Focus on this artwork and explain the Interpretations and symbolism.
Outsider opens interpretations to a broad range of philosophical ideas related to the construction of identity and perception through Bennett's experiences of Australia's colonial past and postcolonial present. Critics of Bennett's work, Bob Lingard and Fazal Rizvi interpret that Bennett fragments historical images and recontextualises them in order to nuance postcolonial possibilities. This is in line with Bennett's purpose to deconstruct Eurocentric conditioning which is seen within Outsider.
Hugh Ramsey Chair of Australian Art History, Ian McLean expands on Bennett's appropriations by calling Outsider a "metaphysical quest for meaning and identity".  Outsider could be interpreted in such a way that the decapitated figure could symbolise either Bennett or Van Gogh. Professor of philosophy, Melvin Rader has commented on the manifestoes of recent (art) schools and expresses how those within, such as Van Gogh, face feelings of "opposition and estrangement" as well as "madness and suicide" which is what Bennett sought to explore and display within his painting of Outsider.  Though Van Gogh was an outsider to the art world, Bennett's decapitated figure is an outsider to his own country of origin and upbringing. Outsider reflects Van Gogh's realistic and humble "self-portrait full of prophecy and psychoanalytical premonitions".  However Bennett's own appropriation is a violent ritual rather than Van Gogh's one of tense calmness, which McLean claims is "transparently staged, his mutilation is a public theatre rather than a private act of desperation". It is a blatantly shocking visualisation of the trauma which Van Gogh's 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.
Australia self-portrait postcolonial art) schools other The Starry Night Bedroom in Arles Indigenous Australian colonial classical statuary Van Gogh Melvin Rader appropriation identity