JENNIFER LOUREIDE BIDDLE

REMOTE AVANT-GARDE
Aboriginal Art under Occupation
 REMOTE AVANT-­G ARDE

Objects/Histories
Critical Perspectives on Art, Material Culture, and Representation
A series edited by Nicholas Thomas
REMOTE AVANT-­G ARDE
Aboriginal Art under Occupation

Jennifer Loureide Biddle

Duke University Press | Durham and London | 2016

© 2016 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper ♾
Interior design by Mindy Basinger Hill
Typeset in Minion Pro by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

Biddle, Jennifer Loureide, author.
Remote avant-­garde : aboriginal art under occupation /
Jennifer Loureide Biddle.
pages cm—(Objects/histories)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-­0-­8223-­6055-­1 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn 978-­0-­8223-­6071-­1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn 978-­0-­8223-­7460-­2 (e-­book)
1. Artists, Aboriginal Australian—Australia—Northern Territory. 
2. Art, Aboriginal Australian—Australia—Northern Territory. 
3. Aboriginal Australians—Australia—Northern Territory—
Government relations. i. Title. ii. Series: Objects/histories.
n7402.n67b53 2016
704.03′991509429—dc23
2015031595

Frontispiece: June Walkutjukurr Richards, We went to the Mission

and we used to paint differently, 2007. © Warburton Arts Project.
Image courtesy of Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art.
Cover art: Pantjiti Ungkari Mackenzie posing with Niningka Lewis’s
Tjanpi Film Camera, npy Women’s Council car park, Alice Springs, 2007.
© Tjanpi Desert Weavers, npy Women’s Council. Photo by J. Foster.

Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the unsw

Art & Design, University of New South Wales (formerly College of Fine Arts),
which provided funds toward the publication of this book.
 CONTENTS

List of Illustrations vii
Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction The Imperative to Experiment 1

One Humanitarian Imperialism 21

PART I BILITERACIES
Two Tangentyere Artists 41
Three June Walkutjukurr Richards 77
Four Rhonda Unurupa Dick 91

PART II HAPTICITIES
Five Tjanpi Desert Weavers 109
Six Warnayaka Art: Yurlpa 139
Seven Yarrenyty Arltere Artists 159

PART III HAPPENINGS
Eight Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route 181
Nine The Warburton Arts Project 197

Epilogue (Not) a “Lifestyle Choice” 217

Notes 221
Further Resources 233
References 235
Index 257
 ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES
I.1. Milpirri 2012, Lajamanu, NT 4
I.2. Milpirri 2012, Lajamanu, NT 5
I.3. Wanta Steve Jampijinpa Patrick and performers, Milpirri 2012,
Lajamanu, NT 5
I.4. Tim Jampijinpa Newth, Myra Nungarrayi Patrick, and David Japaljarri
McMicken, Milpirri 2012, Lajamanu, NT 6
I.5. Artists at work, Warnayaka Art and Cultural Aboriginal Corporation, 2011,
Lajamanu, NT 8
I.6. At practice for Milpirri 2011, Lajamanu, NT 15
1.1. Billboard, Mascot International Airport, Sydney, 2013 29
1.2. Gordon Bennett, Cornfield (with scarecrow), from the Bounty Hunter
series, 1991 34
2.1. Margaret Boko Nampitjinpa working in the Tangentyere Artists studio,
2013 42
2.2. Rhonda Napanangka working in the Tangentyere Artists studio, 2013 45
2.3. Sally M. Mulda working in the Tangentyere Artists studio, 2013 47
2.4. Exhibition: Selfies: Representations of Self and Town Camp Artists,
Tangentyere Artist Gallery, Alice Springs, NT, 2014 51
2.5. Jane Young, Little Rocks in the Simpson Desert, 2013 53
2.6. Recycled bottle top and tin lid earrings created by various artists,
Tangentyere Artists Gallery, 2012 54
2.7. Doris Thomas working in the Tangentyere Artists studio, 2013 57
2.8. Rhonda Napanangka, Second Hand Shopping, 2010 59
2.9. Margaret Boko Nampitjinpa, The Story of Mingkiri the Mouse, 2011 63
2.10. Margaret Boko Nampitjinpa working in the Tangentyere Artists studio,
2013 65
2.11. Margaret Boko Nampitjinpa, White Kids and Black Kids Jumping on Cars,
2011 67
2.12. Sally M. Mulda, Policeman: Mother and Father Drunk, 2013 70
2.13. Exhibition: Selfies: Representations of Self and Town Camp Artists,
Tangentyere Artists Gallery, Alice Springs, NT, 2014 73
2.14. Sally M. Mulda, They Are Drinking Beer at Bush, 2012 73
2.15. Sally M. Mulda working in the studio, 2013 75
3.1. June Walkutjukurr Richards, Pretty Flower, undated 78
3.2. June Walkutjukurr Richards, Mirrka price, undated 81
3.3. June Walkutjukurr Richards, Carpetbagger, 2008 82
3.4. June Walkutjukurr Richards, Breaking our backs, 2008 84
3.5. June Walkutjukurr Richards, Gimme, 2008 86
3.6. June Walkutjukurr Richards, New Idea, 2008 87
3.7. June Walkutjukurr Richards, The Explorers, 2006 88
4.1. Rhonda Unurupa Dick with her grandmother, Mary Katatjuku Pan, at
the inaugural Desart Art Workers Photography Award 2012, Araluen Arts
Centre, Alice Springs, NT 93
4.2. Rhonda Unurupa Dick, Panel 1 from the series My Great-­Grandmother’s
Country. My 2 Grandfather’s Mother’s Birthplace, 2012 97
4.3. Rhonda Unurupa Dick, Panel 2 from the series My Great-­Grandmother’s
Country. My 2 Grandfather’s Mother’s Birthplace, 2012 99
4.4. Rhonda Unurupa Dick, Panel 5 from the series My Great-­Grandmother’s
Country. My 2 Grandfather’s Mother’s Birthplace, 2012 101
5.1. Nora Holland posing with a half-­made basket, “like being on television,”
2010 110
5.2. Kanytjupayi Benson (deceased), Shirley Bennett, Nuniwa Donegan
(deceased), Margret Donegan, Melissa Donegan, Janet Forbes, Ruby Forbes
(deceased), Deidre Lane, Elaine Lane, Freda Lane, Janet Lane, Wendy Lane,
Angela Lyon, Sarkaway Lyon, Angkaliya Mitchell, Mary Smith, and Gail
Nelson, Tjanpi Toyota, 2005 111
5.3. Nyinku Kulitja teaching at Tjanpi weaving workshops at WOMADelaide
Festival, 2007 113
5.4. Pile of purchased baskets at npy Women’s Council bush meeting,
2003 115
5.5. Tjanpi workshop in Tjanpi Corner, Alice Springs, NT, 2006 116

viii | Illustrations
5.6. Nyukana Baker, Basket, 2012 118
5.7. Kunbry Pei Pei, Basket, 2008 119
5.8. Mary Katatjuku Pan dancing with her burned tree sculpture on her head
in Pitjantjatjara country near Amata, SA, 2012 120
5.9. Tjunkaya Tapaya working on her large blue bird for Paarpakani (Take
Flight), Pitjantjatjara country near Amata, SA, 2011 121
5.10. Yaritji Young working on her bird for Paarpakani (Take Flight),
Pitjantjatjara country near Amata, SA, 2011 123
5.11. Paniny Mick, Paarpakani (Take Flight), 2012 124
5.12. Minyma Punu Kungkarangkalpa (Seven Sisters Tree Women) sculptures,
Pitjantjatjara country near Amata, SA, 2013 125
5.13. Paniny Mick with her bird made for Paarpakani (Take Flight),
Pitjantjatjara country near Amata, SA, 2011 126
5.14. Kanytjupayi Benson, Early Camp Crockery, 1996 128
5.15. Carson Biddle with her Tjanpi sculpture produced during workshop,
Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2013 129
5.16. Milyika Carol, Malpiya Davey, Pantjiti Lionel, and Niningka Lewis,
Station Scene, 2009 130
5.17. Judith Inyika Chambers, The Big Green Tractor, 2014 131
5.18. Tjanpi Punu, completed works in Pitjantjatjara country near Amata, SA,
2012 133
5.19. Nancy Jackson and Eunice Yunurupa Porter parading with Tjilkamarta
Minyma Kutjarra Mumu Wati Ngirntaka Warta at Warakurna in
Ngaanyatjarra lands of WA, 2013 135
6.1. Yukurrukurru (various), acrylic on board, Yawulyu as Intergenerational
Art, Lajamanu, NT, 2011 140
6.2. Left to right: Yulurrku Nangala Kelly, Apajai aka Raphaelia Napaljarri
Kelly, Lily Nungarrayi Hargraves, Lynette Napangardi Tasman, Molly
Napurrurla Tasman, Rosie Napurrurla Tasman, Jennifer Nampijinpa
Biddle, Myra Nungarrayi Patrick, Reide Japanangka Marshall, and Carson
Napanangka Biddle, Lajamanu Warlpiri Women’s Yawulyu exhibition,
opening night, Sydney, 2007 141
6.3. Lynette Napangardi Tasman, Wapirra Jukurrpa, 2007 142
6.4. Rosie Napurrurla Tasman, Kalajirri Jukurrpa, 2007 143
6.5. Molly Napurrurla Tasman, Ngurlu, 2007 144

Illustrations | ix
6.6. Three generations of artists at work on Liirliirpa Yurlpa (in process),
Warnayaka Art and Cultural Aboriginal Corporation, Lajamanu, NT,
2011 145
6.7. Rosie Napurrurla Tasman, Ngurlu (in process), Sydney, 2007 146
6.8. Rosie Napurrurla Tasman, Ngurlu Yukurrukurru (in process), Lajamanu,
NT, 2011 148
6.9. Rosie Napurrurla Tasman, Ngurlu Yukurrukurru (in process), Lajamanu,
NT, 2011 150
6.10. Lily Nungarrayi Hargraves, Ngalyipi Jukurrpa, 2007 152
6.11. Rosie Napurrurla Tasman, Ngurlu Yukurrukurru (in process), Lajamanu,
NT, 2009 153
6.12. Rosie Napurrurla Tasman, Ngurlu, 2007 154
6.13. Lajamanu Warlpiri Women’s Yawulyu exhibition, opening night, Sydney,
2007 157
7.1. Marlene Rubuntja, Three Women from Yarrenyty Arltere, 2014 160
7.2. Yarrenyty Arltere Learning Centre, set for Little Dingi, with Tristam
Malbunka’s Grandmother, 2012 161
7.3. Lorretta Banks with Marlene Rubuntja’s sculpture Little Dingi, on set at
Yarrenyty Arltere Learning Centre for Little Dingi, 2012 163
7.4. Behind Yarrenyty Arltere Learning Centre with Marlene Rubuntja’s Little
Dingi and friend (untitled), with Tristam Malbunka’s Grandfather, on set for
Little Dingi, 2012 166
7.5. Dulcie Sharpe, Bush Banana Kunga, 2011 167
7.6. Rhonda Sharpe, I Saw Me and I Was Beautiful, 2012 170
7.7. Rhonda Sharpe, They Came from Nowhere, 2013 175
7.8. Rhonda Sharpe, Orange Alien, 2013 176
8.1. Completed canvases laid out on the red earth at Well 36, Kilykily, August
2007 182
8.2. Artists Nora Wompi, Bugai Whylouter, Kumpaya Girgaba, and Nyangapa
Nora Nangapa, Kunawarritji, 2008 183
8.3. Paruku ipa artists work on their collaborative canvas, Paruku, 2007 185
8.4. Kenneth K. J. Martin and Paul Oceans filming, Well 36, Kilykily,
2007 186
8.5. Friday Jones and Kaye Bingham at Forrest’s Fort, Well 9, July 2007 187
8.6. Eubena (Yupinya) Nampitjin painting, Well 36, Kilykily, 2007 189

x | Illustrations
8.7. Morika Biljabu and Nicole Ma film Jakayu Biljabu painting, Well 36,
Kilykily, 2007 191
8.8. Muni Rita Simpson pointing to a water hole on the canvas, Minyipuru
(Seven Sisters), 2007 192
8.9. Women painting at the Kilykily painting workshop, Well 36, 2007 193
8.10. Child uses the One Road interactive, Perth, 2011 194
8.11. Exhibition visitors use the One Road interactive, Perth, 2011 195
9.1. Cyril Holland, Wanayowarra, 1992 204
9.2. Cyril Holland, Tjuntjunmarrarra Tjipilpa, 1992 206
9.3. Elizabeth Holland and Christine West, All the early days rockholes,
2001 208
9.4. Tjingapa Davies, Right Way to Have a Kurri, 1991 209
9.5. Elizabeth Holland, Wati Kutjarra at Talitjarra, 1992 214
9.6. Exhibition installation shot: Tu Di Shen Ti—Our Land Our Body, Tianjin
Art Museum, China, 2013 215
9.7. Exhibition installation shot: Tu Di Shen Ti—Our Land Our Body, Tianjin
Art Museum, China, 2013 215

PLATES
1. Doris Thomas, Thats Goanna, 2011
2. Margaret Boko Nampitjinpa, Tjulpu and Tjitji, 2013
3. June Walkutjukurr Richards, The Aboriginal Broadcasting Corporation,
2006
4. June Walkutjukurr Richards, We went to the Mission and we used to paint
differently, 2007
5. Rhonda Unurupa Dick, Panel 3 from the series My Great-­Grandmother’s
Country. My 2 Grandfather’s Mother’s Birthplace, 2012
6. Rhonda Unurupa Dick, Panel 4 from the series My Great-­Grandmother’s
Country. My 2 Grandfather’s Mother’s Birthplace, 2012
7. Pantjiti Ungkari Mackenzie posing with Niningka Lewis’s Tjanpi Film
Camera, Alice Springs, 2007
8. Nyurpaya Kaika-­Burton with her bird for Paarpakani (Take Flight),
Pitjantjatjara country near Amata, SA, 2011
9. Nyurpaya Kaika-­Burton, Paarpakani (Take Flight), 2012

Illustrations | xi
10. Triumphant artists with their finished works made for Paarpakani (Take
Flight), Pitjantjatjara country near Amata, SA, 2011
11. Molly Napurrurla Tasman, Yurlpa (in process), Lajamanu, NT, 2011
12. Rosie Napurrurla Tasman, Ngurlu/Kurlukuku/Lampurnu (Mulga
Seeds / Diamond Dove / Breast Milk Drops), 2007
13. Rhonda Sharpe, The Night Birds, 2012
14. Dulcie Sharpe, Grandmothers can rest too, sometimes, 2012
15. Sally Rubuntja and Marlene Rubuntja, See how we stand, proud with our
arms open!, 2013
16. Sally Rubuntja and Marlene Rubuntja, Woman with arms up because she is
proud!, 2013
17. People looking at the artworks displayed at the Nyarna, Lake Stretch Artists
Camp, August 2007
18. Cyril Holland, Tjillawarra Kirritji Warra Warra, 1992
19–20. Cyril Holland at work, Mitjika Rock Shelter, 1992

xii | Illustrations
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My first thanks to the artists and community members represented here, for
entrusting me with their work, and the Art Centre directors, managers, and
art workers who facilitated this project, including, from Tangentyere Art-
ists, Margaret Boko Nampitjinpa, Sally M. Mulda, Rhonda Napanangka, and
Louise Daniels specifically, as well as Liesl Rockchild, Sue O’Connor, Sia Cox,
and Jo Byrne; Yarrenyty Arltere artists Marlene Rubuntja, Dulcie Sharpe,
Louise Daniels, and Louise Robertson specifically, as well as Sophie Wallace;
from Tjanpi Desert Weavers, Nyurpaya Kaika-­Burton, Katatjuku Mary Pan,
Iluwanti Ungkutjuru Ken, Niningka Lewis, Euince Yunurupa Porter, Judith In-
yika Chambers, Yaritji Young, and Janet Forbes specifically, as well as Michelle
Young, Linda Rive, Clair Freer, Karina Menkhorst, and Jo Foster (especially);
Tjala artists Rhonda Unurupa Dick, Katatjuku Mary Pan, Nyurpaya Kaika-­
Burton, and Frank Young specifically, as well as Skye O’Meara; Warnayaka Ab-
original Arts and Aboriginal Cultural Organisation artists Molly Napurrurla
Tasman, Rosie Napurrurla Tasman, Lily Nungarrayi Hargreaves, Myra Nun-
garrayi Patrick, Lynette Napangardi Tasman, Yulurrku Zina Nangala Kelly,
Lava Nangala Kelly, and Gwenyth Napanangka Tasman specifically, as well as
Louisa Erglis and David Erglis; Warburton Arts Project artists and Gary Proc-
tor specifically, as well as Albie Viegas; Carly Davenport, Tim Acker, John Carty,
and Curtis Taylor, previous team members of Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock
Route, and Molly Hewitt of form.
To Wanta Steve Jampijinpa Patrick and Lynette Napangardi Tasman I owe
specific acknowledgment not only for translations, poetics, and correctives but
for enduring commitment to me, my family, and my research.
To Desart Inc. executive officer Philip Watkins and Michele Culpitt (senior
program manager), for formal collaboration underpinning this research
through the public platform Same but Different: Experimentation and Innova-
tion in Desert Arts, and to Lisa Stefanoff, who codeveloped this initiative with
me, I am deeply indebted, as well as to all of the participants of the seventeen
community art organizations who presented their works at the Same but Differ-
ent forums in Alice Springs in 2012 and 2013. While the Same but Different ini-
tiative and the nationally touring program Desert Animations that has accom-
panied it are not the subject of this book and can be sourced directly elsewhere
(see Cultural Studies Review 21 [1], 2015), I nevertheless remain indebted to the
deeply generous undertaking of this collaborative platform for the development
of my thinking and writing. To paw (Pintubi Anmatjere Warlpiri) Media, Susan
Locke, David Slowo, and Jeff Bruer, and Nick Lee of Central Australia Aborigi-
nal Media Association (caama) for recording these events for further research
and outreach purposes; and to Bronwyn Taylor, Melissa Kramer, and Parris
Dewhurst at Desart Inc., for their administrative support of the greater Same
but Different platform, my thanks.
I am extremely fortunate to work in an academic environment where re-
search is taken seriously. To the National Institute for Experimental Arts (niea),
specifically, to niea director Jill Bennett, along with colleagues David McNeil,
Chrisoula Lionis, Anna Munster, Michele Barker, Brenda L. Croft, and, more re-
cently, Doug Kahn, Sarah Kenderdine, Mari Velonki, Laura Fisher, and Veronica
Tello, I am grateful. Professional staff at niea Kathy Yeh, Rachael Kiang, Elena
Knox, and, previously under the Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics
(ccap), Shivaun Weybury, provided invaluable assistance to the research and
writing of this book.
Colleagues Jennifer Deger, Anna Gibbs, Faye Ginsburg, Ute Eickelkamp,
Diana Young, Tess Lea, Djon Mundine, r e a, John von Sturmer, Shelly Erring-
ton, Hetti Perkins, Terry Smith, Josie Douglas, Chery L’Hirondelle, Chris Salter,
Lisa Slater, Lilly Hibberd, Emelia Gelatis, Margaret Levi, Steven Gilchrist, David
Howes, Anna Nettheim, Stephen Muecke, Ian McLean, and Beth Povinelli gen-
erously provided insight at various stages of my thinking. Fred Myers inspired
this project on more than one basis.
Research assistance for this book was provided by Phillipa Roberton, Els van
Leeuwen, Philippa Barr, and Sudiipta Dowsett. Alison Groves worked image
magic. Ellen Oredsson and Sophia Benjamin provided bibliographic assistance
and Sylvia Colegrove of Rhubarb, copyediting. Caroline Marsh read early (and
late) drafts, providing exactly the feedback I didn’t know I needed most. Elspeth

xiv | Acknowledgments
Probyn’s critical commentary on these chapters pushed my thinking and my
writing. Tim Newth and David McMicken, directors of Tracks Dance Company,
share personal and professional background stories to this book that matter, as
does Christiane Senn.
My children, Reide and Carson, Sophia and Stuart, have grown up over the
course of the research and writing of this book. To them, to Jack Marshall and
my extended family, thank you, no matter what. Roger Benjamin has been a
champion cheerleader for this book and for me. And to my father, Bruce Biddle,
and my aunt, Katherine Biddle, who got what I was modeling before I did my-
self, I remain indebted.
Ken Wissoker, Elizabeth Ault, and Liz Smith at Duke could not have pro-
vided closer attention or better advice. My thanks to Nicholas Thomas for his
vital initial feedback.
This book would not have been possible without an Australian Research
Council (arc) Future Fellowship (2010–14), which generously provided not
only the resources for field and collaborative research but the time required
for its undertaking. The former College of Fine Arts (cofa) at unsw (now
unsw Art & Design) Staff Grants and Conference Funds provided further assis-
tance. The Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies
(­a iatsis) funded Yawulyu as Intergenerational Art: A Pilot Study (2010), and a
previous arc Discovery Project provided resources for the Lajamanu Warlpiri
Women’s Workshop (research underpinning chapter 5).
Portions of this book have appeared partially or in earlier drafts: chapter 3 in
“Art under Intervention: The Radical Ordinary of June Walkutjukurr Richards,”
Art Monthly, no. 227 (2010); chapter 8 in “Making (Not Taking) History: Yi-
warra Kuju The Canning Stock Route,” Art Monthly, August 2012; chapter 5
in “A Politics of Proximity: Tjanpi and Other Experimental Western Desert
Art,” Studies in Material Thinking 8 (2012), http://www.materialthinking.org
/papers/88. Chapter 6 appears as “Notes on the Hapticity of Colour,” in Diana
Young, ed., Colour (London: Sean Kingston, forthcoming); republished with
permission of the publisher. Chapter 9 appears in the second Tu Di Shen Ti—
Our Land Our Body (2013) catalog, under the title “Provocations from the Mar-
gins: The Production and Curation of the Warburton Arts Project”; republished
with permission of the publisher.

Acknowledgments | xv
REMOTE AVANT-­G ARDE
 INTRODUCTION
THE IMPERATIVE TO EXPERIMENT

It was an unseen thing and now it is a seen thing.

Wanta Jampijinpa Pawu-­Kurlpurlurnu | Ngurra-­kurlu:
A Way of Working with Warlpiri People

In this book I trace, with great excitement, an emergent body of aesthetics that
I call remote avant-­garde: new and experimental art of the Central and Western
Desert of Australia, including the town camps of Alice Springs.1 Remote Avant-­
Garde tracks trajectories of tradition taking shape today: from the stop-­motion
animation and still-­life sculpture of Yarrenyty Arltere to the digital landscape
portraiture of Tjala Arts artist Rhonda Unurupa Dick and the Desart Photogra-
phy Award, the grass and fiber artistry of Tjanpi Desert Weavers, the ochre experi-
mentations of Warnayaka Art, the biliterary poetics of Tangentyere Artists’ town
camp artists, and the acrylic witness paintings of June Walkutjukurr Richards.
These art forms and practices may not look like acrylic Jukurrpa (Dreaming)
paintings that have become representative of desert Aboriginal tradition. Yet they
are produced by the same communities (as well as by newer art communities)
and, in fact, by many of the same artists (as well as by their descendants). This
demonstrates a lived, intergenerational continuity between earlier art practices
and emergent aesthetics taking shape today that is vital, including the imperative
to experiment itself. The fact that Indigenous heritage requires “remembering
the future,” or what Hetti Perkins and Victoria Lynne (1993) called, over two de-
cades ago, “insurgent acts of cultural reiteration” that revivify as they reveal tra-
dition for the first time, needs itself to be re-­remembered, as it were, in relation
to a new wave of contemporary desert practices taking shape today.2
The Western Desert art movement is now recognized as what Robert Hughes
called the “last great art movement of the 20th century” (in Henly 2005), spec-
tacularly transforming the national and global art stage over the past four de-
cades, from Michael Nelson Jagamara’s masterful mosaic Possum and Wallaby
Dreaming (1988) at the new Australian Parliament House to the Hetti Perkins
and Brenda L. Croft Indigenous curatorial design commission for the Musée du
Quai Branly in Paris (2006).3 In the wake of this aesthetic revolution, no small
surge of research and scholarship has followed (Johnson 1994, 2008; Perkins
and Fink 2000; Myers 2002b; Bardon and Bardon 2004). However, very little
has been written about aesthetic developments that have taken shape since. This
book seeks to address this lack.
Remote Avant-­Garde models Aboriginal art as “art under occupation.” As I
discuss in chapter 1, since 2007 a new Australian government policy called the
Northern Territory Emergency Response (nter)—or, more simply, the Inter-
vention—has seen the targeting of remote Aboriginal communities as sites of
severe social dysfunction, abject poverty, perversion, and disadvantage. In this
climate and, specifically, in the absence of a historical record or responsible
media representation, art provides primary evidence to the contrary. This book
argues for a positive (but not naive) reconfiguration of the so-­called remote,
identifying the critical importance of contemporary art practice both as a pri-
mary means for self-­presentation and as material ways of doing and being in
place otherwise silenced, marginalized, or disavowed. Art in this context is not
a luxury or a leisure-­time pursuit.4 Art under occupation is art as survival: how
to keep hands, eyes, ears attuned to ways of sensing, knowing, seeing, making;
whose very realities are under occupation, subject to relentless assault, dis-
missal, disavowal on a day-­to-­day basis.5 How to remain responsive to and re-
sponsible for intangible heritage, at-­risk vernacular languages, iterative partici-
patory practice bound to place and to others, in a context where not only are
the rights to remain in traditional homelands under threat,6 but the right to be
Aboriginal in place is itself the subject of attack?
This book profiles emergent aesthetics in the context of national emergency.
It asks how qualities of attachment, belonging, and endurance—cultural and
linguistic life-­sustaining capacities—are reproduced against any number of
everyday violence/s of disavowal and impasse. Elizabeth Povinelli (2014) fig-
ures emergent Indigenous mediations as “artefacts at the precipice of the fig-
ured,” highlighting at once the struggle, on the ground as it were, and the pre-

2 | Introduction
carious conditions of visibility itself: what she calls “the effort of emergence and
the endurance of the otherwise.” If my focus remains throughout this book on
the uncertain conditions of aesthetic possibility under the nter Intervention,
it is because the kinds of “slow death” (Berlant 2011) or “slow violence” (Nixon
2013)—what Tess Lea (2014) figures as seeping, relentless, “water that leaches
through structural cracks” attrition of the crisis-­ordinary for Aboriginal people
and communities today—it is because the fact of the nter Intervention, of the
condition of occupation itself in Australia, remains unregistered and under-
signified and is fast becoming normalized.
To put it more pointedly, in Giorgio Agamben’s (1997) terms of occupied life
and aesthetics, following Demos (2013), how can one represent aesthetically a life
severed from representation politically? These arts stage the promise and fail-
ure of the nation-­state, what Agamben calls the “naked” or “bare life,” in which
sanctioned “zones of indifference” suspend the reach of law and thus reveal the
very foundations of neoliberal promise—equality, freedom, justice—to be a
ruse. The rights of Australian citizenry are not guaranteed to remote Aborigi-
nal people, as the nter Intervention makes patently clear (see chapters 1 and 2).
The “remote” is not, however, only a target of government intervention. It is
a term equally dominant and equally problematic (if for different reasons) in
the field of art. Margo Neale (2010, 34) identifies this model as a pernicious di-
chotomy within Aboriginal art appreciation, divided by types of Aboriginal art
and artists along “a north-­south axis of authenticity . . . in the belief that only
Aboriginal people living in remote communities are ‘real Aborigines’ . . . lead-
ing authentic cultural lives with attendant authentic cultural expressions.” The
remote/urban dichotomy not only renders urban Indigenous art inauthentic
and/or invisible (Croft 1993; Browning 2010) in comparison with the high-­end
market of so-called “authentic” remote Aboriginal art; it presents remote art
and artists as locked in time and tradition, invariably reduced, in the more vul-
gar version of this paradigm as Neale sketches it, to “museum artifacts.”
This book identifies emergent remote art forms that challenge this taxon-
omy directly. Counter to the dominant Aboriginal art history that separates
the traditional remote from the progressive urban, this book models a remote
avant-­garde yet to be appreciated by existing frameworks. The demand for “re-
mote” authenticity and traditionalism has erased the possibilities for the kinds
of arts profiled here, producing impossible standards and an imaginary blinker-

The Imperative to Experiment | 3

Fig. I.1. Milpirri 2012, Lajamanu, NT. © Tracks Dance Company. Photo by P. Eve.

ing that in no way reflects the realities of contemporary Indigenous lifeworlds.

This demand is mirrored directly in the art market’s predilections for works of
high traditionalism (that is, acrylic Jukurrpa, Dreaming, paintings) and the very
cramped space left for any other kinds of art.
Australian art journalist Nicholas Rothwell depicts recent art from the Central
and Western Desert as “a fateful journey away from its origins in ceremony and
law” (Rothwell 2013) and, more recently, as an art movement whose lights “one
by one . . . have gone out” (Rothwell 2014). The art in this book insists otherwise.
Rather than a “dying sunset” model of once-­was traditional glory, emergent arts
are actively developing new trajectories of culture and tradition that may not yet
exist. As Wanta Jampijinpa Pawu-­Kurlpurlurnu (Pawu-­Kurlpurlurnu, Holmes,
and Box 2008, 2) says of the newly conceived, experimental, Lajamanu Warlpiri
ceremony Milpirri: “It was an unseen thing and now it is a seen thing.” My use
of his phrase as an epigraph here and elsewhere (Biddle and Stefanoff 2015) in-
dicates specifically what it is that I track throughout this book: how Aboriginal
tradition is revealed through experimental practice.

4 | Introduction
Fig. I.2. Milpirri 2012, Lajamanu, NT. © Tracks Dance Company. Photo by P. Eve.

Fig. I.3. Wanta Steve Jampijinpa Patrick and performers, Milpirri 2012, Lajamanu, NT.
© Tracks Dance Company. Photo by P. Eve.
Fig. I.4. Tim Jampijinpa Newth, Myra Nungarrayi Patrick, and David Japaljarri
McMicken, Milpirri 2012, Lajamanu, NT. © Tracks Dance Company. Photo by P. Eve.

Milpirri shares with other experimental initiatives the fact that as an aes-
thetic, it belies categorical definition: is it festival or ceremony, dance or theater,
traditional or postcontemporary? Milpirri combines traditional Jardi-­Warnpa
ceremony with hip-­hop, break dancing, and high theatrical visual design. A
radical Lajamanu Warlpiri experiment since 2005, in an intercultural partner-
ship with Tracks Dance Company that dates back to 1987 (the longest sustained
community art partnership in the Central Desert), Milpirri refuses to tour or
expand beyond its base, its ground, at Lajamanu (see Newth, McMicken, and
Biddle 2015). What Milpirri looks like for its one night every two years changes;
new traditions, new revelations, emerge in country, on place, in intercultural
collaboration; through bodies, hands, voices, and sensate intertwinings in what
is ultimately, no doubt, a highly unlikely and deeply unwieldy form. Milpirri
relies on experimental participatory experience and encounter to reveal Warl-
piri heritage for the future.7 This is a model I am deeply indebted to and adopt
in the approach developed across this book in exploring the vital role of experi-
mentation in new aesthetic formations taking shape across the Desert today.
For “Aboriginal histories of the future”—as Faye Ginsburg and Fred Myers

6 | Introduction
(2006) call the vital work being undertaken by Indigenous artists, filmmakers,
and other key cultural producers today—to take shape, not only are “a myriad
of cultural resources” required but also a harder to quantify dedication to long
term, sustained collaborative struggle and fierce intercultural imagination (29).
The challenges facing Indigenous communities and the remote art sector re-
quire the building of what Carly Davenport Acker (2015) calls “convergences”:
new pathways and partnerships across the arts and media creative industries,
including academic research; pathways that are, in this sense, tracked formally
for the first time by this book.

i
I need to stress from the outset that this book is not a survey. There is no field of
remote avant-­garde that can be pointed to or simply bundled up by these pages.
Any number of other books could readily be shaped in any number of different
ways, given the sheer variety, quality, and dynamism of emergent arts taking
shape. Where I can throughout the book, I have indicated further references
to work I have not, alas, been able to include by direct discussion. What is pro-
filed here is select, partial, particular; not an exhaustive or inclusive account but
rather snapshots stolen and stilled momentarily only, as it were, from what is a
far greater, more complex, and in-­flux terrain of experimental tradition. What I
have written about reflects the limits of my own funding, capacities, and scope,
as well as my implicated and attached professional and personal history in par-
ticular Indigenous lifeworlds, where social relationships and prior knowledge
are primary and obligatory conditions of research. What I feel I can, should, and
am authorized to write about, in direct commitment to the artists, communi-
ties, and projects these works belong to, is as much a part of the so-­called field I
am following, in this sense, as the works themselves, as they carve out new ter-
ritories, assembled here for the first time.
The question I face in writing this book is how to engender visibility of these
new and emergent art forms without reducing their radical gesture.8 These art-
works are materially embedded and embodied, what Fred Myers (2002, 338)
calls the defining “inalienability” of Western Desert aesthetics. In any number
of ways, the art in this book does not safely or securely produce the one thing
that the art object is, ultimately, said to possess: the very distinction from—its

The Imperative to Experiment | 7

Fig. I.5. Artists at work, Warnayaka Art and Cultural Aboriginal Corporation, 2011,
Lajamanu, NT. Photo by J. Biddle, courtesy of Warnayaka Art and Cultural Aboriginal
Corporation.

apartness as an object-­form—the subjects who produce it. This book explores

the importance of this material inseparability politically, aesthetically, affec-
tively.
Desert art is less representational than performative, in keeping with the tra-
ditions from which it derives. It is not primarily discursive or verbal (or if dis-
cursive, the vernacular narrative specificities that drive these works have been
sidelined, dumbed down, or replaced by something else—issues explored in
part I). These arts do not lend themselves easily to the ruthless abstractions and
alienating tendencies of academic theory; even if they are, in Roland Barthes’s
(1975) sense of it, highly “writerly” (as opposed to “readerly”) aesthetics, that
is, they incite analysis, writing, because they rely upon and demand response as
part of their participatory demand.
This is no aesthetics of illustration. These are primary affective ontologies:
ways of doing and being and sensing in Indigenous-­specific, practice-­based

8 | Introduction
modalities of collaborative process and collective assemblage; aesthetics that
require completion through encounter. If my analysis privileges the work of af-
fect, it is because these arts themselves privilege affect.9
Affects are messy, impure, unbounded, and this is why they matter. They
move faster than and differently from ethical or politically correct proposition
and posturing; they cross and confound bounded ideals of nation-­states, iden-
tities, place. They trump and outwit any amount of theorizing or any singular
model of aesthetics, and provide no small platform, accordingly, from which
to model the kinds of complex, embodied-­perceptual capacities of Central and
Western Desert art forms and practices.
This book develops directly from my previous research for breasts, bodies,
canvas: Central Desert Art as Experience (Biddle 2007) on experimental de-
velopments driven by female artists over the course of the Western Desert art
movement. Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Kathleen Petyarre, Dorothy Napangardi,
and others radically transformed what was then an emergent field dominated
by male artists whose more iconography-­based aesthetics had come to typify
the art of the remote Western Desert. These female artists undertook a certain
“feminization of the Dreaming,” drawing upon female-­specific historiogra-
phy in which marks and designs come directly from the bodies of women in
women’s ceremony called yawulyu (in Warlpiri) or inma (in the Western Desert
languages of Ngaanyatjara, Pitjantjatjara, and Yangunkatjara; see further chap-
ters 4 and 6). The art of female artists became more affective, harnessing the tra-
ditional impetus of female-­specific capacities to radically intensify the aesthetic
force of what Western Desert art was capable of “doing”; a strategic develop-
ment in response to Whitefella outsiders who historically have failed to hear or
get the greater point of the work.
The move to so-­called abstraction evinced by female artists during this
period intensified the originary visceral effects of Jukurrpa, the Dreaming. The
primary Ancestral potencies of Jukurrpa, also called kuruwarri (marks, traces,
essences, and presences found in country, and reproduced by women on the
body in ceremony and, in turn, on canvas today), were heightened by a marked
movement away from the site-­specific icon or story toward a more generic in-
scription, a move that made specific knowledge (of country, Ancestor, site)
arguably less important than the very force of affect itself. The canvas instead
became a site to encounter, a corporeal basis of human-­Ancestral lifeworld con-

The Imperative to Experiment | 9

nectivity, a material re-­marking and remaking of Ancestral inscription-­turned-­
canvas to skin to country.
The responsibility of Aboriginal artists to remake, to re-­mark, the world in
Ancestrally derived and responsive terms today is palpable across all of the arts
within this book, despite or even because of the very high degree of formal in-
ventiveness. These arts utilize a diversity of multilingual and multimodal plat-
forms. What language, any language, can be mobilized and harnessed to the task
today? As the chapters explore, traditional affective-­based, corporeally located
Indigenous arts are becoming more affectively intensive in response to emergent
imperatives of cultural survival and frontier transversality (see Biddle 2012).

ii

Well, back at home in Martu country, we keep telling people our stories,
and our culture to anthropologists and archaeologists mainly, people who
are coming and critiquing Jukurrpa (Dreamtime Cosmology). And I think
that is where we need to be careful. We need to tell the same things in art
today—that we are living the Jukurrpa. It’s not for outsiders to critique it,
but we are completely immersed in it. And that’s how, you know, people
from outside should see that too.
Curtis Taylor | Yarljyirrpa

The premise of the book is that the emergent field of remote avant-­garde can-
not simply be added to the greater cumulative canon of modern or contempo-
rary art. Perceptibility, in this case, is no straightforward task of simply making
present what is new in desert art. Jacques Rancière (2006, 2011) argues that the
revolutionary work of aesthetics operates at the most primary level of politics,
redistributing relationships between the visible and the sayable, the known and
the unknown, words and things. Experimental arts of the desert are not, in this
sense, an obvious avant-­garde but are more subtle, dispersed, antispectacular
even. This book evolves a series of microanalyses of what remain to date largely
indecipherable art practices in order to enable an ordinary-­life understanding
of what is activated, made present, or known by these works for the first time.

10 | Introduction
 An archival or provenance-­based approach to these works is inadequate. These
works cannot be reduced to what Frantz Fanon (1963) originally called “cus-
tom”—formulaic illustrations or information “about” the culture and people
from which they derive. These arts are produced in concrete entanglement with
complex lifeworld circumstances and competing demands. The forms are un-
predictable, unruly even (that is, at least in relation to art market demands),
which explains in part their lack of art historical appreciation to date. Not only
do these works fail to comply but they instigate ways of thinking, feeling, being
that cannot be readily assimilated. These arts are less “mass-­cultural” in their
provocations, even if they intensify or congeal in “consistency” (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987) as they at once approach and exceed the formal category of art.
Remote Avant-­Garde is not art history. It does not seek to present a chrono-
logical account of artistic developments nor an inventory of who has produced
what, when. These works write a historiography of a kind that isn’t mappable
back onto a chronological or teleological version of progressivist history. Each
chapter presents microhistories that write back to, as the works do themselves,
historical and cultural contexts that would otherwise disallow the very condi-
tions of their emergence.
This book is equally not anthropology alone. While this project is unabash-
edly anthropological—it privileges the people, places, contexts, and perspec-
tives of remote art production as what matters most; the life lived of Indigenous
realities, atunements, attachments—nevertheless my approach is not strictly
nor solely ethnographic. How people live and govern discrete meanings in a
localized, bounded place is a model and a reality at risk itself in the contempo-
rary conditions of the Australian nation-­state, as much as it is challenged by the
global circuitry and demands of the arts industry. As an ethnographer, I needed
to develop new methods and means to approach the research and writing of this
book’s undertaking.
Nor is my analysis a strict object-­oriented-­ontology. I do not “follow the ob-
ject,” as Bruno Latour (2005) or others might. Nevertheless I share a commit-
ment to taking the object form as primary.10 These arts are deeply social facts
and active agents in disciplines dominated by either subject-­centric analyses
(anthropology) or object-­focused chronology and description (art history).11
My task here is less to bring together these two fields than a different task al-
together: how to keep the art alive in the terms in which it presents itself.

The Imperative to Experiment | 11

 Djon Mundine (2013) calls Aboriginal art an aesthetic of “moral and politi-
cal insistence.” Such insistences are not secondary to what these works other-
wise achieve. That is, I privilege here an analysis of the experimental art object
as both encounter and event. Put simply, I argue that the experimental success
of emergent desert art is due to its vital materiality.12 This vitality, as it is pro-
duced and consumed in an active participatory sense, engenders implicated re-
lationships between object and subject, art and audience, encounter and experi-
ence. This book explores the vital materialities of contemporary aesthetics, as
the works themselves demand.
The artworks in this book are big, not necessarily in size but existentially—
microtactics and minor strategies that require a certain shift in pace, posture,
orientation in order to be apprehended. The enviro-­somatic facilitations of art
to sustain and transmit “aesthetics of being”—not to possess the art object as
much as to surrender to its terms, as Christopher Bollas (1987) figures the sus-
pension of time and the radical transformative capacities at work in the aesthetic
encounter—requires time itself.13 To allow for, attune to, take up, and yield to
what is in fact on offer in these works is no quick grab and go, though all too
often, over the past years of researching this project, of hanging out, conduct-
ing research in exhibitions, museums, and art markets as much as in Indige-
nous communities of the desert, I have come to realize just how quickly White
art connoisseurs as well as the more general public assume that it is simply up
for grabs. If my writing pays concrete and formal attention to specific works,
if it focuses situated and sustained attention in terms that might otherwise be
dismissed as “too much detail,” it is for this reason. It is rare to find individu-
ated Aboriginal artworks analyzed in detail, in the way that works of European
grand masters are, ipso facto, throughout art history (and no doubt, any of the
artworks analyzed here could indeed, and should, be analyzed in far greater
detail than the cursory job I perform). But my strategy is intentional, to stay as
close to the works and their workings as I can, to slow down to a pace commen-
surate with what they incite and command.
The kinds of subtle, nuanced, and highly aestheticized politics taking shape
require a subtlety of both research and writing that can, without grandstand-
ing or flag waving (as these arts don’t themselves), attend to what are demand-
ing sensorium alterities and deep defiances of dominant codes of appearance; a

12 | Introduction
mode of analysis, in short, that can at once keep up with, open out, and point-
edly not reduce what the works themselves achieve. As a non-­Indigenous per-
son writing about Indigenous representations that, more than anything, are in
fact about the very rights to self-­present, I am acutely attuned to developing a
method that might not make my own voice louder than the works themselves.
Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012, 202) advocates care in the research of Maori
and other Indigenous peoples’ “intellectual, theoretical, and imaginative
spaces.” She stresses the agency of “search” in “research” for what a decoloniz-
ing methodology must undertake: the struggle involved to “constantly imagine
and reimagine, to create and recreate our world” (203) against ongoing, sys-
temic colonial and imperial violence. If I search to adequately model contem-
porary Central and Western Desert art in this book, if I keep open, keep alive,
and stave off, the invariable resuturing that the work of interpretative certitude,
pronouncement, or analytic quieting does, it is for this reason: to do justice to,
to bear witness to, what is at stake in the attestations the art assembled here
itself instigates.
In profound debt to the artists and community art centers represented here,
this book reproduces a high number of Indigenous-­owned and Indigenous-­
produced art images, in order that these works are understood as primary, my
text secondary, in what is ultimately not a level playing field, in terms of the
representational equation this book represents. These images might at once
ground, activate, infiltrate my more discursive lines of flight (I hope), as much
as they might affect, infect, animate, in fact, your own engagement (I hope),
as active readers in response. Images of artworks in galleries, in preparation,
in postproduction, in country, in ceremony, in art centers; images to make
present, keep literally in the frame, on the stage, in the white walls of exhibition
space, as much as on the white pages of this book, the facticity of Aboriginal
bodies, hands, lives at work in the making of Indigenous futures taking shape
today.
Martu filmmaker Curtis Taylor states that Martu are “living the Jukurrpa,”
and that “it’s not for outsiders to critique.” I adopt this posture in a more perfor-
mative politics of writing about these works. My aim is to provide a certain pre-
liminary platform or scaffold-­approach only, through which these works can,
in effect, perform themselves.

The Imperative to Experiment | 13

iii

Culture First.
Desart Inc.

Our art makes more than a living. It is living.

Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair brochure, 2014

The works in this book were produced in remote desert community art centers
(with the notable exception of Tjanpi Desert Weavers, “an art centre without
walls,” chapter 5, and some of the art produced for Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning
Stock Route, chapter 8). Community art centers are where almost all Aboriginal
art today is produced across the Central and Western Desert. Community art
centers are independent organizations, Aboriginal owned, directed, and run,
located in almost all major remote Aboriginal communities across the Aborigi-
nal traditional homelands of the desert. The majority of Aboriginal communi-
ties in the desert have populations below five hundred residents (Yuendumu
would be one of the largest, with approximately a thousand community mem-
bers). The languages that are spoken in these communities are vernacular In-
digenous languages; languages that belong to country, its sites, and its flora and
fauna, which are said to “speak” the same languages as people do themselves
(see Rumsey 1993). These languages are some of the strongest remaining and,
simultaneously, the most vulnerable Indigenous languages globally, actively in
use as first languages in everyday transmission to younger generations and in-
creasingly at risk from a greater national agenda of English-­only education (see
chapter 2 for full discussion of why Indigenous Australian languages are at risk
today).
Community art centers are often described as the interface between Indige-
nous culture and the art market, the first point of inclusion of artists within the
global economy. But art centers provide far more than simply a local, collec-
tive, studio-­to-­market space for art production. They provide one of the only
sources of non-­government income for Aboriginal people in remote commu-
nities (Attorney-­General’s Department 2015)—and therefore actively defy the

14 | Introduction
Fig. I.6. At practice for Milpirri 2011, Lajamanu, NT. Left to right: Rosie Napurrurla
Tasman, Biddy Napanangka Walker, Molly Napurrurla Tasman, Jennifer Biddle, Shelia
Napaljarri Walker, and Kumanjayi Napaljarri Kelly. © Michael Erglis, J. Biddle, and the
women present. Photo by M. Erglis, courtesy of Warnayaka Art and Cultural Aboriginal
Corporation.

perception of remote people as without income opportunities, or the so-­called

lack of engagement of Aboriginal people in employment and professional de-
velopment in remote homelands (daaf 2014). They provide one of the few in-
stitutional places in which the workplace itself is actually driven by, concerned
with, and governed by traditional law and culture and is open and accessible
to all members of the community regardless of their skill or educational back-
ground (daaf 2014). This fact would be specifically in contrast with the other
major institutions that characterize remote communities: the school, the shop,
the clinic, the church, the police station. Art centers are, as Hetti Perkins (2014b)
attests, vital sociocultural hubs of remote community lifeworlds that directly
support and enhance health, vitality, happiness: “Art centres build community

The Imperative to Experiment | 15

pools, set up aged care and dialysis services, work with schools, help with sorry
business, the list goes on and on.”
There are currently forty Aboriginal art centers in the Central and Western
Desert alone, with six located in Alice Springs (see chapters 2 and 4), and no
fewer than one hundred incorporated art centers across Australia (Acker, Stefa-
noff, and Woodhead 2013). The model of the remote-­based community art cen-
ter historically originates with both the founding of the missions in Yirrkala in
Arnhem Land in the 1950s and, specifically, a Yolungu-­run beachfront stall
in the 1960s that would later transform formally into Buku Larrnggay Mulka
in 1975 (daaf 2014). However, in the desert regions of Australia, the first com-
munity art center was Ernabella Arts (1948) at Pukatja, established originally as
a craft room run by the Presbyterian missionaries before becoming, in 1974, the
Aboriginal-­run organization it is today (Eickelkamp 2001). However, the very
fast rise of contemporary desert Aboriginal art centers began with the found-
ing of Papunya Tula Artists Pty. Ltd. in 1972, that would see in less than three
decades the Papunya Tula or Western Desert art movement develop into the
global art industry it is today (see chapter 2), with the virus-­like spreading of art
centers across the desert developing almost as fast as the art movement itself,
taking off, west, north, and south from Papunya. Art centers have in a pro-
found sense now mapped the desert, with the recognition of communities such
as Papunya, Yuendumu, and Hermmansburg, now known as global signifiers of
Aboriginality because of art. Desart Inc. Art Centre’s Location Map literalizes
the importance of this original cartography, making visible what Aboriginal art
and artists have themselves made visible over the past three decades through art
centers (Desart Inc. 2015). In turn, a burgeoning tourist industry now transports
potential clients to select remote communities in order to view and purchase art
directly from the artists in community (this included a bus tour to Alice Springs
Aboriginal Art Precinct for the first time in 2014).14
The development of the Aboriginal arts industry at the community level has
been supported by the advocacy of what are now six key bodies across Central
and Northern Australia. The Association of Northern Central and Arnhem Ab-
original Artists was founded in 1987, followed by Desart in 1992 (the key indus-
try body for Central and Western Desert community art centers), and Anan-
guku Arts in Adelaide (representing artists of South Australia), and the more
recent umi Arts in Cairns (a creole word meaning “you and me”) in 2005, along

16 | Introduction
with Indigenous Art Centre Alliance, representing far northern Queensland,
Tiwi, and Bathurst Island artists and communities.
I list these key bodies and their foundational dates in order to convey the de-
gree to which remote Aboriginal art is today an industry: regulated, supported,
sustained not only by the art market itself, but by grounded, regionally based,
often government-­funded Aboriginal arts organizations. In stating this, how-
ever, it is crucial to recognize that as an industry, what is being produced, mar-
keted, and sold by Aboriginal art centers is in no sense a commodity form alone.
Indeed, as I argue throughout this book, the arts produced today in remote
Aboriginal art centers and across the communities of the desert remain tied to
the bodies and places in which they are produced in material ways that, as I de-
velop, are crucial to the aesthetic work they achieve.

iv
Remote Avant-­Garde is not a metatheoretical book. The nine chapters that fol-
low represent models of highly differentiated kinds of affective intensification
taking shape through formal experimentation, each providing original instan-
tiations of memory, collectivity, and history in the making.
Five of the eight chapters provide detailed performative analyses of indi-
vidual artworks. The other three analyze, respectively, a new pan-­regional art
movement (Tjanpi Desert Weavers, chapter 5), the “making, not taking” of his-
tory (Yiwarra Kuju, chapter 8), and one art center’s experimental trajectory
from the local to the transnational (Warburton Arts Project, chapter 9). Chap-
ter 1, “Humanitarian Imperialism,” presents an analysis of the nter Interven-
tion, the background context for the emergence of all of the works in this book.
The chapters are uneven: varying length and differing voice, tone, and tenor
are utilized as my writing moves across what are, in fact, radically variant art
forms, practices, genres, and scale that require divergent analytic platforms and
perspectives in order to do justice to what the works themselves require. More
unlike perhaps ultimately than they are alike, the chapters themselves jostle up
uncomfortably and differentially at times, as well as sympathetically relational
at others (as certain desert-­specific historical pasts repeat and converge in cur-
rent trajectories). My aim is to keep the works activated; to make them move
and resonate and to reveal, arguably, what they do themselves. Chapter 2 is the

The Imperative to Experiment | 17

longest because there is virtually no art history or ethnographic analysis of the
aesthetics of Alice Springs town camp artists represented by Tangentyere; this is
a history that also sets the stage for Yarrenyty Arltere Artists of Larrapinta Val-
ley Town Camp, in chapter 7.
The book is divided into three sections. Part I (chapters 2–4) is on what I
identify as “biliteracy” or “biliterary” experimental tactics. Part II (chapters
5–7) explores experimental hapticities or touch-­based visual aesthetics. Part III
(chapters 8 and 9) presents contemporary happenings or events, on-­the-­ground
initiatives that have become national and international curatorial platforms
for experimental art to take shape. These three sections are structural devices,
thematic only and in no sense exclusive. The language maintenance platforms
and activation of vernacular collectivities of the arts highlighted in part I are
deeply at work across all the arts presented by this book. Equally, a “haptic visu-
ality” characterizes all of the arts presented here (not only those highlighted in
part II). The kinds of localized ingenuity yoked to national and international
capacity-­building platforms profiled by chapters 8 and 9 represent the kinds of
initiative required today to support, maintain, and facilitate the “history of Ab-
original futures” (Ginsburg and Myers 2006); initiative that is, in fact, present
in all the practice-­based arts profiled.
Finally, my analysis is deeply Warlpiri-­centric. It is derived from and based
upon twenty-­six years of field research with Lajamanu Warlpiri, who taught
me what I know—if only at the surface-­level appreciation I can ever have as
a Whitefella outsider—of the importance of making and remaking Jukurrpa.
While I bring new research to bear upon the works presented here, my bias re-
mains. To make that bias overt: I utilize Warlpiri terminology, concepts, and
vignettes, even when discussing non-­Warlpiri art (only chapter 6 is solely de-
voted to Warlpiri women’s experimental innovation)—no doubt a slippery (if
not suspicious) slide for the more ethnographically rigorous. This is not, how-
ever, to project a neo-­Warlpiri-­desert dominance or a pan-­desert essentialism.
My intention is in no way to reduce what are very real differences between and
across Central and Western Desert languages, territories, and trajectories of
contemporary art and culture. The emphasis I develop across this book in fact
highlights how specific, how not shared, not pan-­regional, indeed, not Warl-
piri, the majority of experimental initiatives are today. Thus in bringing a cer-
tain Warlpiri-­centrism to my analysis, my intent is rather to acknowledge what

18 | Introduction
Aboriginal people have themselves taught me: that knowledge is earned and
owned; indebted, enabled, and restricted; obligating and accountable. It does
not belong to me. The fact of my prior history, relatedness, and knowledge of
Warlpiri has been a major facilitator (as well as sometimes a difficult detractor)
in undertaking the research for this book. I need to acknowledge my debt and
the generosity of Ngannyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara, Yanguktjarra, Arrernte, Pintupi,
Anmatjere, Luritja, Warumungu, Martu, and, indeed, Warlpiri artists and com-
munity members, for their tolerance and appreciation of my capacities and my
failings both, given this history.

The Imperative to Experiment | 19