In the top of the
Metro Arts building on Edward St in Brisbane city is Dale Harding's exhibition Colour by Number.
I stepped into the space and was met obliquely by a black wall
amongst the white walls, and painted on it, in white, was the title
of the exhibition. Curated by Tony Albert, an indigenous Australian
artist who is gaining in prominence and popularity, the exhibition
“looks at ideas of history and storytelling”i,
the title of which “refers both to the childhood art game and also
to the government of Australia's practice of attaching numbers to
Aboriginal children according to a skin tone gradient.”ii.
Now, forgive my ignorance, but I was unaware of this fact until now.
I
went into the exhibition and was greeted by a white mantel-piece
linked to a brown ball with a thread and needle. The small blurb on
the wall outlined the complicit knowledge that the Australian
government had in 'sentencing' Aboriginal children to the service of
white Australians. But the artwork, (as it often tends to be with
these creative responses to highly emotive subjects) was not
immediately intelligible. Dale explained that the white mantel
represented the white phallus fallen, or the white man's edifice
fallen, and the brown ball was aged iron representing the oppression
and hand-work of the indigenous peoples. Not without a certain
conceptual and minimalist strength, but perplexing all the same, and
it left me wondering (as this type of thing has done before) what the
significance of such artwork is if the viewer must be mystified for a
period before being initiated into the true meaning of the artwork.
On
the opposite wall was five white surveyer's stakes, four of them
burned down to the sharp stumps, leaving one complete. Dale assured
me that Tony Albert had left one untouched in order to create tension
within the work, that it was “an entry point”. Well, to me it was
a rather cliché throwback to the one blue dot on a canvas of red
dots. It was also the white man still standing. And while I'm on the
topic of the white-black dialogue that seemed to be being pushed by
this exhibition, I found it interesting to note that the title wall
was black with white writing, and that the exhibition walls were
white, and the first artwork I saw involved a fallen “white”
phallic synbol. Almost as if the curator was attempting to highlight
the black/white contrast for sensationalist purposes, deepening a
divide.
Deeper
in the exhibition was a series of very interesting handstitched pink
images that used the forms of flamingos and other Australiana to
produce repeating patterns. There was also cross-stitched parodies of
Australian home themes, such as “I'm a happy little sodomite”
written on one, all loveingly stitched to resemble affirmations that
might be found in white Australian homes in the fifities. Another
wooden phallic object, (a needle? A sword?) lay on a picnic rug
stitched with flowers and kangaroos. There was also some other
white-on-white stitched work, and a metal neck piece stamped with
W38, aged and with a broken wire necklace, the work was very strong,
like a relic of a turbulent time which had aged the neck piece
irrevocably by a maelstrom.
The exhibition was strong, illuminating in its motivation and history, but I found it to be at times cliché and lacking hope, it seemed only to be perpetuating types. So rather than creating a space for progressive dialogue, it felt more like a well deserved bitter recrimination of the historical injustices of the past, without offering direction forward.
Ari Fuller
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