Dreamtime

Being still confused about the concept of the Dreamtime, the recommended reading for this week's tutorial was very helpful. As the chapter notes from Aboriginal Art by Howard Morphy notes, it's impossible and insufficient to understand the Dreamtime purely from its English sense. In fact, I think that is exactly what I have been doing which has involved trying to summarize it in a few sentences but also ended up limiting my understanding. Like any other religious concept, "the Dreamtime is not something that can be translated by a short phrase: it involves the exploration of Aboriginal ideas about the nature of the world."(1) It involves a complex belief system of ideas intertwining and working together as a whole. And so, by opening up my view and reading this article, at last I was beginning to get a better grasp of what it is about.


Here are a few interesting points I came across:

The Dreaming
The core of the Dreaming is based on the belief about the creation times and ancestral beings from which the rules, culture and Aboriginal people have originate from.

Land

Boomerang rock, Gadjiwok, near Roper Bar, Arnhem Land

Aboriginal people have a strong connection to the land due to its connections to the ancestral beings. This is because the ancestral beings: their actions and as a result of their transformations create different impacts on the form of the landscape:

"Where they crossed a river, rock would appear.."(2)

Art

"The Dreamtime or the Dreaming is crucial to the understanding of Aboriginal art. Art is a means of access to the Dreaming, a way of making contact with this spiritual dimension, and yet in turn it is the product of the Dreaming." (3)

Apart from affecting the landscape, ancestral beings also created ceremonies, sacred objects, songs, dances and paintings and thus, making art in the Aboriginal art have a very strong spiritual significance:

"Since the design of the painting itself thought to have risen out of ancestral activity and since those living today have their origin in conception spirits from the ancestral dimension, art enables the Aboriginal people to participate directly in that world. Paintings and other manifestations of he ancestral past enable people not just to re-enact those events but to make them part of their lives and to unite their experience of the world with that of the ancestral beings." (4)

Representation

Representation of the ancestral past and ancestral beings are often portrayed in figurative ways or more often through objects associated with them. However, as the characters of ancestral beings often transform in shape and such single representation is not able to capture no more than a partial image of who they are, abstract geometric forms are utilized.

Signs and Meanings

Dula Ngurruwuthun Yirritja Moiety, 1976, natural pigments of board.

One of the most prominent features of Aboriginal art is their "capacity to encode a multiplicity of meanings" (Morphy, pg. 97) whereby one element can connote many different meanings.

I think that this links to how other articles have mentioned Aboriginal art as having an "inbuilt mechanism to protect privileged information..[working] in the form of encoded symbolism...[allowing them to] express abstract concepts of cultural power, the inner meanings of which is known only to a select few". (5) This was said to be done as a way for Aboriginal people to defend their beliefs and values which the colonial strategy have attempted to devalue. When I look at an Aboriginal painting, I think this mechanism comes through clearly. It is hard to subtract meaning from what I see often as an abstract image. However, as "Peter Sutton suggest..knowing more about Aboriginal culture might help [us] to understand these works but [while] this cannot guarantee a rich grasp of the art...Sacred understanding largely comes from seeing and particularly from seeing performances and the execution of design, together with listening to the often cryptic glosses offered by elders." (6) Thus, while I might not know much now, I hope that by continuously learning about the Aboriginal art and culture in different ways throughout this semester will at least help me gain a better understanding.

References:
(1) Howard Morphy, "Foundations: Art, Religion and the Dreaming" in Aboriginal Art (London: Phaidon Press, 1998), 68.
(2) Ibid., 69.
(3) Ibid., 67.
(4) Ibid., 91.
(5) Hetti Perkins and Margaret K.C West, eds., One Sun One Moon: Aboriginal Art in Australia (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2007), 36.
(6) 

Sylvia Kleinert and Margo Neale, ed., The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture  (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2000), 23.

* All images from Howard Morphy's Aboriginal Art.