DESTINY CALLING
Leading contemporary Indigenous artist Destiny Deacon has more than lived up to her name.
As one of Australia’s leading contemporary Indigenous artists, Destiny Deacon has more than lived up to her name. With a new exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Myles Russell-Cook, the gallery’s curator of Indigenous art, explores the duality of comedy and tragedy that informs her work.
DESTINY DEACON IS one of Australia’s boldest and most acclaimed contemporary artists. A descendant of the Kuku and Erub/Mer people from Far North Queensland and Torres Strait, Deacon is based in Melbourne, where she is known for a body of work that depicts her darkly comic, idiosyncratic world view. Her practice, which spans photography, video, installation, printmaking and performance, offers a nuanced, thoughtful and at times intensely funny snapshot of contemporary Australian life. Ordinarily I would insist on referring to any artist – woman, man or other – by their last name. Picasso, O’Keeffe, Warhol, Kngwarray. It is a mark of respect. But when it comes to Destiny Deacon, the normal rules of the art world just don’t apply.
Destiny is the title of her solo show at the National Gallery of Victoria, which opens this month, and true to her name, Destiny has forged a path as an international artist with a distinct brand of artistic humour, halfway between comedy and tragedy. There is a duality that lies at the heart of everything she does. Making sense of tragedy through comedy is partly what her work is all about. Or, as she explains: “Most of my art is to tell stories of being an Indigenous Australian, of colonialism, poverty, racism, sexism, etc … jeez, that’s a mouthful isn’t it?”
Among the laughs there is another side, a darker side. Her disturbing visual language marries two worlds, contrasting seemingly innocuous childhood imagery with scenes taken from the darkest reaches of adulthood.
For her 2004 exhibition, Walk & don’t look blak, Destiny said of the photography included in the survey: “I like to think there is a laugh and a tear in every picture.” In blurring the line between that which is sad and that which is comical, Destiny draws audiences to consider how the ‘truth’ is often absurd.
Through her outrageous cast of characters, she explores and examines dichotomies – childhood and adulthood, comedy and tragedy, theft and reclamation, the mask and the face. She transports people into an ‘uncanny valley’ (a term describing the discomfort we can feel looking at things that look like humans, but are not), a chaotic world where disgraced dollies play out sinister scenes for audience amusement. Decapitated, amputated, pants down, tied up,
trapped in a blizzard or flying through the air, the world Destiny creates both reflects and parodies the one in which we live.
Trying to understand Destiny’s work can be difficult. She resists interpretation and ‘art speak’ by presenting the viewer with a deceptively simple narrative. The ‘explanation’ is often hinted at through a comical title, but to take this light-hearted approach at face value would be a mistake. In only reading her images on the surface as amusing standalone narratives, one fails to appreciate the grander ideas and relationships that Destiny’s oeuvre has to offer. These more philosophical contexts are in part her personal visions, and they are things that we the audience must work to understand. One of these themes is the idea of truth and reclamation.
In her photo triptych, Blak lik mi (1991), the artist famously reclaimed three images. The first is a bamboo plate, painted with Aboriginal girl’s face, the second is a blurry close-up of a smiling Aboriginal girl printed on black velvet, and the third is a picture of a little girl crying. The two images on the right are taken from a 1960s reproduction of a 1957 Axel Poignant photograph from his photo essay, originally titled Piccaninny walkabout, later renamed Bush Walkabout. The Axel Poignant photographs were widely reproduced (without his permission or knowledge), printed on black velvet, and signed ‘Martinus’. Destiny calls these types of objects ‘Koori kitsch’; abject knickknacks, which at best portray Aboriginal people as decoration and at worst perpetuate overtly racist stereotypes. She has a massive collection of Koori kitsch. In her own words, she has been rescuing Koori kitsch “since forever”, and explains: “In the beginning I wanted to rescue them, because otherwise they’d end up in a white home or something, somewhere no-one would appreciate them.”
At first glance, the triptych is deceptively simple. But through the simple act of photographing the reproduction, Destiny reclaimed a genre. As always, the hidden meaning, or meanings, behind the work is first introduced through the title. Blak lik mi, spelled in a way so as to differentiate Destiny’s perceived blackness from her selfdetermined ‘blakness’. It’s deliberately indirect.
Blak lik mi is widely accepted as the first instance where an Aboriginal person used the spelling ‘blak’ instead of black. In defining blakness, as unlike blackness, Destiny distinguishes her Aboriginality from her skin colour. But in addition to that, she originates a version of being blak that comes entirely from within.
The legacy of this work has been massive. Countless Aboriginal people now selfdetermine their identity as blak. It is a helpful word as it provides a distinction, separating the experiences Aboriginal people have within an Australian colonial structure from the experience other First Nations people and people of colour (POC) have within other colonial structures. People often confuse the two, lumping together the experiences of Aboriginal people with the experiences of black, POC and colonised First Nations people. But the distinction is so important. Grouping together the experiences of non-white people homogenises countless tribal, cultural and linguistic differences, making anyone who isn’t part of the dominant culture the same, when we are not.
By reproducing and redefining her perceived blackness, Destiny stared back, switching her position from subject to photographer and rewriting the relationship between contemporary Aboriginal people and the Koori kitsch that betrays them.
Contemporary Aboriginal artists throughout Australia owe a debt to artists like Destiny. A powerful and generous matriarch, her artistic, blak humour has illuminated the way for the next generation of blak artists. Through her art Destiny changed what the contemporary art world understood Aboriginal art was and could be. But more than that, she also shone a light on how Aboriginal people can and do construct their identity outside of the colonial gaze. Destiny is on at the NGV until August 20.
Among the laughs there is another side, a darker side. Her disturbing visual language marries two worlds