Challenging the dot problem

An older black man, bearded, besuited, sits beside the couch in classic Freudian psychiatrist mode, probing the fears of young Australian white women in gold bikinis. They play word association games, which turn into a series of racist jokes.

This video, Scratch an Aussie, is part of Australian artist Richard Bell's work at the fourth Auckland Triennial. It has the Bell hallmarks of a direct assault on Australian racism and prejudice, using the language and access afforded by the art world.

Speaking from Adelaide, Bell says the visitors' book at his current show at the Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Institute illustrates the problem Aboriginal artists face.

"Their comments are: 'Where is the Aboriginal art?' They're looking for the dots." That's ironic, given the show, Putsch by Queensland's proppaNOW collective, is about the expectations whites place on Aboriginal artists.

Bell could do dots if he wanted. His belated entry to art in his 30s came when he was helping his brother produce tourist art, after working in community development and being part of the Aboriginal rights movement.

"I was making boomerangs and spears and clapsticks and didgeridoos and someone said to me: 'Why not get into fine art?' I said: 'Look at these fine lines here, that's fine art'. He laughed at that and said, 'No, high art'. I said: 'That's for girls and gays'. He said: 'You can reach a much bigger audience and a much more influential audience than you ever can marching on the streets'. I said: 'Sit down and tell me about this stuff'."

Bell describes his adviser as "an unnamed white man".

"Art history is littered with unnamed noble savages so I'm talking about an unnamed ignoble savage."

Bell says much of his work is about trying to figure out what makes each succeeding generation of Australians so racist against Aboriginal people.

"I suspect it is done by reinforcing the stereotypes of Aboriginal people they hold among themselves. This happens at dinner parties, backyard barbecues where people have the Aboriginal discussion: that we're lazy, we're dirty, we're dumb, all the sort of things that have anchored us to the bottom of the socio-economic indicators with no room for us to move off the bottom." Each wave of migrants from the First Fleet to the Italians, the Vietnamese and Sudanese are "all slotted in directly above us".

"We're almost invisible, and there is a misconception we all get a payout, a million-dollar payout. This is what they all believe."

Aboriginals are almost invisible in Australia - not just because they were almost wiped out, but because of efforts to assimilate the survivors into white culture, with the Northern Territory intervention only the latest manifestation.

"What people don't realise is whatever they do to us, they get done to them. They will eventually get a watered-down version of the laws they impose on Aboriginal people."

Many of Bell's ideas were encapsulated in Bell's Theorem: Aboriginal Art - It's a White Thing, a scathing and brilliantly reasoned critique of the Aboriginal art industry.

"I came to the conclusion there is not one, but there is an industry that caters for a particular form of Aboriginal art." What started as a city-bred teacher going into the desert with canvas and paint, for what Bell calls "noble savages" to paint on, has become a multi-million dollar industry, with a whole lot of pseudo-ethnographic hokum attached.

"I know in a lot of cases the story the artists is asked to attach has little or no connection with that painting. Sometimes they are under such intense pressure to produce - from their families, their dealers - they just make something up. On other occasions they are really considered with their approach and it is genuine, but so often it is not." Bell says Australian critics still write about Aboriginal art in a way that consigns it to ethnography rather than accepting it into the canon of Western art. He uses words and moving images in his work because he is trying to communicate ideas. "Moving image is a better way of communicating ideas quickly to large numbers of people."

When people found his word-based paintings hard to take, he adopted pop strategies, appropriating comic images, a la Roy Lichtenstein.

"I'd been told many times by people: 'Richard, we love your art but it would not fit in our home.' So I took the Lichtenstein interiors, replaced his paintings with mine, and demonstrated they would fit in their homes. And people started buying them.

"It's also scientific; human beings have this attraction to cartoon imagery, animation - it's irresistible, as are primary colours. We also learn from advertising that three or four colour combinations are irresistible to the human mind. When we embed those with messages, we bypass the consciousness."

Bell comes from the Kamilaroi, Kooma, Jiman and Gurang Gurang peoples of northern New South Wales and southern Queensland, and was born in Charleville in Queensland's west in 1953.

"It was a grim start to life, really. The first few years we spent in a tent waiting for the white people to throw away enough corrugated iron for us to make a tin shack. I spent most of my early part of life living in Aboriginal reserves on outskirts of town. It was a semi-tribal lifestyle. We had to live off the land to supplement the low wages our people were forced to put up with in those days."

When he was 5, his mother got a job in Darwin at the Retta Dixon home for "half-caste children", where he lived with his mother and brother for five years. They eventually went back to Queensland, living in tin shacks on riverbanks until he moved to Sydney at age 21 and ran into the Black Power movement. "The discussions I had with people there formed the basis for most of the research for my art practice. It came out of that period and years after that, mixing with all those people."

Bell still lives in Brisbane, "a cultural backwater that has people who live there who buy strong political work. They say what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, so I guess it made me stronger. They can all go and f*** themselves now, I don't care, them and their redneck attitudes. We find ways to fight back."