Dennis Nona signing Goba II etching at Australian Art Print Network Gallery, 2008.
Dennis Nona, Two Brothers, King Abdullah University of Science & Technology, Jeddah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Rosella Namok at her solo exhibition, Coo-ee Gallery, Bondi Beach, 2013.
A painting on canvas originally purchased for $2,500 in 1998 jumped in value to around $30,000 in 2004. By 2013 its value had fallen to half that amount.
It remains to be seen whether any other Tiwi artists will experience the breathtaking success of the Torres Strait Islander artist Dennis Nona – even those like Pedro Wonaeamirri and multi-award winner Timothy Cook are relatively unsuccessful at auction.
The artist and teacher Anna Eglitis, who has done more to encourage the careers of artists from Torres Strait and Far North Queensland than anyone else, introduced me to Dennis Nona in the mid 1980s when he was still a shy, cheeky young student at the Tropical Far North Queensland College of TAFE in Cairns.39 Together we entered the 20-year-old in the prestigious Machida International Print Award in Japan. He won second prize. While his contemporaries made simple but competent images of rainforest and reef animals, Nona invented a narrative style, incorporating imagery drawn from ancient legends. These were depicted exactly as related by his elders. Later he moved to Canberra and studied fine art. He often passed through Sydney after visiting his family on Badu Island and gathering new stories, and always treated us to lavish gifts of crayfish and other exotic fruits de mer.
Nona is still the most gifted carver I’ve ever met. He deftly inscribes lines and images into linoleum, his favourite medium, with fluidity and intricate detail. But he is equally adept at carving three-dimensional objects. During the early 1990s he came with me to the United States and worked at the College of Santa Fe. While there, he was able to learn from the most renowned Native American painter and modernist sculptor of the 20th century, Allan Houser, then in his 80s. We later attended the Brighton Festival together, and at the Brighton University art studios he used a tiny fret-saw to cut the edges of his etching plates into figurative shapes for the first time. It was a technique that subsequently enabled him to create works on paper up to 10 metres in length by arranging many different etching plates onto the bed of the printing press.
Since I departed the auction scene at the end of 2007, artists from Far North Queensland have been appearing in auction catalogues in ever-increasing numbers. Dennis Nona, Alec Tipoti, Rosella Namok and the octogenarian Sally Gabori, for instance, are all represented by important dealers. This increases the likelihood that their works will be included in major art events and the collections of the top institutions. In time, they too are likely to become highly collectable at auction.
WHO’S AFRAID OF THE BIG BAD WOLF?
Alice Springs could have been such a different place, had enlightened forethought gone into its planning. Its physical location and place in the Australian imagination are unrivalled. Aesthetically, however, all the beauty lies beyond its borders. For the most part, the architecture ignores the surrounding landscape, with little sympathy for the desert or celebration of Indigenous culture.
During recent years the town itself has had a makeover. The central mall and main streets, set in an industrial sprawl, now sport new facades, modern metal awnings and native flowering plants. These signs of gentrification are part of a push to enhance what has, for decades, been little more than a rather tawdry service centre. Gone is the wind-blown litter lining cyclone-wire fences and the impromptu swags made from blankets and mattresses sprouting along the Todd’s dry sandy riverbed.
The wealthy white residents live in relatively green enclaves, while hovering on the periphery of the main streets are the blackfella town camps. Shunned by local landlords, and avoided by the majority of townsfolk, Aboriginal people come in from their outstations to support sick relatives on renal dialysis, buy grog and cars, and sell paintings for quick money.
Since the federal government ‘Intervention’ began in 2007, more people have been driven off their outstations, where shops and schools have closed as funding has been directed to larger settlements. Clan groups such as the Anmatjerre and Alyawarre, Luritja, Pintupi, Pitjantjatjara and Warlpiri live under a spectrum of differing circumstances, but all have few options for earning money apart from painting. Passive welfare and mining royalties abound, yet in dozens of encampments from Sandover country in the east to far beyond the MacDonnell Ranges in the west, unemployment and chronic lack of enterprise eat away at the communities like an incurable disease.
To first-time visitors, the Aboriginal people hanging about Todd Mall and along the river look like society’s discards. The idea that a well-known artist could be amongst them prompts the fear that they are being ‘ripped off’, and that those who interact with them are mere opportunists. But like all first impressions, it is not black and white, and in the grey area between there is plenty of room for wild imaginings and myth-conceptions. Few, in fact, are artists. Only a tiny minority are motivated and talented enough to earn a good income. These artists distribute their money widely, and show none of the trappings of wealth. Value judgments based on Eurocentric perceptions fall wide of the mark.
A large number of independent art dealers, from one-man bands to sophisticated businesses, have sprung up in Alice Springs and its surrounds. Artists living outside their communities are free to move from one dealer to the next, until they find one with whom they feel comfortable working. Many dealers enjoy the company of artists and their families and treat them well during the time they are together. A number of these dealers are loved by Aboriginal people because, unlike many of the city dealers, they tend to the artists’ daily needs. Hugh Warden, Steve Ariston, Jo Doyle, Linx MacPherson and Steve Nibbs are just a few of the many Alice Springs residents who have developed small businesses over the years, supporting individual artists who relied upon them for regular income.
The first Alice Springs dealer to be referred to as a ‘carpetbagger’ by the media in the 1990s was Steve Nibbs. He was the insider who tipped off Susan McCulloch, when she was writing for The Australian, and initiated the Turkey Tolson scandal in 1999. Nibbs was also one of the few who agreed to talk to Four Corners in 2008 for an ABC report on the Alice Springs art trade. He probably should have kept his mouth shut. He had no idea that the program would portray him yet again as the quintessential carpetbagger. Given his somewhat dishevelled appearance, it was easily done. He has always been comfortable swagging out with Aboriginal people covered from head to toe in red desert dust. But I can vouch for Nibbs’ integrity. I know for a fact that he has paid for holidays for artists and their families. He’s taken responsibility for the education of their children, and made considerable personal sacrifices while assisting artists to produce beautiful paintings that have sold in galleries all over the country.
Far from exploiting them, his major concern has always been to improve the proportion of the proceeds that artists receive from the sale of their paintings.
He has even suggested that artists might, one day, bypass the market altogether, selling their work directly through an on-line studio where they could deal directly with their buyers. I’m not convinced about this idea, but I don’t doubt his sincerity. In the end, Nibbs sued Four Corners for defamation. When the ABC turned up to court without a prepared defence, the judge ordered it to make a settlement of $140,000, plus costs.
I can cite dozens of examples of the role of the media, and in particular The Australian newspaper, in sensationalising complex issues surrounding the Aboriginal arts industry. During the last 15 years, countless articles have brought the industry into disrepute, adversely affecting its international reputation and actually, if indirectly, hurting the very artists it purports to protect. In my opinion the most damaging of them all was Nicolas Rothwell’s article for The Australian’s Weekend Inquirer, ‘Scams in the Desert’, published in March 2006. Rothwell was already a celebrated author with a string of successful novels and trav
elogues to his credit, including the award-winning Wings of the Kite-Hawk.
In his Walkley Award–winning article, Rothwell portrayed the art trade in Alice Springs as a den of thieves, and indulged in the sort of purple journalism to be found nowhere in his books. He wrote,
The rotten, morally decayed state of the Indigenous art trade is the best-known of secret scandals amongst market insiders, but its scale and depth are completely hidden from the outside world … a fast-growing cancer of exploitation is gnawing at its heart … forgers, con-men and thieves with plausible eyes greet you at the entrances to smart shop-fronts … rough drifters making quick cash deals, mainstream as well as Aboriginal middlemen, Alice Springs entrepreneurs with smooth sales pitches, and elegant assistants in bijou capital city galleries, all play their vital part in the systematic debauch of high art. Government regulators and ministers stand by, art groups wring their hands, and the dance goes on with greed and denial locked in tango-step.40
Many of my contemporaries at the time believed that Papunya Tula’s management, and its close-knit gallery representatives, were so dismayed by the serious effect private dealers were having on their business that they decided to do something about it. There were others, including curators at big institutions and the specialists at ‘elite’ auction houses, who had an ideological position to defend: that the independent dealers were the devil. In my opinion, Rothwell was simply a new chum who walked into a turf war and ended up siding with the establishment. He has since become one of Australia’s finest arts writers, and his opinion appears to have shifted 270 degrees. He now publicly supports the commercial decisions made by many independent artists and the dealers they have chosen to work with, but in 2006 he was relatively naive. Moral sermonising is often the sign of an inexperienced commentator.
I didn’t buy a single painting from an independent dealer prior to the late 1990s, and had never undermined an art centre by dealing through the back door. I had a huge shed in Alice Springs, which would have been ideal for working directly with Aboriginal artists, but I used it exclusively for an international artists’ residency, run at my own expense. Yet the combination of my Art.Trade activities, and my experience at Lajamanu when it didn’t have an art centre, meant that by the early 2000s I had become quite publicly associated with the other side: those advocating independence for artists and a code of ethics for dealers. My decision to offer non-Papunya Tula works by Pintupi artists in my Lawson~Menzies auctions opened up an enormous cache of work that the other auction houses wouldn’t touch. I had refused to discriminate solely on the basis of ‘official’ source provenance.
Regardless of the confusion, one thing was certain: Rothwell’s rash article brought the entire industry into disrepute, and I believe that the fall-out continues to poison public attitudes toward the Aboriginal art market to this day. There would be thousands more people buying Aboriginal art if this notion of a moral vacuum at the heart of the industry had not prevailed. In 2013, the Australian Financial Review reported a 52% decrease in sales from Aboriginal art centres since 2007.41 Rothwell’s article may have been an attempt to drive traffic exclusively through the art centres, but in the end they too suffered. Even experienced buyers ended up confused and alienated.
A little background might be useful at this point. The ideology behind the Papunya Tula operation argues that its outreach provides a safe haven for the protection of ‘pure’ Aboriginal culture: a place to paint, untainted by Western influence. And this has been a model for all art centres, with its insistence that artists have an obligation to their art centre. The result has been a war of sorts waged against artists moving in and out of nearby towns and painting for independent dealers outside the community – and woe betide anyone who buys the product of this ‘illicit’ activity.
Throughout the 1980s, 1990s and the first five years of this millennium, the Papunya Tula shop operated from a tiny gallery in Todd Street; overheads were low and it looked like something found in an eastern bazaar. Uniformly cut canvas paintings were piled on the concrete floor with individual canvases strewn like silk brocades. It was very approachable, and not at all elitist. When it moved into expensive new digs in the mall in 2006, its overheads increased dramatically. The beautiful new gallery was a conceptual leap toward the antiseptic white boxes of urban consumerism.
At the very same time, however, Papunya Tula was facing its greatest challenge concerning the loyalty of its most successful artists. Rothwell’s article caused a scandal that made international headlines and eventually prompted a Senate inquiry into the industry, but the core issue was never addressed satisfactorily. Why were artists, including several on Papunya Tula’s Board, taking their business to the devils?
The devil incarnate in this case was Chris Simon, a former fur trader, who strode into Alice Springs during the 1990s to buy paintings on behalf of Alan Cardy, a major Sydney eastern-suburbs property developer. Born in the outback township of Cobar, Simon had grown up in horse country around Scone on the upper Hunter River in New South Wales, where his father worked for George Moore (then the most famous jockey and horse trainer in Australia). By 2000, Simon had become a familiar Alice Springs figure in his hip-tight moleskins and R.M. Williams boots. He ran a studio in Alice and a retail outlet in Melbourne’s High Street. Later, he took over the Warumpi Art Gallery in Gregory Terrace, opposite Mbantua Gallery. His company, Yanda Aboriginal Art, set up in direct competition with Papunya Tula by specialising in Pintupi works.
Simon created the conditions for artists to produce their finest paintings by restricting the number of top artists he worked with. He soon developed a major collector base for culturally significant paintings of exceptional quality. I’ve never done business with Simon. In fact, we had a violent altercation when I refused to auction a painting by one of his artists. Nevertheless, the next time I saw him in Alice Springs he invited me in to take tea with Daphne Williams, who had just left Papunya Tula after 25 years. After a long chat I came to the conclusion that Simon was deeply committed to the health and welfare of the Pintupi artists with whom he worked.
If ‘safe provenance’ were the issue, Yanda works would easily pass muster. Every painting commissioned by Simon is accompanied by not one but hundreds of photos that fully document their creation. Yet the animosity directed toward Simon by Papunya Tula and its representatives so polarised the industry that no exhibiting gallery reliant on art centre works, and no major Tier 1 auction house in Australia, was prepared to accept a painting with Yanda provenance for fear of retribution. Despite this, Simon built up an enviable international clientele who were prepared to pay tens of thousands of dollars for Yanda works.
On 9 March 2006, Paul Sweeney, the manager of Papunya Tula, insisted the issue was about more than artist loyalty. He told Elisabeth Attwood in the Alice Spring News:
Its about the quality of their [the artists’] life if they live in town for extended periods. Their physical health and appearance is degenerating before my eyes, because of alcohol and a number of other issues, like people being away from regular medications and living in overcrowded houses.42
Overcrowded housing is not just confined to Alice Springs, however. It is endemic to all Aboriginal communities as they swell with people moving in from smaller settlements. And many independent dealers liaise with community clinics to ensure that artists remain healthy when in town. In fact Sweeney conceded, at the time of this 2006 article, that Papunya Tula had finally been forced to abandon its policy of refusing to assist artists in town. It had opened its own workshop, kitchen, studio space and accommodation in Alice Springs to cope with the influx. This was provided free of charge to its members and their families.
Simon is an unabashed advocate of free enterprise. In the same Alice Springs News article, he portrayed artists as ‘smart’ and ‘good at business’, implying that those who depict them as easily exploited are ‘colonialists’ who seek to impose a ‘restraint of trade’. He maintains that artists take great pride in the
fact they can paint for both an art centre and a choice of dealers who have to win their affection and loyalty by treating them well and paying them better. It had taken more than a decade, he said, to build a solid relationship with the artists, who are now more mobile, given the substantial income they earn from him. He insisted they are no different from any of the white residents of Alice Springs: they prefer to work where they can go shopping, visit the pool, go to the pictures and enjoy other facilities. Now, they can travel back and forth between their communities and town, as and when they like. Simon believes that by focusing on the problems that can occur when Aboriginal people come into town, rather than the benefits, advocates for the art centres are constantly reinforcing the white stereotype of the ‘drunken Aboriginal’. Simon won’t work with artists who are drinking. His own studio is air conditioned, with showers and nutritious well-balanced meals, and his staff assist artists to fill prescriptions, which are faxed to him from their communities. Accommodation is provided for about 30 people (artists and their families) staying in town each week, and money for accommodation and food is budgeted into the cost of running the business.
In taking a for us or agin us stand, Papunya Tula benefited greatly. For a time, it managed to stifle competition. Major paintings accompanied by a Papunya Tula certificate could be worth as much as three times the price of equivalent works created outside of the artists’ cooperative. At the height of the market in 2007, its turnover increased to $4 million. The effect on the industry as a whole, however, was profoundly negative.
Five years after Rothwell’s article was published, artist Alison Nampitjinpa Anderson MLA43 accused the community art centre system of being a patronising way for the ‘white art mafia’ to tell Aboriginal artists how they should paint, and for whom. Anderson is a Luritja/Pintupi woman and was once Arts Minister in the Northern Territory government. She spoke vigorously in defence of Simon, ‘the bogeyman of Alice Springs,’44 whom she had chosen to be her sole dealer.
The Dealer is the Devil Page 50