The darker the night the brighter the day.
We have attended 2 galleries that specialise in Aboriginal Art. It has been quite an initiation and revelation. We attended an opening of male aboriginal Art in a gallery in Coff's Harbour a few weeks back. The gallery is run by a British ex-pat millionaire, Steve Bush, whose passion is Aboriginal Art. The paintings are really not in the same language as Western Fine Art being more of a mapping and naming discipline as far as I can gather. I can only approach them from my fifties modernist roots and through those eyes they work as wonderful and daring abstract pics. At this first show I fell in love with a painting by Lilly Kelly Napangardi, one of the Utopian artists. Kathleen Petyarre would be another artist from that area whose work is well known and quite similar.
The art opening was deafeningly noisy and sported the 'beautiful people ' of Coff's Harbour. I was reminded of a photo I saw in an Australian art magazine of a Sydney opening. NOT ONE of the maybe 60 people in the picture was looking at an artwork. The same was true here. More poignant was that there was NOT ONE aboriginal person in the room. Is it now the role of those nations to make artworks for the white middle class?
We have been in OZ for 7 weeks and have seen 3 aboriginal people. 2 were obviously the worse for drink. One of these we talked to in a snooker hall and he was singing along with a heavy metal band on the jukebox "we shall not be defeated".
By most estimates the aboriginal people have lived here for 30 to 40 thousand years and some people say as long as 100 thousand years. Us white people have been here for a little over 200 years. We are walking around with the descendents of 'racial cleansers'.
We visited another aboriginal art gallery, The Mina Mina, at Brunswick Heads and talked to the gallerist who had worked in Alice for seven years and still sourced her stock from there. I invested in a medium sized piece by Kathleen Kemarre which is again in the Utopian style. Very excited and inspired by this. When you buy a work it is important to get authentication and in this case I not only get a CV but a photo of the artist holding the painting in question.
On Feb 5th we fly from Sydney to Alice and on the 6th drive to Ularu (Ayer's Rock) to spend a night there and see this wonder of the world and a sacred site of the indigenous people
The art opening was deafeningly noisy and sported the 'beautiful people ' of Coff's Harbour. I was reminded of a photo I saw in an Australian art magazine of a Sydney opening. NOT ONE of the maybe 60 people in the picture was looking at an artwork. The same was true here. More poignant was that there was NOT ONE aboriginal person in the room. Is it now the role of those nations to make artworks for the white middle class?
We have been in OZ for 7 weeks and have seen 3 aboriginal people. 2 were obviously the worse for drink. One of these we talked to in a snooker hall and he was singing along with a heavy metal band on the jukebox "we shall not be defeated".
By most estimates the aboriginal people have lived here for 30 to 40 thousand years and some people say as long as 100 thousand years. Us white people have been here for a little over 200 years. We are walking around with the descendents of 'racial cleansers'.
We visited another aboriginal art gallery, The Mina Mina, at Brunswick Heads and talked to the gallerist who had worked in Alice for seven years and still sourced her stock from there. I invested in a medium sized piece by Kathleen Kemarre which is again in the Utopian style. Very excited and inspired by this. When you buy a work it is important to get authentication and in this case I not only get a CV but a photo of the artist holding the painting in question.
On Feb 5th we fly from Sydney to Alice and on the 6th drive to Ularu (Ayer's Rock) to spend a night there and see this wonder of the world and a sacred site of the indigenous people
posted by Tim Goulding at Monday, January 31, 2005
2 Comments:
You wrote: 'Is it now the role of those nations to make artworks for the white middle class?'
See also paul Theroux on Circus performers. He pointed out that in most Circuses the performers are usually from developing countries or if not they are people from 'lower class' sections of society - women, black, unqualified and the generally disenfrachised literaly risking their lives twice a day for the 'amusement' for middle class westerners.... (oh sorry Tim got carried away on this one)
Hi Dave, never thought of that. This principle probably applies to many professions. Certainly prostitution.
Paul Theroux's son makes great programmes with BBC- Louis Theroux.
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