Gordon Bennett

During the course of the 1990s, Gordon Bennett established himself as an artist of considerable ability…

… To the work itself, Bennett, along with certain other contemporary artists in Australia, uses the scope and nature of modern Australian history as graphic subject matter for his art. A modern history that began with Captain Cook’s so-called discovery of the great southern land and the subsequent relentless programme of massacres and systematic genocide heaped on the native peoples of Australia.

What makes this a fascinating exhibition are the various ways in which Bennett declares himself (and visually illustrates himself) to be both an intrinsic component of, as well as a physical embodiment of, that brutal history. For an artist such as Bennett, history and identity are forever and inextricably linked. It’s like when Bob Marley, nearly 150 years after the abolition of slavery in Jamaica, sang ‘Ev’ry time I hear the crack of the whip, my blood runs cold/I remember on the slave ship, how they brutalised our very souls’. In his work, such as Australian Icon (Notes on Perception No 1) of 1989, Bennett remembers and reminds us of Captain Cook’s place in the scheme of things. He remembers and reminds us of the European invasion which began with the arrival at Botany Bay and, with work like Self Portrait: Interior/Exterior, 1993, he remembers and reminds us, as does Marley, of ‘the crack of the whip’…

… This is an important exhibition and the Ikon press release (though displaying a worrying ignorance of geography) makes bold the claim that the exhibition ‘will provide the opportunity for a major debate on issues such as artistic responses to the legacy of colonialism in Europe and Australia, and the experience of artists in the two countries’. Though with no substantial seminar being organised as part of the exhibition, it’s unclear exactly how and where the ‘major debate’ can take place.

The above extracts are from an exhibition review by Eddie Chambers, "Gordon Bennett”, Art Monthly, London, Number 233, February 2000: 26-27