New Cornell exhibit gathers Australian Aboriginal art
An exhibit of contemporary Aboriginal art opens this month at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University.
“No Boundaries: Aboriginal Australian Contemporary Abstract Painting” features nine indigenous artists from Australia’s Western desert. The works explore the relationship between the land and the plants, animals and humans that inhabit it. The exhibit has been on tour throughout the United States, and the show at the Johnson Museum is the final stop.
Andy Weislogel, curator at the Johnson Museum, offered some insight into the exhibition.
QUESTION: How did this touring exhibition come to the Johnson Museum?
WEISLOGEL: We were alerted about the exhibition by the collector who assembled the material. He was aware that a few years ago we originated another exhibition, “Icons of the Desert,” which presented somewhat similar material from an earlier period in the painting movement and was very successful here. So he and the other organizers of the exhibition at the Nevada Museum of Art thought it might make a logical stop here. We were thrilled to hear about it and host it because it represents a certain subsequent iteration of the painting movement and an interesting change in the work that’s being produced by indigenous artists in Australia.
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Q: How many pieces are in the exhibit?
WEISLOGEL: There are about 70 works in the exhibition. Most of them are acrylic pigment paintings on canvas, although some of them are works on paper. They have a great range of size, ranging from 12 inches wide to 6 by 8 feet. Most of the works are presented on the wall, but a couple of the pieces, because they are so large, and in order to reference the relationship of the painting to the land, are actually presented flat on raised platforms.
Q: Many of these artists incorporate The Dreaming into their works. What are some of the aspects that reflect this part of Aboriginal culture?
WEISLOGEL: The Dreaming is a wonderful, multi-faceted concept that’s very difficult for non-indigenous people to fully comprehend. It’s a cosmology, a worldview, a belief system that’s shared in some form or another by all of the indigenous people across the Australian continent. It’s a belief system that envisions and presents a sort of timeless ancestral history of world creation that goes back to a time before humans existed, when ancestral beings and animals created the landforms that make up the Australian continent.
The term “dreaming” is given a different name, depending on which indigenous culture you’re speaking of. This is broken into myriad different stories about different animals, plants and landforms that help explain the indigenous Australian world. In addition to that, it’s also a system of law and regulation and understanding of relationships among people. It’s a way of fully relating people, animals, plants and the land together in a way that they can co-exist and the way that the indigenous people can survive in what is a a very fragile desert ecosystem.
Q: The nine artists whose work is part of this exhibition were lawmen in the communities, but that means something different in Aboriginal culture than it does for you or me. Can you explain?
WEISLOGEL: It has very little to do with political or governmental understanding of law. It has to do with the ways of governance within indigenous communities. These nine artists are all steeped in the cultural traditions in which they were raised.
In some cases, multiple cultural traditions because some of them span different language groups. By long learning and leadership, they have come to be revered as cultural leaders within their groups. They’re all initiated men within their communities as well, so they have great importance.
It is these characteristics in many respects that allowed them to produce such encompassing works that make such strong statements about the lore of their communities.
Q: The artists all started painting late in life. What inspired that?
WEISLOGEL: That’s the great paradox and one of the wonderful things about this exhibition, that it’s cutting-edge contemporary art by men who started painting only in their 70s. Some of them only painted for a few years before they passed away. In fact, eight of the nine artists are deceased, some recently. It’s this great paradox of ancient, millennia-old cultural knowledge with contemporary art materials and practice.
Q: How do these pieces differ from traditional forms of Aboriginal art?
WEISLOGEL: Although the history of visual culture of indigenous Australia literally goes back tens of thousands of years — it’s the oldest continuous culture in human history — the practice of putting down these ceremonial and sacred images and depicting these sacred objects on Western art materials is a quite recent development and really began in the early 1970s.
At that time, a group of also senior lawmen at a community called Papunya in northern Australia came together and for the first time put down their ceremonial imagery on Western painting supports. At that time, there was less restriction about the types of imagery that they put down. They often depicted extremely secret, sacred, powerful and, in fact, potentially dangerous and harmful imagery. There was a reconsideration in the years that followed, and many subsequent paintings held back that sacred and secret imagery to present works that would less compromise indigenous knowledge and symbols.
What differs about the works in this exhibition is that there have been a couple of generations of painters since the early movement of Aboriginal art, and there has been a new way of presenting the material, greater abstraction and less literal depiction of sacred objects and ceremonial concepts. There’s also a more individualistic creative expression of what is called “painting country.” The artists own land, an area where they grew up, and their country is what they paint — what they have rights to paint through patrilineal and matrilineal associations and ties. There’s been a greater freedom through abstraction to express one’s country in new ways.
The result is nine artists who are very diverse in their mindsets and very diverse in artistic production. There’s no mistaking one of these artists for another.
If You Go
• What: “No Boundaries: Aboriginal Australian Contemporary Abstract Painting” featuring art from Paddy Bedford, Janangoo Butcher Cherel, Tommy Mitchell, Ngarra, Boxer Milner Tjampitjin, Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, Tjumpo Tjapanangka, Billy Joongoorra Thomas, and Prince of Wales (Midpul).
• Where: Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, 114 Central Ave., Ithaca
• When: Exhibit runs through Aug. 14; museum hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday
• Accessibility: The Johnson Museum is accessible for people with a range of disabilities. Trained staff members are available to provide tours to children and adults with disabilities.