Review Of Artist Brook Andrews Loop. A Model Of How The World

Through reviewing artworks at the Museum of Contemporary Art, an artwork by artist Brook Andrews captured interest. Andrews’s artwork titled “Loop. A Model of how the world operates 2008, defined as a wall painting, embodies various physical and conceptual aspects of the contemporary, depicting how the contemporary world operates in the present. Andrews symbolically displays the effects of how the contemporary world functions in the Australian art scene throughout the 20th century.

The nature of Andrews’s work depicts a postmodern style that portrays the functionality of current Australian culture, referred to by Andrews as a “contemporary culture of consumption and spectacle” . A physical aspect demonstrated in Andrews’s work that relays his

This disregard of culture is accomplished through the use of Appropriation. Appropriation in Andrews’s artwork leads to irony. Irony is found through the form of cultural patterns, traditionally placed on natural walls, found on a new medium of a man-made wall. The patterns references Andrews’s historical culture of his mother’s tribe of the Wiradjuri people, which, when placed onto a man-made wall loses its cultural significance, symbolising the suppression of Aboriginal culture. Andrews exposes Australian society’s forgetfulness of the basic foundation of Australian art and history in favour of the current art and political scene. This concludes that Andrews displays the functionality of the contemporary world in its regard to disregard Aboriginal culture, leading to reflection by the

Andrews, Ah Kee and Bennett provide similar subject matter, focusing on the ideas and effects of Aboriginal culture as well as its influences from and within contemporary Australian society. However, each artist depicts the subject matter with various degrees of severity in regards to their personal expression on said subject matter.

Bennett’s artwork deals with the idea of how “stereotypes” are “fixed by assumptions about geography class and race”, utilising the style of artist Jean Michel Basquiat to display Australian politics . Bennett conveys this through the creation of primitive figures overlapping supposed famous Australian political figures including Peter Garrett and Anna Bligh. Bennett connects “art and politics” possibly depicting “Australian history and identity” being overlapped to convey the idea of the suppression of a rich Aboriginal culture further symbolized by red etchings of paint in the background