The Dealer is the Devil

by Adrian Newstead

  The unstoppable flow of spectacular Aboriginal art demanded formal national recognition and, in 1984, Margie West, the curator of Aboriginal art at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, initiated the first National Aboriginal Art Award. It was won by Michael Nelson Tjakamarra, with second prize going to Arnhem Land bark painter Jack Wunuwun. Third prize for a figurative watercolour on paper went to Harold Thomas, who had been the first Aboriginal person to graduate from an art school. He also designed the official Aboriginal flag. The prize was later to become known as the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award.

  That same year the desert came to the Tandanya Aboriginal Cultural Institute with an exhibition of pulsating Papunya canvases during the Adelaide Arts Festival. At the opening of a Western Arnhem Land exhibition in its brand new Aboriginal and Oceanic art gallery, the National Gallery of Victoria announced that significant funds had been allocated for the ongoing purchase of contemporary Aboriginal Art. Over the following ten years it amassed a definitive collection of Indigenous paintings by purchasing works from important exhibitions held at the growing number of commercial galleries around Australia. These vital purchases enabled galleries like my own to survive the major economic recession of the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 1985 the gallery mounted the first retrospective survey of the Western Desert art movement, Face of the Centre: Papunya Tula Paintings 1971–1984.

  A year later, artefacts and objects were presented as works of ‘art’ for the first time in the iconoclastic Art and Land exhibition at the South Australian Museum. Donald Brook, an art historian, argued that the toas (figurative sculptures traditionally used as direction markers) had been ‘appropriated’ by the curators because they were not displayed in a context relevant to their original function. This contention was hotly debated.75

  As the decade drew to a close Australia’s Indigenous artists found themselves feted on the world stage. The climax was the Asia Society’s Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia, which toured New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Melbourne and Adelaide. According to American anthropologist Fred Myers, ‘American audiences were absolutely spellbound’.76 The Dreamings exhibition drew 27,000 visitors at the Asia Society in New York, the largest attendance of any exhibition ever held there to that time. It marked one of the first occasions when Aboriginal art was presented as fine art in a venue that was not a natural history museum. This was a very intellectual inquisition, based around traditional imagery. Curated by white anthropologists, it explored parallels with contemporary art and met with an extraordinary critical reception.77

  Margaret Levi (back row), Kerry Williams (front row, left) and Louise Allerton (front row, right) with Spinifex women in the Great Victoria Desert, in front of their collaborative painting, Minyma Tjuta.

  The symposium held in conjunction with the exhibition was by all accounts a lively affair. The American curators and critics argued that if Aboriginal art was to be taken seriously as ‘contemporary’ art, the works should speak for themselves – without accompanying stories.

  The ascent of acrylic painting to fine art78 was signalled in reviews in major publications and periodicals from the New York Times and Time magazine to Art in America. Kay Larson, the art critic for New York Magazine wrote:

  Modernism has allowed us to comprehend the Aboriginal point of view … Aboriginal art at its best is as powerful as any abstract painting I can think of. I kept remembering Jackson Pollock, who also spread the emotional weight of thought and action throughout the empty spaces of his canvas.79

  The exhibition also introduced Aboriginal art to a number of major North American art collectors, most notably the media magnate John Kluge and the philanthropist Donald Kahn. Kluge, named the richest man in America three times by Forbes magazine, commissioned large Arnhem Land bark paintings from Djon Mundine after first visiting Dreamings in New York. He later added early Western Desert boards and key works from the former Aboriginal art collections of Ainslie Roberts, Margaret Carnegie and Dorothy Bennett. Kluge arguably did more than any other international enthusiast to facilitate the rapid appreciation of Aboriginal art, and its nascent collectability. Later, in 1995, he brought in Professor Howard Morphy and Margo Smith80 to advise and curate; 36 monumental barks from Yirrkala were added, along with 43 works from Balgo Hills, and a six-metre collaborative canvas by 36 artists from Yuendumu. Much of Kluge’s collection, and the bark paintings collected by Ed Ruhe in the 1950s, were gifted to the University of Virginia during their lifetime. Donald Kahn’s immediate focus was Western Desert painting, and many of these too went to the university following his death in 2007. As a result, Charlottesville, Virginia, has become one of the most important homes to Aboriginal art in the world.81

  Kluge, Kahn and Richard Kelton became known amongst dealers in Australia as the ‘Three K’s’. Of the trio, the west coast advocate Richard Kelton was the more eclectic. His interests extended to maritime art, navigational instruments and ethnographica. Over the following decade, he added more than 1,300 Aboriginal artworks to his considerable tribal and maritime collections and these were exhibited through the Pacific Asia Museum in Los Angeles.

  I visited Kelton and his collection several times. The paintings were housed at his office by the water in Marina del Rey, Los Angeles. He started in one apartment, and expanded into six, framing every painting with exactly the same dark sculpted moulding. On one memorable occasion he took me to lunch at his club, and presented me with a smorgasbord of outsized seafood. I suggested we do a book and a tour of his collection, but he wasn’t keen to shoulder the costs of doing so, most especially the copyright fees. Yet, he once bid over $38,000 at one of my Lawson~Menzies auctions for a bark painting with a crucifixion image. Richard’s daughter, Kerry Smallwood, is the custodian of the Kelton Foundation’s collection, which she could certainly use in the future to promote Aboriginal art in America. It includes a large number of culturally important masterworks, none of which will ever be offered for sale.

  I was inroduced to the fourth ‘K’ sometime in 1985, when I welcomed two unusual visitors to Coo-ee Gallery. I was immediately caught up in their enthusiastic response to Aboriginal culture. They were as excited as kids in a candy shop. But I soon learned that they were serious intellectuals. Attorney Bob Kaplan and his wife, Professor Margaret Levi, a political scientist and author, had been introduced to Aboriginal art after Margaret met anthropologist Diane Bell while working at the Australian National University in 1984.

  The Coo-ee purchases the Kaplans made that day were the first for what would become an extensive collection. When Levi won an accident compensation case, I was the first person that she rang. ‘Bob and I have decided to use the money to create a collection devoted to Aboriginal art,’ she announced, ‘and we want to eventually donate it to the Seattle Art Museum.’ I was soon introducing them to other dealers who represented the most important artists in whom they were interested. Before long they returned to Australia with Pam McClusky, the curator of African and Oceanic art at Seattle Art Museum. Each year, over the following decades, they crossed the Pacific to visit Australia in their search for prize pieces to strategically gift to the museum’s permanent collection. They have now visited so many times that they are considered ‘honorary Australians’, and such is Margaret’s interest in Australia that amongst her many roles internationally she held the inaugural Chair in Politics at Sydney University’s United States Studies Centre. In 2012, nearly 30 years after their first purchase from me, their wonderful exhibition Ancestral Modern, the Kaplan– Levi Collection of Australian Aboriginal art, was experienced by 67,000 visitors to the Seattle Art Museum.

  Europe also enthusiastically embraced Indigenous art during the late 1980s. At the same time as Mythscapes: Aboriginal Art of the Desert opened at the National Gallery of Victoria, six artists from Yuendumu arrived for the exhibition Magiciens de la Terre at the Pompidou Centre, in Paris. With Rover Thomas and Trevor Nickolls’ inclusion in the Venice Biennale
in 1990, Aboriginal art had clearly hit the world stage.

  Strangely enough, despite the international enthusiasm, there was still little real critical discourse on Aboriginal art in Australia. As late as 1988, the year of Australia’s Bicentennial, and almost two decades after the genesis of Western Desert art, there were still no specialist art writers. There were few publications about Aboriginal art, other than a slowly growing number of catalogues documenting museum exhibitions at the national galleries of Victoria and Australia.

  From this point on, however, Aboriginal art moved inexorably toward the white box galleries. Dreaming stories were no longer displayed on wall plaques accompanying the works. They were provided on the accompanying certificates of authenticity that came with the artist’s resumé and other documentation provided by the gallery.

  A new era, dominated by ‘art stars’, had dawned.

  THE DEMISE OF THE COMPANY

  I was working my butt off to expand my own gallery and mount commercial and cultural events around Australia throughout the 1980s. Although it was pretty stressful, my passion had become my vocation and I was having the time of my life. I was aware of the political manoeuvring in Canberra but I wasn’t part of it. The results, however, were to have a profound effect on my own business and the Aboriginal arts industry in general.

  By the mid 1980s, the fate of The Company (which was officially out of business by 1990) had became the subject of a major power struggle between federal government departments, the Australia Council for the Arts and the art centres.82

  In 1981, Dr Timothy Pascoe had recommended that, to transform the entire system into a commercial enterprise, the art centres had to become accountable to The Company and its Board. Canberra powerbrokers (including the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Clyde Holding, and the head of his department, Charlie Perkins) believed that strategic planning and professional infrastructure were urgently required. The Company Board met, and a plan was concocted to make it the overlord of the art centres. Djon Mundine, who represented the art centres on the Board, greeted Holding’s instruction to keep this decision in the strictest confidence with incredulity. When the art coordinators got wind of the move, they called for a boycott of The Company and universally refused to supply it with stock. A number of commercial galleries, including my own, declared their support. From that point onward we committed to purchasing art direct from the communities and shunning The Company’s wholesale warehouse.

  Master printmaker Theo Tremblay working with David Malangi, Ramingining, 1997.

  In 1987, I was invited to Canberra to present a paper at a conference entitled Promoting Australian Aboriginal Culture Abroad, which was convened by the Department of Foreign Affairs.83 I argued that The Company should close its retail outlets and undergo a restructure in order to become the promotional body that the burgeoning industry so vitally needed. I saw it as an opportunity to create a ‘one stop shop’ for those working to promote Aboriginal culture in Australia and abroad. I was howled down by many of the Aboriginal delegates attending who considered The Company a sacred cow.

  Within a year, Clyde Holding had fallen out with the then Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, over land rights legislation, and with the art centre boycott of The Company continuing to affect its viability the newly appointed federal Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Gerry Hand, decided to instigate a major arts industry review. He appointed a committee comprised of the social scientist and economist Jon Altman, Aboriginal Arts Board project officer Chris McGuigan, and Peter Yu of the Kimberley Law and Culture Centre.

  The Altman Report, as it became known, was handed down on 31 July 1989. It contained detailed proposals and recommendations for a comprehensive industry strategy and canvassed the many advantages and disadvantages of The Company. While recommending a restructure, it stopped short of advocating its closure, even though it was now all but impossible to argue the case for a government-subsidised marketing operation.84 The Company had failed to generate a profit from the 1988 World Expo in Brisbane, despite having exclusive rights to all Aboriginal art sales, and it was incapable of repaying a debt of $5 million to the Aboriginal Development Corporation. The end was nigh. After dominating industry marketing for two decades, the Goliath was finally brought to its knees, and closed a year later.

  Two developments now briefly provided a window of opportunity for privately owned galleries keen to promote Aboriginal art to the growing international market. Following concerted lobbying, the Australia Council’s Visual Arts and Crafts Board and Austrade convened a Visual Arts Export Panel. Brian Johns, later to head the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, became its inaugural Chair. Quarterly meetings set out the agenda for Australian participation at international art fairs in Cologne, Frankfurt, Madrid and Chicago. The committee included gallery directors Roslyn Oxley, Gabrielle Pizzi, Christine Abrahams and myself, as well as the prominent Australian artist Colin Lanceley, recently returned from working in London.85

  Simultaneously the Aboriginal Arts Board funded the establishment of the Aboriginal Arts Management Association, later to become the National Indigenous Arts Advocacy Association. The association’s charter clearly identified two areas of priority: protecting Indigenous copyright and assisting event promotion. Apart from running the annual Survival Day celebration in Sydney,86 however, the association’s major focus was copyright.

  It was therefore quite a coup when the Director, Chris McGuigan, and Chairman, Lin Onus, agreed to assist me by offering the Association as the auspicing body for a $25,000 grant to tour the first ever survey of Australian Indigenous printmaking in America. The money itself came from the Visual Art Export Panel. The exhibition, New Tracks Old Land, comprised 91 works representing every historical landmark in the history of Aboriginal printmaking. It had been initiated by Theo Tremblay, whose lifelong friend Jeff Keough was then the director of the art gallery at the Massachusetts College of Art, America’s oldest art school. Tremblay, who taught at the Australian National University School of Art and worked at Studio One in Canberra, had introduced printmaking to scores of Aboriginal artists. Landmark prints in the exhibition were also initiated by Jörg Schmeisser and Basil Hall. While Keough secured American funding, I worked with Tremblay to develop the Australian end.

  The Boston opening was a stunning affair for which Arone Meeks created a large site-specific sculpture working with local artists in the adjacent studios. The Aboriginal rock group Yothu Yindi held a concert in the gallery before the exhibition toured to New York, St Louis, Seattle, Santa Fe and other cities throughout the United States. For less that the cost of sending a gallery to a four-day international art fair, New Tracks Old Land was curated, professionally catalogued, and toured the United States for almost four years between 1991 and 1995. It was reviewed in the international art magazine Art in America and nominated by the Boston Globe as the fourth best touring exhibition to visit America during 1992.

  Abie Jangala working on etching plate at Lajamanu, with master printmaker Basil Hall.

  In spite of the exhibition’s tremendous success, the Aboriginal Arts Management Association Board was far from impressed. The majority of the members believed that McGuigan and Onus had overstepped the mark in working with a private gallery in this way. McGuigan, especially, was in their sights. He’d spent years acting as the Australia Council’s principal advocate on behalf of remote art centres. He’d established Birukmarri Gallery in Fremantle in time for the America’s Cup and launched the Association while on secondment from the Australia Council, but the writing was on the wall. At the following annual general meeting, the Aboriginal Arts Management Association Board staged a ‘coup’, and thus sadly brought McGuigan’s long and capable service to Aboriginal people to an abrupt and graceless end.

  I suddenly found myself thrust into fraught negotiations with the new director. Once resolved, however, the exhibition toured to 25 Australian venues, and ‘getting into print’ symposiums were held in Darwin and Alice Springs. More than 300 artists, co
ordinators, administrators and printmakers participated.

  These events heralded the vibrant contemporary Aboriginal print movement of today, and gave rise to the Northern Territory University’s commitment to Indigenous printmaking. Basil Hall moved from Studio One in Canberra to become the first director of Northern Editions at the Northern Territory University before eventually going on to establish his own Darwin-based studio facility.

  By now a growing number of privately owned galleries were securing high-quality exhibitions from the emerging art centres as well as curating exhibitions sourced through agents and dealers representing independent artists. Here in Australia they could rely on sales of their most important paintings to the growing number of institutions, including the National Gallery of Australia and all of the major state galleries. When faced with opportunities to promote Aboriginal art overseas, however, private galleries received little, if any, support. Throughout the industry’s formative period, The Company had towered over all and provided the only venues in which Aboriginal artists of renown could be shown. Now, important privately owned galleries began to ring the country. The new era would belong to influential and important dealers, curators and consultants.