Australian art – micheal do

On Daniel Boyd: ‘And the horizons swallowed the tortoise’
June 2020

There is a tendency in Australian art history to segregate the art of Aboriginal people from the broader field of Australian art. Separatist terms such as “Aboriginal Art”, “Urban Aboriginal Artist” or even “Folk art” reflect an ongoing colonial hierarchy that contemplates Indigenous communities and their culture, as distinct from the concerns and agendas of Australia today. To conceive of Australian art and Aboriginal art as separate streams of practice reflects a misunderstanding of the independence of Australian culture.

Sydney based artist Daniel Boyd is testament to an expanding field of artists working to create a more self-aware set of cultural relations in Australia that celebrates the nuance, potency and urgency of Indigenous practitioners and their histories. A Kudjla/Gangalu man from North Queensland, Sydney based Boyd has achieved international acclaim for his practice that reframes Australia’s foundational myths as an ongoing history of Aboriginal survival and resistance. What concerns and obsesses him is the injustice meted by Australian settlers and the glorification of this history in visual art

_{Daniel Boyd, We Call them Pirates Out Here, 2006, oil on canvas 226 x 276 x 3.5cm.}
_{Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia.}

After graduating from the Canberra School of Art in 2005, Boyd exhibited a series of paintings that shifted the landscape of Australian art history and history painting. Using Western canonical history paintings as inspiration, he reimagined Captain Cook and colonial explorers as pirates and murderers, using eye-patches and the occasional parrot as signifiers of their criminality in dispossessing Indigenous people of their land. Inscribed beneath each portrait is the expression ‘no beard’, alluding to accounts that Indigenous Australians first thought Captain Cook and his explorers were women as they had no facial hair.

_{Daniel Boyd, Untitled (SCAMSCI), 2018, oil and archival glue on linen, 189 x 266.5 cm.}

Boyd would continue surveying colonial images and mythologies, eventually apply his understanding of particle theory — a theory that notes that all matter and objects consist of small particles that are in constant motion, vibrating with energy — to his practice around 2012. Utilising predominantly found colonial images – often drawn from Museum collections, including the British Museum and the Natural History Museum in London, Boyd would reconstruct these archival images using a field of acrylic pointillist dots painted against dark backgrounds.

These dots, a reference to Modernist painting techniques and Western desert painting traditions, were partial splices of imagery that require viewers to step back and decode the larger image held depicted within the cosmos of paint. By engaging in the mechanics of seeing, Boyd alludes to the fragmentary nature of knowledge and history — highlighting how Aboriginal people exist in the dark spaces of history. The work asks audiences to slow their pace of looking, ponder each image and reflect on Australia’s colonial settler history and the ongoing effects of the terra nullius legal doctrine that disavowed Aboriginal people of their land and personhood.

_{Daniel Boyd, Untitled (FF), 2017, oil and archival glue on linen, 193.5 x 302 cm.}

Boyd has since deepened his practice by developing new paintings, video works and installations for a number of high-profile exhibitions, including Where The Oceans Meet, Museum of Art and Design (2019) curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, All the World’s Futures, 56th Venice Biennale (2015) curated by Okwui Ewenzor, Kochi-Muziris Biennale: Whorled Explorations, Kochi, India (2015) curated by Indian artist Jitish Kallat and David Elliot’s Moscow International Biennale for Young Arts: A Time for Dreams (2014). In each exhibition, Boyd demonstrated fiercely interrogative journeys into the mouth of history in search of human pain, labour and stoicism against the nefarious forces of Colonial relations and histories. The result were powerful statements of colonial legacies and its lasting impact on indigenous and coloured people around the world.

_{Daniel Boyd, Untitled (SOAGS), 2020, oil, acrylic, charcoal and archival glue on canvas, 350 x 570 cm.}

Boyd’s exhibition And the horizons swallowed the tortoise at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery continues this trajectory by uniting three highly personal subject matters. In an ode to his mother, Boyd has painted sunsets that recall a sentimental, secluded beach near his childhood home in Cairns, Queensland. Unable to travel and visit his mother during the coronavirus lockdowns, these brooding scenes beat with the longing of family to be reunited. The beach is an important familial reference point for Boyd, whose grandfather settled on a beach after being expelled—among others—from his Anglican Mission following an uprising.

The exhibition also includes depictions of the Australian native Bush stone-curlew, a bird known for its ominous shriek. Found across most of Australia, these nocturnal birds carry associations of death in many Aboriginal Australian cultures — a haunting reference to the time of coronavirus. The exhibition also touches upon Greek mythology, taking inspiration from Achilles’ paradox — one of many philosophical problems described by Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea (c.290 – 430 BC). While his paradox has been rebutted and purported to have been solved by theorists and mathematicians, Boyd’s interest lies in the theory’s application to assess the risk of infectious diseases without detailed datasets.

_{Zeno’s paradox. Image from Medium.com}

Boyd notes that these works emerge from the unique conditions of lockdown. Social distancing is pre-pandemic for those people who are exiled, marginalised or displaced. These communities, of which many Aboriginal people belong to, have historically had to communicate with loved ones far away, while enduring feelings of isolation, uncertainty, depression and trauma under the watchful eye of the state. While the pandemic represents death, it is also tied to feelings of estrangement. It is this estrangement that is suffused this latest body of work. Boyd notes, “these opportunities his been given have allowed me to fulfil my responsibilities to fill my people. It’s always amazing when young people come up to me to thank me. That’s why I started to paint and make art – I quickly understood this was the forum to question and create a dialogue.”

_{Daniel Boyd, And the horizons swallowed the tortoise, 2020, installation image.}

At this time when the global pandemic threatens the livelihood and safety of populations, Aboriginal people, like many other Indigenous peoples across the globe are at risk of become “asterisk peoples”. This is the risk of being represented as asterisks in large data sets, existing as just footnotes in more dominant conversations about health, cultural and economic life. It is this continual struggle, especially during times of crisis, that gives such gravitas to artists like Boyd who express histories of oppression and resistance. In creating spaces for questions and dialogue in art, Boyd places the Aboriginal experience closer towards the centre contemporary Australian art, drawing attention to the potency of Indigenous practitioners working today. However, the final push towards a more encompassing set of cultural relations and concepts of reconciliation lies with us: as readers, as consumers, as influencers, as collectors and as people capable of tangible action. It is time to question what has, and is, happening around us, and what this might mean. This is power of Daniel Boyd.

END.

This text was originally commissioned and published by Art Collector.

in any given moment: eugenia Raskopoulos

August 2020

Representations of women in visual art have historically defined female experience through difference, weakness, passivity, sexual availability, domesticity and, perhaps most unintelligent, an object to be represented in art rather than a maker of art. For centuries these assumptions have dangerously masqueraded as normal; however, successive generations of artists have worked to rebut this putrid sexism that lies beneath the filthy bandages of Western art history. Eugenia Raskopoulos is part of this chorus of artists, producing work that untangles the relationship between women, art, identity and the veiled patriarchal power relations in Western society.

_{Eugenia Raskopoulos, (dis)order (2019). Installation view at The National, Carriageworks, Sydney. Image: Zan Wimberley.}

In her most recent large-scale installation, ORDER-(DIS)ORDER (2019) for ‘The National’ at Carriageworks, Sydney, Raskopoulos staged a performance where she topples a tower of discarded white goods, which was then projected onto the same site to achieve a ghostly palimpsestic effect that stretches conceptions of time and place. Alongside a topography of the destroyed white goods, the video-installation was framed by a neon pendulum sign alternating the words ‘order’ and ‘disorder’. Challenging the sexual power system of the patriarchy, Raskopoulos selected the whitegoods for their connotations of the domestic, feminine and servile, repurposing these objects and their meaning in a shattering act of apocalyptic and dystopic proportions.

In this process of creation and destruction, Raskopoulos confronts Western society’s conception of women as masters of the domestic universe. Conceiving of herself as a master-hero figure of a different sort, the work uses metaphor and symbolism to remind her audience that supposedly innocent objects, words and their associations have come to embody the status quo of structural sexism and a class system. And while these systems continue to restrict many women, small act of resistance like this are possible and available. In this way, Raskopoulos asserts text, images and objects are never simple, neutral tools that describe the world. They are coded by conventions and rules that reflect broader power relations. To understand any differently, is to be complicit in this system.

Throughout Raskopoulos’ forty-year career, the artist has maintained a deep interest in changing the present by challenging the ways in which we describe the past. She has woven her own image and experiences into a series of photographs, films and installations to articulate the constant negotiation that migrant bodies face in foreign cultures. She notes, ‘I am interrogating the concept of the fragmented body. As an immigrant – a Czech-born woman of Greek descent – my identity is made up of different parts that don’t always sit neatly together. And in the same breath, I want to defy all these labels and break apart traditional conceptions of the body, identity and art.’

_{Eugenia Raskopoulos, rootreroot (2016), HD video, 8:45 and routereroute (2016), murano glass neon, dimensions variable. Installation view, Tarrawarra Biennial 2016: Endless Circulation. Photo: Andrew Curtis.}

Rootreoot (2016) embodies in this interest. The split frame video filmed in an aerial shot features two female figures played by the artist. In the upper section, the figure drags an olive tree in an ongoing clockwise circle, while in the bottom section the same figure simultaneously drags a wattle tree in the opposite direction. Moving at their own rhythms and in opposing parts of the video frame, the circles created by each figure eventually intertwine, creating a moment of completeness as the bodies meld into one another and then dissolve away, concluding the work.

_{Eugenia Raskopoulos, Rootreroot (2016), HD digital video, 8:45. Image courtesy the artist.}

The circular journey of the characters mirrors the complexities of migrant and female bodies, capturing something important about their daily experience. While not a strict self-portrait, Raskopoulos plays the central figure in the composition as she does in many of her other works. By drawing upon the tradition of the self-portrait, Rootreoot explores the interface between the way we present ourselves to others and how others see us. This technique forms part of the many artistic strategies employed by Raskopoulos to explore and challenge codes of thought and behaviour.

Complementing Rootreoot is Routereroute (2016), two circular neon signs that spell the title of the work – one in Greek, the artist’s first language, and one in English. Reflecting the duality of video work, these neon works depict the tectonic reality of migrants in which meaning, identity and conceptions of self are slippery and language (particularly the foreign language of a migrant’s new home) serves both to elucidate and limit these understandings. This particular experience – one of many experiences faced by migrants – speaks to Raskopoulos’ own experiencing growing up in Australia, when she was often required to translate English to Greek for her grandparents; ‘I was a translator from a very young age. That’s when I learned its power. If ever anyone would say anything mean to my grandparents, I would mistranslate the words and protect them … the discrimination we would face.’

_{Eugenia Raskopoulos, diglossia #1 (2010), digital pigment print on archival paper, 142cm x 95cm. Image courtesy the artist.}

Reflecting on her methodology, Raskopoulos notes, ‘I’m at my best when I’m in the studio. I’m happiest in the making process where you get to read and research. It’s all part of it, looking and relooking. I love the repetitive kinds of traces and motions that the body is working through. It’s an important life lesson – just doing this type of work and being diligent about it.’

In thinking about the next set of milestones, Raskopoulos gives little away about her upcoming project at Arc One Gallery, Melbourne. Scheduled for 2021, the works continue the artist’s lifelong flirtation with the power of language and photography as poetic metaphors for life. After all, as Raskopoulos conveys in her work, art is not simply a dream or a vision of a female nude; it’s the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundation for a future of change and a bridge across our fears to new ideas, to experiences and (if we’re lucky enough) to where we have never been before.

END.

_{This article was originally commissioned and published by Artist Profile.}