Richard Bell at Milani Gallery
22 July – 6 August 2011
Reviewed by Nicola Scott
The paintings that greet you upon walking into the main showroom of Milani gallery for Richard Bell’s exhibition You’d Believe Me if I Was a White Man are much like the artist himself: loud, colourful, provocative, complex. Each work looms large on the four walls surrounding you, made up of Bell’s trademark many coloured squares overlaid with bold, capitalised text, some taken from biblical passages and reworded, and finally covered with long, thin splashes of white paint. A black bullseye target emerges, partially obscured, in the centre of each. The right side of each work features a small panel integrated with the rest of the composition but painted with white and metallic pastel paint splashed with black, breaking up the canvas.
Upstairs, smaller works incorporate a rewriting of the commandments. These compositions are busier with text. Some feature only one or two base colours, and other central shapes emerge alongside the black bullseye, including silhouettes of the Sydney Opera House and the Palm Island Aboriginal Reserve. One work, with a blue background composed of desert painting-style patterns similar to that incorporated in the works downstairs, bears the date 1968 in its top left corner. It is a comic-book style rendering of a famous photograph taken at the Olympic Games in Mexico City, depicting African American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos giving the Black power salute (they later stated that it was in fact a human rights salute) after having received their gold and bronze medals in the 200m sprint, while Australian silver medal winner Peter Norman stands beside them with arms at his sides. All three are wearing Olympic Project for Human Rights badges.
This exhibition continues the tradition of thought-provoking wordplay Bell had become known for, and features some of the puzzle-like visual conventions that have frequented his oeuvre since even before Bell’s Theorem. This famous critique of the careless appropriation of Indigenous art (a response to Imants Tiller’s The Nine Shots, but a criticism he also extends to some of his own earlier work sold to tourists) was an early example of Bell’s “cheerful contempt for the willfully ignorant.” It was not the appropriation that bothered the artist so much as Tiller’s uniformed assessment of Indigenous art as being equivalent to, and therefore open to appropriation in the same way as, all other work of art. You’d Believe Me if I Was a White Man seems to once again touch on ideas of location and context, and to expand on the idea that, as Rex Butler and Morgan Thomas (2003, http://www.kooriweb.org/bell/article1.html) have stated: “Ethical thinking places itself elsewhere, outside of itself, in order to reflect on the place where it is - and precisely the injustice of the place where it is.”
In this endeavour Bell sees education as key. For instance, by “Aboriginalise[ing]” the Bible’s commandments “to directly address the Australian position”, he admits to deliberately making the viewer work to get at all the information within each work. Painting the text in a continuous stream without breaks between words, and further obscuring it’s meaning with changes in colour and omitted letters, Bell suggests that this strategy is “the lazy black man making the even lazier white man go to work.” But this most recent work is less antagonistic than hopeful. Just as Bell has given himself “permission to rewrite” a text representing white oppression to reveal the hypocrisy inherent in such commandments as “Thou shalt not steal” – Bell changes this to “Thou shalt not steal land” - from an Aboriginal perspective, he is giving both Indigenous and white Australians a way of confronting our past and understanding how it has led us to our present. In doing so, these works give us permission to imagine a more aware, more equal Australia. As a (white, incidentally) fan once told Bell, his art was a chance to “tell the white fuckers how you feel”. Bell realises that a lot of “white fuckers” empathise with Indigenous Australians, and want to see change too. But, he says, you have to open your mind up, look around, and take in the bigger picture.
In this exhibition, Bell appears to be extending on how Aboriginal art is constructed and mis/treated, to bring into focus ideas that have also been consistently present in his work: how Indigenous Australians as individuals and as a minority are constructed by white histories/art histories and white texts. The works in You’d Believe Me if I Was a White Man do this, as well as drawing connections with other temporal and physical locations to show a different way of thinking about, and looking beyond, ourselves, our country, and our present time. For example, Bell describes the work Prelude to a Trial (Bell’s Theorem, which features the text WESTERN ART DOES NOT EXIST, as being a kind of prophecy. As Western society has always valued the past – collecting and valuing artefacts – art is now first and foremost a commodity. This is no longer only a European tradition, and Bell prophesises that since “art follows money”, the artistic canon will move to Asian nations. His crystal ball is onto something. We need to seek values, new information, new networks. Most importantly, we need new commandments, new art, new heroes.
Perhaps we can find some examples in A white hero for black Australia. History says that all three athletes depicted in are wearing Olympic Project for Human Rights badges because Norman, a critic of Australia's White Australia Policy, expressed empathy with the black athletes political ideals regarding equal human rights. Smith reportedly said that if he won, he would be an American, not a black American. But if he did something bad, then he would be called a Negro. Australians are similarly inclined to claim successful Aboriginal athletes as ‘one of us’, but label all Indigenous Australians according to negative portrayals or individual acts - real or invented. While Bell confirms that this work alludes to racism in Australian sport, connections drawn across cultures, religions, borders and years in his works also point to possible pathways to reconciliation. Pathways that begin with individuals and lead to collective support and action. There is hope there, not only the hope that “art isn’t bullshit”, but that the possibility of equality in Australia isn’t bullshit either. This work seems to reflect Bell’s belief that you “don’t have to kiss ass to make it, you can kick ass”. While he claims that “one day I’m going to grow up and stop thinking like this”, Bell has the unstoppable optimism and larger than life personality of a cartoon super hero, and it is this comic book style that is reflected in the bold, block rendering of A white hero for Black Australia. Here the cartoon heroes emerge out of global history to become role models for a troubled, but hopeful, nation, particularly is younger generation.
This critically optimistic approach is perhaps best understood from the way Bell recounts finding himself in the group show where Tillers originally showed The Nine Shots. Confronted with the difficult decision of whether or not he could justify being in the same show as Tillers, but needing the show to survive, Bell recalls rigorously researching Tillers approach. He then “took it apart and kicked his ass with it”. In this exhibition, Bell seems to have taken up a similar approach. Needing to operate in the art world, Bell takes apart the criticisms levelled at him repeatedly - criticisms used to dismiss him as an artist and the issues raised in his work- that his work is deliberately inflammatory, rude, negative, and blindly hateful towards white Australia - and hits back at them with these works. While seeming to shout at you, Bell’s paintings make you take a step back, look a little harder, think a little longer. The exhibition title too, while it could be taken as merely accusatory and cynical, is perhaps a quiet statement to think about: if a white artist raised similar points about art and race in Australia, would he be simplistically labelled an angry, unhelpful stirrer?
Bell says he’ll challenge anyone to point out one angry painting in his career, let alone this exhibition. As he suggests, “just because it makes them feel angry doesn’t mean my work, or I, am angry”. The only thing he could be said to be angry about is “that people live their lives in ignorance rather than seeking enlightenment and educating themselves”. He suggests that, “we need to look at how we treat each other...we have responsibilities to others and the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step”. Perhaps that is the step back that Bell’s works require of us, giving a little more space so that we start to see the bigger picture, in art as we should in life.
References
Bell, R 2011, public lecture at Milani Gallery.
Butler, R and Thomas, M 2003, “I am not Sorry”: Richard Bell Out of Context, viewed 21 August 2011, < http://www.kooriweb.org/bell/article1.html >.
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