Customer Reviews

Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book should be in every library collection. It is also a handsome volume for the enthusiast or interested person.It is comprehensive, and contemporary.

Gorgeous colour plates, fully annotated.

The book was mostly print with small dull pictures. Only one was of the fabulous rock painting (and they left a colored measure stick in the frame). They mostly showed photographs of things in museum collections and sketches and drawings done by observers of the natives. I kept feeling a sense of condescension toward the culture and art work of these peoples. They left out the colorful, exciting dream cave paintings which I've seen elsewhere and wanted to see more of.

With over 300 illustrations and 155 color plates, coupled with in-depth analysis of Australian history and culture, this book provides an excellent overview of Aboriginal art. There are great examples of bark paintings, sculptures and shields, in addition to the more recent acrylic paintings.

The essays by five different authors/curators take a respectful, appreciative and knowledgeable look at the worlds oldest art and some of the artists who are still following its imperatives. Though, as Peter Sutton explains, it is not so much art as it is a religion made visible. The paintings are also living maps of the natural and psychic world of the people who made (and continue to make) them. There are many fine samplings included here, both contemporary and historical.

Peter Sutton starts with an explanation of the power-filled ground of existence, the Dreaming, (or the Dreamtime) and moves on to define the Dreamings, who are the Ancestral Beings who inhabit both our present world and the Dreamtime. The Dreamings are known by their names and they are represented by particular sets of symbols and signs and patterns. Thus, each painting is a story to be read. It is a mythology and a history of the Ancestral Beings, their gifts, their travels and their experiences. Well, sort of. It's more complicated than that, but the authors of these essays dive into the subject and try to clarify it for non-anthropologists. What needs no clarification is the beauty of the paintings themselves; they communicate directly with their vibrant colors, energetic forms and sure lines, even if one doesn't know the esoteric significance of these elements.

This book came out in 1988, when this art was just beginning to find an appreciative audience here in the US. There may have been advances--in the evolution of the art and in photographic reproduction--since then, but this book remains a sound introduction to the Australian landscape and mythology, and the fine artists who express both so vividly.