Parallel art histories : activism, aboriginal art and Australian identities in the work of Richard Bell

Abstract

In 2003, Australian artist Richard Bell caused a stir by winning the country’s prestigious Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Prize with a work titled Scienta E Metaphysica (Bell’s Theorem). The award-winning painting and an accompanying by a thesis by the artist, took aim at the constructed category of Aboriginal art—declaring it to be “a white thing.” Scientia E Metaphysica (Bell’s Theorem) exposes complex issues of identity politics allowing for a discursive analysis of the history of Australia’s national arts policies, global art market categories, and Indigenous Australian protest movements. Bell’s work questions the limits of the category of “Aboriginal Art,” revealing it as a construction served up to feed a global art market with an appetite for difference. This paper highlights the potential of cultural identity to disrupt or be appropriated by institutional and market power. I will present Bell’s works as corrective counter-narrative, identifying the hierarchy and beneficiaries that produce what Bell describes in his thesis as “a cultural cringe of massive proportions.” I am particularly interested in how Bell applies strategies of resistance, cooperation, and collaboration with art institutions to bring the issues of Indigenous Australian sovereignty and rights to a global stage. Do they effectively undermine Australia’s constructed national identity? Bell agitates for a new parallel art history, proposing a discourse that bypasses cultural identification to focus on the biography of the artwork rather than the artist. Does Bell’s agonistic intervention present an alternative entry point to a parallel art history?