"BIG BANANA TIME INC.": Tracey Benson's Uncanny Australia
(Appeared in MESH#11- Altered States)
The Sixth Annual Graduate Student Conference at University of Buffalo, held April 5, 1997, was entitled "Framing Time: Text/Archive/Trace." This year's papers and presentations were devoted to examining aspects of temporality from a wide range of critical perspectives. The committee had encouraged, at the outset of our call for papers, multimedia and performance presentations because we envisioned the conference as a meeting place for diverse approaches to the way time tells--and not necessarily in the ways one normally expects.
Tracey Benson's "Big Banana Time Inc." caught our immediate attention. For one, the artist was from Australia, and we were pleased and flattered to think that our conference would be international--after all, time tells all over the world, its frame always exceeding our borders, despite what many here would have us believe.
Benson's presentation consisted of slides of, as she describes them, "iconic nationalistic landscape paintings" on which she has grafted images of `Big Things'- the Big Pineapple, the Big Cow, etc.-Australian artefacts which figure as tourist attractions and novelties. Synthesized with the slides is a sound recording of the artist reading a piece of prose entitled "My Country," by Dorothea Mackellar. Benson's voice is sonically altered, slowed down, deepened. It is no longer recognizable as her voice, or, indeed, a woman's voice. The sound is uncanny--a prosopopeia, a voice from the dead.
Benson's presentation brings with it a kitschy humor, juxtaposing the images of the national landscapes with giant cows appearing in the foreground. It inspired in me a fleeting sense of shame in the American will-to-forget that other places exist, and that these other places have histories. If Benson's work turns upon the way that the tourist/consumer gaze is always complicit with the origins of the settler gaze, that in fact the two function as one, her presentation also acted as a corrective to an American audience obliged time and again to imagine ourselves as the center of all representation, the linchpin of all economies. Sometimes, it seems, you need the experience of uncanny visions, and a measured, haunting voice, to jolt you into remembrance of the presence of others.
Such experiences cross national borders, as they do in Benson's art- all the same, her concern with nationalist iconography indicates the way one's national identity is at the origins of what is proper to the self, hence the conjunction of the personal possessive my with country. Benson's images both institute and dismantle this link, for it is the propriety of these landscapes which is in question and interrupted by the Bigs. In fact, it is difficult to know how to size up these Bigs: although they might coincide with the nationalist project of the nineteenth century landscape paintings, they certainly ironize them. Should we celebrate the Bigs, or reject them as an abject embarrassment? As Benson phrases it, "How do mainstream tourist operators survive the embarrassment, though, of working in such establishments as the Big Worm, or the council guy who repairs the perpetually broken testicles of the big bulls in Rockhampton? Should the situation be taken seriously?" That is, should we "pursue the novelty value it represents?" Benson's presentation shows the way these Big Things hint at the absurdly grand and the embarrassingly awful which come together in patriotic iconography. In essence, they expose the dream of the idealized and empty landscape.
Benson acknowledged that her presentation would have a different significance in an Australian context, with an Australian audience--the Mackellar piece, for instance, is well known to Australians. But in Buffalo, New York, that is, here in the States, her presentation had a very different significance. The mostly American audience was unfamiliar with the iconic elements of the presentation. Clearly, there was something odd about these landscapes with giant pineapples living in them--and the country that was my country was not immediately identifiable as Australia. But the loss of a familiar context gave Benson's presentation the force of something unique and powerful--it effected a re-framing of the issues touched upon in her art, and offered to an American audience the sense of a ghostly resemblance to issues that haunt our country.
And when the lights went up, Benson spoke about the political issues of present-day Australia which inform her work- issues, for instance, of Aboriginal land claim, which marked both a difference from the American context as well as a resemblance. Her talk was given, after all, in the midst of Native reservation tax-exemption disputes which exploded shortly after into fiery protests in Western New York. In a voice as clear and earth-bound as her other, recorded voice was strange and supernatural, Benson informed us about the underside of Australian patriotism. In the end, it brought us back to the present, but altered from the experience of seeing visions from beyond, her Australian uncanny.
