Unfinished Business: The Art of Gordon Bennett

Abstract

The psychological self-portraiture running beneath so much of Gordon Bennett’s work was there in the first room. As was the historical revisionism. As was the post-colonial intervention. As was the artist’s critical responsiveness to so many of the racially divisive and damaging frameworks through which we construct our daily lives. Any number of possible narratives could have been used to structure this exhibition. But curator Zara Stanhope’s curatorial openness and her choice of chronological order provided full scope for the multi-layered, contradictory shifts in Bennett’s imaginary to speak clearly about the ambivalence from which they were born and the history of their imagining. The artist rapidly moved from the chance-game of letting an image evolve as if of its own volition, towards a system of representation where he was in full curatorial/artistic control. Bennett understood that, for his particular task, ‘art’ could not be separated from the order or structure of ‘language’. The first two rooms of the exhibition reveal how early he developed the themes that he would ‘worry’ productively about over his 25-year career. These earlier works, which laid bare the complex frameworks of ideas and imagery with transparently painful personal evidence, were soon left behind as the artist moved towards more controlled and strategic tactics in what was for him a game of emotional, psychological and racial life-and-death. Two images in the first room of the exhibition expose the deep uncertainties at the core of his work. In Untitled (Nuance) (1992), a strip of eight black and white self-portraits run above a grey-scale of seven rectangles spelling out the word ‘nuance’. In the first, the artist’s own face stares back at the camera over a rectangle of black. Presented with full-frontal, no-frills directness, it could be a mug shot or an anthropological study of an Australian Aboriginal male. Or both. In the succession of seven images that follow, it is unclear whether the subject is applying or removing the skin-like mask that adheres to his face. As Gordon well knew, in Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon speaks of the ‘epidermalization’ of the ‘black man’s’ ‘inferiority complex’. As if the skin itself binds the fixity of identity into being. But Fanon, a Lacanian psychoanalyst, also identifies the ‘massive psycho-existential complex’ emerging ‘from the juxtaposition of the white and black races’, and his analysis in that book focused on unravelling this complex.