A Parisian Romance

On

cyclone watch at Gunyungarra, Gulumbu Yunupingu speaks gently into her mobile phone: "We're waiting on Cyclone Monica. Coming this way." It's late April in Northeast Arnhem Land, in Australia's Top End, and until the rains came, Yunupingu, an expert in art and bush medicine, had been foraging for yam. Now, as well as the category five storm to worry about, there's her exhibition debut in Paris looming on the horizon, and the mother of four has returned to her community near Yirrkala to paint. As it transpires, over the course of the next few days Monica manages to sidestep Yirrkala, hitting the coast 300 km west at Maningrida, but what begins to form on Yunupingu's bark canvas bound for France has some of its meteorological power. Here the artist's field of shimmering stars mass into high-pressure spirals, drawing the viewer into the eye of her creative storm.

Yunupingu, like the Aboriginal art movement that spawned her, is a force of nature. Arriving late to painting, the 59-year-old spent a lifetime listening to the stories of her father, the distinguished artist Munggur-ruwuy, helping to translate the Bible into the local Gumatj language, and assisting brother Mandawuy, lead singer of the band Yothu Yindi, to organize the annual celebration of Yolngu culture, Garma, before picking up the brush just six years ago. What her father told her came spilling out in a painted universe of stars, gan'yumirri garak, and from next month her work will help guide international audiences through a new era of Aboriginal art at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris. Across 250 sq m of ceiling, her painted mural will transform a curatorial library into an Arnhem Land night, luminous with a different kind of knowledge. "The stars tell stories to Yolngu people," she says.

Yunupingu's ceiling is not unlike Aboriginal art itself: a universe of independent but interconnecting movements, each adding luster to the other. With the June 23 opening of the MQB, President Chirac's $278-million monument to non-Western cultures next to the Eiffel Tower on the Seine, the stars would seem to be aligned for Aboriginal art. Yunupingu was one of eight indigenous Australian artists invited to create work for the museum—not to hang on its walls, but rather to be woven through the fabric of Jean Nouvel's visionary architecture. For indigenous art curators Hetti Perkins and Brenda Croft, it was a chance to define something that has remained by its very essence indefinable.

From its beginnings on cave walls at least 20,000 years ago, Aboriginal art has continually shifted shape like the rainbow serpent Ngalyod, the culture's enduring creation figure: from the X-ray styles of ancient Arnhem Land to colonial-era paintings on bark; from Albert Namatjira's mid-century watercolors at Hermannsburg to the contemporary cultural renaissance that is the Western Desert Art Movement, and its fertile offspring. Recently described by former Aboriginal Affairs Minister Amanda Vanstone as "Australia's greatest cultural treasure," it is an industry conservatively worth $A200 million a year (see following story). But its complexity and dynamism have avoided capture. "It's a paradox," says Perkins. "It's the oldest continuous cultural tradition in the world as well as one of the most exciting contemporary art movements that we'll ever see."

Who better to put paradox into concrete form than architect Nouvel? The light-sensitive façade of his best-known building, the Institut du Monde Arabe, both veils and reveals the culture within, and for the MQB, it was his idea to hand over the administrative wing to the left of the museum's main entrance as a blank canvas for the Australian artists. While the building functions as a bookshop, curatorial offices and library, it was also Nouvel's idea for it to be viewed as a 3D artwork from the street. Every available window, wall, ceiling and column was seen as a potential creative site for the eight artists selected, each embodying a different region of Aboriginal culture (see map). With ambitions far outstripping its $A1.4 million budget, the Australian Indigenous Art Commission was to re-imagine Aboriginal art 20,000 km from its source. "The result," says MQB's chairman and managing director Stéphane Martin, "will be one of the major displays of Australian art outside of your country."

And all the more surprising considering much of it was fine-tuned from a modest warehouse in Sydney's inner-west. "It's the nervous center at the moment," jokes Australian architect Peter Lonergan, the commission's project manager, who for the past year has employed up to 10 scenic painters, enamel firers and glass cutters to bring the artists' dreams to reality. Late last month, Time was given an exclusive preview of the work in its final stages before being freighted off to Paris for installation. With 2,500 sq m of public art, "every square millimeter involves a number of really intense processes that have to be perfect," says Lonergan. Just as fine have been the cultural calibrations of the project. In working with the artists, Perkins and Croft have had to traverse the country by plane, 4WD and e-mail, signing off on designs while negotiating sensitive copyright issues with Paris; in one case, an artist's contract couldn't be signed until the floodwaters had receded from her remote community. "It's not only a cross-nation collaboration," says Perkins. "It's inter-cultural as well, and then also between the strands of architecture, curatorship and the arts." Not to mention language. English and French were easy compared to Kuninjku, Gumatj, Gija, Pitjantjatjara, Pintupi, Wiradjuri and Waanyi, all of which buttress this cross-cultural cathedral.

Walking away from the Seine and left into Rue de l'Université, the AIAC creates a subtle impression at first. The grey building tones into the area's fin-de-siecle streetscape, until you discern the scarification marks sandblasted onto the façade. Then looking up, you begin to make out the painted ceilings inside; Yunupingu's stars flash. "It's something that you discover slowly, little by little," explains MQB deputy director Philippe Peltier, a member of the AIAC's curatorial team. "You really have to read the building and the pieces inside it."