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