Your Iconophile admits: I don’t know how to hang a painting. But I’m not the only one with this problem. Let me show you what I mean. This is a photograph of an untitled painting by the Tiwi artist Ian Cook (2003, 480 x 520, who is represented by Jilamara Arts and Crafts Association). It poses questions that are endemic to much of contemporary Aboriginal art. It inhabits a conceptual space in between the practices of one culture and another, where the one makes paintings horizontally, on the ground, and the other culture views paintings vertically, hanging on the wall. The problem in such instances is how should the paintings make the transition? And does it matter? (Of course it matters! Otherwise you might just have hung your best Piet Mondrian upside down.) The image in question is said to be related to the painting on the Tiwi bark baskets called tunga. There are no other clues.

In Aboriginal cultural practice, most paintings are produced in the absence of a pictorial convention which determines a picture’s orientation in space, or indeed in the absence of a convention which depicts space in pictorial terms. Most Aboriginal paintings are made within a topographical conception of space. In addition, many artists work on a painting from all four sides of the canvas. The resultant ideograph (Eric Michaels and others) is then hung vertically on the wall, occupying the social space given to fine art in the western world. It becomes a picture.

Of course there are some conventions in Aboriginal art which are based on indigenous developments of Western pictorial art. There are also indigenous traditions, as for example with those that have evolved out of body painting, where the depiction of figures and forms are oriented in a pictorial space which makes clear their correct alignment for a viewer. Yet even when an indigenous culture has developed its own rules of pictorial space, and an up/down convention of viewing, curators still get it wrong. See how the Musee du quai Branly provides a stubborn example, even when the image is unambiguous, and the practice well documented. Sometimes other contemporary media are similarly ambiguous, intentionally or otherwise – I have even seen a photograph hanging on its side at the National Gallery of Australia – luckily it was quickly corrected when the error was identified! The problem is complicated by the fact that there are many conventions in contemporary art where pictorial and spatial ambiguity is an essential element in the work’s meaning. It was common in Minimalist art (Carl Andre et al) and there are contemporary mainstream painters (like Peter Adsett) who sometimes exhibit their paintings horizontally to explore the potential of disorientation of conventional ways of looking.

So what determines art advisors’, curators’, dealers’, or collectors’ choice of orientation of a picture like this? Sometimes it is simply a sense of balance. Sometimes it is a choice which is to do with the play of colour and tonal weight – a kind of imagining the effect of gravity. In other cases it is a choice how forms seem to orientate themselves in space – even when it is the spectator who invents these spatial/pictorial effects. A cloudscape, an horizon line, a series of overlapping forms suggest themselves. All culturally specific conditioned responses to pictorial stimuli. Often the judgements made reflect the way in which instances of alien painting traditions are seen as a kind of latent potential/presence in the work of the Aboriginal painter. Something in the Aboriginal painting that is a suggestion of an external referent, which allows the beholder to bridge the gap between the cultures – to allow it to make sense – even when the two cultures seems irreconcilable in almost every other circumstance.

Faced with this dilemma it is common to act out a ritual of cultural projection. Faced with ambiguity, the viewer seeks stasis. So a final aesthetic decision is made, usually completely independent of the artist’s own agency – conception, intention, or choice. That decision is the painting’s orientation in space.  Innocently, almost naturally, it is usually an outsider who performs the final act which confirms the painting’s essential pictorial effects and values for the outside world. Thus when a culture possesses no intrinsic pictorial spatial conventions, it is in such a manner as this that the receiving culture projects its own aesthetic framework on the other’s cultural artefact. An outsider decides what looks best. The work is therefore completed by the imposition of the receiving culture’s own aesthetic values. This final act of pictorial effect is as significant as the final layer of paint for the way such artefacts are evaluated as works of art. See? I’ve just shown you four different paintings… Which do you prefer?

My observations above are triggered by this week’s Sotheby’s catalogue, in which there are 286 Aboriginal paintings. 167 of them are spatially ambiguous. How does one feel about the sheer scale of taste projection employed in determining the aesthetic effects which results from the orientation of these pictures, in the catalogue, and therefore for posterity? Who decides? Alas many of us are implicit in the manipulation of this asymmetrical process of cultural reception and interaction, and the consequential projection/imposition of our own taste. What is to be done?

“And here, at last, we come to it, the unmentioned, all-darkening cloud. For the APY lands, as is well known, are plunged in social chaos. Destitution and anomie are the order of the day, each day; yet the region is the hearth of a cultural renaissance. These things fit together, in an unusual fashion. Painting in the APY communities is an escape, of course, and a crucial source of revenue: the work is made purely for sale. Most of the best-known artists are senior men and women, with large, demanding, dependent families.

Yet there is a sense in which the devastated human landscape almost calls forth the beauty of the art, as if by way of balance, or as a gesture that might provide a faint lifeline of cultural survival.

Just as intriguingly, the new art current is a hybrid phenomenon: the paintings come from studios overseen by mainstream art coordinators. The artists in the studios of the APY lands, for all their autonomy, are exquisitely sensitive to the guidance and suggestion they receive, however subliminal, and this responsiveness explains the speed with which their work has evolved to meet the market’s shifting tastes.

Thus these expressions of desert tradition and identity find a form that tracks the wider rhythms of the contemporary art landscape. It is impossible not to be struck by this pattern, which is closely matched by trends in much of the Kimberley and Arnhem Land; it [is] a phenomenon of the modern frontier between two very distinct cultural worlds.” (“Colours of an arid landscape,” Tues July 13, 2010, p18.)

Who, I ask, is the “we”? Certainly not “them”…

Follow the tags: cultural rennaissance, painting as escape, painting as a source of revenue, devastation and beauty, hybridity, taste. It’s like watching a ping-pong game on a black and white television set…

An inclination to dwell on death’s transforming touch and the life beyond can also be traced in Cook’s routine conversations while at work at Jilamara. Often, he tells art centre co-ordinator Cher Breeze of his anxieties about the moment of his entry into heaven. How will people know him there, how will they recognise him? He has a plan: to take a painting with him, stored in his coffin, so his mother will be sure it’s him when he arrives.

Should such intimacies be chattered about in the press? Why does this particular aspect of an artist’s concerns fascinate Nicolas so?  And should your Iconophile worry about this theme in The Roth’s writings? Only because he has been banging this drum for years. Read on…

And P.S. In the same article The Roth perpetuates another myth of Australian art history:

Cook’s own work increasingly is compared with canvases by the modern, Western master who commissioned those same poles for the gallery, Tony Tuckson, a painter whose use of line and colour field weaves a net of associations between contemporary and indigenous art-making.

What kind of weird retro-projection is this? Sure, Tuckson was a key figure in the recognition of Indigenous artefacts as art, but to his credit there’s no iconographic or other evidence that Tuckson’s own work evoked the art he so admired. Sorry, Nicolas, that’s just sloppy art history. And anyway, what does it mean to compare a contemporary artist’s work with a “modern, Western master” who last painted four decades ago? When artist B is neither a postmodernist nor knows anything of artist A, and we’re not into channeling, not just yet. Projection (a Theory for Troubled Minds) such as this says more about outsiders’ own inclinations to meddle with the history of Indigenous art, and to validate their own tastes, retrospectively.

Things not seen from the top of  Mt Ainslie… this is das Freiburger Munster

If the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt once said that the church’s 116-meter tower will forever remain the most beautiful spire on earth, then…

das Schlossberg Tor is not the most beautiful spire on earth. Isn’t there something a tad melancholy about the stump alongside those big sticks from the Black Forest? Nevertheless, what you see from the top takes your breath away.

Why does this WW2 Luftwaffe wind-up motor drive RoBoT II have such a suspiciously cheery logo, if it was made for the German Air Force? Answer: Once you’re safely back on terra firma its right-angle viewfinder (which allows you to shoot (sic) downwards while up in the sky) also means you can photograph the girl/boy/thing beside you without being spotted. In action. As it were. It’s all about body language. See? You hold it sideways, and peek through that little round knurled thingo on the side. Clever, eh? And pretty, as far as  Functionalism allows us…

“Don’t worry mein liebchen. See? That Überkanonen Hans is photographing all those other nice people.”

Etymology? The word “robot” (from robota, Czech for “forced labor”) made its public debut in 1921, when it premiered on stage in Karel Capek’s play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). The play told of a world in which humans relaxed and enjoyed life while robots – imitation humans – happily did whatever labor needed to be done. Not unexpectedly, the robots eventually rebelled and took over the world. The term “robot” achieved its own world domination in 1923, when the play was translated into English; it quickly overran its competition, its  precursors being “android” and “automaton.” It “quickly overran its competition” eh? Its human minders, presumably…

Want to buy this RoBoT? Go here.

“But there is another, darker evolution that he sees inevitably at work. Something is passing in remote area Aboriginal art as the artists raised in the bush, from largely traditional backgrounds, die and younger artists come to the fore… “The old art was special,” [Hall] says; then, rather tantalisingly: “The surface layer of the new art from the next generation may look the same but that other, deeper layer of knowledge and authority is perhaps changing.” And then, Hall again: “You get the strong sense that every mark they make has a reason for being there. In certain images where the marks may be very close to those used in body-painting you realise the artists aren’t playing around, everything is in its place, it’s not just an amusing hobby for them. With newer work, it’s more art for art’s sake. There might still be indigenous themes, but it’s a different, more contemporary animal.” And then the Roth again: “And so things pass: the fixed marks of tradition in all their rigid beauty fade; newer works, perhaps freer, perhaps more adventurous, come in their place.”

Is just this a throwaway line? Or has “salvage anthropology” now morphed into “salvage art history”? No, the Roth has been at it for years.  Read on…

Tracked this to Reddit posted by “scarlotti-the-blue” and everyone wants to know whether the humble Matt Bateman is the author? Seems to have been becoming viral since at least January 4… Son Axel says Avatar was “the best movie ever” – Seems I’ve got some work to do…

Want to go deeper? Read Daniel Mendelsohn’s review in the NYRB…