The Sacred and Profane in Aboriginal Art

In January 2013 Fred Myers, Silver Professor of Anthropology at New York University, gave a paper at the International Symposium on Australian Aboriginal Anthropology on the Western Desert art movement. The symposium was held in Paris—an appropriate time and place for what he had to say, as an exhibition of Western Desert art, Tjukurrtjanu: The Art of the Western Desert, originally held at the National Gallery of Victoria, had been at the Musée du Quai Branly for the previous three months. In the paper, titled “Paintings, Publics, and Protocols: The early paintings from Papunya”, Myers is concerned with the problematic nature of exhibiting paintings containing images of sacred ritual practices and objects. For traditional Aboriginal people, such images are only allowed to be seen by initiated men, and the viewing of them by women, children or the uninitiated can lead to severe punitive repercussions.

Myers attempts to balance these traditional protocols surrounding the sacred with the imperatives and values of Western gallery display. His resolution to this situation is a balanced and thoughtful response to what is very sensitive cultural terrain. As opposed to neglecting or overlooking the Aboriginal perspective on such issues, Myers suggests incorporating it into the exhibitions themselves. This was the approach adopted in Tjukurrtjanu—images considered inappropriate for Aboriginal women and children to view were shown in a separate area from the other paintings, with signage indicating in which section of the gallery the sacred images were displayed. This was a sensitive accommodation between Aboriginal religious belief and the Western culture of displaying art for public viewing. Exhibition organisers have not always been so appreciative of Aboriginal religious sensibility.

In 1974 when a number of paintings were shown at the Residency Art Gallery in Alice Springs, several traditional men were incensed by the open display of images of ceremonial objects and designs. They threw rocks and spears at the building, and the paintings were consequently removed and replaced by some innocuous watercolours of landscapes of the kind Albert Namatjira became famous for. A similar incident occurred at Yuendumu in 1972 during the annual sports festival when a number of visiting senior Pitjantjatjara men were deeply offended by the open display of sacred images associated with their own country. The paintings were promptly removed from public display before they were seen by women and children. Violent retribution was avoided through a long process of discussion and negotiation spanning the entire weekend in which the men who painted and displayed the images allayed the concerns of the Pitjantjatjara men.

These incidents indicate some of the tensions and cultural complexities evident when negotiating the display of traditional designs. The process of accommodation between the world of gallery display and that of the cultural contexts of the paintings achieved in the Tjukurrtjanu exhibition seems the obvious path to take. However, it was not always so and the path to such an approach was one fraught with profound cultural misunderstandings.

Myers had undertaken field work in the Western Desert in the 1970s, producing one of the most frequently cited texts in Australian anthropology, Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place and Politics among Western Desert Aborigines (1986). This seminal piece of ethnography analyses Pintupi social organisation from the point of view of Aboriginal people themselves, allowing the reader to more intimately enter the experiential basis of the Pintupi way of seeing things, and particularly the importance of sentiment in the structuring of society.

In Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art (2007) Myers reflects on his own involvement in the development of the Western Desert art movement, from its humble beginnings at Papunya in the early 1970s, evolving into the most internationally acclaimed art movement in Australia’s history. What unites this work, his earlier book and the lecture in Paris, is his discussion of the cultural gulf that exists between Aboriginal religious sentiment and the secular world of white Australians—what he calls conflicting “regimes of value”.

Myers highlights the lack of comprehension or awareness by art dealers and bureaucrats that sacred images should not be shown to Aboriginal women, children or the uninitiated. When the men of Papunya began painting their ritual designs on canvas they had little idea of where their paintings would be taken and where they would end up once they were sold. Paintings that were sold in the 1970s which contained sacred images and which are now housed in galleries around the world will no longer be unwittingly shown at a community sports event or in an Alice Springs gallery—but they may appear on a Google search in the classroom of a remote school.

This situation has resulted in a change in how the artists themselves approach painting traditional designs. Painters no longer include overt representations of sacred imagery. However, they have used various techniques to overcome these limitations. For example, very faint depictions of sacred images may be used that only the artist can see, while to others they are essentially invisible. There has also been a tendency to depict only those images that tell a version of the Dreaming story that can be told and shown to women and children.

Painters may describe an image of a sacred object as too “dangerous” for the uninitiated to view, but such images are also described as “dear”, the implication being that the most potent images are also those which evoke the deepest reverence and affection. Unlike many of the early painters, contemporary artists tend not to depict such “dangerous” images, and if they do they are so cryptically embedded in the painting as to be virtually unrecognisable. In this sense the practice of painting has come to reflect and embody the ceremonial and religious protocols of concealment and revelation out of which they evolved, and with which they remained for many years in a state of uneasy tension.

At the launch of the exhibition Unique Perspectives: Papunya Tula Artists and the Alice Springs Community, which opened at the Araluen Arts Centre in Alice Springs in November 2012, Alison Anderson, former minister of the Northern Territory Country Liberal Party, made some pertinent comments on the issue of sacredness and secrecy. Anderson made a distinction between the sacred dimensions of the paintings that must remain secret and the “beautiful surface” that can be viewed by the general public:

These were the men who decided to paint the emblems of their religion. They wanted to show something of themselves to the world. But only something. The paintings were a portal, but they were also a veil, a screen. I know this, because I was there, and I remember that time very well. The men at Papunya wanted to show their culture. They wanted to show they had their culture, and it was hard, and strong, and beautiful. But they never wanted to show what lay behind the paintings.

Anderson asks of scholars and anthropologists that they limit the degree to which they look behind the veil of secrecy, to the “hidden meanings behind the surface stories”. She believes that when white people discover the sacred meanings of the paintings it detracts from the cultural strength of Aboriginal people: “every single thing you discover, you weaken us, and weaken our culture”. While this may be valid to a point, I would suggest that an appreciation of the secret aspects of ceremonial designs, or at least why the protocols of secrecy exist, can deepen our understanding of Aboriginal religious sentiment. It can also enable us to see the affinities such protocols have with other religious traditions, thereby deepening and enriching our understanding of humankind more generally.

Myers worked on the consultation report for the Northern Territory Museum which recommended that sixty-six of the Papunya paintings were inappropriate for the Unique Perspectives exhibition. The report also asked that the reasons for the restriction of these paintings not be made public. Myers is concerned in his lecture with how visual representations of ritual iconography, which have a certain meaning or value in Aboriginal culture, are to be translated for Western gallery exhibitions and the art market. As he writes:

the dynamics of revelation and concealment are intrinsic to the tradition from which these paintings emerge. Painters played at the edge of these boundaries, as they no doubt did in deciding when and what to reveal in ceremonies—sometimes with unfortunate consequences. Art curators must be mindful, indeed accountable to those who will bear the responsibilities of revealing the work. For it to be “art” … something has had to be stripped away in translation.

To understand what is “stripped” away, it is necessary to understand the nature of traditional Aboriginal religious practice. Although Myers does not discuss the painting movement in Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self, he does offer an in-depth analysis of the intersection of cosmology, social organisation, ritual life and religious experience. The Pintupi, like many other Western Desert peoples, believe the landscape was created by ancestral beings during the creative period, or what has become more commonly known as the Dreaming. After their creative activities, such beings are believed to have re-entered the earth from which they originally arose, often via springs or caves. Deep below these recesses in the earth’s surface such beings are believed to eternally slumber—yet they may be woken if the appropriate songs or rituals are performed. Such springs and caves where the spirit ancestors are believed to be slumbering are often the sacred sites where ritual activities may take place. Access to these sites is forbidden to the uninitiated.

We find here echoes of the religious significance of caves evident in Greek and Roman antiquity. It was the sacred cave of Cumae through which Aeneas descended to the underworld and from which the prophetic Sibyl issued her warnings in Virgil’s Aeneid.

When a young man is initiated into manhood he will be given the designs associated with his own country and the actions of his totemic ancestor; for example his body may be painted with the waterholes or rivers the ancestor created. During ritual performances similar designs will be painted on the sand. These sand mosaics are scaled-down depictions of large tracts of country, and by learning the dances and songs associated with that country young men are memorising what are essentially visual and aural maps of land—maps that will enable them to hunt and survive in the harsh conditions of the desert and consequently support a wife and family.

When different groups meet for ceremonial activity—practices which have persisted into the present in the Western Desert—a higher level of social organisation is established. Different tribes may exchange songs, dances and ritual designs, thus cementing ties between neighbouring and potentially hostile groups. As a man grows and matures and his ritual experience increases, he “owns” more songs and broadens his social links with more distant communities. By such a process of sharing, Myers suggests, the Pintupi become “one-country man”—that is, different groups separated by vast distances establish kinship relations through the bestowal of gifts, which is what ritual designs and the accompanying songs and dances essentially are. Older men have very broad and far-ranging social connections so that when disputes arise, senior men from neighbouring tribes will be able to negotiate with one another and come to an outcome that maintains harmonious relations across vast areas. As Meyers writes:

Participation in ceremonies among those sharing Dreaming tracks provides, for the Pintupi, the widest range of relatedness among people. As among “countrymen”, so also this relatedness established in ceremony must be maintained by exchange. Equality and shared identity among men throughout a region is constituted and coordinated through the exchange of ritual knowledge and revelation … Wide ranging relatedness does not exist as an automatic entailment of Pintupi beliefs. It must be produced in social action. Pintupi thus make participation in the male cult—close relationship with men from far away—a precondition of sexual reproduction, creating a differential between those with knowledge and those without it.

Such a cultural context is important for understanding the art. The sharing of images depicting country or its creation during the Dreaming is deeply embedded in the social fabric. Without the sharing of such songs and images, the socio-political integration of groups would break down. Such integration is necessary for trade, wife exchange and the mutual sharing of hunting grounds. This is a dramatically different conception of art from the one we are familiar with in the West. Aboriginal people assumed, when they sold paintings to a white buyer, that their art functioned as a gift, while the white buyer assumed he was buying an aesthetically pleasing painting. Neither party was aware that the other was operating within completely different regimes of value.

The sacred designs in Western Desert art, and how and if they should be exhibited, are the subject of Vivien Johnson’s Once Upon a Time in Papunya (2010). Johnson has been researching the Western Desert art movement for over twenty years. This is the latest of her many books on the subject and is particularly interesting for the discussion of her involvement in the consultation process with Western Desert artists regarding the exhibition of secret material. Johnson had been for many years a strong advocate of increased consultation with artists. These efforts came to fruition in 2006 when the Cultural Heritage Secretariat agreed to sponsor a trip to Central Australia in order to consult the cultural custodians of the images and to establish how to deal with culturally sensitive material under the Protection of Movable Cultural Heritage legislation.

Johnson’s description of what took place is a fascinating account of the profoundly different worlds inhabited by Aboriginal people and those who make decisions for them. It highlights the cultural gulf between those in coastal cities who make laws and formulate legislation for Aboriginal people, and the Aboriginal people in the remote deserts and what they think and feel about the same issues.

Johnson was accompanied by Alison Reid, an official from Canberra who had lobbied for the process of consultation to be undertaken. Reid and Johnson were to meet historian Dick Kimber in Alice Springs and the three of them were to talk with Bobby West Tjupurla, one of the movement’s most prominent painters. Kimber has lived in and around Alice Springs for over thirty years, and in addition to his scholarly publications, has enduring intimate relationships with many people in remote communities. His cultural knowledge is impeccable. Bobby West agreed to the meeting with Reid and Johnson, as he had been informed that Kimber would be accompanying them. However, due to unforeseen circumstances, Kimber was unable to attend the meeting.

Johnson wanted to know what Bobby West thought of a number of paintings so it could be established which ones would not cause offence if exhibited. She opened her computer and the first painting to appear was Old Man’s Ceremony by Bobby’s father, Freddy West. Johnson’s description of the incident is telling:

It was only a thumbnail—I had not even clicked on it to bring up the large image, but Bobby saw it alright—and visibly flinched. He asked me not just to move off that image but to close down the computer. Then he explained to me and Alison that he did want to talk about these issues, but not with us. He asked Alison very pointedly: “Don’t you have any men in your department?” then lapsed into loaded silence.

Even Johnson, with her years of experience, had not anticipated the reaction such images would evoke in Bobby. After an uncomfortable dinner in which Johnson and Reid realised they would not get the information they were seeking, Bobby stated that he only wanted to speak about the paintings to older men—which meant, as Johnson writes, men “with grey hair and beards … who knew something about the culture—in short, men like Dick Kimber”.

One of the most intractable problems lay in the persistent attitude Johnson encountered amongst white bureaucrats and art dealers—they would repeat time and time again that surely contemporary Aboriginal people no longer hold such strict beliefs that prevent the depiction of sacred images. Such an attitude meant the painters and their families were not consulted or asked about the relevant cultural protocols. Consequently, the fact that their views were not voiced or heard reinforced the prejudice that beliefs about the sacred nature of certain images were relics of the past that need not be considered in the context of contemporary art exhibitions.

Johnson’s tireless efforts, and those of Myers and others, to overcome such bureaucratic ignorance are a triumph of sensitive and thoughtful inter-cultural dialogue. Without such efforts, exhibitions like Tjukurrtjanu that now tour the world would not have come to fruition. Such exhibitions have provided an avenue by which the riches of traditional religious sentiment can be expressed and communicated to the global community, enriching our sense of human experience and also providing Aboriginal people venues through which they can share their culture with the rest of humankind.

One of the less noted features of this interaction with the broader world is the degree to which Aboriginal people invest such exchanges with the traditional notion of gift-giving—by sharing depictions of their Dreamings on canvas they tend to see such a process as cementing social ties between themselves and those who view and appreciate the paintings. This dimension of the social meaning of the art is not well known. Thankfully, in Painting Culture Myers treats this as one of the primary motivations underlying the painter’s art.

In 1988 Western Desert painting moved onto the international art scene when the South Australian Museum, in conjunction with the Asia Society in New York, included many of the works in an exhibition titled Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia. Two of the painters, Billy Stockman Tjapaltjarri and Michael Nelson Tjakamarra, were flown to New York and as part of the exhibition over a two-day period they created a large sand mosaic in the gallery. An entry fee was charged and visitors could look down into the gallery and watch the men create the ritual sand designs or maps of country that were the basis of the acrylic works on canvas. Peter Sutton edited a lavish and scholarly book to accompany the exhibition, with a number of essays providing an interpretative framework for the art.

The aim of the exhibition was to give exposure to Aboriginal art and legitimate its status, as not mere ethnographic curiosity, but art with its own aesthetic value. However, the exhibition garnered a number of negative reviews in academic art journals which claimed such cultural displays represented a subtle form of ethnocentrism that covertly denigrated Aboriginal people. For example, Tony Fry and Anne-Marie Willis in their review essay “Aboriginal Art: Symptom or Success?” (Art in America, July 1989) argued that the need to exhibit paintings was itself a symptom of colonialism—the need for a colonised people to earn money and gain acceptance in the dominant white culture. In a similar vein, John von Sturmer described the exhibition as a form of cultural necrophilia, a “spectacle” and “tableaux” in which a white populace fetishised a culture it had already supposedly murdered through colonisation (Art and Text, vol. 32, 1989).

Both of these reviews were highly theoretical applications of postmodern theory in the context of debates about the political empowerment of colonised peoples. During the 1970s and 1980s Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1967) and Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things (1966) became highly influential works that paid particular attention to how Western civilisation deployed certain forms of binary discourse in its representation of “self” and “other”. Derrida and Foucault demonstrated the degree to which metaphysics, philosophy and the writing of history were ideologically loaded. Edward Said, in his equally influential Orientalism (1978), applied Foucault’s critique of ideology, discourse and power to European perceptions of the Arab world.

In the Australian context, the work of Said and other post-colonial theorists was applied to how white Australians constructed Aboriginal people in ways that sanctioned or justified the annexation of traditional lands. Two of the most ubiquitous were the Social Darwinist notion that Aboriginal people were intellectually inferior savages on a lower rung of creation than Europeans, and Thomas Hobbes’s belief that tribal life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. Neither of these views, it turns out, had any real empirical value—but they were ideologically appealing.

In Painting Culture Myers argues that such postmodern critiques do not do justice to the nature of the process of cultural exchange involved in Aboriginal people sharing their painting with the broader community. Nor do such critiques take adequate account of the views of the artists themselves. Discussing the influence of Derrida, Foucault and Said on Australian anthropology and intellectual life, Myers comments:

When the processes of circulation and exhibition are considered up close, one wonders if this dreary and monolithic critical view does justice to the work of cultural exchange … In failing to address any aspect of the agency of production through which representations are actually made, these frameworks betray a heritage in a theory of signification that can hardly imagine change … Exhibitions are not, after all, simply the instantiation of pre-existing frameworks. As participants tell us, exhibitions are real-life organisations of resources, imagination and power—in short social practices.

In Myers’s account of the exhibition and creation of the sand design, the views of Billy Stockman Tjapaltjarri and Michael Nelson Tjakamarra about what they were doing differed from the views of the academic critics who presumed to speak on their behalf. Michael Nelson Tjakamarra held the strong belief that white Australians will “respond morally to the demonstration of Aboriginal ownership of land self-evidently embodied in ritual and painting”—that they might “recognise Aboriginal Law”. Countering the notion that being the object of a white colonial gaze is an implicit form of subjection, of covert ethnocide, Myers writes:

Far from being the condition of their subjection, the audience’s gaze is crucial to the Aboriginal performers as an authentication of their experience. To ignore this exchange analytically is to exclude arbitrarily much of what is an Aboriginal self-defined humanity, as one who should be respected and heard, their own powers and understandings; this would be a double erasure.

The simplistic binaries of coloniser and colonised have been long questioned by international post­colonial theorists, but this more nuanced approach is yet to be taken up by Australian theorists. For example, in In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture, the novelist and cultural theorist Anthony Appiah rejects the binaries of identity and difference and of coloniser and colonised. In discussing the contemporary circulation of cultures in the postcolonial world, he avers that “we are already contaminated by each other”.

I would not use the word contaminated to describe the use of Western materials to depict ceremonial designs, nor would I use the term to describe how the paintings and the culture they give expression to has affected and transformed the consciousness of European Australians. While accepting Appiah’s point, that the binaries evident in the resistance paradigms employed by postcolonial and radicalised theorists have been made redundant by the hybrid condition of our worlds, I would prefer the terms transformed and enriched. Such words sit more comfortably with the processes of exchange evident in the creation of the sand design in New York; the men, like many of the painters who offer visual art depictions of their cosmology to the broader community, believe they are communicating something valuable that will be enriching if received with sensitivity and understanding.

With these thoughts in mind I want to return to Alison Anderson’s comments at the Unique Perspectives exhibition opening. She makes an astute comparison between the paintings and a temple that holds within its walls secret and holy books:

The old painters only wanted to show you the beauty of their culture: not its inner depths. It is as if a western religion had a beautiful temple, and you were free to go inside it, but not look into the secret holy books. That’s what the old artists wanted.

The notion of a secret domain of sacred space and experience is not exclusive to Aboriginal culture—consequently I think Anderson’s comparison is extremely pertinent. The demarcation of existence into sacred and profane realms is a common human impulse. For example, as Carl Kerenyi explains in Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter (1967), the Eleusinian initiation rituals in ancient Greece took place in a temple whose centre was only approached by the initiated in silence. As he writes:

certain rites in themselves imposed secrecy on those who partook of them. But this direct effect could have its source only in the ineffable centre of the rites. Around the centre were grouped elements less charged with emotion, concerning which it was necessary to order silence.

These comments could equally well apply to the sacred caves and springs central to Aboriginal religious belief—or to the sacred designs and objects that are both “dear” and “dangerous”, and which are only to be approached with extreme circumspection and reverence.

Anderson also discussed the veil of secrecy, the “hidden meanings behind the surface stories” the paintings depict. What is significant is not so much what is behind the “veil”, behind the “surface beauty” of the paintings, but that the notions of surface and hidden depth exist in the first place. Aboriginal religious phenomenology has strict protocols that demarcate the sacred and the profane in a manner similar to that evident in ancient Eleusis. Therefore, the notion of sacredness and secrecy which is evident in classical Aboriginal religious thought, and which is central to the practice of contemporary art, may be seen as the expression of an ancient and ubiquitous human impulse. The absence of such a distinction in Australian secular intellectual and cultural life is expressive of, or may contribute to, the spiritual malaise of our post-industrial condition, a sense of absence that it is more often silently endured than adequately resolved.

In Wildbird Dreaming: Aboriginal Art from the Central Deserts of Australia, Nadine Amadio writes eloquently of the spiritual dimension of desert art, making some astute observations regarding the mythic and symbolic nature of the paintings. As she avers, the Papunya paintings are “maps of life meaning—charts of anti-futility—symbols that the men and women of the desert have charged their life and their land with ritual rich in meaning”. Given such embodiment of religious sentiment in the Papunya paintings, it is inappropriate to claim, as Peter Howson has, that Aboriginal religion can no longer mean “anything but nostalgia for a romanticised past”.

Rich and profound religious feeling is articulated in these contemporary works, sentiments that led the art critic Robert Hughes in his review of the Dreamings exhibition to write: “[Aboriginal art] raises painful questions about the irreversible drainage from our own culture of spirituality, awe and connection to nature.” It only requires contrasting these paintings with the fragmented subjectivities we find in the works of, for example, Francis Bacon and Picasso, which are so expressive of spiritual desolation, to grasp the point Hughes is making.

In Painting Culture Myers quotes a passage from his field notes about a trip out to Papunya in the late 1970s. Myers wanted to buy a painting—but unlike other buyers he wanted more than a mere art object to hang on a wall. He told the men he wanted to buy it so as to remember the country and the people when he returned to America, to “look at it and get homesick for them”. Instantly the attitude towards the purchase changed and the men began singing the songs that would accompany the designs in a ritual context. He was told that what they were doing for him was not a just a “brush”, that “sacred words” are different. Given his attitude, some of the men who had been very wary of whites, warmed to Myers. As the men sang for him they looked forward to Myers reciprocating their gesture of warm acceptance into their community. As he noted in his field notes, using initials for some of the men: “Pinny too seems genuinely interested in me for the first time. CT and WW say they may try to come and see me in my country, as painting men!”