This year, it’s the boast of the Wynne Prize at the Art Gallery of NSW, that “for the first time there are more works by Aboriginal artists than non-Aboriginal artists.” Surely, it’s entirely inappropriate to celebrate a preponderance of one group over another when it’s the artists’ work, not their ethnicity that is being exhibited. With any art competition, let alone one as important as the Wynne, there should be a cast-iron commitment to judging works on merit.
The obsession with statistics does no favours to Yunupingu’s winning work, which struck me – and everybody else I spoke with – as the outstanding piece in the exhibition. The AGNSW should not be allowing any suspicion that the work benefited from some kind of ideological agenda. , shows a dark, explosive mass of roots where tall trees have been wrenched out of the ground. It’s an intimate view of the forest with overtones of expressionist agony, and I’ve never seen anything quite like it. As opposed to those artists who ‘knock off’ a landscape for the Wynne or a portrait for the Archibald, Tonkin is a dedicated landscapist who finds almost all her subject matter in a small corner of the Dandenongs.
It could be argued that the actual portrait is too small for the work to warrant inclusion in the Archibald, but Noel McKenna has just picked up the Darling Prize at the National Portrait Gallery, for a painting in which the subject, Bill Nuttall, is but a tiny figure, posing with his horses in a landscape. Today the definition of portraiture has been expanded so far the boundaries are no longer visible.
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