Jonathan Jones - untitled (the tyranny of distance)

Previous page under the aegis, 2006 (detail) fluorescent tubes and fittings installation view, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney courtesy the artist and Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney photograph: Jenni Carter

Jonathan Jones untitled (the tyranny of distance)

Published by Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation 16-20 Goodhope Street, Paddington NSW 2021 ABN 25 122 280 200 www.sherman-scaf.org.au © Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation 2008 Copyright in the text is held by the authors and interview participants Copyright in the images is held by the artist First published 2008 This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

National Library Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Author: Chambers, Eddie, 1960– Title: Jonathan Jones : untitled (the tyranny of distance) / Eddie Chambers, Michael Desmond.

ISBN: 9780957738218 (pbk.)

Notes: Bibliography.

Subjects: Jones, Jonathan, 1978– –Exhibitions.

Other Authors/Contributors:

Desmond, Michael, 1950–

Jones, Jonathan, 1978– Dewey Number: 709.2 ISBN 9780957738218 Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation Chairman, Executive Director Dr Gene Sherman Associate Director Danielle Earp General Manager Amanda Henry Publications Manager Laura Murray Cree Gallery Coordinator Jaime Wheatley Assistant to the Director, Gallery Assistant Rosie Braye Editor Laura Murray Cree Proofreading Freya Job Design Mark Gowing Design Printed in Australia by Image Solutions Australia

untitled (the tyranny of distance) 14 August – 11 October 2008 Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation Commission supported by Sylvania Lighting Australasia

Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation Eddie Chambers Michael Desmond Jonathan Jones in conversation with Hetti Perkins, Victoria Lynn and John Kean

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community members are respectfully advised that several people mentioned in this publication have passed away.

For Pa

Preface

Dr Gene Sherman

Chairman, Executive Director Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation

Jonathan Jones’s association with the Sherman visual arts programme goes back to 2002, when he was included in Sherman Galleries’ mini exhibition space, Sherman Artbox, as well as in the Gallery’s end-of-year celebratory Festivus exhibition. That same year he was awarded the NSW Ministry for the Arts Indigenous Arts Fellowship and the following year saw his inclusion in a third facet of the Sherman programme, the exhibition ‘Artbox Inc.’ curated by Danielle Earp (née Johnson).

From 2003 through 2008, Jonathan Jones has been included in a number of key institutional exhibitions, among them Primavera 2003 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, a fairly consistent predictor of innovative practice; the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s fourth Balnaves Foundation Sculpture Project, ‘Adventures with Form in Space’ (2006); Queensland Art Gallery’s Xstrata Coal Emerging Indigenous Art Award (Winner, 2006); ‘homeland illuminations’, a collaboration with Ruark Lewis at Performance Space, Sydney (2007); and ‘New08’ at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2008).

The focal point of Jones’s work is light. Multiple fluorescent tubes or light bulbs strung or suspended side by side – pinpointing, radiating, overlapping, meshing, resonating. Through repetition and patterning, references to iconic modernist predecessors Dan Flavin and Donald Judd, as well as Indigenous body art and incisions in wood and rock, his work accommodates individual units within larger frameworks, metaphorically alluding to the place individuals occupy within their communities. The artist’s Kamilaroi/Wiradjuri heritage, his early interface with both rural and urban communities, and his curatorial work and creative interactions, all serve to underpin a practice that casts light on hidden issues and imbues the spaces they occupy with hopefulness and understanding. ‘Let there be light’, the directional Old Testament command, separates time’s flow into two distinct zones: darkness makes way for light, ignorance for knowledge and individual preoccupations for community aspirations. Jones’s light-focused work seems to echo ancient traditions across cultural and spiritual divides.

Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation is delighted to present Jonathan Jones’s major installation untitled (the tyranny of distance), comprising large scale, blue-lit multiple walls suggesting a dynamic of intimate spaces – encasing, enfolding, enclosing – whilst simultaneously excluding the audience from entry. We look to continue the Sherman family’s early connection with Jonathan Jones by providing, in accordance with the Foundation’s charter, an opportunity for him to produce a significant project, free from funding constraints and documented via a serious publication.

Contents

4

Preface

Gene Sherman

6

Into white

Michael Desmond

8

untitled (the tyranny of distance) Eddie Chambers

12 Jonathan Jones

20

Colour Plates

60

Artist’s Biography

61

Artist’s Bibliography

62

Contributors

62

Acknowledgements

63

Glossary

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In conversation with Hetti Perkins, Victoria Lynn and John Kean

Jonathan Jones Into white

Michael Desmond

The dawn of the twenty-first century was marked by a remarkable satellite photograph taken and assembled by C. Mayhew and R. Simmon for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 2000.1 The composite image, Earth at Night, shows how artificial light makes the major areas of the world’s population visible from space at night. The symbolism of human control over fire and our ability to separate light and darkness is as ancient as space technology is new. Our ideas of illumination refer to knowledge and community. The image of light and landscape seems appropriate as background to the work of Jonathan Jones, who capitalises on these accepted notions – and more – to charge his works. Jones’s use of the comparatively new medium of fluorescent light with his Indigenous traditions creates a powerful and meaningful set of references that have established him as one of the most interesting artists to emerge in the last decade.

Few practitioners in Australia use light as a medium and there have been even fewer exhibitions devoted to the display of light works in this country. Fluorescent light and digital media are the twentieth-century’s contribution to the palette of art materials.

Appearing in commercial signs at the turn of the century, neon light was first used by Lucio Fontana in an elegant neon ceiling called Spatial Concept for the Ninth Triennale in Milan in 1951.

International artists in the 1960s and 1970s used it extensively as part of the pop art movement, which drew on mass-produced images and advertising for inspiration. Most Australian artists using neon have worked in this vein. Richard Tipping, whose Smothered, 1989, was shown in ‘Lightworks: From the National Gallery of Australia’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1994, recalls flashing neon signs seen in retail areas of a city to create a sequence of evocative words. Conceptual artists Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley have used neon in a number of works, part of their fascination with wordplay. Shown at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2005, the neon installation AK47, 2003, interrogates the visual and linguistic meaning of the potent alphanumeric combination that spells out the name of this celebrity weapon.

Safe, 2005, in which the eponymous title word is closeted between a set of square brackets, functions as a rebus, suggesting the simultaneous meanings inherent in the word when it is presented as a sign and as an ideogram.

Brook Andrew’s works in neon are less ambiguous in their politics. His dhalaay yuulayn (passionate skin), 2004, uses brightly coloured neon tube to describe an emu that is animated like the Sharpies Golf sign adjacent to Sydney’s Central Station. The emu is placed over a Union Jack and vomits the letters U, S and A. Andrew calls on his Indigenous cultural history as well as that of neon as broadcaster of messages. Come into the light, 2007, consists of coloured spirals of neon that set up an interplay between what appears as hip versions of the Indigenous symbol

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for a campsite and the memory of Bruce Nauman’s spiral neon Window or wall sign, 1967, containing the advice that ‘The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths’. The parodic nature of neon conveys an ironic twist to any image or phrase by virtue of the medium’s vulgar associations.

Jonathan Jones employs an entirely different pictorial grammar, dramatically evident in his immersive installation untitled (the tyranny of distance) for Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation.

He chooses to resist the seduction of calligraphy, of tracing lines in light the way a draftsman flourishes a pen to describe text and images. His approach is instead relentlessly abstract. This derives in part from Jones’s materials – he uses incandescent bulbs and fluorescent tubes – and in part from the conceits built into his work. Fluorescent lighting was first sold commercially in 1938 and when used as an art medium by American Dan Flavin, was associated with minimal art.

Like Flavin, Jones allows the cords and fittings of the lights of both the incandescent bulbs and the fluorescent tubes he uses to remain in plain sight, as intrinsic to the work. In the phrase characteristic of minimalism, ‘what you see is what you get’. The works in his exhibition ‘lumination’ at Gallery Barry Keldoulis in 2003 did not attempt the elegant illusions of drawing. The twisting and ordered arabesques of electrical cable in these works are highly decorative, yet severe in their white-on-white simplicity.

Jones’s fluorescent tubes are configured in various aesthetic combinations from near scatterpiece compositions to rigorous geometric patterns, but whatever their disposition and despite the ambience of their environment, they stubbornly retain their original identity. This is more curious fact than a foundation for an Indigenous interpretation of light sculpture. Jones has been able to translate the formal qualities of fluorescent lights into local terms, co-opting the lines, textures and ambience of cast light to an Indigenous reading. The group of stitched drawings shown at the same time as ‘lumination’ gave clues to understanding the works in these terms. Ostensibly diagrams for the placement of light fixtures, the threaded lines equally refer to the sewing activities of Jones’s mother and the patterns of Indigenous markings.

A number of writers have noted Marine Captain-Lieutenant Watkin Tench’s account of seeing the Eora people fishing on Sydney Harbour at night with the fires in their boats glittering on the water’s surface and linked that image with works by Jones, notably his 68 Fletcher, Bondi, 20:20, 8.6.03, 2003, which traces the Bondi skyline seen at night from the sea. lumination fall wall weave, 2004–06, which won the Xstrata Coal Emerging Indigenous Art Award at the Queensland Art Gallery in 2006, is also associated with this story of individual and collective interaction within an environment.

Jones connects lights and humanity much as the NASA map of the world’s cities does on a global scale. In his works with light,

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he articulates space; his light works describe a zone. Jones’s work washes the walls and visitors alike with artificial light: his works inhabit, as well as generate, space. His use of standard fixtures, with their readymade aspect, stand out as discrete elements in an environment. Not consciously art materials, these elements are strongly architectural. Not surprisingly his work has been commissioned for public sculpture. In 2006 Jones contributed a work to the exhibition ‘Ten[d]ancy: artistic interventions for Elizabeth Bay House’, displayed in historic Elizabeth Bay House, Sydney. In Gurrajin (Elizabeth Bay), Jones laid a diagonal grid of fluorescent tubes across the floor of one room, working around the resident desks, chairs and escritoire, essentially leaving the room intact, but interestingly rendered unusable as a domestic space.

The work occupied and mapped territory in an ironic reversal of the European grip on territory through mapping. There is undoubtedly humour in Jones’s work: his white light invaded and occupied this bastion of colonial power.

As in all Jones’s work, Gurrajin (Elizabeth Bay) comments on the distinction between the pictorial space of art and the actual space of his sculptural environment. His light works hover between drawing and sculpture. Jones thinks like a draftsman with a social bent. The elegant patterns he creates with his ephemeral light pieces and his drawings using fragile threads are reliant on a gestalt to work. It is impossible to separate the one and the many, or truly to distinguish the individual and the community, a point he makes strongly to justify his works as being anchored to an Indigenous perspective. Viewers appreciate the deadpan appearance, the humour and the unusual nature of the works but do not necessarily see the ‘dark side’. His work is always as much about the shadows as it is about the light.

Endnote

1

See <http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0011/earthlights2_dmsp_big.jpg>

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untitled (the tyranny of distance) Dr Eddie Chambers

p.34, 30

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Within the practice of Jonathan Jones, one of the most original artists of his generation, nothing is incidental, everything is considered and deliberate and, consequently, meaning, inference and interpretation all become vitally important. Works such as homeland illuminations, 2007 (with Ruark Lewis),1 white lines, 2005, and trade mark, 2007, open up an assortment of potent and fascinating means by which we can consider history and identity and how these have impacted on this young, Sydney-based artist of the Kamilaroi and Wiradjuri Indigenous peoples, as well as on ourselves and our own thought processes.

At first glance it may appear that Jones has an attachment to, or a pronounced interest in, the symbolism, tools and aesthetics of modernism. But we must look deeper, or closer, if we wish to avail ourselves of a broader grasp of Jones’s practice. A few years ago Jones created an installation titled blue poles, 2004, echoing, none too subtly, Jackson Pollock, abstract expressionism, and the consequences and implications of Pollock’s Blue Poles, 1952, being a foundation work in the National Gallery of Australia’s collection of twentieth-century American art. We might also consider that Jones’s blue poles resonated with wider musings on art history, Australian art practice, and ever-relevant, ever-present dualities of inclusion and exclusion. It seems clear that in knowing art history, in referencing, in such explicit and implicit ways this art history, Jones has sought not so much to make work that merely or simply stands outside of, or alongside that history. Instead, Jones has, we might conclude, sought to make work that intelligently critiques the problematic nuances of that history, whilst simultaneously demanding for himself a place and a space well within it.

As Blair French has written: ‘Jones deploys certain materials and forms associated with Euro-American modernism to draw upon the seductive familiarity of its aesthetic conventions while subtly critiquing its broader historical purview. The formal construction of Jones’s work should alert us to the manner in which, rather than simply being conditioned by or located within a space of play or dialogue (or indeed a gulf) between cultures, the work itself animates that space, encouraging reflection upon that space, but also acting to destabilise our experience of it.’2 Abstract expressionism (together with jazz, blues and other forms of music) may indeed be among America’s gifts to the world. But within Australia, the ways in which the country has received, embraced and understood abstract expressionism in particular and modernism in general cannot, as far as Jones is concerned, be kept separate from the politics of Aboriginal experience and identity (and what is, for him, an attendant quest for artistic independence). The art historians and curators of the United States, Australia and Europe have tended to interpret and present modernism in decidedly blinkered ways that have steadfastly refused to embrace wider concerns and wider constituencies of

peoples and artists. Yet within Jones’s work we see an artist who is intent on using the aesthetics of modernism whilst attempting to subtly and quietly disrupt what rapidly became its dominant ethos or the hegemonic meaning historically and traditionally attached to it. In other words, Jones (much like British–Chinese artist Anthony Key) is ‘interested in minimalism with lots of meaning’.3 This is important because art historians traditionally describe modernism as being void of what might be referred to as socio-political inferences. It seems to me that both Key and Jones take issue with this, seeing modernism in much more animated, pertinent and engaging terms. Katrina Schwarz posited the view that: ‘Jones … finds in appropriation a means of empowerment – a challenge to the representation of indigeneity as “other”.’4 It seems to me that reading Jones’s strategy as being one of appropriation as a means of political empowerment and a rebuttal of the prejudices associated with indigeneity is, at the very least, a misreading and perhaps insufficiently nuanced. Jones is after all utilising a set of aesthetics available to all artists, irrespective of the artist’s perceived or actual identity. We need not regard Jones’s way of working as being somehow symptomatic of attempts to sidestep or challenge otherness. As a contemporary artist, Jones is free to make good use of whatever influences he chooses, from whatever quarter those influences emerge.

Incidentally, during precisely the same time period in which Pollock and others were most creative, related matters were concerning and preoccupying artists of African and Asian origin, who were busy relocating from their respective countries to what were, at the time, the major metropolitan art centres of London and Paris. Rasheed Araeen has argued that these ‘Afro-Asian’ artists laid claim to modernism as much as (and in much the same ways as) the artists of the United States, Europe and Australia: I would like to assert that the movement of artists from Asia, Africa and the Caribbean to the West was also not between different cultures but a movement within the same culture defined and constructed by modernity. In the early twentieth century, modernism travelled from Paris to other countries of Europe, triggering other movements in many countries (futurism, constructivism, suprematism, etc), and to the Americas, but it also moved to the colonies in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean (as well as to the countries of Latin America …). When Afro-Asian artists from different parts of the world arrived in Europe, they were not entering another culture but a different level of the same culture which they had left behind.5 Modernism had a global reach and a global embrace. Likewise, in the twenty-first century, to discuss Jones’s practice as merely emerging from, or addressing some sort of schism that constructs aboriginality and modernity as being naturally (my emphasis)

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mutually exclusive is to largely misrepresent and limit his art and also to misread art-historical movements such as modernism.

If, as Araeen asserts, ‘Modernism … signifies that broad philosophical framework within which the modern art movement has taken place in the twentieth century, with all its diversity and disunity of forms and styles, and which also provides theoretical discourse for the evaluation and legitimisation of modern works of art’,6 then there can be no possible reason for Jones’s practice not to be located at the heart of the canon. Furthermore, looking at Jones’s work we might conclude that it puts art history (or more accurately, hegemonic interpretations of it) on trial. The development of African-American art in the twentieth century is inextricably interwoven with the development of modernism in the United States in the twentieth century. But few (white) art historians have acknowledged or taken any interest in this. In this sense, art history has failed diversity, has failed plurality, and has failed people. Jones’s work tells us this and other stories.7 I earlier made mention of Jones’s blue poles having resonated with, amongst other things, the ever-relevant, ever-present dualities of inclusion and exclusion. The same could be said of several of Jones’s other installations, including this new undertaking at Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation. Much has been written about the elliptical grid formations and regimented patterning of Jones’s installations such as white lines, 2005, and under the aegis, 2006. For example, Blair French says: ‘the repeated patterns of [Jones’s] works recall traditional forms carved on weapons and shields and trees, or marked on possum-skin coats’. And, ‘Jones’s patterning of fluorescent light is akin to attempting to knit together a sense of community. But at the same time it is drawn from a traditional shield design. It asserts cultural identity while acting as a protective cover to the self. It is an invitation to breach cross-cultural divides, while remaining hard and impenetrable – an invitation and a challenge broached with a formal beauty.’8 Hetti Perkins has noted: ‘In Aboriginal ceremonial life, where participation is structured according to the position of the individual within the community, cultural affirmation is conducted and achieved through iteration.’9 Katrina Schwarz has echoed and embellished some of these sentiments with the proposition that the fluorescent tubes of Jones’s blue poles, ‘glowed in a geometry derived from the patterns of the Kamilaroi/Wiradjuri – carvings on wooden objects, weapons and the designs of possum-skin coats’.10 If we bring together these assorted interpretations of geometric patterning we might conclude, in much the same way as Andrew Frost, that a ‘notion of dual meaning of materials … informs much of Jones’s work’.11 But the materials Jones uses, much like the work itself, have more than simply ‘dual’ meanings. Jones’s grids, though seemingly strong, pronounced and deliberate structures, nevertheless have much in the way of ambiguity. Grids represent an imposition of a certain (type of) order

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and structure, but this order can only be achieved by each shape within the grid being created by, and relying on, all those around it.

A grid can create bold and decisive patterns, but simultaneously, a grid homogenises and in some ways limits and is constrained by its own patterning. A grid establishes seemingly formidable barriers, boundaries and borders. Yet spatially and visually, these things can really only ever exist as long as the grid itself does. A grid (like the patterning which is such a distinctive feature of so much Islamic art and architecture) can be a thing of great beauty. But a grid can also represent confinement, compartmentalisation and a kind of regimented fragmentation.

Andrew Sayers has commented that, ‘Jones’s materials are … simple in substance and equally complex in meaning’.12 It seems to me that what Jones seeks to do in his practice is, above all else, not to present us with a range of meanings but to disrupt meaning and to interrupt our inherited and assumed ways of seeing. In entering his installations, we may think or believe that we know what we are looking at (or indeed, what we are looking for). But Jones has other ideas. Much like Aikido (the Japanese martial-arts form in which an opponent’s strength is used against him), any complacency we may bring to our reading of Jones’s work can trip us up and will more than likely be used against us. Within the artist’s statement that accompanied Jones’s 2003 installation volta a crociera, single words, groupings of words and even, on occasion, single letters within words are, at seemingly random intervals, rendered in bold.

Likewise, within this text, single words and groupings of words are lightly underlined in red. Read together, the text in bold forms a sort of stream of consciousness, though the words underlined in red have clear and precise inferences: ‘domestic’, ‘creating meditative environments’, ‘other Indigenous communities across the world’ and so on. The two columns of text are effectively and categorically presented in such a way as to disrupt an easy reading. Jones makes sure that our reading of the text is difficult. In so doing he disrupts any presupposed sets of meaning we might be minded or tempted to bring to the text. As such (and as previously mentioned) Jones seeks to interrupt our inherited ways of seeing.

Jones also writes in his statement: ‘To give you an idea of my artistic interests, the subject central to my practice is the symbiotic relationship of community to the individual, and individual to the community. The two are inseparable, though I believe the two factors are fictions.’13 We would do well to bring such clarity (and such caution) to our readings of this new work by Jones. Within the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation exhibition space are a number of rectangular, freestanding walls, each of equal size, each on the same slight diagonal and each closely spaced in proximity and relation to the others. The gallery visitor has room to walk around the assembled and constructed walls but not pass within the installation, between the walls themselves. This point – about

a physical lack of access within the work – is of great significance because, paradoxically, it is by limiting our access that Jones wishes us to open up our understanding of what is happening in the restricted spaces. As Jones himself has stated, ‘I tend to look at the spaces in between things.’14 He would like us to do the same.

Within an instant we might recall Jones’s comments about his work having as its central theme ‘the symbiotic relationship of community to the individual, and individual to the community’. But even here we must be careful. For as Jones states: ‘The notion of a community in many ways is an impossibility, as there is no group of people who are exactly the same constituting a community.

Therefore, all communities can be broken down to individuals.’

Jones then goes on to flip this proviso on its head by asserting that: ‘The individual by itself is a further impossibility, as all individuals are products of their community and must relate to the powers of each other.’15 If we read the rectangular walls as people, we are struck by their apparent sameness, their apparent homogeneity.

This leads us – inevitably – to a symbiotic discussion of community belonging versus the historical and contemporary realities of ‘racial’ prejudice. One of the defining features of racism is its inability (or refusal) to attribute any sort of individuality to those it regards as a group sharing the same characteristics, a group in which each member is in essence indistinguishable from the others. Racism robs its victims of their perceived individuality, the perpetrator of racism preferring instead to rely on prejudicial certainties. ‘They’re all the same.’

Yet simultaneously, untitled (the tyranny of distance) resonates with an insistent, determined and profound sense of what we might call communal empathy in the light of, and in the face of, adverse circumstances. If the blocks can in some ways be read as people, then the grouping resonates with a discernibly bold and articulate sense of shared experiences in the face of wider societal hostility or indifference. Within these two conflicting yet symbiotic readings we can clearly detect what I have referred to as the ever-relevant, ever-present dualities of inclusion and exclusion.

Entering the space of this new work, the viewer ascertains in some ways an awkwardness, a discomfort, almost as much as he or she might ascertain a sense of harmony and order. The blocks might form their own community, but they simultaneously form a quarantined environment. This might be called ‘a dynamic of intimacy versus exclusion’.16 Within many countries of the world, the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century wholesale movement of labouring people from the country to the town brought with it new realities. In country after country, profound demographic shifts occurred as a result of mass labour becoming, by and large, surplus to requirement in agrarian societies. When this new working class (which was often poor, dispossessed and homeless) settled in urban areas, these communities rapidly became framed and

perceived as undesirable centres of deviance, dysfunction, poverty and squalor. Over the course of the twentieth century many of these communities gradually became absorbed into the general fabric of society and the urban environment. Other such communities – particularly in so-called underdeveloped countries (or, in wealthier countries, those communities regarded as underdeveloped) fared less well, falling victim to an apparently indelible societal, political and economic marginalisation. In this sense, the town and the city became, for its ghetto sufferers what Bob Marley so aptly, so poetically described as a concrete jungle.17 As such, the concrete jungle functioned as a dispiriting and constraining space (though simultaneously, a space resonating with hope, optimism and a certain indomitable spirit). With its connotations of resourceful, rudimentary and makeshift sheltering (signified by the blue tarpaulin with which the structures are covered), each of us will have our own visual, cultural and mental access points to this installation. Concrete Jungle is one of mine.

Visitors to this installation will find that they are, ‘unable to fully participate in the sculpture – they [are] able to walk around the outside of the walls but not between them’.18 In this regard, the notion of limited participation takes on a particular wider relevance and poignancy. Again, each of us will have our own visual, cultural and mental access points to this sense of denial, refusal, limited opportunity and limited participation. For some, the effects might be (or might include), ‘alienation, longing, cultural claustrophobia, hidden spaces and lost or secret histories’.19 However we approach this work, and whatever cultural reference points we bring to it, we ought at all times to be mindful of Jones’s penchant for disrupting meaning. In this regard, his new work, like much that has gone before it, is ‘at once delightfully simple and profoundly complex’.20

Endnotes

1

homeland illuminations was based on Jonathan Jones’s (Pa’s) narratives of country and culture.

Blair French, ‘Jonathan Jones’, Adventures with Form in Space, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2006, pp. 34–35.

Walcot Chapel, 2002 video on <http://www.anthonykey.net> Katrina Schwartz, ‘Jonathan Jones: ANZ/Art & Australia Emerging Artists Program’, Art & Australia, vol. 43, no. 2, summer 2005, p. 320.

Rasheed Araeen, Third Text, ‘A new beginning: beyond postcolonial cultural theory and identity politics’, no. 50, spring 2000.

Rasheed Araeen, ‘In the citadel of modernism’, The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain, South Bank Centre, London, 1989, pp. 16–49. See this chapter for further discussions by Araeen on modernism’s links to the artists of Africa, Asia and the Caribbean.

See, for example, African-American Artists, 1929–1945: Prints, Drawings, and Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2003.

Blair French, op. cit.

Hetti Perkins, ‘Jonathan Jones: lumination’, Jonathan Jones, exhibition catalogue, Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney, September 2003.

Katrina Schwarz, op. cit., p. 32.

2 3 4 5 6

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11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20

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Andrew Frost, ‘Afraid of the dark’, Australian Art Collector, issue 42, October– December 2007, pp. 132–11.

Andrew Sayers, ‘Jonathan Jones: white lines’, Jonathan Jones, exhibition catalogue, Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney, June 2005.

Jonathan Jones, volta a crociera, exhibition catalogue, Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney, July 2003.

Jonathan Jones, email communication with the author, 10 October 2007.

Jonathan Jones, volta a crociera, ibid.

Laura Murray Cree, email communication with the author, 25 October 2007.

‘Concrete jungle where the living is hardest … No chains around my feet, but I’m not free, I know I am bound here in captivity …’ Bob Marley, Concrete Jungle, from ‘Catch a Fire’, Island Records, 1973.

Laura Murray Cree, op. cit. loc. cit.

Lisa Slade, ‘New acquisition: Jonathan Jones 68 Fletcher, Bondi, 20:20, 8.6.03’, Artemis, vol. 38, no. 1, July 2007 pp. 10–11.

Jonathan Jones In conversation

with Hetti Perkins, Victoria Lynn and John Kean

This is an edited version of a conversation that took place in Melbourne on 5 April 2008.

You walk into the room With your pencil in your hand You see somebody naked And you say, ‘Who is that man?’

You try so hard But you don’t understand Just what you’ll say When you get home Because something is happening here But you don’t know what it is Do you, Mister Jones?

Bob Dylan Ballad of a Thin Man

Jonathan Jones: The walls I’m creating will sit diagonally within the long gallery space at SCAF [Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation]. They’ll be made of blue tarpaulin, something like 8 metres wide by 3.5 metres high, with about 20 or 30 centimetres between each wall and a metre or so between them and the gallery walls. At the time of conceiving this project I was thinking about the Federal Government’s [Northern Territory] intervention1 and about placement – people’s engagement and sightlines and ways of moving within spaces – about confining and controlling movement and freedom. And I’m playing on other ideas seen in previous works p.57 like the installation at ACCA [Australian Centre for Contemporary Art] in Melbourne using blue tarpaulin and fluorescent tubes.2 John Kean: How wide are the walls?

JJ They’re going to be a metre wide, like permanent walls, with fluorescent tubes inside them.

JK So the walls are bigger than the space between them?

JJ Yes, you’ll catch glimpses of people walking on either side of them and sightlines through the middle. It’s not meant to be accessible between the walls but the space will be smothered in blue light.

Hetti Perkins: It won’t necessarily read as a closed space because the blue will create a kind of volume that will counter the solidity of the walls. What is it that draws you to the colour blue? Does it relate to 1 Michael Riley’s cloud works?3 JJ Yes, it’s very much in homage to Michael. It relates to the sky, which has strong cultural connotations, especially in New South Wales.

HP Michael said that you can call the sky a typical Australian landscape but it’s more than that – it’s a dreamscape.

JJ Yes, like Baimi, ‘things in the sky’. The work engages with the sky, doesn’t disregard it. And then there’s the material. You see tarpaulin everywhere – from people covering their houses after storms to other people using it for seasonal outstations in country. It’s one of those familiar, everyday, temporary materials that people know – and have some attachment to – which is a process that I like to use throughout my work.

HP When you lay blue tarp on the ground it’s like a reflection of the sky, like a mirror. In Aboriginal art there has been such an emphasis on earth-based stories – the idea that country is all about land. But it also includes the air, the water – all the elements are embodied in country.

JK Ancestors will often pop up from the ground and fly off – like flying ants. They’ll come up out of the ground and pphht – go across the country and pphht, back down into the ground – and animate the sky.

2 HP The work of Yolngu artist Gulumbu Yunupingu is about stars in the sky, the ones you can see and the ones you can’t see, in the deepest recesses of space, which multiplies the understanding of country.4 Victoria Lynn: In the history of Western art you have also cited Blue 3,4 poles by Jackson Pollock and White lines (vertical) on ultramarine by

5

6

7

Tony Tuckson as important influences or sources.5 Could you speak to these?

JJ White lines (vertical) on ultramarine came directly from Tuckson’s experience of working with the Tiwi people of Bathurst and Melville Islands and his commissioning of Pukumani burial poles for the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) collection.6 I’m also quoting relationships, which is what so much of the light work is about.

One of the images that also comes up for me is Mervyn Bishop’s 1975 photograph Prime Minister Gough Whitlam pours sand into the hands of traditional landowner Vincent Lingiari, Northern Territory, with that very Australian blue sky – an image which for most Australians defined a certain time in history, certain ideas.

JK So you’re interested in National Iconography. They’re all huge works in Australian art. Blue poles is the most famous painting that’s intervened in Australian history; Mervyn Bishop’s photograph records one of the most significant moments in land rights history in Australia. You’re dealing with big subjects.

HP Emily Ngwarray’s7 striped pictures that we exhibited at the 1997 Venice Biennale had beautiful blues of every kind, with horizontal bands that were awelye, body markings, and about repetition.

Ceremony is a process of reiteration and creating these paintings is almost like performing song cycles or dancing, which historically is a primary vehicle for communicating ideas. This kind of painting is hypnotic and trancelike – a way of entering a different space and opening the mind to receiving and absorbing knowledge.

VL Given that blue, for you, is associated with these key artists and key moments, it is invested with an emotional impact. It becomes an emotional horizon in the work and also, I think, it’s associated with a level of hope.

JJ Yes, if you think of colours having directions, it has a lifting motion.

HP And it lifts your spirits – blue sky, sunny day.

JK But it’s also what you look at when you’re perishing. On your back, in the desert the last thing you see is blue sky. One characteristic of the European response to the Australian environment is the relentlessness of the blue sky that’s not cut into – once you get over the Great Dividing Range – by mountains and huge trees.

HP Early settler accounts talk about the sky. And when people come here they say how enormous the sky is in Australia, so you get a sense of the vastness of the continent.

VL It’s also a religious colour and has a set of universal principles associated with it. But to take another tangent in relation to your work, there is another painting in the AGNSW by Ian Burn entitled Blue Reflex, which is very shiny, minimal, rectangular.8 Has this key piece of Australian conceptualism played a part in any of your works?

JJ Working at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, meeting artists from all over Australia and working with master artworks is fantastic. I couldn’t imagine how much this has informed my work.

It’s intangible.

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1 Michael Riley Australia 1960–2004 Wiradjuri/Kamilaroi peoples Untitled from the series ‘cloud (feather)’ 2000, printed 2005 chromogenic pigment print 110 x 155 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 2005 © Estate of Michael Alan Riley. Licensed by VISCOPY, Australia, 2008 2 Gulumbu Yunupingu born Australia 1943 Gumatj/Rrakpala peoples Garak the Universe 2007 natural earth pigments on stringybark 233 x 99.5 x 9.5 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 2007 © Gulumbu Yunupingu 3 Jackson Pollock United States of America 1912–1956 Blue Poles 1952 oil, enamel, aluminium paint and glass on canvas 212 x 488.9 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1973 © Pollock/Krasner Foundation. Licensed by ARS and VISCOPY, Australia, 2008

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VL

I wonder if we could discuss the idea of the grid or the parallel lines as a structure in your work. When Rosalind Krauss first wrote about minimalism she defined two kinds of grid: the closed grid, where the square is finished before the edges of the canvas; and the open grid, where space, light and colour can flow out beyond the edges.9 It seems to me that you are playing with open grids in your work – through the dynamic structure of hexagonals, zigzags and double lines of fluorescent tubes and so on – and also through the use of light. You said you came up with the idea for this show at the time of the Intervention, which is about the flow of people into space that’s not permitted, or when permissions were changed or interfered with. You are really using the grid or parallel lines as a metaphor for how we engage or interact in space.

JJ With the Sherman work I’m thinking about closed and open circuits and how people access these points. I’m also interested in the physicality of the walls and playing on the idea of the visitor’s position. Will it be enough for people to walk around the work with only sightlines through it and being immersed in the blue light? I am also thinking of exclusionary zones.

JK Are you literally thinking about the permit system and its implications?

HP And interstate borders?

JJ Perhaps, but I’m also thinking about people’s obsession with ‘access’, which comes down to some sort of permit system.

But it’s really the idea of meaningful engagement. I guess the Intervention triggered it off, thinking about people’s engagement with communities. I’m not sure about this ‘community’ of walls and lights. Hopefully they’ll be claiming the space and people will just be visitants through that space.

VL This picks up on a theme in your work of how the individual negotiates being part of a community, how communities negotiate with each other, how individuals negotiate with each other. All your works are made up of parts – if we understand each part to be an individual in a community of other parts, we can see the work as a metaphor for the relationship between private space and public space, individuals and communities.

JJ And also that space between people. What New Zealand architectural theorist Albert Refiti talks about – that notion of the va, the space in between things.

VL … in Samoan architecture …

JJ And tattoos are perhaps the va because they are not quite inside your body, there is public access as well. So there are spaces in between. I’m interested in those zones and for me, light is the best way to discuss them. An engagement of light around spaces and in relation to things is my play on communities and individuals.

HP It also seems to have a resonance with work by John Mawurndjul or Wandjuk Marika, for instance, where power is expressed through shine, the brilliance of the rarrk or cross-

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hatching. The effect that this creates, that emanates from the work, is an expression of ancestral power or agency, whether it’s djang or tjukurrpa or whatever the cultural origins of the artist are. So whether it’s lines – your lines – or whether it’s rarrk, where the lines intersect, or in the case of Timmy Payungka Tjapangati’s classic Tingari stories where, as a block, each individual item contributes to the overall resonance, it is an expression of power, a cultural authority that you can’t know. It’s intangible but no less powerful because of that. In fact it’s probably more powerful.

JK Just getting back to repetition and how it works as a performative thing – a Tingari painting is gradually built over a period of time with increasing numbers of people working on it so that superficially it loses the sense of consistency within the circles, they’re all done by different hands. You get this shimmering quality, the lack of a single focal point, and you’re drawn into it. I wonder how performance comes into your work – whether you’ve done a performance as you’re making it or whether you draw visitors into the work as performers?

JJ It’s both – that idea of building up systems and trying to get energy happening out of them. I’m probably more rigid because I’m still figuring it out.

HP I’ve noticed with you that there’s an impulsive personal or private process where you’re always drawing grids and chevrons and turning them upside down. Your notebooks are full of reiteration.

It’s almost like people are collaborating with you. I noticed this with Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula when he painted – he was working by himself but you got the sense that there’s a whole context, something intangible, that’s feeding into the process.

JJ It’s a meditative state when you’re doing something that you don’t need to think about any more – you’ve done it so many times you’re in a rhythm, a sort of meditation when you open your mind up and start absorbing other things. In the process of working you come up with much better ideas and concerns and narratives.

VL There are some specific references to southeast Australian carvings and possum cloaks ...

JK I was thinking particularly of drawings by Tommy McRae and William Barak. Take Tommy McRae’s Ceremony [c. 1900], which Jonathan has in his research folio – if you look at the body markings, and the stance, it’s the kind of repetition that comes across in Jonathan’s white lines [2005].

JJ Because of a lack of cultural knowledge I’ve had to do a lot of research. What’s been interesting is that many designs are derived from a small detail on an object that I’ve been looking at in London, or anywhere, in any museum. And I’ve taken those designs and started aligning them with similar ideas and images.

HP You amplify the ideas around them as well as the scale.

JJ Yes. VL Do you have to go through a permission process?

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Sometimes – which means talking to different people within the community and showing them images and telling them what’s going on. But because of the minimal nature of the work and its openness in terms of referencing things there have never been any issues. It’s not directly referencing one thing.

VL This brings up the question of whether minimalism has meaning or not. Can you talk through how you came to your particular minimal style – the use of, say, fluorescent tubes in gridline patterns? Most Western viewers would think of minimal artists such as Donald Judd or Dan Flavin (the American minimalism of the 1960s). How aware were you of their work and if you weren’t, where do you think your use of a minimal aesthetic might have come from?

JJ I started using light when my Auntie died, in my first year of art school. She almost brought me up and we were really, really close. She was born days apart from me, we spent a lot of time together and we loved the same things. She passed away suddenly, and I was interested in ways of processing that – thinking about everything she’d taught me and how you hold on to that information, how you go on. It was a way of grieving. I produced fifty-six objects that represented the age of my Auntie when she passed. Eighteen of the objects were lit, which was how old I was.

These objects were meant to reference coolamons. I was interested in how those eighteen objects lit the others and kept them alive or in your consciousness. You still had them in your vision – you hadn’t lost them, they were all part of the light and shadow. It was how you can link things back together that aren’t particularly there, how to hold the meaning, the identity, unite things. I was interested in how light could start pulling things together.

HP That is like Gulumbu’s work again. The stars that you can’t see – but whose light you can see – are all part of Garak, the universe.

VL Did any of your lecturers or fellow students raise the topic of minimalism with you at art school or did you look at it in any way?

JJ I was more interested in materials. For instance, I was really interested in metal because of my Great Granddad who was Aboriginal and travelled around properties fixing fences and sleeping under corrugated iron. I became obsessed with corrugated iron and how it was such a white Australian material and also an Aboriginal material – and the juncture between the two. For a long time I was lighting metal and this dominated the work more than the actual lighting.

HP Some Indigenous women from the South Coast of New South Wales had a really interesting response to one of your corrugated iron works …

JJ Yes, carrying on from the coolamon piece I made a work from corrugated iron, lashed together, with a simple light bulb hanging in it. It was one of my first shows at Boomalli [Aboriginal Arts Co-operative] after finishing art school. I wasn’t sure if the work

4 Tony Tuckson White lines (vertical) on ultramarine 1970–73 diptych, synthetic polymer paint on hardboard 213.5 x 244.6 cm Gift of Annette Dupree 1976 Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney © Reproduced with permission. Licensed by VISCOPY, Australia, 2008 5 Mervyn Bishop Prime Minister Gough Whitlam pours sand into the hands of traditional landowner Vincent Lingiari, Northern Territory, 1975 type R3 photograph, 30.5 x 30.5 cm Hallmark Cards Australian Photography Collection Fund 1991 Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney © Mervyn G. Bishop. Licensed by VISCOPY, Australia, 2008 photograph: Jenni Carter 6 Emily Kam Ngwarray (Kame Kngwarreye) Untitled (Awelye) 1974 synthetic polymer paint on paper laid down on polyester 100 x 75 cm Laverty Collection, Sydney

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was too conceptual but these women from Wreck Bay had a really emotional connection to it. Their response was a big turning point in my career. It was a stimulus to continue.

HP Well, it’s important, we’re talking about minimalism with an underlying set of meanings.

VL There has been some reassessment of minimalism over the decades. In the immediate wake of American minimalism, the work was discussed in very rigid terms, as one thing following another, the grid and seriality and sameness, and the work is very absolute.

But it led to an enormous change in the avant garde – if you think about post-minimalism and conceptual art and so on – so some scholars have looked at the aspects of minimalism that may have set off new ways of working.10 The first of these is the theatrical emphasis on materials in space – a sense that you can’t just look at a work, you have to walk around it, because the objects are just so large. Another aspect is the perceptual dimension – these objects have actually created a sense of aura in their spaces, which is something that I think your work picks up on. And a third aspect is the notion that some minimalist works possess what Rosalind Krauss calls ‘an optical unconscious’.11 That there is actually another level feeding into the power of the object and it could be that something’s repressed or something else is humming below.

Could we say that your work has (consciously or not) picked up on minimalism as a style and has taken on some of these aspects I have outlined and, as it were, exceeded them, by bringing them into your own cultural world? Are we seeing in your work a confluence of a Western abstract mode, which you’ve been exposed to in your working life, and your own cultural interests and heritage?

JJ I was probably less aware of American minimalism than I was of Emily Ngwarray. The minimalism I’m interested in is more like cooking – when you’re reducing something down, boiling and boiling, until you get a rich stock that becomes the base for all your dishes.

Even now, talking about different versions of blue, I guess I was trying to wrap them all up in one, amplifying meaning, not reducing it.

VL I think in this context it is important to recall, as Eddie Chambers and others have done, that modernism is not a singular entity. When it travels, especially to postcolonial countries, there’s not a blind acceptance of it. In fact, what happens is a kind of modification or translation or set of inflections that have to do with the contexts in which artists find themselves. If an artist in New Delhi is painting in an abstract way and an artist in Sydney is painting in an abstract way, both in the 1950s, it could be for two entirely different reasons.

However the so-called ‘centre’ has assumed that there is a bland acceptance and, as such, this centre becomes ‘blind’ to the vicissitudes of regional modernisms. The same attitudes can be found in reactions to traditional Indigenous practice from a range of countries: it is considered exotic. In other words, the ‘centre’ doesn’t have the language regarding what is unfamiliar.

John Clark has written that: ‘In relation to the discourse of modernism it is a modern, non-Euro-American art which subverts clarity of interpretation. The inability of a Euro-American rhetoric to find a modern art in Asia intelligible is the very sign that its subversion will open us to the discourse of modernity itself.’12 In other words, if somebody in Europe is unable to find your work intelligible, it’s the very sign that your work has subverted a dominant set of interpretations that have issued from the ‘centre’. In fact, your work confounds centre-periphery models of understanding modernism and, as Clark suggests and as we see here with this conversation, opens up an understanding of what both modernism and indigeneity might be: it is a minimalism that is inhabited by beliefs/community/land/family.

JK From a theoretical point of view ... Jonathan, is it your intention to make subversive work?

JJ No, it’s not.

JK When I saw your installation at ACCA I felt it was asserting rather than subverting – it was an encounter, a very powerful work in space. I read the patterns on the pieces like two big shield forms – are they shield forms?

JJ In a way.

VL That touches on scale, doesn’t it? Because a shield is one size but your work magnifies or amplifies this imagery to another level and it becomes site specific.

JJ Yes. HP It creates immersion, doesn’t it? With a lot of the work you enter the space and you’re dwarfed.

JJ Yes, that has to do with the subjects and cultural meanings I’m thinking about.

HP And the authority. I don’t know if your work is subversive, assertive or something else. It’s almost like enfolding. You enter the Sherman space, for instance, and you may not be able to fit between the walls but you don’t feel repelled by this. It’s like cultural material from the Western Desert – I think it was James Clifford who said that you need humility to respect what cannot be known.

JJ A lot of the time, for me, it’s dealing with a huge bank of information and sometimes it works to honour that by making the object bigger.

JK What persists in museums, what we call ‘material culture’, are the transportable things, like shields or etched barks or even sections that have been taken out of carved trees from Moree and all through western New South Wales. They’re only a small reflection of culture on the land, where those same patterns are created on a landscape scale as settings for ceremonies – like the patterns left by dancers as they move up and down. The things that are produced ephemerally in space, in ceremony, have similar patterns to the objects that persist in museums.

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In the Western Desert, people really admire a neat pattern left after a ceremony.

HP Or wind tracery on sand or the scratchings of the bettong, the marsupial mouse. Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri takes that miniscule, ephemeral mark and somehow amplifies the meaning of what is the first impression. It’s not just little scratchings, it’s tjukurrpa, story, repetition.

VL But I think Jonathan’s work is doing something different from the Western Desert paintings.

HP Absolutely, but because of conventional understandings of minimalism it’s not often associated with cultural influences.

VL No, but because he’s using everyday materials he is taking his cultural influences into another dimension, if you like.

HP That’s a given but what we’re trying to do is to remember that there is also this cultural influence. Jonathan’s work as a contemporary artist can also be located within artistic histories that are outside Western art history.

VL So it is like a confluence ...

HP It’s the va between Aboriginal art and Dan Flavin perhaps …

JK It also comes back to the notion of the open grid. If you think about the scratching of an animal that might be transformed onto canvas as a series of parallel lines, the repeat pattern is created if the animal moves and starts scratching again. Potentially you could have had any number of the shields created by Jonathan in the ACCA exhibition, leaning up, and it would work within the same repetitive pattern. It seems that this work forms sections out of the open grid that could go on and on.

HP And the light suggests that it would extend beyond the gallery space.

JK And the outside light is going to extend the furthest.

HP Yes, and in terms of the open and the closed grid there are also open and closed circles. The early Pintupi drawings that Geoffrey Bardon collected from his carport at Papunya in Central Australia had the spiralling circle that could go on and on whereas the others, the concentric circles, were closed.13 He said that one was a travelling line and one was like a place. He associated them with movement, rightly or wrongly, in terms of his particular archetypes and hieroglyphs, so that’s interesting as well.

JJ And I’m also keen to reference the inside of a bank envelope, for example, where you get those ridiculous patterns, to create a really open reading, which is what a lot of minimalist artists were doing …

VL Abstract artists in general …

JJ Yes, trying to open up that meaning, open up that dialogue, open up those ideas, which is what a lot of Aboriginal artists working in minimalism are doing. By reducing everything you open up the scope of vision.

HP Yes, but as well as opening up there is also a telescoping.

Say John Mawurndjul paints Ngalyod, the Rainbow Serpent. At

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7 Ian Burn Blue Reflex 1966–67 auto lacquer, epoxy base, plywood panel 90.5 x 60 x 3.5 cm Rudy Komon Memorial Fund 1990 Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney © Reproduced with permission photograph: Ray Woodbury 8 Tommy McCrae Spearing the kangaroo (c. 1880s–c. 1890s) pen and brown ink on buff paper 23.9. x 35 cm (sheet) Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney photograph: Dianna Panuccio 9 Jonathan Jones untitled (coolamon) 1997 cold-pressed steel, threaded rod, battery-powered lights dimensions variable installation view, COFA Gallery, University of New South Wales, Sydney courtesy the artist and Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney

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first he paints the whole Ngalyod and then, as its figurative form disappears in this abstract field of rarrk, he is symbolising power and pure energy. The white pigment, the white light, is said to be the ‘shit’ of Ngalyod. The absolute brilliance is Ngalyod itself. Then what you’re looking at, potentially, is the scaly body of the Rainbow Serpent rendered abstractly with its faeces. It’s taking something to a microscopic level but simultaneously expanding it beyond imagination and it takes someone like John Mawurndjul to do that.

I think that’s happening in your work too.

VL I think it also happens, say, in the way Debra Dawes uses the grid. Here’s a contemporary artist living on the South Coast of New South Wales who paints the most beautiful abstract minimal paintings that nevertheless come from a deep set of concerns about the everyday, and there’s always a story – not a narrative but a set of references in the work. It could be how many hours she had for her painting that day.

JJ Each breath being a brushstroke.

VL Yes, so her seriality is quite different from that of another abstract minimal painter. Many forms of abstraction are underpinned with a set of meanings and Indigenous abstraction in this country alerts us to that even more.

HP You don’t use neon, do you? You’re very particular about your materials.

JJ Everything comes from what my Granddad taught me. He was an instrument-maker, a mechanic-type person so I guess it’s a bit more than the average person’s knowledge of those things. I grew up thinking that breaking things down and fixing them up was normal. Nothing gets thrown out.

HP Reconnecting things.

VL That’s right, and I think your particular type of geometric abstraction can communicate those universal sets of emotions and ideas that the original rarrk painters and the original abstractionists were also working with.

HP I think that Eddie is making that point somehow, in his essay. There’s the idea of placement and what people expect.

People might see Jonathan’s work and instantly make very easy assumptions about minimalism. From my point of view, it’s a very valuable thing for people to see Jonathan’s work as also being part of an Indigenous art continuum, not exclusively Aboriginal, perhaps, but located within that practice as well and observations from that – not so much being a participant in ceremonial – but just being able to learn from those people, as artists, as well.

VL In addition, if you look at an early geometric minimalist work and then compare that to how Jonathan uses the fluorescent tube, his work is very dynamic. The lights and shadows work in all kinds of directions; it’s a matrix, it’s very complex and in that way he’s quite distinct from the modernist artists who practised with light in the

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1960s. It’s the performative aspect of the work that John talked about earlier which really carries it across cultures.

HP Yes, absolutely.

VL Because everybody has a body, everybody has to experience space, everybody takes a journey and as I’ve said elsewhere, your work takes the line, not for a walk but for a journey.

HP Up into the sky … and down along the ground. It’s like the tui, the little bird in Colin McCahon’s landscape painting – a trace of light.

It’s beautiful, which brings us back to Michael Riley’s photographs – the feather suspended in the blue sky, this idea of weightlessness.

Michael’s work is like Jonathan’s – it defies being grounded. It floats and moves and it’s light and air. You can’t grab it, you can’t hold it in your hand.

JJ Michael was a great mentor and a key influence but spending hours walking through cemeteries trying to find the right angel to photograph for cloud when he wasn’t very well was a challenging experience.

HP Again, in the cemetery, it’s all about pointing up to the sky. You’re almost in the zone between the people in the ground and where their spirits are going – and you two are traversing that in-between space. It’s like you were saying, Victoria, about new thinking on minimalism and the notion that something has been closed down.

VL Repressed … something unconscious.

HP Something that’s informing an energy – and in someone like Emily Ngwarray’s work, and in Jonathan’s work too, it’s the current that comes into the work and makes the light. It’s like channels of subterranean power and energy – it’s like a yam root system, it’s underneath the ground and Emily was painting that too. There’s this below-the-surface, pull-back-the-tarpaulin-and-see-what’sunderneath-it subterranean energy as well a celestial or spiritual energy. It’s on the ground and in the sky.

JK It’s the rhizome as the open grid, continuing from potato to potato – and then you have to dig them up with a paintbrush.

HP Yes, human energy activates it in some way – brings it to the canvas or channels the current to the fluoro or whatever it is. I see that electrical current as being associated with the subterranean current that people talk about when they say the ground is corporeal and living and breathing.

VL Yes, because electricity is one of those things that you can’t see, you just experience what it does.

JK You can’t see it but you can certainly feel the current.

HP In works by Johnny Warangula Tjupurrula, for instance, you can see seasonal change expressed in things that appear on the earth. In his Water Dreaming paintings, water is seeping into the earth and new growth is coming up … ancestors are going in and out. Judy Watson talks about blood seeping into the ground.14 These kinds of spaces are not fixed and – as Victoria was saying before – the work moves between cultural interpretations and defies territorial or terrestrial boundaries as well as conceptual or cultural boundaries and borders.

Endnotes

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In 2006 the Northern Territory Government established a Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse. In June 2007 the Little Children are Sacred Report was released, resulting in then Prime Minister John Howard’s announcement of an urgent government response to the critical situation of children at risk in the NT. This involved seizing control of some Indigenous communities for five years; sending police and army personnel to deal with law and order; banning alcohol; and quarantining welfare payments to control spending of welfare money

by Indigenous people. The Intervention continues under Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s Labor Government.

Jonathan Jones was one of seven emerging Australian artists commissioned to produce work for ACCA’s exhibition New08, curated by Anna MacDonald (12 March – 11 May 2008). See http://www.accaonline.org.au/NEW08 Michael Riley, cloud, 2000, ten inkjet prints on banner paper, 125 x 86 cm each.

Collection: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Gulumbu Yunupingu, Garak the Universe, Larrakitj 2005, sculpture, natural earth pigments on hollow log, 304 x 24 cm. Exhibited in ‘Culture Warriors’, National Indigenous Art Triennial 2007, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

When the Gallery purchased Jackson Pollock’s Blue poles for AUS $1 million in 1973, it created a storm of controversy. Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, who had given his approval for the purchase, countered by using the image of Blue poles on his Christmas card that year. Tony Tuckson was Assistant Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales from 1950 (reclassified Deputy Director in 1957) until his death in 1973. He accompanied Stuart Scougall, an orthopaedic surgeon and art patron, to Melville Island and Arnhem Land in 1958 and 1959 on collecting expeditions for the Gallery.

The Tiwi people traditionally carve and paint Pukumani poles for burial ceremonies.

Also known as Emily Kame Kngwarreye.

Ian Burn, Blue Reflex, 1966–67, auto lacquer, epoxy base, plywood panel, 90 x 60 x 3.5 cm. Collection: Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.

Rosalind E. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, Thames and Hudson, London, 1977.

Hal Foster, ‘The crux of minimalism’, in Howard Singerman (ed.), Individuals: A Selected History of Contemporary Art, 1945–1986, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Abbeville Press, New York, 1986.

Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1993.

John Clark, ‘Open and closed discourses of modernity in Asian art’, Modernity in Asian Art, in John Clark (ed), University of Sydney East Asian Studies No. 7, Wild Peony, Sydney, 1993, pp. 16–17.

From 1971 to mid-1973 schoolteacher Geoffrey Bardon lived at Papunya, 200 kilometres west of Alice Springs. He encouraged a group of Aboriginal men to paint their traditional sand designs onto boards using Western materials, giving birth to a new form of Aboriginal art that has become a phenomenon in contemporary art in Australia and internationally.

I listen and hear those words a hundred years away / that is my Grandmother’s Mother’s Country / it seeps down through blood and memory soaks / into the ground.

Judy Watson, artist statement in Wiyana/Perisferia, exhibition catalogue, Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative at The Performance Space, Sydney, 1993.

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10 John Mawurndjul born Australia 1952 Kuninjku (eastern Kunwinjku) people Rainbow Serpent’s Antilopine Kangaroo 1991 natural pigments on eucalyptus bark 189 x 94 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra © John Mawurndjul. Licensed by VISCOPY, Australia 2008 11 Debra Dawes Breath (green July) 2004 oil on primed linen 110 x 55 cm Reproduced courtesy the artist and Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney photograph: Paul Green 12 Johnny Warangula Tjupurrula Australia c. 1925–2001 Water dreaming 1974 Papunya, Northern Territory synthetic polymer paint on canvas board 70.7 x 55.5 cm Elder Bequest Fund 1984 Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide © Estate of the artist. Licensed by Aboriginal Artists Agency 2008

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This page and previous spread untitled (the tyranny of distance), 2008 aluminium, tarpaulin, fluorescent tubes and fittings dimensions variable installation view, Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney commissioned by Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney courtesy the artist, Gallery Barry Keldoulis and Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney photograph: Richard Glover 22 / 25

untitled (the tyranny of distance), 2008 aluminium, tarpaulin, fluorescent tubes and fittings dimensions variable installation view, Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney commissioned by Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney courtesy the artist, Gallery Barry Keldoulis and Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney photograph: Richard Glover

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68 Fletcher, Bondi, 20:20, 8.6.03, 2003 household light bulbs, electrical cable, movement sensors 200 x 900 x 50 cm installation view, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney collection: Newcastle Region Art Gallery, New South Wales courtesy the artist and Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney photograph: Paul Green

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untitled (graphite a), 2005 charcoal and graphite on paper 101.5 x 64 cm courtesy the artist and Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney

untitled (graphite g), 2005 charcoal and graphite on paper 101.5 x 64 cm collection: Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

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white lines, 2005 fluorescent tubes and fittings installation view, Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney courtesy the artist and Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney photograph: Scott Strothers

Overleaf white lines, 2005 fluorescent tubes and fittings installation view, Westpac Headquarters, Sydney courtesy the artist and Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney photograph: Scott Strothers

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Jonathan Jones and Ruark Lewis homeland illuminations, 2007 acrylic and gouache on timber with fluorescent lights dimensions variable courtesy the artists and Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney ‘homeland illuminations’ was based on Jonathan Jones’s grandfather’s (Pa’s) narratives of country and culture.

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blue poles, 2004 fluorescent lights, perspex, mdf 169 x 35 x 35 cm courtesy the artist and Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney photograph: Barry Keldoulis

white poles, 2004 embossed paper set of 3, each 69 x 35 cm edition of 20 courtesy the artist and Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney photograph: Richard Glover

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white poles, 2003 fluorescent tubes and fittings dimensions variable Verghis collection, London courtesy the artist and Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney photograph: Fiona Morrison

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mark making (a view of Botany Bay), 2008 beads, pins, epoxy filler, canvas, axe cuts, framed facsimile of colonial etching dimensions variable installation view, Hazelhurst Regional Art Gallery and Art Centre, Sydney courtesy the artist and Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney photograph: silversalt

mark making (a view of Botany Bay), 2008 (detail) beads, pins, epoxy filler, canvas, axe cuts, framed facsimile of colonial etching dimensions variable courtesy the artist and Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney photograph: silversalt

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lean-to, 2007 mdf, tarpaulin, fluorescent lights and fittings installation view, Gallery Barry Keldoulis courtesy the artist and Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney photograph: Richard Glover

Overleaf under the aegis, 2006 fluorescent tubes and fittings installation view, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney courtesy the artist and Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney photograph: Jenni Carter

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Jonathan Jones and Jim Vivieaere NICE (Maal), 2007 ice and sound dimensions variable installation view, UTS Gallery, Sydney courtesy the artist and Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney photograph: Mark Rogers

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lumination fall wall weave, 2003 electrical cable, light fittings and bulbs 200 x 200 cm courtesy the artist and Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney photograph: Scott Struthers

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lumination interplay 3A, 2003 cotton thread and paper 40.5 x 32 cm (framed) collection: Marion Borgelt photograph: Scott Struthers

lumination interplay 1A, 2003 cotton thread and paper set of 3, each 40.5 x 32 cm (framed) private collection, Sydney photograph: Scott Struthers

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lumination fall wall weave, 2004 (detail) electrical cable, light fittings and bulbs 340 x 720 cm collection: Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane courtesy the artist and Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney photograph: Natasha Harth

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Gurrajin (Elizabeth Bay), 2006 fluorescent tubes and fittings courtesy the artist and Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney photograph: Jenni Carter This work was originally commissioned for the exhibition â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Ten[d]ancyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, curated by Sally Breen and Tania Doropoulos, for Elizabeth Bay House, Sydney, and generously supported by the Historic Houses Trust and the Australia Council.

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untitled (chiselled sponge), 2008 household sponge on canvas board dimensions variable courtesy the artist and Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney photograph: Richard Glover

speak softly and carry a big stick, 2008 aluminium, fluorescent tubes and fittings, tarpaulin, plywood, paint 2 poles, each 700 x 60 x 30 cm installation view, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne courtesy the artist and Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney

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Jonathan Jones and Ruark Lewis Redfern reckonings, 2001 (detail) oyster shells, bricks, household bulbs, extension cords, marble, flour, paper, charcoal dimensions variable installation view, Performance Space, Sydney courtesy the artist and Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney

Jonathan Jones and Nuha Saad Redfern reckonings, 2001 (detail) household bulbs, extension cords, wooden floor boards and balustrades dimensions variable installation view, Performance Space, Sydney courtesy the artist and Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney

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Artist Biography

1978 Born Sydney, Australia 2004 Bachelor of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney

Lives and works in Sydney

Selected Bibliography

2002

2001

Solo Exhibitions

2008 2007

2006 2005 2004 2003 2002

untitled (the tyranny of distance), Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney trade mark, Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney Jonathan Jones, Newcastle Region Art Gallery light maps, Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney white lines, Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney blue poles, Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney lumination, Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney served chilled, Sherman Artbox, Sydney

Collaborative Exhibitions 2007 NICE (Maal), UTS Gallery, Sydney, with Jim Vivieaere Blanche (Phase I), Chalk Horse, Sydney, with KC Adams homeland illuminations, Performance Space, Sydney, with Ruark Lewis 2004 2004, National Gallery of Victoria and Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, with Darren Dale and David Page 2003 The sound of missing objects: panos couros, jonathan jones and ilaria vanni, Performance Space, Sydney; University of Wollongong Gallery, Wollongong, NSW, with Ilaria Vanni and Panos Couros

40 Ambivalent Words, CLUBSproject Inc., Melbourne, with Ruark Lewis 2002 Red Out, Auckland Society of the Arts Gallery, New Zealand, with Jim Vivieaere 2001 Redfern reckonings, Performance Space, Sydney, with Nuha Saad, Ruark Lewis and Romaine Morton

2000

1999

1998

1997

conVerge: where art and science meet, 2002 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, web archive, Collaborations, <http:www.adelaidebiennial.com> Festivus, Sherman Galleries, Sydney Further, A-space, Sydney Colour is the Battle Between Light and Dark, Ivan Dougherty Gallery, COFA, University of New South Wales, Sydney What’s Love Got To Do With It, Storey Hall, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne Temporary Fixtures, Artspace, Sydney The Art of Place, Fifth National Indigenous Heritage Art Award, Old Parliament House, Canberra (national tour) Federation: Contemporary Views of Australia, Camden Museum, Sydney Mum Shirl, The Sacred Trust of Memory Exhibition, Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative Ltd, Sydney, <http://www.fineartforum.org/Gallery/cybertribe/blackout> New Beginnings and New Ideas, Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative Ltd, Sydney Comfort Zone, Biennale of Sydney, Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative Ltd, Sydney Triggered, First Draft, Sydney Trigger, First Draft, Sydney Objectionable, COFA Gallery, University of New South Wales, Sydney Sight Unseen, Tusculum, Royal Australian Institute of Architecture, Sydney Djalarinji: something that belongs to us, Manly Art Gallery and Museum, Sydney What is Aboriginal Art?, COFA Gallery, University of New South Wales, Sydney

Public Commissions 2007

2005- 0 6 2003

The AXA Centre, Docklands, Melbourne COX Architects, Melbourne white lines, Westpac Bank Headquarters, Sydney Architects, Johnson Pilton Walker Wilson Brothers Site, Redfern, Sydney Landscape Architects, Pittendrigh, Shinkfield & Bruce

Selected Group Exhibitions Grants/Scholarships 2008

2007

2006

2004

2003

Moving Light, Fremantle Arts Centre, Fremantle, WA, with Sriwhana Spong NEW08, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne Lines in the Sand, Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and Arts Centre, Sydney The Trouble with the Weather: a southern response, UTS Gallery, Sydney Nguurramban: From Where We Are, Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts, Melbourne Celebrating Aboriginal Rights?, Macquarie University Art Gallery, Sydney Good Company Flash Lights, Bath Street Gallery, Auckland, NZ Xstrata Coal Emerging Indigenous Art Award, winner, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane Adventures with Form in Space: the fourth Balnaves Foundation Sculpture Project, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney gbk at Melbourne Art Fair, Royal Exhibition Building, Melbourne Ten[d]ancy: artistic interventions for Elizabeth Bay House, Elizabeth Bay House, Sydney Flaming Youth, Orange Regional Gallery, Orange, NSW Terra Alterius: Land of Another, Ivan Dougherty Gallery, COFA, University of NSW, Sydney (touring exhibition) Quiet, Aquaspace, Savannah, GA, USA Travelling Light: Collaborative Projects by Pacific Artists, Pacific Wave Festival, Performance Space and Museum of Sydney, Sydney Primavera 2003, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney Il Palazzo Delle Libertà, Palazzo Della Papesse Centro Arte Contemporanea, Siena, Italy Dream Traces: A Celebration of Contemporary Australian Aboriginal Art, University of Brighton, UK Artbox Inc., Sherman Galleries, Sydney Arcanum, First Draft, Sydney, <http://www.fineartforum.org/Gallery/cybertribe/ lightone/index.htm> Picturing Paradise, Mori Gallery, Sydney

2006 2003 2002 2001

Xstrata Coal Emerging Indigenous Art Award, Queensland Art Gallery, inaugural winner International Individual Program, New South Wales Ministry for the Arts New South Wales Indigenous Artists Fellowship, New South Wales Ministry for the Arts Foundation for Young Australians Scholarship

Collections

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane Newcastle Region Art Gallery, Newcastle, NSW Morgan Chase Bank Goldman Sachs JB Were Sussan Corporation Westpac Bank, Sydney and private collections

Artist Publications

Articles and Reviews

2006 2001

2007

light maps, limited edition artist book 40 Ambivalent Words, self-published

Exhibition Catalogues

2008

2006

Bourke, Ace, Lines in the Sand (illus.), Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and Art Centre, Sydney, 2008.

Chambers, Eddie, Desmond, Michael et al, untitled (the tyranny of distance), Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney, 2008.

Cavaniglia, Consuelo, Moving Light: Jonathan Jones and Sriwhana Spong, Fremantle Arts Centre, Fremantle, 2008.

Lynn, Victoria, ‘Taking the line for a journey’, NEW08, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2008.

2007 Cubitt, Sean, Palmer, Tally, Herriman, Jade & White, Stuart, The Trouble with the Weather: a southern response, exhibition catalogue, UTS (University of Technology Sydney), Sydney, 2007.

Harvey, Jirra Lulla, Nguurramban: From Where We Are, Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts, Melbourne, 2007.

Holland, Alison, Hill, Kiralynne & Davis, Rhonda, Celebrating Aboriginal Rights?, Macquarie University, Sydney, 2007.

2006 Breen, Sally & Doropoulos, Tania, Ten[d]ancy: artistic interventions for Elizabeth Bay House, Elizabeth Bay House, Sydney, 2006.

Fernando, Donna, Stories: country, knowledge, spirit and politics, Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery, Lake Macquarie, NSW. French, Blair, ‘Jonathan Jones’, Adventures with Form in Space: the fourth Balnaves Foundation Sculpture Project, Art Gallery of New South Wales Balnaves Foundation, Sydney, 2006.

Moon, Diane, ‘Jonathan Jones’, Xstrata Coal Emerging Indigenous Artist Award, Queensland Art Gallery and Xstrata Coal, 2006.

Sisley, Alan & Gray, Brenda, Flaming Youth, Orange Regional Gallery, Orange, NSW, 2006.

Tunnicliffe, Wayne, Adventures with Form in Space: the fourth Balnaves Foundation Sculpture Project, Art Gallery of New South Wales Balnaves Foundation, Sydney, 2006.

2005 Sayers, Andrew, white lines, Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney, 2005.

2004 Farmer, Margaret, Terra Alterius: Land of Another, Ivan Dougherty Gallery, COFA, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 2004.

French, Blair & Winning, Fiona, Travelling Light: Collaborative Projects by Pacific Artists, Pacific Wave Festival, Performance Space and Museum of Sydney, Sydney, 2004.

Green, Charles (ed.), 2004, National Gallery of Victoria and Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, 2004.

Machen, Kim, MAAP in Singapore 2004 – Gravity, Multimedia Art Asia Pacific, 2004.

2003 Couros, Panos, Jones, Jonathan & Vanni, Ilaria, Sound of Missing Objects, <http://panos.theatreink.com.au/panos/index.php?option=com_content&task=v iew&id=15&Itemid=28> Perkins, Hetti, lumination, Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney, 2003.

Pierce, Julianne, Primavera 2003, Exhibition of Young Australian Artists, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2003.

Tucker, Michael (ed.), Dream Traces: A Celebration of Contemporary Australian Aboriginal Art, University of Brighton, England, 2003.

2001 Phillips, Jacqueline, ‘Temporary Fixtures’, Temporary Fixtures, Artspace, Sydney, 2001.

1998 Watson, Ken, Djalarinji: something that belongs to us, Manly Art Gallery and Museum, Sydney

2005

2004

2003

2002 2001

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Crawford, Ashley, ‘Jonathan Jones’, Australian Art Collector, issue 39, January – March 2007, pp. 138–139.

Frost, Andrew, ‘Afraid of the dark’, Australian Art Collecter, issue 42, October – December 2007, pp. 132–141.

Slade, Lisa, ‘New Acquisition: Jonathan Jones, 68 Fletcher, Bondi, 20:20, 8.6.03’, Artemis, vol. 38, no. 1, July 2007, pp. 10–11.

Eccles, Jeremy, ‘Jonathan Jones: Lights up’, Australian Art Review, no. 9, 2005–2006, pp. 58–62.

Higgins, Jo, ‘Mining for treasures’, State of the Arts, 2006, <http://www.stateart.com.au> Neustein, David, ‘Hickson Rd Bistro’, Artichoke, no. 7 vol. 2, 2006, pp. 83–88.

Palmer, Daniel, ‘Artists Invade history’, Realtime (Sydney), no. 75, October – November 2006.

Schwartz, Katrina, ‘Jonathan Jones’, Art & Australia, vol. 43, no. 2, summer 2006, p. 320.

Totterman, Carolina, ‘Jonathan Jones: The thrill of discovery’, COFA Magazine, no. 15, 2006, pp. 14–15.

Frost, Andrew, ‘Sculpture market update’, Australian Art Collector, issue 34, October ­­– December 2005, p. 265.

Kaldor, John, ‘Gallery’, Art & Australia, vol. 42, no. 4, winter 2005, pp. 562–571.

Gawronski, Alex, ‘The sound of missing objects: panos couros, jonathan jones and ilaria vanni’, Eyeline, no. 53, 2003–04, pp. 44–45.

Peterson, Tanya, ‘Primavera’, Eyeline, no. 53, 2003–04, p. 53.

Smith, Russell, ‘Crypto-realism. Bitter sweet: Contemporary Australian art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales’, Art Monthly Australia, no. 168, 2004, pp. 37–41.

Stephens, Jasmin, ‘Jonathan Jones’, Broadsheet, vol. 33, no. 4, 2004, p. 35.

Angeloro, Dominique, ‘Watt’s up’, Sydney Morning Herald, 3–9 October 2003, p. 26.

Krauth, Kirsten, ‘Primavera’s new media magic’, OnScreen, October – November 2003, p. 21.

Losche, Diane, ‘The sound of missing objects: reflections on the museum’, Haiku Review, issue 6, 2003. <http://www.haikureview.net/HR6< Green, Tony, ‘Red Out’, Haiku Review, issue 2, 2002. <http://www.haikureview.net/node/19> James, Bruce, ‘Redfern reckonings’, Arts Today, ABC Radio National, 7 August 2001.

Contributors

Dr Eddie Chambers was born in England in 1960. His doctoral thesis (Goldsmiths College, University of London), addressed press and public responses to black visual arts activity in England from 1981–86. Since the early 1980s he has curated exhibitions and contributed to journals such as Third Text (London) and Art Papers (Atlanta), with regular contributions to Art Monthly (London) since 1989. The Institute of International Visual Arts (London) published a collection of his essays as part of their ‘Annotations’ series in 1999. His more recent exhibitions include ‘Pat Ward Williams: Isolated Incidents’ (Atlanta, 2005), ‘Curator’s Eye II Identity and History: Personal and Social Narratives in Art in Jamaica’ (Kingston, 2005/06) and ‘Being Lady Lucy: Drawings and Sketchbooks 20042006’ (London, 2007). He is currently a Visiting Professor, Art History, at Emory University, Atlanta.

Michael Desmond is the Senior Curator at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra. Before that he was Manager of Collection Development and Research at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, inaugural Manager of the Drill Hall Gallery, Australian National University, Canberra and Coordinator of International Art at the National Gallery of Australia. He is the author of Imaging Space: Jacky Redgate 1980–2003 (2005); Leonardo da Vinci: The Codex Leicester (2001); Love Hotel (1997); Islands: Contemporary installation from Europe, America, Asia and Australia (with Kate Davidson, exhibition catalogue, 1996); 1968 (with Christine Dixon, exhibition catalogue, 1995); and European and American Paintings and Sculpture 1870–1970 in the Australian National Gallery (with Michael Lloyd, 1992); as well as many articles and reviews.

John Kean is a Producer with Museum Victoria where, over the last decade, he has led the creation of a sequence of exhibitions, electronic interactives and websites. He was the Thomas Ramsay Science and Humanities Fellow at Museum Victoria (2004). Previously he was the Exhibition Coordinator, Fremantle Arts Centre (1992–94), inaugural Exhibition Coordinator at Tandanya: the National Aboriginal Cultural Institute (1989–91) and Art Advisor, Papunya Tula Artist Pty Ltd (1977–79). He has written extensively on Indigenous art and the representation of nature in Australian museums.

Victoria Lynn is an independent curator and writer based in Melbourne. The author of three books and over seventy articles and catalogues, she was the curator of ‘turbulence’, Third Auckland Triennial; ‘Julie Rrap: Body Double’ and ‘Regarding Fear and Hope’ (all 2007).

She previously held the post of Director, Creative Development at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. Prior to that, she was Curator of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. She was also Chair, Visual Arts/Craft Board of the Australia Council (2001–04) and the Commissioner of the Australian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2003).

Hetti Perkins is a member of the Eastern Arrernte and Kalkadoon Aboriginal communities. Currently the Senior Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, she has worked with Indigenous visual art for over twenty years.

Acknowledgements

Glossary

This exhibition and catalogue are dedicated to my Pa, whose country and culture, skills and knowledge, and support and love have made them possible.

To thank my family would be a vast understatement; without my very special and wonderful Mum nothing would be possible. Mum and Ya, along with my late Pa, have always given me encouragement, protection and love, guiding me throughout my life and providing a constant source of inspiration and motivation. And I’ll always hold dear the memory of my brother Tim and Auntie Robin.

I thank Evie for her love and support.

Also Ace Bourke for sharing his passions; Chris Evans for believing in a school drop out; Ruark Lewis for being a mentor/tormentor; Victoria Lynn and John Kean for a great afternoon chat; Carl Marks for more than just his name; Michael McDaniel for being someone I’ll always look up to; Peter McKenzie for getting me in and through uni; Hetti Perkins for her guidance and being a dear friend; Cara Pinchbeck for making me feel like I’m not alone; Avril Quail for her quiet support; Michael Riley for the colour blue and his endless inspiration; Andrew Rowley, and Danielle Hainne, for friendship; Gabriella Roy for (literally) hitting me with my first art book; Jim Vivieaere for teaching me more about table decoration than art.

And a most special thanks to Barry Keldoulis for being a dear friend and without whom I’d be lost, and alone on the dance floor.

Thanks to Wesley Enoch for his words; Sally Brand and the staff at Gallery Barry Keldoulis; the SCAF installation team, Levon Broederlow, George Pizer and Mickie Quick, with Marley Dawson, Pat Macan, Jim Singline and Pete Volich; Capral for their assistance; Chloe Stevens, Warren Ferguson and the team from Sylvania Lighting Australasia for their outstanding support and enthusiasm; and a huge thanks to Dr Gene Sherman and the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation team, especially Danielle Earp and Amanda Henry, Laura Murray Cree and Mark Gowing.

awelye

body painting designs.

Baimi

the All Father Sky Creator of the Kamilaroi Wiradjuri people (among others). bettong

small marsupial, of which there are several species. The most widespread is the burrowing bettong. It is unique among the kangaroos in that it shelters underground in burrows or large communal warren systems. Bettongs are approximately the size of a wild rabbit, strictly nocturnal, foraging widely at night in search of seeds, fruits, flowers, tubers and roots, and succulent leaves and grasses. coolamon

a hand-crafted wooden dish used by the Aboriginal women when gathering bush tucker, carrying water or carrying babies. djang

the sites and stories associated with ancestral beings.

Garak

Garak the Universe is an important ancestral story for the Yolngu of Northeast Arnhem Land.

Ngalyod

commonly known in English as the Rainbow Serpent and is the creator and protector of all djang or sacred places. Ngalyod is associated with the cycles of human and natural regeneration. Ngalyod has powers of creation and destruction and is strongly associated with rain, monsoon seasons and rainbows. rarrk

cross-hatched painted design.

Tjukurrpa

Dreaming or Creation time.

Yolngu

a generic name for the Aboriginal people of central and eastern Arnhem Land. In western Arnhem Land the corresponding term is Bininj.

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under the aegis, 2006 fluorescent tubes and fittings installation view, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney courtesy the artist and Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney photograph: Jenni Carter