Tony Albert: Ashtralia Wheel of Misfortune and Ashtralia

Tony Albert’s work simultaneously presents confronting issues while embodying a spirit of positivity, triumphant in the face of adversity. Drawing on both personal and collective histories, his work poses important questions such as how do we remember, give justice to, and rewrite complex and traumatic histories?

By Claire Summers

Through mechanisms of pop culture and iconography, Tony Albert continues his excavation of the symbols and artefacts of colonial Australia, steeping them in an atmosphere of misplaced of nostalgia. Albert imbues these symbols with meaning, charging them with a new political energy and historical context. Though these totems of pop culture are deeply personal, in matters of history and the way it is told, the personal always intersects the political, permeating a larger cultural narrative.

In Ashtralia, Albert continues his Ash Tray series, a visual narrative that the artist has spent 15 years developing and exploring since its first iteration in 2008. Albert makes use of an instantly recognisable symbol–the ashtray–seen again and again in the shape of Australia, placed atop visuals of violent colonialism or colourful “Australiana”.

In Albert’s work, a symbol repeated is a symbol strengthened–its potency does not dilute but rather intensifies with each reprise.

The act of ashing a cigarette is inherently casual, a gesture deprived of any sentiment or grace. Behind each Australiana ash tray, the choice to construct the colonial gaze in the backdrops of this imagery was a very deliberate one: fleets of ships, depictions of colonial soldiers and slogans of a contemporary white Australia form the backdrop on which Albert’s commentary gathers momentum towards its meaning. A deliberate friction exists in these works: the scene of the butted cigarette, blasé and unconcerned, set against the gravity of an enduring jingoism–a patriotic extremism that, in the case of Indigenous narratives in Australia, erodes the accountability owed by colonial structures and controls the way we have allowed history to be retold in the present.

Never entirely didactic, Albert invites us to stand with him at the edge of the meaning behind these phrases. Through a mix of humour, nostalgia and deliberate juxta-positioning, we are invited to arrive at the meaning by placing it in the context of our own political position.

Wheel of Misfortune collides pop cultural icons embedded in Albert’s childhood memory with catchphrases of the political present. Leveraging the visual framework of prominent 80s gameshow Wheel of Fortune, Albert asks the question: how would it read if Indigenous people got control of the board? The answer looks to the sense of place and history that, to this day, lacks visibility in mainstream vocabulary and imagines them emblazoned on the Wheel of Fortune board.

Following many of the same rules of the original game, where the answers were popular song titles, movie references or cultural mementos, Albert introduces narratives neglected during the era of Wheel of Fortune’s reign in the zeitgeist. These phrases–Live, Laugh, Land Rights; I See Deadly People; or Invasion Day–tell the story of the shifting conversation in the Australian political vernacular and the strain that continues to define the discourse. Many of the slogans of Albert’s Wheel of Misfortune now find themselves as mainstays in the cultural conversation surrounding First Nations People and their relationship to their own history and how colonial Australia has controlled it’s telling.

Never entirely didactic, Albert invites us to stand with him at the edge of the meaning behind these phrases. Through a mix of humour, nostalgia and deliberate juxta-positioning, we are invited to arrive at the meaning by placing it in the context of our own political position. Imbued with the same sense of playfulness that has brought a buoyancy to Albert’s career of agitating complex social and political histories, Wheel of Misfortune presents interventions in the gameboard with catchphrases of today’s vocabulary.