"Mystery in the dramatic is that moment in which the latter overshoots the realm of its own language towards a higher and unattainable one" -Walter Benjamin
It is difficult to overestimate the effect of the Utopia painter Emily Kngwarreye's 1998 retrospective at the Queensland Art Gallery upon the making and thinking of Aboriginal art. Although at the time so-called Western Desertpainting was well known, at least in Australia, and had been included in many exhibitions with white artists, including Biennales, serious discussion of Aboriginal art still remained largely within the province of anthropology and ethnography. It was difficult for Western-trained art critics to account for the work-to justify the language they used- in terms of traditional aesthetic evaluation. The work appeared to come from somewhere else, to be inextricably bound to a context that was other to its audience of mostly urban white Australians. Or, indeed, as was often remarked at the time, it was easy to like the work from a safe, patronizing distance precisely because it did appear to come from so far away. As was said half-appreciatively but also half-critically, it was easy to admire the work for representing the 'spiritual' values white culture felt it had lost. 1
All this dramatically changed with the arrival of Kngwarreye's art. To begin with, the enigma it posed was that, even though Kngwarreye herself came from a remote desert community some two hundred and fifty kilometres north-east of Alice Springs and had virtually no contact with Western art, her work nevertheless looked like abstract expressionism of the highest quality. And because, at least at first, it seemed to embody the 'spiritual' power of Aboriginal art in a newly... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline