In her essay, ‘Moorditj Marbarn (Strong Magic)’, Aboriginal artist Julie Dowling quotes Jean-Paul Sartre who described the role of painting as ‘the painter paints the world only so that free men may feel their freedom as they face it’. Her belief that painting is her means of cultural and personal survival provides an important perspective to the notion that painting is alive in the broadest sense:
On a metaphysical level, the use of pigments and materials such as ochres is a sacred act coming from sacred lands. Such pigments have power because they project these same values, while we translate the many layers of meaning we possess in our minds and hearts as Indigenous peoples. Such colours create relationships between people and the land by travelling great distances throughout the world on bark boards, carved objects and on canvas.
Janet McKenzie
Mediators and Messengers: Contemporary Art in the Landscape
What a line from Sartre: “the painter paints the world only so that free men may feel their freedom as they face it.”
The trouble with “aboriginal art” travelling long distances is that their meaning tends to be obscured by the transaction that creates them a status as “artifacts of interest and difference”, and that they become decorative items from which an intrinsic symbolic meaning is stripped, or made of as a “curiosity”.
I have long been most interested in art, whether drawing and painting, or sculpture or installation, or photography and video which exemplifies artists’ relationship to their own geography and milieu. That resonance, going beyond current artistic fashion, is what tends to ring true to me.
There is a youngish installation artist, a Canadian, Diana Lynn Thompson, whose practice exemplifies this honesty and truthful response to place, time, experience and sensibility.
A work of art has to live on its own. Just as a person might read Moby Dick for whaling facts, some may see Aboriginal paintings as just decorative and quirky.
When you connect with a work of art–a painting, poetry, novels, music, whatever–you are engaging in an energy that is resident in that work. This metaphysical theory of embodiment is the only way I can explain the depth of the conversations I have had with entities that others would refer to as inanimate.
What I love about this quote in the post is the last line: “Such colours create relationships between people and the land by traveling great distances throughout the world on bark boards, carved objects and on canvas.” You are right, no non-Aboriginal can be fully conscious of the traditions and symbolic meaning in Aboriginal work. But that being said, I am definitely getting something from these works that is hard to describe, maybe even ineffable. It feels like it probably has something to do with the relationship between humans and the earth. That feels more meaningful and transcendent than whaling lore from Melville.
Thank you for the alert on Diana Lynn Thompson. I spent some time on her website, and her work is memorable and very beguiling.