NOTES
- Bell's rejection of the usual labour-intensive practice of much Aboriginal art, and his shift instead to a more “conceptual” style, must be understood as a refusal of the dominant ways in which it has been constructed and marketed. Bell himself speaks of the sight of Aboriginal artists laboriously dotting their canvases as a new form of indenture and even wage slavery. It would be interesting to consider the ways in which the deliberate anti-aesthetic and anti-commercial aspects of Bell's practice stand in contrast to the slick and polished surfaces which generally prevail in so-called political art today.
- Other encrypted elements include the concentric circles that are commonly used to designate a sacred site in some kinds of Aboriginal painting and the phrase “European aesthetics”.
- See, for example, Chapters 7 and 8 in Ian McLean, White Aborigines: Identity Politics in Australian Art, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1998, and Terry Smith, “Australia's Anxiety” in History and Memory in the Art of Gordon Bennett, exh. cat., Birmingham: Ikon Gallery, 1999.
- The point is that the “conceptual” aspect of Bell's practice emphasises the provisional, tactical, shifting nature of all aspects of his work—including its modes of address, its attitude towards the materials it appropriates, and the look of the work produced (of which undoubtedly, following Tillers, its presentation on canvas boards is a part).
- When Tillers speaks about the failure of locality, this is to be understood not as the dissolution or doing away of our individuality but as an opening-up of “us” to other possibilities. This is part of the complex simultaneity that runs through his essay and his artistic practice in general: that we would only be subject to the “provincialism problem” (the influence of overseas texts) to the extent that we are able to appropriate them and make them our own; that we are only able to see what resists appropriation or is unable to be appropriated through the act of appropriation itself. We will return to this later in the context of recent discussions of Kngwarreye's work.
- Bell writes in “Bell's Theorem: Aboriginal Art It's a White Thing” (unpublished, 2002): “You have created and maintained barriers between us Aboriginal Peoples. Those barriers serve to reinforce the Regional System (the classification of Aboriginal Art based on geographical areas, for example, Western Desert, Eastern Arnhem Land, Urban, etc).”
- There would be the same kind of “contradiction” if we were to suggest that the statement “Aboriginal art is a white thing” is ironic, that it does not represent Bell's true position, even though everything in the work that says this is appropriated from Tillers’ (white) art. Nevertheless, this ironic reading is opened up by the earth-coloured tones of the words “Aboriginal” and “thing” in Bell's Theorem.
- That is, Bell is describing a double movement in Kngwarreye's work in which it is at once appropriated and resists its appropriation. This ambiguity is caught in the very reading of the words “KILL MABO” that Bell hides in “Kngwarreye's” painting: it is at once for Bell the true implication of the white interpretation of her work, which is inseparable from the historical dispossession of Aboriginal land and culture, and as it were an ultra-Aboriginalist rejection of the Mabo treaty, which Bell would see as an unnecessary compromise and selling-out on the part of its Aboriginal negotiators.The risk of Bell's work—and its promise—lies in its conflation of these two attitudes: the conservative or even racist rejection of Mabo and the assertive Aboriginality that would also challenge it. (For example, Bell stresses the way the painting of Dreamings comes—tenuously—to play an essential role in forcing the burden of proof onto Aboriginal people seeking to make land claims in the wake of the Mabo judgement.)
- In this regard, the declarations “I AM SORRY” and “I AM NOT SORRY” no longer appear simply ironic. The work would no longer be a mere act of ventriloquism, but confessional. And, of course, insofar as Bell himself and other Aboriginal people are part of (white) Australia, a certain tough-minded accusation can also be levelled at them. On the other hand, however, Bell is also unapologetically “not sorry” for the harshness of his judgements and accusations.
- Imants Tillers, “Locality Fails”, Art&Text 6, 1982, 57.
- In fact, the complex point here would be that we always fall short of the moral law insofar as we give it any delineation, any form. This would thus apply even to the statements “I AM/SORRY” and “I AM/HUMILIATED”. Any enunciated is always wrong. But in an impossibly pure and empty enunciation—“I AM”—I would be just, and it is perhaps this that Bell is ultimately trying to get at. Although his arguments are self-contradictory (for example, he speaks against white art in the language of white art), there is nevertheless a certain Aboriginal speaking voice that allows them to be said with justice. The same would go for his claim that the position is “hopeless” at the end of his text “Bell's Theorem: Aboriginal Art It's a White Thing”. As a statement of fact it is perhaps correct, but in the very saying of it, it again opens up hope. Why is Bell saying it? To whom is it said? It is this position of empty enunciation that Tillers is also attempting to get at in his appropriations (Australia as a pure “saying”), as has often been noted. And this is the ambiguity of Kant's moral law (and of the “failure of locality” of appropriation): it is absolutely harsh and terrifying, but also offers up the promise of some future reconciliation.
- Incidentally, the same split can be seen in the two right-hand panels of Worth Exploring? On the left, in the “Kngwarreye” painting, we have as it were a pure “enunciation” in the form of the famous Pollock drip: the Aboriginal law in its raw, unmediated state. In the panel on the right, we have an attempt to decode or translate this law, which is inevitably a reduction and betrayal of it (but the only way in which it can actually be effected): the questions “How?,” “When?,” “To whom?” and “Why?”