Jennifer Biddle: As a way of beginning, could you briefly introduce yourselves, and what brought you together on this project. Why this book now?
Fred Myers: People in Australia– including art critics and art historians — have been criticizing anthropology as a framework for Indigenous art for a long time. Indigenous Australian critics in particular objected to Indigenous works being placed in ethnographic or natural history museums rather than in art galleries considered higher status, recognizing artistry rather than culture. As an ethnographer of Western Desert people, I have documented many paintings and the place of this work in people’s lives affords me knowledge that is relevant to the paintings and their subject matter. Terry is one of the main Australian art historians with a sustained interest and engagement with Aboriginal art, theorizing its placement in the field of contemporary art. We have been in discussion about Indigenous Australian art since the 1990s.
In 2022, near the end of the pandemic, numerous Papunya Tula works were exhibited at the Australian Consul General’s Residency in New York, on loan from two collections, those of John and Barbara Wilkerson, and Steve Martin and Anne Stringfield. When Terry was in New York, we decided to visit, look at the paintings and discuss them, record it, and make that the basis of some writing. We wanted to show those less familiar that these works merited serious consideration as individual works of art. This kind of attention to specific paintings was finally emerging—in exhibitions and in John Kean’s recent book on the innovations of early Papunya Tula art [Dot Circle and Frame: The Making of Papunya Tula Art, Perth: Upswell Publishing2023]. We were aware of the persistence of the unfortunate ethnography/art history binary in the Western art world. We hoped to show that by combining Terry’s more formal analysis and my knowledge of the stories, people, places, and cultural contexts, we could illuminate how the artists chose to put their millennia-old painting traditions into two-dimensional form to show others.
Terry Smith: Indigenous art has posed a great, and productive, challenge to art historians, especially since it became a powerful component of contemporary art.
During my art history training at the University of Melbourne in the mid-1960s, and then at the University of Sydney, Indigenous art appeared only when Picasso visited museums in Paris, then, shockingly, painted Iberian and Africa masks on the heads of the naked women in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Despite various developments around so-called primitivism, few understood this art to be a contemporaneous kind of contemporary art.
Until, in the 1980s, when the extraordinary paintings and sculptures by Indigenous artists in remote communities in north and central Australia began to be circulated by curators, and non-Indigenous contemporary artists responded to them in their own work. In the 1990s, suddenly, both kinds of art historical contemporaneity became possible, more visible, then undeniable.
I was updating Bernard Smith’s Australian Painting, the basic textbook for the field, then twenty years out of date. I saw the need for a chapter on this new art movement, so I undertook research trips to several remote communities, country towns, and inner cities throughout Australia. Many small revelations and one big one followed: that Australian Aboriginal Art was not only a contemporaneous kind of contemporary art, but also its advent—unpredicted, multiplicitous, self-generative and undeniably powerful—suggested that several other major artistic developments occurring throughout the world, many with comparable qualities, were themselves contemporaneous. In short, contemporary art was not a style imposed on the rest of the world by the major art centers. My own subsequent books on contemporary art, some of them now widely used textbooks, have been shaped by this realisation. [For example, Contemporary Art: World Currents (London: Lawrence King, and Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2011 and 2012).]
In Australia, a dense discourse has arisen around this art, with a growing number of Indigenous voices, the artists themselves, curators, critics, administrators and historians, leading the field. The Yamatji curator and scholar Stephen Gilchrist has written a wonderful, acute Afterword for the book. He cites Bandjalungcurator Djon Mundine’s condemnation of the “tournaments taken up between the imperial Houses of Anthropology and Art History.” Very few of us, I think, have been able to combine these discourses to provide, let’s say, the thick descriptions of the best (that is, radically reflexive) anthropology with the micro- and macro-scale accounts of the best (also, radically reflexive) art history. Perhaps our book shows that we are riding side by side, not aiming at each other.
Jennifer Biddle: The book focuses on six paintings from a substantive archive, numerous national and international collections, early and more recent paintings. Why did you select these works?
Fred Myers: We decided to look closely at the early paintings. I knew many of the artists and what they said they were doing. The paintings are well documented; they are from the early period that marks the development of the art movement. We picked paintings for what they seemed to offer aesthetically (formally) and, because of my knowledge of the painter and context. The choice to begin with Kingsley Norris’s seemingly simple painting was Terry’s idea, to start with what seemed to be the earliest painting, in which the dotting was most limited. Others were paintings from men who were dedicated painters, making work that seemed particularly inventive. Four of the paintings were favourites with qualities I wanted to understand better. For one, the enclosure in Wartuma’s painting The Trial [the cover image of the book] shows the importance of understanding mythological and geographical dimensions that motivate the artist. These works also have strong iconographic dimensions, as I have argued, significant for the artist. For me, this project has been an effort to understand what the painters thought they were doing with their work and how they brought intention into visual form. Each painting is an attempt to bring experience(s) of place, story (mythological events), and ceremonial performance into two-dimensional form. Some men were really drawn to this activity and demonstrated virtuosity worthy of sustained attention, what I have called a local art history.
Terry Smith: Fred has identified our main motivations. We were, of course, constrained by what was available in the exhibition: thirteen paintings from the early years at Papunya, 1971 to 1976, all from the Wilkerson’s superb collection of 50 works from that period. To give some context, 1,200 to 1,500 paintings on various kinds of board were produced at Papunya between 1971 and 1973 by more than 40 artists. A much smaller number of artists, half that, made most of these. We are in dialogue with the many interpretations of Papunya painting: the records of the many art advisors who worked at Papunya Tula, the original accounts of Geoff Bardon, the scholarship of Vivien Johnson and others, and the important exhibitions of curators such as Bernice Murphy, Arrernte and Kalkadoon woman Hetti Perkins, Gurindji/Malngin/Mudburra woman Brenda L Croft, Henry Skerritt, and others. The Introduction maps this art historiography in some detail.
My art critical instincts led me to focus us on the originary moment around May 1971; thus we begin with Kingsley Tjungurrayi’s Stars, Rain, and Lightning at Night, the third work listed in the first record of these paintings. We then follow developments to the later months of 1972, when a dozen or so of the men were painting together in a corrugated iron shed at Papunya, many on an almost daily basis. This gave us the chance to evoke the interaction between them as they shared information about their Dreaming [Ancestral, mythological] stories and visual ideas about how to paint them. Some photographs suggest how intense this must have been. But the paintings are the best evidence. Shorty Lungkarta Tjungurrayi working on his Classic Pintupi Water Dreaming alongside Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula as he creates his masterpiece Water Dreaming at Kalipinypa. To me, these interactions are on a par with some of the most celebrated collaborations in the history of art.
The outcome is a dialogue between an anthropologist/ethnographer and an art critic/historian/theorist that has generated 4 to 6,000 words about each painting. This is not exceptional when it comes to passages in books on well-known, even middling, artists working in Western traditions. Indigenous artists in Australia, however, are usually less well served: mostly, a few bland sentences about what the authors understand to be the story underlying the painting are followed by a few more sentences about the medium and the technique used to present it.
Jennifer Biddle: You center paintings as active material agents, whose work is neither finished nor replete. “The conversation” of the subtitle is as much between you two as between the paintings and audience(s): their instigations, engagements, affective and effective potencies. “Our responsibility is to open ourselves to these objects, to see as best we can what they have to say, and to say what it is that we are seeing” (2024: xii). You also identify the “politics of the gift” (2024:17 ff). Could you reflect on what you mean by this gift, this responsibility?
Fred Myers: The question of how this work enters into the broader field of art came up as we went beyond initial conversations. I have always been taken by the Pintupi painters’ discussion of “giving” (yunginpa) the paintings, the same word often used for the ceremonial transfer of knowledge (as a gift), or sometimes to speak of revealing (which is a form of giving). I knew that the artist Bobby West Tjupurrula, a co-curator of the major retrospective Tjungunutja: From having come together [with Sid Anderson, Long Jack Phillipus Tjakamarra, Michael Nelson Jagamarra AM, Joseph Jurrah Tjapaltjarri, and Luke Scholes, Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, 2017] spoke of the paintings as a gift that needed to be reciprocated, with payment analogous to moments when young men might give meat to elders in return for the revelation of knowledge. So, we had to reflect on what we were doing in this analytical work. These works had been sent out into the world, coming to us in some ways as a gift and we have envisioned our response to the works as a return, hoping to render more clearly what the gift is and to help generate the responses they deserve. The painters insisted to me very early in my own research, that the paintings were not made up but dear, and the Law. The stories, designs, and places are identified with or belong to persons who alone have the right to show or paint them. Even if given, the rights to paint, to reproduce, remain with the person with whom it is identified… and thus, anthropologists have learned, they are inalienable, tied to this ancestral authority and identity. That is the subject of much of my writing; in this experiment, we focus on the works’ visual dimension but we do not want to reduce their presence and their ontological value to that alone.
We tried to make the book intelligible in the field of meanings the painters claim. We wanted the works to be seen as objects of intensity and affect that incite a response requiring serious attention, drawing the viewer into understanding something powerful and moving, eliciting from us, perhaps, something we don’t know?
But there was also something else in choosing to pursue the theme of the gift: to challenge the treatment of the paintings as simply commodities, for sale, and to render the participation of Western Desert painters in the contemporary art world on their own terms, to accept the complexity of the differences presented.
Terry Smith: Fred describes well the politics of the gift in play in this situation, as we strive to move (from Mauss to Fabian, you might say) towards a genuinely coeval exchange, one that embodies the qualities that should be present in all exchanges between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, given the systemic inequities of colonisation. Last year, 60% voted against the proposal that the First People of Australia be acknowledged in our Constitution and permitted a formal Voice in the Parliament. This is racism in its most obdurate form. Does it evaporate in the clean-lined spaces of art museums, or in books about art, even those as elegant as this one?
For moments, perhaps, it can be reframed by what we might call the poetics of the gift. This emerges within response to paintings when evidence is gathered, when external knowledge, and rational inference has accounted for all it can, and inferred insight into form-making processes has exhausted itself. At that moment, paintings can retreat into rightful opacity. We were delighted that such moments occurred in our discussions. Right there, right then, the artists have called up the most valuable gift that we can offer in return: our capacity (if only partial, if incomplete, by necessity) for intuitive identification, for analytical insight, and, hopefully, for words that enable rather than block appreciation.
Jennifer Biddle: In the Introduction you mention a milestone exhibition in 2023, Irrititja Kuwarri Tjungu (Past & Present Together): 50 Years of Papunya Tula Artists opening at the new Australian embassy in Washington, DC, including Fred, your editing of the exhibition catalogue with Henry Skerritt (Curator, Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection) and the hosting in Washington of Papunya Tula artists at the Opening.
This framing strikes me as critical for this moment and what are now 37 community-based art centres across the Central and Western Desert (Desart Inc https://desart.com.au/member-art-centres/map/ ) in terms of the ways art production serves to sustain life lived-on county, in place; speaking and maintaining vernacular; the remote art economy; a history of community agency and mobilising force; of “vivification of Indigenous cultural modalities” as Gilchrist (2024:88) models in his Afterword, within ongoing colonial, extractive capitalism, neo-liberal and market-driven tendencies to commodify Aboriginal culture and identity. Could you speak to this 50-year history and the impact of the Western Desert art movement?
Fred Myers: The timing of our book with the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Papunya Tula cooperative is significant. From my perspective as long-time observer and friend to the painters and Papunya Tula, this goes back to the art/ethnography binary; to not excising the artworks from their total place and meaning in the local tradition; that is part of their trajectory. And that trajectory is clear: the circulation (and sale) of these works has provided material support for people to live in their communities on country, has provided prestige and recognition for them as artists, which provides support in the public eye, and they provide recognition for Indigenous people and the significance of connections to land in the broader public imagination in the Australian national landscape. For Papunya Tula, the trajectory of self-determination as supported through artwork culminated in their creation of the Purple House, the Indigenous NGO that they built themselves to provide culturally sensitive dialysis based in remote communities. This has enabled patients to remain on country with kin and able to gain the health benefits of being close to community and to transmit knowledge to younger generations. As an anthropologist, I cannot help but look at the work of art as a practice, a form of activity and not just a piece of aesthetic activity – as the artists said to me, the paintings are not ngunytji, not just made up.
Terry Smith: Fred has just listed several value chains that were generated by the Papunya artists and sustained by them and their supporters for over fifty years—this duration is in itself remarkable when it comes to art movements. But it is not miraculous when we see how grounded it is in local community values and cosmologies, and how important the business of making and selling artworks is to sheer survival in circumstances, often, of severe scarcity.
The kinds of value embodied in these paintings, and activated as they circulate, cannot be reduced to the prices they generate on the art market. There are, in fact, several markets, operating simultaneously, each according to their quixotic logics. The most extreme generate headlines, especially when spectacular prices are reached, and instances of exploitation exposed, no surprise for commodity exchange under capitalist conditions. Yet all this, we would argue, is a sideshow to the core achievement of the artists: the extraordinary artistic and social values they create.
Fred hints at the wider social impact of art practices like that at Papunya, those that were contemporaneous at Yuendumu, at Ernabella and elsewhere, spreading to become the Desart Inc. network you describe in your question, having an impact on non-Indigenous Australians, especially those who take their sovereignty for granted. Powerful works such as The Aboriginal Memorial made by Ramingining elders as a counter-memorial during the 1988 Bicentennial Celebrations of White Settlement, and knock-out exhibitions such as Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius during the Sydney Olympics in 2000, joined countless other demonstrations of the Indigenous capacity for complex, subtle self-imagining. In the early 2000s, the movement as a whole, and desert painting in particular, was a major factor in advancing the agenda of national reconciliation. Meanwhile, Indigenous artists based in the major cities, problematizing White supremacy and imposed Indigeneity—I’m thinking of Gordon Bennett, Tracey Moffatt, and Daniel Boyd, amongst others—have been acknowledged as significant innovators within contemporary art, itself now an international phenomenon, especially in the biennials that continue to proliferate in cities worldwide. Archie Moore’s amazing installation kith and kin won the main prize at the Venice Biennale last year.
Indigenous artists have been at work within their communities, and between them and other communities, for millennia. Secret sacred material must remain the preserve of the initiated; protocols involved must be respected. As Stephen Gilchrist notes in his Afterword, Fred and I have done as best we can, with deep care. We have also, we hope, demonstrated that these paintings invite, and can sustain, detailed interpretation of a kind that draws on our disciplines, as much as it challenges them, requiring us to learn new ways of seeing. We believe this is true of much other art made by First Nations peoples in this country. Indigenous thinkers and scholars are leading this effort to fully value the output of their artists, past, present and emerging, and we hope that our conversation may prove useful to this great enterprise.