signed and dated verso: G. Bennett 8 -03-2001. title, medium and dimensions inscribed verso: NOTES TO BASQUIAT: CUT THE CIRCLE II / Acrylic on linen / 5 x 6, 152 x 182.5 cm. Gordon Bennett 'Notes to Basquiat' (911) 2001 synthetic polymer paint on linen 182.5 x 304.0 cm. Again echoing Benjamin, Bennett draws a direct link between civilisation and barbarism, or here Enlightenment and suicide. Arguing that the codes of Western art, literature, law and science introduced with European settlement have become a prison from which indigenous people cannot escape but rather, only appropriate Bennett sought to picture such manifold conspiracies, employing the deconstructivist aesthetic of postmodernism to re-present the histories and politics underlying the Australian social landscape. My intention is in keeping with the integrity of my work in which appropriation and citation, sampling and remixing are an integral part, as are attempts to communicate a basic underlying humanity to the perception of 'blackness' in its philosophical and historical production within western cultural contexts. Both series used a conspicuous sampling of other artists work, re-contextualising these images into symbols of the wider exclusion and disenfranchisement of indigenous peoples.
In 1999, the year this artwork was created, John Howard issued a 'statement of sincere regret' over the forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families, failing to make an official apology. Indeed, Bennetts extraordinary attention to visual languages, their meanings and implications, is the key revelation about his oeuvre I have taken away from the current exhibition. Notes to Basquiat: Modernity, 1999 is a bridge between these two series, synthesising the main motifs of each into a tightly articulated composition exposing how words and images shape our cultural identity.The array of appropriated motifs within Notes to Basquiat: Modernity tesselate to create a dynamic composition, their collaged intuitive arrangement providing a decidedly contemporary aesthetic. In his recent book Rattling Spears: A History of Indigenous Australian Art (2016), art historian Ian McLean argues that anger is the consistent emotion expressed by Bennetts work. Susan Best receives funding from the Australia Council for the Arts and the Australian Research Council . Gordon Bennett. In its wake the pile of rubble grows skyward. body to expose both pain and anguish and a common humanity. He felt alienated by his Australian education and the representation of Aboriginal people in Western culture and as a result, began confronting the idea of identity in his own work. His playful yet powerfully political artworks borrow images from other artists and mix and re-contextualise elements from Western and non-Western art history. Inscriptions: "G. Bennett Nov. 1999 / Notes to Basquiat: Untitled"--On verso. 5Unscripted: Language in Contemporary Australian Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 20 May 24 July, 2005, The Galleries, Sydney Morning Herald, 9 November 1999, p. 17McLean I., Probability, rap and coincidence: notes to Basquiat in Gordon Bennett: One Tense Moment (episode two), exhibition catalogue, Sherman Galleries, Sydney, 1999, unpaginated (illus. and levels we can relate to each other as human beings in the world of
^ Terry Smith, "Australia's Anxiety," History and Memory in the Art of Gordon Bennett, Birmingham: Ikon Gallery, 1999, p. 17. Identities
30 (illus.
Notes to Basquiat: Female Pelvis by Gordon Bennett | Art.Salon 'Nothing quite prepares you for the impact of this exhibition': Haring Basquiat at the NGV. Levels 7-12. Others are held in regional, state and national collections (National Gallery of Australia, Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of New South Wales) as well as international collections including Wereldmuseum, Rotterdam.LUCIE REEVES-SMITH, Important Australian + International Fine Art, Gordon Bennett, managed by John Citizen Arts Pty Ltd. that make us the individuals we are and the histories of shared experience
Pollocks vibrant skeins of paint can be tracked across a range of works: a section of Blue Poles as a background image in Notes to Basquiat (Jackson Pollock and his Other) (2001). John CitizenInterior (Tribal Rug) 2007acrylic on linen152 x 152cmCollection: Private, Brisbane The Estate of Gordon Bennett. Collection: The Estate of Gordon Bennett. "In the late 1990s Bennett responded to the personal experiences and practice of Puerto-Rican Haitian-American artist Jean-Michael Basquiat by producing a series of paintings that referenced the style and appropriated motifs of Basquiat's own art. Gordon Bennett, Notes to Basquiat: Facial Bones, 1999, acylic on canvas, 51 x 51 cm Courtesy Sherman Galleries, Sydney.
BENNETT, Gordon; Notes to Basquiat: Perfect Teeth secure our sense of ourselves into eternity, identities are the names
signed, dated and inscribed verso: G Bennett 3-9-1999 / NOTES TO BASQUIAT: (ab) original / [], Sherman Galleries, SydneyGene and Brian Sherman collection, Sydney, Gordon Bennett Notes to Basquiat: One Tense Moment (episode two), Sherman Galleries, Sydney, 5 November 4 December 1999, cat. Quoting the raw graffiti expressionism of Philip Guston and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Bennett identifies a more authentic form of modernist painting, intimately connected to notions of race, ancestry and nation scrawled in lists close-by.Playing with the flatness of the picture plane so exalted by Modernist theory, Bennetts layers of text and appropriated images jostle for prominence. Deliberately inconclusive original, archetype, manuscript, master, parent etc Notes to Basquiat: (Ab)original eloquently attests to the compelling possibilities offered by Bennetts art and its embodiment of a process being kept in play; and as he poignantly muses, Poetry doesnt seek closure on its meaning. . 152.0 x 182.5 cm. Looking through the exhibition, this internal language becomes insistently present as the resonances between works start to sound. Read more: by Greg Tate which reads: "To be a race-identified race-refugee is to
other as human beings in the world of material existence, even though
He also wrote an open letter to the dead artist celebrating their cultural and artistic similarities, as well as their shared love of jazz, rap and hip-hop. Anchoring the composition is a confronting tortured skeletal figure . of different experience and layers that make us the individuals we are
Underlying this dialogue with Basquiat Bennett's need to re-contextualise the issues that he has explored throughout his artistic career, confronting them within a global context. These shapes are coloured red, yellow and black referencing the Aboriginal flag and loss of a culture.
Works | NGV | View Work This included abstract expressionism and a dot aesthetic inspired by the Papunya Tula art movement of the Australian Western Desert. 120 x 80cm
The Notes to Basquiat: 911 series and the Camouflage series, which reflect on the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and the war in Iraq respectively, highlight Bennett's global perspective. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account.
NOTES TO BASQUIAT: MODERNITY, 1999 | Deutscher and Hackett His colourful and thought provoking conceptual paintings, prints, performance videos and installations draw on many different sources and styles. I already knew Bennett was in dialogue with other artists and their distinct painterly idioms: Mondrian, Margaret Preston, Thomas Bock, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jackson Pollock to name just a few. In the late 1990s, he embarked on two consecutive series of paintings, the Home Dcor series, and Notes to Basquiat. Free entry, Find out what you need to know before visiting, Untitled (reference to Colin McCahon's 'Valley of the dry bones'), Myth of the Western man (White man's burden), Outsider/ insider: the art of Gordon Bennett, Mmoires vives: une histoire de l'art aborigine, Australian art and the Russian avant-garde. Collection: Bendigo Art Gallery, Gordon Bennett Australia 1955-2014. material existence, even though we may be separated by cultural context,
Bennetts Notes to Basquiat collectively have had an extensive exhibition history, with a selection exhibited in the Kwangju Biennale 2000: Man + Space, Korea and the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial in 2001. Collection: Paul Eliadis Collection of Contemporary Australian Art, Australia. If I were to choose a single word to describe my underlying drive it would be freedom To be free we must be able to question the ways our own history defines us. (1990). In the late 1990s Bennett responded to the personal experiences and practice of Puerto-Rican Haitian-American artist Jean-Michael Basquiat by producing a series of paintings that referenced the style and appropriated motifs of Basquiat's own art. Purchased with funds from the Foundation for the Historic Houses Trust, Museum of Sydney Appeal, 2007, Collection: Museum of Sydney, Sydney Living Museums, Gordon Bennett Australia 1955-2014. In Notes to Basquiat (Death of irony) 2002, Bennett astonishingly knits a homage to Basquiat with Islamic patterns and calligraphy into a coherent composition . This is the third major survey show to consider the breadth of Bennetts work and should not be missed. That is not my intention, I have had my own experiences of being crowned in Australia, as an 'Urban Aboriginal' artist underscored as that title is by racism and 'primitivism' - and I do not wear it well. Exhibited: "Treasures Gallery", National Library of Australia, 12 December 2012 - 7 July 2013. Ewen McDonald (Editor), Biennale of Sydney 2000, Sydney, 2000, 39 (colour illus. on exhibition catalogue front cover), Aulich, A., Visual Arts, The Melbourne Review, Melbourne, issue 21, July 2013, pp. Bennett's art practice is interdisciplinary and encompasses painting, photography, printmaking, video, performance and installation.
Gordon Bennett: Be Polite - Galleries West The, In the late 1990s Bennett responded to the personal experiences and practice of Puerto-Rican Haitian-American artist Jean-Michael Basquiat by producing a series of paintings that referenced the style and. The pop art inspired paintings of the Coloured People and Interiors series seem glossier and less political than Bennetts other work, but this is not the case. The first African American artist to be internationally acclaimed, he was in many ways a model of the exotic success favoured in the rapacious celebrity stakes of the New York art world as much for his ethnic origins and youthful beauty as for his undoubted talent. The work also relates to Basquiat's paintings, following the same principles as his graffiti, signifying the existence of a more basic truth hidden within a given event or thought"--Information from acquisitions documentation. Notes to Basquiat was named for the American Jean-Michel Basquiat (196088), a precocious young artist of Puerto Rican and Haitian-American heritage, originally a graffiti artist, whose star flamed brightly in the energetic international art world of the 1980s; Perfect teeth riffs on Basquiats own paintings. why. Gordon Bennett was an Indigenous Australian artist whose work primarily conveyed indigenous identity struggles, particularly through the subject of colonization and racial injustice. Bennett, Gordon. Cultural Violence, Journal of Peace Research, vol.27 (3), 291-305. A critically and politically engaged artist, Bennett presents alternative historical narratives of Australia and of contemporary world events, creating provocative works that place identity politics front and centre. Appropriation allowed Bennett to refer to both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal art, and situate his painting in a fluid area between these two overlapping forms of contemporary art. Galtung (2009) explains in the article Cultural Violence how historical systems of racial oppression exist permanently within contemporary social consciousness. Collection: Paul Eliadis Collection of Contemporary Australian Art, Australia
signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: G Bennett 15-03-2001/ "NOTES TO BASQUIAT: MYTH OF THE WESTERN MAN". This critical orientation is particularly evident in Bennetts history paintings, displayed in the third room of the exhibition. The persona of John Citizen partly represents 'the Australian Mr Average', but is also a kind of disguise for Bennett. In 1998, ten years after his death, Bennett wrote an open letter to Basquiat that explained his motivations: To some, writing a letter to a person posthumously may seem very tacky and an attempt to gain some kind of attention, even steal your crown. This painting emanates from the 'Notes to Basquiat' series of paintings, where the artist takes appropriation to . Accordingly, in the present Notes to Basquiat: (Ab)original, 1999, the experience of race and life generally in the northern and southern hemispheres is both differentiated and conflated through Bennett's highly sophisticated mimicry of Basquiat's spontaneous urban style. In other words, such discrimination and historic prejudice directly relate to the current cultural conflict and ongoing search for identity for Indigenous Australians (NGV 2014). Notes to Basquiat Untitled, 1999. your book, a reference to Stuart Hall which I have included in my own
In his Welt series of paintings of the early 1990s, he painted over the created scarified surface of Jackson Pollock inspired drip paintings in matt black. Measurements. Gordon BennettAbstraction (Native) 2013acrylic on linen183 x 152.3cmCollection: Museum of Contemporary Art, purchased with funds provided by the MCA Foundation, 2013 The Estate of Gordon Bennett. His three paintings titled. ibid., p. 22, Important Australian + International Fine Art. Synthetic polymer paint on paper
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Gordon Bennett | NGV Review: Unfinished Business: The art of Gordon Bennett, QAGOMA, Brisbane. The works I have produced are notes, nothing more, to you and your works, posthumously yes, but importantly for me - living in the suburbs of Brisbane in the context of Australia and its colonial history, about as far away from New York as you can get - these are also notes to the people who knew you and your works, those who carry you with them in their memories and perhaps in their hearts.1. Mayer, M. GORDON BENNETT (1955 - 2014) NOTES TO BASQUIAT: CUT THE CIRCLE II, 2001 synthetic polymer paint on . Synthetic polymer paint on paper
Conceived as an open letter to Basquiat who died ten years earlier, the series appropriates the raw street style for which Basquiat became renowned in an attempt to communicate via the language of the New York context the similarities and crossconnections of our shared experience as human beings in separate worlds that each seek[s] to exclude, objectify and dehumanise the black body and person.1 Yet if Bennett borrows signature motifs from Basquiats oeuvre such as his use of lists and rap-like banter, he nevertheless imbues them with his own uniquely Australian symbolism.
Gordon Bennett, Notes to Basquiat: Totem Lesson 2 - Annette Larkin