Speaking in Colour
June 2013
Planning for the upcoming exhibition at Shepparton Art Museum began with around 200 sheets of purchase records; a sea of black and white text from which the museum’s director Kirsten Paisley would subsequently tease out a unique and vivid account of Aboriginal art, its creation and its collection.
The records in question were first handed to Paisley by Victorian philanthropist and chairman of the Sidney Myer Fund, Carrillo Gantner AO, along with an offer to loan his collection of modern and contemporary Aboriginal art to the regional museum. This collection, which was gradually built up by Gantner and his wife Ziyin over the past 40 years, will be shown at Shepparton Art Museum until late August under the title Speaking in Colour.
Introducing a visitor-friendly orderliness to the wide selection of paintings included in this exhibition was undoubtedly a demanding task for Kirsten Paisley, partly owing to the fact that the works on display were never intended to form a ‘collection’. In contrast to the largely regulated process of acquiring works for a public art museum, private art collections more often than not emerge from a chance spark of interest and develop from opportunities that arise thereafter. In Carrillo Gantner’s own words: “You don’t start with any idea of ‘collecting’. You simply buy a work of art because you love it and it speaks to you.”
In more than one respect, the works displayed in the new exhibition speak in a range of voices. First and foremost, the pieces serve as visual representations of a variety of language groups around Australia, now brought together in Yorta Yorta country in which the Shepparton Art Museum stands. Gantner’s first acquisition of Indigenous art was a work by the western Arnhem Land bark painter Yirawala (1901-76), who, in 1971, was the first Aboriginal artist to have a touring solo exhibition around Australia. Gantner was directed to this exhibition by Jennifer Isaacs, with whom he then worked at the Australia Council. A prominent arts writer and curator, Isaacs assisted Gantner and his uncle Baillieu Myer to assemble a collection of contemporary Aboriginal art to tour America in the 1990s (the works from which, reproduced in the book Spirit Country, have since been donated to Museum Victoria); she is also the author of the excellent catalogue accompanying the current exhibition.
From this first purchase of a bark painting by Yirawala has developed a disparate and engaging assembly of art, organised for display at the Shepparton museum partly by region (Arnhem Land, Kimberley, Western Desert, Balgo Hills) and partly by artist and practice (including Albert Namatjira and Julie Dowling, as well as a room dedicated to outsider and contemporary urban art). Local Yorta Yorta artist Lin Onus (1948-96) is included in the exhibition with the large-scale landscape Floodwater ‘Woorong Nucko’ (1995), which includes the traditional Arnhem Land design known as rarrk (crosshatching), for which Onus was instructed and given permission by Murrungun/Djinang artist Jack Wunuwun.
It was on account of the landscape by Lin Onus that the present collection was initially lent to Shepparton Art Museum. In order to provide an Indigenous perspective in amongst the largely colonial-filled landscape hang at the museum – and not holding a work by Onus in the permanent collection – Kirsten Paisley approached the Gantner family to, well, have a loaner of theirs. In the current exhibition, this work stands as a paradigm of accomplishment for artists in the Shepparton region, for whom the great success of Lin Onus is clearly a source of encouragement and instruction. Indeed, for Paisley and the team at Shepparton, a key objective of this exhibition is to “bring in local audiences and provide education for local Aboriginal artists” – alongside attracting visitors from Melbourne and further afield.
It is here that we might locate the reasoning behind Carrillo Gantner’s decision to loan – and gradually donate – his family’s very personal collection to the regional museum. Shepparton has the second largest Aboriginal population in Victoria (behind Melbourne) and the addition of this collection to the local art museum will have a big impact on its standing in the community. When I questioned the museum’s director on the role of such deeds of philanthropy in a time of widespread cuts to arts funding, her response was understandably enthusiastic: “It is absolutely crucial”. She was also keen to qualify this tribute with an acknowledgement of the “strong support of local council”, without which a public art museum, such as that in Shepparton, could not achieve its proposed outcomes. “It is a delicate relationship between local councils and philanthropists, particularly in a regional context,” says Paisley.
A thematic thread running across the exhibition at Shepparton Art Museum is that of Aboriginal dispossession, from country and from family. According to Kirsten Paisley, “a lot of artists included in the exhibition were not on their own country when the works were created,” so they were painting “to keep alive stories and their connection to country”. In collecting this range of works together – barks, dot paintings, watercolours, contemporary figural works – and in turn providing them for exhibition, Carrillo Gantner has also brought together these stories to create, with help from Kirsten Paisley and Jennifer Isaacs, one immense narrative of Aboriginal art practice from the early twentieth century to the present.
When this medley of artistic voices is combined with the varied perspectives of the visitors to the museum, the result will undoubtedly prove to be a bright and instructive experience, which changes colour with every set of footsteps through the exhibition. Having the opportunity, as a public visitor, to view and consider these works as one entity, as a private collection, is at least a rare experience. It is a chance to revisit the conceptual foundations of the art museum as we know it, which first emerged in the sixteenth century with the privately-owned wunderkammer of the Habsburgs of Austria. What the exhibition says about the Gantners’ interest in Aboriginal art, and keenness to bring diverse works together, is well worth considering. The collection serves as a distinctive survey of regional developments in Indigenous art practice, and visual representations of country.
Speaking in Colour shows at the Shepparton Art Museum from June 21 to August 25.
Images:
1. Harry J. Wedge. The Coming of the Serpent 2000 acrylic on watercolour paper 70 x 99 cm. Courtesy the Carrillo and Ziyin Gantner Collection. © estate of the artist. Photograph: Andrew Curtis
2. Irene Mbitjana Entata. Loading Camels 2006 acrylic on linen 90 x 120 cm. Courtesy the Carrillo and Ziyin Gantner Collection © Irene Mbitjana Entata and Hermannsburg Potters. Photograph: Andrew Curtis
3. Willie Tjungurrayi. Untitled 1999 acrylic on canvas 122 x 153 cm. Courtesy the Carrillo and Ziyin Gantner Collection. © the artist licensed by Abor