By the end of the 20th century, Aboriginal art sales had ridden a wave of uninterrupted economic buoyancy for almost ten years. Artworks had increased in value exponentially despite regular media speculation about their bona fides, and the ethics of retailers and specialist galleries. Members of the Australian Commercial Galleries Association (ACGA), always happy to snipe from the margins, were conspicuously absent during industry forums such as the 1999 National Indigenous Visual Arts and Crafts Conference. Nevertheless, they did all they could to persuade art coordinators that the interests of their most important artists would be best served by representation in white box galleries. As a result, several of the established specialist galleries who chose to represent independent artists found their access to major community-based artists dried up. They fought back by developing an informal network to promote their own artists cooperatively.
The plethora of accusations about unethical behaviour, dubious authenticity and inappropriate production practices was essentially a storm in a teacup. It centred on a tiny number of desert artists working for no more than six Alice Springs wholesalers. But it gave rise to a disproportionately vicious turf war based on the notion that only an ‘official’ outlet could ‘legitimise’ the source provenance of an artwork. A small number of prominent curators, gallerists, auctioneers and art coordinators were determined to see that this process of legitimisation occur according to their own specific politically and commercially motivated parameters. In this heated atmosphere even the most rational observers missed the wider implications of this concept of ‘authenticity’. It could only work if the Aboriginal art industry was ‘made over’ in the image of the white art market. The disadvantage was that thousands of paintings and the relationships that saw them enter the market were being discredited. It’s probably worth noting that as many as two-thirds of the AIAM Top 100 artists in the history of the Aboriginal art movement had created works while acting as independent artists, not under the exclusive aegis of an art centre.69
A number of gallery owners, like myself, who had worked directly with artists for many years, preferred to judge artworks primarily on the quality of the imagery and the integrity of their execution. We had seen that artists who were badly treated, and inadequately paid, inevitably produced inferior works. Paintings bought on the strength of the artist’s name alone rarely accrued value. We believed that placing restrictions on the freedom of artists to sell their work to whomsoever they desired was a form of neo-colonialism.
In his 2002 publication Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art, American anthropologist and industry observer Fred Myers noted that without a healthy number of collectors or investors, there could be no large market for arts and crafts outside of government patronage.70 The private galleries, which had played such a vital role in stimulating interest in Indigenous fine art, were the driving force behind growing market demand. Yet they were shut out from the decision-making process when it came to strategic industry development. The very people with the entrepreneurial skills and networks to develop the industry were largely ignored by the Australia Council, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and the Aboriginal bureaucracy.
The nature of the market had been changed dramatically when Sotheby’s began specialist Aboriginal art auctions. Sotheby’s imprimatur had heralded the ‘star system’, which would eventually impact throughout every corner of the industry. From then on it was only a matter of time before impassioned ethnophiles were outgunned by collectors hell bent on ‘investment’.
Art Goes into Overdrive
Aboriginal issues attract the world’s attention during the Sydney Olympics and are promptly forgotten as soon as it is over. The great art bubble builds and bursts, and megastars emerge. I am precipitously unemployed and contemplate the future of the movement that has been the touchstone of my life.
FUN AND GAMES
My personal experience of the highly anticipated 2000 Sydney Olympics was a bit like a Fellini movie: a cross between farce and nightmare. Australia was flying high. The whole country wanted to get involved in what was deemed to be an incredible opportunity for anyone with a good idea. There were many, however, including Charles Perkins, John Pilger and Germaine Greer, who were predicting a conflagration in the international media over Aboriginal living conditions. After five years of controversy over authenticity, provenance and authorship, the art trade too was on notice. The heat was on. At the same time, bushfires fanned by strong winds ringed the city. Smoke and burnt leaves swirled through the streets of the CBD.
Overall the Sydney Olympics, and the atmosphere of heightened emotion surrounding them, provided a real insight into the political reality of Australian Aboriginal affairs. A strong push for Aboriginal people to tell their own story, not mediated or laundered by white people, had seen several Indigenous curators ascend to key positions in state and national arts institutions over the previous decade. For them, all Aboriginal art was about land rights and cultural identity. If the Olympics were to showcase Aboriginal Australia, it would have to be on their terms.
In the lead-up to the Olympics opening ceremony, four successive arts festivals were held to celebrate Australian culture. The first of these, the Festival of the Dreaming, was directed by the dynamic arts entrepreneur Rhoda Roberts, who is of Bundjalung heritage from northern New South Wales. Australian artists from urban, rural and remote areas were joined by others from the United States, Canada, Asia and Oceania. The festival program included storytelling, ceremonies, dance, theatre, literature and film put together by Indigenous directors. Roberts also directed the Awakening segment of the Opening Ceremony. More than 1,100 Aboriginal men and women from New South Wales, the Kimberley and Arnhem Land were shipped in to perform a cleansing ceremony at the opening, choreographed by Indigenous dancer Stephen Page. They welcomed the thousands of athletes, international visitors and the millions of people across the world who watched from the comfort of their homes. I was with a large group of friends at Richard Neville and Julie Clarke’s place in Glebe that night. There were 40 cynics in the room, but we were blown away by the Awakening, and found ourselves overwhelmed with pride in our country.
The Olympics were actually mounted on the land of the Dharug-speaking people.1 This meant the exclusive right to run the key Indigenous art venue on the Olympic site was given to the Sydney Metropolitan Area Regional Aboriginal Land Council. The Council was not used to administering major arts projects. Although Art.Trade had also submitted a tender for the job, the question of who would run the venue was never in doubt. It was just too politically sensitive. Our consortium of experienced dealers and art centres, with our meticulously designed exhibition space, didn’t have a chance.2
In spite of this disappointment, I did everything I could to create opportunities for Aboriginal artists throughout the Games. As the National President of Art.Trade, I was constantly fielding calls from overseas journalists who were determined to write a provocative story. I did my best to put a positive spin on the art story as it was unfolding. The local Land Council was ill equiped administratively to deal with an opportunity on this scale. Under-publicised and poorly organised, the on-site venue was to prove a lost opportunity to showcase the range, quality and diversity of Indigenous visual arts at the highest level to the visiting international audience.
I had spent the first half of 2000 travelling the length and breadth of the country to secure support for Art.Trade’s tender. Now I felt I had to do something quickly to create an alternative to the official Indigenous venue at the Homebush site. I entered into hasty negotiations with the Sydney City Council, and after a fortuitous introduction to the Malaysian property developer Ju Kee Tan, I found a precinct in the heart of the city to dedicate to the finest Indigenous art.
World Square was at the time little more than an unfinished building site, with a series of arcades around an outdoor atrium that linked downtown to Chinatown. Only one arcade was finished, but it led to a big hole, closed off with s
caffolding. Undeterred, my friend Steve Culley and I went in and while he bagged the walls I swept the floors. In each of the seven empty shops we created galleries with a brutalist backdrop for the art. A huge rampant bronze bull had already been installed in the atrium to balance the feng shui. We called the main exhibition space the Yuwayi Gallery.
With no funding or official support, I’d partnered up with Culley, Ian Plunkett and David Wroth, the owners of Japingka Gallery in Fremantle. The precinct was costly, and we ended up losing a bit of money, but it was well attended and drew a great deal of publicity. In the end, we were more than happy with our efforts. Guboo Ted Thomas, then a frail 91 years of age, officiated at the opening. Jimmy Robertson Jampijinpa created a large sand painting on the main gallery floor using red earth brought from the Centre. Cleansing smoke from the burning eucalypt leaves wafted around a contingent of chanting Aboriginal women adorned with ochre and splendid feathers. Septuagenarians Lorna Fencer and Lily Hargraves led the dancers through the crowd, proudly displaying their bare, painted breasts.
I had invited the ten Warlpiri artists from Lajamanu to swag down in our TV room and on our living room floor. For two weeks the young helped to look after the old, and we sat around our fire in the courtyard each night, singing and telling stories. All sorts of people dropped in to eat huge roasts and dance with us, with Lorna and Lily competing as they circled the fire, waving their digging sticks. One night Anne leapt up with a broomstick and swept them away from the flames as we all cackled uproariously. They were fantastic nights of caring, sharing and laughter.
Jimmy Robertson Jampijinpa begins creating his sand painting for the opening of the Yuwayi Gallery, World Square, during the Sydney Olympic Games.
Richard Bell, Biblica Australis, 2002. Synthetic polymer paint on linen, 200 x 60 cm x 3 panels.
Throughout the Games these Warlpiri artists painted during the day and often danced at important events in the evenings. They were assisted by Janet Nakamarra Long and Gordon Pupangamirri and his wife, Mandala (my daughter), who acted as interpreters. There was a large desert art gallery that sourced works from art centres, an Arnhem Land art gallery managed by Bula Bula Arts from Ramingining, a print gallery run by the Australian Art Print Network, and an artist workshop studio (where Jimmy Robertson Jampijinpa and the other visiting artists from Lajamanu painted each day). There was also a gift shop which displayed Desert Designs and Outstations products, and a large stock room. Paintings created in the studios below adorned the foyers of the five-star hotel above.
Right at the outset, the Brisbane-based Kamilaroi artist Richard Bell came down from Queensland, hoping to make some money from the Olympic hoopla. He asked if he could stay in the Aboriginal art precinct at World Square, and set up a makeshift workspace where he could bunk down each night. He kept the junkies and drunks out, and greeted the many Aboriginal artisans from around the country who gravitated toward the precinct, hoping to sell to the visiting tourists. Bell wasn’t making political art at that time, although it had brought him notoriety during the 1990s, and would make him a star post-2000. As I watched him churning out shrink-wrapped paintings for the tourist trade, I asked him how he could be content to make this stuff. ‘Being an artist is the greatest job in the world,’ he replied with a typically mischievous beam. ‘An artist can be anyone at any time … anything to make a quid.’
Bell was already an extremely articulate commentator and provocateur. Despite limited formal education, he could run rings around many academics, racists and even the most sympathetic white audiences with his incisive word play and uncomfortable questions. One of the most fascinating commentators in the history of colonised Australia, he had always lived, in his own mind at least, as a fringe-dweller. Taken from his mother and institutionalised at the age of six, he got his first pair of shoes as a teenager and grew up to be a ‘stirrer’, far more interested in speaking to, and for, black people than to white audiences. From the moment we met in the mid 1980s I always felt I was at the stinging end of his sharp, pugnacious, wit … and always on the back foot.
When I saw him win the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award in 2003, he famously accepted it wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with the words ‘White Girls Can’t Hump’. The next day he was excoriated in editorials all over Australia. Everyone was outraged. The postmodern irony of it all escaped the commentariat. Nor did they realise the words directly quoted white policemen in a country town, who were explaining why they went after ‘black velvet’.3 The prize was worth over $30,000. Bell must have laughed all the way to the bank.
During the Olympics, many Sydney galleries played host to first-rate exhibitions and art events. I was a member of the Crafts Council of Australia’s Best in Sydney consortium that installed the very finest examples of Australian craft and Aboriginal art throughout all of the VIP areas in Homebush, Darling Harbour and the CBD.
A monumentally impressive themed installation, Connecting Worlds, was created by Michael Eather and Laurie Nilsen of Queensland’s Campfire Consultancy. This massive collage and mural was mounted in the foyers of the Novotel, adjacent to the Homebush Olympic site. It consisted of a series of four themed works running over 94 metres that featured the stingray and dingo characters from the Ongoing Adventures of X and Ray, a series developed through collaboration with the Lin Onus studio.4
Cathy Freeman with Gabriella Possum at Adam Knight’s gallery in Abbotsford, Victoria, 2004.
Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) was surrounded by the major hotels that housed the wealthiest of the visitors. It installed a magnificent collection of ceremonial objects, regalia and bark paintings, collected from Ramingining and Milingimbi in Central Arnhem Land. The exhibition entitled The Native Born was built on the comprehensive collection assembled by Djon Mundine and Diane Moon for the Power Institute in the mid 1980s.
Later that year the MCA celebrated my much-missed friend with Urban Dingo: The Art and Life of Lin Onus. It was assembled by the feisty and formidable Indigenous curator Margo Neale for the Queensland Art Gallery, but was opened at the MCA as a key Olympic event.5 Hetti Perkins curated the other key visual art exhibition of the final Olympic Arts Festival. This exhibition, Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, was possibly the most influential and important of the first decade of the 21st century. It examined the origins of the Western Desert painting movement, and was accompanied by a book with authoritative essays by Vivien Johnson, Geoffrey Bardon, Dick Kimber, John Kean, Daphne Williams, Fred Myers, Paul Carter and Marcia Langton. The book sold out almost overnight, and today even a secondhand, soiled copy costs around $500 on amazon.com.
In spite of all of these efforts very few of the tourists who came to the Olympics were interested in Aboriginal art. All they really wanted were badges, caps and T-shirts. The much-vaunted exposure in the international press made not a jot of difference to the income of Aboriginal people or their living conditions. As the dust settled, the defining moment for them was Cathy Freeman’s Gold medal win in the 400-metres final. Along with her role in lighting the Olympic torch, this was to embody the Olympic experience in the minds of most Australians. The anticipated adverse publicity largely failed to materialise. Aboriginal disadvantage and discontent had been whitewashed out of the picture.
The international media, however, missed the most extraordinary and exciting event of all. On a spit of sand and scrub sticking out into Botany Bay, La Perouse has been the home to descendants of the Illawarra and coastal clans since the white occupation. On the opposite headland, at Kurnell, Captain Cook made his first landing in Kameygal country, before travelling on to Sydney Harbour. It was far away from the action at the Homebush Stadium, yet this is where the 1,100 Aboriginal visitors who participated in the Awakening camped out during the games. An impromptu market sprang up on the hillsides that sold seed necklaces, woven baskets and paintings from artists keen to earn money for their return journey. The different clans, from every corne
r of the continent, took turns to dance across the football oval throughout the day. Each night they shared their stories by firelight, making everyone who joined them welcome. Anne and I took all of the Warlpiri artists to the day-long corroborree at the end of the Games. It was not reported in the media, but for all of those who were there, this was the true climax of an extraordinary communal experience.
DESERT BLUSH
One of the first desert Aborigines I ever met was the great Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri. On the day he walked into my Coo-ee Emporium in 1985, he carried a roll of canvases under his arm. He settled into a chair at the back of the shop where everyone loved to yarn with Joe Croft. The Aboriginal people I knew from Arnhem Land and the Tiwi Islands were much leaner and shyer than Clifford; he looked more like a well-fed goanna and, having travelled the world, seemed remarkably comfortable in the city. His shirt had a white top that enhanced his lengthy salt and pepper beard and broad, confident smile. A well-worn paintbrush threaded into the band adorned his cowboy hat. He was already a legendary, larger-than-life figure who, like Namatjira before him, represented the Aboriginal face of Australia. Yet he wore his importance lightly, and expressed himself in a simple and gentle manner; alcoholism was yet to erode his composure. Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s he had been the Chairman of Papunya Tula, but like many others who followed him he had already started selling his paintings outside the company. He didn’t need anyone to represent his interests and, after 1983, he frequently walked into galleries and sold his work himself. A chance photograph of Clifford with Joe Croft and Burnum Burnum, taken that first day at the store entrance, was used on Coo-ee’s promotional literature for years to come.
The Dealer is the Devil Page 44