Works by Timothy Wulanjbirr (left) and John Mawurndjul in "Rarrk London" at Bargehouse on London's South Bank
via Artnet Magazine, 10-11-07, + additional linkage provided by RGL:
ABORIGINAL LONDON
by Ben Street
"Rarrk London," Sept. 21-Oct. 7, 2007, at Bargehouse, Oxo Tower Wharf, Bargehouse Street, South Bank SE1 London
On
the surface, Aboriginal Australian art is easily understood as a
special kind of ethnic abstraction that offers both formalist invention
and a spiritual component, qualities that are, unsurprisingly, also
found in abstract art in the West. "Rarrk London" -- the word "rarrk"
refers to crosshatching -- recently brought more than 100 works by
about 15 artists from Western Arnhem Land in Australia to the
Bargehouse on London's South Bank, only a short walk away from Tate
Modern. The exhibition was organized by Josh Lilley Fine Art, a gallery
founded a year ago, in cooperation with Maningrida Arts and Culture.
Lilley
has used the Bargehouse's sprawling industrial spaces to good
advantage. With its weathered steel beams and blisters of paint, the
building is suited to avant-garde art production, and discreetly if
ironically articulates Lilley's stated aim to "bring contemporary
Aboriginal Australian art in line with other contemporary art shows in
London." Spread over four floors of this vast riverside warehouse,
spotlighted or aglow with natural daylight, the bark paintings and
spindly figurative sculptures reacted to the space and each other in a
pointedly "fine art" way.
Interestingly enough, despite the
respect that most of us give to indigenous art forms, their
presentation can still carry a certain sense of disenfranchisement. In
"Rarrk London," this "outsider effect" is verbalized in the show's
documentary (shown as part of the exhibition), in which dealers and
journalists alike voice their bewilderment at the lack of critical
support for the work, and promise that a renaissance is just around the
corner. Here, hope seems to lie in one man, John Mawurndjul, a kind of
Luke Skywalker of Aboriginal art, whose steady rise to prominence --
and steadily rising prices -- this show presumably will quicken.
(Mawurndjul's work sells for as much as £24,000; other works in the
show begin at about £1,500.)
Mawurndjul occupies an odd
position in contemporary art. On the one hand, he's been the subject of
a major retrospective at Basel's Museum Tinguely and made a huge
installation at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. On the other, he
makes art according to an age-old process of stripping bark from trees,
fire-treating it, and painting its smooth interior with highly
elaborate abstract patterns. One day he's posing for the cover of Time
magazine, and the next he's back in his Arnhem Land outstation home
amid the swirling dust and sluggish rivers. Mawurndjul is an apt
reflection of the liminal status of Aboriginal art, and his work -- and
that of his contemporaries also shown here, including Samuel Namunjdja,
Timothy Wulanjbirr and Kay Lindjuwanga -- plays out this position with
often fascinating results.
An initial look at works such as Mawurndjul's Mirelk Site
(2007), an apparently abstract painting on an oblong slice of
stringybark, reveals certain formal echoes of the tropes of Western
abstraction. Bands of minute crosshatched lines in natural ochre
pigment (the Rarrk technique originates in body painting) fill the
inner surface of the bark, with waves of thinner white and black lines
running across it in a distorted grid, like an Agnes Martin reflected
in rippling water. The sinuous lines of the grid -- and the fine mesh
of the Rarrk lines -- reveal an acceptance, even an elaboration, of the
uneven surface of the ground. Natural variations in the hues allow the
painting to pulse with subtle tonal relationships. It's as discreetly
expressive as an Eva Hesse drawing, allowing the discontinuities of the
medium to evoke a sense of organic presence.
Owen Yalandja's Yawkyawks in "Rarrk London" at Bargehouse on London's South Bank
The dispute* that followed the 1984 exhibition, "Primitivism in 20th
Century Art," warned us against interpretation of the sort that rips
objects from their native context for contemplation within the museum
-- but times have changed, at least in this particular region.
Aboriginal bark painting was responsive to market forces as soon as
their presence was felt, and now, in fact, art from Western Arnhem Land
has echoed the teleological narrative of Western art history, moving
away from a naïve, spaceless figuration towards an allover abstraction
immediately reminiscent of post-war American painting. A sense of
primitive craft remains, however, and gives the works their own
distinction: undulating away from the wall, Marundjul's pieces play
against the flatness of Western abstraction, yearning away from the
white cube with a sort of homesickness.
It is in this sense
that the bark paintings acquire their political dimension as esthetic
declarations of land ownership and cultural preservation. Every
material used -- from the fire-treated bark to the ochre pigments and delek, the white clay used to create the circular elements in Mawurndjul's Milmilngkan Site
(2007) -- derives from the artists' immediate geographical
surroundings. Even the titles refer to specific locations; form,
material and meaning are so tightly interwoven that they acquire a kind
of conceptual integrity. But it's in their neither-here-nor-there
identity that the most successful works acquire a resonance that goes
beyond the "ethnographic" bracket. Their awkwardness is something to be
celebrated.
BEN STREET is a teacher, lecturer and critic living in London.
* See Thomas McEvilley, "Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief: '"Primitivism"' in Twentieth-Century Art' at the Museum of Modern Art in 1984", Artforum (Nov. 1984), and the subsequent exchange of polemical letters in Artforum, (Feb. and May 1985) between MoMA curators (William Rubin + Kirk Varnedoe) and Thomas McEvilley. This material was eventually republished in Uncontrollable Beauty: Toward a New Aesthetics, Bill Beckley, ed. Allworth Press, New York, 1998.
