On the Post Colonial in the Post Colonial

Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art

     When I visited this museum, I realized that my time in Australia was going to provide a mirror to my current pre-occupation: trying to write a book about the intersections of my world with my journalist father's world of the 20th. My father participated in World War II as a photographer with the American Field Service Ambulance Corp at Tobruk in North Africa. He watched the British Empire begin to crumble. I went to Ecuador as a Peace Corps Volunteer. After I returned from the Peace Corps, I began studying Anthropology, just as the critiques of the colonial agenda of anthropology were beginning.

     This world class museum, located in the heart of Sydney, next to the transportation hub called Circular Quay, is featuring two brilliant exhibitions which reflect Australia's situation: historically European and geographically Asian. (The phrase is Alison Broinowski's; I'll be writing more about her in another post.)

     Simryn Gill is a Sydney based Malaysian artist. She works in a variety of media, including photography and found objects. Her work is both beautiful and thought provoking, as in a series of necklaces that resemble pearls or Hawaiian puka shells, but are actually beads made from the paper of her friends' favorite books. My favorite work was her treatment of a vintage 1950-1960 Time-Life series on countries of the world. She carefully gessoed or sanded away all of the text of each volume, leaving only the photographs, as the authors and editors had arranged them. The viewer has to reconstruct and may question the rationale for the visual content of this Cold War propaganda.

     On another floor was the astonishing work of Yinka Shonibare, MBE, born in England, raised in Nigeria. Shonibare styles himself a "post colonial hybrid." His work is vivid and disturbing. Headless life size mannequins form a series of tableau vivant of baroque and rococo paintings; their clothing is constructed of gorgeous African textiles. The period's decadence is made visible, yet its folly seems universally, endlessly human.

     Those who preceded my Dad at Tobruk, the generation of Australians who defended Tobruk for the British Empire, the famed "Desert Rats," are now few on the ground. In Sydney, in the Contemporary Art Museum, two brilliant artists offered meditations on all sorts of Empires.