Bark Ladies · 澳大利亚土著女性艺术家的前卫创作

One of the artists featured in the Bark Ladies exhibition to be held at the NGV later this year, Naminapu Maymuru-White, with her work Milngiyawuy.At the end of another turbulent year, as planet, pandemic and disenfranchised peoples continue to nuke all concept of ‘normal’, confusion over the what, who and where of culture is becoming the new culture. Gone is the group-think of a privileged few framing an ascendant view, and growing in its place is the furtive want for revolution from within and without the system. It’s a major conundrum for the modern museum, which must deal with the widening gap between old taxonomies and new art territories without disaffecting a donor elite or audience base.Sign up to theVogue Living newsletterDjapu (2020)by Nonggirrnga Marawili.Photographer: Christian Markel/NGV. All works courtesy the artists and Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre, Yirrkala.But here’s the thing: the chasms created by seismic shifts in current thinking cannot be cleared in little jumps. They call for the big leap of faith that has formalised into Bark Ladies, the National Gallery of Victoria’s front-and-centre showing of works by Yolngu women artists from Yirrkala’s community-controlled Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre (Buku) at the tip of the Northern Territory.Nonggirrnga Marawili with her work Baratjala.Call it an axiom flip of the big-name, white-boy blockbuster, perhaps a timely redress of representation or a savvy pull from the NGV’s wealth of North-east Arnhem Land art at a time when fraught logistics favour local distances. Or call it exactly what it is — a blow-your-socks-offsurvey of world’s-best modern practice at the edge of the planet right now.Djapu (2020)by Nonggirrnga Marawili.Photographer: Christian Markel/NGV. All works courtesy the artists and Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre, Yirrkala.“I think this art is extremely important,” says Myles Russell-Cook, the NGV curator of Indigenous Art who, in collaboration with Buku, has honed two decades of acquisitions down to 11 Yolngu women whose masterworks will display, without resort to rationalising chronologies or kinship structures, in modernist grids and mirrored infinity rooms deserving of Japanese conceptualist Yayoi Kusama. “The show is set on the ground floor at the NGV International, which, in itself, tells that these women are to be looked at on the international scale as among the best painters in the world.”Artist Eunice Djerrkngu Yunupingu.But more than that, he says of the survey’s trenchant start in Federation Court — where Naminapu Maymuru-White’s floor-based depiction, Ringitjmi gapu, (translating to river of heaven and earth) will stream a river of stars and spirit into adjacent galleries — it accords Indigenous creativity due status and recognition “as the oldest continuing tradition of art in the world; one entirely unique to Australia”.Djapu (2020)by Nonggirrnga Marawili.Photographer: Christian Markel/NGV. All works courtesy the artists and Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre, Yirrkala.Seeding out of the wild reception for Yolngu artist Dhambit Mununggurr’s immersive field-of-blue larrakitj (memorial poles) and bark paintings, which installed under the plaintive title Can we all have a happy life (2019-2020) in the NGV’s era-defining 2020 Triennial, Bark Ladies proves that brilliance has no coordinates or colour.It can bubble up in backwaters, on the edge of the Arafura Sea which, part of the single, symbiotic life cycle and law under Yolngu Land, is a potent force in the art of women who only came to painting in the 1990s.“For many years the men painted in a way that was very connected to ceremony, in a very ordered style,” says Russell-Cook of a tendency towards ethnographic documentation that likens to the Homeric epic — stories transmitted for the purpose of preservation. “When First women started painting, we witnessed an incredible shift in innovation — a freedom of gesture and a spontaneity that sparked a whole new style.”And then came the quake in colour; the palette challenge to the strictures of convention that determined all Yolngu art be created from materials found on Country. As Russell-Cook tells it, the Richter scale began registering after Mununggurr sustained critical injuries in a car accident in 2005.Ganarrimirri (Shady Beach) in East Arnhem Land.“Wheelchair-bound and without the use of her right hand, she could no longer collect and prepare the essential ochres,” he says. “But Yolngu are a compassionate people, so she was granted special permission to use store-bought acrylic paints.Leaning into her limitations and the lapping blue of the Arafura waters, Mununggurr dipped her vernacular into its ultramarine depths, producing barks with a Yves Klein-comparable transcendental intensity. Suddenly, her status as an art-prize refusée ramped up to star as global curators came calling.Artist Dhambit Mununggurr.“Her work is spectacular,” says Russell-Cook, advising that an important new piece will be included in the survey. “Just when you think you know someone, she goes and paints Julia Gillard in the midst of these limp-faced politicians delivering her misogyny speech. She cracks me up.”Mununggurr’s radicalisation of palette was foreshadowed by the art of Nonggirrnga Marawili who, famed for her fluoro-pink punking of funerary poles and cross-hatched bark, sources her colours from discarded printer-ink cartridges found on Country. “A clever technicality,” says Russell-Cook of her subversion of protocol in pink. “She’s simply a star.”Artist Dhuwarrwarr Marika.And then there are works by the wildly talented Yunupingus, who count among that family who have produced musicians, community leaders and two Australians of the Year. “I don’t know what’s in their water,” says Russell-Cook, teasing out the intersections of exhibiting art by Nancy Gaymala, Gulumbu (Mununggurr’s late mother who left her starry marks on the ceiling of the Musée du Quai Branly), Barrupu, Eunice andMs. N. Yunupingu.“Gulumbu’s younger sister, the late, super-important Barrupu and painter of the Gumatj fire was the first to transcend past efforts, but her younger sisterMs. N. Yunupingutook it the next step,” he says in nod to her reductive recollections of being gored by a bu alo in a wild apple orchard in her youth. “The apples became emblematic, she painted them over and over again until the work reduced down to circles, painting for painting’s sake; a contemporary musing on rhythm, tone and shape.”Mulku Wirrpanda (left) and Nonggirrnga Marawili painting at Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre, an Indigenous community-controlled art centre in Yirrkala, North-east Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory.“But just when you thought no family could birth another superstar,” adds Russell-Cook, declaring that the barks by the youngest sibling, Djerrkngu Eunice Yunupingu, will be in the show. “She does this wild spiritual conceptualisation of her self as a mermaid; one stemming from the stories she remembers her father telling of spearing a fish when she was in utero.”In light of the female-charged evolution of Buku’s ethnographic visuals into internationally acclaimed high art, the question asks about oestrogen being a catalyst? Russell-Cook laughs and leaves all art distinctions between women, the West, and the rest for others to argue and instead shares a casual remark he overheard when last at Buku.“You know how growing up you’d hear that horrible insult, ‘You throw like a girl’,” he says of the put-down that frames female e ort as never enough. “Well, in Yirrkala earlier this year, I heard someone say: “That boy paints like a girl,” which to Yolngu thinking is the biggest compliment that can possibly issue. Don’t you love that?”Bark Ladies is on at NGV International from December 17, 2021 to April 25, 2022;ngv.vic.gov.auWant moreVogue Living?Sign up to theVogue Livingnewsletterfor your weekly dose of design news and interiors inspiration.Subscribe to Vogue Living and you will become a member of our Vogue VIP subscriber-only loyalty program and be rewarded with exclusive event invitations, special insider access, must-have product offers, gifts from our luxury partners and so much more.Subscribe today.