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On looking at and feeling Aboriginal art.

Article Excerpt
Breasts, Bodies, Canvas: Central Desert Art as Experience (University of New South Wales Press, 2006) by Jennifer Biddle; Papunya Painting: Out of the Desert, National Museum of Australia, Canberra, 28 November 2007-3 February 2008, exhibition catalogue Papunya Painting: Out of the Desert, National Museum of Australia, Canberra, edited by Vivien Johnson.

It is now more than three decades since Aboriginal men began the painting activity at Papunya that would come to be credited as the origin of the Western Desert art movement. Over the years, as the production of art by men and women from this region has flourished, there has been a detectable shift in aesthetic. Generally, this shift might be described as a move away from figurative and iconographic depictions of place and ancestral practice towards more abstract renderings of cultural inheritance. While some artists continue to paint iconographically, the shift to abstraction can be observed in the work of many Central Australian Aboriginal artists, as it can in the work of other Aboriginal artists further afield. This shift provides some of the context of Jennifer Biddle's exploration of Central Desert women's art in Breasts, Bodies Canvas: Central Desert Art as Experience, as it does a recent exhibition, Papunya Painting: Out of the Desert, at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra.

Among the first paintings produced in 1971 and 1972 by men at Papunya are a series of highly potent and spiritually charged works. Produced with the active encouragement and support of manual arts teacher Geoffrey Bardon, these early paintings by male artists conjure up aspects of the cultural universe that Aboriginal people experienced as under threat from the misery of sedentary settlement life. Painted on particle board, scraps of old wood and any other materials the men could lay their hands on, these works tend to be small in size, and the best of them radiate enormous creative force. Where does this force come from? Do these paintings speak for themselves? Do they engage us directly? Or are they at least partly charged for the viewer by the layers of association they have accrued in public discourse --as the first Aboriginal art by the 'last' people out of the desert; as raw visual evocations of the depth of Aboriginal people's association to country; as a series of windows through which to glimpse a culturally different ordering of the universe?

Once we know something of these associations it is difficult to detach them from the experience of viewing the art. But one thing is certain: while these works have been hailed by the art world as great art--a hard won and precarious accomplishment--they have been simultaneously understood by those who interpreted them for a broader public as works about country, as...

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