Richard Bell: You Can Go Now

Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney until August 29

Richard Bell is always called “controversial”. The word is too weak. He is powerful, demanding, unsettling, garish, in-your-face, rabble-rousing and comprehensively loathed by the conservative art critics who dominate the Australian mainstream media. So is his work, unsurprisingly.

Bell speaks truth to colonial power. He calls out racism in unanswerable ways that leave his opponents spluttering with frustration. He uses text, which those critics deride, claiming such works are not art. They conveniently forget – or perhaps also despise – the mostly American artists since Duchamp who form a powerful lineage for text as art, many of them of Bell’s generation.

Bell does, actually, call himself an activist as much as an artist; in fact, he calls himself an activist before an artist. That clarity doesn’t mollify his critics; it only seems to excite them further.

The retrospective of Bell’s work that has just opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney is his largest exhibition so far. The images, the words, the colour and the concepts bounce off the walls. It is clear why he, now 68, has been so influential, especially to younger urban artists and activists.

His most provocative images are there: 38 in all. Various incarnations of his “Bell’s Theorem” paintings include the 2003 work Scientia E Metaphysica (Bell’s Theorem), which won the 20th National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award in Darwin that year and brought him to public notice. Its white text on a vivid ground is challenging: “Aboriginal Art: It’s a White Thing”.

Another, called Art Movements (2004), is a minimalist textual history of “Aryan” art. Pay the Rent (2009) is self-explanatory, as is Little Johnny (2001), for those who remember the Howard years, which carries the text, “I am not sorry”. A documentary painting called A White Hero for Black Australia (2011) depicts Peter Norman on the 1968 Olympics podium wearing a human rights badge while fellow athletes Tommy Smith and John Carlos make the Black Power salute. Bell made that work with Emory Douglas, as well as a wall-long painting titled Peace Heals, War Kills (Big Ass Mutha Fuckin Mural) (2011).

Three takes on Roy Lichtenstein’s Crying Girl carry the thought bubbles: “Thank Christ I’m not Aboriginal!!!” (2007), “Thank Christ I’m not a refugee!” (2014) and “Thank Christ I’m not a Muslim…” (2015).

Hardest to walk away from is his sequence of photographs of heart-breakingly beautiful Aboriginal children, titled Ministry Kids (Children’s Parliament) (1992) and captioned with text such as “Minister for Trees and Culture, Prime Minister” and “Minister for White Affairs, Employment and Industry”. A whole separate room across the foyer is devoted to a re-installation of Embassy (2013–), his tribute to the permanent protest site set up in Canberra by Aboriginal activists in 1972.

Richard Bell: You Can Go Now is controversial, all right. It’s also a fluent deconstruction of white supremacy. And it’s art.