1. Contemporary Indigenous Art
Papunya Tula & Beyond

2. Historical periods in Indigenous art
Before 1788 Pre settlement- Before European settlement in Australia. Traditional art making practices using purely natural materials and used surfaces such as rock, bark sand and the body
1788- Post-Colonial- after Australia became a colony of Britain. Many Indigenous artists carried on as before although some artists were exposed to western traditions and materials near European settlement.
1971 -After Papunya Tula was established- introduction of western art materials in the central desert had a significant impact on the future of Indigenous art and art market. It became much more widespread for Indigenous artists to use acrylic paint and canvas.
1990’s – Impact of the Digital Age and Post Modern practice on Indigenous artists and their adoption of new media and contemporary techniques evident in the practices in the art world

3. Influence of Papunya Tula After 1971 -

4. Papunya Tula- Key work
Exhibited in 'Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius',, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2000
Collaboration between Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri
& Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri
Warlugulong Papunya, Northern Territory Australia
synthetic polymer paint on canvas Dimensions x 170.5cm
Art Gallery of NSW Collection - go to this link for the story behind the work

5. Papunya Tula Revision Papunya Tula Movement started in 1971
School teacher Geoffrey Barden encouraged men to paint murals on a blank school wall and introduced acrylic paints and canvas to the community artists
Papunya , a community 240km north-west of Alice Springs.
Papunya Tula was a government settlement
Style is derived from traditional sand and body painting
Materials are Western materials, acrylic paints and canvas, boards.
Sacred symbols have been removed

6. Timmy Payungka TjapangatiUntitled synthetic polymer paint on linen canvas 1998
Timmy Payungka Tjapangati was among the first Pintupi men to begin painting on hardboard at Papunya in He had lived in his traditional country in the Gibson Desert to the west of the Wilkinkarra (Lake Mackay) saltpan.
Tjapangati was working on the farm at Papunya when he and other Pintupi men took up the brush. In the late 1970s he spent much of his time with his relatives at Balgo Mission, to the north-west of Papunya, and did not paint for the market for extended periods. Tjapangati was a vital force behind the eventual return of the Pintupi to their traditional country of Kiwirrkura in the mid-1980s.
AGNSW Collection informationhttp://

7. Shifts in Indigenous art after Papunya Tula 1971-
Over time Indigenous Artworks became known as fine art objects rather than ethnographic & museum artefacts
Indigenous artworks were no longer ephemeral (such as sand paintings and body paintings) and the works became accessible to exhibiting in the western gallery context and to be sold in the Australian and international art market
Many Indigenous artists continue to represent their ancestral Dreamings in traditional style but use Western materials. Indigenous artworks both traditional and contemporary represent cultural values and beliefs that relate to the land, spirituality and social experiences of the world around them. Structural organisation of artworks include encoded symbolism and visual imagery to communicate cultural meanings.
Indigenous art has since become the most significant Australian visual art export to the world

8. Shields Display - Aboriginal Cultures Gallery (South Australian Museum) Valuing the Indigenous cultural objects as a part of visual arts and craft world
Ethnographic photograph- documenting the Other
Tourism and sale of aboriginal cultural objects – promoting , educating and manufacturing items of Indigneous culture as curios
Gallery owner Brian Bozorg in his Aboriginal art gallery Gannon House Gallery, New South Wales, Australia Valuing the artists merit of Indigenous artists
Display at the Australian Institute of Anatomy on gathering and preparing food using some of Basedow's photographs. Defining and catagorising the Other

9. The Museum versus Fine Art Gallery
Ethnographic studies of the Australian aborigines understood as images and objects from traditional communities as cultural artefacts – not fine art objects. Objects from the Other, exotic `Nobel savages’ not the production of artistic significance.
The aesthetics and techniques of the aborigines was not at first valued by those accustomed to European tastes.
Today, all Australian state and national galleries house significant collections in both traditional and contemporary art.
Consider: How and why do you think this artistic value of Indigenous art has changed??

10. Contemporary Issues in Indigenous Art

11. Contemporary Indigenous Art
Western audiences expectations as to what aboriginal art should be focused on Traditional symbolic landscape and Dreamtime stories and this has become a stereotype of Australian Indigenous art.
Popularisation of traditional Indigenous painting led to breeches of copyright and the unauthorized mass reproduction of artworks (such as on tea towels, carpets and fabric designs) and the breaking of sacred symbolic rites not understood by western audiences.
Urban Indigenous artists have since found their own means of expression in non-traditional Indigenous styles and have made a mark on the Australian art world. Some even adopting Modernist art styles in their practice.
Many contemporary Indigenous artists have used their artworks to make political statements such as about inequality, mistreatment, racism, dispossession and loss of their ancestral land.
Like other contemporary artists, many Indigenous artists of today use new media technologies and experiment with new and unique forms of expression to represent their world and experiences.

12. Aboriginal Art and Copyright
The first Australian decimal currency one dollar note featured an aboriginal bark painting by David Daymirringu. The use of this image was unauthorized by the artist.
The oversight was due to an assumption that the design was by an anonymous and probably long dead artist. Since the bills had already been printed any redesign would have been extremely costly. The story has it that David eventually agreed to have his copyrights paid with 500 dollars, a medal and an army tent.
Wanduk Marika (Arnhem Land) first confronted the courts with the issue of copyright in Aboriginal Art, showing tea towels bearing unauthorised Aboriginal images
One-dollar bill and David Malangi's artwork. You can see clearly how the note copies parts of David's painting into the design Read more:

13. Indigenous Artists using Western Styles
Albert Namatjira is best known for his watercolour Australian outback desert landscapes, a style which inspired the Hermannsburg School of Aboriginal art. While his work is obviously the product of his life and experiences, his paintings are not in the highly symbolic style of traditional Aboriginal art; they are richly detailed depictions using a western viewpoint and painting style.
Albert Namatjira
Mount Sonder, MacDonnell Ranges
c watercolour and pencil on paper
National Gallery of Australia

14. Albert Namatjira- painter
Albert Namatjira became a household name during the 1950’s and his works were the subject of mass production of prints commonly hung in domestic homes.
He is also notable for being the first
Northern Territory Aborigine to be granted Australian citizenship in the sense of being freed from the restrictions of discriminatory legislation that made Aborigines wards of the State. Aboriginal people were not acknowledged as citizens of Australia until the referendum of 1967, they first voted in 1972.
Despite Namatjira’s success he was the subject of criticism from both Indigenous and white Australians due to his style crossing cultural boundaries of western and aboriginal aesthetics.

15. NATIONAL ABORIGINAL & TORRES STRAIT ISLANDER ART AWARD
This award is a national art award for contemporary Indigenous art
running since the 1980’s.
It is the longest running art award dedicated to the work of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists. It is considered the premier national event in the Australian Indigenous arts calendar.
The Telstra Art Award aims to showcase the very best Australian Indigenous art from around the country, and is open to all adult Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists.
In 2010, the Telstra Art Award will continue to award the $40,000 Telstra Award and $4,000 to other categories including; the Telstra General Painting Award, the Telstra Bark Painting Award, the Telstra Work on Paper Award and the Wandjuk Marika Memorial 3D Award (also sponsored by Telstra), with the addition of the New Media Award ($3,000).
New Media is an emerging category into the Telstra Art Award and aims to recognise and celebrate the increasing number of Indigenous artists using new media as part of their art practice. New media works can range from conceptual to virtual art and could be in the form of installation or mixed media presentation.

16. Tjampi Desert Weavers Tjanpi Toyota, 2005
Tjanpi (meaning grass) began as a series of basket-weaving workshops held on the Ngaanyatjarra Lands in Western Australia by the NPY Women’s Council in Torres
©Tjanpi Desert Weavers
Anne Dixon with her baskets, 2010

17. Tjampi Desert Weavers Tjanpi Toyota, 2005
Winner, 22nd Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award, 2005
Desert Grass, Jute string, aviary mesh, steel, found hubcaps, numberplates and steering wheel, recycled wood planks.
Tjanpi Weavers from Blackstone Community: Kantjupai Benson, Shirley Bennet, Nuniwa Donegan (Dec'd), Margaret Donegan, Melissa Donegan, Janet Forbes, Ruby Forbes (dec'd), Deidre Lane, Elaine Lane, Wendy Lane, Angela Lyon, Sarkaway Lyon, Angaliya Mitchell, Mary Smith, Gail Nelson.
Aquired by the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Teritory through the 22nd National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award. ©Tjanpi Desert Weavers

18. Political Aboriginal Art
Some Indigenous artists use art to protest about political Indigenous issues and social inequity in Australia.
Many of these works are confronting are designed to confront the audience with current issues and provoke the audience to consider treatment of Aboriginals both past and present as well as confront their own prejudices.
Some Indigenous artists have used symbolism to raise political issues in a less aesthetically confronting manner.

19. RAMINGINING ARTISTS Raminginging, Northern Territory, Australia The Aboriginal Memorial 1987-88
This artistic collaboration was created in the Bicentenary year of Australian white settlement.
Ramingining Artists, The Aboriginal Memorial, ; via

20. Ramingining Artists, The Aboriginal Memorial, 1987-88
Since 1788 at least 300  000, perhaps a million, Aboriginal people have died at the hands of white invaders...throughout the land in every country town, there was an obelisk to those who had fallen in this war or that, but nowhere was there a memorial to those first Australians who died defending their country.
Within a year of the arrival of the first settler fleet in Sydney, Aboriginal deaths from introduced diseases spread along traditional trade routes well inland, decimating societies along the way. And right up to the early decades of the twentieth century, massacres of Aboriginal people occurred throughout the land. Death came swiftly and was so widespread that in many cases there was no-one to bury the dead.  This is still ‘secret history’ for most of Australia.
In 1988, Australia celebrated the bicentenary of European settlement. For Indigenous people this was no time to celebrate and a number of artists withdrew their work from related exhibitions.
Text © National Gallery of Australia, Canberra From: Franchesca Cubillo and Wally Caruana (eds) Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art: collection highlights National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2010

21. Ramingining Artists, The Aboriginal Memorial, 1987-88
The white Australian Bicentenary celebrations in 1988
presented an opportunity to make a strong statement
about a national event.
The idea of so many people for whom proper burial rites had not been performed led me to think of the painted hollow log coffins made by artists today. In the Dupun ceremony the bones of the deceased are placed in the hollow log coffin, which then embodies the soul. The idea for The Aboriginal Memorial was born: a memorial consisting of 200 hollow log coffins, one for each year of European occupation. The installation would be like a forest—a forest like a large war cemetery, a war memorial for all those Aboriginal people who died defending their country.
Memorial included the work of 43 artists.... the National Gallery was looking for powerful and inspirational works of art to match in iconic status Jackson Pollock’s Blue poles in the Gallery’s collection. They agreed ...to provide funds to complete the project, in effect commissioning the work for the Gallery.
For the artists, the placement of the Memorial at the Gallery, in the Parliamentary Triangle, the centre of Australian government, is poignant: a memorial to the victims of settlement and a symbol for an egalitarian future, in the heart of the nation.

22. Gordon Bennett- Painter
The paintings of Gordon Bennett are loaded with graphic detail, narrative, words, grids, commercial logos, patterns and linear perspectives, all punching at one another in moody arguments.
...we see the appropriation of generic Aboriginal dots in the re-creation of archival photographs of horrible episodes in colonial history. An example is Freedom fighters of 1989, showing chained Aborigines, deposited arbitrarily over a red landscape, which is inscribed with incongruous perspectival boxes. The geometric corners are given letters, insisting on the perfectly mapped, controlled and planned character of European vision, settled on paper and imposed by force on Australian soil.
...Bennett's appropriation of American gestural abstraction, interpreted with Aboriginal colours and overlaid with discouraging symbols of European hegemony. In Big romantic painting (The apotheosis of Captain Cook) of 1993, indigenous figures witness the heroic death struggles of the triumphant white invaders,...
Adapted from : The Age.com.au

23. Gordon Bennett Gordon Bennett's Possession Island (1991).
Gordon Bennett Home decor (Algebra) boomerang,

24. Gordon Bennett- Painter
A fierce critique of aesthetic aggression is poignant in Poet and muse (1991), where a whip-brandishing whitefella is equated with the Pollock-style artist who flings paint on the canvas: from whip to drip, the imposing gesture lashes history, always at the expense of an implicitly primitive and passive past. The triumphal march of individual expression is supported by the "other", for Bennett an Aboriginal "muse" on the beach, now under the fling and slash of the invader.
During the later 1990s, the framework of style as a kind of conceptual trap extends to the early modern movement, especially de Stijl. Within its abstract and supposedly universal grids, the Aboriginal figure is caught, imprisoned, anomalous, out of history, an aesthetic figurative disgrace that disappoints the aspiration to total non-objective transcendence. So it makes sense that the blackfellas are painted a la Margaret Preston, like decorative artefacts that intrude pathetically on the Olympian designs of abstraction.

25. Richard Bell- Art activist & painter
Richard Believes that
" … it is my job as an artist to test people's resolve, to provoke thought and that's what I do, I provoke thought and discussion.“
Profile on ABC-TV's Message Stick by Rachel Maza 2004
Though he may not have expected to win Australia's most important Indigenous art prize, Richard Bell got as much if not more attention for what he wore on the day, "white girls can't hump".

26. His piece Scientia E. Metaphysica Bell’s Theorem (Aboriginal Art It’s a White Thing) earned him the 2003 Telstra National Aboriginal Arts Award.

27. Richard Bell- Art Activist & Painter
Born in Charleville into the Kamilaroi tribe and currently living in Brisbane, Richard Bell was a leader in the first group of urban Indigenous artists whose work provided a means of expression during the period leading up to the 1988 bi-centenary of white Australian settlement. During this time, Richard’s concentration was on ‘challenging non-Indigenous artists who appropriated Indigenous imagery in their work’ and the common notions of traditional and modern Indigenous art.
Today, Bell’s pieces utilize dot application, cross hatching and traditional hand stencils to examine ‘the historical treatment of Aboriginal people after European settlement’.
His work addresses contemporary issues such as religion, art and politics, and responds to issues of oppression, frustration and discrimination. Notably, he also derives influence from American 20th century pop artist Roy Lichtenstein and Bell uses the popular comic book style to illustrate the friction found on the Black/White divide.
Richard Bell

28. Richard Bell
Richard Bell – Masterpiece, 2003
Biblica Richard Bell

29. New Media & Indigenous Art
Media areas of photography, video, sound and multimedia.
Many Indigenous artists use new media art forms as it does not hold the western and white histories that the art forms of painting, sculpture and architecture traditionally have.
This allows them to forge a new forms of artistic expression and aesthetic to communicate their own stories to audiences. (self determination).

30. Destiny Deacon- Digital Photographer
Destiny Deacon (b. 1957), an Australian artist (from the language groups Kuku / Erub, East Cape region / Torres Strait region), has produced some interesting Polaroid work, much of which is presented as large scale prints rather than the initial Polaroids, with and without the distinctive white borders. Much of this work appears to be derived from Spectra / Image System Polaroids.
Destiny Deacon ... presents ..large format colour photographs that explore the narrative and performative potential of objects, as well as their ability to evoke and provoke.
Deacon, an Australian Aboriginal artist, constructs powerful political messages about race, gender, violence, and sexuality using dolls, souvenirs, and other kitsch objects that perpetuate stereotypes.
Adapted from :

31. Destiny deacon - Photographer
Destiny Deacon (born1957) Meloncholy, 2000
Destiny Deacon (Australia), Adoption (1993/2000) Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney Unstilled Lives: Destiny Deacon and Evergon 2005

32. Destiny Deacon- Photographer
Destiny Deacon Over The Fence.  
Lambda print from Polaroid
Look out! Photographic inkjet print from digital image on archival paper
60.0 x 80.0cm i

33. Tracey Moffatt- Photographer & filmaker
Tracey Moffatt Some Lads # 1, 1986 series of 5 images photograph 20 x 24 Edition of 30

34. Tracey Moffatt
Tracey Moffatt first came to prominence in the Australian art world with her series Something More. Commissioned in 1989 by the Albury Regional Art Gallery and shot in the Link Studios in Wodonga, the series set the tone and themes of much of her later work. In a sequence of nine images, Something More is a loose narrative in which the artist puns on the possible meanings of the title and its veiled references to sadomasochism.
In the first image of the series Something More #1 Moffatt appears in the centre of frame in an Asian dress set against a hut in which a woman in a white dress leans against the door. Two children look on and a man in a coolie hat is seen in the background. The backdrop is painted and the image has the look of a film set. Moffatt's image seeks to confuse and disturb meanings of cultural identification while questioning the authenticity of the presentation by reinforcing its own 'fake' construction. The subsequent images in the series present variations on these ideas.
Adapted from: Accessed May

35. Tracey Moffatt- Something More series 1989
Tracey Moffatt Something More # 1, 1989 series of 9 images Cibachrome 98 × 127cm Edition of 30

36. Tracey Moffatt- Something More series 1989
Tracey Moffatt Something More # 5, 1989 series of 9 images Cibachrome 98 × 127cm Edition of 30

37. Tracey Moffatt- film Other 2009
A Tracey Moffatt and Gary Hillberg video collaboration Other, 2009 DVD 7 minutes Edition of 200 (Still)

38. The Other & the Frames - Revision
The Post Modern Frame
The notion of the Other allows for a post modern analysis which challenges traditional values of what is art? and what is worthy Visual arts subject matter. Post modern material practice allows for unconventional ways of representing ideas.
The following art making practices may be used by artists outside the mainstream artworld:
Appropriation allows artists to expose omissions of the past through parody, satire, irony
New technologies are often used as they are not a part of the institutionalized history of art (such as painting and sculpture) – new media allows artists to forge a new path with a new voice.
Works often allow for questioning & challenging in unconventional ways
Artworks may be shocking/confronting subject matter in order to expose inequity in society and in art history.
Indigenous works may utilise craft processes often not associated with fine art or high art values.

39. Homework- Post Modern Frame- 2 pages
Explain how contemporary Indigenous artists have used their art to challenge, shock or make political statements about how aboriginals have been portrayed and valued in Australian society and culture.
Refer to two artists and their artwork in your response.

40. References
Gordon Bennett: The Age.com.au
Richard Bell tracey Moffatt
Destiny Deacon AGNSW collection :
NATIONAL ABORIGINAL & TORRES STRAIT ISLANDER ART AWARD
Art Gallery of NSW Collection
Tjampi Desert weavers:
Powerpoint: Ms jo knight 2011