June Walkutjukurr Richards

In the development of remote avant-garde aesthetics, June Walkutjukurr Richards was a pioneer. Chapter 3 follows the development of her bilingual and biliterary aesthetics. Her early command of the painting of Ngaanyatjarra place-making history turned dramatically to a radical use of inscribing words alone on canvas; words as art that are equally of art, bespeaking an Aboriginal counterhistory to the Western Desert art movement. The opposite of anomie (or the rapid social change associated with modernization), her work instead demonstrates a present-continuous of a colonial history that is in no sense over or past to those who live its effects in the place of the “remote” today.