Rethinking the Past

Posted: 07 Nov 2011  |  By: Stephanie Radok

The most famous element in À la recherche du temps perdu/Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust is the madeleine, the small cake crumbled into a mouthful of linden tea that the narrator eats and from which his vivid memories arise. Proust calls what flows from that small mouthful of tea and cake — “the vast structure of recollection” — a reasonable description of his sprawling seven-volume novel.

Like Proust, the four artists showing work in Bethink at the South Australian School of Art Gallery in November during the Feast Festival are each reflecting upon and thinking over the past in order to create structures that recollect and refashion it. The Feast Festival is Adelaide’s major arts festival for the lesbian and gay community. It includes performing and visual arts, film, literature, food and forums.

Growing up is always difficult but growing up queer is definitely harder. The exhibition curators Keith Giles and Susan Bruce quote from a book on gay and lesbian families: “The way a word like family is defined can affect social policies and practices in a community. Being included in the definition often conveys important rights and privileges while being excluded bars people from these advantages.” As I write these words, Federal Parliament is debating gay marriage, a large part of the rationale for which is surely about normalising being gay as being no big deal, no threat, no reason for fear.

The Visual Arts PhD research of Keith Giles on the subject of censorship and self-censorship in art has led him to look back at his own childhood and adolescence in the form of his old school photos and the elements of repression and disguise within them. Internationally screened experimental video artist Susan Bruce recently completed a documentary about the 1972 drowning in the River Torrens of academic Dr George Duncan, an event which led to South Australia being the first state to introduce gay law reform. Her videos often use disintegrating imagery to examine the mundane and domestic. When his partner of thirty years died, Michael Gabbedy put together a series of photographs for the funeral. In the new work he has made for Bethink, he looks back at the history of this long relationship through stitched images, text and photographs. Gary Campbell uses a bowerbird scrapbook aesthetic to combine history and memory, and to examine what normal means and might mean. He writes: “By pursuing this mixture of past and present there is a sense that the future will be less daunting. Less of a scramble for relevance, less of a search for dignity.”

Bethink — Susan Bruce, Gary Campbell, Michael Gabbedy and Keith Giles
South Australian School of Art Gallery (SASA Gallery)
Adelaide
2–25 November 2011

Click to view image/s from this exhibition: