Artist: Tony Albert

Following his major survey exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, Sullivan+Strumpf presents acclaimed First Nations artist Tony Albert’s solo exhibition Reverb.

In Reverb, Tony Albert draws upon the vernacular of everyday Australia, subverting familiar expressions and cultural shorthand to turn colloquialisms back upon themselves, in a series of text-based works that explore how racism can reside within humour, nostalgia and seemingly innocuous everyday language.

At the centre of the exhibition a phrase recurs, AS THE TOPIC OF ABORIGINAL PEOPLE ENTERED THE CONVERSATION, its repetition creating a rhythmic, almost melodic quality. SORRY BECAME JUST A WORD, A FAIR GO BECAME CONDITIONAL and THE CROWS GOT STONED; words and phrases become refrains, accumulating meaning.

Reverb describes what remains after the original sound has stopped. Words, images and attitudes reverberating through time, changing form while retaining power. A metaphor for history itself, the exhibition exposes not only what Australian language represents, but who it has historically left out.

In these works the past does not simply disappear. It echoes, travels, is reworked and returns, asking us to consider not only what we inherit, but what we choose to carry forward.

Aboriginalia and Australiana perform complementary functions - a thin veneer that disguises something abhorrent (wilfully or otherwise). One flattens an entire population within a country to silly expressions while simultaneously decimating that culture.

The other absolves a population of any culpability by relying on easygoingness that conceals the violence that occurs in settler colonial societies. Both are charming and incredibly effective. Tony Albert’s work lives between the expression of something and its actual meaning and function. It amplifies the subtext to expose the hypocrisy of colloquialisms that dictate easygoingness is a condition of belonging.

The thing that strikes me about Tony is that he gets Australiana and we both engage in it to the extent that black kids from the country do - cricket and football and country music and church and scraped knees and early model Australian made cars.

Tony’s work, in my mind, is the perfect example of what contemporary Aboriginal cultural expression is. Time isn’t stagnant so why would we expect culture and language to be? How do you expand a representation that’s been flattened and turn it into a compelling and coherent story that manages to inflate it again so that it takes on a wholly new shape and meaning?

The commodification of Aboriginal culture has frozen some expressions of it in a certain context, purely for consumption of those who sit outside of it. This dynamic does what the streets of Paris do in the summertime when there are millions of tourists who want a French experience. It performs itself for consumption. That’s not how French people actually live or what the experience of being a Parisian is like. But that doesn’t matter because the symbolism of cultural expression is what tourists want from their experience. When people think of Aboriginal art or culture, these forms - Aboriginalia, as Tony calls them - serve the function; they preserve a particular expression and present it as the symbol so anything outside of that might feel inadequate or even inauthentic.

To be able to identify the dynamic is a sophisticated intellectual process, to then express it in a way that doesn’t participate in the construction of Aboriginality for consumption or commodification, but to elicit a response from an audience accustomed to a flattening of our identity, is quite a leap forward.

Can living breathing people be diminished to cartoonish relics?

Mockery and derision are natural consequences of reducing our experiences into caricatures and souvenirs. Of course, they’re only the first stops along the route if the destination is subjugation which reveals a much darker truth, that you only need souvenirs from places that you’re only temporarily inhabiting. There’s a transient nature to the things they memorialise; it implies that one of the groups - either the person with the souvenir or the one memorialised in it - is only a temporary fixture.

Nationalism in Australia is complex because it truly is a country built by migration. Normally, you can figure out who’s on the inside by describing who’s on the outside, it thrives when borders are permeated and values are challenged which makes it more difficult to exclude Aboriginal people from. Australia can’t get away with the same myth making about its inception that other countries can where people somehow just ended up there so we apply weird frameworks and thresholds.

Language serves as a tool of disguise and creates cleavages that help draw up and enforce the boundaries we use to decide who’s in and who’s out. What’s Australian and what’s not.

We talk about our values, our way of life, our nationhood is built around colloquialisms. She’ll be right, but will she? No worries or lots of worries? G’day, or bad night? The language we’ve created for ourselves reverberates through our seemingly laid back attitudes which become the conditions of entry.

The casualness of the vernacular becomes quite disturbing when you extract what these phrases actually do. They outwardly perform a kind of lightness and unseriousness, while not far beneath the surface sits the structural and symbolic exclusion of the First Peoples. She’ll be right. No worries. There is something strange about a national vocabulary so determined to reassure itself. For such light phrases, they’re doing a lot of heavy lifting. Who is being assured and about what?

We’re larrikins, we take it easy, nothing is a problem. If you don’t use this language and you don’t adopt this disguise then you’re the problem. How could it be possible for people who are so relaxed to be the instigators of violence, subjugation and oppression? It turns the oppressed into the problem, because everyone else is relaxed. It’s not only a condition of belonging but allows the myth to proliferate because speaking in opposition to it becomes the primary source of discomfort.

In Tony’s previous work he explored the caricature of the colonised and this work exposes the other side of the same dynamic - the innocence of the coloniser. With this work, Tony closes a loop and identifies exactly what is required to build nationalism in a country where those who are othered or condemned to the ‘outside’ are the first inhabitants of the lands.

Words by Brooke Boney
Journalist, Broadcaster, Author.