Word: deserts
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...being maintained on the earnings from art production. "Aboriginal art has been the one shining light that people have been able to refer to when they talk about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander achievements," says Paul Sweeney, manager of Papunya Tula Artists, the oldest and most successful of the desert art centers, "and it's getting knocked about a bit at the moment." Industry observers blame a small number of rogue traders working outside the art-center system; others cite skyrocketing auction prices; some accuse the artists themselves. Says Sarra: "It's much more complex than it seems...
...What is certain is that the activity is generally confined to the Western Desert communities around Alice Springs, where the highest concentration of artists live. Here the pressure has been mounting ever since Geoffrey Bardon began marketing the prized work of his Papunya artists in 1971. Incorporated the following year, Papunya Tula Artists were turning over $A1 million a year by 1988, and their success did not go unnoticed. When the exhibition "Dreamings" toured to New York in 1988, "all of a sudden taxi drivers and carpetbaggers from the desert were rocking up with works by the same artists rolled...
...also increasingly evident that the Western Desert artists being targeted are the least experienced of all in the ways of the white world. As Philip Batty's current exhibition "Colliding Worlds" dramatically shows, the last Pintupi tribes emerged from the desert as recently as 1984. "They were still coming out of the bush when I was there," he recalls. While that lack of Western contact brought a remarkably fresh quality to their painting, it didn't equip them well for the art market. "You've got all sorts of traditional beliefs and values basically slamming head-on into Western economics...
...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 and dynamism have avoided capture. "It's a paradox," says Perkins. "It's the oldest...
...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...