expression as moving through three stages. The first was the Indigenous society’s adoption of the colonial power’s cultural forms as a futile attempt to reach a type of equality (somehow this went missing) and respect; the second manifested as an obsession and fixation on the art of the pre-contact times and the rejection of colonial forms as a statement of separate identity; and the third and final position was a rationalisation of both forms (past and present) as a legitimate dynamic, living culture.

  When I started formally in this field in the mid 1970s in a commercial gallery in Sydney, I was advised by my non-Aboriginal supervisor that there were an interesting set of attributes to look for in the valuing of Aboriginal art, and I tried to use them when I came to work at Milingimbi and Ramingining at the beginning of 1979. The first attribute was authenticity: did the artwork come from a tradition or reference a tradition? Secondly, was it technically well made: did the artwork display that the artist was technically proficient? Was the paint applied consistently? Would it stay on the bark or canvas, the wood sculpture remain in one piece? Finally, was it aesthetically pleasing (by Western aesthetic standards): did its composition, form and message compel an emotional response?

  In my opinion, discussion about the value of Aboriginal art at the end of the 20th century centred on the authenticity of the artist and the artwork quite erroneously. What I personally came to look for was a form of ‘gestalt’, a holistic gesture and response: an honesty in art.

  What and how are relationships formed and measured between the artist and the dealer in this time and context? When I worked in Arnhem Land, I thought there were three phases in the creation of a ‘third stage art adviser’.2 Many people came to work in a remote Aboriginal community for a contracted period (usually two years). In the first phase were those who came and fulfilled their time in a world of beautiful exotic people, rituals, society and landscape, of pure bliss. They left with those fond memories. Those who reached the second phase proceeded as the first but encountered a serious argument, misadventure, or brutal awakening to the real state of poverty and disempowerment they lived amongst that pricked their bubble and they left before their contracted period was up, usually embittered. The few who made it to the final phase followed the path of the first but also had a second stage encounter. Yet their relationship was so deep and strong that there was no thought on the part of either party that they would leave.

  A similar scale or time progression of dealing and relations could just as easily occur between dealers/galleries and artists of all races and forms of art. One of the few interesting things in artist Richard Bell’s self-evident 2003 ‘Aboriginal Art: It’s a White Thing’ essay is what he calls the ‘triangle of discomfort’, between the artist, the dealer, and the market. The judgement of the strengths and weaknesses of these interdependent relationships is highly personal, varies over time, and can be complex. They are impossible to standardise.

  In the 1990s, a visiting senior German art curator was surprised by the interest from Australians in general in Aboriginal art as evidenced in the output of books, magazines and news stories. The following account is a fascinating, new broad-read addition.

  I have my own opinion on several events and personalities but I do not believe that the art community as a whole can be held responsible for the crimes or transgressions of a few. It is often said that it’s better to deal wi
th the devil you know than the one you don’t. In this particular case, the dealer may not be the devil, but the devil is certainly in the detail and Adrian Newstead’s personal account is certainly full of detail and varying stimulating views of an exciting passage in Australian history.

  DJON MUNDINE OAM

  Djon Mundine is an independent art curator, writer and activist, and a 2013 PhD candidate at CoFA, UNSW

  DISCLAIMERS

  Every care has been taken to ensure that names, facts and details in this book are accurate but neither the author nor the publisher accepts any responsibility whatsoever for any inadvertent errors. Readers are encouraged to contact the publisher with any errors in fact and suggested corrections. Upon verification, corrections will be incorporated into subsequent editions.

  Aboriginal people should be advised that names and photographs of people who have died during the past decade are reproduced in this book, by which no offence is intended. No secret-sacred, or otherwise restricted images or information have, to the author’s knowledge, been included.

  Sources are detailed in the footnotes and the bibliography. Occasionally, dialogues recorded within have been edited and abridged for narrative purposes, but in such cases all due care has been taken to preserve the original meaning.

  The author acknowledges that spelling conventions have changed over time, especially in regard to artists in the Eastern Desert. For this reason the names of artists, clans and regions that have been used throughout the text are those in most common usage.

  Initiation

  In which the author undergoes his initiation into Aboriginal culture past and present. Falling into the company of clever men and wise old women he explores initiation, kinship, totemism, eldership and the meaning of the Dreamtime, and learns firsthand the repercussions of invasion, dissolution and loss.

  HOT-WIRED

  The interior dashboard was completely ripped out. The seats were slashed and weeping foam. Initials had been recklessly scratched into the interior duco. Polaroid photographs of the ‘perps’, taken with my stolen camera, poked through layers of soft-drink cans, half-eaten takeaway food and cigarette butts.