Too many Cooks?

Yesterday marked the day when, 250 years ago, James Cook steered his ship the ‘Endeavour’ into Botany Bay and made first contact with the local inhabitants. Not surprisingly, the anniversary has generated a mixed response but due to the coronavirus pandemic it has been a much more low-key event than planned for. Cook later made this observation about the Indigenous people: “these people may truly be said to be in the pure state of nature, and may appear to some to be the most wretched upon the earth; but in reality they are far happier than… we Europeans.” However, rather than focussing on James Cook, today’s post will look at the work of the Indigenous photographer Michael Cook and his works in the NGV collection.

Michael Cook’s art photography began in 2009 after many years as a highly-regarded commercial photographer. His change in practice was driven by his increasingly urgent desire to explore issues of identity. Cook lives in Queensland and is of Bidjara origin. On his comprehensive website he describes his background, interests and projects: https://www.michaelcook.net.au/.

His biological mother became pregnant, aged only sixteen, to an Aboriginal man. Her residence in a small country town in Australia in the conservative late 1960s meant that offering him for adoption was almost mandatory. Cook’s own life has been affected by adoption with the circumstances of his birth shared with him from his earliest years. A happy childhood was spent within a family heavily involved in supporting Indigenous rights in Australia. An exploration of issues that surround identity are central to Cook’s approach to creating artwork, yet the stories he develops have an equally universal application to humanity.

Cook’s photographic series are unique in their approach, evocatively recreating incidents that emerge from Australian colonial history. His images unite the historical with the imaginary, the political with the personal. Visually striking, technically complex and sensitively inventive, they occupy a new space in the Australian artistic imagination. He says: “I create artwork about Indigenous issues, past and present, about how the past relates to the present and, eventually, moulds the future. Put simply, I’m a person of mixed ancestry – some of which is Indigenous. I look at the big picture: I tell my stories to Australians of all races and also to those beyond our shores. I am a part of the human race.”

Cook’s practice is unusual. He constructs his images in a manner more akin to painting than the traditional photographic studio or documentary model. He begins with an idea, regarding the image as his blank canvas. Photographic layering is then used to build the image to provide aesthetic depth. He characteristically works in photographic series that explore narratives within a central idea. Unfolding tableaux offer enigmatic stories that are not prescribed, but left open to audience interpretation. While much of the early work was based on Australian narratives, set in outback or beach environments, his more recent, series’, such as Object (2015), speak to a European cultural heritage and a universal experience of dispossession and displacement.

In the NGV collection, there are 13 photographs from four different series. The first series ‘Civilised’ has six works. In describing this series Cook says: “This body of work looks at the four European countries that visited Australia before and in the early stages of colonialisation: The Netherlands, Spain, England and France. It asks ‘what makes a person civilised?’ and suggests what a different historical settlement may have been like if those Europeans had arrived in Australia and realised that the Indigenous Peoples were indeed civilised.

The second series ‘Majority Rules’ contains three works. Cook poses the question: ‘What if Indigenous people were 96 percent of the Australian population and non-Indigenous people defined as the four percent?’ He then asks the viewer to speculate about an Australia where Aboriginal people are the majority. Touching on the discriminatory nature of society, Cook uses the same Indigenous man multiplied over and over in each image to communicate his message, and paint a picture of a societal structure reversed.

In ‘Object’ Cook presents a photographic tableau set in a luxurious manor house. Across unfolding scenes, beautifully dressed black people in period costume are clearly ‘at home’ while naked white people become various objects in their world – a lamp, a table, a vase, a stool and an ashtray. ‘Object’ uses a confronting reversal to depict the historic interracial inhumanity once routinely practised – a black person “owned” by a white – and drives home the depravity of carelessly objectifying people.

The fourth series ‘Invasion’ places an imaginative eye on Australian colonial history and depicts alien creatures invading iconic London-based cityscapes, with white urban residents as their victims. Cook’s images express the shock that enveloped the Australian continent when European people appeared on Aboriginal shores. Aboriginals as aliens, sci-fi scaled animals – featherless birds, super sized grubs, giant lizards, possums on ufo’s, laser shooting fembots, and clouds of rainbow lorikeets – arrive into urban London, the ‘mother’ country, and wreak havoc.

Michael Cook is an imaginative, creative and provocative photographer who adroitly presents an incisive alternative history.  He constantly reminds us of the plight of the Indigenous people – both then and now – and his new series ‘Livin’ the dream’ will hopefully be added to his impressive body of work already in the NGV collection.

Finally, the image used to ‘mark’ the blog post is by another Indigenous artist, Christian Thompson – and is part of his ‘Museum of Others’ series. The NGV collection also includes images of Thompson standing behind portraits of Augustus Pitt Rivers (ethnologist), Walter Baldwin Spencer (anthropologist) and John Ruskin (art critic).