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22 23 ARTLINES 4 | 2020 THE ART OF GORDON BENNETT THE ART OF GORDON BENNETT ARTISTS REFLECT On the occasion of the exhibition ‘Unfinished Business: The Art of Gordon Bennett’, which opened at GOMA in November, exhibition curator Zara Stanhope invited local artists to share their thoughts on the personal significance of Gordon Bennett’s art. Together, these candid reflections confirm that his meaningful and potent practice continues to resonate across generations of artists. Opposite Gordon Bennett, in front of his work Home décor (Preston + De Stijl = Citizen) Men with weapons 1997 / © Gary Medlicott / The Age ‘ ’ ‘ ‘ ’ ’ I met Gordon over 30 years ago. We were young men committed to truth in art. His intelligence, acute sensitivity and hyper-awareness cut through the false veneer of style and linguistic pretence. Gordon specialised in deconstructing human politics and conventions. We were opposites. I would seek to transcend everyday issues and he would dive head-first into the mud of historical deceit and social insincerity. Revealing the flaws of black-and-white logic was his forte. There is unresolved trauma in Gordon's work — an uncomfortable openness, a raw wound carefully disguised as contemporary art. — EUGENE CARCHESIO There are two periods of time that I recall Gordon Bennett’s triptych Requiem, Of Grandeur, Empire 1989 being on show in the Queensland Art Gallery. On one occasion, the painting was hung on the central wall of the Watermall across from the water, and on the other occasion, it was on the prominent first wall at the top of the escalators, just past the information desk. During both of these times, I made return visits to Bennett’s painting while it was on public view. These opportunities to visit the work were moments of witnessing my art history. Gordon Bennett’s bravery is an example of what is shared and what is admirable in the life of an artist. — DALE HARDING Gordon Bennett was of great influence to me, particularly when I was aspiring to become an artist myself. While I had no direct interactions with Bennett, I considered him more a teacher than most of my art history/theory lecturers. His work was generating conversations about art and the legacies of colonisation from a perspective that I could relate to. As someone with dark skin and of mixed racial heritage, I found art school education necessary but at times hugely problematic. For instance, there was a huge disconnect between my experience and aspirations as an artist and the ways in which Pacific art was being constructed within the university through the work of Picasso and ‘Primitivism’. Seeing Bennett reappropriate the work of Margaret Preston was a beautiful sparring of ideas around white privilege. Seeing this type of engagement opened up so many possibilities for me. His work and refusal to be framed within limiting stereotypes encouraged me to question things and follow a similar path, to develop my own voice and ideas, and to speak to the world around me in that more personal (or situated) language. — TALOI HAVINI Growing up I had limited contact with Gordon, and painting was never a point of inspiration for my practice. I had Michael Riley to look up to — same mob, country, history — and he was making the most beautiful still and moving image works. It wasn’t until much later that I got to work with Gordon at the Art Gallery of New South Wales for the 2008 Biennale of Sydney, where he proposed to flip the Old Courts with the Aboriginal gallery and turn all the works upside-down. The institution and curators really let Gordon down in not enabling him to realise that simple but remarkably powerful project. I ended up going to a number of the meetings with him and Leanne to offer support and one thing that really struck me was the perceived need for Gordon to have a watertight concept for the project, and an explanation, an argument, but his simple reply was that he wanted to do it because it felt right . It was intuitive . He also said that as an artist he didn't need to explain himself, that not everything had to be unravelled. People found this hard to accept and in turn didn’t support it. This particular project never got up, but I learned a lot from Gordon. — JONATHAN JONES The work of Gordon Bennett has been with me since the early 1990s. When I first encountered his paintings, I had just started art school and met him a few times while he undertook a residency and held an exhibition of works at the then Canberra School of Art and gallery. It was the period during which his work won the Moët & Chandon and was in dialogue — or at loggerheads, depending on one’s view — with Imants Tillers’s work from around that time. It felt profoundly important to see and experience both his paintings and the narrative around his preoccupations as an artist, even though it didn’t always directly influence the way I approached my own work. What impressed me deeply was his insight and interpretation, the layers and retelling of a complex historical and racial archaeology. His methodology and approach helped me realise that an artistic language could be deeply personal, while simultaneously encompassing shared and broader experiences in life. As with all artists’ work, some periods and themes explored by him resonated more with me than others. Bennett’s history paintings and their strategies of appropriation were so clearly of a moment, just as his place as one of Australia’s most significant artists was so clearly of the time during which he worked. It is those particular works I looked to, and still do, as powerful and innovative markers of insight and courageous truth-telling. — DANIE MELLOR I was first struck by Bennett’s Outsider 1988 in 2003, when I was a teenager in art class. It had an urgency as well as a heaviness to it that I admired. It wasn’t until 2008 that I first had the opportunity to see that same work in person at GOMA. Standing in front of the work, I felt a great sense of appreciation for the risks he had taken to make that sort of statement, and it was gratifying to see the handmade quality of the image, to follow the brushstrokes. Experiencing his work in person for the first time confirmed to me that I could be exactly who I was and make the kind of images I wanted to see and express. — RYAN PRESLEY Gordon Bennett was a friend of mine. We share the same birthday, except he was born a few years earlier. We discovered this when I stayed with him and Leanne in France, when he had the Moët & Chandon residency there in 1991–92. I remember hearing their exciting news about their baby on the way. We went swimming at a pool in Reims and walking in the forest and garden on the Moët estate. I took a photograph of Gordon with the trees behind him and teased him, saying that he looked like a werewolf. I loved the work that he was doing over there in reaction to what he was seeing and experiencing. I first met Gordon in 1989 when I was artist in residence at Griffith Artworks, Griffith University. He came out to see me there. We used to joke that we were like secret agents because people wouldn’t recognise us as being Aboriginal and used to say terrible things that were extremely derogatory and racist about Aboriginal people in our company. Going to Bellas Gallery in 1992 where Gordon Bennett had an exhibition, ‘The Colour Black and Other Histories’, I saw that he had written ‘a black history’ in black wax crayon on the floor. I was horrified to see people walking in, straight across these words, erasing them. Such a powerful, performative action by an unknowing audience. At the Institute of Modern Art in 1990, I saw Gordon’s Psycho(d)rama installation with the Aboriginal concrete garden statues and large black-and-white photographs of his mother and his father. His installation at the Biennale of Sydney with the chest of drawers and objects, his dance video and the whipping of the box. [. . .] So many amazing pieces by an extraordinary artist. I was running a lithography workshop in Townsville at Umbrella Studio when Josh Milani rang me to tell me that Gordon had died. I felt like I had been hit in the gut. Such a terrible loss to Leanne and Caitlin and to all of us. He shone the light on our black history and was roads ahead of anyone else. Gordon had an incisive intellect, wit and vision that powered through the sludge of colonisation in this country. His work remains a testament to his strength of conviction and knack of reflecting the past onto our present and our inadequacies onto ourselves. — JUDY WATSON Gordon Bennett is a remarkable artist whose uncompromising practice has influenced my development as an artist. The potency of Bennett’s semiotic repertoire, in both a Western and Indigenous art canon, underpins his ability to evoke the visceral experience of colonisation to a global audience. Beyond his celebrated aesthetic, Bennett’s contribution to a contemporary cultural discourse continues to resonate the complexities of identity in a nation still attempting to find its own. — WARRABA WEATHERALL