Gordon Bennett and the Art of Exhibition Making

The opportunity to speak, late last year, as part of a panel to mark the launch of Gordon Bennett: Selected Writings, co-published by Power Publications, Sydney and Griffith University Art Museum, Brisbane, provided the impetus to reflect not only on the development of the Gordon Bennett survey I curated at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2007, but equally – and this was something that only occurred to me with the benefit of hindsight – Gordon’s strategic and very deliberate ‘management’ of the exhibition process as an essential part of his artistic practice. Gordon Bennett: Selected Writings also coincided with the exhibition Unfinished Business: The Art of Gordon Bennett at QAGOMA; the first large-scale showing of Bennett’s work since the NGV survey. While I was unable to see this exhibition due to COVID-19 travel restrictions, the expansive catalogue clearly highlights the show’s emphasis on the artist’s working methods and studio practice, with a particular focus on his works on paper. Providing new insights into Gordon’s complex oeuvre through the inclusion of rarely exhibited works and offering a significant point of difference to the last major show (always important in terms of scholarship and from an institutional perspective), the exhibition and publication had Gordon as artist at their centre through the presence of a range of images of ‘the artist at work’, via studio shots and personal photographs, and through his writing. Like all of Gordon’s exhibitions, this major project would not have been possible without the expertise, extensive involvement, administrative flair and guidance of Gordon’s wife Leanne, who is now manager of the artist’s estate. However, without Gordon (sadly), the show was also free, somehow, to be more personal in his absence. And this, for me, was revelatory.

I came to work as the curator of the Gordon Bennett exhibition at the NGV around 2006 through one of Gordon’s museological interventions that was (and still is) fundamentally grounded in his disavowal of categorisation. The exhibition had originally been proposed by Judith Ryan, the Gallery’s Senior Curator of Indigenous Art, but it was given to me after initial discussions with Gordon when he made it clear that he did not want the exhibition developed within the institutional framework of ‘Indigenous Art’. Gordon’s stance on this was not just a case of isolated point-making, but went to the heart of how his work is collected, catalogued and disseminated to the public. For, as part of this discussion, he also insisted that his works already in the Collection were transferred from the Indigenous Art department to Contemporary Art (an expectation that was subsequently replicated across other Australian museum collections). This seemingly simple act was a knowing undoing of the colonial classificatory systems at the heart of western museology. Amusingly, it also created an administrative headache – messing with cataloguing systems, database entries and even potential storage locations; all within an institution that no matter how willing, was bureaucratically slow and largely resistant to change.

The opening of the QAGOMA exhibition and launch of the Power/Griffith University Art Museum publication made me reflect on how the control (or management) of Gordon’s work and career was and remains central to the project itself. It continues to be an act of resistance driven by the hope (indeed, expectation) of societal change; of an acceptance and embrace of difference, and of the desire for a greater understanding of the traumatic legacy and ongoing impacts of colonisation. Similarly, Gordon’s act of Non-Performance (1992-2014)[1] where he refused to speak about or publish on his work, was both a form of resistance and self-protection, just as the creation of John Citizen and his later abstract Stripe paintings (which started in 2003), were a means of escape; a creative space of less expectation and pressure, and of freedom and exploration. Of course, Gordon also realised that this ambition was idealistic and nigh impossible. John Citizen goes on to build a substantial CV in his own right (but is still Gordon Bennett) and as Gordon discussed with Bill Wright in the 2007 interview, the abstract paintings continued to be interpreted through a lens of race and in connection to Indigenous visual traditions (rather than to Western artists such as Frank Stella, whom he had noted as an influence), as well through the known biography and concerns of the artist who created them. However, what I have also understood on reflection, and with distance, is that Gordon’s Non-Performance extended in a very particular way to exhibition making – turning the expectations of the curator (as collaborator), curatorial practice and the museum/institution on its head.

Working and developing the exhibition with Gordon was not based on the usual things – access to him and extended time spent in the studio. Indeed, during my first visit to Gordon and Leanne’s beautiful home on the outskirts of Brisbane, I flew up from Melbourne in the morning, travelled out by cab, and spent the entire day in the kitchen chatting to Leanne while Gordon sat in the adjoining lounge area playing his Playstation. I then did the whole thing in reverse, returning to Melbourne that evening. As the show progressed, Gordon, Leanne and I worked closely on the selection of works and eventually, on the exhibition layout, but there was very little dialogue about the works themselves. While the distance between Melbourne and Brisbane was certainly a factor in this (and this was well before Zoom), along with the time we had available (we had 18-months to do the show, tops), Gordon’s resistance to ‘perform’ for the exhibition – to give himself over to it or to be consumed by it – along with his inherently private nature, was, whether consciously or not, about subverting the power of the curator and the museum. It was also a way of reinforcing – again, whether consciously or not -  that his works, while full of self-portraits, are neither self-portraiture nor autobiography. They’re constructions and exist outside of and separately to him. Once he’s created them, he doesn’t need to be part of the exercise – in fact, it’s something he studiously avoided.

This sense of Gordon’s works as constructions becomes more apparent over time through the paintings’ increasing complexity and the intricate overlapping of their surfaces and imagery (think, to name just one example, of the Home décor series) and access to the artist shouldn’t – and won’t – provide any answers. For Gordon it was all about the art – and in my experience, the curator and especially, the audience, are expected to do the work – to decipher, to think and importantly, to learn. This is also why it was important for Gordon personally, and for his practice, to have trusted long-term interlocutors and collaborators like Ian McLean (now Hugh Ramsay Chair of Australian Art History at the University of Melbourne) and Simon Wright (QAGOMA’s Assistant Director Learning and Public Engagement), because he didn’t have to effectively start the conversation at the beginning, with a re-telling.

Significantly, in terms of the way both the curator and the museum worked, this also meant that the balance of power – which wasn’t and isn’t about power per se, but instead about managing the interpretation or narrative around the works – lies in the artist’s hands. Gordon’s (and now the Estate’s) simple but effective practice of not releasing images and copyright until a text is approved can wreak havoc with institutional workflows and timelines (and create anxiety on behalf of the curator!), but it ensures that the artist can be certain about the framing of the communication around his work. For Gordon, this was so important in terms of education and shifting the perceptions and prejudices of audiences, and he continued to be driven by the hope that his work would drive change. This ambition is also why ultimately, he couldn’t escape figuration and his postcolonial project – the job wasn’t, and still isn’t, done.

For Gordon, exhibition-making – the combination and coming together of different works through the curatorial process – was a meta version of the sampling, circulation and re-use of the different visual languages and art world personalities (van Gogh, Lichtenstein, Pollock, Preston, Mondrian and Basquiat) that we see in his works – and it was subject to the same considered and careful sense of construction and framing. After he moved quickly away from the expressionistic works that had launched his career, the act of painting was one in which everything was pre-planned. Over time, the imagery of his works, which was already labour-intensive and multi-layered, becomes increasingly entangled and complex (particularly as his proficiency in computer software packages like Photoshop improved). As a result, the act of painting became a conceptual exercise based on the execution of a pre-conceived plan. Exhibitions were no different.

Was this way of working easy? No. I certainly struggled with it and didn’t understand it at the time. But given the ongoing relevance of Gordon’s work to contemporary discussions within Australia about sovereignty; constitutional recognition; black deaths in custody; decolonisation of our museums and repatriation of collections, and the need for our societal systems to move beyond consultation to being First Nations led – as well as the international power of #BlackLivesMatter and the ongoing issues of race and violence that plague our world – I’m glad that the Estate’s management of his oeuvre (and its overseeing of the works’ placement in collections and interpretation through exhibitions and writing), will ensure that his work remains central to the discussion and that it will continue to provoke and to advocate for change.

Because, let’s face it, we don’t have a minute to waste.

Image © Estate of Gordon Bennett. Reproduced with thanks.

Gordon Bennett is represented by Sutton Gallery, Melbourne and Milani Gallery, Brisbane.

Notes

1 The one exception to this was the interview he did with Bill Wright for the 2007 exhibition.