The Graveyards of Culture

Poor Dad -- travelling with me inevitably means getting dragged to any number of museums. (I am, predictably, less interested in geography than I am in the human response to it.) These places are like kryptonite to his hyper-accelerated attention span.

Looked at a lot of aboriginal artwork, though, which is utterly opaque to my untrained eye -- the plaques tell stories of incredible, epic battles, and all I see are collections of dots arranged in elaborate patterns. The style's interesting enough, though -- reminiscent of mandalas, assembling fairly detailed images from much smaller pieces -- and something else it took me a minute to identify: comic books; Andy Warhol's blown-up images of comic book panels are arranged in much the same way. I wonder if he was aware of the similarity. Probably. He was a pretty smart guy.

Was talking with another director a while ago, about my frustration with how audiences seem to be so much more preoccupied with stuff they're *supposed* to like, rather than stuff that they *do*. He made a good comparison with gypsy music and Johannes Brahms; that Brahms took what the dirt-poor guy on the street was playing, removed the improvisational elements, arranged it for a European orchestra -- in other words, removed everything that made it gypsy -- and suddenly it was a European phenomenon. People couldn't groove on it until everything unique was gone.

Similar thing here, with aboriginal artwork: their greatest painter was European-trained, and did his work in watercolor, removing the broad, symbolic strokes of tribal storytelling with western realism and detail. The form couldn't be taken seriously until it wasn't the form anymore. Bizarre.

Not that his work was bad, by any stretch of the imagination. It's hard to imagine *any* artist here producing work that wasn't compelling, with this landscape for inspiration. Speaking of comic books, all of the paintings here look like every sci-fi world I've ever seen -- that strange, barren, alien environment that characterizes Krypton or H.G. Wells' Mars. No wonder deserts are where religions are born.