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Tony Albert: Conversations with Margaret Preston MAR/APR 2021 Albert’s major diptych ‘Conversations with Preston: Christmas Bells’ 2020 is based on Preston’s handcoloured print ‘Christmas Bells’ 1925, held in the National Gallery of Australia’s collection. The reds and yellows of the native Blandfordia nobilis are made up of strong black outlines on bright red fabric. The vase, which was black and inscribed with a white V pattern in Preston’s original, is here made up of squares of mostly linen tea towels, many of them with the text ‘Australian Aboriginal Art’ with glimpses of both a calendar and a map of the continent. Interestingly, fake Preston works abound in op shops and on the internet, and Albert has used several questionable Prestons as source images further extending a complex web of appropriation and cultural theft, such as his three depictions of single protea flowers. Albert has also used one of Preston’s mysterious late religious works in this series. Her 1952 colour stencil, gouache on thin black card ‘Expulsion’ was part of a series of biblical themed works, popular perhaps due to post-war religious revivalism that also saw the inauguration of the Blake Prize for Religious art in 1951. Never sold by the artist, the work was gifted by her widower in 1967 to the Art Gallery of New South Wales. On a flat background, at the very top of the composition, a white God presides symmetrically like an icon figure, with a whip in one hand and a sword in another. Instead of an archway to the garden, a corrugated iron fence and a wire gate, secured with a padlock as the central focal point. Adam and Eve are depicted as Aboriginal people – they have dark skin and wear loincloths, being driven from the garden into an Australian landscape overrun with scotch thistles. Adam holds an object aloft, appealing to the God who has forsaken him; Eve holds a baby. This work is confounding in its casting of the sinners as black, and god as white. It could perhaps be seen as depicting the Christian biblical allegory to describe how Aboriginal people were cast out from their own country, by the misuse of Christianity itself, but this is reading too much into the work of an artist who avoided political statements herself on the realities of life for Aboriginal people. Preston saw the use of Aboriginal imagery as a vehicle, a way for Australian artists to make truly original contributions to the pursuit of Modernism. Art historian Ian MacLean asks if Bennett’s works both parody Preston as well as participate in and reproduce her framing of Aboriginality within modernism.(4) Albert is also doing this and more - not making a damning call to denounce Preston, but, as the title of this series title suggests, answering her call to dialogue with Aboriginal art and motifs with his own conversation, while also demonstrating that the ambition to ‘be Aboriginal’ has resulted in the sometimes grotesque caricatures we see in these fabrics, which counteract the positive spirit of her making. Albert says: At the core of my work is a kind of reconciliation with these racist objects’ very existence. Yes, they are painful reiterations of a violent and oppressive history, but we cannot hide or destroy them because they are an important societal record that should not be forgotten. I’m trying to reconcile those two positions.(5) This project of constructive reconciliation has multiple implications. Albert highlights Preston’s formidable skill at rendering the humble still life into the most graphically powerful expressions of Modernism in Australia, while also reminding us of the consequences of using sacred images without acknowledgment or respect. His intention is dialogue; a conversation, which is not to say these conversations will not be confronting and uncomfortable, but will hopefully and ultimately also be productive. Exhibition: March 18 - April 10 + REGISTER FOR PREVIEW BEFORE MARCH 18
Tony Albert Conversations with Preston: Protea (attributed) III, 2020 acrylic and vintage appropriated fabric on Arches paper 76 x 58 cm Endnotes 1. Margaret Preston, ‘The Application of Aboriginal Designs’ Art in Australia, 3rd series, no 31, March 1930. 2. Hetti Perkins quoted in Alexa Moses,’ Shadow cast over a painter's legacy’, Sydney Morning Herald, July 25, 2005, p.11. 3. Bruce Johnson McLean, ‘Invisible truths’, Tony Albert: Visible [exhibition catalogue], Queensland Art Gallery I Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2018, p.18. 4. Ian McLean, ‘Gordon Bennett's Home Decor: the joker in the pack’, Law Text Culture, 4, 1998, p.290. 5. Tony Albert interviewed by Maura Reilly, ‘I am important: An interview with Tony Albert’, Tony Albert, Art & Australia/ Dott Publishing, Paddington, NSW, 2015, p.49. 41
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