Daniel Walbidi.
Daniel Walbidi, Kirriwirri Jila, Canning Stock Route, 2013. Synthetic polymer on linen, 171 x 205 cm.
During the final years of these old people’s lives, a young white woman became the key that unlocked powerful memories of a life they’d left more than 30 years earlier. The result was a body of wonderful energetic colourful paintings powered by their desert tradition. Jan Billycan and many of her artist colleagues ended their lives at the old people’s home in Bidyadanga. This seaside community that had provided a refuge to them more than 30 years earlier became their final resting place.
STATUS ANXIETY
I t’s relentless being an auction house specialist. They say you’re only as good as your last auction, so you have to constantly beat your competitors to the best art. Rod Menzies had contracted me to generate a minimum of $2 million twice a year. This required $3 million worth of artworks for each sale, as only 60-70% of all lots were likely to sell.
The schedule was tight. I had three months to collect, one month to complete the documentation and publish the catalogue, and two weeks to promote and sell the art. To hit my budget targets for each auction, I needed to find around 40 individual artworks worth more than $50,000 each, and a further 50 worth more than $20,000. The truth is, finding this many artworks in a very immature market was a constant struggle, and the pressure only accelerated as Menzies pushed me to sell $8 million a year, to beat Sotheby’s. I was only able to do this because the Aboriginal art market was ‘hot’ throughout the time I spent with him. The demand for major works by high-profile artists outstripped supply. Exhibitions by bright young stars and important established artists regularly sold out at their openings. Collectors watched like raptors as state and national institutions made their latest acquisitions. They circled around the elite galleries at art fairs, and struck the moment the latest art award winner was announced. The most motivated would go straight to the art centres in order to bypass the galleries, snapping up the latest rising star’s work. The hottest artists could have waiting lists up to 50 people long.
In this classic market-driven environment Rod Menzies was in his absolute element. He always had his hands firmly on the wheel, and would do anything to win the best works for his sales. Once he had secured them, he would make certain they would sell by drawing on his extensive business networks. In all the time I worked with him I never had the slightest doubt that vendors had placed their artworks in the safest of hands. His sales method was the epitome of professionalism.
Menzies ‘river of gold’ was his contract cleaning business. Every night, 5,000 employees cleaned offices all over Australia. With such wealth, he gave me a bank of $800,000 per sale to play with. I could offer consignors with the most highly desirable works a guaranteed sale at an agreed reasonable price, with a 50/50 split of any upside. Such an inducement to consign had never been on offer before, and with this in my saddlebag the major works flowed in. The fact that Menzies would be the buyer of last resort created some problems with the financial press. Observers like Katrina Strickland and Terry Ingram of the Australian Financial Review believed that by buying art from his own sales he was overinflating his sales figures. Menzies saw it differently. He wasn’t breaking the law. If he couldn’t find a buyer for a wonderful painting on the night, then he would buy it himself. Or, more likely, he’d find a client who would like to buy it with him, secure in the knowledge that Menzies would always be there to assist in its resale when necessary. In the meantime, he would derive the pleasure of hanging it in one of his several homes.
Rod Menzies loved art, and loved collecting it, but the longer I was with him the more I felt that he loved making money even more. Despite the many years I’ve spent running a gallery, I have never felt completely comfortable with the notion of promoting art as an investment. My number one tip for any collector would be to buy it only if you love it. The real value of a work of art is the joy you get from living with it. How do you quantify that? Most art actually decreases in value, in real terms, over time. There are major costs involved in selling, which make investing in art a game for gamblers and dealers. Only those who are well advised, or extremely lucky, make money. It is therefore with a degree of bemusement that I look back on the period I spent with Menzies. Interest in the visual arts had exploded. More people were collecting than ever before. Aboriginal art was riding this investment wave. But at what peril?
Before the 1990s, when it was appreciated as ethnographic, historic, spiritual, ceremonial or cultural, Aboriginal art had only appealed to wealthy overseas visitors and local ‘tribal’ enthusiasts. Now that it was promoted as contemporary art, affluent middle-class Australians believed it was a ‘safe’ investment, and they could make money out of it. Menzies clearly understood this dynamic. Sotheby’s and Christie’s (which departed Australia in 2005) either failed to grasp it, or chose to ignore it. They continued to take a museological approach, staking out the ethnographic ground and marketing their sales to institutions and conservative collectors.
The greater sophistication in the way Indigenous art was being shown and marketed in contemporary galleries also forced specialist galleries to lift their game, and attracted an entirely new competitor into the market. Brokers with financial and equity market backgrounds began buying and trading Aboriginal art.35 The rapid growth of the market had coincided with an uninterrupted booming economy from 1994 onward. As the rents and wages of professionally run galleries increased, so too did the financial expectations of art centres and artists. This led to rapidly inflating prices. The value of fine art in the primary market was increasing by 15% per annum.36 By the time I was working at Lawson~Menzies, prominent publications featured glossy articles on the latest artists, curators, gallery owners and exhibitions in every issue. Many of these articles were thinly veiled ‘advertorial’. There wasn’t a single art magazine in Australia that could survive without the revenue generated from galleries, dealers and art centres promoting Aboriginal art. The auction catalogues put out by all the major houses were collectors’ items in themselves. They bristled with beautiful artworks representing the most important artists.
Collectors of Old Masters, antiques or European, international and Australian modernists have always pursued works with proven age and pedigree. By contrast, the overwhelming majority of Aboriginal artworks have been created since the beginning of the 1970s. Early artefacts, colonial drawings and old bark paintings are rare. In this context an Aboriginal painting can be said to have ‘age’ when it is only five years old. It’s not unethical but it has always been considered unseemly for auction houses to offer ‘wet’ or recent works on the secondary market. The primary market galleries are thought to be the proper domain for their sale. In such a competitive environment, however, I grasped any opportunity to secure major works by those artists who were being featured in important exhibitions at Australian institutions and abroad. It may have been unseemly, but the market was moving that fast.
The ideal targets were artworks by those artists who had been selected for the Musée du quai Branly, and those chosen to participate in major international commissions, biennales and prestigious art fairs. Important works by John Mawurndjul, Tommy Watson, Paddy Bedford and Ningura Napurrula, for instance, were firmly in our sights. To get works by these and a host of other ‘hot’ artists, we went directly to the stock rooms of their agents, or to well-known collectors with an iron-clad guarantee.
Judith Ryan curated two influential exhibitions, in 2005 and 2006, that stimulated interest around several regional styles and communities. The wave of gestural, vibrantly coloured work emerging from new communities in the Pitjantjatjara lands was legitimised by the perfectly timed Colour Power – Aboriginal Art Post 1984 exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria. Though the exhibition included established artists from Fitzroy Crossing, Ngukurr, Yuendumu and Balgo Hills, it gave an institutional stamp of approval for works emanating from Blackstone, Tjungu Palya, Bidyadanga, Irrunytju and Patja
rr. This exhibition was immediately followed by Landmarks, which Ryan curated to identify groundbreaking moments in the history of Aboriginal art. She cleverly peppered the exhibition with paintings by a number of hitherto scantily known artists, such as Mick Jawalji and Wingu Tingima. As an indicator of the heated market and the constant search for the ‘next best thing’, the inclusion of an atypical work by Josie Petrick saw dealers track her down in order to procure works in a similar style. Petrick, who had spent years supported principally by Barry Dew’s tourist outlet in Alice Springs, suddenly found she could command up to six times the price her paintings had previously realised.
Just as everyone was focusing on highly colourful canvases, the unimaginable occurred. Overlooked for almost two decades, Arnhem Land bark painting returned to prominence. Crossing Country – The Alchemy of Western Arnhem Land Art, an exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, included bark paintings, hollow logs and spirit sculptures by senior artists of earlier generations such as Paddy Compass, David Yirawala and Peter Marralwanga. These were juxtaposed with those by senior living artists, including John Mawurndjul, Ivan Namariki and James Iyuna. The exhibition and the accompanying book had a huge impact on Australian collectors who had been completely in thrall to desert art.
International headlines now propelled Arnhem Land artist John Mawurndjul to heights unparalleled amongst painters in the bark painting tradition. His portrait made the front cover of Time magazine (below). Serious contemporary art collectors began to buy his work after the 2004 exhibition at Bill Gregory’s Annandale Galleries, in Sydney. This was remarkable for an artist whose medium was not clearly understood or accepted in the contemporary mainstream. Mawurndjul’s star status was confirmed when his painting was reproduced on the ceiling of the Musée du quai Branly in Paris. He later painted a pillar in the museum bookshop,37 while still fresh from a retrospective at the Jean Tinguely Museum in Basel, Switzerland. In 2006, Art Collector magazine referred to him as ‘the artist of the moment in Australia’, listing him as one of its 50 most collectable artists. Mawurndjul’s major bark paintings had almost tripled in value by June 2007 when his bark painting, Ancestors at Milmilingkan (c. 1994), made the cover of Joel Fine Art’s auction catalogue. The estimate of $20,000–$30,000 seemed reasonable enough for a work by a currently practising bark artist. The owner must have been jumping out of his seat, however, as bidding rose in $5,000 increments to finally settle at just a fraction over $90,000.
Without significant sales on the public record, an artist’s work is unlikely to get a guernsey in the big league. Entry to Tier 1 sales is heavily vetted, and the intake is innately conservative – that is, unless the auction house specialists are prepared to ‘take a punt’. The auction ‘bible’ in Australia is John Furphy’s Australian Art Sales Digest, the definitive record of every major auction held in Australia and New Zealand. It covers more than 450,000 sales results by artworks, representing more than 40,000 individual artists. Though exciting new work was pouring out of the Western Desert, North East Arnhem Land, Far North Queensland and the major cities along the eastern seaboard, most of it was not considered suitable for our sales.
To survive the competitive environment, however, my auctions needed to be different and for this reason I was particularly keen to introduce new artists, and do whatever I could to boost their secondary market profile. This allowed my team at Lawson~Menzies to stimulate and cultivate the careers of any artists it was prepared to champion. Just five or ten good sales records at auction is all it takes to underpin an artist’s career. This curatorial approach to our collection phase made our sales more varied, interesting and fresh than those of our competitors.
Rod Menzies ran his auctions like a general and he was remarkably efficient. At the sales meetings at the end of each viewing day, in the lead-up to a sale, all the staff sat with catalogues open at Lot 1. In a designated order we called out the bids, the lot number, estimate, reserve, absentee bids and telephone bidders registered, in rapid fire. Then one by one the specialists would give the names of anyone who had spent more than 20 seconds in front of a work. Woe betide the person who detected interest, but failed to retrieve the viewer’s name.
‘Did they register for a seat?’ Menzies would demand. If there was no interest in the work at all, he would spit out the dreaded word, ‘Orphan!’ ‘Who the … accepted that into the sale?’ he’d scowl, looking at me disdainfully. Kerry Williams and I got into plenty of hot water championing bark painters and artists from the new communities in the West because they were such a risk. I came to dread these meetings as much as I enjoyed them. If we’d taken a punt on an artist and the work didn’t sell, he was always furious. His success rate was everything to him.
In the early 2000s, when the art coordinators from the two mega art centres in Arnhem Land started to restrict the representation of their most important artists to particular elite galleries, bark paintings began to attract higher prices and wealthier collectors. It was a clever move on the part of Andrew Blake and Will Stubbs in Yirrkala, and Apolline Kohen in Maningrida. The artists in Yirrkala were now producing some of the most innovative and seductive bark paintings ever. The bark paintings were notable for their pure aesthetic and white ochre clan designs. Their sharp appearance and contemporary appeal were further enhanced by eliminating painted borders, and mounting the barks with all but invisible museum-quality aluminium hanging systems. A multimedia centre, theatrette and a fine art print workshop were constructed on the proceeds. Nevertheless, artworks by Gawirrin Gumana and Gulumbu Yunupingu, who won the Telstra Art Award in 2002 and 2004, only just made it into major auctions at this time. In spite of our interest in them, important paintings by Galuma Maymuru, Banduk Marika, Djirrirra Wunungmurra and Djutjadjutja Mununggurr were not in high enough demand to warrant inclusion. I didn’t care whether an artist had set records or not. I took a curatorial approach, filling our auction rooms with the most exquisite works, whether they were old or only recently created. I was enamoured of the beautifully crafted and decorated Morning Star poles, for example, which were being made at Galiwinku, on Elcho Island. I was able to prise a lovely selection made by Gali Gurruwiwi from a dealer following the display of the Bandigan Morning Star collection at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art. I aimed to create an exhibition feel rather than a mercenary flavour in the viewing room.
The Bandigan Morning Star collection was later included in the breathtaking exhibition Floating Life at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane. An indescribably beautiful collection of body adornments and feathered items were showcased in the glorious exhibition catalogue. I knew pieces like these would be a perfect addition if only I could find them. Curator Diane Moon had clearly demonstrated that highly skilled artists were continuing to nurture these ancient endangered crafts. After walking through the exhibition with Diane, I was introduced to the Governor General Quentin Bryce by then gallery director Tony Ellwood. Bryce was deeply moved, and confessed to me that thinking of the people and their continuing skill in making such objects had brought tears to her eyes.
Master of the Morning Star, Gali Yalkarriwwy Gurruwiwi.
Prince of Wales, Body Marks, 2001, Synthetic polymer paint on linen, 161 x 125 cm. Sold at Sotheby’s in June 2012 for $45,600.
Outside the art centres in the Far North, Karen Brown provided the most formidable hothouse for discovering, fostering and promoting artists. A canny strategist, Brown staged exhibitions in her Darwin gallery each August, just when all the major art collectors and curators would be in town to attend the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards. Brown had stunning success during the 1990s with Larrakia elder Prince of Wales,38 who painted with the most perfect 1940s modernist sensibility. She supported the art practice of artists from the Daly River community at Peppimenarti and was the first to promote Regina Wilson, winner of the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award in 2003. Brown provided the guidance and environment in which Joan Stokes from
Tennant Creek and Angelina George from Roper River were able to produce their best works. Other than Prince of Wales, and perhaps Regina Wilson, however, her artist’s were thought unlikely to do well at auction.
Both Kerry Williams and I loved Kitty Kantilla. I’d known her since my first visit to the Tiwi Islands more than 30 years previously. She alone, amongst the seven elderly ladies who painted in the village of Paru in the 1980s, lived to become a major art world figure. Kitty joined Enraeld Djulibinyana, Deaf Tommy Mungatopi and Mani Luki as the only Tiwi artists amongst the 100 most successful of the movement. This was almost entirely due to her close personal relationship with Gabriella Roy, which resulted in no less than nine solo exhibitions. Kitty and her contemporary Freda Warlapinni were amongst the very last artists on Melville Island to inherit the traditional Tiwi clan designs intact from their fathers. Meanwhile, Jean Baptiste Apuatimi, who was taught to paint and carve by her late husband Declan, emerged through the efforts of Tim and Angela Hill at the Tiwi Design art centre, across the Apsley Strait on Bathurst Island. We always included works by Kitty or Jean if we could find examples that were good enough, but neither sold well at auction. Kitty Kantilla died in 2003 and four years later was honoured with a retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria. You’d have thought that this would have elevated the value of her artworks greatly. Unfortunately, it was not the case.
The Dealer is the Devil Page 49