Napangardi Essay

It is tempting to interpret Dorothy Napangardi’s Women’s Dreamings, particularly her recent Mina Mina works, exclusively
as abstract art, cut loose from their epistemological moorings in the Dreaming. Responding to Napangardi’s work formally
in abstract terms may seem perfectly reasonable because the work is not naturalistic and also because of the way Napan-
gardi’s lines and dots pulsate and shimmer in patterns of movement across the canvas. A painting like Salt on Mina Mina
therefore shares a surface similarity with some abstract work because of the artist’s ability to produce an illusion of move-
ment.

Napangardi’s recent works lend themselves to being conceptualized as abstract art because the artist also eschews tradi-
tional Warlpiri iconography. This has the effect of erasing a good deal of the visual detail ‘traditionally’ associated with this
Dreaming.

As a result the range of interpretations that may be brought to bear in relation to Napangardi’s magnificent works is signi-
ficantly increased. Because she does not use iconography in her work, and her work comprises repetitive, iterative marks
on canvas (‘floating signifiers’) it could be described as ‘semantically open’. Thus it can be interpreted along a continuum
ranging from a visual articulation of Australian Indigenous ‘Dreaming’ through to postmodern abstraction, with many pos-
sible interpretations in between.

It is also beyond doubt that aesthetic pleasure is derived from the work of accomplished Indigenous artists like Dorothy
Napangardi without any understanding of the accompanying oral narrative or even awareness of its existence. It could
however be argued that Dreaming narratives are more than merely value-adding adjuncts to the visual iteration of these
works. Acknowledging the fact that the painting exits in the context of a Dreaming narrative actually increases that visual
pleasure, by adding layers of meaning to the work. It comes down to a question of whether art is only about the visual, or
in fact transcends this.

‘Packaging’ Indigenous art for international consumption colludes with the demands of international capital – but there is
a real danger that the local and specific will become erased by this process. To some extent this involves the de-context-
ualization (some might say the alienation) of Indigenous art works from their original conditions of production, and the ob-
literation of their connection to highly specific locations, as well as complex Dreaming narratives.17

It needs to be remembered that Central and Western Desert art works, and the narratives in which they are embedded,
comprise high levels of information about the environment, site-specific ‘deep ecology’, interactions between species, as
well as offering templates for human interactions and ethical and moral guidance. The artwork itself acts as a kind of visual
shorthand representing these Dreaming narratives, which encrypt Indigenous social memory, or what could be described
as ‘cultural DNA’. Focusing exclusively on the abstract, formal qualities of such art works is ultimately Eurocentric, because
such interpretations are premised on the suppression or even erasure of this considerable substratum of cultural meaning.
This potentially leads to permanent cultural loss on the part of the Indigenous custodians of these narratives.

Dorothy Napangardi’s success as an artist lies in her ability to evoke a strong sense of movement on her canvases, an
effect she achieves because her remarkable spatial sense of oscillating movement is already evident, although less refined.

In works like Salt on Mina Mina however, the evocation of an illusory sense of movement is not an arbitrary matter, nor
an end in itself. In this case the ‘abstraction’ does not exist purely for the ‘seduction of the eye.’18 While visual pleasure
results from the artist’s technical and artistic prowess, the patterning has a deeper purpose. The sense of movement in
Dorothy Napangardi’s work in fact acts as a kind of mimesis of the physical movements of the Women Dreaming Ancestors
as they undertake their lengthy, heroic journey – a journey involving walking, dancing, singing and digging, sometimes
happening simultaneously. The sense of movement in this case mirrors the movement of what is a quite literal journey.
Therefore the work needs to be understood as a great deal more than ‘Op Art’ – although at one level it can be read as
such.

Comparatively few non-Indigenous writers and art critics have discussed Napangardi’s Mina Mina works, and those who
have done so invariably draw attention to their brilliant optical qualities and their potential to be ‘read’ as abstraction.
Privately, comparisons with Bridget Riley and other luminaries of the international art world are quite frequently made.

Some writers attempt to explain the work as both Dreaming and as abstract art, as exemplifying cultural co-existence
rather than convergence. For example Bernice Murphy sees Dorothy Napangardi’s work as concurrently extending older
traditions, and creating new ones, an approach quite consonant with established Indigenous practices of innovating
within a framework of continuity with the past. Writing with considerable insight into Napangardi’s prize winning work,
Murphy, who was one of the two judges of the Telstra award in 2001, describes Salt on Mina Mina (2001), plate 11, as:

"…outstanding in its realization of a grandly scaled painting with a minimum of means. Some white
dot-trails crossing and counter-crossing a large monochrome canvas almost 2.5 meters in length.
Only a few elements, and restricted to monochrome, a myriad acrylic points laid across linen. How-
ever out of so little, so much is eventually made.

This painting proved outstanding as a work exhibiting both the depth of its cultural background
(emerging from a continuing observance of spiritual connections to the artist’s own land) and a
powerful demonstration of capacities to express those connections in new ways – of extending
tradition itself through experimentation, and of reaching out into the broad domain of visual
language in abstract painting, a rich seam of continuing cultural production in the wider world of
art."19

Courtney Kidd, by comparison, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, sees Napangardi’s work not as exemplifying cultural
co-existence but as ‘cultural fusion’:

“…Dense white on black geometry, while representing desert oak trees amid burnt-out spinifex,
could also be read within the conventions of Western abstraction. From a purely visual perspec-
tive this exhibition fuses indigenous and non-indigenous cultures.”20

Indeed, Dorothy Napangardi’s work was recently included in an exhibition of abstract paintings by contemporary Australian
women artists.21 Other Indigenous artists whose works were included in this Adelaide exhibition were Rosella Namok,
Mitjili Napurrurla, Gloria Petyarre and Angelina Pwerle. In writing about her inclusion of these Indigenous artists in Inde-
corous Abstraction, curator Margot Osborne acknowledged that they come from quite different points of origin to their non-
Indigenous contemporaries, and that this has a considerable bearing on their artistic practice:

"…Indecorous Abstraction contains diverse approaches to abstract painting by contemporary
women artists of differing cultural backgrounds and different generations. Yet there are connect-
ing threads, points of convergence, as well as sharp contrasts. This may be partly to do with
common gender, partly to do with the process of painting and the nature of abstraction.

The current resurgence of abstract painting is a post modernist phase, in the sense that con-
temporary artists paint in the full consciousness of the complex and confusing history of modernist
abstraction, or, as in the case of Aboriginal artists, from a totally different cultural and historical
starting point."22

Osborne goes on to claim that these artists look “forward with hope rather than picking over the bones of a past era,”
a statement that contrasts with Murphy’s attempt to reconcile the co-existence the ‘traditional’ and ‘contemporary’ ele-
ments of Napangardi’s work.

It is interesting to compare the expositions of non-Indigenous commentators, who mostly use the language of their own
art-historical traditions, in relation to Salt on Mina Mina, with the commentaries of Indigenous women with regard to the
same artwork. The differences in focus partly arise because the Indigenous women quoted are not art critics (although
they are all artists). The Indigenous commentators all emphasize the fact that ‘country’ is a stage for human activity,
rather than only the ‘geometric’ aspects of the work. For example, Valerie Martin Napaljarri, Chairperson of Desart, Alice
Springs, spoke of Salt on Mina Mina in the following terms:

“…to me, Dorothy’s work23 is like nganayi24 – like Yapa25 running through and across their country,
moving across their pathways, when they go traveling. That’s what it reminds me of – Yapa
crossing paths, crossing their pathways, one another’s pathways, as they go traveling.”26

Part of the appeal of Dorothy Napangardi’s work is that it can be appreciated on multiple levels. These multiple readings
expand our ways of understanding the work, but it is important not to lose sight of its meaning for those who are the
custodians of that meaning. Perhaps we should be asking not what abstraction is to Dorothy Napangardi’s work but
what Napangardi’s work is to abstraction.

Christine Nicholls
Flinders University, Adelaide