XSTRATA coal emerging Indigenous Art award, 2006

Burrut'tji at Baraltja by Gunybi Ganambarr

Posted by Aboriginal Art Directory | 21.06.06

Author: Jeremy Eccles

XSTRATA COAL EMERGING INDIGENOUS ART AWARD, 2006 at Queensland Art Gallery

Jeremy Eccles Ruminates in Art Monthly Australia, June 2006

When a government sets up a public enquiry, a Royal Commission or whatever, it's amazing how often cynics come out of the woodwork to suggest that the terms of reference have been manipulated to achieve just what the government wanted in the first place. In the case of the inaugural Xstrata Coal Emerging Indigenous Art Award (XCEIAA), the cynic in me fears that the hosting Queensland Art Gallery has done something remarkably similar. And the result is the addition of a significant work of art to the walls of its yet-unbuilt Gallery of Modern Art – a work it's had its eye on for over a year.

Which doesn't sound like a disaster at all. And, in many ways it isn't – unless you happened to be one of the seven short-listed artists from remote Aboriginal communities who sat there as the Queensland Minister for the Arts announced the result on April 7th, unable to see any of their own works from an area dominated by Jonathan Jones's winning wall of art, and surely wondering whether they'd been in a different competition.

And maybe they were, as even Jonathan Jones himself acknowledged: "It's all a bit awkward; we're from such different worlds. But I hope there's some connection – not in skin colour, but in shared information".

And there's the question at the heart of my concern. Did the judges have identical levels of information and understanding about all the artists? With Jones, himself both an artist and an AGNSW curator, they had his multi-dimensional woven work – 7 metres of wall woven with electrical flex, a row of lights hanging at the bottom, loaded with metaphors of both personal and cultural history and allusion: light and shade, communal activity, usefulness and uselessness, male and female. And if they missed any of it, galleryist Barry Keldoulis offers curatorial guidance aplenty.

No wonder this was the "overwhelming concensus" for the Award, as I was told by judges afterwards, especially as they felt that their focus was supposed to be on "getting works into the new contemporary art collection". The judges were Doug Hall and Lynne Seear, the QAG's top administrators, Dr Julie Gough, academic and 'senior indigenous artist', Avril Quail, former indigenous curator at the QAG, a representative of Xstrata, and Seva Frangos, the art consultant who'd put the whole prize package together last year.

The judges both selected the 10 finalists from some 50 plus names last year and then chose the winner from the 2 to 5 works sent by each finalist to Brisbane for hanging. The winner, by the way, took home $30,000 for the acquisition of his work, the QAG gets $50,000 a year to buy more works for an Xstrata Coal Indigenous Art Collection, and the sponsorship is topped up to $330,000 over 3 years by another $50,000 to administer the Award.

But should that last sum have been spent sending the judges to the Gulf of Carpentaria? For I suspect that only there could the 81 year old Sally Gabori have pursuaded them that a deceptively simple work like Dibirdibi (Rock Cod Country) has an importance and multiplicity of layers of meaning for her that could be quite a match for Jones. For her wild pink and red washes often in challenging harmony with yellow, reflect a world she hadn't seen since the 1940s when her small Kaiadilt clan was driven by drought and missionaries to leave their beloved Bentinck Island for Mornington Island. There the Christians could put an end to male polygamy and, incidentally almost wipe out a tribe that refused to reproduce in this strange country. Eventually, they did have children, but no child born after the move has ever mastered the intricate Kaiadilt language. Gabori's paintings, therefore, are her language, the only way she can pass her culture, her stories and her understanding of the complex fish-trapping system developed on Bentinck Island on to her offspring.

To have rewarded Gabori, would have been a splendid response to the Queensland Government's perhaps belated efforts to encourage remote indigenous art in that State – the QAG put on Story Place with art from Cape York in 2003 to begin that process, and the Mornington Island Arts & Craft centre has achieved miracles in a short time – including earning enough money for Gabori and her kin to return to Bentinck for the first time. It would also have been a powerful riposte to the Brisbane claque headed by such political artists as Richard Bell and Vernon Ah Kee who insultingly dismiss the Gaboris as "Ooga Boogas, doing only tourist art", while they themselves are "doing the real Dreamtime paintings", according to the city's Courier Mail newspaper.

Would Roma Nyutjangka Butler be one of Bell's Ooga Boogas? I doubt that she's ever met a tourist at either Irrunytju or Warakurna, where she now lives on the edge of the Gibson Desert with her uncle, Tommy Watson. The sweep and sophistication of her work derives only from the importance of Butler's stories to her and the strong colour sense she reveals in building up brilliant dotted maps on a black background. Her most recent work at Agathon Gallery in Sydney uncovered even more confidence than those brought by the Irrunytju art centre to Brisbane.

And back up on Mornington Island, the young Emily Ngarnal Evans – a Lardil native rather than a Kaiadilt refugee – was offering a completely different reading of that fishy world to Gabori's with her microscopically dotted white canvases suggesting, close up, just the faintest hint of the movement of grains of sand beneath a still sea, but representing for her her father's fish totems, the Brown Shark and Spotted Stingray.

This double representation from Mornington was matched elsewhere in the short-list selection process – for no obvious logical reason. Two Tiwi Islanders – Raelene Kerinauia and Timothy Cook – gave us new readings of the classic Kitty Kantilla body design patterning, Kerinauia particularly successful in creating a batik feel that could easily reflect an ancient Macassan influence. But two Miriwoong artists from the recently revitalised Waringarri art centre in Kununurra – Mignonette Jamin and Minnie Lumai – suffered from the placing side-by-side of their works showing strong design and palate similarities. Apparently, since their selection last year, they'd worked together and developed closer visual links.

Even the two other Southern finalists, Lorraine Connelly-Northey and Nici Cumpston had connections through the River Murray. Cumpston's hand-coloured Giclee prints showed the mighty river itself, humbled by the invisible hand of man the irrigator so that water has to be pumped into creeks to keep the old Red River Gums alive. And Connelly-Northey's adaptive reuse of White rural detritus gave us wonderfully rust textured koolimans, woven wire dilly bags and baskets, shields and a digging stick from the pastures around Swan Hill.

It's hard to believe that a wider geographical spread of emerging artists couldn't be found for this inaugural XCEIAA so that we didn't get such duplication: the whole of Arnhemland and its bark tradition was missing, for instance, as were youthful Bidyadanga out of Broome and any youngsters coming out of the fertile fields of Balgo?

And while I'm asking questions, why was gender representation so unbalanced at eight to two, women to men? Does this suggest that indigenous men are unwilling to identify themselves as 'emerging' artists? Or does it suggest that while men began the whole Aboriginal art movement at Papunya in 1971, they're sitting back now, letting the women do the hard work? One judge pointed to a preponderence of women community art advisers as a factor. One might as well point to a preponderence of women judges!

For I think it does come down to the old adage, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? If Xstrata Coal's utterly laudable wish is to establish a benchmark national Award to match the Telstra in Darwin and the National Heritage in Canberra, then its reputation has to be clearly positioned above the interests of the Gallery.

But I also have to admit that the QAG has ended up with a beautiful and resonant work in Jonathan Jones's Lumination Fall Wall Weave.

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