Or consider this more recent vignette from the south-western desert. Tjungu Palya, a young arts centre based in the western Pitjantjatara lands, recently held its first large-scale exhibition at one of the leading galleries in Adelaide. Many significant pieces were on view, including several taut, urgent canvases from senior traditional painters. Here was fresh work that cried out to be reviewed, interrogated, regarded as active: for it was in great part a response to the continuing social upheavals in remote Australia.
Critical reactions treated the paintings as so many gleaming, charming desert jewels. And that’s the part assigned to the desert in modern Australia. It’s the mystery place, where dreams are spun and the spirit plumbs murky, primal, authentic depths. What comes back from this realm is valued on the basis of its rarity – and on the unspoken assumption that the art will be the last of its kind.
If the absence of constructive criticism leaves these works of splendour to speak and fend for themselves in a strange world, it also encourages a kind of breathless, unreflective enthusiasm for paintings that are presented as profound, unmediated – whatever’s blown straight from the Dreamtime into our eyes.
The torrential output of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, most eagerly promoted and collected of Eastern Desert painters, is a spectacular example. It’s hard for anyone with a modicum of visual acuity not to see most of this artist’s later works for what they are: decorative, averagely painted daubs. Yet the look, the all-too-recognisable brand, has been only a small component of their appeal, as they churn through the auction houses, gathering investment value with each resale. The Queensland Art Gallery, in its monumental 1998 Kngwarreye retrospective, made this point clear. Tucked amid the endless walls of blurry dots and scrapes was a tiny room containing ceremonial materials lying at the heart of the artist’s traditional themes. Enter and understand. It was the Dreaming, then, not the painted surface, that made the work. It was certainly the Dreaming that dominated the exhibition’s reviews. And here we’re close to the problem that besets criticism of traditional Aboriginal art.
Critics who consider themselves to be friends, part of the enlightened crowd, will tend to view paintings as if from the artist’s point of view; they will be prompted to explicate the coded meanings, to read a canvas, in almost anthropological fashion, rather than to judge its effect. Spiritual profundity will be assumed as a given and diligently hunted out. And what could count as a bad painting if the Dreaming’s deep? This stance, though, is a species of cultural relativism taken to its logical conclusion. The true task of the critic, faced with the exalted material of traditional Aboriginal art, is to explore the margin between the two worlds; to investigate, to explain how, and how well, the painter succeeds in transmitting the shimmer of beauty and sacred power across the cultural divide.
But this is the fence Australian art criticism hasn’t climbed over – for intriguing reasons.
Debate, even discussion, is pretty well closed off. Cool, critical regard is replaced by an urgent ramp. It’s politically ultra-incorrect, of course, for Western critics to be frankly dismissive of any indigenous art – that would suggest they don’t understand the indigenous wellsprings that nourish it.
Judge by formal or received aesthetic standards and you repeat the sins of colonialism. And a generous liking for Aboriginal paintings sends out a potent social message about the enthusiast: it’s a reconciliation-minded attitude to adopt.
After all, who with disposable funds wouldn’t want to buy a part of the Dreaming and be close, in some small way, to indigenous Australia? The key word here is buy. Almost all of today’s traditional Aboriginal art is made as an export product. It records a pre-existent mental patrimony; it has no intrinsic value for the artists. This means that it has come to respond swiftly to the signals of the market where, during the past ten years or so, a secondary trade has sprung up at breakneck pace. Large fortunes are tied up in traditional paintings. Collectors, private and public gallery custodians, curators, auction-house experts, writers and cultural gatekeepers are all caught up in this whirlwind.
As a consequence, you are most unlikely to read, or even hear, a sharp critique emerging from any of the coterie of inside market-makers who worship at the profitable shrine of indigenous creativity. At every level, the interlock is plain. Private gallery shows are curated and purchased by a circle of friends and associates, experts and connoisseurs. The art trade magazines carry advertising paid for by commercial entrepreneurs whose stables of artists are discussed in the same pages in admiring terms. State art gallery curators can routinely be found in the field, truffling their way through the stockrooms of bush arts centres in quest of the next big thing, their mere presence enough to talk prices and reputations up. This is not a milieu conducive to calm critical reflection.
So what? Isn’t that the way the art world is: delirious, money-driven, prone to abrupt fads and fancies? But in the case of Aboriginal art, something’s missing: the sceptical, irony-laden voice of the contemporary scene – the voice of the critic, engaging in its continuous dialogue.
And what might such a dialogue sound like? Its authors would be familiar with the history, the symbolic and narrative components of the main indigenous schools of art. Perhaps they would know some traditional language as well. They would be steeped in Western cultures, past and contemporary. They would be conscious of the art market’s distorting pressure and immune to it. Above all, they would treat traditional artists not just as figures frozen in the Dreamtime but as individuals, as creative figures susceptible to understanding. It’s not an impossible critical stance: during his glory days on the Sydney Morning Herald in the mid-1990s, John McDonald occasionally mastered it – but few other recent media practitioners come to mind.
The tragedy in all this is that Aboriginal art needs no special dispensation, no favours from the wider community. Over the past generation it has proved itself one of the most distinctive creative currents of our time. It is born of the collision between tradition and modernity, and is best appreciated in a double register drawn from those two contending realms.
We know certain things from the long record of art history: that talents are always unevenly distributed; that the core meaning of an art movement must be unearthed through relentless study; that the weight of significance is shouldered by a few individual artists who stand out from the mass and whose work repays prolonged attention. We can be sure all these things will prove true of traditional Aboriginal art of the desert, Kimberley and Arnhem Land. This is the terrain of the critic. Where, then, are the critical appraisals that love and explain, and dare to judge?
Scams in the Desert
IT IS AT ONCE THE FINEST ARTISTIC movement in today’s Australian culture and the nation’s most unstable, most speculative investment market. It was born in a triumphant renaissance that brought Aboriginal traditions alive in the wider world, but a fast-growing cancer of exploitation is gnawing at its heart.
The rotten, morally decayed state of the indigenous art trade is the best known of secret scandals among market insiders, but its scale and depth are completely hidden from the outside world. It has become a gold-rush scene where money chases the dream of profit, where forgers, con men and thieves with plausible eyes greet you at the entrances to smart shopfronts, while Aboriginal artists sit cross-legged in back-yard sheds, daubing hack works for paltry sums. Government regulators and ministers stand by, art groups wring their hands and the dance goes on, with greed and denial locked in tango-step.
Unconscionable practices are now commonplace in the lower depths of the Central Desert art business. So grave is the crisis of authenticity and legitimacy spreading through the field as a result of these practices that the demand-fed rise of values in the Aboriginal art market seems unsustainable. Portfolios worth millions of dollars have been invested in the outpouring of desert artworks, but many of the new paintings, ostensibly by known artists, are of uncertain provenance and would struggle to hold their value at resale.
Some distinguished collectors, sickened by the corruption at the heart of the trade, have abandoned their great obsession. The crescendo in this sad drama looms: the Central Land Council has invited the Australian Taxation Office to investigate the Alice Springs art trade and Centrelink teams are carrying out their own probes into the finances of artists on their books. Fraud squads across the country have begun monitoring suspect sales and in late 2004 they even broke up an exhibition of forged works at a prominent Melbourne gallery. A federal government inquiry into the Aboriginal art trade has been announced. But the key players in the market are still in place: the impoverished traditional artists in their ghetto-like communities, the rough drifters making quick cash deals, the mainstream as well as the Aboriginal middlemen, the Alice Springs entrepreneurs with smooth sales pitches, the elegant assistants in bijou capital city galleries; all of them are links in the chain, playing their vital part in the systematic debauch of a high art.
The problems run deep. First, there is the simple question of authenticity; second, the disturbing conditions in which much of the art, whether genuine or not, is produced. The market is dangerously tainted and this taint is at least threefold.
Besides the outright fakes, painted at their leisure by common crooks from outside the desert Aboriginal world, there are problematic paintings circulating. These are often painted by family members of famous artists. Then there are the part-forged paintings, made for quick cash by name artists who scrawl a few marks before associates complete the work. And there are autograph canvases of varying quality, created by distinguished artists, but painted without care and often under a degree of duress.
Distinguishing these respective categories from true works by engaged artists requires the eye of a detective. This ambiguous realm is the home of the carpetbagger: the margin trader of the Aboriginal art world, who parasitises established artists and profits from their reputations even as they fall. It is a realm that has grown at explosive speed in recent months: to many insiders the situation appears out of control.
But scarcely anyone involved in the Aboriginal art market will speak on the record; and with authorship of a canvas so hard to prove or disprove, libel laws protect the fraudsters and the truth-benders. This means there are sharp limits to what can be revealed.
Some collectors, of course, are reluctant to confront any problematic items in their holdings. Prominent commercial dealers are under pressure to keep quiet; there are determined Aboriginal art-forging syndicates active in the market and they use threats of violence to procure silence. Most of the celebrated artists who paint for the carpetbaggers are too ashamed of their own behaviour to admit their part openly. Many have spoken privately to me and provided anecdotal information that reveals an entire subculture of exploitation, blandishment and coercion.
Meanwhile, critics and art lovers remain silent about this state of affairs for fear of seeming anti-Aboriginal or talking down the market they love and seek to support. That market is increasingly a complex zone, a spectrum of transactions and interracial contacts, a frontier full of subtle shades of grey.
The best way of picturing the Aboriginal art trade is as a set of superimposed circles. Only when the structure of the industry is unpicked can we start to think about how to police it or the actions that may be necessary to salvage its reputation.
Indigenous art sales are worth about $300 million a year, though much of this comes from knick-knacks sold to the tourist trade and from churning resale of old, high-value pieces. Perhaps two-thirds of that total is generated in Central Australia and its capital, the metropolis of the local art trade, Alice Springs.
The desert tradition first bloomed there three decades ago in an Aboriginal-owned painting company, Papunya Tula, which still sets the blue-chip standard for the market. This establishment stands at the centre of the interlocking circles. Not only is a PT catalogue number on a painting a guarantee of authenticity (and so desirable it is now often imitated); it also suggests a work of some quality, as the company has a high reputation to protect.
PT represents about ninety artists and has forty-nine shareholders. Its new galleries in Todd Mall, Alice Springs, are the Vatican of the desert: the stars of the movement are formed in its ranks. Walk into PT and you are in the world of the connoisseur; austere canvases hang on white walls.
There is an inner sanctum, seen by few; there the gallery’s manager Paul Sweeney presides over the museum-grade masterpieces collected by his fieldworkers in Kintore or Kiwirrkurra, homelands of the Pintupi people. As he ponders the growing flood of fakes and the carpetbagged works being made by PT’s best-known artists, he hangs his head in near-despair.
These days, though, PT is far from the only “pure” source of indigenous art. The next circle is made up of the community-based art centres. Scattered through the desert in Aboriginal settlements are more than thirty indigenous-controlled art workshops, which receive government funding and return all their earnings to their home communities. Some, such as Warlukurlangu Artists at Yuen-dumu, are high profit; others, such as those in the far Western Desert, are new and just finding their feet.
They tend to be chaotic places, full of ideals and inefficiencies; you will find a harassed-looking art co-ordinator trying to pack up new canvases, distribute payments, field phone calls, cope with grumbling old artists and fend off ravenous camp dogs. A few years ago, 80 per cent of the desert’s indigenous paintings came from these art studios. Things were straightforward then; the community art centres were the wholesale outlets and the few capital city galleries that handled Aboriginal art were the retail establishments.
John Oster, head of Desart, the art centres’ umbrella group, outlines the stark shift that has taken place in the market: “Art generated and put into the market by private dealers of whatever flavour now equals the amount of art coming from community-based art centres. It’s a many-layered beast we’re dealing with. Some art goes out through very respectable dealers; there are some commercial dealers that have supported the industry and who even created it, in some sense. And then there are very dubious works being made in backyards, being sold on and finding their way to sophisticated galleries, and then being bought by people keen to acquire good art.”
And in just this way the grey market has formed and grown. It began simply, in the interstices of the original art centre system. It’s easy to see how it works: if you’re a known desert artist, you have to provide for your extended family; it is your cultural obligation to spread your money around.
However, your art centre sometimes takes months to pay you while it waits to sell a painting or get the sale price back from some city show; and even then the art centre takes a healthy cut. Artists don’t sign exclusive deals with their local community art centres; they are quite free to paint elsewhere. So there’s a logical solution: the artist goes to town, paints a few works quickly for a “private dealer” and gets paid in cash or grog or – the preferred currency – a second-hand four-wheel-drive.
Desert artists aren’t naive; even if they speak little English and find it hard to make their way in the white world, they know they are being ripped off in such deals. So, as a general rule, they don’t bother to paint their best works for the back-yarders. Consequently, they undermine their own brand in the marketplace for short-term gain.
Things have snowballed in the past two years. The private market has spread out and developed its strange grace notes. Some back-yard dealers offer their artists prostitutes, Viagra, pornographic DVDs, even Valium. Good, quick business, of course, for the artists and their conduits.
Thousands of new paintings have appeared, keenly priced, of vastly varying quality and degrees of authenticity, sold through multiple channels without serious provenance. A parallel desert art universe has come into being, shining mockingly in the reflected light of the established trade. And who pauses to consider that the artists in the grip of carpetbaggers may be kept stabled in unprepossessing environments when in town, and may be do
minated or exploited until a sweat of sadness exudes from their work?
Step back to the next circle of the trade: the galleries. These come in distinct categories. A handful of high-grade city galleries specialise in Aboriginal art sourced exclusively from community-based art centres. They tend to show limited amounts of work and run extensive exhibition programs. Others, less purist, will source art from communities and from private dealers. Others still have some paintings that are, to the trained eye, rank forgeries carrying the signatures of prominent artists. But none of these galleries can be pinned down as doing anything definitely illegal. Hence the market is full of traps for the trusting and the unwary.
Let’s walk into a typical carpetbagging gallery. It will be well-lit, all front, full of stock, and staffed by an oleaginous, over-friendly salesperson. You will at once be spun a line about the authenticity of the art. There will be much talk about the story accompanying the painting and, just in case you’re worried, a set of photos will record the artist in question making the work. A certain gimcrack quality will be immediately evident, as will a propensity to bargain in order to achieve a sale, and to offer a certificate.
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