Who’s Dreaming Now?

Thus when I read the statutory declaration in Worth Exploring?, I could say that it effectively situates me ‘ultra vires’ — outside the law. The text of the declaration makes it difficult for me to identify with the political and legal position that it articulates. At the same time, in reading it, I am somehow put on the spot.

Something is going on here which seems to take us beyond the obvious kinds of provocation that I noted a moment ago, beyond the ‘inflammatory’ shock tactics which Bell so often employs — important as those shock tactics are. We perhaps start to see how the very posture of intransigence that Bell generally adopts in his work opens up the possibility of a radically different kind of relationship with its audience, a radically different form of communication.

In these more complicated terms, Bell’s work is confronting not so much because of its resistance to, or refusal of, its audience, or a large part of its audience, but rather because of the way it brings that audience face to face with a resistance, a knot, at the very heart of the history of black-white relations in Australia. From this point of view, the radicality of Bell’s work lies in the directness with which it addresses us. (Think of the title of a new essay by Bell: ‘Wot chew gun ado?’) If Bell again and again forces us to encounter that ‘difficulty’ — that injustice, that violence — at the basis of Australian history, it is surely because, for Bell, without a recognition of this, there can be no relation, no communication, no ‘dialogue’ whatsoever.

In this way the absolute and overriding concern of Bell’s work, the demand for an Aboriginal justice, comes to imply an appeal to what we might call, with or without Einsteinian overtones, a principle of relativity— that is, an appeal to a sense of human community and interrelatedness. With Bell, the absolutism of the demand is intimately bound up with the relativity of the appeal: each supports and echoes the other. In Worth Exploring?, for example, it is precisely in the name of ‘civilisation’ that Bell sets down his judgement concerning the criminality of the Europeans who colonised Aboriginal lands — and of those who come after them and continue to profit from this criminal act.

We begin to see that what distinguishes Bell’s work is not in fact some blunt, full-frontal style of approach. In fact, in a strange way, we could say that its capacity to confront us depends on a kind of balancing-act that it always involves, a certain elusiveness (rather like that of the figures in his ‘Shape Shifters’ series) — there is a characteristic reliance on a certain twist or series of twists.

We could think, for example, of Bell’s use of appropriation in the confusingly named Untitled (1978), a work (in fact made in 2002) which consists of two digital prints on canvas. This is a work which wears its sources on its sleeve: the ghost gums and golden light leave no doubt that we’re looking at one of Hans Heysen’s pastoral idylls. At the same time, when we see how the same Heysen image is replicated — and subtly altered — in both prints (one picking out yellows accents, the other picking out pinks), we also know we’re looking at something very like the work of Australia’s key exponent of appropriation art, Imants Tillers. And indeed what Bell has done is to reproduce an untitled work made by Tillers in 1978 (hence the title) — a work which was by chance destroyed after it was bought by the National Gallery of Australia.

What happens when Bell adds another link to this chain of appropriation? It’s difficult not to see this work as making a satirical comment on the way in which white Australian culture fetishises and appropriates the dreaming (or marking) of land-ties in Aboriginal Desert painting. When these panels were hung last year above a dining setting decked out with Aboriginal designs and motifs, they looked like a lacerating riposte to the Desert paintings decorating the board rooms and lobbies of Australia’s corporate giants. It’s as if Bell, in turn, has chosen to take a benevolent interest in the colonial dreamscapes born of a white ‘mythology’ (just as Tillers’ non-existent ‘original’ of this work is also now, partly thanks to Bell, the stuff of myth).

Yet Untitled (1978) might equally be taken with a twist as calling on Heysen and Tillers to add to the history of an Aboriginal painting, or dreaming, of the land, bringing them to attest to its endurance in the face of colonisation, inviting them to be passing figures in this landscape. With its problematic relationship to the Heysen tradition, the painting of Albert Namatjira is then, perhaps, the real ghost haunting this work.

Bell engages in a different kind of balancing-act in Yam (2001), a collaboration with the renowned Western Desert painter Michael Nelson Jagamara. Interestingly, this collaboration arises from the fact that the story of the yam extends across a great stretch of the Australian continent — from Jagamara’s country in Central Australia to Bell’s in the east. While it may surprise us to see Bell painting in a seemingly traditional mode, what’s interesting is the way he inflects the large-format figuration of traditional motifs favoured by Jagamara in his recent work. In contrast to the bright colours which Jagamara generally uses, here the figure of the yam is not differentiated by colour; the whole work is a monochrome, painted in a sobre grey. Using a technique Bell frequently adopts in his paintings, the yam-figure is formed out of gravel which is glued to the surface of the canvas and then painted over. It is almost a figure in relief, one that not that easy to see unless you are looking at the painting side-on or in certain kinds of lighting.

With its subdued, monochrome mode of presentation, Bell’s and Jagamara’s Yam refuses the European ‘dream’ of an Aboriginal art that is inoffensively ‘spiritual’ and decorative — it thus refuses the (white) mythological creation of an Aboriginality that would fill up the void in Australian identity rather than questioning it. At the same time, the yam which gives this work its title seems to encapsulate the Aboriginal presence or voice that Bell seeks out in his work. Like a real yam, this yam is a partly concealed, subterranean presence — it is literally radical. In the way it buckles the surface of the picture and the way it branches out to fill the space, it is at once irruptive and almost infinitely extensive. Seen in this light, this painting perhaps becomes, in an elusive, understated way, a communication of the dream of Aboriginal justice and the desire for a genuine ‘civilisation’ of Australian culture.

By now it should be clear that the dreams we are thinking of here intersect and collide. The difficult balancing-act that Bell performs in his work traces their manifold connections — and at the same time puts their relation in question. This is the radicality of his work — its demand and its appeal.

The Koori History Website thanks Morgan Thomas for permission to re-publish this essay.