I first encountered Gordon Bennett’s work in the Hayward Gallery exhibition ‘Aratjara, Art of the First Australians’ in 1993, billed as the largest exhibition of Aboriginal art ever shown in Europe, which introduced the range and diversity of Aboriginal art to the British public. I remember talking to him about this context, a framing of his practice that he was not particularly comfortable with, although the opportunity to show in London was an important one. The inevitable mixed reviews followed, but it was the work of the urban based artists, including that of Gordon, that made the most impact on me, running a gallery in the highly culturally diverse city of Birmingham. Though coming from an entirely different context, the similarities of some of the issues in his work with those being addressed by Black and Asian artists in the United Kingdom was what caught my attention.
In 1994, Gordon was in London again, this time to take part in a conference at the Tate to mark the launch of INIVA, the new international visual arts organisation which came out of the ’80s debates about artists being excluded from the mainstream artworld. His quietly spoken contribution landed a powerful punch, an intense deliberation on how his own experiences had led to the articulation of issues around identity, racism and colonialism in his work. It was one of the most affecting contributions to the conference—many in the audience were close to tears, not least because his words went much deeper than the artworld: he laid bare the systematic racism of Australia in its treatment of its indigenous people, in particular the impact of the stolen generation. His presentation was all the... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Memorial to Gordon Bennett, Milani Gallery, Brisbane. Photograph Carl Warner.
