A menace in Australian history
Gordon Bennett describes himself ironically as a 'history painter', but he works across visual media, performing the role of 'mimic man ' on Australia's would-be postcolonial stage.[1] In Homi Bhabha's terms this kind of mimicking, which uses the cultural codes of a particular society to challenge its authority, is a menace within.[2] Furthermore Bennett deconstructs identities of self and other in order to address the issue of his own subjectivity as an Australian of Aboriginal and Anglo-Celtic descent. The works are complex negotiations and explorations of identities which proceed from and out off an Anglo-Celtic heritage.[3]
Bennett's position on identity is informed by existentialism and psychoanalysis and fuelled by a homage to Frantz Fanon's critique of colonialism and Antonio Gramsci's concept of the organic intellectual.[4] His personal history is significant because he did not clearly recognise his Aboriginal ancestry until he was eleven years old. Thus Fanon's construct of 'black skin white mask' is pertinent for Bennett as he negotiates his personal identity. His Untitled (Nuance) of 1992 is a photographic self-portrait over eight frames with eight black and white acrylic boards which are set beneath the photographs, and which span the range of pure white to pure black. The photographs show Bennett's face covered in a white latex mask which he slowly peels off. Beneath the faces the word N.U.A.N.C.E. is neatly spelled out across the shaded canvas boards. Neither black nor white board is marked by language. In this way the artist inscribes himself in language, arguing perhaps that both black and white are meta-concepts, essential identities, which can never be achieved.
Bennett claims that to take up an... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline