The exhibition of Danie Mellor's retrospective artwork (drawings, pastel design and sculpture) is as breathtaking as it is thought-provoking. Held at The University of Queensland's Art Museum, Mellor takes the visitor into his own internal journey as he traverses Aboriginal history and his own Aboriginality in the moving display he terms Exotic Lies, Sacred Ties. Mellor is descended from the Manu, Ngagen and Ngajan peoples from the Atherton Tablelands region in far north Queensland.
As a backdrop to his large and intricate pastel drawings, Mellor uses the text of blue and white 'willow pattern' pottery - at once evoking the colonial memory and the locus of struggle for Indigenous people. The pottery is a reminder of the most formal parlour etiquette of England in the18th and 19th centuries. The wealthy classes could afford the much desired and delicate translucent Chinese porcelain for their afternoon teas, and while the middle classes sought to emulate this lifestyle, expensive porcelain was beyond their reach. Instead, they were enticed by the cheaper blue and white decorated dining sets created by the English ceramic company Spode.
Mellor's evocative approach is reminiscent of the way English ceramic makers like Spode used the exotic imaginery and fascination of far off Asia to reproduce the story of European expansion, trade and conflict. This division between the different cultural and individual identities is clearly apparent in his graphic and storied artworks. It is an image of his and his ancestors' lived experience and lifeways.
The works interweave this colonial history into a dynamic rendition of Australia's past. Through complex and layered drawings of lush 'blue and white' rainforest scenery, Mellor proffers an image fixed within Australia's contested heritage - of the Aboriginal and settler. Carefully merged into these large works are these two opposing frames. The appropriated bush and the appropriators of nature, the early settlers, are depicted within the imagined blue and white world of the past, while in contrast, the Aboriginal people, and the animals and birds from the forest, are brightly coloured and vibrant. The differences between the real and the imaginary is striking. The illusion of a fantasy-land tinged with desire to control the unknown is played out in the juxtaposition of colour and form. An almost ghostly blue and alien world shadows a forest brimming with life as Mellor celebrates the integrity of Aboriginal people and their sacred relationship to land and country.
The works are grand. Compelling. The artist takes the viewer right into the heart of the artwork and surprises her with his clever technique. Works are framed by beautiful and ornately carved gold borders surrounding forested and wild rainforests and de-forested - and tamed - colonial spaces. As if to reinforce this dualism between the wild and the tamed - who and what is wild and tame here? - Mellor has interspersed his highly crafted and stylised scenes with sparkling gold flecks and glowing Swarovski crystals - again reproducing (or glamourising) the European world of luxury, the fascination of the exotic other, and the idea of power and control. But these embellishments are absent from the confronting work pictured above.
This artwork is stark. Titled Bayi Minyjirral (2013), it shows a burial scene where the Aboriginal men and even the dingo look back at the spectator with a gaze of disquiet and disdain. 'You are not welcome here', they say. For the non-Indigenous outsider, there is no place to hide.
Throughout the exhibition Mellor turns the tables. His works are confronting in their beauty, style and homage to European culturescapes as they expose the damage to Aboriginal people, culture and country. The exhibition is not at all optimistic. The images present a binary world where the promise of interconnection and dialogue is missing. Both ways working is still a long way off.
This cultural split shows up again in two pieces that deeply affected me. A gloriously sketched Gould-like kangaroo lies sleeping; the beautiful image surrounded by the children's prayer, 'Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep', while the work, The Promised Land (2009) depicts a slumbering koala straddled over the willow patterned Chinois reproduction of bridge over (troubled?) water. This beautiful image is framed by the gentle words of Psalms 23, 'The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside quiet waters'. But the meaning of this most disarming work is far from gentle.
As if to reinforce this view of 'us and other' amidst cultural dislocation, Mellor's most recent sculpture sits in the gallery offering no way out. The sculpture is cast, a silver kangaroo staring out at the world with its large round eyes. Its skin burned, its ears gone, its features poignant, as its wide wide eyes confront us in their incomprehension. The exhibition does not allow us to turn away from the devastation of past and present, however prettily dressed up in a romanticised illusion of pristine arcadia.
While Mellor does not offer the hope of a phoenix rising from the ashes, there is, in some other of his sculptural works, a touch of whimsy and fun. Three kangaroos, nattily dressed with blue and white pottery shards embedded in their white ceramic bodies, are the three monkeys who see, hear and speak no evil. In the playfulness of the sculptural forms, there is a hint of a more positive future - we just have to open our eyes, ears and mouth - and speak - or speak out.
The other journey
To provide some context to the contemporary art produced so exquisitely by Danie Mellor, I turn to scholar Laura Fisher (2012) to help me position the role of contemporary Aboriginal art and the critical stance taken by this artist.
Fisher explores the place of disenchantment and hope in the spectrum of Aboriginal art-types and locations-specific stories. The stereotype of Aboriginal art belongs to the desert-centred dot paintings which visitors to an Aboriginal art exhibition expect to see. But Mellor's own European and Indigenous background, and his interest in issues of subjectivity and displacement, challenge the stereotyped vision of what Aboriginal art is deemed to be in the popular imaginary.
Fisher questions this arty stereotype for 'post-assimilation Australia' (2012:3). She charts the growth and development of the global Aboriginal art market which at one end of the spectrum commemorates Aboriginal heritage and venerates the Indigenous connection to country and place, while at the other, it acts to exoticise, even appropriate the fascinating and remote other. But there is a positive outcome too. Fisher argues it has the effect of countering the all too often negative depiction of Aboriginal people in media representations of violence, alcoholism, incarceration and suffering.
She maintains that these representations - from pop culture and news broadcasts to academic research and government service - assert a imagined authentic identity of an Aboriginal person. She states that 'dark-skinned Aboriginal people from remote areas are strongly differentiated from light-skinned Aboriginal people from rural and urban areas, and the latter are often excluded from the kinds of attention that validate Aboriginality as an identity' (166). In the end both groups become marginal - remote artists as they remain in local communities without 'engagement with western art' (167), and urban artists as they remain outside the lucrative and global art market dominated by remote area artists.
But it's not only this binary perspective that divides Aboriginal art and Indigeneity. Fisher explores another dimension of difference, that between anthropology and art (and the expanding market place). She observes that: 'Urban Aboriginal artists continue to critique the ways in which ethnographic museology and anthropological scholarship have transmitted particular ideas about “authentic” Aboriginality to the public' (191), with its essentialising and universalising consequences.
A further contested dimension is the naming of art and artists as Aboriginal. This sets the Indigenous art-genre apart from the broader artworld. Fisher asks what it would mean to lose the nomenclature of 'Aboriginal artist' and be viewed simply as 'artist'. Danie Mellor plays within this terrain straddling two cultures and two artwords, European and Aboriginal. When he won the prestigious National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award in 2009, the media columnist Andrew Bolt (2009) suggested disparagingly that he was not a worthy winner as he is '[y]et another white who chooses to be black'.
Mellor's art reaches across cultural difference through a deeply personalised journey which engages in questing for social, spiritual and environmental justice and awareness within a world which still seems to hesitate to step across the abyss towards intercultural understanding.
References
- Bolt A. 2009. The artist needs colouring in. Herald Sun Aug 16, 2009, http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/the_artist_needs_coloring_in/
- Fisher L. 2012. Hope, ethics & disenchantment: a critical sociological inquiry into the Aboriginal art phenonomen. PhD thesis, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of New South Wales.
Danie Mellor's artworks
Bayi Minyjarra 2013. http://www.artmuseum.uq.edu.au/content/danie-mellor-exotic-lies-sacred-ties
The Promised Land 2009. http://www.uq.edu.au/news/article/2013/10/leading-contemporary-artist-danie-mellor-feature-uq-art-museum
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