Blak Douglas: The Halfway Line
Eve Sullivan reviews Blak Douglas' survey exhibition 'The Halfway Line' at Penrith Regional Gallery.
Adam Douglas Hill (AKA Blak Douglas) is an attention-seeking artist. Seemingly on the fringes of the art world but also something of a celebrity whose reach goes well beyond it, his work as an Aboriginal rights activist, educator, musician and occasional host and presenter all feeds into the larger-than-life personality portrayed in the recent biopic Blak Douglas vs The Commonwealth (Dir. Cristina Dio, 2024). In this film, the artist outlines his priorities and cultural obligations, stemming from the knowledge that “one half of my family came sailing into Sydney Harbour 229 years ago and the other half has been hanging around the dreaming site in Kempsey and Jerseyville for at least 8,000 years …”.
As revealed in his highly publicised winning of the Archibald prize in 2022 – the first Aboriginal artist to do so – with the brilliant portrait of fellow Indigenous creative, Karla Dickens, battling the Lismore floods with loaded buckets, there is something of a sisyphean task to representing all the contradictions that abound in the unfinished business of dealing with the impacts of British colonisation, not unconnected to our failure to adapt to and mitigate the effects of climate change.
It is a ‘halfway’ line in more ways than one as Djon Mundine, Australia’s most critically prominent and interrogative First Nations curator, usefully channelled in discussions he led at the forum panel discussion on the opening weekend (to be revealed in more detail in a forthcoming publication). This conversation exploring the importance of agency in conversation with Blak Douglas and others present on the day (including Dickens) drew out these shared histories of trauma connected with representations of people and place. The exchange with Dickens was particularly insightful, as she divulged her request to make her look grumpy, bringing up (in my mind at least) that still-raw legacy of the ‘Not Happy, John’ perspective of the culture wars of the Howard years in government that we seem to be returning to.
Mirroring Moby Dickens on the opposite side of the gallery, Storming the Senate (Aden Ridgeway), 1999, painted on the Aboriginal leader’s election to the Australian Parliament, is rendered in suitably bright, bold colours and striated markings—an urban adaptation of rrark, perhaps—as Ridgeway is shown walking down the political yellow brick road, threatened by the clouds of an approaching monsoon against a dark red sun.
Several other portraits entered into the Archibald that at the time of this exhibition’s opening were concurrently on view in Face Value at the NSW State Parliament (to 27 March) highlight the importance to the artist of this genre and the prize that stops a nation. But perhaps the most important face in this exhibition at Penrith Regional Art Gallery is the subject of a more recent triptych, Domestic Violets, 2017, following the artist’s journey to the Cootamundra Domestic Training Home for Aboriginal Girls to locate and confirm the fate of his Dunghutti grandmother, stolen from her family at an early age. The violet tones and flanking icons of household cleaning products used in domestic servitude are this artist’s wry take on Andy Warhol’s foundational image of the Campbell soup can.
Much of the work in this survey exhibition, including the portraiture work, is powerfully laced with satire. It was useful to learn in the artist’s conversation with Mundine that Blak Douglas studied graphic design at the University of Western Sydney under Tony Oliver (who he warmly credited). The earliest work on exhibition, completed soon after the artist’s graduation from high school is a series of coloured drawings that are caricatures of sportsmen in the series Snorts Illustrated, including Tiger Woods and a young Kieren Perkins, some of them signed by their subject. We might well have been saved from the relentlessly dreary and demeaning, if not outright racist, white male stranglehold of the public conversation represented by cartoonists like Bill Leak, had Blak Douglas been among them.
Many of the works function like political cartoons in their strident perspectives on eugenics, land rights and associated big business interests in exploiting mineral resources or destroying the land through intensive farming. Like their titles, these paintings can be read as provocative one-liners, in much the same way as a news media headline is intended to grab our attention as a shortcut to the story. These editorialised images and effigies include alternative views on remembrance and what constitutes an action hero, as in It took a Balmy Army to Stop Him (Ode to Pemulwuy) and others rife with punning in-jokes such as the Native-Pity Scene or Billy Blink’s Undermining Interventions.
Bennelong Time, 2002, commissioned for an exhibition at the Sydney Opera House for the Sydney Olympics, crosses a nostalgia for the good old days with our present-day focus on tourism and lifestyle. Here, a pastoral scene of the good life shows a Captain Cook’s Tour boat appearing to swerve just in time to miss a flotilla of canoes on the harbour. You don’t know whether to laugh or to cry at the casual cheer of another day in the life of the Dharug people of Warrane on a perfect day.
There is no innocent eye or neutral path to represent a historical present, but the ‘lite’ touch of Blak Douglas’s scenes present a beguiling entry point into difficult subject matter. The sensuous use of line and bright colour is highly enabling as Blak Douglas consciously draws on the pop culture of Warhol and a pictorial tradition that derives from the work of colonial artists such as convict artist Joseph Lycett and the Wurundjeri leader William Barak.
Mundine also drew a useful link the legacy of Robert Campbell Jnr, one of the first generation of Boomalli artists, who also came from the region around Kempsey. This artist striking scenes of traditional life and a segregated society, witnessed well into the second half of the 20th century, are a clear influence on Blak Douglas’s moving collaboration with Aunty Elaine Russell on Ashes, Damper and Kangaroo Stew.
Reading the extensive labels that accompany many of the works in this exhibition is like stepping into the artist’s slipstream as he takes on board the need to also account for the spiritual connections made palpable in the telling and the inscription. I was glad to see early drawings and printed works and the mock-up for a mural, the Three Sisters, 1998, telling the story of Bullameddung Mullangan on Gundungurra lands in a work from the artist’s first solo exhibition ‘Growing up on Dharug Country’ held in Jamisontown’s industrial estate. And it was useful to learn about his lessons in playing the Didjeridu from an elder in Nhulunbuy (Gove), in North-East Arnhem Land, an instrument for which Blak Doughlas’s mastery is now legendary.
Like the tribal warriors that appear as witness of narrator figures in many of these paintings, whenever the artist gets up to speak at the podium, he also claims that space as a provocateur from suburbia, metaphorically sharpening his spear, rubbing the fire sticks together and getting ready to make a noise across multiple platforms.
This exhibition is certainly rife with loud, brash and ballsy stuff, even overtly heavy-handed in its graphic imagery as in the thickened and textured layers of paint, some of them purposefully cracked as ‘bad painting’ to good effect. You have to be careful not to tread on the ‘Unwelcome mats’ or get in the way of other sharp objects. But there’s a lot to be said for the power of egregious mischief-making, as in the repurposed classroom furniture resembling Schoolies week-style interventions. Here a desk topped with the artist’s retake on the British colonial Union Jack is speared right through, and a rotatable old blackboard rewrites the map of Australia to make the point that you are standing in ‘Now South Fails’, just above the states of ‘Vicslaughterya’ and ‘Tasmassacre’ with major cities appropriately renamed, with a follow-up mock quick quiz/survey on the back side.
Whichever way you turn, the ironically named Really Bins, 2017, also appear to block the way and any hope of making a quick exit. First shown in the National Gallery of Australia’s Indigenous Art Triennial Defying Empire, 2017, this major sculptural installation of nine rust-red ochre cast resin bins, embossed with the names of national public holidays, further attests to the signification of enduring crimes of empire. As Mundine writes in his essay for Defying Empire, the signature Sorry Day bin, stands in for ‘the remorse’ we must feel for ‘the crimes of theft, rape, murder and paedophilia against the Aboriginal societies’ perpetrated by the colonisers. And, as with all these national days that give rise to excessive celebration, putting out the garbage after a public holiday bash can be viewed akin to getting rid of all that ‘White Trash’.
As I left the gallery, I also held onto that other white image of the seven clouds bearing down upon me, frequently revisited in the painted backgrounds as a symbol of the states of the Commonwealth. These radiant, often highly radioactive-looking representations of a sky shared by all of us, also advances the provocative idea that the artist has gone some way to repatriating the sky as well.