Sydney: Lines in the Sand - Botany Bay Stories

Lines in the Sand - Botany Bay Stories from 1770
Hazelhurst regional Gallery, Gymea
29 March – 11 May 2008

Left: Catalogue cover: © Daniel Boyd 'We Call Them Pirates Out Here', 2006
Acrylic on canvas, 226 x 275 cm
Courtesy the artist and Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney

This excellent show has slipped under Sydney's radar somewhat, possibly because it is at the Hazelhurst Regional Gallery in Sutherland, and therefore way too far 'South of Cleveland Street' for many. We must declare that LF is somewhat partisan, being admirers of the show's creator, Anthony 'Ace' Bourke, and friends with the catalogue's designers. Among many other distinguished projects, Bourke co-curated the remarkable EORA: Mapping Aboriginal Sydney at the NSW State Library in 2006, another important exhibition that seemed to slip below the radar, possibly because Sydney was in the throes of its Biennale at the time.
See LF's post of June 2006: http://leflaneurblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/sydneyvoices-from-zone-eora-at-slnsw.html





Left: © Guan Wei 'Echo', 2005
Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 42 panels: 273 x 722 cm (overall)
Courtesy the artist and Queensland Art Gallery

Back to LITS (Lines in the Sand) then. What made this exhibition so unusual was the juxtaposition of the dry colonial record (faithful and in many ways very humane) of those remarkable Enlightenment gentlemen who were Australia's early administrators, with a multitude of contemporary artists, many of them Indigenous, whose work in some way comments on/interrogates/confronts that record. Hence, at the simplest level, Daniel Boyd and Dianne Jones' interpretations of famous depictions of Captain James Cook, Gordon Bennett's 'Possession Island', Clinton Nain's 're-enactment' of a colonial newspaper article, and Guan Wei's majestic multi-panel work 'Echo'.

If this were all there was, it would still be very interesting, but Bourke has woven a far richer tapestry of references, usually eschewing the obvious, and including contemporary and historical work and artefacts that do justice to a complex history and a multi-layered, nuanced cultural present. There was exciting site-specific new work from Joan Ross (the fur lady) and Jonathan Jones, video by Tracey Moffatt and Michael Riley, political comment from the mysterious boat-people.org, sitting alongside Philip Gidley King's original diary, bark painting by Paddy Fordham and ephemera from the Botany Bay National park (Kurnell) collection.

In this way the show managed to be of equal interest to true-blue Shire conservatives (The Sutherland Shire's corporate emblem depicts Cook) and to contemporary art hipsters, with each hopefully coming away with a little more understanding.

Finally, a small spruik for the Hazelhurst Regional Gallery: the team of Michael Rolfe (Director) and Daniel Mudie Cunningham (Exhibitions Co-ordinator) deserves credit for consistently programming a varied and unpredictable range of shows, resulting in a lively and buzzing arts centre, the more remarkable for its location in the 'Deep South'.

Seeyalayda

Blacktown: Western Transgressions

Bent Western
Blacktown Arts centre
8 February – 12 April 2008
Ron Adams, Lionel Bawden, Liam Benson, Drew Bickford, Michael Butler, Karen Coull, Jose Da Silva, Christopher Dean, Tim Hilton, Marius Jastkowiak, Erna Lilje, Arthur McIntyre, Jessica Olivieri, Kurt Schranzer, George Tillianakis, Anastasia Zaravinos.

Left: © Karen Coull, 'Soft Touch' 1994 | Latex gloves, rose thorns | 32 cm x 30 cm
Courtesy the artist and Casula Powerhouse and Liverpool Regional Museum

A retrospective review alas, but one worth doing we hope. This group show coincided with Sydney's 2008 Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival, and those who made the trip west encountered a subtle and varied exhibition of... well, let's just say 'transgressive' art, with its creative locus in Western Sydney, yet addressing resonant and universal questions of sexual and cultural identity.

Many commentators (including LF) demur at the notion of sexual preference as a curatorial criterion, indeed the exhibition catalogue is at pains to undermine any simplistic notions of this being a compilation of Western Sydney artists that happen to be homosexual. In a thoughtful catalogue essay David McInnes (Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Languages, UWS) writes: Bent Western is not about gay art. Indeed, refuting anything as neat or as clear cut as ‘gay’ is part of the agenda both of the artists’ work and the exhibition’s curatorial framework.

Curator Daniel Mudie Cunningham (El Ubiquito!), writes in his catalogue introduction:
The idea for Bent Western emerged from an essay by Christopher Dean called 'Mollies of the West'. Published in the catalogue for Western Front (Blacktown Arts Centre, 2005), Dean uses ‘molly’ as a descriptor for gay Western Sydney artists. Since the early 1990s, the term ‘queer’ has been used to refer to contemporary cultural expression by non-heterosexuals, so I found his use of an antiquated term like molly rather curious. Was molly an old word for queer that could be recontextualised in a contemporary regional setting like western Sydney? According to Dean it could:
"Mollies were often depicted as bawdy or licentious social satirists who often cocked a snoop at the establishment while remaining committed to the values of their working class origins. Significantly, many of the original mollies were transported to Australia as convicts and presumably some of them would have made their way to what is now Western Sydney (2005: 7) "
The terms we use to describe ourselves and our cultural expressions are important, even if they elude fixed meaning. Whether we use ‘queer’ or ‘molly’ or any other term to describe who we are or what we do, ultimately you can be sure these names will always be contested. Bent Western settles on queer as the most convenient classification for the work surveyed even if it does not always provide the perfect fit. It seems that branding culture queer legitimises the margins, rendering queer vulnerable to cooptation once assimilated into more mainstream cultural forms. Once queer is made visible through knowledge and discourse formation it is subjected to a conceptual erasure, rendering queer unqueer.
This exhibition resists trouble-free answers as to what queer should mean in this specific time and place. The artists in Bent Western have lived, worked or studied in Western Sydney and made important contributions to queer cultures in the region and beyond. The ‘mollyism’ Dean describes harks back to fairly bent and illicit anti- establishment behaviour. Interestingly, many of the artists in Bent Western emerged from an establishment that no longer exists. The art school at the University of Western Sydney, which has been abolished in recent times, produced many important queer artists including ten artists in Bent Western who studied Fine Arts there.

It's hard in such a stylistically varied show to single out particular works, but some LF faves include Lionel Bawden's 'objects of desire' 1998 (dildoes - gasp! - made from his characteristic compressed coloured pencils), Karen Coull's thorny gloves (see above), and George Tillianakis's videos, including 'Always a Blank Fucking Canvas & The Ghetto Jesus of Blacktown' 2006.

Seeyalayda then