Black Boldly Steps Out Of The Shadows And Into The Spotlight
The Age
Wednesday February 20, 2008
ALICK TIPOTI
Malungu, Nellie Castan Gallery, 12 River Street, South Yarra, until February 23, nelliecastangallery.com BLACK IN FASHION: MOURNING TO NIGHT NGV Australia, until August and, from February 29 to August, also at the NGV International, www.ngv.vic.gov.au IN EUROPEAN pictorial tradition, black is for backgrounds. From the 15th century, painters discovered the benefits of a flat backdrop of inky dark. In portraiture, the modelling of the figure can be thrown into powerful relief by a deep background, with a suggestion of infinite space absorbing the shades and edges. The blackness casts the light skin forward and enhances the presence of the sitter.This wonderful atmospheric convenience arose because Europeans have fair skin. The works of Alick Tipoti at Nellie Castan Gallery remind us that the great illusionistic system of chiaroscuro makes little visual sense if you have dark skin.Working in the medium of linocut, Tipoti has a choice of whether the figures are black or white. Given that he's a Torres Strait Islander who represents traditional stories of his country, the figures have to be black.Tipoti's large works on paper are sumptuously ornamented, with multiple figures in ritual or narrative acts, rhythmically disposed among waves of tiny pulsing decorative curves. The background is a graphic bed of natural harmonic energy, seething and settled at the same time and giving vibrancy to the flat forms of humans and animals. The compositions have a horizontal orientation, so that the people and creatures are distributed in a kind of narrative progression, with lots of small detail embedded in the patterns.The figures are naked and the male genitals take on powerful graphic exaggerations, as if extending their potency in accord with the natural environment of surging rhythms, in rich and rapid convulsion. The black members dance with the surrounding decorative currents, as if humans and nature mutually insinuate life energies into one another's form. In a small work, Koedal Augadaalaig, a powerful and conspicuously male figure in the middle is flanked by two somewhat lesser figures whose genitals are connected as an enormous snake. Their bodies jointly spawn the snake or are a symbolic expression of the head and tail of the snake; or perhaps they are individual beings whose reproductive forces are linked or owned by the snake. It is as if the snake has turned them into females and has penetrated them both. A large crocodile superintends this trinity, apparently as the alternative totem for the central man to choose between.In European tradition, black isn't always the background but can assume centre stage, as in Tipoti's figures. For example, John Bodin's Urban Abstraction at Anita Traverso Gallery is a photograph of a factory painted black. The shiny edifice sparkles in the oblique light, with its green mesh grilles providing a bright anomaly. One of them has fallen to the ground, where green spray-paint on the pavement also lights up in the late sunshine. It's a fine photographic inversion of ordinary sights.But apart from the indigenous use of black - and rare examples such as Bodin's - black is the negative form in European visual language, while white is the positive. An exhibition at the NGV,Black in Fashion: Mourning to Night, allows us to extend these speculations beyond the picture and into real life.The exhibition can be seen at Federation Square, and a further component at the NGV International begins at the end of the month. The rich historical ideas informing the show can already be judged by the splendid catalogue, with its wonderful essays by scholars and curators at the NGV.With ample historical material, the authors consistently observe the paradoxes of black clothing: how it's both chic and dismal, seductive and deathly, radical and conservative, glamorous and puritanical.The only element missing is the question of race. Maybe black is flattering for Eurasians because they are mostly pale. Indigenous people with dark skin all around the world tend to prefer brightly coloured clothing: think of African textiles.Europeans, clad in black - perhaps with a white collar - can become an oil painting all by themselves, with their skin seen at its most luminous. In some female outfits from the 1930s, the shoulders and back are exposed. The frisson gained by the chromatic relief - promoting the luscious colours of the skin - must have struck prudish people as almost obscene, as the black sheds wanton lamplight on the fair flesh by contrast.robert.nelson@artdes.monash.edu.au
© 2008 The Age
