Alan Constable (Australian, b. 1956) Untitled (Hasselblad) 2008 Clay, glaze
I finally succumbed and bought myself a wonderful Alan Constable ceramic camera from the Arts Project Australia stand at the Melbourne Art Fair on Saturday (see photographs below – click on the photographs for a larger version of the image). I first saw Alan’s ceramic work at his solo exhibition called Clay Cameras at Helen Gorie Galerie in August 2009 (see photographs from the exhibition) and was instantly attracted to the tactility and beauty of the work. Months later I saw more of his cameras at Sophie Gannon Gallery in Richmond and now at the Art Fair. Third time lucky, I found a stunning medium format Hasselblad in a beautiful two tone glaze that really spoke to me in terms of it’s form and aesthetic appeal. Constable’s work has really impinged on my consciousness and the piece has a special resonance for me.
“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.” (Arts Project Australia text)
Highlights of the Art Fair were the outstanding paintings of Juan Ford at Dianne Tanzer Gallery, the mesmeric video work of Daniel Crooks at Anna Schwartz Gallery (who I think is one of the best artists in the country – see more images of his work from his Intersection exhibition), the delicately layered and outrageously beautiful collage work of Peter Madden at Ryan Renshaw Gallery, the layered transcapes of Janet Lawrence at Arc One Gallery and the cosmological paintings of Lara Merrett at Karen Woodbury Gallery. Brickbats for the most overblown presentation must go to Danie Mellor at Michael Reid for a truly over the top performance that just left one speechless.
It was a real pleasure to meet so many gallery directors and managers face to face including Gina Lee at Niagara Galleries, James Makin at James Makin Gallery, Matt Glen at Martin Browne Fine Art, Sydney, Paul Greenway from Gagprojects, Berlin and Ken Fehily from Fehily Contemporary, Melbourne.
Finally, I visited the Notfair 2010 exhibition in Richmond, a disappointing group exhibition of 30 artists selected from over 300 artists suggested by curators from around the country. As with many group exhibitions that lack thematic development the work was all over the place, in every media imaginable. The absolute standout work were the two antique stereoscopic cabinet and LED light animations of Chris Henschke from the duo Topologies. While the idea for the exhibition is to be applauded (that of presenting an exhibition of unknown or little known artists that may or may not be represented by a gallery) perhaps the next exhibition should have fewer artists to give the work chance to speak for the artist instead of just being a token gesture.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Alan Constable (Australian, b. 1956) Untitled (Hasselblad) 2008 Clay, glaze
Many thankx to David Edghill and the National Portrait Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Karen Sander (German, b. 1957) Herve Blechy 1:5 2008 3D Bodyscans of the living person (3D coordinates and colour texture), MPT (Miniaturised Projection Technology), rapid prototyping, 3D Inkjet printer, plaster material, pigment Courtesy of the artist, Berlin, and Galerie Nachst St. Stephan, Vienna, and Galerie Helga de Alvear, Madrid
Karen Sander (German, b. 1957) Herve Blechy 1:5 2008 3D Bodyscans of the living person (3D coordinates and colour texture), MPT (Miniaturised Projection Technology), rapid prototyping, 3D Inkjet printer, plaster material, pigment Courtesy of the artist, Berlin, and Galerie Nachst St. Stephan, Vienna, and Galerie Helga de Alvear, Madrid.
A good way of looking at the show as a whole is that it is about the interaction of new technologies with the traditional methods of portraiture – painting, sculpture and photography – which already have their own pre-established ‘grammars’… This show foregrounds the fundamental image-making actions which have now become proper to contemporary portraiture. No longer just the snap the of camera’s shutter or the incremental description of the painter’s brush, but now also the trundling progress of the flatbed scanner and the circular pan of the 3D scanner…
In the end this is a humanist show, about ghosts more than shells. It argues that despite all of the cold digital technology in the world portraits are still about the promise of finding the warm interior of a person via their exterior. The show’s inclusion of some three-dimensional ultrasound images of foetuses in the womb could have easily been over-the-top and obvious in its point about our intimate adoption of new imaging technologies. Until we see one intrauterine image of twins in which one foetus is caught sticking its toe into the eye of its sibling. A rivalry which, we think to ourselves, will no doubt continue for the rest of their lives.
Osang Gwon (Korean, b. 1974) Metabo 2009 C-prints, mixed media 130.0 x 80.0 x 105.0cm Courtesy of the artist and Arario Gallery, Seoul
Rineke Dijkstra (Dutch, b. 1959) Julie, Den Hagg, The Netherlands, February 29, 1994 1994 Courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery and the artist
The masterful Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra provides the emotional centre of gravity for the show. Her simple nude photographs of startled young mothers clutching their newborn babies like bags of shopping about to burst remind us again of the power of the straight photo. But her stunning two-gun video installation, The Buzzclub, LiverpoolUK / Mysteryworld, Zaandam NL, also from the mid-nineties, confirms the pre-eminence of the video portrait. Dijkstra has, presumably, momentarily pulled young off-their-faces clubbers straight from the dance floors of the two clubs and put them in front of her video camera in a bare white space off to the side. But the laser lightshows and the duff duff are obviously still going on inside their skulls. As they continue to work their jaws and jig robotically we get full voyeuristic access to them and, even though their interior individualities have temporarily gone AWOL, we nonetheless feel an extraordinary tenderness welling up for them.
Rineke Dijkstra (Dutch, b. 1959) Tecla, Amsterdam, Netherlands, May 16 1994 1994 C-print on paper, mounted on aluminium
Dijkstra decided to make these portraits after witnessing the birth of a friend’s baby. She photographed three women, one hour (Julie), one day (Tecla) and one week (Saskia) after giving birth. The raw immediacy of these images captures something of the contradictions inherent in this common and yet most singular of human experiences. The women appear at once vulnerable and invincible, traumatised and self-composed.
Tate Gallery label, May 2010
Tecla, Amsterdam, Netherlands, May 16, 1994 (1994, above) Julie, Den Haag, Netherlands, February 29 1994 (1994, above) and Saskia, Harderwijk, Netherlands, March 16 1994 (Tate P78099) are three portraits of women made shortly after they had given birth. All the women were known to the artist – one was a personal friend and the other two were friends of friends. Dijkstra photographed the women in their homes because in Holland it is more common for women to give birth at home than in a hospital. While bearing signs of their recent ordeal – the medical pants and sanitary towel which Julie wears, a trickle of blood down the inside of Tecla’s left leg, the caesarean scar on Saskia’s belly – the women appear proud and happy. They hold their new babies turned away from the camera, protectively pressed against their bodies. Dijkstra has developed a way of combining natural light with flash which results in particular quality of soft, clear light. Julie’s left hand covers her baby’s eyes to protect them from the flash.
Dijkstra was inspired to make these portraits after watching the birth of a friend’s baby. She is interested in photographing people at a time when they do not have everything under control. She uses the device of the formally posed, full-length portrait to try to reveal something of what people carry inside them – the emotional intensity concealed behind the mask of the face and the body’s pose. The photographic portrait, titled with the date and place, records a specific moment in time in which the subject was undergoing a particular experience. Dijkstra has commented:
As a photographer you enlarge or emphasise a certain moment, making it another reality. For instance the portraits I made of women after giving birth: the reality of this experience is about the whole atmosphere, which is very emotional. In the photograph, you can scrutinise all the details, which makes it a bit harsh: you can see things you normally would not pay so much attention to. (Quoted in Douglas, p. 79.)
In the same year that Dijkstra photographed the new mothers, she photographed matadors in Portugal, just after they had come out of the ring. Like the new mothers, the bull-fighters had been in emotionally charged, potentially life-threatening situations. Both mothers and matadors are captured in a state of physical and emotional catharsis which contributes to the intensity of their engagement with the camera. Dijikstra uses 4 x 5 inch film to make her portraits, demanding time and concentration on the part of both artist and subject. She is sensitive to the vulnerability which her subjects give her access to and is careful not to abuse their trust. She has explained of the new mothers:
‘It’s amazing how they trust me, and I think that afterwards they understand that these photos are about something universal and that it’s not particularly about them …the first show I had in Amsterdam with these photos a lot of women came to me and said, you know it’s really great that you make these photographs because it’s really the way it is but nobody ever shows it, and I can recognise myself in it. And the men were all like, you can’t show a woman like that.’ (Quoted in unpublished interview with Tate Modern Curator Jane Burton, on the occasion of the exhibition Cruel and Tender,in 2003.)
The portrait is an art of surface predicated on a paradox – that the rendering of someone’s features will somehow ultimately reveal more than just their outward appearance. It reminds me of the twist at the core of Tarkovsky’s film Solaris, (one of the greatest films about identity and representation) where the sceptical psychologist is finally forced to conclude, despite his rationalism, that ‘we need secrets to preserve simple human truths’. But how can the secretive preserve the truthful? It’s a question that Dijkstra, in her portraits, attempts to answer, albeit enigmatically and allusively. A withholding of information and obsession with surface makes her portraits feel recognisably human. They’re so riddled with secrets they practically breathe.
Perhaps it’s to do with the scale of the images, which are large and impossible to overlook, and her palette, which is almost as subtle and perfect as her 17th- and 18th-century precursors. If the Dutch and Flemish portrait painters looked at the world with eyes that anticipated photography, it could be said that Dijkstra continues the cycle by looking at photography through the lens of historical painting. …
Dijkstra’s portraits of three young mothers (Julia, Saskia and Tecla, all 1994) holding their new born babies to their chests with absolute, exhausted tenderness, exemplifies the restraint and deceptive simplicity of her approach towards representing people whose lives have been touched by commonplace but monumental change. Replace the sand with a floor and the sky with a hospital wall and the only thing that separates these images from the beach series is the nature of the transition that these people are experiencing. Our culture’s puritanical fear of the body, so beautifully reflected for hundreds of years in scores of paintings of bloodless, saintly motherhood, is countered in these truthful, unflinching images. One mother stands in her underwear, her sanitary pad bulgingly visible. The other two women stand naked, swollen, scarred and bloody. They all, as well they might, look faintly triumphant.
I can’t remember a show where the audience stood for so long in front of a series of images of ordinary people. The same can be said of Dijkstra’s video in which she isolated teenagers against a white background in two night-clubs (The Buzz Club in Liverpool, England and Mystery World in Zaandam, Netherlands) and videoed them dancing, mainly alone, to the camera. Each of them, of course, responded differently to the absence of those clubbing staples, dim lights and crowds – they danced self-consciously and smoked defiantly. Some flirted with the camera, others looked almost annoyed. Most of them, despite trying very hard not to be, looked very young, rather forlorn, sweet even. The audience watched, riveted. The film was long and repetitive, but mysteriously and compulsively viewable.
 Video of Rineke Dijkstra “The Buzzclub, Liverpool, UK / Mysteryworld, Zaandam, NL”, 1996-1997. Presented in exhibition at Mücsarnok, Budapest, “Coolhunters. Youth cultures between media and the market”, 23 March 2006 – 28 May 2006.
The video was recorded pulling people out of the dance floor of a nightclub and inserting it in a white cube. The behaviour on the dance floor as part of the group, here so isolated as a rare person, an indigenous moved to the museum space.
Robert Lazzarini (American, b. 1965) Skull 2000 Resin, bone, pigment 35.0 x 8.0 x 20.0cm Courtesy of the artist and Deitch Projects
Present Tense: An Imagined Grammar of Portraiture in the New Media Age is the principal exhibition in the National Portrait Gallery’s 2010 exhibition calendar. It will be displayed from 22 May to 22 August 2010. We are entering an exceptional time for portraiture and visual culture in general as the art world embraces the digital age. Traditional portraiture is responding to the application of new technologies and this imaging process is reshaping our interpretation and reading of the face.
Present Tense considers the alliance between portraiture and technology, showing how different ways of imaging in this contemporary, digital world reflect the way an individual is perceived and the various mechanisms of imaging that are used to manipulate that perception. The exhibition is comprised of works by Australian and international artists’ and includes examples of the informal and immediate images made on mobile phones, images recorded with sonograms that reveal faces that cannot be seen by the unaided eye, 2D and 3D portraits generated exclusively from binary code, as well as the more expected streaming digital works and manipulated photographs.
‘Some of the images in Present Tense are confronting and some are positively endearing’, said exhibition Curator Michael Desmond. ‘The exhibition surveys the possibilities of portraiture today, with the premise that the inhabitants’ of our digital society are pictured in a technological mirror’.
The use of digital technologies by artists is increasing, providing affordable alternatives to traditional media and offering a new tool set and the possibility of a new aesthetic. This is not to suggest that older media has been abandoned, or is associated only with conservative practice, rather that artists’ have greater choice in the materials that they use and the style that they wish to engage with. Chuck Close is one of artists’ in the exhibition who ignores the rising tide of digital imaging processes to favour old technology, creating powerful images with the archaic daguerreotype technique. Other artists’ in Present Tense include: Loretta Lux, Patrick Pound, Stelarc, Jonathon Nichols, Petrina Hicks, Ghostpatrol, Patricia Piccinini and more.
‘At one time, oil on canvas or bronze was the medium for portraits. The medium now is technology. In an inversion of one of Modernism’s classic aphorisms, digital technology allows function to follow form; the function of the portrait – to illustrate an individual’s character and physiognomy – is established by the stamp of the technology that created it’, said Michael Desmond.
Chuck Close (American, 1940-2021) Self portrait daguerreotype 2000 16.5 x 21.6cm each Courtesy of Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York
Patricia Piccinini (Australian, b. 1965) Psychogeography 1996 From the series Psycho Type C colour photograph 120.0 x 247.0cm Courtesy of the Parliament House Art Collection, Department of Parliamentary Services, Canberra
Stelarc (Australian born Cyprus, b. 1946) Stretched skin 2009 type C photograph 120.0 x 180.0cm Courtesy of the artist and Scott Livesey Galleries
Jonathan Nichols (Australian, b. 1956) Lucy 2001 Courtesy of James and Jacqui Erskine, Sydney
Petrina Hicks (Australian, b. 1972) Ghost in the Shell 2008 From the series The Descendents Courtesy of the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney
There can be no doubt that we are entering an exceptional time for portraiture as the art world embraces the digital age. Traditional portraiture is responding to the application of new technologies and this imaging process is reshaping our interpretation and reading of the face.
The use of the computer and the internet at the most basic level to source or digitalise images is pervasive. Artists are using digital technologies as alternatives to traditional media and offering the possibility of a new aesthetic. The ease of manipulating an image is a prime aspect of portraiture in the digital age and equally important is the ease of distribution. Artists seek out images on the internet and send out or ‘post’ their own, setting up their own virtual galleries using social media such as Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Tumblr.
The National Portrait Gallery exhibition Present Tense: An imagined grammar of portraiture in the digital age considers the alliance between portraiture and technology and investigates how different ways of imaging reflect how the individual is perceived as well as how the various mechanisms of imaging that are used to manipulate that perception.
Present Tense includes examples of the informal and immediate digital snapshots made with mobile phones; images recorded with sonograms that reveal faces that cannot be seen by the unaided eye; 2d and 3d portraits generated exclusively from binary code; and the more expected videos and manipulated photographs. A number of artists in the exhibition ignore the rising tide of digital imaging processes to favour old technology and create powerful images with the archaic daguerreotype technique or cruder still, old-fashioned stencil.
Video is still the dominant filmic medium. It is a difficult medium for portraiture as the narrative is the signifying factor of this temporal medium. Artist Petrina Hicks tackles this directly in her video portraits. In Ghost in the shell 2008 there are no props to convey identity in a conventional sense; the video is a slow pan of objectivity across the visage of a girl, unimpeded by good manners or fear. The camera records every detail, as her head pivots though 360 degrees and we are able to study and scrutinise the face and enjoy the sheer beauty of youth. The scanning view and the model’s perfect features conjure up the notion of a computer-aided design program that displays the object created by a 3d graphic application. Exhaled smoke emerges from the girl’s mouth in Art Nouveau curls and undulating arabesques. The combination of stilled, unemotional beauty makes the mobile, insubstantial smoke a metaphor for the soul. This is the ghost of the title but also a portrait of the inner self that inhabits all of us. Hicks makes a poetic contrast between the mapped surface and the unseen interior.
Zombies, vampires and plagues that decimate humankind to a few survivors haunt the movie and television screens of this decade. They represent the uncomfortable intimacy and connectedness of contemporary society – the six degrees of separation. While Jonathan Nichols’ portraits Lucy 2001, Nina 2002, and Smiling 2003 are hardly ghoulish the aura of uneasiness that surrounds them derives from the sense of being connected. Using social networks we can connect with fame and celebrity and we are also able to broadcast ourselves. The biggest and most varied galleries of portraits today are websites such as Facebook. These portrait galleries are more likely to display the girl next door rather than the glamorous magazine cover girls. Exhibitionism and voyeurism are implicit in posting portraits online. The aesthetic is bland and gives away little. They are image of self that are safe to broadcast. Nichols uses images taken from the internet to test the ‘look’ of such portraits. There is the hint of smiles to break the passport photo impassiveness, neutrality with a touch of erotic potential, enough personality to separate these anonymous faces from the crowd, and perhaps the comfort of looking at a face and knowing we all are connected.
Ghostpatrol & Miso are street artists who work together creating an extended portrait of a place, the inner Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy. Their portrait layers the views and experiences of inner city living as a sensual rather than documentary composite. Fitzroy 2010 is an homage to the streets of Fitzroy that Ghostpatrol & Miso have explored, stencilled, pasted and postered. Fitzroy is their platform for communication and the multiple images in this work are a response to the streets and the urban network of windows, houses and streets. Fitzroy is a self portrait, illustrating the artists’ perspective and their story in the city.
James Dodd, like Ghostpatrol & Miso, makes the streets his gallery. His posters from Occupied territory 2003 return to an established way of broadcasting and connecting, not by phone or internet, but by placing his portrait posters in the natural nodes and pathways where people travel and congregate. His faces in the streets – George W Bush, Saddam Hussein, Elizabeth II, Osama Bin Laden, John Howard – are powerful individuals who literally occupy the territory as they do the media. Advertisement, wanted poster or propaganda, Dodd employs the hand-made look of stencil to equalise differences between world leaders and as a means to counter the ubiquitous urbane and subjective portraits presented by mainstream new media with a fresh alternative.
The idea of creating accurate three dimensional portraits has always fascinated humanity. Here are portraits that are inseparable from the technology that created it. Robert Lazzarini sculpts forms with the computer. In making Skull 2000 he had little or no contact with traditional art materials. Lazzarini uses materials as close as possible to the original – in this case the skull is bone, though reconstituted with a resin binder. Anamorphic forms like this are measured against an ideal or archetype. The distorted form plays on our ability to recognise common forms such as a face or death’s head and reconstruct them in the mind.
Portraiture with its strict focus on the recognisable image of the individual face is resistant to change despite the many movements and styles in the twentieth century and adoption of new digital technologies in the last decade. And although more choices of media available to the artist who is now able to make portraits using digital photography, digital video or installation the effect of the digital age is probably less on form and more on society. The use of digital media is near ubiquitous in part of the portrait process today. Photography, once considered an objective record of a sitter, as digital photography has gained the persuasive power of painting to subtly alter features and flatter beyond candid or objective description. There is greater spread and distribution with the increasing emphasis on the photographic but this may be only temporary as other forms and hybrids come online with 2d and 3d computer applications.
There is an increasing separation from old materials that slop, mess, spill in favour of keyboards and mice and the artist’s studio is starting to look like an executive’s work space. Research is done online and sketches are made on the camera rather than drawn from life and art is accordingly mediated from the start. Medium is less important than media, and in fact the term ‘medium’ is already starting to be an art historical term. Today, technology is not merely the means of transmission, it is the medium of so much contemporary art. While technology changes, the human face is a constant, mediated by fashion, politics and technological change. It is rewarding to look at portraits in terms of the technology that made it.
Michael Desmond. “Technical Terminology,” on the National Portrait Gallery website, 1 June 2010 [Online] Cited 10/07/2022
Present Tense: An imagined grammar of portraiture in the digital age
Senior Curator Michael Desmond talks about the exhibition Present Tense held at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra from 22 May – 22 August 2010.
James Dodd (Australian, b. 1977) Posters from Occupied Territory (installation view) 2010 Courtesy of the artist, Adelaide
GhostPatrol & Miso (David Booth and Stanislava Pinchuck) (Australian) Fitzroy (installation view) 2010 Courtesy of the artists, Melbourne
Aaron Seeto Oblivion 2006 From the series Oblivion Daguerreotype
Aaron Seeto makes alternate historical positions and experiences visible through an exploration of archives, family photo albums and photographic records. In recent bodies of work Fortress and Oblivion, Seeto has utilised the daguerreotype, one of the earliest and most primitive photographic techniques, to highlight the malleability of narratives within archive records. Not only is the chemical process itself highly toxic and temperamental but the daguerreotype’s mirrored surface means the image appears as both positive and negative, depending on the angle of view. For Seeto, this mutability captures the essence of our experience of history and memory, reflecting how images degrade, how stories are formed and privileged, how knowledge and history are written. …
For his ongoing series Oblivion Seeto sourced details from images of the Cronulla riots – beachside riots around race and territory – of 2005 found on the internet. In reproducing these as daguerrotypes he seeks less to represent the incident than to look at how it was reported, understood and remembered. The instability of the virtual information found online is echoed in the photographic process.
Text from the Stills Gallery website [Online] Cited 14/02/2019
National Portrait Gallery King Edward Terrace Parkes, Canberra
Ewen Ross (Australian, b. 1957) Plain of Mars 2010 from the Warrina Portraits series
There is little more to say about this exhibition of works by Ewen Ross than the erudite catalogue essay by Geraldine Barlow enunciates (see essay below), except to say that the ‘presence’ of these works is extremely moving. It is difficult when viewing photographs of the work to explain the physical impact of actually standing in front of these works, absorbing their energy, examining their surfaces, their depths.
The larger photograph of Thenar Eminence (2010, below) is the closest one can get in the virtual world to appreciating the elemental quality of the work – the fire, the fragmentation and the soil, the contour-like mapping of the earth – as the work resembles a memory of earth, of place, re(as)sembles a signification, a meaning wholly of its own in the mind of the viewer. In the spectator the act of looking may turn into contemplation and this work does seem to have that effect = the context of looking at the work invites a contemplation on place and connection to earth.
Barlow asks. “Is this matter, or its coded representation? Ross sets up a liquid movement between such possibilities.”
Ross does indeed set up a liquid movement between matter and representation. But here I would offer a counter argument to the idea that matter and coded representation are binary opposites. As noted by Judith Butler in the excellent quotation below, matter is already meaningful, already coded and materialised. It always has a history and narrativisation embedded within it. Butler suggests the body is never a valueless matter on which inscription takes place because this hides the inscription already there.
Continuing this idea, Ross brings matter back into the fold, into the peeled away surfaces of his work. His process of materialisation offers these liquid movements not through an oppositional relationship between matter and coded representation but because a) his works are no longer anchored in an unquestionable reality and b) they have moved beyond coded representation. Ross reconceptualises both space and matter in his objects of place and invites us, the viewer, to contemplate these (e)motional environments.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Anita from Anita Traverso Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting and to Geraldine Barlow for allowing me to publish the catalogue essay, all very much appreciated. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Body and Text
“Judith Butler has done much to interrogate and upset the assumes inside / outside binary of culture and nature, and has shown that what is called matter, and therefore presumed to be extra-discursive, is already meaningful. In her book entitled Bodies That Matter (1993) she argues that matter is already materialized, that is, it always has a history, is always narrativized. Any reference to matter will always be a particular formation of materiality that has been discursively set. Matter, nature or the body is never an absolute outside but is rather a constitutive outside that generates the significance of an interiority, culture or law. It is an outside that gives the inside its meaning and is, therefore, already textualized and incorporated within the oppositional space in which signification takes place. For Butler, the suggestion that the body is the valueless matter on which inscription takes place hides the inscription already there … Bringing matter back into the fold of inscription increases the manoeuvrability of political activism as it is no longer anchored by an unquestionable reality, the fixity of which is only secured by continual iteration of the norms attributed to it. ‘I would propose’, Butler argues, ‘a return to the notion of matter as a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce effects of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter’ (Butler 1993: 9).
A useful analogy for this lack of fixity might be the reconceptualization of both space and matter within the new sciences, especially quantum mechanics, where matter, even that which we perceive as rigid or solid, is shown to be permanently in motion, and where the space which gives form to seemingly individual and autonomous objects is now understood to be a less dense area of matter itself.”
Curtis, Neal. “The Body as Outlaw: Lyotard, Kafka, and the Visible Human Project,” in Featherstone, Mike (ed.,). Body Modification. London: Sage, 2000, p. 258.
Ewen Ross (Australian, b. 1957) Thenar Eminence 2010 from the Warrina Portraits series
Warrina Portraits
This body of work presents as a suite of portraits, and continues my ambition to track the truth through creative practice. Metaphorically the palm of my left hand symbolises the natural patterns and rhythms of line found in the landscape along the Glenelg River in the Southern Wimmera, with particular reference to the property where I lived (Warrina).
This work presents as part of a portrait series derived solely from my left hand. It continues the story of my search for the truth of my genesis in reference to the property (Warrina) where I was raised. The notion of touching the landscape with an open hand in order to investigate the relationship between landscape and portraiture underpins this image.
The concept of looking down and across this country continues to drive the format of my work as does the idea of using fire to peel back the surface of the plywood which often reveals new and mysterious information to work with. Fire is part of the natural ecosystem and a valuable means of cleansing and regenerating new life and truth into this landscape. This premise remains integral to my practice.
The linear information gleaned from the palmar in theory creates a conduit for bridging the concept of portraiture and landscape. The notion of inlaying the narrative of my palm into the surface to construct an image of landscape underpins this body of work.
The significance of the left hand is relevant to the principle. It is controlled by the right brain (pattern recognition, relationship understanding), reflects the inner person, the natural self, the anima, and the ability to think laterally. It could even be considered to be part of a person’s spiritual and personal development.
It is also said the left hand is the one we are born with, the one the gods give you; the right is what we do it with.
Ironically, of the four descriptors allied with hands, earth, air, fire, and water, my hands are relative to fire.
Ewen Ross July 2010
Ewen Ross (Australian, b. 1957) Palmar Quartet 2010 from the Warrina Portraits series
Catalogue essay by Geraldine Barlow
Our palms and fingers each bear unique imprints. The intricate and entwined lines and loops of each palmscape have been generated from within the very core of what makes us individual, our encoded DNA.
“DNA molecules themselves, as physical entities, are like dewdrops. Under the right conditions they come into existence at a great rate, but no one of them has existed for long, and all will be destroyed within a few months. They are not durable like rocks. But the patterns they bear in their sequences are as durable as the hardest rocks.”1.
How should we read the patterned lines of a palm? The art of palmistry promised to decode the connections between this intimate landscape and our life to come. Palmistry is now dismissed as a quaint pseudoscience, yet the palm holds a special resonance, a very special part of the body from which the future might be foretold. Via the fingerprint, and now DNA traces, contemporary technology has developed seeking absolute recognition of each individual. Through our palms and fingers we hold and grip the world, we wield tools and touch those we care for. These interior sensate surfaces of the hand are at the centre of our embodied being in the world.
In his latest body of work Warrina Portraits, Ewen Ross has taken his own palm print as the starting point for a highly personal exploration of the relation between self and place. The furrowed banks of lines and shadows etched into ply sheets do not relay the literal five-fingered imprint of a hand, more a topography of interlaced systems, networks of lines which are at once familiar and strange to us.
In bringing these works into being, Ross has evolved a deliberate and multilayered process of making. He relays a detail of his palm print onto plywood, then channels the resulting lines into the layered timber surface. The finished surface of the ply sheet is then removed, to reveal an entirely new layer, with it’s own character and markings. Filler is applied, dries and the surface is sanded back, many times over. Sometimes further layers of stain or fine in-painting are added. This process involves a constant relay between layers of information, impression and counter-impression. At each stage there is the potential for slippage, opportunities for translation, room for the materials and the process of making to assert themselves. When Ross removes the finished surface of the plywood he welcomes chance into the artistic process, allowing for the planned and entirely unexpected to collide.
In Palmar Trilogy 2010 the mapped tracery of white lines and dark hollows sprawls over a surface of many parts. Various separate pieces of timber have been joined on this layer of the sheet; we can still see the remnants of the glue where the pieces were taped. Two systems of information are in conversation here, jostling against each other. Sometimes the incongruities suggest meaning; at other times they raise a series of questions. Looking at this work, I am reminded of a contour map superimposed onto a satellite image, or a geological survey. I see the echo of a tree branch in the patterns on a sheet of timber, overlaid with something more like an x-ray or a brain scan.
Is this matter, or its coded representation? Ross sets up a liquid movement between such possibilities.
In these works, palm print and wood grain take us into an intimate landscape. For Ross this is a place of memory. Warrina is the name of the Wimmera property where he grew up, where he ploughed the fields as a young man. Like Ross’ previous bodies of work Such is Dry Land, Red Gum Country and The Green Pick, these works speak of an intimate and formative connection with the Wimmera landscape. The artist works into and over ground that is familiar in the measure of his own life, as well as in the lives of previous generations.
Ross is sensitive to the connections of the many past generations associated with this land, stretching back beyond his own family’s history in this country. He works with the surface, but also looks behind it, tearing back the first skin, so that what was embedded in the substrate is now called into dialogue with other marks and textures, highlights and shadows.
In these works the artist’s hand is the model for a series of shimmering, chimera-like patterned imprints, echoes, reflections, templates and coursing sequences of code – allowing us to measure one life against many generations, the transitory against the eternal, our intimate landscape against the widest horizons.”
Geraldine Barlow Senior Curator/Collection Manager Monash University Museum of Art / MUMAMelbourne, May 2010
1/ Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, Penguin, London, 2006, p. 127
Ewen Ross (Australian, b. 1957) Palmar Trilogy 2010 from the Warrina Portraits series
Anita Traverso Gallery PO Box 7001, Hawthorn North 3122 Phone: 0408 534 034
Unknown photographer ‘Lifespan’ by Frederick White 2010
“And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by “nothingness” as by a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a space that might be “empty” here or there, but rather a force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there …”
Frederick Nietzsche, The Will to Power
This is sculptor Fredrick White’s second public commission in Queensland. The sculpture Lifespan (2010) is located at Blackall in Western Queensland (see Google map). The work is 8 metres long. Blackall already contains public sculptures by William Eicholtz (Towners Call – Edgar Towner V.C. Memorial (2009)) and Robert Bridgewater (Wool, Water and Wood (2008)).
Fredrick White’s sculpture has always been about flows and extrusions – the movement of energy both visible and invisible, above and below ground, inside and outside the body – an exploration of some giant vascular system of which we are all part. Sculptures sprout from manhole covers (Manwhole 1999), welling up from the hidden system of pipes and passageways that run under the earth; coffin-like boxes hover in suspended animation over the ground, anchored by pipes that disappear into the earth (Universal Attachment 2000); ectoplasmic, ethereal substances emit in Time Being No’s 1, 2 and 3 (2002). In recent work From Life To Life (2007), Drawing Water (2010) and Lifespan (2010) these connections are even more intimately linked to the life cycle and the essential place of water in the scheme of things:
“I am interested in the stuff that holds us together, the dominant paradigms of human life, our reliance on the Earth and each other. There is no separation between anything – birth / death, above/below, past / future – all are part of the life cycle of living things. The life cycle is the main motif of my practice and is a manifestation of my Piscean nature.”
White’s hyper-textural work flows from one link to another, from one connection to another. His text is a body without organs, always moving between the visible and the invisible webs that connect us. As so a rhizome, so the work of White: there is no hierarchical trunk, no beginning and no end, for White’s work is multiple, lateral, circular.
Using the language of Deleuze and Guattari (A Thousand Plateaus, 1980), White’s assemblages (for that is what they are), “are the processes by which various configurations of linked components function in an intersection with each other …” In these assemblages the process of territorialization intensifies and the assemblages, “can be thought of as constituted by an intensification of these processes around a particular site through a multiplicity of intersections of such territorializations.”1
In White’s assemblages there is no language of itself. The rhizomic nature of their being produces an unconscious connection to all things: his work fosters connections, offers multiple entryways, detaches and modifies new cultural forms. Above all White’s work offers a new map for us to cultivate the soil of living, the site of his intersections extruding form in a vibrant intensification of energy.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Wood, Aylish. “Fresh Kill: Information technologies as sites of resistance,” in Munt, Sally (ed.,). Technospaces: Inside the New Media. London: Continuum, 2001, p. 166.
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Unknown photographer ‘Lifespan’ by Frederick White 2010
Sculptor Fredrick White sitting in front of his sculpture Lifespan (2010)
Unknown photographer ‘Lifespan’ by Frederick White 2010
Lifespan is made predominantly from recycled bore casing, a material chosen to suggest the language of plumbing as a conduit for dialogue on the theme of water.
The end sections of the work, like a hydro-electric scheme, rise from the ground and start crossing over. This form whilst inspired by the braided channels of Western Queensland is also about life in general; paths that converge or momentarily cross over, then towards the end of life, like the beginning, level out to a new time for experiencing.
The vertical pipes reference the artesian bore system that provides the main reliable source of water here. In this scenario, the top of the pipes are the surface of the Earth and the pipes bore into the ground to tap into the aquifers deep below in the Great Artesian Basin.
We are here because of the Earth and water is the primal substance that is the source of all life, in fact the artesian water of Australia is in places as old as humanity itself; the perfect symbol of the past, present and future.
Fredrick White 2010
Unknown photographer ‘Lifespan’ by Frederick White 2010
Unknown photographer ‘Lifespan’ by Frederick White 2010
Bindi Cole Chocka (Australian, b. 1975) Bimbo 2009
The exhibition Sistagirls by Bind Cole at Nellie Castan Gallery contains some beautiful photographs and others that are less successful. The successful portraits the ones that depict the Sistagirls in a more natural, less stylised way – they are the more interesting photographs. The subjects seem to speak for themselves without restriction, to be not so beholden to the pose that photographer wishes them to assume and/or the pose they wish to impose on themselves.
For example, the photograph of Jemima (see below) is just stunning in it’s naturalness and beauty. The two photographs of Crystal and Patricia, where the transgendered person asked to be photographed in traditional body paint with traditional objects, are highly successful in their form, composition and in the ability of the photographs to challenge stereotypical notions of Aboriginal culture.
Other portraits are anachronistic and a little try hard, with the misplacing of persons and objects in regard to each other. The portrait of Bimbo (very top photograph) did not need the two objects placed on the beach next to the person to make it a successful photograph; the portrait of Frederina (below) had enough going on in the photograph without the seemingly gratuitous placement of traditional objects in the background. We get the point and there was really no need to labour it.
One of the problems, of course, of a ‘stylised’ portrait (Bind Cole’s word in her artist statement) is that the portrait can become a double forgery, that of the pose of the person and that of the photographer imposing the style …
” … in a sense, the posed photograph is a kind of forgery, an imposition of an artificial composition before the recording instrument. On the other hand, the photo of a posing subject captures the authenticity of the practice of posing. A version of a person’s image is still an image of that person …
We are confronted with the pose, the conscious composition of the image to be photographed, the inherent constructedness of the posed photograph. Our heretofore implicit faith in the photograph as an evidentiary document is shaken. This is not to imply an outright rejection of photography … the effect is more properly an inducement to engage the document directly, personally, and on its own terms.”1
As noted at the end of the quotation, we, the viewer, must cut through this com-pose-ition to address the document directly. We must cut away the appendages of style and view the person and the photograph on its own terms. This is why the simpler portraits in the exhibition have so much more power than the overly constructed ones – they reach for an intangible essence that Cole is seeking by dropping away style and surrendering to the ineffable, a recognition of the lightness and joy in just being.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Feiereisen, Florence and Pope, Daniel. “True Fiction and Fictional Truths: The Enigmatic in Sebald’s Use of Images in The Emigrants,” in Patt, Lise (ed.,). Searching for Sebald: Photography after W.G. Sebald. Los Angeles: The Institute of Cultural Inquiry, 2007, p. 175.
Bindi Cole Chocka (Australian, b. 1975) Buffy 2009
Bindi Cole Chocka (Australian, b. 1975) Crystal 2009
Bindi Cole Chocka (Australian, b. 1975) Frederina 2009
The term ‘Sistagirl’ is used to describe a transgender person in Tiwi Island culture. Traditionally, the term was ‘Yimpininni’. The very existence of the word provides some indication of the inclusive attitudes historically extended towards Aboriginal sexual minorities. Colonisation not only wiped out many indigenous people, it also had an impact on Aboriginal culture and understanding of sexual and gender expression. As Catholicism took hold and many traditions were lost, this term became a thing of the past. Yimpininni were once held in high regard as the nurturers within the family unit and tribe much like the Faafafine from Samoa. As the usage of the term vanished, tribes’ attitudes toward queer indigenous people began to resemble that of the western world and religious right. Even today many Sistergirls are excluded from their own tribes and suffer at the hands of others.
Within a population of around 2500, there are approximately 50 ‘Sistagirls’ living on the Tiwi Islands. This community contains a complex range of dynamics including a hierarchy (a queen Sistergirl), politics, and a significant history of pride and shame. The Sistagirls are isolated yet thriving, unexplored territory with a beauty, strength and diversity to inspire and challenge.
During August and September of 2009, I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to spend a month living with the ‘Sistagirls’ on the Tiwi Islands creating a series of highly stylised portraits of them. I loaded a barge with a four wheel drive, lights, a generator, cameras and enough film to fill a suitcase. Each day brought an emotional roller coaster from moments of elation around what was being achieved with the images to complete anxiety from the many dramas that occurred. This time has affected me in a profound way. The ‘Sistagirls’ have touched my heart. I only hope that in some way I have captured the essence of who they are and the spirit of their community. I know that they will always be a part of me and that I will be a regular visitor to Tiwi to visit the ‘Sistagirl’ community for the rest of my life.
Artist statement from the Nellie Castan website [Online] Cited 22/07/2010 no longer available online
Bindi Cole Chocka (Australian, b. 1975) Jemima 2009
Bindi Cole Chocka (Australian, b. 1975) Patricia 2009
There are some great photographs below, including one of my favourite photographs by an Australian artist of all time – At Newport (1952) by Max Dupain. There is something about this photograph that to me, makes it even more iconic than Sunbaker (1934). Perhaps it is the modernist rendering of space, the tensional placement of the figures: the curve of the boys back, the slope of the young man’s torso and attendant shadow on the wall, the girl at bottom right caught looking at the poised figure about to dive in – coupled with the receding pylons floating into the distance and the dark cliff face at right.
To have the previsualisation in the mind’s eye, that understanding of what was about to happen placed before the camera and then to capture it takes a truly great photographer. Being a naturalised Australian this is, to me, is one of the most iconic of all Australian photographs. What a beautiful photograph.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Miranda Young and the Art Gallery of South Australia for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Candid moments of Australian life from the 1950s, 60s and 70s, captured by some of Australia’s most renowned photographers, go on display in Candid Camera – a fascinating new photographic exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia.
Curated by Julie Robinson, the Art Gallery’s Senior Curator of Prints, Drawings & Photographs, Candid Camera: Australian Photography 1950s-1970s includes more than 80 documentary images by photographers including Max Dupain, David Moore, Jeff Carter, Robert McFarlane, Mervyn Bishop, Rennie Ellis, Carol Jerrems and Roger Scott.
These photographers have been great observers, capturing memorable images in Australia and abroad of people at leisure or engaged in everyday activities – images which appear unposed, spontaneous, or with their subjects captured unaware.
The photographs on display encompass social rituals, beach culture, protest movements, Indigenous issues, migration, youth subcultures, work, leisure, music, people, travel and humour. They range from images of the famous – such as Prime Ministers, boxing champion Lionel Rose, musicians Bon Scott and Daddy Cool – to those of ordinary people.
Says Julie Robinson, “The photographs in Candid Camera epitomise life during the 50s, 60s and 70s and resonate with spontaneity, humour and humanity.”
Robinson explains, “Even the anonymous people seem familiar to us as a result of these photographs, like David Moore’s European migrants arriving in Sydney, Rennie Ellis’s Cosmetics salesgirl, Toorak Rd, the two youths exiting ghost train ride in Roger Scott’s photograph or the unidentified women waiting at an Adelaide bus stop, in Robert McFarlane’s photograph.”
Many of these photographs have only been recently acquired by the Art Gallery of South Australia and this exhibition will provide the first opportunity for audiences to view them displayed together.
Press release from the Art Gallery of South Australia website [Online] Cited 20/10/2010 no longer available online
Max Dupain (Australia, 1911-1992) At Newport 1952, Sydney Gelatin silver photograph Image: 31.5 x 34.0cm D’Auvergne Boxall Bequest Fund 2009 Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
Anne Zahalka (Australian, b. 1957) National Portrait Gallery #1 1992/2010
A patchy exhibition by Anne Zahalka at Arc One Gallery, Melbourne. I can’t help feeling that we have seen this before, and done better, in the work of Candida Hofer and Thomas Struth.
Although the square photographs are taken by a medium format film camera (a Hasselblad I suspect) and printed as C-type prints (hence the lush colours) because the camera was handheld this means that, in some of the photographs, little is actually in focus. While this may add to the immediacy of the images, like a quick snapshot as Zahalka prowls the galleries, it detracts from the clarity of the previsualisation of the artist whilst also detracting from the visual depth of field that the subject matter needed.
On the positive side there are some lovely spatial relationships between the figures in the paintings and the busts on the pedestals: in one particular photograph (National Portrait Gallery #2, 2010) there is an almost symbiotic relationship between the man in the painting at left, the bust of the man on the pedestal and the man at the very left in the right hand painting. This arrangement is like a triple portrait of the same person. A similar understanding of the spatial relationships within the image frame can be seen in National Portrait Gallery #1 (see photograph above), one of the more successful photographs in the series, with it’s wonderful red flocked wallpaper and gilt frames.
On the right hand side of the gallery there are numerous vertical colour photographs taken on a 35mm camera that feature the back of people looking at a work of art (see National Gallery of Australia, Masters of Paris #5, 2010). These are basic photographs that seek to conceptualise the act of looking at art as a tourist industry to no great affect or insight into the condition being examined.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Angela Connor and Arc One Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photograph for a larger version of the image.
Anne Zahalka (Australian, b. 1957) National Portrait Gallery #5 2010
Anne Zahalka (Australian, b. 1957) National Portrait Gallery #3 1992/2010
Anne Zahalka (Australian, b. 1957) Prado Museum, Madrid 1992/2010
Arc One Gallery 45 Flinders Lane Melbourne, 3000 Phone: +61 3 9650 0589
Many thankx to Mark Hislop and the Monash Gallery of Art for allowing me to reproduce the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photos for a larger version of the image.
Photographer unknown Matron Grace Wilson doing a round, Mudros 1915 Gelatin silver print Australian War Memorial
NOTHING could have prepared Grace Wilson for her first day at Turks Head Point on the drought-stricken island of Lemnos, where she was to run a field hospital for injured soldiers being shipped out from Gallipoli, 65km away.
“Things are just too awful for words… we found only a bare piece of ground with wounded men in pain, still in filthy, bloodstained clothes, lying amid stones and thistles,” she wrote in her diary.
Matron Wilson and her 40 nurses had arrived in the island’s Mudros harbour aboard the Dunluce Castle on August 2, 1915, to discover to their dismay there was no sign of the supply ship Ascot, which had been due there a week earlier with the tents, medical equipment, crates of tinned food and other essentials.
In a bizarre display of military pomp, a regimental piper led the women – wearing heavy, ankle-length dresses and petticoats – on a long march in searing summer heat to what would be their home for the most harrowing five months of their lives…”
Norman Bradford Stuckey (Australian, 1914-1983) The Pimple, Shaggy Ridge, New Guinea 1943 Toned silver gelatin print Australian War Memorial
The Battle of the Shaggy Ridge was part of the Markham and Ramu Valley – Finisterre Range campaign, consisting of a number of actions fought by Australian and Japanese troops in Papua New Guinea in World War II. Following the Allied capture of Lae and Nadzab, the Australian 9th Division had been committed to a quick follow up action on the Huon Peninsula in an effort to cut off the withdrawing Japanese. Once the situation on the Huon Peninsula stabilised in late 1943, the 7th Division had pushed into the Markham and Ramu Valleys towards the Finisterre Range with a view to pushing north towards the coast around Bogadjim, where they would meet up with Allied forces advancing around the coast from the Huon Peninsula, before advancing towards Madang.
A series of minor engagements followed in the foothills of the Finisterre Range before the Australians came up against strong resistance centred around the Kankiryo Saddle and Shaggy Ridge, which consisted of several steep features, dotted with heavily defended rocky outcrops. After a preliminary assault on a forward position dubbed The Pimple in late December 1943, the Australians renewed their assault in mid-January 1944 and over the course of a fortnight eventually captured the Japanese positions on Shaggy Ridge and the Kankiryo Saddle, after launching a brigade-sized attack up three avenues of advance. In the aftermath, the Australians pursued the Japanese to the coast and subsequently took Madang, linking up with US and Australian forces.
Barbara Joan Isaacson (Australian, 1923-2017) Journalist Iris Dexter standing under the starboard engine of a Douglas C-47 aircraft February-March 1943 Gelatin silver print 2008 Image courtesy of the AMW
Joan Barbara Isaacson was born into a dynamic and family. Her mother, Lynka Isaacson (also known as Caroline Isaacson), was the first female journalist to be employed by a metropolitan newspaper in Australia, and was a strong role model for her daughter. After the war Isaacson’s mother and brother set up the Southern Cross publishing business.
Isaacson attended the Melbourne Technical College, where she studied photography. When she was 18 years old she joined the Australian Women’s Army Service (AWAS). Working in the Army Public Relations section, she travelled the east coast taking documentary and recruitment propaganda photographs and meeting press journalists and photographers.
In 1943 Isaacson married Richard L. Beck, a graphic designer and photographer. During the period from 1946-1948 they set up their own photographic business in Melbourne, specialising in child portraiture. Isaacson took over the business c.1950 when her husband went back to working as a graphic designer, and continued to manage the studio until the birth of her third baby. After her departure from the photography business Isaacson was involved in a variety of other ventures and gave up her photography.
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) The dozing soldier (Tired Soldier in Train North Queensland) 1943 Gelatin silver print Australian War Memorial
Photographs are an inseparable part of our memory of the First and Second World Wars. They help us remember events which many of us have no direct experience.
Monash Gallery of Art’s new special exhibition Icon & archive: photography and the World Wars draws on the Australian War Memorial’s vast photographic collection to consider the relationship of photography and war. This extraordinary exhibition opens to the public on Friday 16 April.
Direct from the Australian War Memorial, Icon & archive demonstrates the powerful role played by photography in the efforts of Australians to make sense of and remember the terrible events of the First and the Second World Wars.
“Visitors to MGA will see many ‘iconic’ photographs that have become lodged in our national memory,” said MGA Director and curator of the exhibition, Dr Shaune Lakin.
“Icon & archive also presents previously unseen photographs to showcase the experiences of both service personnel and the families left behind during the wars. These photographs provide contemporary audiences with a remarkable picture of the effects of the World Wars on private, family and social life in Australia. In doing this, the exhibition will help members of our community better understand that experience and its relevance to contemporary Australia,” said Dr Lakin.
Icon & archive will play a significant role in the City of Monash’s Anzac Day commemorations, in this the 95th anniversary of the landing at Gallipoli. Icon & archive includes some of the most historically significant pictures from Gallipoli, as well as other important sites involving Australians during both the First and the Second World Wars.”
Press release from the Monash Gallery of Art website [Online] Cited 09/07/2022. No longer available online
Algemon Darge (Australian, 1878-1941) Private George Beamish Swanton with his wife Nellie and their young baby Joan 1915 Gelatin silver print Australian War Memorial
Studio portrait of 1159 Private (Pte) George Beamish Swanton, Australian 24th Battalion, of Werribee, Victoria, with his wife Nellie and young baby, Joan Helen. Pte Swanton enlisted on 28 April 1915 and embarked on board HMAT Euripides on 8 May 1915. He died of wounds on 28 July 1916 at Pozieres, France. Pte Swanton had two brothers who were also killed in action; 222 Pte John (Jack) Swanton, 2nd Battalion, enlisted on 27 August 1914 and was killed in action at Gallipoli Peninsula on 2 May 1915; and 2760 Pte Henry Swanton, 29th Battalion, enlisted on 5 March 1916 and was killed in action at Pozieres, France on 2 November 1916.
This is one of a series of photographs taken by the Darge Photographic Company which had the concession to take photographs at the Broadmeadows and Seymour army camps during the First World War. In the 1930’s, the Australian War Memorial purchased the original glass negatives from Algernon Darge, along with the photographers’ notebooks. The notebooks contain brief details, usually a surname or unit name, for each negative. The names are transcribed as they appear in the notebooks.
Norman Bradford Stuckey (Australian, 1914-1983) Engineers exhausted after destroying obstacles, Tarakan 1945 Gelatin silver print Australian War Memorial
The Battle of Tarakan was the first stage in the Borneo campaign of 1945. It began with an amphibious landing by Allied forces on 1 May, code-named Operation Oboe One; the Allied ground forces were drawn mainly from the Australian 26th Brigade, but included a small element of Netherlands East Indies personnel. The main objective of the landing was capture of the island’s airfield. While the battle ended with success for the Allied forces over the Japanese defenders, this victory is generally regarded as having not justified its costs. The airfield was so heavily damaged that it ultimately could not be repaired in time to make it operational for other phases of the Allied campaign in Borneo.
Asti Studios Studio portrait of an unidentified First World War soldier in Australian service uniform, including greatcoat and slouch hat c. 1914-1918 New South Wales, Sydney Toned silver gelatin print Australian War Memorial
Monash Gallery of Art 860 Ferntree Gully Road, Wheelers Hill Victoria 3150 Australia Phone: + 61 3 8544 0500
A huge gallery crawl on Wednesday last saw me take in exhibitions at Nellie Castan Gallery (Malleus Melficarum: strong sculptural work by James and Eleanor Avery; Broken Canon: vibrant mixed media collages by Marc Freeman); Anita Traverso Gallery (Peristereonas: sculptures, photographs and mixed media by Barry Thompson); John Buckley Gallery (Perpetua by Emma can Leest, beautiful cut paper works; rather mundane paintings by Christian Lock); Karen Woodbury Gallery (Every breath you take: wonderful galaxy-like paintings, perhaps as seen by the Hubble telescope, with a geometric / cellular base by Lara Merrett); The Centre for Contemporary Photography (Event horizon: a group exhibition that “engages the horizon as a means to establish a physical locality with relation to the Earth’s surface and more broadly to the universe of which it is a miniscule component.” An exhibition that left me rather cold); and ACCA (Towards an elegant solution by Peter Cripps, again a singularly unemotional engagement with the precise, contained work: interesting for how the work explores spatial environments but in an abstract, intellectual way).
The stand out work from this mammoth day was Jill Orr: Vision at Jenny Port Gallery. Simply put, it was the strongest, most direct, most emotionally powerful work that I saw all day.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Amelia Douglas and Jenny Port Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in this posting.
Jill Orr (Australian, b. 1952) Megan 2009
Jill Orr’s new participatory performances are photographs of children from Avoca Primary School painted with white clay from the area, displayed in pairs. The children are photographed once with eyes open, once with eyes closed. Orr asked the children to imagine their future life when they had their eyes closed. The key to the work is a group photograph of the ghostly children outside the primary school where everyone is isolated from each other (see photograph below).
“White faces loom up out of a dark ground, described by Orr as a void. On the surface these portraits are finely crafted, the skin of masked face becomes one with the digital file to create a facial landscape. The materiality of the face and the photographic file are exposed for the viewer. Titling the series ‘vision’ Orr ventures into a ‘haptic visuality’ where “vision itself can be tactile, as though one were touching a film with one’s eyes.”
From the catalogue essay by Professor Anne Marsh, Monash University
In the performance, the ritual of being photographed, Orr instructs the children who are placed under the surveillance of the camera. “We are confronted with the pose, the conscious composition of the image to be photographed, the inherent constructedness of the posed photograph.”1 The child assumes the pose by which they wish to be memorialised. The gaze (of the camera, of the viewer) is returned / or not in this spectacle.
Something happens when we look at these photographs. The text of the photographs becomes intertextual, producing as Barthes understands a “plurality of meanings and signifying / interpretive gestures that escape the reduction of knowledge to fixed, monological re-presentations, or presences.”2 This is because, as Foucault observes, texts “are caught up in a system of references to … other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network … Its unity is variable and relative.”3
The photographs invite us to share not only the mapping of the surface of the skin and the mapping of place (the history of white people living on the land in country Australia) and identity but the sharing of inner light, the light of the imaginary as well – and in this observation the images become unstable, open to reinterpretation. The distance between viewer and subject is transcended through an innate understanding of inner and outer light. The photographs seduce, meaning, literally, to be led astray.
As American photographer Minor White, who photographed in meditation hoping for a revelation in spirit though connection between person > subject > camera > negative > print, observes in one of his Three Canons
When the image mirrors the man And the man mirrors the subject Something might take over 4
Here the power of the photographer acting in isolation, the modernist tenet of authorship, is overthrown. In it’s place, “White supposes a relationship with subject that is a two way street: by granting the world some role in its own representation we create a photograph that is not so much a product solely of individual actions as it is the result of a negotiation in which the world and all its subjects might participate.”5 The autobiography of a soul born in the age of mechanical reproduction. This is the power of these photographs for something intangible within the viewer does take over. I found myself looking at the photographs again and again for small nuances, the detail of hairs on the head, the imagining of what the person was thinking about with their eyes closed: their future, their fears, their hopes, the ‘active imagination as a means to visualise sustainable futures’ (Orr, 2010).
These photographs seem to lengthen or protract time through this haptic touching of inner light. As Pablo Helguera observes in his excellent essay How To Understand the Light on a Landscape that examines different types of light (including experiental light, somber light, home light, ghost light, the light of the deathbed, protective light, artificial light, working light, Sunday light, used light, narrated light, the last light of day, hotel light, transparent light, after light, the light of the truly blind and the light of adolescence but not, strangely, inner light)
“Experience is triggered by light, but not exclusively by the visible light of the electro-magnetic spectrum. What the human eye is incapable to perceive is absorbed by other sensory parts of the body, which contribute to the perception that light causes an effect that goes beyond the merely visual …
There is the LIGHT OF ADOLESCENCE, a blinding light that is similar to the one we feel when we are asleep facing the sun and we feel its warmth but don’t see it directly. Sometimes it marks the unplace, perhaps the commonality of all places or perhaps, for those who are pessimists, the unplaceness of every location …
We may choose to openly embrace the darkness of light, and thus let ourselves through the great gates of placehood, where we can finally accept the unexplainable concreteness of our moments for what they are.”6
In the imagination of the darkness that lies behind these children’s closed eyes is the commonality of all places, a shared humanity of memory, of dreams. These photographs testify to our presence and ask us to decide how we feel about our life, our place and the relation to that (un)placeness where we must all, eventually, return.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Feiereisen, Florence and Pope, Daniel. “True Fiction and Fictional Truths: The Enigmatic in Sebald’s Use of Images in The Emigrants” in Patt, Lise (ed.,). Searching for Sebald: Photography after W.G. Sebald. Los Angeles: The Institute of Cultural Inquiry, 2007, p. 175.
2/ Barthes, Roland. “From Work to Text” in Image, Music, Text. trans. S. Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977 quoted in Thumlert, Kurt. Intervisuality, Visual Culture, and Education. [Online] Cited 10/08/2006. www.forkbeds.com/visual-pedagogy.htm (link no longer active)
3/ Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage, 1973 quoted in Thumlert, Kurt. Intervisuality, Visual Culture, and Education. [Online] Cited 10/08/2006. www.forkbeds.com/visual-pedagogy.htm (link no longer active)
4/ White, Minor. Mirrors, Messages and Manifestations. Aperture, 1969
5/ Leo, Vince. Review of Mirrors, Messages and Manifestations on the Amazon website [Online] Cited 26/06/2010
6/ Helguera, Pablo. “How to Understand the Light on a Landscape,” in Patt, Lise (ed.,). Searching for Sebald: Photography after W.G. Sebald. Los Angeles: The Institute of Cultural Inquiry, 2007, pp. 110-119
Jill Orr (Australian, b. 1952) Jacinta 2009
Jill Orr (Australian, b. 1952) Avoca Primary School 2009
Jill Orr’s work centres on issues of the psycho-social and environmental where she draws on land and identities. Grappling with the balance and discord that exists between the human spirit, art and nature, Orr has, since the 1970s, delighted, shocked and moved audiences through her performance installations.
This current body of work involved children from the Avoca Primary School as active participants in Orr’s performance for the camera. The result is a series of high contrast black and white photographic portraits, which are shown as diptychs portraying the different states of seeing both outwardly and inwardly. One of each pair frames the child looking directly at the camera. The gaze meets the viewer. Who is looking at whom? The second captures the child whose eyes are closed. An inner world is intimated, but not accessible to the viewer.
In terms of the ‘gaze’, these works turn to the child as conveyer of the imaginary engaging both within and without. “I have found that creative acts require the visionary sensibilities of both the inner and outer world to operate simultaneously, consciously and unconsciously as dual aspects of the one action. In this instance the action is that of active imagination as a means to visualise sustainable futures.” (Jill Orr, 2010). The portraits also reflect the present relationship to place that is etched into the faces of youth as already kissed by the harsh Australian sun.
Avoca is one of many townships that has been socially, economically and environmentally affected by drought and climate change. The portraits are created against this background.
Text from the Jenny Port Gallery website [Online] Cited 26/06/2010 no longer available online
Jill Orr (Australian, b. 1952) Vision installation photographs at Jenny Port Gallery June 2010 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Unknown photographer Drawing Water by Frederick White 2010
Australian sculptor Fredrick White, has been commissioned to create two public sculptures in Western Queensland. The first has been completed at Thargomindah (see Google map), a town located 1014 km west of Brisbane and was commissioned by artplusplace and Thargomindah Regional Council. In a small town of 250 people this is the town’s first public sculpture.
“The town’s one claim to fame is its artesian bore. The bore, which lies 2 km out of town on the Noccundra road, was drilled in 1891 and by 1893, having drilled to a depth of 795 metres, the water came to the surface. It was then that the town successfully attempted a unique experiment. The pressure of the bore water was used drive a generator which supplied the town’s electricity. Enthusiasts have described this as Australia’s first hydro-electricity scheme. The system operated until 1951. Today the bore still provides the town’s water supply. The water reaches the surface at 84°C.”1
The work Drawing Water (2010) addresses the need for water in such an arid location and the numerous bores that are sunk around the town to draw water to the surface. The earth is reflected in the sky and the sky in the earth in the central polished stainless steel disks (as friend Perry observes, like a tunnel connecting earth and heaven). A forest of bore pipes surround the central platform. Of the work Fred says:
“Drawing Water speaks of our connection to the Earth, specifically the Great Artesian Basin and the bores that provide the only continuous source of water throughout much of inland Australia. The 52 galvanised poles symbolise not only our year round need for water but are also as a reminder of how extensively taped the artesian water is.”
The next commission is at Blackall in Western Queensland (see Google map). A drawing of the work Lifespan (2010), which is 8 metres long, is at the bottom of the posting. Blackall already contains public sculptures by William Eicholtz (Towners Call – Edgar Towner V.C. Memorial (2009)) and Robert Bridgewater (Wool, Water and Wood (2008)).
Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive 
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