Contemporary indigenous art

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Encountering the Black Screen

Rebecca Harkins-Cross

WANDERING THROUGH THE BRISBANE GALLERY OF MODERN ART’S permanent collection of contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art, one can see just how many Indigenous artists have begun incorporating video art into their practice in recent years. GoMA’s contemporary Indigenous collection is one of the strongest of its kind in the country, and was exhibited from June to October 2013 in the survey show My Country, I still Call Australia Home: Contemporary Art from Black Australia. On the walls hung video works by prominent artists such as Richard Bell, Vernon Ah Kee and Bindi Cole, and filmmakers such as Warwick Thornton and Genevieve Grieves. All used video to expand upon their exploration of Aboriginal identities and experiences, but what is also striking is the way these artists are reinvigorating a medium that has, in the wider field, largely lost touch with its political origins. These artists are using the now omnipresent medium to ask di"cult questions about race and history that are rarely addressed in the public sphere.

From its inception in the late 1960s, video art was perceived as an oppositional practice. Technological evolution had placed the tools of TV in the hands of artists, giving birth to a new medium that many believed could turn capitalist ideology against itself. Through video, artists felt empowered to speak back to the mass messages broadcast by commercial television while also undermining the commercial logic and aesthetic hierarchies governing the art world. Part of video’s appeal lay in the fact that it was a medium whose history was yet to be written. In the intervening decades, the radical potential of video was quickly usurped by its ironic one, but in the work of many Indigenous artists, video’s potential as a political medium is being harnessed once more. A new generation of artists are employing it to rewrite historical and cultural narratives—colonial anthropology, religion, racism, the national apology, deaths in custody, to name a few—from an Indigenous perspective. Australia’s dominant images are peeled back to reveal the maelstrom of competing stories that swirl beneath.1

Since the advent of digitisation, video art has become almost a di!erent medium entirely from the rudimentary analogue works created by early practitioners. This juncture is not simply technological but tellingly ideological. For how can a medium remain oppositional when it has become de rigueur not only in galleries the world over, but in the wider culture too? Many white Australian artists working in the medium focus on its performative rather than political possibilities: David Rosetzky’s living portraits, forged in the aesthetics of advertising, where subjects confess their innermost thoughts and anxieties; Soda_Jerk’s seamless mash-ups of Hollywood films, remixing culture to make new works in defiance of copyright law; or Shaun Gladwell, perhaps Australia’s

1 In case we forget how in flux our country’s history remains, Tony Abbott’s comments on the politicisation of the history syllabus in early September, just days before he became prime minister, were an uncomfortable reminder. In a speech to the National Press Club he bemoaned the ‘lack of references to our heritage, other than an Indigenous heritage’, suggesting these hard-won revisions may once again be in dispute.

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highest profile video artist, whose work documents skateboarding feats. Any abiding notion that video was unsaleable was destroyed by Gladwell’s installation Storm Sequence, a video projected onto a mist screen, which set the price record for video art in Australia in 2007, auctioned to an anonymous bidder at Sotheby’s for $84,000.

Conversely, many Aboriginal artists are reviving the radical impulse that drove early practitioners. In My Country, I still Call Australia Home we see the way artists are turning to video for decidedly political purposes while harnessing the new potential of the digital medium. Perhaps it’s only possible for artists who remain outside the dominant culture, not just in the space of the gallery but in the wider political sphere, to use video in this way. For Aboriginal artists there is still some definable centre—some definable dominant image—to rally against.

GoMA’s Indigenous curator, Bruce McLean, takes me through the exhibition he’s assembled. To McLean, it’s almost impossible to make an Aboriginal artwork that’s not political. ‘It’s often hard to separate because the history is political, and even the most apolitical things that people can conceive of as Aboriginal art are often very political,’ he explains. ‘Often when people are making un-political work it’s almost un-Aboriginal. They have to look outside their Aboriginal heritage or their Aboriginal experience to present a work that can’t be viewed as political.’

With such politics in mind, obvious perils arise from my position as a white critic choosing to write about these artworks—the risk, in some way, of exploiting these artists’ work for my own benefit. But what is even more troubling is the fact that there’s often a resounding silence in critical culture around these artworks, even though they speak so loudly—a problem so widespread that Artlink dedicated a whole issue to it in its recent series on Aboriginal art. Why this silence? Is it a fear of saying something politically incorrect? A belief that so-called urban art produced by Aboriginal people isn’t ‘authentic’? Or the assumption that an arcane knowledge of Aboriginality is needed to comprehend these works?

Before we can understand Aboriginal video art in the present, we need to understand the past. All narratives must start somewhere, after all. But the story of video art began with not only several storytellers, but also several di!erent modes of storytelling. These multiple origins go some way to explaining the way it evolved, the way it exists today.

Most art historians begin with South Korean artist Nam June Paik, who started experimenting with television signals in the early 1960s. Paik had studied music in Japan and later Germany, where he became obsessed with

Encountering the Black Screen Rebecca Harkins-Cross Previous page: Stranded (still), Warwick Thornton, 2011. Queensland Art Gallery, © Warwick Thornton, image courtesy the artist and Stills Gallery

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the work of composer John Cage and began forays into Fluxus—an ‘anti-art’ movement that emerged across several mediums in the early 1960s, in which often ephemeral works drew on the individual’s everyday experiences. His solo exhibition Exposition of Music—Electronic Television at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, West Germany, in 1963 is thought to be the first show in which TV was incorporated into the gallery, where he used magnets to distort their signals (though German artist Wolf Vostell had been conducting similar experiments around this time). Paik saw video as a way of fighting back against the mass media, famously declaring, ‘TV has been attacking us all our lives, now we can attack it back.’ This wasn’t only an a!ront to television but, in the avant-garde tradition of Fluxus, to the high-art pretensions of the gallery too—low culture was being introduced into the lofty institution.

These antecedents grounded the emergent video scene in opposition to the television set and all it represented, but it was only with the birth of new technologies that the medium bloomed. The release of the Sony Portapak in 1965 was the pivotal moment in this history; these home recording devices made video accessible, portable and (relatively) a!ordable. By this time Paik had moved to New York and, so the origin story goes, bought one of the first devices. He shot footage of a papal cavalcade that day, replaying it later that night for his friends at the Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village. Often termed ‘guerrilla television’, the very action of individuals being able to film their own video was at this moment a political gesture. (Ironically, this tool of the counterculture was invented as a military technology during the Vietnam War, to be used on aircraft to chart where napalm or bombs had fallen.)

Considered to be an unsaleable medium, video was soon adopted by those art movements (like Fluxus) that were trying to subvert the commercialism of the art world. While it took aesthetic cues from photography and experimental film, it was also influenced by performance art, happenings, body art, avant-garde music and contemporary dance and theatre. Performance artists in particular began using the medium to document their practice. Yet the medium was not constrained by these art forms, or art’s canon more broadly. As US theorist David A. Ross notes, ‘Video was the solution because it had no tradition. It was the precise opposite of painting. It had no formal burdens at all.’ Many practitioners conceived of video as something that would allow them to start again.

Yet for all the movement’s radicalism, it’s debatable whether video art ever achieved its goals. In her 1976 essay ‘Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism’, the North American art critic Rosalind E. Krauss described a ‘narcissism so endemic to works of video that I find myself wanting to generalize it as the condition of the entire genre’. Krauss is talking about the video art made by

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performance artists such as Vito Acconci, Richard Serra, Lynda Benglis and Bruce Nauman, in whose work Krauss sees the video screen acting as a form of mirror. (She allows some concessions, however, including ‘tapes that exploit the medium in order to criticize it from within’.) So, what would Krauss make of the present moment? YouTube and Vine are the ‘medium as a mirror’ writ large, reflecting back not only the faces of artists but also those of everyone with a GoPro or mobile phone or webcam.

In September 2013 a group of curators staged a video art festival in Melbourne, Channels, the first festival to survey the medium since the 1990s. Central to their project was the future of video art in the age of the internet, which they addressed in a forum at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. With the event featuring curators, academics and artists—including Aboriginal artist Vernon Ah Kee—terms such as ‘ubiquity’ and ‘ambivalence’ were thrown around to characterise the present moment. But nobody seemed able to determine what video art is in the digital age. In that flattening of culture which characterises postmodernity, video art was discussed alongside pop music clips or cute cat videos.

Ah Kee prefaced his discussion of his work with an anecdote. He recalled a girl introducing herself to him at university, excitedly telling him that he was the first Aborigine she’d ever met. ‘I was happy for her,’ he said cheekily. ‘It occurred to me then that it’s easy to live your life in this country completely within the context of being white … Particularly if you sit at home and watch YouTube all day.’ In the dispersed realms of the internet, you could quite easily click through videos forever without an Aboriginal person ever gracing your screen.

Five television screens are turned on their side, mounted on the wall in a line like family photographs. Each displays a highly staged colonial portrait of Aboriginal people in various guises. Painted backdrops emulate some generic outback scene—rolling hills, native fauna—with rocks, dead trees and tussocks of grass arranged in the foreground, but the wooden floorboards beneath their feet give the game away. Two shirtless men, draped in skins and woven jewellery, awkwardly grip boomerangs and spears in their palms. A young man and woman in simple cotton clothes, his hand clamped firmly on her shoulder. Raggedy children without a parent in sight. A heavily pregnant woman sitting cross-legged on the ground. A family dressed in their Sunday finery. Everyone looks down the lens of the camera, with pained yet defiant stares.

Genevieve Grieves’ Picturing the Old People (2005) is a five-channel video work that restages photographs from colonial archives, using the moving image

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to penetrate the surface of these historical documents. Walk past these sepia portraits quickly and they seem static, the subjects set rigidly in position. But linger a little longer and they start to come alive, as the subjects shift in their seats or the photographer darts in to rearrange the scene. Located in a section of My Country titled ‘My History’, nestled among a collection of artworks in various mediums that explore the colonial encounter, Grieves uses video as a way of interrogating the fixed narratives of such photographs and the version of history they propagate.

‘What [video] allowed was the sense of bringing those portraits to life,’ Grieves explains. ‘If I’d just done photography I would’ve just been re-creating the old form, whereas video art allowed [me] to bring in a slight sense of movement … Something comes alive and then a whole narrative comes out.’

This project arose from Grieves’ work with the Koori Heritage Trust, where she worked with members of the stolen generations to help them connect with their families and their histories. A wealth of these photographs were donated to the trust—studio portraits of Indigenous people who were unnamed and unaccounted for, which Grieves went on to investigate in a fellowship at the State Library of Victoria. At the time the photographs were taken, the local Indigenous people were already working on farms or living on missions and wearing ‘Western’ clothes, but here they’ve been put in skins and given weapons that are foreign to them. Featuring in portraits of the ‘authentic Aborigine’, the subjects are relegated to a forgotten past. In a further act of exploitation, these images were turned into highly collectible postcards and slides, and sold for considerable sums.

Investigating archives is an ongoing project in contemporary Aboriginal art. Vernon Ah Kee turns in his drawings to the expansive Norman Tindale archives stored in Adelaide, which contain pictures of his great-grandparents on Palm Island. Tindale was attempting to document what he thought to be a dying race; Ah Kee takes these images and transforms them into assertions of bravery and survival, exhibiting these large-scale drawings of his ancestors alongside portraits of his son and daughter. ‘It’s a really important part of what has been happening for over twenty years in contemporary Aboriginal art and Torres Strait Islander art,’ McLean explains, ‘drawing on those archives of family members—both remembering family members, personalising the images of those archives, but also those written archives and anthropological journals have been reinterpreted by a lot of artists.’

Images of children alone, women sexualised with an erotic gaze, men as fearsome warriors—these were driven by the same ideologies that justified the

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policies of colonialism. But beneath their surface Grieves finds other stories of resistance and strength. Like Fiona Foley’s photograph series Badtjala Woman (1994), in which she re-creates anthropological portraits of one of her ancestors with herself as the subject, this is an attempt to restore identity to these individuals, to understand what the ‘old people’ experienced. By restaging these images to create an alternative narrative, Grieves draws on video’s capacity as a generator of memory.

Grieves had never considered herself an artist before she made this work. She considers herself a storyteller, and in this instance video was the appropriate medium; she has also created documentaries for SBS and is now lead curator on the redevelopment of the Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre at Melbourne Museum, where she launched the First Peoples exhibition in September. Nevertheless, she won the Xstrata Emerging Artists Award in 2007 for Picturing the Old People, but has only just completed her second video work, What lies buried rises, at Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts, an exhibition curated by Dianne Jones that looks at the events leading up to Western Australia’s most brutal massacres. Grieves has created a lament for the fallen—a response to the lack of memorial sites around Australia.

‘I think all the work we make is political, all of it,’ says Grieves. ‘In a nation where these stories have only recently started to be told by Aboriginal people in a culture space that doesn’t always welcome other stories, everything you do is political. Just the process of making art is political, because it’s a statement of continuity and survival and it’s actually trying to reinscribe the norms or the national narratives. So I think all that we do is [political] really, yeah.’

In the next room is a video work by the filmmaker Warwick Thornton (who made the staggering Samson and Delilah in 2009), which tackles the imposition of white religion on Indigenous peoples. Stranded shows the artist suspended above a watering hole in the MacDonnell Ranges upon a neon cross, which spins slowly above the reflective water. This 3D video work is the first of its kind to be shown at GoMA, and one of the first in the world.2 Here Christianity is flashy spectacle, especially when contrasted with this sacred site, completely alien to the landscape surrounding it. But the earnestness of this juxtaposition is undercut by the expression on Thornton’s face: he looks uninterested, yawning repeatedly as the cross continues to turn.

It’s fitting that the My Country exhibition took place in Queensland, where Australia’s first markedly political video work was shot. Jeune Pritchard and

2 His video installation Mother Courage (which he made for the Documenta festival in Kassel, Germany, and showed at ACMI in 2013) was also highly innovative, placing a screen in the back of a campervan to show an elderly grandmother mass- producing dot paintings in a take on Bertolt Brecht’s 1941 play.

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Luce Pelissier were members of the Sydney-based video collective Bush Video, who travelled to Queensland in late 1977 to document political unrest under Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s National Party government. The result is the 43-minute documentary video Queensland Dossier. In September that year, Bjelke-Petersen had amended the Tra"c Act to e!ectively prohibit street protests—part of a wider backlash against burgeoning movements for Aboriginal rights, women’s rights and unionism. Citizen journalism has become customary in the internet age, but then the process of reporting this civic repression was highly charged.

Established in 1973, Bush Video was based at the Paddington Video Access Centre, one of several community centres o!ering equipment and training that were established across Australia as an initiative of the Whitlam government in the early 1970s. Alongside video art’s origins in performance art was a strong political impetus, tied to the communal spirit of the counterculture. Such collectives popped up around similar initiatives the world over, with the Videofreex, Ant Farm, TVTV and Raindance Corporation in the United States, SLON in France, and TVX in Britain. In Australia the establishment of the Experimental Film Fund arm of the Australia Council was also crucial, providing funding for these kinds of works.

One of Bush Video’s key projects was the establishment of a video network at the Aquarius Festival in Nimbin in May 1973, where, by the end of the event, they were narrowcasting patrons’ documentation onsite. There is a TV interview with some of the collective’s members in which an ABC reporter asks them about their aims. They’re young and charmingly naive, long-haired kids with open shirts and floppy hats sitting cross-legged on the ground. The democratised medium they’re describing could be YouTube. ‘It was just an open-access situation where anyone who was at Nimbin Festival could come and borrow a Portapak and generate their own video, their own information. Anything they wanted to say, they could say it with videotape,’ says Jonny Lewis. A wide-eyed Jack Jacobson adds, ‘People were just standing around awestruck, watching television that they’d made days before or maybe hours before … It was a beautiful little community service thing.’

According to Bush Video member Stephen Jones, who went on to become part of the electronic music collective Severed Heads and has written extensively about these early days of the movement, it was the arrival of the counterculture that made video art possible in Australia. ‘I mean, we really did want to change the world. We wanted to change your thinking,’ he tells me. ‘It was the hippy days, basically, so all of the utopianism of the hippy world … was very much at the base of what was going on. It was about opening

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up communication, it was about opening up lines of ideas that one could communicate … I mean, we could have had a better world, there’s no question about it.’

Richard Bell’s booming laugh echoes throughout the final section of My Country, which is organised around the theme ‘My Life’. His 2008 video work Scratch an Aussie—the first in what would become a trilogy titled Imagining Victory, which showed as part of an exhibition of the same name at Sydney gallery Artspace in August—depicts Bell as a larrikin psychoanalyst. His Aryan patients look like they’ve stepped straight o! the Gold Coast’s beach and into his o"ce, dressed in gold lamé bikinis and budgie smugglers. They talk about their inability to get over their possessions being stolen—how they feel vulnerable and exposed. ‘Why do people feel the need to take things from other people?’ they ask repeatedly. The therapist is so shaken he goes to see his own uber-analyst, ironically played by Aboriginal activist Gary Foley (a friend who appears in all his video work). Bathed in heavenly white light, there’s an implication that Foley may just be God.

In some ways this work is another example of video being used to contest the media’s dominant narratives. ‘I created a scenario that never happens on public television,’ says Bell when I talk to him later, ‘and that’s where two black men are interacting in an intellectual setting.’ The simple role reversal—white kids saying they can’t forgive and forget the loss of their stolen iPod to a black man expected to feel no resentment for an entire country—is extremely e!ective, but there’s another implication at work here too. Intercut with these therapy sessions are direct addresses to the camera where the golden-haired beach bunnies relay racist jokes with gusto. They stare straight at the camera, implicating the viewer in their address. ‘What’s the fastest thing in Australia?’ one girl giggles. ‘An Abo with your TV!’ Bell the analyst—and by extension Bell the artist—is unearthing the racist subconscious of white Australia.

While the Brisbane-based artist’s career has flourished to make him one of the most prominent artists in Australia, his politics is always at the heart of his practice. His catchphrase? ‘I’m an activist masquerading as an artist.’ Bell hasn’t had an easy life—he spent the first two years of his life in a tent, his mother was a member of the stolen generations, and he grew up in Bjelke- Petersen–era Queensland. As he grew older, his activism became informed by Black Panther politics. He came into art-making almost by accident, though quickly found it to be a way of extending his political reach.

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Throughout his career, Bell’s painting has been informed by acts of appropriation. Often humorously, he draws on the styles of various canonical artists to draw attention to racial issues. In works such as Bell’s Theorem (Trikky Dikky and Friends) (2005), he ironically adopts the distinct comic-book aesthetic of pop artist Roy Lichtenstein to comment on white artists whom he accuses of stealing Aboriginal designs for use in their own work; he also emulated Lichtenstein’s primary-coloured prints in works such as An Uppity School Girl (2008) and Now My Black People Kill! (2007), in which the distressed housewife’s thought bubbles say things like ‘Thank Christ I’m not Aboriginal!’ or ‘Thank Christ I don’t live on Palm Island!’ Bell has done similar projects with the work of Jackson Pollock and Australian artist Imants Tillers (one of those accused in Bell’s Theorem).

It seems natural then that Bell would at some point move into video, where appropriation is such a dominant mode. His video art doesn’t rework found footage, however, but, like the paintings, takes known narratives or styles and reimagines them from an Aboriginal perspective. Bell isn’t overly romantic about his reasons for venturing into video: he saw what was happening in the art market and realised that he needed to diversify his practice. Video art was popular at that moment. He made his first video work, Uz vs Them—in which he also starred—in 2006. Here he honed his public persona, ‘Richie’, a loudmouth who wears garish jewellery such as kangaroo-tail necklaces and shields on chunky gold chains. It’s through Richie that Bell speaks most provocatively.

Bell’s videos are narrative-driven, stylishly produced, funny and to the point. In some ways they take from the logic of television commercials. ‘I made a video because I really disliked the really long stu!, the endurance stu!. I set out to make anti-video art videos,’ says Bell. ‘It’s much more accessible for people than static painting, which stays in the one place, essentially. I’m interested in communicating my ideas to a large audience.’ And it’s through the use of humour that Bell makes these ideas more palatable.

If you’re dealing with tough subject matter, you have to be concerned about accessibility … People watch these things over and over again, and if you disconnect them in the first instance then they’re only going to watch it once and that’s that. I use humour to overcome that problem, and it seems to work. The people like them, even though they’re made to squirm. I actually still squirm every time I see them because there’s stu! in there that makes me uncomfortable as well.

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‘Aboriginal people are well known for having a sense of humour in very hard times. People often say that if we didn’t have a sense of humour we’d all be dead,’ says McLean when discussing Bell’s work. ‘His move into video has been really interesting because it’s allowed that side of his personality to really come through. In his text-based work, it was fairly easy to read what he was saying and doing, but often you didn’t get that sense of humour unless you knew who Richard was and knew him a little bit more personally, whereas with the move into video you get that element as well as sugar-coating this really hard politics that he’s playing with.’

The final video in Bell’s Imagining Victory trilogy, The Dinner Party, premiered in his Artspace show. Here the artist’s idea of victory is finally realised: Gary Foley is the first president of the People’s Republic of Australia, giving his opening address to the citizens. China has bought Australia outright and restored the land to its rightful custodians. Foley plans to redistribute the wealth, and make homeowners start paying rent. His speech is intercut with a bourgeois dinner party where the guests bemoan their loss of place and status, spouting all kinds of racist stereotypes and assumptions; the more wine they guzzle, the more pointed it gets. Bell uses humour to test the boundaries of Australia’s liberalism: placing Indigenous people in charge of the country.

Like the early activist videos, Bell’s video work is focused on the political. The eternal provocateur maintains that his goal is to change the way people think, employing the simple colour combinations and subliminal messaging of advertising to tap into the viewer’s subconscious. And he’s optimistic about the reach these works can have beyond the gallery space. He plans to keep working on videos because of their reach, but in financial terms it’s not where the payo! is. ‘They’ve been pretty expensive to make. I’m funding them with the sale of paintings, so I’m not going to stop painting anytime soon unless people start buying the videos.’

Like many Aboriginal artists making contemporary ‘urban’ art, Bell su!ers from a critical void surrounding his practice.

How many reviews have you seen of my show at Artspace? I don’t mind saying it, but that’s one of the better shows that’s been on in Sydney in a couple of years and it doesn’t get any attention from any art critics and it’s because they’re afraid of being wrong.

Us artists, we risk being wrong every time we make a work. Why don’t they show some fucking guts? They don’t have to be an expert in Aboriginal art to critique my work. I’m making contemporary

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art. And the reason they don’t critique my work is because they know fuck-all about contemporary art. There, I’ve said it. Quote me on that, I don’t give a fuck.

McLean has curated Scratch an Aussie so that it’s in dialogue with Bindi Cole’s Seventy Times Seven (2011), whose title refers to the biblical passage in Matthew chapter 18 where Jesus talks about how many times we must forgive our brothers’ and sisters’ sins. While Bell’s booming laugh can still be heard, the sound is turned down low on Cole’s video, encouraging us to get in close to hear it. A range of Aboriginal faces stare straight into the camera, repeating the words ‘I forgive you’. Surrounded by works that deal with the national apology, these words have obvious connotations. But as they are repeated the viewer must ask what they’re being forgiven for. In some ways these incantations of acceptance are an accusation. Cole is a born-again Christian, and uses forgiveness as a way of coming to terms with the hardships of her own life. But for artists such as Richard Bell and Vernon Ah Kee, the sentiment is o!ensive to their politics. ‘This country’s a long way o!,’ says Ah Kee when I ask his opinion, ‘and Bindi forgives them all.’

Vernon Ah Kee’s The Tall Man is the final piece in My Country, a symbolically weighty move on McLean’s part and perhaps the most political of the works I’ve discussed. This video does not provide a full stop, but has the open-ended feeling of an ellipsis—a story searching for its ending. Ah Kee maintains that art has to ask questions, but the ones that The Tall Man poses are the most troubling yet.

Spanning four adjacent screens, this video installation is a cavalcade of image, sound and emotion. The work is composed from the footage played in court to charge Lex Wotton over the Palm Island uprising in 2004, a response to the death of Cameron Doomadgee while in custody. (Ah Kee is from Innisfail, but many of his family are from Palm Island; Wotton is married to his cousin.) The seats are set only a metre or so from the screen, forcing the audience right up close to the events. And the sound is turned up loud, a veritable barrage. It’s fascinating to watch the way people encounter this work in a national institution such as GoMA: how most hover at the back, waiting to leave, but soon get sucked in and stay for the twelve-minute duration; many have told Ah Kee they left the room weeping. I watched this work numerous times before writing about it, and the emotional impact never seems to waver.

The events of that day were particularly personal for McLean, too, who also has family on Palm Island. He describes being unable to speak, or to move, the

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first time he saw it; he fought for four years to persuade the gallery to acquire it. This immersive experience resonates in the physical body, and I can see McLean tense up even speaking about it. ‘I think it’s hard for me to watch because I’m Aboriginal and have connections to that place, but also I think it’s hard for a lot of people to watch because, you know, they’re people, they’re humans,’ says McLean. ‘I think the important thing that people should keep in mind, and hopefully they do when they see it, is, How would you feel if this happened to a person in your family or in your community? What would your response be?’

Here we see the ubiquity of video in contemporary culture at work. Even in this so-called remote community, more than thirty hours of footage from that day emerged: from mobile phones, newsreels and surveillance cameras. These digital screens are marked with time-stamps, pixelated images blown up for the gallery, shaky cameras gripped in the hand. Video becomes a repository of memory for that day, but memory is not fixed. Ah Kee reappropriates the footage used to create an o"cial narrative of Wotton as a criminal, and shows an alternative: Wotton as a hero.

There are images of this beautiful place—green hills and jewel-coloured water—with plumes of smoke rising above the town. On the ground, people look on anxiously in groups until, finally, the mayor relays the findings over Doomadgee’s death. Wotton grabs the microphone, the frustration and anger and pain welling up in his voice. Shirtless, wearing sunglasses and low-slung jeans, you can see these emotions pass in waves across his body.

‘It’s like I always say to people,’ says Ah Kee, ‘it would be easier to discredit him and debunk his position if he wasn’t so good-looking, because he’s a beautiful-looking specimen in the video … When you talk to him he’s really quiet and that’s the opposite to the way people know him. That’s how he’s perceived through the media and that, but it’s not how he is at all.’

‘Are we going to accept this as an accident?’ Wotton yells. ‘I’m not going to accept it … So let’s do something, more than this!’ When he does do something, however, the impotence of the gesture is heartbreaking. His body pulses with fury as he storms the station, running at the imposing facade with a shovel and a length of piping; what he expects to do with those implements is unclear. CCTV footage from inside the police station is interspersed, some o"cers terrified and others filled with bravado, imploring their colleagues to fire o! rounds to ‘scare the cunts’. Later, elders and mothers give impassioned speeches about oppression, about the imprisonment of their sons: ‘the tidal wave, it’s not going to stop’. Children look on bewildered, smoke curling about their hair.

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These scenes are often interrupted with the overbearing beep and coloured lines of an interrupted transmission. It’s almost ironic, a technological anachronism out of step with the digitised images, simulating a broadcasting error that no longer exists. But that is exactly what this video is designed to do—to jam the signal. This was not a riot, but an uprising. Wotton is not an aggressor, but a hero.

The Tall Man exemplifies the power that video is still capable of, harnessing an immediacy particular to the art form. Political action may still emerge from the medium; remixing doesn’t have to be an ironic gesture. ‘Most people just live in a state of denial that Aboriginal communities exist, because you very rarely see footage of Aboriginal communities, especially when they’re in disarray like that. Especially in disarray that is obviously caused by white people,’ says Ah Kee. ‘Most reporting of Aboriginal communities blames Aboriginal people, and in fact most of the reporting of 2004 on Palm Island has blamed Aboriginal people, and Lex is the only one who went to jail for it. And the way he got vilified in the media anyone would think that he killed [Doomadgee].’

According to Ah Kee, however, he’s not a political artist (though he admits this work was made with a political goal in mind—Wotton has now been released from prison but is still on a gag order). He makes work about his experience, which many critics interpret as political, given his race.

I don’t make romantic art. My art is about my family, the history of Aboriginal people in my family, and I make work about the issues that inform my life … It’s construed as political because it’s often oppositional to what this country believes of itself, and my family’s experiences are not romantic. They’re born of racist attitudes that have impacted upon us personally, but that’s my history. That’s my life. And I always say, how come whitefellas get to make work about their families and no-one bats an eye?

Placing this work as the final piece in an exhibition of contemporary Aboriginal art—but more broadly an exhibition that deals with Aboriginal identity and experience—is a politically charged gesture, no matter how you look at it, but particularly when shown in a Queensland institution. If video art is a mirror, this work holds up a disquieting reflection. M

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