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.Wright, personal communication(29 September 2006).28 It is interesting to note, here, that the exhibition was originally pitched by the curator,and accepted by the Gallery, in fulfilment of the Gallery s remit to present contemporaryAustralian art.Wright, personal communication (29 September 2006).29 Wright, personal communication (29 September 2006).Fire Works is an establishedBrisbane gallery which represents Indigenous artists.30 Wright, personal communication (29 September 2006). 132 Economies of Representation, 1790 2000The overall exhibition design, together with wall-texts and small labels included nextto works, helped to further a principle important to the artist: that the audience shouldsee how the new works shown carried similar information to the more traditionaldot style paintings he was known for.The Kngwarreye retrospective at the Queensland Art Gallery was able, with thelarger budget available to a state cultural institution, to present an even more detailedapproach to Indigenous cultural context.The exhibition was accompanied by thesix-by-eight-meter space of the Utopia Room, an environment created in response tothe needs of the artist s community for a greater collaborative role and the broaderpublic for greater contextualization.The Utopia Room contained lightbox displaysof sacred rocks, sent to the gallery by Greeny Purvis Petyarre and Lindsay BirdMpetyane, senior male custodians of Alkahere, to show that the paintings in theexhibition have important stories.31 It also included women s ceremonial dancegarments which had belonged to Kngwarreye, presented by Gloria Petyarre andhanded over in an impromptu but important ceremony.On the walls were slidesof Alkahere landscape, tracks and body art, many of them sent by Greeny andLindsay.32 The room s mood was thus less elegiac than a living celebration ofAnmatyerre culture, as was amply shown by the contribution of senior members ofKngwarreye s family and community to the exhibition.These contributions, whichalso took place in the performative gestures of story-telling, dance and song, werepart of an extensive consultative process recognizing collaborative ownership ofartworks and involved complex forms of cultural transaction between the Alkahereand local Indigenous communities and curatorial staff.As Margo Neale has described,the Utopia Room was less an anthropological site than a spiritual keeping-place;a space acknowledging the two sites of engagement, that is, Utopia, the place ofproduction, and the Gallery, the place of consumption.33The staging of such exhibitions demands ongoing consultation between artist,community, curators and the viewing public and between local, state and nationalinstitutions and cultural bodies.This consultation, properly conceived, should beundertaken with a commitment to creating ongoing dialogues, not simply as a one-off event.34 Perhaps unsurprisingly, Wright suggests that the public domain mightprovide the most supportive environment within which to pursue this approach: Balancing the interests of stakeholders and artists, particularly in the context ofstaging public exhibitions of indigenous art, in my opinion, requires higher levelsof open consultation and strict adherence to protocols expected by community and31 Neale, p.11.32 Ibid., p.12.33 Ibid.34 For example, in the staging of similar projects, Wright acknowledges the support andguidance of senior curators such as Margo Neale and Brenda Croft, major artists like MichaelNelson Jagamara, Thanakupi, Fiona Foley and Gordon Bennett, the Queensland government,the Queensland Indigenous Arts Marketing and Export agency, Museums Australia, and themany remote and urban-based community arts centres where I have volunteered or undertakenwork for the acquittal of public gallery exhibitions ; Wright, personal communication(29 September 2006). Raw Deals: Kngwarreye and Contemporary Art Criticism 133artist, than activities and practices common to private/market gallery interests.35Such an approach need not require higher budgets, but it inevitably requires longlead-times, and even more importantly, it puts the focus on creating and sustainingpersonal and organizational relationships.I believe that with regard to the display andviewing of work by Kngwarreye, Michael Nelson Jagamara, or any other Indigenousartist, it is Neale s and Wright s respective approaches which come closest to the third possibility Hollingworth strains after and which amounts, ultimately, tosomething like an ethics of perception
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