Ways of Looking at Western Desert Paintings: Fred Myers

   The works presented on this website from the two collections probably should be understood as emanations of the ‘acrylic painting movement’ that began at Papunya in 1971 with the painters of what became Papunya Tula Artists, the first Indigenously owned art cooperative in Australia. For the most part, it is possible to consider these paintings as almost a spiral of development, outwards from the Papunya beginning to spread to other Indigenous communities with some connection to this starting point.

   The collections record mostly two separate moments of artistic work. The Wilkersons’ collection focuses very closely on works of an early period in Papunya Tula painting, works in which one might see some of the early experiments and developments of painting on two-dimensional surfaces of different size. Steve Martin and Anne Stringfield’s collection is mostly focused on works that were produced after that starting moment, and it continues into works produced very recently. In historical time, perhaps with the exception of Sally Gabori’s work and Richard Bell, the works in both collections emanate from a single, basic cultural tradition of image, decoration, and performance and, more specifically, from an historically emergent art movement among Indigenous Australians that has drawn on that tradition. There are paintings from several different Indigenous communities and speakers of different languages, but their underlying cultural forms are shared. That would include the paintings from the Kimberleys, such as Paddy Bedford, and the work from Utopia, such as Emily Kam Kngwarrey.

   What is called the "Western Desert art movement” began concretely in 1971 with Indigenous Australian men who were living at a government-managed community in Central Australia known as Papunya. These men developed the practice of painting with acrylics on a two-dimensional surface, eventually Belgian linen, drawing on their own pre-existing practices, images, and their imaginations of ritual and ancestral creative activities in the landscape. They were, I was told very early on, “true” – that is, drawing their authenticity from the ancestral stories that they continued to represent, and the places in the landscape in which they were primally enacted and which were formed by them. Place, story, origins – all inspired the first generation of painters to put their images into two-dimensional form to show to outsiders. This transformation – from body and ritual painting, rock art and sacred objects to two-dimensional forms – was from the beginning a creative invention, a transposing of traditions into different and new forms, striking for their beauty and variety.¹  One would be misled to refer to this as either traditional or non-traditional; that is quite beside the point. The paintings are strongly asserted to be drawn from, inspired by, and transmitting the authority and truth of the ancestral revelations in place, notwithstanding the human variety of creative mediations, instantiations of “truth.” 

Such artworks are part of a history, a movement of aesthetic and conceptual development that has changed its forms from its beginnings in 1971 to the present. This movement has been a surprising and inspiring history of invention, innovation, and novelty that has made its way onto museum and art gallery walls throughout Australia, Asia, Europe, and the US – all the more compelling for the fact that many of its creators began their lives as hunting and gathering people in one of the world’s most demanding desert environments.

   If the Wilkersons have focused on works from the earliest period, the works in Martin and Stringfield’s collection belong to what might be seen as a third or even a fourth wave of innovation.² They were painted by men who were middle-aged in the early 1970s; women of an age in which they might have been married to those men; men who were young in the early 1970s; and a still younger generation. From the works of a second generation of painters, including Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, but especially in Ronnie’s virtuosic range of experimentation across various paintings, one can see a line of change leading to the celebrated, highly abstract works of Charlie Ward Tjakamarra, George Ward Tjungurrayi, George Tjungurrayi and, ultimately, Warlimpirrnga, along with his close female relative Yukultji Napangati and their fellow Kiwirrkurra resident Doreen Reid Nakamarra, too early deceased. It is not hard to see how Warlimpirrnga’s painting Maruwa (2013) draws on the same form that Ronnie developed: the concentric rectangle. Because they use abstract forms, these images are not restricted from being viewed by outsiders.

   This information might be useful when looking at their works as part of a history: the virtuosity of these artists cannot be appreciated just because of their passing resemblance to other formalist conventions in modern and contemporary art. These are inventions that tookplace indigenously as Indigenous artists have sought to attract broader public attention and communicate what matters to them through visual art.