Michael Jagamara Nelson and Imants Tillers collaborated on Hymn to the Night as a way of healing their rift. Picture: Fireworks Gallery Source: The Australian
IMANTS Tillers expected no controversy when he showed his painting The Nine Shots at the Sydney Biennale in 1986.
The artist had built his entire practice on breathing new life into motifs or compositions by other artists without any trouble. So when some complained that his painting had appropriated imagery from Aboriginal artist Michael Jagamara Nelson's painting Five Dreamings, he was surprised to realise he had committed a kind of artistic blasphemy.
"I didn't think I had done anything wrong but other people did," he says. "Referencing indigenous art was only a minor part of my practice at the time."
Tillers came under fire for not seeking permission from Nelson to use the imagery. Aboriginal artist Gordon Bennett hit back on behalf of Nelson in 1990, creating a work called The Nine Ricochets that reappropriated Tillers's imagery. Then, in 2001, an unlikely friendship emerged when Tillers and Nelson started painting together at the suggestion of Brisbane gallery director Michael Eather. "I feel grateful for having had the personal contact," Tillers says now. "There is still a huge cultural gulf between a Warlpiri artist and a Western artist, but painting is a way of connecting."
Tillers says the pair work sequentially on a painting, responding to each other's efforts. This year they held a joint exhibition called The Loaded Ground at Canberra's Drill Hall Gallery that included 11 co-painted works. At its heart were ideas about cultural ownership, appropriation and cross-cultural collaboration.
Yet the broader issue remains loaded with sensitivity. Several recent cases have refocused debate on how non-indigenous artists need to tread carefully when making use of, respectfully or otherwise, Aboriginal culture.
In June, Melbourne artist Cameron Hayes was criticised for referencing Aboriginal culture in a body of work that was inspired by his 18 months living in the Tiwi Islands, north of Darwin. Alcaston Gallery in Melbourne cancelled an exhibition of his work, The Incomplete History of Milikapiti, following objections from artists at Jilamara Arts and Crafts Association in the Tiwi Islands. Three works were deemed particularly offensive, including felt sticks referencing Aboriginal funeral poles and a painting of a football field littered with VB cans. Gallery director Beverly Knight made the decision to pull the show because "it had implications associated with really sensitive issues and it needed more time", while Hayes said he had been the victim of censorship.
In Brisbane, Maori artist Michael Parekowhai found himself in the centre of a storm after he won last year's Premier of Queensland's Sculpture Commission for The World Turns, his sculpture of a 5m bronze elephant on its head staring eye-to-eye with a water rat. The rat - known as the kuril - is an Aboriginal totem for Kurilpa Point, where the work was installed last month. Parekowhai used the kuril in his work after a discussion with local Aboriginal elder Des Sandy, who gave him his permission to reference the animal. But it attracted the ire of Aboriginal artist Fiona Foley, who objected to a Maori artist being commissioned to tell an Aboriginal story. She accused the artist of cultural theft.
Then in October, also in Brisbane, an Aboriginal artist walked out on his gallery because he was offended by the work of another artist that referenced indigenous painting. Aboriginal artist Ryan Presley, who was born in Alice Springs but now lives in Brisbane, quit Jan Manton Art because he didn't want to share a stable with Lucas Grogan, a non-indigenous Melbourne artist. Presley expressed his feelings to Manton, who suggested the pair do a joint exhibition to resolve the issues between them. The gallery owner was aware of the collaboration between Nelson and Tillers and thought these young artists could benefit from a similar experience. Instead, Presley rejected the invitation and left the gallery.
Australian-born Indian artist Textaqueen also quit her gallery, Melbourne's Gallerysmith, because she didn't want to share representation with Grogan. Textaqueen, who left after learning the gallery was planning to show their work in a group exhibition, said Grogan's use of Aboriginal art-making styles such as cross-hatching "personally affects me as a person of colour". For his part, Grogan says he has abandoned the style that was deemed as "too transgressive" and that while he had previously referenced Aboriginal painting, his inspiration comes from a range of sources. Gallerists Marita Smith and Manton vouched for the quality of Grogan's work, which sells well, saying they weren't prepared to censor their artists.
All of which touches on the broader issue of historical influence and the way artists have always looked to their predecessors for inspiration.
"Appropriation is as old as art itself," says Christopher Allen, The Australian's national art critic. "Homer was already borrowing and reconfiguring things from previous oral traditions."
Allen says artists may look to one another for solutions to problems, such as how to pose a figure or make a composition. They also may search for meanings and cultural associations they can use and transform in their work. History is littered with examples of appropriation, while postmodern theory goes further, saying everything is done in the second degree.
"Postmodernists tend to regard the culture they appropriate as something inert, like discarded rubbish," Allen says. "The earlier practice of appropriation is based on the belief that the material borrowed is like living tissue and it will regrow; and so the reason you are borrowing something from another artist is there is an affinity or a kinship."
Sydney-based Aboriginal curator Djon Mundine says borrowing should be done fairly and respectfully. Mundine has been following Grogan's work and attended three of his exhibitions. He says Grogan "demonised" Aborigines by using the art-making style of cross-hatching in an image of a person vomiting and in works with titles alluding to drinking.
"He used (Aboriginal) designs in the vomit to create these patterns. The big thing is that he uses it in a demeaning way to Aboriginal people, (suggesting) that they're all drunks and they sit around and get pissed," he says. "You wouldn't take the bleeding heart of Jesus image and stick it on toilet paper."
Grogan did not respond to requests from The Australian to comment.
Mundine says collaborations can happen, but he believes they are usually unbalanced. "I don't believe in collaborations," he says. "When they're talking about Aboriginal people working with non-Aboriginal people, generally the non-Aboriginal person is dominating."
Non-indigenous artists inspired by Aboriginal Australia are the focus of Roads Cross: Contemporary Directions in Australian Art, which opened at Flinders University Art Museum and travelled to Charles Darwin University, where it is now showing. The exhibition consists of non-Aboriginal artists who have been influenced by Aboriginal art and culture.
"Any art that's made in the shadow of colonialism is going to be sensitive," says co-curator Fiona Salmon. "There are always questions people want to ask about who is benefiting from that connection with an Aboriginal person or Aboriginal place."
Philip Watkins, chief executive of Desart, the umbrella organisation that represents central Australian Aboriginal arts centres, says Aboriginal art is linked with cultural obligations and responsibilities, existing outside the foundations of Western art, making it a sensitive area to borrow from.
"Aboriginal people have been forced into the Western world, whether through forced removals or the taking of land," he says. "Those areas that have been able to maintain traditional cultural expression (are) wanting to protect that from further appropriation." So where in this discussion do we place Albert Namatjira, the Aboriginal artist who painted with Western watercolours? Namatjira, says Watkins, still painted within the framework of traditional Aboriginal laws.
"He painted those places that he had a right to paint so he didn't just go and paint any mountain range," Watkins says. "So where the style was very Western, what underlies that was his connectedness to particular features in the landscape."
Tillers says the influence of Aboriginal art has grown steadily since the Papunya Tula movement in the 1970s brought it into mainstream Australia. The fact people want to take their cues from Aboriginal art, he says, is an outcome of its success and visibility as part of the contemporary landscape.
"It is part of contemporary art so it becomes harder to defend special treatment for it with regards to influence or appropriation," Tillers says. "We should be proud of Aboriginal art: it's an amazing phenomenon and contemporary phenomenon."
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