ADAM HILL

Urban Aboriginal art as it emerged in the 1980s was conspicuously distinct from so-called traditional practices, by virtue of its alienation from indigenous language and its deracination from the spiritual soil. Typically urban Aboriginal art is a form constantly at war with itself, skeptical and mournful of the languages and systems it has been forced to adopt. It is a style that, although melancholy about of its remoteness from ancestral home, makes the most of the freedom borne from loss to adopt a trenchancy, an irony that the artist revels then in to make viewers both laugh and squirm. Wholly within the tradition of urban Aboriginal art, Adam Hill’s work is reflexive of its own form and process, and directly engaged with its political conditions. Everything in his works is imbued with purpose, conscience and intent. Hill combines the politicized punning irreverence of a Muhammad Ali, with the graffiti artist’s nothing-is-sacred rambunctiousness. Yet while his work has true kinship with a dynamic body of artistic endeavour, there is also nothing like it. That’s why I call his style Aboriginal Hip-Hop.

One of the characteristics of traditional Aboriginal art is that it is graphic, architectural and musical all at once. It is as much a form of writing as of picture-making; it can describe places and settings in a manner similar to maps, garden lay-outs or architectural plans; and many designs which non-initiated viewers see as solely visual are in fact taken from songlines, from body painting and from the stories that require singing to be properly told. Curiously enough, Hill’s work can claim similarities with traditional Aboriginal art on all these points.

An accomplished and recognized musician, Hill’s artistic practice is accomplished on several fronts and converges on two key points: the first is in the effort to maintain community amongst what remains of the once rich and diverse Aboriginal peoples of Australia, the second voices intolerance at the violence, greed and neglect of so much of non-indigenous Australia. The Howard government is for Hill both an immediate touchstone and an enduring symbol for the scourge brought upon the Aboriginal peoples since colonization/invasion. And in this respect his work is also a cathartic voice for those non-indigenous Australians, like myself, who have become sorely embittered by the vast erosion of social goodwill effected by Howard, and who rue its consequences in generations to come.

Hill’s work is all oriented around land and place, above and below, and especially the way in which Australia has been defiled, and the ancient mores of Aboriginal peoples transgressed. It is important to be clear that Hill’s complaints are not a reactionary politics of expulsion, exclusion, us-and-them. Rather their concerns are with divisive politics, and in particular aimed at corporatization’s disrespect for others with different interests, different methods, different customs and different values, and its reluctance to accommodate a more moderate and consultative approach with Aboriginal peoples and their land, changes that would, in any case be better for the environment and many peoples’ well-being.

Trained first as a graphic artist and designer, there is an uncompromising edginess to Hill’s work. It blurts out at you like a call down an alleyway; the lines in the sky are like chant, the bulbous flora like notes. Each painting is a kind of emblem, and a song. Even if all the problems were solved and the so-called revolution were achieved, which it never would, but even if—these works would still sing on for their mixture of energy, morality, persistence and goodwill.

- Adam Geczy