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January 23, 2008
Kathleen Petyarre is from the Utopia region of Central Australia and her dotted paintings are of the Arnkerrth (mountain devil lizard) Dreaming and other sacred women's sites. She is the custodian of the Arnkerrth Dreaming which tells the story of the female ancestors as they traveled across the country pinpointing sites essential for survival.
The painting depicts the Mountain Devil Lizard Ancestral tracks, as he travels the vast tracts of Atnangker country.
Kathleen Petyarre, Mountain Devil Lizard Dreaming, date ? Acrylic on Canvas
There is some discussion of Kathleen Petyarre's work by Deborah Barlow at Slowmuse in the Reading the land post. As a custodian of the Arnkerrth Dreaming, Petyarre has permission to represent her dreaming ancestor and through her art she creates a sense of a landscape densely patterned with collective and individual memory.
What we confront here is that to attend to the insistence of the aesthetic is not to offer it as a refuge from the conflicts of politics and history. The aesthetic does not appear as a form of space—a haven or enclave or utopia—but more as a taking a stand and refusing to give way.
As Forest Pyle observes in his Introduction: 'The Power is There': Romanticism as Aesthetic Insistence
No genuinely dialectical criticism—and Adorno remains its unsurpassed exemplar—understands the disinterestedness of aesthetic judgment or the autonomy of the aesthetic simply as the retreat of art to its own domain; but the characterization of the aesthetic as a space often underwrites the now familiar political criticism of aesthetic autonomy.... Terry Eagleton's neat summary of the left-wing position demonstrates the pervasiveness of this spatial logic: "art is ... conveniently sequestered from all other social practice, to become an isolated enclave within which the dominant social order can find an idealized refuge from its own actual values" (IA, 9).
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This is wonderful.