art forum CONVERSATION: Quentin Sprague

A STRANGER ARTIST: PADDY BEDFORD, TONY OLIVER, AND THE POETICS OF INTIMACY In 1998 Tony Oliver, an ex-Melbourne gallerist and sometime painter, arrived in the remote east Kimberley township of Kununurra in far north Western Australia. Together with Freddie Timms, a Gija artist he’d met in Melbourne, he founded Jirrawun Arts, a group that over the following decade became one of the most successful and controversial Aboriginal painting collectives in Australia. Acting in what Fred Myers has referred to as ‘a field of highly charged cultural difference’ (Myers:2002:164) eventually took an emotional toll, but Oliver was equally drawn to this intense space as one that enabled creative exchange. Although he worked closely with a number of artists, he established a particularly robust form of creative intimacy with Paddy Bedford, a Gija manambarram (senior Law man) who became his close friend. Bedford, in turn, would become one of the most iconic artists of the Indigenous contemporary art movement and would eventually be honored, in 2006, with a career retrospective at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. Although Oliver is easily cast as what Peter Wollen has referred to as an ‘animateur’ (Wollen:1993:196-99), or Ruth Phillips as a ‘stranger artist’ (Phillips:2008:47), here I argue that he reached further than either conception suggests. Together, he and Bedford founded a local form of artistic collaboration that challenges established notions of the artist as individual genius. In the particular intercultural environment of the East Kimberley, their exchanges prompt the following questions: How might the individual valences of specific intercultural relationships be read in the material objects that result from such creative intimacies? How does the historical dimension of such exchange impact our understanding of Bedford’s paintings as contemporary art? Quentin Sprague is a writer and curator based in Melbourne and currently a PhD candidate at the University of Wollongong. His writing has appeared widely in magazines, books and exhibition catalogues, including essays in The Monthly, Discipline, Art & Australia, and Sturgeon, and in recent monographs on Australian artists Derek Kreckler and Timothy Cook. Recent curatorial projects include The world is not a foreign land which opened at The Ian Potter Museum of Art at The University of Melbourne in March, 2014, and is currently touring nationally, and the speculative exhibition A Short Line Between Three Points at Laurel Doody, Los Angeles, (2015). Between 2007 and 2010, Sprague worked as a remote community arts manager in the Tiwi Islands and the East Kimberly. Notes: Fred R Myers, (2002), ‘Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art’, Duke University Press / Ruth B Phillips, (2008), ‘The Turn of the Primitive’, in Kobena Mercer (ed), ‘Exiles, Diasporas and Strangers’, INIVA (Institute of New International Visual Arts), and The MIT Press, pp 46-71 / Peter Wollen, (1993), ‘Raiding the Icebox: Reflections on Twentieth Century Culture’, Indiana University Press