Word: barks
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...From its beginnings on cave walls at least 20,000 years ago, Aboriginal art has continually shifted shape like the rainbow serpent Ngalyod, the culture's enduring creation figure: from the X-ray styles of ancient Arnhem Land to colonial-era paintings on bark; from Albert Namatjira's mid-century watercolors at Hermannsburg to the contemporary cultural renaissance that is the Western Desert Art Movement, and its fertile offspring. Recently described by former Aboriginal Affairs Minister Amanda Vanstone as "Australia's greatest cultural treasure," it is an industry conservatively worth $A200 million a year (see following story). But its complexity...
...Encoded in the architecture is the unfolding history of Aboriginal art. Peltier suspects Europeans will be surprised by the scale of the work in and around the building, but as Perkins points out, it takes the art back to its genesis: "Where do bark paintings start? Inside bark shelters, inside houses. They were painted on the roof. Rock art. This idea of working on that scale with that kind of prominence is not a new thing." While the Aboriginal concept of the Dreaming "forces one to think differently, and in a less linear way, about the relationship between creativity...
...after visiting Oenpelli in 1912 that anthropologist Baldwin Spencer, noticing ocher-drawn designs in the bark shelters of the Gagadju people, made the first commission of Aboriginal art. Painted on a small rectangular piece of stringybark by a now unknown artist, the white ibis was depicted in the X-ray style expressed in rock art for thousands of years. Bound for the then National Museum of Victoria, Aboriginal art made its first serious impression on Western eyes. Fifty years later, the people of Yirrkala revived the tradition for a historic land claim in Australia's federal parliament, with...
...More than anyone else, John Mawurndjul has changed the face of bark painting. Adapting the cross-hatch technique of body painting known as rarrk, the son of a shaman's increasingly virtuoso barks have taken what was previously seen as a craft to the exalted realm of fine art: last year, he was accorded a career retrospective at the Museum Tinguely in Basel, Switzerland. If Mawurndjul is considered the Michelangelo of rarrk, then the MQB is his Sistine Chapel. Across 150 sq m of ground-floor ceiling, his sacred billabong at Milmilngkan ripples and sings; the rarrk's kinetic power...
...Collaboration is the cornerstone of Aboriginal art practice, and nowhere was this more apparent than at Papunya, 250 dirt kilometers west of Alice Springs. Around the same time as the Yirrkala people were presenting their bark petition to parliament, hundreds of desert nomads were gathering at the settlement as part of the government's assimilation policy. Far from their Pintupi, Arrernte, Warlpiri and Luritja homelands, the Papunya mob were caught in "the agony of exile," Perkins has written. Driving his VW into town in 1971, Sydney art teacher Geoffrey Bardon wasn't thinking of starting a revolution. But by encouraging...