Amidst the contemporary art practice world with its fragmentation, there exists the unclassable the timeless, the enduring.
A multiplicity of action, performance and vision - more recently subliminally influenced by technological advances in television broadcasting and the video machine - continuing intellectually and conceptually along an unbroken line despite extremes of interference.
ENTER THE DESERT .... a preamble to the paintings of Charlie Tjaruru Tjungurrayi
Many of the residents of Alice Springs in our red centre, arrive for their public service hardship posting, stay their obligatory two to three years, buy a "sand painting" and leave.
They clearly distinguish between those "bloody blacks" who inhabit THEIR town and the "artists" who "must be reasonably legitimate because they at least live out of town in the bush like real blackfellas. Anyway it gives them something to do out there and the paintings are quite cheap if you know somebody." For over fifteen years Charlie Tjaruru Tjungurrayi has been painting his "stories" - whitefella way. He is a Pintubi man from Kintore, deep in the Western Desert who lived a tribal life - proper way - until his teens.
As a painter he has been part of the Papunya Tula Pty. Ltd. Co. for many years and has also been caught up in the anonymous nature of the promotion of that group. A few selected artists have represented the company in small group or large survey exhibitions outside the Aboriginal art arena, but it has only been during 1987 that a retrospective has been attempted on the work of a single painter.
The collective nature of promotion has been the result of the company based set-up and the somewhat minimal importance that