A Parisian Romance

Judy Watson was another. And around to the left of cloud will be the artist's 11-m-long glass ceiling, inspired by her painting two halves with bailer shell, 2002, in the NGA collection. Floating in a glassy sea of Prussian and ultramarine blue, the sand-blasted image is deceptively beautiful: the Aboriginal bailer shell was drawn from a collection at the British Museum where a friend of Watson's was working last decade, and her work is about the sometimes painful process of cultural retrieval. Watson, 46, who traces her lineage to the Waanyi country of northwest Queensland, calls her blue "the liquid color of dreams." In this case bittersweet ones, for Watson's work expresses the disquiet indigenous Australians can feel in seeing their ancient artefacts in foreign collections. Acid-etched across the front window, the artist's museum piece seeks to challenge "the ethnographic perceptions of Aboriginal culture and traditions," says Watson. "The more that our presence is felt, and the more that people experience and meet with indigenous people on their ground, the more that those perceptions are going to be squashed."

Indeed, squashing the usual perceptions about Aboriginal art has been the life mission of Croft and Perkins, senior curators at the NGA and Art Gallery of N.S.W. respectively. As founding members of Sydney's Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative in 1987, they mixed art with activism (Perkins is the daughter of famed campaigner Charles; Croft is a widely exhibited artist), pushing the envelope with indigenous shows. For the exhibition "fluent" at the 1997 Venice Biennale, they positioned Aboriginal work at the forefront of contemporary art, mixing Murray River eel traps with Western Desert landscapes and more urban visions. "What was achieved through 'fluent' was to start people thinking about contemporary Aboriginal art overseas," says Croft. For starters there were no dot paintings or "Dreaming" in the title. "I just keep seeing those shows coming up," says Croft, "and they've been happening for 20 years. You want to move beyond that."

The AIAC does that by looking as much to the future as the past. It repositions Aboriginal art by locating it outside the displays of historical pieces within MQB. As embodied in Nouvel's architecture, Aboriginal art is its own wildly independent spirit. In this way, the founder of Sotheby's Aboriginal art department in Australia, Tim Klingender, likens its appeal to that of world music. "I don't think it is part of the continuing tradition of Western art which begins in Greco-Roman times and goes through the Renaissance and ultimately terminates in Postmodernism," says Klingender. "It has cross-cultural appeal. It has an aesthetic which relates to Modernism at times, yet it is infused with a language from a most ancient and diverse culture."

That its cultural autonomy should be recognized in a place like France ahead of Australia is perhaps not as surprising as it might appear. For a country that didn't grant its indigenous inhabitants the vote until 1967, modern Australia has sat uncomfortably with its ancient traditions. "European countries can embrace Aboriginal art without any sense of shame or guilt," says Chris Sarra, chair of the Australia Council's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Board. "They don't have a stake in that, whereas Australia does."

The MQB also continues a French fascination with Australia's indigenous culture that began when Napoleon sent scientific voyages to the South Pacific. Napoleon's artists were the first to document Tasmania's Aborigines as individuals rather than types, even recording their songs and dance. "It's a tradition that's been rich and sustained over a long period of time," says Susan Hunt, curator of the 1999 show "Terre Napoléon: Australia Through French Eyes." "So this hasn't just come from nowhere." Indeed, during the 1950s, Paris-based artist Karel Kupka was the first to collect Arnhem Land barks as pieces of art, not anthropology; many of them will be displayed for the first time in MQB. "He was the first to recognize the individuality of each artist," says French-born Apolline Kohen, director of Maningrida Arts and Culture, creative home to John Mawurndjul. In fact, it was the 1989 Paris exhibition, "Magiciens de la Terre," which showed the work of Aboriginal artists alongside their Western contemporaries for the first time, which sparked Kohen's interest in the field. "From my experience in Maningrida, it's been very good being French," she says, "because they think I've got a culture as well."

In her four years, the Paris-trained curator has already helped reshape perceptions of Aboriginal art abroad. As well as assisting with the current Mawurndjul retrospective, now at Hannover's Sprengel Museum in Germany, this year Kohen took the first ever show of Aboriginal art to the Middle East, when "Identity and Country: Contemporary Art from Maningrida" opened at the La Fontaine Centre of Contemporary Art in Bahrain. "They were very curious," says Kohen. "They didn't get what they were expecting." No dot paintings or didjeridus; just the metamorphic power of rarrk. Her most heartening response? " 'Where's the Aboriginal art?' You're just like, 'Well, it's all around you.'"

With this growing presence comes perhaps Aboriginal art's greatest gift to the world. As with the stars on Gulumbu Yunupingu's ceiling, it is no longer a sign of exotic otherness, but something that can unite everyone under the one roof. "Sometimes we make a fire," says Yunupingu. "We sit around the fire and look up into the sky. Big ones, small ones, little ones—faraway, close. Yolngu, everybody around the world loves to see them." In Paris, they're sparkling.