Joshua Searle: Statement
'I’m Sick of Being Polite'
This work references Gordon Bennett, described by the Museum of Contemporary Art as ‘one of Australia’s most significant and critically engaged contemporary artists, addressing issues relating to the role of language and systems of thought in forging identity.’ (1)
Bennett’s artwork ‘Notes to Basquiat: Be Polite’, was made in 1998, the year of Australian-Colombian artist Joshua Searle’s birth. Later ‘Gordon Bennett: Be Polite’ became the title of a retrospective of Bennett’s works on paper, curated by Aileen Burns and Johan Lundh, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2) and a publication. It was through this publication that Searle encountered Bennett’s work in a deeper sense.
Searle’s work continues both Bennett and Basquiat’s discussion around concepts and constructs of ‘Whiteness’ and ‘Blackness’, using the English language, the language of the British Empire, that which has become for much of global society, both the coloniser and the colonised, the only mother tongue.
The use of red in its black on white text, may be a reference to blood, for Bennett, ‘Blood is a potent symbol and has historically been a measure of Aboriginality.’(3) Blood speaks to the violence of the frontier and the continued violence of current colonial occupation, it ‘exposes the truth of colonial occupation – it was a ‘bloody’ conquest.’ (4)
‘I’m Sick of Being Polite’ is also a reference to the history of the laws of racial etiquette, and to code switching. For Black and Indigenous people living under frontier colonialism, behaviour was governed by the state, with punishment for deviation from a continual behavioural policing and self-policing(5). This authoritarian history continues today in the form of code switching, wherein people of colour must constantly self-police their behaviour, in order not to be perceived as embodiments of racial stereotypes, which are always negative. Research into code switching has found that such constant self-policing comes at great psychological cost, leading to burn out and impact on mental health. (6)-
1 Dr Tara McDowell, Associate Professor and Director of Curatorial Practice, Monash University, Melbourne. https://www.mca.com.au/collection/artists/gordon-bennett/
2 First presented in October 2015, touring then to the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts in 2016, Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, 2017 and McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton, Canada, 2018. From this exhibition a publication was produced, edited by the curators, with essays by Helen Hughes, Ian McLean and Julie Nagam.
3 https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/school_resource/gordon-bennett/
4 ibid5 https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/question/2006/september.htm
6 https://hbr.org/2019/11/the-costs-of-codeswitching'Rough Surface
Oro robado'Oro robado (Stolen Gold) is an ongoing series which explores Pre-Columbian artefacts documented in texts as a means to further understand Searle’s own diasporic history and identity as an Australian-Colombian. 'Oro robado' is a statement of strength and questioning.
This work depicts a Colombian Quimbayan mask held in the collection of the British Museum, whose curator noted in 2009:
‘The closed eyes on this mask signal a focus on the inner world. The pendant dangles and nose ornament indicate high status. Much smaller than life size and lacking eye perforations, like other similar objects it was probably not intended actually to be worn as a mask.
It may have formed part of a suite of carefully guarded treasured heirlooms only displayed in the course of elaborate ceremonial events.’
The Quimbaya were Indigenous peoples of the Bogota plain, they were exceptionally fine goldsmiths. Gold was considered a spiritual life force of the land and people, rather than something of material value.
Searle reflects on the British Museum text as an example of the field of archeology, which was born as an enterprise of the British empire. The ways these objects are described exists within a colonial construct, where they are othered.
This work is painted on what Searle describes as 'stolen colonial waste from the side of the road’. Repurposed from a warning road sign, he uses it to ‘caution’ a conversation of colonialism. Keeping the pictorial language, Searle uses stencils of the mask in the way that road signs use symbols on signs. His use of the Quimbayan mask becomes a symbol of ‘Stolen Gold’: the literal and metaphoric gold stolen by colonisation.
Group Exhibition
Including Words
February 28-March 23, 2024