Exhibitions

Hanging on the Telephone

Rex Butler

It is 1938, and the murderous progression of anti-Semitic Nazism is under way in Austria. One of its victims is the great Jewish psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, whose books are first banned and then burnt, and who at the age of 82 is forced to flee his native Vienna, where he has lived virtually all of his life, leaving behind his medical practice, friends, relatives and a treasure trove of objects he has painstakingly collected. And yet, just as this time, before and during his move to London to live the last two years of his life, Freud writes an extraordinary text, whose exact motivations are still being debated today, 'Moses And Monotheism'.

In 'Moses And Monotheism', Freud makes the startling claim, based as he admits on merely speculative anthropology, that Moses—the great liberator and law-giver of the Jews—was in fact an Egyptian prince. In doing so, as Freud well knew, he was contesting what we might call one of the founding 'myths' of the Jewish religion, the very thing that was keeping its adherents together in a time of division and persecution. It is the idea that the Jews are somehow a special or chosen people, with some particular quality that distinguishes them from others. Freud does not entirely disagree with this, but makes the point that this quality is not innate to Jews themselves but was given to them by another. As he writes: 'The great religious idea for which the man Moses stood was, on our view, not his own property: he had taken it over from King Akhenaten.'¹

As the Freud scholar Peter Gay argues, this statement by Freud is one of the highest ethical moments in all of psychoanalysis, risking alienating Freud from the people with whom he identified and to whom he wished to belong.² And in a way it could only appear—this is what it was accused of for a long time afterwards—to contribute to the very cause of Nazi anti-Semitism. And yet Freud's profound insight is that it is just this idea that Jews are somehow different from other people that leads to anti-Semitism, or that is indistinguishable from the anti-Semitic point of view. For, after all, it is this 'last wishful phantasy' of some 'precious possession' that the Jews can be accused of stealing from others;³ it is just this 'special stuff' that leads at first to admiration and then to the murderous desire to acquire it for ourselves.

It is paradoxically for Freud just those Jews who insist on their own specialness who are the true anti-Semites. And the only way to break with this cycle of envy and revenge is to argue that they never actually owned this 'precious possession', that it was originally given to them by another (that is to say, that their Jewish identity is inseparable from the way they appear in the eyes of others, that their supposedly unique and distinctive characteristics mean nothing except insofar as they are desired by another). It is only by a kind of pre-emptive 'strike against themselves', a going beyond the fantasy that they are exceptional, that Jews might finally escape their anti-Semitic persecution and the internalisation of the envy and hatred of others.

Is it not something similar – without over-stating the parallels between Nazi Austria and contemporary Australia—that the Queensland artist Richard Bell has sought to do in a long sequence of works from the mid-1990s on? It is what might be called the psychoanalysis of Aboriginalism. In the well-known aphorism 'Aboriginal Art—It's A White Thing' of Bell's Theorem (2002), Bell attempts to make the point that 'Aboriginality' is not innate and natural to indigenous Australians, but a kind of projection on to them by white Australians, is only for Aborigines to see themselves through white eyes. In Desperately Seeking Emily (2000–2), he attacks and makes ugly arguably the most 'sublime' Aborigine of all, Emily Kngwarreye, in suggesting that the beauty of her work is merely an invention of her white interpreters. In a series of recent public performances in which Bell wears a black T-shirt bearing the words 'Ooga Booga' to openings of Aboriginal art, he proposes –and here the fine line he treads between criticising the 'primitivism' of these artists or the 'primitivising' of them by their white supporters—that it is not desert-based artists but urban artists like himself who are the 'true' Aborigines.⁴

It is fascinating appearing with Bell in any kind of public forum on Aboriginal art. An immensely charismatic man, Bell following his inevitably desultory and offhand presentation soon ends up listening to a series of 'confessions' by his white audience concerning the racist incidents they have witnessed in their everyday life (which, like all good souls, they have simply witnessed without being involved in or responsible for). As with any good analyst, Bell lets them talk, interrupting only when they realise they have said the wrong thing. In truth, he has to do almost nothing—the situation is not really meant for him and he is not naive enough not to realise why he has been invited. It is a kind of love affair between Bell and his audience in which he needs them as much as they need him, and in which each side appears attractive to themselves when viewed through the eyes of the other.

Indeed, it is this love affair that is the subject of Bell's most recent series of works, Made Men (2003) and Colour (2004). In these remakes of Roy Lichtenstein's early Pop paintings, a variety of love scenarios is played out between a number of white women (perhaps it is the same one) and a character called Richie. The intertitles and speech bubbles in the cartoons include such deathless platitudes as: 'I don't care! At last we can be together for ever!', 'Why Richard darling, this painting is a masterpiece! My soon even Australians will be clamoring for your work!' and 'We rose up sowly… Oh why aren't I allowed to enjoy my lusty black lover... why must I deny my love for him, stealing precious moments like a thief in tha nite...' The paintings are done—although Bell remakes them deliberately clumsily, defacing the original sentiment—in a style that was already overblown and parodic in Lichtenstein: romanticised, idealised, unreal. We have square-jawed, black-skinned heroes with chiselled features and booming artistic careers. We have blue-eyed, flaxen-haired heroines who have all the time in the world to lie on their bed dreaming of their man. Both sexes look good to each other and to themselves lit by the glow of their 'mutual' love.

What is being played out here, first of all, is the love of white Australians for Aborigines—a love in which we are all Bell's generically white women. And yet it is this love—for all of the narcissistic benefits it confers on Bell, who can appear so desirable in it—that he rejects. On closer inspection, all the affairs are doomed; no 'sexual relationship' between black and white seems possible. (Indeed, the full sequence of the works ends up with the white woman drowning herself in unrequited love.) Or to repeat one of Bell's more controversial aphorisms, 'White girls can't hump', whose very expression itself has the effect of making Bell appear less attractive, misogynistic, even racist, and whose ethics constitute a kind of 'striking against oneself'.⁵ It is a statement whose ultimate meaning and consequences are unclear even to Bell, that breaks with any subjective mastery, forces him to see himself from an unfamiliar and unlikeable perspective.

It is for this reason that, if Bell has recently begun to think that 'Australian Art—It's An Aboriginal Thing', this is not a mere inversion of or complement to his previous 'Aboriginal Art—It's A White Thing'.⁶ The two are not to be added up to form a whole, do not imply some ultimate encounter with or recognition of the other. Rather, it means that both white Australian and Aboriginal art are cut off, alone in their dreams, their thought bubbles, with no one on the end of their telephone to take their call. It is the same ambiguity as is seen when Bell writes the words 'I am Sorry' and 'I am Humiliated' on his paintings, for it is finally impossible to know who is speaking there. It is easy and perhaps even comforting to think that Bell is suggesting that it is Aborigines who are humiliated and white Australians who should be sorry. But it is perhaps more confronting to think that it is Bell himself who is sorry, insofar as he would not exist as an 'Aborigine' outside of this white gaze which grants him his identity. However, if this is so, it is precisely we whites who would then be humiliated, insofar as without our Aborigines we would no longer have anyone to tell us what it means to be Australian, what we are doing here alone, waiting for someone to take our call, in this faraway land.

And at moments in Bell's work, beneath the bluster and bravado, there is to be glimpsed a melancholy, a resignation at the state of black-white relations in contemporary Australia. It comes from the realisation that, outside of the 'protected' zone of contemporary art, in which Bell has to pretend that he remains angry in the hope that things will change and his white audience alternately has to pretend to be amused and abashed, each simply cannot give the other what they lack. It is at this point, in which each side sees the other as they are, that we paradoxically come closer, that we become neighbours (if not lovers) in our distance from each other. And it is this experience of disorientation and desubjectivisation that Bell's art ultimately wants to lead us towards, something totally at odds with the hope that art (even and especially Aboriginal art) is usually said to offer us. It is perhaps for this reason that Bell insists that he is not an artist. In fact, as much as anything, his entire work is an attack on art and its holding out of the possibility of social change through the 'questioning' of what is. Without the consolation of Aboriginal art, we might finally be forced to confront the truth of black-white relations in this place where we live.

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