Ben Quilty (Australian) - indigenous issues, Australian identity, masculinity

Ben Quilty
Landcruiser, 2007
Cinese Ink and Goauche on Aquari paper
188 x 282cm


It’s an old trick. Take a universal, publicly owned snatch of
melody, fanfare, phrase or image and pervert it. Ben Quilty
has used the Australian coat of arms, an image so offi cial and
hoary it’s almost invisible, and mounted it on a mesa piled
with skulls. The shield-bearers are presented as road-kill,
the kangaroo muzzle fl attened by a double bogie. Between
them now is a cairn of skulls knitted by worms and lies. The
crest is a convict shackle, looking as though it was cut from
a kerosene tin, just to make it clear that not all the bones
belonged to Indigenous Australians.
Like most people, Ben Quilty defi es caricature. A bogan who
chose to pursue a degree in Aboriginal culture. A petrolhead
who buys his art supplies at Bunnings, yet carries tiny
notebooks full of the most exquisite pen-and-ink sketches of
Venice done in his recent youth. Close in, where Quilty works,
his paintings look like a bad paving job. Step back twenty
feet and he’s caught the whole sorry tale, a country built by
the survivors of pogroms, massacres and land clearances
elsewhere, who found a haven here on land cleared by
massacres of our own.
Don Walker

Text from: UQ Art Museum http://www.uq.edu.au/maynecentre/docs/BenQuiltyInterpretiveGuide.pdf


When people ask him why he paints such pessimistic work, Quilty says his view of Australians preferring to ignore the less-than-rosy aspects of Australian history is confirmed. "I love my life, my family, friends and work, and I'm a very lucky person," he says. "But there are some really bad things happening. It seems to me that in Australia no one talks about them, and if you do you're branded as a pessimist. It's just ridiculous.
"The whole 'un-Australian' thing at the moment, that's just insane. I mean, Captain Cook shot the first Aboriginal he met - well, let's talk about that. What's un-Australian? What school do you ever learn Aboriginal in? You learn French and German but I've never heard of a school that teaches Aboriginal and that's the most un-Australian thing I can think of."
Quilty also finds it bizarre that the Union Jack, rather than a representation of Aboriginal people, remains on the Australian flag. "I'm happy to burn the flag. As long as it's got the Union Jack on it, I'll burn it. The Australian flag, as it is, speaks to me of oppression and invasion and it's so politically incorrect to say any of this stuff, but it's also so obvious."

Text from:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/arts/the-hot-seat-ben-quilty/2007/03/16/1173722723863.html

Rorschach – the
Butterfly Effect, 2008.


Where did all this darkness come from? "I started using the skull image when I was buying kids' clothes for my cousins," Quilty, 34, says. "Everything for boys had skulls emblazoned on it. And I just thought, it's such a weird thing to be instilling in little boys, who are full of life."