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Kean, John: Dot Circle & Frame, Upswell Publishing, Perth 2023, ISBN 9780645536812

Table of Contents        ¦         Cover Text        ¦         Review⁄Abstract

Table of Contents

Introduction: 'Catch a fire, so you can get burn, now' -1-

Part One: Before Papunya -20-

Songlines and telegraph poles -22-

The Cross and the oval: the clash of icons at Hermannsburg, 1928-48 -28-

Iconoclasm and sacredness -35-

Roads and territories: Haasts Bluff, 1930-59 -48-

Crossings -56-

Seeing and beeing seen -71-

Framing and unbounded land -80-

Kaapa Tjampitjinpa and performance the Tjartiwanpa -92-

Notes to Part One -100-

Plates -108-

Part Two: Making Papunya Tula art -178-

Approaching Papunya painting -180-

Papunya and the policy of assimilation -184-

Figure and ground -191-

Murals and the Men's Painting Room -210-

The rectangle -221-

'The Dot has a serious Art History' -240-

Johnny Warangula and the invention of the dot -247-

Tim Leura: to reveal and conceal -262-

A new pictorial space -275-

Clifford Possum: mapping the totemic landscape -297-

Conclusion: Reflecting on fifty years of Papunya Tula painting -315-

Notes to Part Two -328-

Appendices -341-

References -348-

Akcnowledgements -360-

List of Plates -364-

List of Figures -367-

Index -374-

Cover Text

The course of Australian art changed in 1971. Kaapa Tjampitjinpa, Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and Johhny Warangula Tjupurrula were central to the formulation of a radical new form of desert art. Standing out among an exceptional cohort of painting men at Papunya, this 'gang of four' closely related artists deployed their inherited iconography while exploring poetic possibilities offered by paint on canvas. Each was responsible for innovations that still influence contemporary desert art. Papunya Tula art did not emerge from barren ground. John Kean's fine-grained study reveals the artform's surprising sources, from its wellspring in the ceremonies of Central Australia to the polular culture of the mid-twentieth century. He foregrounds the contested intercultural context in which the artists came into manhood, first as stockmen and labourers, then as artists. Dot Circle & Frame draws on social history, visual anthropology, as well as formal art analysis to identify how the key innovations that informed contemporary desert art were realised to show just how a new vision of ceremony and Country was assembled, and these four artists claimed a pivotal space in the history of Austalian art.