Art of Place and Displacement: Embodied Perception and the Haptic Ground

Home , Agnes Martin, Barbara Weir, Geoffrey Bardon, Robert Natkin, Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula

Victoria King

PhD Thesis 2005

College of Fine Arts School of Art History and Theory University of New South Wales

I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no material previously published or written by another person, nor material which to a substantial extent has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis.

I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project’s design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is acknowledged.

Victoria King 25 October 2005

This thesis is dedicated to the ancestors.

WARNING: This thesis contains photographs and names of Aboriginal people who are now deceased.

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ABSTRACT

This thesis examines the relationship between art and place, and challenges conventional readings of the paintings of the late Aboriginal Anmatyerr elder Emily Kame Kngwarray of Australia and Canadian/American modernist artist Agnes Martin. In the case of Kngwarray, connections between body, ground and canvas are extensively explored through stories told to the author by Emily’s countrywomen at Utopia in the Northern Territory. In the case of Agnes Martin, these relationships are explored through personal interview with the artist in Taos, New Mexico, and by phenomenological readings of her paintings.

The methodology is based on analysis of narrative, interview material, existing critical literature and the artists’ paintings. The haptic and embodiment emerge as strong themes, but the artists’ use of repetition provides fertile ground to question wholly aesthetic or cultural readings of their paintings. The thesis demonstrates the significance of historical and psychological denial and erasure, as well as transgenerational legacies in the artists’ work. A close examination is made of the artists’ use of surface shimmer in their paintings and the effects of it on the beholder. The implications of being mesmerized by shimmer, especially in the case of Aboriginal paintings, bring up ethical questions about cultural difference and the shadow side of art in its capacity for complicity, denial, appropriation and commodification.

This thesis challenges the ocularcentric tradition of seeing the land and art, and examines what occurs when a painting is viewed on the walls of a gallery. It addresses Eurocentric readings of Aboriginal art and looks at the power of the aesthetic gaze that eliminates cultural difference. Differences between space and place are explored through an investigation of the phenomenology of perception, the haptic, embodiment and ‘presentness’. Place affiliation and the effects of displacement are examined to discover what is often taken for granted: the ground beneath our feet. Art can express belonging and relationship with far-reaching cultural, political, psychological and environmental implications, but only if denial and loss of place are acknowledged.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My research material was collected with the full cooperation and permission of the Utopia women I interviewed and their family members. In particular I am extremely grateful for the generosity, kindness and patience shown to me by Barbara Weir, the late Glory Ngal and her daughter Anna Petyarr Price, the seven Petyarr sisters: Ada Bird, Kathleen, Myrtle, Gloria, Violet, Nancy and Jeannie, and their aunt, the Atnangker elder Weida Kngwarray. I remain humble and respectful of their knowledge, experience and culture. I also thank Emily Kngwarray’s nephews, Greeny Petyarr and Lindsay Bird Mbyetan, and Barbara Weir’s son, Fred Torres. I am grateful to Jenny Green, a ‘long-time’ friend of the Utopia people, linguist, writer and artist, for her generous assistance with Anmatyerr and Alyawarr terms and proofreading the Utopia women’s stories.

At Utopia I sat with the Emily Kngwarray’s countrywomen and learned to listen in new ways. The multi-sensory world of Utopia and its complexities is one that few non-Aboriginals experience. Utopia is Aboriginal Land and permits for access are rarely granted1. Obtaining information is often inappropriate due to the secret/sacred nature of much Aboriginal knowledge, and persistent questioning is rightly seen as cultural appropriation. I respected the many silences that occurred and allowed the women to tell their stories without interruptions. The few questions I asked reflected my interests in Aboriginal connections to country but the essential questions of Why do we need to know? and Should we know? permeated my self-questioning. I was extremely sensitive to the attendant shadow of my culture’s voracious appetite for the exotic and issues of romanticization, sentimentalization and projection. I have taken every due care to ensure the correctness and cultural appropriateness of the material contained within this thesis. I sincerely apologize for any distress that may be caused by any unintended and unforeseen errors or misrepresentations.

1 Each time I have been to Utopia I have been there as a guest of Barbara Weir and accompanied by her.

All of the photographs that I took at Utopia were taken with permission and within an atmosphere of trust. I discussed their inclusion with Emily Kngwarray’s family and each of the women that I interviewed and photographed. Despite this, I would request that the reader remain sensitive to the cultural issues involved. Within the elaborate rituals around death in Aboriginal culture, particular emphasis is placed on the name of the deceased neither being spoken nor written, nor objects being available that will remind the family of the deceased. Photographs fall very firmly into this category.

Throughout this research I have used the term ‘traditional’ to describe land- based central desert Anmatyerr and Alyawarr Aboriginal culture. This is not intended to lessen the value of the experiences or contributions of any indigenous person not living on their land, nor of the many members of the Stolen Generation whose land and birthrights have been denied them. I honour the wealth and range of the vital creativity within all of Aboriginal culture. I recognize that the term ‘Aboriginal’ is itself a non-specific one that does not do justice to the enormous diversity that exists within it2. Where it has been possible I have denoted the particular language group to which I refer.

2 See Ian McLean’s article ‘Global Indigeneity and Australian Desert Painting’ for a discussion of the usages of the terms ‘Aboriginal’ and ‘indigenous’ (McLean: 33-54: 2002).

And Further…

I would like to thank Agnes Martin for her generosity in sharing her time and stories in Taos.

I thank Diane Losche for her supervision of this thesis.

I am grateful to many friends who provided enthusiasm and encouragement. In particular, to Colleen Burke who shares my love of the desert and has an understanding of the shadow side of our shared homeland. She provided me invaluable texts on Agnes Martin. To Sarah Tucker whose open heart and thoughtful words and stitches I deeply honour. To Sheila Christofides for her sensitive friendship. To Anna Williams and Pete Hay, Jan Howard and Derek Verrall, I give my gratitude for our shared love of Tasmania, their ethical perspectives and unstinting generous humour.

To Zachary and Julie, I give my boundless love and countless blessings. Their lives and union have given me pure delight and joy. To John Cameron, a good man, words prove inadequate for the depths of our shared lives, interests, conversations and love. To him, I give my gratitude, my unending respect and love.

To all my ancestors, may this writing allow the past to finally begin to be acknowledged and healed.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter One: Grounds for a Different Perspective I. Mapping Territory 1 a. Perceptions of Art and Place 1 b. Questioning Assumptions 3 c. The Study of Place: A Conceptual History 10 d. The Haptic 12 II. Themes and Thesis Questions 15 III. Methodology 17 a. Phenomenology 17 b. Narrative Inquiry and Lived Experience 21 c. Autobiographical Reference 23 IV. Discovering the Ground Beneath Me: A Personal Journey 27 a. Sowing the Sublime 27 b. On the Edge 29 c. Unexpected Revelations 32 d. Understanding Ground 33 V. Sources of Material 36 VI. Chapter Synopses 39

Chapter Two: Mapping the Mesa: the Life and Work of Agnes Martin

I. Places of Departure 42 a. Arriving at Taos 42 b. Absence and Movement 44 c. A Search for Direction 49 II. The Evolution of Agnes Martin’s Work 55 a. Figurative and Biomorphic Beginnings 55 b. The Plain 57 c. Reading the Present Moment 62 d. An Art of Process 71 III. Spirit, Self and Nature 77 a. Spirit Ground 77 b. Art as a Vehicle for Awareness 82 c. A Ground of Loss 95 d. Not About Nature 103

Chapter Three: Maps of Place and Experience: the Life and Work of Emily Kame Kngwarray

I. Utopia Past and Present 115 a. Journey to Utopia 115 b. Historical Context 119 c. Connections to Country 126 II. Perceptions of Place 131 a. Body and Ground 131 b. Mapping Experience 136

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c. Sites and Stories of Significance 142 III. Anmatyerr Woman: Life, Dreamings and Ceremony 150 a. A Personal Life 150 b. Yam Dreaming 156 c. Awely: Women’s Ceremony for Country 163 IV. Old Traditions, New Mediums 174 a. Batik Painting at Utopia 174 b. Introduction of Acrylic Paints 178 c. A Prolific Flowering 181 d. Gestural Complexities 187

Chapter Four: Perceptions of Art and the Land

I. On Another Ground 197 a. A Change of Aspect 197 b. A Shimmer of Beauty 201 c. The Shimmer of Ancestral Presence 205 II. Implications and Realities 210 a. Contested Intentions 210 b. A Cult of Forgetfulness 217 III. The Exaltation of Vision 225 a. A Singular Perspective 225 b. Distance and Sight 230 c. Perception and Sensation 232 d. A Focus on Dissolution 237

Chapter Five: Different Visions

I. Complexities of Perception 244 a. Potential Space 244 b. Visions of Emptiness 247 c. Presentness and the Sublime 252 II. Addressing Repetition 256 a. Dots, Dots, Dots 256 b. Acknowledgement of Loss 261 III. Displacement and Belonging 266 a. Moving Towards Relationship 266 b. Attuning to Place 273 c. Locatedness and Displacement 279 d. Denial and Displacement 282 e. Displacement and Remembering 288

Bibliography 298

Appendix: Kinship and Skin Names Chart and Utopia Family Tree 318

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Victoria King, 1992 photo of my English garden in Heaton Moor 27 2. Victoria King, Flowering, 1986, oil on canvas, 102 x 127 cm, private collection 28 3. Victoria King, bones, 2003, acrylic on three canvas panels, 35 x 27.5 cm, 35 x 27.5 cm, 75 x 36.5 cm, collection of the artist 33 4. Taos, New Mexico, 2002 (photo: Victoria King) 42 5. Agnes Martin, Untitled, 1963, ink on paper, 21 x 21 cm, private collection 45 6. La Portales Mesa, Cuba, New Mexico, 2002 (photo: Victoria King) 52 7. Agnes Martin, Landscape-Taos, c. 1947, watercolour on paper, 11 x 15 3/16”, Jonson Gallery, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque 55 8. Agnes Martin, Untitled, 1955, oil on canvas, 46 x 66”, whereabouts unknown 56 9. Agnes Martin, Mountain, c. 1960, ink on paper, 23.8 x 30.2 cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York 57 10. Agnes Martin, Untitled/Grey Bird, 1964, ink on paper, 22.9 x 22.9 cm, private collection 59 11. Agnes Martin Gallery, Harwood Foundation Museum, Taos, New Mexico, 2002 (photo: Victoria King) 62 12. Agnes Martin, Grey Stone II, detail, 1961, oil and gold leaf on canvas, 189.9 cm x 187.3 cm, collection of Emily Fisher Landau 68 13. Agnes Martin, Tranquility, 2001, acrylic and graphite on canvas, 60” x 60”, private collection 72 14. Agnes Martin, Leaf (detail), 1965, acrylic and graphite on canvas, 182.9 x 182.9 cm, collection of Mr. and Mrs. D.W. Dietrich II 74 15. Agnes Martin, Love and Goodness, 2000, acrylic and graphite on canvas, 60” x 60 “, private collection 76 16. Ranchos de Taos St. Francis de Asis, Taos, 2002 (photo: Victoria King) 77 17. Navajo healing ritual with sand painting 79 18. San Juan Pueblo Deer Dancers, New Mexico (photo: Steve Larese) 80 19. Agnes Martin, Flower in the Wind, 1963, oil on canvas, 190.5 x 190.5 cm, collection of Thomas Ammann Fine Arts, Zurich 105 20. Agnes Martin, Falling Blue, 1963, oil and graphite on canvas, 180.7 x 182.9 cm, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 107 21. Taos Pueblo, 2002 (photo: Victoria King) 109 22. Cabezon Peak, New Mexico (photo: Mike Butterfield) 110 23. Agnes Martin in her Taos studio, July 2002 (photo: Victoria King) 113 24. Sandover River, dry season, Utopia, 1999 (photo: Victoria King) 115 25. Violet Petyarr preparing perentie, Utopia, 1999 (photo: Victoria King) 119 26. Anmatyerr and Alyawarr women with awely designs giving evidence at the 1976 Land Rights proceedings at Utopia (photo: Diane Bell) 129 27. Emily Kngwarray, Untitled (Awely), 1994, acrylic on canvas, 3 panels 70 x 110 cm each, Art Gallery of New South Wales 131 28. Anna Petyarr Price sand drawing, Utopia, 1999 (photo: Victoria King) 132 29. Emily Kngwarray, Utopia Panels, 1996, acrylic on canvas, one of 18 panels, 280 x 100 cm each, Fire Works Gallery, Brisbane 134 30. Hunting perentie, Utopia, 1999 (photo: Victoria King) 136

31. Emily Kngwarray, Untitled, 1989, acrylic on canvas, 151 x 120 cm, Holmes a Court Collection 138 32. Emily Kngwarray painting, Utopia, 1994 (photo: Fred Torres) 140 33. Alhalker, 1999 (photo: Victoria King) 143 34. Arnkerrth, Utopia, 1999 (photo: Victoria King) 146 35. Atnangker sand dunes, Utopia, 1999 (photo: Victoria King) 148 36. Emily Kngwarray, 1990, Mourning Story, acrylic on canvas, 120 x 90 cm, The Holt Collection 154 37. Atnwelarr yam, Utopia, 2000 (photo: Victoria King) 156 38. Emily Kngwarray, Untitled, 1995, acrylic on canvas, 76 x 85 cm (private collection) 160 39. Emily Kngwarray, Awely, 1990, acrylic on canvas, 54.5 x 85 cm (private collection) 165 40. Emily Kngwarray, Untitled (Awely), 1996, acrylic on canvas, 64 x 39 cm (private collection) 166 41. Awely dances and body painting, Utopia, 2000 (photo: Victoria King) 170 42. Emily Kngwarray, Emu Dreaming, 1977-78, batik on silk, 236 x 117.5 cm, Holmes a Court Collection 177 43. Emily Kngwarray, Emu Woman, 1988-89, acrylic on canvas, 92 x 61 cm, Holmes a Court Collection 178 44. Emily Kngwarray, Untitled, 1993, acrylic on canvas, 233 x 80 cm (private collection) 182 45. Emily Kngwarray, Big Yam Dreaming, 1995, acrylic on canvas, 291.1 by 901.8 cm, Queensland Art Gallery 184 46. Emily Kngwarray painting one of her last awely acrylic paintings, Utopia, 1996 (photo: Anna Voigt) 185 47. Emily Kngwarray, Untitled (Alhalker), 1996, acrylic on canvas, 106.5 x 120.5 cm, Ebes Collection 186 48. Emily Kngwarray’s gravesite, Utopia, 1999 (photo: Victoria King) 196 49. Victoria King, In a Far Land, 1997-2000, acrylic on canvas, 30.5 x 61, 122 x 72, 30.5 x 61 cm, collection of the artist 201 50. Agnes Martin, Falling Blue, 1963, oil and graphite on canvas, 180.7 x 182.9 cm, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 202 51. Emily Kngwarray, Untitled (Awely), 1994, acrylic on canvas, 3 panels, 150 x 60 cm each, private collection 205 52. Djambawa Marawili, Mardarrpa miny’tji, 1996, Yirrkala, 322 x 99 cm, private collection 207 53. Optical blind spot illusion 226 54. Taneda Santoka, No Money, c. 1940, ink on paper, 49.4 x 69.3 cm, Chikusei Collection 250 55. Diagram of a placeless geography 274 56. Victoria King, The Ground of Being, 2003, acrylic on canvas and boards, 27 x 37, 30.5 x 30.5, 78 x 61.5 cm, collection of the artist 295

CHAPTER ONE

GROUNDS FOR A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE

I. Mapping Territory a. Perceptions of Art and Place

In ‘Towards a Holistic Understanding of Place’, Mark Riegner recognized that

[A] fragment, or part, when approached phenomenologically, becomes a revelation of the whole that informs it. Specifically, the living elements of a landscape – its plants and animals – provide focal points through which the character of a place becomes present. The organism and its world are intimately united, and each can be used to read the other (Riegner: 1993: 181-82).

In this thesis, I take up Riegner’s suggestion that it is possible to explore phenomenologically the relationship between a specific landscape and its living inhabitants. Specifically I am interested in how these interconnections may manifest in the work of place-sensitive artists. In order to do this, I have looked in depth at the lives and work of two women artists, Agnes Martin and Emily Kngwarray, whose artistic careers have been intrinsically associated with the places in which they lived and worked1. While these two artists’ lives, cultures and work are vastly dissimilar, I chose each artist to shed light on issues that are highly relevant to Australian artists today. The source of this research was personal experience. I undertook this study in order to understand complexities that manifested within my own art practice when I came to Australia. As an artist who lived the first twenty-one years of my life in the United States, the next twenty-one years in England, and the last twelve years in the Blue Mountains in New South Wales, I am interested in how paintings communicate aspects of

1 I call attention to the now established spelling of Kngwarray (previously Kngwarreye) (Green: 2000: 17).

1 place. While the original motivation for this research was to understand complexities within my own painting practice that the move to Australia revealed, nevertheless the research took on its own life as I proceeded with the comparison between Agnes Martin and Emily Kngwarray. This thesis thus examines the relationship between art and place. In the process I challenge conventional readings of the paintings of both Kngwarray and Martin.

The Canadian-American artist Agnes Martin has lived in the distinctive mesa country of New Mexico for nearly forty years. The linear stripes and grids of her abstract paintings epitomize modernist sensibilities that had also informed my art practice in England. In Australia, I found many contemporary non-indigenous artists were similarly influenced by modernism. Concurrently Aboriginal artists create paintings within very different parameters, but on the walls of a gallery these differences are not so apparent to the eye. The paintings of the late Anmatyerr elder Emily Kame Kngwarray were the first to engage me when I arrived in Australia. Their surface qualities resembled those of the English paintings that I made well before Australia or Aboriginal paintings were part of my imagination. She painted a prodigious number of paintings, many utilizing linear stripes and grid motifs, during the last eight years of her life. Her work epitomizes the many complexities inherent within Aboriginal art.

Martin and Kngwarray and their paintings became ‘focal points’ for me to understand new intricacies about being in place and having a sense of place. Yet the relationship of person and place in relation to art is often not acknowledged as being as complicated as I have discovered it to be. When I arrived in Australia in 1994, I held not only art, but also nature, vision and spirituality in reverence. My English paintings were concerned with conveying the ever-changing colour, space and beauty of a small garden that I had passionately created. At the same time, for over two decades I had practiced spiritual disciplines that focussed on an inner world. In Australia my eyes encountered vastness of scale, a different sense of presence and extraordinary diversity of native flora, fauna and landforms. As I sought ways to depict what

2 surrounded me, old ways of seeing proved to be inadequate and I felt an urgency to understand this place that was now ‘home’.

b. Questioning Assumptions

In Australian art galleries, I felt an immediate, albeit uncanny, sense of recognition in front of the paintings of Emily Kngwarray. Their shimmering surfaces utterly mesmerized me. I was drawn to the authority of her gestures, her use of colour and evocation of landscape. As her paintings were culturally removed from any of the art historical contexts that they appeared to resemble, I initially found myself asking the same question posed by Terry Smith:

How is it that an Australian Aboriginal woman, living among her people in the central desert, possessing little knowledge of, and even less interest in, modernist art, who took up painting on canvas in her late seventies and early eighties, became, during a period of just more than six years from 1989 to 1996, an outstanding abstract painter, certainly among the best Australian artists, arguably among the best of her time? (T. Smith: 1998: 24).

Hidden within Smith’s question and my own were many unspoken assumptions that slowly came to be revealed to me through a chance meeting.

At an Aboriginal art gallery in Adelaide in 1997, I met Emily Kngwarray’s niece and a member of the Stolen Generation, the Utopia artist Barbara Weir. Barbara and I felt an immediate affinity and soon after she asked me to record the stories of her life. I agreed, but with the insistence that I do this as an act of friendship, as a facilitator, and that the stories remain in her own words. Barbara’s stories of her agonizing experiences over the twelve years when she was taken from her family at the age of nine while collecting water for Kngwarray were strongly and complexly interwoven with positive childhood memories and good memories of the considerable time she spent with her

3 Auntie Emily when they were re-united. Although I was not able to find a publisher for her stories, I presented her with a bound copy of her stories in 2000. During my trips to Utopia with Barbara between 1998 and 2000 when I was collecting her stories, I also collected the stories of ten other Alhalker and Atnangker women who were friends of hers and closely connected to Emily Kngwarray: the late Glory Ngal and her daughter Anna Petyarr Price, the seven Petyarr sisters: Ada Bird, Kathleen, Myrtle, Gloria, Violet, Nancy and Jeannie, and their aunt, an important elder of Atnangker, Weida Kngwarray. The women were pleased that their stories would be told the ‘right way’ and they all gave their full permission for the stories to be published. In the company of Barbara Weir acting as translator, I taped an interview with each of them in which they told their Dreaming stories, early memories and their connection to their country. I then transcribed these interviews into manuscript form. This material has not been previously published.

As these women took me to places of secular and sacred importance, I became aware of very different ways of seeing, knowing and being as they travelled the land, hunted and gathered bush tucker, painted their bodies and canvases and sang the songs of their country. My experiences at Utopia were often sublime as well as deeply challenging and disconcerting. For what I witnessed on the outstations was not congruent with how Aboriginal art was marketed and shown in galleries in the major cities of Australia. Because of my experiences at Utopia it became a matter of urgency to understand the relationship between place and Aboriginal art. The question remained how, the method, by which to investigate this broad topic. I thus began my PhD study.

The shimmering surfaces of Aboriginal paintings convey a powerful effect as many art critics and anthropologists have pointed out (Biddle: 2003; Morphy: 1998; Neale: 1998b; Ryan: 1998). Yet in Australia, as in Europe and America, non-indigenous artists work within the heritage of an eclectic art historical tradition. As early as 1907 when Picasso ‘discovered’ African sculptures and integrated their appearance into his painting Demoiselles d’Avignon, non- indigenous artists’ appreciation of the art of other cultures has lurched

4 uncomfortably between appropriation and hybridity (McEvilley: 1984; Foster: 1985). A question soon emerged that applied not just to my art practice: What is an appropriate gesture, painterly or ethical, in an appropriated, contested land? This general question implies many additional questions, not least of which is the complex topic of the right to speak for another person or culture. With regard to writing about indigenous issues, the author Stephen Gray recognised that the debate about appropriation, or what he calls ‘theft’, is still in its infancy.

Australian authors face a new and scarcely discussed challenge: how to write about Aboriginal people without being accused of theft. The challenge arises whether the Aboriginal presence is as a minor character in a novel, a main character or a narrator, whether the author trades upon his or her Aboriginal experience and street cred, or even claims to be Aboriginal (Gray: 2000: 8).

These issues are not just about political correctness. Aboriginal academic, lawyer and activist Marcia Langton has written of an insidious, ever-present danger associated with perception:

Representational and aesthetic statements of Aboriginal people by non- Aboriginal people transform the Aboriginal reality. They are accounts. It is in these representations that Aboriginal as subject becomes, under the white gaze imagining the Aboriginal, the object (Langton: 1993: 40, italics in original).

She went on to issue a further warning:

The racism of the conviction that blacks are morally and/or intellectually inferior defines the “common sense” perception of blacks. However, reversal of these assumptions using a positive/negative cultural formula (e.g. blacks are superior or more compassionate) does not challenge racism. It may, in fact, corroborate racism (ibid.: 41).

5 It is also noted in the document ‘Values and Ethics – Guidelines for Ethical Conduct in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Research’, that ‘how people see the world is generally informed by their own experiences, values, norms and learning’ (NHMRC: 2003: 1). It further contends: ‘To misrecognise or fail to recognize [cultural difference] can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted and reduced model of being’ (ibid.: 3). Assumptions, dualistic perceptions and stereotypes present an enormous challenge for cross-cultural dialogue and understanding. The African- American feminist theorist and Buddhist practitioner bell hooks provided insight into the nature of how such limited classifications occur:

Stereotypes, however inaccurate, are one form of representation. Like fictions, they are created to serve as substitutions, standing in for what is real. They are there not to tell it like it is but to invite and encourage pretence. They are a fantasy, a projection onto the Other that makes them less threatening. Stereotypes abound when there is distance. They are an invention, a pretence that one knows when the steps that would make real knowing possible cannot be taken - are not allowed (hooks: 1992: 341).

Through the generosity of the women of Utopia, my empathy with them and their people, and my appreciation of the diversity of their arid homelands, some of the distances that resonated through the stereotypes that existed outside of that place were bridged. The sensitivity of the researcher is clearly of paramount importance, especially in a situation such as the one I found myself in at Utopia. What I saw and the stories that I recorded there held countless layers of meaning and implications that I strove to be respectful of and sensitive to, even when I did not understand them. The role of ethical witnessing became enormously important to me.

Personal narratives have long been a tradition in anthropology and human history (Behar: 1996). In her relationships with people of other cultures, Ruth Behar recognized that anthropology ‘is the most fascinating, bizarre, disturbing, and necessary form of witnessing left to us’ (ibid.: 5). She advocates one

6 become a ‘vulnerable observer’, acknowledging that anthropology has the capacity to ‘break your heart’. Being with the Aboriginal women at Utopia indeed broke open my heart. I was no longer able to keep art and life at arm’s length, nor continue to treat all places as the same – undifferentiated landscapes with the potential for creative depiction. Hitherto unexamined differences between universal space and particular places became manifestly apparent.

This Utopia phase of the research also raised significant questions. Is it possible to know or understand an Aboriginal painting hanging on the walls of a gallery? What does that word, ‘understand’, mean? Can aesthetic appreciation and goodwill bridge the gap that often exists between cultures? When Aboriginal art is celebrated, how problematic is it to be fascinated by the ‘exotic’ and mesmerized by the surface shimmer of the paintings? How can we understand the strength of the aesthetic gaze that allows difference to be eliminated?

These issues are relevant not just to artists and connoisseurs but also for Australia to be a congruently multi-cultural country. Work still urgently needs to be done to ensure critical multiculturalism is predicated on cultural difference (Gunew: 2003). Yet the recognition of cultural difference, a term established by Homi Bhabha in 1994, is far from straightforward. Nikos Papastergiadis recognized that there is much ‘celebratory rhetoric’ on globalisation and multiculturalism that has often ‘blurred’ the contradictions of traditional social structures (Papastergiadis: 2003c: 168). He also sees a ‘short circuiting of the imagination’ around seeing the connection between the dispossession of indigenous cultures and new refugees and migrants (Papastergiadis: 2003b: 8). Drawing on the writing of Marcia Langton (as I also do in my thesis), he contends the reception of Aboriginal art has become ‘contradictory’ and ‘ambivalent’, with a ‘promiscuous desire to decorate every available surface with an “Aboriginal” design, [while] on the other hand, there is a reluctance to engage with the complex histories of Aboriginal cultures’ (ibid.: 9). This reluctance I contend, comes in large part from our limited perception and ‘blind spots’.

What do we see? The dots of Aboriginal art and differences in culture repeatedly disappear into our blind spots. We do not see our cultural constructions and perspective, but call them certainties, ‘facts’ of the objective world. The cognitive scientists Umberto Maturano and Francisco Varela wrote:

By existing, we generate cognitive “blind spots” that can be cleared only through generating new blind spots in another domain. We do not see what we do not see, and what we do not see does not exist. Only when some interaction dislodges us - such as being suddenly relocated to a different cultural environment - and we reflect upon it, do we bring forth new constellations of relation that we explain by saying that we were not aware of them, or that we took them for granted (Maturana and Varela: 1992: 242).

Because of my move to Australia and the time that I spent on the indigenous outstations of Utopia, I began to see the world from an entirely new perspective. My ‘blind spots’ suddenly changed. In the midst of the often-overwhelming complexity of cross-cultural issues I encountered, a process of erasure slowly became apparent in my paintings, an editing of every mark that I made. In time I recognized that I was in danger of ‘erasing’ my self through a privileging of indigenous perspectives, a process that Marcia Langton has called a ‘reversal’ of assumptions. I urgently needed to reflect upon my own place, life and art practice. In order to shed light upon my own position, I chose to include Agnes Martin in my research, a modernist artist whose cultural roots were more similar to my own. Martin has lived close to the land in New Mexico for nearly forty years. Her interest in spirituality through Zen and Taoism also resonated with my own. In July 2002, Martin generously allowed me to spend a day with her in her home and studio in Taos2. At the age of ninety, she was still prolifically painting her pared down, ascetic vision and was robust and sharp of mind.

2 I arranged this visit prior to my arrival through David Witt, Director of the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos.

8 Surrounded by her recent work, she spoke of her life, her art practice, the places that she has lived and many of the issues of being-in-place. Our time together, like my interactions with the Aboriginal women of Utopia, raised more questions. These questions were not about the perception of a particular social group within a society or appropriation, but about her personal biography and the relationship between places important to her and her art.

Both Martin and Kngwarray have been absorbed into the two canons of modernism: Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism (Auping: 1998; McEvilley: 1987; Hodges in Boulter: 1991; T. Smith: 1998). This absorption, I suggest, obscures rather than illuminates important aspects of their work such as issues of place and displacement, and relationships between the ground, tactility and embodiment. In this thesis I argue that these artists’ paintings in fact rest in discrete hybrid territory informed by the particular places in which they dwelt as well as by their experiences of displacement and loss. American philosopher Edward Casey has stated that ‘if Freud and Heidegger are correct’, displacement is ‘endemic to the human condition in its ineluctable “uncanniness”; Unheimlichkeit, not-being-at-home, is intrinsic to habitation itself’ (Casey: 1993: 34). Separation from place, which Casey recognized involves a sense of ‘unbearable emptiness’, is experienced not just by increasing numbers of migrants and emigrants and those who are involuntarily separated from places dear to them, but by many who feel ‘not at home’, out of place even in their own homes (ibid.: x). Heidegger saw the essential character of modernity to be homelessness. The concept of ‘home’ through his emphasis on ‘dwelling’ authentically in place is foundational. In fact we are ‘doubly homeless’, argues environmentalist, geographer and poet Peter Hay in Main Currents in Western Environmental Thought, ‘because not only are we estranged from home but we do not know that we are estranged from home’ (Hay: 2002: 160-61). Freud, Bachelard and Proust all have suggested that in order to re-find places of significance for us, we need to return through journeys, memory or imagination to the earliest places we have known (Casey: 1993: x). Following this suggestion, during this research I have spent time in places important to Kngwarray and Martin, as well as in seminal places of my own. I explore the

9 repercussions of valuing place relationships as well as the ramifications of displacement and the denial of the importance of home and place, individually and collectively through the work and lives of Kngwarray and Martin.

c. The Study of Place: A Conceptual History

For centuries, ‘place’ was, and still is, taken for granted. Yet Edward Casey maintains that an undercurrent of interest in place has always existed (Casey: 1997). It was the fear of emptiness, of undifferentiated space, he believes that concerned early philosophers such as Aristotle, Plato, Descartes, Pascal, Newton and Leibniz. From the 7th century AD onwards, there was an increasing neglect of place in favour of space that amounted to the virtual exclusion of place from philosophical thought by the end of the 18th century simply because of its taken-for-grantedness. The view of space as infinite and ubiquitous coincided with the spread of Christianity and its universalist aspirations. During the Age of Exploration, the domination of native peoples and the systematic destruction of their local and specific landscapes meant that regional landscapes were insidiously not valued. But in the past three centuries, a critical aspect of modernity, Casey believes, has been that the concept of place has been actively suppressed . Place has been reduced to space and the primacy of time has been asserted, too often disregarding how our bodies exist in place. Casey suggests that a concern with place is largely regarded as parochial or nostalgic. World wars, forced migrations and the advent of the virtual world of electronic technology all have undermined respect for place (ibid.: xii). But it is the very recognition of the precariousness of the world that has perhaps stimulated sensitivity to the potential and real loss of places and thus to the ‘local’ and ‘particular’ (ibid.: xiii).

Other writers before Casey have investigated the phenomenon of place and displacement, the most famous of all being Martin Heidegger. In order to address the philosophical and real disassociation of humans from their environment, from the 1950’s Heidegger began to contrast ‘location’ and

10 ‘region’ with space. His writings on ‘dwelling’ were imaginatively taken up by Bachelard in 1957 in The Poetics of Space (1994). From the 1970’s, geographers such as Yi-Fu Tuan in Topophilia (1974, 1990) and Edward Relph in Place and Placelessness (1976) began to establish ‘place’ as central to their work. Since this time, a small but growing number of architects, artists, sociologists, feminists, anthropologists, theologians and ethicists, as well as philosophers and ecologists, have begun to take ‘place’ seriously. Notable amongst these writers who further explored the implications of place as a critical concept are David Seamon and Robert Mugerauer in Dwelling, Place and Environment (1985, 1989), Tony Hiss in The Experience of Place (1991), Fred Myers in Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place, and Politics among Western Desert Aborigines (1986), Doreen Massey in Space, Place and Gender (1998), and Edward Casey in Getting Back into Place (1993) and The Fate of Place (1997). In Australia, Jeff Malpas in Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (1999) and John Cameron in Changing Places: Re- Imagining Australia (2001) have been influential advocates of place studies through their writing and teaching practices.

Writers such as Relph, Casey, Malpas and Cameron speak of the dangers of postmodern post-capitalist societies constructing the world as a series of manipulable ‘sites’ within empty space. In Australia such a stark worldview is at odds with indigenous knowledge. Place is central to traditional Aboriginal people and the term ‘site’ is understood completely differently. ‘Sacred sites’ are linked and celebrated through stories, songs and dances of the Dreamtime, a time that is understood organically in a non-linear way, where past, present and future are continually interwoven. These places were created by Ancestral beings who travelled across the land and whose marks created all places and all the features of the natural world (Myers: 1986, 2002; Morphy: 1991, 1998). This knowledge has been held for countless generations through custodianship and kinship affiliations. The difference between seeing the land as infinite, without particularity or simply as real estate potential, having no intrinsic significance, to seeing and experiencing it as sacred reveals a fundamental difference of perception that undermines much mutual understanding between

11 non-indigenous and indigenous Australians. Since the declaration of the legal status of Australia as terra nullius, empty land, and the subsequent dispossession of Aboriginals and the Stolen Generation from their homeland, the political and ethical dimensions of this difference have haunted Australia3. Contemporary Aboriginal art has become an icon for Australia, nationally and internationally. Yet a shadow side exists to this celebration. For this ‘art’ is an affirmation of Aboriginal people’s connections to their sacred homeland, what they call ‘country’ – country from which many have been dispossessed. Commodified into the ‘fine art’ of another culture, many discordant themes emerge (Jopson: 2003: 4-5).

This thesis is an extensive exploration of place relationships and the effects of displacement through case studies of Agnes Martin and Emily Kngwarray and the implications that arise from discussions of their lives and art practices. I argue that their signature touch on the surface of their canvases is resonant with evidence of their relationships to places important to them, and the inherent complexities that arise when such places are lost.

d. The Haptic

The sense of touch, the haptic (from the Greek haptesthai, ‘to touch’) has enormous implications for an understanding of the relationship between person and place. Paul Rodaway in Sensuous Geographies argues that the haptic is a significant dimension of human experience, and that the term ‘haptic’ avoids superficial connotations associated with the everyday word ‘touch’ (Rodaway: 1994: 41). Unlike hearing and seeing, touch is an active sense. With touch we explore and alter our world. Touch has two different components: the purely tactile experience of moving one’s finger, hand or feet over a surface and feeling its qualities, and dynamic or kinaesthetic touch, where the physical properties of an object are sensed, such as its length, weight and orientation

3 In his 1980 Boyer Lecture, The Spectre of Truganini, Bernard Smith argued that ‘a spectre has haunted Australian culture, the spectre of Truganini. … Since 1788 Aborigines have been treated in their own country as if they were sub-human’ (B. Smith: 1980: 9-10).

12 (Perkowitz: 1999: 34). Every day we engage with the world by means of information derived from the haptic through surface (texture), geometry (shape, dimensions or size in relation to human scale), material (mass or weight), location (distance from us), energy (temperatures) and dynamic (movement) qualities (Rodaway: 1994: 48).

A number of contemporary philosophers have attended to the issue of touch in ways relevant to this thesis. I draw extensively on Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the term haptic to discuss ‘close vision-haptic space’ (Deleuze and Guattari: 1987: 492-500). They recognized that in ‘local’ places such as those inhabited by nomadic tribes, ‘one never sees from a distance’, but instead one is in a deep relationship with the ground, ‘on’ it, not ‘in front of’ it (ibid.: 493). Yet even more important to my discussion is Merleau-Ponty’s recognition in the Phenomenology of Perception of the relationship of the haptic to perception through what he called ‘the knowing touch’.

All tactile perception, while opening itself to an objective “property”, includes a bodily component; the tactile localization of an object, for example assigns to it its place in relation to the cardinal points of the body image. This property which, at first sight, draws an absolute distinction between touch and the vision, in fact makes it possible to draw them together… [L]ike the exploratory gaze of true vision, the “knowing touch” projects us outside our body through movement (Merleau-Ponty: 1962: 315).

Touch, that most intimate sense, involves the whole body through the properties of the skin that covers it. It is the most essential of all senses and it has been argued that to lose the ability to feel or touch is to lose all sense of being in the world (Tuan: 1990). Touch is an active and a passive sense, for to touch is to be touched, as Merleau-Ponty recognized: ‘The presence of the world is precisely the presence of its flesh to my flesh’ (Merleau-Ponty: 1968: 127). Ecologist and philosopher David Abram believes that it is possible to expand upon Merleau-Ponty and to say that ‘we are organs of this world, flesh of its

13 flesh, and that the world is perceiving itself through us’ (Abram: 1996: 68). Abram believes that this simple yet profound recognition of touching and being touched could be the foundation for a new ‘environmental ethic’ that can come through a new attentiveness, a ‘carnal, sensorial empathy’ (ibid.: 69).

One point of this thesis is that an investigation of person-place relationships must take the haptic seriously. As Merleau-Ponty and the other sources quoted indicate, the haptic is important because it is the most direct route to a sensing of place, a response to place and an expression of place. I will argue that the haptic is extremely significant for both Agnes Martin and Emily Kngwarray in interestingly different ways. For Agnes Martin, the haptic is evoked through her hand-drawn pencil lines that fill her canvases. Her way of being in the world in New Mexico is also one that is characterized by touch through her very physical engagement with the land. Yet it is Emily Kngwarray’s Anmatyerr culture that most clearly celebrates the haptic. Touch is a major component of the traditional women’s ceremonies, awely, for which she was an elder. As the women paint their bodies and their feet firmly make contact with the ground in the awely dances, the Anmatyerr and Atnangker women engage with the sensuous ground of their country for which they are custodians. The ground is a medium for expression, drawn upon to teach new generations (Watson: 1997, 2003). Through case studies of Martin and Kngwarray, I seek to bring insight into the importance of touch, an embodied perception and the interconnectedness of the ground of place and canvas.

14 II. Themes and Thesis Questions

The haptic, embodiment and perception are strong themes throughout my thesis, but Agnes Martin and Emily Kngwarray’s use of repetition also provides fertile ground to question wholly formal readings of their paintings. This thesis demonstrates the significance of historical and personal psychological denial and erasure, as well as transgenerational legacies in the artists’ work. It also challenges the ocularcentric tradition of seeing the land and art, and examines what occurs when a painting is viewed on the walls of a gallery. It addresses Eurocentric readings of Aboriginal art and looks at the power of the aesthetic gaze that eliminates cultural difference. Differences between space and place are explored through an investigation of the phenomenology of perception, the haptic, embodiment and ‘presentness’. Place affiliation and the effects of displacement are examined to discover what is often taken for granted: the ground beneath our feet.

In this thesis I hope to contribute to a clearer understanding of the work of two artists, Agnes Martin and Emily Kngwarray, through an exploration of their tactility and relationship to place, and conversely their experience of displacement. In addition, I explore the issue of what is an ‘appropriate’ mode of representation. This general question implies the following questions that are intrinsic to this thesis:

• What do we see when we look at a painting? What do we see when we look at the land? How are these two forms of perception affected by the strength of the aesthetic gaze?

• How possible is it to ‘know’ or understand an Aboriginal painting hanging on the walls of a gallery?

• How can Eurocentric readings of Aboriginal art and its surface ‘shimmer’ be addressed?

15 • How can reflections upon the place affiliation of Agnes Martin and Emily Kame Kngwarray in relationship with my own life and work provide insights into the complexities of making paintings that refer to the land?

• How can these artists’ work point towards new ways of seeing and being on the land?

• How does a study of displacement inform a sense of place or the longing for it?

• What is an appropriate gesture for a non-indigenous artist in an appropriated, contested land?

16 III. Methodology a. Phenomenology

The exploration of oral narratives of lived experience can be richly pursued through the philosophy of phenomenology, the study of direct experience. This philosophy emerged out of the work of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Husserl encouraged us to go ‘back to the things themselves’, ‘to set aside all previous habits of thoughts’, and ‘learn to see what stands before our eyes’ (Husserl, 1931: 43 in Crotty: 1996: 273). Phenomenology is a way of seeing, engaged yet dispassionate, a method of descriptive inquiry, concerned to illuminate and clarify what it studies, without resort to ‘purely causal’ explanations (Moran and Mooney: 2002: 1-2). Critical reflection is the central discipline of phenomenological inquiry (Crotty: 1996: 276). Phenomenology begins with experience as it is lived and experienced, not theorized. Enormous demands are put upon the researcher to remain animated by the subject in a full and human sense, maintaining a steady focus, not foreclosing conclusions (nor ‘conducting an inquisition’) but offering an opening for disclosure to occur (van Manen: 1990: 33-43).

The researcher, having inquired and reflected on the phenomenon, attempts an ‘incantative, evocative speaking’, a ‘primal telling’ wherein the aim is to involve the ‘voice’ in what phenomenologists call ‘poetizing’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1973 in van Manen: 1990: 13). This is more than analysis and interpretation in that it aims to let the quality of the phenomenon speak through the encounter with thoughtfulness, what Heidegger called ‘minding, a heeding, a caring attunement’ (Heidegger in van Manen: 1990: 12). In my descriptions of the places of Agnes Martin and Emily Kngwarray I have made particular use of this technique in my descriptions of their places, details of which I recorded in situ, to give voice to the land. Similarly with their paintings, I paid close attention ‘to the thing itself’, including the space in which they were situated and how my body responded to them. The process requires attentiveness, a deep listening with all the senses to be an act of witnessing. According to Heidegger, it is a

17 ‘surrender’ to the thing itself, in one’s own life experience, in critical contemplation (Heidegger in Crotty: 1996: 278). The phenomenological researcher characterizes the essence, the structure, pattern and meaning of that lived experience, and aims ‘to show and to name’ (van Manen: 1990: 24- 27). This process of observing, witnessing, reflecting, returning to observe, describing through writing and re-writing, balancing parts and the whole, is the essence of phenomenology (ibid.: 31).

Issues of embodiment play a key role in my thesis, and phenomenology here, too, provides a model. David Abram asserts that Merleau-Ponty ‘invites us to recognize, at the heart of even our most abstract cogitations, the sensuous and sentient life of the body itself’ (Abram: 1996: 45). Phenomenology demands a willingness to reflect upon personal lived experiences with intimacy, without judgement, being completely open. It is a reasoned inquiry into appearances; and appearances are everything that ‘appears to consciousness’, precisely as they so appear and are experienced, and regardless of their supposed cause (Moran and Mooney: 2002: 1). It is a mysterious process in that it involves being sensitive to the present moment in ways ordinary consciousness always has available, but to which it is not always accustomed. Merleau-Ponty gave an ontological expression to the notion of lived experience as immediate awareness, what he called ‘sensibility’:

The sensible is precisely that medium in which there can be being without it having to be posited; the sensible appearance of the sensible, the silent persuasion of the sensible is Being’s unique way of manifesting itself without becoming positivity, without ceasing to be ambiguous and transcendent… The sensible is that: this possibility to be evident in silence, to be understood implicitly (Merleau-Ponty: 1968: 214).

In my research on Agnes Martin, I explore in depth issues of awareness and the present moment, as it is relevant not just to Martin’s art and her philosophy of being but also to the experience of being sensitive to the land.

18 The importance of having one’s awareness sensitised and ‘grounded’ is a fundamental aspect of my thesis. I repeatedly return to the ‘ground’ of the land, its relationship to the ‘ground’ (surface) of Martin and Kngwarray’s canvases and the body’s relationship to the ground. In Heidegger’s Later Philosophy, Julian Young reflects on how Heidegger’s concept of ground is intricately woven into his later understanding of ‘Being’ in his distinction of ‘earth’ from ‘world’:

“World” (in the ontic sense) is the intelligible in truth, that which is “lit up”: as Heidegger calls it, “the clearing” (Lichtung). “Earth” on the other hand, is “the not [“linguistically”] mastered, [the] … concealed, the disconcerting [Beirrendes]”, the dark penumbra of unintelligibility that surrounds (and in an important sense …, grounds) our human existence (Young: 2002: 9).

This ‘disconcerting’, mysterious yet fundamental reality of ground to provide space, place, horizontality and verticality, indeed humanness, is best perceived through our relationship to the ground. Heidegger declared:

We stand outside of science. Instead we stand before a tree in bloom… and the tree stands before us… This face-to-face meeting is not, then, one of those “ideas” buzzing about in our heads… [We] have leapt, out of the familiar realm of science and even… out of the realm of philosophy. And where have we leapt? Perhaps into an abyss? No! Rather, onto some firm soil. Some? No! But on that soil upon which we live and die, if we are honest with ourselves (Heidegger: 1976: 41).

Heidegger recognized that our elemental relationship with the ‘soil’ or ground goes beyond philosophy, and is concerned with our very being. Merleau-Ponty took the idea of our relationship with ground into the territory of mutuality and participation. He contended that all of our perceptions and exchanges occur through the simple but profound fact that our bodies are entirely continuous with the ground: ‘The presence of the world is precisely the presence of its flesh to my flesh’ (Merleau-Ponty: 1968: 127). It is from this ground of our essential interconnectedness that emerges the possibility of a radical new way of

19 ecologically and ethically engaging with the earth that I discuss in Chapters Four and Five (Abram: 1996; Cameron: 2003c; Davies: 2000; Diprose: 2002; Gordon and Tamari: 2004; Hay: 2002; Hiss: 1991; Malpas: 1999; Mathews: 2003; Seamon: 1989, 1993, 1998; Thomashow: 1996).

As relevant as phenomenology has been to my research, I have also discovered some of its limitations in the course of writing this thesis. This was particularly evident in my recognition of ethical considerations that need to be taken into account when Aboriginal paintings are displayed on the walls of a gallery. In most cases, Aboriginal art is viewed far from the harsh realities of the lives of the artists who created it. People’s lives and land are invisible in galleries when the paintings are removed from present and historical accountability. Traditional phenomenology has been criticized for the fact that it searches for universal essences that are largely divorced from cultural context. Heidegger himself acknowledged that gender, culture, history, and related life experiences ‘prohibit an objective viewpoint’ yet it is still possible for people to share experience and for there to be common meanings (Heidegger in Byrne: 2001: 2). Phenomenology has also been criticised because increasingly some phenomenological researchers do not directly participate in the processes that are the focus of their enquiries (Richardson: 1999: 57). Those researchers ‘typically relied upon the secondhand accounts of distant correspondents’ (ibid.). In order to address this limitation and sensitive to issues of appropriation, I have included the ‘voice’ and stories of the women in a direct and unedited transcribed narrative form. This, I suggest, allows for a level of authenticity that can often be lost when fragments are taken out of context or are ‘secondhand’.

Yet research must be interpreted and analysed, and through careful reflection and repeated familiarity with the material, meaning evolves. A leading exponent of phenomenological research methodology, Max van Manen noted, ‘Is this not the meaning of research: to question something by going back again and again to the things themselves until that which is put in question begins to reveal something of its essential nature?’ (van Manen: 1990: 43). In the words of Merleau-Ponty himself: ‘To return to things themselves is to return to that world

20 which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks’ (Merleau- Ponty: 1962: ix, italics in original). In this thesis, I have attempted to allow the voice, places and art of Martin, Kngwarray and her countrywomen themselves to provide new insights into the importance of issues of place and displacement.

b. Narrative Inquiry and Lived Experience

The stories of Agnes Martin and Emily Kngwarray’s fellow countrywomen form part of my qualitative research and provide not only factual information otherwise unavailable, but also a structure through which I could analyse and make sense of discrete experiences. Story is a special kind of narrative, a linguistic form of expressing what we know and how we feel (Goodfellow: 1997: 65). Emergent complexities within qualitative research, especially postcolonial feminist research, have provided the groundwork for the possibility to ethically and creatively explore other voices as well as one’s own (Anzaldua: 1987; Spivak: 1988a, 1988b; hooks: 1990, 1992, 1995a, 1995b; van Manen: 1990; Haraway: 1991; Behar: 1996; Olesen: 2000). It has been my intention to create an interpretative medium to allow Martin and the women of Utopia to be heard through their own words without exploitation or distortion. Yet bell hooks and Ruth Behar, like many others, consistently issue reminders in their writings that the identity of the researcher cannot be entirely dropped (hooks: 1990, 1992, 1995a, 1995b; Behar: 1996). I am aware that I bring my own personal history, cultural background, gender, class and race to bear on my research and seek to make transparent the reflexivity and complexities of my position.

Although often perceived as subjective, narrative inquiry requires studious and meticulous processes of data accumulation, synthesis and interpretation (Goodfellow: 1997: 72). What makes it distinctive as a form of qualitative research is that it provides a resource to explore shared meaning. Researchers undertaking narrative inquiry have a concern with embodied experiential knowledge rather than technical conceptual knowledge, and explore the moral, emotional and aesthetic qualities of all forms of data. It moves from the

21 collection of stories and data through interpretation and synthesis to an articulation of expressions of understanding. The use of narrative as a methodology has a long history in literature, history, psychotherapy and theology, and more recently in postcolonial feminist research (Olesen: 2000: 231-32). I also found that it has many resonances with the practice of painting through its emphasis on process. Joy Goodfellow described narrative inquiry as a ‘natural discourse’ that is process oriented, one that allows for sequentiality and elements of place and time to emerge (Goodfellow: 1997: 61-62). She argued that in narrative inquiry, the richness and resonance found within shared stories and metaphor actually ensures a study’s credibility (ibid.: 73). Just as our understanding and personal experiences are contextually based, so is narrative inquiry. Goodfellow recognized that such a methodology brings ‘sight’ together with ‘insight’, what is ‘inside’ the experience, and thus is an affective way to express ‘humanness’ (ibid.: 63-65).

It is this ‘humanness’ that brings subjectivity as well as complexity, specificity and interconnectedness to bear in the stories told by Martin and the women of Utopia. It is important to acknowledge that a story ordinarily tells one person’s viewpoint and memories. But as Annette Kuhn recognized in Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination, although memories are those of one individual, ‘their associations extend far beyond the personal. They spread into an extended network of meanings that bring together the personal with the familial, the cultural, the economic, the social, and the historical’ (A. Kuhn: 1995: 4). This is particularly true in the case of an oral culture such as that of Emily Kngwarray, as I will show in Chapter Three. Stories and memory are a revered and respected part of her Anmatyerr culture and traditions. They are essential for the continuity of knowledge and wisdom, and provide an authority rarely given within non-indigenous culture. But in all cultures, narrative provides a different way of expressing lived and shared experience and what is often otherwise unsayable.

This is especially relevant when exploring the world of lived experience. Max van Manen stated in Researching Lived Experience that using personal

22 experience is a logical place to begin (van Manen: 1990: 54). As well, phenomenological research in experiential terms focusing on particular situations or events in one’s own life provides insight into the possible experiences of others (ibid.). Yet as van Manen acknowledged, all recollections, reflections and descriptions of experiences, be they taped interviews or transcribed conversations about experiences, are already transformations of those experiences (ibid.). But through language and writing, the richness of lived experience can be revealed; the invisible can become visible. Van Manen also recognized that this process is reminiscent of the artistic activity of creating art, where the subject has to be approached again and again, going back and forth between the parts to create a piece that reflects not only the subject but the ‘personal signature’ of the author (ibid.: 131-32). Thus, through the activities of re-writing, reflecting, and re-recognizing, meaning is approached. Writing becomes a reflexive activity that involves not a narcissistic unfolding, but a collective endeavour that allows being itself to be grasped (ibid.: 132).

c. Autobiographical Reference

Iain Chambers recognized that ‘To write, hence to speak and move, is to break the mould of unicity and become part of an ethical movement’ (Chambers: 1990: 115). My life experiences form part of the methodological underpinning of the imbroglio of issues of art practice, connoisseurship, perception, space, place and displacement that I explore in this thesis. From informal conversations I know that my particular experience is not idiosyncratic and is relevant to other people. Often in research the researcher’s interest in the topic is related to their own personal history. Autobiographical information can thus add to an understanding of the subject matter as well as provide transparency as to the researcher’s position. In recent years there has been a trend towards autobiographical studies in postmodern research representation. The term ‘autoethnography’ describes studies connecting the personal to the cultural (Ellis and Bochner: 2000). The inclusion of the researcher’s experience allows her to avoid the adoption of an ‘objective outsider’ viewpoint by incorporating

23 elements of her own life experience when writing about others (Reed-Danahay: 1997: 4). While it is acknowledged that one cannot speak for another person or culture, it has been argued that ‘the voice of the insider is assumed to be more “true” than that of the outsider in current debate’ (ibid.). But the researcher must continually be on guard to avoid the autobiographical inclusion becoming dominant or self-indulgent in the text. It is an integral part of my research that I am an artist with long-standing interests in art, place, perception, psychology and spirituality, and that throughout the writing of this thesis I maintained and thoroughly scrutinized my art practice as I attempted to depict the land around me4. Yet I do not assume an advantageous or ‘insider’ relationship to the work of either Martin or Kngwarray. Knowledge and experience can never be regarded as stable or unified.

A place has also opened for the use of autobiographical references in academic text since the emergence of feminist theory. A change of focus occurred in the 1980’s within feminism, from that of attacking male versions of the world to exploring and reconstructing lost or suppressed records of female experience (Barry: 1995: 122). Feminists have subsequently placed emphasis upon the inclusion of non-literary and historical data such as diaries, memoirs, social and medical histories to facilitate greater understanding of the subject (ibid.: 124). Notable amongst these proponents are Julia Kristeva, Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray who deem not just literature to be important, but language, representation, psychology, psychoanalysis and philosophy (ibid.: 125). Many women authors have struggled to find a suitable style of writing, an ecriture feminine, to allow their voice to be heard and experiment with a free play of meanings within loosened grammatical structures and heightened prose (ibid.: 126-28).

As well, many women artists such as Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois, Jo Spence and Trinh Minh-ha have used autobiographical data to inform their art practices

4 A curated survey exhibition of over sixty of my paintings and installations made between 1982 and 2004 was shown in 2004 at the Penrith Regional Art Gallery in Emu Plains, New South Wales, and then travelled to the Braemar Blue Mountains Contemporary Art Gallery in Springwood, New South Wales. The exhibition, entitled ‘The Ground of Being’, directly addressed issues of place and displacement in my life.

24 and writings. In her book on Eva Hesse, Lucy Lippard extensively quoted large tracts of Hesse’s writing and wove biographical data throughout her text to give an understanding of Hesse’s art practice (Lippard: 1992). Lippard did not apologize for making the text ‘personal’ and quoted Hesse for her reason: ‘My life and art have not been separated. They have been together’ (Hesse, 1968 in Lippard: 1992: 5-6) 5. Autobiography and memory also play an enormous role in the work of Louise Bourgeois. Josef Helfenstein recognized that her work has ‘frequently been considered from the point of view of the autobiographical content that is encoded in it, with reference to the artist’s obsessive analysis of her childhood’ (Helfenstein: 1999: 19). Beatriz Colomina maintained that all of Bourgeois’ work is rooted in memories of spaces she once inhabited (Colomina: 1999: 29). ‘These spaces’, she said, ‘are all domestic and all associated with trauma’ (ibid.). Bourgeois’ own stories in her own words and her biography are central to Colomina’s arguments.

The work of the English artist/photographer Jo Spence also provides a hybrid model for the inclusion of personal autobiography. Her book, Putting Myself in the Picture: A Political, Personal and Photographic Autobiography, is far from conventional (Spence: 1986). Written after a major retrospective of her work, the book intersperses personal memories with an evolving understanding of her life and career as a photographer through a montage of photographs and text. With Rosy Martin, Spence pioneered ‘photo therapy’, a way of examining one’s social and psychic construction both emotionally and theoretically through photography (ibid.: 172-93). She was adamant that her life and photography ‘fed into and off each other’ (ibid.: 12).

Like Jo Spence, Trinh Minh-ha has found her voice through a writing style that is inclusive, non-linear and distinctly feminist. In Woman, Native, Other, a study of post-colonial processes of displacement, Trinh Minh-ha juxtaposes contemporary discourses of women’s studies, anthropology, cultural studies, literary criticism and feminist theory through story-telling, film stills, and a poetic

5 Eva Hesse was an artist who admired Agnes Martin’s work and many of her drawings were clearly influenced by Martin’s grid motif (Lippard: 1992: 203).

25 style of writing. ‘The heart of the matter’, she says, ‘is always somewhere else than where it is supposed to be. … There is no catching, no pushing, no directing, no breaking through, no need for a linear progression which gives the comforting illusion that one knows where one goes’ (Minh-ha: 1989: 1). She fearlessly creates her own form out of formlessness to tackle difficult territories of ethnicity and femininity, identity, authenticity and difference, all the time creating an authoritative voice while giving voice to women and oppressed minorities. She juxtaposes Zen sayings, poems of her own and others, feminist critiques and the life stories of herself and countless other women. The role of storytelling is central to her work. She called story ‘a regenerating force’, ‘the simplest vehicle of truth’ and ‘the natural form for revealing life’; the storyteller ‘an oracle and a bringer of joy’, ‘the living memory of her time, her people’ (ibid.: 123-25). Continually challenging, Minh-ha sees her work as a film-maker and writer to be one of ‘disrupting’ the ‘grand narratives of the human sciences’, a ‘means of survival … where a straight oppositional discourse is no longer sufficient’ (Minh-ha: 1992: 155).

Storytelling, be it autobiographical or biographical, as a form of personal and collective revelation and political irritant, can thus be seen to hold enormous integrity. The path that I have taken in formulating this research, in raising the questions that I do, very much informs my thesis. My life, art practice and experiences of place and displacement provide the context and motivation for this research and are pertinent to the arguments that I make concerning issues of displacement and the art practices of Agnes Martin and Emily Kngwarray. For it was only in a close scrutiny of my own paintings and the process of their creation during this research that previously unrecognised patterns of trauma in my own life became revealed. These patterns uncannily echoed behaviours and qualities of mark making not immediately evident in the lives and paintings of Martin and Kngwarray. To give insight into how displacement and trauma thus became central to my understanding of their work, I present my own story.

26 IV. Discovering the Ground Beneath Me: A Personal Journey a. Sowing the Sublime

1. My English garden, Heaton Moor, Cheshire, August 1992 (photo: Victoria King)

But as any honest geographer will readily admit, mapmaking cannot escape the bias – both in the literal sense of a slanted perspective and in the metaphorical one of a cultural prejudice – of the mapmaker. There is no “view from nowhere” for even the most scrupulously “detached” observer (Jay: 1994: 17-18).

Over a decade, I created a remarkable garden in the north of England that became my sanctuary as well as a place for the birds and animals that made it their home. The garden became my vision and my refuge. There I could experience the colour that was conveyed in the paintings that I loved in museums and galleries. My sensibilities as an artist were informed by a rich legacy of art history, especially the colour and space within the work of Cezanne, Monet, Bonnard and Matisse, and a deep appreciation of ethnographic art closely connected to the land. With each new discovery of an artistic vision that touched my own I felt ecstasy and an ephemeral sense of belonging. But stories are only partial histories. The visions that we see are often illusions; appearances can be deceiving. My hunger for beauty offset often-overwhelming depressions and lack of agency to live elsewhere. I did not

27 wish to be in the north of England but felt trapped in circumstances I felt I could not change.

I had long searched for a congruent subject matter for my art and my intimate garden became the sole content of my paintings as I witnessed and recorded its minute and sublime changes.

2. Victoria King, Flowering, 1986, oil on canvas, 102 x 127 cm (private collection)

Within Cezanne’s words I recognized my own goal:

Shut your eyes, wait, think of nothing. Now open them... one sees nothing but a great coloured undulation. What then? An irradiation and glory of colour. That is what a picture should give us, a warm harmony, an abyss in which the eye is lost, in secret germination, a coloured state of grace (Cezanne in Milner: 1989: 24-25).

This sense of losing oneself and obtaining ‘grace’ was what I had long searched for in spiritual disciplines. In my garden-inspired art practice I combined my secular and spiritual aspirations. Working from vivid memories and transcriptions of extraordinary living colour, I painted prolific evocations of the sublime beauty that was in front of my eyes. Yet there were no long vistas and the English growing season was short. Over the hedge was a reminder of where I was and did not want to be – feeling hopeless and chronically depressed in a provincial northern suburb where I stayed for the sake of my

28 beloved son, Zachary. In the studio, I obsessively painted memories of flowering colour as space without a larger perspective. As a child growing up in America, I had learned endurance and the capacity for close-space vision when I found refuge in a tiny woodland space beyond the fenced boundaries of my suburban home. Decades later this focus proved invaluable in England.

b. On the Edge

In Family Secrets, Annette Kuhn wrote that ‘Although we take stories of childhood and family literally, I think our recourse to this past is a way of reaching for myth, for the story that is deep enough to express the profound feelings we have in the present’ (A. Kuhn: 1995: 1). Through the particularity of the place in which I grew up, depths and layers of meaning resonated through the past to my present. Historically, geographically and psychologically, I grew up on an edge on the Kentucky side of the Ohio River, the crucial dividing line between what was once the southern slave-holding state of Kentucky and the northern free state of Ohio. In 1951 when I was born, discrimination and inequality were still rampant, racism and denial endemic. Segregation placed African-Americans in ghettos, out of sight. Sights were set on financial ambitions and denial was the American Way.

In my family, denial was taken to an extreme. Both my father and my mother were in strong denial of their psychological and physical illnesses and made it clear to me that I must not reveal the ‘family secrets’. Kuhn’s words seemed particularly apt in relation to my own family and youth:

People who live in families make every effort to keep certain things concealed from the rest of the world, and at times from each other as well. Things will be lied about, or simply never mentioned. Sometimes family secrets are so deeply buried that they elude the conscious awareness even of those most closely involved. From the involuntary amnesias of repression to the wilful forgetting of matters it might be less than

29 convenient to recall, secrets inhabit the borderlands of memory (A. Kuhn: 1995: 1-2).

Conversation, intimacy and touch were unknown inside my ostensibly ordinary house, but what it did hold were traumas and terrors that were never mentioned.

My family was immersed in dysfunction without external witnesses. At the age of twenty-one, angry with my homeland for racial injustices and the war in Viet Nam, and feeling a lack of connection with my family, I emigrated to England to study with the spiritual philosopher John Bennett6. After his death I went on to study painting and made a career as an artist and senior lecturer in painting. But in 1993, on a three-month Buddhist retreat in France, I fell in love with an Australian and my world suddenly changed. I soon moved to Australia to be with my new partner, leaving behind my seventeen-year old son with his father. We made our home in a place of great natural beauty on three acres in the Blue Mountains National Park and I began again to paint. I tried to depict the surrounding bush land that inspired me but every gesture seemed inadequate and inappropriate. My newfound appreciation of the paintings of Aboriginal artists, especially Emily Kngwarray, soon clashed with the aesthetic colour- space language of painting the sublime that I had brought from England.

In the studio, my paintings bore traces of restraint and indecision. I increasingly painted out and erased, and often in desperation pulled colour across surfaces I had worked on for years. These repetitious vertical and horizontal gestures of erasure held physical and psychological intensity. In 1998, I was diagnosed with

6 In 1972, I went to England to study with J.G. Bennett at Sherborne in the Cotswolds. In his seventies, he had undertaken a five-year project of passing on his knowledge and experience to one hundred students each year in a ten-month residential course. Bennett integrated the wisdom of Western and Eastern traditions from his lifetime study with many renowned spiritual teachers. With formidable energy and compassion, he taught each student to develop awareness skills and ‘work on oneself’ through cultivating ‘attention’ to the present moment. The ‘Work’ was an experiential integration of body, mind, emotion and spirit from an eclectic mix of Buddhism, Sufism, esoteric Christianity, Hermeneutics and the Fourth Way teachings of G.I. Gurdjieff. At the end of my course Bennett asked me to stay on to teach art to new students as well as to be part of Coombe Springs Press, a three-person team that published his books and monographs. When Bennett died in 1975, I chose to stay in England.

30 a rare form of ovarian cancer. Only a few months after extensive chemotherapy, through my new friendship with Kngwarray’s niece, Stolen Generation artist Barbara Weir, I began to spend time at Utopia with her. As I learned more of her and Kngwarray’s countrywomen’s culture and its complexities, I became convinced that I should not, for ethical reasons, make any gesture that resembled the surface appearance of Aboriginal paintings. In the studio it became difficult to make any paintings at all.

I was stimulated by the power and beauty of the Utopia artists’ land and art. But I also recognized the only too obvious difficulties of their everyday living situation and witnessed despair. I felt overwhelmed by the injustices I saw and those I heard in the stories they told me. The psychoanalyst Dori Laub recognized that a transferential relationship exists between the telling of trauma and the listening:

[T]he listener to trauma comes to be a participant and co-owner of the traumatic event: through his very listening he comes to partially experience trauma in himself. The relation of the victim to the event of the trauma, therefore, impacts on the relation of the listener to it, and the latter comes to feel the bewilderment, injury, confusion, dread and conflicts that the trauma victim feels (Laub: 1991: 57-58)7.

I believe that through the legacy of my own traumatic upbringing, together with my illness and witnessing the suffering of the people of Utopia, I soon became consumed by a sense of grief, confusion, guilt, privilege and helplessness. The walls of my home filled with Central Desert Aboriginal paintings but not a single painting of my own. Increasingly in the studio I erased and over-painted, continually and ruthlessly editing not just my work but myself. ‘Art’ as I knew it had ground to a halt.

7 Dori Laub is a cofounder of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale, an interviewer of the survivors who give testimony, a psychoanalyst who treats Holocaust survivors and their children, and a child survivor of the Holocaust (Laub: 1991: 58).

31 c. Unexpected Revelations

In England I was immersed in a painterly tradition unashamedly informed by modernist aesthetics and felt a strong sense of belonging. Empathetic to injustices of the world, those injustices seemed far removed from my experience. After spending time at Utopia, each mark I made seemed to reflect an ethical dilemma. Each line or dot I made upon my canvas felt like theft. This place, for which I had given up so much, held no sense of belonging for me. I was deeply in denial of the effects that the major displacements in my life had had upon me. I could only feel this country’s contested sense of place.

I continually confronted unrelenting complexities about having a sense of place in Australia. Even in my own garden the ground had become suspect. The exotic garden I once loved that surrounded the house felt inappropriate to ecological discourses (despite the fact that native creatures had developed a voracious taste for it) and if it were not so extensive, I would have replaced it in its entirety with native plants. Still drawn to the diversity of the natural world, I felt guilty at having introduced species in Australia’s fragile ecosystem. I could no longer countenance the simplicity of a worldview based as mine once was simply on the exquisite colours of flowers or sublime vistas.

Yet a research trip to the United States and England at the end of 2002 provided insights contrary to my expectations. On my visit to Agnes Martin in Taos, I discovered for the first time the remarkable land and indigenous presence of the South West of America and was humbled by the strength and appropriateness of her presence there. On visiting Kentucky, I felt previously repressed feelings of connection that laid rest some of the anger I had long carried. In England I was delighted to find that my son had matured into a caring and responsible adult and was involved in a meaningful and loving relationship. I was also surprised to experience a sense of claustrophobia from the lack of space on that small island, and once loved gardens such as Sissinghurst no longer held my interest. The trip affirmed to me that Australia was my home and some remnants of my past could now be let go. Previous longings and regrets

32 were dissolving in the reality and recognition that I had been discretely but profoundly involved in place-making.

d. Understanding Ground

3. Victoria King, bones, 2003, acrylic on three canvas panels, 35 x 27.5 cm, 35 x 27.5 cm, 75 x 36.5 cm, collection of the artist

In my studio on my return, I began to consciously acknowledge the process of erasure within my paintings. My gestures had become essentialized and colour had slowly drained away from both my canvas grounds and gestures. The work no longer relied on high-key contrasts. Yet I continued to see these canvases as failures until gradually their beauty and spaciousness were revealed. Intriguingly, without intention, their muted colour had begun to echo the neutral colours of the bush and my own skin colour. I witnessed the colours become a hybrid middle ground between black and white.

‘Ground’ took on a new dimension. The ground of my canvas, created through multiple erasures, became more than space or void but a subject in itself (figure 3). Paradoxically only when I accepted the process of erasure did I begin to feel an authentic relationship between my art practice and myself. I discovered that what lay behind the erasures was a fear of the pain associated with the loss of important places and relationships held in those places. Only when those were confronted could I begin to look at how much I had been in denial and move forward. As I researched ‘ground’ in all its aspects for this thesis what was

33 background slowly came to the fore, and in that process, gesture and ground were made equal. Previously I had explored the haptic gesture as a means to create art. Now the ground of the canvas took on the significance of being a place for my own presence and embodied engagement. I discovered a different ‘here’, not ‘there’, vulnerable yet grounded in the present when I finally slowed down the process of ‘art’ making. When I stopped to include the erasures, the pain and fear that had been obscuring and issuing from my past, a new place emerged. I realized that place must include an intimate present and past, an embodied relationship with time and space.

At the same time, in the centre of Australia, in a community peripheral to the lives of most Australians, this process had begun to unfold through my engagement with the women of Utopia. As I collected their stories and witnessed their strength and suffering, I was forced to acknowledge the extent of their displacement and in turn my denial of my own displacement, suffering and ancestors. I began to bear witness to what my affinity with beauty and the sublime in art and nature had repressed in my life. Thus as I struggled to come to terms with the complex situation and displacement of the Utopia women, I simultaneously found myself deeply involved in a process of mourning8. Distance was no longer a safe and viable option.

In 1974, Emmanuel Levinas spoke of the nature of the move towards being, towards oneself and other. He said that this process of relationship occurs ‘in the risky uncovering of oneself, in sincerity, the breaking up of inwardness and the abandon of all shelter, exposure to traumas, vulnerabilities’ (Levinas in Princenthal, Basualdo and Huyssen: 2000: 122). In Australia, I have been moved to open myself more deeply, become more vulnerable, and confront with empathy my own and others’ trauma. Through trauma a process of erasure and silence had become entrenched in my life and studio practice. My paintings had once given the appearance of ‘art’ but could not hold the depth of inclusion of

8 Annette Kuhn noted that Freud portrayed the process of mourning as a passionate or hyper- remembering of all the memories bound up with the person we have lost or some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as fatherland, liberty or an ideal (Kuhn: 1995: 105).

34 myself that I have come to require. With the acceptance of the hybrid ground of this place where I now live and my displacements, paintings now slowly emerge as an affirmation of an embodied present and a complex past. A place has now emerged for a new kind of courage and action as I express my existence, firmly located in the present yet in full acknowledgement of the past. This is a ground to testify to both presence and absence. Sculptor Doris Salcedo recognized the importance of displacement: ‘Displaced is the most precise word to describe the position of the contemporary artist. Displacement … generates tension and conflict, but I believe that from the position of displacement art derives its most powerful expression’ (Salcedo in Princenthal: 2000: 35).

Art can be a radical action; every gesture, if consciously made, is an act of taking up space, a defiant outward gesture that is an affirmation of oneself as an irritant within a society that is dominated by an economic rationalist mentality. Continually the artist must be aware of the aestheticization and commodification of art. Because of my experiences of the complexities surrounding place affiliation and Aboriginal art, it became a matter of urgency for me to investigate the problem of the aestheticization of art. The insights I gained through a candid exploration of the repetition and erasure in my art practice led to an exploration of issues of place and displacement in the lives and work of Martin and Kngwarray. I chose Martin because of her distinctive relationship with New Mexico as well as because her paintings epitomize modernist sensibilities that had formatively influenced me. Her life and work had long resonated within me and presented conundrums that I felt had not previously been critically addressed. I chose Kngwarray as a case study because she was an important elder for her people and country as well as being an artist whose paintings I held in the highest regard. Her work, more than any other Australian artist, intrigued me. Yet Germaine Greer’s recognition had become increasingly clear to me: ‘All the contradictions, prejudices and injustices of the system coalesce in Emily Kame Kngwarreye’ (Greer: 1997: 5). While enormous cultural and artistic differences exist between Martin and Kngwarray, they each are outstanding artists whose lives and paintings epitomize the complexities surrounding place and displacement.

35 V. Sources of Material

Max van Manen recognized that because artists are involved in giving shape to their lived experience, the products of their art are themselves ‘lived experiences transformed into transcended configurations’ (van Manen: 1990: 74). The often highly restrained ‘transcended configurations’ of the paintings of Martin and Kngwarray hold strong traces of their lives. Through insights that came through my own art practice, I have respectfully attempted to provide a space for their paintings to communicate the importance of the interconnection between person and place. Through an analysis of the literature available on their work, time spent in their places, deep listening to their stories, phenomenological studies of their paintings and research into the growing field of place studies, I present a multi-layered study of their art and lives.

There is an extensive literature available on Agnes Martin including the considerable body of her own writings that exist in a volume that was published to coincide with a major 1992 Whitney Museum retrospective exhibition of her paintings in New York9. Yet in 1992, Rosalind Krauss wrote that Kasha Linville’s 1971 phenomenological reading of Martin’s paintings was the only critical discourse to exist on her work (Krauss: 1992: 158; Linville: 1971: 72-73). While many published interviews and accounts of her life exist due to the status of her long and successful art career and the quasi-mystical status that she holds in the art world, few attempt a critical analysis.

During this research I have travelled to the United States and England to study her paintings, particularly those in the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, the Museum of Fine Art in Santa Fe, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate Modern Collection in London. I also made repeated visits to see her two paintings and suite of prints held by the Australian National Gallery in Canberra. In July 2002, I was extremely fortunate to spend a day in Taos with Martin at her home, at lunch with her at her favourite restaurant, and in her studio surrounded by fifteen of her most recent large canvases. Her reserved,

9 This exhibition toured throughout the United States and travelled to Madrid until 1994.

36 quiet nature and generous attitude, and her uncanny combination of innocence and experience allowed me to glimpse repeatedly her very personal way of being in the world. She reflected thoughtfully upon each painting as I placed it on the wall before her. For over a month on this trip, I explored and spent time in the places in New Mexico that were important to Martin. As I quietly sat in these places, they spoke eloquently of the more-than-human world and revealed strong resonances with her paintings.

After my visit with Martin, I was given a copy of a documentary film (DVD) on her art that has been an invaluable resource (Lance: 2003). Made by the producer/director Mary Lance between 1998 and 2002, it contains rare and extensive interviews with Martin, archival footage and images of over five decades of her paintings. On it, Martin was remarkably open about her childhood, her philosophical beliefs, her life as an artist and working methods. It is a revealing and intense record of her life and in keeping with her chosen path of solitude, she alone appears in it. It provides a unique opportunity to observe her during the four years of filming. Through repeated viewing of the candid monologues, it is possible to gain insight into her way of being in the world through her gestures and voice. It allowed the time that I spent with her to remain vivid in my memory.

For my research on the chapters on Emily Kngwarray, I have utilized the many critical writings on Aboriginal art and indigenous issues. But due no doubt to difficulties in translation, there is extremely little published material in Kngwarray’s own words that articulates the relationship between her acrylic painting and her country. I never met Kngwarray personally but my research has been substantially informed by original material that I collected during my visits to Utopia between 1998 and 2000 prior to undertaking my PhD. This took the form of oral documentation that I transcribed from tape recordings of stories told to me by Kngwarray’s niece, Barbara Weir, and ten other Alhalker and Atnangker women closely connected to Kngwarray with their approval and

37 permission10. It was extremely important to me that the women’s stories were kept in their own words to give voice to their experience and not to appropriate their knowledge11. As I recorded what the women wished to tell of their lives, Dreamings and culture, stories emerged that reflected their country, personal integrity and survival. The stories also had undeniable political implications. These narratives were by their nature ‘cluttered’ rather than the ‘uncluttered’ history of a nation’s past that is normally seen as singular and dominant12.

I have been able to draw on my memories of Utopia as well as extensive journal material that I wrote while there on my visits with Barbara Weir of my impressions of the land and its people. Kngwarray’s countrywomen’s generosity was considerable and their care unforgettable. I feel privileged to have been trusted as they shared their love of their land, their knowledge and wisdom. I experienced time and space differently in that remarkable place. I also spent considerable periods of time with Kngwarray’s paintings (as well as those by other Aboriginal artists) in public and private galleries, notably in Alice Springs, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. It was in these spaces that I witnessed repeatedly a troubling lack of information available either as descriptions on the walls or offered by gallery staff that could allow the viewer to gain a larger perspective about historical injustices towards Aboriginal people and the present conditions of the lives of the artists. The display and marketing of the artworks rarely gives any indication of the conditions of their making. While the artists understandably wish to protect the secret/sacred aspects of their Dreamings and their privacy, I hope that my research contributes to a consideration of a range of display modes for galleries and museums other than the white cube that pulls the work into a universalist space.

10 Barbara Weir fluently speaks Anmatyerr and Alyawarr and translated where necessary. The linguist and writer Jenny Green kindly proofread the women’s stories for me. Each of the Utopia women that I interviewed gave me their permission to publish their stories but the material remains inalienably theirs. 11 I was influenced by Gayatri Spivak’s writings on the Subaltern Group and her view that you have to learn to become a listener and an enabler (Spivak: 1988a; Spivak: 1988b). 12 This way of working was established by the cultural historian Shahid Amin and the Subaltern Group and is described by Amin in his book Event, Metaphor and Memory: Chauri Chaura 1922-1992 (Amin: 1995: 1-6). Amin used the terms ‘cluttered’ and ‘uncluttered’ in his talk at the University of Technology of Sydney conference ‘Remembering/Forgetting: Writing Histories in Asia, Australia and the Pacific’ held in Sydney in 2001.

38 VI. Chapter Synopses

In Chapter Two, ‘Mapping the Mesa: the Life and Work of Agnes Martin’, I describe the mesa country where Martin lives in New Mexico. I explore the themes of absence and movement that were extremely strong forces in her life before she settled there at the age of fifty-seven. I maintain that their traces can still be detected in her paintings. I examine the evolution of her work from its early figurative and biomorphic stages to her discovery of the linear motif that she made her own. I look in depth at her art practice and her emphasis on process, her spiritual and philosophical beliefs, and her professed and actual relationship to nature and place through her own writings. While she describes her work as ‘classical’ abstraction, I explore the resonances between the land of New Mexico, her relationship to it and her painting.

I complexify the discussions of Martin’s work by presenting evidence of seminal losses within her life that I argue bear strongly upon her art practice and life, and the repetition that characterizes both. Through a study of her distinctive use of the haptic and the ubiquitous repetition of her linear motif on her canvases, I present the case that issues of place and displacement are equally important in understanding her work and life.

In Chapter Three, ‘Maps of Experience: the Life and Work of Emily Kame Kngwarray’, I present my impressions and observations of the Aboriginal outstations of Utopia where Kngwarray painted the works for which she became well known. I provide cultural and historical contexts in order to understand her people’s displacement, their struggles for Land Rights and how they now live. Strong ties to country can be understood through patrilineal and matrilineal lineages and kinship connections, and I establish how each person holds specific Dreamings and custodianship responsibilities for country. Through ancestral stories told to me by Kngwarray’s countrywomen I explore how land is seen and expressed by Anmatyerr and Alyawarr people. I investigate the profound connections between body and ground that are celebrated by the

39 women in their body painting and dances for women’s ceremonies, awely, and more recently in their batik and acrylic paintings.

In order to understand the connection between Aboriginal art, place and displacement, I look at the role of repetition, performance and custodianship in ceremonies and in the paintings of Utopia women artists. The correlations between ceremonial body painting and contemporary painting on canvas provide interesting ground to question whether the term ‘contemporary art’ is sufficient to express the particularity of the dots and lines used by the Utopia women to express their relationship to their country. I examine the contemporary and cultural use of dotting and lines, and present a case for a new understanding of it. I take into account many of the complexities that surround Kngwarray’s paintings, her remarkably prolific output of paintings and her relationship to dealers.

In Chapter Four, ‘Perceptions of Art and the Land’, I bring together and explore further the themes of place and displacement that have emerged in the two previous chapters. Discussions of perception and embodiment play a major role in this chapter as I examine how art and the land are perceived. Through coming to understand what occurred in my own art practice through displacement and trauma, I challenge conventional readings of both Agnes Martin and Emily Kngwarray’s paintings. I consider the artists’ individual intentions in creating the surface shimmer of their work and the implications of being mesmerized by it. This is particularly pertinent in the case of Aboriginal paintings. I explore significant cultural and historical issues and the ‘selective forgetting’ that occur when Aboriginal paintings are viewed on the walls of a gallery. I question whether the legacy of ‘primitivism’ still permeates viewers’ perceptions of Aboriginal art and look at matters of commodification and appropriation. A contested ground exists in regard to both Aboriginal paintings and the land, and this holds political implications for contemporary Australia.

In Chapter Five, ‘Different Visions’, I question what lies behind the yearning to merge into an experience of the sublime in front of the paintings of both Agnes

40 Martin and Emily Kngwarray. I explore repetition in the artists’ practices and lives and the need to recognise the role of displacement. I investigate the importance of bearing witness to loss and confronting denial. I examine ‘emptiness’, process and ‘presentness’ as themes in art and spirituality in relation to the land. I look at differences in perception between space and place, and how these are pertinent to and inform a discussion of the importance of place affiliation. I propose different ways to attune to places in greater depth, at the same time as recognizing the power and complexities of a place called ‘home’.

Within the Appendix, a skin name chart has been provided. I have also included a family tree that Barbara Weir patiently described to me to show the relationships between Emily Kngwarray and the Alhalker and Atnangker women whose stories I collected.

Through my study of Agnes Martin and Emily Kngwarray’s work I present evidence of the importance of an embodied connection to place through all the senses, an acknowledgement of ancestors and the effects of the past upon the present and future. I show how a larger perspective of place and displacement can provide not only the scope for an extremely relevant art practice, but also has far reaching local and global, personal and collective psychological, cultural, political and environmental implications. For as physicist Fritjof Capra boldly stated, ultimately all the problems facing the world are a result of the same crisis: ‘a crisis which is largely of perception. Only if we perceive the world differently, will we be able to act differently’ (Capra: 1992: 116).

41 CHAPTER TWO

MAPPING THE MESA: THE LIFE AND WORK OF AGNES MARTIN

I. Places of Departure a. Arriving at Taos

Where do the roads lead? It is not where we expected. (Judith Wright: 1994: 14)

4. Taos, New Mexico, 2002 (photo: Victoria King)

In New Mexico, Taos is flanked east and west by grey-black mountain ranges whose undulating silhouettes dissolve into expansive cobalt skies. Soft pink- orange plains are dotted with aromatic grey-blue junipers and sagebrush. Mesas rest flattened on the horizon. The sounds of insects reverberate through the land and the body as the heat of the sun shimmers off the baked ground. This remarkable place touches all of the senses. Paul Cezanne once declared that a painting contains within itself even the smell of the landscape (Cezanne in Gasquet: 1991: 151). Agnes Martin’s paintings echo this place that has nourished and sustained her. Her work provides visual metaphors about being human and dwelling in place through vertical and horizontal lines that confirm our own upright stance in relationship to the earth’s horizon.

42 It was in her home in Taos that we began our conversation1. We sat in two rocking chairs, she beneath a small Aboriginal Arnhem Land cross-hatched bark painting and myself beneath a dark, roughly carved Hispanic wooden cross. In the next room was a small painting of a farm, a gift from the late painter Georgia O’Keefe, who, like Martin, found artistic and spiritual fulfilment in New Mexico. After our lunch together, we drove to her nearby adobe-style studio where our dialogue continued. We entered between two hand-carved wooden spiral pillars; a small, square window painted violet-blue nestled next to the door. Her white studio consisted of two connecting rooms, each perhaps seven metres square, with two rocking chairs. The perfect light from an overhead skylight created an intimate, calm and meditative space. She told me that this was the smallest studio space that she has ever had. In one corner were stacked fifteen new five-foot square paintings ready for her next New York PaceWildenstein exhibition. She sat down in a rocking chair and instructed me to begin to individually hang each canvas from hooks on a painting wall that held a pastel rain of drips from countless brushstrokes. Each minimal canvas resonated with the colours and space of the vast arid land that surrounded us. An atmospheric presence radiated from the bands of pale washes that were undeniably reminiscent of being immersed in desert light.

Desert landscapes often speak to the soul. Seekers of all faiths have been called to such places where minimal outward distractions allow the mind to focus on inner contemplative states. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, spiritual seekers from the early Desert Fathers, St. Jerome and Meister Eckhart have found that the austere spaciousness of the desert is conducive to a mystical life. Rudoph Otto noted that ‘Empty distance, remote vacancy, is, as it were, the sublime in the horizontal. The wide stretching desert, the boundless uniformity of the steppe have real sublimity and even in us Westerners they set vibrating chords of the numinous’ (Otto in Haynes: 1998: 28-29). ‘The sublime in the horizontal’ is an apt description of Agnes Martin’s work. In this harsh yet sensual landscape she found beauty, inspiration and the solitude that has been

1 This meeting occurred on 19 July 2002. It was arranged through David Witt, Director of the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos.

43 essential for her distinctive artistic, philosophical and spiritual vision. From this place she said that ‘The times when you are not aware of beauty and happiness you are not alive’ (Martin, 1979: 1991: 135, italics in original). In order to understand the complexity of what lay behind this emphatic statement, it is necessary to look at the formative landscapes of her life.

b. Absence and Movement

Place deeply enters the psyche at a very young age2. Agnes Martin was born in 1912 in Maklin, Saskatchewan, Canada, a place of open plains of summer grains and delicate wild flowers. Her father was a wheat farmer and at an early age her peripheral vision would have been filled with flat horizontal fields of the tall verticals of shimmering grasses. When she was only two years old, her father died, an event that perhaps further imprinted this landscape upon her.

My father died and we left Saskatchewan when I was, I think I was four, maybe three years old, but I do remember. It’s hard to believe but I do remember that it was so flat that you could see the curvature of the earth. When a train came into vision at nine o’clock in the morning it was still leaving at noon. You could see it leaving; it took that long to go across the prairie (Martin in Lance: 2003: documentary film).

After her father’s death, her mother took her four young children to live for two years with their maternal grandfather, a devout Scottish Presbyterian of whom Martin was immensely fond3. Martin said that he gave her the mental and physical space to have ‘a free life’ while allowing the children to express their own potential, never criticizing or interfering (Martin in Simon: 1996: 87). His

2 Many Australian Aboriginals believe that the influences of a place enter each person at the place of conception (further discussed in Chapter Three) (Swain: 1993: 39). David Abram believes cadences of place enter into our psyche before language (Abram: 1996: 74-76). 3 In our interview, Martin went on to say: ‘My relatives were from Scotland. I went back to see if I could find any but they were all dead. Some of them went to New Zealand, they were whalers, and others to Canada. They were from the Isle of Skye’ (Martin: July 2002: personal interview).

44 appreciation of the Bible would have been implanted within Martin at this early age and she has continued to find inspiration in it: ‘I quote from the Bible because it’s so poetic, though I’m not a Christian’ (Martin in Sandler: 1993: 12). A passage in Isaiah that evokes life’s unending cycle of birth and death through the image of fading grasses and flowers particularly inspired her:

The voice said, Cry. And he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field: The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: because the spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it: surely the people is grass. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever (Isaiah: 40, 6-8, The Bible, King James Version, italics in original).

5. Agnes Martin, Untitled, 1963, ink on paper, 21 x 21 cm, private collection

The unusual imagery and phrasing of the words ‘All people are grass’ provided Martin with the inspiration to cross her signature hand-drawn horizontal pencil lines with vertical lines. This simple intersection of space and ground created the empty rectangles of her grid paintings. She wrote in 1972:

With these rectangles I didn’t know at the time exactly why I painted those rectangles From Isaiah, about inspiration

45 “Surely the people is grass…” … Then I drew all those rectangles All the people were like those rectangles They are just like grass… (Martin, 1972: 1991: 39)

The recognition of the inherent beauty held within a field of grasses could have been sown in her father’s wheat fields at Maklin. To a small child’s gaze the daunting scale and repetition of vertical grasses and horizontal furrowed fields would have seemed endless. An image flashes into the mind of a peopled landscape; individuals standing in a vast open field, silent, together yet separate in grief or resolution. Within the poetic words of Isaiah, she may have found consolation for her father’s otherwise unfathomable death through an acknowledgment of nature’s ephemerality. Person and vertical become one: ‘the people is grass’. In the deceptively simple motif of a hand-drawn grid, memory and inspiration are fused. As she searched for a larger perspective within her life, real and metaphorical grasses continued to provide insight. In profound yet self-revelatory words, she wrote in 1972:

My painting is about impotence We are ineffectual In a big picture a blade of grass amounts to not very much Worries fall off you when you can believe that… (ibid.: 40)

The horizontal and vertical lines of Martin’s paintings hold profound emptiness and perseverance. She understood her place within a larger perspective.

Absence and movement are major themes and characteristics of Martin’s work and life. Her early childhood was unsettled. In 1916, just two years after the death of her father, she had to leave her beloved grandfather when her mother moved with her children to Calgary, Alberta. The family moved again in 1919 to Vancouver, British Columbia. To this day she has fond memories of that place:

Vancouver is a wonderful place to be in your youth. There are beaches all around. Everybody can walk to the beach. We swam every day. I actually fished every day. There’s everything, sailing and skiing. Hiking in the mountains. And now that I’m old, I think that hiking and camping in the mountains is one of my best memories (Martin in Lance: 2003: documentary film).

In 1931, Martin went to America to help her sister in Bellingham, Washington, and subsequently studied there to become a teacher, graduating in 1937. In 1941, she went to New York to Columbia University’s Teacher’s College for a year, and stayed to teach and paint until 1946. Her first encounter with New Mexico was in the fall of 1946 at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. In the following year she attended a summer school in Taos. In 1950, her sense of belonging in America was strong enough for her to take up American citizenship. She returned to Columbia University in 1951 to take her Masters of Arts degree but in the fall of 1952 left for Oregon to teach at Eastern Oregon College in La Grande. She returned to Columbia in 1954 for post-graduate study before leaving for Taos in the fall. There she stayed for three years before returning to New York for a decade. She continued this pattern of movement between New York and the western states of America until 1967.

Dore Ashton noted that the great prairies of Martin’s formative years ‘endowed her with an undying hunger for spaces’ (Ashton: 1977: 7). From the fall of 1954 to 1957, Martin lived in Taos, deeply connected to the land but living a life of extreme poverty. When she first arrived, Taos was a natural haven, a small ‘primitive’ town that had attracted artists since the turn of the century (Martin: July 2002: personal interview). Artists there were beginning to be strongly influenced by Abstract Expressionism and she soon became part of a small group of artists who drew their inspiration from nature 4. Yet she was adamant in our conversation that she was attracted to Taos because of its climate.

4 A group that included Louis Ribak, Bea Mandelman, Wolcott and Georgett Ely, Clay Spohn, Dorothy Brett, Earl Stroh, and Edward Corbett (Haskell: 1992b: 98-99; Borden: 1973: 40).

I was brought up by the sea and loved it. I thought the mountains would compensate for the sea but they don’t. I came here for the climate. I like the climate; it’s like this all year round…. Taos was very different, not so many crowds…. There are a thousand artists in Taos [now], an artist’s colony since the 1800’s. But I came for the climate (ibid.).

During the summers of 1956 and 1957, the influential New York gallery owner Betty Parsons and the artist Kenzo Okado visited the Santa Fe area and were impressed with Martin’s work. Parsons presented her with the opportunity to exhibit at her gallery if she returned to New York and in 1957 she was lured back for a decade. New York was a striking contrast to Taos with its very different sense of place, energy and purpose. Artist Ann Wilson wrote of their time together in New York:

[W]e were completely absorbed in our work and in a great emergence in visual and performance art. The impetus from the shock waves of the Second World War, existential thought, concepts emerging from Zen Buddhism, and the pause given to ideas about the purpose of life in the then important contemplation of the atomic bomb was what distinguished us from earlier, smaller American artists’ groups (A. Wilson: 1998: 20).

In lower Manhattan, Martin chose the Coenties Slip area to live and work, a place of great character with formidable 19th century buildings associated with the area’s shipbuilding past. Her short foray into sculptural assemblages occurred here with paraphernalia she found in her loft (Cotter: 1993: 95). Her neighbours included many prominent local artists such as Robert Indiana, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Lenore Tawney, Ann Wilson and Jack Youngerman, many of whom were her friends (Haskell: 1992: 101). Yet one can imagine her endlessly gazing out from the large windows of her loft at the mesmerizing horizontal shimmer of the Hudson River for inspiration and perhaps as consolation for the loss of New Mexico’s vistas and natural beauty.

48 c. A Search for Direction

It is difficult to visualize Agnes Martin in the frenetic urban environment of New York despite her artistic successes in the decade that she lived there. With her affinity for the open spaces of New Mexico, she appears displaced in a place that was so all consuming. Yet she had an affinity with her Coenties Slip studio and the local art community that would have given her a sense of belonging.

I had a perfect loft… It was 125 feet long, 30 feet wide. Windows right across on the river. And up the side it had two sky-lights. A beamed ceiling that was 14 feet high…. [It was on] the fifth – the top [floor]. Honestly, I could see the expressions on the faces of the sailors, it was so close to the river (Martin in Simon: 1996: 89).

This evocative description of her ‘perfect’ loft space and its large windows with views of the river conveys a quality of spaciousness and refuge that she required to maintain the contemplative inner life that was important to her. Dore Ashton recalled that Martin’s temperament ‘inclined her to solitude’ whether in city loft, desert or mountains (Ashton: 1977: 8).

But in 1967, Martin received a notice that her studio was to be torn down. She said, ‘I lived there for ten years and then they said they were going to tear the building down. I couldn’t imagine living any place else in New York so I left’ (Martin in Lance: 2003: documentary film). Yet discontent had already set in. In a 1991 interview with Marja Bloem, Martin revealed for the first time that ‘when a massive building went up just in front of the window of her studio shutting off her view of the water, the East River, it was clear that she had to go’ (Bloem: 1991: 34). Her need to gaze out upon this view was clearly essential to her well- being and had sustained her during her time in New York. She had also been experiencing a strong emotional conflict that she linked to her art. ‘Every day I suddenly felt I wanted to die and it was connected with painting’ (Martin in Poirier and Necol: 1983: 132). In 1981, Martin described her confusion:

49 I could no longer stay [in New York City] so I had to leave, you see. I suppose you could say I wasn’t up to the demands and everything, the life I had to live there. But there was something else: that I came to a place of recognition of confusion that had to be solved. I had to have time and nobody’s going to give you time where I was. So I had to leave, but I also think it’s just like painting, I waited patiently for the, I don’t know, just something like permission to leave (Martin in Horsfield: 1981: 1).

She spoke of this time in another interview in 1976.

At that time, I had quite a common complaint of artists – especially in America. It seemed to have been something that happens to all of us. From an over-developed sense of responsibility, we sort of cave in. We suffer terrible confusion. You see, it’s the pressure in the art field in America (Martin in Gruen: 1976: 94).

It is clear that Martin’s emotional state was a major contribution to her decision to leave New York and the art world whose intense centre was undoubtedly focussed there. The responsibility and pressure that she was experiencing had reached a critical point. She once made a revealing comment about ‘responsibility’ in relation to Mark Rothko: ‘He only committed suicide out of remorse, from having money, fame, and therefore a terrible responsibility’ (Martin in A. Wilson: 1998: 39)5. In 1972, she had referred to this sense of ‘responsibility’ when she said, ‘People get what they need from a painting, the painter need not die because of responsibility’ (Martin, 1972: 1991: 36). Yet her admission of her own daily longing for death implies that she had reached a state of desperation. She was at a point of crisis and the notice of the loss of her studio provided the impetus for action. A fateful synchronicity occurred the following day.

5 Rothko was an artist Martin knew personally. They both exhibited at the Betty Parsons Gallery (Bloem: 1991: 35).

50 I got a notice they were tearing down my studio. I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t like it anywhere else in New York. The next day I won a prize for my painting so I went to Detroit. I took the $5000 to Detroit and went to a dealer and said, “I want the best pick-up and camper that you have” (Martin: July 2002: personal interview).

But where to go?

I left New York and travelled for about a year and a half, waiting for some inspiration. You see, if you live by perception, as all artists must, then you sometimes have to wait for a long time for your mind to tell you the next step to take. I never move without a sort of command from my mind. And so I left New York. I went on a camping trip. I stayed in forest camps up north which could camp three thousand people. But there was nobody there. I was there alone. I enjoyed it. I had this problem, you see, and I had to have my mind to myself. When you’re with other people, your mind isn’t your own. Well… finally you see, I remembered New Mexico. I was there before, but I travelled a long way, as far as I could go, and in every direction (Martin in Gruen: 1976: 93).

Martin was fifty-five years old and a very successful artist creating hard-won mature paintings when she set off alone into the unknown in order to have her mind to herself. Although her decision to leave was amplified by inner and outer rationales, the length and breadth of that remarkable exodus from New York showed the depths of her desperation and determination. She said, ‘I went all over. I drove 6,000 miles in northern Canada alone. I spent almost two years driving around and wondering where to go. I slept in the back of the truck’ (Martin in Spranger: 2002: 22). What stopped her nearly two years of travelling was surprisingly unexpected.

Then I had a vision of an adobe brick. Just the brick. And I thought, that means I should go to New Mexico. So I went to New Mexico…. I was driving though Cuba, New Mexico, and I went to a gas station. I asked the

51 manager if there was anybody that he knew who had land outside of town with a spring. And he said, "Yes, my wife does.” She had 50 acres on top of this mesa (Martin in Simon: 1996: 89).

6. La Portales Mesa, Cuba, New Mexico, 2002 (photo: Victoria King)

Martin paid close attention to her dream vision of the mud brick and followed the inner direction that her mind provided her back to New Mexico and her strong connection with nature. La Portales Mesa became a turning point in her life.

Sometimes, nature calls to you and says, “Come and live with me”. So I decided to experiment with the simple life. I think our culture is orientated towards ego, and winning and overcoming and all of that. Our culture is so chaotic and materialistic. So I decided to experiment with simple living; I went up on top of a mesa that is eight miles long and six miles wide and there was nobody up there and the nearest house was six miles away. There was no electricity and no telephones. I stayed up there for years and became as wise as a Chinese hermit (Martin in Sandler: 1993: 14).

Martin’s decision to ‘experiment with simple living’ on the mesa allowed her the time and space to engage with nature and the land in a way that was deeply contemplative while also being extremely challenging. As she worked with the materials of the land to create her home and studio, she created a strong sense of place and belonging.

52 I’ve only ever built in the natural way… I built two adobe houses in my life. On the mesa at Cuba I made the bricks, six at a time in a wooden frame. Then you stack them in the sun, it only takes two days it’s so hot there. I built my studio out of logs, fifty feet long by twenty-five. I was out driving one day and I came across a truck with a crane and I asked if it were for sale. They said it was. It was only $500. So it was easy building with the logs, I didn’t even have to step on the gas, it just inched them up. I had somebody helping me. I bought the logs; he only charged me fifty cents a foot. They were big logs; it was very cheap. I put a permanent finish on them… and I made a stone fireplace so I know how heavy rocks are. It took me a year and a half to recover (Martin: July 2002: personal interview).

Alone in the sparse beauty of La Portales Mesa, Agnes Martin thoroughly ‘built’ a life on the land, in Heidegger’s sense of ‘dwelling in place’ (Heidegger: 1971: 148). She did not paint for six years after leaving New York but began to write extensively6. In her journals, she combined common sense with an all-pervasive spiritual philosophy in a complex set of ideas that seemed to the art critic Lawrence Alloway to be distinctively American. He noted that they brought together ‘non-institutional revelation, personal modesty, links between the one and the many, the great and the small’, and an attitude to ‘Nature’ to be both ‘approached and transcended, respected and rejected’ (Alloway: 1973b: 36).

Four years after she built a mud brick home to live in, she built a studio and only then began to paint again (Martin in Lance: documentary film: 2003). But three years later in 1977, a familiar theme of loss recurs. ‘The only mistake I made was that they didn’t know exactly where their land was, and I accidentally built on the land that belonged to her [the owner’s] brother. They finally took it back’ (Martin in Simon: 1996: 89). Martin had firmly put down roots on the wide mesa. This reclamation and upheaval had echoes with previous losses of childhood

6 Many of Martin’s writings from this period were published in 1991 in Agnes Martin, Writings/Schriften (Martin: 1991).

53 places and her loft at Coenties Slip. Absence and loss would again reinforce her need to make sense of life, to seek happiness and find peace.

When the time came to leave her home and studio at La Portales Mesa she philosophically recognised that the move could be beneficial. ‘Then I decided that that is not a natural human way of living, to be so isolated, so I came back down [off the mesa]. But it is tempting, isn’t it, when you get out in nature, just to give way to natural living’ (Martin in Sandler: 1993: 14). In 1989, she made an interesting comment about solitude and her time on the mesa:

About that period of solitude. I decided the most important thing, which is that we are in life to find out what life is about, and that in solitude you can’t find it out. So then I came back. I gave it a good try, but I really think that we’re supposed to find out everything about life (Martin: 1989: 23).

At the age of sixty-five, in 1977, Martin left the mesa and moved to Galisteo, New Mexico, and hand-built another adobe house. There she stayed for sixteen years. Only in 1993, at the age of 81, did she leave, returning to Taos where she has since been notably ‘unretiring’ in her prolific output of new paintings7.

7 In 1993 Martin moved to a retirement community in central Taos where she has a studio only a mile away.

54 II. The Evolution of Agnes Martin’s Work a. Figurative and Biomorphic Beginnings

7. Agnes Martin, Landscape-Taos, c. 1947, watercolour on paper, 11 x 15 3/16”, Jonson Gallery of the University Art Museum, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque

During her time in New Mexico during the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, Agnes Martin made figurative paintings: ‘We’d paint the Indians. And I painted flowers and landscapes’ (Martin in Simon: 1996: 88). She would later destroy all these paintings when she discovered the power and potential of abstraction (Spranger: 2002: 21). Her figurative work and subsequent biomorphic explorations were steps in her quest to discover a content and painterly language to convey the beauty and inspiration that she found in New Mexico. From 1952, Martin left behind her use of thick black contour lines and introduced a more delicate language of hieroglyphs. These pictographs were reminiscent of the work of Picasso, Miro, Arp, Gorky, Gottlieb and Baziotes. The natural colours and shapes of the land and nature were strong influences on her work. These early abstractions were the results of slow and painful struggles to distil what Lizzie Borden called an ‘ultimate system of information’ from her earlier figurative painting as it became congruent with her philosophy and experience (Borden: 1973: 39).

8. Agnes Martin, Untitled, 1955, oil on canvas, 46 x 66”, whereabouts unknown

Biomorphic abstraction provided an important transition from rendering a world of outer appearances to the inner focus of her mature linear work. Yve-Alain Bois shed light on biomorphic painting in his writing on Barnett Newman, an artist-writer Martin regarded as a personal friend and mentor. Bois wrote:

Newman is at pains to define a new type of picture: it should not be a design nor “a formal abstraction” of a visual fact, with its overtone of an already-known nature,” which is how he saw Mondrian’s paintings, but it should convey a sense of shape akin to that of the Kwakiutl artist – shape as “a living thing,” as “a vehicle for an abstract thought-complex.” The new painting should be ideographic – and Newman refers to the dictionary to give some precision to his thought: the ideograph is a “character, symbol or figure which suggests the idea of an object without expressing its name,” the ideographic is that which represents “ideas directly and not thought through the medium of their names” (Bois: 1993: 192).

Martin was familiar with the pictographs that had been created by the ancestors of the Native Americans whose land she shared. Throughout the Southwest these essentialized ideographic designs were etched on rock faces with minimal yet dynamic lines that expressed vital cultural, experiential, spiritual and philosophical beliefs.

Between 1954 and 1955, Martin began to develop a more expansive, less illusionistic style of painting that was pervaded by an atmospheric light through

56 thin washes of colour. When she returned to New York in 1957, she continued to paint biomorphic abstractions with the colours and forms of New Mexico. Even as her work was undergoing massive changes, she continued to recall nature and places important to her in the titles of works such as Earth, Desert Rain, Wheat and Tideline.

b. The Plain

9. Agnes Martin, Mountain, c. 1960, ink on paper, 23.8 x 30.2 cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York

I used to paint mountains here in New Mexico and I thought My mountains looked like ant hills I saw the plains driving out of New Mexico and I thought The plain had it Just the plane… (Martin, 1972: 1991: 36-37)

Agnes Martin once had an important moment of inspiration as she drove out of New Mexico. She described it in detail in 1976:

57 One time, I was coming out of the mountains, and having painted the mountains, I came out of this plain, and I thought, Ah! What a relief! (This was just outside of Tulsa.) I thought, This is for me! The expansiveness of it. I sort of surrendered. This plain… it was just like a straight line. It was a horizontal line. And I thought there wasn’t a line that affected me like a horizontal line. Then, I found that the more I drew that line, the happier I got. First I thought it was like the sea… then, I thought it was like singing! Well, I just went to town on this horizontal line. But I didn’t like it without any verticals. And I thought to myself, there aren’t too many verticals I like. But I did put a few in there. Finally, I was putting in almost as many verticals as horizontals (Martin in Gruen: 1976: 94).

Martin literally ‘went to town’ with this new linear language, taking back to New York her vision of the plain that would become the seed of her mature work. She was ready for a change. ‘For twenty years I didn’t paint a painting I liked. I kept throwing them out. I knew I wanted to paint abstract. When I put lines on them they were hardly painting. I didn’t think people would buy them. (Laughing) But they did’ (Martin: July 2002: personal interview). She began to explore perceptual orders and systems and slowly incorporated frontality, formality and balance into her work through experimentation with symmetrical compositions. These works carried the memory and conviction of the moment of their conception with fortuitous timing. For these new paintings now placed her within the major strands of two of the most successful art movements in America: Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism. Thomas McEvilley wrote:

Agnes Martin’s characteristic art began to appear at a moment when the tradition of the abstract sublime, while still alive in the canvases of Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and others, was on the verge of giving way to Minimalism… Because of their moment in art history, [Martin’s] works … were compared to and exhibited with the works of other artists who had been termed Minimalists (McEvilley: 1987: 94).

58 McEvilley believed that the comparison of Martin’s art to Minimalism was rooted in a certain ‘similarity of look, but look alone is an insufficient criterion of such judgements’ (ibid.). Her pared down sensibilities and use of repetition in her paintings resembled those of the Minimalists, but her hand-drawn lines, pale washes and edges were soft rather than hard-edged. She came to regret her one exhibition with a group of Minimalist artists8.

10. Agnes Martin, Untitled/Grey Bird, 1964, ink on paper, 22.9 x 22.9 cm, private collection

I made the mistake of showing with the Minimalists. They had a very definite philosophy. There were non-subjective, that means none of their emotions were displayed in the work of art. They tried to be like, not there, and have the inspiration to come absolutely pure and put down without any interference from them... Ever since [I exhibited with them], people have called me a Minimalist, but I’m not a Minimalist, I’m an Abstract Expressionist (Martin in Lance: 2003: documentary film).

While Martin’s emphasis on subjectivity, feeling and touch were antithetical to Minimalism, these characteristics did indeed link her work to Abstract Expressionism. She believed that

The most important cluster of painters in history were the American Abstract Expressionists. Even though their paintings vary to such an

8 Agnes Martin’s paintings were categorized as being Minimalist at the exhibition ‘Systemic Painting’ held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum New York in 1966. Soon after she declared herself an Abstract Expressionist (Rifkin: 2002: 111).

59 extent, they all gave up the same things. Before their time abstract art was an arrangement of forms in space. They gave up defined space (which resulted in enormous scale) and they gave up forms as expressive in themselves and they gave up all objectivity, making an authentic abstract art possible (Martin in Poirier and Necol: 1983: 132).

Martin acknowledged her debt to the Abstract Expressionists in our meeting: ‘I feel greatly indebted to Barney Newman and Jackson Pollock. They gave up defined space and gained infinite space. They gave up form. It was a great thing’ (Martin: July 2002: personal interview). Within his paintings, Barnett Newman attempted to convey to the viewer ‘the feeling of his own totality, of his own separateness, of his own individuality’ (Barnett Newman, 2002 exhibition wall notes: Tate Modern, London). He was adamant that people view his canvases from a short distance, believing his work could engender feelings of heightened self-awareness (ibid.). In 1949, Newman visited prehistoric Indian mounds in Ohio and wrote: ‘Here are the greatest works of art on the American continent… perhaps the greatest art monuments in the world… Here is the self- evident nature of the artistic act, its utter simplicity’ (Newman, 1949 in R. Hughes: 1997: 469). Jackson Pollock, born in the American West, was also influenced by Native American culture, in particularly Navajo sand painting (R. Hughes: 1997: 468-69). He successfully integrated their horizontality and performative power into the execution of his own work. Through the sheer physicality of his actions upon canvas laid flat on the horizontal plane of the earth, Pollock ruptured the opacity of the Cubist picture plane. This action was groundbreaking in its implications. In particular, in modern life we often forget our fundamental relationship to the ground. Yve-Alain Bois maintained that

Even if one no longer speaks of painting as a “window opened onto the world,” the modernist picture is still conceived as a vertical section that presupposes the viewer’s having forgotten that his or her feet are in the dirt. Art, according to this view, is a sublimatory activity that separates the perceiver from his or her body (Bois and Krauss: 1997: 25).

60 Bois noted that after the impressionists’ ‘exaltation of “pure vision”’, a crisis ‘shook the visual arts’ that is usually associated with the work of Paul Cézanne (ibid.: 26-27). Bois recognized that

It suddenly became clear that the strict demarcation between the realms of the “purely visible” (the verticality of the visual field) and the carnal (the space that our bodies occupy) – a demarcation theorized since the Renaissance by means of the conception of painting as a “window opened onto the world” – was a fiction (ibid.).

Martin developed a close relationship with the earth in New Mexico. Her feet were firmly grounded on the land. Just as she mindfully engaged with the ground of her canvases, so she engaged with the ground of her place, paying close attention to it in all its minutiae and building her adobe homes with it.

Yet she has always painted her work in the more conventional upright position rather than on the ground like some of her Abstract Expressionist forebears. She follows the gravity of the direction of the line or band on the vertical rather than painting across the horizontal in order to avoid the dripping that would in itself be a signifier for much Abstract Expressionist painting (Simon: 1996: 84). Her practice of painting allows maximum stillness for herself and this is often conveyed to the beholder. She wrote in 1974 that ‘My interest is in experience that is wordless and silent, and in the fact that this experience can be expressed for me in art work which is also wordless and silent’ (Martin, 1974: 1991: 89). Michael Auping noted that Martin ‘tapped the metaphysical essence of Abstract Expressionism without resorting to the gestural bravura, existential rhetoric or authoritarian size that became typical of that movement and its 2nd generation followers’ (Auping: 1998: 81). She took Pollock’s mazelike skeins of paint and redirected them into grids of utmost transparency and emptiness, order and calm. With quiet perseverance she establishes a field of stillness with her hand- drawn lines and creates a space that offers the viewer an invitation to re-inhabit the space of their own body. Like the plains of New Mexico, her paintings offer a place for contemplation and for memories of beauty and perfection.

61 c. Reading the Present Moment i. Participation

11. Agnes Martin Gallery, Harwood Foundation Museum, Taos, New Mexico, 2002 (photo: Victoria King)

To see Agnes Martin’s work in the landscape of their creation is a rare pleasure. Seven of her paintings hang in an octagonal gallery specially designed for them at the Harwood Foundation Museum in Taos9. The presentation is stunning; the space created is intimate and accessible. In a white room with warm oak floors and a cylindrical skylight, each five-foot square painting is spaciously hung on its own wall. A minimal wooden seating cluster designed by Donald Judd of four squares the colour of autumnal aspen leaves sits in the centre. The dialogue between the paintings and the space of the gallery is truly outstanding. One is reminded of Barnett Newman’s Stations of the Cross in the National Gallery in Washington or of the Rothko Chapel in Houston.

These paintings are a series united through scale and colour with horizontal bands of sensuous washes of pale blue-whites and whitened-blues. The artist’s hand is evident in the calm and discreet characteristic hand-drawn graphite lines and subtle brush strokes. The bands differ in width and ratio, giving each painting its own unique personality. Their simplicity is startling and uncompromising, and each has a profound presence and maturity. These are

9 Martin painted these works between 1993 and 1994 and gave them as a gift to the museum in 1994. She titled them in the summer of 2000 when the new gallery was opened.

62 rigorous, disciplined paintings that, like clouds, hold form and formlessness. The ethereal yet substantial bands continually change colour in the natural light from the overhead skylight. A separate sense of self is lost as one merges into each painting in turn and as the painting merges into the space of the room. In an enigmatic yet succinct statement Martin once remarked, ‘I’m not trying to describe anything. I’m looking for a perfect space’ (Martin in Auping: 1998: 84). In each of these paintings she is successful in creating an intimate space that breathes light and holds the attention, a middle ground that can be entered and negotiated. The room becomes an interactive place where person, painting and space fluidly merge.

A sense of joy and natural simplicity is conveyed by the titles of these paintings: Playing, Innocence, Ordinary Happiness, Perfect Day, Friendship, Love, Lovely Life. But while the space within each painting and the room is meditative and calm, these are not transcendental paintings. A statement Martin made in 1981 gives insight into her intention: ‘Painting is not making paintings: it is a development of awareness. And with this developing awareness your work changes’ (Martin in Horsfield: 1981: 1). Erich Franz wrote of the experience of viewing her paintings: ‘These movements of perception are certainly not without meaning. Yet they do not have a meaning, they are a meaning – in the sensual experience of their performance’ (Franz: 1990: 54, italics in the original).

At first glance the paintings’ simplicity and stillness is deceptive. The awareness and concentration required to maintain the consistency of lines and brush strokes is tangible yet they appear effortless and without struggle. She admitted to me that these qualities were extremely difficult to achieve, and in a 2003 documentary her intense concentration is evident while she is painting (Martin: personal interview: July 2003; Martin in Lance: 2003: documentary film). The surfaces of her paintings are luminous and radiant light emanates from them. This is an active space of potentiality where with intention, receptivity and participation, moments of clarity and reciprocity can be experienced. Within this human-made environment, as I looked at each painting, I felt discreetly touched with a heightened sense of being alive. Such an experience evokes Merleau-

63 Ponty’s phenomenological insights into the mutuality of the world: ‘[T]hings touch me as I touch them and touch myself: flesh of the world – distinct from my flesh: the double inscription outside and inside’ (Merleau-Ponty: 1968: 261).

Like an encounter with landscape, one’s attention continually moves between the close and the distant in Martin’s work. Kasha Linville noted three distances within Martin’s paintings, one of a close-to reading, then of moving back into an ‘atmosphere’, and a third moment where the work becomes objectified and ‘immovable as stone’ (Linville: 1971: 73). In an initial encounter the awareness is drawn close to read the surface, texture and materiality. One notices variations in the graphite lines or in the application of pigment on the porous gesso ground. Stepping back to a middle distance, the lines and colour begin to oscillate and shimmer. Ambiguities and illusions begin to occur at the same time as an atmospheric quality emerges that evokes strong landscape associations. In a more distant viewing, this atmosphere becomes less distinct and the image field fades and begins to disappear. In this distant space, Rosalind Krauss observed an ‘opaqueness’ arising that dispersed the earlier atmosphere of landscape readings (Krauss: 1992: 158-59). As one moves between these distances, boundaries between oneself and the painting become porous and a mutuality of subject and object can be felt. Just as the process of painting for Martin is ‘a development of awareness’, so, too, for the beholder is the action of viewing her paintings.

Continual changes in pressure of the artist’s hand result in variations within her lines and colour bands that allow for a particular kind of intimate engagement. Her paintings require time for contemplation and demand prolonged concentration simply in order to visually comprehend them (Stringer: 1998: 14). They openly carry the history of their making, yet all prior knowledge can be let go of as one engages in the action of being with them. Few artists evoke so aptly Merleau-Ponty’s description of paintings being ‘crystallizations of time’ (Merleau-Ponty: 1968: 208). The repetition and all-over quality of her lines evoke a temporality and reflexivity that is inclusive of the artist’s creative process and that of the beholder’s act of seeing. One’s attention becomes a

64 tool; the senses become more acute. For the patient and receptive viewer, a discrete motion unfolds, a shift from an outer gaze of visual disclosure of surface to an inner recognition of self-in-the-world. Through an engagement with Martin’s lines and simple bands of colour we can experience time actually slowing down as we are brought back to our own embodiment. One’s breath develops heightened awareness. This slight shift occurs on a breath and is held by the breath in one’s body as a fluid and dynamic field of space, a place where the distinction between where one’s body ends and the world begins dissolves. Subject and object become less static and fixed. In this place of self-awareness, dualistic separations are diminished. We, the seeing and the seen, are one. The mind and the body are in place, grounded in the present moment rather than in past or future time. These paintings can act as a vehicle for meditation for the artist and the beholder.

Martin works with perception at its most fundamental level. In 1974, she acknowledged a profound yet subtle distinction between perception and thought when she wrote: ‘Perception is the primary experience. Thinking, we consider that which we have perceived. It is a secondary experience’ (Martin, 1974: 1991: 89). Presence itself can be located within perception. In The Optical Unconscious, Rosalind Krauss also noted the importance of this recognition.

Consciousness did not have to be redoubled into an experience and a thought about, or an analysis of, that experience in order to breathe meaning into it. The existence of mental acts, Husserl insisted, does not have to be analysed by the subject because their effects are immediately present to him in the present moment. And in this immediacy of self- presence the present, as lived intuition, is already fully meaningful (Krauss: 1993: 213-14).

For Martin, the line is a tool that develops awareness and brings presence and meaning. She has always placed a high value on the consciousness inherent within the immediacy of the ‘here and now’. Jean-Francois Lyotard stated that the experience of the ‘now’ is what differentiates romanticism and the modern

65 avant-garde. He believed that ‘The avant-garde task is to undo spiritual assumptions regarding time. The sense of the sublime is the name of this dismantling’ (Lyotard: 1984: 36-37)10. Martin’s painting acts as a practice of the present moment. She incorporated a linear geometry to represent the sublime not because it held an intrinsic symbolism but that it could offer a means of attaining a ‘plane of attention and awareness’ upon which the perception of sublimity depended (Auping: 1998: 166). ii. Perceptual orders

The experience of viewing Agnes Martin’s painting could be seen to link her work to that of Minimalist artists’ intention to generate self-conscious awareness of the viewer’s own condition of spectatorship. Michael Fried noted that Minimalism’s decidedly theatrical thrust spoke of a concern with the actual circumstances in which the beholder encounters a work of art (Fried: 1967). Minimalism challenged Abstract Expressionism’s regard for art as the place of the ‘authorially expressive self’ and relentlessly went about the task of draining the expressive self from the work of art (Knight: 1988: 22). Minimalism’s denial of a wholly interiorized source is achieved through strategies such as the use of pre-determined mathematical systems, contextual positioning, the elimination of evidence of the artist’s hand and phenomenology (ibid.). Yet as we have seen, fundamental philosophical differences separate Martin from truly belonging to the Minimalist school, most notably her hand-drawn lines and her subjective search for perfection and beauty. As she has emphatically declared, ‘I paint my pictures in response to something’ (Martin in Haskell: 1992a: 16).

Martin enters into an open-ended dialogue with inter-subjectivity. She does not exploit her subject matter but distils it. She has pared down mark making to essentialize and make tangible her experience of being witness to the beauty of the world. Her lines and grids provide her with a philosophical system to remove all references to any literal representation of the world while still evoking her sublime experience of it. She once said, ‘When I first made a grid I happened to

10 This is further discussed in Chapter Five in ‘Presentness and the Sublime’.

66 be thinking of the innocence of trees and then this grid came into my mind and I thought it represented innocence, and I still do, and so I painted it and then I was satisfied. I thought, this is my vision’ (Martin in Chave: 1992: 131). It is interesting to note that it was through the observation and drawings of trees that Mondrian was able to develop his own linear language; his haptic ‘crosses’ also eventuated in the development of a grid.

The grid is normally associated with pure surface and what Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried both noted were the minimal conditions for being a painting: flatness and the delimitation of flatness (Greenberg: 1962: 30; Fried, 1967: 2000: 822-34). Lawrence Alloway described the grid as follows:

The field and the module (with its serial potential as an extendable grid) have in common a level of organization that precludes breaking the system. This organization does not function as the invisible servicing of the work of art, but it is the visible skin. It is not, that is to say, an underlying composition, but a factual display (Alloway in Elderfield: 1972: 53).

Yet Martin used the ‘skin’ of the grid for her own means and purposes. When, inspired by the words of Isaiah, ‘the people is grass’, she inserted vertical lines into her horizontals, she created one of the most fundamentally simple yet powerful dissections of space that is known. This linear cross carries with it profound symbolism, both secular and spiritual. The grid is found in Coptic, Celtic, Indian, Tibetan and much indigenous art. Rosalind Krauss noted that it was also used by Symbolist painters of the 19th century to depict window mullions, a vehicle for light and a metaphor for ‘Spirit’ (Krauss: 1979: unnumbered). Further back in time it was found in perspectival treatises of the 15th and 16th centuries. Yet Krauss saw grids as emblems of all that is quintessentially modern in art (ibid.). She reflected that the grid works spatially to state the ‘absolute autonomy of the realm of art. Flattened, geometricized, ordered, it is anti-natural, anti-mimetic, anti-real. It is what art looks like when it

67 turns its back on nature’ (ibid.). Yet Martin did not turn her back on nature, quite the reverse.

12. Agnes Martin, Grey Stone II, detail, 1961, oil and gold leaf on canvas, 189.9 cm x 187.3 cm, collection of Emily Fisher Landau

Her paintings exemplify a compelling paradox that Krauss also recognized:

The grid opposes the relationship perspective had with the world of mapping one reality onto another for the grid only maps the surface of the painting itself. But this materialism is not what the artists who employ the grids discuss, invariably the artists speak of “Being, Mind or Spirit” (ibid.).

Krauss maintained that the grid’s

mythic power is that it makes us able to think we are dealing with materialism (or sometimes science, or logic) while at the same time it provides us with a release into belief (or illusion, or fiction). The work of Reinhardt or Agnes Martin would be instances of this power (ibid.).

This paradox does not detract from Martin’s work but is an example of one of its many inherent complexities.

68 iii. Attunement to perfection

Since Rosalind Krauss wrote her essay on grids in 1979, there has been a subtle shift towards an inclusion of the immaterial in art that has been greatly facilitated by Agnes Martin’s attunement to the sublime in nature and to her rich interior life through her spiritual philosophy of living. Memories of inner and outer places echo in her work to bring past and present ‘here and now’. Her paintings are a writing of process, an action of being nature as her lines ground us and bring us back to ourselves and to the space that we inhabit. Merleau- Ponty extolled this quality of being in nature:

Nature is at the first day: it is there today … It is a question of finding in the present, the flesh of the world (and not in the past) an “ever new” and “always the same”… The sensible, nature, transcend the past present distinction, realize from within a passage from one into the other (Merleau- Ponty: 1968: 267).

Like many Abstract Expressionist painters, Martin consciously attempted to bridge matter and spirit. Rosalind Krauss noted that Pollock tried ‘to get below metaphor into a new, hitherto unimagined relation to the world, one in which the mark would manifest a premetaphorical sense of presence’ (Krauss: 1993: 322). This presence is facilitated through Martin’s steady awareness and haptic participation with the ground of her canvas, the lines and bands of her work provide a reminder for our own being-in-place and embodiment. She creates a sensible gap in our expectations, a tiny jolt and reminder to be here now.

Barbara Haskell recognized that Martin is part of a tradition of artists for whom art became ‘an investigation into the immutable constants which constitute the hidden meaning of life… Her own search for life’s underlying meaning led her to conclude that perfection, unseen and immaterial, is the essential and pervasive character of reality’ (Haskell: 1992a: 7) This perfection that is ‘known forever in the mind’ would occupy her work for five decades. Haskell believed that Martin’s central problem became ‘how to render in concrete form that which is inherently

69 immaterial and thus incapable of being objectified…. For Martin wanted more from her work than pure abstraction; she wanted it to carry a message about transcendental experience’ (ibid.: 104). Yet as Martin seeks to convey perfection, she is also acutely aware of the associations that accompany it. In a 1989 interview she said, ‘The trouble is, people will interpret an interest in perfection as a matter of technique, whereas technique has nothing to do with it. In art and in life, technique is a hazard. To live with technique – do you see how awful that would be?’ (Martin, 1989: 1991: 161). She had previously written in 1972 that her paintings ‘are very far from being perfect – completely removed in fact – even as we ourselves are’ (Martin, 1972: 1991: 15). In 1973 she explained the subtle nature of the perfection she tries to achieve:

We must surrender the idea that this perfection that we see in the mind or before our eyes is obtainable or attainable. It is really far from us. … But our happiness lies in our moments of awareness of it. The function of artwork is the stimulation of sensibilities, the renewal of memories of moments of perfection (ibid.: 69).

In attempting to differentiate between what is seen and what is known and experienced, Martin goes beyond the world of form to express pure awareness and feeling as formlessness. While she seeks to convey her ‘memories of perfection’ she also knows that this can never be achieved. This is the paradox that is held in her paintings.

You can’t make a perfect painting. We can see perfection in our minds. But we can’t make a perfect painting. … [The Greeks] could see a perfect circle in their minds, but they couldn’t draw a perfect circle. But when they discovered that they could see perfection in their minds, they patterned their life on it. They wanted a perfect mind, a perfect body. That was their idea. We’ve never come up to them in ideals (Martin in Simon: 1996: 88).

For over forty years, Martin has repeatedly embarked on a journey to create a container for ‘memories of moments of perfection’. Yet as perfection is sought,

70 imperfection is embraced and held within the pulse of her hand-drawn graphite lines.

d. An Art of Process

Intimacy and spaciousness shimmer and resonate within Agnes Martin’s paintings just as in the land that surrounds her. She once said that the landscape surrounding her hand-built adobe home on the mesa at Cuba was ‘like a Chinese painting’ (Martin in A. Wilson: 1998: 22). ‘The snow stayed on the mesa top. It was big; there were six gorges’ (Martin: July 2002: personal interview). Like a Chinese scroll, her paintings contain time as well as a sense of the panoramic quality of the land. The tremulous lines and bands evoke subtle memories of nature and landscape. Holland Cotter noted that her watercolours ‘bring to mind the landscapes of Chinese and Japanese brush- and-ink drawings that she greatly admires’ (Cotter: 1993: 91). Calligraphic brush strokes, pale washes and limited colour are characteristics of her work as well as that of traditional Asian landscape painting.

Martin holds the classicism and refined simplicity of Asian art in high esteem. She wrote in her journal in 1972: ‘I would like my work to be recognized as being in the classic tradition (Coptic, Egyptian, Greek, Chinese), as representing the Ideal in the mind. Classical art cannot possibly be eclectic. One must see the ideal in one’s own mind. It is like a memory of perfection’ (Martin, 1972: 1991: 19). Through intention and process she captures in her paintings ‘classical’ restraint and beauty. She has said, ‘In a Chinese vase we can see all that the artist rejected in order to have as close an approximation as possible to his response to reality. We can feel as he felt looking at his work. The same response is made continually over a thousand years’ (Martin in Haskell: 1992a: 29). This timeless quality is also conveyed in the ‘writing’ of the lines of Martin’s paintings. In what could be a review of her paintings, the Sinologist Simon Leys described Chinese calligraphy:

71 The silk or paper used for calligraphy has an absorbent quality: the lightest touch of the brush, the slightest drop of ink, registers at once - irretrievably and indelibly. The brush acts like a seismograph of the mind, answering every pressure, every turn of the wrist. Like painting, Chinese calligraphy addresses the eye and is an art of space; like music, it unfolds in time; like dance, it develops a dynamic sequence of movements, pulsating in rhythm (Leys in E.O. Wilson: 1998: 43).

13. Agnes Martin, Tranquility, 2001, acrylic and graphite on canvas, 60” x 60”, private collection

With utmost restraint, Martin has refined her artistic language to the barest essentials yet her delicate touch conveys an all-encompassing vision and unmistakable rigour. She uses a graphite pencil and at most three colours upon the absorbent and luminous white ground. Her work confirms the old Chinese saying that ‘Many colours make one blind, many sounds make one deaf’. The scale of her work is uniform and smaller than that of most of her contemporaries. Her canvases, once six-foot square, are now five-foot square for ease of handling, but still in direct relationship to the human body11. She said she chose the six-foot format because she wished the canvas ‘to be big enough so that it was as big as the person looking at it, as though they could step into it’ (Martin in Lance: 2003: documentary film). In 1974, Martin stopped using oil paint on unprimed canvas and began using acrylic paints on gessoed canvas.

11 Martin made the transition to five-foot square canvases when she moved to Taos in 1993: ‘The reason I moved to five-foot was the weight. The two layers of gesso make them heavy’ (Martin: July 2002: personal interview).

72 She told me that she now frequently uses black Japanese sumi ink to mix with the acrylics. This thins the paint and makes it difficult to apply but gives a quality of colour that she likes (Martin: July 2002: personal interview). The resulting colours that I saw in her newest paintings in her studio – blackened blues and sulphuric yellows that approach greens – were indeed distinctive.

‘Simplicity is never simple’, Martin once said. ‘It’s the hardest thing to achieve, from the standpoint of the East. I’m not sure the West understands simplicity’ (Martin in Auping: 1998: 82). Her work is an art of process. Dore Ashton recognized that ‘What Martin calls “art work” is a work in the active sense that Chinese painting is a work and not a product’ (Ashton: 1977: 8). Her method of creating the works could not be simpler. ‘I use a small ruler, 18 inches long, and draft-draw across the canvas…. using a big ruler to draw a line clear across the canvas is impossible. The canvas goes back just a little, and the line’s not straight’ (Martin in Simon: 1996: 85). When asked what had sustained this method for her for so long, she replied, ‘It looks good to me’ (ibid.).

Martin was the first of her peer group to consistently use a square canvas format12. McEvilley noted that this ‘undercuts both the literal suggestion of landscape that the horizontal rectangle brings with it and the suggestion of the figure borne by the vertical rectangle’ (McEvilley: 1987: 96). Within the square canvas she creates ratios with her hand-drawn lines that set up interesting relationships. Speaking of her use of the square, she said:

My formats are square, but the grids never are absolutely square; they are rectangles, a little bit off the square, making a sort of contradiction, a dissonance, though I didn’t set out to do it that way. When I cover the square surface with rectangles, it lightens the weight of the square, destroys its power (Martin in Lippard: 1967: 55).

12 Painters such as Malevich and Josef Albers had previously used the square format.

14. Agnes Martin, Leaf (detail), 1965, acrylic and graphite on canvas, 182.9 x 182.9 cm, collection of Mr. and Mrs. D.W. Dietrich II

Joan Simon thought that Martin appeared to have an Oriental model in mind when she consciously sought to undermine the power of her square canvas format (Simon: 1996: 86). Martin had this brought to her attention by Hermann Kern in 1973 in an exhibition catalogue review of her work. He noted the similarity of her work to the ancient tradition of Indo-Tibetan Tantric abstract- geometrical yantras (Kern: 1973b: 8). She acknowledged the similarity.

The rectangle is pleasant, whereas the square is not. … It’s too stiff, too authoritative. My paintings are made up of little rectangles, not little squares. There was a scholar who dug up a Tantric drawing that was just like my grid, and it was made of rectangles, too, just exactly like mine. … I was surprised. I didn’t think anybody had made a grid quite like that (Martin in Simon: 1996: 86-87).

The square format of her paintings provides focus and unity, drawing the attention into a space that is formal yet intimate. Like a secular mandala, she creates a plane of attention and awareness to focus the mind. ‘The line doesn’t have to describe anything. It focuses you, beyond it and beyond itself’ (Martin in Auping: 1998: 82). Yet Martin’s paintings do not rely simply on opticality. The

74 vibrations that resonate from the horizontal and vertical lines work on a different order through the pressure of her touch; they breathe life into the flat surfaces while never closing them down. Lawrence Alloway believed that her paintings thrive in the absence of opticality and differ fundamentally with works that seem to resemble hers (Alloway: 1973b: 32-34).

Initially Martin experimented with lines that hovered inside the square format until 1964 when she took them to the canvas edge. After her long break from painting, her exhibition at Pace Gallery in New York in 1976 no longer contained grids but parallel vertical lines. Soon she began to compose with horizontal lines and gradually the spaces between the graphite lines filled with flat colour that created stripes or bands. She has continued to concentrate on simple yet dynamic variations and differing internal relationships of colour and ratios that persist in surprising the beholder. The lines of her paintings have been compared to music notation (Ashton: 1977: 11; Rifkin: 2002: 28-29). In 1976, she revealed that she thought her horizontal lines that were inspired by the flat New Mexico plain were also ‘like singing’ (Martin in Gruen: 1976: 94). Similarities exist between the simplicity, emotion and abstraction of musical form and her artwork. She believes that ‘Music is the highest form of art. With just nine notes it expresses exultation most effectively and completely. It demands from us a full emotional response. It is abstract, not about anything objective’ (Martin in Udall: 1996a: 51) 13. Like a musician, Martin is extraordinarily adept at working with a motif that gives a structure of limitations within which endless creative variations can occur.

During the decade of the 1990’s, Martin began to use soft brush strokes rather than flatly painted horizontal bands of colour. She experimented for a while with what she called ‘wild brushstroking’ – a slight exaggeration – but these gestures did temporarily disrupt her normally discreet handling of colour.

13 She is particularly fond of the music of the late German composers. ‘Sometimes there are great bursts of art expression [such as] music in Germany’ (Martin in Udall: 1996a: 51).

15. Agnes Martin, Love and Goodness, 2000, acrylic and graphite on canvas, 60” x 60 “, private collection

She also began to explore a new symmetry as she worked with a central horizontal line or band. During this time she began to title her work for the first time since she stopped painting in 1967. Nearing her ninetieth year, titles such as Lovely Life, I Love the Whole World, I Love Love, and Love and Goodness signalled new depths of feelings of joy, innocence and acceptance. These were indications that she had touched the world and felt its magnanimous response.

76 III. Spirit, Self and Nature a. Spirit Ground

The vision of an adobe brick brought Agnes Martin back to New Mexico in 1968 after she had travelled for a year and a half in search of a place where she could live and rest. She hand-built her adobe dwelling surrounded by visual reminders of the tangible spiritual presence there. Native American-Hispanic- Christian adobe chapels and churches are ubiquitous in this land. From the windows of her current home in Taos, the Sangre de Christo (blood of Christ) Mountains rise like sentinels on the horizon. Near Taos, the devoted make pilgrimages to Sanctuario de Chimayo’s Shrine of the Holy Earth. Those suffering in body, mind and spirit appeal for intercession for their pains and take away some of the sandy soil as a blessing. In the church, carved folk art retaro figures of saints stand amidst flat, brightly painted designs as poignant expressions of yearning for relief through belief: Jesu, suffering, pain and redemption.

16. Ranchos de Taos St. Francis de Asis, Taos, 2002 (photo: Victoria King)

At the remarkable Ranchos de Taos St. Francis de Asis in Taos, the eye and heart are held by the natural simplicity of the monumental adobe structure. In a yearly declaration of faith the community unites to renew with their bare hands the sensuous curved surfaces with a mixture of local earth, water and straw.

77 The American Southwest has a strong genius loci and for many has long provided a ground for reflection. It has attracted many notable artists and writers such as Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keefe, John Marin, D.H. Lawrence, Ansel Adams, Richard Diebenkorn, Judy Chicago and Bruce Nauman to name but a few (Bakewell: 1996: 1-6; Udall: 1996b: 39). In ‘Spirituality in the Art of 20th Century New Mexico’, Sharyn Udall recognized that ‘To generations of Americans weary of accepting European cultural superiority, the notion that this continent possessed an indigenous artistic legacy was a breakthrough of real significance’ (Udall: 1996b: 39). Mabel Dodge Luhan, a flamboyant early Taos resident from 1917 and enthusiastic advocate of Native American and Hispanic art, invited Carl Jung as well as many other prominent artists and writers from both sides of the Atlantic to Taos (ibid.: 46). Like many, Luhan believed that Native Americans derive their sense of design and aesthetic from the universal unconscious. ‘We find that he [sic] has discovered the law of form which states that all life is a manifest geometry, that every concrete expression of art or nature has a determinable mathematical structure’ (Luhan in Udall: 1996b: 42). In Man and his Symbols, Jung wrote of the Native Americans’ integrated life (Jung: 1972: 213). He agreed with Luhan that their culture must be preserved and should serve to remind Anglo-Europeans of what they had lost (Udall: 1996b: 46).

Native Americans’ engagement with the land and their use of a linear geometry to describe a sacred vision in their art, artefacts and architecture would have resonated with Martin’s own artistic and spiritual sensibilities. Like them, she had a dynamic relationship with the land and believed explicitly in the divinity of life and nature. Both she and Barnett Newman had an abiding love of Native American art and shared their concern for ‘the metaphysical pattern of life’ (Cotter: 1993: 92-93). Navajo and Hopi peoples, as well as many other tribes, have long lived in New Mexico and their art reflects their belief in the harmonious integration of person, place, nature and spirit. The hand-made squares and rectangles of earth-washed pueblos and adobes echo Martin’s hand-drawn linear abstractions. At Galisteo, Martin built her adobe dwelling next to the remains of an ancient adobe that was twelve-foot square; twice the

78 dimensions of her once preferred six-foot square canvas size (Martin: July 2002: personal interview). Decorated Navajo pottery shards are frequently found when walking on this land. Their geometrical designs, like those of Navajo woven rugs and blankets, resonate with local landforms, particularly the step formation of the mesa. Its strong horizontal plateau and sheer vertical edges that touch the horizon call to mind the horizontal and vertical lines of Martin’s grids.

17. Navajo healing ritual with sand painting (from Jung: 1972: 214)

Strong linear sensibilities are also found in Native American dances and rituals such as the cruciform of the four directions of Navaho sand painting (figure 17) (Bahti: 2000). Carl Jung noted the power of these sand paintings that are made on the ground to focus the energies for healing and energizing the soul, bringing a person ‘back into harmony with himself and with the cosmos’ (Jung: 1972: 213-14). Navaho people make sandpaintings as part of elaborate ceremonies in which they symbolically re-enact the events of a mythic past. Roger Cook used the term ‘chantways’ (a term that finds parallels with Aboriginal ‘songlines’) to describe their operation and function and believed that the symmetrical structure of the paintings always centres on a symbol of the Axis Mundi:

At a certain point in the proceedings the patient is actually placed upon the painting, and sand from the figures is applied to his body. The purpose of this action is to plunge him, psychologically and spiritually, into mythical

79 time and space. This is a dimension stronger and more vital than that of profane, everyday existence, because it is the time and space in which things first came to be. It is this experience of a “return to origins”, at the axial centre of the world, that integrates the patient and affects the cure (Cook: 1974: 17, italics in original).

The oral traditions of Native Americans are deeply informed by the land and embedded in it. Within their languages there was no word for ‘art’ as creative activity was not separated from life. Martin used to go to see and hear the Navajo ceremonial dances and songs where dancers’ feet emphatically touch the earth to invoke the spirits. These ceremonies express a strong sense of order, pattern and rhythm with a remarkable sense of scale. She related a memory of them to me:

18. San Juan Pueblo Deer Dancers, New Mexico (photo: Steve Larese)

I used to go to the Indian dances all the time. I once went with a young man. We were the only two whites among thousands of Indians. The men were all together and all the women and children on the other side. The young man I was with didn’t want to leave me and he sat down near to me. They all laughed, all four thousand of them. They have a good sense of humour. The Navajo dance all night. They do fertility dances. The Spanish came and made them slaves, but they kept their traditional ways (Martin: July 2002: personal interview).

80 In a reciprocal relationship, Native American cultures have depended on the land for their identity and the land depends upon them for its care. Navajo anthropologist Harry Walters has said that ‘Navajos believe that suffering results when one does not have a proper relationship with the surrounding world[,] and consequently that relief is acquired by re-establishing relationships with everything in the environment’ (Walters in Peterson: 2001: 108). When Martin left New York she searched for an appropriate place to re-establish her own relationship to the world. The strong Native American presence within New Mexico could have provided a reminder that this is a fundamental requirement for well-being. Anthropologist Maureen Schwarz asserted that ‘Being alive in Navajo philosophy is to have your feet planted into the earth and your head in the sky. In your Mother Earth and Father Sky. Everything that is alive has its feet planted in the earth and its head in the sky’ (Schwarz in Peterson: 2001: 110). This intersection or sacred cross between earth and sky finds resonance in Martin’s grids. Her most frequently used colours are the soft pink earth colour of the sandy soil and the blue and white of the vast sky.

The relationship between human, earth and sky is also seen in adobe dwellings. Tessie Naranjo has said that ‘The roof or ceiling of the structure may be seen as the sky, or the father, which protects and nurtures the people who live inside. The floor is the Mother Earth, which embraces us when we die’ (Naranjo, Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico, wall notes at the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture, Santa Fe, New Mexico: 2002). In 1972, Martin reflected on her adobe:

The silence on the floor of my house is all the questions and all the answers that have been known in the world The sentimental furniture threatens the peace The reflection of a sunset speaks loudly of days… (Martin, 1972, in Kern: 1973a: 65)

Martin chose to dwell within the silence, simplicity and harmony of the adobe structure. Throughout her life to the present, she has lived extremely simply,

81 with few material possessions14. The beauty of the world has sustained her. The following Navajo chant conveys this quality of all-pervasive beauty:

In beauty I walk With beauty before me I walk With beauty behind me I walk With beauty above me I walk With beauty around me I walk It has become beauty again It has become beauty again It has become beauty again It has become beauty again (Navajo chant, Dineh Cooperative, Chinle, Navajo Nation)

b. Art as a Vehicle for Awareness i. A solitary spirit

Agnes Martin and her independent and contemplative spirit holds an almost mythical visionary status amongst admirers of her paintings and writings. While her work could be seen as difficult to engage with, it proves to be rewarding to the sensitive viewer who is willing to participate with it. The following description by Lucien Stryk of the haiku of the Japanese Zen poet Basho (1644-1694) could equally describe Martin’s paintings:

[The] reader is aware of a microcosm related to transcendent unity. A moment, crystallized, distilled, snatched from time’s flow…. [it] demands reader’s participation: without a sensitive audience it would appear

14 Agnes Martin is extremely non-materialistic. She told me that her ‘voices’ tell her not to own property (her ‘voices’ are explored in ‘A Focus on Dissolution’ in Chapter Four). The profits of her paintings go into a trust fund to enable public museums to acquire Abstract Expressionist paintings (Martin: July 2002: personal interview).

82 unimpressive… [it is] likely to give the reader a glimpse of hitherto unrecognised depths in the self (Stryk in Basho: 1985: 12).

In a 1976 lecture, Martin stated that ‘true knowledge of self is the greatest wisdom’ (Martin, 1976: 1991: 112, italics in original). Many who appreciate her work often purport to perceive in them universal truths that reflect an engagement with the inner self and outer world not easily found in a secular culture. Lawrence Alloway contended that her works are ‘attached to a concept of inwardness and even landscape references imply states of mind, psychic spaces’ (Alloway: 1973b: 32). Yet in a 1968 statement to her dealer Betty Parsons, Martin wrote: ‘I paint out of certain experiences, not mystical’ (Martin, 1968 in Kern: 1973a: 78). She believes the concept of spirituality has been over-popularised and misconstrued: ‘The spiritual has been so messed up… I object to people calling me a mystic because I’m not any different to anybody else’ (Martin in Lance: 2003: documentary film). But in her journal notes of 1972 she wrote that ‘a mystic and a solitary person are the same’ (Martin, 1972: 1991: 42).

Just as Martin’s work does not fit neatly into the categories of Minimalism or Abstract Expressionism, neither does she wish it to be called ‘religious’ and finds the term ‘spiritual art’ too self-limiting (Martin in A. Wilson: 1998: 27). Yet her emphasis on the ‘inner experiences of the mind’ and her wish to reach people’s ‘subtle awareness’ reflect the deeply held spiritual philosophy that frames her life. She thinks that ‘we are all spiritual’ and believes not in God but in ‘absolute reality’, ‘like a stream bubbling and dancing in the morning sun’ (ibid.: 28). ‘What I’m most interested in are the ancient Chinese like Lao Tse and I quote from the Bible because it’s so poetic, though I’m not a Christian’ (Martin in Sandler: 1993: 12). Writing on Martin’s early grid paintings, Barbara Haskell said that

[Her] empty rectangles provide a visual equivalent to the emptiness of mind which was a prerequisite for the perception of the absolute. This notion of quieting or emptying the mind in order to receive illuminations of

83 absolute reality ... is especially central to the Taoism and Buddhism that Martin admired (Haskell: 1992b: 106-7).

Martin’s paintings share many of the sensibilities of Buddhist and Taoist art, such as simplicity, stillness, focus and spaciousness. In her journal notes of 1972, she referred to the ‘three bodies’ of the Buddha: ‘the Dharmakaya – the void-pure mind, freedom’, ‘the Sambhogakaya – the underlying purity (the classic)’, and ‘the Nirmanakaya – ritualistic’ and associated her own work with the Sambhogakaya (Martin, 1972: 1991: 16). In 1973, Hermann Kern compared her work to Indo-Tibetan Tantrism, a ‘system of comprehensive knowledge’ that unites the practical experiences of life, psychology, philosophy, astronomy and mysticism (Kern: 1973b: 8). He concluded that Martin’s work could be seen as ‘messages’ that are ‘transmitted’ by the artist who serves only as a ‘relatively unimportant medium’ (ibid.).

Once Martin discovered the linear, geometric structure for her mature art, she developed it as a vehicle for awareness and heightening perception. She said:

To lead a creative life, then, we must pay attention to our minds – not to the intellect that deals with the facts and ideas and all human knowledge, but to the intuitive mind that gives us inspiration… We want to be creative because it is the unfolding of our potential, our vital living (Martin in Udall: 1996a: 51).

She works with her intuitive mind and registers her awareness on the ground of her canvas in a process that is like an act of silent prayer. With the most minimal means, she creates a sense of presence on the skin of her canvas ground. Her touch tangibly records a corporeal pulse as the fine lines follow her breath, in and out, in an existential movement full of aspiration, urgency and humility. Minute hesitations and variations reflect a different space and place for time, not unlike the gestures made on many rock and cave walls by members of indigenous cultures. A mystery is held within these simple traces of human presence that reflect pure being and becoming in harmony with the land.

84 Between lines, grids and bands of soft colour, a space is created for the unnameable and the unsaid.

Martin’s inner journeys parallel her travels to find outer places of belonging. But in 1972, she wrote:

wandering away from everything giving up everything not me anymore, any of it retired ego, wandering on the mountain no more conquests, no longer an enemy to anyone ego retired, wandering no longer a friend, master, slave… (Martin, 1972: 1991: 42)

In these simple lines, she announced that she no longer needed to outwardly give up worldly attachments or travel to escape the world. Through ‘retiring’ her ego she now had the possibility to wander upon the mountain without harming anyone, even herself. In 1979, she called this internal state ‘an arduous happiness’ (Martin, 1979: 1991: 116). It is not conventional enlightenment but a place of acceptance and contentment that she achieved in the place of her dwelling. ii. One with nature

Cradled on the mountain I can rest Solitude and freedom are the same Under every fallen leaf (Martin, 1972: 1991: 35)

Agnes Martin wrote these words in her journal on the mesa at Cuba, New Mexico. Here she found a place of refuge and rest where nature provided

85 meaning and beauty. In the 17th century, the Zen poet Basho wrote in his journal: ‘All who achieve greatness in art … possess one thing in common: they are one with nature’ (Basho: 1985: 10). Basho cautioned fellow haiku poets to ‘rid their minds of superficiality’ by means of what he called ‘karumi’ (lightness), the artistic expression of non-attachment and the result of the calm realization of profoundly felt truths (ibid.). Like many of Martin’s own writings, Basho expressed in the minimal form of haiku not only lightness, but also a sense of his detachment or contented solitariness (sabi) and his appreciation of the commonplace and humble (wabi).

Over the years the lines in Martin’s paintings have diminished yet her work holds the energy of previous more complex compositions. In her studio she showed me a completed work that had only one vertical graphite line across the middle of a white gesso ground. Even this audacious minimalism is in accord with Zen. The renowned Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki explained this phenomenon:

When a feeling reaches its highest pitch, we remain silent, even seventeen syllables may be too many. Japanese artists… influenced by the way of Zen tend to use the fewest words or strokes of brush to express their feelings. When they are too fully expressed no room for suggestion is possible, and suggestibility is the secret of the Japanese arts (Suzuki in Basho: 1985: 16).

Haiku poets seek to create an experience that will point the reader towards revelation and reveal the eternal within the phenomenal world. Historically they were practitioners of Zen and knew that the unconditioned was attainable only within the conditioned world, nirvana within samsara. Illumination could only be found within the ‘here and now’ of daily life. Through her observations and contemplative reflections on the natural world, Martin found a similar perspective on life, one that has given her ‘solitude and freedom’ as well as consolation. She wrote in 1972:

86 That’s the way to freedom If you can imagine you’re a grain of sand you know the rock ages… if you can imagine that you’re a rock all your troubles fall away It’s consolation Sand is better You’re so much smaller as a grain of sand We are so much less… (Martin, 1972: 1991: 39)

The sandy soil of New Mexico, vast, yet intimate in detail, provided a healing ground upon which Martin could wander and reflect on a larger perspective. Her experiences have not been transcendental but firmly grounded in this world.

When your eyes are open You see beauty in anything… (ibid.: 40)

She points to a reality that is found through awareness and open receptivity. The beauty that she is trying to convey in her paintings is unattached to subject or object. In a lecture that she gave at Yale University in 1976, Martin said:

Joy is Perception. Perception, reception and response are all the same. Sometimes we perceive, sometimes we receive and sometimes we respond but it is all the same. It is all awareness of reality… (ibid.: 96, italics in original)

Martin uses the word ‘reality’ as a signifier for a state of awareness that has been described by mystics and contemplatives of all faiths, ordinary yet extraordinary in its capacity to penetrate the veils of maya, illusion. Her succinct poetic references to nature and inner states of being hold qualities similar to

87 many expressed in Zen and Taoism. During the late 1940’s and early 1950’s she read works by D. T. Suzuki and attended lectures by the Indian philosopher Krishnamurti (Cotter: 1997: 46). Classic Asian texts by Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu’s ancient collection of Taoist sayings, stories and allegories have long inspired her (Ashton: 1977: 13). She said of her time living alone on the mesa that ‘It was all one big long meditation’ (Martin in Spranger: 2002: 21). Her reclusive life has been similar to that of the Taoist hermit who communed with nature and aspired towards harmony with it. The ideal Taoist has been described as a person ‘who has learned to use all his senses and faculties to intuit the shapes of the currents of the Tao, so as to harmonize himself with them completely’ (Rawson and Legeza: 1973: 10).

The Tao conveys a clear, non-verbal meaning and provides a background to much Chinese art and thought. Taoists believe that it is possible to see the infinite multiplicity of the Tao within nature. Tao has been described as a ‘seamless web of unbroken movement and change, filled with undulations, waves, patterns of ripples and temporary “standing waves” like a river’ (ibid.). Every observer is an integral part of this immense interconnected network. In Taoist thought, the world is not filled with separate things and concepts but is one of continual change where nothing ever repeats itself and nature is seen as ‘vibration’. Yet this immense web does not itself change, it is the ‘uncarved block’ devoid of any definable shape that includes both ‘being’ and ‘not being’, the present, future and past (ibid.: 11).

Like the ‘standing waves’ of a river, Martin creates a linear web of discrete vibrations that captures the essential pulse inherent in all things. Her lines and bands of colours never exactly repeat yet are constant, never ceasing, held upon the luminous canvas ground. Thomas McEvilley compared the structure of Martin’s grid to the ‘uncarved block’ of Taoism. ‘It is like the block from which no particular form has yet been carved. It contains within its potentiality all possible forms’ (McEvilley: 1987: 96). This analogy could be applied to the meditative quality of emptiness found within all her mature paintings.

88 iii. Tracks of emptiness

The vibration or pulsation that emanates from the lines and spaces of Martin’s paintings fluctuates between a registration of presence and absence15. They are empty in the Buddhist understanding of emptiness (shunyata) as potentiality, where all things are seen as not solid, singular or possessing independent meaning, but interdependent. This is comparable to the ‘seamless web of unbroken movement and change’ of the Tao. Martin’s paintings express interconnectedness in their capacity to create a silent yet active field of energy where each unit is connected, but no ‘thing’ is separate. In 1397, the Tibetan Buddhist philosopher Tsongkhapa said, ‘Emptiness is the track on which the centred person moves’ (Tsongkhapa in Batchelor: 1997: 80). The former monk and Buddhist scholar Stephen Batchelor noted that Tsongkhapa’s word for ‘track’ is shul, meaning an impression, indentation or mark (ibid.). In everyday life these impressions carry the turbulence of selfish craving, yet when one is ‘centred’ or ‘grounded’ the turbulence subsides, and tranquillity, relief and freedom are experienced. Martin’s lines are the tracks of her awareness and allow her to remain centred; they register her touch, perseverance, determination and reality. This worldview is conveyed to receptive viewers of her paintings like that of Chinese calligraphers who project the Tao in secret scripts through brush movements that embody its essential threads.

The strokes and accumulated touches set down by all great Chinese painters in the open space of their pictures never claim to enclose, limit or define any things composing the real world. They may express the qualities of movement that give “life” to a bird or plant, to a rock or landscape. But every mark laid on the surface of silk or paper is there in the first place to convert the empty surface into a visible crystallization of limitless Tao (Rawson and Legeza: 1973: 20).

15 It is worth noting that the general viewing public often finds the ‘emptiness’ of Martin’s paintings confrontative. Martin has acknowledged that many of her works have been defaced. ‘There are some people that just simply can’t take my paintings… They don’t like emptiness’ (Martin in Chave: 1992: 139-40).

89 Similarly, Martin’s lines do not ‘enclose, limit or define’ external forms through representations but ‘crystallize’ memories of ‘moments of perfection’ ‘here and now’. Her white gesso grounds and pale colour washes capture the spaciousness of New Mexico’s vast skies and plains while her lines and bands hold active energy. In Taoist philosophy, everything is in dynamic process. The earth is the greatest container of Yin male energies, and the air, the sky, the Yang female energy. Taoism contains imaginative ‘units’ of cyclic patterns of process and linear threads or veins (ibid.: 12). This is seen in Chinese landscapes and sculpture, in the changing relationships between Yin and Yang, and in the hexagrams of the I Ching . The straight and broken lines of the I Ching define the possible shapes of process and change in terms of unbroken duration rather than a mere shift from one state to another (ibid.: 14-15). This occurs through a divination of the constant cycles of elements and the four directions. Martin’s visual language of ‘units’ of lines can be seen to be sympathetic to the Tao in their structure as well as their recording of time, energy and process.

The veins of subtle energy that traverse three-dimensional space in Taoism are especially significant in both two-dimensional and three-dimensional Chinese landscape art. This energy, Ch’i, is studied in feng shui, the Chinese science of geomancy (ibid.: 18). Ch’i is the vital force and life essence that animates all things and permeates the earth, mountains, rocks, trees and rivers. In Asia, ‘spirit stones’ have been avidly collected for centuries and are thought to contain the pure energy of Ch’i transformed and fixed into solid shape (Little: 1999). Gardens are designed to manifest the currents and energies and to preserve them as miniature representations of the universe and the energies that created it. Martin once revealed that she had an inspiration on her mesa at Cuba to create a space that would convey the quality of such a garden.

I had an inspiration about a land thing – like Smithson. I thought I was going to build a garden. I mean I was going to build an eight-foot wall, 40 yards square. It was going to be like a Zen garden, or at least something like it, but with absolutely nothing alive in it. We have a lot of interesting

90 materials where I live. The mountains are volcanic, and there are a lot of different kinds of lava, some of it very light and very white. I was only going to let people in this construction one at a time, and if their response to the silence would be good, then I would have considered the structure successful (Martin in Gruen: 1976: 93).

Although Martin never constructed the garden that she envisioned, the silence that she wished to convey is communicated by her paintings within a gallery space. She is fully aware that viewers of her work see it as ‘contemplative’ (Martin: July 2002: personal interview). While the formal structure of her work appears initially to distance the viewer, when walking closer to it a visible field of energy begins to emanate from the surface. As in an experience with landscape, close contact diminishes subject/object differentiations and brings the possibility of more intimate engagement. Thomas McEvilley noted the capacity of Martin’s lines to ‘disappear’ into the otherwise formless ground as one backs away from her work, and that this imbues them with ‘a kind of latency’, an ‘invisible but active force’ (McEvilley: 1987: 96). In 1966, Martin said of her work: ‘My paintings have neither object nor space nor line nor anything – no forms. They are light, lightness, about merging, about formlessness, breaking down form’ (Martin, 1966: 1991: 7). This statement appears at first to hold an obvious contradiction as her work clearly has both space and line. The dynamic she refers to relates to the inherent relationship between form and emptiness that is expressed in the Buddhist ‘Sutra of the Heart of Transcendent Knowledge’ in the Prajnaparamita:

Form is emptiness; emptiness also is form emptiness is not other than form, form is no other than emptiness. In the same way, feeling, perception, formation, and consciousness are emptiness (Prajnaparamita in Conze: 1984: 3)

91 It is within the recognition of the continual interplay between form and emptiness that the essence of ‘no self’ is contained. Holland Cotter noted that Martin’s work suggests the ‘emptying out’ that is Zen’s goal: ‘the arrival at the point where zero equals infinity’ (Cotter: 1993: 93). Martin first recognised the potentiality of art to express the infinite in the paintings of the Abstract Expressionists. ‘They gave up defined space and gained infinite space’ (Martin: July 2002: personal interview). In Zen and the Birds of Appetite, the Christian contemplative monk Thomas Merton said that the ‘double equation’ of zero equalling infinity and infinity equalling zero is to be understood dynamically; they are not contradicting ideas (Merton: 1968: 107). Merton wrote that

Emptiness is not sheer emptiness or passivity or Innocence. It is and at the same time it is not. It is Being, it is Becoming. It is Knowledge and Innocence. The Knowledge to do good and not to do evil is not enough; it must come out of Innocence, where Innocence is Knowledge and Knowledge is Innocence (ibid.).

Merton’s reference to innocence echoes Martin’s own writing on humility. In 1972, she wrote that she ‘would rather think of humility than anything else’ (Martin, 1972: 1991: 17).

Humility, the beautiful daughter She cannot do either right or wrong She does not do anything All of her ways are empty Infinitely light and delicate She treads an even path Sweet, smiling, uninterrupted, free …16 (ibid.)

16 Anna Chave wrote a feminist critique of this passage in ‘Agnes Martin: Humility, the Beautiful Daughter… All of her Ways are Empty’ (Chave: 1992: 131-42).

92 This capacity of humility to do neither right nor wrong could be seen to allude to a middle ground, an ‘even path’, where nothing needs to be done yet things are accomplished. She describes the ‘even path’ as a way to freedom. Buddhism is often referred to as ‘the middle way’. Martin’s recognition of humility as an ‘empty’ way that is ‘light and delicate’ could be seen to reflect the non-action that exists within action. The Taoist Chuang Tzu once described this discrete movement and its inherent joy:

From emptiness comes the unconditioned. From this, the conditioned, the individual things. So from the sage’s emptiness, stillness arises: From stillness, action. From action, attainment. From their stillness comes their non-action, Which is also action And is, therefore, their attainment, For stillness is joy. Joy is free from care Fruitful in long years… (Chuang Tzu in Merton: 1965: 80)

It is clear from Martin’s own writing that she is very familiar with Buddhist and Taoist texts and that she greatly values contemplative solitude. Stillness is cultivated in Buddhism through meditation. As thoughts arise in the mind, they are brought into awareness and allowed to simply dissolve. Contemplative practices work with the mind, grounding it and the body, creating a still centre, a place to obtain freedom from inner and outer distractions. Martin’s art practice works in such a way and her paintings convey this to the beholder. ‘[My] paintings’, she said, ‘are about freedom from the cares of this world’ (Martin in Kern: 1973b: 9). She clearly felt a strong incentive to find stillness and freedom. iv. Stillness and Urgency

In her 1972 journal, Agnes Martin described a meditative process of reflection that revealed long years of practice as well as a sense of urgency:

I am constantly tempted to think that I can help save myself By looking into my mind I can see what’s there By bringing thoughts to the surface of my mind I can watch Them dissolve I can see my ego and see its intentions I can see that it is the same as all nature I can see that it is myself and impotent like all nature Impotent in the process of dissolution of ego, of itself I can see that its main intention is the conquest and destruction Of ego, of self And can only go back and forth in constant battle with itself Repeating itself… (Martin, 1972: 1991: 35)

This passage of writing is a powerful revelation of both Martin’s contemplative practice and her inner struggle to ‘save’ herself. Her description of being witness to her thoughts in ‘constant battle’ and the impotence of an unrelenting ego articulates the continual struggle that exists within human consciousness. Yet most people seek more and more distractions. Her apparent aim of egolessness has noticeably set her apart from most of her peers. Anna Chave noted that ‘The “extreme degree” of Martin’s engagement in her moral and spiritual quest – for truth and beauty, joy and serenity, humility and the concomitant defeat of the ego or pride – would distinguish her, then, from those with whom she otherwise had much in common’ (Chave: 1992: 136). I believe that the urgency behind Martin’s ‘quest’ pointed to the fact that her path was an absolute necessity for her. She revealed in 1972 that ‘Many artists live socially without disturbance to the mind, but others must live the inner experiences of mind, a solitary way of living’ (Martin, 1972: 1991: 32).

In a 1976 lecture that she gave at Yale entitled ‘What is Real’, Martin spoke from the strength of her personal experience and implored young artists to ‘pursue truth relentlessly’ (Martin, 1976: 1991: 93). Holland Cotter compared

94 Martin’s humility to that of St. Teresa of Avila when he said that, like Teresa, ‘humility for Martin is ultimately and paradoxically a source of power that permits survival’ (Cotter: 1993: 94). In the solitude of the place she made her own, Martin faced the tumultuous spaces of her own mind in ‘constant battles’ and finally found rest and wisdom. Ever mindful of the deep chasm and pitfalls of mindlessness, she embraced a practice of awareness through necessity. She said in 1989, ‘There is so much written about art that it is mistaken for an intellectual pursuit… Our emotional life is really dominant over our intellectual life but we do not realize it’ (Martin, 1989: 1991: 154). I believe that it was the dominance of Martin’s emotional life, perhaps tumultuous through early losses and displacement, which drove her relentless spiritual search to ‘find herself’ as well as a place in which she could feel a sense of belonging.

c. A Ground of Loss i. Childhood

Anything is a mirror. There are two endless directions. In and out… (Martin, 1972: 1991: 18)

In a state of crisis, Martin abandoned painting in 1967 and travelled for over a year and a half until she found a place that she could rest. Six years after leaving her New York studio, after building her home and studio on the isolated mesa at Cuba, New Mexico, she began to make art again. In late 1973 she destroyed a year’s work before she completed a series of nine-inch square drawings on paper to her satisfaction17 (Borden: 1973: 44). This destructive pattern had previously occurred. ‘I painted for twenty years but I didn’t like my

17 These small works on paper of grids and horizontal lines executed in pencil were completed in 1973 and published in 1974 by Parasol Press in grey silkscreen ink. A survey exhibition of her work was presented in 1974 at the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art that would have provided a valuable opportunity for Martin to reflect upon her artwork. At the end of that year she allowed a series of six-foot paintings to leave her studio (Bloem: 1991: 34). These works marked the end of her use of the grid as a motif.

95 paintings so I didn’t show or sell them. I used to burn them at the end of every year (Martin in Spranger: 2002: 21). Martin’s relentless search for perfection could be linked to the presence of loss early in her life. When she lost her father and consequently her home and sense of belonging as her mother moved her young family throughout the provinces of Canada, I believe a ground of loss may have been established that would reverberate throughout her life and manifest in her art practice.

In a telling statement in 1972, Martin revealed that she believed that ‘the little child sitting alone, perhaps even neglected and forgotten, is the one open to inspiration and the development of sensibility’ (Martin, 1972: 1991: 62). In a recent documentary film, she spoke of her childhood and said that she could even recall the moment of her birth:

I remember back very easily. I can remember the minute I was born. … I think everybody is born one hundred per cent ego, after that it is just adjustment. I adjusted as soon as they carried me into my mother, about twenty minutes later. Half my victories fell to the ground. My mother had the victories. I’ll tell you, she was a terrific disciplinarian. I imitate her... My mother never said a word. You know, she didn’t do anything. And as a disciplinarian, I didn’t talk either. It was just miraculous that it worked (Martin in Lance: 2003: documentary film).

This extraordinary statement about Martin’s mother, a woman who, perhaps through grief, temperament or generation, ‘never spoke a word’ to her children, speaks of dysfunctionality. To her daughter, ‘the little child sitting alone, perhaps even neglected and forgotten’, the mother bequeathed a legacy of silence and repression. This loss of normal childhood intimacy could have contributed to Martin’s extreme sensitivity. She recently said, ‘If you are alone you focus in on everything, you’re just affected by everything: the sky and the wind and the air and nature, all of nature’ (ibid.).

96 While Martin may have gained an aesthetic sensibility and sense of awe and appreciation of nature at a young age, loss was also imprinted upon her psyche. As a grown woman, the pressures from the art world in New York, the loss of her artist’s loft at Coenties Slip and the loss of her hand-built home and land on the mesa in New Mexico would have reinforced early childhood loss and absence. The experience of trauma in childhood often forms and deforms the personality, and a quest can begin for a sense of safety and control that carries into adulthood (Herman: 1992: 47-49). Trauma manifests itself in individuals through isolation, withdrawal, trying to ‘be good’, but most importantly through obsessive and monotonous repetition (ibid.). These characteristics exemplify Martin’s life and paintings yet are uncannily evaded in the literature on her. While I am aware of the dangers of over-psychologizing, I strongly believe that issues of loss and displacement are fundamental to understanding her work. ii. The unheimlich

For over forty years, Martin has worked solely with charting her hand-drawn lines to the canvas edge, sometimes hovering near, always returning to begin the journey again and again and again. She recognizes that few artists have worked with such a limited motif: ‘I painted horizontal lines for forty years… They’re all horizontal lines; I think that’s some kind of record’ (Martin in Lance: 2003: documentary film). Standing before one of her paintings, it is possible to feel a sense of the unheimlich, the uncanny . There is a very subtle ‘outsider’ quality that reflects a deep psychological ‘inside’ through the obsessive nature of the repetition of the simple, ubiquitous lines. Her art has a capacity to engender a dizzying effect on the viewer, a trance-like altered state through prolonged concentration on the work. Kasha Linville noted this experience: ‘Once you are caught in one of her paintings, it is an almost painful effort to pull back from the private experience she triggers to examine the way the picture is made. The desire to simply let yourself flow through it, or let it flow through you, is much stronger’ (Linville: 1971: 72). It is truly unsettling to become aware of one’s body held captive in a web of lines, and it is clearly not Martin’s conscious intention to create such an experience.

The term unheimlich was used by Freud to refer to the shift that occurs when the familiar becomes unfamiliar, unsettling and often terrifying (Freud: 1981: 217)18. The homely and intimate suddenly turn into unhomely, psychological territory that is uncomfortable and unknown, where what should be life giving becomes its opposite, a repression. Wounding is implied within the unheimlich that leads to this repression, and in Martin’s case I believe psychological wounding occurred in repeated disruptions to her sense of security and belonging. Trauma creates ‘frozen time’ and as such imbues a timeless quality in the lives of those affected. While her work can effectively be seen as an engaged meditation, the inherent repetition could also be seen as a tragically reinforced expression of loss. Her methodical delineations of time in horizontal and vertical lines might be attempts to rectify that loss. The nature of her painting’s making reflects more than the horizons of its placement, it also speaks of displacement. iii. Trauma and repetition

Not that I’m for asceticism but the absolute trick in life is to find rest… (Martin, 1972: 1991: 36)

Martin has declared art to be ‘the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings’ (Martin in Simon: 1996: 124). Yet she does not use the canvas surface to hold outpourings of angst or confusion; she does not believe every human emotion worthy of a painting. She wishes only pure sensation devoid of suffering to be conveyed in her work (Martin in Linville: 1971: 73). But despite her intention, suffering is visible in her paintings. Trauma and denial are frozen within the repetitious lines. Martin has defined her paintings as successful if ‘you can get in there and rest, the absolute trick in life is to find rest’ (Martin in A. Wilson: 1998: 17). This quest for a place and space to rest speaks of a soul not

18 It is this aspect of repression that I refer to rather than Freud’s later interpretation of the uncanny as taboo.

98 at rest. Stillness and beauty exist within the paintings as well as repression. One is continually aware of what is not said or depicted in her temporal measured lines. This uncanny quality of Martin’s work is conveyed to the spectator, allowing them to be complicit in what Rosalind Krauss has called the ‘modernist vocation’ of the stare. In The Optical Unconscious, Krauss wrote:

The traumatic event, the missed encounter, what Lacan comes to call the tuche, produces not excitement but loss, or rather excitement as loss, as a self-mutilation, as something fallen from the body. The repetition automatism set in motion by this trauma will work thereafter to restore that unknown and unknowable thing, attempting to find it, that is, on the other side of the gap the trauma opened up in the field of the missed encounter. The structure of trauma, then, is not just that it initiates a compulsion to repeat but that it institutes the gap of the trauma itself – the missed encounter – as the always-already occupied meaning of that opening onto a spatial beyond that we think of as the determining character of vision. For it is from the other side of the perceptual divide that the signifier will come, the object capable of standing for what the subject has lost. It is this object that the child sets out to find, supplying itself with an endless series of substitutes that present themselves to it, in the world beyond the gap (Krauss: 1993: 71-72).

Martin’s obsessive repetition can be seen as an attempt to restore and heal the ‘missed encounter’ of loss and displacement that has occurred in her life. Trauma is substituted or displaced through endless linear repetitions as Martin perpetually seeks to create a ground to replace the lost places of her life. Her lines and bands can be seen as endeavours ‘to restore the gap’ as she attempts to create a safe space on the ground of her canvas. Peter Read noted in Returning to Place: the Meaning of Lost Places, that those who suffer the loss and continued deprivation of a place of attachment often suffer psychological disturbance, technically referred to as the effects of ‘transient situational disturbance’ and ‘reduced environmental stimulation’ (Read: 1996: 156-57). He recognised a ‘desperate need to go home’ within those who have

99 been displaced (ibid.: 157). For a sensitive small child unable to articulate the complex emotional turmoil of loss, insecurity and grief, this unrest could understandably form a pattern where a search for a sense of belonging and a connection to place become paramount.

An individual and collective sense of continuity is intimately bound with a person’s spatial identity (ibid.: 21). The spaciousness of Martin’s Canadian birthplace would have had resonances with New Mexico. Through grounded acts of place making, New Mexico became a place where she could not only engage with the land but also be a place to work with the ‘confusion’ and trauma she carried. She methodically controlled and notated the immeasurable presence of an otherwise engulfing time and space through absences that she endlessly repeated in her paintings. She said in 1973 that

It is hard to realize at the time of helplessness that that is the time to be awake and aware. The feeling of calamity and loss covers everything. We imagine that we are completely cut off and tremble with fear and dread. The more we are aware of perfection the more we will suffer when we are blind to it in helplessness. But helplessness when fear and dread have run their course, as all passions do, is the most rewarding state of all (Martin, 1973: 1991: 71).

Without distraction and with quiet dignity her soft lines mark time and confront pain as stroke by stroke she registers her reality. With each line she focuses on an ephemeral present moment to deal with the void and sense of helplessness that might otherwise overwhelm and consume her. Her words convey the darkness with which she struggled and her inner states of mind:

The solitary life is full of terrors. If you went walking with someone that would be one thing but if you went walking alone in an empty place that would be an entirely different thing. If you were not completely distracted you would surely feel “the fear” part of the time… I am speaking of pervasive fear that is always with us. It is a constant state of mind of which

100 we are not aware when we are with others… In solitude this fear is lived and finally understood… self-destructiveness is the first of human weaknesses. When we know all the ways we can be self-destructive that will be very valuable knowledge indeed. We cannot afford one moment of antagonism about anything… I am not moralizing, but simply describing some of the states of mind that are a hazard in solitude (ibid.: 91-92).

The ‘terror’ and ‘pervasive fear’ that Martin described are not normally associated with a contemplative life. In this light, her art can be seen to have evolved as a means of survival rather than as simply an aesthetic journey. With a legacy of ‘discipline’ from her mother, she resolutely developed an attitude of restraint and perseverance in her art and life in order to face her fears.

Anna Chave noted that Martin’s lines are

deliberately drawn by a person endowed with nearly unimaginable powers of concentration and a hair-trigger sensibility. So slight and so subtle are the stimuli these schematic paintings offer viewers that if they wish to continue to pay attention at all, they must pay attention on Martin’s own, exacting terms – the terms of a woman who is forever attempting to draw a perfectly straight line in full awareness that she will never do so (Chave: 1992: 148). iv. An ‘arduous happiness’

Martin’s paradoxical quest for perfection exists as a precarious silence within her work, resting on lines that seem at times to disappear before our eyes. She reduced her visual language to the barest minimum. Donald Kuspit noted that

Many artists have increased silence by abandoning even geometry, except for the minimal geometry of the canvas shape, which is sometimes echoed in the form of a grid, as in works by Agnes Martin. Touch itself

101 exists under enormous constraint; it often becomes increasing inhibited (Kuspit: 1986: 315, my italics).

While Martin’s touch is exquisitely sophisticated and restrained, it is also constrained, inhibited and repressed. She rejected the blank Minimalist canvas and the totally ethereal for a ground upon which she could engage in an urgent practice of mindfulness. In a 1979 lecture, she spoke of the journey of life as ‘an arduous happiness in which we move forward’ (Martin, 1979: 1991: 116). This insight conveys the movement of her lines across the canvas, her personal struggles and perseverance as well as the existential condition of life. Her paintings can be read as imperative journeys that continually bring one back to oneself. In 1972, she wrote in her journal that ‘Walking seems to cover time and space but in reality we are always just where we started’ (Martin, 1972: 1991: 17). Her lines find a pace and distance that is distinctly human as they hover near or reach the canvas edge, only like Sisyphus to return the journey again and again.

In an uncommonly pointed review in Artforum of Martin’s otherwise extremely well received 1993 Whitney Museum exhibition, Donald Kuspit interpreted this journey as ‘fatalistic’ and ‘without hope’, rather than spiritual:

Behind all the supposed spirituality and mysticism that have been attributed to Martin’s Formalist paintings, the development of her increasingly hermetic, ultimately monodic works shows her working though a death wish but unwittingly submitting to it. In the end the desert of the grid unmistakably discloses the sense of desertion that her withdrawn art and life acted out all along (Kuspit: 1993: 92).

What Kuspit read as a negative submission to a ‘death wish’, Martin would more likely see as her process of conveying moments of perfection and beauty. While her life and work manifest the external characteristics associated with trauma – obsessive repetition, withdrawal and isolation – she ultimately gained consolation and rest through the very action of paying attention to the inner

102 states of her mind. While she has referred to her inner states of ‘confusion’, ‘fear’, needing to ‘save’ herself and a time when ‘every day I suddenly felt I wanted to die’, she has never used the term ‘trauma’ to describe the losses within her life. But it is clear from her mythic journey from New York in 1967 that she urgently needed to find a place where she could finally rest and begin to heal herself. In her art and life, Martin refined her aesthetic, philosophical, psychological and spiritual sensibilities into a mastery of understatement and simplicity. Her survival came through the creation of a place of belonging, her love of nature and her capacity to communicate its beauty through her paintings to receptive audiences.

d. Not About Nature i. Anti-nature

The underside of the leaf Cool in shadow Sublimely unemphatic Smiling of innocence

The frailest stems Quivering in light Bend and break In silence

This poem, like the paintings, is not really about nature. It is not what is seen. It is what is known forever in the mind… (Martin, 1972: 1991: 15)

Whilst being one of America’s foremost artists, Agnes Martin has lived the life of a contemplative recluse as she finely tuned her practice of awareness in a place of great natural beauty. She has deeply engaged with nature’s majesty and

103 minutiae. Barbara Haskell noted that early in Martin’s life ‘Her practice of opening herself to nature rather than imposing herself on it signalled an abatement of ego that was central, even then, to her way of life’ (Haskell: 1992b: 99). Martin has been an astute witness to the external beauty of the world. She wrote in 1972, ‘I turn to perfection as I see it in my mind, and as I also see it with my eyes even in the dust’ (Martin, 1972: 1991: 16). This awareness of perfection is one that she returns to again and again. ‘In our minds there is awareness of perfection; when we look with our eyes we see it’ (ibid.: 18). Yet at the same time she has repeatedly denounced readings of nature within her art and stated that her work is ‘anti-nature’ (ibid.: 35). ‘They’re just horizontal lines. There’s not any hint of nature. And still everybody responds, I think’ (Martin in Simon: 1996: 85). In 1972, Martin made a distinction between nature and the awareness of perfection that she found in nature.

Nature is conquest, possession, eating, sleeping, procreation It is not aesthetic, not the kind of inspiration I’m interested in Nature is the wheel When you get off the wheel you’re looking out You stand with your back to the turmoil You never rest with nature, it’s a hungry thing Every animal that you meet is hungry not that I don’t believe in eating But I just want to make the distinction between art and eating… (Martin, 1972: 1991: 36)

Turning her ‘back to the turmoil’, Martin has made paintings that certainly do not lend themselves to a literal interpretation of nature or landscape in a conventional sense and it could be this reading that she is trying to avoid, having once, long ago, been a figurative painter19. Yet her work and many of

19 Martin may also wish to distance herself from the ubiquitous landscape paintings of every description and quality in the many Santa Fe and Taos galleries.

104 her mid-career titles repeatedly bring one back to nature. When she speaks of her art as being non-objective and about feelings, it must be remembered that no feeling is without a referent. Feeling always exists within a context. But these paintings exist within a world where distinctions between nature and culture are commonplace. Landscape is believed to be ‘out there’ and culture found in places such as the museums and galleries where Martin’s paintings are hung. Yet to make a distinction between nature and culture is to create false demarcations. In The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty wrote that ‘the distinction between the two planes (natural and cultural) is abstract: everything is cultural in us (our Lebenswelt [life-world] is “subjective”, our perception is cultural-historical) and everything is natural in us’ (Merleau-Ponty: 1962: 253). Martin’s paintings resonate in a play between nature and culture, between readings of pure abstraction and nature, and it is in that territory that they hold extremely interesting readings. ii. Beauty and the sublime

19. Agnes Martin, Flower in the Wind, 1963, oil on canvas, 190.5 x 190.5 cm, collection of Thomas Ammann Fine Arts, Zurich

Rosalind Krauss maintained that Martin’s work holds a ‘covert allusion’ to nature through its simplicity, uniformity, shape, colouring, atmosphere and light, placing the paintings into the category of the Abstract Sublime (Krauss: 1992: 157-59). The sublime was fervently explored in art and nature in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth centuries and provided a vehicle for the new

105 Romantic experiences of awe, terror, boundlessness and divinity that began to impose on earlier aesthetic systems (Rosenblum: 1973: 55-56). Immanuel Kant, in his 1790 Critique of Judgment, made the distinction between beauty and the sublime: ‘[T]he Beautiful in nature is connected with the form of the object, which consists in having boundaries, the Sublime is to be found in a formless object, so far as in it, or by occasion of it, boundlessness is represented’ (Kant in Rosenblum: 1973: 56). It is through the qualities of formlessness and boundlessness that the work of artists such as Martin, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still and Barnett Newman has been categorized by the description of the Abstract Sublime. These artists’ paintings are seen to carry the essence of the experience of nature expressed in simple yet elemental visual language.

Martin’s paintings mirror both the microscopic and macroscopic nature of landscape. It is particularly within a middle distance reading of her work that an atmosphere or light emerges and it is in this space that Krauss believes her work most enters the domain of the Abstract Sublime (Krauss: 1993: 159). Carter Ratcliff also described her work in terms that are compatible with the Abstract Sublime:

Each of her grids seems to abstract an aspect of nature, not usually a specific shape but the generalized persistence of vast phenomena; see Mountain, Dark River, Park, Starlight and many others…. These evoke phenomena so vast or elusive as to be unnameable, and seem to shift from external to internal states (Ratcliff: 1973: 27).

Lawrence Alloway maintained that innate memories of nature are elicited through her work, what is ‘known’ through an experience of nature rather than ‘seen’.

[N]ature as “unequal and contesting” is one thing and landscape images cultivated by mental laws, which is the area of Martin’s iconography, are something else. The value that she places on what is “known” rather than “seen” suggests innate ideas, which she sometimes calls “a memory of

106 perfection.” [Martin wrote:] “Although I do not represent it well in my work, all seeing the work, being already familiar with the subject, are easily reminded of it” [Agnes Martin, unpublished notes, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia]. Thus, the aesthetic criterion of wholeness has the function of confirming pre-existing patterns in the mind (Alloway: 1973b: 36).

20. Agnes Martin, Falling Blue, 1963, oil and graphite on canvas, 180.7 x 182.9 cm, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

These ‘pre-existing patterns in the mind’ would be continually reconfirmed for Martin in the landscape of New Mexico. Memories of places, especially childhood places, are deeply ingrained in us (Read: 1996). During my conversation with Martin, she spoke of such memories and feelings: ‘I was brought up by the sea [in Vancouver] and loved it. I thought the mountains would compensate for the sea but they don’t’ (Martin: July 2002: personal interview). This revealing comment about loss of place also elucidates viewers’ recognitions of sensations of fluidity in paintings that she executed in an arid inland environment. Her hand-drawn lines strongly resonate with ever repeating shifting tides, waves and mesmerizing patterns of water currents.

Martin has said of this phenomenon:

107 When people go to the ocean they like to see it all day… There’s nobody living who couldn’t stand all afternoon in front of a waterfall. It’s a simple experience, you become lighter and lighter in weight, you wouldn’t want anything else. Anyone who can sit on a stone in a field awhile can see my painting. Nature is like parting a curtain, you go into it. I want to draw a certain response like this… Not a specific response but that quality of response from people when they leave themselves behind, often experienced in nature – an experience of simple joy … the simple, direct going into a field of vision as you would cross an empty beach to look at the ocean (Martin in A. Wilson: 1966: 48).

In a painting such as Falling Blue (figure 20), our peripheral vision registers fluidity and expansiveness, and as the lines are negotiated, a state of being is entered into not unlike that felt when gazing at water. iii. Nature and perception

The experience of entering nature and entering one of Martin’s paintings can be effectively explored through phenomenology, a philosophy of place that looks ‘to the thing itself’. Early proponents such as Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau- Ponty challenged subject/object preconceptions and proposed opening up to the essence of the phenomenon in order to dwell authentically in the life-world, the lebenswelt. In The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty recognized that the earth provides our bodily awareness of space. He brought attention back to the sensuous and sentient life of the body, the ‘body subject’ (Merleau-Ponty: 1968: 98-102). He recalled us to our participation in the ‘here and now’ of our directly felt and lived experience of the world. Phenomenologists have used the term gelassonheit to describe the necessary ‘letting go-ness of things’ that is required to fully participate in this reciprocal activity. It is from this place that mutuality and a new relationship of non- separateness can emerge. Merleau-Ponty recognized that ‘the presence of the world is precisely the presence of its flesh to my flesh’ (ibid.: 127). The awareness of touching and being touched, of seeing and being seen, conveys

108 the fundamental interconnectedness inherent within the life-world. Merleau- Ponty recognised that the perceptual world is ‘at bottom Being in Heidegger’s expression’ (ibid.: 170).

The lines of Martin’s paintings breathe with a quality of ‘letting go-ness’, interconnectedness and being-in-place. When viewing even her most abstract grids, many people have memories of the natural world. Lawrence Alloway recognized this when he compared her vertical and horizontal notations to Mondrian’s plus-and-minus drawings of 1915:

[Martin’s paintings] combine a comparable degree of formalization in the signifiers without losing contact with a signified scene. In Mondrian’s case it was the dunes and the sea; in Martin’s case it appears to be aspects of landscape that can be schematised by the repetition of identical or similar units (Alloway: 1973b: 34).

21. Taos Pueblo, 2002 (photo: Victoria King)

The unitive and repetitive qualities of Martin’s paintings mirror the austerity and spaciousness of the land around her. Many signifiers for her work can be found in New Mexico: the spaciousness of distant horizons across flat plains, the strong angularity of mesas, the colours of desert light, the warm pink sandy soil and white clouds resting like strokes of watercolour in the vast blue sky. Dore

109 Ashton believed that in spite of Martin’s own words to the contrary about landscape allusions, she is ‘gifted with an aptitude precisely for analogy’ (Ashton: 1977: 13). ‘Martin’s relationship to nature, once so direct, has become more oblique and the metaphors have changed, but the sites in her imagination are ineffable’ (ibid.: 7). Ashton wrote:

Never can we separate her from that mesa and the radiance, harmony and measure that emanates from it. This is not the desert of sagebrush and Indian arrowheads and kivas and coloured bluffs in bizarre shapes. This is the desert whose light is between words and silence and whose image resides in the imagination (ibid.: 13).

22. Cabezon Peak, New Mexico (photo: Mike Butterfield)

Martin’s horizontal lines resonate with the vast horizontal expanses of her Canadian birthplace and the American Southwest. Although her work is not a direct or literal translation of landscape, the work does convey similar affective and experiential sensations, even to her. Indeed, she attributed her initial use of horizontal lines to one particular moment of vision: ‘I saw the plains driving out of New Mexico…. I thought, This is for me! The expansiveness of it… This plain… it was just like a straight line. It was a horizontal line’ (Martin in Gruen: 1976: 94). As her work developed, so did her clarity about her responses to nature and what she wished her lines to convey:

110 I used to think that it was the plain that affected me. Now I know with these things that it isn’t the plain. But then I don’t mind when people think that they see landscape, because when they go out into the landscape they’re in the best condition they’ll ever be in. (Laughs) They’ll get the same feelings there, I hope, drawn to the landscape, as they get from the paintings (Martin in Collins: 1999: 14). iv. A feeling for nature

Ultimately Martin paints feelings that are beyond words and images. This is one reason why she is so emphatic that people do not mistake her work for a literal translation or abstraction of nature. Yet those feelings were initially experienced in nature and are dependent upon it.

A lot of people say my work is like landscape. But the truth is that it isn’t, because there are straight lines in my work and there are no straight lines in nature. My work is non-objective, like that of the abstract expressionists. But I want people, when they look at my paintings, to have the same feelings they experience when they look at landscape so I never protest when they say my work is like landscape. But it’s really about the feeling of beauty and freedom that you experience in landscape. I would say that my response to nature is really a response to beauty. The water looks beautiful, the trees look beautiful, even the dust looks beautiful. It is beauty that really calls (Martin in Sandler: 1993: 13).

Horizontal lines and bands of colour became a vehicle for Martin, an equivalent for the sense of expansiveness, beauty, perfection and freedom that she experienced on the land. She became clear that it was these feelings that she wished to convey. ‘One time’, she said, ‘I had an inspiration when I was in a beautiful place. I thought if I could paint this and get the beauty in there, then maybe a lot of people could see it’ (Martin in Simon: 1996: 88). In 1973, she wrote that ‘The function of art work is the stimulation of sensibilities, the renewal of memories of moments of perfection’ (Martin, 1973: 1991: 69). ‘Moments of

111 perfection’ are experienced in nature but in 1972 she made the distinction that beauty is beyond nature, ‘unattached’ to it:

We say this rose is beautiful and when this rose is destroyed then we have lost something so that beauty has been lost When the rose is destroyed we grieve but really beauty is unattached and a clear mind sees it The rose represents nature but it isn’t the rose beauty is unattached, it’s inspiration – it’s inspiration… (Martin, 1972: 1991: 35)

In a 1994 lecture, Martin returned to her analogy of the rose:

When we are in nature, we see beauty and it makes us happy. We think that beauty is in nature, but beauty is beyond nature. Beauty is unattached. When a beautiful rose dies, beauty does not die. We are looking at perfection, and it does not die with the rose. This is what beauty is, an awareness of perfection beyond nature. It is an abstract response that we make and it is the subject matter of art (Martin, 1994 in Udall: 1996a: 51).

In her paintings and writings, she has communicated her vision of ‘perfection beyond nature’ as she grounded her life and work in the ‘here and now’. She developed a philosophy of place and a way of being that was deeply inspired by her feelings for nature. Through her art and acts of place making in New Mexico, she provides an example of a different way of dwelling in the world, actively engaged whilst living contemplatively with nature. Her works are declarations of faith in life itself. In ‘The Sound of Silence’, Francine Prose wrote:

112 Nothing about her canvases suggests that the artist has come to find the self more interesting or more engaging than the world. Their strange, haunting, paradoxical nature suggests (as do contemplative and mystical religions) that simplifying or eliminating the outward manifestations and trappings of the world can actually tell us something about the world and how we are meant to inhabit it (Prose: 1999: 142).

23. Agnes Martin in her Taos studio, July 2002 (photo: Victoria King)

Martin’s receptivity to nature is shared by many land-based peoples such as the Navajo and Hopi, indigenous Australians, and by practitioners of Zen and Taoism whose traditions are grounded in nature and the land. She is also a kindred spirit to many who look to an ecological place affiliation for the sustainable maintenance of an increasingly fragile world and its inhabitants. Turning her back on the materialism and individualism of her culture, Martin physically created a sense of place and belonging through simple living in New Mexico. Her work extols sensible and sentient ways of knowing within a culture still divided in its recognition of the connection between perceiver and perceived.

In Taos in 1958, Agnes Martin wrote a statement to her dealer, Betty Parsons: ‘I paint aesthetic analogies of belonging and sharing with everything’20 (Martin,

20 The entire statement reads:

113 1958 in Kern: 1973a: 78). But as late as 1996 she was quoted as saying that she could paint her works anywhere: ‘I don’t think it matters where you live. I painted the same when I was in New York as I do here’ (Martin in Simon: 1996: 83). Yet at a time of crisis in her life in New York in 1967, the qualities of space and place most important to her eventually drew her back to New Mexico. Here she has continued to live and work in a very particular landscape. Reading between the lines, she thought that she could indeed paint anywhere, yet it is clear from her writings and paintings that New Mexico gave her not only inspiration, but also a sense of belonging and well-being.

In 2002, Martin finally admitted the seminal importance of place in her life: ‘I think it is more important to figure out where you want to be than it is what you want to do. First you have to find where you need to be, and then you can do what you need to do’ (Martin in Rifkin: 2002: 14). This unequivocal revelation confirms that she has clearly found a place of belonging, a place conducive to her living in physical and emotional harmony with the land. Touched by the natural world, her lines touch our own memories of the life-world and still our thoughts, immersing us in the recognition of our place in the world, a grounded being-in-place, ‘here and now’.

‘I paint out of certain experiences not mystical. I paint without representational object. I paint beauty without idealism, the new real beauty that needs very much to be defined by modern philosophers. (I consider idealism, mysticism and conventions interferences in occasions of beauty. Other interferences are evil, physical pain, mental confusion, and insularity.) I do not paint scientific discoveries or philosophies. Art is not ethical, moral or even rational and not automatic. I paint aesthetic analogies of belonging and sharing with everything. I paint to make friends and hope I will have as many as Mozart’ (Martin in Kern: 1973a: 78, underline by Martin).

114 CHAPTER THREE

MAPS OF PLACE AND EXPERIENCE: THE LIFE AND WORK OF EMILY KAME KNGWARRAY

I. Utopia Past and Present a. Journey to Utopia

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at (Oscar Wilde in D. Harvey: 2000: 133).

24. Sandover River, dry season, Utopia, Northern Territory, 1999 (photo: Victoria King)

Within our imagination we can often long for a utopia, a place to live in physical and emotional harmony. We might dream of a utopia, a place that literally means ‘nowhere’ or ‘no-place’, but in central Australia, held in precarious balance, Utopia exists. An extraordinary beauty emanates from the land and the remarkable paintings created there, yet this is a very real and complex place with no room for sentimentality. Utopia is a tract of approximately 1540 square kilometres of Aboriginal land about 240 kilometres northeast of Alice Springs. Here a shifting population of about one thousand Anmatyerr and Alyawarr people related through blood, marriage, and moiety kinship relationships live in extended family groups on sixteen outstations. This was where Emily Kame Kngwarray lived for most of her adult life and where during the eight years before her death in 1996 she became known as one of Australia’s most famous artists of all times. She has been called ‘our greatest landscape painter’,

115 ‘second only to Fred Williams (McGregor: 2003: 20). Margo Neale has suggested that her work was ‘the final word on the Australian landscape’ (Neale: 1998b: 31). Within her Anmatyerr culture, Kngwarray was a highly respected elder, Law woman and ‘boss’ of her country long before her acrylic paintings gained recognition. Born around 1910, she intimately knew her country of Alhalker before European presence on it. Alhalker now lies to the west of Utopia on a neighbouring non-indigenous pastoral property. Although title to Utopia Station was handed over to its traditional owners in 1981 as the culmination of the Land Claim process, Alhalker was not included in this claim (J. Green: 2000: 19).

Approaching Utopia, the bitumen surface of the Sandover Highway soon ends1. The corrugation of rough tyre tracks on compacted sand vibrates the entire body as temperatures rise above 40 degrees Celsius. Red dust envelops the vehicle and visibility is difficult. The glaring sun blazes and obliterates the horizon. Mind and body succumb to motion and the endless expanse of flat land. An unbounded visual shimmer is created from the oppressive heat and the spinifex, acacia, gidgee and mulga trees that punctuate the land. There are few distractions; when even a small topographical change occurs it is immediately noticed. I am told that here a Dreamtime Ancestor ‘sat down’. Over there, her journey continued, ‘that way’. Birds of prey penetrate the stillness, resting motionless in the sky, then circling, ever watchful. Fluorescent emerald ring- neck parrots flash and dart overhead across unimaginably vast blue skies. We see tracks, as if moments before the sand had been teeming with activity. There is a sense of presence, of invisible eyes watching. Ethereal white-skinned ghost gums (Eucalyptus papuana) illuminate the land, stark silhouettes that provide shade and shelter2. Recently rain has fallen and there is an astounding diversity of flora. An incredible number of plants, shrubs and trees are producing flowers and berries, some discrete and others so flamboyant that one can only gasp at their beauty and the ingenuity of survival techniques in arid lands. Audacious

1 Each time I have travelled to Utopia I have been the guest of Utopia artist Barbara Weir. She accompanied me during the entire time I was there. 2 As well, the leaves of Eucalyptus papuana are used for medicinal purposes and the gum nuts and leaves for decoration (Latz: 1995: 181).

116 bright pinks, lime greens, purples, lemon yellows and carmines are outrageously beautiful against the red sand.

At Utopia’s Arlparra store, people congregate. Rhythmic conversations flow simultaneously in Anmatyerr and Alyawarr, broken by frequent shouts and the raucous barking of mangy dogs. Pervasive red dust and flies cover every surface. The funnels of ever-present dust storms, willy willys, spin past. Children run and play with expressive physical abandon as the women sit in clusters, their clothing a joyful cacophony of colour and pattern. They draw constantly with fingers or sticks in the soft sand as they tell stories and explain relationships and topography. The lines are then brushed away and begun again. When they get up and walk away, the silky sand is trodden softly as prickles of spinifex and burrs can bite deeply into bare feet.

This country is interwoven with stories of Dreamtime ancestral beings who created every place and object, animate and inanimate. The Aboriginal men and women are custodians of the land and its flora and fauna. For almost every place, plant and animal there is a person who considers it to be their totem, part of their ‘spirit’ or ‘life essence’ (Strehlow: 1968: 35; Latz: 1995: 69). This ancient wisdom is held as well as new stories that unfold with often callous and brusque imprints. Within the unrelenting complexities of the modern world, there are no Dreamings for alcohol, domestic violence, suicide, diabetes, renal failure, money, fast foods or un-recyclable packaging. Yet the people’s profound relationship to their country, the strength of their traditional culture and their creativity is cause for hope. But I have repeatedly heard the same phrase from tourists who travel to Australia’s centre: ‘There is nothing here’. This arid land that mirrors inner processes, reveals deep shadows and amplifies beauty and weakness holds many mysteries. Our eyes and minds are not trained to perceive the abundance, different reality and Law that exist here. In order to truly see what is here, a non-judgmental vision is required that can penetrate assumptions, preconceptions and sentimentality.

117 The roads that intersect Utopia have no conventional signposts or markers that are usually taken for granted. As our vehicle belts across dusty and ungraded roads dangerously weathered by rain, I try, usually unsuccessfully, to get my orientation. Even in terms of direction, the land holds secrets that are not revealed to me. At high speed, the women glimpse perentie and porcupine tracks and veer off into the scrub to follow them. At other times we reverse simply to admire arnkerrth (Moloch horridus), the tiny mountain devil lizard making its nest in the sand by the side of the road. Tracking is a very fine art that is highly valued within each family, a skill requiring impeccable vision and much experience. Arnkerrth, kangaroo, perentie, goanna and porcupine all etch their stories in the soft sand and their imprints reveal information about time, direction, the species’ age and vigour. These temporal tracks are read as hieroglyphs, symbols imbued with survival and the Dreaming stories of each creature.

Old cars filled with family groups visiting relations on other remote outstations or men hunting criss-cross the land and make new tracks. Where once bare feet covered vast distances, cars now speed across well-travelled routes and are a vital part of desert life. The sandy terrain is lethal to auto parts and the men have versatile and ingenious mechanical skills. Great resourcefulness is required to keep very low-cost, well-used vehicles on these elusive sandy grooves that feign to be roads. It is said that even the best four-wheel drive vehicle has a life of no more than two years in this sandy terrain. Most of the men go hunting daily for kangaroo. Distances are vast and fuel costs are expensive in the outback. Yet as well as providing meat that is lean and healthy, hunting is an important activity that reinforces social and cultural bonds.

Women have traditionally collected native fruits, seeds, berries, honey ants and witchetty grubs, as well as hunting smaller game such as perentie, goanna and porcupine. The concentration of flavour and nutrients within bush tucker offers a reward for the intensive labour involved in its collection. Children of all ages accompany the women, eating as they go along while becoming proficient in skills that once would have ensured their physical survival. Bush tucker now

118 provides a healthy dietary supplement and a communal traditional source of enjoyment. Walking slowly, the women softly ‘sing up’ perentie. As the startling body patterns of the giant lizards come into view, they are dug out and their back feet skilfully broken as they are pulled unwillingly from their underground labyrinths and swiftly killed. As the deep pit cooking fire blazes in the dusk, the world becomes sensually more vivid.

25. Violet Petyarr preparing perentie according to Aboriginal Law, 1999 (photo: Victoria King)

All of the senses are engaged; no vocabulary is large enough to give justice to the almost electric energy of life and sublime beauty here. A different time, space and perspective exist at Utopia that the people, their land and paintings reflect. This is a country within a country, a place where traditional Aboriginal Law is still strong.

b. Historical Context i. The myth of terra nullius

Anthropologist Wally Caruana recognized that ‘The physical landscape is a palimpsest of history and human interaction’ (Caruana: 1994: 3). To fully understand Emily Kngwarray’s paintings and her connection to her country of Alhalker, it is necessary to have an historical context to comprehend the

119 magnitude of the impact of British colonization. Colonization was an action that anthropologist Howard Morphy recognized had an impact on all Aboriginal Australians (Morphy: 1998: 8). The Aboriginal culture of Australia is the longest continuously surviving culture in the world, with estimates of between 40,000 and 65,000 years of continuous occupation of the land. Only since 1788 has that cycle been interrupted with devastating effect by the arrival of the British to a continent that they conveniently called terra nullius, empty land. It was in their interest not to see that this was a diversely populated country with about five hundred different language groups and dialects, all living effectively and resourcefully in one of the oldest and thus geologically least fertile land masses in the world (Berndt and Berndt: 1988: 28).

It was only in the 1860’s that explorers, pastoralists and miners ventured into the arid centre of Australia. The overland telegraph line between Alice Springs and Darwin opened up the country in 1872 to new settlement and to systematic violence. As it had been for tribal groups living on Australia’s coastal edges, new immigration brought dispossession and worse for indigenous people. Thousands of Aboriginal people died through massacres, susceptibility to new diseases, malaria and smallpox epidemics. Introduced livestock contaminated precious water sources. During the 1870’s and 1880’s, the Anmatyerr and Alyawarr people of what is now called Utopia suffered huge population losses through drought and ‘dispersals’ resulting from a ‘pacification’ policy (Devitt: 1994: 25). In 1971, T.G.H. Strehlow gave the following chilling account:

To counter the growing discontent occasioned by the closing of many surface waters to the natives on most of the cattle stations, the South Australian Government dispatched Mounted Constable Willshire to Central Australia in 1881. Willshire and a fellow police officer Wurmbrand inaugurated a severe “pacification” policy during the eighteen-eighties. The then settled areas were quietened, and organised tribal resistance broken by the liberal use of rifles and bullets (Strehlow: 1971: xxxiii).

Water is the single most crucial factor for survival in arid lands and Aboriginal family groups traditionally congregated at underground water sources called

120 soakages (Latz: 1995: 18). Emily Kngwarray painted many of her batik and acrylic paintings near Ankerrapw, an important soakage whose name comes from two Alyawarr words: ankerr for emu and apwa for emu feathers. This place was where two European brothers, Sonny and Trott Kunoth, arrived in 1927 to graze cattle. They called it Utopia for its abundance of feral rabbits, an appreciated source of meat with a familiar flavour (A. M. Brody: 1998: 10). This utopian allusion is ironical because of the untold environmental havoc that the introduction of rabbits and hooved livestock caused. The Utopia artist Kathleen Petyarr told me of the harrowing events that followed the Kunoth brother’s arrival, because it was her father who, with good will, showed the brothers the main water source of his country. He did not understand their intentions.

I was a young girl walking ‘round and two brothers come and they bring sheep to Ankerrapw. First time they bringing all the sheep looking for water. Ankerrapw was our main soak. When Kunoths first came, they were asking my father where the water was. My father was trying to tell ‘em: ‘Take your camel to get water at soakage’, but in language. So my father took ‘em there to show ‘em where water was, but he made a big mistake ‘cause we got kicked out.

Those two white men came, two cheeky ones, hurting people, telling ‘em to get out and go bush, go ‘round bush. My father hid in bushes, we all hid in bushes. Two white men living there and flogging us all the time. And my father said they’re going to be killing ‘em all the people, so we’re hiding in the bushes. And they’re going ‘round and ‘round with horses and rope, trying to hit us. They’re hunting people away from soak. We was hiding in bushes and they was hitting at us with rope and we was screaming, hiding in branches, underneath, and my father came back with spear and he chased ‘em Kunoths with spear. We were all crying, screaming and frightened. Kunoth was telling us to get out, but that was our main soak. And then we went back to Atnangker ‘cause they wanted to put their sheep there at the soak (Kathleen Petyarr: 2000: personal interview).

121 ii. After colonization

The families that congregated around the soakage were terrorized and displaced from their water source and thus the pastoral station of Utopia Homestead came to be3. Some of the Aboriginal men and women became stockmen and domestic workers on the station, paid with food rations and second-hand clothing. Although working conditions were harsh, the employment allowed them continuity with their country. They held their jobs proudly until 1966 when the government ruled that Aboriginal pastoral workers were to be paid equal wages to other stockmen (McEvoy and Lyon: 1994: 2)4. Abruptly, station owners terminated the vast majority of Aboriginal jobs, despite the fact that the stations were often created by and had been financially dependent on Aboriginal labour. Many people did not find suitable alternative sources of work until the new acrylic painting movement became established.

Agreements were made with the station owners that allowed many of the Anmatyerr and Alyawarr people of Utopia to stay on or near their land. Other family groups were not as fortunate. As late as 1970, degrading mass round- ups of Aboriginals into dire and inadequate government settlements were still occurring throughout the centre of Australia (Myers: 1986: 32-34; Bardon: 1991: 10-15). People who for centuries had been tribal enemies were now forced to live together in close proximity on country which was not their own, and unable to perform important traditional custodial ceremonies on their own land. Although the government’s assimilationist policies officially began in 1886, they continued through the late 1960’s and resulted in the forced removal of half- caste Aboriginal children from their families and the creation of a traumatised ‘Stolen Generation’ (Kennedy and Wilson: 2003: 119-39). These children, of which the Utopia artist Barbara Weir was one, were fostered to white parents or housed together in often-brutal circumstances and regimes, forbidden to speak

3 In 1961, Alexander McLeod was granted a fifty-year pastoral lease on Utopia Station and in 1965, Charles and Rose Chalmers took pastoral control of a portion of Alyawarr lands that included Utopia (Toohey: 1980: 6-7). 4 This was precipitated by the action taken on 22 August 1966 by Gurindji stockmen and station hands who walked off Wave Hill Station, owned by England’s Lord Vestey, in the northwest of central Australia. It took twenty years for the Gurundji to be given inalienable freehold title to their land (Wright: 1998: 1).

122 their native languages, callously disciplined, forced to do unpaid menial work and rarely educated (ibid.; Weir: 1999: personal interview).

Barbara Weir was born at Utopia but taken by a government official while she was collecting water for Emily Kngwarray. She recounted the event that dramatically changed her life:

Early one morning, I went to get water with a billycan for Auntie Emily [Kngwarray] with Glory Ngal. We saw a Land Rover and we went behind a tank but he [a government official] grabbed me and took me to Mother and made her make a cross to sign [her consent]. There was sorry business [death rituals] ‘cause my family thought they’d kill me… My mother had to forget about me…. I was taken when I was nine or ten years old…I was like a ghost when I went back in 1968 (Barbara Weir: 1999: personal interview).

In 1997, the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s National Inquiry reported on the forced removals of indigenous children from their families between 1788-1996:

Separation and institutionalisation can amount to traumas. Almost invariably they were traumatically carried out with force, lies, regimentation and an absence of comfort and affection. All too often they also involved brutality and abuses. Trauma compounded trauma (1997 Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission National Inquiry report entitled ‘Bringing Them Home’ in Kennedy and Wilson: 2003: 119).

Records were often not kept or lost so that to this day a great many of those stolen children, now adults, have still not been reunited with their families and do not know the place of their birth.

Slowly, a Land Rights movement gained force amongst Aboriginal people (McEvoy and Lyon: 1994). In 1963 in Arnhem Land, the people of Yirrkala Mission submitted a petition in the form of a bark painting to the Commonwealth

123 Parliament in recognition of their rights as traditional owners of their land (Morphy: 1998: 252-55). But in 1971 the Northern Territory Supreme Court rejected their claim and property system, stating that before 1788, Australia was terra nullius. A newly elected Labour government appointed Justice Woodward in 1973 to head a Royal Commission into Aboriginal Land Rights and in 1974 the Central Land Council was formed as an independent Aboriginal organization with Aboriginal delegates (McEvoy and Lyon: 1994: 4). The Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 was passed by the Liberal Government of Malcolm Fraser, after instrumental preliminary work by former Labour Primer Minister Gough Whitlam (ibid.: 10-14). On 26 January 1977, Australia Day, the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 became law (ibid.: 15). iii. Land Rights

Utopia played a major role in the struggle for Land Rights and Barbara Weir with her hard-won capacity to speak English played a central role. After long negotiations, the station owners, the Chalmers, agreed to sell Utopia Station pastoral lease and in 1976 the traditional owners made a formal land claim through the Aboriginal Land Rights Act (ibid.: 17). The Aboriginal Land Fund Commission acquired Utopia Station in 1976 and from 1977 the running and control of the station was in Aboriginal hands (ibid.). But political tensions within the Northern Territory government were rife and Utopia’s land claim was the first of many to be blocked. In 1978, one hundred traditional landowners of Utopia signed and sent the following message to the Northern Territory Government’s Chief Minister Paul Everingham:

Mr. Everingham we don’t like what you are doing trying to stop our claim to make Utopia Aboriginal land. We hold the land in a stronger way than whitefellas. We hold it from our fathers and our grandfathers. We hold it as Kurtingurlu5.

5 Kurtingurlu is a term of relationship and ceremonial role, and indicates the category of a persons’ descent (J. Green: 1992: 186; Toohey: 1980: 5-6).

124 We can’t leave our country behind. If we go away bad things will happen. Somebody might get killed if we go somewhere else. We can’t leave this country. We have to hold this land. It has our Dreamings and sacred places. We’ve got sacred everything here.

This has been our land; it has been our food, for a long long time, this country. You can’t hold us up again, like whitefellas did before (Declaration by the people of Utopia, 1978, in McEvoy and Lyon: 1994: 19).

In February 1980, the High Court rejected the Northern Territory Government’s challenges to Utopia’s claim. Gough Whitlam visited the community in April, and in May 1981, Angarapa (Urapuntja) Aboriginal Land Trust received the freehold title to Utopia6. This became the first pastoral station successfully claimed by Aboriginal people, a turning point for the whole Land Rights movement, setting a precedent for claims on other pastoral leases (Toohey: 6: 1980). Obtaining Land Rights was only the beginning of a slow process of recognition of Aboriginal rights. It was only in 1992 in the Mabo case ruling that the High Court acknowledged that Native Title existed in Australia, and the1996 Wik Decision declared that Native Title existed on pastoral leases, but with the proviso that pastoral interests should prevail (ibid.: 28). Much has been at stake and continues to be so, as Sir William Deane, then Governor General of Australia, strongly pointed out to the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission National Inquiry in 1997:

[T]rue reconciliation between the Australian nation and its indigenous peoples is not achievable in the absence of acknowledgement by the nation of the wrongfulness of the past dispossession, oppression and degradation of the aboriginal peoples (Deane, 1997 in Kennedy and Wilson: 2003: 120).

6 Angarapa and Urapuntja are previous spellings of Ankerrapw, the original soakage area at Utopia.

125 This acknowledgement is still yet to be made and its absence haunts the land and its people. c. Connections to Country

Emily Kngwarray’s country of Alhalker has still not been returned to its original indigenous occupants (J. Green: 2000: 19). Her life spanned the tumultuous period of first contact with Whites and the loss of her homeland to her being recognized as one of Australia’s most famous artists. That her art can apparently bridge these transitions should not obscure their enormity. The linguist, writer and long established friend of many of the Utopia people, Jenny Green, said that Emily Kngwarray told her in 1990 that she went to an exhibition of her paintings in Western Australia ‘to secure her country from threats of mining’ (ibid.). Mary Eagle noted that the term ‘my country’ has been in constant use amongst Aborigines since European settlement in the nineteenth century and is related to a deep concept of ownership (Eagle: 2000: 236). For Kngwarray, as for most traditional Aboriginal artists throughout Australia, country provided the content and context for her art. An understanding of her paintings must include the crucial recognition that connection to country has been systematically disrupted and threatened.

Whilst Kngwarray’s paintings hold aesthetic, surface similarities with the work of some non-indigenous artists, it is essential to understand the depth of their contextual cultural and political history. Roger Benjamin argued that the ‘vexed question of reconciliation’ must counteract the ‘universality’ of her paintings:

When a metropolitan audience feels at ease with Aboriginal painting, it can congratulate itself that “reconciliation” across the gaping cultural, economic and racial divide has occurred. Kngwarray’s work … performs this task of re-assurance with notably more success than, for example an Arnhem Land bark-painting or the explicit protest art of certain urban Aboriginal artists…[T]he time is ripe for her work to escape the dominant Eurocentric reading (R. Benjamin: 1998: 53).

126 Yet while the content of Kngwarray’s paintings is wholly her cultural relationship to her country of Alhalker, Eurocentric readings are still imposed upon her art. Aboriginal academic, lawyer and activist Marcia Langton described her work:

Kngwarray’s work depicts her homeland. The meaning of land most critical to understanding the sacred visions in the classical Aboriginal genre is the inherent meaning of native title – landscapes humanised over tens of thousands of years and subject to a system of laws and religious conventions which bind particular people to particular places. People and places are transformed from a mere species and a mere geography into sacred landscapes (Langton: 2000a: 12).

Langton was specific that Kngwarray’s paintings were not just ‘landscapes’ in the European sense of the term but ‘sacred landscapes’. Stephen Muecke similarly contended that this radical difference of Aboriginal paintings forestalled a label of ‘landscape’. The genre of landscape painting is normally associated with the ‘imperial vision’ of its European precedents and subsequent non- indigenous Australian practitioners such as Russell Drysdale and Fred Williams (Muecke: 1999: 45-46). Kngwarray was connected to her country of Alhalker through totemic ancestral Dreaming stories that connect her people with their land and its sacred sites. Jenny Green affirmed this:

According to Kngwarray’s own testimonies, the themes of country and Dreamings in her work remained a constant throughout the transformations of her style. For Kngwarray the locus of this power lay in Alhalker country, her country of spiritual origin for which she maintained a connection inherited through her fathers and their fathers before them. Painting her country was an exercise of right – to nurture, celebrate and protect (J. Green: 2000: 18-19).

Both men and women in Aboriginal culture are custodians and traditional owners of country. Fred Myers, an anthropologist who has worked extensively

127 with the Pintupi people, west of Utopia, explained the significance and obligations of ‘holding’ country:

To “hold” a country is to have certain rights to it, mainly the right to be consulted about visits to the place, about ceremonies performed there, or about revelatory ceremonies concerning its ritual associations held elsewhere. To carry out this status, one must know (ninti) the story of a place, the associated rituals, songs, and designs. What one “holds” and what one “loses” or passes on is essentially knowledge (Myers: 1986: 149).

Each Aboriginal person ‘holds’ or ‘owns’ a main Dreaming connected to their country handed down from fathers to both male and female children7. When a woman marries, her children take their father’s Dreaming as their main Dreaming. Dreamings are associated with the Dreamtime, a spiritual concept about the nature of the world, time and space – time that is inclusive of past, present and future (Morphy: 1998: 67-69)8. At Utopia, Dreamtime or Creation Time is commonly referred to as Altyerr. Jenny Green made the important distinction that Altyerr refers to totems or ancestors coming from the mother’s country (the term Aknganenty refers to totems from the father’s side) (J. Green: 1998: 48, footnote 2). Ethnobotanist Peter Latz (who grew up at the mission station of Hermannsberg) noted that for Aborigines,

conception occurs when the “life essence” or “spirit child” of a certain mythological ancestor enters the mother’s womb. The child will then assume the totem of this ancestral being for the rest of their life. The most common totems are animals and plants but inanimate things such as wind, rain and fire also important (Latz: 1995: 69).

7 There are multiple affiliations to country through both parents and the places in which the person was brought up. Fred Myers also pointed out that ‘Many people can claim identification with a site, but they do not “hold” it unless other “holders” agree to accept the person’s claim and teach them about it’ (Myers: 1986: 138-39, 149). 8 Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen first used the term ‘Dreamtime’ in an 1896 publication (Morphy: 1998: 68).

128 While main Dreamings are given to the newborn infant through a paternal lineage, the woman bestows a separate Dreaming to her child through the very ground where that child was conceived. Tony Swain noted that ‘Life is annexation of place’ and affirmed the importance of the place of conception:

The mother does not contribute to the ontological substance of the child, but rather “carries” a life whose essence belongs, and belongs alone, to a site. The child’s identity is determined by his or her place of derivation. The details vary; the location might be directly linked with feeling the child enter the womb or, alternatively, dreams or foodstuffs may provide clues as to the site from which the spirit derived (Swain in Malpas: 1999: 3).

26. Anmatyerr and Alyawarr women with awely designs giving evidence at the 1976 Land Rights proceedings at Utopia (photo: Diane Bell)

During the 1976 Utopia Land Rights claim, Anmatyerr and Alyawarr women played a fundamental role in proving their continuous relationship to country by performing some of their ceremonial women’s dances and songs called awely (Toohey: 1980: 27-28) 9. In the report on the proceedings, a witness to the proceedings, Meredith Rowell, noted that ritual matters such as the care of sites and the performance of certain ceremonies were essentially women’s business. ‘Women’s business is distinct from men’s business and women have a ceremonial responsibility towards country which is different from but complementary to that of the men’ (Rowell in Toohey: 1980: 27). She noted that at Utopia,

9 Later in this chapter, I discuss awely in depth.

129

Through men’s song cycles, site names along a track are committed to memory in a set sequence, while women’s songs and awulya [awely] refer to sites in a different way. So when asked about sites on a dreaming track, men and women react differently. Men produce a string of names in a set order – usually the order in which they are sung, from hand-over point to hand-over point – while women give sites in a less strictly ordered fashion (Rowell in Toohey: 1980: 27).

Rowell stated that because of difficulties in giving oral evidence in front of all the people, the women ‘chose to perform awulya [awely] for the Court in addition to giving formal evidence by displaying some of their body paintings, ritual objects and dances, which belong to particular clan countries’ (ibid.). By doing this it was recognized that ‘they were showing in visual terms their ownership of these countries’ (ibid.). Anthropologist Diane Bell also spoke at the hearing and confirmed the importance of the women’s testimony: ‘They wish to display their knowledge and to demonstrate their rights and responsibilities by performing awulya [awely] as answers to questions about country. Their hesitancy should not be confused with lack of knowledge’ (Bell in Toohey: 1980: 28). The report concluded that the women’s body painting, songs and dancing was a vivid demonstration of the importance of the community’s ceremonial life and the significance that their country has for them (Toohey: 1980: 28). Today traditional ceremonial life and custodial responsibilities are still strongly held at Utopia and affiliations between person and place are expressed in new mediums that travel far beyond the sites of their origin.

130 II. Perceptions of Place a. Body and Ground

27. Emily Kngwarray, Untitled (Awelye), 1994, acrylic on canvas, 3 panels 70 x 110 cm each, Art Gallery of New South Wales

As we approach one of Emily Kngwarray’s paintings hanging in a gallery, the lines pulsate with an energy that is palpable. Painted on stretched canvas with acrylic, it appears familiar. We begin with comparisons through art history: it is ‘like’ but ‘not like’ Abstract Expressionist and Minimalist paintings. Intuition suggests there is more than meets the eye. We are intrigued and have a sense of its unheimlich nature. But in 1991, Christopher Hodges, an artist and dealer of Utopia art, said of Kngwarray’s paintings: ‘[L]et there be no mistake: this is contemporary art quite outside the realm of the tribal or the ethnographic’ (Hodges in Boulter: 1991: 9). Yet the term ‘contemporary art’ does not hold the enormous complexities that her paintings contain.

Kngwarray was insistent that her paintings were about her country and a large number of her acrylic paintings were entitled ‘My Country’. At Utopia, the ground of country is all-important. On the ground people sit, collect bush tucker, make their fires, cook their meat and most still sleep on it under the stars. Men and women’s sacred ceremonies are conducted on the ground and are intrinsically linked to it. The ground provides spiritual, physical and emotional connections, nourishment and identity. Living so closely attuned to the land has social, cultural and political ramifications, and points to qualities of embodiment that are inherent within traditional Aboriginal culture. In 1973, anthropologist Nancy Munn noted that the Central Desert Walbiri people often contrasted their own

131 mode of life with that of White Australians by remarking with pride, ‘We Walbiri live on the ground’ (Munn in Nicoll: 2001: 155).

28. Anna Petyarr Price drawing awely patterns in the sand, Utopia, 1999 (photo: Victoria King)

The sandy ground is a sensual medium; the body is drawn to draw in it. At Utopia I have watched the women draw in the soft sand as they map directions, illustrate their stories, describe hunting and gathering activities and recreate the tracks of animals. Christine Watson specifically studied women’s sand drawing at Balgo, a community northwest of Utopia. She noted the effectiveness of sand as an unbounded surface, one that is instantly available and can be smoothed away or ‘erased’ (Watson: 1997: 109)10. By the indentive capacity of the finger, sand has a visual and haptic nature; it is a subtractive as well as an additive medium (ibid.). Watson recognized that the earth is

saturated with cultural meanings and associations, gender symbolism and the bodies and power or essence of the Ancestors… The layer of the earth on which human beings live is a domain where gendered human beings, gendered animals, gendered plant species and gendered landscape features co-exist, all linked to each other by kinship ties and ultimately to the Tjukurrpa [Dreamtime] (ibid.: 111).

Once after hunting perentie at Utopia, artist Gloria Petyarr drew aspects of her Arnkerrth or Mountain Devil Lizard Dreaming story in the sand for me and then sang the song cycle for it. As she chanted, her hands enacted precise and graceful repetitious movements that described the Dreamtime journeys of

10 Nancy Munn had earlier called the process of women smoothing the sand to create an unmarked surface ‘erasure’ (Munn in Biddle: 2003: 66).

132 Arnkerrth Ancestors across the land. The women often softly sang the songs of the particular place we travelled through, reminders of a Dreamtime that is a dynamic living force within Aboriginal culture. Women’s awely ceremonies are repeatedly performed to recreate Dreamtime activities for the well-being of the country and its people. Upon the new ground of canvas, Emily Kngwarray frequently painted awely body painting designs for her Yam Dreaming just as she had also traced and retraced those lines on women’s bodies in ochres for ceremonies. Paul Carter commented that

The haptic engagement the paintings evidenced did not submissively mimic traditional forms; but nor did it exploit them decoratively. Rather, it “deepened” their grooves, lending them a baroque elaborateness that might signify, on the one hand, a “pidginization” of motifs for external consumption, but on the other hand, could be seen as a way of informing them methektically, performatively, with an additional historical meaning (Carter: 1996: 348).

Kngwarray’s paintings and awely ceremonies arise from an oral tradition where stories are made powerful by their repetition. Her repeated motifs work as a performative action that ‘deepen the grooves’ of cultural continuity just as awely reanimates and rejuvenates country. This intentional repetition is fundamental to ceremonies and her acrylic painting. Meanings are held within the performance, an affirmation of custodianship and deep connections between person and country. The dots and lines of Kngwarray’s paintings are not background or infill but the re-creation of her country through the physically rejuvenating gestures of her own body. Looking after country, the teaching of children, sacred ceremonies and the creation of acrylic paintings all have a pedagogic and restorative function.

The marks that Emily Kngwarray made upon her canvases contain a gestural energy that is tangibly conveyed to the beholder. The haptic is an often unacknowledged but fundamental feature of her paintings and culture. It is the most intimate of the senses and involves the whole body with enormous

133 emotional impact. The skin mediates between the body and the surrounding world: To touch is to be touched. Kngwarray held in her body the knowledge of survival on her country and the ceremonies for it. In awely dances, women’s bodies weightily connect into the ground and create a tremor of the sun-baked earth. Djon Mundine noted the physical memory held within the movements of the women’s dances and described them as a kind of ‘minimalist shuffle’ where the dancer is supposed to keep her feet on the ground at all times to connect them to the earth (Mundine: 2002: 68). He associated the choreography of dance with the performance implicit in the action of painting as the artist dances through her own ‘kinesphere’ in the interactive space between artist and canvas (ibid.: 69).

29. Emily Kngwarray, Utopia Panels, 1996, acrylic on canvas, one of 18 panels 280 x 100 cm each, Fire Works Gallery, Brisbane

Just as she had ‘painted up’ her countrywomen’s bodies for ceremonies, Kngwarray conveyed experience and cultural knowledge to the new medium of canvas as it became commensurate with skin and country11. Margo Neale recognized that the ‘Use of the body as a site, a surface and a tool for mark- making is integral to Aboriginal visual culture’ (Neale: 1998b: 27). In awely ceremonies conducted on the ground, the body is painted and the skin becomes a ground in an elemental declaration of connection to country. The skin of the earth is thus linked to the skin of the body and the ‘skin’ or ground of the canvas. At Utopia, the women’s canvases are prepared for acrylic painting with a ground of black to signify skin colour or a deep reddish-brown to denote country. This colour is painted on top of a layer of acrylic white primer and is an intentional and significant statement. Upon this ground or ‘skin’, empty yet full of potential, are placed marks that link the women’s bodies to their ancestors and

11 Jennifer Biddle noted the relationship of skin and ‘substance’ to the Warlpiri term kuruwarri, a ‘mark, trace, Ancestral presence and/or essence, birthmark and/or freckle’. It provides a ‘necessary material intercorporeal means for linking Ancestral bodies to contemporary bodies’ (Biddle: 2003: 65). Christine Watson also likened the body scarring practice of creating cicatrices to the ridges made in sand drawing (Watson in Biddle: 2003: footnote 19: 74).

134 country. Just as Dreamtime Ancestors once roamed the land as an original void upon which they put their marks and created the landforms, plants and creatures, so did Kngwarray perform her Dreamings and awely on canvas.

All aspects of the women’s ceremonies of awely are infused with touch and embodiment. Taking turns with a rounded stone on a flat grinding stone, I watched as the women rhythmically and laboriously ground rough chunks of mineral ochres they had gathered from special sites on the land. With rocking, meditative movements, the ochres were slowly ground into a soft powdered pigment. The women then prepared their upper bodies to receive their particular Dreaming designs by covering their skin with animal fat to create a workable surface. Jennifer Biddle called attention to the Warlpiri term for ‘annointing’ or oiling of the skin in awely to create a receptive site as the ‘profane’ is transformed into the ‘sacred’ (Biddle: 2003: 66). Emotional bonds are also communicated as the women paint each other with fingers or twigs dipped into the ochres. Over and over the lines are traced onto the sensuous surface of the skin, each line affirmed and repeated. Repetition is an essential part of awely. It is heard in the chanting of the elaborate song cycles and in the clapping of the twererr, the music sticks. It is seen in the choreography of the ritual hand gestures that accompany the dancing. It is felt in the reverberating ground as en masse the women dance and emphatically connect their feet to the earth just as Dreamtime Ancestors once journeyed across the land and created this place.

At Utopia, women are custodians for knowledge that is reinforced by repetition and passed on to new generations. Yet the ceremonial imprints of Emily Kngwarray’s culture are transient – sacred designs are danced back into the sand and ochre patterns fade with sweat. Aboriginal acrylic paintings are hybrid expressions of country that hold meaning in the process of their making and are a significant new form of communication, barter and exchange. But for people of all cultures they contain a valuable message about the importance of the interconnections between person and place, body and ground.

135 b. Mapping Experience i. A rapport with the land

Mary Eagle recognized that imagery in Aboriginal paintings and culture is provisional and contextual, a fluid and layered palimpsest of meanings and functions that is difficult for non-indigenous people to grasp (Eagle: 2000: 244). Emily Kngwarray’s paintings convey both cultural and perceptual particularity of her country. Standing before one of her dotted canvases, viewers often experience a sensation of looking down upon arid vegetation. The dots seem to echo nature’s colours and seasonal abundance. But a purely aesthetic, non- specific landscape reading contradicts the specificity of her work. Kngwarray did not depict simply any arid generic landscape but solely her country of Alhalker and her Dreamings and awely for it. Her paintings’ content was prescribed by her traditional Anmatyerr culture. Yet she did not map her country in a strictly topographical sense but as a cultural expression of a storied, interconnected and vital life world.

30. Hunting perentie, Utopia, 1999 (photo: Victoria King)

In Aboriginal culture all places, flora and fauna are seen as animated with a life force. Everything comes from the ground of country. In the opening line to The Land is Always Alive: a History of the Central Land Council, Kumantjayi Ross emphatically stated that ‘Aboriginal spirituality, culture and society can be defined in one word: land’ (Ross in McEvoy and Lyon: 1994: vii). Aboriginal

136 acrylic paintings reflect an integration of person and place through complex spatial, spiritual, cultural and social mapping of each artist’s country. Howard Morphy wrote that ‘Aboriginal paintings are maps of land’, ‘sign systems’ of a mythological perspective where there is ‘no scale and no conventional compass orientation’ (Morphy: 1998: 103).

At Utopia, the people travel with assurance across country that appears to outsiders to be undifferentiated landscape with few distinguishing features. Desert skills of tracking and navigation are a source of pride and a survival tool taught to all the children (Barbara Weir: 1999: personal interview). Roslynn Haynes noted that in Western culture the desert is a mapmakers’ nightmare and equally inimical to early non-indigenous artists’ conventions of framing and perspective (Haynes: 1998: 4). It is no coincidence that Descartes, who formulated the subject-object dichotomy, also invented co-ordinate geometry, which made the theory of functions and accurate scientific map-making possible (Vernon in Haynes: 1998: 3) Haynes recognized that non-indigenous maps mark

the end of the I-thou relationship because, once space is mapped (that is, enclosed, objectified and localised in relation to all other space), the observer is perforce either a detached subject locked out of this world and observing it from a distance, or else included within the map as another object (Haynes: 1998:3).

Haynes acknowledged that ‘It has taken nearly two hundred years of settlement before a Eurocentric culture could begin to appreciate the Aborigines’ rapport with the desert’ (ibid.: 22). Enormous cultural differences exist in how the land is perceived and depicted, with profound social, psychological, ecological and political implications (further discussed in Chapters Four and Five). In 1976, the Anmatyerr and Alyawarr people of Utopia attempted to convey their profound and complex engagement with country in order to present their case for Land Rights of their own country. In Justice Toohey’s report on the proceedings, he stated that

137

Dreaming tracks were described by witnesses as important. But they did not seem to be the determinants of clan areas as they were with the Warlpiri. It was the outer limits of country that marked off one clan’s territory from another’s. Dr. O’Connell commented: “Countries are best defined as clusters of points in space, rather than as enclosed, bounded spaces” (Toohey: 1980: 9). ii. Acrylic maps of sites of significance

These ‘clusters of points’ plot places of significance and sacred sites where totemic Ancestors’ mythic journeys created the land. Underneath the dotting in many of Kngwarray’s early paintings (figure 31) was a map-like diagram of Alhalker. She held this map in her consciousness as an imprint of embodied knowledge and intimate experiences of her country gained through sacred ceremonies, ancestral stories and hunting and gathering.

31. Emily Kngwarray, Untitled, 1989, acrylic on canvas, 151 x 120 cm, Holmes a Court Collection

Ruth Megaw commented that traditional Aboriginal paintings map

ancestral stories and social relationships which take precedence over accurate geographical representation. This mythological mapping … not only imprints on each person’s memory the essential features and interrelationship of the land which is also her/his daily sustenance, but is a process which may mean the difference between death and survival. In addition, by giving different parts of Dreaming stories to different individuals and different gender groups, it ensures co-operation through

138 the wide dispersal of knowledge and the survival of that knowledge through its’ handing on (Megaw: 1999: 8-9).

Learning about country is continuous at Utopia. Young male and female children learn through direct experience, story telling and ceremonies12. The songs and stories of an oral culture tell of past and present journeys as knowledge of the land is passed on to future generations. This cultural particularity and relational aspect between person and place actually creates a place out of space. Paul Carter commented that in traditional Aboriginal culture ‘the landscape is not seen, it is narrated; it is not static, but endlessly mobile’ (Carter: 1996: 352). Movement is made across the land in paths that are endlessly ‘re-grooved’, what Carter called ‘a slow oscillation’ up and down specific roads, a ‘reversed perspective’ in which there exists a ‘refusal to rationalize the ground as flat’ (ibid.: 356-57). Space thus becomes a negotiable, ‘embodied multiplanar surface rather than a theatrical vacancy to be composed’ (ibid.). This non-optical, embodied engagement with the land corresponds to the ‘step by step’ negotiation of country that Deleuze and Guattari noted in their distinction between smooth and striated space:

The first aspect of the haptic, smooth space of close vision is that its orientations, landmarks, and linkages are in continuous variation; it operates step by step. Examples are the desert, steppe, ice, and sea, local spaces of pure connection. Contrary to what is sometimes said, one never sees from a distance in a space of this kind, nor does one see it from a distance; one is never “in front of,” (one is “on”...). Orientations are not constant but change according to temporary vegetation, occupations, and precipitation. There is no visual model for points of reference that would make them interchangeable and unite them in an inertial class assignable to an immobile outside observer (Deleuze and Guattari: 1987: 493)

12 Both young male and female children attend the women’s ceremonies of awely but at adolescence female children are taught awely while male children take on a structured and more formal knowledge of country and Aboriginal Law in a series of initiations. Glory Ngal and Barbara Weir emphasized to me that male initiations continue through adolescence and adulthood rather than in a single ceremony (Glory Ngal and Barbara Weir: 2000).

139 iii. Close vision-haptic space

Deleuze and Guattari’s recognition confirms the dynamic narrated relationship that I witnessed at Utopia. The women engaged not as spectators observing a distant aesthetic ‘view’ ‘in front of’ their land but as fully embodied participants ‘on’ it. Country was experientially negotiated as points in space through body memories and confirmed through repeated journeys, Dreamtime stories and songs. This intimate engagement with ‘close vision-haptic space’ also allows Aboriginal artists to engage with their paintings at close range without standing back from the canvas to appraise it. There is no depiction of a generalized vista but an interconnected present, ‘here and now’, ‘this’ place, not ‘that’. Howard Morphy noted that

‘Whereas there is a right way to view a map or a landscape painting in most European art – a top and a bottom, left and right, or north and south – in Aboriginal art this is often not the case. Paintings are frequently produced on the ground, with the artist adding features from different sides as he or she moves around it, and each section of a painting may have its own geographical orientation’ (Morphy: 1998: 105).

32. Emily Kngwarray, Utopia, 1994 (photo: Fred Torres)

Emily Kngwarray negotiated the ground of her canvas often sitting in the middle of large works as she built up layers of gestures and colours. Although her paintings are maps of place and experience, there is no directional ‘right way’ to view them as Howard Morphy pointed out. Yet she painted in a traditional ‘right way’, that is, ever mindful of cultural appropriateness and kinship relations. For country is continually negotiated through physical journeys and social relationships. Stephen Muecke recognized that in view of a land ethic, ‘the texts collected on one’s travels are the travelling, the landscape is always in the

140 process of being constructed, and authority is constantly deferred because one has to engage with so many people…All these responsibilities… are the work getting done’ (Muecke: 1992: 177). This dynamic process is continually witnessed on Aboriginal communities. While Aboriginal paintings are not literal topographical maps, they are expressions of complex and layered ancestral stories and kinship relationships that have begun to be acknowledged as evidence of traditional ownership of land. They have become a serious and integral part of many claims for Land Rights (Haynes: 1998: 287-88). iv. Certificates of knowledge

Most Aboriginal artists do not see themselves as artists in a Western sense. Writing on the work of the late east Kimberley Turkey Creek elder, Rover Thomas, Muecke made the important distinction of Aboriginal artists being custodians rather than ‘authors’ of their work (Muecke: 1992: 169-70). Their paintings are not just ‘an object for the pleasure of the eye’; the focus is not on individual expression or comparisons within an artist’s oeuvre or between artists (ibid.). Custodianship implies kinship responsibilities and a ‘travelling’ relationship to the land of a very different order. Muecke maintained that:

The paintings are parts of a series rather than an oeuvre, certificates of knowledge and an invitation to know – not to gaze. They open on to travel and to performance or ceremony. They are the country signing itself in pure writing; yet they are also figurative representations of country in a magical realism (ibid.: 177).

Muecke made the distinction between ‘knowing’ to gain wisdom and ‘gazing’ at a spectatorial distance. He emphasized that the seemingly abstract work is ‘figurative’, that is, the specific nature of the paintings are representations and containers of cultural knowledge and experience. Aboriginal artists such as Rover Thomas and Emily Kngwarray communicate a vast holistic vision of the physical and spiritual world where all things and events are interconnected, a

141 way of seeing and being that is particular and intimate. Howard Morphy similarly recognized that

The whole of creation, all of human life, is mapped on the landscape, to which ancestral beings are inextricably connected. Almost anything that exists has its place in the Dreamtime, whether it is an animal such as a kangaroo or emu; an object such as spear-thrower, a stone spearhead or a ceremonial headdress; a ritual practice such as circumcision; or even an illness such as a cough or smallpox. And everything that has a place in the Dreamtime is likely to have a place associated with it on earth (Morphy: 1998: 108).

With dynamic, haptic sensibilities reinforced through their intimate connection with the earth, Aboriginal artists, as custodians for their country, celebrate it and convey site-specific knowledge in new artistic mediums.

c. Sites and Stories of Significance i. Alhalker

In front of her batik and acrylic paintings, Emily Kame Kngwarray was sometimes heard to ‘sing up’ her country, tracing with her finger the journeys of her Dreamtime Ancestors and sites on the land connected to them (Neale: 1998b: 29). The stories I collected at Utopia strongly illustrate her connections to Alhalker and Atnangker, two adjoining countries inextricably linked through their creation stories. In each country a special sacred site bears its name where men and women separately perform custodial ceremonies. At Alhalker, a massive rock structure features a distinctive hole through which you can see the sky. The name literally means ‘a hole made through the septum of the nose’ and refers both to a hole in the rock as well as a ceremonial ritual (J. Green: 1992: 22). As a specially chosen young woman, Kngwarray had the hole of Alhalker ritually pierced through her nose to link her to that rock formation. The

142 site of Alhalker is sacred because it is the embodiment of the ancestors, the place where the mythic journeys of two Dreamtime brothers overlapped.

33. Alhalker, 1999 (photo: Victoria King)

Alhalker artist Anna Petyarr Price told me part of the story for this sacred site13:

This story from Dreamtime, both own story, [people linked to] Atnangker and Alhalker. Those two birds, green parrots, came back west from Pine Hill Station. They travelled all the way from Arlpatyant [arlpaty means Port Lincoln ring-neck parrot] back to Alhalker. They came back as two men; those two birds are the two brothers. That’s why there is Atnangker and Alhalker. There are two stones there at Alhalker and that’s where they were sitting down looking at the water hole. They’re still there, rock figures at Alhalker. They watch the waterhole, the soak at Alhalker.

As soon as the two birds came and sat down, the mountain devil lizard women came and packed up all that ochre and they started going north, going to the other side of Tennant Creek. The hole [in the rock formation] is the nose, that’s why it’s called Alhalker. There is more to the story but that’s Men’s Business. That’s why Emily had a hole in her nose, from that place. That hole put through her nose in olden times when she was really,

13 Anna Petyarr Price and Emily Kngwarray’s main Yam Dreaming are the same because Emily Kngwarray’s father’s brother’s son was Anna’s father (her mother, the late Glory Ngal’s husband). He was an Alhalker man and his Dreaming was for yam, thus in Aboriginal Law, yam is Anna’s and Emily’s Dreaming. Anna is not blood related to the seven Petyarr sisters, but lives at the outstation of Boundary Bore at Utopia where Gloria, Nancy and Violet Petyarr also live.

143 really young. She had to be a special woman, because of her country. They put the kangaroo bone [a small piece of bone from the sharp part of the lower leg of a kangaroo] through when they were young girls and it had to stay there ‘til they were old women. And that is what they did to Emily because she was boss of that place, that country (Anna Petyarr Price: 1999: personal interview).

Kathleen Kemarr, the wife of Emily Kngwarray’s blood nephew, Greeny Petyarr who is custodian of the sacred site of Alhalker, took me there with his permission. Anna Petyarr Price, her mother the late Glory Ngal and Barbara Weir accompanied us. Care must be continually taken for it would cause untold distress and negative consequences if a sacred site were approached without the permission of the appropriate custodian. Gloria Petyarr explained to me that awareness and respect are necessary in regard to sacred sites and how this information is taught:

My grandfather told my father stories. Before my father passed away, he hand ‘em all stories to us mob. And my father said, “This body paint and song and all that, that’s all for you mob.” I used to walk ‘round with him, we’d walk ‘round same way. He’d say, “This one, don’t go that way. You got to go this way. This is sacred place, you go this way round.” We know father would tell us which way to go. Not allowed to go to men’s sacred place. We know which way to take people. We tell ‘em where not allowed to go, we tell ‘em, “Go this way” (Gloria Petyarr: 2000: personal interview)

As the women walked across this country they softly ‘sung up’ the songs of this place. Plants were pointed out with medicinal purposes and the women collected bright red intekw berries that had fallen on the ground to make necklaces. The huge rock formation of Alhalker with the striking oval hole looms out of the flat land that surrounds it. Near the base was a deeply worn grinding stone used to grind ochres for body painting. I was instructed to stay close as nearby there were places of Men’s Business that women were not allowed to see nor go. Two rock ‘parrots’ were pointed out, still sitting at the waterhole.

144 Their connection to the site began with the Emu Ancestor, one of Emily Kngwarray’s Dreamings that she depicted in her earliest batik and acrylic paintings. Kathleen Petyarr told me about how the shape-shifting Emu Ancestor’s journey linked Alhalker and Atnangker:

In Dreamtime, one ankerr [emu ancestor] he been going to Alice Springs. He go [as] man first, then he change into woman when he got to Alice Springs at Jessie Gap. He went there looking for his people. He changed to woman but nobody there. He went ‘round from Jessie Gap, he walked west and went right ‘round. When he was coming back he was making ntyerrm [edible bean from dogwood tree] and then he made two birds [Port Lincoln ring-neck parrots]. Then came back to Barrow Creek, west from Papunya and went straight across north past Barrow Creek (Kathleen Petyarr: 2000: personal interview).

The topographical details of Dreamtime Ancestors’ journeys ground the stories in place and in time that incorporates past, present and future, not just a mythical era. The people take their responsibilities seriously and repeat these journeys to ensure this knowledge is correctly transmitted into the future for the well-being of the country and for their children as future custodians. Steven Muecke emphasized the importance of such journeys and their relationship to old and new art forms: ‘To know this country is to walk around it along tracks put down by the ancestors, participating in ceremony; for the arts are performed, repeated arts, not unique creations’ (Muecke: 1992: 168). Each journey and each painting is an affirmation of country and cultural continuity. ii. Atnangker and arnkerrth

In order to show me how Alhalker and Atnangker are linked, on another day I was taken to Atnangker and told some of its stories. This is the country of the senior Law woman Weida Kngwarray and her nieces, the seven Petyarr sisters:

145 Myrtle, Kathleen, Ada Bird, Gloria, Nancy, Violet and Jeanne14. Weida and the seven sisters share the Dreaming for arnkerrth, mountain devil lizard (Moloch horridus). The startlingly marked lizard with its many protruding humps along its back and head is evident throughout Utopia.

34. Arnkerrth, Utopia, 1999 (photo: Victoria King)

Although arnkerrth looks quite ferocious, she is quite timid. Through the motion of her curling tail, she leaves a distinctive semi-circular patterned track in the sand. Her survival-adaptation is particularly canny. She is about fourteen centimetres long and has a chameleon-like capacity to change colours with the time of the day to become less visible to predators. She takes in water indirectly by a ‘gulping oral mechanism that moves water, including dew, along microgrooves on its back, and into its mouth’ (Nicholls and North: 2001: 16). Arnkerrth provides a metaphor for survival and existence in arid lands. Christine Nicholls noted that arnkerrth is

a great traveller, crossing vast distances over inhospitable terrain, encountering other beings who may be less than welcoming, or sometimes even hostile. Arnkerrth is the classically Heroic Being, necessarily reliant on her own resources, abilities and strength of character to make it through life’s vicissitudes (ibid.: 19).

Kathleen Petyarr told me the Dreaming story of this small lizard’s travels and confirmed the connections between Alhalker and Atnangker:

14 The seven Petyarr sisters had a common father but four different mothers. The sisters all told me that their father was a good hunter and provided for the four wives and children extremely well. Kathleen and Gloria are sisters from one mother; Myrtle, Violet and Jeanne are sisters from another mother; and Nancy and Ada Bird each had a different mother. Weida Kngwarray is the blood sister of their deceased father. She is ‘boss woman’ for Atnangker, an elder with a status equal to that which Emily Kngwarray held for Alhalker.

146 In Dreamtime, that arnkerrth travelling and another lady one [Mountain Devil Lizard Ancestor] go and follow all the time and come back, start there. Old lady keep coming back, picking up that pinky stuff [sandy ochre] and this one go to Alhalker and come back and pick up more powder stuff. One lady, she didn’t see anyone, so she came to Alhalker and she went back and sat down long time. The [Mountain Devil Lizard Ancestor] ladies went to Tennant Creek, all the women, and that woman, that other lady, she’s still there [embodied in a landform]. And she came back and nobody was there and she said ‘Where all my family gone?’ And she went back and she picked up the left over pinky stuff. She was last one and there was hardly anything left so she picked up their track and she picked up whatever was left and she kept going, making sand hills. And the others kept going, ended up at Tennant Creek, Three Ways, sacred site. And the women went and stopped half way at Akweranty and the old woman kept going, stopped at Three Ways, that’s where the sacred site is. Woman not allowed to drink water there, only man can go and drink, that’s all. They made that Mary Anne Dam near that place, Three Ways, and a lot of people died there, drowned, and Aboriginals say it’s because of that sacred site there, Dreaming place (Kathleen Petyarr: 2000: personal interview).

In this Dreaming story, the Mountain Devil Lizard Ancestor is given human characteristics as she goes about her mythic tasks. These ancestral beings each carried a load of silky-pink sandy ochre on their backs and created the softly undulating sand dunes that are characteristic of the country of Atnangker.

Arnkerrth’s story is at once human and heroic and the places that she ‘sat down’ form the sandhills of Atnangker. The bumps on the tiny mountain devil lizard’s back are seen to represent the ochre that the Dreamtime Ancestors carried. Akweranty, one of the places where she stopped, belongs to both Kngwarray and Petyarr groups and holds special significance because it is where special red ochre is collected for ceremonial body painting (J. Green: 1992: 15). Anna Petyarr Price described this ochre that in the Dreamtime was

147 carried by the Mountain Devil Lizard Ancestors from Alhalker to form the sand hills of Atnangker:

35. Atnangker sand dunes, Utopia, 1999 (photo: Victoria King)

This story from Dreamtime, both own story, Atnangker and Alhalker. Arnkerrth, the [Dreamtime] mountain devil was carrying this sandy stuff, rtart [ochre]. It’s not really red, it’s silky pink, purple-y pink. We put it on our faces to make us feel cool. [It is also used medicinally to rub on the bodies of people with fever to cool them down.] When we were young it used to make you like half-caste person, pink. When you put it on it shines, it’s very clean. It comes from rock but it’s very soft. It’s not solid rock; it‘s like sand. You pick it up and put it on your face. They use it when they “finish up” [the final ceremony of mourning during sorry business] but only from this country, only this mob. Only Atnangker and Alhalker use it for our “finishing up” (Anna Petyarr Price: 2000: personal interview).

She sang the song for the mountain devil lizard that the women sing during awely and then translated it for me.

We sing about the mountain devil travelling, when she was making the sand hills through our country. The song is about how they have to travel before the sun went down, before it got dark. They had to make sand hills before the sun went down. [She sang:] “Let’s get home before it gets night, while it’s still daylight. Let’s do work while its daytime, making sandhills, and we’ll keep travelling before night time.” And they sat down and started “singing up” Akweranty [creating the place]. While they were travelling they

148 were talking to each other saying they have to make sand hills before night (ibid.).

This song is part of an ancient and elaborate song cycle that is sung and danced for awely over many nights by the women of Alhalker and Atnangker. During the ceremonies, responsibilities and connections between people and place are re-established. Anna Petyarr Price confirmed that Emily Kngwarray was an important elder and teacher to her and many new generations of young women. She passed on her embodied knowledge of her country in the form of stories, songs and paintings. The personal stories of Kngwarray’s life, her Dreamings and ceremonies shall be next explored in Section III.

149 III. Anmatyerr Woman: Life, Dreamings and Ceremony a. A Personal Life

Due to difficulties in translation, the details of Emily Kngwarray’s early life are scantily recorded in the existing literature on her. The oral history of her life that Barbara Weir told me is the most detailed account currently available15. Barbara first spoke of Emily’s paternal and maternal background:

Auntie Emily, her father was Anmatyerr, her mother was Anmatyerr, her grandmother was Anmatyerr. … Auntie Emily’s mother came from Arlparra and her father came from Alhalker (Barbara Weir: 1999: personal interview).

Through a traditional paternal lineage, Emily’s father’s country of Alhalker became her own and from him she received her main Yam Dreaming. Alhalker was the country for which she was custodian and the place where she participated in ceremonies at its sacred site. Yet her connection to Arlparra, the place at Utopia where she lived during the later years of her life in a meagre tin humpy, came from it being both her mother’s country as well as her second husband’s country.

15 Barbara Weir’s mother, Minnie Pwerl, is an Alyawarr woman and her father was an Irishman who married the daughter of a nearby pastoral station owner. Because of Pwerl’s ambivalence towards her half-caste child, Barbara was ‘brought up’ by Emily Kngwarray. But in approximately 1956 Barbara was ‘stolen’ by a government official when she was about nine years old while collecting water for Kngwarray. They were reunited about twelve years later in 1968. Kngwarray was the first person to recognize her and make her feel welcome when she returned to Utopia. Barbara spoke of her relationship to Kngwarray: I was called half-caste by Aboriginals. They always made me feel not accepted. I had to prove a lot to those people. They’d say, “Your father was a white man, he come from somewhere else”. It was different with Auntie Emily and me. She treated me like hers, like I was like one of her kids. I had nothing to prove to her and Lily [Sandover]. We’d take off to the next station, me, her and her dogs. We’d go hunting kangaroo with the dogs and I cooked the meat and carried it. She meant her love for me. Auntie Emily and I had lots of stories. She made me feel like I was really loved (Barbara Weir: 1999: personal interview).

150 It is known that Emily had been brought up at Alhalker at a soakage in a dry creek between sand hills and it was here that she first saw a white man while digging for yams (ibid.; A. M. Brody: 1998: 13-14).

When Emily first saw that white man, she and my other auntie, Polly [Myrtle, Violet and Jeannie Petyarr’s mother], they were playing and they had titties. That was what she told me. That was before Utopia station was. They didn’t have any white people out there then (Barbara Weir: 1999: personal interview).

After the Kunoth brothers arrived at Ankerappw and named it Utopia, other pastoralists came and took over Aboriginal land surrounding it. As a young woman Emily worked on nearby Woodgreen Station, Alcoota Station, Bushy Park Station and Yamba Station, looking after farm animals, mainly nanny goats (ibid.). Paid in food rations and used clothes, Aboriginal workers’ lives were not highly considered.

Once her uncle got into trouble because he went and killed a nanny goat and Auntie Emily and him were in chains going to Barrow Creek where they had the lock-ups [jail] and they had a flat tyre on the way. And then he [the policeman] unchained Auntie Emily and told her to go and spread a blanket out under the witchetty tree and told her to help him to take the tyre out. But it wasn’t like that; he took her behind the tree to have sex with her. And when she realised what he was going to do, she ran off, she ran from that Mount Skinner boundary where she was, she went all the way back to Waite River, the bush boundary (ibid.).

Such treatment was not uncommon.

Emily was married twice during her life to two Alyawarr men that were brothers through Aboriginal Law. The first marriage was traditionally arranged to Peter Ngal when she was a young woman. She was his first wife but when it was discovered she could not bear his children, he soon took another wife.

151

Uncle Peter went and got Auntie Emily when she was young but they never had no children so Uncle Peter went and got Lorna. She [Lorna] ended up having kids by Uncle Peter so Auntie Emily decided to leave him. She [Emily] was his first wife, the first wife has lots of power, is boss. She teaches the others. Auntie Emily hung ‘round ‘til Lorna had all the kids. She stayed with him a long time (ibid.).

But while she was working at Woodgreen Station she met the man who was to become her second husband, Jimmy Sandover, when he came to work as a stockman. Her single-minded, strong character is clear in what happened next.

She fell in love with him there, with Jimmy, and when my uncle [Jimmy] went back to Utopia she ended up following him back. She ran away [from Peter]. She fell in love (ibid.).

Amidst much controversy, she and Jimmy returned to Utopia.

She followed my uncle [Jimmy] back… And there was big trouble because she was married and she slept with my uncle and my uncle was a young man. And it was big trouble. And that was in the early ‘50’s. And from then on she lived at Utopia and no other place (ibid.).

At Utopia, Emily had a long relationship with the late Lily Sandover16. Lily was a constant companion to her, especially during her last years and Emily considered her family to be her own. Barbara Weir and Lily were a similar age, and during their adolescent years, Emily was a mother figure and teacher to them both. A young and ‘frightened’ girl, Lily had been ‘promised’ in marriage to Emily’s second husband’s blood brother, Tom Sandover. Emily effectively raised young Lily as her own child. But Barbara related another connection between Lily and Emily.

16 Lily Sandover’s mother and Barbara Weir’s maternal grandfather were blood brother and sister.

152

Auntie Emily knew Lily was going with her [Emily’s] husband [Jimmy]. She’d get any girls for her husband; she wanted to please him… Lily married Tom, but her first son Frankie was not Uncle Tom’s but Uncle Jimmy’s [Emily’s husband]….Simon is [Lily’s] other son to Uncle Jimmy… [S]he [Emily] felt those boys were her sons ‘cause they were Jimmy’s kids. [Kngwarray thought that] Lily just carried him [and that] he was Auntie Emily’s son ‘cause in Gypsal in Utopia a big snake came and rolled round and made tracks and went to Auntie Emily’s first. It was meant for Auntie Emily to have [that child]. She always said, “It was in my tummy and shifted to Lily’s. He’s my kid. That snake he came to me first” (ibid.).

To Emily, Lily and her two sons were family and they were good to her. When her paintings became highly valued, many accusations were made about where the money went. A common misconception was that she was supporting the entire community. But Barbara pointed out the reality as well as the reciprocal relationship Emily had with Lily and her family.

She fed their whole family, Lily’s family, but Lily also worked hard, too, and looked after her. It wasn’t just one way that she gave everything to them, but Lily also looked after her and made sure she had clean clothes and her cooking and wash her clothes. So it was both ways with Lily and Auntie Emily. Not all of Utopia people got anything, they didn’t, ‘cause everything went to the family that she lived with, that family, but they also treated her good and looked after her good, they never treated her bad. Simon never ever abused her or anything and he was always gentle with her, and Frankie, the one who went missing, they looked after her (ibid.).

Around 1989, Lily’s son Frankie disappeared and Emily was distraught. He had been accused of a murder near Alice Springs and revenge was anticipated. He never returned to Utopia but for the rest of her life, Emily continued to look for him (ibid.). Her grief was overwhelming and the sombre paintings that came from this period reflect her sense of loss. She mourned for him until her death.

153

36. Emily Kngwarray, Mourning Story, 1990, acrylic on canvas, 120 x 90 cm, The Holt Collection

Survival on the land was never easy. Barbara relayed a story of one of her childhood hunting trips with Emily that conveyed Kngwarray’s resilience, strength and compassion.

When I was little, Auntie Emily and me, we went out hunting and when you hunt all day you drink water and you run out of water. And we was hunting all day that day for everything, kangaroo, digging for witchetty grubs, looking for perentie, looking for goanna and we ended up with the dogs getting three kangaroos. And we was at a place called Salt Bore inside Utopia and by that time the [hunting] dogs had gone and got the kangaroos and we’d already run out of water ‘cause all morning we’d gone all over the place looking for tucker. So we drank from the blood out of the kangaroo when he was cooked, when you cut it up it comes. And ‘cause there wasn’t much to eat at Utopia, everybody was on rations, she had to take all of that meat to make sure it wasn’t wasted and walk back to Utopia. It was a long way, even though we had drunk the blood from the kangaroo we were still thirsty and I walked as much as I can until I got really that bad, having no shoes and prickles and that, and your mouth was dry and all the prickles were on my feet and I began to cry. And she would go ahead… and leave the kangaroo meat under a tree and she would walk back to where I wouldn’t walk no more. And I’d sit down under the tree and cry, then she’d come back and carry me to further on to the

154 meat, up ahead, then she’d leave me there. Then she’d come back and get her meat and that was how it was all the way back to Utopia (ibid.).

Emily was clearly a remarkable strong and resourceful woman. She was highly respected and reported to have a special ‘power’ over those around her, especially when it came to hunting her favourite foods.

I used to go hunting with Auntie Emily all the time, when I was a little kid and when I came back. We’d say, “Emily, we’re weak now, we’ve got enough perentie.” … “Get em! Get em! Get em!” she shouted. We had to climb up the tree, hot time. If she wanted something you had to bloody do it… She could force you to do anything, that old woman. You could be half dead but you’d have to do it. Like she had a power over us to demand things. She did have a power. We had to shut our mouths if we saw a perentie early in the morning because she’d make us hunt for it all day. She loved perentie (ibid.).

A picture emerges of a capable and persuasive yet compassionate Anmatyerr woman who knew and spoke her own mind. Many of the profits from her paintings financed cars that allowed her to enjoy her traditional way of life on the land, especially her love of hunting. When she took up batik and acrylic painting late in life, she bridged two extremely different cultures. Working with authority, spontaneity and remarkable speed, she painted an estimated 3000 acrylic paintings between 1989 and her death in 1996 (J. Green: 2000: 18). She had many dealers but her commitment was to her extended family, her culture and country17.

In 1992, Kngwarray was a recipient of the prestigious Australia Artists’ Creative Fellowship award, a statement of recognition of her major contribution to Australian contemporary art. Posthumously her work was chosen to represent

17 Germaine Greer pointedly commented that ‘Thousands of dollars passed through her hands and on to her many relatives; millions stuck to the fingers of dozens of dealers’ (Greer: 1997: 5). Some of the major collectors and dealers of her paintings during her life were Robert Holmes a Court, Rodney Gooch, Christopher Hodges, Fred Torres, Donald and Janet Holt, Hank Ebes, Gabrielle Pizzi, Michael Hollows, Tim Jennings and Savah of Gallery Savah.

155 Australia at the 1997 Venice Biennale and a major retrospective of her work travelled to the major public art galleries of Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra between 1998 and 1999. Yet as Anne Marie Brody recognized, her work ‘forces the parameters of contemporary art discourse and renders Western terms of reference largely inadequate’ (A. M. Brody in Neale: 1998b: 23). Her country, Dreamings and women’s ceremonies provided the powerful content for the extraordinary number of paintings for which she became well known nationally and internationally. In order to better understand her paintings, I will now look in depth at her ‘main story’ of her Yam Dreaming.

b. Yam Dreaming

37. Atnwelarr yam, Utopia, 2000 (photo: Victoria King) i. Yam as bush tucker

Emily Kame Kngwarray’s name, Kame, means yam seed, akam, and during the last eight years of her life she prolifically painted the yam in all of its cyclical manifestations. With spontaneity and creativity she painted the colours and patterns of its tiny seeds, flowers and leaves, the winding underground growth of its tubers, as well as the tracks and cracking network of the dried earth that reveals the below-the-surface presence of this staple food. The women systematically gather the perennial yams ‘that always return’ when they are seasonally available (Kathleen Petyarr: May 2001: talk at Museum of Contemporary Art, personal notes). Precise knowledge of the availability and location of plant foods is passed down from generation to generation. Christine

156 Nicholls called this a ‘rotational navigation rather than nomadism’ (Christine Nicholls: May 2001: talk at Museum of Contemporary Art, personal notes). People journeyed to collect bush tucker far across their country. Ada Bird Petyarr spoke to me about collecting bush tucker with her mother:

Long time ago walk ‘round here, long time ago, when [I was a] little one, me, ‘round here for bush tucker. Yernt [bush plum], black ones, we eat ‘em when I was little one like this mob [gestures towards her grandchildren]. One place at Utopia has ‘em. Get yernt and eat ‘em here. I’d go with my mother and big sister and get ‘em bush tucker. Lot of bush tucker then, easy to find. We used to catch ‘em kangaroo, whole lot tyunp [perentie], arlewatyerr [goanna]. Hunting with dogs, long time ago. Tyunp white meat, good meat. And bush medicine we collect from bush, mix it with fat (Ada Bird Petyarr: 2000: personal interview).

Myrtle Petyarr confirmed the wide variety of bush tucker that her family collected and that they dug for two different types of yams.

We used to just eat bush tucker: akatyerr [bush tomatoes], atnwelarr [yam] and arlatyey [yam] and arlewatyerr [goanna] and ilpangkwer [blue tongue lizard]. We used to eat arnkerrth [mountain devil lizard], too. We used to follow their tracks, arnkerrth, little ones. Snakes we used to eat if it was in the tree, follow its track and eat it. Marlew [carpet snake], too, we used to kill ‘em and eat ‘em. This is old story I’m telling. We had no flour, we used to just live on bush tucker, alangkw [bush banana] and akarley [wild orange]. We’d tie up bush tucker with vine from alangkw and put it in ashes for a little while and cook it. We used to dig for atnwelarr [yam] and arlatyey [yam] and eat ‘em. My father used to take dogs and get tyunp [perentie] and kangaroo. Dogs go and get kangaroo. And my arrengey [paternal grandfather] and aperley [paternal grandmother], everything they spear. And we only had fire to keep warm. Arrengey and aperley tell me story about how they get bark from apeng [kurrajong tree] to keep baby warm. We’d do the same thing they do, getting alangkw and akarley, tying

157 ‘em up and cooking ‘em. We’d walk around, go and eat bush tucker, then we’d go and sit down in another place.

My mother and my father and I used to go hunting. Ada [Ada Bird Petyarr] used to sit down and Kathy [Kathleen Petyarr] and I used go with my father. Those little ones used to sit down. A little bit of flour and sugar we got, then a little more. We used to eat alpangwerr [black goanna] from the tree, too, and some snakes. And seeds we used to get and make like damper [the seeds were ground into flour for bread]. I used to eat alangkw [bush banana] and akarley [wild orange] and I used to eat that arnkerrth [mountain devil lizard], too. As I grew up we used to have bit of swags and we go everywhere, walking to Spring Range. Used to eat ankerr [emu] and yalk [a wild onion] there and we’d shift and come back to same place and sit down there. We used to eat tyap anyemayt [witchetty grubs] and inap [porcupine] and tyunp [perentie]. Climb the hill with no shoes, looking in caves to see if inap or tyunp was lying there. We’d make holes with stick, no axe, only a stone axe, dig ‘em out (Myrtle Petyarr: 2000: personal interview).

These were not nomadic wanderings but specific journeys for survival that always brought the people back to their country. As an elder with Yam Dreaming, Emily Kngwarray would have had a special understanding of the perennial yam and knew where to find its tubers. Writers have variously attributed the species of yam that she painted but Jenny Green, a linguist who spent a great deal of time with her at Utopia, confirmed it as atnwelarr. Green noted that ‘Her main concern was with the atnwelarr yam, a creeper with bright green leaves, yellow flowers, and edible roots … Although non-Indigenous scientists only recognise one species of this yam (Vigna lanceolata), Aboriginal people name two distinct plants – atnwelarr and arlatyey’ (J. Green: 2000: 19). Alice Springs ethnobotanist Peter Latz has worked extensively with many of the people of Utopia to catalogue their unique knowledge of native plants and their

158 use of fire management18. He found that the yam’s growth is encouraged by fire and grows after rain at any time of the year (Latz: 1995: 296). This capacity of the yam to survive drought and fire makes it especially important as a food source as the tubers store water and plant nutrients. Latz described the atnwelarr pencil yam (Vigna lanceolata):

The edible swollen roots of this plant are an important food source throughout its range. These juicy, starchy storage organs have a rather bland taste; they are either eaten raw or, more frequently, after being cooked in hot sand and ashes. The above-ground portion of this plant usually dies off a month or so after rain, and it is after this time that the yams are usually collected. Considerable skill is required to locate the underground portions of the plant at this stage, and involves both a knowledge of the specific habitat of the plant and an ability to recognise the remaining dry stems and leaves (ibid.).

All of the women at Utopia confirmed to me the importance of this tuber as a staple food. Despite the widespread introduction the foods of the settler culture, it is still collected and cooked by the women. ii. Painting Yam

Barbara Weir described Kngwarray’s connection to the atnwelarr and more about the particularity of the yam’s growth.

Akam, yam seed, her father gave her that name. …The truth is she always painted the same thing, about the yam. She painted the yam roots, she painted the yam flowers after the rain, the seeds of the yam, and the body paint of the yam. But it was nothing but the yam she painted. A couple of times she painted the emu woman, but her story and I know because she was speaking [in Anmatyerr] language to me all the time and I know the

18 Peter Latz has frequently collaborated with Jenny Green. She illustrated many of the plants in his book, Bushfires & Bushtucker: Aboriginal Plant Use in Central Australia (1995).

159 story, it’s all to do with the yam. Emu is her Dreaming, too, but her story was yam.

Atnwelarr, that was the yam she painted. When it’s ready to flower, it lifts the ground and that’s how it comes up. Like with any other thing growing, the flower comes on as the leaves come, but with atnwelarr it’s different, it just comes up and the flower comes right up from it. And that’s how she draws the roots because the roots were underneath the ground and they lift the ground up. And a lot of that [painting] was about earth, too, when she did the wildflower [yam flower paintings]. The earth was all mixed up in it, too. She did yam seeds, the yam itself and the way it used to flower and the roots (Barbara Weir: 1999: personal interview).

38. Emily Kngwarray, Untitled, 1995, acrylic on canvas, 76 x 85 cm, private collection

Kngwarray’s all-encompassing understanding of the yam and its growth cycle is confirmed by the importance she gave it in her paintings. The many layers of cultural, experiential and spiritual knowledge of her story are evident in a painting such as Untitled (figure 38). Here the lines suggest the linear cracking of the sun-baked red earth and the women’s journeys to collect them. The repeated arm motion of the women digging into the compacted ground with digging sticks is also strongly sensed. This painting also evokes the lines of the arlkeny patterns of body painting for awely in the organic web of red, yellow and white acrylic that represents the colours of ochres painted on the body. The lines are repeated on the black ground of the canvas just as they are on the black skin of the women for ceremonies.

160

Anna Petyarr Price also paints the seeds of her Yam Dreaming passed down to her through her father. She told me more about atnwelarr yam and its awely that was taught to her by Emily Kngwarray:

That is what Emily passed down to her nieces: atnwelarr [yam] and akam [the yam seed]. When she painted she used a lot of white because it was white seed. Emily taught me her awely long, long time ago when I was young. Emily started us, taught us awely and dance for atnwelarr and for that special thing that emu eats, intekw. Emily taught us the Akweranty song [the place where the red ochre used for ceremonies is found] and Law. Atnwelarr was Emily’s main story and she gave it to us mob to carry on; that was the main thing she painted. Atnwelarr belongs to me, like Emily (Anna Petyarr Price: 2000: personal interview).

Anna Petyarr Price, Barbara Weir and Jenny Green all confirmed that atnwelarr yam was Kngwarray’s ‘main story’. Marcia Langton contended that gender differences in art subjects explained what she called Kngwarray’s ‘style’, for as ‘gatherers of vegetable foods and small animals, women tend to paint plant species and the Dreamings associated with them’ (Langton: 2000a: 16). Yet the women’s subject matter was not simply derived from what they hunted and gathered. Adherence to Aboriginal Law and its secret/sacred distinctions about Dreamings determines the content of what can and cannot be painted. Ownership of a Dreaming is never generic but specific. At an exhibition of her own work, Kathleen Petyarr explained that under Aboriginal Law an artist is obliged to paint their own Dreaming, not changing fixed elements of the Dreaming story, but that visual innovation is possible (Kathleen Petyarr with Christine Nicholls at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney: 9 May 2000: personal notes). Through patrilineal descent there is a familial, communal holding of Dreamings with ‘big bosses’ for each and it is from them that permission is sought to paint (Glory Ngal: 2000: personal interview). Each person paints their appropriate Dreaming but in their own creative way. Glory Ngal emphasized important hierarchical differences to me at Utopia as she

161 explained her Dreaming for alkwa, bush plum (Santalum lanceolatum). She and her brothers were all given this Dreaming from her father, but with significant gender distinctions.

Alkwa, Bush Plum Dreaming, passed down from akngey [father] to me. Arrengey [grandfather] to akngey, akngey to sisters and brothers. I paint about the root and the flowers, not the fruit part. The fruit is really sacred and the man does that. My brothers George Ngal and his sons and Paddy and Barbara’s [Weir’s] brother Raymond at Camel Camp have [Bush Plum] Fruit Dreaming. And the other bosses for the flowers and roots are my nieces: Eileen, Betty, Dora and June, and my sisters Gracie Morton and Maria (Glory Ngal: 2000: personal interview).

Repeatedly the women impressed upon me that I must make clear that men hold the most sacred Dreamings and Law, and any breach of that recognition would have negative repercussions for the entire community. Yet mutual respect for each gender’s ceremonies was strong. This was evident when I asked Barbara Weir about women’s songs for country:

We sing for all sorts: new growth, for animals, for meat, to make ‘em fat, to bring rain, to make ‘em breed. ‘Cause they’ve got different songs for each thing. Like for beans, they have a song. Every bush tucker they have a song for it. Some of them are sacred songs. My grandmother’s country is very sacred, it’s about kangaroo, so we don’t really talk about it that much. ‘Cause that’s man’s side. It belongs to my grandmother, too, but man always have to stay in charge. Everything, every animal, every bush tucker, each one of them has a song (Barbara Weir: 1999: personal interview).

Yam Dreaming was the culturally appropriate story for Kngwarray to paint and she held experiential, botanical, ecological and spiritual knowledge of the atnwelarr yam. To ‘hold’ or to ‘own’ a Dreaming is also to be ‘held’ or ‘owned’ by it and this has secular and sacred implications. In a comment whose magnitude

162 is difficult to comprehend, Kngwarray frequently said, ‘I am akam’ (Anna Petyarr Price: 2000: personal interview). Jennifer Biddle maintained that Aboriginal paintings can epitomize a way of being where a merging occurs between subject and object, one that corresponds to a ‘dissolution’ of self (Biddle: 2003: 71). Biddle believed that this conveys a ‘carnal experience’ to the viewer, a ‘gift’ that does not jeopardize the secret/sacred knowledge that must be protected (ibid.). Kngwarray’s statement ‘I am akam’ carries profound spiritual connotations and resonates with Martin Buber’s affirmation of an ‘I-Thou’ relationship. Buber wrote:

[I]f will and grace are joined, that as I contemplate the tree I am drawn into a relation, and the tree ceases to be an It… it confronts me bodily and has to deal with me as I must deal with it – only differently. One should not try to dilute the meaning of the relation: relation is reciprocity (Buber: 1970: 58).

Emily Kngwarray’s acknowledgement of herself as a personification of yam expresses not only her traditional culture but also a profound sense of reciprocity and relationship with her country of Alhalker. Such a remarkable way of seeing and being is a mystery in its dissolution of distance between ‘self’ and ‘other’. Respect and reverence allow difference and affinity to be acknowledged and celebrated. This is truly a ‘gift’ that Kngwarray’s acrylic paintings have the potential to communicate.

c. Awely: Women’s Ceremony for Country i. ‘Whole lot’

Aboriginal women’s lives are deeply connected to the ground of their country through the hunting and gathering of bush plants and food, Dreamings and ceremonies. When Kngwarray began to paint in batik and acrylic and was asked what her paintings were about, she was quoted to have replied ‘amern’,

163 an inclusive term for vegetable food as well as food in general. Jennifer Isaacs literally translated amern as ‘everything, all the plants and flowers of the desert garden in bloom or in fruit at a particular season’ (Isaacs: 1998a: 512). Yet this comment contradicts the ownership and particularity of Dreamings and the cultural emphasis on painting the appropriate ‘right way’. Kngwarray once said that what she painted was ‘whole lot’ (Kngwarray in Boulter: 1991: 61). When one pays close attention to her own words, translated by Kathleen Petyarr and published in 1991, a better indication of what she meant is revealed:

Whole lot, that’s whole lot, Awelye (my Dreaming), Arlatyeye (pencil yam). Arnkerrthe (mountain devil lizard), Ntange (grass seed), Tingu (a Dream- time pup), Ankerre (emu), Intekwe (a favourite food of emus, a small plant), Antwerle (green bean), and Kame (yam seed). That’s what I paint: whole lot (ibid.).

In this list of what she painted, Kngwarray first named ‘awely’, giving it primary importance. The bracketed translation of awely as ‘my Dreaming’ is misleading. Awely specifically means ‘women’s ceremonies’ (J. Green: 1992: 119). ‘My Dreaming’ should have followed what came next as Kngwarray then proceeded to list her Dreamings. First was her main Dreaming of pencil yam. Although it was translated as arlatyeye rather than atnelwarr, this appears to be a mistake in transcription. Transcription is extremely difficult and mistakes are easily made; punctuation can distort context and emphases are often missed as this passage demonstrates. What Kngwarray described as ‘whole lot’ was not an inclusive listing of all the desert flora or fauna as Jennifer Isaacs implied in 1998. Her ‘main story’, as Anna Petyarr pointed out, was for yam: ‘Emily started us, taught us awely and dance for atnwelarr… Atnwelarr was Emily’s main story and she gave it to us mob to carry on, that was the main thing she painted’ (Anna Petyarr Price: 2000: personal interview). Kngwarray’s painted her other Dreamings in her early batiks and very early acrylics, but she soon came to

164 focus on her ‘main story’ of Yam Dreaming and awely19. Anne Marie Brody said that ‘by virtue of her origins, age and experience’, Emily Kngwarray was one of the most traditional Aboriginal painters (A. M. Brody: 1998: 20). Her work in batiks and acrylics had long-established precedents through her being a respected Alhalker elder for her Anmatyerr culture. ii. Painting awely

39. Emily Kngwarray, Awelye, 1990, acrylic on canvas, 54.5 x 85 cm, private collection

Mary Eagle recognized that

The canvas and the paint which ensure the continued existence of Emily Kngwarreye’s great work derive from the settler culture. Otherwise the work [Big Yam Dreaming, figure 45], enormous in scale and significance, would have been drawn in the sand. The knowledge of how and when to make such images was there for many generations before westerners acquired a taste for Aboriginal art and set about capturing images on canvas. The idea lives not in its representations, whether on sand or canvas, but vitally in the minds and hands of the Anmatyerre women who have had the responsibility of embodying the knowledge and passing it on to younger women (Eagle: 2000: 238).

19 In ‘Batik Painting at Utopia’ in Section IV, I explain how the Utopia women’s first batik experiments included more generic bush plants and animals before they came to concentrate on their appropriate Dreamings.

165 Barbara Weir confirmed the important function that Kngwarray played in the continuity of her culture: ‘Auntie Emily was the eldest woman that taught the Law that had got to be handed down, the awely… She was the main woman that knew the Law. She sang and painted on the young women and taught us all that, handed it down’ (Barbara Weir: 1999: personal conversation). From one of her earliest acrylic paintings in 1990, Awelye (figure 39), Kngwarray repeatedly returned to women’s ceremonies for the content of her paintings. In paintings such as Big Yam Dreaming (figure 45), she rhythmically repeated the gesture of a half-circle to represent women’s breasts ‘painted up’ for awely. In later acrylic works (figure 40) she painted bold yet sensual lines that recreated the arlkeny, the body painting designs on breasts, shoulders and torsos.

40. Emily Kngwarray, Untitled, 1996, acrylic on canvas, 64 x 39 cm, private collection

Jenny Green acknowledged the importance of awely: ‘The awely comes from the land and the knowledge of these ceremonies is passed on by senior land- owning women to the younger generations’ (J. Green: 1992: 119).

Women have ownership rights and responsibilities to the country of both their mother’s and father’s clans, as well as to the country in which they were born. The women celebrate their special relationship to the country through the performance of women’s ceremonies called awely. Women perform awely to “make ourselves happy”. Their purpose can be to promote the health and well-being of the community, to instigate success in matters of love and to familiarize the younger women with the songs and dances that demonstrate their ties with the land, thus drawing upon

166 and renewing the power left in the country by the altjira or dreamtime beings. Only recently have non-Aboriginal people recognized the very existence of women’s ritual life and responsibilities (J. Green: 1981: unnumbered catalogue).

What appear to be minimalist or expressionistic abstract gestures in Emily Kngwarray’s batik and acrylic paintings are the linear patterns of her awely. She filled large and small canvases with U-shape gestures of breasts and straight lines of the arlkeny body painting designs that she painted on her countrywomen’s skin in ochres (figures 39, 40 and 45). In her 1996 acrylic work, Untitled (figure 40), Kngwarray depicted women’s breasts painted with red ochre arlkeny patterns on the black ground of the canvas that stood for the women’s skin. Her work evokes women ‘painted up, dancing in unison to the songs of their country, their feet touching the earth. In a new medium, often working in series, she continued to celebrate her awely. Her capacity to transform awely into a powerful motif on cloth and canvas showed her enormous capacity for creative innovation within her strong cultural tradition. iii. Cultural rituals of awely

In 1990, Kathleen Petyarr described Kngwarray’s participation and role in the awely ceremonies and the women’s preparation for body painting:

Every afternoon the women congregated and prepared for the ‘awelye’. They smeared their bodies with animal fat and traced the ceremonial designs on their breasts, arms and thighs, using brushes called ‘tyepale’ (made from flat sticks padded with cotton). These were dipped in powders ground from charcoal, ash, and red and yellow ochre. The paintwork was appraised critically by everyone and mistakes or omissions of detail corrected. The women sang as each took her turn to be ‘painted up’.

The singing continued for hours, interspersed with dance. Several women who had been painted danced together, led on many occasions by Emily,

167 the most senior woman of the Alhalkere clan. She carried the ceremonial painted stick (kwetere). Meanwhile the other women beat the rhythm with their hands, and sang the songs relevant to the dreaming story. These depict the travels of the dreamtime ancestors through Alhalkere country, including the mountain devil (arnkerrthe), the emu (arnkerre) and the kangaroo (aherre) and other totemic plants, animals and natural forces (Kathleen Petyarr in A. M. Brody: 1990: 13).

As the journeys of Dreamtime Ancestors are danced and sung, awely plays an important custodial role in providing cultural continuity with country. Kathleen Petyarr recounted in 1998 how the early batik paintings were seen to continue that tradition:

All the old women, the aunties and the young nieces, well all of us do our awely ceremonies to hold onto our country. Nobody else can say anything about it... The kwertengerl woman might come and have a look and she’ll say, “that’s really good what you are all painting - your country. You are all holding onto it.” The country that our grandfathers and grandmothers handed on to us. Then their brother might have a look and when he sees it say, “Oh, you’re doing our country designs on the batik.” He’ll have a look and say, “So you’re holding onto the country by doing that painting” (Kathleen Petyarr in J. Green: 1998: 45).

Kathleen expressed how the paintings are seen and understood to ‘hold onto the country’. ‘Holding on to country’ is a profound cultural, ecological and political statement. The traditional owners of Alhalker and Atnangker take awely as well as batik and acrylic painting extremely seriously. Kathleen’s reference to ‘kwertengerl’ refers to a male or female adult who has the role of guardian or ‘manager’ of ceremony, a ceremonial role in relation to the mother’s country (J. Green: 1998: 48). In Justice Toohey’s report for Utopia’s Land Rights claim, the role of kwertengerl, or kurtingurla, was extensively discussed. ‘The main functions of the kurtingurla [kwertengerl], as outlined by the Aboriginal witnesses, were to hold knowledge, to teach, to bear witness, to punish, to care

168 for and protect, and to work’ (Toohey: 1980: 13). During these proceedings, Sandy Riley described how the male kwertengerl paints the men for ceremonies and paints the shields and sacred objects:

[Kwertengerl] has to tell him the right way… He’s got to tell him or he might make a mistake and do wrong way… he has to tell him off and say ‘You have to keep it; that’s your country’. That’s what kurtingurla [kwertengerl] got to say… He knows the songs through country, how to paint it. They look after the painting, look after the painting on the country and they’ve got to paint him… all the time (Riley in Toohey: 1980: 14).

This early affirmation of the importance of painting of sacred objects and bodies the ‘right way’ applies equally to awely. Meredith Rowell noted during the Land Claim proceedings for Utopia that ‘[W]omen’s business is distinct from men’s business and women have a ceremonial responsibility towards country which is different from but complementary to that of the men’ (Rowell in Toohey: 1980: 27).

Gloria Petyarr explained to me that Emily Kngwarray was the main teacher for the ceremonies of awely for Alhalker and Weida Kngwarray for Atnangker:

‘Men pass ‘em [Dreaming] story on. They do it first, then that awely, body paint, hand ‘em over for ladies, Kngwarray for Alhalker and Auntie Weida for Atnangker. When my Auntie [Emily Kngwarray] passed away and my father passed away, they tell their sister Weida. Only Auntie Weida still alive. We sing songs and sit down, Alhalker and Atnangker, sit down together [for awely] (Gloria Petyarr: 2000: personal interview).

In my conversation with Weida Kngwarray, she confirmed the ceremonial links between the two countries as she spoke of awely:

Atnangker and Alhalker, we use same Law to make young men and awely same. [Women’s] Dance same, but colours [ochre colours and designs for

169 body painting] different. When awely, we do together. Boss lady at Akweranty, she gave hairstring skirt [braided hair skirt for ceremonial dancing] to Emily, same one. That supposed to go to me when Emily died20 (Weida Kngwarray: 2000: personal interview).

41. Awely dances and body painting, Utopia, 2000 (photo: Victoria King)

Anna Petyarr Price shares Emily Kngwarray’s Yam Seed Dreaming and spoke of the joint nature of the ceremonies and the songs that link Atnangker and Alhalker:

We have one awely. Akam [yam seed] Dreaming. Alhalker’s awely [belongs to] just this mob, [that is] why the hairstring skirt belongs here. When Gloria [Petyarr] sings Auntie Emily’s songs, they are my songs, too, for the akam awely. They are for Atnangker and Alhalker. It is the seed and the flower (Anna Petyarr Price: 2000: personal interview).

The late Glory Ngal, Anna’s mother, spoke at length about the women’s roles in awely and more about the ceremonial hairstring skirt and its connection to the Dreamtime Ancestor’s journeys.

20 I witnessed much distress amongst the women because their ceremonial hairstring skirt had been taken by Utopia’s non-indigenous arts coordinator and given to the curator of Kngwarray’s 1998 retrospective exhibition. It had not been returned in 2000.

170 All the women [of Atnangker and Alhalker] have the same dance, only designs are different for each country. Everybody owns different awely designs. Anna [Petyarr Price] has a white and red design. Young girls, the old women teach them from young and the old women decide when they’re ready. They paint the body paint on them and make them ready when they first get titties. When they get them ready it can be any old lady who knows the story and song who paints them. The mother’s got a different Dreaming so it’s the girl’s father’s mother who has to teach the daughter. Designs are still done with red ochre and we cut a little stick, tyepal, to paint with or use fingers. There is no black ochre so we use charcoal. Red ochre is still around here but long way, on that hill. White and red both come from west of Boundary Bore, Atneltyey. In olden days we used fat from arlewatyerr [goanna] and kangaroo and ankerr [emu] and inap [echidna] and amwely [bearded dragon lizard], whatever fat we can get to mix with the ochre. We can use anything. Today we use bullock fat (Glory Ngal: 2000: personal interview).

Glory Ngal continued:

The old women paint the girls ready. Just women dance, old women sing and other old women will dance to teach them dancing. Girls would sit down in front and they’d teach them…. Only awely designs we put in paintings on canvas, we don’t put story about the other painting up [body painting for young men’s initiation and death and mourning rituals of ‘sorry business’].

For awely, breasts and arms painted up with ochre and hairstring skirt worn. Every hairstring skirt is greased with different colours, black and red, black charcoal, red ochre. Other is red and yellow ochre. … Hairstring skirt is like necklace. One for forehead and we have a feather that goes in front. And one for each arm, both sides, upper arm, and then one really big one lays cross the neck and across breast [she described a diagonal motion]. Breasts and arms painted and hair belt worn. It was made out of hair from

171 olden times, painted with red ochre greased up with animal fat. It’s important, we teach the young girls with it. It was passed down from old people who died, and keeps passing down from before we were born. We keep greasing it up and put it away. That came back from where the [Dreamtime] arnkerrth was travelling. The boss lady on the other end sent it back here, and it should stay here. They used to dance naked, but would have some hairpiece to cover front part. Today we just dance with skirt. Olden times people were naked (ibid.).

The enormous cultural importance of the awely ceremony is apparent in Glory Ngal’s story. She revealed how the particular combinations of colours and patterns hold very specific meanings in acrylic paintings. In 1998 Kathleen Petyarr gave further details of the body painting and dances:

The old women used to paint the ceremonial designs on their breasts, first with their fingers, on the breasts and chest, and then with a brush called a tyepal, made from a twig. They paint thighs with white paint, with their fingers and then with the tyepal. They paint up with red and white ochres, then they dance, showing their thighs. While the old women are singing the old “boss” woman dances with a ceremonial stick and a headdress of feathers, and she places the ceremonial stick in the earth…. I used to watch my father’s mother; and she used to instruct me as I was dancing. Well now I have learnt about it, like my father’s mother (Kathleen Petyarr in J. Green: 1998: 44).

In her description of the rhythmic awely dances, Myrtle Petyarr spoke about the ceremonial stick, the kweter, which penetrates the earth:

My aperley [father’s mother] and anyany [mother’s mother] and my aunties, they used to make awely and dance, used to teach me how to dance. Emily used to teach me and my aperley and anyany used to teach Emily. Another mob [of women] would sing and another mob [of women] would dance. Two would dance alone and two would sit and two would

172 come back with kweter [dancing stick], then two more dance. Even if just one or two ladies dancing, everyone would sing. And then another three or four would dance going around kweter then come back to ladies sitting down singing. Then another mob might come along. If they had three or four kweter, three or four dancers would take one back to singers until all kweter were gone. Then they put it back in middle and carry on teaching ‘em. And all the women they dance around kweter, going ‘round it. Olden time children everything was taught. Now I’m painting story given to me, painting on canvas, showing breast marks, white, yellow and red, three colours. I put same awely on batik, women’s story. Same on batik [as] on body (Myrtle Petyarr: 2000: personal interview).

For Myrtle Petyarr, like Kngwarray and many of the Utopia women who paint in batik and acrylic, cloth and canvas are seen as a potential skin that can represent their own skin and embodied connection to the ground of their country. Jenny Green described the respect with which awely was held and its transference to the new mediums of batik and acrylic painting:

The visual symbolism of awely, which once found expression only in ceremonial body painting, has found a new form in the batik designs on silk, and in more recent years, acrylic paint on canvas. It is regarded as special – a “dear one” (highly valued) – something to be painted carefully and correctly and with due respect for the protocols of kin relations and country. Images of awely were often applied to clothing as if the garment were a body (J. Green: 1998: 44).

In order to better understand the secular components of Emily Kngwarray’s batik and acrylic work, I shall now look at the origins and complexities of the art movement at Utopia and her role in their development.

173 IV. Old Traditions, New Mediums a. Batik Painting at Utopia

Emily Kngwarray’s paintings were a major catalyst in the reassessment of Aboriginal art as ‘contemporary art’ rather than ‘ethnographic or ‘primitive’ art. From the beginning, her depiction of her country and her Dreamings challenged the traditional, conventional imagery of previous more literal and symbolic Aboriginal art (J. Green: 2000: 18; Langton: 2000a: 14; R. Benjamin: 1998: 47). Howard Morphy believed the ‘enormous appeal’ of her paintings ‘echoed so many themes in the recent history of European art’ and fitted the criteria and expectations of a ‘modernist aesthetic’ (Morphy: 1998: 315). Marcia Langton wrote that Kngwarray’s artwork won overwhelming acclaim because of its painterly style, innovation and experimentation, yet because of her indigeneity, feminine gender, extreme age and religiosity, she also represented the ‘authentically different’ (Langton: 2000a: 14). Kngwarray’s paintings continue to resonate between two distinctly different cultures. Jenny Green believed she was a role model for Aboriginal artists, an Australian indigenous ‘heroine’ and a ‘counterpoint to Albert Namitjira, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Rover Thomas and others’ (J. Green: 2000: 18). Her use of vibrant colour and her capacity for stylistic renewal continues to influence Utopia women artists today21.

Kngwarray’s introduction to the new mediums of batik and acrylic came from communal initiatives. In 1977, Jenny Green organized the first art and craft programmes for women at Utopia and Kngwarray was one of the first to be involved in the popular experiments with tie-dye and woodblock printing on fabric (J. Green: 1998: 40) 22. Later in 1977, the success of these crafts led Green to invite Suzy Bryce and Nyangkula Brown, a batik artist from Fregon, to give a workshop in batik (ibid.). Employed through the Institute for Aboriginal Development, Bryce and Nyangkula taught the women to use the traditional

21 This influence is particularly evident in the work of Gloria Petyarr and Barbara Weir. 22 Jenny Green was herself an artist and initially arrived to teach literacy and numeracy skills at Utopia in 1976.

174 Indonesian tjanting tool to achieve intricate linear patterns. Jenny Green recognized that ‘Batik (and tie-dye) was the first major innovation providing the creative link between the traditional and the contemporary for Utopia women, and Kngwarray began experimenting with these newly imported art materials in 1977’ (J. Green: 2000: 18).

The portability and sociability of batik immediately suited the Utopia women as they engaged in decorating clothing and fabric around communal fires in the bush. They first imitated commercial, stylised ‘pretty flower’ patterns of store- bought fabrics but then their ‘natural creativity’ led them to incorporate bush creatures and plants from Utopia (J. Green in Tweedie: 1983: 78, J. Green: 1998: 42-43). In 1978, Julia Murray, a friend of Green’s, came and developed the Utopia Women’s Batik program23. At the end of 1980 the women first exhibited their batiks at an exhibition with Green’s own paintings at Artworks Gallery in Alice Springs (ibid.: 42). It was a huge success and all the work sold. Jenny Green noted that ‘One of the exceptional works from that first show was the silk length by Emily Kngwarray, perhaps the earliest work indicative of her formidable talent’ (J. Green: 1998: 42). Fifty of the Utopia women came into Alice Springs for the exhibition opening and witnessed first hand the extraordinary effect the batik had on the public. Murray recounted that ‘The women got a real kick out of seeing white people, politicians and important townspeople rushing to buy their stuff. That was the point at which we all started taking the batik seriously’ (Murray in Tweedie: 1983: 78). Despite the popularity of the batik, funding remained difficult. Green and Murray were committed to the potential they saw within the shimmering, vibrant silks and resourcefully found ways to allow the batik work to continue.

The Utopia women’s batiks first gained national attention in 1981 at an exhibition of them at the Adelaide Festival Centre. But for many of the Aboriginal women who accompanied their work to that exhibition and

23 For non-Indigenous people working on Aboriginal communities, gender is a significant issue that has to be continually negotiated. Just as Geoffrey Bardon was able to work with the men at Papunya, so, too, working directly with the Utopia women was appropriate for Jenny Green and Julia Murray. Anne Marie Brody also noted issues of gender associated with the early batik project at Utopia (A. M. Brody: 1990: 14).

175 demonstrated its creation each afternoon it was a ‘mixed blessing … traumatic for many of them. As old Emily said, it was “too much, too much everything’” (ibid.). This early notation of the ‘traumatic’ effect of the art experience upon Kngwarray is noteworthy. Murray concluded that it was ultimately an ‘adventure and a learning experience’ and it encouraged the women ‘to continue with their bush themes, as a means of expressing their Aboriginality and the specialness of their culture’ (ibid.). She described how the women enjoyed the social aspects of making batik:

In retrospect, perhaps it was foolhardy to persist with batik and not introduce canvas and paints to the artists, but I was convinced that the batik would ultimately achieve the recognition it deserved as fine art. I was reluctant to interfere with the way the women worked as a group, which was part of the reason the batik was so happily embraced. It was a collective, social, unpressured way to “make art”. There was a sense of shared enjoyment that working as individual painters does not provide (Murray in Tweedie: 1983: 78).

In 1987, the Department of Aboriginal Affairs asked Rodney Gooch through his affiliation with CAAMA, the Central Australia Aboriginal Media Association to manage and market Utopia batik through the CAAMA shop in Alice Springs. Gooch initially gave out pieces of cotton at Utopia and then in 1988, he distributed rectangles of silk to everyone who wished to participate in a project he envisioned. He asked them to express ‘the way they were related to each other and to “their country” for the first time on the silk’ (A. M. Brody: 1990: 14). Eight-seven women and one man, Lindsay Bird Mpetyan, completed silk batiks between 1988 and 1989, depicting their Dreamings as well as familiar bush foods, desert flora and aspects of camp life (ibid.)24. Emily Kngwarray completed a batik in yellow and brown on white with designs associated with her Emu Dreaming (figure 42). Her description of her it was translated as follows:

24 This collection was exhibited as ‘Utopia - A Picture Story’ and was acquired by the Robert Holmes a Court Foundation. Lindsay Bird Mpetyan is a blood nephew of Emily Kngwarray.

176

‘Ceremonial body paint designs are shown for the Emu Dreaming from Alhalkere country. The large floral motif is woolybutt grass. Bush turkeys, sand goannas and perenties are depicted. The background patterns represent the fruits and seed that emus like to eat. The border pattern is based on ceremonial body designs for the Pencil Yam Dreaming from Alhalkere country’ (Kngwarray in A. M. Brody: 1990: 116).

42. Emily Kngwarray, Emu Dreaming, 1977-78, batik on silk, 236 x 117.5 cm, Holmes a Court Collection

Kngwarray’s earliest batik contained a combination of her Dreaming motifs, bush flora and fauna, and awely patterns. It is interesting to note the early inclusion in the border of the repeated straight lines of her body painting designs. During the last two years of her life, these arlkeny lines for awely emerged as a central theme in her acrylic paintings. This early batik displayed strong visual unity and painterly spontaneity. With great effect she utilized the sputtering of the hot wax to create a secondary field of dotting amongst the natural irregularity of the primary dots that depicted seeds (J. Green: 1998: 41). These dots generated an active field upon which her Dreaming symbols could surface and then merge into the artful ground of their constructed desert camouflage.

177 b. Introduction of Acrylic Paints

For many years batik was distinguished from Fine Art through a long differentiation between art and craft, batik being seen as traditionally ‘women’s work’, a craft considered less valuable (Megaw: 1999: 7). In late 1987, six months after the batik project, Rodney Gooch proposed another initiative at Utopia. He distributed one hundred 60 by 90-centimetre canvases and acrylic paints. Of these, eighty-one paintings were completed and exhibited at the S. H. Ervin Gallery in Sydney in 1989 as ‘A Summer Project: The First Works on Canvas’ with great critical acclaim, especially for Emily Kngwarray (A. M. Brody: 1990: 31). Her ‘Emu Woman’ painting (figure 43) was used to illustrate the catalogue and her art immediately was in great demand.

43. Emily Kngwarray, Emu Woman, 1988-89, acrylic on canvas, 92 x 61 cm, Holmes a Court Collection

Kngwarray and many of the Utopia artists embraced the new freedom and speed which acrylics allowed. Jenny Green noted that acrylic was ‘easier’ for Kngwarray, better for her failing eyesight, and that it offered greater economic returns (J. Green: 2000: 18). A small painting could now easily be done in a day compared to the laborious stages involved in batik work. In 1990, Kngwarray told Green why the acrylic medium appealed to her:

I gave up [batik]… to avoid all the boiling to get the wax out. I got a bit lazy – I gave it up because it was too much hard work. I finally got sick of it… I didn’t want to continue with the hard work doing batik required – continually boiling and boiling the baric, and lighting the fires, and using up all the soap powder – over and over – that’s why I gave it up and changed

178 over to canvas then – it was easier (Kngwarray, Utopia, 1990 in J. Green: 1998: 47).

Acrylics eliminated the many laborious stages of the batik process. Batik is an intractable and obstinate medium; the first mark remains visible at the work’s completion. Mistakes cannot be corrected because one works from light (the white of the cloth) to dark (the accumulative result of individual dye baths) as intricate wax line work is laboriously built up. Acrylics have universally gained popularity amongst artists for their immediacy. They dry quickly, allow fast layering of colour and design, and as a water-based medium, brushes can be cleaned with ease. Green observed that Kngwarray carried over the techniques of batik to her acrylic painting in the overlaying of colours and images (J. Green: 2000: 18). On canvas her characteristic ‘lack of concern for precision, neatness and regularity’ fit easily into the niche of ‘Fine Art’, whereas the women often teased her for these very same attributes in her batik (Neale: 1998b: 26). With the ease of acrylic painting and the demand for her work, Kngwarray soon developed a signature style of dotting with few of the figurative motifs she had used in her early batiks. The dots, once present in her batiks as intekw seeds (a food of the emu) and the splutter of the wax process, now became the yam flowers and yam seeds of her main Dreaming and profusely filled her canvases.

In her writing on Kathleen Petyarr’s work, Christine Nicholls commented that ‘In terms of Anmatyerr law, dots are the least significant aspect of the painting, often, though not always, thought of simply as infill’ (Nicholls and North: 2001: 204)25. But the gestural power behind Emily Kngwarray’s dots and her use of them as a motif demand that her dots be seriously considered more than infill. Her capacity to imbue the dots with the signification of her country and culture as well as their aesthetic beauty is noteworthy. Dotting can incorporate a vast diversity of references in Aboriginal painting (Munn: 1973; Sutton: 1988; Watson: 1997, 2003; Morphy: 1998; Myers: 2002; Biddle: 2003)26. Dots can

25 I return to the issue and perception of dotting in ‘Dots, Dots, Dots’ in Chapter Five. 26 Part of a universal painterly language, the dot is one of the most basic visual symbols found throughout the world. The dot is found in places as diverse as medieval and Byzantine art, early

179 symbolize particular topographical features or flora. They can make oblique references to women’s ways of telling stories drawn directly in the soft sand with the hand or a stick (Watson: 1997, 2003). Many early Aboriginal rock engravings were first incised with individual dots in a series of drilled holes connected to form a line (Stanbury and Clegg: 1990: 1).

In men’s acrylic paintings, dots can refer to the formal geometry of men’s ritual sand paintings, large elaborate mosaics made up of clumps or ‘dots’ of plant material (Latz: 1995: 70, 161, 212; Morphy: 1998: 115). Johnny Warrangkula Tjupurrula was the first Papunya artist to use dotting as a ‘background’ for his painting rather than traditional ‘hatching’ (Bardon: 1991: 126). Some of the early Papunya paintings depicted secret/sacred ceremonial symbols that traditionally would never have been shown to uninitiated boys or to women, much less be made public to outsiders (ibid.: 127; Megaw: 1999: 8). An outcry occurred within the community and the artists soon used more discretion upon the new surfaces that had the potential to transmit ancient knowledge far from their communities of origin. They developed an innovative system of obliterative dotting to discreetly cover and hide the secret paths and objects27.

Contemporary Aboriginal acrylic dot paintings hold a vital link to the artists’ traditional culture. The work of the early painters at Papunya and Emily Kngwarray at Utopia continues to inspire new generations of artists. With an extraordinary focus and output, Kngwarray explored her traditional motifs in ways that were hitherto unprecedented for Aboriginal artists.

French impressionism, pointillism and American pop art of the 1960’s. In the guise of the .com it now captures the essence of cyberspace. 27 Paul Carter noted that while dotting was traditional to Aboriginal visual culture, it was in the early acrylic work of Johnny Warrangkula at Papunya that it was given a new ‘hieroglyphic status’ (Carter: 1996: 352).

180 c. A Prolific Flowering i. Painting on the ground

Sitting cross-legged on the ground, Emily Kngwarray vigorously painted highly innovative representations of her country, Dreamings and awely ceremonies. She worked in series and her speed of painting was phenomenal. Barbara Weir told me that often Kngwarray’s canvases filled quicker than new ones could be prepared (Barbara Weir: 1999: personal conversation. She used a rich orchestration of colour as she worked between very small canvases and some up to eight metres in length. A way of working became established that enabled her to sit in one place as her helpers moved the canvas when a passage was completed. This had similarities to how batik was made at Utopia when fabric was worked by moving it across the lap. Jenny Green noted that

The rigours of working outside, often in the wind, have led to the development of particular techniques for batik production at Utopia, and the stylistic consequences of these techniques are unique. For example, wrapping the fabric across the lap gives a horizontal working surface, in contrast to the Indonesian method of draping the fabric over a frame, which provides a vertical one (J. Green: 1998: 41).

Sitting in one place enabled Kngwarray to paint an enormous quantity of canvases as well as to conserve a maximum amount of energy, allowing rest for her small arthritic legs. Barbara Weir told how Kngwarray painted:

She was a very frail woman if you saw her, but that was how she sat [cross-legged]. She worked from one hand to the other, sometimes she started in the middle, other times wherever…. She alternated hands in a single painting, first her left hand, then the right. Her left hand was the strongest (Barbara Weir: 1999: personal interview).

181 Kngwarray discovered an unusual way to create simple yet effective visual complexity in her dotting. By cutting the centre bristles from her brushes she created florets of paint with deft movements of her wrist that symbolized yam flowers (ibid.). Through swift dabbing from one colour pot to the next, she filled her brushes with colours that mixed on the canvas. This was called her ‘dump dump’ style. Barbara Weir described this technique:

The colours were just made there [mixed in small containers with water to the right painting consistency and colour] and just left, and whatever colour she’d go and pick it herself. She dipped that one brush into all different colours. She had one brush then she’d put it into another colour, then dip that same brush to another colour and it all came out like this (ibid.).

44. Emily Kngwarray, Untitled, 1993, acrylic on canvas, 233 x 80 cm private collection

Kngwarray was a magnificent colourist, yet looking closer, the traditional ochre body painting colours of awely – red, yellow and white – appear more often than any other combination in her work. Heightened variations of these colours are abundant in her paintings and she juxtaposed them in startling combinations. Red ochre found its correspondence in acrylic in bright pink, crimson, orangey red, mauve and reddened brown; yellow ochre manifested as acrylic lemon and cadmium yellow; ceremonial white ochre took on pastel striations through her brush techniques. These vivid colours are also found throughout her country in desert flora after rainfall and her paintings echo the colours of seasonal change. She had a vast experiential knowledge of not just the growth cycle of atnwelarr yam but other desert vegetation. Her fields of dotting often give a sense of the aerial sensation of looking down upon clusters of wildflowers and the visual heat shimmer so familiar in arid country.

182 Fred Torres, Kngwarray’s nephew and art dealer, commented upon her ‘wildflowers’:

Out of 3000 of Emily’s paintings, 2000 were wildflowers. It was a constant series; she did it all the way through to the end. She might have changed to other series but she always revisited it. The reason she stopped painting the wildflowers was that people asked her for the lines, the yam tracking roots. But it was nothing but the yam, the atnwelarr yam (Fred Torres: 1999: personal interview).

Torres confirmed that these were not generic ‘wildflowers’ but the flowers of atnwelarr, her Yam Dreaming. The linear motif he mentioned was not new, but what was new was its undisguised prominence28. Elaborate linear networks that mapped her country can sometimes be detected underneath the dotting of her earliest canvases (figures 36 and 43). Soon these paths became less frequent and then fell away completely as the dots became larger and bolder. In the final two years of her life, she discarded the dots themselves on many of her canvases. Audacious new lines appeared that mirrored a gestalt of both the yam’s underground growth and awely body painting. This stark yet potent linear work is groundbreaking yet exemplifies her role as a respected elder and custodian for yam. ii. Big Yam Dreaming

Kngwarray’s assuredness is particularly evident in her enormous 1995 black and white painting, Big Yam Dreaming (figure 45). In the bold haptic repetition of meandering lines, a lifetime’s experience of the connections between body and country can be sensed. The ground teems with activity. The painting incorporates knowledge of the above and below-ground characteristics of the

28 Emily Kngwarray was extremely adaptable and often returned to other series of work when requested. Terry Smith commented that she was highly responsive to the tastes of those around her and felt that paradoxically this pressure accelerated her individualism (T. Smith: 1998: 25).

183 plant in its twists and curves. The gestures echo not just the underground networks of tubers but also the motions of digging for them. Each line carries the memory and touch of arlkeny body painting designs for awely. The scale and repetition evokes the rhythmic choreography of the women’s bodies as they dance in the sand.

45. Emily Kngwarray, Big Yam Dreaming, 1995, acrylic on canvas, 291.1 by 901.8 cm, Queensland Art Gallery

To make Big Yam Dreaming, Kngwarray reached into the vast black canvas ground as she pushed and pulled her whitened brush to her arm’s length. Her arms were strong from years of physical engagement with the land. Great strength is required to dig the hardened earth where yams grow; repeated thrusts of the digging stick are required to prise the staple food from the ground. As for all of her large paintings, she would have sat within the canvas to reach the internal passages. The painting conveys continual movement, a field of energy and growth. The complex undulating movement of white lines painted over the black ground creates a spatial effect that causes the lines to oscillate – wild, organic lattices that pull one into its mesmerizing network29. It is a stunning painting, powerful and compelling in every sense. The immense scale creates an experience of being surrounded by nature in a vast expansive land. Through this painting, Kngwarray reanimated her country with gestures that held the authority of body memory, knowledge and experience.

29 This mesmerizing effect will be discussed in Chapters Four and Five

184 Big Yam Dreaming was a commission and Kngwarray had an audience surrounding her as well as helpers30. She undertook the painting seriously but when she finished, she walked away ‘without a backward glance’. This action has variously been interpreted as ‘an immunity to the vanities of artworld retrospection, relief at the conclusion of a marathon effort, or perhaps a disenchantment with the taxing and competing demands of dealers’ (Perkins and Fink: 1997: 79). It was also exhausting paid work, and it was finished. Already in her eighties, she completed this huge canvas within two days (Neale: 1998b: 25). She was becoming frail yet she continued to paint on demand. Her brush strokes were still confident but at times the paint became almost ethereal, like transparent whispers upon the canvas ground (figure 46).

46. Emily Kngwarray painting one of her last awely acrylic paintings, Utopia, 1996 (photo: Anna Voigt)

30 ‘Big Yam Dreaming’ was commissioned by Donald and Janet Holt, pastoralists who own Delmore Downs station near Utopia. They became art dealers and encouraged Kngwarray and other men and women of Utopia to paint on their station (see D. Holt: 1998; J. Holt: 1998). Barbara Weir introduced me to them at their property in 2000 and I witnessed a complex relationship between them and the Aboriginal people that were there. In a conversation with me at that time, Donald Holt admitted that Aboriginal paintings were far more lucrative than cattle.

185 iii. Final series

In 1996, during the last days of her life, in her mid- to late-eighties and in poor health, Emily Kngwarray painted a series of paintings in a bush camp at Utopia for her nephew Fred Torres (figure 47). Torres told me that he questioned whether she should be painting because she was so ill but she was adamant that she wished to paint (Fred Torres: 1999: personal interview). These twenty- four paintings were completely unlike any she had executed before. They were similar to her previous work only in their gestural authority and exuberance of colour. She asked for canvas and pigment to be brought to her, and while her regular brushes were still being found, she grabbed a large gesso priming brush and began to paint (ibid.). In 1997, the expatriate art writer and critic Germaine Greer argued that these last paintings were a ‘ghastly parody of her own style’ (Greer: 1997: 5).

47. Emily Kngwarray, Untitled (Alhalker), 1996, acrylic on canvas, 106.5 x 120.5 cm, Ebes Collection

As she filled canvases with broad sweeps of her brush, Kngwarray created fields of light, space and colour and dispensed with dot and line altogether (figure 47). Some of the paintings were comprised of large minimal passages of subtle pastel whites; others had joyously juxtaposed high key colours. In all the paintings there was a sense of numinous spaciousness that captured the essence of the land with sublime painterliness. What followed over those two days can be seen both as a final expression of her remarkable spirit and a

186 draining away, a kenosis. In this last series, Kngwarray merged self and subject in a visibly extreme dissolution of form. She became progressively weaker and was taken to the hospital at Alice Springs where she died later that night.

d. Gestural Complexities i. Art world pressures

Emily Kngwarray’s paintings are powerful declarations of her connection to her country of Alhalker and are often undeniably beautiful in her layering of colours and gestures. Yet her work epitomizes the many complexities inherent within Aboriginal art. Germaine Greer went so far as to say that ‘All the contradictions, prejudices and injustices of the system coalesce in Emily Kame Kngwarreye’ (Greer: 1997: 5). Her enormous output of paintings is not surprising to anyone who witnessed her speed in painting the canvases that kept being provided. Without doubt there was pressure on her from her extended family and dealers alike to keep painting. Kathleen Petyarr was quoted in 1998 as saying, ‘I don’t want to end up like that old lady [Emily Kngwarray]. Everybody fighting over canvas all the time’ (Petyarr in Myers: 2002: 324). But the situation is even more complex than that. Greer wrote of what she witnessed as a ‘capitulation of Aboriginal creativity to European notions of what art is’ (Greer: 1997: 5). She interviewed Aboriginals who believed that Dreamings were being ‘stolen’ from the places where they were intended to remain and that acrylic paintings were destroying the culture by taking its ‘strength’ and ‘heart’. In the continued desire for Kngwarray’s work amidst her failing health, Greer saw manipulation and believed that ‘under pressure she began to paint mechanically, with neither conviction nor joy’ (ibid.). She felt that Kngwarray’s paintings hanging on the walls of strangers ultimately reflected the owners rather than the artists and saw the ‘frenzied pace of exploitation’ as symptomatic of the Australian attempt to cash in and exploit all the country’s natural resources (ibid.).

187 Anne-Marie Brody echoed Greer’s comments about Kngwarray’s health and lack of conviction. Brody revealed that Kngwarray told her that she wished to give up painting because it made her ‘sick with worry’ only eighteen months after she began painting on canvas (A. M. Brody in Neale: 1998b: 19). Four years later, Kngwarray announced publicly that she wished to ‘retire’ on receiving the Australian Artists Creative Fellowship from the Prime Minister (ibid.). Kngwarray had assumed that her fellow countrywomen would paint for her in order to relieve some of the pressure that she was experiencing. Family involvement in the creation of artwork is a common practice for Anmatyerr people (Nicholls and North: 2001: 24). But she very quickly was made to realize that outside of her culture, it was her hand alone that gave the work its value and authentication.

There could have been many factors that contributed to Kngwarray’s ambivalence about painting. During the height of her career as a painter in 1990, she suffered profound personal grief at the loss of her ‘son’ Frankie, Lily Sandover’s child by Kngwarray’s second husband. She continued to search for him until the end of her life. But her nephew, Fred Torres, an Adelaide dealer of Utopia art, interpreted the exhausting emotional pressures and demands placed upon her differently. He gave an interesting account of her relationship to dealers:

She knew money could buy things. …Wherever or whenever she painted, it sold. She knew she could sell her paintings instantly as food, money or cars. She could go to Alice Springs to any number of dealers as early as ‘91. She didn’t have to worry when it came to selling her painting, it didn’t matter. She knew they’d sell within twenty-four hours of her doing them. If you weren’t paying her very much she wouldn’t have much respect, she’d know that person was cheating her. She didn’t care. She could paint them so fast. I’d say to her “Emily, you’re too good. You know how to control these whitefellas!” (Fred Torres: 1999: personal interview).

188 Kngwarray clearly welcomed the status and money that painting gave her. When she painted at Utopia, women, small children and helpers often surrounded her as news, gossip and food were shared. Barbara Weir provided another insight into Kngwarray’s prolific painting practice that is at conflict with Germaine Greer’s viewpoint.

If she didn’t paint she would have died. That was her life, working. It was in her blood. If she would have stopped, she would have died. That’s what she said. Everyday, that was her thing. She looked for canvas as soon as she got out of bed…. She was never sick of painting, that was her life and that’s what kept her going…so she had to have canvas all the time or otherwise she reckoned that life wasn’t worth living. But that was why she kept working all the time (Barbara Weir: 1999: personal interview).

The apparent discrepancy in perception between Germaine Greer and Barbara Weir reflects their different relationships with Emily Kngwarray. Greer would have been sensitive to issues of abuse and manipulation, and these are clearly abundant in the Aboriginal art market (Greer: 1997: 5; Janke: 2002: 26-28; Myers: 2003: 324, 325, 327-28). Weir was an Aboriginal artist herself who was extremely close to Kngwarray and spoke from a position that included the recognition of the hardships and difficulties of survival at Utopia. Further complexities arise from the fact that Weir’s son, Fred Torres, was a gallery owner and dealer of Kngwarray’s paintings. Painting was undoubtedly enormously important to both Weir and Kngwarray. While it was an activity that required continual cultural sensitivity, it provided material benefits that could be achieved in no other way. Painting also gave a structure to daily life. Time is abundant at Utopia and painting provided activity and income. On this remote community, the possibilities for employment are negligible. Painting is an important means to an end, a welcome form of barter and exchange for food, cars and petrol. The four-wheel drive vehicles that Kngwarray’s family drove to transport her through the rough terrain at Utopia to satisfy her appetite for kangaroo, emu and perentie were financed solely through her success as a painter.

189

Contemporary acrylic painting holds a complex role within many Aboriginal communities. When batik was introduced to the Utopia women in 1977, it was as a communal activity that brought the women together in a culturally affirming way. All the women were paid the same amount of money for their work. Jenny Green and Julia Murray’s desire to keep batik a ‘collective, social, unpressured way to “make art”’ could be seen now as a premonition of what would eventually come to be (Murray in Tweedie: 1983: 78). They intentionally did not introduce acrylic and canvas as Geoffrey Bardon had done at Papunya in 1971. As an artist herself, Green understood what an isolating activity it can be. Today most Utopia artists participate in painting as a solitary activity without the support and notice that Kngwarray received. Yet painting has provided income and given a sense of purpose to many Anmatyerr and Alyawarr people there. But this has come at a cost. Many people of both cultures who have seen the strength of traditional Aboriginal culture continually tested and eroded have disparaged it. The fear is that painting is done at the expense of cultural and communal activities, creating a slow and insidious breakdown of values. As early as 1972, Geoffrey Bardon was made painfully aware that the Papunya artists’ ‘obsession’ for money was ‘as much a sickness in the interior deserts as anywhere else’ (Bardon: 1991: 45). As well, a loss of stability and discord can occur within the communities as jealousy and resentment quickly surface when certain artists are favoured. Great burdens are placed upon such artists, especially women, as they must not be seen to rise above their cultural status within the community31. ii. Marketing Aboriginal art

To add to the complexities, there is also a complete lack of transparency and gap of knowledge surrounding what appears to be so public an event as the buying and selling of Aboriginal paintings. Aboriginal painting has provided enormous wealth to the art dealers, galleries and auction houses that represent the artists. While Aboriginal artists’ cooperatives provide fair financial

31 As a respected elder, Emily Kngwarray appeared to be in control of such jealousies. Yet the pressures upon her to continue painting could be construed as her yielding to resentments and demands.

190 recompense to the artists, many ordinary galleries do not, giving a lesser per centage mark-up to the artists than that which applies to non-indigenous artists. Galleries provide patronizing excuses for this blatant inequality although it does not deter their continued marketing of the works (Janke: 2002: 26-28). Fred Myers identified ‘corruption’ within the art realm and recognized that what is required is an ‘uncorrupted sphere in which Aboriginal people can know themselves, [and] communicate’ (Myers: 2002: 332-33). But this is far from the reality. The artists’ voices are rarely heard when the paintings are commodified into Fine Art. Huge financial disparities exist in what the artists receive from different dealers. Kngwarray’s paintings rose astronomically in price during her lifetime and even more after her death. Her works became lucrative merchandise that was avidly marketed and collected nationally and internationally.

In ‘Fine line between art and theft’, Joyce Morgan highlighted another ethical issue that continually needs to be negotiated by Aboriginal artists:

Globalisation might have brought people into closer contact but it has also increased the possibility of causing cultural offence as practices and traditions are revealed, imitated or appropriated and everything ends up in the post-modern cultural soup. For sometimes a little cultural knowledge can be a disrespectful – or even dangerous – thing (Morgan: 2001: 14).

Hetti Perkins added that ‘Part of the problem is people don’t realise the consequences of cultural theft in indigenous communities where it is a matter of life or death for some people’ (Perkins in Morgan: 2001: 14). Boundaries of the secret/sacred can be easily and inappropriately infringed. iii. Titles: More than meets the eye

An example of the infringement of the secret/sacred can be readily witnessed in the titling of Aboriginal paintings. Djon Mundine maintained that the naming of Aboriginal paintings by dealers and academics is a ‘form of appropriation, of

191 transforming it in order to own it’ (Mundine: 2002: 69). He believed that the use of ‘untitled’ has a ‘certain intellectual credibility’ as the ‘Dreaming narrative inside the society is dynamic, varying with the speaker, the context, the audience, and the political take’ (ibid.). Kngwarray’s paintings were often given titles that clearly had more to do with dealers’ perceptions than with the artist’s approval. Titles such as Winter Abstraction (1993), Stripes (1994) and Lines (1994) show a Eurocentric aesthetic ‘visual’ privileging and imposition of meaning. At Utopia in 1999, I witnessed one of the more unfortunate consequences of the clash of cultural intentions when an exhibition catalogue of Kathleen Petyarr’s work produced by her principal dealer attributed erroneous titles to her paintings32. The paintings in question were of Petyarr’s Atnangker country but had been given titles such as Hailstorm, Sandstorm and Winterstorm by her dealer. I saw the fury that the Utopia community directed at Petyarr when the catalogue was discovered to contain the inaccuracies. Hundreds of community members encircled her and after much heated debate she was publicly speared in the thigh. For not only were those titles not her Dreamings, but Hailstorm Dreaming is one of the most powerful men’s Dreamings and not to be discussed much less painted by an Aboriginal woman. The white dotting within Kathleen Petyarr’s painting might have looked like a hailstorm to the eyes of another culture but this incorrect attribution had extremely negative repercussions.

In 2003, anthropologist Jennifer Biddle wrote an article on Petyarr’s paintings and she, too, fell prey to the elements33. She linked the physicality and imprinting qualities of weather with what she saw as a discourse of ‘immanence, of the material matter of the world’, ‘tangible and tactile’ rather than ‘transcendental, spiritual or mystical’ (Biddle: 2003: 70). While this interpretation is interesting and attempts to find cultural equivalence, it is a discourse that remains Eurocentric.

32 1999 catalogue, ‘Kathleen Petyarr’, Gallerie Australis, Adelaide. 33 Biddle’s analysis came from paintings on gallery walls; she acknowledged that she did not speak to Petyarr directly (Biddle: 2003: note 4, p. 73).

192 iv. Universalising tendencies and neo-colonial attitudes

Thomas McEvilley argued against the ethnocentric subjectivity of the presentation and curatorial discourse of the New York Museum of Modern Art’s 1984 exhibition ‘“Primitivism” in Twentieth Century Art’ (McEvilley: 1984: 339). Modernism’s universalising tendencies proliferated in that exhibition where the ‘primitive’ was described in terms such as ‘irrational’, ‘timeless’, ‘unchanging’ and ‘pure’. In his critique, McEvilley pointed to ‘the parochial limitations of our worldview and the almost autistic reflexivity of Western civilization’s modes of relating to the culturally Other’ (ibid.). He recognized that

The sacrifice of the wholeness of things to the cult of pure form is a dangerous habit of our culture. It amounts to a rejection of the wholeness of life…. Are we not ready yet to begin to understand the real intentions of the native traditions, to let those silenced cultures speak to us at last? (ibid.: 347-8).

He concluded by asserting that this worldview ‘shows Western egotism still as unbridled as in the centuries of colonialism and souvenirism’ as it ‘pretends to confront the Third world while really co-opting it and using it to consolidate Western notions of quality and feelings of superiority’ (ibid.: 351).

Yet Terry Smith has stated that Australian Aboriginal art has been ‘protecting the secret-sacred, sharing understanding and bringing about reconciliation ever since first contact. During the past decade it has taken the lead in this task’ (T. Smith: 1998: 41). Roger Benjamin countered that ‘When a metropolitan audience feels at ease with Aboriginal painting, it can congratulate itself that “reconciliation” across the gaping cultural, economic and racial divide has occurred’ (R. Benjamin: 1998: 53). Benjamin’s recognition goes to the heart of the complexities surrounding Aboriginal art. A feel-good factor can obscure past history and current realities and can be witnessed in some of the most empathetic (albeit frequently mesmerized) viewers’ appreciation and frenzied acquisition of Aboriginal paintings. The voracious hunger for the art and

193 knowledge of Aboriginal culture is a subtle form of appropriation that the artists must continually and precariously negotiate. This can mask an unspoken and often unconscious desire to possess the lore of the ‘Other’ that is seen in the larger debate surrounding ‘primitive’ art (see Hiller: 1991; McEvilley: 1990; Price: 1989; Rubin: 1984). v. A matter of survival: Of life and death

It could be seen as a great irony that Kngwarray came to be recognized and celebrated by the very culture that wrought such losses upon her own. She learned to negotiate two cultures early in her life when she worked on pastoral stations looking after farm animals, but her status within her own culture was very different. As Anna Petyarr Price told me, ‘That hole put through her nose in olden times when she was really, really young. … that is what they did to Emily because she was boss of that place, that country’ (Anna Petyarr Price: 2000: personal interview). There was a sharp contrast between being ‘boss’ of her country and being in servitude to pastoralists. Barbara Weir acknowledged Kngwarray’s exceptional situation and recalled that survival had once been and could still be very different for older generations of her culture:

In my time, even before my time, stories that been told to us and passed down, once old person got old, they just made a cool humpy for them and them old people knew they were never coming back for them. They had to do that to survive. … Not now, ‘cause they got cars to shift them ‘round but it was done for their survival… I think Auntie Emily survived because art came into it. I really think she survived that long because other old people weren’t taken care of that well. With her I think she survived a long time because of her art and people were taking notice of her all the time. …And she was an old woman that didn’t stay in one place anyway. She wanted to move around and paint there and then go hunting and paint and that’s why she survived a long time. There’s been old people that nobody really cared about; once they got old they just died. She was just one of the lucky people (Barbara Weir: 1999: personal interview).

194

In many complex ways, Emily Kngwarray was indeed one of the ‘lucky people’. The people living on the outstations of Utopia are extremely fortunate that traditional ceremonies and responsibilities for kinship and country are strong. Anmatyerr and Alyawarr are still spoken as first languages, an important factor as language holds particularity and experiential knowledge of the natural world. Yet there is also a sense of quiet endurance, resignation and hopelessness within those who survived the ‘unlucky’ invasion of her country.

48. Emily Kngwarray’s gravesite, Utopia, 1999 (photo: Victoria King)

Even in death, Kngwarray was caught in a tension between two cultures. She was a respected traditional Anmatyerr elder and Law woman but her body was not interred in her country in her culture’s traditional way. Her family was led to believe that people would want to see her grave and so buried her at a distance from the community. They placed her body in an expensive metal coffin beneath a marble headstone in a place that was accessible to the Sandover Highway (Barbara Weir: 2000: personal interview). The place of interment, coffin nor headstone was in sympathy with tradition. As well, during what should have been respectful mourning at her ‘sorry business’, the very sorry state of affairs of the art industry that had built up around her paintings was in evidence. Many of her dealers attended and tensions manifested as fights and accusations broke out amongst them about the short and long-term profits to be made from her paintings (ibid.; Myers: 2000: 327-28).

195 Ultimately, Emily Kame Kngwarray’s paintings are a declaration of her connection to her country of Alhalker and a tribute to the continuity of her culture. Yet there is a strong shadow side to the celebration of Aboriginal paintings. To see them as simply aesthetic decorations and commodities is to perpetuate the denial of both the past history and the present reality of indigenous peoples’ lives. The people’s profound connection to their land and the effects of their displacement from it carries enormous implications. What is not needed is sentimentality, greed or an aesthetic myopia caused by being mesmerized by the surface shimmer of these contemporary expressions of country and belonging to it.

196 CHAPTER FOUR

PERCEPTIONS OF ART AND THE LAND

I. On Another Ground a. A Change of Aspect

Nature has neither core Nor outer rind, Being all things at once. It’s yourself you should scrutinize to see Whether you’re center or periphery (Goethe: 1988: 38).

In 1921, Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in Philosophical Investigations that ‘The expression of a change of aspect is the expression of a new perception and at the same time of the perception’s being unchanged’ (Wittgenstein in Elderfield: 2001: 11-12). He used the term ‘change of aspect’ to discuss the implications of a new vision that appeared in the field of vision, one that was ‘half visual’ and ‘half thought’, an ‘echo of a thought in sight’ (ibid.).

The change of aspect. “But surely you would say that the picture is altogether different now!” But what is different: my impression? My point of view? – Can I say? I describe the alteration like a perception; quite as if the object had altered before my eyes. “Now I am seeing this,” I might say (pointing to another picture, for example). This has the form of a report on a new perception (ibid.: 42- 43).

My journeys to Utopia disrupted and affected my perception of art. I could no longer see the paintings of Emily Kngwarray or other Aboriginal artists, those of

197 Agnes Martin or my own in the same way as before. I suddenly became aware of how strongly my views on art had previously been influenced by the phenomenology of modernism. This chapter explores the implicit question posed by Wittgenstein: What are the implications of a ‘change of aspect’?

The influential modernist art critic Clement Greenberg maintained that abstract art demanded and created certain spatial relationships between the viewer and the art object. He wrote that ‘the picture has now become an object of literally the same spatial order as our bodies… It has lost its “inside” and become almost all “outside”, all plane surface’ (Greenberg: 1986c: 191). This interpretation of a surface ‘skin’ resonates with phenomenological assertions about perception. In his essay ‘Eye and Mind’, Merleau-Ponty stated that

In whatever civilization it is born, from whatever beliefs, motives, or thoughts, no matter what ceremonies surround it – and even when it appears devoted to something else – from Lascaux to our time, pure or impure, figurative or not, painting celebrates no other enigma but that of visibility (Merleau-Ponty: 1964: 165-66).

Although modernism has now become the focus for accusations of essentialism in its aesthetic attention to how we see rather than what we see, that is, difference and specificity, the phenomena that Merleau-Ponty highlighted is still very much in evidence when art is viewed in a gallery. Such a celebration of vision does not allow space for cultural difference or the specificity of artists’ intentions. By their very nature, galleries provide a particular kind of space where viewers, while seemingly brought into close proximity with artworks, are distanced from them. In answer to a question after a recent lecture on Gilles Deleuze, philosopher and theorist Elizabeth Grosz said that art galleries are by their nature ‘striated’, not ‘smooth’ spaces; ‘places of commodification’ (Elizabeth Grosz: August 2003, University of Sydney Architecture Lecture Series, personal notes). ‘Striated’ spaces relate to distant vision and optical spaces, and Deleuze and Guattari noted that while paintings are done close up

198 (within the ‘smooth’, haptic space of close vision), they are viewed from a distance (Deleuze and Guattari: 2000: 493).

Since the Renaissance, there has been a growing autonomy and secularisation of art that made it conducive to external valuation (Berger: 1972; Jay: 1994). But in Australia, I found such ‘external valuation’, that is, the conventions of viewing, buying and selling art that seems straight forward in galleries in America and Europe, to be more complex. Fiona Nicoll made the important distinction that in a gallery, Aboriginal paintings, out of context of their creation, are seen all on the same ground:

Central and western desert dot-paintings are executed on the ground and depict the land and the ancestral movements that produced its morphology… Up to the point of their exhibition and consumption, the conceptual/spatial axis of these paintings is emphatically horizontal. Once these paintings are mounted on the walls of galleries, boardrooms, government departments and private homes, the horizontal axis so important in the context of production is lost. Placed upon the vertical axis of the wall, these paintings cease to occupy the ground (Nicoll: 2001: 156, italics in original).

In the space of an art gallery, the vertical placement of Aboriginal paintings that are largely made horizontally, often on the ground of the artist’s homeland with the artist sitting in the middle of the canvas to reach its edges, supports a modernist, phenomenological reading that rarely acknowledges the inherent particularity and meaning of the work. While postmodernist theories have recognized cultural difference as potentially challenging universalistic, Euro- centric and ethnocentric notions of aesthetics (Bhabha: 1984a, 1984b; During: 1985), the gallery space remains a place where old visions remain intact. The implications of Aboriginal artists’ strong use of the haptic to convey ancestral totemic presences, embodied connections to the land and Land Rights are largely lost when their paintings are hung upon gallery walls. While the gestures and motifs hold specific cultural connotations inexorably linked to the ground of

199 the artist’s country and affirm ownership of that country, that information is rarely effectively disclosed by the gallery or understood by the beholder. ‘Difference’ is too often ignored in the process of viewing and commodification. This contributes to what Fred Myers has called a ‘generic appropriation of Aboriginal art’, where artists’ views of their own lives, their ‘agency’, are rarely taken into consideration (Myers: 2002: 298).

Writing on Utopia artist Kathleen Petyarr’s paintings, Jennifer Biddle noted that ‘What Dreaming Ancestors themselves produced as they made, marked, imprinted the landscape, is exactly what is repeated by Petyarre’... [T]hese marks are not “icons” (signs which look like what they represent) but “indexes” (signs which remain existentially tied to what they “represent”)’ (Biddle: 2003: 64). On canvas, Aboriginal artists’ embodied gestures are the re-animated country and as such they hold enormous power and meaning. In ceremonies for the land, similar dynamic lines and gestures are painted on the bodies of those connected to that country. But in another medium and context, the shimmering dots and lines are often perceived in very different ways from what the artists intend. Within an art gallery, viewers have long associated the surface shimmer of paintings by artists such as Agnes Martin with aesthetic beauty. Marketed as ‘contemporary art’, Aboriginal paintings risk losing connection with their places of origin and are too often seen simply as charming interior decorations. The paintings are re-contextualized into interior spaces where they become symbols rather than indexes: symbols of generalized notions of the spiritual and an ‘essential’ Australia. The assumption that to own or to see is to know or to understand proliferates. When the paintings are viewed on the walls of galleries or the walls of our living spaces, we are distanced from the reality of Aboriginal people’s lives and the places of their creation. Mesmerized by remarkable surface shimmer, crucial cultural difference and particularity are too easily ignored and meaning is appropriated into a celebration of surface beauty.

200 b. A Shimmer of Beauty

‘Shimmer’ is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as a tremulous or flickering light or glow (Onions: 1978). For many years I intentionally endeavoured to create the effect of shimmer in my paintings to represent the shimmer of nature.

49. Victoria King, In a Far Land, acrylic on canvas, 1997-2000, 30.5 x 61 cm, 122 x 72 cm, 30.5 x 61 cm, collection of the artist

The surface qualities of my triptych In a Far Land (figure 49) resonated with the dappled, silvery light that played upon the bark and leaves of eucalypts and angophora trees in the sandstone country overlooking my home and studio in the Blue Mountains. The pale, smooth skin of these tree trunks vividly contrast with those blackened by frequent bushfires. After years of erased gestures on the central canvas, a correlation suddenly appeared for this visual shimmer in the interaction between the ground colour and the shuddering verticals. With this successful correspondence, I quickly made essentialized branch and leaf- like calligraphic gestures upon the two flanking canvases.

In paintings of Agnes Martin such as Falling Blue (figure 50), shimmer is perceived in the interaction between ‘figure’ and ‘ground’ through the repetition of parallel linear gestures upon the canvas ground. To Rosalind Krauss and

201 Marcia Tucker, the surfaces that underlay Martin’s grids and lines seem more like ‘luminous containers for the shimmer of line’ than material objects (Krauss and Tucker in Haskell: 1992b: 106). Annette Michelson described this shimmer as a ‘visual tremolo’ (Michelson: 1967: 46). Lawrence Alloway noted that Martin’s grids created ‘a single undifferentiated tremor of form, or a plateau of non-form, across the whole surface’ (Alloway: 1973b: 34).

50. Agnes Martin, Falling Blue, 1963, oil and graphite on canvas, 180.7 x 182.9 cm San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

The experience of shimmer in Martin’s work is conducive to phenomenological readings that describe what occurs to the spectator at various distances from the canvas (Linville: 1971: 72). Thomas McEvilley commented on the ‘floating vibrancy’ of her work at different distances:

When Martin’s grids disappear as one backs away from the painting, they disappear, as it were into the otherwise formless ground, where they reside always in a kind of latency, giving the ground an appearance of floating vibrancy, of light-filled potentiality, of invisible but active force. Thus the grids are intensifications of the meaning that the ground itself has in art. They show the ground hyperactivated for the appearance of the

202 figure, the image yet still empty, suspended at the moment of hyperactivation just before forms appear, and before infinity is compromised (McEvilley: 1987: 96).

Martin engages with the ‘hyperactivated’ ground of her paintings to create ‘classical’ abstractions yet she also recognizes that her work strongly evokes memories of nature. She fully embraces their capacity to convey ‘the feeling of beauty and freedom that you experience in landscape’ (Martin in Sandler: 1993: 13). The placement of her work into the category of the Abstract Sublime has been due in no small part to the encompassing effect of its shimmer. Carter Ratcliff quoted Edmund Burke to describe the ‘gradual variation’ within Martin’s paintings: a variation ‘whose parts “vary their direction every moment, chang[ing] under the eye by a deviation continually carrying on,” producing disparate forms ultimately unified or “melted as it were into each other”’ (Burke in Ratcliff: 1973: 26). Ratcliff also noted how Martin’s paintings ‘evoke phenomena so vast or elusive as to be unnameable, and seem to shift from external to internal states’ (Ratcliff: 1973: 27). Many people have experienced such a shift in front of her paintings, as well as in nature. This corresponds to Martin’s own intention that she articulated in 1966:

Nature is like parting a curtain, you go into it. I want to draw a certain response like this… Not a specific response but that quality of response from people when they leave themselves behind, often experienced in nature – an experience of simple joy … the simple, direct going into a field of vision as you would cross an empty beach to look at the ocean (Martin in A. Wilson: 1966: 48).

From Martin’s early biomorphic paintings to her grid paintings and most recent light-filled works, it is possible to experience an often-mesmerizing shimmer. Even in the minimal bands of soft colour that glow with many layers of whitened gesso beneath, a translucent shimmer is evident. Francine Prose noted that ‘the cool strips that float across the surface of her paintings appear to capture light and shine it back at us, transforming it in the process, so that we feel we are

203 learning something new and significant about the nature of light’ (Prose: 1999: 142). Martin’s work often captures elusive qualities of light that evoke landscape spaces. Her relationship with nature has been consolidated by her extensive reclusive periods of time being witness to its beauty. Inspired by the shimmer of nature, she developed not only her art practice but also a contemplative personal philosophy. In a 1976 lecture at Yale, she quoted a poem by William Wordsworth:

For oft, when on my couch I lie In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude; And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils… (Wordsworth in Martin: 1991: 95)

After recounting the poem of Wordsworth, Martin said that on the ‘straight forward path’, ‘only joyful discoveries count’ (Martin: 1991: 95). From similar inspirations came the ‘happiness’ that has informed her philosophy and given direction to her life. In a vision such as that of fields of yellow spring daffodils, the ‘flash’ of nature upon the ‘inward eye’ can create a shimmer of beauty and well-being in the beholder. ‘Joy is Perception’, she emphatically stated (ibid.: 96, italics in original). Stimulated by nature, Martin creates and communicates aesthetic beauty through sensations of touch upon the ground of her canvas. Caught in the often literally ‘stunning’ shimmer, artist and beholder collude in losing themselves in the sublime, mesmerized by feelings of bliss.

204 c. The Shimmer of Ancestral Presence

51. Emily Kame Kngwarray, Untitled (Awely), 1994, acrylic on canvas, 3 panels 150 x 60 cm each, private collection

The paintings of Emily Kngwarray are frequently shown next to those of other contemporary non-indigenous artists and are described and marketed in terms of their shimmer. A 1997 Melbourne exhibition of Aboriginal art was entitled ‘Shimmer’ and featured a painting by Kngwarray on its catalogue cover1. Jennifer Biddle’s study of the ‘animation’ within Kathleen Petyarr’s paintings included reference to what she saw to be a similar quality of abstraction that occurred in Kngwarray’s work (Biddle: 2003: 67). Biddle compared the ‘simultaneous animating of body and country’ with Francoise Dussart’s reference to a Walpiri term for ‘shimmer’ to describe the ‘vibrancy’ that ‘clarifi[es] the design and ensure[s] its spiritual potency’ (ibid.).

Many writers and most gallerys’ publicity describe the shimmer in Kngwarray’s paintings in terms of its aesthetic qualities. Margo Neale wrote of Kngwarray’s capacity to combine pure sensation with sensuousness (Neale: 1998b: 27). Judith Ryan wrote that the inherent painterliness in Kngwarray’s 1993 Alhalkere Suite achieved a ‘vision of shifting, floating hues, a universe of forms and colours, comparable with that of Monet’s waterlilies’ (Ryan: 1998: 43). While

1 ‘Shimmer’, Aboriginal Art Galleries of Australia, 1 November – 3 December 1997, Melbourne.

205 Roger Benjamin recognised the need for new interpretations of her work that would escape dominant Eurocentric readings, he quoted a 1948 text by Clement Greenberg to describe the qualities of Kngwarray’s ‘all-over’ dotting and line work:

[The] all-over, “decentralized”, “polyphonic” picture … relies on a surface knit together of identical or closely similar elements which repeat themselves without marked variation from one edge of the picture to the other… The dissolution of the pictorial into sheer texture, into apparently sheer sensation, into an accumulation of repetitions, seems to speak for and answer to something profound in contemporary sensibility (Greenberg, 1948 in R. Benjamin: 1998: 48)2.

But the dissolution into ‘sheer sensation’ through the ‘all-over’ repetition that Emily Kngwarray employed was not a modernist painting technique. While the affect may speak to contemporary sensibilities, Kngwarray’s gestures come from her Anmatyerr cultural experiences. They express performative aspects of women’s awely ceremonies and striking correspondences between body, ground and canvas, as well as her acute knowledge and observation of the seeds, flowers, tubers and tracks of her Yam Dreaming.

It is interesting to note another aspect of shimmer through anthropologist Howard Morphy’s extensive study of the bark paintings of the Yolngu people. He wrote that ‘To the people of Arnhem Land the shimmering effect of the cross-hatched surface of bark paintings is seen as a manifestation of spiritual forces that are imminent in the landscape’ (Morphy: 1998: 37). This visual effect is called the ‘bir’yun’: The bir’yun is the flash of light – the sensation of light that one gets and carries away in one’s mind’s eye, from a glance at the likanbuy miny’tji [what is considered to be the most sacred painting used on sacred objects, the bodies of male initiates and dead persons] (Morphy: 1991: 183).

2 I return later in this chapter in ‘Perception and Sensation’ to Greenberg’s recognition that the dissolution into sensation ‘seems to speak for and answer to something profound in contemporary sensibility’.

206 Morphy described the shimmer of fine crosshatched lines that cover the surface of a sacred painting:

[Bir’yun] is the sensation of light, the uplift of looking at this carefully carried out work. They see in it a likeness to the wangarr [ancestral being] (field notes 4.8.87). Thus bir’yun is the shimmering effect of full cross- hatched paintings which project a brightness that is seen as emanating from the wangarr being itself; this brightness is one of the things that endows the painting with ancestral power (ibid.: 194-5).

52. Djambawa Marawili, Mardarrpa miny’tji, 1996, Yirrkala, Northern Territory, 322 x 99 cm, private collection

In 1998, Morphy further explored the correspondence between ancestral power and sensations of light through natural phenomena:

Much Aboriginal art consists of objects whose surface appears to shine and simultaneously create the effect of movement. Natural phenomena that have these characteristics – rainbows, sparkling water, the rays of the rising or setting sun shining intense light on tree trunks or bringing out the colours in the surface of rocks – can be signs of the powers of ancestral forces in the land…. Part of the appeal of Western Desert acrylics or Eastern Arnhem Land bark paintings is that they simultaneously convey a sense of vibrant surface movement with clarity of form. The very techniques used – layering on the surface with thin cross-hatched lines in bright colour or the covering of the surface of the painting with gradations of dotted infill – seem designed to produce such an effect. Forms emerge with clarity but then shift with the movement of the eye (Morphy: 1998: 185).

207 Morphy recognized that this effect has parallels in non-indigenous forms of painting, such as in the optical art of Bridget Riley or the Abstract Expressionism of Willem de Kooning (ibid.: 185). But he emphasized that in the case of Aboriginal art ‘this shimmering brilliance is thought to be of ancestral origin: it is the presence of the ancestors in the art and land’ (ibid.: 185-86). He noted that in the transformation of the work of the Yolngu bark painters

from a rough dull state to shimmering brilliance, Yolngu are not merely producing an aesthetic effect but moving the image towards the ancestral domain…. The artist is in effect developing a qualitative understanding of the spiritual power of the ancestor. Painting is a form of contemplation and spiritual communion: the graded and layered effect of the infilling creates a depth of field for the Dreaming (ibid.: 189).

Morphy explained that traditionally the designs drawn for mortuary rituals, on sacred objects or for sacred ceremonies on the body or on the ground, have always been restricted, revealed only in particular circumstances or partially ‘glimpsed’. ‘The aesthetic effect of paintings is mediated through the way in which they are viewed and by the contexts in which they occur. In many cases paintings are seen at a distance or glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, rather than being subject to a prolonged gaze’ (ibid.: 191). ‘The power of revelation, the impact of the moment of seeing, is thus enhanced by its rarity and the shortness of its duration’ (ibid.: 192). Morphy noted the contrast that occurred when bark paintings went on display in another cultural context and were ‘gazed at for prolonged periods by the avid viewer’, for ‘in indigenous contexts the conditions of seeing remain the same as always and are far removed from the context of the art gallery wall’ (ibid.: 192-93). When these works enter another cultural setting the parameters of performance and perception change enormously. The aesthetic gaze often produces self-centred absorption rather than ‘spiritual communion’ or contemplation of the numinosity of nature.

In 1936, Walter Benjamin wrote that ‘[P]ainting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon himself to his associations’

208 (W. Benjamin, 1936: 1992: 231). Echoing Merleau-Ponty’s words that paintings celebrate ‘visibility’, the American contemporary art critic John Elderfield stated in 2001 in his writing on the work of Bridget Riley, that ‘to attend to a painting is, therefore, also to attend to our own attention, for the performance of the painting self-evidently takes place not in the painting but in our eyes’ (Elderfield: 2001: 13). Yet these seemingly unproblematic statements become problematic if the artist has created the work with a very different intention. The bir’yun of the Yolngu and the lines and dots of Emily Kngwarray’s paintings create a shimmering sensation of movement, an ‘uplift’ that corresponds to the shimmer of natural phenomenon. But while this may seem to relate to Agnes Martin’s individual deep appreciation of nature’s beauty, in traditional Aboriginal culture natural phenomena are collectively seen to hold ancestral power. What traditional Aboriginal artists paint is not arbitrarily chosen but that for which they are custodians through paternal and maternally bestowed Dreamings for their country. Such specificities of meaning and locatedness are inherent in indigenous art and give it a context that contests a Euro-centric view. The shimmer that emanates from the surface of an Aboriginal painting is far more than a ‘tremulous flicker’ or interplay of spatial relationships in its contrast of colours, lines and dots upon a canvas ground. Yet the effect is the result of a play of opposites. For in the shimmer often lies a shadow side of the aesthetic, an unspoken ground of contested intentions.

209 II. Implications and Realities

a. Contested Intentions i. Phenomenological distances

On my visit with Agnes Martin, we discussed the fact that her paintings are avidly viewed as ‘contemplative objects’ (Agnes Martin: 2002: personal interview). She acknowledged that her intense focus and state of concentration during their making may engender a comparable response, and wished that viewers would take ‘at least a minute’ when viewing them (ibid.). Many beholders of her work as well as art critics do seem to take the time and with few exceptions only positive, ‘glowing’ reviews have appeared over the many years of her career. In 1992, Rosalind Krauss wrote that Kasha Linville’s 1971 phenomenological reading of Martin’s paintings was the only critical discourse to exist on her work (Krauss: 1992: 158). Linville noted three distances within Martin’s paintings: one of a close-up reading, then moving back into an ‘atmosphere’, and a third where the work becomes objectified and ‘immovable as stone’ (Linville: 1971: 73). Krauss pointed out that phenomenology had come to be the dominant discourse for modernist painting:

[A]t the beginning of the century, modernist painting opened up, within an ever growing dependence of the work on the phenomenology of seeing (and thus on the subject), what we could call an “objectivist opticality,” namely, an attempt to discover – the level of pure abstraction – the objective conditions, or the logical grounds of possibility, for the purely subjective phenomenon of vision itself (Krauss: 1992: 164).

In a gallery space, without available explanations, Emily Kngwarray’s paintings are conducive to purely phenomenological and aesthetic readings of them. While such modernist readings of her work have been shown to be inadequate, they still surface and proliferate in critiques and in the marketing of her paintings.

210 ii. A different shimmer

In his writing on Aboriginal art, Howard Morphy contended that:

Aboriginal art has maintained value to its producers while gaining in value to outside audiences. The appreciation of art across cultures reveals shared sensitivities to visual forms while allowing for aesthetic values and interpretations of forms to differ. To the people of Arnhem Land the shimmering effect of the cross-hatched surface of bark paintings is seen as a manifestation of spiritual forces that are imminent in the landscape. Its connotations are likely to be different for those brought up in a Western urban environment under a different value system. Nonetheless, art provides a means of exchanging ideas and sharing values (Morphy: 1998: 37).

Similarly, Hetti Perkins and Hannah Fink wrote in 1997 that ‘Rather than looking at the art market as an exploitative imposition on Aboriginal culture, it can be regarded as a “meeting place between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal cultural values”’ (Perkins and Fink: 1997: 75)3. But my experience has been that the exchange of ideas and values is far more complex and problematic than these authors imply. In a gallery space, surface shimmer provides a dominant aesthetic reading. Cultural differences remain largely hidden. So, too, does a still contested history of oppression. On the walls of a gallery, without appropriate information, viewers are presented paintings that they can never truly know and the paintings’ meanings are appropriated into contemporary Fine Art. In Australia, in that encounter, there may be, I suggest, an implicit ethical demand that the paintings actually be known: see and understand. See and take action.

My action, a generic offer of assistance to Barbara Weir, eventuated in her taking me to Utopia where the women artists introduced me to their country. I slowly began to understand a different way of being on the land and a different

3 Fink and Perkins referred to a quote from Luke Taylor’s article ‘Making Painting Pay’ in Meanjin 55(4): 1996: 746.

211 way of seeing their acrylic depictions of their homeland. I could now see Emily Kngwarray’s artwork as site-specific maps of place and experience of Alhalker, her dots and linear tracks the visual expressions of embodiment and interconnection. The people of Utopia clearly perceive and experience their country as an animated, living presence mapped by Dreamtime ancestors still embodied in the land just as T.G.H. Strehlow once observed in the nearby Aranda people. ‘In the scores of thousands of square miles that constitute the Aranda-speaking area there was not a single striking feature which was not associated with an episode in one of the many sacred myths, or with a verse in one of the many sacred songs, in which aboriginal religious beliefs found their expression’ (Strehlow in Haynes: 1998: 12). But at Utopia, as well as being shown land formations and sites created by Dreamtime Ancestors’ activities, I also found myself witnessing complexities that shuddered against the aestheticization and commodification of Aboriginal art. iii. A shudder of past and present complexities

When the European Kunoth brothers arrived at Ankerrapw in 1927 and claimed and named the land ‘Utopia’, they saw the land only for its potential to generate wealth as a pastoral station. They chose not to see or value the Anmatyerr people and violently chased them from their homeland. Introduced hooved livestock soon fouled precious water sources, damaged the topsoil and destroyed native species. Although this tract of land was returned to its original Anmatyerr and Alyawarr owners in 1981, the social, psychological and ecological repercussions of this violent seizure of land are still in evidence at Utopia today. Emily Kngwarray’s country of Alhalker is still private pastoral land with fenced boundaries that keep her people away from country for which they are custodians.

A denial of Aboriginal culture has long been perpetuated in Australia from the original declaration of terra nullius to the massacres, enforced removals and continued injustices, including the refusal of the current government to apologize for past actions. The current Prime Minister John Howard positively

212 acknowledged historian Keith Windschuttle’s revisionist claims in The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (2003) with the award of a Centenary Medal. This book is yet another denial of the effects of a brutal colonization and supports the insidious view that Aboriginal society is wholly responsible for its current state of affairs. Robert Manne, Marilyn Lake, Henry Reynolds and Cassandra Pybus addressed Windscuttle’s claims in their book Whitewash and provided evidence of his biased and flawed research (Manne: 2003b). This debate is an indication of the existence of continuing and deepening divisions within the nation.

The ground of Australia has become a contested and contentious place and feeling a sense of place and belonging to it are neither straightforward nor simple. Marcia Langton has attested to an ongoing and intensifying ‘culture war’ in Australia, one whose base lay in ‘white anxieties’ (Langton in Myers: 2002: 339). Yet paradoxically, indigenous art has increasingly been used as a positive icon for Australia nationally and internationally. Fred Myers noted that

The Aboriginal and the Outback, the “difference” they have to offer, are increasingly the source of Australia’s self-marketing for the international tourist industry. These constitute an important dialectical dimension of emerging formulations of Australian national identity: something essential outside and before the nation that lies also at its heart, central to its identity, these significations give Aboriginal representations of place a particular value. The painting represents this mystery, in a way, by being the token of what the place/country is prior to or outside its appropriation into the uses and purposes of white society. Australians, therefore, can obtain such tokens and display them as representations of some part of themselves on their wall (Myers: 2002: 303).

Yet for me, the manner of consumption of Aboriginal paintings masks a further appropriation and an ethical dilemma. It is the maintenance of a double denial: a denial of historical injustices and a denial of the state to which Aboriginal culture has been rendered. Each time I go to Utopia I witness the people’s

213 affinity to their land and the tragic effects of their dispossession and displacement. I am confronted with the human face of the devastating reality of Third World conditions, appalling health and mortality statistics, alcohol abuse, and lack of infrastructure, education and hope4. I see extraordinary paintings being produced in states of physical and emotional dysfunction. In that place I can’t escape the ethical imperative to address the issue of the complicity of the art world in being blind to those conditions, thus reducing the potential for change. When I leave Utopia, I take with me visceral body memories of the people’s suffering. ‘A change of aspect’, as Wittgenstein noted, can produce profound and enduring effects:

The change of aspect. “But surely you would say that the picture is altogether different now!” But what is different: my impression? My point of view? – Can I say? I describe the alteration like a perception; quite as if the object had altered before my eyes. (Wittgenstein, 1921 in Elderfield: 2001: 42-43) iv. On another ground

When I see Aboriginal artists’ paintings displayed on another ground, the walls of an art gallery, I now see far more than a surface shimmer. Their celebration in urban art galleries and auction houses rings a highly discordant bell. Viewers perceive aesthetic beauty and shimmer not unlike that which is experienced in front of works by Agnes Martin, yet there are immense differences. While Martin’s paintings convey aesthetic sensibilities informed by nature and place, she is part of a status quo that enjoys rights, privileges and choices unknown to Aboriginal Australians.

4 In his controversial book The Politics of Suffering – Indigenous Policy in Australia Since the Seventies, anthropologist Peter Sutton supports Land Rights but believes the promotion of self- determination and separate services as solutions to violence, unemployment and ill health has been a disastrous failure. He sees a profound incompatability between modernization and cultural traditionalism, and laments the ‘willful blindness’ of social organizations that hinder modernism. Sutton now believes an interventionist approach is essential to apply the same standards for protecting the vulnerable throughout Australia (Sutton in Arndt: 2001: 11).

214

As artists of shimmering canvases that are viewed as exotic decorations and investment commodities, Aboriginal people have achieved wide recognition5. But Fred Myers made the distinction that ‘what is at stake in a sense of place in Australia is different from what it is for consumers from overseas’ (Myers: 2002: 302). Like my own realization, Myers noted a paradox remained despite the success of the Papunya Tula exhibition in 2000: ‘The wider conditions for their lives, however, remain poor, and they may be becoming even worse’ (ibid.: 341, my italics). The curator of that exhibition, Hetti Perkins, acknowledged that ‘It’s the story not only of a great and wonderful art movement; but is also the story of colonisation, dispossession, and displacement’ (Perkins in Myers: 2002: 343). Over thirty years before, Professor W.E.H. Stanner had also seen that ‘The gap between the average real conditions of the aborigines and ours shows signs of widening, not narrowing’ (Stanner: 1969: 58).

Even in the realm of art, indigenous artists benefit far less than the art dealers, galleries and auction houses that profit from them (Janke: 2002: 26-27). Aboriginal art dealers have participated in what Myers called an ‘entrepreneurial free-for-all’ (Myers: 2002: 315). But ‘untrammeled competition’ can ‘sink even lower – into outright exploitation’ (ibid.: 324). Myers stated that ‘The word used repeatedly to refer to what is happening in the world of dealing Aboriginal art is “greed”’ (ibid.: 324). This has contributed to making the Aboriginal art market unstable, ‘roiled by scandal, rumour, and media sensationalism’ (ibid.: 316). Myers recognized four themes that have characterized discussions and newspaper accounts of the public scandals: forgery and fraud, secondary auctions and the artists’ poverty, the infringement of indigenous cultural rights, and the ‘avid interest’ and large sums of money paid for early acrylic paintings (ibid.: 325). Yet for all the embarrassing scandals that have occurred, they have been simultaneously ignored (ibid.: 330)6. The imbroglio of art and economics

5 Contributions made by Aborigines still remain largely unacknowledged in the realm of pastoralism, fishing, surveying, botanical and herbal knowledge. 6 Fred Myers acknowledged that there has existed a long-standing avant-garde critical concern about the division between art and life for Aboriginals by some writers such as Robert Hughes and Thomas Keneally (Myers: 2002: 295-96).

215 continues to weave a powerful web that allows injustices and blind spots to be perpetuated.

Unscrupulous art dealers lured by quick profits often undermine Aboriginal artists’ existing relationships with dealers and cooperatives (ibid.: 322). Dealers have created a ‘virulently commercial and competitive’ situation where bitter fights for control over the market and particular artists are played out (ibid.: 326- 27). Yet Myers noted that Aboriginal artists have not always accepted contractual terms of exclusivity with dealers or their cooperatives. ‘Faced with hungry or demanding relatives or the need for a quick dollar for any number of reasons, few artists hesitate to sell their canvasses to whomever will buy them… [T]he painters regard the paintings as their inalienable property’ (ibid.: 316). Myers recognized that

the movement of Aboriginal art into commodity status challenges or subverts other values attached to these objects, as they partially resist and partially accommodate commodification… The rumors and scandals may be understood, in part, as struggles over fixing the place and limits of Aboriginal culture’s appropriation by the market (ibid.).

‘Appropriation’ in its many guises is rife, a dilemma that cannot escape moral consideration. Many eminent Australian artists as early as Margaret Preston have allowed the surface appearance of Aboriginal art to ‘influence’ their own paintings. In 1980, art historian Bernard Smith recognized this phenomenon existed. While commenting on the effect of Aboriginal art upon Australian artists such as Ian Fairweather, Anthony Tuckson, John Olsen, Fred Williams and Leonard French, he noted that ‘For most of our artists the Aborigine has been an aesthetic rather than a moral presence; influencing the sensibility rather than disturbing the conscience’ (B. Smith: 1980: 32). Smith believed modernism’s strength was that it could draw upon ‘the sources of all the arts of mankind’, but its fundamental weakness was to ‘borrow the forms and ignore the meanings’, commenting that in the latter case, ‘perhaps they cut too close to the bone’ (ibid.: 51). Today, under the guise of hybridity, non-indigenous artists continue

216 to ‘cut too close to the bone’. Artists such as Tim Johnson and Immants Tiller who ‘use’ Aboriginal dotting in their paintings are seen as mainstream and the ethical position of their practice is rarely any longer challenged. Paintings by the Aboriginal artist Richard Bell, such as his confrontative Bell’s Theorem (2002) whose central text reads, ‘ABORIGINAL/ART/IT’S A/WHITE THING’, are fundamental to challenging such perceptions (see R. Butler and M. Thomas: 2003: 29-40)7.

Until the realities of Aboriginal Australians’ lives are acknowledged and addressed, a profound hypocrisy permeates the art field. Each time an auction price reaches new records, each time an Aboriginal painting is used to market Australia, a selective forgetting occurs that has profound human ramifications. For as Fred Myers has boldly stated, ‘[W]e are all in the picture’ (Myers: 2002: 355, italics in original).

b. A Cult of Forgetfulness i. Out of context

Ian McLean recognized that ‘Even though the global reach of acrylic desert painting is greater than any other Australian art, its reception often remains trapped in old modernist primitivist ideas’ (McLean: 2002: 49). The legacy of ‘primitivism’ is still strongly evident in the marketing of Aboriginal art despite the heated debate that followed the 1984 exhibition ‘“Primitivism” in 20th Century Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In that exhibition a trope of visual affinity was presented to exist between art and artefacts of other cultures and the ‘fine art’ of American and European artists. Displayed in the museum’s galleries without reference to cultural meaning or intention, decontextualized and commodified, the indigenous art was presented to show its formal

7 In their article ‘I am not sorry’, Rex Butler and Morgan Thomas write that Richard Bell’s artwork describes an ambiguity or ‘double movement’ that can be seen in Emily Kngwarray’s work, where it is at once appropriated and at the same time resists appropriation (R. Butler and M. Thomas: 2003: note 8, p. 39).

217 similarities with Western art (McEvilley: 1984; Foster: 1985). A universal aesthetic was put forward and celebrated that was blind to cultural difference, specificity or particularity. Similarly, on the walls of Australian public and private museums and galleries, little information about context is given to the work of Aboriginal artists. Sometimes a brief reference to the artist’s Dreaming is noted in the title but often the work is untitled. Effective curatorial comment is largely absent in the fashionably minimalist-influenced spaces of most contemporary galleries. I am not suggesting that information be given that could cause a breach of secret/sacred aspects of Aboriginal knowledge to occur. But I do believe minimal or non-existent reference to the depths of connection that exist between the artists and their homeland and the reality of past and present history and conditions is problematic when the paintings are exhibited and marketed simply as contemporary Fine Art.

While Aboriginal artists paint specific cultural expressions of belonging to their country, audiences perceive out of context an object commodified into Fine Art. Far away from where the work was made, misunderstandings readily surface. With the ambiguous presentation of Aboriginal art as Fine Art and that of the ‘Other’ (the ‘different’ or ‘exotic’), and with little information at hand in the gallery about the context of the work or the artist, an uneasy confusion prevails. Yet what is known but too often suppressed, a classic imbroglio in the art context, is the knowledge of indigenous Australians’ dispossession, displacement, oppression and suffering. The aesthetic prevails even though sometimes a disturbance of what is not acknowledged or allowed into the consciousness is felt in a momentary gap.

An implicit assumption exists that a consensual agreement occurs between artist and spectator to allow the abandonment of self into a field of shimmer and subjective ‘associations’. American art critic John Elderfield has maintained about art in general that ‘An enforced subjectivity would distance and isolate the viewer’ (Elderfield: 2001: 13). But an ethical subjectivity is needed when Aboriginal art is viewed, one that could lead towards a much needed ground of objectivity and action. Modernism still maintains a firm hold over the perception

218 of Aboriginal art. Fred Myers argued that ‘For the formal construction of these paintings to become intelligible communication for white Australians, then, some local art history – ethnographic and historical understanding – is needed’ (Myers: 2002: 310). He continued:

Special pleading for an ethnic category of art [for Aboriginal art] may fly in the face of theories that emphasize the formal features of art, where the artist’s identity is held not to matter. Clearly, however, the artist’s identity does matter here, and the producers themselves insist that it does (ibid.: 338, italics in original). ii. A ‘moment of danger’

Perceptions and complacency need to be countered. Walter Benjamin recognized in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ that

To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it “the way it really was” (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers (W. Benjamin: 1992: 247).

A ‘moment of danger’ exists for all members of contemporary Australian society when blindness, denial and selective forgetting occur. With an aestheticizing gaze and a partial view of past history, it is too easy to be blind to the reality of indigenous lives and the remarkable yet vulnerable culture that is conveyed within their paintings. Aboriginal culture is too often seen as a utopian ‘site of nostalgia’ or conversely, one that is subject to derision and accusations of ‘inertia and parasitism’ such as Professor W.E.H. Stanner addressed (Stanner: 1969: 58). Such perceptions stand in the way of allowing Aboriginal paintings to act as the extraordinary agents of change that they have the potential to be at a critical point in time.

219

In his 1968 Boyer Lecture, Stanner eloquently exposed ‘the great Australian silence’ in regards to the Aboriginal presence whose past had been regarded as only that of ‘a melancholy footnote’ to the colonizer’s history (ibid.: 27). He directly linked this ‘cult of forgetfulness or disremembering’ to the problems of ‘homelessness, powerlessness, poverty and confusion’ that still so strongly affect Aboriginal people today (ibid.: 53). This silence has contributed to an erasure of memory and the attempt to forcibly erase both the unique places and culture of indigenous peoples. Bernard Smith took up this theme in his 1980 Boyer Lecture when he said in words that are equally true today, that Australia was passing through the years of a ‘manifest hypocrisy, during which we extend our sympathies increasingly to the Aboriginal people while our institutions, legal and otherwise, continue to permit the cannibalisation of their culture and their aspirations in the name of technological progress’ (B. Smith: 1980: 34). Smith believed that an awareness of our colonial past ‘constitutes a central problem for the integrity and authenticity of Australian culture today’ (ibid.: 11)8. iii. The confrontation of denial and erasure

The attempted erasures of memory of injustices towards Aboriginal people and their culture have profoundly affected not just indigenous people but how the land and expressions of it are perceived. Smith commented on what he saw to be a misinterpretation by historians of the perception of the landscape by White settlers of native bush as being ‘mournful and melancholic’, instilling a nostalgia for England when it was more the product of fear and guilt that was projected upon the land itself (ibid.: 21). He wrote:

By still deeper processes of repression and projection it became possible to write the history of the pastoral occupation of Australia, despite the fearful atrocities of the 1830s and 1840s, as if it were an Arcadian idyll,

8 There have been changing policies to Aboriginal communities in the last quarter century but most observers note that despite these, over-all health and other indicators seem to be worsening in relation to the population in general (Atkinson: 2002). There are, however, pockets of improvement.

220 with squatters singing the 23rd Psalm as they led their flocks into green pastures, like Abraham into the promised land (ibid.).

Such fear and guilt underlies what Marcia Langton has more recently named ‘white anxieties’ (Langton in Myers: 2002: 339). Bernard Smith argued that for a culture to develop and survive it must ‘put down firm ethical roots in the place from which it grows’ (B. Smith: 1980: 10). He saw Social Darwinism as an

ethic of conquest, providing the basic moral justifications for dispossession – those best able to exploit the land, or anything else for that matter, have the best right to it….Social Darwinism erected an almost impenetrable barrier between the deep spirituality of Aboriginal culture and the materialism of our own new, white Australian culture (ibid.: 15-16).

Those ethical roots have not yet been established. The belief within Social Darwinism that Aboriginals would gradually ‘die off’ provided bloody validation for the treachery and genocide that ensued9. But Smith made the point that it was not from London that the principles of universal justice championed by the philosophers and lawyers of the Enlightenment began their long process of degeneration:

If it was upon the frontier that our mateship ethic evolved [one that Smith emphatically noted excluded Aboriginals] it was also upon the frontier that the Enlightenment ethic began to crumble. …Confronted by the realities of the colonial frontier, the murder, rape, abduction and servitude for victuals and clothing amounting to slavery [of Aboriginals], colonists turned away from the principles of universal justice enunciated by their European fathers and grandfathers (ibid.: 18-19).

9 Yet during this time the very attention that Social Darwinism had placed upon Aboriginal people provided new interest to be given to them, albeit still as objects of scientific curiosity, by the emerging sciences of social anthropology and sociology (B. Smith: 1980: 25).

221 As government policies were developed, many Aboriginals were increasingly removed as a visible element from the Australian landscape, hidden from sight on missions and reservations, invisible to most white Australians. This action consolidated national forgetfulness and the land could now be seen as a pastoralist’s dream. Indeed, as Smith noted, the Heidelberg painters and their successors did just that (ibid.: 22).

Smith was aware that a new history of ‘concerned conscience’ to counter the prevalent ‘white racism’ could turn towards sentimentality but it must not ‘blind us to the liberating power of sympathy’ (ibid.: 26-28). In his conclusion to The Spectre of Truganini, he insisted that shame must be experienced by White Australians for the recent history of genocide, the infliction of trauma upon Aborigines, and the denial and corruption of that history (ibid.: 52). Nearly two decades after Bernard Smith’s invective against denial, Henry Reynolds broached the culture of silence in Why Weren’t We Told? (Reynolds: 1999). But Fiona Nicoll believed that the question is not ‘Why weren’t we told?’ but ‘What is it that we know but refuse to tell?’ (Nicoll: 2001: 12). Certainly injustices and social inequality desperately need to be acknowledged and acted upon. In ‘Whitefella jump up’, Germaine Greer argued that far more was required to act upon the perception of Australia and its indigenous people. She maintained that the first step in the journey to address the ‘predicament in which we find ourselves as guilty inheritors of a land that was innocently usurped by our ignorant deluded, desperate forefathers’ is to acknowledge that ours is an Aboriginal country (Greer: 2003: 14)10. Such an action, albeit unlikely, could possibly confront collective forgetting, complacency and the self-interested tendency towards ‘disremembering’.

10 In Quarterly Essay 12 (2003), responses to Germaine Greer’s article were mixed, yet most correspondents appreciated the opportunity for debate. Marcia Langton countered Greer’s suggestion to call Australia an ‘Aboriginal country’ as it being ‘trapped by the racism on which the nation was founded in 1901’ (Langton: 2003: 77).

222 iv. Historical injustices and transgenerational trauma

The popularity and marketing of Aboriginal art risk masking a traumatic past and present history that is rarely acknowledged. In psychoanalytic theory, the term ‘trauma’, which literally translates as ‘wound’, is used to refer to a ‘wound of the mind’ rather than a physical injury to the body (Takemoto: 2001: 119). Cathy Caruth recognized that trauma was a ‘double-wound’, a ‘repetitive’ awakening to an experience that cannot be assimilated into consciousness, yet cannot be forgotten (Caruth: 1995: 7). It is ‘the narrative of a belated experience, far from telling of an escape from reality – the escape from a death, or from its referential force – rather it attests to its endless impact on a life’ (ibid.). In Trauma Trails: Recreating Song Lines, Judy Atkinson looked without sentimentality at the transgenerational effects of trauma upon indigenous Australians’ lives11. She saw that

[V]iolence is an everyday occurrence of many Aboriginal people suffering the continuing impacts of colonisation which has shaped human interaction in Australia (indeed internationally) across many generations. Actions of violence have clear traumatising effects that have formed and reformed people, their families, communities and societies generally (Atkinson: 2002: 261).

Atkinson recognized that violence is not only an ‘activity’ on the part of the perpetrator – one that manifests in actions of brutality, cruelty, sadism, bloodshed, atrocity and carnage, but also an ‘experience’ – one that is felt as resentment, hostility, hate, enmity and lack of empathy – for those to whom it is directed (ibid.: 11). She said that ‘In spite of the fact that colonisers have disregarded the rights of Indigenous peoples, and have used force to dominate, intimidate, subdue, violate, injure, destroy and kill, they do not consider their actions, either morally or under their law, to be violence’ (ibid.: 11-12).

11 Atkinson found that the transgenerational transmission of trauma was mirrored in other indigenous cultures throughout the world that suffered colonisation (Atkinson: 2002: 81-8). She also found that this parallels documentation of the trauma experiences of Holocaust victims in Nazi concentration camps (ibid.: 86).

223

Double standards and denial have had insidious effects. Historical injustices towards indigenous peoples have created transgenerational trauma and chronic endemic crises that have resulted in trauma behaviours tragically becoming the norm (ibid.: 83). Aboriginal Australians experience physical and mental illness far more than other Australians, as well as disproportionately higher rates of social problems such as unemployment, alcoholism, substance abuse, domestic violence, crime, deaths in custody and suicide (Tatz: 2001: 97-98). The children of survivors suffer trauma in new and even more traumatic ways (Atkinson: 2002: 86). In Australia, Atkinson contended that violence began with displacement onto the reserves, frontier violence and land dispossession (ibid.: 12). She emphasized the importance of understanding Aboriginal people’s relationship to the land for ‘country can hold healing or traumatic memory and energy, by the human activity or ceremony that has made a place unique, sacred or profane’ (ibid.). This recognition of the power of place and the effects of displacement is a searing reminder of the vital importance of facing the denial that haunts this land in order to positively affect the future. Ours is not ‘a view from nowhere’12.

In The Guilt of Nations, Elazar Barkan emphasized that the new ‘we’ of history are at the same time ‘winners and losers, perpetrators and victims, beneficiaries as well as casualties’ and, ‘we are all implicated (Barkan in Lake: 2000: 22). The propensity to merge into the shimmer of the sublime in front of both paintings and the land stuns and reduces the potential for relationship, effective reconciliation and justice for indigenous people, as well as for environmental action. In order to understand our capacity to be mesmerized by shimmer, it is necessary to understand the power of our perception and vision, and the depths of complexities that arise from it.

12 Martin Jay noted that ‘There is no “view from nowhere” for even the most scrupulously “detached” observer’ (Jay: 1994: 17-18).

224 III. The Exaltation of Vision a. A Singular Perspective

Australians have been largely blind to the welfare of its indigenous inhabitants as well as to the ecological state of the ground of the country itself. Steven Muecke has written that it is important to keep talking about the land not through a ‘cultural nationalism’ but because ecologically the land itself is in crisis (Muecke: 1992: 165). Artists, he feels, through their representations contribute to its healing through making visible what is ‘already there’. Perception is a ‘reaching out to the world’, an activity that is recognised in its Latin root percipere, to take hold of, to feel or comprehend (Tuan: 1990: 12). Yet in non-indigenous culture, this ‘reaching out’ is largely experienced through the eyes and associated with our predominant sense of sight13. Sight certainly enriches our lives and visual metaphors are ubiquitous in our language. We pronounce that ‘Out of sight is out of mind’, that ‘Seeing is believing’, and sometimes ‘We see eye to eye’. Sight takes us into philosophical and

13 Perception and optics are of specialist interest to artists. One third of the highest level of our brain, the cerebral cortex, is devoted to visual processing (Long: 1992: 8). The world provides a rich input of light signals to our eyes in a seemingly instantaneous action, indeed the eye is often compared to a camera. We see by way of photons of light that flood the retina to activate photoreceptors called rods and cones because of their shapes. Cones specialize in bright light and are concentrated in a central patch of retina called the fovea that provides our acute central vision, rich with colour. Spread through the retina’s periphery, the sensitive but colour-blind rods enable us to see in dim light. Each can be activated by a single photon. Signals from the rods and cones are processed by bands of other cells and forwarded to the cortex. Large ganglion cells seem to specialize in data such as motion and outline, and small ganglion cells to colour and fine detail. Messages from these cells leave the eye and enter the optic nerve. The parsing of information continues in the primary visual cortex and dozens of other visual areas in the brain. For example, the specifics of colour, motion, depth perception, and form are emphasized in certain areas (Long: 1992: 16-17). What catches our attention exists first as light flooding into our eyes before being decoded by our brain. A fundamentally abstract world without names or judgements is processed into colour and shade, form, shape and motion. A tapestry of innumerable impressions bombards our retinas as our world is created before and in our eyes.

While colour and shape provide sensations that our eyes can translate, the same does not exist for size or distance; these have to be learned through experience. This has been confirmed through reports of indigenous people who have lived all their lives in rain forests densely enclosed by lush vegetation that provides an intimate rather than distant view. When these forest dwelling people are brought into a different and open landscape with mountains in the distance, it has been reported that they sometimes try to touch the mountaintops with their hands (Sacks: 1995: 113).

225 metaphysical territory with insight, foresight and hindsight. But while sight appears objective, it is extremely subjective.

53. Optical blind spot illusion

With your right eye closed, stare at the cross and slowly move the diagram closer to your eyes. The red dot will disappear when its focused image on your left retina covers the optic nerve head, called the blind spot because it has no photoreceptors. However, using data from adjacent receptors, the brain improvises, filling the void with slanted lines from the surrounding area (Long: 1992: 14).

Sight on its own gives us access only to surfaces and is concerned with appearances. Inherent in vision is its duplicitous capacity to accidentally and quite deliberately provide appearances that deceive. The Greeks believed in the nobility of sight and while Plato spoke of vision as humanity’s ‘greatest gift’, he also warned against its capacity for illusion in his allegory of the cave, where shadows are mistaken for real objects (Plato: 1976)14.

As well as being a metaphor for a propensity for deception, the blind spot of the eye is real, the place where the optic nerve connects with the retina. Oliver Sacks highlighted the illusory nature of vision through case studies of people with anomalous eye-brain connections (Sacks: 1995). One of the most striking conditions that he recognized is a perceptual incapacity called ‘agnosia’, a ‘lack of capacity or impulse to look, to act seeing - a lack of visual behaviour’ (ibid.: 111, italics in original). Sacks pointed out that we do not see, sense or perceive in isolation. ‘[P]erception is always linked to behaviour and movement, to reaching out and exploring the world. It is insufficient to see; one must look as well’ (ibid.). He noted that a patient with a visual agnosia

14 In The Republic, Plato went so far as to ban painting from his utopian state for it being a mimetic art form (Plato: 1976)

226

may be unable to recognise anything visually, even though the elementary visual sensations (and even the capacity to draw) are perfectly intact. But as soon as other senses are called into action - the sense of touch, hearing, smell or taste - the object is recognised, categorised, without the least difficulty (Sacks: 2001: 20).

Through a comparison with those that are newly sighted, Sacks provided insight into how the senses are interconnected in their relationship to perception. His subjects

have radical difficulties with appearances, finding themselves suddenly plunged into a world that, for them, may be a chaos of continually shifting, unstable, evanescent appearances. They may find themselves completely lost, at sea, in this flux of appearances, which for them is not yet securely anchored to a world of objects, a world of space. The newly sighted who have previously depended on senses other than vision, are baffled by the very concept of “appearance”, which, being optical, has no analogue in the other senses. We who have been born into the world of appearances have learned to master it, to feel secure and at home in it, but this is exceedingly difficult for the newly sighted (Sacks: 1995: 121).

The condition of agnosia mirrors how we often do not see a larger perspective or our interconnectedness with the world. Even our fundamental relationship to the ground is rarely acknowledged or even noticed. Yve-Alain Bois commented upon the relationship between ground and person within modernist art:

227 This forgetting that our ‘feet are in the dirt’ is crucial to my thesis. Yet non- indigenous Australians rarely reflect upon its importance. Bois’ recognized that the ‘exaltation of pure vision’ had brought about

a crisis, traditionally pin-pointed in the work of Paul Cézanne [that] shook the visual arts. It suddenly became clear that the strict demarcation between the realms of the “purely visible” (the verticality of the visual field) and the carnal (the space that our bodies occupy) – a demarcation theorized since the Renaissance by means of the conception of painting as a “window opened onto the world” – was a fiction (ibid.: 26-27).

In Renaissance Italy, artists clearly embraced the invention of perspective that rendered three-dimensional space onto a two-dimensional surface. Leonardo da Vinci described it quite simply: ‘Perspective is nothing else than seeing a place behind a pane of glass, quite transparent, on the surface of which the objects behind the glass are drawn’ (da Vinci in Pinker: 1998: 216) 15. But art critic John Berger described a profound implication of that action: ‘Perspective makes the single eye the center of the visible world. Everything converges on to the eye as to the vanishing point of infinity. The visible world is arranged for the spectator as the universe was once thought to be arranged for God’ (Berger: 1972: 16).

The technique of perspective relied on the artist and the subject remaining in the same fixed position with tapering lines projected from a single vanishing point. The artist used one eye and did not move his head in order to keep a fixed perspective. But seeing with one eye through a piece of glass without moving one’s head speaks of a disembodied engagement with the world where person, place and nature are artificially separated. What is seen is reduced to a view, a dot or outline, removed from corporeal experience and relationship. While the invention of perspective was a conspicuous movement from previously stylised, although expressionistic Christian Byzantine depictions, the

15 Perspective was invented in fifteenth century Florence in a collaboration between the architect Ghiberti and the painter Masaccio whose fresco, The Holy Trinity in the Basilica Santa Maria Novella in Florence, is the first painting known to incorporate perspectival space.

228 art of the Byzantine period had itself dramatically shifted from the supposedly pagan Roman period of history. The naturalistic Roman frescoes that survived from the second century AD were inclusive of the sensual delights of plants and animals of the life-world (Miller: 1978: 191-92). Renaissance perspective created space that was constructed rather than experienced and this soon became a code for visual reality. This spatial leap was as radically different from ordinary sensory awareness as our encounter with the world of virtual reality today. Perspective became a radical tool for illusion that fuelled a hunger for appearances of reality that still influences how we see and act in the world today. The privileged, albeit static, centre of perspectival vision affirmed the objectivity of sight and separated the viewer from the world.

In art schools, drawing has been traditionally taught by a technique of measured drawing based on perspective where a fixed measurement, usually one’s drawing implement, is held at arm’s length, against the object or figure to be rendered. In Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought, historian Martin Jay recognized that ‘No longer did the painter seem as emotionally involved with the space he depicted; no longer was the beholder absorbed in the canvas’ (Jay: 1994: 54-55). Distance was established for both the artist and the viewer. Jay extensively explored what he called the ‘ocularcentric discourse’, the history of vision as the ‘master sense of the modern era, variously described as the heyday of Cartesian perspectivalism, the age of the world picture, and the society of the spectacle or surveillance’ (ibid.: 543). He also noted that the sensually seductive and persuasive capacity of sight has been linked to art since the Renaissance (ibid.: 45-46). Perspective was then free to follow its own course and become the naturalized visual culture of the new artistic order with the differentiation of the aesthetic from the religious as an outgrowth of the Reformation (ibid.: 52).

Shortly after the rules of perspective were formulated, oil painting was invented and paintings became commodities to be sold and possessed. The distancing capacity of perspective to create uniform, infinite, isotropic space was congenial to both modern science and capitalism. Jay surmised that in ‘the placement of

229 objects in a relational visual field, objects with no intrinsic value of their own outside of those relations, may be said to have paralleled the fungibility of exchange value under capitalism’ (ibid.: 57-59). The Albertian grid of perspective turned particular places into visual spaces to be manipulated. Within such a field of engagement, sites became commodities rather than places of engagement. Descartes’ philosophy of cogito me cogitare accorded well with perspectival distancing, indeed Cartesian dualism valorized the disembodied eye. The spectatorial rather than incarnated eye meant that the body was consigned to objecthood (ibid.: 91). The link between subject and object was denied.

b. Distance and Sight

Perception is acknowledged to be determined culturally through language, gender, age, socio-economic factors and personal histories (Tuan: 1990). The eye itself is not passive but extremely expressive; only touch has comparable emotional power (ibid.: 9). But Martin Jay maintained that a profound suspicion now surrounds vision and its hegemonic role. ‘If postmodernism teaches us anything, it is to be suspicious of single perspectives, which like grand narratives, provide totalizing accounts of a world too complex to be reduced to a unified point of view’ (Jay: 1994: 545). The universality of visual experience can no longer be automatically assumed. It has also been argued that vision constitutes a fundamental and insidious power dynamic between the subject who looks and the object or target of the gaze. The viewer is often represented as masculine and dominant, and the object viewed – the body or landscape – as feminine and subservient (Rodaway: 1994: 123; Jay: 1994: 288). Luce Irigaray stated that

More than other senses, the eye objectifies and masters. It sets at a distance, and maintains a distance… In our culture the predominance of the look over the smell, taste, touch and hearing has brought about an

230 impoverishment of bodily relations. The moment the look dominates, the body loses its materiality (Irigaray in Massey: 1998: 232).

This distancing capacity of sight can result in a lack of grounded physical and emotional engagement. Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan noted that

The person who just “sees” is an onlooker, a sightseer, someone not otherwise involved with the scene. The world perceived through the eyes is more abstract than that known to us through the other senses… Distant objects can only be seen; hence, we have the tendency to regard seen objects as “distant” – as not calling forth any strong emotional response – even though they may in point of fact be close to us (Tuan: 1990: 10).

Tuan called attention to the Inuit people’s perception of place where space is always in flux as they learn to negotiate their environment through constant orientation with the land with all their senses alert (ibid.: 12; see also Lopez: 1987; H. Brody: 2001). His comments recall Deleuze and Guattari’s recognition that in such places the land is not seen from a distance. In the haptic, ‘smooth’ space of close vision one is never ‘in front of’, one is ‘on’ the land (Deleuze and Guattari: 1987: 493). Yet to truly be ‘on’ the land, one must be conscious of not only the ground beneath one’s feet but a larger perspective.

Over twenty-five years ago as a mature student in an English art college life drawing class, I had an unexpected and startling moment of revelation of not- seeing. As I focussed on drawing the contours of the life model’s body, I suddenly became aware that I was not seeing the interior setting that we both occupied. The ‘wholeness’ of the room was invisible to me. That epiphanal moment was greatly charged by the fact that I had spent twelve years engaged in a pursuit of the ‘real’ in the practice and study of Asian spiritual philosophies. Buddhist, Sufi and Hindu texts stated unequivocally that life was illusion, but the problem was that life looked and felt real. I knew intellectually the logic but until that moment I had never before seen the limitations of my perception. With a kind of agnosia common to my culture, I had previously ‘looked at’ but did not

231 ‘see’ the larger world around me. I separated objects from their contexts and placed lines and boundaries around the world. From that one moment of seeing anew, I believed I could cultivate in my art and my gaze a vision of wholeness. Years later I further discovered the limitations of vision when the women of Utopia introduced me to a deeper understanding of perception. Through spending long periods of time with them on their land they taught me to reach out and explore the world with all my senses. My experiences with them confirmed to me that their relationship to the desert, like ice for the Inuit people, is one of embodied perception and haptic attentiveness that eliminates any possibility of being an ‘onlooker’ or ‘outsider’. Body and ground are linked through ‘step by step’ negotiation of the land. Such relationships with places provide models for an active participation with the land with all the senses engaged. Person and place are not ‘distanced’; land and nature are not out there but in ongoing relationship to the self.

c. Perception and Sensation i. Losing oneself in nature

Over time, Agnes Martin established a deep relationship with the ground of New Mexico through walking the land, her appreciation of nature and hand-building her mud-brick adobe dwellings. She developed a haptic, linear language to construct paintings that act as vessels and vehicles for feelings of beauty that she perceived in places that were special to her. The founder of phenomenology, Edward Husserl, wrote in 1913 that ‘This is the love of art, this willingness to let oneself be touched’ (Husserl, 1913: 1989: 29). Paul Cezanne‘s petite sensations also expressed the ‘intoxification’ he felt in front of natural phenomena (Cezanne in Milner: 1989: 25). Through touch and process, Martin and Cezanne created paintings that are artefacts of time and synthesis, testaments to being witness to the beauty and power of the land. Cezanne dismantled the a priori system of perspective and expressed interconnectedness in moments of seeing that mirrored the constant renewal

232 and state of flux of the universe. Like Martin, his gaze was fuelled through ‘feelings’ that he captured in a methodical and organized system of depiction. He declared that ‘Art is personal perception. This perception I place in feeling and I ask of feeling that it should organize it [perception] into a work’ (Cezanne in Merleau-Ponty: 1965: 110). Like Cezanne, Martin emphasized that ‘feelings’ were not to be confused with ‘personal emotions’ or ‘sentimentality’; such feelings she believed were ‘anti-art’ (Martin, 1989: 1991: 154). She wrote in 1989: ‘Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye it is in the mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection. We respond to beauty with emotion. Beauty speaks a message to us’ (ibid.: 153).

In her studio, Martin translated these messages of memories of beauty in minimal lines on the white grounds of her canvas. On the land, Cezanne acknowledged the white ground of his canvas as pure space and often left considerable areas of that ground blank. He said, ‘Colour sensations producing light give rise to abstractions which prevent me from covering my canvas or fully defining the contours of objects when the points of contact are subtle and delicate, with the result that my image or picture remains incomplete (Cezanne in Gasquet: 1991: 167). On canvas and paper, Cezanne created a participatory space where he could liberate form from the boundaries of outlines and perspective. His horizontal and vertical touches of colour dissolved objects’ appearance of solidity into a shimmering field. Yve-Alain Bois noted in Cezanne the emergence for the first time in Western art since the Renaissance a ‘hiatus’ between the ‘purely visual space of projection (on the vertical plane of the painting) and the tactile and carnal space in which our bodies participate’ (Bois: 1998: 34). Bois contended that Cezanne wished to ‘splice’ vision and touch together to invent a ‘tactile vision’ (ibid.: 37).

Cezanne’s intense participation with nature that led to his ‘tactile vision’ was through his losing himself in art and nature. He expressed his exhilaration to Joachim Gasquet:

233 Shut your eyes, wait, think of nothing. Now open them… One sees nothing but a great coloured undulation. What then? An irradiation and glory of colour. That is what a picture should give us, a warm harmony, an abyss in which the eye is lost, a secret germination, a coloured state of grace. All these tones circulate in the blood, don’t they? One is revivified, born into the real world, one finds oneself, one becomes the painting. To love a painting, one must first have drunk deeply of it in long draughts. Lose consciousness. Descend with the painter into the dim tangled roots of things, and rise again from them in colours, be steeped in the light of them (Cezanne in Milner: 1989: 25).

Just as the single focus of perspective once fed a hunger for appearances in Renaissance artists and viewers, Cezanne’s petite sensations fed a new hunger ‘to lose consciousness’ in the shimmer of the world. He described how he learned to paint in a new way from gazing at the sea:

For a long time I was quite unable to paint [the mountain, Mont] Sainte- Victoire; I had no idea how to go about it because, like others who just look at it, I imagined the shadow to be concave, whereas in fact it’s convex, it disperses outward from the centre. Instead of accumulating, it evaporates, becomes fluid, bluish, participating in the movements of the surrounding air. Just as over there to the right, on the Pilon du Roi, you can see the contrary effect, the brightness gently rocking to and fro, moist and shimmering. That’s the sea… that’s what one needs to depict. What one needs to know. That’s the bath of experience, so to speak, in which the sensitized plate has to be soaked (ibid.: 153).

Through his awareness of the shimmering movement of the sea, Cezanne came to feel strongly that ‘Everything is connected. Believe me, if my canvas is imbued with this vague, cosmic religious feeling which moves and improves me, it’s going to affect others at a point of their sensibility they many not even be aware of’ (ibid.: 165-66). He continued:

234 It gave me a great thrill to realize that. If I can convey that thrill to others through the mysterious effect of my colours, won’t they get a richer more delectable – even if more obsessive – sense of the universal... Seeing it, one would feel how everything is related to oneself… sensation is at the root of everything (ibid.: 166).

His recognition that ‘sensation is at the root of everything’ is revealing. In the act of painting, Cezanne’s attention was immersed in an ‘obsessive’ bliss of union with nature and pigment. Through ‘coloured undulations’ that acted as a ‘receptacle of sensations’, he embarked on a mission to create a ‘harmony which parallels that of nature’ (ibid.: 150). In his introduction to Gasquet’s book of conversations with Cezanne, Richard Schiff wrote of ‘Cezanne’s belief that nature came alive in him as he painted, that he and nature became one’ (Schiff in Gasquet: 1991: 19). Yet Cezanne’s own words that describe his looking at and drawing the landscape qualify that comment: ‘I see rocks just below the surface of the water and feel the pressure of the sky overhead... Outlines are pale and trembling... I begin to distance myself from the landscape, to see it… I detach myself from it’ (Cezanne in Gasquet: 1991: 153-54). He strove to express this detachment in his art.

Cezanne was reported to have said ‘that one of his most constant preoccupations was to render the real distance between eye and object sensible’ (Jourdain in Bois: 1998: 34). But in his efforts to express detachment and bridge distance, he remained emotionally distant. Yves-Alain Bois interpreted his preoccupation as ‘obsessive’, an ‘anxiety about distance’ due to the fact that Cezanne was ‘panicked by the idea of being touched’ (Bois: 1998: 37). Bois queried whether perhaps this ‘phobia’ was ‘directly symmetrical with what he wanted to realize in painting’, whether his petite sensations of touch fulfilled for him an enormous longing for union (ibid.). The sensitive en plein air painter certainly longed to bring the landscape into what he repeatedly called ‘contact’, a tactile affirmation of his being witness to the mystery of nature and the sublime. He wished to convey the ‘cosmic religious feeling’ and sense of interrelatedness that he beheld to viewers of his paintings.

235 ii. Presentness and kenosis

But despite his intention, Cezanne’s paintings, his goals and influence have been largely secularly translated. Like Cezanne, Agnes Martin has a personal philosophy that has been essential to the creation of her art. She, as did most of the Abstract Expressionists, utilizes an ‘all-over’ handling of line and pigment that creates a haptic diffusion of surface that relies on Cezanne’s artistic achievements. Michael Fried wrote in ‘Art and objecthood’ in 1967 that surface ‘tactility’ had become an important means to an end within modern painterly expression (Fried, 1967: 2000). In the closing line of his influential article, he emphasized that ‘Presentness is grace’ (ibid.: 832). In 1972, he noted that in the most ambitious modernist paintings, ‘every grain or particle or atom of surface competes for presentness with every other (Fried: 1972: 50, emphasis in original). But in 1948 Clement Greenberg had stated in ‘The Crisis of the Easel Picture’ that the new ‘uniformity’ of picture surfaces was ‘antiaesthetic’. He maintained that ‘This very uniformity, the dissolution of the pictorial into sheer texture, into apparently sheer sensation, into an accumulation of repetitions, seems to speak for and answer to something profound in contemporary sensibility’ (Greenberg: 1986b: 224).

For Fried, issues of ‘picture-surface’ emerged from the previous disposition of modernist painters to leave much of the bare canvas ground visible, resulting in what he saw as ‘the authority of the canvas giving out, becoming depleted, right before our eyes’ (Fried: 1972: 50). A similar recognition of depletion came from the art critic Peter Fuller. He used the theological term of kenosis, or self- emptying, to describe the modernist’s ‘self-reduction towards blankness’ (Fuller: 1988: 215). He related this to a historical moment that recurred in cosmological, theological, mystical and psychological writings from about 1910 onwards. Fuller believed that this ‘blankness’ represented a ‘literal wiping clean of the slate of consciousness given the realisation that the structuring of the 19th century world view was wrong’ (ibid.). But with the new beginning also came doubt, anxiety and a longing for the sublime.

236 d. A Focus on Dissolution i. An intense beauty

The paintings of Agnes Martin could be seen to exemplify the dissolution into sensation that Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried described and the self- emptying to which Peter Fuller referred. Her horizontal and vertical lines and limited colour focus the viewer’s attention before their shimmer allows that focus to dissolve. Yet her writings express a strong underlying content to her work. She has said that her paintings are ‘really about the feeling of beauty and freedom that you experience in landscape. I would say that my response to nature is really a response to beauty’ (Martin in Sandler: 1993: 13). This immersion in nature’s beauty could be seen to relate not only to Merleau- Ponty’s recognition of the porous relationship between human flesh and the flesh of the world, but also to Cezanne’s capacity to lose consciousness in the ‘dim tangled roots of things’. Yet Cezanne recognized that this was not always an altogether benign experience. ‘I am becoming more lucid before nature but with me the realizing of sensations is always painful. I cannot attain the intensity that is unfolded before my senses’ (Cezanne: Tate Modern wall documentation, October 2002, London). But with determination, or perhaps obsession, he single-mindedly pursued the dissolution of form through repetitious touches of colour until the end of his life.

Agnes Martin’s vision has been equally extreme. In 1976, she completed a small-budget movie that she called Gabriel. It slowly followed the movements of a young boy through landscapes that silently echoed her paintings. She said of the film: ‘It’s about a little boy that climbed a mountain and all the beautiful things he saw. Gabriel was an angel. The little boy wasn’t one, but he looked like one. The film was about climbing a mountain’ (Martin in Lance: 2003: documentary film). Before she shot the footage of the child, she spent five months photographing the landscape and nature and she revealed that this made her feel immensely happy (ibid.). She believed the best image in the film was the opening and closing scene of waves going ‘over and over a rock’; it

237 was, she said, a ‘good recording of time’ (ibid.). In a catalogue essay on Martin’s work entitled ‘The/Cloud/’, Rosalind Krauss wrote that Gabriel constructed a reading of Martin’s work as ‘crypto-landscape’: ‘The terrain of the work, in both film and painting, it seems to say, is that of the abstract sublime, behind which, underwriting it as its field of relevance, is the immensity, the endlessness, the ecstasy, the terribilita of nature’ (Krauss: 1992: 156). Krauss argued that Gabriel exemplified the internal inconsistency within Martin’s work: the clash between overt allusions to nature and the sublime, and her desire for her work to be read as ‘classical’ abstraction (ibid.: 158).

Yet in 1976 Martin had said emphatically that Gabriel was

about happiness – exact [same] thing with my paintings. It’s about happiness and innocence. I’ve never seen a movie or read a story that was absolutely free of any misery. And so, I thought I would make one…. If I’m going to make a movie about innocence and happiness, then I have to have in my mind – free of distraction – innocence and happiness. And then, into my mind will come every thing that I have to do. And if it doesn’t come into my mind what to do, then we just cannot proceed. You see, the artist lives by perception. So that what we make, is what we feel. The making of something is not just construction. It’s all about feeling… everything, everything is about feeling… feeling and recognition! (Martin in Gruen: 1976: 94).

In an otherwise profusely favourable article on Martin’s life and work, the critic Holland Cotter admitted that he found Gabriel ‘vaguely irritating’ and that the ‘labor-intensive effort’ in all her work contained an ‘air of quiet but concentrated obsessiveness’ (Cotter: 1993: 90). This intensity is revealed in an anecdote that Martin told to Ann Wilson in 1998 about the making of the film. While explaining that Gabriel was about ‘joy’, Martin described how she had no problem carrying heavy camera equipment ‘but when she began to shoot the wild flowers up close, her hands would begin this terrible shaking, and she couldn’t figure out why or what was happening. Finally her voices told her that she was trembling

238 for joy because of the beautiful flowers’ (A. Wilson: 1998: 28). Like Cezanne, Martin was extremely sensitive to the intensity of nature’s beauty even in its minutiae. She had written in 1972 that she could see beauty even in a grain of dust (Martin: 1991: 16). But the reference to ‘her voices’ reappeared throughout Wilson’s interview:

She said her voices tell her not to own property and to keep cutting back. The first thing she got rid of was obsessive thinking. Then she dropped the things that she did not like about herself. It figures. You keep cutting back until there is nothing there (A. Wilson: 1998: 27).

The severity of Martin’s ‘cutting back’ can be seen in the austerity of her life and the emptiness of her paintings. Yet the phrase ‘her voices’ again struck me. In 1976 she had said, ‘[I]f it doesn’t come into my mind what to do, then we just cannot proceed’ (Martin in Gruen: 1976: 93). In that same interview she said that during her departure from New York and her travels over the subsequent year and a half she sought inspiration and guidance for where to go next. ‘I never move without a sort of command from my mind’ (ibid.). Hearing voices. Biblical passages are filled with ethereal voices uttering declarations such as the one from Isaiah that had early in her career provided her with inspiration:

It has been a common theme in many religions to respect and abide by the messages of divine voices. Land-based indigenous cultures such as Emily Kngwarray’s and those of Native Americans highly value shamanic visions. But in Martin’s contemporary secular culture people rarely admit to hearing voices.

239 The line between knowledge given by inner voices or intuition and emotional fragility is often precariously indistinct. ii. ‘With My Back to the World’

In 1972, Agnes Martin wrote the following words:

Classicists are people that look out with their back to the world It represents something that isn’t possible in the world More perfection than is possible in the world It’s as unsubjective as possible (Martin, 1972: 1991: 37).

Through the ‘classical’ abstraction that she embraced, Martin strove for a perfection that she recognized was not possible in the world. In 1997, after painting untitled works for two decades, Martin referred to her 1972 writing when she titled a suite of six sixty-inch square canvases With My Back to the World. She made another reference to these words in 1999:

The cause for my painting is not in this world. I paint with my back to the world. This is how it is. You wake up in the morning and feel happy and that’s what I paint. I don’t see the dark side. I don’t pay attention to it. I don’t have no time for badness. I live a simple life. I sleep. Get up. Work. Sleep. Get up. Work (Martin in Kusel: 1999: 61).

With her back to the world, Martin’s determination not to see ‘the dark side’ is revealing. The denial of suffering and concentration on its light-filled opposite speaks of an intense determination not to see, not to feel. The strength of her determination not to integrate more difficult and complex aspects of life is a fierce denial of reality. While her focus is often seen to be a metaphysical and mystical one, this denial is in distinct contrast to the first Buddhist precept that ‘life is suffering’ (Batchelor: 1997: 5). For the Buddha had realized that

240 No conditions are permanent; No conditions are reliable (Buddha in Batchelor: 1997: 21)

Birth, sickness, sorrow, grief, despair, aging and death are part of the human condition. Even modern physics recognizes the constant flux and impermanence of all life and many people have found increasing resonances and parallels between science and ancient mystical and spiritual teachings (Bohm: 1980; Capra: 1991; Bortoft: 1996). But Agnes Martin appears to have an extreme need to control her experience of the world and she confirmed this again in an interview in 2001:

I don’t paint the darker side. I stay above the line. Above the line is love and happiness. Below the line is everything depressive, everything destructive and wrong. I paint above the line and I live above the line (Martin in Spranger: 2001: 23).

In a 2003 documentary film on her life and work, she continued this theme:

Suffering means that you’ve chosen the negative. Life gives you choices… Only the positive choices count. I stay level and never go down below the line. Above the line is happiness and comfort. Below the line is all kinds of depression and unpleasant thoughts (Martin in Lance: 2003: documentary film).

This extreme focus on happiness and repression of psychological pain could be seen to parallel her single-minded search for perfection. This was evident in a comment she made in 2001, one that she also repeated to me: ‘I painted for twenty years but I didn’t like my paintings so I didn’t show or sell them. I used to burn them at the end of every year’ (Martin in Spranger: 2001: 21). Martin’s art and life appear to be characterized by an intense need for control. She has a precise daily routine and timetable. Her ‘one meal a day’ is her one daily ‘brush with society’ (Martin: July 2002: personal interview). In 1976, she revealed the extent of her focus:

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I don’t get up in the morning until I know exactly what I’m going to do. Sometimes, I stay in bed until about three in the afternoon, without any breakfast. You see, I have a visual image. But then to accurately put it down, is a long, long ways from just knowing what you’re going to do (Martin in Gruen: 1976: 94).

The director of the Harwood Museum in Taos, David Witt, noted in his book, Taos Moderns, that Martin’s ‘severe focus’ on achieving critical success was an ‘obsession’ according to those who knew her (Witt: 2002: 42). Her compulsive concentration on the activity of painting goes beyond professional or self- discipline. It could be seen to reveal a chasm of emptiness within her life, her inexorably relentless hand-drawn lines an attempt to fill a traumatic ‘gap’. Martin’s rigid determination not to incorporate the shadow side of life is reflected in an art practice characterized by obsessive linear repetition. Her lines etch across the surface of vulnerabilities and old wounds; tracks that attempt to bridge the gap of trauma without confronting it. In her article ‘What is affect?’, Australian art historian Susan Best called upon Freud’s solution of sublimation to look at the ‘problem’ of aesthetic pleasure: ‘[A]rt serves first the artist, and then by proxy the viewer, as a substitute for wishes and pleasures foregone or forbidden. It is thus a shared cultural consolation for giving up the more primary pleasures of the self’ (Best: 2002: 208). In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud recounted how he witnessed his patients being obliged to repeat the repressed event rather than making themselves vulnerable to the ‘displeasure’ of ‘remembering’ it as something belonging to the past (Freud: 1989a: 19, italics in the original). iii. Engulfed by the sublime

The lines of Martin’s paintings endlessly repeat. Yet in 1967, at the peak of her career as an artist and in a state of crisis and abject desperation, she left New York and her painting practice. Painting could no longer offer consolation. After driving alone and without direction for a year and a half, she finally found a

242 place in New Mexico that would provide the refuge she desperately required. ‘I didn’t come out West’, she said, ‘I came home’ (Martin in Kusel: 1999: 61). But the inner space that she sought was even harder to find than an outer place of belonging. ‘I’m not trying to describe anything. I’m looking for a perfect space’ (Martin in Auping: 1998: 84). This ‘perfect space’ she sought is unachievable by the very nature of human longing and existence. But her compulsive drive to achieve it is often communicated to beholders of her work through the uncanny sensations they convey.

Dore Ashton once remarked that the surfaces of Martin’s paintings are ‘surprisingly thin, allowing gessoed grounds full right to radiate interior light’ (Ashton: 1977: 12). An atmosphere of light permeates her paintings and it has been argued that her work transforms the signifier of light into the signified of material pigment and canvas (Linville: 1971; Krauss: 1992). This shimmer of light has contributed to the placement of her work within the Abstract Sublime. Equally so is the space that she creates in her field of parallel lines, a surface skin that can seduce, envelop and overwhelm the sensitive viewer. But it has been the boundless and limitless aspects of the sublime that Martin’s work has been most frequently associated with rather than the affiliations of the sublime with engulfment. Yet a sense of being engulfed is frequently experienced in front of her work. Kasha Linville noted that ‘Once you are caught in one of her paintings, it is an almost painful effort to pull back from the private experience she triggers to examine the way the picture is made. The desire to simply let yourself flow through it, or let it flow through you, is much stronger’ (Linville: 1971: 72). This resonates with Edmund Burke’s 1757 definition in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful of the sublime as ‘tranquillity tinged with terror’ and associated it with terms such as ‘Vacuity, Solitude, Silence and Infinity’ (Burke in Fuller: 1988: 188; Casey: 2002: 40-46). To better understand the experience of engulfment and the sublime, it is necessary to delve deeper into perceptions of art and the land.

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CHAPTER FIVE

DIFFERENT VISIONS

I. Complexities of Perception a. Potential Space

The experience of the sublime engendered by the land can be felt as mystery and presentness, or felt as fear with an overwhelming awareness of emptiness or a void. The American psychologist James Hillman recognized that people can sense the power of nature and be overcome by ‘panic’ and ‘dread’ as ‘objects become subjects’ and ‘move with life’. He described this panic as ‘a direct participation mystique in nature, a fundamental even ontological experience of the world as alive’ (Hillman: 1990: 98). Edmund Burke described the uncanny feeling of ‘astonishment’ before nature as ‘that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it’ (Burke in Casey: 2002: 41). We look and are literally stunned.

Similar feelings can be experienced in front of an artwork. In Art & Psychoanalysis, Peter Fuller attempted to penetrate the material, biological base of the mystery of paintings that can also bring up feelings of engulfment. He described this mystery as being involved with the nexus of the submergence of self into the environment and the differentiation of self out from it (Fuller: 1988: 199). His writing on the American painter Robert Natkin resonated strongly with my experience of Agnes Martin’s work, especially in the ambiguous capacity of Natkin’s canvases to blur the distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. Fuller described the pleasurable and engaging surfaces of Natkin’s paintings as being saturated with a vibrant sensuality and a seemingly ‘seamless skin of light’ (ibid.: 177). This seductive ‘illusionary space is recognised to be contained within the painting, one in which the skin reforms

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around you as the viewer becomes a literal subject’ (ibid.: 179). Fuller noted that certain paintings had the capacity to evoke

a stage in our development when it was difficult to differentiate between “self” and “not self”; when the skin of our bodies did not provide an absolute, concrete limitation to our sense of our physical being; a stage in which we also lacked the sense of time. The reconstruction of that phase in the present turns out to be fascinating, alluring, and satisfying – although simultaneously frightening and tragic (ibid.: 182).

He associated this experience with the experience of the child before separation from the mother and her breast. He proposed that the ‘epic’ and at the same time ‘intimate’ quality of Natkin’s paintings recaptured aspects of ‘infantile experience about the nature of time, space and ourselves, which in adult life, we have been compelled to renounce, defensively, and sometimes to the detriment of our perceptions’ (ibid.: 183). He called upon the Object Relations psychologist D. W. Winnicott’s concept of ‘potential space’ to describe the illusionary space created by the artist into which the beholder enters. Fuller contended that

Almost as consolation for the lost capacity to create the world, the infant establishes an intermediate area of experience, or “potential space”, to which inner reality and external life both contribute. Thus the infant seeks to avoid separation by the filling in of the potential space... The potential space, originally between baby and mother, is ideally reproduced between child and family, and between individual and society, or the world. Thus Winnicott described this intermediate area as the location of cultural experience, which, as it were, provides redemption from the insult of the Reality Principle [the fact of the existence of the world whether the baby creates it or not] (Fuller: 1986: 6, italics in original).

Fuller further maintained that ‘The capacity to explore and investigate this “potential space” in a situation of trust, allows the individual to develop his

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internal sense of place and integration, his sense of external reality, and his ability to act imaginatively and creatively upon the latter’ (ibid.: 202-3, italics in original). He believed that through erratic mothering, fears of abandonment and lack of predictability, Natkin artificially constructed in visual form the ‘potential space’ that was denied him by his environment in infancy. Fuller believed that this space held the potential for Natkin to be something ‘other than that which he was – a fractured and dissociated individual’ (Fuller: 1988: 210-11).

Robert Natkin’s paintings, like those of Agnes Martin, are characterised by the repetition of all-over surface incident1. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Sigmund Freud addressed the relation of the instinctual processes of repetition to the dominance of the ‘pleasure principle’, given that ‘the origin of an instinct can be traced to a need to restore an earlier state of things’ (Freud: 1989a: 69, italics in original). From this he recognized that people often felt obliged to repeat rather than remember an unpleasant past (ibid.: 19, italics in original). He argued that the manifestations of a compulsion to repeat ‘exhibit to a high degree an instinctual character and, when they act in opposition to the pleasure principle, give the appearance of some “daemonic” force at work’ (ibid.: 41). I recognized similarities between Natkin’s childhood and my own, with my experience of erratic parenting and trauma. My prolific art practice certainly created a refuge, my canvases a ‘potential space’ in which to engage to protect me from painful memories that I felt unable to address. Natkin’s experience of ‘erratic mothering, fears of abandonment and lack of predictability’ are common to Martin’s early childhood. Martin, too, appears to be endlessly reconstructing a ‘potential space’ on her canvas grounds, perhaps to compensate for the security that had been ruptured so early in her life. The repetition of lines on her canvases for over forty years seems to be evidence of a ‘daemonic’ rather than an aesthetic force.

1 Robert Natkin uses coarse cloth to imprint a repetitious texture of pigment on canvas as he creates a mesh-like surface web of colour. He often incorporates dots and roughly drawn grids to accentuate the spatial paradox. In the 1992 Peter Fuller Memorial Lecture, he told a story about how once when he was making dots on a painting he came close to passing out and began to cry inexplicably – more dots, another tear. He revealed how in a session with his psychiatrist he uncovered the event that occurred to him as a small boy that made him associate the repeated dots with trauma (personal notes: Tate Gallery, Liverpool: 9 May 1992).

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The death of Martin’s father when she was two may have created a sudden gap in her life, a dual loss and sense of abandonment as her family was then forced to move from their family farm. Her sense of place and security would have been abruptly altered at that impressionable age. When she hand-built her mud-brick adobe home and studio in the open mesa country of New Mexico at the age of fifty-six, she also experienced a sense of belonging. There she felt the freedom to stop painting as she began to address the powerful pattern of repetition and movement that had dominated her life and art practice. Internally and externally she began to feel a sense of place and healing. Her statement in 2002 revealed the importance of place to her: ‘I think it is more important to figure out where you want to be than it is what you want to do. First you have to find where you need to be, and then you can do what you need to do’ (Martin in Rifkin: 2002: 14). After seven years of living a contemplative life on the mesa confronting time, space and her psychological processes, she began to paint again. Her anxieties seem to have lessened and the lines on her canvases became noticeably fewer. She still used repetition in her pared down linear language but now with a lighter touch and considerably more ease.

b. Visions of Emptiness

The changes seen in Agnes Martin’s use of repetition highlight a Zen perspective found in many Zen parables in which through clear seeing everything is the same but different. In the eleventh century parable of the ‘Ox and its Herdsman’, a young herdsman believes that in a cloud of dust he has lost not just his ox but also his way (Brinker: 1987: 103-9). The opening line commences: ‘To begin with, we never really lost him [the ox as a metaphor for our true nature], so what is the use of chasing him and looking for him?’ (ibid.: 104). The short poems and illustrations tell not just of finding the ox but give insight into the phenomenal world. Such stories and images epitomise various levels of awareness and knowledge, and give insight into the basic tenets of Zen Buddhism (ibid.: 103). Anne Bancroft related another Zen commentary on perception:

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A famous Zen maxim says that before studying Zen, one sees mountains as mountains and waters as waters. When one reaches a more intimate knowledge one sees that mountains are not mountains and waters are not waters. But when one reaches the very substance one is at rest. For then one sees mountains once again as mountains and waters once again as waters (Bancroft: 1979: 43).

Gazing upon the vast, flat horizon of New Mexico, Martin recognized the straight line to be a powerful motif. In New York, far away from the open spaces of that land and nature, the lines on her canvases became obsessive and repetitious. Yet when she returned to New Mexico and slowly to painting, the lines held more spaciousness, just like her original vision of the horizon. When she found where she needed to be she could begin to re-engage with herself, life and art in a more emotionally sustainable way. Her journals from this period corroborate her new confidence and sense of inner clarity (Martin: 1991).

The Japanese concept of ‘wabi’ may help to illuminate Martin’s experience. Wabi is a term for an inner joy in poverty and simplicity, ‘an inwardly echoing aesthetic poverty’ (Merton: 1968: 91). In (In)scribing Body/Landscape Relations, the Australian academic Bronwyn Davies noted that the complementary concepts of wabi and sabi (often described as wabi-sabi) were central to understanding Japanese body/landscape relations. Wabi-sabi includes nature in its pure state and the human experience of it, the human mind and all its ‘unnatural’ creations, it is ‘all that exists, including the underlying principles of existence’ (Davies: 2000: 175). Wabi was originally related to the idea of loneliness and lack of comfort and only later was developed into the concept of ‘making poverty and loneliness synonymous with liberation from material and emotional worries and by turning the absence of apparent beauty into a new and higher beauty’ (ibid.: 111). Davies argued that by taking the emphasis away from the self and tuning into the multi-sensory perceptive body as a process engaged with the landscape, then the experience of embodiment and non-

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separateness from nature and the world can become a real possibility (ibid.: 252). She quoted from a Japanese text:

“Greatness” exists in the inconspicuous and overlooked details. Wabi-sabi represents the exact opposite of the Western ideal of great beauty as something monumental, spectacular, and enduring. Wabi-sabi is not found in nature at moments of bloom and lushness, but at moments of inception or subsiding. Wabi-sabi is not about gorgeous flowers, majestic trees, or bold landscapes. Wabi-sabi is about the minor and the hidden, the tentative and the ephemeral: things so subtle and evanescent they are invisible to vulgar eyes (Koren in Davies: 2000: 182).

Martin appreciated the subtlety of nature in the vast, arid land surrounding her. This and her respect for classical Asian spiritual writings reveal precedents for linking her work with the numinous, the sublime and the void. In The Idea of the Holy, Rudolf Otto noted the ‘hidden kinship’ between the aesthetic and the sublime through darkness, silence and the Oriental model of emptiness and empty distances. Otto believed that ‘the remote vacancy is, as it were, the sublime in the horizontal’, pointing out that the ‘wide-reaching desert, the boundless uniformity of the steppe, have a real sublimity’ (Otto, 1959 in Fuller: 1988: 216). Otto’s description of Oriental paintings may also provide a means of understanding how space and gesture operate in Martin’s paintings, works that epitomize ‘the sublime in the horizontal’:

Not only are there pictures upon which “almost nothing” is painted, not only is it an essential feature of their style to make the strongest impression with the fewest strokes and the scantiest means, but there are very many pictures – especially such as connected with contemplation – which impress the observer with the feeling that the void itself is depicted as a subject, is indeed the main subject of the picture (ibid.: 216-17).

Thomas Merton made the critical distinction that the absolutely life-affirming emptiness of Zen and its art is the exact opposite of the ‘world-denying

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pessimistic nihilism’ and existential nothingness of Jean-Paul Sartre (Merton: 1968: 90). Impermanence and emptiness have been constant themes in the paintings of traditional Asian artists who have often been sages and spiritual masters who have discounted the technique of perspective for a sophisticated and philosophically congruent spatial play of the void. Zen has been called a ‘teaching without words’ as masters train students to break the bonds of dualistic and logical thinking (Seo: 1998: 14). Zen calligraphy is an expression of line, form, energy and movement rather than scripture and it is believed that through brush and ink the ‘Zen mind’ of the artist can be communicated (ibid.: 14-15). For traditional Zen artists, art is seen as an expression of spiritual experience where there is no separation between art, life and spirituality, and ‘being’ is regarded as ‘the self-unfolding of the unformed Nothing’ or emptiness (Merton: 1968: 90)2.

54. Taneda Santoka, No Money, c. 1940, ink on paper, 49.4 x 69.3 cm, Chikusei Collection

There is a Zen phrase that is translated as ‘like this’ or ‘just this’ that points to what Dogen, the Japanese founder of the Soto sect of Zen, called the true nature of reality, the ‘body-mind of right now’, ‘what is’ (Seo: 1998: 112-14). This

2 Even for the experienced practitioner, this is not simple. Comparing Christian and Zen paths, Thomas Merton warned of the inherent dangers: ‘The Desert Fathers realized that the most dangerous activity of the devil came into play against the monk only when he was morally perfect, that is, apparently “pure” and virtuous enough to be capable of spiritual pride. Then began the struggle with the last and subtlest of the attachments: the attachment to one’s spiritual excellence; the love of one’s spiritualized, purified and “empty” self; the narcissism of the perfect, of the pseudo-saint and of the false mystic’ (Merton: 1968: 125).

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is expressed in the poem by Santoka on one of his large-scale scrolls: ‘No money, no things, no teeth, just me’ (ibid.: 126-27).

As an alternative to a dualistic seeing of the world through the framework of ‘I-it’ relationships or domination, Stephen Batchelor advocated going beyond ‘beliefs’. He described Buddhism as a culture of awakening with an internally consistent set of values and practices that creatively animates all aspects of human life (Batchelor: 1997: 19-20). He referred to the 1871 definition of ‘culture’ by the anthropologist Sir Edward Burnett Tylor as ‘that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society’ (ibid.). The experience of satori or enlightenment in Buddhism is often likened to seeing the world ‘right way up’ or having a bag removed from one’s head, that is, one sees as if for the first time. What is seen is emptiness – the nature of all things – all things interconnected and yet without permanence. As the 14th century Tibetan lama Tsongkhapa declared, ‘Unborn emptiness has let go of the extremes of being and non-being. Thus it is both the center itself and the central path. Emptiness is the track on which the centred person moves’ (Tsongkhapa in Batchelor: 1997: 75).

The ‘track’ of emptiness is a well-worn spiritual path yet for the unwary it holds a subtle paradox. Within many mystical traditions, the void is associated with the transcendental; the gaze is focussed upon the void as ‘Divine Source’. Rudolf Otto believed this void is ‘a negation that does away with every “this” and “here” in order that the “wholly other” may become actual’ (Otto in Fuller: 1988: 75). Such ambitions towards the transcendent can have obvious implications for how the outer world is actually inhabited ‘here and now’. Even ostensibly more integrated attempts to actualise spiritual ‘emptiness’ can highlight a propensity to detach from the reality and ground of the present. Australian philosopher David Tacey argued that

Despite the New Age rhetoric about the immanence of the divine and the worldliness of its vision, the New Age appears to be caught up in a

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transcendentalist interpretation of the spirit. The New Age tends to find its spiritual experiences away from life and beyond the ground of ordinary experience (Tacey: 2001: 59).

Geographer and place philosopher Neil Evernden also pointed to the importance of a grounded engagement with the world: ‘It is in that territory of mutuality where the recognition of the intermingling of our flesh with the world creates an “extended self” that truly fertile new grounds for conscious and ethical action can occur in each moment’ (Evernden: 1985: 13). He also called attention to the potential shadow side to that process: ‘The propensity for denial and the creation of “Other” and “it” only creates a new distorted emphasis on “being” as is seen in mysticism, New Age individualism and requirements for personal space and bliss (ibid.). Evernden recognized that such an emphasis can be a strong tool for denial that can stop one participating in engaging with the world. Agnes Martin found consolation in a personal philosophy and art practice that emphasizes being and presence, yet she recognized after seven years of living reclusively on the mesa that her extreme detachment from the world was counter-productive. Reflecting on her long period of solitude, she said, ‘I decided the most important thing … is that we are in life to find out what life is about, and that in solitude you can’t find it out’ (Martin: 1989: 23). The space of the present moment holds far more complexity than might otherwise appear.

c. Presentness and the Sublime

In ‘The sublime and the avant-garde’, Jean-Francois Lyotard associated the sublime and the art of the Abstract Sublime with the present moment, the ‘here and now’, to distinguish it from its romantic predecessors’ focus on ‘elsewhere’ (Lyotard: 1984: 36-37). Yet his affirmation of the sublime reveals an interesting gap when attention is placed upon the actual moment of perception. In The Optical Unconscious, Rosalind Krauss explored the capacity of vision to incorporate ‘a seeing and a knowing that one sees, a kind of cogito of vision’ (Krauss: 1993: 19). In regard to painting, she recognized that modernism

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incorporated a systematic reinvention of the ground as figure. ‘The modernist not ground is a field or background that has risen to the surface of the work to become exactly coincident with its foreground, a field that is thus ingested by the work as figure (ibid.: 16, italics in original). Erich Franz noted that in Agnes Martin’s paintings ‘Figure and ground, line, form and plane are not contrasted with one another; they do not separate as positive and negative’ (Franz: 1990: 52). Thus Martin’s lines and grids create a picture of pure immediacy, of complete self enclosure. Krauss wrote that

Vision is a form of cognition. As a form, then, it reworks the very notion of ground. The ground is not behind; the ground is what it, vision, is. And the figure, too, is reworked. Perception marks this figure that the eye singles out by labelling it “pure exteriority”: set off from the field on which it appears, it is even more surely set off from me, the beholder. But cognition – in vision – grasps the figure otherwise, capturing it in a condition of pure immediacy, yielding an experience that knows in a flash that if these perceptions are seen as there, it is because they are seen by me; that it is my presence to my own representations that secures them, reflexively, as present to myself (Krauss: 1993: 15, italics in original).

In her acknowledgement of the immediacy of cognition in vision, Krauss also recognized that a true knowing of an art work must take into account modernism’s tendency towards an autonomy that ‘brackets it off from the world, from its context, from the real’ (ibid.: 12). This bracketing off or distancing has profound implications in life and art. Krauss had long suspected that within modernism ‘the content question’, Clement Greenberg’s belief that quality is content, had been always ‘just under the surface’ of the writing of most art critics (Krauss: 1972: 49). From that position, Krauss called into question Michael Fried’s location of presentness in modernist painting3. Krauss wrote:

The flatness that modernist criticism reveres may have expunged spatial perspective, but it has substituted a temporal one – ie., history. … Failing

3 In ‘Art and objecthood’, Fried’s last line stated that ‘Presentness is grace’ (Fried: 2000: 832).

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to see that its “history” [Fried’s reference in ‘Art and objecthood’ to modernist continuity: “the entire history of painting since Manet”] is a perspective, my perspective – only, that is to say, a point of view – modernist criticism has stopped being suspicious of what it sees as self- evident, its critical intelligence having ceased to be wary of what it has taken as given (ibid.: 50, italics in original).

In one of Joachim Gasquet’s conversations with Cezanne, I found a precedent for Fried’s ‘historical logic’. Cezanne was reported to have said:

Awareness of the world is perpetuated more fully in our canvases than in your poems, because our paintings embody more materialized sensations. They mark the stages of mankind’s journey. From the reindeer on cave walls to Monet’s cliffs on pork butchers’ walls, you can follow the path of human development… From the hunters and fishermen peopling the tombs of ancient Egypt, the sophisticated world of Pompeii, the frescoes of Pisa and Siena, the mythological paintings of Veronese and Rubens, the evidence mounts, a spirit emerges which is everywhere the same: memory translated into objective form (Cezanne in Gasquet: 1991: 168).

Krauss recognized that Cezanne’s view and the modernism that proceeded from him embraced only one perspective that relied upon a dubious universalising of history. She then dismantled the argument of a continuity of presentness within an artwork: ‘If a work’s meaning depends on comparison with things that exist outside it, then that meaning cannot be seen to be entirely present in the perception of the single work’ (Krauss: 1993: 50).

The concept of presentness is interestingly approached through Cezanne in his preoccupation with translating memory and awareness of the world to the viewer in an objective form. Each petite sensation was a momentary perception made tangible. Yet such a ‘here and now’ holds questionable presentness. In his discussion of the sublime, Lyotard pointed to ‘now’ being the moment of ‘perception “before” perception’, what Merleau-Ponty had called ‘Cezanne’s

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doubt’, where the inadequacy of even the petites sensations becomes clear (Lyotard: 1984: 41). Lyotard recognized an ‘agitation’ in the discrete movement that occurs when ‘thought seizes upon what is received’ (ibid.: 37). He likened this agitation to an ‘anxiety’ or ‘anticipation’ and the existential question ‘Is it happening?’ that occurs after the ‘happening’ or experience (ibid.: 36-37). He differentiated this experience, one that he felt was of relevance today, from the ‘temporal ecstasies’ of the present moment that have been analysed from Augustine’s day to the phenomenologists. He concluded that ‘The avant-garde task is to undo spiritual assumptions regarding time. The sense of the sublime is the name of this dismantling’ (ibid.: 43).

Each of Cezanne’s paintings, like those of Agnes Martin, is an accumulation of many present moments, shimmering accretions of time. Individual moments of perception of beauty such as theirs frequently occur in front of nature and art when the artist and the beholder of the artwork experience a sublime moment of being present. Yet at the same time one can quickly be lost in perception, either caught in the web of self-conscious ‘agitation’ or overwhelmed by nature or the artwork, when the mind is entirely filled with its object to the extent that it cannot entertain any other. Martin’s extreme concern with perfection and beauty and Cezanne’s dictate to ‘lose consciousness’ and descend with the painter into the ‘dim tangled roots of things’ make it seem likely that these artists would have aligned themselves with ‘temporal ecstasies’ that would have left them in a not entirely embodied state.

This collusion with fusion into territory of the ‘no self’ has echoes with the aesthetic rapture experienced with making and viewing art, the sublime sense of harmony or terror felt when viewing the land, the ecstasy of spiritual union and the passion of secular love. In such heightened experiences of the present moment, one can easily move away from reality and oneself. Moments of fear and anxiety or individual epiphany and bliss are ultimately a denial and evasion of the ‘here and now’. The possibility for grounded engagement with all the senses becomes diminished and a sense of disembodiment can occur that has consequences for artists and beholders.

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II. Addressing Repetition a. Dots, Dots, Dots i. Embodied iconography and a discontinuity

In different ways, Agnes Martin and Paul Cezanne both placed enormous emphasis on the present moment and touch to translate their sublime perceptions of place upon canvas. In Emily Kngwarray’s Anmatyerr culture, time and the land are understood differently. The perception of Dreamtime ancestral presences embodied in natural phenomenon allows time to be understood as fluid exchanges between past, present and future. To her people, the land, ‘country’, has undeniable power. Ceremonies are repeated to affirm this knowledge as well as to reanimate and rejuvenate country and its custodians. Dots and lines constitute the iconography of awely body painting designs as well as the men’s ceremonial sand painting mosaics. Hetti Perkins and Hannah Fink linked the use of infill dotting in contemporary acrylic paintings to the ‘intensive construction of low relief sandpaintings in which an often vast section of flattened ochred earth, decorated with ancestral designs, is embellished by white flecks of wamulu [plant materials]’ (Perkins and Fink: 2000b: 174). But Christine Nicholls wrote that ‘In terms of Anmatyerr law, dots are the least significant aspect of the painting, often, though not always, thought of simply as infill’ (Nicholls and North: 2001: 204). Yet Emily Kngwarray transformed ‘infill’ dots into exuberant fields of colour whose animating shimmer held the spiritual power of her country and her Yam Dreaming. She creatively developed those dots into a masterful body of work in batik and acrylic.

Many writers have written of the importance of dots. In 1973 Nancy Munn extensively explored the cultural significance of dots in Walbiri Iconography (Munn: 1973). More recently Christine Watson researched dots in relation to women’s sand drawings at Balgo (Watson: 1997; 2003). The discussion of dots forms a central part of Peter Sutton’s 1988 book, Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia, as well as Howard Morphy’s 1998 book, Aboriginal Art

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(Sutton: 1988; Morphy: 1998). Fred Myers examined acrylic painting dots, their usage, relationship to connoisseurship, and central role in the widely contested arena of appropriation (Myers: 2002). Jennifer Biddle presented a strong case that the dots made upon the new grounds of canvas hold enormous power: ‘Even if disengaged from the body of the Ancestor these forms, features, marks, places do not cease to retain Ancestral presence’ (Biddle: 2003: 65). Yet I believe that the marks represent even more. Just as Emily Kngwarray’s gestures in Big Yam Dreaming (figure 45) hold the presence and authority of the awely ceremony, when they are repeated ad infinitum, outside of those ceremonies, they also reflect a discontinuity. The acrylic paintings hold not just the power and presence of country, Dreamtime ancestors, Dreamings and ceremonies in a creative hybrid merging of past and present but also a continuing history of collective and personal displacement from homelands, oppression and trauma. Dots and lines have become an acceptable aesthetic surface covering a depth of anguish and pain that non-indigenous culture would prefer not to see.

This perception of the repetition of acrylic dots and lines on canvas does not contradict cultural meanings of Aboriginal acrylic painting but broadens their understanding. At Utopia I saw many artists sitting on the ground painting in acrylic on canvas. What was often painfully evident was the monotonous and obsessively repetitious nature of the paintings’ production. This was in strong contrast to the qualities of engagement and energy involved in the activity of ‘painting up’ their bodies in ochres for ceremonies that I also witnessed. While the batik beginnings of the acrylic painting movement at Utopia was a communal activity, today people there often work alone while painting, filling time and canvases. The repetitious acrylic dots and lines point to an undisputable fact: there now exists an abundance of time that is now largely dislocated from traditional activities. The trauma of dispossession and high levels of unemployment physically, psychologically and socially affect the whole community.

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In their writing in 2000 on Papunya acrylic paintings, Hetti Perkins and Hannah Fink stated that ‘If exile is the dream of home, the physical longing for homelands expressed in the early paintings has now been answered’ (Perkins and Fink: 2000b: 185). Indeed for the people of Papunya and Utopia and many Central and Western Desert artists, the land of their ancestral inheritance has been returned. Yet social disparities are still as prolific as the dots upon the artists’ canvases. A schizophrenic split exists between the aesthetic celebration of Aboriginal painting and the hopelessness and helplessness experienced by many Aboriginal people. It is a shameful indictment when an audience privileges ‘art’ rather than acknowledging the larger perspective of Aboriginal peoples’ lives and their connection to country. Too often the viewer perceives only an aesthetic shimmer and an ‘exotic’, decorative commodity when the work is hung on gallery walls. The reality of past and present conditions is appropriated into ‘art’. Unless the beholder can bring the equivalent of a ‘change of aspect’ to their perception and witness the paintings’ capacity to reflect displacement, oppression and trauma as well as being unique cultural expressions, maps of place and experience, and documents of Land Rights, the painful legacy will continue and ‘art’ will collude with denial. ii. A place of sadness

Within the first year of the Aboriginal acrylic painting movement’s inception, dots characterized the paintings created by the men at Papunya, a place Eric Michaels called ‘the mother lode of the Western Desert painting movement’ (Michaels: 1994: 153). Yet this ‘mother lode’ was a place of great sadness and misery for the Anmatyerr, Arrernte, Luritja, Pintupi and Warlpiri people (Bardon: 1991). They had been forcibly displaced from their traditional country and sacred sites to a place and circumstances out of their control and suffered terrible losses and anguish. Geoffrey Bardon recognised their despair. He seems to have judged that the paintings he encouraged would be a positive contrast to the unaccustomed drudgery of the lives of the men who participated. But there is no doubt that the sense of loss and trauma would have been deeply

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embedded in the bodies of the artists and thus affected the actual painting of the boards and canvases.

Bardon acknowledged that within the first year of painting at Papunya the acrylic dots became stylised and changed from their original particularity (Bardon in Carter: 2000: 255-56). Paul Carter described the Papunya paintings as emerging through ‘a convergence of common interests, a genuine exchange across difference’ (Carter: 2000: 255-56)4. The result was the formation of a new hybrid graphic language that is apparent in Bardon’s description of Johnny Warangkula’s painting:

During my “talkings-out” of Warangkula’s stories the hieroglyphics basic to the Water Dreaming were defined in their many variants and most striking representational forms… I felt that as we talked, and he painted, that Johnny was clarifying and giving new life to an archetypal form; moreover, he was showing, with supreme brilliance, that archetypes were being modified, and changed, sometimes even omitted from a representation; that he was making his own rules stylistically and iconographically (Bardon in Carter: 2000: 255).

This affirmation of the paintings’ undisputed visual brilliance is also a confirmation of their hybridity. Paul Carter recognised that ‘The mobilisation of the Papunya Tula movement depended in a sense on resigning the desire to comprehend, to channel and control. It meant suspending disbelief, embracing acts of make-believe to make something happen’ (Carter: 2000: 257). This action was not without its effects. Carter noted that ‘In transferring the iconic signs from the performative context of the ceremony – where singing, ground- marking and body painting combine to evoke complex abstract concepts – to the permanence of the painting board, the marks risk growing disembodied’ (ibid.: 255, my emphasis). I believe that today the repetition of dots and lines divorced from cultural activities does reflect an unacknowledged sense of

4 Paul Carter also noted the artistic influence of Geoffrey Bardon himself on the new painting movement (Carter: 2000: 255-6).

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disembodiment and grief that is tragically a reality for many indigenous people. The haptic marks carry an animating vibrancy of cultural context but also a sense of the unheimlich through cultural difference and unspeakable trauma.

Writing on the paintings of Papunya artists, Carter stated that ‘The shock of the ancient which these paintings represented for Australian art audiences weary of modernist renditions of a land they hardly knew still reverberates in this uncomfortable post-colonial society’ (ibid.: 266). Yet the efficacy of the reverberation or ‘shock’ may have already largely faded as the paintings have become more familiar and widely marketed as decorative commodities. The power of these remarkable paintings to express longing, belonging, loss and identity through place is still largely unacknowledged or met with denial. The tragic contemporary legacy of colonization and dispossession has to be acknowledged in the shimmering dots if the work is to communicate cross- cultural understanding and reality. The fact that the appreciation and consumption of Aboriginal acrylic paintings does not extend into meaningful action has not gone unnoticed by the artists.

Djon Mundine wrote in 2002 that because of ongoing legal battles over Native Title, ‘references to cultural tradition and artistic statements of identity are needed as never before’ (Mundine: 2002: 25-26). He believed that art plays a critical role:

In Indigenous society art objects are made as a form of non-literary communication with the world outside. This gesture of communication is in effect a statement of identity within a world in a state of flux, as well as a redefinition within Aboriginal society, and in relation to the “outside” world, a re-statement of who we are (ibid.).

Yet when this communication is appropriated into shimmering decorations on the walls of another culture, its makers’ two-fold message of identity and the state to which Aboriginal culture has been rendered remains unheard and unseen.

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b. Acknowledgement of Loss

The repetition within the paintings of Emily Kngwarray and many other Aboriginal painters, as well as Agnes Martin and myself, I believe reflects not only their affinity with the land, but deeply held loss and trauma often associated with it. In his study of Robert Natkin’s paintings, Peter Fuller concluded that an artist’s repetition can be a desperate defence against underlying depression (Fuller: 1988: 221). Art making provides a safe space, a place to escape the insidious effects of trauma. To use D. W. Winnicott’s example, where security and play have been denied, they shall be sought in a new ‘potential space’. The viewers of paintings, too, through their own needs, often collude with the immersion into shimmer. While this safe aesthetic space provides a refuge from the complexities of the world and the insidious effects of trauma, it is ultimately a form of silent denial. To describe the effects of a ‘negative aesthetic’, Peter Fuller called upon the term ‘anaesthesia’, a widely used 19th century term meaning ‘deprived of sensation or the agent of such deprivation’ (ibid.: 189).

Trauma can anaesthetize and insidiously permeate and restrict lives as attempts are made to create a place of safety and to control fear through actions that are often dissociative, monotonous, obsessive and repetitious (Caruth: 1995; Herman: 1992). Clinical literature has found that for some people, stressful life events and trauma are risk factors for the development of depression, anxiety, vulnerability and post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) (Harvey and Miller: 2000). As I reflected on the stories of loss and displacement in the lives of Emily Kngwarray and the women of Utopia, as well as those of Agnes Martin and my own, I came to realize that an important part of my research has been to bear witness to loss. In Truth and Testimony, the psychologist and Holocaust survivor Dori Laub recognized three separate and distinct levels of witnessing in what she called a ‘ceaseless struggle’ to obtain truth: ‘the level of being a witness to oneself within the experience, the level of being a witness to the testimonies of others, and the level of being a witness to the process of witnessing itself’ (Laub: 1995: 61). Laub also confirmed my experience that ‘the listener to trauma comes to be a participant and co-owner

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of the traumatic event: through his very listening he comes to partially experience trauma in himself’ (Laub: 1991: 57). The inherent trauma held within the Aboriginal women’s stories and lives forced me to see their paintings differently and to confront the trauma of my past, to look at how I had previously denied it in my desperate urgency to immerse myself in art and spirituality.

Dori Laub recognized that a loss of the capacity to be a witness to oneself and thus to witness from the inside is ‘perhaps the true meaning of annihilation, for when one’s history is abolished, one’s identity ceases to exist as well’ (Laub: 1995: 67). The importance of acknowledging trauma is particularly relevant in Australia with its past and present denial of personal and collective histories of displacement and oppression. The repetitive insistence upon its status as the ‘Lucky Country’ and ‘mateship’ is transparently specious in the continued blindness directed towards its oldest and newest inhabitants. Sir William Deane, former Governor General, was quoted in the 1996 Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s National Inquiry on the Stolen Generations, ‘Bringing Them Home’:

For Aboriginal Australians, past injustices and genocidal policies comprise an oral history that still meets denial. At Utopia, as it is on many Aboriginal communities, the legacy of those actions can still be witnessed today in the shocking statistics of health and mortality rates, deaths in custody, education and unemployment. Vivien Johnson has insisted that Aboriginal art has the power ‘to speak to such contentious issues as Indigenous connections to land, cultural and intellectual property rights, and the stolen generations (Johnson in Myers: 2002: 336). But she believed that its capacity ‘to bear this potent form of cultural witness’ is continually being undermined (ibid.).

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Psychologist Judith Herman uncategorically stated that remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are pre-requisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims (Herman: 1992: 1). In her book, Trauma and Recovery, she presented studies that showed that feelings of disempowerment and dissociation of victims of trauma can be turned into feelings of reconnection and empowerment when victims begin to witness, reclaim and make sense of their experiences in an appropriate context (ibid.: 133). Otherwise the legacy is one of repetition. The behaviour of adults who suffered childhood trauma often resembles an enactment of the suppressed feelings of that original trauma (ibid.: 38). Herman’s studies were confirmed by Judy Atkinson’s work on transgenerational trauma in Aboriginal communities (Atkinson: 2002). With continued denial and without affective acknowledgement, trauma is endlessly re-experienced and repeated. Within a different field, Rosalind Krauss also recognized the pattern of trauma:

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Art can provide a powerful substitute for both producer and beholder. The traumatic gap of unacknowledged loss, memories and feelings can turn into the tragic performance of repetition where hopelessness is all too prevalent. Aboriginal art holds enormous potential to be a testament to a larger perspective but unless it is brought into affective engagement and taken out of denial, communication and healing remain in the realm of the ‘missed encounter’. In Trauma Trails, Judy Atkinson called upon Miriam Rose Ungunmerr’s recognition of dadirri, an Aboriginal process of ‘inner deep listening and quiet, still awareness’, that has been effective on some Aboriginal communities in dealing with trauma and loss. She called dadirri ‘the Aboriginal gift’, a deep ‘contemplative’ process of ‘listening to one another’ (Atkinson: 2002: 15-16). This reciprocal encounter traditionally occurred in the silence of the bush, in ceremony and in familial campfire settings. ‘We call on it and it calls on us’ (ibid.: 17). Atkinson confirmed that dadirri holds the potential to ‘reacquaint people with their own self-healing abilities’, their ‘being-in-a-world- of-relationships’ (ibid.: 213). She described it as a journey of self-discovery as people engage together in educating themselves about themselves (ibid.: 262). While dadirri is undoubtedly a strong tool for healing and can create a place of safety, Atkinson recognized that it is not appropriate or possible to force a healing process upon Australian society (ibid.: 207).

Aboriginal paintings are hybrid expressions of country that contain an uncanny echo that resonates within a gap of disturbance. They hold country with haptic fluency but might also be a request to the beholder to ‘see’ and act with more than just visual perception – with eyes informed by knowledge and compassion. Otherwise the paintings will be perceived as assimilated objects of desire in a field of optical pleasure. On gallery and private walls, the paintings ‘sing up’ country with a song that is also a lament of loss and a plea for reality. To privilege a purely aesthetic reading of Aboriginal art or to see it only as an economic commodity is to deny past history, present realities and their message of the intricate interrelationship between person and place that exists not just for indigenous artists, but for all people.

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An enormous need exists for deep listening and self- and collective healing for both Aboriginal and non-indigenous Australians from the events and effects of the past. As a society we can no longer afford to allow the dots of Aboriginal paintings to be our cognitive blind spots. Through touch, the artists call forth their country and create stunning and innovative works of art. Yet the artists’ repetition of dots and lines on their canvases can also be seen to reflect profound depths of trans-generational losses that need to be acknowledged and acted upon. Aboriginal art provides an opportunity to counter a national propensity towards a ‘cult of forgetting’. Through its positive visibility and promotion, the art holds a potential for new understanding, dialogue and healing, an unsentimental vision of reality and a declaration of a history that has too long been in denial. They signify the power of place and the effects of displacement, and are potent acknowledgements of the fundamental importance of human belonging.

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III. Displacement and Belonging a. Moving Towards Relationship i. Body and life-world

Emily Kngwarray expressed the animating consciousness and spiritual potency of her Alhalker country and Yam Dreaming in her awely and in acrylic on canvas. In the cross-hatched lines of their bark paintings, the Yolngu people of Arnhem Land create an equivalent for the shimmer of natural phenomenon to express the power of places that are sacred to them. Aboriginal Law comes from the land, an affirmation that the land has its own consciousness (Laudine: 2003: 68-77). For Kngwarray’s people, the power of country is real; sacred sites are regarded as potent and even ‘dangerous’, and need to be respected and approached in a ‘right way’. Gloria Petyarr recounted how this knowledge is taught:

My grandfather told my father stories. Before my father passed away, he hand ‘em all stories to us mob… I used to walk ‘round with him, we’d walk ‘round same way. He’d say, “This one, don’t go that way. You got to go this way. This is sacred place, you go this way round.” We know father would tell us which way to go. Not allowed to go sacred place. We know which way to take people. We tell ‘em where not allowed to go, we tell ‘em, “Go this way” (Gloria Petyarr, personal interview: 2000).

The mutually affirming relationship between person and place is tangibly experienced and celebrated at Utopia as knowledge and custodial responsibilities for country are passed on to new generations. New expressions in acrylic on canvas represent relationship and participation with the land. Yet the European tradition of landscape painting bestowed a very particular legacy for contemporary non-indigenous artists to negotiate. In Representing Place, Edward Casey recognized that

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[F]or Western painters, whether those of the ancient world or Hellenistic times, the Middle Ages or the renaissance, or the early modern period, nature is without: it is something external to conquer, subdue, and shape. The natural world is first of all something to take over – take over in its material otherness, its transcendence of the human realm – and then to take in: where to “take in” connotes both to internalise and to represent, and to do so by respecting its very otherness. … Deeply different is the view that nature is never strictly outside us – nor, in contrast, within us, in “human nature” – but everywhere, equally so and at all times. We are in nature, and nature is in us: “nature” in lowercase, no longer transcendent, wholly other, or altogether wild (Casey: 2002: 95, italics in original).

Phenomenologist Edmund Husserl acknowledged the intersubjective life-world of our lived experience, the lebenswelt, as he questioned the assumption of our objectivity being separate from the world. In The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram described the life-world as ‘the world of our immediately lived experience, as we live it prior to all our thoughts about it… [it is] reality as it engages us before being analysed by our theories or science’ (Abram: 1996: 40). Our body’s edge is porous, a surface of metamorphosis and exchange through which our body enters into a direct and sensuous relationship with the world. Merleau-Ponty grounded the ‘self’ within the bodily organism as ‘body- subject’ and affirmed that ‘The presence of the world is precisely the presence of its flesh to my flesh’ (Merleau-Ponty: 1968: 127). Embodied perception is this reciprocity between body and world, a continuous dialogue that David Abram noted is often independent of and unfolds far below our verbal awareness (Abram: 1996: 52). He wrote:

To acknowledge that “I am this body”… is to affirm the uncanniness of the physical form. The breathing, sensing body draws its sustenance and its very substance from the soils, plants, and elements that surround it; it continually contributes itself, in turn to the air, etc… so that it is very difficult to discern, at any moment, precisely where the living body begins

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and where it ends… [T]he body is a creative, shape-shifting entity (ibid.: 45-47).

Bronwyn Davies explored the body in landscape and landscape as an extension of bodies in (In)scribing Body/Landscape Relations. She realized that ‘Old established boundaries may temporarily dissolve in the specificity and materiality of the texts of embodied being’ (Davies: 2000: 251). Awareness of the porous edge between our flesh and the world allows for an experience of our embodiment as illusions of distance and separateness are suspended. We are brought more deeply into touch with the world and ourselves. Yet while we can understand our embodiment intellectually and philosophically, its full uncanniness is rarely experienced for more than short periods of time. ii. The knowing touch

Emily Kngwarray’s culture provides a cosmological framework that does not dualistically separate nature, place and person. Her paintings represent a perspective of relationship and express through the haptic the strong connection that can exist between the body and the ground of a specific place. In the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty emphasized the relationship of the haptic to perception:

Gilles Deleuze recognized that painters like Cezanne, and, I believe, Agnes Martin and Emily Kngwarray, through rhythm ‘make visible a kind of original

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unity of the senses’ (Deleuze: 2003: 42, italics in original). ‘Sensation is vibration… It is immediately conveyed in the flesh through the nervous wave or vital emotion’ (ibid.: 45). He argued that ‘This is not a hysteria of the painter, but a hysteria of painting. Abjection becomes splendour, the horror of life becomes a very pure and very intense life. “Life is frightening,” said Cezanne, but in this cry he had already given voice to all the joys of line and colour’ (ibid.: 51-52). Deleuze recognized that ‘sensation’ is

Being-in-the-World, as the phenomenologists say: at one and the same time I become in the sensation and something happens through the sensation, one through the other, one in the other. And at the limit, it is the same body which, being both subject and object, gives and receives the sensation. As a spectator, I experience the sensation only by entering the painting, by reaching the unity of the sensing and the sensed. This was Cezanne’s lesson against the Impressionists: sensation is not in the “free” or disembodied play of light and color (impressions); on the contrary, it is in the body, even in the body of an apple. Color is in the body, sensation is in the body, and not in the air. Sensation is what is painted (ibid.: 34-35, italics in original).

The implications of Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze’s recognitions go far beyond the canvas. Our ‘knowing touch’ is corporeal and multi-sensual, grounded in environmental stimuli collected and mediated by the senses. Perception as cognition is a mental process that, while immediate, involves remembering, recognition, association and other thinking processes (Rodaway: 1994: 11-12). Traditionally the distinction between sensation and cognition has been hierarchical and bodily sensations have been seen to be inferior to the workings of the mind. Cartesian dualistic thinking has separated mind and matter and created distinctions that have led to ‘I-It’ rather than ‘I-Thou’ relationships. Referring to Martin Buber’s writing, the Australian psychologist and academic David Russell noted:

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A person takes some relational stand in regard to a particular place … and it is in this stand that the specific nature of the I appears. The experiential world of an I-It relationship is set in time and space and is characterised by a sense of fragmentation and separateness of the observer and the observed. Whenever a person has an object before her/him, be it an object of perception, imagination, will or thought) she/he has established the realm of It, but the world of Thou is different. [As Martin Buber said in 1970:] “Whoever says [Thou] does not have something; ‘he’ has nothing. But ‘he’ stands in relation” (Russell: 2003: 155-56).

The importance of relationship, embodiment and the ‘knowing touch’ are rarely acknowledged in non-indigenous cultures. Yet identity and well-being are intrinsically connected to being grounded in one’s body in a particular place in subtle and profound ways. Agnes Martin discovered the importance of place- making and touch when, inspired by the adobes and pueblos of Native Americans, she physically built her mud-brick dwellings. New Mexico provided a conducive space and place to encounter nature and heal as she developed a sense of ‘home’ and belonging. In Sensuous Geographies: Bodies, Sense and Place, Paul Rodaway recognized that ‘To know who one is, and ultimately where one is, is grounded in contact with one’s own body and specifically, feeling in ownership of a body, one’s own body in itself and relative to other objects in the environment’ (Rodaway: 1994: 42). Self exists through a sense of locatedness that creates the potential for an embodied ‘here and now’. Edward Casey argued that it is the actual physical relationship of body to place that distinguishes place from space (Casey: 1993: 54-55). He wrote that

To be in a place is to be somewhere in which movement in the local landscape and thus journeying in that landscape becomes possible. In a site, by contrast, we are stuck in space (as well as frozen in time) such that we can move effectively only insofar as we overcome distance at various rates of acceleration … In contrast being-in-place brings with it actualities and virtualities of motion that have little if anything to do with

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speed and everything to do with exploration and inhabitation, with depth instead of distance (ibid.: 289). iii. The significance of place

This quality of emplacement allows depth through relational movement within a place rather than feeling separate and distanced from it. In The Question of Being, Martin Heidegger declared that ‘place’ places a person in such a way that it reveals the external bonds of their existence and at the same time the depths of their freedom and reality (Heidegger: 1958: 19). Edward Relph applied the word ‘place’ to ‘those fragments of human environments where meanings, activities and a specific landscape are all implicated and enfolded by each other’ (Relph: 1993: 37). He specifically cited the example of indigenous Australians and recognized that for them, ‘Space is full of significance, and the landscape, rather than being comprised of physical and geological features, is a record of mythical history in what the rocks and trees [are] for us are experienced as ancestors and spirits by the aborigines’ (Relph: 1994: 15). He thus distinguished sacred and symbolic existential space from that view of technological and industrial cultures where spaces are seen as merely geographical and significant only for functional and utilitarian purposes.

David Abram noted that Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty’s later writings provide

tantalizing clues, talismans for those who are struggling today to bring their minds and their bodies back together, and so to regain a full-blooded awareness of the present… [They] were both striving toward the end of their lives, to articulate a more immediate modality of awareness, a more primordial dimension whose characteristics are neither strictly spatial nor strictly temporal, but are rather – somehow – both at once… [S]uch a mode of experience is commonplace for indigenous, oral peoples, for whom time and space have never been sundered (Abram: 1996: 205-6).

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Emily Kngwarray’s Anmatyerr culture provides a model for a way of being on the land that is multi-sensory, firmly embodied and embedded in place. While her people’s connection to country was once violently disrupted by displacement, I witnessed the women’s grounded custodial relationship to their country when they were actively engaged on their land. The recognition of the particularity of those places is part of the profound relationship between their bodies and the ground of their homeland that they express on the grounds of their canvases. Fred Myers countered claims of the ‘ineffable’ nature of Aboriginal paintings through the recognition of particular places:

As forms acceptable to the art world, Aboriginal acrylics offer a powerful link to particular locations in a world that is said – according to most postmodern theorists – to have “no sense of place”5. What the acrylics represent to their makers resists this sort of commodification: all places are not the same. Painters can only produce images from their own local area, all conceived of as different (Myers: 2002: 301-2, italics in original).

Such starkly different ways of seeing the world have come through many factors, not least of which is the influence of globalisation on place (Cameron: 2003a: 9-10). The driving force of capitalism ensures that particularity and difference are not highly valued, and places are seen and treated as commodities. David Abram has argued that ‘the recuperation of the incarnate, sensorial dimension of experience brings with it a recuperation of the living landscape in which we are corporeally embedded’ (Abram: 1996: 65). But without a cultural tradition of relationship to the land such as that held by Emily Kngwarray, artists and other individuals face a challenge to develop a more fully embodied connection to the places in which they dwell.

5 Myers referred to Joshua Meyrowitz’s 1985 book, No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

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b. Attuning to Place i. Flatscapes

In Place and Placelessness, Edward Relph described ‘placelessness’ both as an environment without significant places and the underlying attitude that does not acknowledge significance in places (Relph: 1994: 143). Natural and urban places are increasingly being developed and in that process often lose their particularity. In 1969, Christian Norberg-Schulz used the term ‘flatscape’ to describe places that lack intentional depth and provide possibilities only for commonplace and mediocre experiences (Norberg-Schulz in Relph: 1994: 79). Edward Relph noted that

Much physical and social planning is founded on an implicit assumption that space is uniform and objects and activities can be manipulated and freely located within it; differentiation by significance is of little importance and places are reduced to simple locations with their greatest quantity being development potential (Relph: 1994: 87).

Relph observed that space provides the context for places but that it derives its meaning from particular places (ibid.: 8). For Relph, it is genius loci that is missing in modern landscapes, but he also recognized that such a ‘spirit of place’ cannot be designed to order. It must evolve from the ‘inside out’ through the involvement and commitment of the people who live and work in particular places (Relph: 1993: 34-38). Place-making is a dynamic activity. Yet through nostalgia, poor planning and a desire for instant meaning, attempts to create genius loci have often produced sentimental ‘museumized’ and kitsch intrusions upon the land. Relph extolled ‘imperfection’ and ‘generosity’ as significant and positive qualities of place and recognised that place is above all ‘a territory of meanings. These meanings are created both by what one receives from and by what one gives to a particular environmental context’ (ibid.: 36).

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In what looks uncannily like one of Agnes Martin’s paintings (figure 55), Relph used a diagram to represent the plotting of a placeless geography6. This was ‘one in which different localities both look and feel alike, and in which distinctive places are experienced only through superficial and stereotyped images, as “indistinct and unstable” backgrounds to our social and economic roles’ (Relph: 1994: 118).

55. Diagram of a placeless geography (Relph: 1994: 120)

Relph argued that distinctive places are necessary for a

reasonable quality of communal life and psychological well-being. Furthermore, a serious concern for the qualities of specific places is an important element in finding an antidote to the abstract and generalized knowledge that leads otherwise intelligent people to talk for example, of targeted sites and mega-deaths instead of devastated towns and human agony (Relph: 1993: 25-26).

He maintained that we must

develop a sensitivity to the spirit of place. Then, one must circumvent the grand delusions of technology, ideology and obscure theory that beset the

6 This diagram was originally Melvin Webber’s representation of the ‘non-place urban realm’ of the United States in which geographical space extends horizontally and level of specialization vertically (see Relph: 1994: 120).

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late-twentieth century and that cause environments to be made and processed like sliced bread. Finally, one must strive for an understanding of the vital qualities that are essential for all distinctive and significant places (ibid.: 26).

Being attentive to the spirit of place requires more than having an aesthetic, distanced ‘view’ of it. Self-awareness is required to bring oneself back to one’s embodied self in relationship with that place. Too often the recognition of our flesh in relationship to the flesh of the world is an intellectual one rather than being the actual experience of the uncanny, animate presence of each. ii. A change in perception

In The Experience of Place, Tony Hiss described how the stream of consciousness of our ordinary perception, our habitual thinking, shuts us off from our surroundings. He advocated the cultivation of ‘simultaneous perception’, a quality of being relaxed and alert that is continually available to us (Hiss: 1991: 4). He argued that this helps us experience our surroundings and our reactions to them, and not just our own thoughts and desires. University of London art historian Anton Ehrenzweig called this ability ‘utter watchfulness’, paying equal attention to everything at once, omitting nothing and at the same time emphasizing nothing (Ehrenzweig in Hiss: 1991: 20-21). Dr. Arthur Deikman, a California research psychiatrist, named this relaxed sense of our own outside edge – the place where we stop and everything else begins – a ‘fluid body boundary’, one that can lead to

diminished self-object differentiation – that is, a point at which we divide our attention equally between ourselves and things outside ourselves. The diminished differentiation makes it easier to move in concert with other people… [S]imultaneous perception… acts like a sixth sense... a different sense of who, or what, we are... Ordinarily, we seem to be completely separate from everything and everyone in our surroundings, and our sense of external things (if not of other people) is that they are waiting

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around until we can find something for them to do. At moments when the boundaries flow together, perhaps even disappear, a different sense emerges. Walking through a landscape, we have the sense that the plants and animals around us have purposes of their own. At the same time, our sense of ourselves now has more to do with noticing how we are connected to the people and things around us (Deikman in Hiss: 1991: 21- 22).

Research has shown that both enriched and impoverished environments have a psychological and physical effect upon us (Hiss: 1991: 34-38). Our energy and sense of well-being are immediately responsive as our brain responds to certain experiences. Deep attentive engagement with the natural environment can create spontaneous and quiet changes in our perception as it alters and refocuses our awareness, allowing us to be relaxed and alert at the same time. Hiss described how one can begin to do this more fully:

One part of experiencing places ... has to do with changing the way we look at things, diffusing our attention and also relaxing its intensity - a change that lets us start to see all the things around us at once and yet also look calmly and steadily at each one of them. We have to choose what to do, giving attention, taking attention away from the continual conversations in our head (ibid.: 34).

Tony Hiss’s description for changing our perspective is extremely similar to a technique of Buddhist meditation where one frequently experiences a subtle quality of sensitive engagement with the world. In The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Buddhist teacher Sogyal Rinpoche advocates keeping one’s eyes open, not closed, during meditation. ‘Instead of shutting out life, you remain open and at peace with everything. You leave all your senses – hearing, seeing, feeling – just open, naturally, as they are, without grasping after their perceptions’ (Rinpoche: 1992: 65).

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[Y]our meditation and your gaze should be like the vast expanse of a great ocean: all-pervading, open, and limitless… Do not focus on anything in particular; instead, turn back into yourself slightly, and let your gaze expand and become more and more spacious and pervasive. You will discover now that your vision itself becomes more expansive, and that there is more peace, more compassion in your gaze, more equanimity, and more poise (ibid.: 67).

Sogyal Rinpoche encouraged the integration of this expansive quality of vision into everyday life. Although having different ultimate intentions, Buddhist meditation develops a quality of attention similar to what Tony Hiss described. Hiss also noted that moving between ordinary perception and simultaneous perception is always within our reach and is simple once we have developed a taste for the experience. Through ordinary perception we see ourselves as observers of an environment composed of separate objects while through simultaneous perception we look for ways in which we are connected to or part of our surroundings. This is equally true of meditation where the gaze can, with intention and practice, become more compassionate and less distanced. iii. Action through non-action

A ‘fluid body boundary’ provides the possibility for an intimate and sensual engagement with the world. I have repeatedly witnessed the qualities of ‘utter watchfulness’ and ‘simultaneous perception’ in the people of Utopia as they engaged in tracking, hunting and simply ‘being’ on the land. With them I was reminded of Carl Jung’s recognition and admiration of a different way of being of Asian cultures that practice Buddhism.

What did these people do in order to achieve the development that liberated them? As far as I could see they did nothing (wu wei, action through non-action) but let things happen, consciousness is forever interfering, helping, correcting and negating and never leaving the simple growth of the psychic processes in place (Jung in Reich: 1962: 93).

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What Jung recognized as ‘doing nothing’, letting things ‘happen’, was a different cultural perspective and quality of perception. It is what I believe many people, myself included, have encountered and found to be so utterly compelling when they spend time with Aboriginal custodians on their country. The paradoxical simplicity of action through non-action is based on the Buddhist recognition of the ground of emptiness. The Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki once related the story of the 12th century Japanese sage and Zen master, Basho, who was asked, ‘What is Tao?’ To which the master replied, ‘Everyday mind’. The pupil asked, ‘What is one’s everyday mind?’ Basho replied, ‘When tired, you sleep; when hungry, you eat’. Basho was then asked by his pupil, ‘Doesn’t everybody do that?’ ‘No’, said Basho. ‘When others eat they do not eat with their whole being. They talk, they plan, they think while eating and they dream and worry while asleep’ (Suzuki in Merton: 1968: 134). This integration of body, mind and spirit Suzuki likened to a veritable ‘paradise’ or heaven on earth. Yet he went on to explain that this state of being is never outside of our reach: ‘Paradise has never been lost and therefore is never regained… [A]s soon as I become conscious of the fact, Paradise is right away with me’ (ibid.). iv. An ethical interdependence

Utopia can be a projected fantasy or ‘no-place’ but in fact is a very real place whose reality and circumstances need to be acknowledged. So, too, a veritable ‘paradise’ is available to us through our fluid body boundary yet too often is a consolatory illusion or a ‘temporal ecstasy’. To experience one’s embodiment through deep attentive engagement in relationship with a particular place provides a different way of being in the world. A focus on immanence rather than transcendence when combined with a firm grasp of the dangers of denial offers the possibility of an integrated reality that goes beyond religious dogma and conventional notions of time and space. Interdependence is an essential and ethical truth: we are connected to everything and everything is connected to us. We certainly do not experience this perspective when we hold a place or person at arm’s length, interpreting through a measuring stick of our own

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construction. Neil Evernden recognized that Cartesian dualism amounts to trying to reduce a description of the continuum of being into just two categories: ‘thinking matter and extended matter – or, more colloquially, “us” and “it”. Everything in between is not simply ignored but defined as impossible’ (Evernden: 1985: 75). Australian scholar Veronica Brady further maintained that since the time of Descartes,

western society has rested on false premises about the nature of the self and of its relations with other human beings and the world. This is especially true, I think, of settler societies like ours whose very existence depends on notions of power as domination, of purpose as a matter of physical expansion and productivity and of value as success and usefulness, again in material terms (Brady: 2000: 10)

In a settler society such as Australia, feeling a sense of belonging and a sense of place hold enormous complexities that are rarely taken into consideration.

c. Locatedness and Displacement

There is a growing discourse in Australia surrounding place affiliation (Read: 1996, 2000; Malpas: 1999; Cameron: 2003a, 2003b, 2003c). In 1980, Bernard Smith hoped at political and cultural levels Australians would strive towards what he called a ‘convergent culture’, one that had its sources in two traditions: ‘the one derived largely from European sources, the other derived from this ancient land’ (B. Smith: 1980: 45). But for many people who have experienced displacement and felt a sense of placelessness, to feel a sense of belonging, a sense of place, is extremely difficult. To belong to a place implies more than the act of simply taking up space in a particular place. Anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose has said that ‘To be located is to have a ground from which to know, to act, to invite and deny, to share and to ask, to speak and to be heard… Locatedness – identification with place – is fundamental to Aboriginal people's understanding of life all over Australia’ (Rose: 2000: 106).

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Yet Peter Read has asked the vital question of how can non-indigenous Australians justify their continuous presence and love for this country while the indigenous inhabitants’ history is unacknowledged and many remain dispossessed? (Read: 2000: 1). One of Read’s central arguments is that this discourse essentializes and idealizes indigenous people as those belonging to the land and non-indigenous people as those alienated from the land. He said, ‘I don’t believe that we will never belong, nor necessarily that we don’t now. But we are required to undertake some very hard thinking, talking and learning’ (ibid.: 17). Read concluded that there are many ways to feel a sense of belonging to this land and to this nation, and none should be taken for granted (ibid.: 208). Yet feeling a personal sense of belonging must not bring denial or complacency about the plight of indigenous communities and individuals whose lives require restorative justice. An acknowledgement of the importance of a sense of locatedness when combined with a recognition of loss and displacement in both indigenous and non-indigenous lives can provide a powerful antidote to sentimentalized projections and denial. David Malouf described the ‘complex fate’ of non-indigenous Australians as being

The paradoxical condition of having our lives simultaneously in two places, two hemispheres [which] may be just the thing which is most original and most interesting in us. I mean our uniqueness might lie just here, in the tension between environment and culture rather than in what we can salvage by insisting either on the one or the other (Malouf: 1998: 33).

Malouf presents a challenging model. Many people today exist in a condition of being simultaneously rooted and rootless, feeling placeless and without a sense of ‘home’. Heidegger once said that ‘Homelessness is becoming a world fate’ (Heidegger in Relph: 1994: 143). Expressions of place and longings for ‘home’ can be extremely diverse. In Space, Place and Gender, English philosopher Doreen Massey recognized people’s need for attachment to places and the importance of place in the search for personal identity in what she called this ‘troubled era of time-space compression’ (Massey: 1998: 10). In Getting Back

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into Place, Edward Casey stated that if Freud and Heidegger are correct, displacement is ‘endemic to the human condition in its ineluctable “uncanniness”; Unheimlichkeit, not-being-at-home, is intrinsic to habitation itself’ (Casey: 1993: 34). Casey explored the experience of Navajo people’s strong connection to their homeland and their displacement from it and recognised that the experiences of many contemporary non-indigenous Americans ‘uncannily resemble’ those of displaced Native Americans, particularly in their ‘disorientation, memory loss, homelessness, depression, and various modes of estrangement from self and others’ (ibid.: 38). Each of these emotional symptoms involves a sense of ‘unbearable emptiness’ (ibid.: 9). Casey witnessed a ‘massive nostalgia’ over cherished childhood places and ‘many now inaccessible or despoiled places, often in consequence of ecological damage or negligence’ (ibid.: 38). He contended this was a ‘speaking symptom of the profound placelessness of our times, in which we have exchanged place for a mess of spatial and temporal pottage’, and the belief that ‘for the modern self, all places are essentially the same’ (ibid., italics in original).

The Australian feminist eco-philosopher Freya Mathews has argued that developing a sense of place can act as an antidote to the attitude that all places are essentially the same. ‘Places’, she said, ‘like all things can be converted into property, to be acquired and disposed of, traded and trashed, at will’ (Mathews: 2003: 197). She maintained that we can learn to re-invest matter in a pan- psychist tradition with an animating principle. Objects will then come to have meaning not just as consumer commodities and places can become ‘home’. Mathews confirmed the need, especially in urban areas,

to complete, or “deepen”, the project of re-animation or re-sacralisation. It needs to acknowledge the life-force or soul not only in the natural and biological order, but in the order of matter generally... for soul itself cannot observe a divide between the artefactual and the natural: if it is present in the land, in the mud, then it is present in the bricks made from the mud, and in the house made from the bricks. … Beauty is at least as much a function of meaning as of abstract aesthetics, meaning takes time to grow.

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Love the given. Affirm, forgive, preserve, enhance the given, convert commodities back into the sacred order. Re-enter ourselves rather than projecting it out into an unknown romantic space (ibid.: 198-99).

Having experienced a childhood beset by the loss of places important to her, Agnes Martin created a home for herself from the very earth of her newly chosen place of New Mexico. In that process of ‘re-entering’ herself and engaging in place-making, she experienced a strong sense of belonging. ‘I didn’t come out West’, she said, ‘I came home’ (Martin in Kusel: 1999: 61). She reduced her life on the land to the barest of external essentials and became as ‘wise as a Chinese hermit’ (Martin in Sandler: 1993: 14). Place nourished her as she vigorously engaged with it.

d. Denial and Displacement i. Yearning for home

In this thesis, we have seen that the effects of displacement on the lives and work of Agnes Martin, Emily Kngwarray and myself have been substantial, yet often unacknowledged. During my conversation with Agnes Martin, she spoke of strong memories and feelings for her childhood places. From early on, Martin’s life was marked by loss and movement, a pattern that lasted until she was fifty-seven years old. At fifty-five, with a successful career in New York behind her, she undertook an epic two-year search for a place of belonging. Yet even after she settled in New Mexico, she was beset with nostalgia for the past. ‘I was brought up by the sea and loved it’, she said. ‘I thought the mountains would compensate for the sea but they don’t’ (Martin: July 2002: personal interview).

The evidence of displacement marks my own life. In my English home and garden, I had experienced the life-affirming wisdom of Freya Mathews’ praxis to re-animate the unloved. I was unprepared for the complexities that

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accompanied my move to Australia. Having previously travelled often and lived in many places, I arrived with the view that all places were fundamentally the same. Since coming here there has not been a day when I have not felt grief for what I left behind and paradoxically the rightness of that move. The tension between those two feelings has been in many ways the impetus for this research. In ‘The Richness of our Native Soils’, Bobbi Allan reflected that ‘the leaving of home and sense of place to cross oceans and live in a strange land is as traumatic for people as it is for plants to be pulled from the earth and relocated. Gardeners know about this. You do not just pull up a plant, bare of soil, then stick it straight into strange soil and leave it to get on’ (Allan: 2003: 18). Despite my once being a passionate gardener, this was a lesson that I had not learned. I was in denial of the effects of displacement and the strong sense of nostalgia that I was experiencing.

Psychologist Juliet Mitchell stated that nostalgia is a longing for the point of origin, a place where, with a ‘yearning desire’, narrative begins and ends (Mitchell: 2000: 84-85)7. Ghassan Hage recognised that nostalgic feelings abound in everyone’s life, but the experience of immigrants is often associated with a nostalgia or homesickness for a lost past. Hage also noted that nostalgia is assumed to be the ‘exact opposite of home-building: a refusal to engage with the present’ (Hage: 1997: 104). I did not ‘refuse’ to engage with my new situation, but my attempts proved to be as arid as the land that surrounded me while I was in denial. I was inspired by this ancient land but also perplexed as to why I felt so deeply unhappy here. I had given up too much to face that I was homesick and ambivalent about being here. That denial stood in the way of truly feeling the pain of loss of a place and son I loved. While I struggled to paint the beauty of my new place, my painting gestures and marks were trapped in a pattern of repetition that echoed my sense of displacement.

Agnes Martin spent a lifetime trying to paint an equivalent for the beauty and perfection that she witnessed in the land. Her paintings indeed allow the

7 Nostalgia or homesickness is particularly evident in soldiers who are serving in foreign countries. ‘As late as 1946 [nostalgia] was termed a possibly fatal “psycho-physiological” complaint by an eminent social scientist’ (Lowenthal: 1985: 11).

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beholder to enter an aesthetic space that resonates with memories of sublime places. But, as I have argued, the repetition in the lines and grids of her paintings also echo an unbearable emptiness. So, too, do the dots, lines and grids of the paintings of Emily Kngwarray speak of more than her remarkable embodied connection to her country of Alhalker. When she and her Anmatyerr people were displaced by the arrival of white settlers, it was an action that was violent and long lasting. As Kumantjayi Ross emphatically stated: ‘Aboriginal spirituality, culture and society can be defined in one word: land’ (Ross in McEvoy and Lyon: 1994: vii). Aboriginal people experienced trauma from the violent nature of their removal from their homeland and the racism of many of the settlers. This was compounded by the loss of familiar places and the inability to perform custodial responsibilities for their country. Today that legacy continues in the form of transgenerational trauma.

In Returning to Nothing: The Meaning of Lost Places, Peter Read recalled T.S. Eliot’s words, ‘Home is where one starts from’ (Eliot in Read: 1996: 101). Read recognized that

The loss of a loved place sharpens perceptions of what is most valuable in the shaped and fashioned space. The affection for a home, in western cultures, is the point where griefs for lost countries, towns, properties, gardens and suburbs seem to meet. Home is the ultimate focus of all lost places (Read: 1996: 101-2). ii. The complexities of ‘home’

Yet ‘home’ is a problematic concept. In Place and Placelessness, Edward Relph realized that there is often ‘an implicit assumption that space is uniform and objects and activities can be manipulated and freely located within it; differentiation by significance is of little importance and places are reduced to simple locations (Relph: 1994: 87). For those who have been involuntarily dispossessed from their land, that belief is particularly misplaced. ‘Uniform space’ allows no place for feelings of connection to ‘home’. In a comment that is

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relevant for Australia, James Clifford recognized that ‘every center or home is someone else’s periphery or diaspora’ (Clifford: 1989 in Myers: 2002: 356). Colonization brought settlers who claimed Australia as terra nullius. Alhalker was made into a cattle station where Emily Kngwarray was unable to live.

Displacement can take many guises. Unlike Kngwarray, who was involuntarily forced from her home, like Agnes Martin, as an adult I had voluntarily shifted from place to place without regard to the consequences. For Martin and myself, that movement might have been fuelled by childhood unrest. Both Edward Casey and Peter Read have commented on a ‘massive nostalgia’ and ‘desperate need to go home’ associated with those who have lost cherished childhood places (Casey: 1993: 38; Read: 1996: 156-57). Frequent movement in adulthood is often seen to result. Yet Martin’s childhood home appears not to have been a place of great warmth and intimacy, and her relationship with her mother, like mine, was complex. In 2003, she made a startling revelation about her mother: ‘My mother… was a terrific disciplinarian... My mother never said a word. You know, she didn’t do anything. And as a disciplinarian, I didn’t talk either’ (Martin in Lance: 2003: documentary film). This legacy of silence might have created an atmosphere of tension difficult for a child to understand.

My own childhood experiences certainly bear out Doreen Massey’s recognition: ‘(T)he fact is that home may be as much a place of conflict (as well as of work) as of repose…. Many women have had to leave home precisely in order to forge their own identities’ (Massey: 1998: 11, italics in original). My home in America evoked complex memories that resonated with the homesickness of Louise Bourgeois – the ‘sickness of the home’ – the trauma of domestic life and the trauma of exile from it. Bourgeois’ ‘will to survive’ was intricately linked with finding a way to work with the ‘exorcism’ of loss and ‘the pain of existence’ from her childhood. In ‘The Architecture of Trauma’, Beatriz Colomina noted that Bourgeois reconstructs and narrates homesickness ‘in the double sense of mourning for a lost home and the sickness of the home itself’ (Colomina: 1999: 38). Bourgeois continually returns to those themes and has said that ‘Repetition is the artist’s substitute for therapy… The truth is that Freud did nothing for

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artists, or for the artist’s problem, the artist’s torment… That’s why artists repeat themselves – because they have no accesses to a cure’ (Bourgeois in Colomina: 1999: 37). Each work, each repetition ‘alleviates momentarily a state of pain’, like a ‘sedative’, but one that ‘doesn’t last very long’ (ibid.). iii. Casting a shadow

The obsessively repetitious lines on Agnes Martin’s canvas can be seen to operate in this way. Yet through acts of place-making in New Mexico over many years, Martin slowly regained a sense of herself and a sense of belonging. The lines on her canvases became fewer and her bands of colour now hold more spaciousness. But the situation for Kngwarray and the people of Utopia is far more complex because of the legacy of transgenerational trauma created through displacement. This has been exacerbated by continued political lack of recognition and the ‘selective forgetting’ of non-indigenous Australians mesmerized by the shimmer of Aboriginal art. Many non-indigenous artists remain in denial by seeing Aboriginal art merely as a contemporary art form ‘to borrow’. In 1980, Bernard Smith recognized the effect of Aboriginal art upon Australian artists: ‘For most of our artists the Aborigine has been an aesthetic rather than a moral presence; influencing the sensibility rather than disturbing the conscience’ (B. Smith: 1980: 32). The implications of remembering and acting ethically resound. For on each Aboriginal outstation, ‘a moment of danger’ exists ‘here and now’.

My own inability to feel a sense of belonging or a sense of place in Australia came in large part from my failure to acknowledge the importance and strength of my bond to my former homelands and ancestors. While I remained in denial of the pain of these separations I could only acknowledge the sublime shimmer of the Australian land and the surface shimmer of art. Through reflecting on my time with the Utopia women, their suffering and the repetition inherent within their paintings and those of Agnes Martin, and the use of erasure in my own art practice, a new space emerged. I slowly began to see that what I had once purported to represent, my sense of place, was suppressing my feelings of

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displacement. Only when I faced my past could I begin to establish a ground upon which to act congruently. My denial had insidiously created a shadow that followed every move I made. Carl Jung emphasized that we all have a ‘shadow’ and that everything substantial casts one.

Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is… it is constantly in contact with other interests, so that it is continually subjected to modifications. But if it is repressed and isolated from CONSCIOUSNESS, it never gets corrected, and is liable to burst forth suddenly in a moment of unawareness. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions (Jung in Samuels, Shorter and Plant: 1993: 138, capitalization in original).

The archetypal shadow, Jung said, is ‘marked by AFFECT, obsessional, possessive, autonomous – in short, capable of startling and overwhelming the well-ordered ego’ (ibid.: 139, capitalization in original). Bringing into consciousness the shadow of my past allowed me to see how I had displaced or projected my energies out into the world, into art, Aboriginal issues, spirituality, nature and into relationships. Shimmer had become a shudder. The unheimlich, the unhomely and uncanny, returned again and again as a shadow of what I had repressed. ‘Shadow’, as understood in Jungian analysis, manifests as a strong, irrational projection, positive or negative, upon others and the world. Jung contended that to ‘admit’ or bring into awareness the shadow is to break its compulsive hold (Jung in Samuels, Shorter and Plant: 1993: 139). It was within the shadow that Jung found ‘a convincing explanation not only of personal antipathies but also the cruel prejudices and persecutions of our time’ (ibid.).

Annette Kuhn stated that ‘Remembering is clearly an activity that takes place for, as much as in, the present’ (A. Kuhn: 1995: 107-8, italics in original). The late Australian poet Judith Wright recognized that the denial of the forced displacement and transgenerational traumas of Aboriginal people continues to

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haunt all its inhabitants and the land: ‘The love of the land we have invaded, and the guilt of the invasion – have become part of me. It is a haunted country’ (Wright: 1990: 83). The past is vitally important to the present. Denial has serious ramifications that impinge on personal lives and collectively affect cross- cultural understanding and environmental realities. It creates an impenetrable imbroglio. Yet as Doreen Massey has pointed out, there is no ‘internally produced, essential past’. ‘Just as personal identities are argued to be multiple, shifting, possibly unbounded, so also ... are the identities of place’ (Massey: 1998: 7). The identities of places and people are continually being produced. Massey noted that when bell hooks repeatedly emphasised that ‘our struggle is also a struggle of memory against forgetting’, she is speaking of ‘a politicisation of memory that distinguishes nostalgia, that longing for something to be as once it was, a kind of useless act, from that remembering that serves to illuminate and transform the present’ (hooks in Massey: 1998: 171). When the importance of place is understood, Aboriginal art holds the potential to act as a powerful political and ethical reminder, a ‘memory against forgetting’.

e. Displacement and Remembering i. Different senses of place

A sense of place and belonging contain enormous complexities for the artist and the wider community. To speak of a sense of place, it is necessary to first ask of whose sense of place and identity we are speaking. Both Agnes Martin and Emily Kngwarray have strong relationships to their places, but there are very important differences that must not be overlooked. In Space, Place and Gender, Doreen Massey recognized that a sense of place is very different for those who have been colonized, marginalized and oppressed (Massey: 1998: 166). Yet she also acknowledged that ‘Place and the spatially local are rejected by many progressive people as almost necessarily reactionary…[and] an evasion, as a retreat from the dynamic and change of real life[,]… a romanticized escapism from the real business of the world’ (ibid.: 151). While

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recognizing that places, cultures and social identity are always in flux, contested and changing, we must be sensitive to cultural difference and the experiences of those that have been colonized, marginalized and oppressed. An enormous challenge exists to maintain a larger perspective so as not to perpetuate old paradigms and create new blind spots and stereotypes. Yet as bell hooks recognized, stereotypes abound when there is distance; they are a fantasy and ‘projection onto the Other’ that makes them less threatening (hooks in Langton: 1993: 38).

Massey’s writings counter tendencies towards nostalgia and sentimentalization and confront fundamental issues surrounding place relationships in Australia. In a personal conversation with her in 2002 in London, I brought up some of the complexities of inter-cultural understandings of place in Australia. She admitted that the issues were indeed challenging but said that because of the simultaneous multiplicity of spaces, social and place relations are never still but inherently dynamic (Massey: October, 2002: personal interview). Her anti- essentialist views challenge conceptualizations of nationalist, regionalist and local place advocates’ attempts to fix the meanings of particular spaces, to enclose or endow them with fixed identities and to claim them for one’s own as sites of nostalgia. Massey argued that to view a place as bounded, authentic, singular, fixed and unproblematic in its identity is to perceive space as stasis (ibid.). ‘Just as personal identities are argued to be multiple, shifting, possibly unbounded, so also... are the identities of place’ (Massey: 1998: 7). This view challenges claims to internal histories or to ‘timeless’ identities of either. ‘All attempts to institute horizons, to establish boundaries, to secure the identity of places, can in this sense therefore be seen to be attempts to stabilize the meaning of particular envelopes of space-time’ (ibid.).

Place dualisms and exclusivity can romanticize place and home, and can lead to a loss of mobility. Massey advocated a need to achieve mobility while ‘at the same time recognizing one’s necessary locatedness and embedded/embodiedness, and taking responsibility for it’ (ibid.: 11). She contended that the sense of displacement that many feel in the world today is

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the result of a new and violent phase of ethnocentric ‘time-space compression’ due to globalization where power is related to size, and mobility reflects and reinforces power (ibid.: 150-58). ‘[C]urrent reorganizations of capital, the formation of a new global space... [and] new technologies of communication, have undermined an older sense of a “place-called-home”, and left us placeless and disorientated’ (ibid.: 163).

Massey proposed thinking in terms of a global sense of place, one that recognizes the movement and intermixing of people and places while seeking to find ways to retain a sense of local place and particularity. She problematized as a ‘colonizer’s view’ the reactionary aspects of sense of place such as the longing for coherence, nationalism and ‘sanitized heritages’ that lead to antagonism to newcomers and outsiders (ibid.: 146-47). The idealized belief that communities were once coherent and homogenous constitutes a retreat and romanticized escapism from the dynamic change of the real world. It does not deny the importance of place to recognize that places do not hold single, seamless, coherent identities that everyone shares, but that they are full of internal conflicts. Places are continually in process, always being produced rather than having essentialized and internalized histories. Massey advocated alternative interpretations of place to integrate the global and the local and link a place to places beyond, ones that are ‘constructed out of a particular constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus’ to create a ‘global sense of the local’ (ibid.: 154-56). Her ideas are particularly relevant to Australians for in the global sense of place that she proposes, a fluid interchange can occur between cultures, races and genders where respect for the particular and local is not lost. ii. Fluid interchanges

Yet as we have seen, place is differently perceived by Australia’s oldest and newest inhabitants. This has many ramifications. The Australian eco-feminist philosopher Val Plumwood recognized that ‘It is a paradox that in Australia what seems to be one of the most land-sensitive human cultures the planet has ever

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seen confronts what statistics attest to be one of the most wasteful and land- insensitive’ (Plumwood: 2001: 1). ‘While public policies tolerate, and even encourage, abusive practices such as land clearance, our love of the land does not deserve the name’ (ibid.: 3).

In his book Belonging, Peter Read expressed strong feelings about inter-cultural convergence and the land:

Leave the spirits to the people who made them or were made by them. Let the rest of us find the confidence in our own physical and spiritual belonging in this land, respectful of Aboriginality but not necessarily close to it. Let’s intuit our own attachments to country independently of Aboriginals. We can belong in the landscape, on the landscape, or irrelevantly to the landscape. We don’t all have to belong to each other. To understand that is a step to belonging (Read: 2000: 204).

Read emphasized that what he called ‘belonging-in-parallel’ did not imply that the majority cultures should pretend that Aboriginals don’t exist (ibid.: 210). Val Plumwood has argued strongly against Read’s understanding of cultural independence.

Aboriginal culture has a great deal to teach about these specific forms of land spirituality which challenge western traditions. At this point [Peter] Read’s objective of cultural independence or separate spiritual development risks losing the plot. It would deprive non-indigenous Australians of alternative models from indigenous land cultures that can be most helpful and suggestive of how to develop the communicative and dialogical elements, that according to Deborah Bird Rose, are characteristic of indigenous land culture, as opposed to the monological character that adheres to the propertarian and instrumental forms that have typified western land relationships (Plumwood: 2001: 5).

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Plumwood recognized that the journey towards inter-cultural dialogue and sustainability would be difficult, for ‘bearers of Western culture mostly still have to discover not only that they belong to the particular lands they inhabit but that they belong to the earth at all’ (ibid.: 8, my italics). This recognition resonates with comments by Rosalind Krauss and Yves-Alain Bois discussed earlier in this thesis (see page 60) about the capacity of modernist art to create a situation where viewers forget that their feet ‘are in the dirt’. This cultural agnosia needs to be addressed when the land and its indigenous occupants who have been displaced from that land remain in our blind spots. Susan Sontag reflected on the consequences of being inured to the reality of suffering in Regarding the Pain of Others: ‘Our failure is one of imagination, of empathy’ (Sontag: 2003: 7).

With the privilege of the change of aspect I experienced at Utopia, I now engage with the land and Aboriginal paintings very differently. While still greatly appreciating their beauty and surface shimmer, I now also see depths of cultural meaning, complex histories, difference and suffering as well as interconnectedness. The profound relationship between skin and ground has had a deep effect upon me as I have become increasingly aware of Australia’s fragile environment and appreciated the role of Aboriginal custodianship of the land. The work of American environmental activist and Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy could be seen to be a bridge between indigenous and non-indigenous understandings. She wrote in World as Lover, World as Self: ‘The self is a metaphor. We can decide to limit it to our skin, our person, our family, our organization, or our species’, or, she said, we can choose to see ‘the entire ‘pattern that connects’ (Macy: 1993: 189). She was emphatic that this construction of the self does not eliminate a person’s distinctiveness but ‘allows for and even requires diversity. You become more yourself. Integration and differentiation go hand in hand’ (ibid.). She believed that this ‘deep ecology’ perspective allows us to recognize our ‘imbeddedness in nature, overcome our alienation from the rest of creation, and change the way we can experience our self through an ever-widening process of identification… The world is our body’ (ibid.: 191-92). This experience of interconnectedness on a personal level is

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complementary to the fluid interchanges between cultures that Val Plumwood believes can be achieved in contemporary Australia. iii. An ethical vision

There are ethical consequences for art and artists of attempting to engage seriously with local and global ecological custodianship. In his 1996 book, Ecological Identity, Mitchell Thomashow recognized that

Ecological identity work also involves concentric circles of tension and satisfaction. As you realize the importance of being present in nature, you might also observe how often you are absent from nature, ever aware of the distractions that prevent you from paying attention. As you discover how much you require solitude and retreat to contemplate nature, you might realize that you have a responsibility to get more involved in time- consuming political action. And as you more clearly formulate a strong environmental point of view, you might observe how your behaviour and actions challenge other people (Thomashow: 1996: 23).

These experiences correspond strikingly with my own. Yet in the search for a ground of understanding and action, cognitive scientists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela also gave a fundamental warning about attempting to enter into a new perspective of the world:

The knowledge of knowledge compels. It compels us to adopt an attitude of permanent vigilance against the temptation of certainty. It compels us to recognize that certainty is not a proof of truth. It compels us to realize that the world everyone sees is not the world but a world which we bring forth with others. It compels us to see that the world will be different only if we live differently. It compels us because, when we know that we know, we cannot deny (to ourselves or to others) that we know.

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That is why ... our knowledge of our knowledge, implies an ethics that we cannot evade, an ethics that has its reference point in the awareness of the biological and social structure of human beings, and ethics that springs from human reflection and puts human reflection right at the core as a constitutive social phenomenon. …Hence, the only possibility for coexistence is to opt for a broader perspective, a domain of existence in which both parties fit in the bringing forth of a common world (Maturana and Varela: 1992: 245-46, italics in original).

There is a genuine role in Australia for intercultural dialogue and a ‘broader perspective’ to lead to reconciliation, much needed action and sustainable ecological understanding. An ethical vision is essential for the gaze with which one views the world determines what one will see. bell hooks emphasized the global in the local when she wrote about a new way of perceiving ‘home’:

Home is no longer just one place. It is locations. Home is that place which enables and promotes varied and everchanging perspectives, a place where one discovers new ways of seeing reality, frontiers of difference. One confronts and accepts dispersal and fragmentation as part of the constructions of a new world order that reveals more fully where we are, who we can become (hooks in Massey: 1998: 171).

Rather than engaging with places with sentimentality and nostalgia, merging into the shimmer of the land’s aesthetic beauty while denying the past, Australians can engage differently with and incorporate many people and places, past and present, inner and outer, with the reality of what is. There can be a mythology of distance, a fear of intimacy and the ‘Other’. Yet in the vast spaces of central Australia I did not find emptiness but a new kind of attentiveness. Throughout my life I sought a utopia, but the one that I found was not one that I expected nor one that many people fantasize about. The people of Utopia introduced me to a different reality and complexities that I needed to confront. I now more fully appreciate Agnes Martin’s words: ‘We are in the midst of reality responding with joy’ (Martin, 1976: 1991: 93).

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Three hundred years ago, the Zen poet Basho (1644-1694) also issued an invitation to

Come, see real flowers of this painful world (Basho: 1985: 54).

56. Victoria King, The Ground of Being, 2003 acrylic on canvas and board, 27 x 37 cm, 30.5 x 30.5 cm, 78 x 61.5 cm, collection of the artist

Through deep attention to the ground of place, canvas and being, I can now make a gesture that acknowledges my relationship with the land as well as emptiness and loss (figure 56). I now feel more of a sense of belonging and can look at the harsh realities. It has taken me a lifetime to find a place to encounter ‘this painful world’, to find my own voice and my own gestures, to know the value of my experience and those of others who have been displaced. Repeated childhood traumatic events had created emotional wounds, patterns of repetition and a sense of loss of self that, although not visible, affected my capacity to act in the world. I now view my art practice as an effective action that has the power to communicate rather than merely decorate. Perhaps this is the gift, the teaching that I sought in desert places: that there is a vital place for the conscious confrontation of time, space, self and others. The disembodied

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gaze carries us away from ourselves, away from relationship with the world. When one goes beyond surface appearances and beauty, a place for the present and acknowledgement of the past is revealed.

In non-indigenous cultures, there is an often-overwhelming propensity to merge with the sublime in nature and art. But when we celebrate only the positive boundless and blissful aspects of the sublime, we repress the voice of the land and the people who are deeply connected to it. Cultural difference, particularity and transgenerational trauma are easily ignored when Aboriginal paintings are avidly viewed on the same ground as the ‘Fine Art’ of another culture. Realities exist that we would often rather not see. But it is always insufficient to simply look or see. The importance of embodied perception and the power of empathy are too often overlooked, and so is the ground beneath our feet where the flesh of our body and the flesh of the world meet.

The challenge is to acknowledge and respect difference at the same time as confronting illusions of separateness. Denial and displacement have affected both indigenous and non-indigenous cultures. As Emmanuel Levinas pointed out, the move towards being and relationship occurs ‘in the risky uncovering of oneself, in sincerity, the breaking up of inwardness and the abandon of all shelter, exposure to traumas, vulnerabilities’ (Levinas in Princenthal, Basualdo and Huyssen: 2000: 122). With openness and humility, a movement towards remembering, attentiveness and relationship can provide a powerful place for action and reconciliation. New sensibilities are required to understand that our identity is inextricably linked to the particular places in which we dwell: ‘the world is our body’.

Developing an ethical sense of place requires bringing together what has been artificially separated. Aboriginal art, the conditions of Aboriginal peoples’ lives, economics, ecology and spirituality are firmly compartmentalized into an imbroglio that separates and restricts discussions of their commonality. Bruno Latour argued in We Were Never Modern, knowledge and power have too long been separated with increasingly disastrous results (Latour: 1993). The

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relationship between ourselves and the world is still disavowed. But as Martin Heidegger recognized, ‘[W]orld and things do not subsist alongside one another. They penetrate each other. Thus the two traverse a middle. In it, they are one’ (Heidegger: 1971: 202).

In order to have a meaningful sense of place, I maintain that it is necessary to confront the sense of displacement and often ‘unbearable emptiness’ that haunts so many of the occupants of Australia. An informed and empathetic engagement with art can be part of this process as the artwork and lives of Agnes Martin and Emily Kngwarray have revealed. Connections between person and place are intricately interwoven and fundamental to human identity. The importance of acknowledging trauma is particularly relevant in this country with its ongoing denial of personal and collective histories. I have come to challenge the way we express our most deeply held place attachments. Too often we view the land with a distanced, disembodied gaze, projecting our desire for a utopia or ‘no-place’, a ‘potential space’ that we create to avoid painful realities. When we engage just with the visual shimmer of the land or art, the potential for relationship, reconciliation, and effective ethical environmental action is reduced. Ours is not ‘a view from nowhere’.

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317 APPENDIX

Kinship and Skin Names Chart

Alyawerr Central Eastern rough Warlpiri and Anmatyerr pronunciation Eastern guide to Arandic Arrernte skin names Apetyarr Peltharre Apetyarr a-PITCH-ara Japaljarri Petyarr Napaljarri Pengarte Pengart PUNG-art-a Japangardi Napangardi Akemarr Kemarre Akemarr a-COME-ara Jakamarra Kemarr Nakamarra Ampetyane Ampetyan um-BID-jahn-a Jampijinpa Mpetyane Mpetyan Nampijinpa Kngwarrey Kngwarray Kngwarray NWAR-ay Jungarrayi Ngwarrey e Ngwarray Nungarrayi Penangke Penangk PUN-ung-gah Japanangka Napanangka Pwerl Perrurle Pwerl PULL-ah Jupurrurla Jupurrula Napurrurla Napurrula Angale Angal ung-A-lah Jangala Ngal Nangala

318 Notes on Kinship and Skin Names

In addition to other personal names, such as Christian names and surnames, Aboriginal people from Central Australia are born into one of several groups and so acquire a 'skin name' which is part of a complex system of social labelling locating an individual within the interconnected systems of kin and country. The 'skin name' in part defines relationships to all other people within the close family group and beyond. As shown above in Table 1 the skin names used by Alyawerr, Arrernte and Anmatyerr speaking peoples correspond to those used by other language groups such as the Warlpiri.

The spelling of Aboriginal languages in Central Australia has gone through many phases and refinements, beginning with early documents compiled by missionaries and linguists, who, in some cases, brought to the task their own idiosyncratic ways of spelling. Prior to the publication of Aboriginal language dictionaries such as The Alyawerr Dictionary and The Eastern and Central Arrernte to English Dictionary extensive community meetings were held to discuss spelling and ensure that the orthography reflected speakers' perceptions of their languages. These meetings continue to this day, with the most recent being held in Alice Springs in May 1998.

Although the letters of the English alphabet are used to spell Aboriginal languages, there are of course many sounds in these languages which are not heard in English. English letters or combinations of letters are used to systematically represent these sounds in the spelling systems of Aboriginal languages.

The written forms of skin names at first glance present a plethora of spellings, which may confuse the reader. In part this is due to the proliferation of versions written before the publication of Aboriginal language dictionaries. For example, various spellings of the skin name KNGWARRAY have included Kngwarreye, Ngwarai, Ngwarri and Nquara. APETYARR may have at times been spelt as Pitjara, Pichara and Pitjarra. The language name ANMATYERR itself may be found written as Unmatjera, Anmatjera, Anmajirra, Anmadjera, Anmatjere, Anmatjirra, Anmatyira or Anmatyerre in some sources.

There are also legitimate variations in the way that some words are pronounced, and so, for example, many words may be pronounced with or without the initial A vowel. The skin names ANGAL and AKEMARR may be heard without their initial A, and some speakers have chosen to write these words in this way. The initial K sound in the skin name KNGWARRAY may also be 'dropped'. However, the policy as detailed in the published dictionaries, is generally to write the word in its fullest form. Pronunciation remains, as in any language, a matter for individual difference, but of course always within language specific bounds.

319 The major difference between the Arandic language spelling systems at this point is the inclusion by some of a final 'e' vowel on each word. Others, such as the Alyawerr and Anmatyerr, have decided to omit this optional sound and not write any vowel at all on the end of words. These minor differences do not make any difference to the pronunciation of the words.

It is also the case that, for skin names, some people may have their own preferred spellings which are at variance with those in published dictionaries.

The skin name chart and explanation was kindly supplied to me by Jenny Green, Institute for Aboriginal Development Dictionary Program, March 2000.

320 UTOPIA FAMILY TREE

One Atnangker man had four children

Harper Kngwarray Mick Kngwarray (d) Weida Kngwarray Rita Kngwarray (d)

four wives:

Topsy Pwerl* (d) Kwementyay (d) Maggie Polly Pwerl* (Barbara Weir’s mother Minnie Pwerl’s sister)

Four children: Two children: Three children: Four children:

Clem Petyarr Ada Bird Petyarr Kathleen Petyarr Myrtle Petyarr

Ted Petyarr Kwementyay (d) Gloria Petyarr Violet Petyarr

Douglas Petyarr Kwenentyay (d) Jeannie Petyarr

Nancy Petyarr Paddy Petyarr (d)

* Polly and Topsy Pwerl were blood sisters.

Kwenentyay is the name given as a term of respect for a deceased person.

321 One Alhalker man had two sons

One son married an Arlparra woman One son married a Kaiditch woman .

three children: three children:

Alhalker Jack Kwementyay (d) Emily Kngwarray (d) Kgorbaji Michael (d) Alan (d)

three wives: two husbands married Glory Ngal Peter Ngal 1st wife (d) 3rd wife: Jesse** (d) 2nd wife: Minnie* (d) Jimmy Ngal**

two children: six children:

Anna Petyarr Price children: Lindsay Mbyetan

Greeny Petyarr Tom Mbyetan (d)

* Minnie (Alhalker Jack’s 1st wife) was Barbara Weir’s grandmother’s eldest sister

** Jimmy Ngal was Jesse’s (Alhalker Jack’s 2nd wife) brother and Barbara Weir’s uncle. Minnie Pwerl (Barbara Weir’s mother) and Jimmy Ngal’s mother were blood sisters.

322