‘Cyborg Ned is my contribution to Republican art', so muses self-confessed mythomaniac John Conomos, artist, cineaste, essayist, and intertextualist. Kelly, outlaw and outsider, representative of the rebellious larrikin element in the Australian psyche, is a particularly pertinent figure for Conomos, who, together with Brad Buckley, co-edited the recently published Republic of Ideas (Artspace/Pluto Press). Cyborg Ned is Conomos's version of the Kelly myth, and Conomos casts him as Australia's first cyborg, at the intersection of art, technology and now Republican history.
The figure of Ned Kelly has long been a rallying point symbolic of Australian culture, achieving an international iconic status through the paintings of Sidney Nolan. In this densely layered work, Conomos the intertextualist weaves Nolan's Kelly with its Surrealist overtones through a history which folds back through the commentary of such noted scholars and commentators on Australian cultural identity as Les Marinos, Mark McKenna, Humphrey MacQueen and Barry Pearce. Kelly is at its core, and Conomos the historian/essayist also turns the camera over the text of the autobiography of Kelly, poor Irish settler - victim of English oppressors. Common horse-thief turned accidental hero or rebel-reformer of anarcho-politics? Regardless of which, Kelly's slotted and helmeted Nolan silhouette floats through the Australian landscape, the outlaw a mythic symbol of the Australian consciousness - a figure straddling the future as well as the past.
Conomos sees this Kelly as Australia's first cyborg, a helmeted armour-plated figure emerging incongruously out of the Australian bush. Uncanny, and surreal in the rupture with the landscape, this cyborg Ned epitomises the disjunction between art and technology, between the landscape and the age of the machine. It matters, for Conomos, that Kelly's ploughshare armour makes him... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline