ProppaNOW

ProppaNOWGeorge Petelin

The term Movement must be one of the most ambiguous words in art writing. It has been used to describe massive trends that developed over more than a century such as Modernism, it has been used to refer to styles such as Expressionism, to choices of media such as Performance Art and Earth Art, and to discrete groups such as the Surrealists. Lately, the term Australian Aboriginal Movement has been used to describe the output of a whole culture. To do that culture no disservice, it is important to now distinguish among the distinct schools of thought within Aboriginal visual culture according to the more precise discrete meaning of the term movement. It is not sufficient to distinguish Urban Aboriginal Art from Remote Area Aboriginal Art nor, in view of the debates and politics associated with authenticity, is it productive to differentiate between traditional and non-traditional art. However, there is arguably a whole range of art practice by Aboriginal people living in cities. Some of this practice arises out of nave un-taught talent. And some of this practice adopts features of remote art, with different degrees of understanding of its protocols. Other branches of this practice draw on European methods and techniques, with an equally broad range of success. To constitute a movement, in the stricter and more enlightening art-historical sense, one of these tendencies would need to mobilise a distinct group of members with a common philosophy and stylistic similarities.Social movements in general are characterised by the sharing, in response to some form of deprivation or alienation, of an interest in promoting social change. These circumstances patently obtain for most Aboriginal people. The rise of a movement, however, occurs when some support becomes available from a sector of the very society the movement wishes to change and resources emerge for its members to network and enact their point of view. They become a movement when they have the infrastructure to ideologically frame their discontents and advance a coherent attack on the status quo.

In the industrial era, movements increasingly characterised by urban alienation became known as avant-garde. Urbanisation appears to be a key requirement for this phenomenon in more ways than one. The Metropolis facilitates social interaction whether by means of a cafe society or an underground network, the resources for production, and, through its sheer population, the possibility of finding an audience for unconventional artistic products. As Renato Poggioli points out, the experience of the avant-gardes was primarily a metropolitan one. Moreover, he argues, an avant-garde can exist only in the type of society that is liberal-democratic from the political point of view (and) bourgeois-capitalistic from the socioeconomic point of view. No sooner had Russian Futurist movements utopia arrived than that movement faced its demise. Capitalist cities thus provide both the alienation and the resources to critique this alienation. Avant-gardes are at once the symptom of urban social ills and their proposed cure. Despite fashionable claims that the notion of an avant-garde is irrelevant in the post-modern era I would like to examine in what sense ProppaNOW can be thought of as an avant-garde movement the cutting edge of a particular type of Aboriginal art that negates other (particularly Aboriginal) art practice and promises to redefine or reshape its artistic form, alter its social reference, and influence its distribution and reception in a manner comparable to that of previous avant-gardes.

Peter Brgers view that an institutionalised avant-garde is automatically no longer authentic needs to be critiqued from a trans-institutional viewpoint. Rather than consider art to be a single, monolithic, institution we should see within its malleable and permeable borders the play and contest of multiple sub-institutions. However, the condition that Lyotard called the post-modern sublime, the attraction of playing with fire, that is, threatening to extinguish the institution that feeds you, I will argue still pertains and continues to characterise even an Aboriginal avant-garde. As I have already suggested, an avant-garde is most likely to arise in an urban context. But what distinguishes ProppaNOW from other urban Aboriginal artists as a potential avant-garde?

Town-based Aboriginal art has precedents that go back as far as Tommy McRae, Mickey Ulladulla, and William Barak in the mid-1800s. In the 20th century, it features outstanding individuals such as Trevor Nicholls, Lin Onus, Gordon Bennett, Tracey Moffatt, Fiona Foley, and Judy Watson. But neither they nor their predecessors constitute a movement in the terms I have outlined. The first city-based indigenous artist-run space, Boomalli, founded in 1987 by a group of ten artists based in Sydney, brought together art-school trained and self-taught urban artists to exhibit regularly, and was driven by a general Aboriginal urban disaffection, but fulfilled neither the condition of forming a coherent philosophy and style nor of a stable limited membership. Similarly, the Campfire Group, an organisation established in Brisbane after the ground-breaking Balance 1990 exhibition at the Queensland Art Gallery that brought together urban and remote area Aboriginal art and selected non-aboriginal artists, did not achieve an aesthetic coherence throughout its membership nor formulate a firm aesthetic direction.Formed largely of veterans of the Balance 1990 show, including Richard Bell, Bianca Beetson, and Laurie Nilsen who are now members of ProppaNOW, the Campfire Group was extremely influential. But its self-designed brief, to generally promote the development of Queensland Aboriginal art, was too eclectic and all-inclusive to sustain a coherent aesthetic framework. Its role was primarily to develop a market for contemporary indigenous art and indeed for effecting a kind of cultural reconciliationnot just between European settler culture and Indigenous culture but also within Indigenous culture itself. From the beginning, it was conceived as a broadly collaborative affair and not suited to the focused antagonism that characterises avant-gardes. The Campfire Group spawned numerous other art enterprises: conferences for Aboriginal artists took place at Yarrabah and at Woorabinda, QICVA, the Queensland Indigenous Committee for Visual Arts was formed and then became QIAAC, the Queensland Indigenous Artists Aboriginal Corporation, and Australia's first university art degree based entirely on indigenous principles, the Bachelor of Visual Art in Contemporary Australian Indigenous Art, was established at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University. This degree was organised and taught by Jennifer Herd. Vernon AhKee, after graduating from this degree, subsequently also taught in it. Both are now crucial members of ProppaNOW, which acted as a filter of Aboriginal talent from earlier organisations.While these organisations shared an Aboriginal ethic and certain common issues, and even generated sometimes similar indigenous imagery critiquing the status quo, it was never their mission to develop a focused common aesthetic.What ProppaNOW contributes to art practice is a unique negotiation of aesthetic and ideological stumbling blocks and pitfalls, a refinement of aesthetic philosophy, through a thoughtful collective process within its own ranks that none of the other organisations was able to pursue. Ironically, it owes this aesthetic and ideological coherence neither to avant-garde tradition nor to Aboriginal traditions of iconography but to a rigorous adherence to indigenous social principles. ProppaNOW might legitimately be called the start of a movement because, unlike individual artists drawn together only to exhibit, ProppaNOW consciously develops a philosophy and does this by means of a group consensus, rather than a by democratic majority as in white institutions. Here is the irony: ProppaNOW members behave and produce according to more philosophically authentic Aboriginal principles than do now many central desert artists, and hence wield an iconography limited only by their collective decisions rather than by market perceptions of authenticity. Yet they are firmly entrenched in a marketing system that currently, to their annoyance, marginalises them in relation to the traditions of their own culture. However, does using the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticise the discipline itself, as Clement Greenberg so famously noted, rather than subvert it, simply entrench it more firmly in its area of competence? Or can this be seen more subtly in terms of Walter Benjamins logic of destruction, which renews tradition by destroying or rejecting only parts of it?

The name, ProppaNOW, derived from a colloquial expression often used by Aboriginal people, encapsulates the groups philosophy of approaching everything in a proper and considered manner. What doin things proppa in Aboriginal parlance means is not to superficially imitate tradition, but to adhere to a protocol of respect and consultation in developing that tradition. ProppaNOW does not subscribe to the superficial rituals and symbols that now mistakenly signify authenticity; instead, it adheres to central social processes that are profoundly Aboriginal. This is what allows ProppaNOW to pursue, as their mission statement cum manifesto expresses it, a constantly innovative approach and to question established notions of Aboriginal Art and Identity without at the same time jeopardising that identity. As Jenny Fraser, initially a member of ProppaNOW expressed it, their work still relates to land and dreaming stories, but now and in the future.But of course there is every risk of jeopardising Aboriginal artor at least Aboriginal art as we now know it. This then is the ProppaNOW post-modern sublime: the art market for Aboriginal art within which ProppaNOW is categorised is sustained by a mixture of white guilt and spiritual longing that ProppaNOW inexorably dismantles. Driven by a need to oppose claims to superior authenticity by remote area art, and by its many tourist driven city look-alikes, as well as by the desire to stand against the colonialist traditions of Western culture, ProppaNOW develops a visual language that seems to critique both cultures.Thus ProppaNOW can be defined as an avant-garde movement, not in negation of the whole institution of Western art, which is one of the few European institutions to which they have gained some access, but of the limited definition of Aboriginal art that the Western art system has valorised. This is not a revolt against the bourgeoisie per se as a Western avant-garde might have led, but a critique of institutionalised cultural misrepresentation.

Mass marketing has a corrosive influence on all products. And not only on the products themselves but also on their mediation; the rationale for the product becomes publicity hype. As Theodor Adorno observedthe only ones who can still critique through this mass deception are the avant-gardes. As central desert art becomes ever more tourist-corrupted and shallow, ProppaNOW represents the Australian art wave of the future.These Aboriginal artists dont pretend to be nave primitives; they lash out at all hypocrisy with grim yet seductive humour. Tony Albert, for example, makes ironically sweet colouring book images of first contact: happy black people who wave to a benign Captain Cook. Richard Bell and Vernon AhKee find humour in the many paradoxes to which official Australian culture has a blind spot. Binding these artists is a fascination with language. Often their work recycles slogans and clichs that are either self-contradictory or ambiguous and allude wittily to the sinister implications of these. These artists have developed a sophisticated, city-bred Aboriginal aesthetic in contrast to what they call the Ooga-Booga mentality that seeks to cast indigenous culture as inherently static and primitive. It is in this sense that ProppaNOW is avant-garde. It negates the autonomy of a remote area, authentic Aboriginal culture. It may be a neo-avant-garde in terms of Western culture, as Brger would argue, but it is a true avant-garde in relation to commercialised reified Aboriginality removed from its everyday concerns.Even the materials used by these artists carry a wry satirical edge: for example, Laurie Nilsen, hailing originally from Roma in central Queensland, sculpts indigenous fauna out of the barbwire that threatens their existence and Andrea Fisher paints ominous birds of prey, referring to massacres of indigenous people, on suburban windows.

And womens business gains a whole new look in the work of ProppaNOW artists Bianca Beetson, Jennifer Herd, and Andrea Fisher. Their art maintains a look of traditional feminine gentleness but packs a powerful contemporary punch.

ProppaNOW began with a meeting intended to start a Queensland Urban Aboriginal Artists and Designers Cooperative in Brisbane in 1998, but was not formally established until 2003. Recognising the importance of professional resources, they set out to establish a space for urban Aboriginal artists to work together towards exhibitions, to enhance working partnerships, and to provide mentoring to young and emerging artists in the necessary professional skills that will enable them to become successful. From the beginning, they looked for links within the art industry both nationally and internationally. They found such opportunities at the Banff Center in Canada and at the San Francisco Biennale (The Bayennale). But what is important is that they established a space for collaborative interaction and philosophical debate while making art. The space they established, an ex-warehouse in Brisbanes West End, for three years became a ferment of creativity. Working at the same space gave full reign to a uniquely productive social dynamic.Richard Bell, well known throughout Australia as an outspoken and provocative artist who relishes a debate, was now thrown together with some challenging understudies.

Vernon AhKee, no less a debater with a turn of phrase often even more subtle than Richards, joins in avidly, while the groups youngest member, Tony Albert, remains quiet until he finds an opportunity for an incisive remark that stops the conversation. Laurie Nilsen contributes a solid bush practicality, and, along with Gordon Hookey always manages to turn the discussion towards something funny. Meanwhile, Bianca Beetson mixes the zany with the sensible (her favourite colour for serious paintings is pink) while Jennifer Herd tends to dispense a final feminine wisdom that brings the men back down to earth. This interaction is reflected in their artwork. All of these artists deal with serious issues but do that in the spirit of a conversation, with good humour and flashes of brilliance. You can see the give-and-take as Richard, Vernon and Tony all play with words as well as with visual imagery, learning from each other and sharing suggestions but asserting their own point of view in how an idea is realised. All the while, Jennifer Herd and Bianca Beetson also assert a modern womans interpretation of both so-called black armband history and of their own expected role in indigenous society.

And just as their discussions usually end in a joke, so do many of their pictures. Their criticism of society is often cheeky and tongue in cheek. Vernon AhKees text work for example, asks what do you think of white civilisation? and then answers its a good idea (implying, when the penny drops, that the actuality of civilisation falls somewhat short of the mark). One of the goals of the avant-garde, the connection of art with social life, was, again ironically, intrinsic to traditional indigenous society. The export of Ooga Booga art of course circumvented this. ProppaNOW jumps boots and all into the social sphere through its provocative stance but, rather than blur the boundary between art and life, draws attention to its difference attacking the specific barrier that occludes indigenous reality from mainstream awarenessprecisely that aesthetic curtain they term Ooga Booga. What they have clarified for all of us is that art is not life, but making art is life itself: identity building is an active process of social transformation.17 January 2008