Aboriginal women express the infinite

Robin Laurence VISUAL ART ARTS

TWO OF THE biggest and most compelling paintings in the exhibition Marking the Infinite are by senior Aboriginal artist Angelina Pwerle. Executed in acrylic paint on canvas, each is composed of thousands upon thousands of small white dots, one work with a rosy red ground, the other, sooty black. Suggestive of the night sky, of looking upward at the numberless stars and cloudlike galaxies of our universe, they are, instead, symbolic depictions of the small white flowers of the bush plum that is native to Pwerle’s country in the Australian desert, northeast of Alice Springs. More than that, they allude to the artist’s patrilineal clan estate, walked in the time of creation—the time of the Dreaming—by the clan’s Bush Plum ancestor.

Subtitled “Contemporary Women Artists from Aboriginal Australia”, this glorious exhibition recently landed at the Museum of Anthropology after travelling to five galleries in the United States. Drawn from the collection of Miami-based Debra and Dennis Scholl and curated by art historian Henry F. Skerritt, it includes some 61 works by nine women. In addition to Pwerle, the artists represented are Nonggirrnga Marawili, Wintjiya Napaltjarri, Yukultji Napangati, Carlene West, Regina Pilawuk Wilson, Lena Yarinkura, Gulumbu Yunupingu, and Nyapanyapa Yunupingu. As Skerritt writes in the accompanying catalogue, the show is not intended as a comprehensive survey. Instead, “it focuses on artists who draw from the local and the specific, and extrapolate to the universal.” At the same time, the show demonstrates an interesting development: much contemporary Aboriginal art production in Australia in the past three decades has been powered by women.

With a few exceptions (twinedpalm-leaf figures by Yarinkura; memorial poles by Marawili and others), Marking the Infinite is composed of paintings, some of them acrylic on canvas (by women based in desert communities in the Australian interior) and others, earth pigments on bark (by those living in Arnhem Land, in Australia’s tropical north). Whether composed of dots, lines, circles within circles, or cross-hatching, all these seeming abstractions are symbolic, “defiantly embedded in specific cultural contexts and artistic traditions,” Skerritt writes. One of the fascinating aspects of this work is how so many of the artists have found ways around gendered proscriptions, especially regarding access to certain stories and symbols. They have truly claimed the marks as their own.

A number of the paintings were commissioned directly by Dennis Scholl, who encouraged the women to work on a larger scale than they were accustomed to—that is, to produce work that would command attention in a western art gallery or museum. While most of them met this request with skill and confidence, there is something unsettling about an outsider-imposed, biggeris-better aesthetic. Still, contemporary Aboriginal art from Australia has been produced since the early 1970s expressly for the market and the non-indigenous art world. Similar to contemporary Inuit art, it is a guided and adapted cultural practice that provides a dependable income for Aboriginal families in small, remote, impoverished communities.

Art ranges from Napangati’s Ancestral Women at Yunala, whose dotted surface seems to shift and undulate before our eyes, to Carlene West’s huge, gestural depictions of Tjitjiti, the salt lake on whose western edge she was born. It also includes Wilson’s Syaw paintings, based on her people’s lost tradition of fishnet weaving, and Marawili’s diamond-patterned depictions of fire, water, lightning, and rock. Particularly captivating are Napaltjarri’s bold red U-shapes, bars, loops, and circles emerging from a creamy white ground, and Gulumbu Yunupingu’s star paintings, rendered in earth pigments on bark. Gulumbu’s works, which western viewers might describe as all-over abstractions, are composed of thousands of dots and crosses, and evoke, the catalogue tells us, the night sky and the Yolngu people’s conception of the cosmos. Like Pwerle’s bush-plum paintings, they beautifully embody the show’s underlying theme— “the interconnectedness between a humble mark and the vastness of the universe.”

DTHIS TIGHTLY

controlled ball of Korean interclass fury from veteran filmmaker Lee Chang-dong (Peppermint Candy) is loosely based on a Haruki Murakami story called “Barn Burning”, itself a nod to William Faulkner’s tale of the same name. The film is packed with literary references, but is a strikingly visceral experience, centring on a would-be writer too busy being baffled by life to sit down and write.

Said scribe is Lee Jong-su, played by Yoo Ah-in, a TV, film, and art-world icon in South Korea. Jong-su would be called good-looking if he had a better wardrobe and didn’t shuffle around Seoul like a 12-year-old with his mouth half open. Anyway, he’s considered attractive by Shin Hae-mi (Jeon Jong-seo), a similarly impoverished schoolmate from his childhood days in a farming community so far north, you can hear state propaganda blasting across the border.

When he bumps into her at a random food stall, she says he meant a lot to her when they were kids. But he doesn’t remember her at all. This doesn’t stop her from asking him to look after her cat for two weeks, during some kind of spiritual journey to Africa. So he accompanies Hae-mi to her dingy, less-than-tiny apartment. (“This is a lot nicer than my place,” he says.) He looks after her needs, but the cat never puts in an appearance.

Nonetheless, Jong-su returns to refill the food bowl, clean the litter box, and more. He’s thrilled when Hae-mi calls him from the airport, asking for a ride—less so since she’s travelling with a devilishly handsome fellow called Ben (The Walking Dead’s Detroit-raised Steven Yeun). Actually, the guy has his black Porsche Carrera waiting for him, but he condescends so nicely to Jong-su, it’s even harder to compete for Hae-mi’s attention.

They form a kind of unlikely trio. And after the film’s most remarkable sequence, at Jong-su’s farm—with Hae-mi doing a seminude sunset dance to Miles Davis’s crepuscular music from Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows—the rich but gainfully unemployed Ben confesses that he occasionally burns down abandoned greenhouses for fun. Does he really do that, or might he mean “women”, not greenhouses, like some kind of Korean Patrick Bateman? Jong-su sees him as a not-so-great Gatsby, and casts himself as a resentful Nick Carraway. But will he ever get to that typewriter?

Some viewers will be more baffled than the protagonist by Burning’s 148 minutes of puzzle-making. And they can argue that its shocking coda actually adds too much clarity to what precedes it. Still, the haunting film’s elegant mysteries keep unfolding after the last ashes are swept away.

Ken Eisner