Undoing the Colonial Gaze: Ambiguity in the Art of Brook Andrew

NOTES

• See King-Smith in her artist's statement in Patterns of Connection (Melbourne: Victorian Centre for Photography, 1992). The exhibition was held in April-May 1992; Fiona Foley drew on ethnographic images in her Native Blood series (1994) and in later work included them in her Wild Times Call series (2001–2). Gordon Bennett identified the role of anthropology and ethnography in constructing concepts of Aboriginality in the present, in Ian McLean and Gordon Bennett, The Art of Gordon Bennett, (Sydney: Craftsman House, G+B Arts International, 1996) 31–4. Bennett's works Self-portrait (Gone Primitive) (1992) and Self- portrait (Vessel) (1992) both incorporate references to these disciplines. In the second of these two works, Bennett, like Andrew, uses a version of Rubin's Vase. Bennett's work, however, features his own profile.
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• E.g. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Protocols for Libraries, Archives and Information Services, comp. Alex Byrne, Alana Garwood, Heather Moorcroft and Alan Barnes, endorsed at the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Library and Information Resource Network Conferences, December 1994 and September 1995, and at the First Roundtable on Library and Archives Collections and Services of Relevance to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People, May 1995. Available online at http://alia.org.au/policies/atsi.protocols.html.
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• In many Indigenous communities the display of images of deceased persons is not permitted, and there may also be material in photographs that is not suitable for general viewing for cultural reasons.
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• Recent aesthetic theories of political agency have focused on interconnectedness rather than the deconstruction of identity, e.g. Jill Bennett's analysis of the critical potential of affect in Empathic Visions: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art, (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2005). However Bhabha's theorising of postcolonial artistic agency was produced contemporaneously with Andrew's 1990s artworks, which reflect the concerns of identity politics. For my purposes here, therefore, Bhahba's theory offers a more productive line of enquiry.
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• Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: on the Discursive Limits of “Sex”, (London; NY: Routledge, 1993).
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• Homi Bhabha, “Freedom's Basis in the Indeterminate”, October—The Identity in Question, 61 (Summer 1992) 46–57.
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• Homi Bhabha, Nation and Narration, (London & NY: Routledge, 1993) 3.
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• Anne Loxley, “The Battles Continue: Brook Andrew”, Colour Power: Aboriginal Art Post 1984, ed. Judith Ryan (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2004) 143; Warren Coatsworth, “brook andrew and rea, bLAK bABE(z) and kWEER kAT(z)”, Eyeline 36 (Autumn/Winter 1998) 38; Hannah Fink, “Cracking Up” Beyond Myth, catalogue (Melbourne: Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi Gallery 1999) 13.
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• Maud Page, Polemics, catalogue (Melbourne: Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, 2000).
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• ibid, unpaginated.
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• Catriona Moore, Indecent Exposures, Twenty Years of Australian Feminist Photography (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994) 111.
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• Marcia Langton, Well I Heard it on the Radio and I Saw it on the Television… (Sydney: Australian Film Commission, 1993) 9.
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• ibid. 27.
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• Ian McLean's writing on the work of Gordon Bennett has at times suggested that this is Bennett's principal motivation. See Ian McLean, White Aborigines: Identity Politics in Australian Art (Cambridge & NY: Cambridge UP, 1998) 138–47. More recently, McLean has reflected on his past writing and noted that he may have been placing the “burden of representation” on Bennett: “The most important lesson I have learnt in writing and speaking about Bennett's work over the previous five years is not to pass on to him that burden of representation… of not, for example, reading his work in too autobiographical a fashion, as if here speaks the Aborigine of his identity problems, as if the problems he pictures are the Aboriginal ones. Yet I have, in the past, invested in the argument that Bennett's work pictures all the conundrums and aporias of Australian identity.” Hancock Lecture, University of Sydney, 11 November 1998, republished as “Post Colonial: Return to Sender”, Australian Humanities Review 12 (December 1998), online journal at http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/Issue-December-1998/mclean2.html.
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• Homi Bhabha, “Halfway House (Art of Cultural Hybridization)”, Artforum International 35.9 (May 1997) 11, 12, 125. Bhabha has elsewhere argued for ambiguity and ambivalence in fiction and sundering and splitting in art as effective forms of political intervention, e.g. The Location of Culture, (London; NY: Routledge, 2004) 1–27.
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• Homi Bhabha, “Beyond the Pale: Art in the Age of Multicultural Translation”, Elisabeth Sussman et al., 1993 Biennial Exhibition, catalogue (NY: Whitney Museum of Art, 1993) 62.
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• Brook Andrew, interview with author, Melbourne, 13 July 2004.
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• Andrew refers to the image as being that of an Aboriginal man from New South Wales, sourced from the Mitchell Library; and in “Seeing Black”, Gawronski identifies the man as Cunningham. Alex Gawronski, “Brook Andrew; Seeing Black”, Globe 10. www.arts.monash.edu.au/visarts/globe/issue10/batxt.html. [accessed 11 July 2004], This site has recently been decommissioned.
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• “Translator Translated”, Artforum International, 33.7 (March 1995) 80–3, 110, 114, 118, 119.
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• ibid.
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• Bhabha, The Location of Culture. 188.
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• Lisa Havilah, “Brook Andrew”, August 1998 at www.nga.gov.au/Retake/artists/00000000.htm [accessed 13 October 2004]. This online publication contained material that was not included in the exhibition catalogue: Re-Take: Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Photography, catalogue (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 1998–9).
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• ibid.
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• Examples provided include the “duck-rabbit” and “my wife or my mother-in-law”, both of which present the viewer with alternative pictures within the one image, W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation, (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994) 45–8.
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• ibid, 48.
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• In his 1994 treatment of multistable images Mitchell makes no reference to Rubin's Vase but in his more recent work, What do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (London; Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 2005), he refers to what he calls the “classic multistable image of the one vase/two faces.”: 210–11.
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• Ann Marie Barry, Visual Intelligence: Perception, Image, and Manipulation in Visual Communication (Albany: State U of NY P, 1997) 51.
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• Gawronski, “Brook Andrew: Seeing Black”: 38.
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• I am grateful to Terry Smith for his comment on this aspect of the work when an earlier version of this paper was presented to the AAANZ conference, Sydney, December 2005.
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• Brook Andrew, interview with author.
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• ibid.
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• Andrew identifies this image as being of the same man as the one in the source photograph for I Split Your Gaze, however this time Andrew used a different photograph.
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• The description of the work is drawn from Andrew's discussion of the exhibition in Chris Chapman, “Never Make Decisions Based on Fear: The Work and Ideas of Brook Andrew”, Art and Australia 40.3 (Autumn 2003) 446–53.
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• Brook Andrew, interview with author.
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• Coatsworth, “brook andrew and rea”: 38.
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• Homi Bhabha, “Beyond the Pale”: 65.
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• These continuities are referred to by Marcia Langton in her essay “High Excellent Technical Flavour”, catalogue Hope & Peace, (Melbourne: Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi; Sydney: Stills Gallery; Adelaide: Greenaway Gallery, 2005).
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• Moore, Indecent Exposures. 105–11.
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• Quoted in Helen Hills, “Commonplaces: The Woman in the Street: Text and Gender in the Work of Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger”, Language and Gender, Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Sara Mills (Harlow: Longman, 1995) 241.
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• Mitchell What do Pictures Want?: 45. Here he describes the face in this work as being of indeterminate gender. However in more contemporaneous readings of this image the face is presumed to be female and the image read within a binary, though not essentialising, framing of gender. See Craig Owens, “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism”, Beyond Recognition—Representation, Power and Culture, eds. Scott Bryson, Barbara Kruger, Lynne Tillman and Jane Weinstock (Berkeley, LA, Oxford: U of California P, 1988) 183–4. Owens refers to the image as having been “culled from a ‘50s photo-annual of a female bust”; and in Kate Linker, Love for Sale, The Words and Pictures of Barbara Kruger (NY: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 1990) 62. This is not to say that the image cannot be read as androgynous. If it is more likely to be seen in this way in 2005 this may reflect the profound influence of Butler's work on sex and performativity in Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter, in the intervening years, and no doubt the viewer's own expectations.
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• As told to Chapman, “Never Make Decisions Based on Fear”: 450.
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• Karen Raney, “Barbara Kruger”, Art in Question (London; NY: Continuum, 2003) 117.
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• Gawronski, “Brook Andrew: Seeing Black.”
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