>> 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]