Apparently not everyone stayed home for Charlie Sofo’s opening at Darren Knight! Thanks to the pilgrims, Sydney came to a standstill, but all the right people made their own pilgrimage to Charlie’s show. Everything was sold - to Queensland Art Gallery, ArtBank, and six other astute collectors. Next opportunity? ArtWranglers in October… (a guaranteed pilgrim-free zone).

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Charlie Sofo has produced a new body of work for his first solo exhibition in Sydney: Particular Particles at Darren Knight, opening this Friday 19th July.

Charlie writes: The works in Particular Particles are very quiet, but full of order and time. Some of the pictures are almost invisible. I’ve focused in on particular things, marginal materials and minor processes. In the work Eyes I repeatedly cast the eye of a needle in paint. I turned out hundreds of these tiny forms and pasted them on a sheet of cardboard creating a field of sorts, a concentration of eyes. In the work Clothes Lint I picked, rolled and pasted individual balls of lint from 16 items of clothing. The result is a patchwork of lint - an ordered collection of superfluous materials. I’ve tried to make something out of almost nothing. Each piece is based upon a simple idea that has been expanded or carried through to its logical end.

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For those readers on the Bill Henson trail, the July issue of Art Monthly Australia contains key articles by Denise Ferris and Martyn Jolly, Adam Geczy, Donald Brook, and more… Very timely for the debates which will no doubt be raised in the context of the upcoming VIVID National Photography Festival here in Canberra. The cover image is by Polly Papapetrou, Olympia as Lewis Carroll’s Beatrice Hatch before White Cliffs (detail) 2003. If you want to read back along the Henson trail on this site, type “Henson” in the search box to your right… And follow the consequences of Art Monthly Australia’s stand in the SMH , the ABC, News (more Malevich than Papapterou, a Moral Rights issue in the making), something called Scopical. On Monday Perthnow interviews Olympia herself, (now eleven, and angry with the PM) and quotes from Martyn Jolly’s ABC interview this morning. And more on The Art Life. The A.C.T. Chief Minister Jon Stanhope is the only politician not running for cover, or threatening to “review” AMA’s funding: see his measured comments on the ABC. The Malevich-like blanking of the image only serves to intensify the frenzy… And Gerard Vaughan, Director of the NGV…

On the ABC the Prime Minister avoids the use of the word “revolting”, but (as reported in The Australian) says Mr Rudd today said work such as that shown in this month’s edition of Art Monthly Australia did the opposite of restoring dignity to the debate over depictions of children in art. The taxpayer-funded magazine used a picture of a naked six-year-old girl on the cover of its July edition in protest against the treatment of artist Bill Henson. Angered by the “hysteria” over Henson’s pictures of a 13-year-old girl, the magazine also has a number of highly sexualised images inside, according to the Sunday Telegraph newspaper. Art Monthly editor Maurice O’Riordan said he hoped the July edition would restore some “dignity to the debate”. Mr Rudd was asked if the picture restored dignity. “If you ask for my personal view, no it doesn’t. It does the reverse,” he told ABC television. “My view hasn’t changed on this. We’re talking about the innocence of little children here. “A little child cannot answer for themselves about whether they wish to be depicted in this way. “I have very deep, strong, personal views on this, which is that we should be on about maximising the protection of children. “I don’t think this is a step in the right direction at all.” Mr Rudd said he had no idea what the motivation for the Art Monthly pictures was. “But I’ve got to say my interest and the interest of many Australians, I think most Australians, is to protect little children and restore some innocence to childhood,” he said. “Frankly, I can’t stand this stuff.”

And one crazy blogger found “children posing naked in adult jewellery” in AMA, which some journos have faithfully repeated!!!

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Go to mobilepolitics and click on the top left thumbnail and download your free Charlie Sofo!

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If you don’t think Prince Harry has done much to change the world recently, five years ago he did provide The Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones with an opportunity to reflect on the appropriation of contemporary Aboriginal art. In his article of August 20, 2003, “Aborigines are wrong about Harry” Jones reflects on the “modernist sublime”, and its relation to previous critiques of primitivist appropriation, observing “The case against Harry is not simply that his pictures are a pastiche, in their banally decorative way, of Aboriginal art, but that he has appropriated symbols with specific cultural meanings. Intellectual property is an unusually powerful concept in Aboriginal culture.” Given the developments in this field in the past five years, it’s worth a read, and caused us to reflect on the specificity of this work, currently the entrance decor for the Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art’s They are Meditating: paintings from the MCA’s Arnott’s Collection, curated by Djon Mundine.

What’s the connection? Is it possible that the situation Jones describes, ludicrously exploited by the younger and more naive Prince Harry, and many other much more serious artists, has now been inverted? This is not to imply the meaning of The Inversion of Tradition elaborated by Nicholas Thomas in 1992, in which he identifies inversion as a conscious process of cultural opposition, but rather an inversion of meaning seemingly imposed by the interventionist motivations of the institutions of the art world.

This work, by Richard Birrinbirrin, is the latest in a series of commissioned murals Mundine has introduced as the entry experience to exhibitions he has curated, both at the MCA, and subsequently in Europe. Djon has often expressed the observation that aspects of contemporary Aboriginal art look just like early minimalism (Daniel Buren meets Sol LeWitt, etc.), and he has exercised his various roles and influence to promote this idea. In his view “Aboriginal art has continually struggled in not being seen as contemporary…” and now we see the latest outcome of this motivation. Regrettably, Aboriginal art as architectural decor has since caught on, most notoriously when John Marwurndjal’s (and others’) “sacred” designs were applied to the columns and ceiling of the bookshop at the Musee du quai Branly in Paris. So what’s the relevance of “inversion” to this discussion, apart from the clumsily obvious, the depiction of sacred sites, painted on the ground, turned upside down and reproduced on the ceiling of a Paris shop? At vast expense, and to much brouhaha. When art becomes decor, content is evacuated, and the secular and sacrilege coincide…

As promotion for the MCA show, back in Sydney, Richard Birrinbirrin (who is clan leader of the Mannharngu, the eldest son of the late David Daymirringu Malangi) is shown painting the classical palette of his family’s tradition: red and yellow ochre, white pipeclay and carbon black, in this instance in vertical acrylic stripes. In a previous MCA exhibition curated by Mundine in 2000, the entrance was also painted, with horizontal stripes, red ochre, white, yellow ochre, and white, recognisable as the representation of Djirrididi (kingfisher) body design, made famous by the art of the late Micky Durrng (Liyagawumirr’).

In this case, Birrinbirrin’s wall painting is also titled “Djirrididi (kingfisher)”, but in this instance both the colours and orientation of the stripes are different. It’s understood that the colour black was given to the mainland clans by the Djan’kawu Sisters. In the art of Arnhem Land, such micro-details of non-figurative art are usually rich with coded meanings, which are owned, inherited, licensed by particular clans, triggering references to particular ancestral narratives. These designs retain their traditional referents, whether seen on bodies, hollow logs, barks, baskets, or now in printmedia, on canvas, or applied to architectural settings.

At the entrance to the exhibition visitors will find this video monitor (set amongst the striped doors, lift surrounds etc.) which shows Richard Birrinbirrin and his djungayi (manager) David Dharrapuy roller-painting the striped entrance hall, plus Birrinbirrin’s introductory talk, plus a short interview with Djon Mundine. Inter alia, Birrinbirrin describes the stripes as body painting for ceremony (although which ceremony is not identified), as the kingfisher story, and as “the colour of the sunset”. It’s explained that these colours derive from (or reference) the passage of the ancestral Djang’kawu Sisters through central Arnhem Land who, it is said, as they travel west the black colour is added to the white, yellow and red. There’s no mention of the verticality of the stripes, although when Birrinbirrin talks about body painting, he gestures horizontally across his chest. So the origin of the verticality of this stripe installation remains to be confirmed. Dharrapuy speaks briefly in Yolngu matha to explain that this is his mother’s story, and Birrinbirrin explains that he’s using it with permission “if not, we’re stealing [from] each other”. The sisters of the late Micky Durrng, Helen Ganalmirriwuy and Ruth Ngalmakarra, who paint the kingfisher story in white yellow and red, also attended the opening, but did not appear in the video. Here’s another more lighthearted viewpoint.

Here’s how Birrinbirrin (we believe) painted the wall of Bula’bula Arts in Ramingining. More geometric, like a logo…

Closer to home, women from both Balmbi (Birrinbirrin’s mother’s side) and Djambarrpuyningu clans paint their baskets similarly, sometimes referencing the kingfisher design, sometimes without any narrative attribution. See, for example, this basket by Judy Baypungula, who is Ngakarrana (and Birrinbirrin’s classificatory mother), also painted in acrylic. The different sequences of the four colours may (or may not) be significant, especially if you compare with the second basket, by Margaret Gindjimirr’ (Balmbi)…

As with this and other baskets, previous examples of the Djirrididi design (including, for example, the relevant poles in the Aboriginal Memorial at the NGA) conventionally have the stripes running horizontally, referencing the marks left on mangrove trees by tidal waters. With the Liyagawumirr’ version, applied as body painting, elements of the design sometimes run vertically, on the thigh, or on the torso.

When asked what his new “site-specific wall painting” is about, Richard Birrinbirrin says, “body painting”. When asked which story, he is not forthcoming. So, we ask ourselves, where’s the precedent, where does this striking design of vertical stripes come from? How does the artist conceive of a monumental installation derived from a sideways-tipped design? Is this an anything goes approach to form and colour? Maybe it is possible to see this as an instance of the inversion of the expectation that non-figurative Aboriginal art makes specific coded references to ancestral designs, invoking ancestral narratives. In the current discourse, this is usually seen as the crucial legitimization of their difference and distinctive otherness, and as a guarantee against the values of look-alike late modernisms. But if painting no longer has the need of a inherent narrative, or precedent, then geometric forms and the palette of just four colours may in themselves be a self-sufficient motivation for an abstract work of art.

So, is this a kind of inversion? This is not to deny the place of invention within tradition, along the lines suggested by Marshall Sahlins, whereby innovation is recognised as the distinctive way by which tradition proceeds. But when Aboriginal artists (or their agents) appropriate the look of the art of another culture, or when the art is no longer grounded in the prior motivation of a coded narrative, a disconnection between tradition, representation and abstraction has occurred. Neither is this likely to be an indigenous postmodernity, as for example in the work of Gordon Bennett, where non-figuration makes no claim to a mnemonic relation to inside knowledge, but asserts its critical relation to modernism’s claim to sublimity, which is a position much closer to Thomas’ original conception.

If we don’t think this what is happening here, what we’re left with is a kind of institutional agency, where the abstract effect of the decor and the ubiquitous shopping experience frames the experience of the art… This is risky business indeed, when secular and sacrilegious motives combine.

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Sometimes earlier works by ArtWranglers artists are worth remembering. Charlie Sofo’s work is usually small in scale, but visitors to the ANU School of Art Library will realise that for Charlie, scale is no more than the limits of an idea. This work one step at a time 2004, made while Charlie was a third year student at the School, is still an ArtWranglers favourite. Is it the largest photographic print in Australian art? It was made using a roll of minilab paper, a torch, a darkroom, a processor, a drier (which broke down during the process) and thus lots of helpers. The paper was fed from one light-proof box to another, and each footprint exposed by torchlight. Dimensions unknown.

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[this is a detail of finger-grease, 2007, which the artist describes as "paper, finger oil and grime"]

There’s two days left to see Charlie Sofo’s studio exhibition at Studio 17, ANCA Dickson, 12.00-5.00pm, this Saturday and Sunday. Email Willa for a list of works still available… or, see what you missed, in his gallery in the sidebar ->

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[stretching an elastic band until it snaps, spray-paint, cardboard, elastic band, 2007]

Charlie Sofo’s studio show at ANCA Dickson (SOME THING LIKE A HUMAN) opens on Wednesday night at 6.00pm, and will be open for the next four days from 12.00 to 5.00pm. ArtWranglers is happy to email the list of works and prices on request. Please contact Willa if you want to see the show outside normal hours.

[tooth-pick, paper, ink, toothpick, 2007]

With this body of work Sofo continues with the essential ingredients of his art. A constant dimension of all of his work over the past three years has been a kind of revelation and celebration of its processes - an aesthetic of discovery whereby the processes of observing, conceiving, making, ordering, and presenting continue until the work reaches a definitive state of completion. Most often his materials determine the form of the work, and sometimes the materials are so ephemeral the completion of the work is a forecast of its own destruction. With his fascination for what evolves in front of his eyes, he neither predicts the final character of the work, nor is longevity one of his criteria. The primary pleasure for Sofo is in the discovery of the final form through its processes, and only secondarily whether the outcome is something which will appeal to others. There is also we suspect a kind of perverse pleasure in the (human) body at play. We imagine him looking at his hands and asking himself: “what have I got to work with today? Ah! that looks interesting!” and so the process begins which results in a perfect circle of finger-grease, (paper, finger oil + grime), number 5. in this exhibition.

You can see what Charlie has to say about it all on the previous post.

See all the works in the show in the Gallery at Charlie’s name in the sidebar ->

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Charlie is holding a show of his recent works at his ANCA studio in Dickson on Wednesday 31st October from 6.00 pm. Charlie is picking up sticks (and other things) and joining the Canberra diasporic artists community in Melbourne. Let’s hope we don’t lose him altogether!

Charlie explains that with this body of work he is interested in margins, or very small quantities of things. In the studio I have collected small particles and applied them to surfaces. Sometimes these particles form larger particles. Things. I have used a tooth-pick to make dots, a shit load of dots. I roll a single die 650 times, each time pressing it into paint and then into paper. The exhibition Something like a Human is a bit mechanical and a bit human, but mostly its just me.

This project has been generously funded by artsACT.

Very soon ArtWranglers will have a list of works for sale which we’d be happy to email to anyone who’s interested, and we’ll be continuing to represent Charlie in Canberra, show new work on the blog, and plan for an “at home” show down the track. We’ll be posting images of this exhibition some time next week.

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at the Canberra Contemporary Art Space’s Best in Show exhibition at Manuka until 7 October, 2007. And thence to the collection of Karina Harris and Neil Hobbs…

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