Inventing a tradition - Australian Aboriginal art, various artists, Austral Gallery, St. Louis, Missouri

Art in America, Oct, 1993 by Ann Wilson Lloyd

New Tracks--Old Land: Contemporary Prints from Aboriginal Australia" is a handsome, first-ever survey of recent Aboriginal printmaking. The show contains over 80 prints by 56 artists--women and men ranging from formally trained urban artists who have worked and studied abroad to those still fully immersed in traditional tribal life. It is a compelling exhibition, not only for its rich, evocative imagery but also for the way it grapples with the current debate over Australia's indigenous culture.

The show was shaped by its organizers--the Aboriginal Arts Management Association, a Sydneybased Aboriginal collective, and Boston's Massachusetts College of Art--at least in part as a response to the controversy surrounding the art world's embrace of Aboriginal art [see A.i.A, July '89 and July '90]. Aware of previous charges of the exploitation of Aboriginal artists and sensitive to purists' complaints that the introduction of print-making marks a further step away from Aboriginal art traditions, the curators have included catalogue statements by the artists and provided for the ongoing sale of editions and multiples that will directly benefit them. Some of the catalogue essays seem anxious to establish the legitimacy of contemporary Aboriginal printmaking, linking it to the prehistoric stenciling of images on rocks and to modern-day Aboriginal fabric printing. While this may seem a bit of a stretch, tribal eider Guboo Ted Thomas is quoted to the effect that printmaking is just a new branch on the Aborigines' very sturdy and well-rooted cultural tree. And cocurator Theo Trembley maintains that in his experience as an educator, Aboriginal artists "are eager to learn new means of expression."

Urban Aboriginal artists have in fact been introducing printmaking methods to their tribal counterparts--a kind of symbolic exchange carried out by artists who have increasingly sought to reestablish contact with their cultural heritage. Arone Raymond Meeks, who has studied art in Paris, writes of his adult pilgrimage to ancestral lands in North Queensland and his tutelage in tribal rituals there. Meeks's Laura Dreaming (1989), a four-panel linocut, recounts his experiences via fluid-limbed figures, executed in a graphic black-and-white style, that symbolize fertility and creation. At the show's Boston venue, Meeks also devised an installation to accompany the prints: a sand-and-rock arrangement surrounded by a tangle of bare branches and guarded by three wavering wire figures.

These natural materials injected a bit of bush ambience into the otherwise pristine gallery setting and helped to anchor the imagery in many of the prints to its Australian roots. It is because the print medium can be used both to parallel and to break free of the techniques long used by Aboriginal artists, such as low-relief sand sculpture and bark painting, that it has come to serve as a flexible and unifying art form. In this exhibition, artists of very different backgrounds and skills presented images that testified to a still-living culture rounded on nature-based religious beliefs.

For example, Mary Anne Purlta's Kiinyu (1988), a simple, delicately worked line etching, tells the enchanting story of a spirit animal who heals people by licking them. Pooaraar Bevan Hayward's intricate lithograph Through the Mists of Time--State H (1990) shows a silhouetted human head surrounded by smoky, swirling spirit figures and totemic animals; the print was produced by a complex process that yields a range of shaded tones.

Urban Aboriginals and their outback kinsmen are increasingly being reunited by politics, and many contemporary prints employ overt political imagery. A recurring theme is the suspiciously high number of Aboriginals who die while in police detention. In her catalogue statement, Donna Leslie dedicates her brutal, haunting lithograph Death in Custody (1990) to "my cousin, Bruce Leslie ... and all Aboriginal people who have died in custody." One of the earliest Aboriginal prints, Kevin Gilbert's linocut My Father's Studio (1965), was made while the artist was in prison. He writes that the linocut block was incised "with tools I'd made from a spoon, gem blades and nails, on a piece of old brittle lino off the prison floor."

The major contemporary question facing all indigenous artists, writes Meeks, is "the unresolved issue of land rights." The Aboriginal handling of land imagery is complex, and probably never fully understandable even to Westerners immersed in the romance of Dreamtime and songlines. Artist Lin Onus, who chairs the Aboriginal Arts Management Association, writes that while traditional imagery may not yield much to the uninformed, for the Aboriginal artist the making of such images is more than a response to some obscure urge. "It is an imperative. The action of depicting one's country in a particular fashion will have an effect upon that country itself. This process, for want of a better description, might be described as custodianship."

Thus Djunuwiny (1989), an abstract color screenprint, is meant to keep alive the place where artist Doris Gingingara says that friendly spirits "came to get me when I was a little girl." Banduk Marika's DJanda and the Sacred Waterhole (1985) depicts two goanna lizards, symbols that remind her, she says, of the strength of "my people, my land, my laws, my custom." For all their potent imagery, such works also carry a contemporary political message that is evident to Aboriginals. As urban artist Fiona Foley asserts in the catalogue, "All Aboriginal art in this country is political," whether it is an abstract bark painting explaining the title deeds to land ownership or an oil painting that includes the flag in yellow, red and black that stands for Aboriginal land rights.