ART PAPERS
David and Alfred Smart Gallery University of Chicago
May/June 1989

Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia
by Claire Wolf Krantz

In recent years, the exhibition of so‑called .Primitive art" has been criticized for being a form of cultural imperialism. Particularly controversial was the 1984 "'Primitivism' in 20th Century Art" exhibit at New York's Museum of Modem Art. it was conderyined. by critics from a variety of disciplines for its presentation of "primitive" artifacts only in relationship to a supposedly more highly evolved Western art. The tribal worles roots in tightly ®rganized cultural constructs was ignored, continuing questionable Western practices of evaluating and comparing artwork of all cultures on formal grounds alone, and of using Western aesthetics as the basis of comparison. Moreover, the power and beauty found in tribal art is erroneously seen as instinctually emanating from deep, archetypal images and feelings less available to more civilized artists. Fundamental to the criticism of "primitive art" exhibits is their presentation of partial views of the work, probably the least significant viewthat of its formal qualities. Their decontextualization of beauty from content, and aesthetics from its embeddedness in a social system ultimately falsifies the work and does a disservice to both its maker and its consumer. The present exhibit provides a valuable alternative to such questionable ideas and practices by presenting Aboriginal artwork within a conceptual framework that integrates the people, their social and religious systems, and their artistic production. Its strength is the focus on presenting the work on its own terms, and enriching the meanings concealed in unfamiliar codes.
          This large exhibit presents a variety of paintings, painted implements, and sculpture, dating from the mid‑ 19th century to the present. The materials generally used prior to the early 1970s are ochre, blood, and charcoal on bark or wood. More contemporary works add acrylic on board or canvas to the more traditional material. Characterized by extremely rich surfaces, intricate designs, subtle use of color and spatial relationships, the work's abstract beauty is immediately and powerfully felt. Not as immediate is the conceptual framework, and how this framework totally shapes their appearance and their ultimate value as works of art.
          As one enters the exhibit, introductory texts and drawings immediately set the tone for viewing the work of a particular people in a particular place. As one moves through the rooms, easily readable descriptions, maps , and drawings are posted to explain the surface meanings of each piece and to place it in context. Such a presentation is vital to viewing art of the Aborigines because their world view is one of synthesis, and because at least the works' surface meanings can be easily transmitted to the viewer.
           For the Aborigines, their artwork is a manifestation of the Dreamings, a complicated religious construct shaping their integrated way of life, in which nothing exists in isolation or without meaning. The pieces are permanent, transportable manifestations of activities which also take place in other, more ephemeral ways as part of the larger sphere of their religious and secular lives. The forms, designs, colors, and symbols on the paintings are the same used in body painting, ground paintings and sculptures, and other ceremonial events. The Drearnings are stories which the Aborigines regard as historical fact in which their Ancestral Figures and their activities, their relationships, and sites upon which these activities took place, exist simultaneously in the ancestral past and present. The landscape was formed by the actions of these Ancestral Beings, and certain sites are infused with power because they are associated with their Drearnings. Each clan has inherited rights to certain Dreamings and their accompanying designs. The artists depict the Dreamings to which they have rights, and theseworks become further manifestations of the Dreamings. and proof of territorial rights.
          The painted images and forms are based on highly abstract, conceptualized constructs which combine all sorts of information about the person, place, plant, animal, or event being depicted. They may appear as stylized, but recognizable images, or as abstract designs. However, their function is never to depict appearances of things. The recognizable forms follow standardized conventions: for instance, a Turtle Dreaming would be shown dorsally and splayed, to give all relevant information about that turtle. Frequently a schematic Xray version of the Turtle's interior anatomy provides additional physical and symbolic information. The physical elements of a particular being are reordered to convey, not a momentary impression of it, but its energy and explicit meaning in a particular context. In the older bark paintings, the exterior and interior forms would be outlined with lines or dots and filled in with markings such as lines, crosshatchings, dots, and concentric circles on a plain background. These markings have a variety of meanings themselves, such as references to the artist's clan rights to particular designs (and therefore to its Drearnings and territorial rights), to the anatomy of the object depicted, and to the aesthetic requirement of enhancing its appearance.
          Geometric designs serve similar functions, but convey much more information than the relatively simpler morphological depictions. They can be seen as schematic maps of the Dreaming to which the artist holds rights, thus representing the Ancestral Beings and their related events, journeys, ceremonies, relationships, and sites. Here, parts of the meaning are easily read by those who know the key, while underlying meanings are only known to those initiated into the clan's ceremonial knowledge. These meanings are gradually revealed to the initiates by their elders over a lifetime of participating in ceremonial activities, including painting. Therefore, an older artist would have more access to information with which to create and to interpret artwork.
Choice of color is as complex as the use of design. The colors have religious and clan significance: they relate to the colors of the artist's physical surroundings and properties of light, to the artist's personal preferences and their relationships in the painting, and to the materials which are available.
The newer paintings (since the mid1960s) often replace the former simple figureground relationship with markings and designs similar to those filling the interior of the motifs. One motif may fill the entire space with its accompanying fill‑in designs, such as in the
bark painting, Catfish Dreaming (1987) by Jimmy Wululu, in which ochre is used to paint parallel and perpendicular bands of finely hatched lines representing the parallel ribbones of Catfish Dreaming. In Sun Woman at wurriyupi (1954) by Big Tom at Melville Island, a progression of 4 black circles with radiating bands of colored designs represent the Sun Woman traveling across the sky, each circle delineating a different time of day. Paintings sometimes represent large ground sculptures or paintings, themselves the abstraction of a Dreaming site, a contemporary place, and the locus of a ceremony. The painting would depict both the sites and the ceremony in a schematic, layered arrangement of symbolic designs, motifs, and colors. Larger, more ambitious (and usually more contemporary) paintings combine many motifs in even more complex arrangements, in which the relationship and placement of the motifs involve several Drearnings, sometimes from different clans, in, different places, and over periods of both historic and current time. The largest, most ambitious painting of this type in the exhibit is the huge (213 x 701 cm), stunning, acrylic on canva.s Possum Spirit Dreaming (1980) byTim Leura Japan‑i from Central Australia. Here, a dotted, zigzag line snakes across the horizontal axis of the painting, providing the pathway of Dreaming journeys to which the artist owns rights. Circles along the way designate resting places, while other motifs signify landmarks such as running water, campsites and windbreaks. In addition, three rectangular inserts set aside three different drearnings in specific places along the way: Old Man's Dreaming, Yam Dreaming, and Sun and Moon Dreaming, each with its own territory and its own story. Other qualities of the landscape, such as sand and clouds, are indicated in the complex dotted designs of the background and interlocking with the foreground motifs.
          Aesthetics are an important part of the work. While no work is made or kept for its aesthetic significance, it is important to note that no work exists without a completely integrated aesthetic dimension. While the word "beautiful" is not used by Aborigines in connection with their artwork, other words, such as brilliance, are used to convey qualities which contribute to what a Westerner would call beauty. All work attains power by being done correctly and with maximum brilliance. Clan members gain special recognition for their artistic gifts, although everyone has a place in the ceremonial life of the community.
          Because the Aborigines invest meaning in everything they do, even their commercial paintings constitute authentic expressions of an individual's or group's experience of the world. Most Aboriginal artwork contains sacred material, but symbols and meanings which contain too much power to be entrusted outside the clan will be left out in work made for sale, or destroyed after ceremonial use. The objects are seen as receptacles of knowledge, and as such, are valuable to anyone smart enough to want them and to be willing to pay for them.
          The appeal of this work to outsiders is due to several factors. For one thing, the exhibit contains work of some of the most gifted Aboriginal painters in Australia. Although their aesthetic sensibility is different from ours, they use formal qualities and relationships highly applicable to the development of our own abstract sensibility. Terms such as harmony, symmetry, dissonance, surface vibration, and color relationships could describe successful Aboriginal art as it does much contemporary Western art. Each piece is invested with an authenticity grounded in a particular way of life, set of relationships, and world view. This authenticity or sense that the work is the result of the artist’s active engagement with a system of belief is communicated in the paintings, even to people who may not share in the artist's beliefs. Moreover, the artists’ goals for their work of imparting power, energy, and spiritual force into the object are what set apart all art from other activity. The former attitudes towards the appreciation of primitive art trivializes it, as in the MOMA exhibit, through isolating its aesthetic qualities and ignoring the rest; an attitude which ultimately contributes to the trivialization and reduction to decorativeness of all art. Perhaps exhibits such as the current show of Aboriginal art at the Smart Gallery, which further our appreciation and understanding of art embedded in vastly different world views, can enhance our own attempts to understand and expand the spiritual and aesthetic dimensions of our own lives.