WITITJ HEALING

In fact, this is the Aboriginal art exhibition of the year, though not for the reasons its organisers and various enthusiastic supporters believe. It is the show that marks, for the most highly regarded art studio in north Australia, the crossing of a crucial, elusive aesthetic line.

Ganambarr, 36, is the most prominent member of the new generation of bark painters working for Buku Larrnggay Mulka art centre in Yirrkala, at the very tip of northeast Arnhem Land. He lives on the remote homeland of Gangan, one of the key religious centres for the region's Yolngu clans. Yet it is this tradition-soaked artist who now overthrows, in these new pieces, almost all the rigid conventions that control the structure of his people's ceremonial art.

Unsurprisingly, there is a mood of excitement surrounding Ganambarr and his work in the support camps of the Aboriginal art realm, where the premium on novelty is high, and the desire for radical breakthroughs, for work with contemporary accents, burns unquenched.

Hence the zest in the catalogue essay written by Buku Larrnggay's long-time co-ordinator, Will Stubbs, at once the animator and the chief explainer of Ganambarr's unfolding career. Stubbs counts no fewer than nine "important innovations" in the artist's work, from painting on both sides of the bark surface, to shaping and carving barks and memorial poles, to laminating bark layers on bark, Frank Stella-style. John McDonald, art critic for The Sydney Morning Herald, takes up this theme in both an essay for the exhibition and a hagiographic review, arguing that Ganambarr's innovations have been completely "instinctual" and the artist has "virtually reinvented bark painting". The best for barks, it follows, is yet to come, and the golden age for the medium is today, and tomorrow, close ahead. In case visitors to Annandale miss the eager voice of establishment approval, discreet little nudging labels have been affixed to various pieces, announcing that the National Gallery of Australia has bought them for its collection. Bill Gregory, Annandale's director, and a long-term supporter of Arnhem Land art,

likes to compare Ganambarr's use of square and circle to themes in the work of Henri Matisse.

We are in heady terrain here: dreams of greatness surround the young artist from obscure Gangan. What, though, is the precise nature of the appeal? There is no doubting its originality: Ganambarr is the first well-known bark painter to strip away surface segments from his pieces, leaving a bare wood underlayer exposed: he cuts out animal heads and leaves them protruding, he cuts deep into his poles to emphasise their painted lines. He is a majestic draughtsman: his bird figures have a grace that matches the finesse and control of his cross-hatching and his sinuous structural shapes.

But how, for all its striking qualities, to appraise this art, which operates on the edges of a strict, hieratic tradition? How should outsiders judge it? Buku Larrnggay's co-ordinators are careful to assure us that Ganambarr's work, for all its radicalism, does not offend the sensibilities of senior Yolngu ritual leaders. And its address to Western eyes and minds is coloured, of course, by its attendant aura of sacred force and mystery, as much as by its startling formal explorations. But the first and last assessment must be visual: the impact on the eye of each piece, bark panel or towering, sculpted memorial pole: the effect of colours, patterns, figures and clan designs. What do we see?

Ganambarr's previous exhibition at Annandale, the "Young Guns 2" group show in April 2008, showed smaller, more intimate works: the double-sided barks were full of elegance, they had the quality of medieval portable altars. Even the larger pieces concentrated in almost loving detail on the totemic animals and clan designs. In this year's show, by contrast, that static element is gone, the swirl and rush of patterns is fierce: the influence of Ganambarr's close relation by marriage, Djambawa Marawili, the most experimental bark painter of the older generation, whose works are awash with tidal energy, seems palpable. The palette has changed as well: a bleak suite of grey and dark brown ochres predominates. The overall effect is one of amorphous turbulence: the sense of birds and snake-forms flying, writhing, coming into being from the background flux of dots and lozenge patterns is very strong. Fluidity, perpetual change, rather than stability and geometric clarity: emergence, rather than certainty. An intellectual project, a testing of formal possibilities, more than an expression of religious conviction, deeply felt. The show contains a handful of obvious experiments, like Dhangultji, 2009, a bird's head resembling a coathanger, or the "waisted" pinched-in barks. But the most alluring pieces are the ones cast in Ganambarr's former idiom: the stately Gangan pole that approximates the style of the homeland's presiding elder statesman, Gawirrin Gumana, or the wave-like Baraltja, May 2008, both, significantly, among the oldest pieces in the exhibition.

What lies behind this rapid artistic evolution? Ganambarr is not given to expressive interviews. Those who speak for him insist his innovations stem from his own promptings: "I only know what comes from my mind." But there is another way to read the shift in the painting style at Buku Larrnggay. Aboriginal art theorist Howard Morphy suggests that innovation, in northeast Arnhem Land, is influenced by "how art, as a means of acting in the world, is used". The art is an ambassador of Yolngu values; it is also a commercial product, sensitive to market desires and trends. And it bears the impress of its art centre: the influence of Buku Larrnggay's two co-ordinators, Andrew Blake, a celebrated wood sculptor, and Will Stubbs, a lover of cultural complexity, seems visible in the grain of Ganambarr's work. Yolngu bark painters at Yirrkala and its surrounds are keenly aware of the wider indigenous art realm: over the past decade they have watched closely as traditional forms in the nearby, rival art centre of Maningrida have been on the march. The international celebrity that surrounds Maningrida's chief art star, John Mawurndjul, and his extended family derives largely from the shift of their work away from old-fashioned figural barks, and towards intricate geometric designs, akin to western abstractions in their impact on the eye.

This trend in Maningrida art towards a contemporary look and great market success has been followed, at slower pace at Buku Larrnggay, where two broad currents have emerged in the past few years: an intensely elegant, fine, conservative style, perhaps best incarnated by the winner of this year's Telstra bark painting prize, Rerrkirrwanga Munungurr, and a rougher, wilder school, free and experimental: its chief exemplars are Malaluba Gumana and Nyapanyapa Yunupingu, and, of course, Ganambarr himself. New forms of art-making have also been emphasised: print-making, chisel-carving, even video. There is, in this quest for modern, contemporary accents, not just a drive to meet the market's tastes, but a lurking conviction that progress and adaptation in traditional art forms is desirable, that earlier work was less polished.

This idea has hardened into orthodoxy in some critical circles, even as our increased acquaintance with mid-century barks -- such as the masterpieces in the recently exhibited Thomson and Arnott's collections -- makes it almost impossible to sustain.

In fact, a counter-history of Arnhem Land art, contesting this "progress narrative", can now be written, and by chance strong evidence for it was on view last month at Sotheby's where a rich collection of early barks from northwest and northeast Arnhem Land was displayed.

Works from this time horizon hold an inward force and coherence, they embody a composed, distinctive world. Contemporary barks, fashioned for the Western purchaser, have a far higher degree of obvious visual sophistication. They aim for the pleasing shimmer of optical paintings: they achieve the look, so reminiscent of Western minimalism, that holds sway across the high-end Aboriginal art market today.

But there is a cost. The painting tradition in Yirrkala and its fringing homelands dates back through times of great cultural tensions, when the art form mirrored those tensions in precise style: it accommodated constant exploration, in themes, and in emphasis, while yet remaining held within a strict formal envelope. The most compelling northeast Arnhem Land bark paintings have been precisely those works on the radiant edge-line between cultures that operate as doors between worlds while preserving the rigour of the old designs.

When the straitjacket is relaxed, or jettisoned, charm and novelty enter the art form, its austerity and grace dissolves. Is the old mediating role still the task of bark painting? Can it remain so? Is there a future once constraints are broken? Such questions lie at the heart of indigenous art-making today. They are also close to the heart of Ganambarr's present show. Hence its pivotal importance in the tale of Australian art, and the meeting between Aboriginal and mainstream worlds.

Time will sieve and sift this body of work, and will render its slow verdict: but for today's gallery-goers, a walk through the airy spaces of Annandale, filled as they are with demanding, domineering art, is a walk with resonance. At times one feels oneself in a kind of post-colonial tragedy, where an artist of great traditional strength and poise has been lured across a shadow line, and towards the temptations of experiment for its own sake.