Appraisal of Tim Johnson's work is these days invariably accompanied by debates sourced in the painful realm of Australian black/white politics. Within the jargon-spewing mechanisms of the white art system, and for sections of the engaged black community, "appropriation" and "convergence" are terms packed with potential risks, risks which symbolise a whole, ongoing (but not unstoppable) history of dispersal and subsumption.
That his art has been placed as an iconic cipher at the centre of these issues is unavoidable, given its substance, and the multiple roles Tim Johnson assumes in the field - as curator, writer and spokesperson as well as practitioner. The artist is clearly not unwilling to extend and contribute to the exchanges. His appearance at forums and discussions dealing, in marginal or focal ways, with "aboriginality", seems a compulsory component of such events - since mid-March this year, for instance, he has participated in Artists' Week, Biennale and Institute of Modern Art panel debates on the subject. Johnson's work (After Canaletto, 1986) is currently hung alongside Western Desert art in the dubious finale to Daniel Thomas's Bicentennial "Great Australian Art" exhibition and he has a sensitive catalogue essay, on Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri's Man's Love Story, (1978) in the accompanying text. This exhaustive, if not unproblematic, infiltration of the critical/curatorial machine is more than a little ironic considering Tim Johnson's designation of his early forays into aboriginal communities as journeys away from an art world which had rejected him.
The popular and commercial appeal of Johnson's April show at the Bellas Gallery was not openly mediated by any of these concerns, though some of them were debated at the later I.M.A. forum (June 17th). The
Tim Johnson, Eternal Return, 1988
