(2 of 2)
; The show's five curators, anthropologists with an unusual sensitivity to the way images work in Aboriginal life, have produced in their catalog what may be the best short introduction to the Aboriginal world view now in print. Very briefly, the Dreamings are the world's spirit ancestors; they brought the world out of chaos, formed it, filled it with plants, insects, animals and fish, created human society. They exist in vast numbers, and there is one for every nameable entity: a Honey Ant Dreaming, for instance, or a Witchetty Grub Dreaming, a Flannelflower Dreaming or a Bushfire Dreaming.
The deeds of each of these ancestors, in creating and sustaining the world, form an immense narrative beside which the Mahabharata is a mere short story, and all of them are embedded in the sacred sites that cover Australia. (From the Aboriginal point of view, in fact, Australia is one big sacred site.) Hence as curator Peter Sutton puts it in the catalog, "The land is already a narrative -- an artifact of intellect -- before people represent it. There is no wilderness."
The myriad dots that form atmospheric drifts of color in a recent Papunya school painting like Five Dreamings, 1984, by Michael Nelson Jakamarra and his wife Marjorie Napaljarri, may fill the space with an "all-overness" as complete as any painting by Jackson Pollock. But they are specific symbols for terrain, vegetation, movement, sites and animals, of which the most obvious is a big reddish snake. Concentric circles mark campsites or rock holes, straight lines the routes between them, wavy ones rain or watercourses, and so on. Even the toa carvings collected from tribesmen around Lake Eyre in the early 1900s, which seem to radiate a degree of sculptural fantasy that predicts the surrealist work of Giacometti and the totems of David Smith, are maps of landscape and the ancestors it contains.
Tribal art is never free and does not want to be. The ancestors do not give one drop of goanna spit for "creativity." It is not a world, to put it mildly, that has much in common with a contemporary American's -- or even a white Australian's. But it raises painful questions about the irreversible drainage from our own culture of spirituality, awe and connection to nature.