Richard Bell Review (Llewellyn Millhouse)

Richard Bell: “YOU’D BELIEVE ME IF I WAS A WHITE MAN”

22/07/2011 – 06//08/2011

In his latest exhibition, “YOU’D BELIEVE ME IF I WAS A WHITE MAN”, Richard Bell presents a new body of paintings which build upon his soundly established formula of art production. In addition to the ongoing series of major “Theorem” works for which Bell is best known, “YOU’D BELIEVE ME IF I WAS A WHITE MAN” reveals a new series of work based around an Indigenous appropriation and Aboriginalisation of white biblical culture. Whilst retaining the appropriation of canonical elements of Twentieth Century Western art which have become key to Bell's work, Bell’s new “Ten Commandments” series ensures that text dominates the image plane, soaking into the image and covering it entirely. In this “Ten Commandments” series, Bell re-writes and appropriates the fundaments of Judeo-Christian morality from an Indigenous perspective, turning the moral code of colonialism against itself. In Untitled (2011), Bell shows us a stylized and flattened Sydney Opera House disrupted by a wall of text made up of the Ten Commandments.

As a response to the appropriation and assimilation of Indigenous culture into the white art market and white cultural identity, of which the Sydeny Opera House is an icon, Bell appropriates colonial cultural ethics and reflects its hypocrisy back into the Western cultural system of art.

The intensity and wide palette of colour present in Bell’s “Theorem” work is stripped back in his “Ten Commandments” series, the black and white text becoming at once less decipherable and more central to the creation of the image. Bell explains this development as ‘the lazy black man putting the lazier white man to work’, large clumps of text necessitating the audience to break up and piece together words and phrases. The result is an extended time period of visual analysis, and one in which the viewer is compelled to read and reflect on the voice of the artist. Utilising cross-cultural appropriation and these bold textual pronouncements, Bell’s monumental and provocative paintings on canvas serve foremost as functional tools of communication, speaking in as loud and clear a voice as possible.

Sitting awkwardly between a rejection of the Western phenomenon of fetish art object, and an embracement of painting as a medium of communication with white bourgeois culture, Bell simultaneously critiques and exploits the art institution. By working within the commercial art market, Bell creates a space for an urban Indigenous voice in an arena created, policed and dominated by white bourgeois culture.