Exhibition: ‘Out of the closets, into the streets: gay liberation photography 1971-73’ at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: Tuesday 22nd July – Saturday 26th July, 2014

Opening: Tuesday 22nd July 6-8pm

Nite Art: Wednesday 23rd July until 11pm
Artists represented: Philip Potter, John Storey, John Englart, Barbara Creed, Ponch Hawkes, Rennie Ellis
Curators: Dr Marcus Bunyan and Nicholas Henderson
Catalogue essay by Professor Dennis Altman (below)

Barbara Creed (Australian, b. 1943)
Julian Desaily and Peter McEwan in the back of a VW Combi van, Melbourne
Melbourne, c. 1971-1973
Digital C type print on Kodak Endura Matte
© Barbara Creed

Five days, that’s all you’ve got! Just five days to see this fabulous exhibition. COME ALONG TO THE OPENING (Tuesday 22nd July 6-8pm) or NITE ART, the following night!

The exhibition Out of the closets, into the streets: gay liberation photography 1971-73 pictures the very beginning of the gay liberation movement in Australia through the work of Philip Potter, John Storey, John Englart, Barbara Creed, Ponch Hawkes and Rennie Ellis. The exhibition examines for the first time images from the period as works of art as much as social documents. The title of the exhibition is a slogan from the period.

As gay people found their voice in the early 1970s artists, often at the very beginning of their careers, were there to capture meetings in lounge rooms, consciousness raising groups and street protests. The liberation movement meant ‘being there’, putting your body on the line. “It was a key feature of the new left that this embodied politics couldn’t stop in the streets: that is, the public arena as conventionally understood. ‘Being there’ politically also applied to households, classrooms, sexual relations, workplaces and the natural environment.”1

Curated by Dr Marcus Bunyan and Nicholas Henderson and with a catalogue essay by Professor Dennis Altman (see below), the show is a stimulating experience for those who want to be inspired by the history and art of the early gay liberation movement in Australia.

The exhibition coincides with AIDS 2014: 20th International AIDS Conference (20-25 July 2014) and Nite Art which occurs on the Wednesday night (23rd July 2014). The exhibition will travel to Sydney to coincide with the 14th Australia’s Homosexual Histories Conference in November at a venue yet to be confirmed.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Connell, Raewyn. “Ours is in colour: the new left of the 1960s,” in Carolyn D’Cruz and Mark Pendleton (eds.,). After Homosexual: The Legacies of Gay Liberation. Perth: UWA Publishing, 2013, p. 43.

Many thankx to all the artists for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Ponch Hawkes (Australian, b. 1946)
Gay Liberation march, Russell Street, Melbourne
Melbourne, 1973
Digital C type print on Kodak Endura Matte
© Ponch Hawkes

John Englart (Australian, b. 1955)
Gay Pride Week poster, outside the Town Hall Hotel, Sydney Town Hall
Sydney, 1973
Digital C type print on Kodak Endura Matte
© John Englart

Out of the closets, onto the streets

Professor Dennis Altman

This exhibition chronicles a very specific time in several Australian cities, the period when lesbians and gay men first started demonstrating publicly in a demand to be accorded the basic rights of recognition and citizenship. Forty years ago to be homosexual was almost invariably to lead a double life; the great achievement of gay liberation was that a generation – although only a tiny proportion of us were ever Gay Liberationists – discovered that was no longer necessary.

The Archives have collected an extraordinary range of materials illustrating the richness of earlier lesbian and gay life in Australia, but this does not deny the reality that most people regarded homosexuality as an illness, a perversion, or a sin, and one for which people should be either punished or cured. It is revealing to read the first avowedly gay Australian novel, Neville Jackson’s No End to the Way [published in 1965 – in Britain – and under a pseudonym] to be reminded of how much has changed in the past half century.

Gay Liberation had both local and imported roots; the Stonewall riots in New York City, which sparked off a new phase of radical gay politics – when ‘gay’ was a term understood to embrace women, men and possibly transgender – took place in June 1969. They were barely noticed at the time in Australia, where a few people in the civil liberties world, most of them not homosexual, had started discussing the need to repeal anti-sodomy laws.

Small law reform and lesbian groups had already existed, but the real foundation of an Australian gay movement came in September 1970 when Christabel Pol and John Ware announced publicly the formation of CAMP, an acronym that stood for the Campaign Against Moral Persecution but also picked up on the most used Australian term for ‘homosexual’. Within two years there were both CAMP branches in most Australian capital cities, as well as small gay liberation groups that organised most of the demonstrations illustrated in this exhibition.

The differences between gay liberation and CAMP were in practice small, but those of us in Gay Liberation prided ourselves on our radical critique, and our commitment to radical social change. CAMP, with its rather daggy social events and its stress on law reform – at a time in history when homosexual conduct between men was illegal across the country – seemed to us too bourgeois, though ironically it was CAMP which organised the first open gay political protest in Australia [immediately identified by the balloons in the Exhibition photos].

It is now a cliché to say “the sixties” came to Australia in the early 1970s, but a number of forces came together in the few years between the federal election of 1969, when Gough Whitlam positioned the Labor Party as a serious contender for power, and 1972, the “It’s Time” election, when the ALP took office for the first time in 23 years. We cannot understand how a gay movement developed in Australia without understanding the larger social and cultural changes of the time, which saw fundamental shifts in the nature of Australian society and politics.

The decision of the Menzies government in 1965 to commit Australian troops to the long, and ultimately futile war in Vietnam, led to the emergence of a large anti-war movement, capable of mobilising several hundred thousand people to demonstrate by the end of the decade. Already under the last few years of Liberal government the traditional White Australia Policy was beginning to crumble, as it became increasingly indefensible, and awareness of the brutal realities of dispossession and discrimination against indigenous Australians was developing. Perhaps most significant for a movement based on sexuality, the second wave feminist movement, already active in the United States and Britain, began challenging the deeply entrenched sexist structures of society.

To quote myself, this at least reduces charges of plagiarism: “Anyone over fifty in Australia has lived through extraordinary changes in how we imagine the basic rules of sex and gender. We remember the first time we saw women bank tellers, heard a woman’s voice announce that she was our pilot for a flight, watched the first woman read the news on television. Women are now a majority of the paid workforce; in 1966 they made up twenty-nine per cent. When I was growing up in Hobart it was vaguely shocking to hear of an unmarried heterosexual couple living together and women in hats and gloves rode in the back of the trams (now long since disappeared). As I look back, it seems to me that some of the unmarried female teachers at my school were almost certainly lesbians, although even they would have been shocked had the word been uttered.”

In Australia Germaine Greer’s book The Female Eunuch became a major best seller, and Germaine appeared [together with Liz Fell, Gillian Leahy and myself] at the initial Gay Liberation forum at Sydney University in early 1972; looking back it is ironic that a woman who has been somewhat ambivalent in her attitudes to homosexuality was part of the public establishment of the gay movement.

But the early demonstrations illustrated in this exhibition did often include sympathetic “straights” – a term that seems to have disappeared from the language – for whom gay liberation was part of a wider set of cultural issues. It is essential to recognise that while political demonstrations may seem to assert certain claims they play widely different roles for those who participate. For some of us a public protest is a form of “coming out”; indeed many people had never been public about their sexuality before they attended their first demonstration. For others a demonstration is primarily a place to find solidarity, friendship, and, if lucky, sex.

For the gay movement more than any other just to declare oneself as gay was to take an enormous step, a step that some found remarkably easy while others had to wait until late in life to discover that actually almost everyone knew anyway. I remember the now dead Sydney playwright, Nick Enright, who was one of the first people to be open about his homosexuality, and was so without any sense of difficulty; at the same time there are still people who go to great lengths to hide their sexuality even while acknowledging they would face little risk of discrimination were they not to do so

Maybe there is a parallel for people who now declare their lost Aboriginal heritage, unsure how they will be regarded but aware that this is crucial to their sense of self. Every generation has its own version of coming out stories, this exhibition hones in on that time in our national history when everything seemed in flux, and gay liberation seemed a small part of creating a brave new world in which old hierarchies and restraints would disappear.

Looking back at the photos creates a certain nostalgia – we all look so young, so sure that we were changing the world, though in reality most of us were putting on a brave front. The oddest thing is that in some ways we did change the world. Forty years ago we looked at the police as threatening, symbolised in the photograph from Melbourne Gay Pride 1973 where the policeman is clearly telling people to move on. Today openly lesbian and gay cops march with us in the streets, and the very idea that homosexuality could be criminalised, as it still is in many parts of the world, has largely disappeared from historical memory. Indeed to many people attending this exhibition that may be the first time they confront the reality that being gay in Australia in the early 1970s was to live in a world of silence, evasion and fear.

Professor Dennis Altman
July 2014

Anonymous photographer
I am a Lesbian, Gay Pride Week
Adelaide, 1973
Digital C type print on Kodak Endura Matte
© Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives

Anonymous photographer
Man in black hat and red shirt, Gay Pride Week
Adelaide, 1973
Digital C type print on Kodak Endura Matte
© Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives

Supported by

Rennie Ellis is an award winning photographer and writer (03) 9525 3862 www.rennieellis.com.au

AIDS 2014: 20th International AIDS Conference
20 July – 25 July 2014
Melbourne, Australia

Edmund Pearce Gallery

This gallery has now closed.

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Exhibition: ‘In the Looking Glass: Recent Daguerreotype Acquistions’ at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City

Exhibition dates: 25th January – 20th July 2014

Attributed to:
Tsukamoto (Japanese)
Portrait of a man in samurai armour
mid 1870s
Ambrotype
5 x 3 1/2 inches
Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
© Nelson Gallery Foundation

OMG some of these images are SO beautiful and others SO bizarre. Please enlarge the detailed shots of Lady in Costume (c. 1850, below) and Traveling Minstrels – banjo and bones (c. 1850, below) – my two favourites – so you can see the costumes and the people. The clothes of the bones player are incredible… I wonder what they did with their lives, where they went and how they lived. How old do you think they are? And what is that on the front of his hat, a watch?

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Unknown maker (American)
Woman telegrapher
c. 1850
Daguerreotype, quarter plate
image size: 4 1/4 x 3 1/4 inches
Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
© Nelson Gallery Foundation

Augustus Washington (American, 1820-1875)
John Brown
c. 1846-1847
Quarter plate daguerreotype
4 x 3 3/16 inches
Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
© Nelson Gallery Foundation

John Brown (May 9, 1800 – December 2, 1859) was a white American abolitionist who believed armed insurrection was the only way to overthrow the institution of slavery in the United States. During the 1856 conflict in Kansas, Brown commanded forces at the Battle of Black Jack and the Battle of Osawatomie. Brown’s followers also killed five slavery supporters at Pottawatomie. In 1859, Brown led an unsuccessful raid on the federal armoury at Harpers Ferry that ended with his capture. Brown’s trial resulted in his conviction and a sentence of death by hanging.

Brown’s attempt in 1859 to start a liberation movement among enslaved African Americans in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, electrified the nation. He was tried for treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia, the murder of five men and inciting a slave insurrection. He was found guilty on all counts and was hanged. Southerners alleged that his rebellion was the tip of the abolitionist iceberg and represented the wishes of the Republican Party to end slavery. Historians agree that the Harpers Ferry raid in 1859 escalated tensions that, a year later, led to secession and the American Civil War.

Text from Wikipedia website

(Pierre) Victor Plumier (French, active 1840s-1850s)
Lady in Costume
c. 1850
Daguerreotype, half-plate
Plate: 5 1/2 x 4 1/2 inches (13.97 x 11.43cm)
Mount (open): 8 1/8 x 6 5/8 inches (20.64 x 16.83cm)
Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
© Nelson Gallery Foundation

(Pierre) Victor Plumier, French, active 1840s-1850s
Lady in Costume (detail)
c. 1850
Daguerreotype, half-plate
Plate: 5 1/2 x 4 1/2 inches (13.97 x 11.43cm)
Mount (open): 8 1/8 x 6 5/8 inches (20.64 x 16.83cm)
Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
© Nelson Gallery Foundation

Unknown photographer
Traveling Minstrels – banjo and bones
c. 1850
Daguerreotype, sixth plate
Plate: 3 1/4 x 2 3/4 inches (8.26 x 6.99cm)
Case: 3 3/4 x 3 3/8 x 5/8 inches (9.53 x 8.59 x 1.6cm)
Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
© Nelson Gallery Foundation

The bones are a musical instrument (more specifically, a folk instrument) which, at the simplest, consists of a pair of animal bones, or pieces of wood or a similar material. Sections of large rib bones and lower leg bones are the most commonly used true bones, although wooden sticks shaped like the earlier true bones are now more often used…

They have contributed to many music genres, including 19th century minstrel shows, traditional Irish music, the blues, bluegrass, zydeco, French-Canadian music, and music from Cape Breton in Nova Scotia…

They are typically about 5″ to 7″ in length, but can be much longer, and they are often curved, roughly resembling miniature barrel staves. Bones can also be flat, for example by the cutting of a yardstick. They are played by holding them between one’s fingers, convex surfaces facing one another, and moving one’s wrist in such a way that they knock against each other…

While North American players are typically two-handed, the Irish tradition finds the vast majority of bones players using only one hand, a distinction in method that has a strong impact on musical articulation. The comparison of the function of banjo rolls with that of bones within an ensemble suggests that stereotypically a subdivided accompaniment pattern is played on the bones.

Text from Wikipedia website

Unknown photographer
Traveling Minstrels – banjo and bones (detail)
c. 1850
Daguerreotype, sixth plate
Plate: 3 1/4 x 2 3/4 inches (8.26 x 6.99cm)
Case: 3 3/4 x 3 3/8 x 5/8 inches (9.53 x 8.59 x 1.6cm)
Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
© Nelson Gallery Foundation

David C. Collins (American, 1825-1909)
 Thomas P. Collins (American, 1823-1873)
Portrait of Frances Amelia Collins Mitchell
c. 1850
Daguerreotype, half plate
Plate: 5 1/2 x 4 1/2 inches (13.97 x 11.43cm)
Case: 6 x 4 7/8 x 3/4 inches (15.24 x 12.37 x 1.91cm)
Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
© Nelson Gallery Foundation

David C. Collins (American, 1825-1909)
 Thomas P. Collins (American, 1823-1873)
Portrait of Frances Amelia Collins Mitchell (detail)
c. 1850
Daguerreotype, half plate
Plate: 5 1/2 x 4 1/2 inches (13.97 x 11.43cm)
Case: 6 x 4 7/8 x 3/4 inches (15.24 x 12.37 x 1.91cm)
Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
© Nelson Gallery Foundation

Unknown photographer
Portrait of Three Girls
c. 1850s
Daguerreotype, half plate
Plate: 5 1/2 x 4 1/2 inches (13.97 x 11.43cm)
Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
© Nelson Gallery Foundation

An exhibition featuring more than 50 daguerreotypes acquired by The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art since 2007 opened on Jan. 24. In the Looking Glass: Recent Daguerreotype Acquisitions is a fascinating look at an early photographic process that was introduced in 1839. “In the 19th century, daguerreotypes seemed to be magical bits of reality,” says Jane Aspinwall, associate curator of Photography. “Now, more than a century later, they still hold that kind of wonder and appeal.”

A precursor of printed photography, the daguerreotype image is formed on a highly polished silver surface that is exposed to iodine fumes. The fumes produce a light sensitive coating. The plate is then covered with a protective dark slide and placed into a camera. An image is projected through the lens and onto the plate; the image is then developed using heated mercury. The distinguishing visual characteristics of a daguerreotype are that the image is on a bright, mirror-like surface of metallic silver and it appears either positive or negative depending on the lighting conditions and whether a light or dark background is being reflected in the metal.

Important additions to the Nelson-Atkins American collection include portraits by major makers, including possibly the earliest of only six known daguerreotypes of noted abolitionist John Brown. In the French holding, lively portraits, cityscapes, and archaeological images are highlighted. A 170-year-old daguerreotype from Egypt transports viewers to the shimmering banks of the Nile River, a place few would have been able to travel to at the time. British pieces are distinguished by elaborate hand-colouring.

Small, intimate American daguerreotypes, most housed in jewel-like velvet or silk-lined cases, were made to be held close and scrutinised. Because they are reflective, the Nelson-Atkins designed more than two dozen cases with special lighting features to provide optimal viewing conditions, bringing each detailed image to life. A daguerreotype of a young girl clutching a shawl around her bare shoulders seems to float; another sharply detailed, rare Gold Rush image [second image, below] depicts a small group of men standing in front of their grocery store located in a California frontier town.

“It’s an amazing experience to view these precious, one-of-a-kind daguerreotypes,” said Aspinwall. “Once you see one, you never forget it. It takes you back in time to share a mid-19th century moment with the sitter.”

The Nelson-Atkins is recognised as having one of the top five American daguerreotype collections in the U.S. and loaned more than 80 to the Taft Museum in Cincinnati for the 2013 exhibition Photographic Wonders. Daguerreotypes are an internationally significant cornerstone of the museum’s photography holdings.”

Press release from the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art website

Unknown photographer
St. Anthony Falls
c. 1852
Daguerreotype, half plate
Plate: 5 1/2 x 4 1/2 inches (13.97 x 11.43cm)
Case: 6 x 4 3/4 x 1/2 inches (15.24 x 12.07 x 1.27cm)
Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
© Nelson Gallery Foundation

Unknown maker, American
Bond & Mollyneaux Groceries and Provisions
c. 1850
Daguerreotype, whole plate
Image size: 8 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches
© Nelson Gallery Foundation

Unknown photographer
Three carpenters in their workshop
c. 1848-1850
Daguerreotype, quarter plate
Plate: 4 1/4 x 3 1/4 inches (10.8 x 8.26cm)
Case (open): 4 3/4 x 7 1/2 inches (12.07 x 19.05cm)
Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
© Nelson Gallery Foundation

David C. Collins (American, 1825-1909)
Thomas P. Collins (American, 1823-1873)
Portrait of Annie M. Collins
c. 1847
Daguerreotype, quarter plate
Plate: 4 1/4 x 3 1/4 inches (10.8 x 8.26cm)
Case: 4 5/8 x 3 3/4 inches (11.76 x 9.53cm)
Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
© Nelson Gallery Foundation

Unknown photographer
Genushe (animal post-mortem)
c. 1845-1846
Daguerreotype, sixth plate
Plate: 3 1/4 x 2 3/4 inches (8.26 x 6.99cm)
Case: 3 3/4 x 3 1/4 x 1/4 inches (9.53 x 8.26 x 0.64cm)
Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
© Nelson Gallery Foundation

Unknown photographer
Untitled (eagle facing left)
c. 1850
Daguerreotype, sixth plate
Case: 3 3/4 x 3 3/4 x 3/4 inches (9.53 x 9.53 x 1.91cm)
Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
© Nelson Gallery Foundation

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
4525 Oak Street
Kansas City, MO 64111

Opening hours:
Thursday – Monday 10am – 5pm
Closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art website

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Exhibition: ‘View from the Window’ at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 2nd – 19th July 2014

Curated by: Vivian Cooper Smith and Jason McQuoid

Artists include: Sean Barrett, Danica Chappell, Kim Demuth, Jackson Eaton, Mike Gray, Megan Jenkinson, Benjamin Lichtenstein, Phuong Ngo, Izabela Pluta, Kate Robertson, Jo Scicluna, Vivian Cooper Smith, Melanie Jayne Taylor and Justine Varga

Installation view of the exhibition View from the Window at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne, July 2014

Photography can be anything your heart desires (or so they say)…

Another stimulating exhibition at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne.

My personal favourites are the works of Jo Scicluna and the two large “sculptural” photographs by Kim Demuth, but every artist in the exhibition had something interesting to offer.

Marcus

Many thankx to Edmund Pearce Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Justine Varga (Australian, b. 1984)
Morning from the series Sounding Silence
2014
Type C print
77 x 61cm
Edition of 6 + 1AP
Images courtesy of the artist, Stills Gallery, Sydney and Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide

Justine Varga (Australian, b. 1984)
Evening from the series Sounding Silence
2014
Type C print
47 x 38.5cm
Edition of 6 + 1AP
Images courtesy of the artist, Stills Gallery, Sydney and Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide

Izabela Pluta (Australian born Poland, b. 1979)
Left: Study for a sham ruin #7, pigment print, 50 x 50cm, 2012 (installation view)
Right: Study for a sham ruin #8, acrylic on pigment print, 50 x 50cm, 2012
Images courtesy of the artist, Dianne Tanzer Gallery + Projects, Melbourne and Galerie pompom, Sydney

Izabela Pluta (Australian born Poland, b. 1979)
Left: Study for a sham ruin #7, pigment print, 50 x 50cm, 2012
Right: Study for a sham ruin #8, acrylic on pigment print, 50 x 50cm, 2012
Images courtesy of the artist, Dianne Tanzer Gallery + Projects, Melbourne and Galerie pompom, Sydney

Megan Jenkinson (New Zealand, b. 1958)
Promise – Morrell’s Islands
2009
Type lenticular
22.6 x 38cm
Edition of 5
Image courtesy the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney

Megan Jenkinson (New Zealand, b. 1958)
Solace – Morrell’s Islands
2009
Type lenticular
21.7 x 38cm
Edition of 5
Image courtesy the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney

View from the Window presents current thinking around photography (if we can even talk of something called photography any more).

The exhibition adapts its name from the oldest existing camera photograph, View from the Window at Le Gras by Nicéphore Niépce. Created with a cumbersome process using Bitumen of Judeah, it remains a trace of a day nearly two hundred years ago and a fragile, enigmatic object today. Since that time, photography has undergone continual seismic shifts in its short history. Given its technological foundations it was inevitable that as new processes and techniques were discovered they would influence current photographic practice. From daguerreotypes, cyanotypes through to Kodachrome, C-41, digital negatives and Photoshop just about everything has changed how we engage with the medium.

With the ubiquity of the modern photographic image View from the Window attempts to highlight the need for considered reflection upon the place and value of current photographic practices. The artists respond to this by considering what ‘photography’ is, and in doing so re-shape, re-imagine, expand and break it down. They explore new thinking with traditional techniques and invent new methods of image making. The work is digital and analogue, flat and sculptural, conceptual and experiential, whole and fragmented. Despite all this, the photographic ‘idea’ remains – reshaping the way we see the world.

Press release from the Edmund Pearce Gallery website

Installation view of the exhibition View from the Window at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne, July 2014

Jo Scicluna (Australian, b. 1969)
Where A Circle Meets A Line (#4) (installation view)
2014
Archival pigment ink on cotton rag, victorian ash timber, tinted acrylic
37.5 x 37.5cm
Edition of 5
Image courtesy of the artist

Jo Scicluna (Australian, b. 1969)
Where I Have Always Been (An Island) (detail)
2014
Archival pigment ink on cotton rag, Victorian Ash timber, acrylic
45 x 45cm
Edition of 5
Image courtesy of the artist

Extracts from the catalogue essay View from the Window

Over 180 years ago, the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce produced View from the Window at Le Gras. Depicting the view over a series of buildings and the countryside surrounding a French estate, this fragile work was produced in a camera obscura by focusing light onto a pewter plate coated with Bitumen of Judea. Its archaic form and production seem far removed from the digitally-augmented, large-scale work of many contemporary artists, yet it still haunts photography. As well as recalling the origins of photography, it indicates a number of enduring polarities: analogue and digital; image and object; physical darkroom practices and digital post-production; personal and institutional or collective experiences; and duration and snapshot…

As these artists’ works demonstrate, the field of contemporary photography is fundamentally multifarious, constantly eluding attempts to delimit and define it. Despite the diversity of these practices, they share a sense of critical inquiry. Whether working with analogue photographs in darkrooms or digital images in post-production, building physical objects or emphasising the immaterial, these artists all foreground the capacity for photography to interrogate our understanding of the world. Consequently these practices recall art historian Bernd Stiegler’s vision of photography as a ‘reflective medium’.5 By this term Stiegler refers to the inextricable link between photography and realism, but importantly not a form of realism understood as naïve mimesis. Rather, for Stiegler, photography reflects upon the structures and assumptions through which we perceive the world, it ‘plumbs the conditions and limits of our understanding of reality’.6 More than a veridical document or hollow simulacrum, photography thus exists as image, object and process, potentially all simultaneously.

The complexity of these works signals a second common element: the investment of time. All these artists expend considerable time and effort in producing their work, as do any dedicated artists. However, the relevance of this observation is that this temporal investment differentiates such work from the overwhelming glut of photographic images that circulate through the electronic networks of globalised society. Although it would be disingenuous and insensitive to claim that tourist snaps of well-travelled monuments are only meaningless ephemera or signs of globalised homogeneity,7 the near ubiquity of photographic images highlights the need for considered reflection upon the place and value of photographic practices. Committed to extended periods of observation and experimentation, these artists display the patience and persistence to interrogate the problems and possibilities of photography. At their gentle request we repay this dedication through our own extended viewing, for without the time to look we might lose the time to think.

Christopher Williams-Wynn
2014

Christopher Williams-Wynn is an art history honours graduate of The University of Melbourne, and co-founder and co-editor of Dissect Journal.

5/ Bernd Stiegler, ‘Photography as the Medium of Reflection’ in Robin Kelsey and Blake Stimson (eds), The Meaning of Photography. Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2008, pp. 194-197.
6/ Ibid., p. 197.
7/ John Urry and Jonas Larsen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0, London: SAGE Publications, 2011, pp. 155-187.

Kim Demuth (Australian born England)
12.16am 18.02.2009
2012
Sculptural photography
110 x 92 x 6.5cm
Edition of 3
Image courtesy of the artist

Kim Demuth (Australian born England)
9.55am 11.06.2008
2012
Sculptural photography
110 x 88 x 6.5cm
Edition of 3
Image courtesy of the artist

Sean Barrett
Cool Aether
2014
Duratrans on blackwood lightbox
80 x 60cm
Edition of 3
Image courtesy of the artist

Sean Barrett
Bright Swarm
2014
Duratrans on blackwood lightbox
80 x 60cm
Edition of 3
Image courtesy of the artist

Sean Barrett
Dual Aurora
2014
Duratrans on blackwood lightbox
80 x 60cm
Edition of 3
Image courtesy of the artist

Edmund Pearce Gallery

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Exhibition: ‘Fútbol: The Beautiful Game’ at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)

Exhibition dates: 2nd February – 20th July 2014

Dario Escobar (Guatemalan, b. 1971)
Obverse & Reverse XIV (installation view)
2013
Latex, leather, string and steel
11 1/2 × 6 9/16 × 6 9/16 ft. (349.89 × 199.94 × 199.94cm)
Dario Escobar
Courtesy of the artist and Josée Bienvenu Gallery, New York

In honour of the World Cup final and a wonderful tournament, here is a glorious posting to celebrate The Beautiful Game!

PS. So much of this work is conceptual graphic design, doesn’t anybody make art anymore?

Marcus

Many thankx to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

On the eve of the World Cup – which, like the Olympics, takes place every four years – this exhibition celebrates football, the world’s game, and its richness as a field for metaphorical inquiry. Just as the World Cup brings together athletes and fans from around the globe, Fútbol: The Beautiful Game explores some of the ties that bind us as humans. Focusing on a simple game allows for a direct conversation about the communication and (more often) miscommunication that characterise our collective life, while celebrating one thing that most of the planet holds its breath for: the quadrennial event held to crown a nation as world champion of football. The sport has often been cited as a metaphor for nations, for cultures, and even for life, as is suggested by a statement attributed to the writer Albert Camus: “After many years in which the world has afforded me many experiences, what I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football.” Camus believed that the simple rules governing the game often had more to teach us about life than did politicians and philosophers.

Fútbol: The Beautiful Game presents the work of more than 30 artists who address the game through its imagery, signs, symbols, and sounds while also touching on larger issues well apart from the field of play. These themes include masculinity and the construction of heroes; ritual and worship; marketing and power; and current political, social, and cultural phenomena.

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In the background: Andreas Gursky (German, b. 1955)
Amsterdam, EM Arena I (installation view)
2000
Chromogenic print
108 1/4 × 80 11/16 × 2 7/16 in. (275 × 205 × 6.2cm)
Gagosian Gallery
Andreas Gursky, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

Nelson Leirner (Brazil, 1932-2020)
Maracana (installation view details)
2003
Plaster, plastic, ceramic, wood
120 x 130 3/4 x 9.5 in.
Brooklyn Museum

In case: Satch Hoyt (Anglo-Afro-Jamaican, b. 1957)
Kick That
2006
Mixed media with sound
Satch Hoyt
Courtesy of the artist

In the background: George Afedzi Hughes (Ghanaian-born American, b. 1962)
Parallel
2009-2011
Acrylic, oil, enamel on canvas
72 x 120 in. (182.88 x 304.8cm)
Skoto Gallery
Collection of the artist, Courtesy Skoto Gallery

Stephen Dean (French-American, b. 1968)
Volta (installation view)
2002-2003
Single-channel color DVD installation (9′) with audio and fabric enclosure
Collection of Ruth and William True

Right on floor: Mary Ellen Carroll (American, b. 1961)
FREE THROW (installation view)
1984
Mannequin bottom and basketball with rubberised paint
4 x 3 x 1 ft. (121.91 x 91.44 x 30.48cm)
Mary Ellen Carroll
Courtesy of the artist, 3rd Streaming-NYC, Galerie Hubert Winter-Vienna, Austria

Centre: Wendy White (American, b. 1971)
Clavado (installation view)
2013
Acrylic on canvas, wood, enamel
74 1/2 × 74 1/2 in. (189.23 × 189.23cm)
Andrew Rafacz Gallery
Courtesy of the artist and Andrew Rafacz

Kehinde Wiley (American, b. 1977)
Samuel Eto’o (installation view)
2010
Oil on Canvas
76 x 60 in.
Roberts & Tilton Gallery
© Kehinde Wiley
Image courtesy of the artist, and Roberts & Tilton, Culver City

Right: Nery Gabriel Lemus (American, b. 1977)
Thank You for the Game (installation view)
2013
Serigraph
36 x 50 in. (91.44 x 127cm)
Self Help Graphics & Art, Professional Printmaking Program, 2013. On loan from the Self Help
Graphics & Art Collection
© Nery Gabriel Lemus

Right: Dewey Tafoya (American)
Olmeca 1370 BCE (installation view)
2013
Serigraph
36 × 50 in. (91.44 × 127cm)
Self-Help Graphics
Self Help Graphics & Art, Professional Printmaking Program, 2013. On loan from the Self Help
Graphics & Art Collection

Installation view of the exhibition Fútbol: The Beautiful Game at The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents Fútbol: The Beautiful Game, an exhibition examining the sport of fútbol, or soccer, as it is known in the United States. Featuring approximately 50 works by nearly 30 artists on the subject of fútbol – often referred to as “the beautiful game” – the exhibition looks at issues of nationalism, identity, globalism, and mass spectacle as well as the shared human experience between spectators from a multitude of cultures. In anticipation of the 2014 World Cup that takes place in Brazil this summer, LACMA’s exhibition considers the sport through video, photography, painting, sculpture, and large-scale installation.

“A globally beloved sport celebrated in the context of a museum: what a great opportunity to explore the international scope of soccer through the lens of art,” said Michael Govan, CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director of LACMA. “Fútbol should excite all, especially as it coincides with the World Cup in Brazil in summer 2014.”

“When people watch a game, they feel inspired by the spirit of the team, the fans, and the sense of community,” remarked Franklin Sirmans, Terri and Michael Smooke Curator and department head of contemporary art at LACMA, “We, the fans, create the spirit of the team via our rituals. Witnessing a game is one of the few occasions during which a collective sense of enthusiasm is still possible. This exhibition explores that energy.”

Exhibition overview

Two room-sized video installations anchor Fútbol: The Beautiful Game. The first, Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait by the artists Philippe Parreno and Douglas Gordon, provides an intimate portrait of Zinedine Zidane – one of the greatest soccer players in the history of the sport – during the course of a single match. Meanwhile, Stephen Dean’s Volta, set to samba music, directs its gaze at stadium crowds and draws attention to both the pandemonium and organised ritual of mass audiences.

Other works by artists including Robin Rhode, Kehinde Wiley, Petra Cortright, Andy Warhol, Mark Bradford, Mary Ellen Carroll, Hassan Hajjaj, and Andreas Gursky, among others, provide a sense of the possibilities of the sport as a universal conversation piece. With artists hailing from as far afield as Morocco, Germany, Mexico, and South Africa – in addition to several Los Angeles–based artists – the geographic range represented in Fútbol: The Beautiful Game reflects the global reach of the sport.

Gustavo Artigas’s The Rules of the Game examines the ways in which communities that play different sports (basketball, soccer, and football) perceive one another, while Miguel Calderón’s video Mexico vs. Brasil dramatically unfolds during an unlikely victory for Mexico. Chris Beas harkens back to classical modes of presentation in his paintings: his athletic figures are depicted in a celebratory, almost mythic light. Meanwhile, the athletes featured in Generic Art Solutions’ works are almost caricatures caught in moments of extreme dramatisation.

In collaboration with LACMA, a new edition of prints has been commissioned by Self Help Graphics under the direction of executive director, Evonne Gallardo. The new prints by Carolyn Castano, Nery Gabriel Lemus, Ana Serrano, Dewey Tafoya, Ami Motevelli and Mario Ybarra, Jr. address varied aspects of the game – from a commemoration for the Colombian soccer player Andres Escobar who was shot and killed shortly after the 1994 World Cup, seemingly for his mistaken own goal, to references to the Olmec culture of the first major civilisation in Mexico.

As a nod to the imminent World Cup, the exhibition’s design alludes to the Brazilian flag with graphic symbolism as it evokes the environs of the sport – sun, sky, and grass – through a vibrant yellow, blue, and green.

Press release from the LACMA website

Lyle Ashton Harris (American, b. 1965)
Verona #2
2001-2004
Silver gelatin print
16 x 20 in.
The Robert E. Holmes Collection
© Lyle Ashton Harris

George Afedzi Hughes (Ghanaian-born American, b. 1962)
Parallel
2009-2011
Acrylic, oil, enamel on canvas
72 x 120 in. (182.88 x 304.8cm)
Skoto Gallery
Collection of the artist, Courtesy Skoto Gallery

Stephen Dean (French-American, b. 1968)
VOLTA (still)
2002-2003
Single-channel color DVD installation (9′) with audio and fabric enclosure
Collection of William and Ruth True, Seattle
Courtesy of the artist and Baldwin Gallery, Aspen
© Stephen Dean

Miguel Calderón (Mexican, b. 1971)
Mexico vs Brasil (video still)
2004
Video transferred to DVD
Duration: 1 hrs. 30 minutes
Courtesy of the artist and kurimanzutto, Mexico City
© Miguel Calderón

Antoni Muntadas (Spanish, b. 1942)
Celebracions
2009
DVD
Blake Byrne
Collection of Blake Byrne, Los Angeles

Chris Beas (American)
Sir Bobby
2007
Acrylic on Canvas
24 x 25 3/8 in.
Courtesy of the artist and Martha Otero Gallery
© Chris Beas

Ana Serrano (American, b. 1983)
Narco Soccer
2013
Serigraph
50 × 36 in. (127 × 91.44cm)
Self-Help Graphics
Self Help Graphics & Art, Professional Printmaking Program, 2013. On loan from the Self Help
Graphics & Art Collection

Generic Art Solutions
Pieta
2008
Photograph
36 x 36 in.
Courtesy of Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, New Orleans
© Generic Art Solutions

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Pele
1978
Silkscreen
40 x 40 in.
University of Maryland Art Gallery, College Park, MD
© Andy Warhol Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Kehinde Wiley (American, b. 1977)
Samuel Eto’o
2010
Oil on Canvas
76 x 60 in.
Roberts & Tilton Gallery
© Kehinde Wiley
Image courtesy of the artist, and Roberts & Tilton, Culver City

Nery Gabriel Lemus (American, b. 1977)
Thank You for the Game
2013
Serigraph
36 x 50 in. (91.44 x 127cm)
Self Help Graphics & Art, Professional Printmaking Program, 2013. On loan from the Self Help
Graphics & Art Collection
© Nery Gabriel Lemus

Philippe Parreno (French, b. 1964) and Douglas Gordon (Scottish, b. 1966)
Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait
2006
© Philippe Parreno and Douglas Gordon

Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
5905 Wilshire Boulevard (at Fairfax Avenue)
Los Angeles, CA, 90036
Phone: 323 857 6000

Opening Hours:
Monday, Tuesday, Thursday: 11am – 6pm
Friday: 11am – 8pm
Saturday, Sunday: 10am – 7pm
Closed Wednesday

LACMA website

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Marcus Bunyan black and white archive: ‘The Songs of Eternity’, 1994

July 2014

These are really important photographs for me.

As Minor White’s artist book The Temptation of St. Anthony is Mirrors (1948) is a visual love poem to Tom Murphy, so my artist book The Songs of Eternity (1994) is a visual love poem to my then long-time partner Paul. Both are exceedingly rare books: there are two copies of White’s book and there is one copy of mine.

The prints are even more beautiful in the flesh (so to speak).

Marcus

I am scanning my negatives made during the years 1991-1997 to preserve them in the form of an online archive as a process of active memory, so that the images are not lost forever. These photographs were images of my life and imagination at the time of their making, the ideas I was thinking about and the people and things that surrounded me.

All images © Marcus Bunyan. Please click the photographs for a larger version of the image. Please remember these are just straight scans of the prints, all full frame, no cropping !

Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a vintage 8″ x 10″ silver gelatin print costs $700 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my store web page.

*PLEASE NOTE THIS POSTING CONTAINS ART PHOTOGRAPHS OF MALE NUDITY – IF YOU DO NOT LIKE PLEASE DO NOT LOOK, FAIR WARNING HAS BEEN GIVEN*

The Songs of Eternity

Images and poetry by M. Bunyan 1994

I stood at the edge of the precipice / and peered in as William Blake would say

The timepiece of eternity / swung hands through all the hours

so how naive I’ve been / not to see its powers

Did I deceive / or was I led

What a rude awakening / throughout my head

Many fabulous things were said /

many a doubt was in silence bled …

Nothing is certainty but the change – I was must be strong to attain

Depth, spirit, integrity and the rest

This affirmation I will confirm – not in conformity but in my own special way

Not this way nor that but my own path / that one day will whisper gently in my ear

Be strong, for we have much to say / when the sea becomes the sky.

Strong in your arms I become your scent

Lying in my bed the sheets of flowers enfold me

Trusting in my heart I know

Today Yesterday Tomorrow

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Shroud
1994
From the series The Songs of Eternity
Silver gelatin photograph

The Songs of Eternity

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Paul, shadows
1994
From the series The Songs of Eternity
Silver gelatin photograph

I stood at the edge of the precipice / and peered in as William Blake would say

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Eternal timepiece
1994
From the series The Songs of Eternity
Silver gelatin photograph

The timepiece of eternity / swung hands through all the hours

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Paul, head covered
1994
From the series The Songs of Eternity
Silver gelatin photograph

so how naive I’ve been / not to see its powers

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Pendent #1
1994
From the series The Songs of Eternity
Silver gelatin photograph

Did I deceive / or was I led

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Untitled
1994
From the series The Songs of Eternity
Silver gelatin photograph

What a rude awakening / throughout my head

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Untitled
1994
From the series The Songs of Eternity
Silver gelatin photograph

Many fabulous things were said /

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Suspension #1
1994
From the series The Songs of Eternity
Silver gelatin photograph

many a doubt was in silence bled …

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Chrysalis
1994
From the series The Songs of Eternity
Silver gelatin photograph

Nothing is certainty but the change – I was must be strong to attain

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Décolleté
1994
From the series The Songs of Eternity
Silver gelatin photograph

Depth, spirit, integrity and the rest

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Paul, doorway (for Georgia O’Keeffe)
1994
From the series The Songs of Eternity
Silver gelatin photograph

This affirmation I will confirm – not in conformity but in my own special way

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Pendent #2
1994
From the series The Songs of Eternity
Silver gelatin photograph

Not this way nor that but my own path / that one day will whisper gently in my ear

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Shadow, wreath
1994
From the series The Songs of Eternity
Silver gelatin photograph

Be strong, for we have much to say / when the sea becomes the sky.

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Madonna, male
1994
From the series The Songs of Eternity
Silver gelatin photograph

Strong in your arms I become your scent

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Suspension #2
1994
From the series The Songs of Eternity
Silver gelatin photograph

Lying in my bed the sheets of flowers enfold me

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Paul, wreath and hands
1994
From the series The Songs of Eternity
Silver gelatin photograph

Trusting in my heart I know

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Untitled
1994
From the series The Songs of Eternity
Silver gelatin photograph

Today Yesterday Tomorrow

Marcus Bunyan black and white archive page

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Exhibition: ‘Transmissions: Archiving HIV/AIDS – Melbourne 1979-2014’ at George Paton Gallery, The University of Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 14th July – 25th July 214

Curators: Michael Graf and Russell Walsh

Artists include: Marcus Bunyan, Juan Davila, Andrew Foster, Brent Harris, Mathew Jones, Peter Lyssiotis, Lex Middleton, Andi Nellsün, Marcus O’Donnell, Scott Redford, and Ross T Smith.

Opening: Wednesday 16 July 5.30 pm – 7.30 pm

Unknown photographer
ACT UP D-Day on the steps of Flinders St. Station, 6 June 1991
1991
Image courtesy of the Australian Queer Archives

Another important exhibition to coincide with the 20th International AIDS Conference to be held in Melbourne this July. The exhibition – which focuses on the seminal exhibition Don’t Leave Me This Way: Art In The Age Of AIDS, curated by Ted Gott at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra in 1994 – is supported by an extensive program of public events (see below) some of which I hope to get to. The community lost so many good people.

I just want to say ‘good on ya, Andi’, hope your smiling up there somewhere!

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to Michael Graf and The George Paton Gallery for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. The exhibition will be open until 9pm on Wednesday 23 July as part of the Nite Art Walk.

Andi Nellsün (Australian)
Matr’x
1993

To coincide with the 20th International AIDS Conference to be held in Melbourne in July, TRANSMISSIONS | Archiving HIV/AIDS | Melbourne 1979-2014 is an exhibition of artworks, manuscripts, and other material from private collections and public archives. It will focus on the partnership between government, health professionals, and Melbourne’s gay community, and on relations between activism, art and design.

Australia is recognised for having implemented one the world’s most successful HIV/AIDS prevention campaigns. The exhibition and conference, however, coincide with a twenty-year high in infection rates. To be able to reach a younger generation,current health promotion campaigns have become increasingly sophisticated. TRANSMISSIONS will investigate several of these campaigns in relation to others from the past thirty years.

TRANSMISSIONS will feature artworks by Marcus Bunyan, Juan Davila, Andrew Foster, Brent Harris, Mathew Jones, Peter Lyssiotis, Lex Middleton, Andi Nellsün, Marcus O’Donnell, Scott Redford, and Ross T Smith.

A publication and a comprehensive public program will accompany this two-week exhibition.

Exhibition curated by Michael Graf and Russell Walsh.

Andi Nellsün (Australian)
Synergy
1993

Free Public program

Wednesday 16 July 5.30 pm – 7.30 pm – Exhibition Launch

Thursday 17 July, 5.30 pm – 6.30 pm – Introduction to the archives
Nick Henderson (Australian Queer Archives) and Katie Wood (University of Melbourne Archives) in conversation with Russell Walsh.

Friday 18 July, 5.30 pm – 6.30 pm – Activism, archives and history
Graham Willett (Australian Lesbian & Gay Archives) in conversation with Russell Walsh.

Saturday 19 July, 3 pm – 4 pm – Curator floor-talk with Michael Graf and Russell Walsh

Wednesday 23 July – exhibition open till 9pm for Nite Art Walk

Wednesday 23 July 7.00 pm – 8.00 pm – Hares and Hyenas Word is Out presents: Charles Roberts, Infected Queer – 20 years on
Melbourne writer Javant Biarujia will read from the polemical AIDS diary that he helped edit and publish in 1994.

Thursday 24 July, 5.30 pm – 6.30 pm – Don’t Leave Me This Way: Art In The Age Of AIDS: 20 years on
Ted Gott, Curator of the seminal exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia in 1994, in conversation with Michael Graf, with several of the exhibition’s artists present for comment.

Friday 25 July, 5.30 pm – 6.30 pm – The Face of HIV/AIDS: Photographic Portraiture and HIV/AIDS 1984-1994
Susannah Seaholm-Rolan reflecting on why many of the artists featured in Don’t Leave Me This Way: Art In The Age Of AIDS worked in the medium of photographic portraiture and self-portraiture (includes exhibition closing drinks).

Please note: all events will commence sharply at advertised times owing to the early closure of the Student Union Building

Lex Middleton (Australian)
Gay Beauty Myth
1992
Gelatin silver photographs

Juan Davila (Chilean-Australian, b. 1946)
LOVE
1988
Oil on canvas
© Juan Davila, Courtesy Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art

The central theme of the exhibition is the response from Melbourne’s LGBT community to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. It will contain artworks from this period as well as activist, government and other cultural responses – some of the works have never been exhibited before.

Michael Graf is co-curator of Transmissions, along with Russell Walsh. Both Graf and Walsh have spent the past seven months trawling through the Australian Queer Archives (AQuA) and the University of Melbourne Archives, where they have discovered some of the most moving and unique stories in Melbourne’s LGBT history.

“We wanted to focus on some of the cultural responses to the crisis,” Graf says. “The main part of that has been Ted Gott’s exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia in 1994: Don’t leave me this way: art in the age of AIDS. That exhibition became an incredibly important event for a lot of people. The NGA actually thought they would get 10,000 people through the space in four or five months – they got 140,000 people.

“It became a kind of pilgrimage for people from Melbourne and Sydney and other places around Australia. They went to Canberra specifically to see that exhibition. It was the first time a national gallery anywhere in the world put on an exhibition about HIV/AIDS.”

Transmissions includes copies of the visitors books from Don’t leave me this way: art in the age of AIDS. As the exhibition became a place where people remembered those they had lost, they poured their emotions and their experiences of the exhibition into the visitors books.

“There are some extraordinary accounts,” Graf says. “They had this experience in a national gallery to actually grieve.”

Graf and Walsh also tracked down artists from this exhibition. While many concede that Don’t leave me this way has been long forgotten, the milieu surrounding Transmissions is that it is time for this work to be considered again.

“They [the artists] have also said this is the perfect time to remember it,” Graf says. “Sometimes these things have to wait until they have receded enough back into history before they can be looked at again.” …

Graf hopes people visiting Transmissions will take away the richness of these collections. He also hopes they attract a younger audience as well as those who will remember what life was like in the gay community at the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

“We’re hoping people might be inspired to access places such as the Australia Lesbian and Gay Archives and for a younger generation of people in Melbourne to be exposed to this incredible important history.”

Rachel Cook. “Transmissions: Archiving HIV/AIDS – Melbourne 1979 – 2014,” on the Gay News Network website, 2nd July 2014 [Online] Cited 06/07/2014. No longer available online

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
How will it be when you have changed
1994
Silver gelatin photograph

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Tell me your face before you were born
1994
Silver gelatin photograph

George Paton Gallery
Level 1 Arts and Cultural Building
Monash Road, the University of Melbourne

Opening hours:
Monday – Friday 11am – 5pm

George Paton Gallery website

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Exhibition: ‘Robert Mapplethorpe’ at the Grand Palais, Paris

Exhibition dates: 26th March – 13th July 2014

Grand Palais
Galerie sud-est, entrée avenue Winston Churchill

Many thankx to the Grand Palais for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“I have boundless admiration for the naked body. I worship it.”

“I was a Catholic boy, I went to church every Sunday. A church has a certain magic and mystery for a child. It still shows in how I arrange things. It’s always little altars.”

“I am looking for perfection in form. I do that with portraits. I do it with cocks. I do it with flowers.”

Robert Mapplethorpe

Installation views of the exhibition Robert Mapplethorpe at the Grand Palais, Paris 2014
© Didier Plowy pour la Réunion des musées nationaux-Grand Palais, Paris 2014

The exhibition will present over 250 works making it one of the largest retrospective shows for this artist ever held in a museum. It will cover Mapplethorpe’s entire career as a photographer, from the Polaroids of the early 1970s to the portraits from the late 1980s, touching on his sculptural nudes and still lifes, and sadomasochism.

The focus on his two muses Patti Smith and Lisa Lyon explores the theme of women and femininity and reveals a less known aspect of the photographer’s work. The challenge of this exhibition is to show that Mapplethorpe is a great classical artist, who addressed issues in art using photography as he might have used sculpture. It also puts Mapplethorpe’s art into the context of the New York art scene in the 1970-1980s.

In his interview with Janet Kardon in 1987, Mapplethorpe explained that photography in the 1970s was the perfect medium for a fast-paced time. He did not really choose photography; in a way it was photography that chose him. Later in the same interview, he said “If I had been born one hundred or two hundred years ago, I might have been a sculptor, but photography is a very quick way to see, to make a sculpture. Lisa Lyon reminded me of Michelangelo’s subjects, because he did muscular women.”

Mapplethorpe positioned himself from the outset as an Artist, with a capital A. Unlike Helmut Newton, who as a teenager already wanted to be a fashion photographer, and imposed his vision of the world and photography, making it an art in its own right, Robert Mapplethorpe is a sculptor at heart, a plastic artist driven by the question of the body and its sexuality and obsessed by the search for perfect form.

Like Man Ray, Mapplethorpe wanted to be “a creator of images” rather than a photographer, “a poet” rather than a documentarist. In the catalogue for the Milan exhibition which compared the two artists, Bruno Cora recalls the parallels in their lives and works: “Before becoming masterly photographers, Man Ray and Mapplethorpe had both been painters and sculptors, creators of objects; they both lived in Brooklyn in New York; they both made portraits of the intellectuals of their time; and they were both incisive explorers of the nude form, its sculptural qualities and the energy emanating from it.”

Mapplethorpe was an artist before being a photographer. His images come from a pictorial culture in which we find Titian (The Flaying of Marsyas / Dominick and Elliot), David, Dali, and even the great artists of the Italian Renaissance, Michelangelo, Piero della Francesca, Bernini …

As in Huysmans’s novel, the exhibition is a countdown for this other dandy from the end of another world, Robert Mapplethorpe. It starts with his self-portrait with a skull-headed cane, the image of a young man already old, the tragedy of a life cut down in full flight by AIDS. But his almost royal final posture, as if beyond death, still (just) alive but already in the posterity of his oeuvre, seems to beckon us with a gesture of his pastoral cane to follow him into the world that he constructed in twenty years of photography. The exhibition continues with statuary, a dominant theme in Mapplethorpe’s last years, photos of statues of the gods in his personal pantheon: Eros, of course, and Hermes … The artist always said he used photography to make sculptures, and he ended his oeuvre with photographs of sculptures. His nudes were already photographic sculptures.

Works are not created just anywhere. To be fully appreciated, Mapplethorpe’s art must be put into the socio-cultural context of arty New York in the 1970s and 80s, and the underground gay culture there at that time. Two permeable and equally radical worlds. To take the measure of the libertarian explosion of the time, we need to watch Flesh, Warhol’s film with Joe Dalessandro, which narrates 24 hours in the life of a young New York male prostitute. To understand the violence and passion of gay sexuality for young New Yorkers fighting for freedom in a repressive period, we must read Edmund White’s The Beautiful Room is Empty, the story of a young gay in the years of riots and demonstrations and extreme emancipation; and Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance (1978), to plunge into the sexual experiments of Fire Island in the 1970s.

Mapplethorpe is hailed as one of the world’s greatest photographers and the exhibition aims to give a broad view of his work.

Press release from the Grand Palais website

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Milton Moore
1981
50.8 x 40.6cm / 50.8 x 40.6cm
Silver gelatin prints
New York, Fondation Robert Mapplethorpe
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Milton Moore (detail)
1981
50.8 x 40.6cm
Silver gelatin print
New York, Fondation Robert Mapplethorpe
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Ken Moody
1983
50.8 x 40.6cm
Silver gelatin print
New York, Fondation Robert Mapplethorpe
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used with permission

Introductory text

Robert Mapplethorpe was an artist with an obsessive quest for aesthetic perfection.

A sculptor at heart, and in his imagination, he wanted “people to see [his] works first as art and second as photography.”1 An admirer of Michelangelo, Mapplethorpe championed the classical ideal – revised and reworked for the libertarian New York of the 1970s – and explored sophisticated printing techniques to create unique works and mixed compositions, which he framed in unusual ways.

Like the novel by Joris-Karl Huysmans, this exhibition has been organised “À rebours” [against the nap] and examines the work of another dandy, living at the end of another world. It opens with Mapplethorpe’s self-portrait with the skull-head cane: the image of a young man, already old, tragically cut down in the prime of life by AIDS, it also reveals how the master of the realm of shadows – photography – gave free rein to his imagination. Like a modern day Orpheus, beyond death, he seems alive – although only just – yet already in the afterlife of his work, beckoning us with his satanic cane to follow him into the underworld of his life, in search of his desire.

“Photography and sexuality have a lot in common,” explains Mapplethorpe. “Both are question marks, and that’s precisely what excites me most in life.”2 Exploring the photography of the body, he pushed it to the limits of pornography, perhaps like no other artist before him. The desire we see in these images – often the photographer’s own desire – also reflects life in New York, as lived by some, in the 1970s and 80s, at the height of the sexual liberation movement. “I’m trying to record the moment I’m living in and where I’m living, which happens to be in New York. I am trying to pick up on the madness and give it some order.”3

This retrospective of Mapplethorpe’s work – the first in France since he passed away – features some two hundred and fifty images exploring a range of themes. They cover every aspect of Mapplethorpe’s art – bronze bodies and flesh sculptures, geometric and choreographic, still lives and anatomical details, bodies as flowers and flowers as bodies, court portraiture, night photography, and eroticism, soft and hard – interspersed with self-portraiture in all its forms. The works from the photographer’s early career, which close the exhibition, reveal how the path taken by his art was already mapped out in his first Polaroids. The sign of a great artist.

1/ Inge Biondi, “The Yin and the Yang of Robert Mapplethorpe,” in The Print Collector’s Newsletter, New York, January 1979, p. 11
2/ Mark Thompson, “Mapplethorpe,” in The Advocate, Atlanta, 24 July 1980
3/ Sarah Kent, “Mapplethorpe,” in Time Out, London, 3-9 November 1983

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Thomas
1987
61 x 50.8cm
Silver gelatin print
New York, Fondation Robert Mapplethorpe
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used with permission

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Calla Lily
1986
92.7 x 92.7cm
Silver gelatin print
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used with permission

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
The Sluggard (Le Paresseux)
1988
61 x 50.8cm
Silver gelatin print
New York, Fondation Robert Mapplethorpe
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used with permission

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Self-portrait (Autoportrait)
1988
61 x 50.8cm
Platinum print
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used with permission

Grand Palais, Galeries Nationales
3, Avenue du Général Eisenhower
75008 Paris

Opening hours:
Wednesday – Saturday 10am – 10pm
Monday and Sunday 10am – 8pm
Closed every Tuesday

Grand Palais website

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Review: ‘Polaroid Project’ at Arts Project Australia, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 14th June – 12th July 2014

Alan Constable creating one of the cameras for the Polaroid Project

Polaroid Project is a vaguely disappointing exhibition at Arts Project Australia. The intentions and concept are good but the work sits rather silently and uneasily in the gallery space.

Constable’s anthropomorphised cameras are as lumpy and charismatic as ever, but the black colour does them no favours. Instead of transporting the viewer they become rather heavy and dull. They loose most of their transformative appeal.

Atkins’ boxes, “readymade abstractions” – his first attempt at sculpture – needed to be pushed further. While his painting practice uses distinctive graphic, jazz and minimalist colour forms, what makes them so watchable and mesmerising is that the eye has to attempt to go beyond the two-dimensional plane, to interrogate the juxtaposition of shape and space. The MDF cubes hand painted with auto acrylic paint deny the eye the ability to probe beyond the surface because the surface is already three dimensional. These boxes, these gestures of appropriation (devoid of text) just become perfect simulacra and, in reality, they really don’t take you anywhere.

Here’s an idea (or two): as Constable has had to take the camera out of the boxes – interior becomes exterior – what about carving into the MDF boxes in a series of steps that move inwards – exterior becomes interior! The colours would then move away from you. Not in all of them, just a few. It would certainly add more life and movement to the ensemble. And then, for good measure, paint a couple of the walls in the colours of the boxes – the whole goddam wall. THEN, place the cameras and cubes against this neon pop surface and see what happens… WHAM! KAPOW! Now we have something to think about, not this side by side act of representation that is really rather awkward.

Just me rabbiting on with some ideas, but as I said at the beginning, the whole exhibition is too silent and deadly. The whole shebang needs a good jolt of electricity to get the juices flowing. After all these ARE pop colours and these ARE Polaroid cameras – which produced the most popular form of instantaneous photograph, and representation in a physical form, so far invented. Ah, that speed and velocity of transmission.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to Arts Project Australia for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. As noted installation photographs © Marcus Bunyan

Polaroid camera inspiration

Polaroid Project is an in-depth collaborative project between celebrated Melbourne based artists Alan Constable and Peter Atkins examines both artists shared interests in the reinterpretation of existing forms, offering the viewer an opportunity to experience the complimentary ways these diverse artists view their distinctive worlds. This significant exhibition sees both artists responding to a collection of twelve original Polaroid cameras and packaging manufactured in the 1960s and 1970s.

Alan Constable (Arts Project Australia, Melbourne)

Alan Constable is both a painter and a ceramicist who has exhibited in Australian and International galleries for over 25 years and has been a finalist in a number of significant contemporary art awards. Based on imagery from newspapers and magazines, his recent paintings are notable for their vibrant kaleidoscopic effects and strong sense colour and patterning. Though Constable’s works are often centred on political events and global figures, his thematic concerns are frequently subjugated by the pure visual experience of colour and form. Despite the occasional gravity of his subject matter, there is a genuine sense of joy within Constable’s paintings.

Constable’s ceramic works reflect a life-long fascination with old cameras, which began with his making replicas from cardboard cereal boxes at the age of eight. The sculptures are lyrical interpretations of technical instruments, and the artist’s finger marks can be seen clearly on the clay surface like traces of humanity. In this way, Alan Constable cameras can be viewed as extensions of the body, as much as sculptural representations of an object. Alan Constable’s clay cameras were recently exhibited in Melbourne Now at the National Gallery of Victoria. All thirteen cameras displayed were subsequently acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria for their permanent collection.

Peter Atkins (Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne)

Peter Atkins is a leading Australian contemporary artist and an important representative of Australian art in the International arena. Over the past twenty-five years he has exhibited in Australia, New Zealand, England, France, Spain, Italy, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Mexico. His practice has centred around the appropriation and reinterpretation readymade abstract forms and patterns that are collected within his immediate environment, either within a local or international context. This material becomes the direct reference source for his work, providing tangible evidence to the viewer of his relationship and experience within the landscape. Particular interest is paid to the cultural associations of forms that have the capacity to trigger within the viewer, memory, nostalgia or a shared history of past experiences. Recent projects including ‘Disney Color Project’, ‘The Hume Highway Project’, ‘Monopoly Project’ and ‘In Transit’ all reference this collective cultural recall and shared experience.

Peter Atkins has held over 40 solo exhibitions with his survey exhibition titled Big Paintings 1990-2003 touring regional galleries during 2003-04. He has been represented in over fifty significant group exhibitions, including The Loti and Victor Smorgan Gift of Australian Contemporary Art at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Uncommon World: Aspects of Contemporary Australian Art and Home Sweet Home: Works from the Peter Fay Collection, both at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra and more recently in the prestigious Clemenger Contemporary Art Award at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2009/2010. His work is represented in the collections of every major Australian State Gallery as well as prominent Institutional, Corporate and Private collections both Nationally and Internationally. In 2010 his solo exhibition for Tolarno Galleries at the Melbourne Art Fair titled Hume Highway Project was purchased for The Lyon Collection in Melbourne.

Text from the Arts Project Australia website

Peter Atkins with Alan Constable in the Arts Project Australia Studio in Northcote

Alan Constable work in progress at Arts Project Australia Studio in Northcote. The cameras are inspired by a collection of retro Polaroid cameras collected by Peter Atkins

Installation views of the exhibition Polaroid Project at Arts Project Australia, Melbourne
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Two Takes On The Pop Object

Polaroid Project, which brings together Peter Atkins’ re-creations of Polaroid camera packaging and Alan Constable’s versions of the cameras found within those boxes, demonstrates the continued relevance of how artists engage with the objects of consumer culture fifty years after the advent of Pop Art. At first glance, Peter Atkins and Alan Constable seem like unlikely collaborators. Atkins is a painter and Constable is best known as a sculptor, a maker of ceramic cameras. Atkins is invested in reproducing the clean lines and abstract, colourful design of the advertising industry in exacting detail. The lines of Constable’s cameras are never clean. His forms are inherently exaggerated, and the cameras themselves showcase the thumbing, handling, and kneading of the clay medium. If Atkins goes out of his way to convince us that his Polaroid box paintings-cum-sculptures share the near-seamlessness of the real thing, Constable seems to do just the opposite with his cameras. The latter are obviously NOT real cameras: their comic-book personalities, decidedly handmade disposition, their larger-than-life scale, and the fact that they wear their ceramic qualities so proudly (glazed in any number of colours) collectively proclaim their fiction. Despite the apparent disparity of the two artists, both rely exclusively on their own hands to create their work, even when that labour replicates the aesthetic of mechanical reproduction, in the case of Atkins. If we dig deep, we can ascertain a pronounced kinship shared by the two artists that dates back to early Pop in the United States – before the advent of Warhol’s screenprinting techniques that relied on the photograph. Both Atkins and Constable inhabit the handmade rather than the machine-produced realm of Pop, and signal to us that such strategies are still surprisingly timely today despite the digital and highly mediated culture we inhabit.

For nearly 20 years, Peter Atkins has been painting design forms on tarpaulin canvases (occasionally using other supports as well) appropriated from a range of sources including outdoor advertising, record albums, matchbooks, paperback books, product packaging, and street signage. Atkins reduces the essential forms of selected designs by deleting accompanying text and focusing completely on the graphic qualities of the image itself. Atkins has labelled his engagement with the graphic design of packaging and signage ‘readymade abstraction’ – utilising imagery that already exists in the world to transpose and distil into pared-down paintings. Steeped in the gesture of appropriation that has concerned artists for a century now (the readymade made its debut at the 1913 Armory Show when Marcel Duchamp displayed a porcelain urinal as a sculpture), Atkins has worked exclusively as a painter until recently.

Atkins has long been a collector of the objects on which he bases his paintings and the genesis of Polaroid Project firmly demonstrates this. Struck by the iconic graphic design of bright rainbow colour patterns on the original containers for Polaroid instant cameras, Atkins began collecting the camera boxes in earnest about three years ago (the original cameras were still inside the packaging). All of the packages and cameras date between 1969 and 1978; the colour spectrum / rainbow motif evident on the packages is not only indicative of graphic design of the period, but also alludes to the purported chromatic vibrancy of Polaroid film. Atkins knew he wanted to make a body of work using the boxes and was aware that he would be breaking new ground within the evolution of his practice by painting three-dimensionally. Atkins acknowledges that he first ignored what was inside the boxes he was collecting – the cameras themselves. Fetishising the veneer surrounding the product rather than the thing itself, Atkins almost forgot that the purpose of the packaging was to sell cameras. Halfway through the development of the project, Atkins began to marvel at the engineering elegance of the cameras and a light bulb went off in his head – the Arts Project Australia studio artist Alan Constable, recognised for his ceramic sculptures of cameras, would be an inspired collaborator for the project. If Atkins explores the visual language of how we are drawn to things, thereby making images designed for the masses his own, Constable’s skill lies in personalising what is inside the box, transforming a mass-produced consumer product into an idiosyncratic object.

Polaroid Project marks the first time Atkins has focused on replicating consumer packaging in 3D, creating what Donald Judd might have termed ‘specific objects’, art objects that incorporate aspects of painting and sculpture, but do not fit neatly into either category. As Atkins admits himself, his transformed Polaroid camera containers are difficult to categorise: Are they 3D paintings or sculptures? Similarly, they exist in the interstices of Pop and Minimalism, referencing images taken from advertisements, but eliminating descriptive text, distilling ads to abstraction. If it were not for Alan Constable’s cameras exhibited nearby, the viewer would most likely be unable to make the associative leap that these brightly coloured objects are in fact based on commercial packaging that housed and marketed cameras. In order to create boxes that appear as realistic as possible while still retaining proper rigidity as a support for a painting, Atkins used 6mm thick MDF board that he painstakingly sanded, infilling any gaps or surface blemishes with epoxy in order to simulate paper packing material as closely as possible. He then masked out the designs with tape and finally painted the Polaroid signature designs using carefully matched automobile spray paint. What looks machine-printed and fabricated is actually the product of artistic labour. Atkins’ boxes are the same size as the original packaging and are seemingly authentic in every way except for his decision not to reproduce text or photographic imagery, concentrating only on the colourful designs and the cubic format of the container.

Alan Constable’s glazed ceramic cameras lack precise lines and angles; their handmade wonkiness imbues them with a sentience, as if each sculpture is a character, a refugee from a cartoon narrative. If Philip Guston was a ceramicist, these are the kind of objects he would make. Constable has had a near life-long fascination with cameras. He made his first cameras from cardboard at the age of eight. The ceramic cameras have ranged from accordion-style devices to digital cameras to Polaroids, and all share the noticeable imprint of the artist’s hands and fingers, and quite often, an enlargement of scale compared to their real-world counterparts. Constable is legally blind and has pinhole vision so must work close-up during the creative process. For objects whose very existence are predicated on recording the visible, Constable’s cameras are created far more out of a sense of touch than sight. In Constable’s hands, cameras, which we usually associate with the optical, are transformed into the tactile.

Constable’s cameras are made by adding, subtracting, forming, and inscribing clay. A viewfinder or dial might be modelled separately from the camera body and then grafted on later and finally secured in the firing process. Viewfinders and lenses may be actual apertures or voids, but sometimes (as in the case of Constable’s copies of digital cameras) the display might feature an incised drawing of an imagined landscape, Constable’s take on trompe l’oeil realism. Constable also incises line work onto the camera’s surface to suggest dimension and detail. Constable’s cameras are structurally engineered from the inside out, containing internal chambers and walls to provide inherent stability, but also, perhaps, as a nod to speculative authenticity. Constable usually makes his cameras based on magazine advertisements; for Polaroid Project he had the rare opportunity of using real cameras as models for his sculptures.

Atkins is firmly situated within the handmade domain of the pop object/painting, as his renditions of Polaroid boxes are fabricated and painted only by him not by mechanical means, although the precise and seamless nature of his paint application replicates the look of commercial printing nearly exactly. While Alan Constable also relies on his hands in an endeavour to create a rendering of a commercial product, he does not in any way attempt to copy the Polaroid camera perfectly, or at least the results of his labour do not suggest a desire for verisimilitude. In a certain sense, Atkins plays Roy Lichtenstein to Constable’s Claes Oldenburg – two masters of early 1960s Pop. Lichtenstein made paintings of mass-produced printed imagery – notably comics – enlarging the image to reveal the building block of newsprint, the Ben Day dot. While Atkins does not necessarily play with scale the way Lichtenstein did, he shares with Lichtenstein a keen interest in exploring the imagery of popular culture, transposing it in paint to mimic commercial printing. In his installation The Store (1961), Claes Oldenburg riffed on the consumer products of the day creating handmade, cartoonish objects of exaggerated scale. While Constable forms his cameras out of clay, Oldenburg made his renditions of consumer goods from plaster-soaked muslin formed over wire frames, then painted in enamel – making no attempt to ape the real. Oldenburg’s objects have more in common with paintings than Constable’s cameras, but both amplify scale and instil an animated sensibility in the work, anthropomorphising objects. Lichtenstein and The Store-era Oldenburg represent the extremes of how Pop artists engaged with representation – mimicking commercial printing technology through exacting paintings, on the one hand, versus reproducing commercial goods through awkward handcraft on the other. The pairing of Atkins and Constable shows that the Lichtenstein / Oldenburg diametric is alive and well today and that artists continue to explore different registers of the real in depicting the pop object, relying solely on their own hands.

Reproduced with permission

Alan Constable (Australian, b. 1956) and Peter Atkins (Australian, b. 1963)
Square Shooter 2 #2 (installation view)
2014
Ceramic camera and auto acrylic on MDF
Box: 16.7 x 16.7 x 18.4cm
Camera: 16 x 14 x 16cm
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Alan Constable (Australian, b. 1956) and Peter Atkins (Australian, b. 1963)
Super Shooter (installation view)
2014
Ceramic camera and auto acrylic on MDF
Box: 16 x 17.5 x 18cm
Camera: 16 x 14 x 16cm
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Alan Constable (Australian, b. 1956) and Peter Atkins (Australian, b. 1963)
Colorpack ll (installation view)
2014
Ceramic camera and auto acrylic on MDF
Box: 16.7 x 16.7 x 19.8cm
Camera: 15.5 x 16 x 20cm
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Alan Constable (Australian, b. 1956) and Peter Atkins (Australian, b. 1963)
Colorpack ll (installation view details)
2014
Ceramic camera and auto acrylic on MDF
Camera: 15.5 x 16 x 20cm
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Alan Constable (Australian, b. 1956) and Peter Atkins (Australian, b. 1963)
The Clincher (installation view detail)
2014
Ceramic camera and auto acrylic on MDF
Camera: 17.5 x 18 x 18cm
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Alan Constable (Australian, b. 1956) and Peter Atkins (Australian, b. 1963)
Colorpack 82 (catalogue view)
2014
Ceramic camera and auto acrylic on MDF
Box: 16.7 x 16.7 x 18.4cm
Camera: 16.5 x 14.5 x 20cm

Alan Constable (Australian, b. 1956) and Peter Atkins (Australian, b. 1963)
Super Color Swinger (catalogue view)
2014
Ceramic camera and auto acrylic on MDF
Box: 16.7 x 16.7 x 18.4cm
Camera: 17 x 15 x 15cm

Alan Constable and Peter Atkins
Square Shooter 2 (with flash) (catalogue view)
2014
Ceramic camera and auto acrylic on MDF
Box: 16.7 x 16.7 x 18.4cm
Camera: 17 x 14 x 18cm

Arts Project Australia

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Enter via 35 Johnson Street or 30 Perry Street, Collingwood
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Exhibition: ‘Ana Mendieta: Traces’ at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg

Exhibition dates: 29th March – 6th July 2014

PLEASE NOTE: THIS POSTING CONTAINS PHOTOGRAPHS WHICH MAY BE DISTRESSING TO SOME PEOPLE

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Untitled (Facial Hair Transplant)
1972
Suite of seven colour photographs, estate prints 1997
© The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C.
Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris and Alison Jacques Gallery, London

If I had half of this artists courage, I might not even have a quarter of her talent.

Marcus

Many thankx to the Museum der Moderne Salzburg for allowing me to publish the photographs and text in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

View the catalogue essays Ana Mendieta: Traces by Stephanie Rosenthal and Embers by Adrian Heathfield (2.66Mb pdf)

“Art is a material act of culture, but its greatest value is its spiritual role, and that influences society, because it’s the greatest contribution to the intellectual and moral development of humanity that can be made”

“My art is grounded on the belief in one universal energy which runs through everything; from insect to man, from man to spectre, from spectre to plant, from plant to galaxy.”

“To me, the work has existed on different levels. It existed on the level of being in nature and eventually being eroded away. But obviously when it’s shown to someone as a photograph, that’s what it is.”

Ana Mendieta

The few women working with the body at that time were in instant affinity with each other… The struggle for all of us was to keep the sensuousness of the body and to de-eroticize it in terms of cultural expectations. It was gratifying and exciting to discover her work. Those of us who had already been situating the body as central to our visual aesthetic could also anticipate the resistance that would be around her.

I see her death as part of some larger denial of the feminine. Like a huge metaphor saying, we don’t want this depth of feminine eroticism, nature, absorption, integration to happen. It’s too organic. It’s too sacral. In a way, her death also has a symbolic trajectory. More than Ana dies, when she dies.”

Carolee Schneeman quoted in Camhi, Leslie. “ART; Her Body, Herself,” on the New York Times website published June 20, 2004 [Online] Cited 20/06/2014

“You do feel the sadness that she’s not with us and you wonder where she would have gone with her work.”

Raquelin Mendieta

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Untitled (Facial Cosmetic Variations) (detail)
1972
Suite of eight colour photographs (estate prints, 1997)
Each 50.8 x 406cm
The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection; courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Rape
1973
Colour photograph (lifetime print)
20.4 x 25.4cm
The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection; courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Rape Scene
1973
Colour photograph (lifetime print)
39.8 x 31 x 3.2cm (framed)
Tate: Presented by the American Patrons of Tate, courtesy of the Latin American Acquisitions Committee 2010

Rape Scene (1973) was part of series of works devised in response to the rape and murder of a fellow student on the Iowa University campus, where Mendieta completed her BA, MA (painting) and an MFA (inter-media). She invited friends and fellow students to her apartment. The viewer entered through a slightly ajar door into a dark apartment into a room where the artist appeared under a single source of light revealing Mendieta stripped from the waist down. The artist stood slouched and bound over a table, nude from the waist down with her body smeared in blood. Around her was an assemblage of broken plates and blood on the floor. Her direct identification with a specific victim meant that she could not be seen as an anonymous object in a theatrical tableau.

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Untitled (Self-Portrait with Blood) (detail)
1973
Suite of six colour photographs (estate prints 1997)
Each 50.8 x 40.6cm
Private collection, London; Courtesy Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Untitled (Body Tracks)
1974
Colour photograph, lifetime print
Collection of Igor DaCosta
© The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C.
Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris and Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Untitled (Glass on Body Imprints)
1972
Suite of six colour photographs, estate prints
© The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C.
Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris and Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Untitled
1973
Lifetime colour photograph
Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2011
© The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C.
Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris and Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Blood and Feathers #2
1974
Colour photograph, lifetime print
Collection Raquelín Mendieta Family Trust
© The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C.
Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris and Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Imagen de Yagul
1973
Lifetime colour photograph
Glenstone
© The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C.
Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris and Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Ana Mendieta: Traces is the first comprehensive survey of this influential artist’s work to be presented in Great Britain or the German-speaking world. It persuasively demonstrates that her art, while very much rooted in the concerns of her day, maintains a powerful connection to our present moment. Born in Cuba in 1948, Mendieta was forced to immigrate to the United States as a child due to her father’s political situation, and much of her work is obliquely haunted by the exile’s sense of displacement, while also reflecting her position as a double minority in North America’s largely white, male art world of the 1970s and 1980s. From the beginning, motifs of transience, absence, violence, belonging, and an identity in flux animated her multidisciplinary art, which ranged nomadically across practices associated with body art, land art, performance, sculpture, photography and film. At its core lay her recurring use of her own body – its physical and photographic traces – and her interest in marginal outdoor sites and elemental materials.

Spanning her brief, yet remarkably productive, career, this exhibition explores the many distinct facets of her practice. It captures her powerfully visceral evocation of ritual and sacrifice, as well as cycles of life and decay, while also highlighting her pioneering role as a conceptual border-crosser. Including photographs, drawings, sculptures, Super-8 films and a substantial selection of photographic slides, most of which have not been exhibited until now, Ana Mendieta: Traces reveals an artist whose underlying concerns led her to bravely re-work and re-combine genres, to draw on different cultures, both archaic and contemporary, while challenging the limits of the art discourse of her time. Her work continues to profoundly challenge, disturb, influence and inspire.

The Museum der Moderne Salzburg will open an extensive retrospective of the work of Ana Mendieta, one of our era’s most important and influential artists. Mendieta was born to a politically active family in Havana, Cuba in 1948. In the wake of the Cuban revolution, when she was only twelve years old, her parents sent her together with her sister to the United States. In 1985, at just thirty-six years old, she died under tragic circumstance in New York. During her short yet prolific career, she developed a unique visual language that is mesmerising in its intimacy, and equally challenging. Her pioneering work has been acknowledged by large retrospectives in the United States and Europe, and is represented in the collections of major museums.

According to Sabine Breitwieser, director at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, who has arranged the exhibition, “a comprehensive exhibition in the German-speaking area, especially in Austria, and the German monograph on Ana Mendieta are long overdue. The artist’s distinctive work, in which she stages her body within the landscape, seems to be ideally exhibited at this site, where nature and the theatrical take on such a major role. Due to the fragility of the work, this could possibly be one of the last extensive Mendieta exhibitions.”

Among the central themes in Mendieta’s artistic work are exile and cultural displacement. In her search for identity and finding her place in the world, she attempted to create a dialogue between the landscape and the female body. Her work reveals numerous points of contingency with the emerging art movements of the 1960s and 1970s – Conceptual art, land art, and performance art. Nonetheless, it refuses any kind of categorisation and instead addresses missing links or gaps between different media and art forms. “Through my art I want to express the immediacy of life and the eternity of nature,” wrote Mendieta in 1981. Using her own body and elementary materials, such as blood, fire, earth, and water, she created transitory pieces that combine rituals with metaphors for life, death, rebirth, and spiritual transformation. Her disembodied “earth body” sculptures were private, meditative ceremonies in nature documented in the form of slides and films. From them, Mendieta developed the so-called Siluetas (silhouettes), which form the core of her work. In the 1980s, Mendieta’s body disappeared from her artworks and she started to generate indoor works for galleries. Her engagement with nature continued in her sculptures and drawings, which she created as lasting works.

The exhibition presents roughly 150 works, which are organised throughout twelve spaces; two of these spaces are reconstructions of the original exhibitions by the artist. The works shown are in a multitude of media ranging from photography, film, and sculpture through to drawing. A further section will present the artist’s archive. Slides and photographs, notebooks and postcards offer insight into Mendieta’s working methods. The concern of Stephanie Rosenthal, chief curator of the Hayward Gallery London, is “to show Ana Mendieta’s outstanding work in all of its facets, and to place her artistic process at the center.”

While the artistic media that Mendieta utilises in her works could not be any more diverse, the pictures that she produces are characterised by an unmistakable, overwhelming and mystical poetry. This exhibition makes clear that almost thirty years after the artist’s premature death, her work has lost none of its singularity and uniqueness.

Text from the Museum der Moderne Salzburg website

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Untitled (Silueta Series)
1978
Gelatin silver print
20.3 x 25.4cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Alma, Silueta en Fuego (Soul, Silhouette on Fire) (still)
1975
Super-8 colour, silent film transferred to DVD
3:07 minutes
The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection; Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris, and Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Anima, Silueta de Cohetes (Firework Piece) (still)
1976
(Soul, Silhouette of Fireworks)
Super-8 colour, silent film transferred to DVD
2:22 minutes
The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection; courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Untitled (Cuilapán Niche)
1973
Black and white photograph (lifetime print)
25.4 x 20.4cm
Private collection, London; Courtesy Gallery Lelong, New York and Paris, and Alison Jacques Gallery London

Ana Mendieta died at just 36 years old, but the imprint of her life digs deeper than most. Mendieta’s work occupies the indeterminate space between land, body and performance art, refusing to be confined to any one genre while working to expand the horizons of them all. With the immediacy of a fresh wound and the weightlessness of a half-remembered song, Mendieta’s artwork remains as haunting and relevant today as ever.

Her haunting imagery explores the relationship between earth and spirit while tackling the eternally plaguing questions of love, death and rebirth. Like an ancient cave drawing, Mendieta’s art gets as close as possible to her subject matter allowing no excess, using primal and visceral means to navigate her themes. Decades after her death, the Museum der Moderne Salzburg will show a retrospective of the late feminist artist’s work, simply titled “Ana Mendieta: Traces.”

Mendieta, who was born in Havana, Cuba in 1948, moved to the U.S. at 12 years old to escape Castro’s regime. There she hopped between refugee camps and foster homes, planting inside her an obsession with ideas of loss, belonging and the impermanence of place. As an artist in the 1970s, Mendieta embarked upon her iconic series “Silhouettes,” in which she merged body and earthly material, making nature both canvas and medium. In her initial “Silhouette,” Mendieta lay shrouded in an ancient Zapotec grave, letting natural forms eat up her diminutive form.

Her “earth-body” sculptures, as they came to be known, feature blood, feathers, flowers and dirt smothered and stuck on Mendieta’s flesh in various combinations. In “Imagen de Yagul,” speckled feverishly in tiny white flowers, she appears as ethereal and disembodied as Ophelia, while in “Untitled Blood and Feathers” Mendieta looks simultaneously the helpless victim and the guilty culprit. “She always had a direction – that feeling that everything is connected,” Ana’s sister Raquelin said of her work.

An uncertain mythology runs throughout Mendieta’s oeuvre, a feeling at once primal, pagan and feminine. Admirers have cited the Afro-Cuban religion of Santeria as an influence, as well as the ancient rituals of Mexico, where Mendieta made much of her work. Yet many of Mendieta’s pieces removed themselves from the spiritual realm to address present day events, for example “Rape Scene,” a 1973 performance based off the rape and murder of a close friend. For the piece Mendieta remained tied to a table for two hours, motionless, her naked body smeared with cow’s blood. In another work, Mendieta smushes her face and body against glass panes, like a child eager to peek into an off-limits locale, or a bug that’s crashed into a windshield. Against the glass, her scrambled facial features almost resemble a Cubist artwork.

Mendieta died tragically young in 1985, falling from her New York City apartment window onto a delicatessen below. She was living with her husband of eight months, minimalist sculptor Carl Andre at the time. Andre was convicted of murder following the horrific incident and later acquitted. Though the art world remains captivated by the mysterious nature of Mendieta’s passing, her sister emphasised the importance of removing Ana’s work from her life story. “I don’t want it to get in the way of the work,” she said. “Her death has really nothing to do with her work. Her work was about life and power and energy and not about death.”

Fellow feminist performance artist Carolee Schneeman disagrees, however, telling The New York Times in 2004: “I see her death as part of some larger denial of the feminine. Like a huge metaphor saying, we don’t want this depth of feminine eroticism, nature, absorption, integration to happen. It’s too organic. It’s too sacral. In a way, her death also has a symbolic trajectory.”

Since many of Mendieta’s artworks were bodily performances, the ephemera that remain are but traces of her original endeavours. For an artist whose career was built on imprints, ghosts and impressions, this seems aptly fitting. Visceral yet distant, bodily yet spiritual, Mendieta’s images speak a language very distant from the insular artistic themes that so often populate gallery and museum walls. Mendieta’s works present the female body turned out, at once vulnerable and all-powerful, frail and supernatural. As her retrospective makes obvious, her artistic traces are still oozing lifeblood.

Priscilla Frank. “The Haunting Traces Of Ana Mendieta Go On View (NSFW),” on the Huffington Post website February 4, 2014 [Online] Cited 30/06/2014

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Untitled
1976
“Silueta Series, Mexico”
Colour photograph (lifetime print)
39.8 x 31 x 3.2cm (framed)
Tate: Presented by the American Patrons of Tate, courtesy of the Latin American Acquisitions Committee 2010

Mendieta formed a silueta on the beach at La Ventosa, Mexico, filling it with red tempera that was ultimately washed away by the ocean waves. The artist documented the obliteration of the figure by the tide in a sequence of 35 mm slides.

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Tree of Life
1976
Colour photograph, lifetime print
Collection Raquelín Mendieta Family Trust
© The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C.
Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris and Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Untitled
1978
“Silueta Series, Iowa”
Colour photograph (lifetime print)
25.4 x 20.3cm
The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection; courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Itiba Cahubaba (Esculturas Rupestres) [Old Mother Blood (Rupestrian Sculptures)]
1982
Black and white photograph, box mounted, exhibition copy
Collection Ignacio C. Mendieta
© The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C.
Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris and Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Untitled
1982
Graphite on leaf of a copey tree (Clusia major)
E. Righi Collection
© The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C.
Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris and Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Ana Mendieta with Untitled wood sculpture, 1984-1985
© The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C.
Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris and Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
El Laberinto de Venus (Labyrinth of Venus)
1985
Acrylic on paper
Collection Raquelín Mendieta Family Trust
© The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C.
Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris and Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Museum der Moderne Salzburg
Mönchsberg 32
5020 Salzburg
Phone: +43 662 842220

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday: 10.00am – 6.00pm
Wednesday: 10.00am – 8.00pm
Monday: closed

Museum der Moderne website

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Exhibition: ‘John Divola: As Far As I Could Get’ at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)

Exhibition dates: 6th October 2013 – 6th July 2014

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
Cone, 87CN09
1987
Black and White Polapan Print (Polaroid)
20 x 24 inches
© John Divola

FINALLY… two postings on consecutive days by conceptual artists who use photography to document their staging, performance, sculpture, body, earth-body, action art, found art, land art – WORK THAT I REALLY LIKE AND CAN REALLY CARE ABOUT.

I care about both artists work not so much because of the quality of the photography but because of their passion, insight, ideas and general human nous, their need to understand humans and the worlds we inhabit: that INTELLIGENCE necessary for understanding what is true or real, using their intuition to root out, to dig down into the human psyche.

In this posting Divola eloquently investigates the mysterious process of creation through imagination (only for the original “model” then to be destroyed); the notion of photographic authenticity and an interrogation of the human impulse to master the natural world; photography at its most deceptively naturalistic revealing hidden, dead animals; and the landscape altered by human presence and staged to serve as a theatre for creative activity through the “captured” act of running away.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Installation views of John Divola: As Far As I Could Get at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
© John Divola Photo
© 2013 Museum Associates/LACMA

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
Man in Vortex, 87CA2
1987
Black and White Polapan Print (Polaroid)
20 x 24 inches
© John Divola

In Divola’s words, the Polaroids feature “The photograph as an object has an relationship to that which it represents, something like the relationship the snake skin has to the snake that sheds it. The relationship of something dead to something living.” The Polapan prints especially lend themselves to this associate with skin. Their plasticity and their alchemical marks bear witness to a mysterious process of creation; their subject matter conjured up, and then discarded. Divola’s “studio constructions,” as he called them, were temporary structures made solely for the purpose of photographic depiction, including funnels, human and animal figures, and expressively painted backdrops. Divola’s photographs are themselves echo chambers: they replicate and reverberate light from objects that have long since vanished.

Divola’s process has important photo-conceptual precedents: Richard Long’s photographic records of lines made by walking, Jan Dibbets’ play with optical illusion through the camera’s lens, or Robert Smithson’s Yucatan Mirror Displacements. Divola’s work, though, is equally in conversation with the work of Jasper Johns. Johns, known for his paintings of numbers, flags, maps, and targets, focused on flat subjects as a means to conjoining the surface of subject matter with a painting’s flat picture plane. Divola has transmuted the achievements and medium-specificity of high modern painting into images that explore photography’s mimetic qualities and its sheer surface. These are images are about a recognisable reality we cannot access, dim echoes of a familiar world, yet one that has vanished.

“JOHN DIVOLA – Echo Chamber” on the Gallery Luisotti website [Online] Cited 01/07/2014. No longer available online

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
Rock and Water #1, 88RW1
1988
Black and White Polapan Print (Polaroid)
20 x 24 inches
© John Divola

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
Man on Hill, 89MHA1
1987-1989
Internal Dye-diffusion Print
20 x 24 inches
© John Divola

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
Moon, 88MOA1
1988
Internal Dye-diffusion print
20 x 24 inches
Courtesy of the artist
© John Divola

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
Rabbit, 87RBA1
1987
Internal Dye-diffusion print
20 x 24 inches
Courtesy of the artist
© John Divola

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
Artificial Nature (detail, 1 of 36)
2002
Gelatin Silver Print
8 x 10 in.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by the Ralph M. Parsons Fund and the Photographic Arts Council, 2013
© John Divola

Across the gallery is a series of found photographs, “Artificial Nature” (2002), made up of continuity stills (the photographs taken on film sets to make ensure uniformity from scene to scene) from mid-century films. The photographs show fabricated landscapes created in studio backlots. The images zero in on the notion of photographic truth – the idea that when you look at a photograph, what you’re seeing is an accurate representation of the world – by presenting a false natural landscape. Without outside knowledge, upon first glance, the photographs look like ordinary landscapes.

Maxwell Williams. “John Divola’s SoCal Moment,” on the Art in America website [Online] Cited 01/07/2014. No longer available online

“Artificial Nature” (2002) stands out, and as with many of Divola’s series, the bluntness of the title belies the delicacy and actual locus of interest. Composed of thirty-six “continuity stills”, these black and white prints have been repurposed from movie studio archives, framed and hung in a tight grid. Ranging in provenance from the 1930s to the 1960s, each picture documents a movie set dressed as a lush, natural landscape. A clapperboard sign planted in the foreground might identify the scene as “wooded hillside” or “the beach.” At once romantic and businesslike, the series opens a delicious gap between intention and effect. To view these pictures only through the lens of nature vs. artifice would be reductive and superficial at best. Treat them instead as a peek into the cabinetry of early pop mechanics, or evidence of a peculiar temporality where worlds should be fixed with a sign because they so routinely congeal and vanish.

Kristin Posehn. “John Divola: As Far As I Could Get,” on The Miami Rail website [Online] Cited 01/07/2014.

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
Artificial Nature (detail, 4 of 36)
2002
Gelatin Silver Print
8 x 10 in.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by the Ralph M. Parsons Fund and the Photographic Arts Council, 2013
© John Divola

With a career compromising four decades, John Divola is as distinctive for his commitment to the photographic community as for his thought-provoking work, Divola’s influence within the field of photography is widely recognised by curators, critics, scholars and photographers throughout the country; yet, his work has remained largely uncelebrated. Many of his former students have achieved illustrious careers and far more recognition, even as Divola continues to mentor and inspire both undergraduate and graduate students in contemporary practice.

As Far As I Could Get is the first over-arching presentation of Divola’s work and is a collaborative project led by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA), shown simultaneously at SBMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and the Pomona College Museum of Art (PCMA) in the fall of 2013. Though Divola’s photographic series are diverse in subject matter, this approach as one exhibition among three Southern California venues emphasises the consistent conceptual and performative threads that run through Divola’s entire body of work.

Divola was born in Los Angeles in 1949. After graduating with a BA from California State University, Northridge, he entered the MFA program at the University of California Los Angeles. There, under the tutelage of Robert Heineken, the artist began to develop his own unique photographic practice, one that merges photography, painting, and conceptual art. In addition to his own studio practice, he teaches contemporary art in the underserved California inland empire and writes on current photographic practice for a national audience.

John Divola’s photos of photographs range widely but the intellectual rigour from which they spring is unvarying. Whether testing the visual limits of photography by vandalising abandoned houses, interrogating the iconography of the divine through paint, flour, and film, or emphasising the distance between image and reality through the blurred figure of a running dog, Divola’s work is simultaneously fun and philosophical, visually appealing as well as intellectually stimulating.

LACMA On view: Four series of John Divola’s work in the Ahmanson Building, 2nd Floor

The series 20 x 24 Polaroids is Divola’s earliest work exhibited at LACMA, shot between 1987 and 1989. Hastily fabricated sculptures created out of impermanent materials attempt, on one level, to approximate actual physical objects in the world – branches, a rabbit, the moon, etc. At the same time, the roughly-hewn surfaces and ticky-tacky backdrops insist on the artificiality of what is depicted. These works express Divola’s ambivalence to the idea of photography as a descriptive medium with a one-to-one relationship to the real. Photography, in this case, is not employed in the service of documentary truth, but instead is held up as a crucial interlocutor in a creative exercise.

Artificial Nature (2002) offers a clear example of Divola’s interrogation of the human impulse to master the natural world. The work is a collection of 36 continuity stills from films made between the 1930s and the 1960s. These photographs, taken on film sets to establish consistency across multiple cuts (to ensure that the placement of objects remains constant from take to take), document fabricated landscapes contained within the artificial space of the film studio. Representing the diversity of natural topographies add weather patterns, the images also include accessories such as signage and clapperboards, highlighting the distance between ourselves and the natural world – a distance that is only accentuated by cinematic representation.

Seven Songbirds and a Rabbit (1995) is a series of details from the Keystone Mast collection of stereographic negatives housed at the California Museum of Photography, University of California Riverside. Stereoscopy, a three-dimensional imaging technology popular from the mid 19th to the early 20th century, exemplifies photography at its most deceptively naturalistic. When Divola began to examine the original glass-plate negatives in the Keystone collection, he found a wealth of detail, such as the birds and rabbit nestled amidst the foliage that gave the series its title.

The series As Far As I Could Get (1996-2010), five works of which are included in the LACMA exhibition, has Divola once again engaging with the natural environment, but this time in a more performative vein. Divola positioned his camera on a tripod, set the timer for ten seconds, and then ran straight into the established frame. At one level, this was a completely dispassionate endeavour. On another level, because the resulting pictures depict a man in a landscape, not in a controlled experimental setting, the viewer cannot suppress a frisson of physical and emotional tension. The works engage the viewer with the natural landscape – a landscape altered by human presence and staged to serve as a theatre for creative activity.

Press release from the LACMA website

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
Seven Songbirds and a Rabbit (details)
1995
Gelatin Silver Print on Linen
20 x 20 inches
© John Divola

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
As Far As I Could Get (R02F09), 10 Seconds
1996-1997
Pigment Print
60 x 40 inches
© John Divola

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
As Far As I Could Get (R02F06), 10 Seconds
1996-1997
Pigment Print
60 x 40 inches
© John Divola

“Divola is a photographer who works in distinct conceptual series that span and stretch the reaches of photography as art. For instance, at LACMA, the works include a series called “As Far As I Could Get” (1996-2010), where Divola sets a 10-second timer and sprints as far from the camera as he can. It’s performative, simple, amusing and alienating – a tiny body in full physical exertion, far off in the landscape.”

Maxwell Williams. “John Divola’s SoCal Moment,” on the Art in America website [Online] Cited 01/07/2014. No longer available online.

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
As Far As I Could Get (R02F33), 10 Seconds
1996-1997
Pigment Print
60 x 40 inches
© John Divola

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
As Far As I Could Get, 10 Seconds
1996-1997
Pigment Print
60 x 40 inches
© John Divola

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
As Far As I Could Get (R02F33), 10 Seconds
1996-1997
Pigment Print
60 x 40 inches
© John Divola

Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
5905 Wilshire Boulevard (at Fairfax Avenue)
Los Angeles, CA, 90036
Phone: 323 857 6000

Opening Hours:
Monday, Tuesday, Thursday: 11am – 6pm
Friday: 11am – 8pm
Saturday, Sunday: 10am – 7pm
Closed Wednesday

LACMA website

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Exhibition dates: Tuesday 22nd July – Saturday 26th July, 2014

Opening: Tuesday 22nd July 6-8pm

Out of the closets, onto the streets

Professor Dennis Altman

Sponsored by

Supported by

Exhibition dates: 25th January – 20th July 2014

Exhibition dates: 2nd – 19th July 2014

Extracts from the catalogue essay View from the Window

Exhibition dates: 2nd February – 20th July 2014

Exhibition overview

July 2014

Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a vintage 8″ x 10″ silver gelatin print costs $700 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my store web page.

The Songs of Eternity

The Songs of Eternity

I stood at the edge of the precipice / and peered in as William Blake would say

The timepiece of eternity / swung hands through all the hours

so how naive I’ve been / not to see its powers

Did I deceive / or was I led

What a rude awakening / throughout my head

Many fabulous things were said /

many a doubt was in silence bled …

Nothing is certainty but the change – I was must be strong to attain

Depth, spirit, integrity and the rest

This affirmation I will confirm – not in conformity but in my own special way

Not this way nor that but my own path / that one day will whisper gently in my ear

Be strong, for we have much to say / when the sea becomes the sky.

Strong in your arms I become your scent

Lying in my bed the sheets of flowers enfold me

Trusting in my heart I know

Today Yesterday Tomorrow

Exhibition dates: 14th July – 25th July 214

Free Public program

Exhibition dates: 26th March – 13th July 2014

Introductory text

Exhibition dates: 14th June – 12th July 2014

Alan Constable (Arts Project Australia, Melbourne)

Peter Atkins (Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne)

Two Takes On The Pop Object

Exhibition dates: 29th March – 6th July 2014

Exhibition dates: 6th October 2013 – 6th July 2014