United Nations Security Council Resolution 1497

Transcription

>> So, good afternoon everyone, if you could all take a seat. I think we're going to get going. It's my great pleasure to introduce to you the Associate University Librarian from the University of North Carolina, otherwise known as Will Owen [Laugh]. And Will, and obviously Harvey, who I think he's back in the very, oh there he is, Will and Harvey of course are the great donors of this collection to the Hood Museum of Dartmouth College and the Crossing Cultures exhibition celebrates this in such a very profound way. And I'm going to say no more than just saying, Will, take it away. >> Will Owen: Well, I'm a little overwhelmed at the size of the audience here. I thought I was going to do a small walking tour through the galleries [Laughter] and I guess that's not going to happen. But at least, you know, there's so many things I love about the Hood and one of them is that you can stand here and see so much of the art in one glimpse. And so I'm going to try to talk to give you the tools and a few reference points so that when you walk through these galleries, you might be a little bit more prepared. Although I have to say that the wall texts that Steven Gilchrist has done are just fabulous and if don't usually read wall texts, make an exception this time. I think he set himself a word limit that he was only going to write a hundred words for each one and give you what you absolutely needed to take away about each work of art. And it's been an extraordinary experience of me to read these texts. You know, Harvey and I have lived with this art for twenty years, some of it. We bought it because we loved it, we wanted to, you know, our criteria for selecting a painting is 'is this something I want to see every day for the next six months or twelve months'. And I come here and I look at what Stephen has done, and I'm learning more about the art that I've lived with for decades, and so I think that's yet one more wonderful testimony to the things that happen here at the Hood. So, a brief introduction to Australian Aboriginal art and our journey through it: We were both very interested in contemporary American art in the sixties and seventies. Ellsworth Kelly is a favorite artist of mine. In the eighties, we would go up to New York every once in a while and we would see the art that was being shown in the galleries there and at the end of the day we would say 'Why did we do this?' We didn't see anything that we liked. And then a friend of ours who had a gallery down in Soho said there's a show at the Ages Society and you have to go see this. And it was the Dreamings Exhibition, and so there are people who've seen it. Well we went to see it and it was literally a life-changing experience because what you see here is the result of what happened to us that afternoon. We were so bowled over by the art that two years later we were in Australia and we bought our first painting. Took it home, lived with it for three years, and then went back to buy more, and it sort of hasn't stopped since then. But the first paintings that entranced us were these paintings from the desert in the center of Australia. They're what are called dot paintings because they're comprised of lots of little dots. And sort of the background of this is that all of these paintings relate to, let me just call it 'sacred matters'. And when the men and women engage in the rituals that make them, that bring them in touch with that sort of sacred, let me stop for a minute, sorry. There's this thing that's called the Dreaming or the Dream Time, and it often sounds like it's a Creation period where the ancestors rose up from the Earth, created the landscape, sang it into existence and taught people the ceremonies and the rituals by which they could pass that knowledge of how to live and how to live right, how to live morally, on to future generations. But it's not really a Creation period that came and went and is over and done with. It's, someone says that the people have a tense that doesn't exist in English. We have past tense and future tense and present tense. Aboriginal people have this tense that encompasses all of those, and the Dreaming is imminent in everything that exists at all times. And so when they're performing a ritual, they're actually partaking of that ancestral power that animates the world. And the men paint their bodies up and they dot themselves with white down, either vegetable down or feather down, and they outline their designs there. And as they dance, the fluff down flies off their bodies and there's this sense of power emanating out. And when you look at these paintings, at almost any of the paintings, that's what you should be looking for, is how does that power manifest itself visually, optically, off the wall and kind of into your guts? And you know, yes, there's a story. This is a story about, it's called a Rain Dreaming and it's about the water in the desert, a great storm that comes up, and you see lightening bolts flashing across the sky and water running across the desert. And, you know, this is some of the driest land on Earth and water is extremely important. And so many of these stories also act as maps. And if you can turn around and see just that big, bright, orange painting there, what you've got is a series of circles with lines in between them. It's called the Circle and Line motif, and its a way of saying lots of things, okay. From the ancestral point of view, when the ancestors were traveling around creating the country, they camped at various places. And where they camped, significant features of the landscape, often a water hole where you could find, get replenished in the desert, and the stories that they tell, tell you how to get from one place to another. So in an oral culture and in a nomadic culture, where a family might cover two thousand square kilometers in the course of a year you need to know where to find food and you need to know where to find water. And many of these desert paintings tell those stories. And when the old men paint these paintings, if you ever get to see a video of them actually working, you will hear them singing. They're singing the song about how you went from one place to the next place to the next place, and when the painting is done, they'll sit and they'll touch it and they'll trace with their hands that movement from one place to the next. And they'll be singing the songs as they touch the canvas. And again, it's in that action that you've got that past, present and future tense happening because they are living that Dreaming, and as they sing it, they're teaching it to their children and to their grandchildren and so it becomes, it's past, present, and future all there together. So this is the art that we first fell in love with and began collecting. And part of it was that engagement with the story. Part of it was also just the sheer beauty of the work. Do you need to know that this is a sacred place where women go when they're ready to give birth? This is a restricted hill. Men aren't allowed near here, only women, and it's a child birthing place. If you know that, let your imagination run a little bit wild. You may be able to see some more imagery in there. But apart from that, again, it's just the power of the way that the image shimmers, that the white dots almost jump off the canvas at you because after all, there's very few experiences like the experience of giving birth that has that sense of generative power, literally, of creation. For many people, this kind of brilliant, almost abstract art is the first point of entry. It's accessible, it's gorgeous, in a very literal sense. But as we spent more and more time travelling around Australia, we began to see that this dot painting wasn't all there was, and it became a very intriguing journey. Probably the next thing that we got hooked on were the paintings in that far gallery to your left. There are two distinct geographical areas located or represented in that gallery. There's a small group of islands off the north central coast of Australia where people called the Tiwi live. And then in the northwest, in another very dry desert country called the Kimberley. The paintings on the back wall along the side are from the Kimberley, the paintings on the left and the sculpture are from the Tiwi, and again, I'll tell you some stories to sort of hook you into that. There's three okra paintings on the paper stacked up on the wall there, and they tell a Tiwi creation story about Peruca Pali [ph] who was the first man and his wife Bema and Peruca Pali's brother Topera [ph]. Peruca Pali and Bema had a little child Jinani [ph] and the sad part of the story is that Bema was fooling around on the side with her husband's brother Topera. And they kind of went off into the bush and they left the baby under a palm tree and as the sun traveled around the sky, he saw that baby had been abandoned and as his rays moved around, they burned the baby to death. And you'll see the picture of the baby is black in there. The big bird that you see, the sculpture of the big bird there, the honey eater told Peruca Pali that his son had died. And Peruca Pali was inconsolable. He and Topera had a great fight. Topera said "Let me have the baby, let me go away for three days and I'll bring him back to life, I'll bring him back with me alive". And Peruca Pali said "No, my son has died and henceforth, all men will die", and that's how death came into the world. And Peruca Pali went away into the sky for three days and came back. And Peruca Pali is associated with the moon and so that three day period when he would have gone away is the period of the New Moon. And this story is told over and over in Tiwi painting. When Peruca Pali finally took his son in his arms and said 'Men are going to die and I'm going to teach you how to die' and he gave the Tiwi people the rituals that they have to perform someone passes away. And the poles that you see to the left of the bird there, they are called Tutini, and they are poles that are carved by relatives of the deceased and placed around a grave, and they're left there to wither away and eventually kind of fall over, so they're essentially grave posts. But they're all part of this ritual that's performed when someone dies, following the rules and guidelines that Peruca Pali gave to everyone after Jinani died. So the Tiwi work in there is very representative of, again of this sort of mythological, cosmological explanation for the world. The Warman [Sp] works on the other hand are in some ways very, very contemporary paintings. The big red one that you can see right there at the end of the hall, is by an artist named Patty Bedford who was born in the nineteen twenties not too far from the place that's depicted in that painting. And it's a place that's associated with the emu and the emu ancestor. And so you can see the emu there and those shapes on either side are the hills. And again, there is sort of a mythological association with death, and its believed that when someone dies, the emu cries out in sorrow and in pain. But what also happened there was this was an area where cattle ranchers, pasturalists came, brought their herds over land to graze this very rich grassland in the Kimberley and they essentially displaced the people who had lived there. The water holes that were the source of their sustenance became fouled by the cattle or drunk by the cattle, and people could no longer sustain their way of life. They were very, very tightly coupled to the natural environment, and once the cattle came in and disrupted that, they had no way of sustaining themselves. And so, they were hunters, and so every once in a while, they would hunt one of these great big horned, four-footed animals that had come with the White Man, and as you can imagine, the cattle ranchers didn't take very favorably to this. They were using Aboriginal people as essentially labor on their cattle ranches but they wouldn't really share the meat with the Aboriginal people. And often times, when they speared a cow for their own sustenance, the ranchers would retaliate by just coming out and shooting a few people. And this site, this emu site, this site that's associated mythologically with death is also the site of a place where many people in the artist's family were massacred in a retaliatory raid by the cattle ranchers. They shot the people, they burned them so there wouldn't be any evidence of the crime that had been committed. Patty's mother and a few other people managed to escape and get away from this area. Eventually they came back, well Patty wasn't even born then, but his mother was one of the people who got away. Eventually she came back and started working for the rancher again and when she had a son, the rancher said 'I'm going to name him after myself. He's going to be Patty too' and the ranch was called Bedford Downs and so Patty Bedford is the artist's name. Shortly after Patty was born though, the Aboriginal people have lots of dogs. Camp dogs are like family to them. A rancher decided that the dogs were a nuisance so he put out strychnine-laced meat and killed all of the dogs, and the people left again and never came back. And they went and they moved to a community that's called Warman and that's now the center of this painting activity. And so what you've got in these paintings are both Dreaming stories, sort of these eternal myths of the people, but equally as much a part of that story is this contemporary twentieth century historical narrative tied together by this place of death in the paintings, and so again, you have this sense of sort of simultaneity of lives lived past, present and future. And it's just, it's one of the truly extraordinary things as you learn more and more and get deeper and deeper, to see how this sort of multiple-tensed living operates in people's minds. So, how am I doing here? Okay. I'm going to skip this gallery for a moment. I'm going to take you sort of where we went next, from the Tiwi and the Kimberley all the way down to the end of the hall gallery here, and those paintings on bark at the end of the gallery. So this is tropical Artemland. It's monsoonal, tropical territory. It's only eleven degrees south of the equator. Huge eucalyptus forests. And what they do is they strip the bark off the eucalyptus trees, put it over a fire to make it, not malleable, that's not the word I want, flexible, flatten it out, bury it in the sand so it stays flat and then they cover it with ground up okra and paint on it with other kinds of okra. And traditionally they would use things like orchid sap as binder, today they pretty much use PVC glue. But they paint with, you look at them and you'll see that these paintings are composed of these extraordinarily fine brush strokes and they'll just pull a hair or two out of their head and tie it to a twig, run it through some of this wet okra and draw that line after line. And the sheer artistry of it is exquisite and extraordinary. But again, the point of it is to create, as the desert paintings do with their dots, this sort of visual shimmer, and this brilliance is the word that they use, that in itself, directly communicates to you that power, that spiritual power. [Clears throat] Literally, those paintings at the back there refer to sacred water holes in the artist's country. And in the north, actually all the way throughout Aboriginal Australia, there is a creature known as the rainbow serpent. And the rainbow serpent is associated usually with the onset of storms and rain in the northern part particularly with the onset of the monsoon season. And so you have this enormously powerful snake serpent that can [microphone noise] oops, that can arch up and cover the entire sky, but most of the time he lives in the bottom of this water hole and he's pretty much undisturbed, and there might be water lilies floating on the top of the water hole. But when he's down there, imagine when you look at those paintings that you're looking at the surface of the water and down at the bottom is this extraordinarily sacred, powerful serpent being, whose power is emanating up through the water. And what you're seeing is in one sense the shimmer of sunlight on the water surface or the shimmer, the iridescent shimmer of sunlight on a snake's skin or simply the power of the rainbow serpent coming up through that water and into your eyes. And again, there is this sense of layers of things that are hidden and things that are exposed to view. There are things that are in the past and things that are in the present. And the sense of metaphor of how every moment and every aspect of life somehow contains more than meets the eye. And it is your job as a human being as you live life, to learn more and more about what doesn't meet the eye. And so when you're looking at those paintings, that's part of what you're seeing. And the surface of that painting in that brilliance, is meant to make you feel the imminence of the power that lies just beyond what you can see with your eyes on a sort of mundane, daily basis. Another story that I'll tell you that's just real cool, I'm really proud of. The painting in the middle there that that woman is standing in front of, wasn't one of the first bark paintings but the artist, John Mawurndjul, is a very famous Aboriginal artist. He has had a solo retrospective in Boslem in Switzerland and he was one of eight artists who was selected as part of the; I'm going to get the name wrong so I'm not even going to try; but eight artists were commissioned to create work for the Museum de Capron Li in Paris, which opened in two thousand and six. It was created, it was Chirac's Monument to himself and his presidency. And it was created, which I think is really cool. I mean, you know, what would you rather have, a presidential library? [Laughter] You know, the Nixon Library or a great art museum? You know, I'm going to go with the French every time, frankly. [Laughter] And Capron Li was formed by the merger of the two main ethnic graphic museums in Paris, and they invited eight Aboriginal artists to create work that was literally built into the architecture of the Administrative wing of the Capron Li Museum. And so on the second floor, European Way, if you go there, you'll see designs like this by Ningura Napurrula on the third floor. There was a pole, the first pole that you get to down there, you'll see it's covered with stars. Her name is, we call her Jodera, she passed away recently so I can't use her real name. The first floor is covered with her stars. If you go into the bookstore and you look up at the ceiling of the bookstore, you'll see that painting. When Mawurndjul got the commission, he said 'That's the one I want to do in Paris' and we had to get the thing photographed and sent to the architects and it was just one of the coolest stories in our career as collectors, and of course, we were there in Paris when the whole thing opened, we wouldn't have missed it for the world. Just moving in a little it from there though, you'll see those feathered poles. Those are called morning star poles and they're just exquisitely beautiful. The story is that out east of this neck of the woods in Australia which is called Artemland, there's an island, a mythical island called Baralku and it's the island of the dead. It's where people come from and go back to. At Baralku, there's an old woman and every morning she takes the morning star out of her basket then throws it up into the sky and it's attached by a string. And as the sun comes around, she starts to pull the string back down and she puts the star back in her basket for the rest of the day, and then the next morning, it comes up again. And so you'll see these bursts of cockatoo feathers on top of the pole that represent the morning star. And in the ceremonies, they'll tilt the pole at an angle like this and the strings and the feathers that are attached to it hang down. And those strings, when they are lit by the light of the morning star, form a pathway for the spirits of the deceased to follow out east and back to Baralku, and the feathers represent food that's there for them on their journey back to Baralku. Moving up one gallery, in the middle there where you can't really see anything except a couple of those wooden poles, are works for East Artemland, from Yalmu people. Yalmu people are, I think of them as the most philosophically sophisticated bunch of people in Australia, and maybe it's just that they talk more than anybody else. When you read about these paintings, they'll say, well, 'This is the story of a group of women who camped at Marapinti, where they made decorations, bone decorations for their noses. The rest of the story is too sacred to tell you anything'. These desert people are a closed-mouthed lot, but the young people, they just delight in talking to you about their world and their conception of their world. And a lot of it revolves around water, about fresh water and salt water. There's a painting on the left, it's a great, big one by a guy named Water Gumina [ph] and it shows a river, and the course at that river from inland it source running out into the bay and at the bottom there are these zigzag lines that represent the waves on the bay. When the monsoons come in it floods the whole country and it pushes the fresh water of the river all the way out into the bay and there are these spots where you can be out there in a canoe and dip your hand into the water and taste fresh water. When the dry season comes, the process is reversed. The river dries up into a series of disconnected water holes and the tide pushes the salt water up into the inland parts of the river. This dynamic, this back and forth, these two opposite but mutually necessary and irretrievably interconnected aspects of life. This is like the heart of Yalmu philosophy. Everything in the Yalmu world is divided into one of two moieties, the Dua [ph] or the Ureta [ph] and one cannot exist without the other. If you were born into a Dua clan, you will marry from a Ureta clan. That's just the way it works. We need this complementarity, this balance of opposites and where to live life and where to live life properly. And this notion informs almost everything the Yalmu thought. And it informs almost all of these paintings which are somehow representations of something like this river, this meeting of fresh water and salt water. And the Yalmu are the absolute most metaphorical people I have ever encountered. Everything has meaning, and again, it's this notion that there is sort of this surface that you see and the meaning that lies behind it. There is the outside story, as they call it, and the inside story. And when you're very young, all you know is the outside story and as you grow older and wiser and get more teaching from your elders, you learn more and more of the inside story, and eventually you know enough of the inside story that you can actually make paintings like these and make them correctly. The Yalmu though, are also, perhaps because their lives are permeated with metaphors, they're just incredibly creative people. And there's a painting back there that if you didn't know better, you would think was an early Robert Briman, it's just a white painting and it's by a woman named Napanapa Udepengu. And she just, she delights in the act of mark making and in the act of making ark. So this is kind of revolutionary for Yalmu because everything else that you'll see in there has a very sacred meaning and Napanapa has kind of pushed the boundaries and is almost, not quite art for art's sake, but it's getting close to it. It's just a vibrant creative, you never know what's going to come next, community of blue collar where these people work. The poles that you see in there, just very quickly are, they're art. They are made as art, they are made for the art market, they are meant to be bought and sold to people like me. But they come from Yalmu aerial traditions. When after a person dies, they're buried. When the flesh has fallen off the bones, the bones are exhumed and they're put in those hollow logs as a final resting place. And the logs are painted with the Clan design so that the spirit of the deceased person will know how to get back to the country that they came from, so it's a variation on that idea of the morning star among this bunch of Yalmu. You go back to the country when your spirit came from or your spirit returns to the country that it came from. You may have traveled a long distance in your life but your spirit will go back, and the painting on those poles help to tell you how to get there. [Clears throat] Okay, the near gallery you can see some, you can see a shark and a crocodile and a dingo sculpture there. And off to the side you'll see a rack of fish hanging. These are from a community called Aracune [ph]. If you, you can see on the map there on the right hand top side there's this finger that sticks up towards Papua. New Guinea. Well on the west coast is where the community of Aracune [ph] lives. And these sculptures are used in rituals that again tell stories from the Dream Times of the crocodile ancestor or the shark ancestor. And these are pretty much, again they're modern creations for the art market. But there are some wonderful films. There's a film called Dances at Aracune that was shot about fifty or sixty years ago and it's a film of the rituals and it's full of what they would carry out on to the ritual ground and dance around. It's still part of these people's lives as well as being part of their livelihood. And that gets me to sort of one of the sadder stories. Many of these communities are way the hell away from everything else. You know, it's six hundred kilometers to the next town and there's like two hundred people where you live and you have to travel a few hundred miles to get to your nearest neighbors. You can imagine there's not much in the way of an economy in these towns. The people are desperately poor. They essentially survive thanks to we'll call social security payments from the government because there is no unemployment. But their attachment to their country, to their land is so strong that's it's almost unimaginable for them to move away from that country. This leads to lots of problems in the modern world. Unfortunately, with the traditional hunter gatherer systems, economy disrupted, they are forced to rely, on a large part, on food that's brought in to the community and paid for with their social security benefits. What's unfortunate is that a lot of alcohol comes into these community as well, and when the communities themselves say we don't want this, we don't want the grog. The Liquor Licensing Board says 'Restraint of trade. You can't stop us from selling it' and so there's this horrible stand-off where people who are unemployed, who are sometimes dispossessed for the country that rightfully belongs to them, they are living on country that belongs to somebody else which is a horrible thing for these people. There's nothing to do and there's booze, and it's a recipe for social disaster. And one of the sad things about Aracune is it's in the grip of horrible violence as well as an alcohol-fueled violence and it's very, very hard for people to stop that from happening because somebody's always willing to sell it to them and somebody's always willing to buy it. And that alcohol-fueled violence is also a theme in another community on the cape called Lockhart River. And the three painting along this side of the wall, these brilliant red and blue paintings are from this community of Lockhart. And this is, the Lockhart story is a story of these contradictions. This hope, this despair all mangled up into one. In many areas, as I've said, you get to do this kind of painting when you're old and when you've learned the stories and when you've learned the traditions and you've learned how to do it properly. In the Lockhart River area, the people basically have been wrenched away from their culture. That connection to the stories that their grandparents and their great grandparents knew has been lost through the process of colonization. And yet, there's still remnants of it. There's rock art in the caves of the area and people know that. And about ten years ago, this group of twenty-year olds decided that they were going to do something positive in their community and, with some help, they brought in a sort of community college art teacher to start teaching people how to make art that they could sell to bring some money and some meaningful employment into the community. And at the time, this was, you know, unheard of, young twenty-year old people taking this kind of initiative, taking the painting into their own hands. And they became known as the Lockhart River Art Gang and they were phenomenally successful. And there were three paintings by three women, Samantha Hobson, Fiona Almeinu [ph] and Roselle Anama [ph]. And they sort of, the three, what I like about the way that Steven has hung this, there's so many things I like about what Steven has done with the show, but these things sort of tell the story of the community in three different ways and it's not quite past, present and future but there's a resonance to it. The middle painting shows these humanoid figures and these are adapted from the rock art drawings, they're called quinkins of the area. And so to me that means that it's sort of a little bit the past. The past is also kind of present in the painting on the right, which is this loose blue water hole. And it's the beach, and there's rain falling on the beach and the artist i painting an image of getting out of the town, getting away from the stress of the community, going down and sitting on the beach with her grandmothers or her aunts, her aunties, and hearing the stories about the past. And she's trying to capture the mood of that peace and quiet on the beach, listening to her grandmothers telling her stories. The painting on the left, you'll see, is this swirl of deep blues and reds and white. And it's called Wave Break at Night and again, it's this multi-layered story because on one layer it's sitting on the beach at night, maybe there's a moon out, maybe there's a star, the stars are out, and you're watching the waves crashing furiously into the shore. But the other part of the story is what she's escaping when she goes down to the beach is the violence in her community, that alcohol filled violence. Samantha Hobson is the artist's name. She has a whole series of paintings called Bust Em Up. It's about domestic abuse. And if you step back from this painting of the waves breaking at night, and look at it in a slightly different way, what you see is blood and bruising and a different kind of violence depicted in that image. You know, that's art by any standard definition. And so this sort of adaptation of the traditional moving sort of closer to what we in the west think of as art, is going to take us to the final gallery here on the left which is mostly photography, water color drawing. The artists who are represented in this gallery are people who have grown up in the urban, metropolitan areas of Australia in the big cities, in Sydney, in Brisbane, in Melbourne. And these are people who again, through the history of colonization have lost touch with their traditional language and cultures for many, many decades if not longer. And they are struggling to say 'What does it mean to be an Aboriginal person today in Australia?'. If you were at the symposium yesterday afternoon, several of the speakers made reference to the fact that since the seventies, the government has provided a mechanism whereby the Aboriginal people can reclaim the title to the lands that their grandfathers and great-grandfathers lived on, to their country. But to do so, they have to prove an authentic connection to those kind of century old traditions. And this is really a double edged sword because in order to maintain, to seize control of their life today, they have to say 'Well, actually we've been living in this kind of museum' or 'we're just primitive people' when actually they're not. They've been, it's culture changes. Culture is dynamic and Aboriginal culture continues, as these paintings attest, to evolve and change through time. And yet somehow, to be considered an authentic Aborigine, you have to be living in the past. The artists who are represented in this gallery live with this conundrum every day. They are twenty first century cosmopolitan, urban citizens of Australia and they are also Aboriginal and they are struggling to say 'What is my identity as an Aboriginal person in a modern society'? On the left hand side, you'll see Vernon Aqui's "Unwritten" and it's this series of faceless portraits. It's a portrait, you can tell it's a person, and yet you can't quite see the features, and as you move along, they become increasingly less defined. The gaze kind of falls down and you're left saying 'Who is this person? Who am I?' Over on the right hand side, there's a great big green photograph. This guy is Terrence Sewass. He's from South Australia from Adelaide, and it's a wonderfully provocative photograph. What he's done is he's taken a photograph of this area outside Adelaide. It's a road, Crossroads, and there's a triangular sign that you see the back of. And in Australia, well we would call it a Yield sign; in Australia, that sign would say 'Give Way'. On top of that photograph Crossroads, which is in itself a significant word, Crossroads, he has superimposed this time exposure image of himself. He's an Aboriginal man, he's wearing a white shirt and tie. He's decked out in contemporary Western dress. But if you look at him, he's also, because of the trick in photography, you can see through it. He's ghost-like and you can't really tell whether he's a ghost that's appearing in this Crossroads or disappearing from this Crossroads. And that's his metaphor for his life as a Contemporary Aborigine. Posted right next to this crossroads with the sign that says 'Give Way'. And it's just a marvelously evocative piece, one of the first photographs if not the first photograph that we ever bought. On the other side, you've got two pictures looking at one another. One of them is a black and white close up of an old man's face and the other one is this incredibly sensual color photograph. And I'm going to steal something that Steven pointed out to me, one of these 'Oh my God'. The old man in the photograph, the black and white photograph, is the artist who made those bone fish sculptures in this gallery. So he's from Cape York all the way up north. The photographer is an Aboriginal man from Tasmania, the island all the way to the south. AJ, the person in the color portrait is from the Tiwi Islands all the way in the north photographed by an Aboriginal woman who was born and raised in the Melbourne area, again on the south coast. And so you've got these artists who are working across cultures. They're crossing cultures within Australia from their own roots in the south to working with people in the north. The other thing about the portrait by Bindhi Kole [ph] of AJ there, that I think the didactics explain this to you is, this is in the Tiwi Islands and today, AJ is one of a group of about fifty transgendered people who live on the Tiwi Islands. So you look at her and she looks beautiful. The photography is beautiful. When you go up and you look at that, check out the way the sunlight flies through the earring and casts a shadow on her neck. It's just an exquisite piece of photography. But essentially, biologically AJ is a man who lives as a woman in Tiwi culture and this is, there's actually an old Tiwi word for people like this. When the Catholic church showed up on the Tiwi Islands in the twenties, along with almost everything else about traditional Aboriginal culture, they tried to stamp this out and the culture has persisted and these, they call themselves Sister Girls, and the Sister Girls still have their place in Tiwi society. And so what you've got is a woman of mixed Scottish and Aboriginal decent Bindhi Kole [ph] who lives in Melbourne working with and taking photographs of people who, in themselves, are crossing cultures but attesting to the survival of an older Tiwi culture in the face of Catholic church, in the face of modernization. It's just, you know, it's layer upon layer of upon layer of crossing cultures. So, there's one more gallery over there and actually I left that for last because I don't really have stories to tell you about the paintings in there. But, when you walk in there, just look at them. Don't worry about what they mean or what they depict, although Steven's notes will tell you something about them, but they are some of the most simply beautiful visual experiences in this whole exhibition and I think that's saying a lot, because the beauty of these paintings and the variety of beauty in these paintings. I mean, this is one of the things that has sustained us through more than two decades, is every time I turn around, there is something new, there is something unexpected, there is a new way of bringing beauty into the world that's found in these paintings. And it's beauty that's being brought in and out of, often times extreme deprivation, extreme misery, but it comes out of this core, a connectedness, this sense that past, present and future are really all one thing. And there is a sense of inextinguishable humanity that comes through these paintings and these photographs for me, no matter whether it's the okra paintings from the Kimberley or the bark paintings from the far north or these modern acrylic on canvas paintings from the dessert areas. Those words just came into my mind but that sense of the inextinguishable humanity of the artists and the people and the communities and the culture that this work springs from that is able to reach across another cultural gap, I think, to speak to people like us. I was talking to somebody yesterday during the opening reception and she kind of focused on the word contemporary in the name of the exhibition. And in these art critical circles, there's always these controversies about well, is this traditional or is it contemporary? Well, yes this is contemporary art. But I think one of the things that make it hard for us in America sometimes to see that it's contemporary is, there's no irony. I mean, if you think of modern art, contemporary art, if you go to museums, if you see it, you know that irony is an almost inextricable of art in America today. There is no irony in this work. It is sincerity, it is a direct connection, it's like straight from my heart to you, as the song goes. And that is the gift that these artists give to me that keeps me coming back over and over again and I think that's all I have to say for today. [ Applause and the Silence to the end]