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In Your Face

I have a recollection of a renowned painter writing of his shock at discovering that he was descended from an indigenous people, something he reflects on in an early essay about his work. After a childhood in which he had been indoctrinated to be prejudiced against Aboriginal people, he was confronted with the fact that he was ‘one of them’, that he was an Other. In the scene I recall, he was looking at himself in the mirror, trying to see through the preconceptions of his self-identity and gain insight into his recently discovered indigeneity by striking various postures, even standing on one leg with the other leg raised and folded, the sole of that foot against his thigh, like someone out in the desert resting as he watches an explorer pass. Yet, when I returned to the essay in which I thought this event had been recounted, I couldn’t find it. Nor could I find it in other texts on the artist in art magazines nor in the several books by the prominent art historian who has championed him. Was that event enacted in front of the mirror, that moment of performance, my own imaginary moment, a theatre I felt necessary to ascribe to the artist? According to this perhaps false recollection, it would seem that, for the artist, the possibilities of seeing himself as an indigenous person were predetermined and circumscribed by the clichés of mainstream Australian depictions. At around the time that I believed I had read his account of his self-discovery, I was becoming aware of the proliferation and power of what was then called ‘urban Aboriginal art’. It was a time when the mood of the nation was lively and affirmed Aboriginal politics. This reached its official apotheosis in Prime Minister Paul Keating’s famous Redfern Address. The artist’s earliest work coincided with the Bicentenary, the celebrations of the start of the British colonisation of Australia, a time of widespread soul searching. I had imagined that artist posing in front of the mirror at a time prior to the indigenous politicisation of representation which is now taken for granted; an era during which the pain of that kind of discovery was primarily private and invisible. In keeping with the focus on issues of representation and identity politics that were current in the 1980s and 1990s, the artist subsequently pursued an art practice that was concerned with modes of image-making; building a substantial body of work that revealed the imperative to attack the conventions of the national art history. This artist always adhered to the view that images encode power and that, as an artist, it was his duty to decode established images, producing others which might provide the code for a new kind of self. It seemed to me that if he, as a young adult, was unable to imagine himself within a received image of indigeniety it was because the self – the individual – of that ethnicity hadn’t yet been publicly recognised and acknowledged in Australian culture. Other artists in a similar position have come to terms with this predicament of depersonalisation, this kind of dispossession, each responding with a different strategy. Common to them all – whether Destiny Deacon’s photographs of racially charged scenarios using black dolls, Ricky Maynard’s documentary photographs of traditional food gathering in Tasmania, Tracy Moffatt’s cinematic and photographic tableaux that are a product of a nuanced understanding of the idioms of international contemporary art or Lin Onus’s often wry paintings and sculptures which aboriginalise everyday experience – is the understanding that they do not have a radical, independent visual culture, one completely separate from the broader Western culture in which they have found themselves. They speak the common tongue differently, with a concern for their own politics and with a sense of possible restitution for the trauma of the nation’s beginnings.