Onus became a prime advocate for the Aboriginal arts movement and an important player in the Aboriginal Arts Board of the Australia Council.
Lin Onus in his studio in the Dandenongs, Victoria, c. 1994.
He was acutely aware of the art industry’s preoccupation with legitimacy, and was heavily involved in the public debate over ‘authenticity’ in Aboriginal art. Once criticised for his mix of Western and traditional iconography, he responded by pointing out that the issue of ‘appropriation’ rested on the premise that Aboriginal art has to remain static to remain pure. Jack Wunuwun’s decision to adopt him into his family was made, in part, to enable him to overcome this dilemma.70 The Aboriginal community into which he had been accepted had given him its permission and was anxious to help him find his way.
Trevor Nickolls was another urban artist whose personal encounter with ‘tradition’ was to be a turning point in his life. While growing up, his family had concealed their Aboriginal heritage owing to the race pressures in suburban middle-class Adelaide. He studied the theory and practice of Western art at university before encountering traditional Aboriginal art for the first time in the late 1970s. In 1979, while completing postgraduate studies at the Victorian College of the Arts, Nickolls met Papunya artist Dinny Nolan. Struck by the possibility of synthesising an art style from elements of both cultures, he began to combine traditional dotting and crosshatching with postmodern imagery.
‘Everything is moving,’ he said at the time, ‘… you can look at things in a molecular way.’71 His appointment as an education officer the following year allowed him to travel throughout Anthem Land, meeting artists and elders who took him to see traditional rock paintings. Experiences such as this enriched his understanding of the Aboriginal relationship to the land. As he explained to arts writer Liz Thompson, ‘I was right in it … it wraps itself around you, full of spirit, the space, the Dreaming, imagining how it was once.’72
Now that his connection to his heritage was no longer simply intellectual, a new mood of relaxation and fulfilment began to permeate his work. Cramped, complex urban landscapes gave way to a uniquely Australian Garden of Eden, vibrantly radiating a life force. But Nickolls returned to the city, feeling the need to re-enter the mainstream. He’d become sadly disillusioned by the living conditions in some of the Aboriginal settlements at which he’d stayed.
At the time I met him in the early 1980s, Nickolls was living in a flat in the Sydney beachside suburb of Manly. Looking dishevelled and even haunted, he was surrounded by brutal paintings that explored the alienation of the individual in an industrialised landscape. If there were works about the ‘harmony of nature’ I certainly didn’t notice them. He’d coined the catchphrase ‘Dreamtime–Machinetime’ for this body of work, which explored the divide between Aboriginal and Western cultures. In Machinetime, humankind is trapped by its own inventions: individuals isolated in cell-like apartments plug into their television sets trying to ward off a sense of loss and anxiety. In Dreamtime, people experience spiritual sustenance and cultural continuity in keeping with Aboriginal beliefs. Often juxtaposed within one canvas, these two competing realities collide abruptly with contrasting areas of colour, texture and spatial composition. A recurring language of symbols intertwine: a Rainbow Serpent slides into the shape of the dollar sign, as a bird wings its way toward a vibrant sun; roofs become mouths lined with teeth avariciously swallowing smoke and people. During this period he explored surrealism, portraiture, comic book illustration and cartoon animation. These were integrated with desert dotting and Arnhem Land crosshatching, in a delicate balancing act between cultures. Additional themes included the Stolen Generation, the Republic, child exploitation and corporate branding.
Trevor Nickolls, The Flood, 1994. Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 59 x 44 cm.
Nickolls was cast into the limelight when chosen to represent Australia at the 1990 Venice Biennale. Thirty of his autobiographical paintings were displayed alongside those of the East Kimberley master Rover Thomas. His unflinchingly honest self-portraits reflected the dilemmas of contemporary life, as much as his own fears and longings. After the Venice Biennale, his association with Thomas resulted in a body of paintings in which the old cowboy became the central figure, displaced in a range of urban and suburban settings. One such work, Roving in Thomas Town (1994), currently holds the record price for a painting by Nickolls on the secondary market. It was the first of his paintings to be highlighted in an auction with a major catalogue essay, and sold for $53,525.
Of all the urban artists of this period, only Tracey Moffatt was to become a major art ‘star’ with a wide international representation and following. She started out as a photographer, rather than a printmaker or painter. Brought up in Brisbane, in the cultural divide between an Aboriginal mother, Irish father and adoptive white working-class family, she later preferred not to be pigeonholed as an ‘Aboriginal’ artist. As a child, her connection to her Aboriginality was maintained through occasional visits from her birth mother. From the outset, she embraced popular culture, and has credited the black-and-white photos in the 1960s American Life magazine as an important early influence. Moffatt developed a directorial talent by staging snapshots and home movies in her neighbourhood. She trained at the Queensland College of Art in the 1970s and worked consistently throughout the 1980s, participating in group exhibitions without particular distinction. On moving to Sydney in 1987, she became a founding member of the Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative. Here she joined a highly motivated and diverse group of artists that included Fiona Foley, Raymond (Arone) Meeks, Avril Quaill, Bronwyn Bancroft, Brenda Croft, Jeffrey Samuels, Michael Riley, Fernanda Martins and Euphemia Bostock.
Moffatt’s earliest works addressed issues of Indigenous identity and survival. Her first solo exhibition, Something More, was held at the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney in 1989. These images were so cinematic, iconoclastic and groundbreaking that they remain, to this day, her most highly sought-after works. That same year she released her first short experimental film, Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy, to critical acclaim. Both are tales of women trapped in an arid, rural environment. While evoking issues of race and sexuality, love and cruelty, they draw no moral conclusions. At the 1990 Cannes International Film Festival, Moffatt’s film Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy premiered to rave reviews. It was credited with unleashing ‘complex and violently discordant conflicts with razor sharp insight’.73 Even at this early stage of her career as a storyteller, Moffatt varied her narrative strategies. Her highly contrived scenarios drew upon the postmodern techniques of pastiche and homage, and were saturated with shifting levels of meaning. Throughout the next two decades, she spent most of her time in America while exhibiting internationally. Employing methods of mass production, Moffatt crafted series after series of images exploring the stereotypes of myth.
The founding members of Boomalli. From left to right: Michael Riley, Bronwyn Bancroft, Euphemia Bostock, Raymond Meeks, Fiona Foley, Brenda Croft, Jeffrey Samuels, Tracey Moffatt, Avril Quaill and Fernanda Martins. [courtesy of Margaret Olah]
In Boomalli’s heyday many artists joined the cooperative, which was favoured by the funding bodies. Association with Boomalli provided the entrée to jobs and overseas opportunities. In the 1990s it was run by Brenda Croft who, along with Hetti Perkins, went on to become a high-profile institutional curator. Another founding member was the savvy Bundjalung multimedia artist Bronwyn Bancroft, who has kept Boomalli going since the year 2000. Her retail gallery, Designer Aboriginals, was located in the run-down inner western suburb of Rozelle, where she created and sold original prints, paintings, fabrics, jewellery and clothing and ran classes in business for Aboriginal women.
Fiona Foley was the most hard-hitting and uncompromising of all Boomalli artists. She is best known today for her confronting political works such as Hedonistic Honky Haters (2004), from her series HHH. Once seen, these sinister photographs of men and women in bold Indigenised outfits and bla
ck KKK witches’ hats are hard to forget. Long before she made them, her work already had a political edge. During the 1980s, Foley’s diverse art practice was strongly influenced by visits, first to her own country, Fraser Island, and then later to Ramingining in Central Arnhem Land.
Arone Raymond Meeks at his solo exhibiiton, Coo-ee Gallery, 1992.
Other Queensland artists who joined the burgeoning urban art movement included Raymond Meeks, Judy Watson, Jennuarrie and Zane Saunders. Of these artists my closest relationship was with Raymond Meeks. Arone, as he later became known, was a regular exhibitor at Coo-ee Gallery while he lived in Sydney, and the nearby Blue Mountains, during the 1980s. Good-looking, charming and socially adroit, he was naturally gifted, and created imagery with seductive colour and a sensual line. Though less politically inclined than many of his urban contemporaries, he explored gay themes and issues that directly affected the lives of his wide circle of friends. I remember attending the Boomalli exhibition at which it was announced that he was to be the first Aboriginal artist in residence at the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris. It was a wonderful opportunity for a young descendant of the Kuku Midiji people of Laura in Cape York. During the following years Arone’s work was in great demand as he exhibited all over Europe and North America. In the late 1980s, Arone worked on many illustrated books for children. Enora and the Black Crane won the UNICEF Ezra Jack Keats Award for the best international children’s book in 1991. He attended the televised presentation ceremony and was presented with the award by UNICEF ambassador Audrey Hepburn. Arone eventually settled in Cairns and established himself as a leading figure in the art of equatorial Queensland. He worked on several major ‘art in the built environment’ projects, and mentored younger and emerging artists. We made several visits to the United States together over the years. While I worked organising and staging exhibitions, he met and worked at art studios where he collaborated with local artists. In Santa Fe he produced monoprints for the first time. This was a medium that was perfectly suited to his style. It has enabled him to capture the vivid colours of the tropics in his art practice ever since and, through his mentorship, has influenced dozens of younger artists. In fact, by 2012 the monoprint had become a defining technique amongst Queensland Indigenous graphic artists.
Arone Meeks, Cyclone Series #21, 2006. Monoprint, 76 x 56 cm.
Judy Watson was not an original member of Boomalli. She undertook intensive studies at art colleges in Queensland, Victoria and Tasmania and explored themes related to Aboriginal history and significant world events. As her art developed it was informed, at its core, by the histories and Dreaming stories of her female relatives from Waayi country in northwest Queensland. Developing her delicate lithographs and chine-collé prints that explored women’s themes, she gravitated toward pigments ground from rocks which are rubbed into unprimed, unstretched canvas. Watson builds her surfaces incrementally, with subtle layering through fluid pools of paint. Figures and shapes are introduced within and upon these layers. Shadowy presences emerge to assert their story or, at times, to exert a protective influence, like ancestral spirits. Objects rise to the foreground through stark outlines, sometimes with swirling dots that evoke the spirit in transit.
Judy Watson won the Moet & Chandon Australian Art Fellowship in 1995, which was, at the time, the premier award in Australia for an artist under 35 years of age. She travelled to France the following year and was included in the Venice Biennale in 1997.
Another outstanding urban artist who gained recognition outside Boomalli’s cooperative umbrella was Gordon Bennett. A sort of Basquiat/Banksy/Pollock, his riffs on elements from science fiction, fantasy, psychology and European art history have made him one of the most incisive and politically deft commentators on the contemporary scene. Yet he has never participated in the Indigenous art ‘scene’ as such.
Bennett graduated from the Queensland College of Art, Brisbane, in 1988, at the age of 33. Like Moffatt, he came from a largely white working-class background, and was uncomfortable with stereotypes of black identity. An avid reader, he was influenced by postmodernism and, from his earliest works, he fragmented and juxtaposed visual references. Events, icons and texts were thrown together amid drips and splatters. This confrontational mesh of imagery rejected the ‘homogenising impulse’ of the colonising white culture. Bennett sought to retrieve a history of discarded memories and moments and install them alongside the heroic ideal. From the late 1980s onward, he established himself in the Australian art world mainstream, and in 1991 won the Moet & Chandon Australian Art Fellowship, just three years after finishing art school. I remember Bennett being asked to create a collaborative work with Imants Tillers for the Institute of Modern Art exhibition, Commitments, in the early 1990s. He avoided all attempts to meet the curators, leaving them utterly frustrated and in the dark about his contribution until the very last minute. Eventually a telepathic work was constructed from the faxes that had passed back and forth between them.
A more naive artist with a completely different temperament, and no overtly political motivation, was Ngarrindjeri artist Ian Abdulla. His hometown, Cobdogla, was an early irrigation settlement in the Riverland region of South Australia, located beside the Murray River, and he grew up by a swamp that was a haven for waterbirds, especially pelicans. The name ‘Cobdogla’ was a corruption of Cobdogle, the ‘king’ of the local Aboriginal clan. Abdulla was encouraged to become an artist by art activist and teacher Steve Fox, who had taken an extended break from his role as art adviser at Yirrkala in North East Arnhem Land. Abdulla’s childhood memories, though simply told, were deeply grounded in local history, although he told Fox, in a moment of self-deprecation, that he couldn’t draw and that his mob had no culture left.74 In time he developed a quiet, reflective style which garnered considerable popular affection. His paintings depicting childhood memories of life on the river were rendered with touching naivety. The people were never dominant, but were perfectly integrated within the painted landscape of mountains, trees, birds and animals. Most of his paintings were annotated, and it is the text, centred in the visual forefront of the image, that provides the link between these naive images and the broader historical framework of Aboriginal dispossession.
A big, gentle country fella, Robert Campbell Jnr’s style was unique to the area he grew up in around Kempsey in New South Wales. Themes of racism and the effects of alcohol in rural Australian towns dominated his distinctive, formally arranged, brightly coloured paintings. His subjects ranged from discrimination in the allocation of seating at the local movies to the brutal treatment of Aboriginals in the local lock-up. Campbell was brought up in the transitional environment of the Ngaku clan during the 1940s and 1950s, and had left school by the age of 14. After many years of hard manual labour, he met Sydney artist Tony Coleing and rapidly developed the cartoon-like, figurative style for which he is now renowned. As his success grew, he encouraged other younger Kempsey artists to paint in the hope that it would become a new way for them to earn money. While his own exhibitions with Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney during 1987 and 1988 won critical acclaim, Boomalli proved a more willing venue for the younger artists he was encouraging. The developing Kempsey art style had struck a chord, and Campbell’s career, in particular, was set to really take off when he suddenly died of renal failure in 1992 at just 48 years of age.
I remember many other Indigenous artists who were living and working in the cities and country towns around the eastern seaboard at this time. By the beginning of the 1990s urban Aboriginal artists had well and truly emerged from the shadowlands of white society. They were challenging entrenched stereotypes, including the notion that Indigenous culture was something ‘fixed in time’. They clearly demonstrated that their cultures were constantly dynamic and alive, and in doing so created emblematic and powerful statements against both overt and implied racism.
THE MAINSTREAMING OF ABORIGINAL ART
Before the 1980s, the Eurocentric bias of the predominantly whit
e art world was rarely challenged. But in the 1980s there was so much creative activity amongst Indigenous artists that the curatorial direction of Australia’s major art institutions experienced a radical shift.
The National Gallery of Victoria kicked off a busy year in 1981 with the groundbreaking Aboriginal Australia exhibition. It featured 19th-century paintings by Tommy McRae and William Barak, ceremonial weapons, ornaments and masks, and, for the first time, ‘modern’ Western Desert paintings. The exhibition later toured to Sydney and Perth.
In the same year Western Desert paintings were included in Perspecta at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. A large sand painting, created by a group of elders from Lajamanu, was a central exhibit at the Sydney Biennale in 1982. For the second Australian Perspecta at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Djon Mundine selected 80 works from Ramingining, in Central Arnhem Land. Here, at the cutting edge of the white art world, he chose to install traditional works without the usual cultural explanation on the bare white walls of the gallery. These detailed explorations of saltwater country subsequently travelled with a selection of Western Desert paintings to the XVII Bienal de São Paulo, in Brazil.
Under the eye of its director, James Mollison, the National Gallery of Australia began to build the foundations of its formidable Aboriginal art collection. Mollison may not have been the most flamboyant character, but his audacious acquisitions have justifiably earned him recognition as the most famous art gallery director in Australia’s history. In 1974, at the peak of the Whitlam era, he rocked the political landscape with the purchase of Jackson Pollock’s controversially ‘modern’ Blue Poles. It’s price tag of AUD$1.3 million was portrayed as a scandalous extravagance at the time, but the painting eventually proved immensely popular with the public and in 1999 it was selected as the centrepiece of MoMA’s Pollock retrospective in New York. By 2003 it was conservatively valued at over AUD$40 million. Mollison also splashed out on other American modern masterpieces, including Willem de Kooning’s Woman V, but his interest and zeal in developing the National Gallery of Australia’s Aboriginal art collection is less well known. It now occupies 11 galleries throughout an entire purpose-built wing and is the public face of the gallery entrance.
The Dealer is the Devil Page 32