Bedroom in Arles only symbolises and keeps invisible. According to Ian McLean, Bennett identified with Van Gogh's own tortured life and had a compulsion to show the "darkness in light"- where Van Gogh's work had been "interrupted by madness", Bennett's Outsider "interrupts the madness of the world" in order to reframe the role of identity in self-portraiture. The walls of the room are occasionally spattered with red hand marks which artist Adam Gezcy interprets to be "the most venerable Aboriginal sign of both presence and absence". He suggests that it is a harrowing and an "audacious work that places the pain of the Aboriginal peoples at the centre of the West's own mythologies". Bennett deconstructs the history of Australian colonialism and is understood by Gezcy as an artistic form of ‘payback’ and the Aboriginal version of ‘eye for an eye’- rather than being combative in nature, Outsider seeks to find a middle ground of redemption and peace. Another critic, Art Historian Jeanette Hoorn suggests that Van Gogh's Bedroom at Arles and The Starry Night are "modern icons of Europeanness" and are objects of admiration by cultures of the West which Bennett appropriates against "black memories of violence and mutilation".'' The mutilation is interpreted to be an allusion toward bounty hunters in early colonial Australia who decapitated black men in exchange for money in Europe. Bolstering her claim are the spirals in Bennett's own 'Starry Night' which are interpreted to be a gruesome reference to the vanishing of Indigenous Australian culture. The spurting blood from the neck of the Indigenous Australian has assimilated into and has been replaced by the culture of the West's 'Starry Night' which Hoorn suggests is reinforced by the "representation of classical statuary" in the painting. Reception In an exhibition at the inaugural Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art in 1990 Bennett was subjected to a racist verbal attack in an Adelaide restaurant by a woman who "could not handle" his painting. Within an art program, Painting: [Traces of Place] between Bennett and Pat Hoffie, Pat describes it as a violent image but one which has a sense of rightness. She praises Bennett's work as being "informed by history, by politics, by a whole number of subjects". References 1988 paintings Australian paintings 20th-century paintings