THREE COLOURS, GORDON BENNETT AND PETER ROBINSON
“The World The time has come to Push the button The World My finger is on the button”
From the Chemical Brothers’ Galvanize
T
he catalogue accompanying ‘Three Colours, Gordon Bennett and Peter Robinson’ describes the exhibition as offering ‘a wider appreciation of the thought provoking work undertaken by two key contemporary artists reflecting on existence today in our part of the world’.1 This art particularly shares a common base in terms of the artists’ indigenous heritage (Bennett’s Aboriginal heritage and Robinson’s Maori heritage), and the consequence of that heritage for existence in ‘our part of the world’. Ranging from 1987 to 2003, the artworks are deeply of their time, transforming familiar attributes of Australian and New Zealand culture into self-critical artefacts of conventional ideology. The ‘galvanising’ effect of this exhibition, however, is not its local perspectives or histories so much as its scoping of the construct ‘local is global/global is local’. A post 9/11 sensitivity drifts retrospectively through the exhibition, embedding a vision of the world’s profound incapacity for co-existence. There is a silencing effect in confronting the depth of this impasse. Even irony finds its limits here, driven to redundancy in a world critically aware of its increasingly devastating polarity.
Both artists work across a broad range of contemporary practice, from installations of furniture and assorted ephemera that show the political as personal, to starkly posed image/text compositions carrying blunt messages and raw emotion. Each artist has a propensity for working in the style of what might be called ‘vernacular tableaux vivant’. Excerpts of everyday life are formed into a pastiche using a vernacular iconography that demands audiences see history as a matter of personal... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline