Gordon Bennett always tells a good story, and a major attraction of his work is its narrative structure. Not any more. His recent abstract paintings forsake the discursive qualities upon which he built a very successful career. Bennett has a history of abandoning successful modes for new ones, but nothing in his oeuvre matches the audaciousness of this turn. Be it radical, risky or simply foolish, what other artist in his position would (or could) make such a wild move?

Bennett’s previous work may have shown an intense interest in abstract art (particularly the art of Pollock, Malevich and Mondrian) but it was always discursively referenced in elaborate postcolonial allegories that were implicitly cynical of abstract art’s esoteric claims. However his recent paintings, which primarily quote the early work of the American minimalist Frank Stella, have no obvious narrative, postcolonial deconstruction, or even parody. Instead he seemingly pays homage to Stella and, ipso facto, the creed of abstraction. In the context of his earlier work, it is not at all obvious what Bennett is doing or intending.

By his own admission Bennett had exhausted his previous Basquiat theme, and was also exhausted by the intensity of his discursive mode. Hence I initially expected the abstract work to be a temporary therapeutic hiatus before some new onslaught. However this has proved to not be the case. Bennett has tackled this new direction in his art with his usual diligence and perseverance. He has been making abstract paintings for five years (as long as the Notes to Basquiat series).

In one sense all art is abstract, and Bennett’s graphic dexterity (evident since he was a student) reveals his understanding of this. However the abstract series have developed into a real commitment to the purely aesthetic pleasures of art, as well as to that 1960s dictum that less is more. Bennett reduces the graphic and compositional complexities of his previous work to relatively simple arrangements of form and colour. This is not familiar territory for Bennett. Despite his previous works being in a fundamental sense about various lacks, their narrative content was invariably in excess.

However the abstract works do not seem to me to be about returning to a more simple way of doing things or of getting back to some core or essential truth. Bennett’s use of Stella’s art as a starting point signals this, for Stella jettisoned the metaphysical pursuits of the previous generation (such as Pollock and Rothko) for a more upfront phenomenological world—which is why minimalism developed into an art of surface appearances rather than invisible and unfathomable emotion, concealed meaning or spiritual longing. But nor does Bennett exactly follow this minimalist credo of ‘what you see is what you get’. The metallic gold and c opper  underpainting and the quivering way the stripes hold onto the surface (upon which, to me, depends the success of these works) suggest a haunting, a ghostly edgy presence —though it is not a presence that Bennett articulates or names (or un-names) as he did in his earlier work.

If the abstract paintings can be said to be about anything, it is Bennett’s faith in the power of art. Or more pointedly, he might be testing this faith at a time when there seems little evidence to believe in art anymore. Is Bennett then searching for that purported originary power of the raw aesthetic moment Kant described and analysed? At a recent address at Mumbai, Thierry de Duve proposed the new relevance (in the emerging glocalised world) of Kant’s argument that the aesthetic faculty bridges the singularity and differences of individual feelings * For all the apparent pessimism and resentment of Bennett’s earlier art, its very address or appeal to our (universal) humanity (‘you ought to feel the way I feel’) was imagined in Kantian terms as a platform upon which a sensus communis might productively work with these differences. Now, in the abstract works, this essentially Kantian dream is more patently laid bare, or perhaps more accurately, tested.

The first time this Kantian (or de Duvian) moment occurred in a very real sense in Australia was in the 1970s when Aboriginal artists based at Papunya made a deliberate appeal to the outside world through a purposeful erasure of their familiar iconography, laying bare an aesthetic rawness and intensity rarely seen in Australia or elsewhere. Interestingly— and perhaps this is one reason why Bennett turns to Stella— the Australian artworld interpreted Papunya paintings through the tropes of minimalism. But if in their evacuation of meaning American minimalists like Stella made artworks in which there was nothing left to reveal (‘no secrets worth keeping’), the evacuations of the Papunya minimalists were acts of concealment or even deliberate repression that increased the haunting presence of what had been erased.

If the haunting quality of Bennett’s abstract paintings follows the example of Papunya rather than Stella’s minimalism, Stella is patently on Bennett’s mind. He quotes Stella’s work with the same direct and brash appropriation-like manner of his earlier art . Perhaps, then,
Bennett’s doppelgangers of Stella’s work, like the Japanese artist Ushio Shinohara’s 1964 imitation of Rauschenberg’s Coca Cola Plan, are attempts to imagine modernism and its legacy beyond the confines of an exclusive Western system.

It might be that Bennett’s project since he graduated from art school nearly twenty years ago was less a concerted debate with Australian history and its absent Aboriginal voices and more a searching for a way out of the historicism and Eurocentrism of the whole twentieth-century modernist project and its postmodernist endgames. This, at least, explains the constant shifts in mode and motif in Bennett’s work. He shows no loyalty to any particular aesthetic genealogy, as for example Juan Davila does to surrealism and Imants Tillers does to post-conceptual appropriation. This restless cosmopolitanism (of Bennett) is symptomatic of contemporary art since its globalisation in the 1990s, and signals the necessity to re-think the restricted Eurocentric commitments of twentieth-century Western art (including its primitivisms), be they modernist or postmodernist.

Ian McLean

911 (with Apologies to Walter Benjamin) by Ian McLean, 2002

Gordon Bennett’s more recent dialogues with Jean-Michel Basquiat’s paintings return to a theme that preoccupied him when a student: the frenetic alienation of inner city life. Except now the city is New York. The imaginative migration to New York via Basquiat might seem an unlikely destination for an artist long concerned with the impact of colonialism in Australia. However New York is a powerful emblem of the colonial era, especially to someone like Bennett who has always been alert to its global reach, its ambiguous transcultural forms, and its continuing hold over our lives. Supposedly bartered in 1626 by Dutch colonists from its Algonquian custodians for a few glassy trinkets, Manhattan Island is now a restless metropolis and gateway to the future. However the ever new of New York is symptomatic of its colonial origins. Not York, but New York; its very name bears the insignia of New World colonial cultures and their modernity, and of the New World Order we are now racing towards. Once a colonial outpost, now New York is the financial centre of a global economy. But more than this, it is the centre of a symbolic order that beguiles us all. It is ‘Gotham City’, the ‘Babylon’ of our times.

Bennett pictures New York on September 11, 2001, as if that catastrophic blast was a reverberating echo of a long and explosive history. The fiery tower collapses into the apocalyptic ruins of signs and Gothic apparitions, a new pop-icon in the acid graffiti of Bennett’s staccato designs. Here New York is a symbolic site rather than an actual place, a post-human Babel blindly speeding on from the present to the amnesiac allure of futurity. The past, unrecognised, is forgotten. But Bennett, uneasy citizen of Babylon, cannot forget. Flashbacks and visions of ghostly encounters explode across his canvases.

Basquiat and Bennett share a deeply ironic wit. However, Bennett’s paintings are darker and more Dostoevskian in mood. In Notes to Basquiat (Big Shoes), a young woman in big shoes, an image drawn from Basquiat’s painting Big Shoes (1983), stands bewildered in the mayhem: innocence betrayed. Or is she a native American warrior, perhaps one of those who bartered with the Dutch colonists so long ago, uncannily catapulted into Ground Zero on that dreadful day? Her body, drawn in a hybrid Basquiat-Oenpelli x-ray style, is pinned to a Malevich cross on a grided matrix. Transfixed in the whirlwind of history, New York is her new Golgotha. With eyes and mouth wide open in horror, her face turns inexorably towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, she sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage, and hurling it in front of her feet. She would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm blowing from Paradise irresistibly propels her into the future to which her back is turned, while the pile of rubble before her grows skyward.

Like this Byzantine Christ figure, Bennett’s remembrance is not nostalgic or regretful. Rather it scorches him as if the furnace of an unending terror from which he hopes to forge some fleeting freedom. Even if the past is a paradise, it can not be recovered. Time is irreversible. The past can only be an imaginary site of resistance (or affirmation) to the present. If colonialism is a poison that terrorises all that stand in its way, its effects are the only hope of cure. Both poison and cure are inseparably lodged in the same transcultural chemistry of colonial cultures, especially in its more virulent modernist forms. Like a new second nature, they have erased all memories of the natural world that nurtured Indigenous cultures. Bennett works in the tracks of these erasures. By overlaying modernist styles with images drawn from colonialist discourses, Bennett’s art acknowledges the terrible complicity of modernism and colonialism. However, at the same time he makes good use of this complicity as a partial cure. Constantly working in and between modernist discourses, he re-fashions their signs into a liberating pidgin. Throughout his career Bennett has especially looked to those artists who best witnessed the world in which he lived, and transformed the signifying power of their art into pathways to a new way of being. This is particularly the case in his dialogue with Basquiat. Basquiat’s hybrid aesthetic, like the Afro-American music that Bennett also enjoys, is a street-wise way of living in Babylon. It offers a way out of the colonialist legacy of slavery and racism without forgetting the ways it still poisons US society. Bennett enjoys conversing with Basquiat because, like a shaman, his rap Creole beats out a liberating discourse.

If Bennett has, in the Notes to Basquiat series, shown a greater interest in the therapeutic potential of transcultural texts, he never lets us forget their poisonous origins. His paintings are not utopian pictures. Yet their beguiling melancholic mix of memory and pain promises a knowing freedom that might just count as redemption. In this respect his paintings recall the presence and power of so much art that has come out of New York, from jazz and rap to Pollock and graffiti – all of which resonate in Basquiat’s paintings.

If, for many, a taboo was transgressed and a dream shattered on September 11, for Bennett the past again brightly flashed by. His pictures are not wise reassuring messages from some reflective sage contemplating the sins of the world. Like a graffiti artist hurrying at night, Bennett has to get it down. But also like a graffiti artist, he ‘writes' 1 in a deliberate assured way that, no matter how esoteric, can be read. However his hermeneutics is never closed; it is a matrix of signs on which we must write our own interpretations. Who is Big Shoes and what does she see? Which dead are stirring? Who is the large pink ghoulish face speaking with forked tongue? Can we trust its written signs - one of the ninety-nine names of Allah, al-Muzellu (the humiliator), and the background Shamsa pattern that often adorns the inside cover of the Koran? Is this another deceit of the great colonial city that, this time, blasphemes the Last Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him)? Or is it the angel of history; or the artist himself speaking with forked tongue? Even the dead, the demonic face seems to warn, will not be safe from the enemy.

Ian McLean, School of Architecture and Fine Art, University of Western Australia

Urban Renewal: Gordon Bennett's Notes to Basquiat (911) by Greg Dimitriadis & Cameron McCarthy, 2002

The scale of the attack was mind boggling--cinematic references most often come to mind. The initial reports of those dead and missing were beyond imagination. Lower Manhattan became--within 20 minutes--a virtual war zone. Some believed, at least initially, that only a nuclear bomb could have caused such devastation. Soon, we learned, the weapons had been culled largely from the everyday--a handful of box cutters, a few commercial flights, men transforming their bodies into the faggots and purified fuel igniting the purgatorial flames. Soon, the mail, crop dusters, tap water, were all pregnant with devastating possibility. The world, or at least our corner of it, would never be the same again. The "there" had finally come "here" for Americans everywhere--the postcolonial condition tout court.

Indeed, to live in the postcolonial moment, the postcolonial condition, is to encounter a world constantly emerging, a world that demands we engage with difference in all its complexity always. It is a world, to echo Stuart Hall, with no guarantees of any sort. The line between oppressors and oppressed--between colonizers and colonized--between the "here" and "there"--is always open to negotiation and re-negotiation. It is a world that often exceeds our ability to contain it through language and discourse. It is a world, we have argued, best anticipated through the work of postcolonial artists--work replete with ambiguity, indeterminacy, contingency, possibility, warning.

Gordon Bennett's new series Notes to Basquiat: 911 emerges as a vital and timely intervention here. Just three months after the attack, Bennett has offered up a fully elaborated visual terrain for thinking through a trauma that still seems largely beyond narrative closure. In this stunning series of paintings, Bennett wrestles once again with the work of the late New York City artist, Jean Michel Basquiat. Basquiat, of course, prosecuted a vision of the urban that was hybrid and poly-vocal, that cut across high and low culture as well as imagined and interrogated ethnic and racial boundaries of all sorts. It is a vision that Bennett has struggled with over the last several years as he has struggled with his own multiple cultural inheritances in contemporary Australia. The project, however, has taken on renewed urgency today, as the lived and imaginary space of New York City has been dealt such an unimaginable blow. Bravely taking on the task of "urban renewal", Bennett offers up a space of thoughtful deliberation in the series Notes to Basquiat: 911--a new angle of vision on Ground Zero--a deceptively slight shift in perspective that makes all the difference in the world.

Perhaps expectedly, planes and buildings are ever-present in these paintings. Throughout the collection, Bennett reworks an untitled 1982 painting by Basquiat which features a small plane hung mid-flight between two city buildings. Bennett takes these sparse images and multiplies, crowds, and intensifies them. Planes move in several different directions at once. City buildings of different shapes and sizes proliferate. Post 9-11, the effect is disquieting. The constant motion of contemporary urban centers, the social transactions which mark our postcolonial moment, now evoke terrifying vulnerability as much as possibility. This seems a permanent tension of our moment, this "age of globalization."

Other familiar images pepper these new paintings. We are struck, for example, by the extensive use of Basquiat's crown icon in these new works. In addition to its playful, self-referential dimension, the icon was often used by Basquiat to crown his personal heroes as in Jack Johnson (1982), Untitled (Sugar Ray Robinson) (1982), and CPRKP (1982) (i.e., Charlie Parker). Bennett uses the icon freely throughout these new paintings, though it now has far more haunting resonance as in Notes to Basquiat (City) (2001) and Notes to Basquiat (Jackson Pollock and his Other) (2001). We call particular attention to the painting Notes to Basquiat (911), which features both a crowned plane and a crowned Statue of Liberty. Does the crown symbolize Western imperialism? Or despotic theocrats, intent on spreading their own brand of religious intolerance? Where are our heroes now? It is a time, it seems, when all such claims are called into question.

Islamic text marks all these paintings. The process of rewriting and redirecting orientalism also puts the West on trial in its most global of cities--New York. Perhaps most notably, in Notes to Basquiat (TV News Presenter) (2001) and Notes to Basquiat (City) (2001), distinctive Arabic text appears to swirl across the skyline like fire. Baroque and evocative, this text translates as "In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful." It is said, we are told, by Muslims before any good deed. We are reminded here of the ideological disconnects which seem so much a part of our contemporary moment. The underside of a dynamically interdependent world is our profound sense of loss of control over ancestral markers of place and origins and a contingent struggle for meaning, identity, and affiliation. Indeed, while global flows of people, images, and technologies have drawn together heretofore far flung parts of the globe, difference has multiplied and intensified in stark and unforgiving ways. One person's good deed is also the next person's atrocity today. These differences are scripted across these paintings, as they are now scripted across the landscape of lower Manhattan.

We note, finally, the skeletal and anatomical images that so mark the work of Basquiat, in paintings such as Carbon Dating Systems Verses Scratchproof Tape (1982), Hand Anatomy (1982), and The Dutch Settlers (1982). While Bennett reworked these images into powerful commentaries on identity in earlier paintings such as Notes to Basquiat (Family) (1999) and Notes to Basquiat (Culture Bag) (1999), body parts now crowd the streets of lower New York in far more literal ways. In new paintings such as Notes to Basquiat (TV News Presenter) (2001) and Notes to Basquiat (Mirror) (2001), Bennett re-engages with this material, taking us beyond narrative verisimilitude to new, uncharted spaces.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the painting Notes to Basquiat (911), from which this exhibit takes its title. Here, Bennett takes Basquiat's clinical, disembodied hand from Hand Anatomy (1982)--an image he used earlier in Notes to Basquiat: Hand of God (1999)--and places it in the middle of the World Trade Center wreckage. The image evokes both death and life--devastation and creation--ends and beginnings. We recall a similar image from Basquiat's triptych Charles the First (1982)--the left hand of bebop giant Charlie Parker. Indeed, like Parker and Basquiat before him, Bennett has taken familiar material and improvised off it, stubbornly re-imagining and re-visioning the world around him in particular, thoughtful, and complex ways.

This is a desperately needed ethic today, as we face a world marked by cultural encounters, replete with both danger and possibility. Bennett offers us a model for productive dialogue here, one that speaks to the best impulses of contemporary cultural transactions, and foregrounds the critical interpretive role of aesthetics in understanding modern life. Bennett, an Australian artist with a complex European and Indigenous Australian cultural inheritance, has given us--American citizens, one of whom grew up in Barbados, one of whom grew up in New York City--a way to think through this moment in ways more powerful than we had heretofore encountered. Bennett, for us, has risen to the complex challenges of our moment, re-imagining the role of the artist--also now pedagogue, also now reporter, also now witness--in vitally important and necessary ways.

Greg Dimitriadis / Cameron McCarthy, 2002

Urban Renewal: Gordon Bennett's Notes to Basquiat (911)
Greg Dimitriadis
University at Buffalo, The State University of New York
Cameron McCarthy
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Gordon Bennett's abstract art: the aesthetics of commitment and indifference by Ian McLean, 2004

Gordon Bennett is Australia’s most recognised postcolonial Aboriginal painter. While he has always resisted the cult of Aboriginality (to the extent of refusing to identify his art as Aboriginal or himself as an Aboriginal painter), critics generally considered this a deconstructive tactic by which Bennett could further interrogate the politics of Aboriginality and identity. Paradoxically the more he distanced himself from Aboriginality the more Aboriginal his art seemed. This is because Bennett built his career and reputation on politically motivated artworks that directly called into question the viewer’s own attitudes through images that effectively expressed his moral indignation at the injustices of colonialism in Australia and the catastrophic effects of its racism and ideological war on Indigenous culture and lives.

Despite the emotional impact of his work, Bennett’s art is intellectually based: it is well researched, consists of complexly layered references, and appeals to the viewer’s intelligence. In short, Bennett was not intending to be judgemental, but to provide a space of judgement in which the viewer’s own intelligence made the calls. However many viewers feel that Bennett’s art tugs too hard at their conscience, or forces their judgement. This is mainly due to the ethical nature of Bennett’s aesthetics. Like many political artists, Bennett not only appeals to the viewer’s ethical commitments, but his own ethical commitments are all too obvious and guaranteed his work an authenticity of vision. As such his art quickly became exemplary of the late-twentieth century turn towards an ethical art and away from the empty formalism (or apparent moral bankruptcy) of late-modernism and the equally empty language games of postmodernism. An aesthetic of commitment replaced what Moira Roth called an ‘aesthetics of indifference. 1 Why then has Bennett, in these recent abstract paintings, suddenly turned back to what seems like a postmodernist pastiche of late-modernist formalism? Has he succumbed to globalism’s indifference to local differences? Has there been a radical discontinuity in his work, a complete break from his previous art to a new post-Aboriginal way of seeing the world?

While Bennett’s new abstract paintings might at first seem just another gambit by him in a career which has seen many twists and turns, none to date have been so radical and unexpected as this. The Notes to Basquiat paintings, which he has been working on for most of the previous five years or more (and longer than any other series), were the first to turn away from local issues of Aboriginal and Australian history. The turn was not sudden, and at the time hardly registered as a significant shift. His style of layered appropriated images drawn from media and art remained much the same; only his subject matter changed. At first he addressed issues of race and identity through an exchange with mainly African-American discourses. However in the previous few years his subject matter veered further away from local issues including (it seemed) the specific issues of race and identity that have galvanised notions of Aboriginality. Instead he addressed international terrorism and the war in Iraq. Bennett’s aim, it would seem, is to escape his Aboriginalisation by shifting his imagery to a more obvious international arena. The current abstract paintings would then be a culmination of this desire. If issues of race, identity, colonialism and even Australian colonialism could still be indirectly read into his paintings of the previous few years, this is not the case with these abstract paintings. Even his characteristic wordy titles in which his commitment was plainly if ironically displayed, have been reduced to just anonymous numbers. If this is a ploy to escape his Aboriginalisation, it would seem a desperate and extreme one, for Bennett has exchanged an aesthetics of commitment for one of indifference.

Moira argued that the ‘aesthetics of indifference’, particularly evident in US art since the 1950s, was a symptom of the ascendancy of the Right in Cold War US politics, just as the Leftist and anti-Fascist politics of the 1930s and 40s produced an art of commitment. While the end of the Cold War has further entrenched the Right, at the same time it created a new politics in which the old antagonism between Left and Right receded and a new space was opened especially for Third World and Indigenous cultures. This provided the opportunity for the ethical turn of postcolonial art. Bennett’s art developed in Australia at this time, and within a politics of reconciliation. With the defeat of the Labour party in the mid-1990s a new conservatism hostile to reconciliation quickly embedded itself in Australian politics. Bennett’s new aesthetics of indifference may be seen as symptomatic of this, and of Bennett’s own sense of impotence before a government indifferent to the suffering of others.

However, this reading of discontinuity, desperation and defeat is too neat an explanation of Bennett’s abstract paintings. Despite the obvious shift that has occurred in his work, there are also striking similarities between the abstract paintings and the figurative allegories that preceded them. The first point to note is that these abstract paintings are also appropriations: appropriations of last-modernist 1960s American abstraction. If this might to some extent confirm Moira’s argument, throughout his career Bennett has had a continuing fascination with modernist abstraction – from Malevich and Mondrian, to Pollock and Lichtenstein. Hence Bennett’s move towards abstraction is not new and nor should it necessarily be interpreted as an indifference to his earlier commitments. He has long sought relationships between modernist abstraction and issues of colonialism and Aboriginalism.

Bennett’s long interest in the connections between modernist abstraction and Aboriginality is not just the deconstructionist one of giving voice to what is othered by modernity. It is also a personal project of escaping an identity politics which paradoxically dispossess a people (including himself) by Aboriginalising them. As mentioned earlier, this paradox has always been at the heart of Bennett’s art as he sought to escape the very Aboriginalisation that has been the source of his success. In this respect, these latest paintings acknowledge the failure of his escape. However it would be too narrow a reading to see them as a last ditch attempt at such an escape. More likely they acknowledge the impossibility of escape, and affirm that this impossibility has always been the central motive of his work.

Many years ago Bennett confessed to me that he had always wanted to be an abstract painter but that images uncontrollably burst onto his canvasses. Like the demons and monsters that supposedly hide just below the surface of Pollock’s abstract paintings, the apparent formalism of Bennett’s recent works only barely hides the tortured pre-history of their making. Nevertheless, despite certain continuities with his earlier work, these recent paintings demand new readings. Stripped of what Clement Greenberg called literary associations, they ask to be read as art rather than discursively; and equally, the maker of these paintings demands to be acknowledged as an artist not an Aboriginal spokesperson. Thus Bennett may not have escaped his destiny, but he has sought a way to live with good conscience – or, if you like, being (and being judged for) what he is, an artist.

The abstract series is, then, essentially ethical in intent. Its ethics however is quite different to the ethical turn of postcolonial art. Indeed, Bennett’s new ethics implicitly rejects this ethical turn; he turns away from issues of social and political justice and towards the Kantian ideal which Greenberg championed in his defence of abstraction. Here art, or more accurately aesthetics, is itself the ground of ethics or the good. Judgement, reduced to a purely aesthetic dimension, had to be indifferent or unprejudiced. Like the scientist weighing up experimental observations, the artist also must keep his or her cool. Hence political commitment, once the measure of ethics, was now a symptom of its corruption.

While Roth was writing about art practices that Greenberg deplored - the legacy of Duchamp in the ultra-cool performance and art of Cage, Cunningham and Johns in the 1950s, and minimalism and pop in the 1960s – this legacy owed more to Greenberg than it cared to admit, for formalism is surely the quintessential aesthetic of indifference that frames this period. However Greenberg was not the first to develop an aesthetic of indifference – after all, indifference rather than commitment is a key Kantian concept. Baudelaire, Manet and various Symbolist poets and painters also made it an essential component of early modernism. This Kantian current, at odds with the general Western philosophical tradition that grounds ethics in its relative social and political applications, has been influential on modernism and also contemporary poststructuralist discussions of the ethical. 2

Arguably this Kantian current in twentieth century art is a displaced spiritualism. Greenberg, who warned against spiritualism and metaphysics, 3 nevertheless described the ethos of abstract art in spiritual metaphors as ‘a search of the absolute’.

The avant-garde artist tries in effect to imitate God by creating something valid solely in its own terms, in the way nature itself is valid, in the way a landscape – not a picture – is aesthetically valid; something given, increate, independent of meanings, similars or originals.

While Greenberg secularised this ‘search of the absolute’ by locating it in the material processes of art, these processes assumed a transcendental quality. ‘Content was dissolved so completely into form that the work of art’ was irreducible ‘in whole or part to anything not itself.’ 4 For Greenberg this was most unequivocal in the work of Pollock, which ‘has gone beyond the stage where he needs to make his poetry explicit in ideographs. What he invents instead has perhaps, in its very abstractness and absence of assignable definition, a more reverberating meaning.’ 5 For Greenberg this ‘reverberating’ meaning, felt sensuously in the aesthetic revelation of form, remains as an essential residue of art that will keep ‘culture moving in the midst of ideological confusion and violence’. 6

Bennett may see his task after nearly ten years of conservative government as something similar. However the aesthetics of indifference is not necessarily without commitment. Greenberg not only developed his aesthetics from within a commitment to Leftist politics, but he championed a generation of abstract expressionist artists who were likewise committed to social justice. While derived from late-modernist hardedge and minimalist paintings that eschewed the commitments of abstract expressionism, the texture of Bennett’s abstract paintings looks more like the latter (more like the committed Barnett Newman than the indifferent Frank Stella, even though Stella is Bennett’s source). Bennett’s art has long combined the postmodernist aesthetic of indifference with the committed art of expressionist artists he admires from Van Gogh to Pollock and Basquiat. Aboriginal western desert painters also (seemingly) paint between and across the once antagonistic stylistic conventions of late modernist abstraction and abstract expressionism. An example that Bennett’s abstract paintings seem particularly close to is Emily Kngwarreye’s stripe paintings of the mid-1990s. This is probably why Bennett’s post-Aboriginal abstract paintings look more like traditional Aboriginal art (be it acrylic paintings or carved patterns on shields) than anything he has made before. Even abstract art, it seems, will not save Bennett from being tagged Aboriginal. It is too early to tell where Bennett will go with his new abstract paintings, but like Greenberg (though from a different perspective and history), Bennett’s shift towards abstraction is made with the impossible ambition of retaining his former commitment within an aesthetics of indifference that would guarantee his own ethical integrity as an artist in the midst of the ideological confusion and violence of contemporary politics.

1 Many thanks to Sue Best for letting me read her unpublished essay ‘Mild Intoxication and Other Aesthetic Feelings: Psychoanalysis and Art Revisited’.

2 Moira Roth, ‘Aesthetic of Indifference’, Art Forum, 16,3 (November 1977), pp. 46-53.

3 See Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction, Blackwell, Oxford, 1993; Ethics Politics Subjectivity, Verso, London, 1999

4 See Greenberg, ‘Orbituary of Mondrian’, Clement Greenberg the collected essays and criticism, Volume 1, ed John O’Brian, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1986, pp 188.

5 Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, Collected Essays, Vol 1, p. 8.

6 Greenberg, Review of Exhibitions of Jean Dubuffet and Jackson Pollock, Collected Essays, Vol. 2, 1886, p. 125.

7 Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, p. 8.

Who is John Citizen? by Ian McLean, 2006

'It’s all me. Nothing is me.' (Philip Roth 1)

Like the Jewish-American author Philip Roth, Gordon Bennett’s art is at once intensely autobiographical and self-effacing. Each plays with the rhetoric of identity precisely to deny the identity game any oxygen or legitimacy as if nothing is more boring (or dangerous) than its heavy-handed politics. Roth denies he is a Jewish writer: Bennett denies he is an Aboriginal artist: for both their art is a means to escape the reductive logic of identity politics by showing its essentialisms to be discursive fictions or, as Bennett once said, a 'hall of mirrors'.

In line with this strategy Bennett has continuously shifted his style, not only to avoid being typecast (though as all successful mid-career artists know this is impossible) but also to make the point that he is, before anything else, an artist, a performer. We don’t confuse an actor with the role he plays, so too we should not confuse the artist with the persona projected in his art. In short, art is a type of disguise, mask or mirror rather than a window onto the soul, but a disguise by which the artist can be something more than himself, and a mirror that reflects back to the audience their own selves and the world they live in. 'Gordon Bennett' did this masterfully, but the danger of too good a performance is that it is mistaken for reality itself. As if to drive this point home, Bennett has invented a new artistic persona, John Citizen.

John Citizen is not an identity (his anonymity is particularly ego-less), nor even an alter ego with all its psychological connotations, but transparently a type of disguise. Perhaps the main point of John Citizen is that in recognising his disguise, we must also accept that ‘Gordon Bennett’ is one too. But John Citizen also has his own play to stage.

John Citizen’s first work, 'Skin Deep', mimicked Gordon Bennett’s art. Made in September 1995, it appropriated the welt paintings – amongst the most violent works Gordon Bennett made. But as with all good mimicry John Citizen’s was notably different. Instead of raw red whip marks on a black skin of Pollock-like lesions, John Citizen used a smoothly applied 'skin tone' (i.e. pink) producing a more luxurious and even seductive effect. They are distinctly postmodern rather than postcolonial.

Bennett staged 'Gordon Bennett' as a postcolonial artist, but John Citizen is an artist for our times: he reflects back to us citizens the white Australia of the post-Keating era. If Gordon Bennett is a history painter, John Citizen paints science fiction, which is a subset of the utopia genre. Utopias are generally thinly disguised critiques of contemporary society. However John Citizen, an altogether more relaxed persona than Gordon Bennett, keeps his cards quite hidden. Without Gordon Bennett’s biting satire, John Citizen’s sardonic humour might easily be missed.

In the recent Interiors series (shown in this exhibition) John Citizen has become his own artist as if he no longer needs the inspiration of Gordon Bennett. Gordon Bennett has made paintings of the Interior but their deconstructions of the myths of Australia’s colonial history were altogether different. The interior, a metaphor for both John Citizen and Gordon Bennett of Plato’s cave and other myths of the psyche, is the proverbial stage of identity. However John Citizen’s contemporary Interiors with monochrome paintings have completely foreclosed on Gordon Bennett’s maps of contested colonial identities. Made in the image of modernist utopias – postmodern versions of Corbusier and Bauhaus - they are the Ikeas of the mind in which humans have seemingly evolved to some higher post-historical plane and where the beautiful is a smart mathematical ratio rather than in nature and the sublime emotions of human passions. So too the monochrome paintings, like the modern furniture and slick tones of these placeless rooms they decorate, have lost the mystical aura modernist artists and theorists once invested in them. It is as if the theoretical progenitor of the monochrome, Clement Greenberg, stands naked, his turmoils and commitments left behind leaving only the flatlands of postmodern desire.

These halls of mirrors reflect nothing but their own timeless glassy surface. Futures without history, they have nothing to apologise for. John Citizen might picture the poverty of the future we are making for ourselves, but he also reminds us that this Dreaming is only a hall of mirrors.

NOTE: the title is taken from a quote by Philip Roth (Weekend Australian, 11-12.02.06, R4)

1 From a quote by Philip Roth (Weekend Australian, 11-12.02.06, R4)