1993 APT1 Conference : Identity, tradition and change

Some of the strongest: art now being made in Australia is oy Aboriginal artists analysing and criticizing the traditions from which white Austral was created. Like many of his contemporaries Gordon Bennett has used the imagery of the Western avant-garde, but with a highly sophisticated double-entendre in which the dominance and alienation experienced by our colonial culture becomes a metaphor for one relationship between black and white Australia. Bennett is able to give a sharp and poignant edge to works which are to do with struggling to define an identity using terms borrowed from, elsewhere. His paintings which paraphrase Jackson Pollock's calligraphy of flung-paint underline the fact that the Australian art world was only able to read Aboriginal dot-technique paintings as art because of the familiarity of the all-over non-figurativ patterns of the New York School. The interaction in the opposite direction, Aboriginal imagery in the work of white artists, has usually been awkwardly polite (when it has not been done for straightforward commercial exploitation). Australia, the European-invented Australia, has almost from the beginning paid some sort of official token respect to the ancient indigenous culture of this country, even when brutally mistreating the indigenous people. This official respect did not seem completely genuine. It tended to be patronizing.and carried an unspoken assumption that the European tradition in Australia was culturally superior. With Aboriginal culture now in a position of increasing strength, non-Aborigines can't afford to be patronizing. Since the world acclaim for Aboriginal art and one moves toward legal recognition of Aboriginal ownership of their land through the Mabo case, white Australian society which for so long has made an art out of being a culture colony, has to seriously contemplate the prospect of oeing culturally colonized by the indigenous people of Australia.