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Gordon Bennett EssayThe following contemporary artists both represent their subject fields in a post-modern frame. Post-modern can include satire and paradox, annexation and pastiche and intersexuality. Gordon Bennett and Fiona Hall fit into one of these categories. Bennetts painting Outsider, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 1988 is a violent painting using appropriation of Vincent caravan Goghs artwork, and the treatment of aboriginals in todays society. Fiona Halls sculpture of the Nelumbo nucisera, lotus, elum, thamarei, aluminium and steel, 1999 is made up of a sardine tin rolled down revealing a bare stomach, and plant leaves. Bennetts work can be seen as post-modern as Bennett takes Van Goghs famous images and recreates them in his own manner. Bennetts painting Outsider, is a violent painting using appropriation of Vincent Van Goghs artwork Vincents Bedroom in Arles, 1888 and Starry Night, 1889, and the treatment of aboriginals in todays society. He fits into the category of appropriation where he uses anothers work in a new context, with the intention of altering its meaning. He seizes copies and replaces the original imagery of Gough, by interpreting it in his own way. He uses heathen aspects of aboriginal art and is in search for meaning and identity.Bennett identifies with the world through people, events and issues involving the aboriginal people. His work is political about both primeval and European-Australian history. It helps him and his people to indemnity the disparity between the two cultures. Many of his views about Aboriginal culture have been understandably formulated from a European perspective. His shocking, violent and traumatic work was painted while Bennett was still at art school. The painting raises many issues from Aboriginal cobblers lasts in custody to Bennetts feeling of isolation. Frustration is also sheer with the call downion that it can lead people to suicide or self-mutilation, as in the case of both Van Gogh and the run across in the picture.The Aboriginal figure complete with ceremonial paint is frustrated and confused, that his head explodes, with blood whirling into Van Goghs turbulent sky. The classical heads with eyes closed, may relate to Europe, or the famous Greek marbled heads, blind to the consequences of its actions and unwilling to acknowledge the blood on its hands. They are humming or dreaming to hold out the exploding head. Bennett figuratively displays his own dilemma of violently contested genealogies. The hands on the figure reach towards or draw away from the closed eyeball heads on the neck. The red hands on the wall represent the hands of the white people. It may suggest that the white people are caught red hand by the way they react to the mutilated figure.The red in the painting is strong and contrasting with the other natural tones the same red is taken from the bed cover, and used in the handprints on the wall and the blood on the wrists and neck of the figure. T he window seems to be a window to the dark swirls of the night, which may represent death. The figures head is almost exploding into the dark metaphysical zone, here drawn from Starry Night. For Van Gogh the starry night was a forbidding of death and return to an ultimate peace for which he longed. Bennet seems to deliberately take on this same theme. The dots, dashes and roundels in Bennetts starry night may suggest Western Desert Aboriginal paintings.