Jean Baptiste Apuatimi, jilamara, and art history on the Tiwi Islands

Ethnography is the principal method for studying the art of the Tiwi Islands, as it is for the study of Aboriginal Australian art more generally. Relying on the testimonies of the artists themselves, scholars use Tiwi art to build knowledge of Tiwi cosmologies and society. This essay turns to the oeuvre of Tiwi artist Jean Baptiste Apuatimi to argue that the methodology of visual analysis can also contribute to knowledge of Tiwi cosmology and society. The persistence of the jilamara design in her oeuvre can be related to the global phenomenon of geometric design. For the art historian Wilhelm Worringer, the emergence of geometric ornament in different societies betrays anxieties about the cosmological place of a people in the world. Tiwi jilamara can be read in terms of such anxiety in a contribution to the scholarship on Tiwi society that relies on the evidence of art practice rather than ethnography. Keywords: Tiwi IslandsAboriginal artethnographyart historyvisual studies Notes 1. This study is indebted to the generosity of Tim and Angela Hill at Tiwi Design, who hosted the research for this essay in February of 2009. Thanks also to Jean Baptiste Apuatimi, who gracefully tolerated our scrutiny of her work, and to fellow researcher Sam Togni, whose magnificent eye enabled many of the observations in this paper. 2. Lionel Hudson, introduction to Tiwi: The Life and Art of Australia's Tiwi People, by Heide Smith (Sydney: Edition Habit Press, 1990), 24. 3. C. W. M. Hart, “The Tiwi of Melville and Bathurst Islands,” Oceania 1.2 (1930): 170. 4. Hart, “The Tiwi of Melville,” 170. 5. C. P. Mountford, The Tiwi: Their Art, Myth and Ceremony (London: Phoenix House, 1958), 16; see also Sally May, “The Art of Collecting: Charles Pearcy Mountford,” in The Makers and Making of Indigenous Australian Museum Collections, ed. Nicholas Peterson, Lindy Allen, and Louise Hamby (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008), 464–65. 6. Ronald M. Berndt, “An Appreciation of Tiwi Art,” in Declan: A Tiwi Artist, ed. Margaret K. C. West (Darwin: Australian City Properties, 1987), 6. 7. Margie West, “‘It belongs to No One Else’: The Dynamic Art of the Tiwi,” in One Sun One Moon, ed. Hetti Perkins (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2007), 7. 8. Kathy Barnes, Kiripapurajuwi: Skills of Our Hands: Good Craftsmen and Tiwi Art (Nguiu Nguiu: Tiwi Land Council, 1999), 13. 9. Howard Morphy, “Moving the Body Painting into the Gallery - Knowing about and Appreciating Works of Aboriginal Art,” Journal of Art Historiography 4 (June 2011): 2. 10. Ian McLean, “How Aboriginal Art Conquered the Art World,” in How Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art (Sydney: Power Publications with the Institute of Modern Art, 2011), 17. 11. Mountford, The Tiwi: Their Art, Myth and Ceremony, 19–22 and unpaginated. 12. Laura Fisher, “The Art/ethnography Binary: Post-colonial Tensions within the Field of Aboriginal Australian Art,” Cultural Sociology 6.2 (2012): 264. 13. Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, vols. 1–3, trans. J. M. Dent (London: J. M. Dent, 1927). 14. Bernard Smith, Modernism's History (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1998), 44. 15. Alois Riegl, Problems of Style: Foundations for a History of Ornament, trans. Evelyn Kain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 17. 16. Riegl, Problems of Style, 39–40. 17. May, “The Art of Collecting,” 456. 18. Ralph Altman, review of The Tiwi: Their Art, Myth and Ceremony, by Charles Mountford, American Anthropologist 61 (1959): 1156. 19. Altman, review of The Tiwi, 1155. 20. Altman, review of The Tiwi, 1157. 21. May, “The Art of Collecting,” 458. 22. Philip Jones, “The Art of Contact: Encountering an Aboriginal Aesthetic from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Centuries,” in The Cambridge Companion to Australian Art, ed. Jaynie Anderson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 35. 23. Jane C. Goodale, “The Tiwi Dance for the Dead,” Expedition 2.1 (1959): 2–13. 24. Goodale, “The Tiwi Dance for the Dead,”13. 25. James House Jr., “Tiwi Burial Poles as Sculpture,” Expedition 2.1 (1959): 14. 26. House, “Tiwi Burial Poles as Sculpture,” 16. 27. Hetti Perkins, “A Privileged Moment: Retracing Tony Tuckson's Pioneering Journey North,” Art and Australia 47.1 (2009): 108–17. 28. Margaret K. C. West, Declan: A Tiwi Artist (Darwin: Australian City Properties, 1987); Judith Ryan, Kitty Kantilla (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2007). 29. Thanks to Angela Hill, who shared this with Sam Togni and myself. See also Jenny Hill, Tiwi-English Interactive Dictionary (Australian Society for Indigenous Languages, 2011), http://ausil.org/Lexicons/Tiwi/lexicon/mainintro.htm. 30. E. H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art (London: Phiadon, 1979), 117–148. 31. Morphy, “Moving the Body Painting into the Gallery,” 16; Rex Butler, “Bright Shadows: Art, Aboriginality, and Aura,” South Atlantic Quarterly 101.2 (2002): 511. 32. Baptiste told art coordinator Angela Hill this, when explaining these new works. 33. Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, trans. Michael Bullock (London: Routledge, 1953)

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