BROOK ANDREW

Born 1970 in Sydney, Australia. Lives and works in Melbourne, Australia.

Brook Andrew Jumping Castle War Memorial, 2010, vinyl, 400 x 700 x 700 cm. Courtesy the artist and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne. This work has been made possible through the support of DETACHED, Hobart in partnership with the University of Queensland Art Museum and Urban Art Projects

In his photographs, screen prints, neon text pieces, videos, sculptures and museum installations, Brook Andrew takes in a range of themes that look into the causes and effects of the inequalities between the people who have lived in Australia for thousands of years, and more recent settlers from Europe and elsewhere. He inserts the culture and motifs of his Wiradjuri heritage into many of his works while incorporating a diversity of references that include the media, politics, popular culture, nationalism, and colonial and anthropological histories.

Andrew draws on archival material, language and the iconography of the circus to insert questions into cultural assumptions and received notions of history. Museums have been a strong point of reference for the artist, who since 1995 has researched into the collections of the Mitchell Library, Sydney, the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge, and the Royal Anthropological Institute, London. One of his most famous works, Sexy and Dangerous (1996), was based on an ethnographic photograph found in the Mitchell Library. The stereotype of the ‘native’ and the power dynamics of colonialism are subverted by Andrew’s addition of Chinese characters and the phrase ‘sexy and dangerous’. By incorporating another language, Andrew notes the mutability of culture and its means of exchange, effectively combating fantasies of primitivism with the addition of new layers of meaning. In other works, Andrew has written statements in Wiradjuri language in neon (such as Ngajuu ngaay nginduugirr, 1998, which translates to ‘I see you’) and used the aesthetic of agit pop in collage works such as Peace, the Man and Hope (2005). In the latter, he inserts an image of the Australian boxer, former rugby league player and sometime musician Anthony Mundine between packs of ‘Hope’ and ‘Peace’ brand cigarettes, against Andrew’s signature black-and-white striped repeating diamond shapes, based on a Wiradjuri design traditionally inscribed on trees. This distinctive patterning appears throughout Andrew’s works as a sign of his and other indigenous people’s heritage, as well as a cipher for what he terms a ‘cultural state of hypnotism’. It has been used on walls, on large inflatable sculptures, and even on court jester-inspired costumes designed for security guards.

Playing with the tradition of public monuments, Andrew premieres a contemporary war memorial in the form of a ‘bouncy castle’, seven-by-seven metres, designed as if it were an attraction for children. But it is presented with a catch: only adults over 16 will be allowed to jump on it. For the artist, 16 is the age at which many young adults begin to take on greater responsibilities, become aware of sociopolitical issues, and are legally allowed to have sex (in most states in Australia). On closer examination, we see that its plastic-enclosed turrets contain the heads of historical Aboriginal figures that float and bobble as air gusts into the chambers on every bounce. Such specimens, or trophies, were sent back by the first British explorers and colonists. A central figure thrusts upwards from the middle, peeking above the inflatable walls with arms outstretched in pseudo-heroic victory. The question is posed: to jump or not to jump? Andrew provides information to contextualise the unique war memorial, so that prospective jumpers can choose to be informed about or implicated within the dark subtext of this seemingly benign but savagely ironic display. In complicity, or unconscious delight, they may again partake gleefully, uncomfortably, or both, in Australia’s violent history.

Selected Solo Exhibitions
2008 ‘BROOK ANDREW: THE ME-PARK’, AA MU, Utrecht, The Netherlands 2008 ‘The Island’, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge, UK
2007 ‘Brook Andrew: Eye to Eye’, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, Australia (travelling exhibition)
2007 ‘Come into the Light’, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, Australia
2006 ‘YOU’VEALWAYSWANTEDTOBEBLACK’, National Gallery of Victoria, Victoria, Australia

Selected Group Exhibitions
2009 ‘The Exotic Human: Other cultures as amusement’, Teylers Museum, Haarlem, Holland and Museum Dr. Guislain, Ghent, Belgium
2006 ‘PRISM: CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIAN ART’, Bridgestone Museum of Art, Ishibashi Foundation, Tokyo, Japan
2006 ‘Alfred Metraux: From fieldwork to Human Rights’, Smithsonian Institute, National Museum of Natural History, Washington DC, USA
2006 ‘TRANS VERSA’, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago, Chile
2006 ‘HIGH TIDE: currents in contemporary Australasian art’, National Gallery of Art, Warszawa, Poland (travelling exhibition)

Selected Bibliography

Annie E. Coombes, ‘Memory and history in settler colonisation’, Rethinking settler colonisation, Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York, 2006, pp. 9–10, 18–19
Mark Langton, ‘Tinsel Dreams, Brook Andrew: Theme-Park’, exhibition catalogue, Aboriginal Art Museum Utrecht, Holland, 2008
Christine Nicholls, ‘Transcending the Culture of Sheep’, Asian Art News, vol. 16, no. 4, July–August 2006
Nikos Papastergiadis, ‘Crossed Territories’, Brook Andrew: Eye to Eye, exhibition catalogue, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2007 Ed.
K. Schwartz and Michael Fitzgerald, Current: Contemporary Art from Australia and New Zealand, Dott Publishing, Australia, 2008, pp. 40–43