– Jonathan Jones in McGregor and Perkins (2014).
NSW Traditions: Urban and Contemporary
As described in Chapter 4, south eastern designs are frequently referred to, by participants, as part of the traditional visual language of Aboriginal groups from NSW. Similarly, other artistic styles or genres less overtly connected to pre-settlement art practices are also felt to form part of the state’s artistic heritage. Artworks conceptualised as urban or contemporary were described by various participants as quintessentially south eastern: part of a visual tradition that artists from NSW, Victoria and elsewhere had pioneered and now practice with great proficiency. Young, emerging artists were amongst those who described urban and
contemporary art in this manner. For example, Dennis Golding, an artist living in La Perouse, explained that although much of his current practice was ‘traditional’ in form (in that it told cultural stories, represented the Dreaming and featured depictions of native animals and abstract symbolism) he was hoping to start making art in an urban style, because as an artist from NSW, this genre of art-making was part of his visual heritage, a tradition he wished to participate in. Renowned artists – such as Tracey Moffatt, Brenda Croft, Michael Riley, Trevor Michaels, Harry Wedge, Mervyn Bishop, Fiona Foley, Gordon Bennett and Robert Campbell Junior – who have become strongly identified with the birth of the urban art movement in NSW, were cited by various participants as their artistic forebears.1
The terms contemporary art and urban art are less easily defined than south eastern designs, which designate specific visual forms. Literature on Aboriginal urban or contemporary art often omits absolute definitions regarding these art forms, offering instead discussion of the work of particular urban or contemporary artists, the visual diversity of these genres, the history surrounding the emergence of the urban art movement, or the thematic focus of such works (often emphasising engagement with political issues).2 Upon commencing fieldwork, my idea of what constituted contemporary or urban art was fairly amorphous and strongly
associated with those prominent Aboriginal artists listed above. In articulating why their works were contemporary, or urban, or both, participating artists expanded my understanding of what was denoted by these terms as they pertain to Aboriginal art in NSW. Of particular interest was how infrequently specific types of aesthetic and material qualities seemed to
1
These artists are also cited in literature canvassing urban or city-based art. See for example, Caruana (2003: 190-216), McCulloch and McCulloch Childs (2008: 278).
2 See for example, Sutton et al. (1988: 203-204), Neale (2000a: 267-277), McCulloch and McCulloch
define these concepts. Here, contemporary and urban are terms that designate certain types of artistic practice and, often, imply something about the artist who made the work under consideration, but are otherwise quite elastic in terms of the aesthetic qualities or material features they denote. Ultimately these categories were not defined by stable connections to particular visual forms or media, instead artists utilised them to indicate something about the nature of their art practice, and indeed, something about themselves as artists and individuals. Thus, regardless of the type of work they made, almost all participating artists identified their work as either urban, contemporary or both.
This near universal identification with these terms affirms that urban and contemporary art are considered to be part of the artistic heritage of NSW. In view of this, this chapter explores contemporary and urban art as it is created by Aboriginal artists in NSW, with a focus on how artists understand these artistic categories. First though, it is worth noting that, as with art practices featuring south eastern designs, just as artists articulated the opinion that
contemporary art was part of their artistic heritage, so there is evidence of government and institutional support of this notion. For example, one of the aims of Arts NSW’s Aboriginal Arts and Cultural Strategy is to ‘promote NSW as a gateway for contemporary Aboriginal arts and culture’ (Arts NSW 2010c: 13). This strategic aim was inspired by community consultation sessions in which participants, describing the kinds of support they were seeking in the Aboriginal arts industry, stated that they ‘wanted to see a greater focus on NSW and contemporary Aboriginal arts, not the exclusive focus that some galleries give to traditional Aboriginal arts and artists’ (Arts NSW 2010b: 5).
In the context of my research, artists, arts workers and curators tended to use the terms urban and contemporary interchangeably as a kind of shorthand to describe work that they saw as distinct from dot or bark paintings, or other art forms originating outside of NSW that are popularly supposed to be ‘traditional’ Aboriginal art. The designation of contemporary was evoked by artists as a means of describing their work with far greater regularity than the term urban, although the latter was certainly used. Indeed, it is my feeling that urban as a
descriptive term has fallen somewhat out of favour, and has, at least in part, been replaced by the term contemporary. In view of this frequent conflation of urban and contemporary by participants, these terms, and their implicit meanings, are discussed in tandem in the remainder of this chapter.
Time, Place and Personhood
In designating artworks that were broadly distinct from those perceived to have been inspired by practices originating from the past, the term contemporary was used by artists to highlight
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the temporal contemporaneity of their practice, specifically to acknowledge that they make work in the present. Artists would explain that they saw themselves as contemporary because they make work now and, as will be explored in greater detail below, as such their work reflected their experiences of contemporary life. The term urban was occasionally utilised in this way also. This usage of urban and contemporary also operates to signal that an artist is making work that is not ‘traditional’. As will be explored further in Chapter 7, tradition is a term that has various meanings for artists and arts professionals in NSW, however, in this context traditional artworks usually denoted dot paintings created by desert artists. Such artworks were felt to be distinct to the practice of artists identifying as contemporary or urban because of a perception that these works were reproductions of a visual heritage from the past and, as such, did not express individual personal experiences, or contemporary political and social occurrences. More than this, because work from desert artists has, in some
commercial and critical quarters, been hailed as traditional Aboriginal art, artists making work they felt to be visually distinct from, for example, desert dot paintings, identified themselves as contemporary or urban.
Conceptions and experiences of place play a part in artists’ understandings of the terms urban and contemporary. Urban has frequently been utilised in the literature to refer to art made by artists working in metropolitan locales, particularly Australian cities such as Sydney,
Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth.3 Artists, in self-identifying as urban and contemporary, often reflected on the role their current place of residence, and the locations they had lived
previously, particularly where they spent their childhood, played in their artistic practice. Take for example the following comment from Blak Douglas who lives and works in Redfern, in central Sydney, but grew up, and spent the early years of his adult life in Western Sydney. Following a comment about urban art, I asked Douglas if he identified as an urban artist and he responded:
Evidently I am because I came from an urban environment, semi-rural, but most of my art practice has been forged in Sydney, so that’s an urban environment. However, interestingly a lot of stuff is influenced from the landscape and elsewhere but fundamentally it’s a political commentary that has been the crux of my output. So I guess you would strongly sway towards the urban tag and particularly now if you look at this three dimensional stuff [sculptural installation works]…it’s only stuff you can really create in an urban environment. So yes, I guess it is an urban thing and whether that is an unnecessary label I’m not sure…
As Douglas’ comments indicate, artists often identify as urban not only because they live, or grew up in an urban environment, but because they feel that their work has been shaped,
3
visually and thematically, by that environment. For Douglas, growing up in Sydney meant he was exposed to, and engaged with, particular social and cultural milieus that both enabled and motivated him to explore particular political issues in his work, such as racial prejudice in Australian society. For other artists the term urban does not appeal, precisely because it denotes an art practice forged by, and reflective of, the experience of living in a city, or regional centre.
Artists who live and work in rural or remote parts of NSW almost universally preferred to identify themselves as contemporary, because they felt the term was free of the geospatial implications embedded in the term urban, and yet still distinguished their art practice from the work of artists operating in remote regions beyond NSW. This preference for the classification of contemporary, over urban, was in evidence when artists living in regional or remote areas of NSW, made work that represented this landscape. In these instances their depictions of non- metropolitan environments made it impossible to identify their work as urban. In some instances the line between urban and rural was less clearly demarcated. For example, Michael Philp, a painter based in Lismore, discussed how he would like to be classified as an artist and ruminated on the applicability of the terms urban and contemporary in view of where he lived and worked. While ultimately identifying himself as an ‘urban storyteller’, Philp’s affinity with the label urban was not straightforward or without qualification. When I asked him how he’d like his work to be described he responded with the following:
I suppose there’s them words; contemporary or urban. It’s funny because I was just doing a bit of drawing before and I was thinking rural, you know. Because…I grew up in Tweed [Heads] and when I was young it was rural, as I was growing up it became more urban as time went on. So it became a very different environment from when I was a child to the time I was in my early 20s. It had gone from being a rural country town to an urban centre and it was essentially an extension of the Gold Coast which is right next door to it. So as a child I’d seen mainly all bush but by the time I was in my late teens a lot of the bush was cleared. And there were homes built and shopping centres were put in and the place was starting to get high-rise buildings.
Here, Philp identifies the mutability of the term urban as both an artistic and geosocial designation. Tweed Heads, once clearly a rural location is now experienced by Philp as an urban one, however, in contrast to other metropolitan centres, such as Sydney or Newcastle, Tweed Heads remains a rural or regional hub. Similarly, urban, as a classification of Aboriginal art, has for artists varying, sometimes shifting, applicability; in some respects it might be an adequate description of the geographical space they live, but not of their art work, and vice versa.
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Discomfort with the term urban, as expressed by artists and other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples living in the south east of Australia, has been explored by scholars such as (Gibson 2008a, 2013, Kleinert and Koch 2012: 10). Gibson, in particular, has focused on the uneasiness that Aboriginal artists living in rural or remote parts of NSW have felt about the term. Gibson writes that the Aboriginal community in Wilcannia reject, often stridently, the classification of themselves, and their cultural products as urban (or, indeed contemporary), because of a conviction that this implied that they were somehow less properly Aboriginal than non-urban, ‘traditional’ Aboriginal people living in the remotest regions of Australia (2008a: 306-307). More than merely rebuffing the label of urban, community members actively distinguished themselves from urban Aboriginal people living in cities, concluding that such people – unlike themselves – knew ‘fuck all’ about culture (2008a: 306-307). Artists in Wilcannia sometimes conceded that they would utilise the classifications of urban or contemporary, with regards to the artwork they produced, if it enabled them to more effectively play the art ‘game’, but otherwise were uncomfortable with such terms (2008a: 309). In view of these attitudes Gibson ultimately concludes that ‘…there remains a clear and indeed hierarchical separation between “remote”, “tribal”, tradition-oriented and “urban”, “non-tribal” or “settled” Aboriginal art and Aboriginal people…’ and that in Wilcannia, terms like urban and contemporary were inextricably associated with cultural loss and ersatz Indigeneity (2008a: 309).
While, as reported above, some artists participating in this research did not utilise the term urban to describe their work because of a feeling it did not adequately represent the art they made, or the places where they lived and worked, there was little indication that they held similar attitudes to those artists discussed by Gibson. Indeed artists were often quick to assert that urban and contemporary Aboriginal art is as valid, and, as will be discussed below, sometimes more authentic, than so-called traditional artwork created outside of NSW. As is explored in Chapter 2, rather than expressing discomfort about the terms contemporary or urban, artists were often more interested in teasing out issues arising from the classification of their work as Aboriginal or Indigenous art, as opposed to simply art.
Gibson’s discussion of the way terms like urban and remote, or contemporary and traditional mask value judgements about the cultural life of those to whom the terms are applied, brings us neatly to another meaning embedded in the labels urban and contemporary. It was evident that for many research participants identification of an artwork as urban or contemporary was the result of inferences made, or knowledge about, the artist who had created it. Consider, for example, the following comment from photographer Paris Norton who, in discussing the way audiences responded to her work, noted: ‘…to have people telling you that it’s really good and
really interesting, it’s good to know that they get it and that as an Indigenous person I might not have access to doing things traditionally but I am still passing on the stories and people are listening’. Norton describes her photography as a contemporary expression of the traditional cultural knowledge she was in the process of learning about from her family and Elders in her community. As articulated in the quote above, Norton’s pleasure in the positive response her work elicited in viewers derives, at least in part, from the knowledge that she has succeeded in communicating important cultural stories and concepts to her audience, even if, as she states, she does not have ‘access to doing things traditionally’. Growing up in Coonabarabran, a small town with a population of just under 8,500 (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2013b), and living and working there and in nearby Dubbo, has meant that Norton lives and practices her culture in certain ways, which are, for her, distinct from traditional iterations of such cultural practices. Art making is, for Norton, an expression of her cultural identity and a means for her to
represent and explore the traditional knowledge she is in the process of learning about, practicing and maintaining. Classifying her photographic work as contemporary is, here, an acknowledgement that she is living, and learning about, her cultural life in particular ways and using particular tools (such as photography) to share and honour her traditions in
contemporary ways.
Paris Norton’s classification of her work as contemporary illustrates that while the term might be deployed to describe aesthetic or thematic elements of certain artworks, it ultimately has implications regarding the kind of lifestyle, and tenor of cultural engagements, of artists identified as contemporary. In other words, urban and contemporary works are, in the parlance of many participants, made by contemporary people living in urban or rural locales, rather than, say, ‘traditional’ people living in remote parts of Australia. This might seem like a simple reiteration of the observation that urban, as a descriptive word, evokes an artist’s residence in a metropolitan location in NSW. However, as Norton’s statement indicates, while the terms urban and contemporary are indeed reflective of the locations an artist lives and makes work in, they are also evocative of the kind of Aboriginal person – as a product of these urban or rural environments – an artist is. This also points to an explanation as to why rural artists who do not identify with the urban nomenclature identify themselves as contemporary; the term captures not only the aesthetic and other properties of the work they create, it also speaks to their daily life experiences, and engagements with culture.
Originality and Openness
Beyond an association with place and personhood, the terms urban and contemporary were used by participants to gesture to a certain level of openness in their works, in terms of the ways they can be interpreted by audiences. While traditional works are often conceptualised,
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by participants, as having highly specific, localised, cultural meanings that facilitate only specific culturally informed interpretations – such as the decoding of a particular religious lesson or ancestral story associated with particular Country – contemporary or urban artworks may address or represent cultural stories but also encapsulate and facilitate broader
interpretations relevant to audience members from diverse backgrounds. Paris Norton clearly articulated this conceptualisation of contemporary art in the following exchange in which we were discussing the difference between her photographic and painting practices:
Paris Norton (PN): I find when I am painting you are telling the old stories, and when I’m taking photos I’m telling the new stories with an element of old. It’s more like talking about, in photos, what it’s like to be Indigenous today.
Priya Vaughan: So it’s a very contemporary take?
PN: Yes a contemporary take on things because traditionally you wouldn’t explore so far into it. Whereas, that’s what my photography does, goes much deeper with it. Like I find traditional art shows you, once you know what the symbols mean, it’s a really direct story, very directive.