Progress and regression! Before it opened, I wrote about the National Gallery of Australia’s new Emily Kam Kngwarray exhibition to share some of my understanding of the great lady from Utopia, having concluded I had the right to write because “I feel I’ve just lived with Kam!”.
Now I’m going right back through my Emily archive to call her Kame again – because that’s how it’s pronounced according to people who knew her. And I’m sticking with Kngwarreye (an e rather than a) despite the NGA’s best efforts because I read in one catalogue that Prof Christine Nichols believes we should respect Emily’s wishes in life, which were to have her name spelt Emily Kame Kngwarreye in English.
Bugger the orthographers!
And, I suppose, ignore linguist Jenny Green, who’s had a lot to do with the new exhibition – as she has every right to do, having both introduced batik to Utopia and mastered Emily’s Anmatyerre language. So the NGA features a lot of Emily’s batik work to justify that history, and Jenny has taken curators Kelli Cole and Hetti Perkins back to meet the rellies at Utopia to help us all understand Emily that much better.
But there’s a worrying moment in the lovely film taken of that encounter when said rellies admit that they don’t actually know the songs that Green has recorded Emily singing – but would like to learn them. How close can they have been to That Old Lady, who died without issue in 1996?
But at least we do learn much about the botany behind the Kame/Yam seed in the catalogue from which Emily’s name and cultural roots undoubtedly derive. Did you know that it changes from white, to yellow to brown as it matures – not unlike Emily’s seasonal changes of painting style? I’m just not sure that these new insights emerge directly from the exhibition itself.
When I think back to some of the exhibitions I’ve seen dating from 1989 – the first sighting of the famous Summer Project which featured Emily’s Emu Woman on the cover; via her Venice Biennale appearance in 1997; Margo Neale’s alhalkere – Paintings from Utopia in 1998 in Brisbane and Sydney; followed by her Japanese and National Museum outings acknowledging ‘The Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye’ in 1998 – nothing much has changed.
Actually, I lie. For virtually unnoticed by other commentators, the NGA show actually opens with a whole wall of the Summer Project paintings – presumably still in the Holmes a Court Collection, which saved the Utopia artists’ bacon by buying all 81 works. Fascinatingly, Anne Brody, the Collection’s curator then revealed her intention at the time to present “an impressive collective statement about community life”. But of course, her selection of Emily’s Emu Woman for the catalogue cover kicked off the radically different history of recognising Aboriginal artists as individuals with different levels of both skill and market appeal.
What a shame that the NGA didn’t hang Emily in the midst of the likes of Nora Kemarre Moore, Ada Bird and Rene Kngwarreye to see if we could spot the rising star!
From that startling communal proof of a capacity to translate the world around the artists to a foreign visual medium, we jump back to the batiks – and I have to acknowledge that Emily did make progress from her early technical unease to the beginnings of control in 1987/8. Which was precisely when Rodney Gooch of the CAAMA shop was put in charge of art from Utopia – seven remote outstations scattered over 1800 sq kms of the almost-Simpson Desert. As well as supplying acrylic paint and 100 primed canvases for the Summer Project (and getting 81 back after just a week – there was a hunger out there!) he would go on to encourage the women to paint in blues, greens, pinks and purples, try experimental circular canvases or car doors, and generally invent the role of the activist art adviser who knew his market.
Within a year of her first canvas, Emily was exhibiting the first signs of her masterly control of brush and paint in Untitled (Alhalker) and then a carefully gradated 5-panel work, Alhalker Country in 1990. She was about to advance to her brilliant over-dotting period invariably blending a range of three or four different colours that was more than a match for Kandinsky’s early efforts – followed by the bigger dump-dump dots that were surely less effort.
Sadly, I believe Emily’s decrease in effort lead into her notorious Colourist period identified by Margo Neale. For then Emily seemed to lose her fastidious capacity to connect colours and her brushstrokes became slap-dash. The NGA is so proud of its 22-panel Alhalker Suite, but I can find nothing in it to justify the curators’ claims that it visualises “an aerial perspective of waterways, spinifex sand plains and variable topographies”. That description might well justify the great sweeps of grass and flower movement in Kam (1991), but offers no explanation of those canvases.
Who commissioned the work, I wonder and gave Emily those paints??? She wasn’t entirely autonomous.
I have to take you back to the living Emily to justify my understanding. Recalled for an exhibition in 1994, the writer Rudolph Talmacs describes events in 1993 when Emily was in Sydney and asked to sing one of her paintings. An outstretched arm identified an area of it, and “a thin droning voice began intoning – soon joined by her friend Gloria Petyarre. Another region of the painting was identified and a new song was started. Then a third, given over to the utmost inner awareness and concentration. It was spell-binding…….Her paintings are, in essence, a prayer for Country, for the ancestral spirits embodied within it, and for the nourishment of that life cycle that passes through it”.
Do we get to feel that extraordinary mix of aesthetic sense, painterly vigour and spiritual underpinning at the Gallery in Canberra?
Maybe in the exhibition’s last room where the 8 metre Big Yam takes a whole wall, a pair of smaller black and white yam works mix and match the tonal order, and Wild Yam VI is a fascinating mass of yellows with a challenging purple patch. But Emily’s dynamic couldn’t be stopped there – three errant red lines reveal she just couldn’t quite stop herself even when she’d achieved perfection; as does a patch of scrabbled white lines in the Big Yam which suggests just a tiny break in her dynamic concentration over this massive work.
Interestingly, the catalogue reveals that for once in her career, she brought friends and family to see this work at Delmore Downs Station two days after finishing it. Her normal process was to declare a work “pretty….whole lot”, and then head off for tea.
But then I’m undoubtedly missing so much with my non-Anmatyerre eyes; which is why so many commentators fall back on abstraction and abstract expressionism to try to make sense of Aboriginal art. James Mollison did it when he bought the NGA’s first Emily from CAAMA – but did it matter? And I must admit I did it when writing about the 1998 alhalkere exhibition. “The all-over picture relies on a surface knit of identical or closely similar elements which repeat themselves without marked variation from one edge to the other. It dispenses apparently with beginning, middle or end, dissolving the pictorial into pure texture, sheer sensation”.
Sounds like Emily? In fact it was critic Clement Greenberg in the 1950s explaining (and admiring) American Abstract Expressionism.
But then the great Australian anthropologist Howard Morphy also talks up the cross-over in his Yolngu art commentary: “The more knowledge one gains of the designs, the less abstract they seem, yet the more the process of abstraction becomes apparent”. In other words, Emily is abstracting from her real knowledge of story, Country and body painting as she daubs.
Which leaves me one final thought from the exhibition’s linear, body-painting derived room. Oddly, the fine Sydney Morning Herald critic John McDonald took exception to Untitled (1996) – “a crude grid of white and purple lines on a brownish backdrop, that make one pause in wonder”. In my eyes this was a gestural work that Tony Tuckson might have created at his peak. And from the catalogue I discovered that it was the last work Emily did for Rodney Gooch – seizing a canvas prepared for another artist when he attempted to tell her she should just retire and enjoy life. She still needed to paint.
And she went on to paint until the very end, well after the NGA’s exhibition closes. Why have they left out all of the 24 small canvases that the ailing Emily is said to have insisted on doing with a 6 inch house-painting brush for her great-nephew Fred Torres’ Dacou Gallery just before she died? She simply needed to paint. And the big Japanese exhibition saw a Buddhist Nirvana in the work they starred on their catalogue cover.
So it’s a disappointment in Canberra that undermines curator Kelli Cole’s claims to be attempting “a major survey exhibition, but the consultation and community involvement definitely make it a more thorough, engaging and distinguished exhibition”.
