Abstract

Lecture linked with the exhibition Gordon Bennett: The Expiation of Guilt. Followed by drinks in the Museum.

Since the 1990s Gordon Bennett has been Australia’s pre-eminent postcolonial painter. His art primarily addresses the trauma of colonialism as it is felt at individual and collective levels today, and also as it is pictured and mapped in Western discourses. He ranges over Australian and global themes, including 9/11 and the Iraq war. The talk will discuss Bennett’s art in terms of postcolonial trauma, and at the same time provide an overview of his oeuvre as it developed since he graduated from art school nearly twenty years ago.

IAN McLEAN has written extensively on Australian art from a postcolonial perspective. In addition to The Art of Gordon Bennett (Sydney, 1996) , co-authored with Gordon Bennett, he is author of White Aborigines: Identity Politics in Australian Art (Cambridge 1998) and many essays. He is a member of the international board of Third Text, and lectures on art at the University of Western Australia.