Who's dreaming now?
Today it is almost a standard form of approval to describe an artist’s work as ‘provocative’, ‘subversive’ or ‘confronting’. A certain style of radicalism in art has come to be institutionalised as part of the everyday currency of contemporary culture and criticism. Offering little in the way of resistance to the political or cultural structures which shape our experience, this style of radicalism does not finally interfere with the imperative of carrying on ‘business as usual’. It seems able to live in relatively peaceful co-existence with the mood of complacent conservatism, or ‘enterprising’ self-interest, which has been in the ascendant in this country for some time now.
In this context, what I find interesting and even mysterious about the work of Richard Bell is that it really is confronting. It is provocative. To encounter it can be an unsettling and discomforting experience (let us note the name of a recent show featuring Bell’s work held at Fire-Works Gallery in Brisbane late last year: ‘Discomfort: Relationships within Aboriginal Art’).
What is it that gives Bell’s work its unusual political bite? It is tempting to equate the confrontational character of the work with the non-negotiable, ‘out-there’ political stance that it frequently seems to be advancing—and particularly to see this confrontation in terms of Bell’s liking for statements which he acknowledges are deliberately ‘inflammatory’ in their formulation.
We might recall, for example, that Bell is the Aboriginal artist who proclaims: ‘Aboriginal Art—it’s a White Thing’. (This statement appears as the subtitle to a recent essay by Bell entitled ‘Bell’s Theorem’; it also forms the main text in Bell’s Theorem, a painting from 2002.) We could note the patently incendiary—yet also cryptic and sometimes... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline