Provenance

Exploring socio-political themes in post-colonial Australia, the photographic series Provenance combines historical research with the artist’s experience of patriarchal and elitist characters. The new series unfolds in five panels, designed for specific display in the distinctly Venetian Palazzo Mora. A million miles away, Australia is not without its imported architecture and customs. Shot on location at Labassa, a 19th century National Trust property in Melbourne, an aesthetic mimicry is immediately apparent.

As in other faraway places, the culture of the ‘old world’ was deposited in Terra Australis without regard for its suitability to the landscape and climate, and with complete disregard for the Indigenous inhabitants, who had many millennia on the new arrivals. Cook’s contemporary telling of the impact uses arresting contrasts to convey a slice of Australia’s history that’s still with us today, and translates to a shared experience of minorities the world over.

Recreating fanciful dinner party scenes, where each image leads to the next, Cook forms a narrative which turns divisions – class, gender, colour – on their head. The commentary rests in quirks of pose, dress and status. Role reversal has Indigenous subjects interacting with people as props; the once elite, recast as objects. And from the perspective of the controlling subject, an object doesn’t exist for its own satisfaction and gets no sense of achievement from its inherent ‘use’.

The ‘object’ is doomed to serve, the ‘subject’ void of feelings of discomfort and guilt. Empathy is impossible if one cannot identify with the abused, so slavery averts its eyes to people’s distress.

The boredom of privilege creates a rupture – a disconnect with reality. Status is taken for granted, it doesn’t humble, or satisfy. The subject is hollow, like the grand surroundings in which they’re positioned. Even the pampered pooch ‘serves’ – pets a narcissistic vehicle for the ruling classes to demonstrate ‘charitable ownership’.

Exaggerating how early high societies perceived foreign cultures highlights a lack of understanding and interest in the breadth and depth of difference. Such assumption of superiority led to the kind of wholesale pillage that is still apparent in the current socio-economic gap between different racial groups.

 But Cook doesn’t aim to offend, as offence risks a defensive ignorance. The aim is shock, because that kind of buzz can get a person thinking. Thinking of disrespect, of history, of divisions in society. Shock is a little slower, but more effective in the long-term, so while inequality exists, he pursues an art that highlights human bias and challenges audience interaction with the work, and society at large.

Michael Cook at This Is No Fantasy