The Dealer is the Devil Page 19
Bardon noted that the men had great difficulty reproducing or copying successful earlier works. He was convinced that their artistic expression depended primarily on touch rather than sight, having been derived from drawing with fingers in sand or on the body. The subjective nature of the designs was, he noted, informed by the individual artist’s psychological connection to the spirit of his Dreaming as he worked. Bardon was convinced that the act of painting was a transcendental interaction between man, his spirit, and his world. He undoubtedly watched, as I have on countless occasions, while artists lost in reverie, murmured their songline, the volume increasing as a swelling number of others painting nearby joined the chanting.
As we have seen, these historic decisions were being made against a backdrop of ruthless repression. Aboriginal people were being constantly humiliated by the white police force. Interracial tension exploded into riots, leaving several young men with unreasonably severe jail sentences. Papunya was at breaking point.
In this poisonous atmosphere Bardon made his inflammatory and momentous decision. He decided to travel to Alice Springs to sell some of the paintings, and returned triumphant with $1,400. When the news broke, that 50 works had been sold to Iris Harvey, the owner of the Arunta Art Gallery and Book Shop, and Pat Hogan’s Stuart Art Centre, it had an immediate effect on the artists. Selling their paintings was more than just a way of improving the life of their families.
It rekindled a sense of self and community esteem among the men who had, to a degree, been estranged from their once important tribal positions. Pat Hogan’s encouragement and acute business sense also gave Bardon the confidence to expand the painting activities and take on additional artists.
With the advent of better quality art materials such as brushes and a wider variety of colours, ritual designs were transformed into a unique art form, accessible to Western audiences. As this unfolded, a number of artists emerged who made significant stylistic advances, most importantly Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri. Clifford Possum, in particular, rapidly developed a singular artistic style. His inventiveness with spatial configuration and placement of realistic figurative imagery was possibly derived from his skills in woodcarving prior to the Papunya movement. The result was that his early works conveyed a remarkable sense of atmosphere.
Bardon left the community for the Christmas break in 1971. When he returned the attitude of the white administrators toward him had significantly hardened. The sympathetic school principal had been replaced, and the deputy superintendent of the community accused him of trading in paintings for his own benefit. It was an accusation he strenuously denied. The welfare branch, several teachers and the administration all wanted him out. He had become too close to the Aboriginal people, who at the time had no rights, and whose paintings, the administrators insisted, belonged to the government. Behind his back, Pat Hogan had proposed a deal with the new superintendent to take over the painting group.
Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Love Story, 1972. Synthetic polymer on composition board, 45 x 61 cm.
The pressure on Bardon was becoming unbearable but, refusing to give up, he enlisted Tim Leura’s help in purchasing and selling more paintings. Another two consignments were sold to the Stuart Art Centre and, in March, Hogan sold 105 paintings she had purchased between August 1971 and early 1972 to the Northern Territory Museum of Arts and Sciences.16 This was the first acquisition of Papunya paintings by a public art gallery. In April 1972, moves to establish an artists’ cooperative began, and during the following month Charlie Tarawa suggested the artists name it Papunya Tula after the smaller of two hills nearby.17 With these negotiations proceeding, Bardon travelled to Sydney with Tim Leura to hold Papunya’s first commercial exhibition at the David Jones Gallery. In July, both Bardon and Pat Hogan organised separate exhibitions in Alice Springs, while the Northern Territory Museum exhibited the paintings they had acquired earlier in the year in Darwin.
As both sides argued over the establishment of the artists’ cooperative, the Northern Territory administration stepped in. There would be no mediation through an interpreter. Aboriginal people would have no say in the running of their own cooperative. There was strong pressure on Bardon to resign. The administration induced in him such terror, that he became distressed and ill. By August 1972, just 18 months after his arrival, Bardon’s predicament had become untenable. His family sent his brother, James, to Alice Springs to help him leave the community.
EARLY DESERT MASTERS
While the whites battled for power over the emerging market for Papunya art, the artists continued to debate the boundaries of the new contemporary style.
Long Jack took the lead in stepping away from problematic subjects. In his earliest paintings, such as Kadaitcha Dreaming, he depicted the feared and invisible spirit who punishes wayward children. Later he concentrated on Water Dreaming imagery, which tells of the wondrous, life-giving effects of rain in the desert. He achieved quite striking effects by employing traditional earth colours in more harmonious ways than a number of the other men. During the early 1970s, Long Jack’s paintings sold well in Alice Springs. Their symmetrical balance, stylised figurative elements, and soft decorative approach appealed to the public. His success spurred the other men on in their own efforts.
Long Jack was very tall, devout and dignified. A committed teetotaller, he had worked as a timber cutter and stockman before he arrived at Papunya in 1962, and soon after became a groundsman. He was also one of the first to join the painting group and carefully instructed Bardon in the difference between clan and personal custody of Dreamings. He was appointed to the Aboriginal Arts Board of the Australia Council during the 1970s, and created some of Papunya Tula’s largest early canvases for the Board’s overseas exhibition program.18 In 1983, he was ordained as a Lutheran pastor and later became the Chairman of the Papunya Tula cooperative.
One would expect that Long Jack’s early boards, like all other early examples of the movement, would be highly prized by collectors, but this is not the case. His best results at auction have been relatively modest and his record prices were set as long ago as 1998. This is possibly due to the fact that the highly praised simplicity of his early style is no longer fashionable. The early vignettes of another important artist, Billy Stockman, have suffered a similar fate. He too sold hundreds, if not thousands, of artworks over a 30-year painting career. Yet his symmetrical images of plants and animals are now considered too decorative. Today, interest in the paintings of both these artists is limited.
Of all the early painters, Kaapa Mbitjana Tjampitjinpa was undoubtedly the most important at the outset. He was a charismatic figure who nurtured a unique sense of vocation as an artist. After becoming the first Aboriginal to win the Alice Springs Caltex Golden Jubilee Art Award in 1971, he was elected by the painting group as founding Chairman of Papunya Tula Artists. He set himself up thereafter with the keys to the painting room firmly in his pocket at the only table facing the door, so that he could greet visitors while working with immense concentration on his art.
Early collectors were keen on Kaapa’s graphic clarity and symmetry. His paintings of the period depict realistic figures, finely decorated with body paint. These and ceremonial objects such as shields, spears and dance boards were painted on a plain black or orange background. His ability to paint intimate details and to build an ordered sense of story, appealed to European sensibilities.
Over the years following Bardon’s departure, developments in painting at Papunya gravitated toward a less representational, modern style. Like the others, Kaapa concentrated on the essentials of a story and avoided revealing secret or specific details. Consequently, the power and authority of his later works were dissipated by a veil of dots that concealed the sacred references. The dots evolved into monochromatic fields surrounding design elements, and still later into a cartographic matrix. While he continued to paint until his death in 1988, Kaapa’s most valuable paintings were those created during Bardon
’s time at Papunya between 1971 and 1972. His greatest artistic legacy was the monumental Budgerigar series of 1972, which negotiated a very close line between the sacred and the secular.
Kaapa was also one of the first artists to sell his paintings independently of an official art centre. While I was working for Lawson~Menzies auction house in 2006, I received a call from a fossicker who had paid $10 for an unidentified Aboriginal painting in a garage sale in Beaumaris, Victoria, in the early 1980s. He had kept it with his brick-a-brack for 25 years before he decided to try to sell it. Though I immediately recognised Kaapa’s signature style, there was no art centre code number written on the back, and because the painting had no provenance I advised the owner to spend $500 having it examined at the Ian Potter Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation. A few weeks later while hovering over an examination table flooded in ultraviolet light with the Director, Robyn Sloggett, I was thrilled to see showing through the surface pigment the sacred symbols that Kaapa had over-painted in order to avoid offending his fellow countrymen. Despite its less than pristine condition, the painting eventually sold for $72,000. Though this was a spectacular result, the lack of a recorded verifiable history kept the price down. Two years later, in 2008, Sotheby’s sold a similar board by Kaapa that had supreme provenance. It was the very work that won the Caltex Golden Jubilee Art Award in 1971 and it set the artist’s record price at $276,000.
Kaapa Mbitjana Tjampitjinpa, Budgerigar Dreaming, c. 1971–1972. Synthetic polymer paint on composition board, 71 x 43 cm. Bought in a garage sale in Beaumaris, Victoria, in the early 1980s for $10. Sold by Lawson ~ Menzies in 2006 for $72,000.
Over the intervening 40 years, no two issues have divided opinion in the Aboriginal arts industry more than artists painting outside of their art centres, or being assisted by family members in the creation of their paintings. Yet Kaapa, who was the founding father of Western Desert art, was also the first desert artist to openly be assisted by his female relatives and to sell his art directly into the market. During the 1980s, art advisers and observers already feared that family assistance would diminish his stature as an artist and respected elder, but Kaapa brushed these concerns aside. He insisted that this practice was entirely appropriate to Anmatjerre law and cultural convention. In the late 1990s the issue of assistance would become even more contentious. But unlike the scandal that attached itself to the late-career works of Clifford Possum and Turkey Tolson, for instance, all assisted paintings created by Kaapa and dozens of other artists during the 1980s continue to be sold as if they were completed by a single artist.
Another invaluable friend to Geoffrey Bardon was Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri. His strong command of English made him a trusty assistant and interpreter. A deep thinker steeped in tribal law, he made a wholehearted commitment to the painting project, despite his initial reservations. Today he is recognised as one of the four founding members of the Western Desert art movement. Bardon remembered him as a ‘most gentle and endearing man’, and as his ‘dearest and closest friend in the Western Desert’.19 Through the trials and tribulations of the art movement’s beginnings, Leura enabled the necessary dialogue to develop between Bardon and ‘the painting men’, and later with interested outsiders. He enlisted his ‘brother’ Clifford Possum to the painting group. As it grew, the men would often burst out in laughter at Bardon’s efforts to understand their explanations of paintings, or his attempts to discuss visual aspects of their work. It was Leura who invariably came up with a story that was comprehensible and acceptable to all.
Sitting in his own corner of the painting room with his board across his knees, Leura initially followed the ordered and symmetrical style that typified Anmatjerre paintings. A deep melancholy was often discernible in his art. He was drawn to subdued tones, mixing colours, dotting onto wet grounds and blending outlines, so that shapes would often run into each other. With great subtlety, he would include stylised animal, plant or skeletal human figures without disturbing the balance and clarity of the design.
Geoff Bardon tried to curb the group’s raw enthusiasm and slow their painting so they could become more technically proficient and embrace stylistic innovation. In Leura’s case this led to more painterly experimentation. He developed elegant tracery and filigree effects that eddied beneath and between the surface dotting, thereby creating a depth of suggested meaning.
Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri, Father/Son/Grandfather Dreaming, c. 1978. Synthetic polymer on composition board, 47.5 x 62.5 cm.
Clifford Possum at Coo-ee Aboriginal Art Gallery, 1989.
Leura anguished over the loss and humiliation his people had suffered and recognised that his Dreaming must be kept alive and passed on to future generations. Promoting awareness of his ancient cultural heritage seemed the best remedy for its threatened dissolution. He was, in Aboriginal eyes at least, a more important figure than Clifford Possum, who outlived him by 18 years to become one of the most prolific and successful Aboriginal artists of all time. Today Clifford Possum is the more famous of the two ‘brothers’, but Tim Leura is now recognised as his spiritual and artistic mentor. While Leura’s output was relatively small, his best works are exquisitely rendered. These are rare and important paintings and will, over time, become more and more coveted. He passed away in 1984, several years before the desert painting movement spread widely beyond Papunya, and long before Aboriginal art gained wide acceptance.
Clifford Possum had already been earning good money from carving for some years before the mural went up. He did not join the painting group until February 1972 but his inventiveness was notable from the outset. Early works evoked a psychological mood and sense of atmosphere,20 and today these command some of his highest prices at auction. Emu Corroboree Man, painted during 1972, is considered his most emblematic and important early work. It sold for $411,750 at Sotheby’s in 2005. Possum went on to create paintings on an unprecedentedly massive scale during the late 1970s, and enjoyed a long and industrious career until his death in 2002. Today he is considered one of the three most influential artists in the history of the Aboriginal art movement, alongside Emily Kngwarreye and Rover Thomas.
CREATING A MARKET: DESERT ART’S TAKEOVER
Gough Whitlam is the only politician I can think of who has ever put art onto the national political agenda during an election campaign. Increased funding for the arts was central to his party’s vision of Australian nationhood. Whitlam and Nugget Coombs, by then the Chair of the Australia Council for the Arts, understood that art had the potential to be an agent for Aboriginal economic empowerment. They also understood its political role in asserting cultural identity and land rights. Under their inspirational leadership, generous government funds were channelled into Aboriginal Australia for the first time.
When the inaugural Aboriginal Arts Board (AAB) was established in 1973 it had 15 directors, of which 11 were Indigenous. It provided direct support for communities that were reviving traditional Aboriginal arts and crafts, and mapped the future direction and promotion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts. Led by Indigenous Chairmen Dick Roughsey (1973–1975) and Wandjuk Marika (1975–1979), its members through the 1970s included the trade union activist Chicka Dixon, Thancoupie the potter, the actor and director Brian Syron, and traditional artists and lawmen David Mowaljarlai, Billy Stockman Tjapaltjarri and Bobby Barrdjaray Nganjmirra.21
These Indigenous directors knew that even as they encouraged increased production, sales of art in their own communities had stalled. There was already a glut of paintings around the country, and in the absence of sales, many artists were offering art and craft directly to community workers for ready cash.
Desert communities beyond Papunya watched developments there with concern. Pitjantjatjara men were so outraged by the content of a Papunya painting shown during the Yuendumu sports day in 1972 that a group of elders from Ernabella complained to the Board. The Papunya artist had used motifs that the Pitjantjatjara mob ‘owned’ and regarded as secret. In 1974, another exhib
ition of paintings in Alice Springs was closed down because the content was deemed taboo to women and children.22 Tensions grew to the point where spears were thrown at the gallery by angry elders. During the following year, Pitjantjatjara men insisted that images were being viewed publicly against their wishes at a Perth exhibition, and 44 paintings out of 46 were turned to the wall. The Papunya painters were forced to pay compensation.23 As a result, the process of abstraction and stylisation which had been invented to veil sacred elements shortly after the creation of the Honey Ant mural became fully integrated into Pintupi painting, and evolved into a strong focus on design.