The Role of Writing in Aboriginal Art?
Aboriginal art, even the contemporary kind, has a strong affinity with writing. One of the reasons for this is that traditional Aboriginal culture (pre-colonised and after) is fundamentally an oral culture. What writing it had consisted in image-making. Their images tell stories, and in some cases, depending on the people and the region, they can be counted as similar to maps. The images trace and describe a particular geography, together with the sacred sites, totems, and stories associated with them.
This means that images have a slightly different function for Aboriginal culture than for cultures that rely on written language. Even for urban and contemporary Aboriginal artists who have had the colonized culture imposed on them and thus have written language, links to traditional image-writing culture are retained to certain degrees. Hence the legibility and heavy symbolism in contemporary Aboriginal art, tracing a line of continuity between the past and now.
Aboriginal Art: Australia’s Biggest Art Export
The biggest international market for Aboriginal art—which also happens to be Australia’s largest cultural export—is New York. This is no surprise, as it is the city that made the largest claim to non-objective abstraction after many of Europe’s best artists fled Paris in 1940-2.
Lovers of art in New York have been accustomed to a heaped serving of abstract painting in their visual diet. It is a basic truth that people gravitate to what they know, which explains the remarkable responsiveness of New York to Aboriginal art when it began dribbling into their market in the 1980s.
Their appetite for abstraction also explains that the artist that so far asks the highest prices, Rover Thomas, is also appreciated for his bold compositions and flat, simple planes, remotely like a Clyfford Still or Rothko except in earth tones.
Hills of Durham, Rover Country, 1984, Rover Thomas, https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/97.1995/
It is unlikely that the first collectors knew much about Aboriginal art and culture, or the meanings within their art, or may not have cared. But those who bothered to find out may have been surprised to learn that Aboriginal art, while sharing many superficial traits with 1950’s American non-objective painting, is in other respects quite the opposite to it.
Aboriginal art is a complex mesh of visual and written, and in some cases poses more as ‘written’ than ‘visual’. Nelson Rockefeller's quip about Abstract Expressionism, 'what I like about abstract art is that it can mean anything I want it to mean', when applied to Aboriginal art, assumes grotesque ethical proportions about the intrusiveness and presumption of Western capitalism's colonizing eye.
Pre-settlement Aboriginal art is not abstract, a term only learned by contemporary Aboriginal artists in the last few decades. Instead, it is closer to what we might call a sacred realism.
The Australian Aboriginal (aboriginal means ‘originary' or 'primal') peoples are now considered the earth's oldest, dating from between 40 000 to 50 000 years old.
Before their devastation after colonial invasion, they were a culture, or cultures, as varied as Mediaeval Europe, with over 200 language groups. With so many tribes and languages now extinct, traditions are lost forever.
Aboriginal Art and the Sacred
Pre-settlement Aboriginal art is/was fundamentally sacred, its entire meaning at the sole behest of a few elders who communicate their content guardedly and gradually.
Depending on its level of sacredness, a story could be communicated as a conjunction of dance, song, body-painting or sand-tracing, as found in the sacred get-together, the corroboree. Such rites told the stories of animals significant to their moiety, or totem, relating the people to the spirits to the land. The significance of the land is always the cardinal aspect.
Story of the Women’s Camp and the Origin of Damper, <Insert Year e.g. 2005>, by Anatjari (Yanyatjarri) Tjakamarra, https://bit.ly/38nOozY
The paintings from the Kimberly Ranges and the Western Desert, for example, act like maps, or even imaged distillations of the land and the mythic storylines.
A useful way of thinking about the art of these regions is as a map, which depicts a particular movement through a landscape, much as in any story of a person's odyssey from home, over a hill, to a watering-hole, an encounter with an animal, hunting, and so on.
It is often said that the dots that plentifully litter the paintings such as those originating from Papunya and the Western Desert region grew in intricacy in the last few decades since the 70s to act as a gauze-like screen to the non-indigenous viewer, protecting the sacred content from exposure to the uninitiated.
More Recent Traditional Aboriginal Art
In a more recent example of traditional art, a masterpiece of its kind, the Burial Poles (1988) were an initiative by a group of artists from northern Arnhem Land (the region around the squarish middle bump of Australia's north coast) in response to the Bicentennial celebrations. It was like their version of a protest petition, although voiced without belligerence.
The Aboriginal Memorial in the foyer of the National Gallery of Australia Photograph: '© National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, http://bit.ly/3h6MUhx
Fittingly, there are two hundred poles, each pole symbolizing a year of white occupation.
Nine groups contributed to the work, each represented in their location in the installation that corresponds like legends on a map with their physical location, mirrored in the work's configuration whose walkway refers to the Glyde river estuary that flows from the Arafura Swamp to the sea.
Each pole, or ceremonial coffin, is decorated with designs specific to their ancestral group. They are variously derived from stylized references to the sacred land or to animals cherished for ritual and survival purposes. In many places, they narrate or connote key encounters of the deceased with their immediate environment.
Some poles have a ventilating eyelet which, as the story goes, enables the dead spirit to stare out onto the landscape. Most evident in the image of the installation here are the heavily banded poles belonging to the liya-qawumirr-Manyarrngu people, 'liya' meaning 'head' and 'gawumirr' 'muddy water'. This is because the people live at the head of the river, salt and fresh water meet, causing the tidal flats to go muddy. This explains the repeated lines representing the tidal marks on the tree trunks that monitor the tide's rise and fall.
They are schematic and diagrammatic of the land’s conditions and effects.
Contemporary Aboriginal Art
When we turn to contemporary Aboriginal art that has absorbed Western idioms of media and practice, despite its evident differences from the art of their ancestors, there is still a substantial degree of lexicality, or readability.
Literalness, generally a flaw to the Western eye, is here pardonable to the point of being desirable because images perform the same role as words to relate a story or situation.
Average Life Expectancy, <Insert Year e.g. 2005>, by Blak Douglas (aka Adam Hill), https://bit.ly/3rap7Sx
In this painting by Blak Douglas (aka Adam Hill), each element is ripe for decoding. In the 2006 painting, Average Life Expectancy, the artist launches a frontal assault on what he sees as the Australian Federal government’s derelict handling of Aboriginal affairs.
The road sign reads, 'federally defunded black spot', referring to the desert regions within Australia that are the home of indigenous communities. Because they are not in the public or media line, Douglas is drawing attention to the fact that the lack of sufficient regard for remote Aboriginal groups is a contributing factor in their markedly lower life expectancy.
Painted in a style that might be called Aboriginal hip-hop, redolent of graffiti art and urban graphics, in the absence of a ‘traditional’ upbringing, the artist has drawn together his own set of visual codes.
The sun is the Aboriginal dreaming in the distance. The clouds represent the white presence pressing down upon the land. The vertical lumps are like phalluses, which suggest the whites' rude intrusion upon the landscape. The scene is void of life. Typical to many urban Aboriginal works, it is decodable and declaims its content with indignant force.
