Who's Dreaming Now?

(c) Morgan Thomas

Today it is almost a standard form of approval to describe an artist's
work as 'provocative', 'subversive' or 'confronting'. A certain style of
radicalism in art has come to be institutionalised as part of the everyday
currency of contemporary culture and criticism. Offering little in the way
of resistance to the political or cultural structures which shape our
experience, this style of radicalism does not finally interfere with the
imperative of carrying on 'business as usual'. It seems able to live in
relatively peaceful co-existence with the mood of complacent conservatism,
or 'enterprising' self-interest, which has been in the ascendant in this
country for some time now.

In this context, what I find interesting and even mysterious about the
work of Richard Bell is that it really is confronting. It is provocative.
To encounter it can be an unsettling and discomforting experience (let's
note the name of a recent show featuring Bell's work held at Fire-Works
Gallery in Brisbane late last year: 'Discomfort: Relationships within
Aboriginal Art').

What is it that gives Bell's work its unusual political bite? It's
tempting to equate the confrontational character of the work with the
non-negotiable, 'out-there' political stance that it frequently seems to be
advancing - and particularly to see this confrontation in terms of Bell's
liking for statements which he acknowledges are deliberately 'inflammatory'
in their formulation.

We might recall, for example, that Bell is the Aboriginal artist who
proclaims: 'Aboriginal Art - it's a White Thing.' (This statement appears
as the subtitle to a recent essay by Bell entitled 'Bell's Theorem'; it
also forms the main text in Bell's Theorem, a painting from 2002.) We could
note the patently incendiary - yet also cryptic and sometimes literally
encrypted - phrases like 'Kill Mabo' and 'Hide Ya Kidz' that Bell comes up
with in some of his paintings. Or, in a rather different vein, we could
think of one part of the four-part work called Worth Exploring? (2002): a
blown-up version of a carefully composed statutory declaration in which
Bell points out the illegality of the white occupation of Australia, taking
this illegality as the premise for the claim that everything subsequent to
this occupation is ultra vires (illegal, outside the law), and drawing the
consequence that all non-Aboriginal Australians must be counted as
criminals and all Aboriginal people recognised as the victims of crime. We
could also think of a new series of paintings, where Bell quotes from the
comic-strip-style paintings of Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein to comment on
attitudes to black-white sexual relationships, broaching what is a taboo or
no-go area even now.

There is no doubt that the difficulty of Bell's work, certainly for white
audiences, has a lot to do with the enjoyment Bell seems to take in coming
up with the most provocative formulations possible, along with his evident
lack of participation in talk of social cohesion and reconciliation. We
might well speak of a kind of ultra-Aboriginalism being voiced in Bell's
work, an ultra-Aboriginalism which is confronting precisely insofar as it
lays down a law which refuses to accept or 'admit' a great many of those
(white) people who encounter it.

Thus, when I look at the statutory declaration in Worth Exploring?, I
could say that it effectively situates me 'ultra vires' - outside the law.
The text of the declaration makes it difficult for me to identify with the
political and legal position that it articulates. At the same time, in
reading it, I am somehow put on the spot.

Something is going on here which seems to take us beyond the obvious kinds
of provocation that I noted a moment ago, beyond the 'inflammatory' shock
tactics which Bell so often employs - important as those shock tactics are.
We perhaps start to see how the very posture of intransigence that Bell
generally adopts in his work opens up the possibility of a radically
different kind of relationship with its audience, a radically different
form of communication.

In these more complicated terms, Bell's work is confronting not so much
because of its resistance to, or refusal of, its audience, or a large part
of its audience, but rather because of the way it brings that audience face
to face with a resistance, a knot, at the very heart of the history of
black-white relations in Australia. From this point of view, the radicality
of Bell's work lies in the directness with which it addresses us. (Think of
the title of a new essay by Bell: 'Wot chew gun ado?') If Bell again and
again forces us to encounter that 'difficulty' - that injustice, that
violence - at the basis of Australian history, it is surely because, for
Bell, without a recognition of this, there can be no relation, no
communication, no 'dialogue' whatsoever.

In this way the absolute and overriding concern of Bell's work, the demand
for an Aboriginal justice, comes to imply an appeal to what we might call,
with or without Einsteinian overtones, a principle of relativity- that is,
an appeal to a sense of human community and interrelatedness. With Bell,
the absolutism of the demand is intimately bound up with the relativity of
the appeal: each supports and echoes the other. In Worth Exploring?, for
example, it is precisely in the name of 'civilisation' that Bell sets down
his judgement concerning the criminality of the Europeans who colonised
Aboriginal lands - and of those who come after them and continue to profit
from this criminal act.

We begin to see that what distinguishes Bell's work is not in fact some
blunt, full-frontal style of approach. In fact, in a strange way, we could
say that its capacity to confront us depends on a kind of balancing act
that it always involves, a certain elusiveness (rather like that of the
figures in his 'Shape Shifters' series) - there is a characteristic
reliance on a certain twist or series of twists.

We could think, for example, of Bell's use of appropriation in the
confusingly named Untitled (1978), a work (in fact made in 2002) which
consists of two digital prints on canvas. This is a work which wears its
sources on its sleeve: the ghost gums and golden light leave no doubt that
we're looking at one of Hans Heysen's pastoral idylls. At the same time,
when we see how the same Heysen image is replicated - and subtly altered -
in both prints (one picking out yellow accents, the other picking out
pinks), we also know we're looking at something very like the work of
Australia's key exponent of appropriation art, Imants Tillers. And indeed
what Bell has done is to reproduce an untitled work made by Tillers in 1978
(hence the title) - a work which was by chance destroyed after it was
bought by the National Gallery of Australia.

What happens when Bell adds another link to this chain of appropriation?
It's difficult not to see this work as making a satirical comment on the
way in which white Australian culture fetishises and appropriates the
dreaming (or marking) of land-ties in Aboriginal Desert painting. When
these panels were hung last year above a dining setting decked out with
Aboriginal designs and motifs, they looked like a lacerating riposte to the
Desert paintings decorating the board rooms and lobbies of Australia's
corporate giants. It's as if Bell, in turn, has chosen to take a benevolent
interest in the colonial dreamscapes born of a white 'mythology' (just as
Tillers' non-existent 'original' of this work is also now, partly thanks to
Bell, the stuff of myth).

Yet Untitled (1978) might equally be taken as calling on Heysen and
Tillers to add to the history of an Aboriginal painting, or dreaming, of
the land, bringing them to attest to its endurance in the face of
colonisation, inviting them to be passing figures in this landscape. With
its problematic relationship to the Heysen tradition, the painting of
Albert Namatjira is then, perhaps, the real ghost haunting this work.

Bell engages in a different kind of balancing act in Yam (2001), a
collaboration with the renowned Western Desert painter Michael Nelson
Jagamara.Interestingly, this collaboration arises from the fact that the
story of the yam extends across a great stretch of the Australian continent
- from Jagamara's country in Central Australia to Bell's in the east. While
it may surprise us to see Bell painting in a seemingly traditional mode,
what's interesting is the way he inflects the large-format figuration of
traditional motifs favoured by Jagamara in his recent work. In contrast to
the bright colours which Jagamara generally uses, here the figure of the
yam is not differentiated by colour; the whole work is a monochrome,
painted in a sobre grey. Using a technique Bell frequently adopts in his
paintings, the yam-figure is formed out of gravel which is glued to the
surface of the canvas and then painted over. It is almost a figure in
relief, one that is not that easy to see unless you are looking at the
painting side-on or in certain kinds of lighting.

With its subdued, monochrome mode of presentation, Bell's and Jagamara's
Yam refuses the European 'dream' of an Aboriginal art that is inoffensively
'spiritual' and decorative - it thus refuses the (white) mythological
creation of an Aboriginality that would fill up the void in Australian
identity rather than questioning it. At the same time, the yam which gives
this work its title seems to encapsulate the Aboriginal presence or voice
that Bell seeks out in his work. Like a real yam, this yam is a partly
concealed, subterranean presence - it is literally radical. In the way it
buckles the surface of the picture and the way it branches out to fill the
space, it is at once irruptive and almost infinitely extensive. Seen in
this light, this painting perhaps becomes, in an understated way, a
communication of the dream of Aboriginal justice and the desire for a
genuine 'civilisation' of Australian culture.

By now it should be clear that the dreams we are thinking of here
intersect and collide. The difficult balancing act that Bell performs in
his work traces their manifold connections - and at the same time puts
their relation in question. This is the radicality of his work - its appeal
and its demand.

Morgan Thomas

Brisbane, August 2003

Detail - Eddie 2003

for information about works, please contact Bellas Gallery - bellasgallery@ozemail.com.au