Beyond the Future: Papers from the Third Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Michael as a national hero . I ron ically he received the Order of Australia in the same year, 1 993 . It is difficult to bel ieve that one can describe th is artist as traditional in the way it is defined in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, and I quote, Traditional (of Aboriginal society, now ch iefly that of central and northern Australia) characterised by social practices and rel igious beliefs that prevailed before European settlement.' But to suggest that he is not a trad itional man, which is how he describes himself, reveals the ambiguity of this term in general usage. Where does this leave us in the contemporary art stakes? Is it trad itional or contemporary? Obviously in my view it has to be both . One of the ambiguities is that if a work is produced by a tribal person it has to be trad itional and if it looks contemporary in style, as his works in the APT do, then it can't be traditional according to the l inear view. Then there is the issue of a tribal man painting in a western art style causing many to view this as somehow corrupting the purity of tribal culture. Th is in turn often raises the contentious issue of authenticity. Yet innovation in western art culture is not apparently subject to questions of authenticity in the same way. Better still it reveals how the continued reference to these binaries, trad itional and contemporary, serves to reinforce their respective hierarchical status rather than d ismantle them. These are inseparable and fused . As Vivien Johnson observes, 'Michael Nelson Jagamara not only creates his own version of over-the-top expressive painterliness . . . he also turns the whole situation on its head by re­ Aboriginalising the imagery.' 1 These huge marks are more than inspired brushwork, they are the signs and symbols of the creative passage of the ancestors through the landscape. Like ancestors footprints writ large, they are steeped in ancestral narratives that connect the artist to h is place and to his past. He is quick to point out that these marks are in fact closer to the original mark-making of the ceremonial ground painting than the heavily worked surfaces of the classical style of work many have come to view as more 'authentic' . While these high key gestural works might appear on the surface as neo-expressionist works in the western tradition , they are in many ways the antithesis. On the one hand he creates paintings that are visually compatible with the works of Franz Kline for example, teasing one i nto believing it is directly influenced by h is New York experience, wh ich one can not d iscount completely of course, but of more direct influence in the work of another desert artist, the late Emily Kame Kngwarreye, who in fact had almost no exposure to works outside her remote desert community of Utopia. She drew on her own ceremonial mark-making. But through her and other artists in the desert he may have learnt about the possibil ity of working in a more m inimal style. He often remarked on how sick and tired he was of doing too many dots for a market he believed would not accept as authentic works without dots, these recent signifiers of desert art. He is also respond ing to a buying public nourished on the Euro-American tradition of modernist art and who were already demonstrating their approval of this style of work through their unquestionable desire for the work of Emily Kngwarreye, b ig time. Yet at the same time he was nervous that such a departure would cause those who expect h is work to be heavily laboured with the familiar dots and circles of the classical style might no longer view him as a serious artist. But the exhilaration of working with such bodily freedom and vibrant colours liberated h is artistic spirit making th is exercise irresistible. He gave himself permission to be a painter, free from the pigeon holes he has been placed in and negotiate the terrain between the western art tradition and his own evolving Aborig inal cultural traditions . One aspect of these negotiations involves wit and parody. Dr Joan Kerr goes so far as to suggest that Jagamara is mocking the white art market which he does 'so seductively that we still yearn to hang them on our walls' .2 Whilst there is no doubt about the importance of the story in these works, is he taking the M ickey out of the art market by giving them what they want in terms of style? If he is, then what we are seeing is yet a nother product of negotiation by the viewer rather than the artist in this case, where one recalls the challenges put out by Duchamp. What is art and when does it become art? 86