Gurrutu

Grading is done so, as promised, some further appreciations of "Madayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala." I went twice, which was barely enough to begin to register what I was seeing! But the second time I was overlapping with a friend, arriving a little before I had to leave. I arrived earlier, managing to tag along as a docent led a tour and, once my friend arrived, offered my own introduction to the exhibition in a way which seemed to me closer to the curators' intent. So, for instance, I made a point of avoiding the "historical timeline" and map of Australia in the landing outside the exhibit, which the Aboriginal curators had resisted as privileging a western way of seeing the world, but were included, it was explained, with this caveat but in an effort to make the work accessible to a global audience. It might be helpful for first-time visitors to know where Yirrkala is, but not for getting to know what it means for the Yolngu, whose bark paintings communicate how this time and space live.

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The exhibition, I've learned, has had a few earlier iterations. This was the only one with all white walls; the predecessors seem all to have had at least some of the walls a deep blue. This showed the bark with its mineral-based colors in a different way, closer to the world from which they flowed. Our version (nearly) made up for this by starting in a separate room with a gorgeous video of salt water waves flowing into sweet as we heard a silhouetted singer sing, the giant video wrapped around a glass case containing the first of these bark wonders, painted by a Yolngu leader in 1935 for anthropologist Donald Thomson as they sought a way to defuse a political crisis. Sacred patterns had not been painted on bark before, we learned; they lived on dancing bodies and ephemeral sand drawings in specific places. These unprecedented works were painted at this point not as works of art but as political documents: articulations of the abiding relationships of the Yolngu with their country. They show balanda (whitefellas) as much as is sufficient for this purpose, no more.

The whole exhibit is structured with a similar intent - an invitation to a living country whose eternal "voice" is the Yolngu. The first time I went, I was transported by many of the bark paintings, but although I'd read the interpretive materials, I misread them as works of a community of individual painters telling clan stories. I should have known better: the stories, connected to country and the ancestral beings who shaped it, are charged to particular clans, yes, but all the clans - like everything in the Yolngu world - are kin. And "kin" not in some amorphous sense, but in the very structured forms of what's called gurrutu. Everything is associated with one or other moiety, and each moiety is in turn divided into eight clans; complicated rules of intermarriage maintain the mesh of these sixteen clans, and so of the country whose songs they sing. I remembered this from my course a dozen years ago but I hadn't connected it to the visual culture. Likewise, I knew that bir'yun - "shimmer," like light reflected on water - inhabits this area's cross-hatchings, but not that each clan has its own pattern of bir'yun called miny'tji which only they are free to use. (Permission may be granted to members of close kin groups for particular paintings, too.)

This was reflected on one of the cards made available to children visiting the show, but somehow deemed unimportant for grownups to know. Going through the exhibition a second time with this card in hand opened the works up in a way that figure-ground doesn't begin to describe. The organizing principle of the exhibition is gurrutu, and so works from the same clan are shown together, whether from the 1940s or the 2010s. Once I was keyed in to the distinctive visual language of each clan, I could see for the first time how each painter worked within it.

Witness, for instance, these works of the 1960s from the Gumatj clan. Can you see the strings of diamonds? But this is the visual currency also of more recent works, Rerrkirrwana Munungurr's "Gurtha/Ancestral Fire" (2018) or Gulumbu Yunupingu's "Ganyu'/Stars" (2009). Captions tell us the stories of the first three, and that the other two are newer: the last is "not a sacred story. This is a story for everybody to see." And the one before is actually painted by a member of another clan, with permission.

I took my friend from the room with the water video to the description of gurrutu, but before pressing the card of clan designs in her hand invited her to just look around for a while. Then we started seeing the clan designs and everything changed. (I think the same might be done following the songlines which often traverse and link clans; the exhibition website lets you follow both networks.)

So I said that I wound up particularly taken by Mawalan Marika’s 1959 "Djan’kawu Waŋarr Dhäwu 3/Djan’kawu Creation Story 3" - here's the bottom two-thirds of this tall work. I'd noticed it on my first visit since it's full of trees. But I didn't register that the miny'tji is that of the Rirratingu. Suddenly the background came alive and stayed alive. It wasn't background at all, more like the flowing water on whose surface evanescent patterns - trees, flying foxes, human beings - danced.

I stared, entranced. The shimmering parallels and perpendiculars - the miny'tji of the Rirratingu - danced, too, the ground and potentiality of all that happens. A two-dimensional picture suddenly seemed to have a depth that involved several more dimensions! I was put in mind of the gold or red of Orthodox icons or medieval religious paintings, representing the Holy Spirit beyond and before all created things, coursing with creativity and patterned harmony. I would love to live in this world, I found myself thinking, everything's here!

Except, of course, that this was but one painting, one of the stories of but one clan. Finally, with a little vertigo, I got a sense of the storied and interlaced terrain which all these paintings were telling, one whose life can't be captured by any single map. (On reflection the painting which grabbed me the first time I went perhaps seemed to me a map of maps.) Gurrutu is a world which can be known - only - in sixteen different ways! Nobody knows or can know more than one of them fully. It's a world which sustains itself through complementary songs, miny'tji, ceremonies, marriages - and bark paintings.

How fortunate to be able to get a glimpse of this teeming sparkling undulating world, the shimmer not only of individual bark paintings in particular miny'tji, but the profounder bir'yun of the spaces between and across and around them. I won't have a chance to be with these wonders again before the show closes, but the website - now that I have my multi-dimensional compass! - may help keep the memory fresh.