Eiffel Tower Dreaming: Lena Nyadbi
Words, voices and images: Connecting to cultures around the world
“A monumental painting from the Aboriginal artist Lena Nyadbi, that the seven million visitors per year to the Eiffel Tower will be now lucky to view”. Dr Stéphane Laurent
Duration
Director
Cinematography
Dr Stephane LAURENT is a French scholar versed in the culture and the prospect of the economy and industry. He is currently Professor and Director of Research at the Sorbonne University, Paris, and shows an open-mind to the world and a great interest in global issues thanks to a strong international experience. Alumnus of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, he first specialized in history to study the techniques, education, art, architecture, heritage, crafts, design, institutions and culture fields through many books and articles. He developed an international academic career, which brought him to work in Asia, in the Americas and in the Middle East where he became Dean of a College. From this diverse and long experience abroad he started to build up a cross-analysis of the economical and industrial aspects of our global world. His thinking focused on a critical approach of the French political and social situation in comparison with the USA and the growing economies in Far Asia and in the Arabic Peninsula. Dr. Stephane Laurent gave numerous lectures around the world both in French and in English. His works were awarded by many grants in Brazil, the USA, Japan and China. He is currently publishing books titled “Lessons of the World” and “Made in France”, which will debate creativity and production.
Peter Hylands asked Dr Stéphane Laurent (Professor and Director of Research at the Sorbonne University) to write this article in English to give us all a perspective on France's intellectual connection to the Indigenous people of Australia.
The results of and stories about this connection have been both extraordinary and powerful. Lena Nyadbi's large scale work on the roof terrace of the Musée du Quai Branly is one of these stories. The original painting by Lena Nyadbi was executed on linen with natural ochre and charcoal. The painting was offered to the museum by the Australian entrepreneur and philanthropist Harold Mitchell. Harold was eager to see the painting reproduced in a bigger dimension and as a decoration to broaden its potential audience. Lena Nyadbi is represented by Warmun Art Centre which is located in the Gija Country of the East Kimberley region of Western Australia.
On Thursday June 6th was inaugurated in Paris a monumental painting from the Aboriginal artist Lena Nyadbi, that the seven million visitors per year of the Eiffel Tower will be now lucky to view. Purposefully, this giant work sponsored by the Australian businessman and philanthropist Harold Mitchell, covers a large part of the roof terrace of one of the Musée du Quai Branly (also called Musée des Arts Premiers / Primary Arts Museum) buildings, the most recent national museum of the French capital, supported and inaugurated by the former French president Jacques Chirac in 2006. The museum is located on the left bank of the Seine River (quai Branly), at one stone’s throw from the Eiffel tower, one of the most popular world landmarks. It displays objects from Europe, but presents cultures from Oceania, Africa, Asia and the Americas. To satisfy Chirac’s passion for ‘Primary arts’, the museum was designed by the French renowned architect Jean Nouvel, who agreed the idea to hide the black isolating tar covering on what he calls the ‘fifth facade’ for the building thanks to a permanently visible contemporary work in a manner to complete agreeably the construction.
This commission adds an endpoint to a series of installations from Australian indigenous artists in one of the Musée du quai Branly’s buildings located rue de l’Université. These installations are very popular to the public.
“The Musée du quai Branly presents Australian Aboriginal contemporary art in a permanent way, explains Stéphane Martin, the director of the musée since the opening of this institution. The Australian Indigenous Art Commission at the Musée du quai Branly, which was launched in the early 2000s, is one of the most significant cultural projects for Indigenous art from Australia in France".
The initiative came from Mr. Martin himself who wished to offer to the onlookers a pleasant bird view of the building from a certain distance. It can be considered as unique in the Parisian landscape because there is no oversized decoration of this kind in the French capital. It was strongly supported by the Australian representatives in France and the French Embassy in Canberra. Australia Council chair Rupert Myer says the project strengthens ongoing ties between Australian museums and galleries and the Musée du quai Branly.
"This powerful new work by Lena Nyadbi is an historic opportunity to highlight and promote Indigenous Australian art and cultures to a global audience in Paris," he reported in a statement.
Stéphane Martin approached the Australia Council in 2011 with the proposal for a large scale work at the museum. A committee of people, including former Art Gallery of New South Wales indigenous art curator Hetti Perkins, recommended Nyadbi’s work for the rooftop project. The discussions led to visits with Nyadbi at her home in Western Australia and the creation of the artwork itself.
The results of and stories about this connection have been both extraordinary and powerful. Lena Nyadbi's large scale work on the roof terrace of the Musée du Quai Branly is one of these stories. The original painting by Lena Nyadbi was executed on linen with natural ochre and charcoal. The painting was offered to the museum by the Australian entrepreneur and philanthropist Harold Mitchell. Harold was eager to see the painting reproduced in a bigger dimension and as a decoration to broaden its potential audience. Lena Nyadbi is represented by Warmun Art Centre which is located in the Gija Country of the East Kimberley region of Western Australia.
On Thursday June 6th was inaugurated in Paris a monumental painting from the Aboriginal artist Lena Nyadbi, that the seven million visitors per year of the Eiffel Tower will be now lucky to view. Purposefully, this giant work sponsored by the Australian businessman and philanthropist Harold Mitchell, covers a large part of the roof terrace of one of the Musée du Quai Branly (also called Musée des Arts Premiers / Primary Arts Museum) buildings, the most recent national museum of the French capital, supported and inaugurated by the former French president Jacques Chirac in 2006. The museum is located on the left bank of the Seine River (quai Branly), at one stone’s throw from the Eiffel tower, one of the most popular world landmarks. It displays objects from Europe, but presents cultures from Oceania, Africa, Asia and the Americas. To satisfy Chirac’s passion for ‘Primary arts’, the museum was designed by the French renowned architect Jean Nouvel, who agreed the idea to hide the black isolating tar covering on what he calls the ‘fifth facade’ for the building thanks to a permanently visible contemporary work in a manner to complete agreeably the construction.
This commission adds an endpoint to a series of installations from Australian indigenous artists in one of the Musée du quai Branly’s buildings located rue de l’Université. These installations are very popular to the public.
“The Musée du quai Branly presents Australian Aboriginal contemporary art in a permanent way, explains Stéphane Martin, the director of the musée since the opening of this institution. The Australian Indigenous Art Commission at the Musée du quai Branly, which was launched in the early 2000s, is one of the most significant cultural projects for Indigenous art from Australia in France".
The initiative came from Mr. Martin himself who wished to offer to the onlookers a pleasant bird view of the building from a certain distance. It can be considered as unique in the Parisian landscape because there is no oversized decoration of this kind in the French capital. It was strongly supported by the Australian representatives in France and the French Embassy in Canberra. Australia Council chair Rupert Myer says the project strengthens ongoing ties between Australian museums and galleries and the Musée du quai Branly.
"This powerful new work by Lena Nyadbi is an historic opportunity to highlight and promote Indigenous Australian art and cultures to a global audience in Paris," he reported in a statement.
Stéphane Martin approached the Australia Council in 2011 with the proposal for a large scale work at the museum. A committee of people, including former Art Gallery of New South Wales indigenous art curator Hetti Perkins, recommended Nyadbi’s work for the rooftop project. The discussions led to visits with Nyadbi at her home in Western Australia and the creation of the artwork itself.
A legendary story hosted on the top
Mrs. Nyadbi work shows giant fish scales imagined by an artist already in her seventies, who is born in the Kimberley region of North-west Australia and started to perform her visual work only in 1998 at Warmun Art Centre, in Western Australia. It enlarges forty-six times the detail of a painting titled Dayiwul Lirlmim (Barramundi scales), enough to be seen from the first and the second floors of the Eiffel tower. The Barramundi is a sweet water fish, which belongs to the species of the bass. The "dream of the barramundi scales" evokes the territory of the parents of the artist, where is situated the largest diamonds mine in the world. It tells the story of three women who tried to catch the ancestral barramundi in a fish trap. But the fish escaped. Pursued by the women, he jumped over the creek before falling down on the rocks. His scales scattered across the soil at the current location of the mine. Actually, the artists always pointed out the similarity between the scales and the diamonds.
The original painting by Lena Nyadbi was executed on linen with natural ochre and charcoal coming from the Giga territory. It has been offered to the museum by Harold Mitchell, who was eager to see it reproduced in a bigger dimension and as a decoration to broaden the potential audience.
The piece was traced with 172 stencils measuring 3 meters per 1.5 meters on the black canvas of the roof by workers, who painted with a roller a white rubberised and waterproof color used for the city’s traffic signs. The expansion of the original painting was calculated with a computer and digitalized, a way also to facilitate the reproduction of the stencils when it will become mandatory to replace the tar covering every fifteen years or so, owing to degradations caused by the weather conditions. Until the very last moment, Stéphane Martin worried about the difficulty to achieve the work in due time because of the persistent showers which fell on Paris during a chilly Spring.
Lena Nyadbi belongs to the Warmun area (Turkey Creek), which mostly gathers artists from the Gija people like Paddy Jaminji, Queenie McKenzie and Rover Thomas, all represented at the Warmun Art Center, that Mrs. Nyadbi finally joined after starting her artist’s career independently. Giga people struggle to maintain their millenary culture through religious ceremonies in which their sacred territory, Gija and the Dreamtime - the mythical time of creation for Aborigines – are made inseparable. Lena Nyadbi production is based on a bold interpretation of customary designs with a personal sense of space and color. Represented in groups or individually, symbolic references to ancestral Dayiwul barramundi (featured by its U-shaped scales) to Jimbirla (spearhead) and Gemerre (scarification) predominate.
Her work is not unknown in France. The Musée already commissioned her in 2005 a mural for one of the external facades of the building entitled Jimbirla & Gemerre (spearhead and scarification). It is composed of several small modeled spearhead-shapes in raw color, which cover the surface of the wall from the second storey; black and white patterns inspired by the scarifications decorate the upper part of the windows. Again, none of the motifs is similar. They create an effect of repetition of abstract signs which capture the attention. Jimbirla stones can be found everywhere in the artist’s father’s country which is called Jimbirlan – the place of the spearhead. The Gemerre patterns resemble the traditional body scarification marks. The significance of this imagery is part of the artist’s cultural heritage, known as the Ngarranggarni, which is intrinsic to Nyadbi’s production.
A success in France
The impressive production on the top of Musée des Arts premiers pays a tribute to Lena Nyadbi’s talent in particular and to the Australian indigenous art in general, which encounters a growing success on the international art scene. The Musée du quai Branly conserves around 33 000 objects from Oceania including 1423 aboriginal art objects from Australia such as boomerangs, sculptures, 250 weapons, bark paintings from Arnhem Land and 69 Australian Aboriginal contemporary acrylic on canvas and synthetic polymer paintings. Last Fall, an exhibition titled ‘The origins of Western Desert Aboriginal Art – Australia – Tjukurrtjanu’ was organized there, showing the birth of an art output in the heart of the Australian desert. It displayed 160 pictorial artworks and 70 objects presented for the first time in Europe. The event attracted over 133,000 visitors (the museum welcomes 1.3 million visitors each year).
While the Musée is dedicated to non-western arts, one can be surprised that aboriginal creators were preferred to creators originated from another continent such as Africa, which holds strong historical diplomatic ties with France since the colonization, even if France possesses territories in the Pacific ocean. With certainty, in a context of economical downturn, the active sponsorship from a media-buyer mogul’s foundation played in important role in making Stéphane Martin's decision.
“Through the Harold Mitchell Foundation we seek to have a transformational impact with the projects we fund, said Mr. Mitchell. Presented in the heart of European civilization this project both raises the profile of Indigenous art and expands the ways we think about the possibilities of Aboriginal art in a global context.”
However, one has to keep in mind that the most successful cultural projects generally come out because of personal connections and initiatives rather than from ambitious programs.
Hence, this huge 700-square-metre (7,500 sq. ft) installation conceived as a spectacle reveals a particular trend for Australian Indigenous art in nowadays France. Since about ten years ago, many galleries dealing with “Primary arts” opened in the Saint-Germain-des-Près area, the historical core of Paris and a hotspot for the antiques and art market. The passion for African art decreased recently while on the contrary the passion for the Aboriginal art, which is more perpetuated by living artists, has grown, like the Asian arts, from China especially. In addition, indigenous Australian art calls to mind graphic design, tattoos and graffiti, which belong to a popular aesthetical language.
The French public is usually fond of cultures from other continents. One can find traces of the “exotism” in the late seventeenth century, when the Sun king started to establish diplomatic and commercial relations with Turkey and China. A fashion for “Turqueries” and “Chinoiseries” developed simultaneously in the arts and literature. This phenomenon revived in the late nineteenth century with the Japonism, which reflects the discovery of a civilization, which was closed on itself for a long time. While many artists like the Impressionists were inspired from Japanese prints, department stores sold various items such as garments, silk, ceramic, painted rolls (kakemonos), folding screens and fans… In the early twentieth century, African arts attracted the attention from cubist artists like Picasso. Notwithstanding, the interest in the Japanese arts persisted to the point that the Japanese government decided to open one of his three cultural centers in Paris (the other ones are in Tokyo and New York). The passion for the aboriginal culture echoes a recent attraction for Australia, a country where many French people started to emigrate to.
Capstone of a passion
The fascination for the Australian culture is epitomized by Australian Indigenous Art Commission at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris, which is one of the most significant cultural projects in France in recent times, and a landmark event for contemporary Indigenous art from Australia. It consists of ten major interventions: two in the concrete and glass façade of the four-story building, five ceiling installations from the ground to third floors, two internal walls and one sculptural lorrkkon(hollow log coffin).
Several artists representing the major figures of Australian indigenous contemporary art across the country participated in the project. They were asked to produce specific installations under the supervision of curators and of the Cracknell & Lonergan Architects agency. The artists included: Lena Nyadbi, Paddy Nyunkuny Bedford, Judy Watson, Gulumbu Yunupingu, John Mawurndjul, Tommy Watson, Ningura Napurrula, Michael Riley and Karel Kupka. The contribution of the artists and their commitment to the project exemplify the Museum’s will to embody the world’s cultures as ‘living traditions’. The program was defined in order to respect ancestral traditions. For example, the scale of the works is vast enough to be commensurate with their cultural depth, to fulfill their aesthetic sense and to be aligned on traditional panoramic rock art paintings and engravings, immense sand sculptures and majestic carved trees.
The artists, who worked traditionally with painting on bark and canvas using natural and synthetic pigments, or more commonly with printmaking, sculpture and photography, embraced new technologies and mediums to see their works coming to fruition on a hugely increased scale. They primarily created samples, sketches and drawings according to their own practice while integrating the place where their final work will be displayed permanently.
Among them, the multi-award winning photographer and filmmaker Michael Riley shows a photographic series called Cloud which combines the key themes of his art practice. In a dream-like sequence, iconic images featuring the differing values of Aboriginality, Christianity and pastoralism come together. He used an advanced technical process to adapt his work: starphire and float glass laminated with photographic interlayer, chadobak (spandrel glazing).
More classical transposition was also used. The painter and printmaker Judy Watson who co-represented Australia at the 1997 Venice Biennale, juxtaposes drawings of natural objects from forgotten museum collections contained in her sketchbook on a window, and drawings of natural objects against a richly coloured background on the ceiling close by. This double installation using etched glass stresses a poignant evocation to the dispossession of Indigenous people and their culture. Inspired by a dream, in Two halves with bailer shell 2006displayed on the ceiling, blue represents memory and the shell is a symbol of survival and resistance.
The fascination for the emerging cultures in France finds probably its roots in an archetypal exhibition held in 1989 at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris: ‘Magicians of the Earth’. For the first time, the public could discover contemporary artists originated from non-Western cultures who dealt with their own traditions and beliefs which they expressed through a modern language.
“Magicians of the earth was the first truly international exhibit in the sense that it was conceived on a global scale, says André Magnin, who co-organized the event, spanning the works of a hundred artists from different cultures and five continents. The organizers never sought to rank the art in some hierarchical or geographic order; they let the works speak for themselves. The exhibit, with its worldwide repercussions, provoked lively debates that continue to this day. It was visionary in its conception, turning the aesthetic landscape upside down, changing the prism through which we view issues and creating new ones".
The richness and the originality of this large spectrum of creativity became both a milestone and a revelation which raised the attention for other living art performances than the history of modern art people could usually find in the museums. This interest was enhanced by the globalization phenomenon that affected the whole economy including the art market since 2000 and by the special attention paid to “Primary” arts and ‘exotism’ in France for a long time.
Hence, thanks to the Musée du quai Branly, the world becomes smaller: “Our paintings represent our memory for the next generations, explains Tommy Yannima Watson, one of the artists selected to adorn the building. If they come to the art centers, the Aborigines see the canvas painted by their parents, they can mull over their history”. This possibility now expanded to another territory, Paris, one of the world’s leading places for the arts.
Dr Stéphane Laurent
Severe flash flood destroys the Warmun Art Centre
Additional information from Peter Hylands
In March 2011 a severe flash flood destroyed the Warmun Art Centre. While very luckily no human lives were lost, the loss of and damage to the community’s collection of paintings was devastating. With the help of experts over 400 paintings from the Warmun community art collection have now been carefully restored.
Many of these paintings, works of extraordinary cultural value, were by the regions most famous artists and included paintings by Rover Thomas, Queenie McKenzie, Hector Jandany and and Paddy Jaminji. In this blog Cayla Dengate, Warmun Art Centre assistant manager and curator, tells us about the art centre today and its great success beyond the flood.
A plain of dried, golden spinifex stretches from Warmun Art Centre’s doors to the horizon, where it juts up against a red rock escarpment, glowing like an ember in the afternoon.
In this sun-dried sea of savannah, an immense boab tree anchors Warmun Art Centre in the frame - its gnarled branches providing a canopy of shade for artists.
It is this sparse, beautiful environment that is central to the contemporary artists who own Warmun Art Centre.
This globally significant Western Australian centre is a 100 per cent Aboriginal owned corporation where the artists preside over the studio and gallery.
Isolation is no barrier between Warmun Art Centre and the contemporary art world. In this year alone, Warmun Art Centre has supported Lena Nyadbi as she launched the world’s largest installation at the base of the Eiffel Tower; It has celebrated with Mabel Juli as she won the Kate Challis RAKA Award; It has seen Churchill Cann win the West Australian Artist Award and it will surely watch on as Lena attends The Deadlys this year where she is nominated for Visual Artist of the Year.
Since the centre opened in 1998, Warmun artists have been renowned for their use of natural ochre and pigments on canvas, which is integral to the contemporary expression of land and culture as identity for Indigenous Gija people. The work of Warmun artists is an inseparable and celebratory part of Gija culture and country, and draws on traditional Ngarrangkarni (Dreaming) stories and contemporary life.
Today at the centre, the boab tree is laden with seed-filled nuts – heavy with promise and potential. The art centre is also cultivating its next generation by way of emerging artists. From crushing ochre and painting boards to creating cutting-edge multimedia art in the centre’s media lab, these emerging artists are supported on their journey through Gija culture and contemporary art practice.
Like the boab, Warmun Art Centre continues to cultivate emerging talent at its base while reaching its branches higher to the clear Kimberley sky.
Lena Nyadbi at the Warmun Art Centre photo Matthew Fallon. The Musée du quai Branly featuring Lena's rooftop painting photo Jonathan Kimberley. Landing image Andrea Hylands taken from inside Musée du quai Branly.
A legendary story hosted on the top
Mrs. Nyadbi work shows giant fish scales imagined by an artist already in her seventies, who is born in the Kimberley region of North-west Australia and started to perform her visual work only in 1998 at Warmun Art Centre, in Western Australia. It enlarges forty-six times the detail of a painting titled Dayiwul Lirlmim (Barramundi scales), enough to be seen from the first and the second floors of the Eiffel tower. The Barramundi is a sweet water fish, which belongs to the species of the bass. The "dream of the barramundi scales" evokes the territory of the parents of the artist, where is situated the largest diamonds mine in the world. It tells the story of three women who tried to catch the ancestral barramundi in a fish trap. But the fish escaped. Pursued by the women, he jumped over the creek before falling down on the rocks. His scales scattered across the soil at the current location of the mine. Actually, the artists always pointed out the similarity between the scales and the diamonds.
The original painting by Lena Nyadbi was executed on linen with natural ochre and charcoal coming from the Giga territory. It has been offered to the museum by Harold Mitchell, who was eager to see it reproduced in a bigger dimension and as a decoration to broaden the potential audience.
The piece was traced with 172 stencils measuring 3 meters per 1.5 meters on the black canvas of the roof by workers, who painted with a roller a white rubberised and waterproof color used for the city’s traffic signs. The expansion of the original painting was calculated with a computer and digitalized, a way also to facilitate the reproduction of the stencils when it will become mandatory to replace the tar covering every fifteen years or so, owing to degradations caused by the weather conditions. Until the very last moment, Stéphane Martin worried about the difficulty to achieve the work in due time because of the persistent showers which fell on Paris during a chilly Spring.
Lena Nyadbi belongs to the Warmun area (Turkey Creek), which mostly gathers artists from the Gija people like Paddy Jaminji, Queenie McKenzie and Rover Thomas, all represented at the Warmun Art Center, that Mrs. Nyadbi finally joined after starting her artist’s career independently. Giga people struggle to maintain their millenary culture through religious ceremonies in which their sacred territory, Gija and the Dreamtime - the mythical time of creation for Aborigines – are made inseparable. Lena Nyadbi production is based on a bold interpretation of customary designs with a personal sense of space and color. Represented in groups or individually, symbolic references to ancestral Dayiwul barramundi (featured by its U-shaped scales) to Jimbirla (spearhead) and Gemerre (scarification) predominate.
Her work is not unknown in France. The Musée already commissioned her in 2005 a mural for one of the external facades of the building entitled Jimbirla & Gemerre (spearhead and scarification). It is composed of several small modeled spearhead-shapes in raw color, which cover the surface of the wall from the second storey; black and white patterns inspired by the scarifications decorate the upper part of the windows. Again, none of the motifs is similar. They create an effect of repetition of abstract signs which capture the attention. Jimbirla stones can be found everywhere in the artist’s father’s country which is called Jimbirlan – the place of the spearhead. The Gemerre patterns resemble the traditional body scarification marks. The significance of this imagery is part of the artist’s cultural heritage, known as the Ngarranggarni, which is intrinsic to Nyadbi’s production.
A success in France
The impressive production on the top of Musée des Arts premiers pays a tribute to Lena Nyadbi’s talent in particular and to the Australian indigenous art in general, which encounters a growing success on the international art scene. The Musée du quai Branly conserves around 33 000 objects from Oceania including 1423 aboriginal art objects from Australia such as boomerangs, sculptures, 250 weapons, bark paintings from Arnhem Land and 69 Australian Aboriginal contemporary acrylic on canvas and synthetic polymer paintings. Last Fall, an exhibition titled ‘The origins of Western Desert Aboriginal Art – Australia – Tjukurrtjanu’ was organized there, showing the birth of an art output in the heart of the Australian desert. It displayed 160 pictorial artworks and 70 objects presented for the first time in Europe. The event attracted over 133,000 visitors (the museum welcomes 1.3 million visitors each year).
While the Musée is dedicated to non-western arts, one can be surprised that aboriginal creators were preferred to creators originated from another continent such as Africa, which holds strong historical diplomatic ties with France since the colonization, even if France possesses territories in the Pacific ocean. With certainty, in a context of economical downturn, the active sponsorship from a media-buyer mogul’s foundation played in important role in making Stéphane Martin's decision.
“Through the Harold Mitchell Foundation we seek to have a transformational impact with the projects we fund, said Mr. Mitchell. Presented in the heart of European civilization this project both raises the profile of Indigenous art and expands the ways we think about the possibilities of Aboriginal art in a global context.”
However, one has to keep in mind that the most successful cultural projects generally come out because of personal connections and initiatives rather than from ambitious programs.
Hence, this huge 700-square-metre (7,500 sq. ft) installation conceived as a spectacle reveals a particular trend for Australian Indigenous art in nowadays France. Since about ten years ago, many galleries dealing with “Primary arts” opened in the Saint-Germain-des-Près area, the historical core of Paris and a hotspot for the antiques and art market. The passion for African art decreased recently while on the contrary the passion for the Aboriginal art, which is more perpetuated by living artists, has grown, like the Asian arts, from China especially. In addition, indigenous Australian art calls to mind graphic design, tattoos and graffiti, which belong to a popular aesthetical language.
The French public is usually fond of cultures from other continents. One can find traces of the “exotism” in the late seventeenth century, when the Sun king started to establish diplomatic and commercial relations with Turkey and China. A fashion for “Turqueries” and “Chinoiseries” developed simultaneously in the arts and literature. This phenomenon revived in the late nineteenth century with the Japonism, which reflects the discovery of a civilization, which was closed on itself for a long time. While many artists like the Impressionists were inspired from Japanese prints, department stores sold various items such as garments, silk, ceramic, painted rolls (kakemonos), folding screens and fans… In the early twentieth century, African arts attracted the attention from cubist artists like Picasso. Notwithstanding, the interest in the Japanese arts persisted to the point that the Japanese government decided to open one of his three cultural centers in Paris (the other ones are in Tokyo and New York). The passion for the aboriginal culture echoes a recent attraction for Australia, a country where many French people started to emigrate to.
Capstone of a passion
The fascination for the Australian culture is epitomized by Australian Indigenous Art Commission at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris, which is one of the most significant cultural projects in France in recent times, and a landmark event for contemporary Indigenous art from Australia. It consists of ten major interventions: two in the concrete and glass façade of the four-story building, five ceiling installations from the ground to third floors, two internal walls and one sculptural lorrkkon(hollow log coffin).
Several artists representing the major figures of Australian indigenous contemporary art across the country participated in the project. They were asked to produce specific installations under the supervision of curators and of the Cracknell & Lonergan Architects agency. The artists included: Lena Nyadbi, Paddy Nyunkuny Bedford, Judy Watson, Gulumbu Yunupingu, John Mawurndjul, Tommy Watson, Ningura Napurrula, Michael Riley and Karel Kupka. The contribution of the artists and their commitment to the project exemplify the Museum’s will to embody the world’s cultures as ‘living traditions’. The program was defined in order to respect ancestral traditions. For example, the scale of the works is vast enough to be commensurate with their cultural depth, to fulfill their aesthetic sense and to be aligned on traditional panoramic rock art paintings and engravings, immense sand sculptures and majestic carved trees.
The artists, who worked traditionally with painting on bark and canvas using natural and synthetic pigments, or more commonly with printmaking, sculpture and photography, embraced new technologies and mediums to see their works coming to fruition on a hugely increased scale. They primarily created samples, sketches and drawings according to their own practice while integrating the place where their final work will be displayed permanently.
Among them, the multi-award winning photographer and filmmaker Michael Riley shows a photographic series called Cloud which combines the key themes of his art practice. In a dream-like sequence, iconic images featuring the differing values of Aboriginality, Christianity and pastoralism come together. He used an advanced technical process to adapt his work: starphire and float glass laminated with photographic interlayer, chadobak (spandrel glazing).
More classical transposition was also used. The painter and printmaker Judy Watson who co-represented Australia at the 1997 Venice Biennale, juxtaposes drawings of natural objects from forgotten museum collections contained in her sketchbook on a window, and drawings of natural objects against a richly coloured background on the ceiling close by. This double installation using etched glass stresses a poignant evocation to the dispossession of Indigenous people and their culture. Inspired by a dream, in Two halves with bailer shell 2006displayed on the ceiling, blue represents memory and the shell is a symbol of survival and resistance.
The fascination for the emerging cultures in France finds probably its roots in an archetypal exhibition held in 1989 at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris: ‘Magicians of the Earth’. For the first time, the public could discover contemporary artists originated from non-Western cultures who dealt with their own traditions and beliefs which they expressed through a modern language.
“Magicians of the earth was the first truly international exhibit in the sense that it was conceived on a global scale, says André Magnin, who co-organized the event, spanning the works of a hundred artists from different cultures and five continents. The organizers never sought to rank the art in some hierarchical or geographic order; they let the works speak for themselves. The exhibit, with its worldwide repercussions, provoked lively debates that continue to this day. It was visionary in its conception, turning the aesthetic landscape upside down, changing the prism through which we view issues and creating new ones".
The richness and the originality of this large spectrum of creativity became both a milestone and a revelation which raised the attention for other living art performances than the history of modern art people could usually find in the museums. This interest was enhanced by the globalization phenomenon that affected the whole economy including the art market since 2000 and by the special attention paid to “Primary” arts and ‘exotism’ in France for a long time.
Hence, thanks to the Musée du quai Branly, the world becomes smaller: “Our paintings represent our memory for the next generations, explains Tommy Yannima Watson, one of the artists selected to adorn the building. If they come to the art centers, the Aborigines see the canvas painted by their parents, they can mull over their history”. This possibility now expanded to another territory, Paris, one of the world’s leading places for the arts.
Dr Stéphane Laurent
Severe flash flood destroys the Warmun Art Centre
Additional information from Peter Hylands
In March 2011 a severe flash flood destroyed the Warmun Art Centre. While very luckily no human lives were lost, the loss of and damage to the community’s collection of paintings was devastating. With the help of experts over 400 paintings from the Warmun community art collection have now been carefully restored.
Many of these paintings, works of extraordinary cultural value, were by the regions most famous artists and included paintings by Rover Thomas, Queenie McKenzie, Hector Jandany and and Paddy Jaminji. In this blog Cayla Dengate, Warmun Art Centre assistant manager and curator, tells us about the art centre today and its great success beyond the flood.
A plain of dried, golden spinifex stretches from Warmun Art Centre’s doors to the horizon, where it juts up against a red rock escarpment, glowing like an ember in the afternoon.
In this sun-dried sea of savannah, an immense boab tree anchors Warmun Art Centre in the frame - its gnarled branches providing a canopy of shade for artists.
It is this sparse, beautiful environment that is central to the contemporary artists who own Warmun Art Centre.
This globally significant Western Australian centre is a 100 per cent Aboriginal owned corporation where the artists preside over the studio and gallery.
Isolation is no barrier between Warmun Art Centre and the contemporary art world. In this year alone, Warmun Art Centre has supported Lena Nyadbi as she launched the world’s largest installation at the base of the Eiffel Tower; It has celebrated with Mabel Juli as she won the Kate Challis RAKA Award; It has seen Churchill Cann win the West Australian Artist Award and it will surely watch on as Lena attends The Deadlys this year where she is nominated for Visual Artist of the Year.
Since the centre opened in 1998, Warmun artists have been renowned for their use of natural ochre and pigments on canvas, which is integral to the contemporary expression of land and culture as identity for Indigenous Gija people. The work of Warmun artists is an inseparable and celebratory part of Gija culture and country, and draws on traditional Ngarrangkarni (Dreaming) stories and contemporary life.
Today at the centre, the boab tree is laden with seed-filled nuts – heavy with promise and potential. The art centre is also cultivating its next generation by way of emerging artists. From crushing ochre and painting boards to creating cutting-edge multimedia art in the centre’s media lab, these emerging artists are supported on their journey through Gija culture and contemporary art practice.
Like the boab, Warmun Art Centre continues to cultivate emerging talent at its base while reaching its branches higher to the clear Kimberley sky.
Lena Nyadbi at the Warmun Art Centre photo Matthew Fallon. The Musée du quai Branly featuring Lena's rooftop painting photo Jonathan Kimberley. Landing image Andrea Hylands taken from inside Musée du quai Branly.
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Dr Stephane LAURENT is a French scholar versed in the culture and the prospect of the economy and industry. He is currently Professor and Director of Research at the Sorbonne University, Paris, and shows an open-mind to the world and a great interest in global issues thanks to a strong international experience. Alumnus of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, he first specialized in history to study the techniques, education, art, architecture, heritage, crafts, design, institutions and culture fields through many books and articles. He developed an international academic career, which brought him to work in Asia, in the Americas and in the Middle East where he became Dean of a College. From this diverse and long experience abroad he started to build up a cross-analysis of the economical and industrial aspects of our global world. His thinking focused on a critical approach of the French political and social situation in comparison with the USA and the growing economies in Far Asia and in the Arabic Peninsula. Dr. Stephane Laurent gave numerous lectures around the world both in French and in English. His works were awarded by many grants in Brazil, the USA, Japan and China. He is currently publishing books titled “Lessons of the World” and “Made in France”, which will debate creativity and production.