indigenous+art

It is in the Central and Western Desert that contemporary Aboriginal painting was born, in the vicinity of the former religious missions that had settled there since the 1930's and above all among the "reservations" where the Australian authorities has installed the nomadic tribes they wanted to assimilate by settling them – Haastbluff (1941), Yuendumu and Lajamanu (1955), Papunya (1960). Although they were sometimes very far away form their ancestral lands, the Aboriginals had retained the nostalgia thereof and continued celebrating their wonders in their ceremonies in honor of the Dreamtime, when their Great Ancestors, coming out of primeval chaos, shaped the land in their images, traveled through the desert to give them their laws and customs. On disappearing, they left them with the memory of their feats in dreams they were to celebrate through dances, songs, sculptures, engravings (wood or stone) and paintings (on their bodies, on the ground or on cave walls). This is how a religious art dedicated to the celebration of sacred sites and travels was born. The symbolic language of the works of art was rather the same in all the tribes: circles (sometimes concentric) stood for springs and the sacred ceremonies happening there; the U-shaped forms around them stood for the initiated and the Great Ancestors who created the site. When these forms were combined with an I-shaped form or an oval, they stood for women with their digging sticks and their carrying dishes. Straight or undulated lines stood for elements in the landscape (sand dunes, hills, canyons or rivers) or the paths (real or legendary) linking up the diverse sacred sites. All these signs made up a real map of Aboriginal territories, having first and foremost a ritual value: beyond a simple act of celebration, these paintings were a means of ensuring that the Dreamtime would be carried on through the representation of the most secret elements of it. From the 1970's onwards, the Aboriginals began to reproduce – on cardboard, plywood and eventually canvas – the motifs they used to draw during their religious ceremonies. This adventure began in Papunya, on the initiative of a white school teacher, Geoffrey Bardon, who died in 2003. A cooperative was founded. The works produced there met with great success, partly because they were quite abstract and resembled modern occidental painting. The success of that experience prompted the creation of new cooperatives, where very talented painters appeared – while they were following the pictorial tradition of the desert, they were also original. This way, Aboriginal artists were able to circulate their works in the best conditions, not only from a strictly economic viewpoint but also from a political one. Their painting was to prove so instrumental in the cultural acknowledgement of the desert communities that they were used in the trials the Aboriginals were involved in to get their territories back, from the 1980's: their canvasses were regarded as evidence of the Aboriginals' legitimate ownership of the traditional sites represented, which were therefore given back to them. The most remarkable features of Aboriginal desert painting owe a lot to the ground painting it comes from, to a great extent. For example, the technique of dot painting – so characteristic of this art – comes from the use of little sticks dipped in natural pigments to paint the ground with a great many dots. Originally, these dots enabled the painters to underline the contours of the represented objects. When they changed supports, the Aboriginals generalized the use of dots to the rest of the canvas and created thus a true pictorial style. Besides, in accordance with the tradition of ground painting, the works were still painted horizontally, which explains the bird's eye view of the landscapes. The same canvas can show a very large place as well as a very precise one – macrocosm and microcosm meet in the Dreamtime in the same way as the original universe and the present world.