On looking at and feeling Aboriginal art.

Breasts, Bodies, Canvas: Central Desert Art as Experience (University of New South Wales Press, 2006) by Jennifer Biddle; Papunya Painting: Out of the Desert, National Museum of Australia, Canberra, 28 November 2007-3 February 2008, exhibition catalogue Papunya Painting: Out of the Desert, National Museum of Australia, Canberra, edited by Vivien Johnson.

It is now more than three decades since Aboriginal men began the painting activity at Papunya that would come to be credited as the origin of the Western Desert art movement. Over the years, as the production of art by men and women from this region has flourished, there has been a detectable shift in aesthetic. Generally, this shift might be described as a move away from figurative and iconographic depictions of place and ancestral practice towards more abstract renderings of cultural inheritance. While some artists continue to paint iconographically, the shift to abstraction can be observed in the work of many Central Australian Aboriginal artists, as it can in the work of other Aboriginal artists further afield. This shift provides some of the context of Jennifer Biddle's exploration of Central Desert women's art in Breasts, Bodies Canvas: Central Desert Art as Experience, as it does a recent exhibition, Papunya Painting: Out of the Desert, at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra.

Among the first paintings produced in 1971 and 1972 by men at Papunya are a series of highly potent and spiritually charged works. Produced with the active encouragement and support of manual arts teacher Geoffrey Bardon, these early paintings by male artists conjure up aspects of the cultural universe that Aboriginal people experienced as under threat from the misery of sedentary settlement life. Painted on particle board, scraps of old wood and any other materials the men could lay their hands on, these works tend to be small in size, and the best of them radiate enormous creative force. Where does this force come from? Do these paintings speak for themselves? Do they engage us directly? Or are they at least partly charged for the viewer by the layers of association they have accrued in public discourse --as the first Aboriginal art by the 'last' people out of the desert; as raw visual evocations of the depth of Aboriginal people's association to country; as a series of windows through which to glimpse a culturally different ordering of the universe?

Once we know something of these associations it is difficult to detach them from the experience of viewing the art. But one thing is certain: while these works have been hailed by the art world as great art--a hard won and precarious accomplishment--they have been simultaneously understood by those who interpreted them for a broader public as works about country, as cross-cultural maps, title deeds, Dreaming stories, visual representations of artists' inheritance, entitlement and responsibility. As Aboriginal art first found a place in the galleries of Sydney, New York and London, the non-Aboriginal approach to it was primarily concerned with meaning--with unlocking the code that might allow a viewer to 'read' the significance of what was depicted on canvas. In the late 1970s and 1980s, this art was read in terms of a cross-cultural communication about Aboriginal conceptions and relationships to land.

Jennifer Biddle's stimulating and provocative book Breasts, Bodies, Canvas sees this way of viewing Aboriginal art as effectively behind us. She begins with an anecdote from a road trip she made with Warlpiri women across north Australia (no date given). The women were carrying a series of canvases to sell en route. At Jabiru, on the urging of her travelling companions, Biddle brokered a sale with a young Anglo-Australian woman working in a shop. With the transaction complete (the buyer having talked down the price, the artist having assented to the meagre $50 sale through Biddle's mediation) and the Central Australian bus on the verge of departure, the Jabiru woman called out, 'But wait, isn't there a story?' Biddle recounts a mumbled reference to 'Yarla (Bush potato) Dreaming' before the bus drove off.

The central premise of Biddle's book is that Central Australian women's artworks should be understood as autonomous objects in their own right--that is, not as objects that refer to or seek to represent something else (that is, country). In tracing a movement away from artists giving buyers 'stories' through which they might approach the art, she argues that women's art does not represent but rather enacts--paintings 'literally bring to life country, Ancestors, people'. And as suggested by the book's subtitle, her ultimate conclusion is that painted canvas, skin and country are all made of the same stuff--brought to life, animated, in the activity of women artists. In turn their art is seen as carrying the capacity, in its own right, to make us feel. Art produces not just a way of seeing, but a way of experiencing the world.

Biddle's appeal to an experiential or sensual viewing of Aboriginal art needs to be understood as part of the broader shift in the humanities and social sciences from structuralist to post-structuralist analysis. One of the features of this shift is a move from concern with political, economic and institutional contexts to the more intimate field of bodies, persons and subjective agency. In relation to art, Biddle is suggesting that our appreciation of contemporary women's art can and should occur through direct engagement with the work itself, rather than via narratives provided by anthropologists, linguists and others. She wants to bring it all back to bodily experience--that of the artist and viewer. But she makes the highly questionable move of arguing that Aboriginal art is a particular form of writing: 'a bodily imprinting, a way of enacting, performing, repeating the work of the ancestors'.

What is gained by the description of Aboriginal visual expression as a form of writing? Biddle seems determined to bestow equality between European and Aboriginal ways of rendering knowledge. But there is much at stake in retaining a distinction between the print literacy we generally associate with writing and the kind of enactment of knowledge, the 'bodily imprinting', practised in ceremonial and other contexts by Central Australian Aboriginal people. Members of print literate societies inherit very particular, individualised, self-reflexive ways of being in the world, ways of being which are thoroughly at odds with the relationships between people, place and spirit that are brought to life in ceremony and are the driving force behind much Aboriginal art. Biddle writes in defence of and towards an appreciation of cultural difference at one level, but uses concepts that have the opposite effect.

If Aboriginal art, like all art, holds a mirror up to the world, what does a shift from the depiction of place to greater abstraction tell us about the contemporary circumstances of Aboriginal life, or the place of art within that life? While Biddle alludes to such questions, her approach does not help us address them, but rather ends with an essentialised femininity --the notion of a 'breasted ontology', a 'culturally distinctive intimacy of breastedness'. Women's art has it origins in ceremonial painting on breasts, and Biddle sees this as the source of what is distinctive in Aboriginal women's art. Linking painting to caring for country via the metaphor of breastfeeding is certainly an original argument, but not one that is particularly convincing beyond the way it functions as an expansion of the more general idea of nurturance. Moreover, it leads to simplistic questions such as does this mean that 'real art' can only be painted by mothers? The notion of a breasted ontology does not help us understand the distinctive nature of Aboriginal women's relationship to country in the present nor, indeed, why women paint. Nor does it contribute at all to ongoing debates about how to develop a cross-cultural appreciation of aesthetic value--how the best Aboriginal art might be differentiated from the mediocre or the bad.

A recent exhibition at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra of early works from Papunya is curatorially framed according to a very different perspective to Breasts, Bodies, Canvas. Writing of the show's centrepiece work, Uta Uta Tjangala's Yamari (1981), curator Vivien Johnson suggests:

   Geography (site), history (narrative
   of events at the site) and ceremony
   (ritual re-enactment of those
   events) are thus seamlessly
   conjoined in one visual image. Of
   course, anyone can choose to
   ignore all of this and concentrate
   on Yumari's historical significance
   as a 'great Australian painting'. Or
   simply enjoy the exhilarating
   outpouring of creativity for its own
   sake. But to do only this would be
   to miss out on what is unique
   about Papunya Tula paintings from
   this era and the National Museum
   of Australia's collection of them in
   particular. They are more than just
   'art'.

One of the refreshing aspects of this exhibition is that its works are organised according to discrete historical periods--four phases in the life of the Papunya Tula Artists Cooperative overseen by different white managers. The intercultural context of production is made explicit in the hang of the show, although this is contradicted to some extent by the lighting, which has creates an unfortunate mystifying effect. The works on display were all produced in the period 1974-81, after the departure of Geoffrey Bardon. At that time, the artists were engaged in a re-evaluation of art practice in response to angry accusations of Aboriginal men from neighbouring settlements that in their early paintings the Papunya men had revealed restricted knowledge that should not have been placed in the public domain. So, as well as a change in the scale of works and materials being used, the works on display register a clear shift in aesthetic as well. Traces of the figuration that charged the best of the earliest Papunya works with such power remain in some of the most affecting paintings, especially Uta Uta Tjangala's Yumari (1981) and Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri's Trial by Fire (1975). But overall there is a simplification and repetition of the elements that appear on canvases. The raw and intricate narrative detail of some of the earliest Papunya works seems to have gone. The power of the paintings on show seems to derive from other features--scale, repetition, the subtle use of colour. Here, it seems, we find support for Biddle's observation of a general shift to abstraction.

The layout of the exhibition and its accompanying catalogue are oriented towards explanation--while the hang of the show is generous, with plenty of space to contemplate each work in its own right, there is significant textual support to aid visitors' interpretations. The catalogue includes a section 'Reading Papunya Paintings' that translates the iconography of each painting on show. Via text panels and catalogue essays we learn that manager Peter Fannin introduced large-scale canvas painting in 1973. The first of these canvases were, Johnson observes, highly experimental, as artists adjusted to painting at large scale. We learn of the financial precariousness of the Papunya Tula company in the early days, of tensions between artists and managers over money and over demands for canvas, and that the company would have collapsed if not for the commission of works by the Aboriginal Arts Board for a series of international exhibitions. We also learn of the negotiations between artists themselves in relation to the depiction of subject matter and rights to paint. Philip Batty's evocative biographical essay about Mick Namararri Tjapaltjarri provides a window onto the extraordinary life experience of one of the artists. The message here is clear: these works can only be fully appreciated in the social context of their production.

Biddle makes only brief passing references to the contemporary social context in which women's art is produced. But it would seem that an account of the way art is experienced requires this social context to be illuminated, especially if it is to grapple with the impetus for a move from an iconographic to abstract aesthetic.

Some of this context is historical: the period in which the National Museum works were painted coincided with the coming to power of the Whitlam government and subsequent legal recognition of Aboriginal land rights. The 1970s and early 1980s were a period of enormous optimism. The flourishing of new forms of creative cultural expression, especially painting, in Central Australian communities was closely tied to a series of developments, including the introduction of bilingual curriculum that for the first time, which brought senior Aboriginal people into the classroom as instructors in a new 'two-way' approach to education. Paintings on the walls and doors of the schools at Papunya and Yuendumu heralded a new way of ordering community spaces as well as announcing a new era of respect for Aboriginal forms of knowledge. Painting in the 1970s and 1980s was an important expression of this transition in intercultural relations: these paintings were public, and they were produced to sell to whitefellas--they were presented as an invitation to glimpse the world from a radically different perspective.

What was the response of wider Australia to this invitation? Since the end of the land rights era and the birth of native title in the early 1990s, Aboriginal people have been confronted with a series of hostile responses to their claims for recognition of the colonial legacy; widespread attacks on native title; failure to respond empathetically to the experiences of the stolen generation; an increasingly confrontational mode of engagement with Aborigines and attacks on their representative bodies; the declaration of the end of self-determination and the beginning of mainstreaming, culminating most dramatically in the Howard government's 2007 'national emergency' intervention in the Northern Territory. All of this occurred as Aborigines failed to achieve meaningful improvements in their life circumstances. Over time, the hope of the 1970s and 1980s turned to despair, despondency and malaise.

If Aboriginal artists are retreating from dialogue with the audiences about culture and country, this set of circumstances is likely to have something to do with it. The shift that Biddle is observing, which has prompted her insistence that viewing or understanding now be 'focused solely on the painting itself', may better be interpreted as a rebuff. Biddle seems to recognise this when she suggests that abstract Aboriginal art is a form of 'writing back to an institutionalised incapacity of Europeans to recognise Aboriginal ways of being', an attempt in response to 'induce bodily responses in a climate of failure to hear'.

Significantly, the past three decades have also witnessed the deaths of many of the last generation of Aboriginal people who were born in the bush and retained the kind of knowledge of country required for their survival. The children and grandchildren of those early artists have come to know the country they have inherited through very different kinds of experience. Biddle is right to observe that country is activated, indeed brought to life in the act of painting, and that increasingly this is the only kind of practice though which country is known and 'looked after'. Surely here lies the rub. The shift to abstraction in Aboriginal art is occurring in tandem with the transformation of the relationship of many Aboriginal artists to their customary lands. Her argument would be more compelling if she attempted to grasp the implications of this shift in experience, which she clearly recognises in the observation that in the hauntingly beautiful work of Dorothy Napangardi lies 'perhaps concrete manifestations of displacement', rather than falling back on an essentialised notion of a 'breasted ontology'.

Biddle insists on a more bodily engagement with Aboriginal women's art at a time when those same women's physical relationship to their country is more attenuated than ever, and a dissolution of the divide between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people when that divide is starkly drawn. As Biddle puts it:

   What is being asked for here is our
   participation in this ongoing
   responsibility to make, remake,
   country; to partake in what
   amounts to a denial of
   differentiation of body from
   canvas, country from Ancestral
   body, viewing subject from
   painting subject, kardiya from
   yapa, whitefella from black.

Biddle's vision of the ultimate dissolution of separation and difference is fuelled by a politics of hope, but the ground I have traced arguably lends itself to a contrary interpretation: the move to abstraction in Aboriginal art can at least be partly understood as an (understandable) retreat from engagement with Whites about the terms of Aboriginal beliefs, a closing of a door, an insistence on unbridgeable difference.

Of course, from within this grim set of circumstances Aboriginal art has continued to flourish, suggesting the move to abstraction is multifaceted and contradictory. Clearly not all artists wish to disengage from dialogue with wider Australia. Another aspect of the context that must be accounted for in this regard is the workings of the global market and Aboriginal artists' responses to the aesthetic preferences of buyers. In short, a confluence of influences seems to be at work here.

Can paintings in their own right make us feel differently towards their makers? I hesitate to give such agency to art objects given the widespread tendency in Australia to laud Aboriginal art as one of the jewels in the crown of our cultural heritage, yet simultaneously dismiss as unviable Aboriginal people's aspiration to pursue the ways of life that enable, and indeed fuel, such artistic expression. The ability of paintings to affect us is constrained by the associations we are able to bring to bear on our viewing of them--which takes us back to the social world of the present. One Howard government Minister for the Arts illustrated the implications of this process of detaching artworks from their producers when he remarked that the wonderful thing about Aboriginal art is that it is not political. Art can 'make us feel' in a whole range of ways. But only if we have a certain level of comprehension of the social world from which that art emerges and to which it speaks, can we have any chance of a meaningful--and genuinely emotional--meeting with its makers. Surely this is why viewers of Aboriginal art, like the woman at Jabiru, continue to 'ask for story'?

Melinda Hinkson teaches anthropology at the Australian National University, Canberra.