remote avant garde by jennifer loureide biddle

JENNIFER LOUREIDE BIDDLE

REMOTE AVANT-GARDE Aboriginal Art under Occupation

REMOTE AVANT- GARDE

Objects/HistOries

Critical Perspectives on Art, Material Culture, and Representation

A series edited by Nicholas Thomas

REMOTE AVANT- GARDEAboriginal Art under Occupation

Jennifer Loureide Biddle

Duke University Press | Durham and London | 2016

© 2016 Duke University PressAll rights reservedPrinted in the United States of America on acid- free paper ♾Interior design by Mindy Basinger HillTypeset in Minion Pro by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication DataBiddle, Jennifer Loureide, author.Remote avant- garde : aboriginal art under occupation / Jennifer Loureide Biddle.pages cm—(Objects/histories)Includes bibliographical references and index.isbn 978- 0- 8223- 6055- 1 (hardcover : alk. paper)isbn 978- 0- 8223- 6071- 1 (pbk. : alk. paper)isbn 978- 0- 8223- 7460- 2 (e- book)1. Artists, Aboriginal Australian—Australia—Northern Territory. 2. Art, Aboriginal Australian—Australia—Northern Territory. 3. Aboriginal Australians—Australia—Northern Territory— Government relations. i. Title. ii. Series: Objects/histories.n7402.n67b53 2016704.03′991509429—dc232015031595

Frontispiece: June Walkutjukurr Richards, We went to the Mission and we used to paint differently, 2007. © Warburton Arts Project. Image courtesy of Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art.Cover art: Pantjiti Ungkari Mackenzie posing with Niningka Lewis’s Tjanpi Film Camera, npy Women’s Council car park, Alice Springs, 2007. © Tjanpi Desert Weavers, npy Women’s Council. Photo by J. Foster.

Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the unsw Art & Design, University of New South Wales (formerly College of Fine Arts), which provided funds toward the publication of this book.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations viiAcknowledgments xiii

intrOductiOn The Imperative to Experiment 1One Humanitarian Imperialism 21

PART I BILITERACIEStwO Tangentyere Artists 41tHree June Walkutjukurr Richards 77FOur Rhonda Unurupa Dick 91

PART II HAPTICITIESFive Tjanpi Desert Weavers 109six Warnayaka Art: Yurlpa 139seven Yarrenyty Arltere Artists 159

PART III HAPPENINGSeigHt Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route 181nine The Warburton Arts Project 197

epilOgue (Not) a “Lifestyle Choice” 217

Notes 221Further Resources 233References 235Index 257

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURESi.1. Milpirri 2012, Lajamanu, NT 4i.2. Milpirri 2012, Lajamanu, NT 5i.3. Wanta Steve Jampijinpa Patrick and performers, Milpirri 2012,

Lajamanu, NT 5i.4. Tim Jampijinpa Newth, Myra Nungarrayi Patrick, and David Japaljarri

McMicken, Milpirri 2012, Lajamanu, NT 6i.5. Artists at work, Warnayaka Art and Cultural Aboriginal Corporation, 2011,

Lajamanu, NT 8i.6. At practice for Milpirri 2011, Lajamanu, NT 151.1. Billboard, Mascot International Airport, Sydney, 2013 291.2. Gordon Bennett, Cornfield (with scarecrow), from the Bounty Hunter

series, 1991 342.1. Margaret Boko Nampitjinpa working in the Tangentyere Artists studio,

2013 422.2. Rhonda Napanangka working in the Tangentyere Artists studio, 2013 452.3. Sally M. Mulda working in the Tangentyere Artists studio, 2013 472.4. Exhibition: Selfies: Representations of Self and Town Camp Artists,

Tangentyere Artist Gallery, Alice Springs, NT, 2014 512.5. Jane Young, Little Rocks in the Simpson Desert, 2013 532.6. Recycled bottle top and tin lid earrings created by various artists,

Tangentyere Artists Gallery, 2012 542.7. Doris Thomas working in the Tangentyere Artists studio, 2013 572.8. Rhonda Napanangka, Second Hand Shopping, 2010 592.9. Margaret Boko Nampitjinpa, The Story of Mingkiri the Mouse, 2011 632.10. Margaret Boko Nampitjinpa working in the Tangentyere Artists studio,

2013 65

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2.11. Margaret Boko Nampitjinpa, White Kids and Black Kids Jumping on Cars, 2011 67

2.12. Sally M. Mulda, Policeman: Mother and Father Drunk, 2013 702.13. Exhibition: Selfies: Representations of Self and Town Camp Artists,

Tangentyere Artists Gallery, Alice Springs, NT, 2014 732.14. Sally M. Mulda, They Are Drinking Beer at Bush, 2012 732.15. Sally M. Mulda working in the studio, 2013 753.1. June Walkutjukurr Richards, Pretty Flower, undated 783.2. June Walkutjukurr Richards, Mirrka price, undated 813.3. June Walkutjukurr Richards, Carpetbagger, 2008 823.4. June Walkutjukurr Richards, Breaking our backs, 2008 843.5. June Walkutjukurr Richards, Gimme, 2008 863.6. June Walkutjukurr Richards, New Idea, 2008 873.7. June Walkutjukurr Richards, The Explorers, 2006 884.1. Rhonda Unurupa Dick with her grandmother, Mary Katatjuku Pan, at

the inaugural Desart Art Workers Photography Award 2012, Araluen Arts Centre, Alice Springs, NT 93

4.2. Rhonda Unurupa Dick, Panel 1 from the series My Great- Grandmother’s Country. My 2 Grandfather’s Mother’s Birthplace, 2012 97



5.1. Nora Holland posing with a half- made basket, “like being on television,” 2010 110

5.2. Kanytjupayi Benson (deceased), Shirley Bennett, Nuniwa Donegan (deceased), Margret Donegan, Melissa Donegan, Janet Forbes, Ruby Forbes (deceased), Deidre Lane, Elaine Lane, Freda Lane, Janet Lane, Wendy Lane, Angela Lyon, Sarkaway Lyon, Angkaliya Mitchell, Mary Smith, and Gail Nelson, Tjanpi Toyota, 2005 111

5.3. Nyinku Kulitja teaching at Tjanpi weaving workshops at WOMADelaide Festival, 2007 113

5.4. Pile of purchased baskets at npy Women’s Council bush meeting, 2003 115

5.5. Tjanpi workshop in Tjanpi Corner, Alice Springs, NT, 2006 116

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5.6. Nyukana Baker, Basket, 2012 1185.7. Kunbry Pei Pei, Basket, 2008 1195.8. Mary Katatjuku Pan dancing with her burned tree sculpture on her head

in Pitjantjatjara country near Amata, SA, 2012 1205.9. Tjunkaya Tapaya working on her large blue bird for Paarpakani (Take

Flight), Pitjantjatjara country near Amata, SA, 2011 1215.10. Yaritji Young working on her bird for Paarpakani (Take Flight),

Pitjantjatjara country near Amata, SA, 2011 1235.11. Paniny Mick, Paarpakani (Take Flight), 2012 1245.12. Minyma Punu Kungkarangkalpa (Seven Sisters Tree Women) sculptures,

Pitjantjatjara country near Amata, SA, 2013 1255.13. Paniny Mick with her bird made for Paarpakani (Take Flight),

Pitjantjatjara country near Amata, SA, 2011 1265.14. Kanytjupayi Benson, Early Camp Crockery, 1996 1285.15. Carson Biddle with her Tjanpi sculpture produced during workshop,

Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2013 1295.16. Milyika Carol, Malpiya Davey, Pantjiti Lionel, and Niningka Lewis,

Station Scene, 2009 1305.17. Judith Inyika Chambers, The Big Green Tractor, 2014 1315.18. Tjanpi Punu, completed works in Pitjantjatjara country near Amata, SA,

2012 1335.19. Nancy Jackson and Eunice Yunurupa Porter parading with Tjilkamarta

Minyma Kutjarra Mumu Wati Ngirntaka Warta at Warakurna in Ngaanyatjarra lands of WA, 2013 135

6.1. Yukurrukurru (various), acrylic on board, Yawulyu as Intergenerational Art, Lajamanu, NT, 2011 140

6.2. Left to right: Yulurrku Nangala Kelly, Apajai aka Raphaelia Napaljarri Kelly, Lily Nungarrayi Hargraves, Lynette Napangardi Tasman, Molly Napurrurla Tasman, Rosie Napurrurla Tasman, Jennifer Nampijinpa Biddle, Myra Nungarrayi Patrick, Reide Japanangka Marshall, and Carson Napanangka Biddle, Lajamanu Warlpiri Women’s Yawulyu exhibition, opening night, Sydney, 2007 141

6.3. Lynette Napangardi Tasman, Wapirra Jukurrpa, 2007 1426.4. Rosie Napurrurla Tasman, Kalajirri Jukurrpa, 2007 1436.5. Molly Napurrurla Tasman, Ngurlu, 2007 144

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6.6. Three generations of artists at work on Liirliirpa Yurlpa (in process), Warnayaka Art and Cultural Aboriginal Corporation, Lajamanu, NT, 2011 145

6.7. Rosie Napurrurla Tasman, Ngurlu (in process), Sydney, 2007 1466.8. Rosie Napurrurla Tasman, Ngurlu Yukurrukurru (in process), Lajamanu,

NT, 2011 1486.9. Rosie Napurrurla Tasman, Ngurlu Yukurrukurru (in process), Lajamanu,

NT, 2011 1506.10. Lily Nungarrayi Hargraves, Ngalyipi Jukurrpa, 2007 1526.11. Rosie Napurrurla Tasman, Ngurlu Yukurrukurru (in process), Lajamanu,

NT, 2009 1536.12. Rosie Napurrurla Tasman, Ngurlu, 2007 1546.13. Lajamanu Warlpiri Women’s Yawulyu exhibition, opening night, Sydney,

2007 1577.1. Marlene Rubuntja, Three Women from Yarrenyty Arltere, 2014 1607.2. Yarrenyty Arltere Learning Centre, set for Little Dingi, with Tristam

Malbunka’s Grandmother, 2012 1617.3. Lorretta Banks with Marlene Rubuntja’s sculpture Little Dingi, on set at

Yarrenyty Arltere Learning Centre for Little Dingi, 2012 1637.4. Behind Yarrenyty Arltere Learning Centre with Marlene Rubuntja’s Little

Dingi and friend (untitled), with Tristam Malbunka’s Grandfather, on set for Little Dingi, 2012 166

7.5. Dulcie Sharpe, Bush Banana Kunga, 2011 1677.6. Rhonda Sharpe, I Saw Me and I Was Beautiful, 2012 1707.7. Rhonda Sharpe, They Came from Nowhere, 2013 1757.8. Rhonda Sharpe, Orange Alien, 2013 1768.1. Completed canvases laid out on the red earth at Well 36, Kilykily, August

2007 1828.2. Artists Nora Wompi, Bugai Whylouter, Kumpaya Girgaba, and Nyangapa

Nora Nangapa, Kunawarritji, 2008 1838.3. Paruku ipa artists work on their collaborative canvas, Paruku, 2007 1858.4. Kenneth K. J. Martin and Paul Oceans filming, Well 36, Kilykily,

2007 1868.5. Friday Jones and Kaye Bingham at Forrest’s Fort, Well 9, July 2007 1878.6. Eubena (Yupinya) Nampitjin painting, Well 36, Kilykily, 2007 189

illustratiOns | xi

8.7. Morika Biljabu and Nicole Ma film Jakayu Biljabu painting, Well 36, Kilykily, 2007 191

8.8. Muni Rita Simpson pointing to a water hole on the canvas, Minyipuru (Seven Sisters), 2007 192

8.9. Women painting at the Kilykily painting workshop, Well 36, 2007 1938.10. Child uses the One Road interactive, Perth, 2011 1948.11. Exhibition visitors use the One Road interactive, Perth, 2011 1959.1. Cyril Holland, Wanayowarra, 1992 2049.2. Cyril Holland, Tjuntjunmarrarra Tjipilpa, 1992 2069.3. Elizabeth Holland and Christine West, All the early days rockholes,

2001 2089.4. Tjingapa Davies, Right Way to Have a Kurri, 1991 2099.5. Elizabeth Holland, Wati Kutjarra at Talitjarra, 1992 2149.6. Exhibition installation shot: Tu Di Shen Ti—Our Land Our Body, Tianjin

Art Museum, China, 2013 2159.7. Exhibition installation shot: Tu Di Shen Ti—Our Land Our Body, Tianjin

Art Museum, China, 2013 215

PLATES1. Doris Thomas, Thats Goanna, 20112. Margaret Boko Nampitjinpa, Tjulpu and Tjitji, 20133. June Walkutjukurr Richards, The Aboriginal Broadcasting Corporation,

20064. June Walkutjukurr Richards, We went to the Mission and we used to paint

differently, 20075. Rhonda Unurupa Dick, Panel 3 from the series My Great- Grandmother’s

Country. My 2 Grandfather’s Mother’s Birthplace, 20126. Rhonda Unurupa Dick, Panel 4 from the series My Great- Grandmother’s

Country. My 2 Grandfather’s Mother’s Birthplace, 20127. Pantjiti Ungkari Mackenzie posing with Niningka Lewis’s Tjanpi Film

Camera, Alice Springs, 20078. Nyurpaya Kaika- Burton with her bird for Paarpakani (Take Flight),

Pitjantjatjara country near Amata, SA, 20119. Nyurpaya Kaika- Burton, Paarpakani (Take Flight), 2012

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10. Triumphant artists with their finished works made for Paarpakani (Take Flight), Pitjantjatjara country near Amata, SA, 2011

11. Molly Napurrurla Tasman, Yurlpa (in process), Lajamanu, NT, 201112. Rosie Napurrurla Tasman, Ngurlu/Kurlukuku/Lampurnu (Mulga

Seeds / Diamond Dove / Breast Milk Drops), 200713. Rhonda Sharpe, The Night Birds, 201214. Dulcie Sharpe, Grandmothers can rest too, sometimes, 201215. Sally Rubuntja and Marlene Rubuntja, See how we stand, proud with our

arms open!, 201316. Sally Rubuntja and Marlene Rubuntja, Woman with arms up because she is

proud!, 201317. People looking at the artworks displayed at the Nyarna, Lake Stretch Artists

Camp, August 200718. Cyril Holland, Tjillawarra Kirritji Warra Warra, 199219–20. Cyril Holland at work, Mitjika Rock Shelter, 1992

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My first thanks to the artists and community members represented here, for entrusting me with their work, and the Art Centre directors, managers, and art workers who facilitated this project, including, from Tangentyere Art-ists, Margaret Boko Nampitjinpa, Sally M. Mulda, Rhonda Napanangka, and Louise Daniels specifically, as well as Liesl Rockchild, Sue O’Connor, Sia Cox, and Jo Byrne; Yarrenyty Arltere artists Marlene Rubuntja, Dulcie Sharpe, Louise Daniels, and Louise Robertson specifically, as well as Sophie Wallace; from Tjanpi Desert Weavers, Nyurpaya Kaika- Burton, Katatjuku Mary Pan, Iluwanti Ungkutjuru Ken, Niningka Lewis, Euince Yunurupa Porter, Judith In-yika Chambers, Yaritji Young, and Janet Forbes specifically, as well as Michelle Young, Linda Rive, Clair Freer, Karina Menkhorst, and Jo Foster (especially); Tjala artists Rhonda Unurupa Dick, Katatjuku Mary Pan, Nyurpaya Kaika- Burton, and Frank Young specifically, as well as Skye O’Meara; Warnayaka Ab-original Arts and Aboriginal Cultural Organisation artists Molly Napurrurla Tasman, Rosie Napurrurla Tasman, Lily Nungarrayi Hargreaves, Myra Nun-garrayi Patrick, Lynette Napangardi Tasman, Yulurrku Zina Nangala Kelly, Lava Nangala Kelly, and Gwenyth Napanangka Tasman specifically, as well as Louisa Erglis and David Erglis; Warburton Arts Project artists and Gary Proc-tor specifically, as well as Albie Viegas; Carly Davenport, Tim Acker, John Carty, and Curtis Taylor, previous team members of Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route, and Molly Hewitt of FOrm.

To Wanta Steve Jampijinpa Patrick and Lynette Napangardi Tasman I owe specific acknowledgment not only for translations, poetics, and correctives but for enduring commitment to me, my family, and my research.

To Desart Inc. executive officer Philip Watkins and Michele Culpitt (senior program manager), for formal collaboration underpinning this research through the public platform Same but Different: Experimentation and Innova-

xiv | acknOwledgments

tion in Desert Arts, and to Lisa Stefanoff, who codeveloped this initiative with me, I am deeply indebted, as well as to all of the participants of the seventeen community art organizations who presented their works at the Same but Differ-ent forums in Alice Springs in 2012 and 2013. While the Same but Different ini-tiative and the nationally touring program Desert Animations that has accom-panied it are not the subject of this book and can be sourced directly elsewhere (see Cultural Studies Review 21 [1], 2015), I nevertheless remain indebted to the deeply generous undertaking of this collaborative platform for the development of my thinking and writing. To paw (Pintubi Anmatjere Warlpiri) Media, Susan Locke, David Slowo, and Jeff Bruer, and Nick Lee of Central Australia Aborigi-nal Media Association (caama) for recording these events for further research and outreach purposes; and to Bronwyn Taylor, Melissa Kramer, and Parris Dewhurst at Desart Inc., for their administrative support of the greater Same but Different platform, my thanks.

I am extremely fortunate to work in an academic environment where re-search is taken seriously. To the National Institute for Experimental Arts (niea), specifically, to niea director Jill Bennett, along with colleagues David McNeil, Chrisoula Lionis, Anna Munster, Michele Barker, Brenda L. Croft, and, more re-cently, Doug Kahn, Sarah Kenderdine, Mari Velonki, Laura Fisher, and Veronica Tello, I am grateful. Professional staff at niea Kathy Yeh, Rachael Kiang, Elena Knox, and, previously under the Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics (ccap), Shivaun Weybury, provided invaluable assistance to the research and writing of this book.

Colleagues Jennifer Deger, Anna Gibbs, Faye Ginsburg, Ute Eickelkamp, Diana Young, Tess Lea, Djon Mundine, r e a, John von Sturmer, Shelly Erring-ton, Hetti Perkins, Terry Smith, Josie Douglas, Chery L’Hirondelle, Chris Salter, Lisa Slater, Lilly Hibberd, Emelia Gelatis, Margaret Levi, Steven Gilchrist, David Howes, Anna Nettheim, Stephen Muecke, Ian McLean, and Beth Povinelli gen-erously provided insight at various stages of my thinking. Fred Myers inspired this project on more than one basis.

Research assistance for this book was provided by Phillipa Roberton, Els van Leeuwen, Philippa Barr, and Sudiipta Dowsett. Alison Groves worked image magic. Ellen Oredsson and Sophia Benjamin provided bibliographic assistance and Sylvia Colegrove of Rhubarb, copyediting. Caroline Marsh read early (and late) drafts, providing exactly the feedback I didn’t know I needed most. Elspeth

acknOwledgments | xv

Probyn’s critical commentary on these chapters pushed my thinking and my writing. Tim Newth and David McMicken, directors of Tracks Dance Company, share personal and professional background stories to this book that matter, as does Christiane Senn.

My children, Reide and Carson, Sophia and Stuart, have grown up over the course of the research and writing of this book. To them, to Jack Marshall and my extended family, thank you, no matter what. Roger Benjamin has been a champion cheerleader for this book and for me. And to my father, Bruce Biddle, and my aunt, Katherine Biddle, who got what I was modeling before I did my-self, I remain indebted.

Ken Wissoker, Elizabeth Ault, and Liz Smith at Duke could not have pro-vided closer attention or better advice. My thanks to Nicholas Thomas for his vital initial feedback.

This book would not have been possible without an Australian Research Council (arc) Future Fellowship (2010–14), which generously provided not only the resources for field and collaborative research but the time required for its undertaking. The former College of Fine Arts (cOFa) at unsw (now unsw Art & Design) Staff Grants and Conference Funds provided further assis-tance. The Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies ( aiatsis) funded Yawulyu as Intergenerational Art: A Pilot Study (2010), and a previous arc Discovery Project provided resources for the Lajamanu Warlpiri Women’s Workshop (research underpinning chapter 5).

Portions of this book have appeared partially or in earlier drafts: chapter 3 in “Art under Intervention: The Radical Ordinary of June Walkutjukurr Richards,” Art Monthly, no. 227 (2010); chapter 8 in “Making (Not Taking) History: Yi-warra Kuju The Canning Stock Route,” Art Monthly, August 2012; chapter 5 in “A Politics of Proximity: Tjanpi and Other Experimental Western Desert Art,” Studies in Material Thinking 8 (2012), http://www.materialthinking.org /papers/88. Chapter 6 appears as “Notes on the Hapticity of Colour,” in Diana Young, ed., Colour (London: Sean Kingston, forthcoming); republished with permission of the publisher. Chapter 9 appears in the second Tu Di Shen Ti—Our Land Our Body (2013) catalog, under the title “Provocations from the Mar-gins: The Production and Curation of the Warburton Arts Project”; republished with permission of the publisher.

REMOTE AVANT- GARDE

INTRODUCTION

THE IMPERATIVE TO EXPERIMENT

It was an unseen thing and now it is a seen thing.

Wanta Jampijinpa Pawu- Kurlpurlurnu | Ngurra- kurlu:

A Way of Working with Warlpiri People

In this book I trace, with great excitement, an emergent body of aesthetics that I call remote avant- garde: new and experimental art of the Central and Western Desert of Australia, including the town camps of Alice Springs.1 Remote Avant- Garde tracks trajectories of tradition taking shape today: from the stop- motion animation and still- life sculpture of Yarrenyty Arltere to the digital landscape portraiture of Tjala Arts artist Rhonda Unurupa Dick and the Desart Photogra-phy Award, the grass and fiber artistry of Tjanpi Desert Weavers, the ochre experi-mentations of Warnayaka Art, the biliterary poetics of Tangentyere Artists’ town camp artists, and the acrylic witness paintings of June Walkutjukurr Richards. These art forms and practices may not look like acrylic Jukurrpa (Dreaming) paintings that have become representative of desert Aboriginal tradition. Yet they are produced by the same communities (as well as by newer art communities) and, in fact, by many of the same artists (as well as by their descendants). This demonstrates a lived, intergenerational continuity between earlier art practices and emergent aesthetics taking shape today that is vital, including the imperative to experiment itself. The fact that Indigenous heritage requires “remembering the future,” or what Hetti Perkins and Victoria Lynne (1993) called, over two de-cades ago, “insurgent acts of cultural reiteration” that revivify as they reveal tra-dition for the first time, needs itself to be re- remembered, as it were, in relation to a new wave of contemporary desert practices taking shape today.2

The Western Desert art movement is now recognized as what Robert Hughes

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called the “last great art movement of the 20th century” (in Henly 2005), spec-tacularly transforming the national and global art stage over the past four de-cades, from Michael Nelson Jagamara’s masterful mosaic Possum and Wallaby Dreaming (1988) at the new Australian Parliament House to the Hetti Perkins and Brenda L. Croft Indigenous curatorial design commission for the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris (2006).3 In the wake of this aesthetic revolution, no small surge of research and scholarship has followed (Johnson 1994, 2008; Perkins and Fink 2000; Myers 2002b; Bardon and Bardon 2004). However, very little has been written about aesthetic developments that have taken shape since. This book seeks to address this lack.

Remote Avant- Garde models Aboriginal art as “art under occupation.” As I discuss in chapter 1, since 2007 a new Australian government policy called the Northern Territory Emergency Response (nter)—or, more simply, the Inter-vention—has seen the targeting of remote Aboriginal communities as sites of severe social dysfunction, abject poverty, perversion, and disadvantage. In this climate and, specifically, in the absence of a historical record or responsible media representation, art provides primary evidence to the contrary. This book argues for a positive (but not naive) reconfiguration of the so- called remote, identifying the critical importance of contemporary art practice both as a pri-mary means for self- presentation and as material ways of doing and being in place otherwise silenced, marginalized, or disavowed. Art in this context is not a luxury or a leisure- time pursuit.4 Art under occupation is art as survival: how to keep hands, eyes, ears attuned to ways of sensing, knowing, seeing, making; whose very realities are under occupation, subject to relentless assault, dis-missal, disavowal on a day- to- day basis.5 How to remain responsive to and re-sponsible for intangible heritage, at- risk vernacular languages, iterative partici-patory practice bound to place and to others, in a context where not only are the rights to remain in traditional homelands under threat,6 but the right to be Aboriginal in place is itself the subject of attack?

This book profiles emergent aesthetics in the context of national emergency. It asks how qualities of attachment, belonging, and endurance—cultural and linguistic life- sustaining capacities—are reproduced against any number of everyday violence/s of disavowal and impasse. Elizabeth Povinelli (2014) fig-ures emergent Indigenous mediations as “artefacts at the precipice of the fig-ured,” highlighting at once the struggle, on the ground as it were, and the pre-

tHe imperative tO experiment | 3

carious conditions of visibility itself: what she calls “the effort of emergence and the endurance of the otherwise.” If my focus remains throughout this book on the uncertain conditions of aesthetic possibility under the nter Intervention, it is because the kinds of “slow death” (Berlant 2011) or “slow violence” (Nixon 2013)—what Tess Lea (2014) figures as seeping, relentless, “water that leaches through structural cracks” attrition of the crisis- ordinary for Aboriginal people and communities today—it is because the fact of the nter Intervention, of the condition of occupation itself in Australia, remains unregistered and under-signified and is fast becoming normalized.

To put it more pointedly, in Giorgio Agamben’s (1997) terms of occupied life and aesthetics, following Demos (2013), how can one represent aesthetically a life severed from representation politically? These arts stage the promise and fail-ure of the nation- state, what Agamben calls the “naked” or “bare life,” in which sanctioned “zones of indifference” suspend the reach of law and thus reveal the very foundations of neoliberal promise—equality, freedom, justice—to be a ruse. The rights of Australian citizenry are not guaranteed to remote Aborigi-nal people, as the nter Intervention makes patently clear (see chapters 1 and 2).

The “remote” is not, however, only a target of government intervention. It is a term equally dominant and equally problematic (if for different reasons) in the field of art. Margo Neale (2010, 34) identifies this model as a pernicious di-chotomy within Aboriginal art appreciation, divided by types of Aboriginal art and artists along “a north- south axis of authenticity . . . in the belief that only Aboriginal people living in remote communities are ‘real Aborigines’ . . . lead-ing authentic cultural lives with attendant authentic cultural expressions.” The remote/urban dichotomy not only renders urban Indigenous art inauthentic and/or invisible (Croft 1993; Browning 2010) in comparison with the high- end market of so-called “authentic” remote Aboriginal art; it presents remote art and artists as locked in time and tradition, invariably reduced, in the more vul-gar version of this paradigm as Neale sketches it, to “museum artifacts.”

This book identifies emergent remote art forms that challenge this taxon-omy directly. Counter to the dominant Aboriginal art history that separates the traditional remote from the progressive urban, this book models a remote avant- garde yet to be appreciated by existing frameworks. The demand for “re-mote” authenticity and traditionalism has erased the possibilities for the kinds of arts profiled here, producing impossible standards and an imaginary blinker-

4 | intrOductiOn

ing that in no way reflects the realities of contemporary Indigenous lifeworlds. This demand is mirrored directly in the art market’s predilections for works of high traditionalism (that is, acrylic Jukurrpa, Dreaming, paintings) and the very cramped space left for any other kinds of art.

Australian art journalist Nicholas Rothwell depicts recent art from the Central and Western Desert as “a fateful journey away from its origins in ceremony and law” (Rothwell 2013) and, more recently, as an art movement whose lights “one by one . . . have gone out” (Rothwell 2014). The art in this book insists otherwise. Rather than a “dying sunset” model of once- was traditional glory, emergent arts are actively developing new trajectories of culture and tradition that may not yet exist. As Wanta Jampijinpa Pawu- Kurlpurlurnu (Pawu- Kurlpurlurnu, Holmes, and Box 2008, 2) says of the newly conceived, experimental, Lajamanu Warlpiri ceremony Milpirri: “It was an unseen thing and now it is a seen thing.” My use of his phrase as an epigraph here and elsewhere (Biddle and Stefanoff 2015) in-dicates specifically what it is that I track throughout this book: how Aboriginal tradition is revealed through experimental practice.

Fig. i.1. Milpirri 2012, Lajamanu, NT. © Tracks Dance Company. Photo by P. Eve.

Fig. i.2. Milpirri 2012, Lajamanu, NT. © Tracks Dance Company. Photo by P. Eve.

Fig. i.3. Wanta Steve Jampijinpa Patrick and performers, Milpirri 2012, Lajamanu, NT. © Tracks Dance Company. Photo by P. Eve.

6 | intrOductiOn

Milpirri shares with other experimental initiatives the fact that as an aes-thetic, it belies categorical definition: is it festival or ceremony, dance or theater, traditional or postcontemporary? Milpirri combines traditional Jardi- Warnpa ceremony with hip- hop, break dancing, and high theatrical visual design. A radical Lajamanu Warlpiri experiment since 2005, in an intercultural partner-ship with Tracks Dance Company that dates back to 1987 (the longest sustained community art partnership in the Central Desert), Milpirri refuses to tour or expand beyond its base, its ground, at Lajamanu (see Newth, McMicken, and Biddle 2015). What Milpirri looks like for its one night every two years changes; new traditions, new revelations, emerge in country, on place, in intercultural collaboration; through bodies, hands, voices, and sensate intertwinings in what is ultimately, no doubt, a highly unlikely and deeply unwieldy form. Milpirri relies on experimental participatory experience and encounter to reveal Warl-piri heritage for the future.7 This is a model I am deeply indebted to and adopt in the approach developed across this book in exploring the vital role of experi-mentation in new aesthetic formations taking shape across the Desert today.

For “Aboriginal histories of the future”—as Faye Ginsburg and Fred Myers

Fig. i.4. Tim Jampijinpa Newth, Myra Nungarrayi Patrick, and David Japaljarri McMicken, Milpirri 2012, Lajamanu, NT. © Tracks Dance Company. Photo by P. Eve.


(2006) call the vital work being undertaken by Indigenous artists, filmmakers, and other key cultural producers today—to take shape, not only are “a myriad of cultural resources” required but also a harder to quantify dedication to long term, sustained collaborative struggle and fierce intercultural imagination (29). The challenges facing Indigenous communities and the remote art sector re-quire the building of what Carly Davenport Acker (2015) calls “convergences”: new pathways and partnerships across the arts and media creative industries, including academic research; pathways that are, in this sense, tracked formally for the first time by this book.

iI need to stress from the outset that this book is not a survey. There is no field of remote avant- garde that can be pointed to or simply bundled up by these pages. Any number of other books could readily be shaped in any number of different ways, given the sheer variety, quality, and dynamism of emergent arts taking shape. Where I can throughout the book, I have indicated further references to work I have not, alas, been able to include by direct discussion. What is pro-filed here is select, partial, particular; not an exhaustive or inclusive account but rather snapshots stolen and stilled momentarily only, as it were, from what is a far greater, more complex, and in- flux terrain of experimental tradition. What I have written about reflects the limits of my own funding, capacities, and scope, as well as my implicated and attached professional and personal history in par-ticular Indigenous lifeworlds, where social relationships and prior knowledge are primary and obligatory conditions of research. What I feel I can, should, and am authorized to write about, in direct commitment to the artists, communi-ties, and projects these works belong to, is as much a part of the so- called field I am following, in this sense, as the works themselves, as they carve out new ter-ritories, assembled here for the first time.

The question I face in writing this book is how to engender visibility of these new and emergent art forms without reducing their radical gesture.8 These art-works are materially embedded and embodied, what Fred Myers (2002, 338) calls the defining “inalienability” of Western Desert aesthetics. In any number of ways, the art in this book does not safely or securely produce the one thing that the art object is, ultimately, said to possess: the very distinction from—its

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apartness as an object- form—the subjects who produce it. This book explores the importance of this material inseparability politically, aesthetically, affec-tively.

Desert art is less representational than performative, in keeping with the tra-ditions from which it derives. It is not primarily discursive or verbal (or if dis-cursive, the vernacular narrative specificities that drive these works have been sidelined, dumbed down, or replaced by something else—issues explored in part I). These arts do not lend themselves easily to the ruthless abstractions and alienating tendencies of academic theory; even if they are, in Roland Barthes’s (1975) sense of it, highly “writerly” (as opposed to “readerly”) aesthetics, that is, they incite analysis, writing, because they rely upon and demand response as part of their participatory demand.

This is no aesthetics of illustration. These are primary affective ontologies: ways of doing and being and sensing in Indigenous- specific, practice- based

Fig. i.5. Artists at work, Warnayaka Art and Cultural Aboriginal Corporation, 2011, Lajamanu, NT. Photo by J. Biddle, courtesy of Warnayaka Art and Cultural Aboriginal Corporation.


modalities of collaborative process and collective assemblage; aesthetics that require completion through encounter. If my analysis privileges the work of af-fect, it is because these arts themselves privilege affect.9

Affects are messy, impure, unbounded, and this is why they matter. They move faster than and differently from ethical or politically correct proposition and posturing; they cross and confound bounded ideals of nation- states, iden-tities, place. They trump and outwit any amount of theorizing or any singular model of aesthetics, and provide no small platform, accordingly, from which to model the kinds of complex, embodied- perceptual capacities of Central and Western Desert art forms and practices.

This book develops directly from my previous research for breasts, bodies, canvas: Central Desert Art as Experience (Biddle 2007) on experimental de-velopments driven by female artists over the course of the Western Desert art movement. Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Kathleen Petyarre, Dorothy Napangardi, and others radically transformed what was then an emergent field dominated by male artists whose more iconography- based aesthetics had come to typify the art of the remote Western Desert. These female artists undertook a certain “feminization of the Dreaming,” drawing upon female- specific historiogra-phy in which marks and designs come directly from the bodies of women in women’s ceremony called yawulyu (in Warlpiri) or inma (in the Western Desert languages of Ngaanyatjara, Pitjantjatjara, and Yangunkatjara; see further chap-ters 4 and 6). The art of female artists became more affective, harnessing the tra-ditional impetus of female- specific capacities to radically intensify the aesthetic force of what Western Desert art was capable of “doing”; a strategic develop-ment in response to Whitefella outsiders who historically have failed to hear or get the greater point of the work.

The move to so- called abstraction evinced by female artists during this period intensified the originary visceral effects of Jukurrpa, the Dreaming. The primary Ancestral potencies of Jukurrpa, also called kuruwarri (marks, traces, essences, and presences found in country, and reproduced by women on the body in ceremony and, in turn, on canvas today), were heightened by a marked movement away from the site- specific icon or story toward a more generic in-scription, a move that made specific knowledge (of country, Ancestor, site) arguably less important than the very force of affect itself. The canvas instead became a site to encounter, a corporeal basis of human- Ancestral lifeworld con-

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nectivity, a material re- marking and remaking of Ancestral inscription- turned- canvas to skin to country.

The responsibility of Aboriginal artists to remake, to re- mark, the world in Ancestrally derived and responsive terms today is palpable across all of the arts within this book, despite or even because of the very high degree of formal in-ventiveness. These arts utilize a diversity of multilingual and multimodal plat-forms. What language, any language, can be mobilized and harnessed to the task today? As the chapters explore, traditional affective- based, corporeally located Indigenous arts are becoming more affectively intensive in response to emergent imperatives of cultural survival and frontier transversality (see Biddle 2012).

ii

Well, back at home in Martu country, we keep telling people our stories,

and our culture to anthropologists and archaeologists mainly, people who

are coming and critiquing Jukurrpa (Dreamtime Cosmology). And I think

that is where we need to be careful. We need to tell the same things in art

today—that we are living the Jukurrpa. It’s not for outsiders to critique it,

but we are completely immersed in it. And that’s how, you know, people

from outside should see that too.

Curtis Taylor | Yarljyirrpa

The premise of the book is that the emergent field of remote avant- garde can-not simply be added to the greater cumulative canon of modern or contempo-rary art. Perceptibility, in this case, is no straightforward task of simply making present what is new in desert art. Jacques Rancière (2006, 2011) argues that the revolutionary work of aesthetics operates at the most primary level of politics, redistributing relationships between the visible and the sayable, the known and the unknown, words and things. Experimental arts of the desert are not, in this sense, an obvious avant- garde but are more subtle, dispersed, antispectacular even. This book evolves a series of microanalyses of what remain to date largely indecipherable art practices in order to enable an ordinary- life understanding of what is activated, made present, or known by these works for the first time.


An archival or provenance- based approach to these works is inadequate. These works cannot be reduced to what Frantz Fanon (1963) originally called “cus-tom”—formulaic illustrations or information “about” the culture and people from which they derive. These arts are produced in concrete entanglement with complex lifeworld circumstances and competing demands. The forms are un-predictable, unruly even (that is, at least in relation to art market demands), which explains in part their lack of art historical appreciation to date. Not only do these works fail to comply but they instigate ways of thinking, feeling, being that cannot be readily assimilated. These arts are less “mass- cultural” in their provocations, even if they intensify or congeal in “consistency” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) as they at once approach and exceed the formal category of art.

Remote Avant- Garde is not art history. It does not seek to present a chrono-logical account of artistic developments nor an inventory of who has produced what, when. These works write a historiography of a kind that isn’t mappable back onto a chronological or teleological version of progressivist history. Each chapter presents microhistories that write back to, as the works do themselves, historical and cultural contexts that would otherwise disallow the very condi-tions of their emergence.

This book is equally not anthropology alone. While this project is unabash-edly anthropological—it privileges the people, places, contexts, and perspec-tives of remote art production as what matters most; the life lived of Indigenous realities, atunements, attachments—nevertheless my approach is not strictly nor solely ethnographic. How people live and govern discrete meanings in a localized, bounded place is a model and a reality at risk itself in the contempo-rary conditions of the Australian nation- state, as much as it is challenged by the global circuitry and demands of the arts industry. As an ethnographer, I needed to develop new methods and means to approach the research and writing of this book’s undertaking.

Nor is my analysis a strict object- oriented- ontology. I do not “follow the ob-ject,” as Bruno Latour (2005) or others might. Nevertheless I share a commit-ment to taking the object form as primary.10 These arts are deeply social facts and active agents in disciplines dominated by either subject- centric analyses (anthropology) or object- focused chronology and description (art history).11 My task here is less to bring together these two fields than a different task al-together: how to keep the art alive in the terms in which it presents itself.

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Djon Mundine (2013) calls Aboriginal art an aesthetic of “moral and politi-cal insistence.” Such insistences are not secondary to what these works other-wise achieve. That is, I privilege here an analysis of the experimental art object as both encounter and event. Put simply, I argue that the experimental success of emergent desert art is due to its vital materiality.12 This vitality, as it is pro-duced and consumed in an active participatory sense, engenders implicated re-lationships between object and subject, art and audience, encounter and experi-ence. This book explores the vital materialities of contemporary aesthetics, as the works themselves demand.

The artworks in this book are big, not necessarily in size but existentially—microtactics and minor strategies that require a certain shift in pace, posture, orientation in order to be apprehended. The enviro- somatic facilitations of art to sustain and transmit “aesthetics of being”—not to possess the art object as much as to surrender to its terms, as Christopher Bollas (1987) figures the sus-pension of time and the radical transformative capacities at work in the aesthetic encounter—requires time itself.13 To allow for, attune to, take up, and yield to what is in fact on offer in these works is no quick grab and go, though all too often, over the past years of researching this project, of hanging out, conduct-ing research in exhibitions, museums, and art markets as much as in Indige-nous communities of the desert, I have come to realize just how quickly White art connoisseurs as well as the more general public assume that it is simply up for grabs. If my writing pays concrete and formal attention to specific works, if it focuses situated and sustained attention in terms that might otherwise be dismissed as “too much detail,” it is for this reason. It is rare to find individu-ated Aboriginal artworks analyzed in detail, in the way that works of European grand masters are, ipso facto, throughout art history (and no doubt, any of the artworks analyzed here could indeed, and should, be analyzed in far greater detail than the cursory job I perform). But my strategy is intentional, to stay as close to the works and their workings as I can, to slow down to a pace commen-surate with what they incite and command.

The kinds of subtle, nuanced, and highly aestheticized politics taking shape require a subtlety of both research and writing that can, without grandstand-ing or flag waving (as these arts don’t themselves), attend to what are demand-ing sensorium alterities and deep defiances of dominant codes of appearance; a


mode of analysis, in short, that can at once keep up with, open out, and point-edly not reduce what the works themselves achieve. As a non- Indigenous per-son writing about Indigenous representations that, more than anything, are in fact about the very rights to self- present, I am acutely attuned to developing a method that might not make my own voice louder than the works themselves.

Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012, 202) advocates care in the research of Maori and other Indigenous peoples’ “intellectual, theoretical, and imaginative spaces.” She stresses the agency of “search” in “research” for what a decoloniz-ing methodology must undertake: the struggle involved to “constantly imagine and reimagine, to create and recreate our world” (203) against ongoing, sys-temic colonial and imperial violence. If I search to adequately model contem-porary Central and Western Desert art in this book, if I keep open, keep alive, and stave off, the invariable resuturing that the work of interpretative certitude, pronouncement, or analytic quieting does, it is for this reason: to do justice to, to bear witness to, what is at stake in the attestations the art assembled here itself instigates.

In profound debt to the artists and community art centers represented here, this book reproduces a high number of Indigenous- owned and Indigenous- produced art images, in order that these works are understood as primary, my text secondary, in what is ultimately not a level playing field, in terms of the representational equation this book represents. These images might at once ground, activate, infiltrate my more discursive lines of flight (I hope), as much as they might affect, infect, animate, in fact, your own engagement (I hope), as active readers in response. Images of artworks in galleries, in preparation, in postproduction, in country, in ceremony, in art centers; images to make present, keep literally in the frame, on the stage, in the white walls of exhibition space, as much as on the white pages of this book, the facticity of Aboriginal bodies, hands, lives at work in the making of Indigenous futures taking shape today.

Martu filmmaker Curtis Taylor states that Martu are “living the Jukurrpa,” and that “it’s not for outsiders to critique.” I adopt this posture in a more perfor-mative politics of writing about these works. My aim is to provide a certain pre-liminary platform or scaffold- approach only, through which these works can, in effect, perform themselves.

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iii

Culture First.

Desart Inc.

Our art makes more than a living. It is living.

Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair brochure, 2014

The works in this book were produced in remote desert community art centers (with the notable exception of Tjanpi Desert Weavers, “an art centre without walls,” chapter 5, and some of the art produced for Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route, chapter 8). Community art centers are where almost all Aboriginal art today is produced across the Central and Western Desert. Community art centers are independent organizations, Aboriginal owned, directed, and run, located in almost all major remote Aboriginal communities across the Aborigi-nal traditional homelands of the desert. The majority of Aboriginal communi-ties in the desert have populations below five hundred residents (Yuendumu would be one of the largest, with approximately a thousand community mem-bers). The languages that are spoken in these communities are vernacular In-digenous languages; languages that belong to country, its sites, and its flora and fauna, which are said to “speak” the same languages as people do themselves (see Rumsey 1993). These languages are some of the strongest remaining and, simultaneously, the most vulnerable Indigenous languages globally, actively in use as first languages in everyday transmission to younger generations and in-creasingly at risk from a greater national agenda of English- only education (see chapter 2 for full discussion of why Indigenous Australian languages are at risk today).

Community art centers are often described as the interface between Indige-nous culture and the art market, the first point of inclusion of artists within the global economy. But art centers provide far more than simply a local, collec-tive, studio- to- market space for art production. They provide one of the only sources of non- government income for Aboriginal people in remote commu-nities (Attorney- General’s Department 2015)—and therefore actively defy the


perception of remote people as without income opportunities, or the so- called lack of engagement of Aboriginal people in employment and professional de-velopment in remote homelands (daaF 2014). They provide one of the few in-stitutional places in which the workplace itself is actually driven by, concerned with, and governed by traditional law and culture and is open and accessible to all members of the community regardless of their skill or educational back-ground (daaF 2014). This fact would be specifically in contrast with the other major institutions that characterize remote communities: the school, the shop, the clinic, the church, the police station. Art centers are, as Hetti Perkins (2014b) attests, vital sociocultural hubs of remote community lifeworlds that directly support and enhance health, vitality, happiness: “Art centres build community

Fig. i.6. At practice for Milpirri 2011, Lajamanu, NT. Left to right: Rosie Napurrurla Tasman, Biddy Napanangka Walker, Molly Napurrurla Tasman, Jennifer Biddle, Shelia Napaljarri Walker, and Kumanjayi Napaljarri Kelly. © Michael Erglis, J. Biddle, and the women present. Photo by M. Erglis, courtesy of Warnayaka Art and Cultural Aboriginal Corporation.

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pools, set up aged care and dialysis services, work with schools, help with sorry business, the list goes on and on.”

There are currently forty Aboriginal art centers in the Central and Western Desert alone, with six located in Alice Springs (see chapters 2 and 4), and no fewer than one hundred incorporated art centers across Australia (Acker, Stefa-noff, and Woodhead 2013). The model of the remote- based community art cen-ter historically originates with both the founding of the missions in Yirrkala in Arnhem Land in the 1950s and, specifically, a Yolungu- run beachfront stall in the 1960s that would later transform formally into Buku Larrnggay Mulka in 1975 (daaF 2014). However, in the desert regions of Australia, the first com-munity art center was Ernabella Arts (1948) at Pukatja, established originally as a craft room run by the Presbyterian missionaries before becoming, in 1974, the Aboriginal- run organization it is today (Eickelkamp 2001). However, the very fast rise of contemporary desert Aboriginal art centers began with the found-ing of Papunya Tula Artists Pty. Ltd. in 1972, that would see in less than three decades the Papunya Tula or Western Desert art movement develop into the global art industry it is today (see chapter 2), with the virus- like spreading of art centers across the desert developing almost as fast as the art movement itself, taking off, west, north, and south from Papunya. Art centers have in a pro-found sense now mapped the desert, with the recognition of communities such as Papunya, Yuendumu, and Hermmansburg, now known as global signifiers of Aboriginality because of art. Desart Inc. Art Centre’s Location Map literalizes the importance of this original cartography, making visible what Aboriginal art and artists have themselves made visible over the past three decades through art centers (Desart Inc. 2015). In turn, a burgeoning tourist industry now transports potential clients to select remote communities in order to view and purchase art directly from the artists in community (this included a bus tour to Alice Springs Aboriginal Art Precinct for the first time in 2014).14

The development of the Aboriginal arts industry at the community level has been supported by the advocacy of what are now six key bodies across Central and Northern Australia. The Association of Northern Central and Arnhem Ab-original Artists was founded in 1987, followed by Desart in 1992 (the key indus-try body for Central and Western Desert community art centers), and Anan-guku Arts in Adelaide (representing artists of South Australia), and the more recent umi Arts in Cairns (a creole word meaning “you and me”) in 2005, along


with Indigenous Art Centre Alliance, representing far northern Queensland, Tiwi, and Bathurst Island artists and communities.

I list these key bodies and their foundational dates in order to convey the de-gree to which remote Aboriginal art is today an industry: regulated, supported, sustained not only by the art market itself, but by grounded, regionally based, often government- funded Aboriginal arts organizations. In stating this, how-ever, it is crucial to recognize that as an industry, what is being produced, mar-keted, and sold by Aboriginal art centers is in no sense a commodity form alone. Indeed, as I argue throughout this book, the arts produced today in remote Aboriginal art centers and across the communities of the desert remain tied to the bodies and places in which they are produced in material ways that, as I de-velop, are crucial to the aesthetic work they achieve.

ivRemote Avant- Garde is not a metatheoretical book. The nine chapters that fol-low represent models of highly differentiated kinds of affective intensification taking shape through formal experimentation, each providing original instan-tiations of memory, collectivity, and history in the making.

Five of the eight chapters provide detailed performative analyses of indi-vidual artworks. The other three analyze, respectively, a new pan- regional art movement (Tjanpi Desert Weavers, chapter 5), the “making, not taking” of his-tory (Yiwarra Kuju, chapter 8), and one art center’s experimental trajectory from the local to the transnational (Warburton Arts Project, chapter 9). Chap-ter 1, “Humanitarian Imperialism,” presents an analysis of the nter Interven-tion, the background context for the emergence of all of the works in this book.

The chapters are uneven: varying length and differing voice, tone, and tenor are utilized as my writing moves across what are, in fact, radically variant art forms, practices, genres, and scale that require divergent analytic platforms and perspectives in order to do justice to what the works themselves require. More unlike perhaps ultimately than they are alike, the chapters themselves jostle up uncomfortably and differentially at times, as well as sympathetically relational at others (as certain desert- specific historical pasts repeat and converge in cur-rent trajectories). My aim is to keep the works activated; to make them move and resonate and to reveal, arguably, what they do themselves. Chapter 2 is the

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longest because there is virtually no art history or ethnographic analysis of the aesthetics of Alice Springs town camp artists represented by Tangentyere; this is a history that also sets the stage for Yarrenyty Arltere Artists of Larrapinta Val-ley Town Camp, in chapter 7.

The book is divided into three sections. Part I (chapters 2–4) is on what I identify as “biliteracy” or “biliterary” experimental tactics. Part II (chapters 5–7) explores experimental hapticities or touch- based visual aesthetics. Part III (chapters 8 and 9) presents contemporary happenings or events, on- the- ground initiatives that have become national and international curatorial platforms for experimental art to take shape. These three sections are structural devices, thematic only and in no sense exclusive. The language maintenance platforms and activation of vernacular collectivities of the arts highlighted in part I are deeply at work across all the arts presented by this book. Equally, a “haptic visu-ality” characterizes all of the arts presented here (not only those highlighted in part II). The kinds of localized ingenuity yoked to national and international capacity- building platforms profiled by chapters 8 and 9 represent the kinds of initiative required today to support, maintain, and facilitate the “history of Ab-original futures” (Ginsburg and Myers 2006); initiative that is, in fact, present in all the practice- based arts profiled.

Finally, my analysis is deeply Warlpiri- centric. It is derived from and based upon twenty- six years of field research with Lajamanu Warlpiri, who taught me what I know—if only at the surface- level appreciation I can ever have as a Whitefella outsider—of the importance of making and remaking Jukurrpa. While I bring new research to bear upon the works presented here, my bias re-mains. To make that bias overt: I utilize Warlpiri terminology, concepts, and vignettes, even when discussing non- Warlpiri art (only chapter 6 is solely de-voted to Warlpiri women’s experimental innovation)—no doubt a slippery (if not suspicious) slide for the more ethnographically rigorous. This is not, how-ever, to project a neo- Warlpiri- desert dominance or a pan- desert essentialism. My intention is in no way to reduce what are very real differences between and across Central and Western Desert languages, territories, and trajectories of contemporary art and culture. The emphasis I develop across this book in fact highlights how specific, how not shared, not pan- regional, indeed, not Warl-piri, the majority of experimental initiatives are today. Thus in bringing a cer-tain Warlpiri- centrism to my analysis, my intent is rather to acknowledge what


Aboriginal people have themselves taught me: that knowledge is earned and owned; indebted, enabled, and restricted; obligating and accountable. It does not belong to me. The fact of my prior history, relatedness, and knowledge of Warlpiri has been a major facilitator (as well as sometimes a difficult detractor) in undertaking the research for this book. I need to acknowledge my debt and the generosity of Ngannyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara, Yanguktjarra, Arrernte, Pintupi, Anmatjere, Luritja, Warumungu, Martu, and, indeed, Warlpiri artists and com-munity members, for their tolerance and appreciation of my capacities and my failings both, given this history.

remote avant garde by jennifer loureide biddle

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