The anthropological concern with difference, often misunderstood as a preference for it and an aversion to theory, is hardly more than the recognition, hard-earned in hundreds upon hundreds of detailed and extended field investigations, that difference is what makes the world go around, especially the political world. Heterogeneity is the norm, conflict the ordering force, and, despite ideological romances, left and right, religious and secular, of consensus, unity, and impending harmony, they seem likely to remain so for a good deal longer than the foreseeable future.
Clifford Geertz died in 2006 and a posthumous collection of essays Life Among the Anthros has been published this year. Like all of his writings it is full of illuminating ideas expressed with wonderfully convoluted yet lucid style. The essay ’What is a state if it is not a sovereign?’ from which the quote here is taken, is a great read and directly relevant to where national museums fit into the political picture.
I was in Townsville on the weekend, a guest of the Perc Tucker Regional Gallery. The Gallery’s Director, Frances Thomson, introduced me to the great Australian printmaker and teacher Tate Adams who now lives and works in Townsville. Tate Adams was a pivotal figure in the world of printmaking in Melbourne from the 1950s and ran a gallery there specifically devoted to artists’ prints, the Crossley Gallery. He is now 88 and busy publishing fine artists books under the imprint Lyrebird Press he established 1977.
Tate Adams and Frances Thomson. The print on the wall behind is by Jock Clutterbuck
Transparent things, through which the past shines
Kimberley points, spearheads made in the Kimberley region of northern Western Australia crafted from ceramic telegraph insulators and bottle glass brought by Europeans.
Christopher Allen’s piece on our exhibition Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route in the Weekend Australian Review was quite a spray. OK, Christopher, mon semblable, mon frère, you’re bored by the building. But let’s move on, shall we? Let’s imagine the building filled with things – things through which the past shines! We are working on it. I am glad you were able to overcome your aversion to come up with your concluding idea: ‘[In these paintings] what speaks to the Western viewer is … a sense of the numinous that modern art has largely forgotten’. Numinous – beautiful word!
Thinking about colour
The colour of paintings in the Yiwarra Kuju exhibition here at the National Museum, so evocative of the desert. Thrilling.
Patrick Olodoodi (Alatuti) Tjungurrayi pointing out the waterholes in his painting Canning Stock Route Country, 2007
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