A Parisian Romance

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ncoded in the architecture is the unfolding history of Aboriginal art. Peltier suspects Europeans will be surprised by the scale of the work in and around the building, but as Perkins points out, it takes the art back to its genesis: "Where do bark paintings start? Inside bark shelters, inside houses. They were painted on the roof. Rock art. This idea of working on that scale with that kind of prominence is not a new thing." While the Aboriginal concept of the Dreaming "forces one to think differently, and in a less linear way, about the relationship between creativity and form in art," as anthropologist Howard Morphy wrote, a natural entry point for the building is the bark painting tradition of Arnhem Land.

It was after visiting Oenpelli in 1912 that anthropologist Baldwin Spencer, noticing ocher-drawn designs in the bark shelters of the Gagadju people, made the first commission of Aboriginal art. Painted on a small rectangular piece of stringybark by a now unknown artist, the white ibis was depicted in the X-ray style expressed in rock art for thousands of years. Bound for the then National Museum of Victoria, Aboriginal art made its first serious impression on Western eyes. Fifty years later, the people of Yirrkala revived the tradition for a historic land claim in Australia's federal parliament, with the so-called "bark petition"; one of its authors was Yunupingu's father, Munggurruwuy. In humble ocher on bark, it demonstrated Aboriginal art's importance as a cultural document, and its power to change lives.

More than anyone else, John Mawurndjul has changed the face of bark painting. Adapting the cross-hatch technique of body painting known as rarrk, the son of a shaman's increasingly virtuoso barks have taken what was previously seen as a craft to the exalted realm of fine art: last year, he was accorded a career retrospective at the Museum Tinguely in Basel, Switzerland. If Mawurndjul is considered the Michelangelo of rarrk, then the MQB is his Sistine Chapel. Across 150 sq m of ground-floor ceiling, his sacred billabong at Milmilngkan ripples and sings; the rarrk's kinetic power suggesting the presence of Ngalyod. Nearby, his painted hollow-log column appears to bear the weight of the building. Mawurndjul visited Paris last September to hand-paint his lorrkkon log and supervise the ceiling work, joining his artisans on the scaffolding. "His eye followed every single line as it was painted," recalls Lonergan.

Collaboration is the cornerstone of Aboriginal art practice, and nowhere was this more apparent than at Papunya, 250 dirt kilometers west of Alice Springs. Around the same time as the Yirrkala people were presenting their bark petition to parliament, hundreds of desert nomads were gathering at the settlement as part of the government's assimilation policy. Far from their Pintupi, Arrernte, Warlpiri and Luritja homelands, the Papunya mob were caught in "the agony of exile," Perkins has written. Driving his VW into town in 1971, Sydney art teacher Geoffrey Bardon wasn't thinking of starting a revolution. But by encouraging the town's senior men to paint their ceremonial sand designs onto the local school wall, an artistic one was unleashed. In a series of concentric circles and squiggles, their Honey Ant Meeting Place ("Papunya Tula" in Pintupi) was conjured up, and one of the most extraordinary art movements of the 20th century had begun.

Not only did the movement's founding fathers summon up their far-flung homelands in paint, but they would return to them by decade's end, setting up outstations at places like Kintore and Kiwirrkura near the Western Australian border. Their signature dotted style not only dazzled the art market but also kept their sacred stories screened, in the process producing "masterpieces of ambiguity, equivocation and disguise," cultural theorist Paul Carter has written. By the mid-'90s, as the senior men began to pass away, their wives and daughters took up the brush, releasing a second wave of artists. Nearing 70, Ningura Napurrula's work bears the hallmarks of the latest style, with thick impasto not unlike ceremonial body painting. Across her first-floor ceiling in Paris, black and white forms cartwheel through space. Employing Napurrula's usual technique, artisans prepared a groundcover of ocher-like red, over which they traced the artist's design of a sacred site near Kiwirrkura; infilling the rest with daubs of white. In this way, the blood and bones of her country are laid bare.

Like desert flowers after the rain, Papunya also inspired a new blossoming of art centers across the border into South Australia. As a founder of Irrunytju Arts, Tommy Watson, a Pitjantjatjara man in his late 60s, is one of the new kids on the block. But with the eye-popping palette of his enamel-fired ceiling—which depicts a rock hole in his grandfather's country in a blaze of hot pink, green and red—we see the full bloom of the Western Desert three storeys above a Paris street.

In 1974, the year Papunya's Honey Ant mural was casually whitewashed over, Rover Thomas experienced a series of dreams at Warmun, 1,000 km northwest in the East Kimberley's diamond country. An old woman had recently died, and in his dreams her spirit flew eastward, encountering the land and its sacred sites. Former stockman Thomas' visions were later recorded on boards and held aloft during a ceremony known as Gurrir Gurrir. These boards grew into a contemporary art movement, made famous by the late Thomas' Rothko-like swathes of ocher necklaced by sun-bursting dots (in 2001, his All That Big Rain Coming Down from Top Side was purchased by the National Gallery of Australia for $A786,625, still a record for an Aboriginal work).

With their tactile, outside view of country, it's fitting that Thomas' successors adorn the front of the Australian building. Painted to the left of the front doors is Paddy Bedford's Thoowoonggoonarrin, the former stockman's maternal homeland. In tones of blue-black and pinky-white, his diamond-sharp eye excavates the land from above. Raised in relief across three storeys of the façade above are the jimbala spearheads of Lena Nyadbi's paternal country. These spearheads were also used to tattoo the skin of young initiates, and even from oceans away, the architects could feel the artist's hand marking the project. "She was driving it completely from a long distance," says Lonergan.

Greeting the viewers as they enter the building are the large-scale photos of Michael Riley. The late Dubbo-born artist and filmmaker recalled growing up in central New South Wales, "lying down in the front yard looking up at telegraph poles and lines… cutting through the clouds." Made four years before his death, his final photo series cloud (2000) recaptures that view, though what float across the sky are poetic symbols of Aboriginal dispossession: European farm animals and vestiges of Christianity; even the boomerang returns to him as a weapon of racial stereotyping, beautiful but deadly. Riley was a child of the '80s urban-based Aboriginal movement, when art school-educated indigenous Australians like Tracey Moffatt and Gordon Bennett began using the tricks of Postmodernism to critique Australia's colonial past.