Gordon Bennett: Selected Writings - AAANZ | The Art Association of Australia and New Zealand

Publication Details Paperback with dust jacket, ISBN 978-0-909952-01-3, 66 images, including colour plates, 216 pages, 297 x 210 mm, 890 gms

Author and/or Editor name/s Gordon Bennett (author), Angela Goddard and Tim Riley Walsh (eds.)

Author and/or Editor bio/s Gordon Bennett (1955-2014) was an Australian artist of Aboriginal and Anglo-Celtic descent. Born in Monto, Queensland, Bennett was one of Australia’s most significant and critically engaged contemporary artists. Angela Goddard is the Director of the Griffith University Art Museum. Tim Riley Walsh is a Brisbane-based curator and art historian.

Year of publication 2020

Publisher Power Publications and Griffith University Art Museum

Abstract Gordon Bennett: Selected Writings is the first publication to survey the writing practice of the late Gordon Bennett (1955–2014), giving vital insight into one of Australia’s most important contemporary artists in his own words. Bringing together nearly forty published and unpublished essays, artist’s statements, letters, and interviews from across Bennett’s nearly thirty-year career, Selected Writings profiles the importance of the written word within his art and broader intellectual practice. Through its focus on Bennett’s written voice, which shifts between scholarly debate, political argument and personal reflections, this publication reveals Bennett considered art and life to be just as entangled as words and images.

Edited by Angela Goddard and Tim Riley Walsh, Selected Writings is co-published by Power Publications, Sydney, and Griffith University Art Museum, Brisbane. The book also provides glimpses into Bennett’s personal archive via the reproduction of previously unseen notebooks, correspondence, sketches, preparatory compositions, and more. Offering new knowledge of his creative process, intellectual and artistic influences and professional relationships, this project amplifies Bennett’s already significant contribution to subjects of race and identity in national and global contexts, as well as reaffirming his centrality to postcolonial discourse in the twenty-first century.