Aboriginal Art
the 1950s and ‘60s. The men, who saw Bardon distributing the art supplies to schoolchildren, had a simpler aim: they were looking for something to do. Together they painted a mural on a whitewashed schoolhouse wall, and then they created individual works in a former military hangar that Bardon called the Great Painting Room. In 1972, with his assistance, 11 of the men formed a cooperative called Papunya Tula Artists. By 1974 the group had grown to 40.
Papunya Tula is now one of about 60 Aboriginal arts cooperatives, and Australian Aboriginal art generates nearly $200 million in annual revenues. It is not only the largest source of income for Aboriginal people but also, arguably, the most prestigious Australian contemporary art. Featuring bold geometric designs in earth tones, with characteristic circles, dots and wavy snakelike lines, Aboriginal acrylic painting appeals to Western collectors of both abstract and folk art. Prices have soared. A mural-size 1977 painting on canvas by the Papunya artist Clifford Possum established a record price for the genre when it sold in 2007 for $1.1 million.
Still, a special aura attaches to the first, small paintings, done on masonite boards usually less than 2 by 3 feet. Created before there was commercial interest, they benefit from the perception that they are more “authentic” than the stretched-canvas works that came later. It is hard to deny the energy and inventiveness of the early boards; artists used unfamiliar tools and materials to cover two-dimensional surfaces with designs they’d employed in ritualistic body painting or sand mosaics. They improvised, applying paint with a twig or the tip of a paintbrush’s wooden handle. “The early period—you’re never going to find anyplace where there’s so much experimentation,” says Fred Myers, a New York University anthropologist. “They had to figure everything out. There’s an energy that the early paintings have, because there’s so much excess to compress.”
The first exhibition in the United States to focus on these seminal works—49 paintings, most of them early Papunya boards—recently appeared at New York University, following showings at Cornell University and the University of California at Los Angeles. The paintings are owned by John Wilkerson, a New York City-based venture capitalist in the medical field, and his wife, Barbara, a former plant physiologist. The Wilkersons collect early American folk art and first became enamored of Aboriginal work when they visited Australia in 1994. “We both thought, ‘We don’t like this—we love it,’” Barbara recalls. “We just liked everything.” With the help of a Melbourne-based gallery owner, they soon concentrated on the earliest paintings.
Aboriginal Art is more than an art movement. In 1995 a video was produced on Aboriginal Art for Crystal Productions that explored prehistoric cave art to today’s contemporary paintings. Acrylic paint is the reason Aboriginal art is now produced for commercial success. Art was an essential ingredient of Aboriginal life permeating every aspect, both ceremonial and secular.
The elders, who were also the artists, painted these legends of creation.
Since the early 1900's the demands of anthropologists, researchers and collectors for portable works of art have stimulated the production of bark paintings translated into acrylic works of art. The Chromacryl company of Australia donated paint and canvas board to the natives so that the indigenous people could make a living. The artists have adapted to a lucrative form of communication and raised their level in society to innovators and leaders.
Three major techniques were used by many different clans.
The cross-hatched “Mimi” patterns identify clans in Western Arnham Land.. The mimi spirits were the predecessors of the present day Aborigines. The stick-like figures represented animated mimi spirit people, magic-makers.
X-ray paintings are essentially static and show the external form and what cannot be seen: the skeleton of an animal, the stomach, the heart, lungs and other organs. The paintings are used for hunting and fishing magic and also for teaching.
In central Australia ground paintings provide the models for acrylic dot paintings on canvas and board which initially emerged around 1970.
Aboriginal artists can now support their lives through their art. The artists express Aboriginal values and perspectives to a world which continues to be hostile to Aboriginal aspirations. The issues of dispossession, broken families, racism and an intensification of the sense of cultural identity provide strong motivation for today’s painting compositions.
Though the Aboriginal art movement launched in Papunya is just four decades old, it’s possible to discern four periods. In the first, which lasted barely a year, sacred practices and ritual objects were often depicted in a representational style. That was dangerous: certain rituals, songs and religious objects are strictly off limits to women and uninitiated boys. In August 1972, an angry dispute broke out at an exhibition in the aboriginal community of Yuendumu over explicit renderings in Papunya paintings. Some community members were offended by the realistic depictions of a wooden paddle swung in the air to produce a whirring sound in initiation ceremonies that are hidden from women and children.
paints and other materials to a group of Aboriginal men in the forlorn resettlement community of Papunya, 160 miles from the nearest town, Alice Springs. Bardon had moved near the remote Western Desert from cosmopolitan Sydney hoping to preserve an ancient aboriginal culture imperiled by the uprooting of Aboriginal people from their traditional territories in
An art movement’s origins usually can’t be pinpointed, but boldly patterned Aboriginal acrylic painting first appeared at a specific time and place.
In July 1971, an art teacher named Geoffrey Bardon distributed some brushes,