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Yilpinji and the Visual Art of the Warlpiri and Kukatja peoples.

    This exhibition explores the visual tradition relating to yilpinji, the love magic practiced by the Warlpiri and Kukatja people of the central and western deserts of Australia.

    While a rich tradition of love songs, poetry, drama and other literature exists in the English language, as shown by many of the quotations above, this exhibition demonstrates clearly that the theme of love in art is not the exclusive preserve of western art. It is less well known – or perhaps not known at all in some quarters- that here is, in fact, an equally rich and even longer tradition of Indigenous Australian love poetry, song and visual art pertaining to love.

    Love – either socially sanctioned or in some way trangressing normative social or ethical boundaries and values –appears repeatedly as the focus or subject matter of a great deal of both Western and Aboriginal visual art. In European visual arts and literature, both oral and written, the list of art works making reference to love would be as extensive as the theme’s literary manifestations. Anglo-European visual arts frequently express sexual love in all of its iterations, including its sometimes perverse and socially transgressive expressions. Among the multitude of possible examples are the many artistic representations of the ‘interspecies love’ between Leda and the Swan (for example, Leonardo da Vinci’s work of 1507; as well as works by Michelangelo, Raphael and Corregio, inter alia); David’s painting The Love of Paris and Helen (1788); and Gérard’s famous Amor and Psyche, also known as Psyche Receiving the First Kiss of Love. The latter two works are both housed in The Louvre. In more recent times, Picasso’s many depictions of his wives and mistresses; Max Ernst’s 1923 work Long Live Love or: Pays Charmant, in the Saint Louis Art Museum, U.S.; and even more recently still, Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographic oeuvre spring to mind. Of course there are many more examples from both literature and visual dating back to the Egyptians, the Ancient Greeks (for example Sappho’s love) and the Romans and the Italians (most famously, some of Dante’s works).

    Contrastingly, for the Warlpiri and the Kukatja peoples of Australia’s tanami desert region, the primary seat of the emotions is not the heart, but the stomach. Happiness, sadness, rage, anger, desire, concern, anxiety, depression, feelings of protectiveness and responsibility towards others, indeed all the intuitive faculties are thought to be located in one’s miyalu, or stomach. The late Warlpiri linguist and teacher Paddy Patrick Jangala, in his quote at the beginning of this essay, provides evidence of a people in whose lives romance and sexual love play an extremely significant part.

    Yilpinji, is when men sing with other men, to get women to fall in love with them. The women fall in love with them * as a result of being seduced by the yilpinji songs – in this way each man attracts a woman….A man sings love songs to attract the object of his affections, his desired lover, to him and in the same way a woman may also sing yilpinji [in an all women group] to charm a man who is her beloved, and the object of her sexual desire ** with powerful love songs.…‘Waninjawarnu’ [‘from the throat’] is when a man and a woman fall in love with each other, like when two people feel attracted to each other in their inner feelings, in their heart and soul [literally throat and stomach].