BROOK ANDREW
What are you working on now?” The question elicits an exasperated laugh from Brook Andrew and the answer: “This Year”. It’s not a facetious response to the havoc wreaked on his 2020 diary by COVID-19 and its deferral of the 22nd Biennale of Sydney for which he was the first Indigenous artist lead, nor its dismissal of his plans to finish a doctoral thesis at the University of Oxford. No, ‘This Year’, as Andrew explains, is the title applying to the art he has completed during its chaotic term; a title that could apply to any year and carries the niggling inference that nothing really changes.
“I mean, are we still dealing with the same old issues over and over?,” he says with a ready roll call of Black Lives Matter, climate, queerness, gender, border issues, the women’s movement, land rights, globalisation, anxiety and art still viewed through the eye of Europe. “Why don’t all these things have a balance of representation? Is every year to remain the same? If we are going to talk about race, let’s talk about economics, we have to be specific about what it means for us here and that includes the power of objects — where do they come from and who really knows?”
The question of inherited histories burying in innocuous forms is driving his thesis research but has arguably always ordered Andrew’s thinking. He harks back to his eureka strike in the solitude of museum archives, where he first encountered the “phantoms” of ethnographic photo collections. “They would have been taken by anthropologists or photographers who sold those images on to institutions,” he says. “But they didn’t record any names. So there are all these silent unnamed, orphaned photos. For all I know, they could be of my great-grandparents.”
Growing up in Sydney’s western suburbs, Andrews recalls his first consciousness of an exclusionary culture at 15, when, he “suddenly awakened” to the reality that his mother was not represented by broader culture. “She is Wiradjuri, comes from a big family of about seven, and we would go over and join the entire mob every weekend — it was very much a foundation of my growing-up,” he says of an inclusiveness that absorbed his father, the only child of Scottish Jewish parents. “We didn’t know anything about the history wars because everything was so silent then, but something was missing — my people weren’t figuring in the mainstream.”
Andrew recalls the rancid words issuing at university that his admission was a function of his father’s whiteness; a put-down that he absorbed into the persona of the “trickster” — the magician who makes art that doesn’t scare people away but messes with mindsets. His graduating art-school work White word I (1993), a diptych repeating ‘white words’ alongside the racist rant ‘coon’ on a black-and-white velvet canvas, was his first notable sleight of hand. Where it delivered the velvet-gloved gut punch that got him noticed, Sexy and Dangerous (1996) — a tricking-up of the sepia-tinted Aboriginal warrior typecast with saturated colour and consumerist text — propelled him into the stratosphere. It marks the moment when his co-opting of Western narratives started to zigzag (quite figuratively in the Wiradjuri dendroglyph tree pattern) between the poles of black and white.
“But this goes beyond colour,” he says of a world that is now collectively fighting a common enemy, congealing into the collages of This Year. “I’ve just been smashing together cut-outs, fashion shots from magazines, newspaper clippings and archived bits — looking at issues around environment, history, abstraction, decontextualising the image of a woman pouring milk into her eyes after tear gas releases at a protest, painting into it, colliding stories, clashing a headline that reads ‘Racism in Italy Hits Holocaust Survivor’ next to an article about an ‘Arctic River Running Red’.”
What Andrew sees when he stands back and looks at the graphic mayhem of 2020 through his Magic Eye is the three-dimensional chimera of familiar pattern and movement shaping. “Is humanity shifting or fixing?” he asks. “Or is history just doomed to repeat?” @brook_andrew_artist tolarnogalleries.com; roslynoxley9.com.au
“Why don’t all these things have a balance of representation? Is every year to remain the same? If we are going to talk about race, let’s talk about economics, we have to be specific about what it means for us here” BROOK ANDREW