Evoking The Spirit Ancestors

By ROBERT HUGHES

"The inhabitants of this Country," wrote William Dampier, the English sea dog who in 1688 became the first Englishman to record his impressions of Australia, "are the miserablest people in the World . . . Setting aside their humane shape, they differ but little from Brutes." Early this year, English journalist Auberon Waugh, who seems to have inherited his father Evelyn's racism if not his genius, visited Sydney for the Australian bicentennial. "They had no form of civil society at all, beyond whatever social organization may be observed in a swarm of locusts," he wrote of the Aborigines. Their art "must be judged the merest piffle by civilized standards."

From brutes to insects, in only 300 years: what an evolution for English thought! And in between, for the Aborigines, a long and melancholy history of invasion, resistance, murder, rape, rum and the destruction of tribal identity by white paternalism and greed. No indigenous people ever had a worse deal from European colonists.

And yet they did survive. There are more than 225,000 Aborigines living today, about 1.5% of Australia's population, and instead of dying out (as most whites around 1900 assumed they would), they are increasing their numbers. The fate of these people is now one of the prime moral dilemmas Australia faces. It has also made whites more aware of the realities of Aboriginal culture. For here is the oldest continuous tradition of visual art on earth (30,000 years at least, more than twice the age of the Lascaux Cave paintings), tenaciously maintained in the face of pressures from the white majority. It is not a single tradition, for the Aborigines were never a homogeneous people. Between their arrival in Australia 40,000 years ago and the whites' arrival in 1788, their society ramified into hundreds of tribes and languages, thinly spread across a landmass almost the size of the U.S.

Nevertheless, it is strange that in the U.S., where every kind of primitive art from Nigerian to Alaskan has been exhaustively studied and consumed, so little attention has been paid to Aboriginal art. Something so old is very new -- at least in America. Hence the fascination of "Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia," on view at the Asia Society Galleries in New York City through Dec. 31. This show of some 100 paintings and carvings, the older ones in earth colors on bark, the more recent in modern acrylic pigments on canvas or panel, was mainly lent by the South Australian Museum, the prime collector of this work. Its importance lies in the link between ancestral Aboriginal painting and its contemporary forms -- a third of which, in this show, comes from the Warlpiri culture at Papunya and Yuendumu, in the western desert.

A degree of Schadenfreude (pleasure in the misfortunes of others) dogs the aesthete's responses to modern primitive art. It gets written off as airport stuff for tourists, insincere, perfunctory, without the aura of mythical use. With the best of contemporary Aboriginal painting this cannot be done, partly because of the striking beauty and formal intensity of the work, but largely owing to the consistency and continuity of its central mythology -- that of the Dreamings, or ancestral beings.

; The show's five curators, anthropologists with an unusual sensitivity to the way images work in Aboriginal life, have produced in their catalog what may be the best short introduction to the Aboriginal world view now in print. Very briefly, the Dreamings are the world's spirit ancestors; they brought the world out of chaos, formed it, filled it with plants, insects, animals and fish, created human society. They exist in vast numbers, and there is one for every nameable entity: a Honey Ant Dreaming, for instance, or a Witchetty Grub Dreaming, a Flannelflower Dreaming or a Bushfire Dreaming.

The deeds of each of these ancestors, in creating and sustaining the world, form an immense narrative beside which the Mahabharata is a mere short story, and all of them are embedded in the sacred sites that cover Australia. (From the Aboriginal point of view, in fact, Australia is one big sacred site.) Hence as curator Peter Sutton puts it in the catalog, "The land is already a narrative -- an artifact of intellect -- before people represent it. There is no wilderness."

The myriad dots that form atmospheric drifts of color in a recent Papunya school painting like Five Dreamings, 1984, by Michael Nelson Jakamarra and his wife Marjorie Napaljarri, may fill the space with an "all-overness" as complete as any painting by Jackson Pollock. But they are specific symbols for terrain, vegetation, movement, sites and animals, of which the most obvious is a big reddish snake. Concentric circles mark campsites or rock holes, straight lines the routes between them, wavy ones rain or watercourses, and so on. Even the toa carvings collected from tribesmen around Lake Eyre in the early 1900s, which seem to radiate a degree of sculptural fantasy that predicts the surrealist work of Giacometti and the totems of David Smith, are maps of landscape and the ancestors it contains.

Tribal art is never free and does not want to be. The ancestors do not give one drop of goanna spit for "creativity." It is not a world, to put it mildly, that has much in common with a contemporary American's -- or even a white Australian's. But it raises painful questions about the irreversible drainage from our own culture of spirituality, awe and connection to nature.