Richard Bell: Lessons on Etiquette and Manners

Richard Bell is a member of the Kamilaroi, Kooma, Jiman and Gurang Gurang communities; he was born in 1953 in Charleville, Queensland, and lives and works in Brisbane. Lessons on Etiquette and Manners is the artist’s first in-depth presentation in Melbourne.

Working with humour and agit-prop activism, Bell’s writings, paintings and videos instruct his audience on the assumptions and false histories surrounding race politics in Australia.

Bell turns the practice of appropriation back on Western art, miming the pop art styles of Roy Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns, and the paint drips of Jackson Pollock. Overlaid with texts that challenge the status quo, his paintings interrogate common ideas about Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians’ relationships to each other, to their country’s history and to art itself.

Bell’s practice extends to his public persona, infamous for the incendiary slogans of his T-shirts and his provocative appearances on panel discussions, and at major art events around the country. Bell presents here a new installation, based on the original Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra in 1972, in which he has invited radical political leaders to speak over the course of the exhibition.

MADA lunchtime art forum with Richard Bell, Wednesday 13 March, 12.30pm, MADA lecture theatre, G1.04, Monash University, Caulfield campus - Free

Daniel Crooks: A Garden of Parallel Paths

Daniel Crook’s A garden of parallel paths 2012 splices together tracking shots of Melbourne laneways, creating a seamless ambulatory gaze from narrow slices of urban space. Originally commissioned forParallel Collisions: 2012 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Crooks describes the work as ‘an attempt to exert absolute control over the camera – to take the perfect precision of the computer-based world and to impose that on a reality that is unpredictable, imprecise and otherwise difficult to control’.

Laresa Kosloff: CAST

CAST 2011 is the artefact-object-sculpture-remains of Laresa Kosloff’s situational performance presented during the Vernissage of the 54th Biennale de Venezia in 2011. Departing from Melbourne with her leg encased in plaster and aided by crutches, Kosloff travelled by air, bus and vaporetto to the Biennale where, in a speculative autograph hunt, she asked well-known artists to sign her cast. Once covered in signatures, Kosloff removed the cast and carried it home as a sculptural object.

Drawing on Kosloff’s interest in the body’s agency in public contexts and everyday settings, CAST engages with ideas concerning participatory art and community, authorship and authenticity, and the relations that exist between art, fandom and celebrity.

The performance project was commissioned by the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art through the ACCA Pop Up Program with support by the Victorian Government through Arts Victoria.

Exhibition Dates: 5 February - 13 April 2021

Opening Function: 3.00 - 5.00pm with opening remarks by Gary Foley at 3.30pm, Saturday 9 February 2021

Venue: Monash University Museum of Art, Caulfield Campus

For more information and public program see the MUMA website http://www.monash.edu.au/muma/index.html