I AM GORDON BENNETT

Abstract

In the last room of the Queensland Art Gallery’s 2020 exhibition Unfinished Business—The Art of Gordon Bennett, just before the spectator exited the show, was a page from one of Bennett’s notebooks, blown up and applied to the wall. Unfinished Business was a survey exhibition of Bennett’s work, one of several that have so far taken place since his death, this time with an emphasis on works on paper. These were framed and mounted on walls throughout the exhibition, along with a selection of paintings from throughout Bennett’s career. But this particular page from the notebook was enlarged and applied directly to the wall of the final room, as though to serve as something of an artist’s signature in relation to what had come before—indeed, at the very bottom of the the wall were Bennett’s initials, GB, along with the date on which he originally made the entry, 25 August 1990 (Fig. 1). What we have on that last wall of the gallery is testament to the ongoing importance of language in Bennett’s work. Words enter Bennett’s practice at least as early as 1987 with The Persistence of Language and continue virtually all the way to the end. Indeed, critics would later come up with the evocative term ‘word stack’ to describe a similar run of words in Bennett’s Notes to Basquiat series (1998–2002), which this notebook page is clearly a forerunner to. Earlier in the show, in fact, there was another page from Bennett’s notebook, very similar to the one in the last room, although it was actually framed and mounted on the wall. Its series of statements reads ‘I am Australian’, ‘I am Aboriginal’, ‘I am Human Being’, ‘I am Spiritual Being’, ‘I am Body’ and ‘I am Spirit’, followed by a final ‘I am’, Bennett’s initials and the date on which he made the entry, which is the same as the other page, 25 August 1990. In that version on the final wall, we have in slightly more abbreviated form ‘I am Gordon Bennett’, ‘I am Australian’, ‘I am Human Being’ and ‘I am Spirit’, again followed by a final ‘I am’, Bennett’s initials and the date. But although the two versions have the same date, we might say that the version on the wall comes later, insofar as we do not have that same crossed-out ‘a’ before ‘Human Being’, as though by now Bennett had made up his mind as to its proper formulation (Fig. 2). As we read this series or sequence of categories, just to consider the earlier version mounted on the wall for a moment—Australian, Aboriginal, Human