Title

Piwi.

Author

Kentish, Duncan and Downs, Jarinyanu David .

Source

[Not applicable]

Publication date

1988

Type

About the work

Language

English

Country of context

Australia

Full text

Piwi.
by Duncan Kentish and Jarinyanu David Downs

Piwi is a powerful man from the Ngarrangkarni, the Walmajarri word for that dimension generally known to English-speaking Australians as The Dreaming. This central but quite elusive concept refers in part to a time of spatial and social innocence, when the features of the country were still being defined and named, and languages and patterns of living were being established. The Ngarrangkarni is much more than history, however, since the creator beings and human characters involved are still resident as potent forces at all the major sites associated with their actions. And in a special sense, each key moment of the many creation dramas, although clearly evidenced in geological form, is still unfolding - still being incarnated in human descendants from time to time, in ceremony and dance and in everyday states of being. Moreover, contemporary reality, for all its appearance of modernity and change, is essentially governed by the immutable deeper fixities behind these primal events and patterns.

Piwi embodies a complexity of sometimes conflicting aspects: Creator, Beneficent Being, Trickster — defining right behaviour through negative example, and Demiurge. This etching concerns Piwi as Demiurge at Jilpinu, though his actions here do reference his earlier Creator role at Kunayuna, where in the context of an outpouring of flatulence, he gave birth to Jarinyanu's spirit. Kunayuna is on the eastern side of the Great Sandy Desert of Western Australia, over 100 kilometres south-south-west of Balgo. From here Piwi journied west-south-west to Jilpinu.

The image depicts the primordial defecation by Piwi, over a group of people gathered together for an initiation of young boys. For a long time prior to this event, Piwi had ceased to defecate and had consequently stored up a vast quantity of faeces so that his abdomen was extremely distended. When he defecated over the gathering, the deluge of excrement appalled everybody with its disgusting smell, and it ushered in the further miseries of headaches and colds.

Jarinyanu describes Piwi as being from the Ngarrangkarni –“like a God”. He existed before Noah and Jesus — although these two are also said to be Ngarrangkarni beings. Like Noah, Piwi had many wives and sons and daughters-in-law and these too were entombed in the deluge of excrement, crouched in foetal position with their arms over their bowed heads. Later Piwi images extend the Noah parallel further, showing these family members being saved - placed in an arc around his shoulders and head.

The image focuses on the act of defecation and events immediately after, when the mixture of excrement and humanity is simultaneously being stirred in a vast circle by Piwi, flung east and west, and in the process, being cleansed by the flood of Noah and the Light of Jesus. The people are described as being the ancestors of Mankind generally; Aboriginal, European and all other races. The eastern portion became the Tingari men, who thereafter left spirit children throughout Australia to incarnate from time to time as Aboriginal people. The western portion was flung overseas to foreign lands to become the ancestors of the rest of humanity.

The logical structure of Jarinyanu’s explanation involves a poetic resolution of omnipotent reaction to forbidden behaviour: People of the Dreaming break certain rules while participating in the initiation of young boys. In punishment, everyone is then subjected to universal ‘initiation’ by primal deluge. During this catastrophe, they are ‘drowned’ and then ‘reborn’ by being stirred into life and finally cast out into the world as the forebears of modern man. The agency of ‘death’ is excrement, although this also doubles as a metaphor for the ‘blood’ of ‘re-birth’. The excrement brings horror, sickness, and suffering and is equated with sin — here conceptualised as disgusting, dark, imprisoning, and essentially physiological in nature. It is being ‘washed away’ by the cleansing imagery associated with the Biblical Dreamings of the Flood of Noah and the Light of Jesus.

This etching and the painting it developed from, shows a central darkened circle which is the anus of Piwi. The surrounding darkened ring represents the deluge of faeces rolling outwards and engulfing everybody, represented by the innermost circle of people trapped up to their waists. The next circle shows people half engulfed and half free, floating on excrement that has broken up into radiating spokes. The third circle represents people cleansed of the excrement. Beyond this point the deluge has now transformed into water, light and humanity at large, represented by masses of swirling lines extending east and west. The smaller horizontal lobes are simply design features particular to this etching, and not the subject of description.

The inspirational origins of the work are kaleidoscopic, but in a certain sense, it is still totally traditional. In Jarinyanu’s view of the world, mankind is a single unity, with particular nations and tribes being but local representations of the wider ‘family’. The common possession of Biblical Dreamings underpins this universal relatedness. Thus the collective Dreaming-history of man, inevitably has local expression through analogous Stories, or even particular sites. This view of Jarinyanu's also has a certain general currency in the region. For example, south of Noonkanbah there is a Noah's Ark site. Here, it is believed, people will one day again be saved from a general deluge by a giant boat: a focus that is perhaps unsurprising for a region of climatic extremes and tremendous floods.

To a significant degree, the particular catalyst stimulating the articulation of Jarinyanu's world view, was his encounter with racial, cultural and religious diversity in Adelaide during late 1987. Here he met with Asian, African and Aboriginal friends of various traditions and attended a Jewish Bar Mitzvah. But the visual power of the image comes from Jarinyanu's intensity of focus, in telescoping a range of apparently unrelated ideas and events into a single Dreaming-scape. Here we gain a rare insight into the artist's poetic mastery of religious syncretism; in being able to marry into a single vision some of the great Stories of the Biblical and Aboriginal traditions. His talent here demonstrates the essentially dynamic capabilities of the Dreaming, as being basically a system of logic, rather than simply a storehouse of legend and orthodox belief; not so much a local history, but a particular way of ordering the totality of experience and contemporary culture.

Jarinyanu describes his Ancestor/Creator Piwi as his ‘Boss’. He identifies strongly with him and explains many of his own behaviours and physiological conditions as attributable to qualities and behaviours first exhibited by Piwi in the Ngarrangkarni. The relationship is stronger than simply that of ancestor — descendant, and at times borders on a shared identity, with Jarinyanu sometimes referring to Piwi’s exploits as having happened to himself. As he puts the matter; “I'm Ngarrangkarni meself!”.

© Duncan Kentish and Jarinyanu David Downs, 1988.

Last Updated

26 Sep 2020