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History and Memory in the Art of Gordon Bennett

History and Memory in the Art of Gordon Bennett
Library Shelf Location 18.BENN
Publication Date 1999
Description Catalogue of an exhibition held at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, 20 Nov. 1999 - 23 Jan. 2000 and at the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo, 9 Apr - 12 Jun. 2000. Gordon Bennett is internationally acclaimed as one of Australia's most significant and critically engaged contemporary artists. He is recognised for his powerful perspectives on the post colonial experience, particularly in the Australian context, with much of his work mapping alternative histories and questioning racial categorisations and stereotypes. As a way to expand his oeuvre, Bennett regularly adopts the persona John Citizen. This invented character exists as a type of disguise that plays with the rhetoric of identity. Moreover, by shifting his artistic style under the John Citizen pseudonym, Bennett avoids typecasting his practice. Gordon Bennett is an artist of Aboriginal descent who, growing up in Brisbane during the fifties and sixties, had to negotiate his way through the Anglo-Celtic identity which the assimilationist Australian state so vigorously promoted. Encouraging its citizens into the identity of the universal subject, the state persuaded all of us, whether we were of British, Italian, Aboriginal, Dutch or any other background, to think of ourselves as Anglo-Celtic Australians and to marginalise those who sought to develop different identities, or to simply think of them as outsiders.
ISBN 0907594638
Quantity 1
Pages 84
Author Terry Smith
Formats Paperback, Exhibition Catalogue
Publishers Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, Henie Onstad, Kunstsenter
Related Artist Gordon Bennett
Category Painting
Keyword Identity
Artist's Nationality Australian
Language English

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