Living Water: Contemporary Art of the Far Western Desert

Living Water
‘We all have the same song, different tunes.’ 1
This exhibition of twenty-first-century art surveys the
powerful and important compositions of artists from
the Far Western Desert. These celebratory narratives
participate in the rhizomic legacy of a late twentiethcentury
movement that became a prescient epoch in
Australian art. It was in 1971 at Papunya that senior
Aboriginal men decoded their hitherto inviolate
cultural narratives and laws and accorded to them an
alternative function and status. The customary visual
language shared by many Aboriginal peoples across
the Western Desert thereafter became the vernacular
of a dynamic art movement. By deploying a conjunction
of archetypal designs and modern materials, the
founding artists objectified ways of understanding,
seeing and sensing ngurra (country) 2 and its spiritual
cosmology, and navigated a contentious transition from
the restricted context of men’s ceremony to the market
place (fig.1). In so doing they established a cultural
correspondence through the medium of aesthetics
unique to their way of experiencing and interpreting the world and composed an
authoritative rhetoric that challenges ‘the belief that western art and art history
are pre-eminent’. 3
The jubilation that attended the artistic achievement of these revolutionary
‘fetish objects’ on hardboard in some kartiya (non-Aboriginal) circles was not
shared by tjilpi (old men) from surrounding Western Desert communities, who
were vexed by the artists’ alleged revelation of restricted elements of men’s
law. Their escalating disquiet provisionally impeded the expansion of the
painting movement until the mid 1980s when women, also custodians of ritual
and of sacred sites, began to participate alongside their male relatives. Their
contribution was to be one of audacious form and seductive colour, exemplified
by works initially emerging in Yuendumu, Lajamanu, Balgo, Utopia, and later in
Pintupi homelands of Walungurru (Kintore) and Kiwirrkura.
Eventually, a generative and instrumental form of painting developed out of
the transitional ‘miniatures’ on unprepossessing scraps of board. The elemental
composition of these early works is conceptual and abstract yet also referential,
and holds in equipoise an aerial perspective of and a grounded affinity with
country. By the end of the twentieth century, it was clear that Western Desert
painting had erupted into the art world and had transformed the way we see the
land and the history of art in this country. 4
The precocious art movement that had commenced at Papunya
nevertheless abided quiescent yet undetermined in two of its most conservative
and inaccessible cultural and geographical zones: the tri-state region, which
demarcates NPY Lands of the Ngaanyatjarra (Yarnangu) people to the west
and the APY (Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjara) people to the east; 5 and the
Pilbara region in Western Australia (WA), the familial home of the Martu and
Yulparija peoples, among others. 6 The inhabitants of these regions viewed the
iconographic translations of their Papunya Tula and Balgo peers with scepticism
and apprehension. Fearing the consequences of an inappropriate or unlawful
revelation of motifs and symbols that encode restricted levels of knowledge, they
prevented access to and observation of their work.
Living Water examines the most recent painting practice evolving in these
two cultural and geographical zones: an artistic resurgence dominated by
senior women. In homage to the origins of the Western Desert art movement,
the exhibition begins with esteemed Papunya Tula founding artist Ronnie
Tjampitjinpa and other Pintupi senior men and women, all of whom have recently
succeeded in revitalising and advancing their practices.
The sovereign peoples of the Great Sandy, Little Sandy, Gibson and Victoria
Deserts, whose twenty-first-century paintings are represented in Living Water,
share intimate kinship, social, cultural and ritual interconnectivity. They speak
the closely related languages and dialects of the Pama-Ngungan language family
of the Western Desert bloc. Their profound knowledge of ngurra, and its sources
of spiritual potency, was acquired during pujiman (nomadic, bush) days, a time
when they developed survival expertise in an unpredictable desert environment,
exacerbated by long periods of unrelenting drought. These custodians of country
and law also have parallel experiences of first encountering Europeans, adapting
to the enormous social and economic changes that ensued and making art with
introduced materials on unaccustomed rectangular and square surfaces for
the commercial market. Their untrammelled and joyous paintings — bearers
of sanctity — tell tjukurrpa (Dreaming) 7 stories associated with special places
of living water in their ngurra. For these traditional owners, the tjukurrpa — an
active and all-pervading life force that informs their spiritual and social identity
— is the very foundation of their being. It is from the tjukurrpa, a creation period,
embodying past, present and future, that Aboriginal people inherit their highly
organised system of kinship, language, ritual and law.
fig.1
Shorty Lungkata Tjungurrayi
4 Men in a bushfire 1972
5

Roy Underwood
Simon Hogan
20 Mulaya 2008
Ilkurlka 2004
21