It transpired that Petyarre's diverting use of this rather imperious gesture was modelled upon her razor sharp observations of formal Balinese ceremonies that she had observed over the course of her many visits and extended stays in Bali. Later, she told me that bowing to one's audience in a similar manner has also become an entrenched practice at her local Lutheran Church in Utopia, about 270 kilometres north east of Alice Springs.

It was apparent from this gesture that Kathleen Petyarre is not only well versed in the nuances of Balinese social life and the Lutheran Church in Aboriginal settlements, but also quite adept in her handling of the 'Sydney Suits' and the 'Melbourne Cocktail Frocks' who attend opening nights of solo art exhibitions in large and glamorous metropolitan institutions.

It is an interesting story because it is an illustration of one of the many ways in which high-flying contemporary Indigenous Australian artists like Kathleen Petyarre have become deeply imbricated in a kind of postmodern 'globalization of the Indigenous' which utilizes the international while continuing to draw from the local. This applies not only to the making, marketing and reception of the art itself but also to the creation of an aura around the persona of the contemporary artist, so essential to the postmodern art market. Indeed, the power of the aura deriving from what is deemed to be 'authentic' Indigeneity is being harnessed to serve those same postmodern market forces.(2)

Photograph courtesy of Eric R. Pianka, Moloch Horridus — (Mountain or Thorny Devil) Tracks in the Sand, by Eric R. Pianka, School of Biological Sciences, University of Texas at Austin, US.	Kathleen Petyarre, Mountain Devil Lizard Dreaming 1997, Synthetic Polymer Paint on Belgian Linen, 182.5 x 182cm. (6' x 6') Brisbane Australia.

Kathleen Petyarre
A Brief Biography

Kweyetwemp Petyarre was born around 1940 on the Atnangker homelands belonging to her father and grandfather. Located approximately 270 kilometres north east of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, Atnangker is arid spinifex country, hilly in places and covered with low-lying vegetation, extending over more than 200 square kilometres. Hot and dry in summer(3), with temperatures soaring well into the 50s, Atnangker's sandy red earth is capable of sustaining life on account of the presence of a number of permanent water and rock holes located on it, as well as other semi-permanent water supplies, including creek beds and underground water. During the wet season, Atnangker country can be transformed by flooding rains and ferocious hailstorms. When the large hailstones are scattered over the country, the ground temporarily undergoes a transformation in colour from its usual vivid red to a murky, whitish shade.

As a small child, Kweyetwemp Petyarre walked around her father's homelands with her extended family. The family group moved around their vast estate according to the systematic principles of rotational land navigation, based on the seasonal availability of a variety of local bush foods and water. The family moved around their country, walking from site to site, living on emus, kangaroos, echidnas, perenties (small lizards), blue tongue lizards, goannas, witchetty and other small grubs, sugarbag and other bush honeys, bush beans, native peas, yams and dogwood seeds (acacia coriacea), which were dried and added to water to make a rather sweet milky drink. The women in the family also collected the seeds of mulga bushes and pigweed, which they would grind and then sometimes cook to make small cake-like dampers.

Later, after Kweyetwemp Petyarre and her family first encountered white people in the late 1940s, the name 'Kathleen' was bestowed on her. At the same time, English names were also imposed on the other members of her extended family. Soon after that, they went to work for local pastoralists, eventually settling at Utopia, an Aboriginal settlement comprising a number of outstations, close to their own country, Atnangker.

To appreciate the trajectory of Kathleen Petyarre's artistic career — she is now regarded as one of Australia's greatest living artists — it is illuminating to understand a little about some of the significant events of her remarkable life.

In her teens, Kathleen Petyarre married her 'promised' husband, a much older man. During these years, from her late teens to her late twenties, Petyarre tried to conform to what it meant to be a 'traditional' Anmatyerr wife and mother, and gave birth to her only child, daughter Margaret Pwerle. For the decade between the late 1950s and late 1960s she devoted herself to family and ceremonial responsibilities. She was however becoming increasingly restless, eventually separating from her husband. Petyarre was seeking another dimension to her life.

So, when in 1968 the Northern Territory Department of Education(4) announced that the following year it would open a small western-style school for the children of Utopia, and that a local person would be employed to work alongside the first white teaching staff as the teaching assistant, Kathleen jumped at the chance. She put her name forward to the government authorities, and won the job. For twenty years she worked as an assistant teacher at the Utopia School. This was to prove one of the most significant and formative experiences of her life, in terms of developing finely tuned intercultural negotiation and mediation skills.

It was during this time, in the late 1970s, while she was working at the Utopia School, that Kathleen Petyarre became involved in Utopia batik, along with many of her countrywomen. The context for this involvement was an astonishing renaissance of Indigenous artistic production that had begun to take place in Central and Northern Australia in the early 1970s, in remote locations where the practice of making Indigenous art had survived the onslaught of colonisation.

As a result of a fortuitous synchronicity, at Utopia the Indigenous art renaissance movement became entangled with the globally important social movement of second wave feminism. Collectively, the Utopia women began to make a name for themselves as batik artists, assisted by Jenny Green and others. Jenny Green was the first of a succession of young and idealistic white women who came to live at Utopia in the late 1970s, delivering courses in batik method to a group mainly consisting of women. Initially the exhibitions of the women's batik work were small in scale, but after several years many 'name' artists began to appear – the most famous of whom is Kathleen's late aunt, Emily Kame Kngwarreye.

While she was involved in batik on cloth and silk, Kathleen Petyarre became involved in a Land Claim of immense significance to the Anmatyerr. She was a key claimant in a claim for Anmatyerr Freehold Title over the Utopia Pastoral Lease, which had been purchased for the community in 1976 by the Commonwealth Aboriginal Land Fund Commission.(5) The claim eventually proved successful and in 1980 the land around Utopia was formally returned to its traditional owners. Like many other Indigenous Australians, Kathleen Petyarre has consistently emphasised the strong connection between her land and her art. Each of her batiks and canvases is an assertion of land rights, an expression of her inalienable connection with Atnangker country and its associated Dreaming, Arnkerrth.

Petyarre's involvement in the batik movement eventually led to her painting with acrylics on canvas in 1986. From today's perspective, Petyarre's early acrylics on canvas, few of which survive, are competent but unremarkable 'dot and circle' works showing the strong stylistic influence of the Papunya school, which by that time had become hugely popular and in great demand.

As the years went by, Petyarre's commitment to her artistic practice became increasingly apparent. In 1989 she resigned from her teaching post at Utopia School to devote herself to painting full time. Her career as a fulltime artist proceeded slowly at first, then really took off, to the point where she is now acclaimed as an internationally important painter.

Arnkerrth – Kathleen Petyarre's Dreaming Ancestor

When I was a little girl my grandmother mob, all the old women, showed me and taught me the ceremonies – the whole lot – they taught me singing, dancing, body painting… the old ladies got me to dance from when I was little one – they thought one day I would be leader.(6)

When Kweyetwemp was a little girl, her paternal grandmother began instructing her in what is today recognized as Petyarre's great artistic subject, the Dreaming narrative of Arnkerrth, the Old Woman Mountain Devil or Thorny Devil Lizard. Today, all of Kathleen's canvases portray the journeyings of Arnkerrth through Atnangker country.

The Mountain Devil is a small agamid lizard that walks in a characteristically jerky style, feeds on ants, and has great desert survival skills, on account of its astonishing ability for camouflage and also because of its peculiar ability to take in water without drinking through the mouth.

Arnkerrth's distinctive semicircular pattern of movement is portrayed — subliminally at least — in all of Kathleen's artistic works. In Kathleen's art, as is the case with other Anmatyerr, Centralian and Western Desert artistic production, Arnkerrth is not represented figuratively, but conceptualized spatially. In Kathleen's paintings we see the traces of Arnkerrth's epic journeyings through Atnangker country.

As Kathleen puts it: 'In my paintings, Arnkerrth is walking, walking, through her country, getting ready for ceremony, for girls and young boys too. A long walk! On her back, [she is] carrying everything – special red ochre for ceremony, hair, hairstring for ceremony, seeds, everything. She's crossing over other Dreaming[s], all on Atnangker country, Green Bean Dreaming, Dingo Dreaming, Emu Dreaming, Seed Dreaming – all on that country…this Old Lady Arnkerrth Dreaming – my Dreaming – shows us about the initiation of all the young Anmatyerr girls'.(7)

Within the framework of this narrative, it is clear that Kathleen's identification with the Old Woman Arnkerrth, her Dreaming Ancestor, is absolute. Kathleen and her Ancestor are one and the same being.

In most of her paintings, Kathleen Petyarre portrays Arnkerrth's journeying though her country, during that original and continuing time of the ancestral heroes, and the institution of the Law, inadequately translated into English as 'The Dreaming'. 'The Dreaming' is the central tenet of Anmatyerr and Alyawarr religious belief. Petyarre is also permitted, under Anmatyerr Law, to paint the related Emu, Bush Seeds and Green Bean Dreamings, although she rarely does so these days.

In Petyarre's paintings, Arnkerrth makes her way through the physical and cultural landscape of Atnangker. This country is characterized by extremes of temperature and climatic conditions, over sand dunes, through dizzying arrays of colourful seeds blown about by the harsh desert winds, through Atnangker's rock holes and other watercourses.

To understand the relationship of Kathleen's Arnkerrth Dreaming paintings to one another, one needs to understand that they are all depict either the entire expanse of Atnangker country, or one of several smaller parts or details of the mosaic organization that comprises this large tract of land.

Imagine a jigsaw puzzle made up of the 200 plus square kilometres of Atnangker country (see painting). Sometimes Kathleen re-creates the 'big picture', or 'whole lot', but at other times, she focuses on localized sites of significance within that whole – for example, she will paint an entire canvas devoted to an important rock hole, or a creek bed visited by Arnkerrth in her travellings, or the rows of trees on her country that signify underground water, or women's 'business' sites. Like ecosystems in general, these localized partitions are inherently patchy rather than uniform across their spatial distribution. Each patch, every tiny bit of this 'patchwork quilt' differs, if only minimally, from its neighbouring plot. Petyarre captures the sense of fractal mosaic diversity that exists within the larger aggregate system – Atnangker country as a whole – with extraordinary grace and skill. All of the different parts that go to make up the whole are on display at the MCA exhibition.

At the same time, Petyarre evokes a moral and gendered landscape, indicated by visual means. For example, she portrays the areas that are off-limits to men and women, in order that spatial transgressions can be avoided. Nonetheless, in common with other traditionally-oriented Indigenous art, Petyarre's approach is profoundly anti-anthropocentric and anti-humanist. Philosophically, this means that such art has something in common with the 'deep ecology movement' of recent years, which refuses to place human beings at the centre of things, or to privilege human life over other forms of life. The inseparability of Kathleen's art from her life, her land, 'country' or 'place' and her Dreaming Ancestor Arnkerrth becomes evident in any extended conversation with Kathleen Petyarre about her art work.

Kathleen Petyarre
A Great Contemporary Artist

Because Kathleen Petyarre has a thorough and grounded knowledge of the Mountain Devil Dreaming, she is highly respected as an artist by her fellow Anmatyerr. In other words, Kathleen Petyarre's art work continues to meet the cultural criteria of Anmatyerr Law and culture. (Hers is a collectivist culture in which the group has an almost organic function, and she strenuously resists, both in art and life, the individualism that characterizes high modernity.)

But, as a direct result of colonization, the truth of Kathleen Petyarre's experience now no longer coincides entirely and exclusively with the Atnangker of her childhood, the place where she grew up, but stretches well beyond 'her place'. By necessity, this has resulted in incorporating other ways of seeing and 'being in the world' into her epistemological framework. This does not mean that place or locale is no longer important to Petyarre – absolutely the reverse is true. But rather, because of what sociologist Anthony Giddens has referred to as 'time-space distanciation' — that is, a profound reorganising of time and space in social life brought about by the processes of globalisation, which in turn is an offshoot of colonization — nowadays Kathleen Petyarre often evokes the travellings of Arnkerrth through Atnangker country from memory. For example, many of her recent paintings have been created in Adelaide, or in Bali. Adult recollections of early childhood experiences are powerfully evocative, and despite the fact that Petyarre returns to Atnangker at regular intervals, she is well aware that many of the events of the irretrievable past have become mythologized in her mind.

Furthermore, Kathleen Petyarre is aware that like other art work in an increasingly global market, her own work is now located within the world of circulating and trading commodities. Petyarre's work is therefore very much at home in the context of Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art, in this first-ever thorough-going survey of her work.

Globalisation refers, inter alia, to the linkages that exist in the global financial system as well as transnational corporate activity. Contemporary visual art is part of this system.

This does not mean that place or locale are not important in structuring social life but instead, 'the truth of experience no longer coincides with the place in which it takes place' (to paraphrase and take some liberties with Frederic Jameson's views on globalization).

Kathleen Petyarre is among that handful of Indigenous Australian artists whose work has contributed to opening up what had become pigeon-holed as 'Indigenous Australian art', to a broader set of possible meanings. In terms of its impact and meaning, Petyarre's work is clearly multivalent: not only is it deeply meaningful to other Indigenous groups as religious art of the Dreaming but it may be also read as abstract, expressionist, impressionist, minimalist or even postmodern, and most certainly as post-ethnographic.

It is perhaps ironic, given the facts of Kathleen's life, that her works seem equally at home in New York, Paris, or Sydney as they do at her own 'place', Atnangker. Like the late Emily Kngwarreye, Kathleen Petyarre draws upon the Indigenous to create the international. Kathleen's artistic oeuvre seems at home in the international art world, defying simplistic categorisation. Like the work of many other cutting edge contemporary artists, this very indefinability is ultimately one of the greatest strengths of Petyarre's work.

Kathleen Petyarre is also a great innovator within the framework permitted by Anmatyerre Law. Taking a different kind of 'horizonal' perspective than she has in the past, in recent years Kathleen has been attempting to create what she describes as a 'new style', evoking the sense of 'travelling in a light plane, like it's moving, travelling, looking down'.

Yet Kathleen is adamant that, although she's not afraid to innovate: 'It's still body painting, still ceremony, even looking from the sky, [it is] still dancing, still ceremony, my new style is still dancing ceremony'.(8)

In common with many other contemporary artists, Petyarre evinces a high level of discipline with regard to her work. All her compositions are meticulously organized, relying on a grid pattern that she maps out in detail before beginning work. Many hours are spent in canvas preparation, in carefully applying the gesso in a way that allows layer upon layer of different-coloured paints to become absorbed into the linen. It is this absorption of colours and layers into the canvas that gives Petyarre's work its very 'fine', or even 'refined' appearance — a factor which differentiates it from a great deal of contemporary Indigenous art. Because the colour of the paint becomes diluted as successive layers are applied and soak into the canvas, this heightens the illusion of three-dimensionality. It sometimes gives the impression that the earth has been sliced open, so that we feel that we are looking at the earth's surface dissected, from above. Petyarre's restrained palette, mostly restricted to 'earth' colours, compounds this impression.

Underneath the screen of very fine dotting Kathleen's Dreaming exists as a barely tangible, shadowy palimpsest, overlaid by the luminous surface colours which gradually change tone. Nodes of colour shift seamlessly through the work. As a result, Petyarre's works provide the viewer with a fleeting, subliminal, awareness or suggestion of her Dreaming Ancestor's travels or journeying. The layers upon layers upon the scarcely discernible grid create a strong sense of abstraction, an alchemical atmosphere. The paintings are architectural, seemingly seen from above. Arnkerrth, the journey woman, the Dreaming Ancestor, is glimpsed sometimes as a trick of the surface, sometimes as a tantalising subterranean presence sensed or felt by the viewer rather than actually seen. Arnkerrth's tracks, as she makes her way through the harsh desert conditions, become a whirling vortex. The layering effect and the illusion of spiralling movement come from Kathleen's sheer technical brilliance. The powerfully suggestive layering effect is almost certainly a by-product of her earlier familiarity with body painting, learned during her youth and early adulthood, and later with the technically demanding methods of batik.

The layering effect that is so characteristic of her canvases works at a number of levels. On the one hand, it signifies the ability of Arnkerrth to camouflage herself no matter what the challenges of the terrain. By metaphoric extension this suggests that what takes place beneath the earth's crust is equally, if not more, significant than that which can be seen by the naked eye, above the ground. Arnkerrth has the ability to alternately reveal and disguise herself by going in and out of the earth's surface in the course of her epic journeying, all the while bearing her load of ground red ochre in preparation for the forthcoming ceremony. Arnkerrth's passage through climatic extremes is also suggested by the muted array of oscillating, variegated colours that Petyarre so skilfully applies to her canvases.

These groupings of tiny colourful specks or dots Petyarre applies using the sharp end of saté sticks which she purchases in commercial quantities during her travels to Bali, going through hundreds of these saté sticks in the course of any working year. The visual effect of this controlled explosion of very fine dots, which give Petyarre's works their exquisitely stippled 'fine art' look, means that a non-Anmatyerr viewer does not have to be aware of Arnkerrth's presence in Petyarre's work to appreciate it. Thus, the work can be appreciated on a number of different levels. Petyarre's uncanny ability to imply shimmering, subterranean layers of meaning invites many possible readings of her work, thereby both incorporating and transcending exclusively Anmatyerr interpretations, and simultaneously tantalising and fulfilling spiritually-hungry non-Indigenous audiences who are seeking depth, perhaps even transfiguration. This ability to operate on a number of levels simultaneously has led to contemporary art critics unselfconsciously discussing Petyarre's work in relation to Kant's concept of the sublime,(9) or to compare it with New York based Ross Bleckner's hypnotic conceptual studies of the molecular world of DNA and cell structure.(10) In this sense, Petyarre's works not only fulfil but exceed their manifest destiny.

Yet ultimately control is exercised over the work by that underlying Dreaming and the power of Petyarre's work emanates from this truth. Kathleen Petyarre manages to keep the substratum of sacred meaning intact, evoking, rather than disclosing, her Dreaming. As Aboriginal cultures tend towards being 'cultures of concealment' rather than 'cultures of revelation' this is a move at once pragmatic, strategic and poetic.

Petyarre succeeds par excellence at performing this double dance, which is what may well guarantee her a kind of immortality. Even those who have little or no understanding of Petyarre's subject matter will appreciate the grandeur and power of her work.

(Christine Nicholls has recently co-authored a book on the work of Kathleen Petyarre, Genius of Place: the Life and Art of Kathleen Petyarre, Wakefield Press Adelaide, gina@wakefieldpress.com.au)(11)

Reference

Kathleen Petyarre, Mountain Devil Lizard Dreaming 1997, Synthetic Polymer Paint on Belgian Linen, 182.5 x 182cm. (6' x 6') Brisbane Australia, exhibited 27 November 1998, Seppelt Contemporary Art Award, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.
Nicholls, Christine, May 2001, The Work of Kathleen Petyarre : Genius of Place, 9 May — 22 July 2001, Room Brochure, to accompany exhibition of the same name, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney Australia.
Photograph courtesy of Eric R. Pianka, Moloch Horridus — (Mountain or Thorny Devil) Tracks in the Sand, by Eric R. Pianka, School of Biological Sciences, University of Texas at Austin, US.
Giddens, A., 1998, The Third Way: New Politics for the New Century,Polity Press, Cambridge, UK.