While non-Indigenous artists may have to wait until they’re dead to get an institutional retrospective exhibition, it seems that the process can be speeded up for the Indigenous. In Melbourne currently we have the urbane Reko Rennie recognised by the NGV with a major show of a career which only began in 2008; while at ACCA, as contemporary as its rusted Corten steel carapace might suggest, the Tennant Creek Brio have hit the southern ground at full speed after a mere eight years to fill this gallery with an exhibition hailed by ACCA CEO Max Delaney as “a wonderful and wild ride, and very much a collaborative enterprise, in keeping with The Brio method”. It’s a much more complete picture than their emergence at the 2020 Sydney Biennale, NIRIN.
From the Overland Telegraph linking Australia’s South to the Empire in the 1870s, via a gold rush, subsequent industrial mining and agriculture, missions, the Coniston Massacre in 1929 sending Warlpiri fleeing north into Waramungu Country, all these intercultural histories are reflected in the Brio way of “collaborative creolisation, collage, bricolage and assemblage. Driving their practice is the importance of truth telling and future thinking, and a desire for how First Nations and non-Indigenous people might better live together, care for Country, and for one another”.
Explaining the exhibition’s title, Juparnta Ngattu Minjinypa Iconocrisis, the catalogue says, “Opening in Warumungu, Juparnta Ngattu conjures notions of ceremonial strength and power through image-making, while the Walpiri term, Minjinypa, means ‘cheeky one’ or troublemaker”. Completed by the newly-minted Iconocrisis, this gathering of the languages attests to the formal, linguistic and material collisions inherent in TCB’s creative and cultural practice, while highlighting their irreverent approach to bringing images, icons and ideologies into question.
In all, there are 10 language groups gathered in Tennant Creek, and TCB consists of a mix of them in the persons of Fabian Brown Japaljarri, Lindsay Nelson Jakamarra, Rupert Betheras, Joseph Williams Jungarayi, Clifford Thompson Japaljarri, Jimmy Frank Jupurrula. Fabian Rankine Jampijinpa, Marcus Camphoo Kemarre, with Eleanor Jawurlngali Dixon, Lévi McLean, Gary Sullibhaine and sculptural fabricator Jonathan Leahey.
The extensive show includes just about every one of The Brio’s practices of reinscribing their experiences, cultural identity and mark making on to found materials such as oil barrels, car bonnets, solar panels, poker machines, television screens, and geological maps from the abandoned Warrego and Peko mines. Confronting the local clash of histories and belief systems, the exhibition explores themes of extraction, reclamation and collaboration.
It’s Urban art from remote Australia. With Melburnians undoubtedly picking up on the name of TCB founding member Rupert Betheras, who originally arrived to lead art therapy workshops at the health centre with the men. He’s a legendary name in Magpie footy history!
Outstanding in my memory is a new sculpture, Kunari by Jimmy Frank Jupurrula, backgrounded by a wall-work Rainbow Serpent crafted from oil barrel lids. Kunari, the lightening story, represents a ‘Black Zeus’ figure in the recycled form of a plaster statue of the Incredible Hulk’s muscular arm that’s survived where his body hasn’t, with a raised spear expertly carved in mulga wood in his clenched fist…..a monumental testament to Warumungu law, protocol, power and resilience. It’s a fascinatingly agit-prop contrast to Reko Rennie’s coloured neon version of a clean-cut warrior hero based on Adam Goodes’s infamous war dance.
Elsewhere at ACCA you find a salon hang of cartesian empiricism. Using maps salvaged from the disused (and unrefurbished) Warrego mine which privilege colonial claims, and delineate the intrusive presence of telegraph and cattle stations, mining allotments and infrastructure, missions, and township boundaries. All that was off-limits to the Warumungu for almost forty years from the 1930s. Of course, an alternative mapping of Country predates these cartographies, in the songlines and sites of cultural and ceremonial significance which connect clans, Country and Warumungu kinship. So why not redraw and overlay as a way The Brio can reclaim Country and culture, so that different types of knowledge can sit alongside one another as parallel perspectives.
One graffitied poem stood out: “It was taken/then the people/was awaken/from the taken/from the mining”.
There are also gem-like sand stories on mud bricks that recall a story-telling just a little more ancient than graffiti!
The curatorial team of outgoing ACCA CEO Max Delany with Jessica Clark, Elyse Goldfinch and Shelley McSpedden were well advised by the Nyinkka Nyunyu Art and Culture Centre’s manager, Erica Izett.
TENNANT CREEK BRIO at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art until 17 November.
It all felt a whole lot dirtier and more real than the NGV’s tribute to Reko Rennie. Strange, because he too emerged from a graff tradition in Melbourne’s western suburbs – something he captures well in a night-time film driving a Westie Holden in a wet, street-light lit city. My problem is that Rennie’s emergence today as one of Australia’s most respected contemporary artists (the NGV’s assessment) has somehow encouraged his political intent to become prettified. Lots of colour and pattern, less content.
The NGV also see this him as having “the intention of subverting romantic ideologies of Aboriginal identity, (so) audiences can see a mix of Kamilaroi diamond-shaped designs, hand-drawn symbols and repetitive patterning displayed in his art”. This, of course, could be read as supporting the proppaNOW group’s dirtier usage of the term “Oooga-Boogas” to de-romanticise (and insult) classical/remote Aboriginal artists. “A bold contemporary point of view,” NGV director Tony Ellwood calls it. But the Brisbane mob don’t have Rennie’s marketing magic which now allows him to ask more than $50,000 for his elegant canvasses.
Comparisons with the Americans Basquiat and Keith Haring seem less and less reasonable as Rennie moves further from his graff origins. The monumental 15-metre-wide illuminated text work, Remember Me seems clean and elegant miles away from its stated intent of memorialising Indigenous lives lost in frontier wars. Even his National Gallery Triennial three-channel video work OA_RR, in which he drives a Rolls-Royce, painted in his signature lurid camouflage style, “doing raging burnouts” to reclaim the Kamilaroi land where his grandmother was forcibly ‘taken away’, seems pristine compared to his older Holden film.
Perhaps I should bear in mind that, despite his trenchant words, it would seem that the artist would prefer to be adjudged only on the aesthetics of his art. Last year, the Station Gallery wrote of an exhibition, “Rennie asks why First Nations artists are still so often positioned within the context of their Indigeneity. This discussion of identity politics in art has been around for decades, and within the Australian context has been voiced by other high profile artists including Gordon Bennett and Tracey Moffat”. Rennie seems to want it both ways.
Interestingly, that was his seventh exhibition with Station. This year, he’s gone round the corner in Sydney to the dynamic Ames Yavuz Gallery – who offer international exposure – with a series of human figures, often with cars, that are as colourful as ever, but faceless. They are, we’re told, “faceless figures that represent a defiant reimagining of the urban landscape as a space of Indigenous resilience, progress, and success”. Certainly a success for the artist if he sells out at $50,000+ each!
Once again we’re informed, “I’m excited and proud of this new body of work at Ames Yavuz. The figurative elements throughout Urban Rite play on smashing romanticised notions of Aboriginal identity,” he said. Significantly, for me, it was apparent that faceless figures decorated with his Kamilaroi patterning displayed a boldness, almost an aggression that the plain (non-Indigenous?) faceless men lacked. Perhaps that’s because “They’re about resisting stereotypes and reclaiming space, blending urban aspirations with a rich spiritual identity”?
Yavuz Gallery 114 Commonwealth Street, NSW 2010, showing until the 9th of November 2024.
