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April 21, 2004
The Wynne Prize in Australia is awarded to what the judges consider to be the best landscape painting of Australian scenery in oils or watercolours, or for the best example of figure sculpture by an Australian artist. That is what the blurb says anyhow.
The winner of the 2004 prize was this painting from the Western Desert:
George Ward Tjungurrayi, Untitled
For the record here are the finalists for the Archibald portrait prize and the finalists of the photographic portrait prize.
Nicolas Rothwell visited George Ward Tjungurrayi. His account of the visit is here. Rothwell describes the austere formalesque paintings as:
"...depict the ancestral desert narratives, relating to the country west of Kintore – above all, the snake-rich landscapes around Lake MacDonald. But they are not maps, as much as expressions of a world, a logic, a sense of how space is enlivened by spirit.
Just as the creation journeys they refer to operate on many levels, so do the paintings: to the outside eye, they possess an austere beauty; when explained in detail, they can serve as visual cues to a complex story-system; but all the while their air of coherent depth comes from the underlying mental architecture of the desert world."
It is a world that is outside the horizons of we white Australians in the city and we--those in the art institution--re-interpret them largely in formal terms.
I'm uncomfortable with that reading. Though the painting is very formal--geometric even --- it also expresses story and country as do these. Many whites refer to this as spirit (of the desert) which has its ancenstry in Hegel's conception of Geist. Spirit with its roots in Geist is tacitly given a religious, rather than a cultural interpretation, and so implies that reality is ultimately spiritual. Spirit means dreaming.
There is no way around Geist or spirit. I prefer to give it a minimal interpretation (what Hegelians call a non-metaphysical interpretation) of a strong attachment to land, a strong sense of territory, a very strong attachment to country as the traditional lands. From the attachment to country as a heritage to be cared for comes the cultural values of a sharing of the land and resources, co-existence and a collective conception of society. This takes us to the threshold of Aboriginal culture.
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I don't know what the judges had in mind - maybe a good ornamental painting for some - but is this what they call a landscape? I think it is appalling.