Transculturation in the Painting of Idris Murphy - European and Aboriginal Dialogues
 

The ‘cultural convergence’ between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australia that was initially called for by Bernard Smith in his 1980 Boyer lecture for the creation of a sense of national Australian identity, finds resonance in the interplay of philosophic and aesthetic discourses expressed in the work of Australian artist Idris Murphy.

Murphy comments, “Of course I’m not Indigenous but I love the idea of this great wonderful European tradition, which I belong to, fusing with the Indigenous art – happening right under my nose, in my lifetime! And I can see that as a whole new sort of language base for contemporary painting.”

Art historian, Terry Smith formally acknowledged this convergence in 1991 to have occurred in thecontemporary work of Australian artists and that of Aboriginal artists in the mediums of bark and acrylic.More recently, Professor of Art History at Melbourne University, Ian McLean, has intricately evaluatedon this contemporaneity. McLean now explores this cross-cultural interaction through the lens of the ‘transcultural’.

McLean explains, …there is no single Indigenous or Western art style, but many constantly evolving ones responding to, and dealing with, changing situations. Likewise because art is the currency of transculturation there is no exclusively Western or Aboriginal aesthetic principle. Rather the poetry of feeling that produces art is an innate human faculty not bound by cultural mores, and artists, whatever their traditions, are adept or interacting with other ways of making and thinking about art, thus artists are alert to the new and the different; like the canary in the mine, art is an early warning system of the new and the other (McLean 2016: 247-248)

Idris Murphy elaborates his aesthetic and philosophic discourse of ‘transculturation’ through the medium of landscape painting interweaving the complex metaphysical currents associated with ‘connection to place’ and ‘being’ that are informed by a number of sources. Foremost is that of the Aboriginal Dreaming first elaborated by anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner (1905-1981) in his famous essay, ‘The Dreaming’ written in 1953 and published in his White man got no Dreaming:

The Dreaming is that of a sacred heroic time long ago when man and nature came to be as they are, but neither ‘time’ nor ‘history’ as we understand them is involved in this meaning ...Time is also, in a sense, part of the present. One cannot ‘fix’ the Dreaming to time: it was, and is, everywhen ... It was an age when the ancestors did marvellous things that men can no longer do ...The Dreaming is ... a kind of charter of things that still happen: and a kind of logos or principle of order that transcends everything significant for Aboriginal man. For traditional Aboriginal artists, an understanding of the nature of their relationship to ‘country’ and the Dreaming is vital to how they see themselves, how they lead their lives and what they paint. (Stanner 1979: 23-24)

For Murphy ideas of relevance from this Indigenous context include the holistic and immersive experience intrinsic to its understanding, notions of both the moral and spiritual relatedness to landscape or ‘country’ and concepts of timelessness, dynamism and agency.

Of parallel importance to Murphy, are the writings of 20th century, Austrian-born, Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber. Significantly are those proposed in his book I and Thou. In the catalogue to his 2009 exhibition I and Thou Murphy writes,

By quoting extensively from Buber’s book I and Thou, I hope to elucidate his approach to confronting the visual – and show how this text might be useful in considering encounters with the land, generally, as well as with painting. His depictions of the difference between the truth of a painting and the truth about a painting become particularly significant.

Buber’s writings have been a way of continuing my assessment of European paradigms in painting and have added to my encounter with Indigenous art. Buber’s ideas which resonate with how Murphy sees the world and how he ‘sees’ his painting is that “everything – picture, and movement, species and type, law and number, [are] indivisibly united…”. The primitive, brutal simplification of landscape form in the paintings of New Zealand artist Colin McCahon has also been an enduring influence on Murphy, especially how he integrated notions of both Christian and Maori spirituality. Murphy’s expressive vision and ambition for painting finds resonance with what McCahon saw in the land,

“I saw something logical, orderly and beautiful belonging to the land and not yet its people. Not yet understood or communicated, not even really yet invented. My work has largely been to communicate this vision and to invent the way to see it.”

The connection to landscape that Murphy tries to express in his work, also takes inspiration from ideas proposed by Gerard Manly Hopkins. In particular are the explanatory writings of his invented category of experience ‘Inscape’ which he uses to ‘personify’ all of Nature’s subjects. These include ‘transcendence’, ‘the soul of art’, ‘Plato’s philosophy of the ideal real world’, ‘the charged presence of the Creator in all forms of creation’ and unified complex of ideas associated with the expression of ‘the inner essence of an object’.

Writing in Murphy’s catalogue for the exhibition I and Thou, Glen Barkley observes that Murphy’s practice sits between the Indigenous tradition of ‘inside’ and the European of ‘outside’. He doesn’t see the landscape from within as in the holistic Dreaming expressive tradition of Indigenous art, nor in the European tradition, observing the landscape in an objective way.

Barkley explains, Murphy’s work is somewhere between these two ideas, or trying to. It is the struggle of trying to find a space within which to work that makes it interesting and worth pursuing.

Murphy plays at the edges of reality and questions boundaries that separate. What is real? What is not? In the mesmerising space that he constructs, he combines both abstract and figurative elements in fields of sensuous, vibrating colour that synonymously suggest forms that are emerging and/or disappearing. The solidity of the real world is questioned. Interconnectivity seems imminent. Edges seem to dissolve. It’s tantalizing viewing. The complexity of the layered surface reveals a subtle process of creation.

“It’s mysterious. I do what the painting suggests or gives me. Its an interactive process.” The impact of the image is compelling, creating ‘a poetry of feeling’. It rewards the patient viewer with Eureka moments as shifts in perception occur over time. Collisions of colour conspire with spontaneous brushwork to produce fleeting moments of striking beauty.

Murphy’s formal aesthetic, while influenced by the Western painting tradition also draws from that of Indigenous Australian artists. In particular, the spacious painterly fields and figurative abstraction of Kimberley artist Rover Thomas and the bright, dramatic colour palettes and landscape view of southeast Arnhem Land artist, Ginger Riley Munduwalawala. Like them he uses figurative depictions of landscape symbolically. For Murphy in recent times, the tree has become an increasingly important element that he sketches onto his surfaces. As if to recall Buber’s entreaty to understand the interconnectivity of the universe:

‘The tree is no impression, no play of my imagination, no value depending on my mood; but is bodied all over against me and has to do with me, as I with it – only in a different way.’

Dr Marie Geissler

Honorary Associate Fellow Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts at the University of Wollongong

Essay from Empyrean: scattering of stars exhibition catalogue

2019