Richard BellBorn in 1953 in Charleville, Queensland, Richard Bell has long used charm and humour to
Richard BellBorn in 1953 in Charleville, Queensland, Richard Bell has long used charm and humour to purvey what is an utterly distinct and confronting strain of activism. In a career spanning more than three decades, the various incarnations of Bell’s practice have spoken with an unyielding force.But Bell’s overt brand of activism, reverse appropriation and the wonderfully propagandistic tenor via which he expresses it, isn’t activism as we commonly recognise it. Indeed, it’s the fact that Bell – a member of the Kamilaroi, Kooma, Jiman and Gurang Gurang communities – has, for so long, managed to confront and negotiate a taxonomy of mainstream, white Australia’s most disturbing tenets and mythologies, only with humour and a lightness of touch, that makes his work so effective, affecting and downright unsettling. Bell disarms, charms and entertains, only to turn the mirror square on. We smile, chuckle, then wake in fright.Aboriginal Art—it’s a white thing (2002), included in the exhibition, is one of the artist’s famous ‘Theorems’, in which he accuses the contemporary art world of manipulating and exploiting indigenous art.Scratch and Aussie (2008) is almost cinematic in scale. The video casts Bell as a therapist considering the trivial middle-class concerns, racist jokes and rants, and disquieting word associations that spill from his couch-reclining, blonde, gold swim-suited Anglo-Australian patients in one sequence, only to recast him as patient in another, unfurling his soul to stand-in therapist and long-time collaborator Gary Foley. It is here that Bell manages his greatest about-face and power shift. With a giggle and laugh, he expresses not the pain of everyday racist belittlement, but the abject absurdity of those who flaunt it. He laughs at his bikini-clad and budgie-smuggling subjects, not with them. -- source link
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