The Dealer is the Devil

by Adrian Newstead

  They included David Cossey’s Gallerie Australis, located in the forecourt of the Adelaide’s prestigious Hyatt Regency Hotel, and Karen Brown’s Shades of Ochre, above a restaurant in the old Admiralty building on Darwin’s esplanade.

  For a brief moment after The Company closed its Melbourne gallery the only dealer exclusively showing Aboriginal fine art in Melbourne was the artist and jeweller Siri Omberg, whose Emerald Hill Gallery in South Melbourne memorably promoted artists living around Beswick and Buranga. Soon, Gabrielle Pizzi’s new gallery in Flinders Lane was joined by Alcaston House, owned by Beverly and Anthony Knight, which opened behind their restaurant at the top of Collins Street.

  Within a year the infectiously enthusiastic Violet Sheno opened her Contemporary Australian Visions further down Bourke Street, opposite the mercurial Hank Ebes, who initially began his Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings in partnership with Michael Hollow.

  In Sydney my own Coo-ee Emporium on Oxford Street, Paddington, morphed into Coo-ee Aboriginal Art Gallery. It joined the Hogarth Galleries, established by Jennifer Isaacs and run by Kerry Williams for prominent Sydney lawyer Clive Evatt. Artist Christopher Hodges opened Utopia Art Sydney on the first floor of a shopfront on a desolate stretch of Parramatta Road in Stanmore.

  Meanwhile the Gary Anderson Gallery championed Aboriginal art from a tiny hole-in-the-wall space opposite East Sydney Technical College, later to become the National Art School. Indigenous designer Bronwyn Bancroft ran her own shop, Designer Aboriginals, in Darling Street, Rozelle.

  In Canberra Judy Behan’s Chapman Gallery showed the best of Australian contemporary and Aboriginal art with occasional competition from Beaver Galleries and Joy Warren’s Solander Gallery. The major outlets in Perth were Sharon Monty’s Dreamtime Gallery and Birukmarri, in Fremantle.87

  The industry profited from a formidable contingent who had learned the ropes in The Company galleries. Gabrielle Pizzi and Vivien Anderson had both worked in The Company’s Melbourne outlet before opening their own highly successful businesses. Gabriella Roy, Fay Nelson, Ace Bourke and Hetti Perkins all worked for The Company in Sydney, before moving into important positions elsewhere. Roy opened her Aboriginal and Pacific Art Gallery, first near Central railway station in Sydney in partnership with Vivien Anderson, before striking out on her own in the Sydney Dymocks Building, later relocating to the Danks Street complex in Waterloo. Fay Nelson went on to become the Director of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Board. Hetti Perkins became the senior Aboriginal art curator at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Ace Bourke left The Company to become gallery manager for Sydney’s Hogarth Galleries, later working as the senior Aboriginal art consultant to Shapiro auctioneers. Still later he became an independent art curator and consultant. After running The Company’s gallery in Darwin, Shirley Collins opened her own Raintree Gallery. Roslyn Premont opened Gallery Gondwana in Alice Springs and Sydney, having managed The Company’s Centre for Aboriginal Artists in Alice Springs.

  A quick survey of these names and galleries shows that far from affecting the industry negatively, the withdrawal of support for the government-subsidised marketing company pushed many trained and knowledgeable personnel out on their own, carrying the industry into a decade of unparalleled growth and prosperity.

  AN ACCIDENT WAITING TO HAPPEN

  What do you do when you want to stay in business, interest rates are skyrocketing, and you get hit by an economic recession? As you scramble to keep your staff and stay afloat, it’s most likely to be the supplier who is last to be paid and, in the art world, that means the artist.

  This occurred when the great international art bubble burst in 2007 just as it had at the end of the 1980s. The industry had looked incredibly buoyant then. The pot was on the boil. Record sales were being achieved. New art was flooding the market. Then, wham, we were hit by a financial catastrophe.

  Galleries didn’t have computers in the late 1980s, only faxes, snail mail and paper trails. Most were still five years away from purchasing computers and developing the electronic database and stock control systems needed for more sophisticated operation. Email was not even on the agenda. Everything was recorded in hand-written ledgers. So much of the stock was consigned and accountability was harder to track. Many remote communities were yet to install a single telephone. Galleries communicated with overseas clients by fax, as telephony was considered overly expensive. As rentals escalated, overdrafts, commercial property loans and repayments hit 22%. The fight over the limited access to high-value works was intense.

  Throughout the 1980s exciting art projects popped up throughout the Central and Eastern Deserts, across the Tanami, and deep into the Western Desert, the Kimberley and Top End.88 As the decade advanced the retail sector appeared to boom. Between 1982 and 1987 the number of Aboriginal art galleries and craft shops increased rapidly as prominent privately owned galleries entered the field. Between 1980 and 1985 the industry grew at a rate of 33% per annum from $2.5 million to $7 million. Aboriginal art was being incorporated into the mainstream and after the stock market crash of October 1987 it benefited from an international investment boom in fine arts amplified by a 25% growth in international tourism between 1987 and 1988. Robert Bleakley’s tribal art sales for Sotheby’s had always included bark paintings, but when he introduced Papunya paintings and Kimberley works by Paddy Jaminji and Rover Thomas in the late 1980s it was a genuine game changer for Aboriginal art. The fact that Sotheby’s was prepared to add its imprimatur to modern Aboriginal artworks sent a signal to the world that they were important and seriously collectable, even though there was still a lack of critical discourse about the art at the time.89

  The costs of doing business may have been on the rise, but on the supply side everything looked rosy. Yet the influential Economist magazine cautioned that both ‘art investment’ and international tourism were volatile, and vulnerable to sudden decline.90 By the time the Altman Report was released in 1989, the value of the Aboriginal art industry was estimated to have soared to $18.5 million, though only just over $7 million of this went into Aboriginal people’s pockets. The museum and public gallery sector was spending close to $700,000 per year to boost their Aboriginal art collections. Art and craft were being sold through 91 art outlets and a further 72 general retailers and souvenir shops, with 50% being purchased by overseas buyers.91 Aboriginal art was experiencing a dream run.

  But, then, suddenly, the Australian economy went into free-fall. By 1990, the 160 outlets listed in Altman’s report as selling Aboriginal arts and crafts had already been decimated. The federal Treasurer, Paul Keating, later to be Prime Minister, famously called it the recession ‘we had to have’.92 It was to build the decade of prosperity that followed, but it was incredibly painful at the time, and especially so on galleries and other small retailers.

  With the demise of The Company, dealer rivalry intensified over the major artists from Papunya, the Kimberley and those emerging in Utopia. In Western Arnhem Land fierce competition emerged between the new underfunded art centre in Oenpelli and a number of cashed-up ‘private dealers’. This was mirrored in the Kimberley where private dealers and arts organisations vied for the loyalty of artists. In this increasingly adversarial environment, divided opinions with regard to ‘safe’ or preferred provenance added fuel to a number of conflicts. The relationship between retailers and their suppliers in the bush strained to breaking point. Under intense pressure, many relationships foundered and galleries began to fail. Poor communication and the lack of commercial experience and expertise at both ends of the marketing chain created misunderstandings and distrust. The entire enterprise had become a free market rollercoaster: an accident waiting to happen.

  Highway to Hell

  Provenance, authorship, attribution and authenticity. the free market becomes a rollercoaster: dealers duck for cover, the press lays the industry bare. Who is protecting the artists? Who is in control of the market? Who is getting all the money?

  THE ADV
ENT OF ‘AUTHENTICITY’

  The roar of the cicadas was so loud it was hard to think. Their excrement fell in a fine mist as the astringent smell of masticated gum leaves infused the boiling hot air. It was 29 January 1989, the eve of the Gulf War. Guboo Ted Thomas was celebrating his 80th birthday. Several hundred people had joined him under the towering old gums around the bora ring of sacred stones, deep in the wilderness behind Bulgarn (Pigeon House Mountain) on the New South Wales south coast.

  Throughout the previous four weeks I had led hundreds of people in collecting native nuts and pods including acacia, banksia and eucalypt from the surrounding forest. These were burned and scarified, their contents filling dozens of cardboard boxes with seed. A large tree had been cut, stripped of bark and divided into ten one-metre long sections. The director of this project, Theo Tremblay, had conceived each section to represent a decade of Guboo’s life. The first, symbolising the Dreamtime, would be inserted into the ground. Everyone spent time with Guboo to learn what he had done when he was their own age; each worked on that section of the pole, carving and painting designs.

  On Guboo’s actual birthday, more than 200 people made the drive down to nearby Murramarang. The large boxes overflowing with seed were emptied into trailer loads of river sand. This was bucketed and strewn across the sand dunes behind the oldest surviving middens in Australia, where the ground contains a thick scatter of prehistoric cultural material up to 12,000 years old. They were intended to reseed the forest which had been cut down by settlers for grazing and sand mining at the turn of the 20th century. Today the area is covered with trees.

  All through the early 1990s Anne and I helped Guboo with a number of similar projects. Our headquarters was my small office behind the Coo-ee Emporium. On one memorable occasion, we joined our spritely octogenarian mentor each weekend for two months as he walked 350 kilometres along the coast from Mallacoota in Victoria, all the way to Kurnell in Sydney. It was a journey Guboo had made in the company of his own elders when he was nine years of age. This time, he led a handful of Aboriginal Yuin children from his country round Wallaga Lake. All of them came from families affected by alcohol and drugs. As Guboo trod in the footsteps of his ancestors, a large contingent of non-Aboriginal followers camped out along the bush tracks. Experiences such as this were life changing for everyone involved. Over the next ten years our projects became more and more ambitious, and helping Guboo heal his people and the planet took up about four months of our time each year. We tried to get 9,000 people to surround Uluru holding hands, but the heavens opened, the highway was flooded, our convoy stalled, and our ‘Earth Walk’ ended up as a circle of 300 in the Uluru camping ground. When Guboo was invited to lead workshops in Woodstock we accompanied him to New York and began putting the first building blocks into place for an exhibition that toured the United States for four years.

  In Australia, interest rates were hitting 20%, and sales were bad. Business was a slog and we pursued every opportunity to exhibit Aboriginal art overseas. Trying to outrun the recession, I also opened two other spaces, in Paddington and the Rocks. I liaised with overseas dealers to organise cultural exchanges between urban artists such as Arone Raymond Meeks, Laurie Nilsen, Dennis Nona, Karen Casey and First Nations artists in America. I applied for grants to stage exhibitions in Berlin, Paris, Santa Fe, Boston and New York. I was hardly ever in Sydney. I tried everything, but before I knew it, I was half a million dollars in debt.

  As the art market in Australia began to pull out of recession in 1994, and more and more galleries took on Aboriginal art, my network in the outback was also collapsing. The best Indigenous galleries and the biggest honchos in the mainstream art world were all hell-bent on beating me out to communities, to beguile the new generation of young art coordinators, and sign up their artists. They promised to promote the artists to more discerning clients, alongside other highly successful non-Indigenous artists. This was a big challenge to the specialist galleries. I realised I had to get back out there or I’d be dealt out of the game.

  So for the next five years I was constantly on the road all over Australia. The competition for artists became intense. I was relieved when the 1990s were over. It was a bloody nightmare.

  More importantly, a big shift had taken place. A small number of elite private galleries and curators working in the public gallery system were now deciding what was kosher and what was not.1 This was to have a profound impact on the evolution of the entire industry and as a consequence on my own career.

  I first became aware of it in 1987 as I began actively seeking exhibitions for my gallery. I found myself standing in front of electric, almost fluorescent, Aboriginal paintings in the first Aboriginal-owned-and-run gallery in Sydney, Bronwyn Bancroft’s Designer Aboriginals. These brilliant, shiny, expressionistic paintings were rendered in psychedelic acrylic, not traditional ochre pigments, and my immediate reaction, as well as that of the art establishment, was shock, even horror. Surely this wasn’t ‘authentic’ Aboriginal art?

  Later that year, these groundbreaking works from Ngukurr in Southern Arnhem Land were given the stamp of approval when Gabrielle Pizzi exhibited them in her swanky, new Melbourne gallery. She’d made her art world reputation running The Company gallery in Melbourne, after exhibiting Papunya paintings at Roar Studios, alongside cutting edge, neo-expressionist works. By championing the Ngukurr paintings, Pizzi was lending them some of her high art cachet, and eventually critical opinion swung behind her.

  Thirty years later, the question of what is or isn’t authentic Aboriginal art still incites controversy. It lies at the core of the claim to legitimacy of the entire Aboriginal art movement. So heated has been the debate that reputations have even been ruined over it.

  To understand the furor over authenticity it helps to consider the nature of non-literate Indigenous cultures. When there is no written record, knowledge is carefully remembered and passed on in paintings, sculpture, song and dance. Great emphasis is placed on preserving and replicating the information in pristine detail. Elders are revered for what they can accurately remember, which is an astonishing amount by modern standards. There is no room for error. They carry a reservoir of vital ‘living knowledge’ that must be shared to facilitate their clan’s survival in the natural world.

  Objects fashioned to fulfil specific functions and to pass on specific knowledge have always been considered more authentic than those made for sale. As a consequence they are considered more valuable amongst collectors of tribal art. But once Aboriginal artefacts became commercial items they had to compete with other forms of contemporary art in the marketplace. Their ethnographic authenticity became less important than their aesthetic appeal. In the 21st century the content of individual works is usually seen as either a marketing tool or an irrelevant anachronism. Aboriginal art is easily exhibited without reference to its cultural context or meaning.

  In the Western tradition, which operates within the context of 3,000 years of written history, the question of who painted a work, and who has owned it since, is usually more important than the subject. It’s not necessary to understand the information embedded in a Byzantine painting, for instance, in order to desire or value it. The information, which can be accessed elsewhere, is superfluous to the everyday viewer’s relationship with the work.

  Such cultural and historical notions of value and authenticity have not been well understood by either the press or the contemporary art industry in Australia. As a result, as far as I am concerned, the debate over the authenticity of Aboriginal art has been woefully inconsistent, and far too easily manipulated. The result is that in the Aboriginal art world today the boundaries of authenticity are policed by an elite band of galleries, museum professionals, auction house specialists and art centre advocates. These ‘experts’ are the gatekeepers to a narrow definition of authenticity.

  There is nothing unusual in this sort of business practice. In extreme cases, as in the oeuvre of Andy Warhol or Jackson Pollock in America, it is commo
n for a small number of people to ‘own’ and administer the artistic legacy of very successful artists. At times this brings them into conflict with the interests of the artists’ own families. The Australian Indigenous art market is modelled on the same paradigm. It is also based on the construction of elite ‘brands’. Only certain prescribed works by any particular artist are considered authentic, and any created during the course of other relationships are deemed inferior, worth less, or possibly even worthless. The point to make here is that these concepts of ownership and authenticity are utterly foreign to traditional family- and clanoriented cultures. Yet the marketplace has the power to insist that thousands of Australian artworks, created and exchanged through relationships with Aboriginal people both within and beyond the community context, are not authentic. They have been marginalised, systematically discredited and devalued.

  The career of Ginger Riley is a classic example. Like his fellow artists from Ngukurr, he used vibrant acrylic colours. But when his paintings first appeared in galleries, the market found them too confronting. They were initially judged to be odd and uncommercial. Eventually, however, the mainstream came to terms with Ngukurr artists such as Gertie Huddleston, Willy Gudupi, Sambo (Djambu) Burra Burra and their wives Moima Willie and Amy Johnson. Ginger’s narrative style, however, made him the only one of all the Ngukurr artists who matched what was happening in urban painting at the time. His rowdy palette and eccentric panoramas looked like naive hallucinations. He is also the only one of this group to have entered the top 100 Aboriginal artists of the movement.2