12 minute read
Tony Albert: Forbidden Fruit
from Sullivan+Strumpf Contemporary Art Gallery Sydney & Melbourne, Australia & Singapore – Jan-Mar 2024
Words Daniel Browning
AS A NEW BODY OF WORK THAT constitutes a certain risk for the artist, Forbidden Fruit is — perhaps surprisingly — numbly homoerotic. These ideograms, pictographs or glyphs of the male pubis and genitalia are literally stripped back to an exaggerated form, devoid of glistening flesh and saturated with ‘skin’ colours so improbable that they might have been synthesised by paint manufacturer Pantone.
If you flip the ideogram vertically, the triple pendant form flips the bird, giving you the extended middle finger. Is this some kind of post-Referendum blak humour? It is perhaps a 2023 version of Albert’s most confrontational work, the monumental Pay Attention, 2009-10. Instead of an exhortation to listen and be more conscious (which is how I read Albert’s declaration, based on a lithograph by Bruce Nauman) Forbidden Fruit reckons with sexualityin a straight-up way, a coming out into full disclosure in his work. It is a declarative statement that this Girramay man from the rainforest country around Cardwell in North Queensland, born blak and queer in Brisbane, will no longer excise from his work in the performative act of self-censorship. Albert’s new body of work also stakes a new claim: a refusal to accept the homophobic tenor that still prevails in many workplaces, public spaces and indeed, within some First Nations communities.
Albert has managed to avoid this confrontation to now. He is identified as an Aboriginal artist first and foremost, although he has declared his indifference to that term by quoting his mentor Tracey Moffatt, who once asked: “If I bake a cake, is the cake Aboriginal?” Albert is one of the least confrontational men I know, yet he tests that theory by sliding unannounced into my DMs every six months or so. We go back a long way, and I would like to think there is both trust and understanding between us, so my inbox is hardly off limits. We first met in 2007, when Albert worked in education at the Queensland Art Gallery. He was long-haired and whippet-thin, his promise masked by a diffident 25-yearold making artwork that, quite plainly, was risk-averse. In his timidity I saw my own embodied trauma response to homophobic bullying and racism, performed mostly (in my case) by cisgendered apparently straight men in antisocial behaviour ranging from daily microaggressions to unprovoked physical violence. Albert was still deep in his apprenticeship, sharing a studio with another mentor, Richard Bell (who once described himself as a “recovering homophobe”), Jennifer Herd, Gordon Hookey, Vernon Ah Kee, Bianca Beetson and Andrea Fisher, the core of proppaNOW, the history-making artist’s collective of which Albert is a key, longstanding member.
When we first speak about this new body of work, Albert is still slightly apprehensive about the way it will be received (and perceived) by the critics who keep most of us blackfellas in check: the mob who, as Bell once put it, will tell you straight to your face if you’ve got snot hanging from your nose. There is an ethics of care at work, that isn’t motivated by professional jealousy or the impulse to simply take a big noter down (some call it ‘tall poppy syndrome’, but I prefer the mud crabs in the bucket analogy). These intracultural critics patrol the limits of ‘Aboriginality’, our collective identity and experience, and how it is projected in the public domain. They (I say they, but we all do it at one time or another) directly or indirectly enforce relational standards of behaviour that we might call ‘proppa’ – the culturally appropriate, blackfella way of doing things. I sense Albert’s hesitation, and the risk any statement he might make as an individual constitutes, by inflecting the visual cues or signs of Aboriginality – appropriated from mass-produced tea towels and other vintage fabrics – with queerness.
Despite what we may think, rampant homophobia does exist and it’s recruiting now. A subset of this antisocial phenomenon, of intracultural or blak on blak homophobia, was expressed by former professional sportsman Anthony Mundine in a violent anti-gay rant on Facebook in 2013. Mundine claimed that a gay Aboriginal character created for the highly anticipated but entirely fictional ABC television drama series Redfern Now was a distortion, based on the apparent absence of a cultural precedent for homosexuality in our tradition. Mundine went much further, associating homosexuality with aberrant behaviour or moral crime, one which could be punished by sanction according to customary law. The convert to Islam seconded his remarks by invoking a presumably Christian god, for which there is certainly no precedent in traditional culture:
Watching redfern now & they promoting homosexuality! (Like it’s ok in our culture) that ain’t in our culture & our ancestors would have there [sic] head for it! Like my dad told me GOD made ADAM & EVE not Adam and Steve.
Unedifying though it was, the ‘story’ – Mundine’s violent homophobia – proved one thing: the knife edge on which the lives of many blak queers are poised. As a cultural text, Mundine’s expectorations have possessed some great minds ever since. However wrong or hateful, his comments provoked debate about who speaks for the ancestors in eastern Australia and why we blak queers need a cultural precedent for homosexuality (it just is). Altogether, it is more time than they deserve. The obscene weaponising of ‘our culture’ and ‘ancestors’ to justify homophobia so violent it kills is the lede for me. If, a decade on, Mundine speaks for anyone other than himself, then we’d better shape up because we have a fight on our hands.
“[In] our lives, our Aboriginality actually overrides or supersedes… the queer elements of life”, Albert begins. “[However] we shouldn't be excluded from a [queer] curatorial premise [because] the work is Aboriginal, instead of queer-driven… We shouldn't not be represented [in exhibitions such as the omnibus Queer, curated by Myles Russell-Cook, Pip Wallis and Meg Slater in 2022, drawn from the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, but it should be understood that those nuances and difficulties or politics are deeply attached.” Russell-Cook, the NGV’s senior curator of Indigenous art, ensured that Aboriginal artists such Albert, Moffatt, Destiny Deacon and Dylan Mooney were not left out of the expansive survey, which rather tenuously ‘queered’ a woodcut by Albrecht Durer of the interior of a male bathhouse and an indulgent self-portrait by a former director of the National Gallery, whose only credential to be included in the exhibition was his rampant homophobia.
“Yes, this show is stepping into new territory,” Albert says. Overtly, perhaps. I gently remind him that for some of us, his work has always been queer regardless of the content or subject matter – engendered, like me and Albert, at the precise moment of conception, we are unashamedly born this way. His early black velvet paintings of tearful or lost ‘bush babies’ reframed with text, his appropriated pastoral scenes with high-key red fringe curtains that morph into rivers of metaphorical blood, and his assemblages of kitsch Aboriginalia inset into vinyl letters are, for me at least, part of a blak queer aesthetic (as prevalent as Australian Gothic) laid down by artists such as Deacon, Moffatt, r e a and Brook Garru Andrew).
The three-part pendant form Albert uses to signify the penis is also visual shorthand for a mountain, the landform that some of our Ancestors mistook for the tall ships that hove into sight, albeit floating ones. To my mind, the form hangs like overripe fruit. Although cock worship (expressed homosocially as toxic masculinity, the performative aspect of patriarchy) is a global phenomenon practised largely by cisgendered men who identify as straight, this mere reductive sign of the penis is replicated, multiplied and gridded – one-dimensional icons in the semiotic sense, referents like the binary male on the door of a public toilet or the road sign koala giving us the finger (or is it a claw?). Don’t get me wrong: I love cock as much as the next sex-deprived queer living regionally where ‘discreet’ is normal sexual behaviour and closets aren’t just for hanging clothes. I prefer the flesh and the veins pumping warm blood to the organ itself to the symbolic phallus with all its baggage. Pun intended.
Plato taught that Eros is more than just hormonal spermatozoa and oestrogen on the move. It is a life force, with the centre of gravity being the divine. If eros is a term that embodies the human impulse to feel sexual desire (and its fulfilment in sexual acts with the object of our lust) Albert’s images neutralise eros. Nor are they phalluses, the visual representation of male power and sexual energy. Albert replicates the sign to emphasise its commodification, its over-reproduction, its ubiquity (the dick pic). Yet each of the individual works is distinct, even the couplings (Dicktych I and II ). If you use any of the gay ‘dating’ apps, you’ll know it’s a sausage factory out there, churning out cheerios, chorizo and chipolatas in every shade (dimensions variable).
A succession of Catholic popes, whose patronage generated much of Western visual culture and drove the Renaissance, emasculated Classical statues for the sake of modesty. The patriarchs were driven at least in part by Christianity’s morbid fear of the naked human body given its causal relationship with original sin and the eternal shame of humankind’s expulsion from Eden, which condemned us all to die for eternity. From then onwards the censorship of the organ and its repression in visual representation in the West mystified the penis and oxygenated cock worship, expressed throughout history as patriarchy. The act of concealment glamourised and fetishised the penis, anaesthetising the nerve endings of this particular extremity of the male body.
The female form was never quarantined; indeed its primary and secondary sexual organs were splayed for the enjoyment of men and their gaze from the Venus of Willendorf to Manet’s Olympia and Courbet’s L’Origine du monde to British artist Jamie McCartney’s Great Wall of Vaginas. To represent the penis, however, was obscene, and risked exposing the shame visited on all of humanity every day since Adam and Eve were banished (given the choice I’m also not certain I’d prefer a sex-deprived state of grace in paradise, surveilled by a prurient god). As St Paul wrote in his epistle to the Romans: “sin entered the world through one man.” Coming out as gay in an Aboriginal community in eastern Australia in the early nineties, as I did, was to confront a particular kind of homophobia, stoked by Christianity and internalised with self-loathing and risky, self-harming behaviour. The closet was dark and overcrowded, and not in a good way. The absurdity of it hit me as I sheltered in a literal closet on one of those baking hot Brisbane summer days when the humidity is almost visible although it feels as thick as fog on your pheromone-saturated skin. It was 1991, my summer of love, a full year after I’d come out to my parents. When I wasn’t sweating in my jocks in a wardrobe in a basement car park in Highgate Hill, I was swimming in a churning hot sea of oxytocin and dopamine. I was at my sexual peak, and under my skin I was a secreting gland, dripping wet with foaming spermatozoa. That day though, I was flaccid. My first true love, let’s call him Dickhead, was not just closeted – he was empanelled. The only son of a female Anglican deacon, I was his first same-sex partner and soon inherited his Christian shame and homophobic self-loathing, even though I’d buried my own and danced on the grave. Dickhead was from the country west of Brisbane and on that day, his aged parents had decided to pay him a visit, unannounced. My first true love saw them approach through a window, and I was bundled out the back door in my underpants. Expelled from sex paradise and into a basement, I covered my shame in a wardrobe earmarked for the tip. I cried. Hard though it was, my coming out was not enough. The transfiguration was within me. I decided I couldn’t live with shame and denial, and no man was worth that kind of self-flagellation. After my first true love spirited his parents away, I left the closet forever. I ripped the figurative door off its hinges and set that motherfucker, with Dickhead walled up inside, on fire. Broken hearted but utterly resolute, I collected my things from the flat, including my prized 3-in-1 CD player. If not literally, it was metaphorically stuck like a stylus in warped vinyl that hot summer on one song: The Eurythmics’ sublime You Have Placed a Chill In My Heart.
The moral of this long-winded story? Closets, and wardrobes, are not fit for human habitation. The only thing they are designed to accommodate for any extended period of time is clothes. You can fold yourself up like I did on that infernal day in 1991, but it’s no way to live. I see Albert’s latest body of work in much the same light, as the artist broaches a subject that he once may have avoided. These are public statements, and in them he makes explicit his own relationship to the thing once forbade him.
