Appropriation - Gordon Bennett and Vincent Van Gogh

Bennett's latest series continues his Notes to Basquiat, begun three years ago. Conceived as a communication with Basquiat, the black American artist who died in 1988, they have become a platform for Bennett to work through a range of ideas and feelings. Bennett has often been buoyed by an emotional rapport with other artists - and Jackson Pollock's all-over or drip paintings have been a long-time favourite. With Basquiat, however, he also feels a special solidarity with the cultural issues and rap aesthetic of his art. If other artists' works have been appropriated as signs in deconstructive discourses about the complicities of modernism and colonialism, Bennett paints in the style of Basquiat as a means to better communicate with him as an exemplary other. Further, he finds Basquiat's rap-speak liberatory. It provides a way to live in rather than just diagnose the traumas of colonial cultures. While Bennett does not paint with Basquiat's expressive touch, he uses his style as a type of language or mode of thought. With Bennett it becomes a global pigeon-speak for communicating across cultures.

In his most recent paintings Bennett also returns to Pollock, but in a different way to his earlier work. Pollock's all-over style is not juxtaposed to Basquiat's rap style with a blatant deconstructive intent, but is a conversation point in an exchange that Bennett is having with Basquiat. Basquiat remains Bennett's interlocutor. Sometimes Pollock's paintings are integrated into the Basquiat-speak of the painting's flat space. But in every painting Pollock himself is pictured painting/dancing shaman-like around a floating canvas that hovers like a magic carpet in front of the painting, jutting into our world. It recalls Duchamp's interest in dimensional shifts - though to me the effect is to make Pollock a type of ghost in the Basquiat machine. In this respect Bennett's interest in Pollock is similar to his earlier work, in which Pollock is a mythic figure in the story of modernism, and so an important player in the conspiracies of modernism and colonial cultures. Pollock haunts its discourses, just as he has haunted much of Bennett's work. So it is not surprising that Bennett talks to Basquiat about Pollock.

In this series Bennett repeatedly pictures the iconic figure of Pollock dancing around his canvas on the floor. However, in his earlier work, Bennett focused on Pollock's characteristic interlaced lines, always turning back in on themselves like the syncopated rhythms of jazz. They served as a counter to the perspectival space of colonialism. Other times they became welts or scars. Maybe they were the unconscious of colonialism. Or were they a web of conceit that captured the colonial subject, or a web of deceit that hid the monstrous faces of colonialism?

If in these earlier paintings Pollock's drip technique provided a

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