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Overview
Part art history, part detective story, this gripping insider's account of the Papunya art movement—which was centered around the 1,000 small, painted panels created at the remote northern territory Aboriginal settlement of Papunya during 1971 and 1972—goes beyond a mere discussion of the astronomical auction prices in the late 1990s that first drew many people's attention to these pieces. Celebrating Australian art history, this study explores the background of the artists themselves as well as restoring the boards' historical and cultural significance as the first inscriptions of the religious beliefs and sacred visual language of the Western Desert peoples. It additionally looks at the controversies that surrounded the paintings at the time of their creation, the role of teacher Geoffrey Bardon, the depiction of sacred imagery, what they mean to the artists' descendants, and the distant worlds of art auctions and international exhibitions—telling the larger story of Aboriginal art in Australia and beyond.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781742240138 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | UNSW Press |
| Publication date: | 12/01/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 400 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Vivien Johnson is a global professor at the University of New South Wales, the editor in chief of the Dictionary of Australian Artists On-Line, and the author of Lives of the Papunya Tula Artists. She has been researching Western Desert art for almost 30 years and recently helped the Papunya community establish their own art center, Papunya Tjupi.
Read an Excerpt
Once Upon a Time in Papunya
By Vivien Johnson
University of New South Wales Press Ltd
Copyright © 2010 Vivien JohnsonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74224-013-8
CHAPTER 1
The School of Kaapa
Kaapa Mbitjana Tjampitjinpa was not the kind of individual the Welfare Branch ordinarily singled out for anything – except maybe disciplinary action. On at least one occasion the settlement authorities tried to expel him from Papunya as a 'troublemaker'. He was a drinker and, by reputation at least, a cattle duffer and grog runner. He refused to stay docilely around the settlement performing the menial tasks to which the administration assigned all able-bodied men if they wanted to receive the meals prepared daily in the Papunya kitchens and served in the communal dining room. He was forever running off to visit relatives in Yuendumu or Napperby or into Alice Springs on some nefarious errand or other. Kaapa has been described as 'possibly the greatest wheeler-dealer of all time', but there was something roguish and lovable about his 'wickedness' that enabled him to badger people – especially whitefellas – into doing things for him.
No doubt that was why Jack Cooke, District Welfare Officer for the Southern Division (Central Australia), was barrelling along the bitumen towards Alice Springs that winter's day in 1971 after a routine inspection visit to Papunya settlement with half-a-dozen of Kaapa's paintings on the back seat of his car. Perhaps Jack Cooke had something of the larrikin about him too, because he took Kaapa's paintings and entered them in the upcoming Caltex/Northern Territory Art Award. He later remarked with evident pride that this was the first time an Aboriginal artist had been entered in what was typically a display of conservative, white, Territorian art. The winner was to be announced at a function at the Alice Springs Golf Club on the night of 27 August 1971. Jack Cooke was in the audience that night. As he remembered it over thirty years later, the judge's decision 'knocked the Alice Springs artistic community right back on their backsides'.
'The winner is ...' Jo Caddy, Adelaide painter and judge of the Award, hesitated over a name whose correct pronunciation would still defeat most European tongues. '... Karpa Jambajimba, for his painting ...' Another pause, while she struggled with one of those Aboriginal place names which generations of European explorers had carelessly overwritten with the names of colonial administrators and English lords, '... Gulgardi'. Twenty years later, Jack Cooke still remembered what Jo Caddy had said about Kaapa when he came up to collect his prize. Whatever else it symbolises, the term 'boards' refers to this defining moment:
This old man is a true artist. He took what he found, an old piece of waste lumber he located in a rubbish tip and the dregs of some paint he found lying around the settlement and made art out of it.
In its coverage of the story a few days later under the page 3 headline 'Aboriginal artist shares rich prize', the Centralian Advocate ignored this remark. It preferred to appease the wounded artistic egos of its white readership by quoting Jo Caddy's explanation for her decision to acquire Gulgardi and a group of Top End bark paintings for the Araluen Trust: that 'they might not be around in such numbers in years to come'. Although this prediction proved spectacularly wrong, for the painter of Gulgardi, the announcement was a moment of unadulterated triumph, when his art found legitimacy in the eyes of the whitefellas. Kaapa Mbitjana Tjampitjinpa had shown the scornful settlement authorities who sacked him from his job picking up papers around the Papunya Special schoolyard for the crime of stealing paintbrushes, that he really was an artist, in fact the 'number one' artist. His idea of paintings about tribal culture and ceremony had received the first public sign of the recognition and acclaim that a few decades later would be literally worldwide.
* * *
Those six paintings that emerged from Papunya in July or August 1971 are the starting-point of this story. The award-winning Gulgardi's inclusion among the six is crucial, and not only because Kaapa's win (and the substantial prize money that went with it) helped to galvanise the artists into the outpouring of creativity that produced the early Papunya boards. It also enables us to determine the timing of Jack Cooke's trip into Alice Springs with the paintings, which must have been in late July or August 1971 so that Gulgardi would be delivered in time for the judging. It was Papunya Tula's longest-time supporter, Dick Kimber, an Alice Springs high school teacher at the time, who first recounted the Jack Cooke episode in the essay 'Papunya Tula Art: Some Recollections August 1971 – October 1972', which he wrote for the catalogue of the 1986 Dot and Circle exhibition mounted by the Flinders University Art Museum. Dot and Circle: A Retrospective Survey of the Aboriginal Acrylic Paintings of Central Australia was a key early scholarly publication on the painting movement. It included not only Kimber's invaluable essay but also an excerpt from Geoffrey Bardon's by then out-of-print 1979 publication Aboriginal Art of the Western Desert, and contributions from Janet Maughan, Rodney Morice, Andrew Crocker and JVS Megaw, as well as the first appearance of Pat Hogan's name in the literature of the movement. Her 'Notes and Inventory for the Early Consignments of Pintupi Paintings' listed the contents of nineteen consignments of paintings delivered to her Stuart Art Centre by Geoffrey Bardon 'between Show day in Alice Springs in 1971 (generally July) and Yuendumu Sports Day 1972 (August)'.
As the only eyewitness account of the first few months of the painting movement (apart from Bardon's) by an interested and meticulous observer, Kimber's writings on this period have been enormously influential. This includes his dating of Jack Cooke's trip into town as October 1971, at least a month after Geoffrey Bardon's delivery of the first consignment of paintings to the Stuart Art Centre:
Jack Cooke, Assistant Director of the then equivalent to the Federal Department of Aboriginal Affairs, had been one of the few people highly impressed by the art and its potential for sales that would assist the Aboriginal people. In October 1971 he brought six paintings into Alice Springs – wonderful works with minutely detailed human figures and ceremonial regalia painted against black backgrounds. They were sold on the instant.
The Araluen Trust acquired Gulgardi under the terms of the Award, but the other five paintings were indeed 'sold on the instant'. The competition judge Jo Caddy purchased one titled Goanna Corroboree at Mirkantji, and her friend Helen Brown who had accompanied her from Adelaide for the Award bought two more, both untitled at the time. The Alice Springs Town Council bought a work titled Corroboree at Waru from an exhibition of Award works mounted at the local high school. Kimber purchased the sixth painting. It was included in Dot and Circle as the first work in the exhibition, reproduced on page 58 of the catalogue as 'An October 1971 work believed to be one of the first paintings offered for sale in Alice Springs'.
Knowing Kimber's interest in Aboriginal art, Jack Cooke contacted him to tell him about the paintings and Kimber photographed some of them on the lawns of the old Department of Aboriginal Affairs (Welfare Branch) building:
Jack gave me permission to take them out into the sunlight to photograph them. I placed them on the ground along the base of one side of the building, took the photographs, then returned them to Jack's care.
Gulgardi was not among the slides Kimber took that day; Cooke must have contacted him after he delivered the painting to the Award. If it had been, Kimber might have realised his error in ascribing these events to October, several months after the Award. But 'October 1971' was what he had written on the box of slides. What could it refer to if not when he took the photos? The answer is as simple as I suspect most solutions to the chronological mysteries of this history would be if one could only stumble across them: he was broke at the time – mainly from the expense of paying off the painting he had purchased – and could not afford to have the slides developed until October 1971! And why does it matter? Because if those paintings came into town in July or August rather than October, that makes them the first six paintings to come out of Papunya.
In October 1989, eighteen years (and three months) after she bought the paintings and one month before Kaapa's death, Jo Caddy's friend Helen Brown sold the two paintings she had bought at the time of her visit to Alice Springs for the 1971 Art Award to the Art Gallery of South Australia for what would today be considered extremely modest prices: at $7000 and $5000 they cost the Gallery somewhat less than they would have paid for a contemporary Papunya Tula canvas at that time. One of these works so exactly fits Kimber's description in his Dot and Circle essay of the paintings Jack Cooke delivered to Alice Springs that his later recognition of it as the very painting this description was based upon will come as no real surprise.
But it would be another seven years before these two paintings went on public display, in the 1996 Dreamings of the Desert show of the Gallery's entire collection of Western Desert art, and another six years after that before Kimber finally saw an image of them in the catalogue of this exhibition. I showed it to him in a café in Alice Springs where we had met to discuss the chronology of events in those early months of the movement, particularly the timing of Jack Cooke's arrival in Alice Springs with the paintings in the light of what Cooke had told me about entering Gulgardi in the Caltex/Northern Territory Art Award when I visited him in the Adelaide Hills in April 2002. Kimber instantly recognised one of the paintings which Jo Caddy's friend had purchased in August 1971 as the one he had photographed on the Department of Aboriginal Affairs lawns and on which he had based his Dot and Circle report. 'That's the one!' he exclaimed, pointing to the expressive ceremonial figures kneeling by the ground mosaic.
Another nine years later, when Dick Kimber put the painting he had purchased up for auction in Sotheby's second Important Aboriginal Art auction in July 1998, it was acquired (for $85 000) by the John and Barbara Wilkerson Collection. Renamed Mikanji, it next appeared in the catalogue of the Icons of the Desert exhibition of this collection and was once again described (quoting Kimber) as 'an October 1971' work. On the basis of this mistaken chronology, Icons curator Roger Benjamin represented the painting in his catalogue essay as 'an aesthetic advance on the July–August works by Kaapa Tjampitjinpa, who had won the Caltex Art Award with Gulgardi on August 27 1971':
In comparison with such works, Kaapa has avoided the use of perspective and literal figures of men participating in ceremony. In Mikanji Kaapa provides a symmetrical schematisation of the ceremonial scene. 'Realistic' figures are replaced by U-signs placed around a central sand mosaic partitioned off by large ceremonial objects.
Benjamin's observations may well be apt, but the timing is crucial because between August and October when these 'aesthetic advances' supposedly occurred, Kaapa would have been exposed to Geoffrey Bardon and his criticisms of the European influences in his paintings as he worked with Billy Stockman and Long Jack Phillipus at the back of Bardon's classroom. Bardon's 2004 account gives September 1971 as the date Kaapa 'joined our painting group'. So in August or July when Jack Cooke was in Papunya being humbugged by Kaapa to take his paintings into town for him, Kaapa was still working independently of Bardon. And this matters because it means that the developments Benjamin sees in Mikanji were, every bit as much as Gulgardi itself, the product of an artistic practice based upon Aboriginal traditions which existed in Papunya prior to and independently of the painting group that gathered around Geoffrey Bardon. And the leader and main exponent of that pre-Bardon practice was Kaapa Tjampitjinpa, whose authorship of the six paintings Jack Cooke brought into town that day Kimber omitted to mention in his Dot and Circle essay. In recognition of Kaapa's authorship of most of the known paintings (but certainly not all) in the style of miniaturised depictions of ceremonial grounds, objects and performances on plain backgrounds that characterised the paintings produced in this independent practice, I have christened it the 'School of Kaapa'.
When Ron Radford, then Curator of Contemporary Australian Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia, argued in favour of the acquisition of Helen Brown's paintings that they would fill a gap in the Gallery's otherwise unusually representative collection of Western Desert art in being both works by Kaapa Tjampitjinpa and examples of the 'very earliest type' of Papunya paintings, he was more accurate than he knew. Only since the late 1990s, thanks in part to the auction houses' tireless promotion of the hundreds of early Papunya boards passing through their hands, has it become obvious that the half-dozen paintings Jack Cooke brought into town and Kimber saw and described were not at all typical of the painters' work over the first two years of the movement – not even of Kaapa's.
In those days no-one really knew what early Papunya paintings looked like. In the absence of the vital information that Kaapa Tjampitjinpa had painted 'most if not all' of the works answering Kimber's description in the Dot and Circle essay, that description came to represent all the early Papunya works produced over the first two years of the movement, which people had not seen and could at that stage only imagine. It was all they had to go on. But it was a confabulation to cover the huge gaps that then existed in the historical record of the origins of Papunya painting. What Radford probably meant by the 'very earliest type of Papunya painting' was all the early Papunya boards produced in the Bardon years – 1971–72. The Gallery still lacked a Kaapa Tjampitjinpa from any period of the movement or any works from 1971 to 1972, and Radford saw Helen Brown's paintings as a way to plug two significant gaps in one fell swoop. He was based in Adelaide and one of the small band of Papunya enthusiasts at that time, so he would have seen Kaapa's painting in the Dot and Circle exhibition and presumably read Kimber's description of 'minutely detailed human figures and ceremonial regalia painted against black backgrounds'. If he did somehow put two and two together, it was not the first – or the last – time he would secure remarkable desert paintings for the national collection by acts of prescient curating.
Kimber did mention that Kaapa had painted 'most if not all' of those six paintings in his notes in the 1998 Sotheby's sales catalogue for Mikanji. Nevertheless, the misconception still persists that his description applies to the very earliest works by the group around Geoffrey Bardon rather than to the independent practice of the School of Kaapa. As we shall see in the next chapter, realistic scenes of the ceremonial life were not at all typical of the earliest paintings from Bardon's group, much less archetypal. They were also quite unlike the paintings Kaapa himself produced once he joined the group of 'painting men' around Geoffrey Bardon. Paintings like the six Jack Cooke brought into Alice Springs in July or August 1971 are actually extremely rare. In a sense this group of paintings were some of the last to be painted in the pre-Bardon style.
Kaapa Tjampitjinpa
Who was this man Kaapa? How had he come to be a practising artist in a western sense before Geoffrey Bardon set foot in Papunya? Born in the mid-1920s at the Emu Dreaming site of Altijira, west of Napperby station, Kaapa Tjampitjinpa was the eldest son of a man known disparagingly to some whitefellas as 'Mad Jack'. Perhaps Kaapa inherited from his father the flamboyant personal style that the settlement authorities found so disconcerting. In Aboriginal terms, Kwalapa Tjangala was a man of ritual substance, being 'Boss' for the site of Warlugulong, his birthplace and the source of the great ancestral bushfire later represented in his son's paintings – and made famous in monumental works by his nephews Tim Leura Tjapaljtarri and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri. Tim and Clifford were the sons of Kwalapa's sisters Margie Long Nangala and Long Rose Nangala. Billy Stockman was adopted into Clifford Possum's family as a baby after his mother, another of Kwalapa's sisters, was killed in the 1928 Coniston massacre.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Once Upon a Time in Papunya by Vivien Johnson. Copyright © 2010 Vivien Johnson. Excerpted by permission of University of New South Wales Press Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments,Introduction,
1 The School of Kaapa,
2 'So Beautiful',
3 The Pintupi Factor,
4 The Problem of Secrecy,
5 The Midas Touch,
6 The Object of Protection,
7 Give Those Men a Real Voice,
8 The Icons Precedent,
Epilogue,
Notes,
Bibliography,