The federal government will inform Sotheby’s today that its prize Aboriginal painting to go up for auction tonight will not be given an export permit under Australia’s Protection of Movable Cultural Heritage Act.
The decision is certain to deter overseas collectors from bidding and will undoubtedly mean it will not fetch as high a price as Sotheby’s had hoped.
Warlugulong, a monumental, wall-sized work, was painted in 1977 by the famed Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and has been rated one of his greatest paintings, depicting as it does the artist’s Fire Dreaming.
Sotheby’s had estimated it could set a new record for an indigenous art work of up to $2.5 million. The firm was hopeful it could even break the current top price for any Australian painting of $3.48 million (set last month for Brett Whiteley’s The Olgas at a Deutscher-Menzies auction in Sydney), especially as it had attracted considerable interest when the saleroom exhibited it with other major works from tonight’s sale in New York and London earlier this year.
Tim Klingender, Sotheby’s Aboriginal art specialist, has told prospective overseas buyers they would not now get a permit to take the painting out of the country.
Klingender told Crikey the painting would have attracted strong bidding from foreign collectors and that it would have sold for a much higher price than he now expected had the ban on its export not been imposed.
“We did apply for a permit for this work – that and many other pictures – but were told the painting was considered ‘contentious’ and we would be informed before the sale whether it would be allowed out of the country,” he said.
“The quality of this painting, its age and the fact Clifford has died, means it will not be given a permit.”
Under the act, Aboriginal art works that are 20 or more years old and worth more than $10,000 must obtain an export licence to be taken overseas. An expert committee advises the federal Arts Minister who makes the final decision.
Although Klingender claims the act has had a serious impact on sales of Aboriginal art to overseas collectors, it has not stopped them or local bidders who have been buying up paintings and other indigenous art in ever-increasing numbers.
In the early 1990s, Aboriginal art was worth a mere $620,000 a year to the auction-houses but by 1995, turnover exceeded $1 million for the first time and, by 2001, sales totalled $6 million. Last year, with three firms holding specialist auctions and more than 2500 Aboriginal works on offer, turnover hit a new high of $14.3 million.
Sotheby’s was the first to hold an Aboriginal art-only auction in Melbourne in 1997 and was the first to take a selection of works to show in New York, Los Angeles and London. Over the years, those exhibitions helped expand the market as collectors across Europe and America became enthusiastic buyers.
As with the general art market, prices have also boomed although the rapid escalation only really started in 1998 when an American collector paid $200,000 – 10 times the presale estimate – for a stunning painting by Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula.
The artist, one of the pioneers of the Papunya “dot movement”, is believed to have sold it in the 1970s for about $200 and at the time of the Sotheby’s sale he was half-blind and destitute.
The work re-appeared at Sotheby’s two years later when it sold to another American for $486,500.
why are you surprised? The art was unexplored for the past 50,000 years and even in 1900 there was none exibited in paris due to “australian natives cant paint”. Since then things changed.
In a postmodernist sense a self-determining identity need not be possible, or socially or politically justifiable. Born of isolation, literature eschews isolation.
Though we inevitably feel excluded from the intricacies of this complex art [by Walpiri people] with its layers of polyvalent and unexplained meaning, this work will demonstrate a basic art form, which cannot be ‘got at’ through its immediate visual impact but rather in ceremonial which involves one’s whole self with soberness, deliberation and respect consistent with initiatory rites. (Page 1983:14)
If there should be only Australian contemporary art without segmentation, why do we then have NATSIA Award that promotes “vital role of art in indigenous Australia for its strength and cohesion” yet only aboriginal artists participated. And SAAB Melbourne Art Fair Awards for the Visual Arts 2007 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales was not attended only by few aboriginal artists.
Right now Australian Trade Commission promotes Aboriginal Art Tours, not Australian contemporary art tours (Forum, Art Collectors).
The Museum of Contemporary Art, which occupies the Maritime Services Board Building at Circular Quay in Sydney has two illuminated signs hanging above the front entrance and they read as follows: “200 years of white lies” and “End white supremacy”. The rooms are full of aboriginal art priced at levels of Tokyo car show. I am disgusted that a building owned by the NSW Government is being used to display such obscene diatribe which serves to divide the community instead of unite it. .
Whites refused to shake hands with them for fear of catching diseases. Blacks were seldom allowed in government cars or any white car at all (McCulloch, 2001)
Indigenous Affairs Minister Macklin plans to form a new Aboriginal Affairs body and describes the advisory body’s purpose as “to make sure we have a place where we are consulting and discussing issues with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people — that they are able to contribute views [to government]”.
Forming representative bodies on racist lines can only divide us and the indigenous art will never be just contemporary whilst such divide exists. Present tends to reward those preaching division rather than those who have integrated. It implies a lack of faith in our existing, non-racial means of representation. No wonder ATSIC became riddled with radicals and hate preachers, led by a man who looked about as white as I do but insisted he was in fact entitled to far more rights on the grounds of his “race”.
Todd says “we are placed on the edge of the dominant culture, while the dominant culture determines whether we are allowed to enter its realm of art. When we assert our own meanings and philosophies of representation we render the division irrelevant, and maintain our Aboriginal right to name ourselves. However, when we articulate the dichotomy of the traditional versus, the contemporary, we are referencing the centre, acknowledging the authority of the ethnographer, the anthropologist, the art historian, the cultural critic. We have to play ‘catch up’ to the academic and other institutions of art, and we set up an opposition within our own communities that keeps [us] in our position of ‘other’. We are caught in the grasp of neocolonialism, in the gaze of the connoisseur or consumer, forever trapped in a process that divides and conquers. (Todd 1992: 75)
Some Aboriginal artists are now living their lives as professional artists and are comfortable with being referred to as ‘artists’ not necessarily ‘Aboriginal artists’. While acknowledging their Aboriginality, also wish to be free of the stereotyping and constraints which they invariably attract, and wish to be considered simply as artists in their own right. (www.artb
Fourmile writes that in resisting non-Aboriginal peer categorization, such artists often take an internationalist approach (Fourmile 1994:77) where “Artists … tend to be interested in each other. There is an innate curiosity about different imagery, technology and lifestyle. Creativity in all art forms transcends language barriers and that interest is closely paralleled within Aboriginal Australia. (Onus 1990:14)
Gordon Bennett’s work is often referred to as ‘Urban Aboriginal’. His background of having been brought up as a white Australian then discovering as an adult his Aboriginal parentage has provoked a search in his art not for a discovery of self but an exploration to create a language which traverses these two worlds (www.artbank.ch)