Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 17, 1991 TAG: 9103140123
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KATHLEEN NOLAN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Although all of the works are recently made by artists whose identities are known, they are related to an ancient tradition in which art-making is a process that links man to the environment and to the spiritual world. These works function as magical images, binding their makers to Dreamtime, the time when the mythical ancestors of the Aborigines called the world into existence.
The handsomely installed show includes work from different regions of Australia: bark paintings from the northern tropical forests and dot paintings from the central and southern deserts. All of these works reflect the Aborigines' belief that they are profoundly connected to the natural world. They believe they are descended from animal ancestors: crocodiles, kangaroos, emus and so on. Fellow descendants of a given ancestor belong to a spiritual clan, or Dreaming, that transcends familial and geographic boundaries.
The paintings on eucalyptus bark are portraits of these animal ancestors, which serve both as a totem and a spiritual father for members of their Dreaming. The ancestor paintings, like Peter Waralwonga's "Crocodile of the Dreaming," are scratchy, linear images, more drawings than paintings, whose vibrancy suggests the potency of the animal forebears.
The most striking works in the show are the paintings from the Australian deserts. These works in acrylic on canvas are a more permanent variant of the ephemeral sand paintings that are made as part of religious rituals.
The canvases are made expressly for sale to a non-Aborigine market, so they represent a commercialization of a religious practice. Still, the paintings apparently reflect traditional styles and imagery, and in any event are stunning visually. The pieces read like large abstract paintings of great beauty: an intricate mesh of dots forms the backgrounds, and concentric circles and wavy lines create hypnotic patterns.
Unlike the Western non-representational art they resemble, these desert paintings have a specific meaning. Their patterns are not determined purely by formal considerations, but instead they have a story to tell, and they give directions.
These paintings are maps that trace the footsteps left by an ancestral animal over the Australian countryside. As the late Bruce Chatwin explained in his book "Songlines," another name for these totemic footprints, the whole surface of Australia is covered with sites linked to one of the ancestors and therefore sacred to some ancestral clan or Dreaming. Paintings like Maxie Tjampitjinpa's 1988 "Bush Tucker Dreaming at Watikinpirri," or Johnny Warankula's 1987 "Rain Cycle Dreaming at Kalipinpa" mark the paths connecting these sites.
Members of a given Dreaming can interpret the circles and wavy lines as clearly as we can read a road map. They can follow the traces of their forebears on a symbolic or even a literal journey, a "walkabout," through the countryside.
But to us, the uninitiated, the code of the maps is unintelligible. We wonder at the intricate compositions of these works both ancient and modern, but we cannot follow the journey through the sacred landscape.
\ "We Were Children Just Like You" is an exhibit of photographs organized by the Brooklyn-based Center for the Holocaust that documents the shattered lives of Jewish children during the Nazi era. It includes reproductions of photographs that survived by chance of the young victims or survivors of the Holocaust, as well as biographical sketches of the children.
These wrenching images fall into several groups, including pre-Holocaust photographs that are like those that loving parents everywhere take of their children, images painful because we know the fate of their subjects during the Nazi regime. Other photographs document post-war efforts to care for surviving children, reunite them with their families and rebuild their lives.
Hardest of all to look at are the photographs of children in concentration camps. When I saw a photograph of a baby with a tattooed identification number on his arm, I had to leave the show.
These are important images, these records of unimaginable barbarism. It is essential that we see them and be reminded that the unthinkable events they represent really did take place.
At the same time, I wonder why this exhibit is in an art museum. Defining art is always a tricky business, but what this show has to offer is not the reflection of the creative process but the presentation of evidence. Most of the photographs are snapshots or official group photographs; they were intended to be documentation, not art.
More importantly, the photographs in the show are not even the original prints, only copies of them. The powerful images of "We Were Children" would be more appropriately exhibited on another floor of the Center in the Square, in the history museum.
"Dreamtime: Aboriginal Art from the Kluge Collection" continues through April 14, and "We Were Children Just Like You" runs through March 31 at the Roanoke Museum of Fine Arts, Center in the Square, Roanoke City Market. Open Sunday, 1-5 p.m.; Monday through Thursday and Saturday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Friday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Admission is now free. 342-5760.
by CNB