One of the most striking pieces of art I’ve seen lately is this Australian Aboriginal bark painting of a fish, from the Northern Territories, made around 1920. One expert noticed how it resembled Aboriginal rock art–images scratched onto rocks by the inhabitants of western Arnhem Land, similar to Native American petroglyphs–but what struck me was the way the fish’s simple profile is cut away to reveal skeleton and guts. There’s no precise cutaway boundary; this is no textbook cross section. Rather this style–common to the tribes in Arnhem Land–expresses a vision of a living being in which inside and outside are not seen as separate entities. Photographic realism is sacrificed to a deeper one–the fish’s insides are what one sees when one cleans it, but they’re also what make the living fish’s outsides possible.
