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© 2008
rod
moss: intervention new paintings at fireworks gallery 52a Doggett St Newstead April 23 - June 7 Rod Moss legendary painter from the fringes of Alice Springs brings us more of his arresting imagery - a closer look into Aboriginal daily life in the desert. Often perplexing but always engaging, these graphic works can appear both mundane and sardonic. Tongue in cheek references and suggestive poses by the Aboriginal subjects simultaneously challenge both our knowledge and ignorance of Aborigines and Indigenous life, often wryly quoting famous masterworks from European painting history including Manet, Bellini and Caravaggio. You can almost hear the viewer muttering…”do they really live like that?”… Rod Moss has been painting this scenario for over 25 years and he doesn’t look like giving up yet. The title for this new body of work 'Intervention' comes at perfect time for the natural story-teller that Moss is: He writes of returning to Alice Springs from a sabbatical in Europe. “I was traveling overseas for 7 months last year. Almost the first thing I heard from Indigenous friends when I landed back in Australia was that the army had invaded Central Australian indigenous communities in knee-jerk response to the Little Children Are Sacred Report. Was this only the most current modality of the coloniser's handiwork? Well, we have our own history of Dreamings that collaborate in this work. And I had only just left the home of Caravaggio whose 1609, Nativity I deployed in this instance. When I started this (and it was on request of Noreen Hayes, who wanted a painting of her baby and her) the Whitegate mob were incensed that they were being treated differently from other Australians. Similarly in another recent work 'Fallen Man'..., Bellini's 1516 work, 'The Drunkenness of Noah' is referenced. Little needs to be added to the overdriven press of alcohol abuse that continues to threaten and destroy indigenous lives. Of course, that the NT has, according to some sources, two and half times greater drinking per capita than elsewhere in this thirsty country, is not the singular province of its indigenous population. Another work in this collection that makes a connection to older art is, 'Le Dejueur sur Teppa Hill', and it relies on the ‘frenchified’ title somewhat alluding to a Manet. The Stratco building, which wasn't there when I dreamt up the painting, just offered that crunching irony….And I didn't do a thing about getting Xavier or Lenny Cavanagh to gesture in the Manet mannerism! It was just a lucky throw of the dice…” Artist will be present at the opening Through
his painting and drawing Rod interprets the cultural interface
between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Central Australia
where he resides. Using graphite and synthetic polymer paint
he carefully constructs narratives that challenge conventional
images and endow his subjects with a common humanity. The blinding
light of the desert environment renders a new way of seeing
and elicits a gentle interrogation of the nature of what is
accepted as realism. To anyone who knows a little art history, it’s obvious that the poses of the Aboriginal figures in Rod Moss’ paintings are taken from a series of Western masterpieces. For example, the singers of Gospel Singers come from Seurat’s Bathers at Asnieres, the road workers of Road to Arltunga come from Courbet’s The Stonebreakers and the men sprawled on the ground in Raft come from Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa. And, once we realise this, an irreducible strangeness enters these works. But how exactly do these poses make Moss’ figures look? How is it that these poses actually inhabit these bodies? As always in art, it is a matter of looking closely and describing what we see. It is absolutely in the way these bodies are painted and not in any “controversial” subject matter that the true provocation of Moss’ work is to be found.On the one hand, as we look at this imitation of another by these bodies, we might say that they are no longer who they appear to be but are precisely posing, taking up an attitude for some invisible gaze outside of the canvas. It is almost as though these figures seek to incorporate our look upon them, imagine how they are being seen by us, so that what we see when we look at them is literally our own gaze embodied in them. This is obviously Moss’ point about the way that these figures are merely the reflection of a certain white gaze upon them, with all of its preconceptions and stereotypes, before which they turn into images of themselves.And yet, on the other hand, if this pose can appear as something these bodies consciously put on, it is also something that divides them from themselves. That is, the more these bodies lie or slump in their earthly desolation, the more we become aware of something else in them, somehow tensing or stiffening them, as though they were taking a kind of incommunicable pleasure in themselves. There appears to be some hidden quality that shines out through them despite themselves, of which they are unaware, something “in them more than themselves” of which they are only the temporary holders. And what is this mysterious, sublime substance that so attracts us to these figures, makes us desire to participate too in this enjoyment known only to them? In a provocative way – but this is to take it away from anything objective about these bodies, anything that can actually be held or possessed – we would say it is their Aboriginality. It
is at this point that the real enigma of Moss’ work emerges,
for how can this peculiar quality be at once unfathomably deep,
something of which even its possessor is unaware, and entirely
superficial, merely the effect of a certain gaze upon it? How
can it be at the same time the most profound essence of Indigenous
Australians and caught only in a fleeting attitude or aspect
(surely the meaning of Moss painting these figures already in
a pose)? But it is just this duality that is the proper subject
of Moss’ work: the fact that this supposedly special quality
of Aborigines that draws our gaze to it is only the reflection
of a certain white gaze. And it is this that produces the absolute
ambiguity of his work. It seeks to expose the operation of the
essentially racist belief in the specialness of Aborigines –
for we all know that the admiration of their “difference”
is only the reverse side of a certain violence and hatred –
but it can do this only by making Aborigines appear special
again. It is a brilliant diagnosis of that whole tradition of
white artists effectively representing Aborigines as representations
– all the way from the early image of the Dying Gaul to
Russell Drysdale – but it can do this only by rendering
Aborigines once again as paintings. And we might say that Moss
finally brings an end to this tradition, henceforth making it
impossible for a white artist ever again to paint an Aborigine,
but it is also Moss who has found an ingenious way of continuing
this tradition just when it was thought to be over, by turning
this impossibility of painting Aborigines into a painting of
this impossibility. |
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