Gordon Bennett
Out of Print: Gordon Bennett is a daring gambit, a de facto twenty year survey through his printwork, for an artist who is not considered to be a printmaker in the conventional sense. Making prints, however, has been a constant and important aspect of Bennett's practice: it is a way of thinking, exercising and exorcising ideas and his discomfort with the way things are. It is also a means of pushing boundaries in the orderly and prescribed world of printmaking by focusing on content rather than a mastery of technique. Bennett has done work with reduction techniques—lino and wood cuts, collographs, lithography, etching and aquatint, but his use of computers (an Amiga 500 at an early stage in 1986-87, the tool of choice for the rogue image-making artist at the time, and now the state-of-art consumer hardware and software) allows him a freedom and independence to control the means of production, and his own place as an artist.
Through computer-generated imaging, Bennett incorporates a wide range of source material, often described as a strategy of appropriation. In Bennett's own words, from a letter that he wrote to Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1998, ten years after Basquiat's death: 'I became acutely aware of racist stereotypes and the power/knowledge relationship that governed my indigenous heritage and how it was inherently intertwined with the history and reality of colonialism. I found the avenue of "appropriation" art within the conceptual framework of post modernism to be the most suitable way of pursuing my interests'. Typically, appropriation can be a contrivance, to inhabit a signature motif through high irony without making a commitment. But in hindsight, Bennett's letter can also be read as a declaration of