Aboriginal Art John Citizen: Interiors
The Gordon Bennett retrospective, which opened at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2007 and toured to the Queensland Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of Western Australia, concluded with a selection of Bennett’s abstract paintings. The exhibition’s curator, Kelly Gellatly, explained these in terms of respite from the ‘postcolonial project’ that had driven Bennett throughout his artistic career. The abstract works begged the question, however, what will come next? Bennett’s exhibition at Melbourne’s Sutton Gallery earlier this year provided the answer—an emphatic return to his Home Décor series.
It could be said that Bennett had never entirely put aside the postcolonial project. The abstract paintings, while giving him relief in the form of neutral visual material and the pleasure of mark making, were still legible in terms of the issues that his work had always addressed. They seemingly dared the viewer to read them as ‘Aboriginal art’ because of a superficial resemblance to the work of particular traditional Indigenous painters. Perhaps the political potency of Bennett’s work up to that point left an echo that his audiences were not able to ignore, his reputation being such that viewers of the abstract works refused to believe that there was no agenda behind them.
Whether or not the abstract paintings were deliberately intended to look ‘Aboriginal’, the new paintings certainly demonstrate that relatively little is required for a painting to be read as such; in this case ochre colours and forms that vaguely evoke the symbology of Desert painting. Bennett demonstrates how the ‘borrowing’ of Indigenous visual cultures by the non-Indigenous mainstream has reduced them to a set of visual cues, and one blushes at being able to read them in