Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula
I’ve been back from Australia for two weeks, but my intoxication with Aboriginal art continues unabated. My night dreams and daytime ponderings are populated with images and senses that are not of this hemisphere.
For years I have studied Aboriginal art though reproductions. As is the case with any artist whose work I feel deeply–Mark Rothko, Brice Marden, Bill Viola, Joan Mitchell, Richard Diebenkorn, Lee Bontecou, Gerhard Richter, Agnes Martin, among others–everything shifts when you sit with the work “in the flesh.” When art speaks to you, it is because it is embodied with an essence and an energy field of its own. Spending time with actual Aboriginal paintings has shifted my insides in a way that is hard to describe.
I have been thinking/feeling about how Aboriginal art speaks to an Aboriginal relationship to space. In Geoffrey Bardon’s posthumous account of the Western Desert painting movement, Papunya: A Place Made After the Story, Bardon observes that the painters “felt no need to read a painting from right to left or from a standing position…A painting was read from any direction, as if it were lying upon the earth and able to be walked about…the artists could read their paintings with ease and naturalness while the representations were upside down.”
He also comments on how the Aboriginals had a “predilection for a sensitivity of touch, a hapticity or physical quality different from the visual sensation of eyesight…The painters seemed to me to understand space as an emotional idea, the capacity to feel this idea often excluding any need to visualise what was represented.”
Bardon’s observations speak to profound differences between the Aboriginal and the Western way of perceiving. David Michael Levin (author of Sites of Vision) makes this distinction: “I think it is appropriate to challenge the hegemony of vision in the ocularcentrism of our culture. And I think we need to examine very critically the character of vision that predominates today in our world.”
It may seem contradictory for a painter to be questioning the primacy of the retinal experience. But there are so many ways to map the territory, and it is those other ways of knowing that made me want to paint. Aboriginal artists navigate the terrain with a different set of tools that we, relying so completely on our eyes, may have lost access to through disuse. “Seeing is believing, but feeling’s the truth.”
To my mind, the closest to the Aboriginal way of percieving that we in the west come is in our concept of mapping, but even most maps we make have a lack of information about the tactile qualities of things we encounter in our movements from place to place. Vision is active and always directed to “outside the self”; sensation by way of touch and skin or body feeling, or motion is receptive (I hesitate to call it passive), a sort of “being inside” experience. As culture, we seem to place great value on operating in an active and outward manner always noting and categorizing, but giving little consideration to our physical relationship to worldly phenomena in any other than the direct visual confrontation manner. So our perception of space and time is always contingent on the individual being at the centre of experience, not an integral part of the whole or “one with”. I have struggled to express an idea here, but maybe left you with more confusion?
No, I am not confused at all by what you have written. My posting this morning on Slow Painters (http://slowpainters.wordpress.com) entitled “Haptic Spaces” features a quote that mirrors much of what you have said here. So we are amazingly in synch (although that shouldn’t be a surprise to either of us!)
I enjoy your beautiful site very much. Like stepping to another place. And especially these pieces on Australian art. In that connection I wanted to be sure you noticed (as you likely did) the article in the April 16th New Yorker by John Calapinto on the language of the Piraha, a small Brazilian hunter-gatherer tribe living on two small Amazon tributaries.
The piece is mainly about Dan Everett’s linguistic studies of the Piraha language—an exceeding “simple” language—and various linguistic controversies, Chomsky, etc., such as doesn’t a language that shows no use of “recursion,” phrase nesting to build complexity, violate Chomsky’s generalization about a Universal human Grammer that has recursion as its fundamental feature.
But—for you and your Australia—note at the end of the article the insights of Everett’s former wife, also a linguist, also proficient in the Piraha language. She learned most from listing to the women sing to (teach language to) their children. In this speech even words themselves apparently disappear and only tones, lilts, clicks, and a lyric essence remains. And yet the story is told, the children learn. So, she hints at a much more modest and near mystical theory of their language.
You refer to the Aboriginal way of percieving as a challenge to the hegemony of vision in the ocularcentrism of our culture. I’d guess the Piraha offer a somehow similar (or at least equally radical) challenge to our language-equals-thought assumptions. It is a principle of linguistics (established by the great Vergotsky, I think it is) that all human languages are completely adequate to express everything necessary for those speakers. The Piraha appear to sing stories to children that have no beginning, middle, or end. There is none of the ubiquitous nesting of phrases as in our culture and, in some sense, almost no words. To say the do not have a complete language is like saying the Aboriginal people cannot do art.
Jim,
This is such an interesting point of view. I’m behind on my New Yorker reading so I will look for Everett’s article. You have identified such a provocative parallel to what I have been prospecting for in and around Aboriginal art. Thank you so much for sharing such this rich vein.
Hello Deborah,
While writing my thesis on architecture I came across this site (it all started for me after reading Juhani Pallasmaa’s book The Eyes of the Skin).
So, we cannot but acknowledge that the eye sees. It is very dominant in our western culture. Seeing feeds the brain with information, so it has something to analyse. And thinking stops feeling. I think it is difficult to stop thinking in our (visual) information-processing culture. But I don’t think that more or better thinking will help humanity as a whole. We are not becomng a part of something when thinking.
I wonder, did you succeed in stopping with seeing/thinking and started feeling (and being) while in Australia and do you still manage?
Sincerely,
Niek Heideman
The Netherlands
Nick, Thank you for stopping by and pulling me back into the profound experience that I had when I was in Australia 3 years ago.
To answer your question, yes and no. Every day is a yes and every day is a no. That feels like the journey of art making for me and one that has some of that quality in the old meditation line: Here I am, wasn’t I?
I haven’t read Pallasmaa’s classic text yet, but your comment drove me to order a copy, which I have. Thanks for that nudge.
Stop in again please.
hello Deborah,
I didn’t think you would reply, so I didn’t check for a long time. but now I found out you did. How nice.
Did you like Pallasmaa’s book?
I found you on twitter (I am new on twitter, and not very familiar yet with it), so I try to follow you, and your thoughts.
I understand your remark about yes and no (in eveyday life). So good we still have day-dreaming left sometimes.
since the spring of 2010, I went to Nepal in october, for a hiking trip of 3 weeks. There I bought the book ‘the snow leopard’, by peter matthiesen. I believe he is an american writer. anayway, it was really good reading, even when I was back home. it also pulled me back to the feeling and space of the tranquility between the moutains, and the theme of ‘quest’, and ‘searching’, which seems so in vain.
so long.
Niek
Niek,
Thank you for checking back in. I owe you a huge thank you for introducing me to one of my top 5 books, Eyes of the Skin. (If you do a search on Slow Muse you will see all the posts that reading that book inspired.) What a find, and I have you to thank for that.
I know what you mean about The Snow Leopard. It captures something about being in the Himalayas, another place where our western ways melt away.
Please keep in touch. I am so grateful you stopped by.