Thank you to my friend, Bluehorn, for looking after this blog while I’ve been away. Love the expression,”wishy washy.” How can I not have used it for a while? It seems essential.
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Just back from Central Australia — Alice Springs, Uluru, Kata Tjuta, Kings Canyon and nights of sleeping on the red dirt of the desert in only a swag and sleeping bag.
While in Alice, I visited the Mbantua Gallery and Museum which is owned by Tim Jennings. In 2007 he paid the then record-breaking price of $1,000,000 for Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s Earth’s Creation (1994). It’s one from her so-called “high-colourist middle period,” though “middle days” might be more appropriate; she didn’t start painting until she was an old lady of 80 and passed away 6 years and 3,000 paintings later. The enormous painting is displayed in a poky room surrounded by red dirt and tableaux of camp stools and open Billy Tea packets. In short, the full cliché.
There’s a video playing in another room which shows Jennings going out on a typical trip to Utopia, the settlement 270 km north-east of Alice where Emily and many of the other famous female artists lived. He announces at the beginning of the film that it’s designed to show visitors and prospective buyers the relationship with the Aboriginal artists is a respectful one, yet it had, at least for this viewer, the exactly opposite effect.
Jennings is shown distributing the acrylic paints and canvasses from the back of his Landrover, and giving the younger members of the community instructions about what to paint. The artists line up next to the vehicle and after flicking through the bundle of finished canvasses they give him, he writes each a cheque. Trying and failing to remember their names, he scurries back to the Landrover and, like a rat with a gold tooth, can hardly get away quick enough. Back to Alice with his huge booty which he’ll sell at prices marked up by many thousand per cent.
Images: Earth’s Creation (1994) by Emily Kame Kngwarreye (top); the artist herself (bottom)
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