Richard Bell: YOU'D BELIEVE ME IF I WAS A WHITE MAN

Richard Bell’s YOU’D BELIEVE ME IF I WAS A WHITE MAN

@ Milani Gallery, Brisbane

As soon as you step into Richard Bell’s current exhibition, YOU’D BELIEVE ME IF I WAS A WHITE MAN at Milani Gallery, you are hit with a shock of colour and text. Bell claims his work isn’t angry, but when you view his work, it feels aggressive. When you enter a room of his paintings, you can’t help but be taken aback by the sheer size, weighing down on you, as the viewer and surrounding you. The capitalized thick text seems as if its being shouted and the colour makes your eyes pop. The content of the text itself would be scandalous enough, for some. His work does not sit quietly, with his bold personality clearly present, along with his sarcastic humour and politics.

But it doesn’t matter if Bell’s work is aggressive or not. It charges at you, politically and aesthetically; taking back what Western Art has claimed, as it’s own and appropriated for centuries. Through Bell’s use of sarcastic statements and re-use of signs and symbols from non-Western art (e.g tribal/ethnic patterns), Bell questions the viewer’s perception of art, ownership and history.

In Bell’s essay, Bell’s Theorem he critiques the Western art’s post-modern concept of appropriation; highlighting how Aboriginal art has become a commodity, with carpetbaggers buying Indigenous art for little to nothing and selling it for outrageous prices on the art market. Or creating counter-fit knock-off's overseas and locally, taking away income from Indigenous people and immorally misusing Indigenous intellectual and cultural property. One of the larger paintings in the exhibition, Prelude to a Trial (Bell’ Theorem) reads in chunky, capitalised letters ‘WESTERN ART DOES NOT EXIST’; it’s based on the themes and issues discussed in his essay. Using the tools of text and appropriation, he questions the constructs of Western art and it’s relationship to Indigenous art through subversion. 

Sancintya Simpson