Painting Culture

Abstract

Charley Tjaruru Tjungurrayi is to his side.Photo by Fred Myers.moves that were highly publicized (Lockwood 1964; Long 1964a Long , 1964b;; Thomson 1975) and equally controversial (Nathan and Leichleitner 1983; Long 1993).They were settled on government reserves, principally at Papunya in the Northern Territory, where approximately one thousand Aboriginal people of different language groups had come to live in a project of directed assimilation organized by the government's Welfare Branch.At Papunya, for reasons I will discuss more fully, they became dependent on European goods and services and necessarily involved with the cash economy.Like most other Aborigines, these Western Desert people had and still have a rich ceremonial and ritual life in which songs, myths, and elaborate body decorations, as well as constructed objects, are combined in performances that reenact the somewhat mysterious events that gave the world its physical form and social order.Men and women of the Western Desert take great interest in their religious knowledge and its dramatic, sensually rich performance.It was in 1971 at Papunya that a group of Pintupi, Luritja, Arrernte, Anmatyerre, and Warlpiri men began to turn traditional designs involved in ritual and body decoration and cave painting into a new and partly commoditized form-acrylic paintings on flat surfaces (Bardon 1979(Bardon , 1991;; Megaw 1982).Vincent Megaw has pointed out that this art cannot really be described as ''traditional' ' (1982, 203), since it began with interactions with a cultural outsider, Geoff Bardon (see chap-

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