Unfinished Business: The Art of Gordon Bennett
Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art
The late Gordon Bennett (1955-2014) leapt fully formed from his Brisbane art school in his 30s; having been shocked by his mid-teens discovery of his Aboriginal ancestry, he left school to become a Telstra linesman and only belatedly decided to become an artist. Within a few years he had won the Moet & Chandon Fellowship, appeared on the cover of Bernard Smith’s ‘Australian Painting’, had been selected for the Havana Biennial, and was sent by the Department of Foreign Affairs to South Korea representing Australia in a group show.
No wonder he was recognised as ‘the first artist to explore our Indigenous past using conceptual art techniques… kicking the door open for artists such as Brook Andrew, Tony Albert and Danie Mellor’ in a Sydney Morning Herald obituary in 2014.

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By 1999, Bennett had a solo exhibition at Queensland Art Gallery which toured Europe, and featured in a show curated by Zara Stanhope at Heide Museum of Modern Art in 2004. So, with plenty of experience about, it’s interesting that this catalogue, which accompanied the recent survey, ‘Unfinished Business: The Art of Gordon Bennett’, at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, takes a deep academic dive into the ideas behind works that appropriate widely from art history – Malevich, McCahon, Pollock and most famously, Jean-Michel Basquiat – and only marginally communicates a real enthusiasm for Bennett’s powerful imagery as a whole. An exception is his friend and Assistant Director, Learning and Public Engagement, QAGOMA, Simon Wright’s personal take, admitting that ‘some of his most famous paintings’ were made as that art history was first experienced, during his 1991 Moet & Chandon residence in Europe.
It was then that Bennett appropriated from traditional First Nations art – especially the dotting of the Deserts and, unnoted, the Wandjina headdresses that often surround his portraits. Thus, it’s odd that there’s no Aboriginal examination of this aspect of his work, especially as Bennett refused to allow his work to be placed in the Indigenous section of State galleries. Challengingly, Stanhope interprets the concentric desert roundels in Bennett’s Haptic Painting (1993) as ‘contentious symbols of his ‘self’ and European culture’. However, an alternative would be that Bennett’s explorer, drowning in a sea of sand, is actually reaching for the classic image of a waterhole.
Bennett himself was a reluctant commentator. So, the most intriguing aspect of the catalogue is the frequent use of the artist’s preparatory notes for works as intuition into the finished product. He may even have intended such usage because all seem to be signed. But to see his 1991/92 Colin McCahon borrowing, ‘I am’ beside one of his typical lists – which often transferred on to his canvases: “I am Australian; I am Aboriginal; I am Human Being; I am Spiritual Being; I am Body (retrospectively pushed above Spiritual Being); I am Spirit; I Am”, is a brilliant insight into the thinking of this enigmatic artist.
It takes until the penultimate page of the catalogue to be truly moved. Here a 1991 note to himself finds Bennett proudly announcing that ‘I am trying to paint the one painting that will change the world before which even the most narrow-minded racists will fall to their knees… recognising their own stupidity’. Then he adds: ‘Of course this is in itself stupid and I am a fool, but I think to myself what have I got to lose by trying?’
Jeremy Eccles is a specialist arts commentator who has been writing, broadcasting and filmmaking in Australia since 1983, with a special interest in Indigenous culture.