Installation photograph of the exhibition Unexpected Pleasures at the National Gallery of Victoria Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan
An elegant, refined exhibition of contemporary jewellery at the National Gallery of Victoria’s newly redeveloped Contemporary Exhibitions space. The most striking and beautiful pieces are the neck ornaments, although I am a very much over some relatively unstructured jewellery made out of found objects. It really has been done to death. Trying to take photographs of jewellery in cases with reflections and extraneous light is very difficult but I hope my photographs below give you an idea of the design, installation and some specific pieces in the exhibition.
Susanne Klemm (Swiss, b. 1965) Frozen (installation view)
2007
Polyolefin
Courtesy of Anna Schwartz Gallery Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan
Lisa Walker (New Zealand, b. 1967) Necklace (installation view)
2009
Plastic, thread Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan
Beverley Price Nespresso Collier (installation view)
2012
Anodised aluminium, plastic coated wire, fine gold Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan
Gijs Bakker (Dutch, b. 1942) Shoulder piece (installation view)
1967
Anodised aluminium Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan
Unexpected Pleasures: The Art and Design of Contemporary Jewellery displays over 200 works by important Australian and international contemporary jewellers who have pushed conceptual and material boundaries within their practices. This Design Museum, London exhibition is curated by Guest Curator and Melbourne jeweller Susan Cohn, and is complemented by a selection of NGV Collection works and private loans.
Unexpected Pleasures looks at what we mean by jewellery from a number of different perspectives. Taking as its starting point the radical experiments of the Contemporary Jewellery Movement that challenged a conventional understanding of the language of personal adornment, and looking instead at the essential meanings of jewellery, the exhibition brings together important work from around the world, and looks at it from the point of view of the wearer as well as the maker. Contemporary Jewellery in this sense is at the intersection of art and design.
Dr Gerard Vaughan, Director, NGV said: “This is a remarkable and exciting exhibition, brilliantly installed in the Gallery’s newly redeveloped Contemporary Exhibitions space at NGV International.”
The exhibition explores the essential meanings of jewellery, bypassing traditional perceptions and instead tracing the radical experiments of contemporary jewellers who have challenged the conventions of jewellery design. The exhibition is curated through a number of themes: Worn Out – celebrating the experience of wearing jewellery; Linking Links – looking at the ways in which ‘meaning’ and narratives are invested and expressed through sub-themes such as Social Expressions and Creative Systems, and; A Fine Line – offering insight into the origins of contemporary jewellery today, highlighting key instigators of the Contemporary Jewellery Movement that started in the late 1970s.
Each theme within the exhibition provides an outline of current thinking and offers a unique view on how people use and interact with objects, through which design and production processes come to light. Photography in this context becomes a vital instrument for expressing the ‘wearability’ and the performative aspects of jewellery, and a selection of photographic works are also included in the exhibition.
New techniques and experimentation continue to question the relevance of preciousness, highlighting the shifting values from material worth to the personal associations that jewellery holds. The exhibition celebrates jewellery from the point of view of both the maker and the wearer. It considers the pleasures of wearing jewellery and the many meanings associated with jewellery which are at times unpredictable and, in turn, unexpected.
Press release from the NGV website
Otto Künzli (German, b. 1948) Wallpaper brooches (installation view)
1982
Wallpaper, synthetic polymer core, steel Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan
Meaning arises out of context – or the lack of it. Unlike the grids of the Bechers which promote multiple ways of seeing and construct narrative tension these images do not increase the photographic narrative. They are like the parrots, finches or scarab beetles in a display case at a natural history museum – part of a taxonomic classification system, where one out of a thousand is the most impressive beetle, the bird with the brightest plumage, where the composition is the most surprising. Multiples as collected here are fascinating but emerge from a slightly obsessive mind (which any collectors mind is!)
This photomontage of impressions, ground and movement blurs the history and memory embedded in each photograph. The assemblage of all these visions ranges far and wide but ultimately collapses time and space into one huge universal snapshot. As in advertising imagery the individual documentary-style images mean relatively little – it is the overall impression that impinges on the consciousness. If you watch MTV and stop to analyse the individual images in a pop video you soon acknowledge their vacuousness. The context of the singular image is lost. In this display the grid controls the photographs position relative to each other and the viewer – a compositional design matrix that has a symbolic function. The grid both decontextualises and recontextualises the floating signifier.
Richter obviously uses them as an aide-memoire. Some remind me of the folded photographs found in Francis Bacon’s studio; others Bacon’s portraits of blurred bodies; yet more, ethnographic mappings of Indigenous bodies or criminals cut out of newspapers. Others remind me of Surrealist experiments and the colour photographs the paintings of Gerhard Richter. Funny about that…
They may be the source material of a great artist but in this regimented form of prosaic knowledge they become like bugs caught in amber.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“I see countless landscapes, photograph barely one in 100,000, and paint barely 1 in 100 of those that I photograph,”
Gerhard Richter, 1986
“If the grids of art are about arrangement, synchronic vision, connections and knowledge, a standing back to grasp a pattern, then the grids of life are just as much about chance, disconnections among the connections, and the inability of the elements within the grid to perceive, and know, the larger patterns of which they are a part, so that it is only a ‘higher’ consciousness standing outside the grid that will be able to see it all (with or without understanding it). How you know and form a grid depends on whether you are inside or outside it. You can ‘form’ a grid both actively and passively, wittingly and unwittingly – either by simply being part of a grid or by actually assembling one… The grid becomes a potentially totalizing system with which reality (the real of experience as well as the real of the mind), another totalizing system, must endlessly play its games of elusiveness and containment, chaos and order, freedom and necessity.”
Aveek Sen. “The Grid and More,” in ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Photography,’ on the Fotomuseum Winterthur website, 7th April 2012
Gerhard Richter. Atlas
The film for the special exhibition!
The ATLAS occupies an outstanding position in Gerhard Richter’s entire work. It is both the basis of his painterly oeuvre and an independent work. As a so-called work in progress, the artist, who was born on February 9, 1932 in Dresden, has repeatedly revised and supplemented the ATLAS for more than four decades.
The ATLAS was on display in a special exhibition at the Gerhard Richter Archive of the Dresden State Art Collections.
In celebration of Gerhard Richter’s 80th birthday, the Gerhard Richter Archive of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden presents the ATLAS of the artist in the Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau. The ATLAS takes a prominent role in the oeuvre of Gerhard Richter. It is the basis of many of his paintings just as it is an artwork in its own right. The ATLAS consists of approximately 800 framed panels with more than 15,000 photographs, newspaper clippings, sketches and designs, which Richter had accumulated for work in his studio from the early 1960s onwards. In 1972, he ordered and arranged the collection on boards and presented it under the title ATLAS for the first time. Ever since then, he has continuously added new material. The conceptual character of the ATLAS offers unique insights into the mindset of the artist, into the development of some ideas for works as well as into the creational process of several of his paintings.
Gerhard Richter’s ATLAS merits a special place within his oeuvre as a whole. It not only forms the basis of his entire work as a painter but is also an autonomous artwork in its own right. Born in Dresden on 9th February 1932, Richter has been constantly revising and augmenting this “work in progress” for more than four decades.
ATLAS may be seen as an accompaniment, commentary and extension of the entire oeuvre of Gerhard Richter, for it also develops its own perspectives and poses its own questions. ATLAS is Richter’s reflection not only on his own work but also on the everyday world of images that he himself has documented photographically in their thousands. “I see countless landscapes, photograph barely one in 100,000, and paint barely 1 in 100 of those that I photograph,” Richter wrote in 1986. This photographed, yet and seemingly inexhaustible flood of images has afforded Richter a concentrated, ready accessibility of motifs for his future works. Indeed, for some of his paintings, he has been able to draw upon old motifs in his ATLAS, some of them dating back more than a decade.
The accompanying artist’s book “ATLAS” is not just intended as a means of documenting the exhibition. Gerhard Richter sees it as an alternative presentation to the exhibited panels, one that permits an additional, different, non-linear approach to the material. By 1964, Richter had collected a vast amount of pictorial source material for his painting, first keeping it in drawers and portfolios. Five years later he began to sift through this material with a critical eye, grouping the individual photographs, reproductions and sketches into different themes and pasting them onto separate panels. Richter then soon recognised the intrinsic artistic quality of these collections of source material and, in 1972, framed the panels and exhibited them at the Museum Hedendaagse Kunst in Utrecht under the title ATLAS. Meanwhile this repository of source material has grown from its original 343 panels to its present 783, with more than 8,000 individual motifs.
Press release from the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden website
Exhibition dates:Â 18th February 2012 – 22nd April 2012
Curator: Magnus af Petersens
Many thankx to the Moderna Museet for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
This spring we will be showing more than forty photographs from the period 1950-90 taken by leading artists such as Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe, Samuel Fosso, Tracey Moffatt, and Elina Brotherus. The exhibition focuses on the art of portrait photography and how the artist in his or her studio creates images that depict people not just as they actually are, but also as they would like to appear.
Moderna Museet’s collection of photography is among the foremost in Europe, it includes some of the most prominent figures in the history of photography. Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, and Robert Mapplethorpe are all big names in photography, artists whose work often revolves around concepts of identity, sexuality, and performativity. The photography studio is a place for masquerades and manipulations, a stage where various identities and roles can be tested. It therefore problematises the idea that a portrait is meant to convey some truth about the subject’s inner life. How do we distinguish a staged scene from reality? Is it even possible to make such a distinction? How free are we to form our own identity? If it’s a matter of choosing a role, what roles are available to us?
Andy Warhol’s Polaroid pictures, whose title, Ladies and Gentlemen, has also provided the name for the exhibition, are examples of his interest in – or rather his obsession with – celebrities. From industrial magnates to movie stars, from rock musicians to the “superstar” friends who hung out around the Factory, his fabled studio. In the world of pop art and popular culture, surface is everything. Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs are instead classically composed – stylised and aesthetically formed. In the controlled environment and lighting of the photo studio, he strives not for realism but for beauty. Here role-play becomes a part of the picture’s constructed character.
Moderna Museet Malmö is located in the city centre of Malmö. Ten minutes walk from the Central station, five minutes walk from Gustav Adolfs torg and Stortorget.
“I always assumed that I would simply be forgotten and disappear from view.”
Saul Leiter
The second of two postings on the colour photography of Saul Leiter. The first posting was for the exhibition Saul Leiter: New York Reflections at the Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam, October 2011 – March 2012. This exhibition is the first major retrospective of his work. At last this artist seems to be getting the recognition he deserves!
The prosaic nature of the titles of the photographs belies their complexity. They remind me of the refractions of Lee Friedlander, the colour fields of Mark Rothko, the emotional intensity of Abstract Expressionism and the impression of spontaneous, subconscious creation that is Surrealism. His photographs are the glorious spirit of the city writ large – unique, atmospheric and with great psychological use of colour and space. I can’t think of any other colour photographer of the era (or for that matter, any era) that occludes the picture plane as much as Leiter does, and to such psychological affect, as in the last two photographs in this posting. The viewer becomes like a Peeping Tom, a voyeur of the world. Leiter deserves to be one of the modern masters of colour photography. I am so glad that he hasn’t disappeared from view. The world would be a poorer place without his visualisation.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to The House of Photography at Deichtorhallen for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Leiter is a rare artist, one whose vision is so encompassing, so refined, so in touch with a certain lyrical undertone, that his best photographs occasionally seem literally to transcend the medium.”
Jane Livingston
House of Photography at Deichtorhallen will from February 3 to April 15, 2012 be highlighting the oeuvre of 88-year-old photographer and painter Saul Leiter in the world’s first major retrospective. The exhibition covers more than 400 works and brings together in marvellous combination his early black-and-white and colour photographs, fashion images, painted-over nude photographs, paintings and his sketchbooks, which have never gone on public view before. Then final chapter in the exhibition is dedicated to Saul Leiter’s most recent photographic works, which he continues to take on the streets in his neighbourhood in New York’s East Village.

 Saul Leiter was born in 1923 in Pittsburgh and it was not until a few years ago that his work received due recognition for its pioneering role in the emergence of colour photography. As early as 1946, and thus well before the representatives of New Color Photography in the 1970s (such as William Eggleston and Stephen Shore) he was one of the first to use colour photography, despite it being despised by artists of the day, for his free artistic shots.
“The older photo-aesthetic views on the hegemony of black-and-white and the dating in photo history of the artistic use of color photography to the early 1970s need to be critically revisited. With Saul Leiter’s oeuvre, the history of photography essentially has to be rewritten,” comments curator Ingo Taubhorn. 

Saul Leiter has always seen himself as both painter and photograph. In his painting and in his photographs he tends clearly to abstraction and a surface feel. Often there are large, deep black surfaces caused by shadows that take up as much as three quarters of the photographs. These are images that do not present passers-by as individuals, but as blurred colour impulses, behind panes of glass or wedges between house walls and traffic signs. He espouses a fluid transition between the abstract and the figurative in his paintings and photographs. Saul Leiter’s street photography, and in this genre his work is quite without precedent, is actually painting that has become photography, as Rolf Nobel writes in the book accompanying the exhibition.
On Saul Leiter
Saul Leiter discovered his passion for art at an early date and started painting as a teenager at the end of the 1940s. His family did not support him in his artistic endeavours as his father, a renowned Talmudic rabbi and scholar, always hoped his son Saul would one day follow him in the family tradition and become a rabbi. Leiter was self-taught, but by no means uneducated. He read and learned a lot about art, such that his knowledge and understanding constantly grew. In this way, he could be certain that his own thought and artistic efforts were duly related to the historical context, as Carrie Springer, curator at the Whitney Museum in New York, points out in the catalog.

 In 1946, shortly after he had moved to New York, Leiter got to know Richard Poussette-Dart, who introduced him to photography, a medium that Leiter found very much to his liking and which he quickly made his own. Leiter soon resolved to make use of photography not only as a means of making art but as a way of earning a living. He started taking fashion photographs and thanks to his good eye, his playful sense of humour, and his pronounced sense of elegance, swiftly emerged as an extraordinary fashion photographer.
 In the 1950s, LIFE magazine brought out the first photo-spreads of Saul Leiter’s first black-and-white images. For example, he took part in the exhibition on Always the young strangers (1953) curated by Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art. From 1958 to 1967, Leiter worked for Harper’s Bazaar. All in all he was to spend some 20 years photographing for both the classic magazines and more recent ones, such as Esquire and Harper’s: Show, Elle, British Vogue, Queen and Nova.
Saul Leiter was born in 1923 in Pittsburgh and has lived since 1946 in New York. For over 40 years, until her death in 2002 New York artist Soames Bantry was his partner. During the preparations for the Hamburg exhibition, Saul Leiter once remarked that he wished that Soames Bantry has received the same attention from the art world as he is now receiving. This spawned the idea of an homage to Soames Bantry, an exhibition in the exhibition at House of Photography that Saul Leiter has himself curated – with over 20 paintings: For Soames with Love Saul. 

In his photographs, the genres of street life, portraiture, still lifes, fashion and architectural photography meld. He comes across his themes, such as shop windows, passers-by, cars, signs and (a recurrent motif) umbrellas, in the direct vicinity of his apartment in New York, where he has now lived for almost 60 years. The lack of clear detail, the blurring of movement and the reduction in depth of field, the compensation for or deliberate avoidance of the necessary light as well as the alienation caused by photographing through windows and by reflections all blend to create a language of colour fuelled by a semi-real, semi-abstract urban space. These are the works of an as good as undiscovered modern master of colour photography of the 1940s and 1950s. The Hamburg exhibition and the major monograph by Kehrer Verlag seek to prevent this happening.
Press release from The House of Photography website
West Bengali woman embroidering the Disappearances
I have always loved the work of Nicola Loder ever since I saw her solo exhibition Child 1-175: A Nostalgia for the Present at Stop 22 Gallery in St Kilda in 1996. This exhibition is no exception. Loder is the consummate professional, her work is as imaginative and intriguing as ever and there has been a consistent thematic development of ideas within her work over a long period of time. These ideas relate to the nature of seeing and being seen, the mapping of identity and the process of its (dis)appearance.
This latest iteration of her ongoing series Tourist (described in detail, below, in the erudite essay by Stuart Koop) again involves de/reconstructions of identity through slippages, elisions, deletions, disappearances and transformations. In Tourist #5: Disappearing Project 1-41 the shroud-like effigies that result from Loder’s project, a reference reinforced by the muslin cloth lying over the bench in the gallery space (see the installation photographs below), are a repeated re-presentation of a lost or missing identity: the disappearance of the person in their own minds; photography’s “capture” of the original person; Loder’s deletion of this identity (I was there) to be substituted by Photoshop’s geometric algorithms; the West Bengali women’s reinterpretation of this disappearance; and the reappearance of a new energy in the colourful, embroidered reinterpretations. I have very much a feeling of a spiritual energy in this last embodiment – think of the link between death and the spirit (as in the Shroud of Turin).
The images have multiple narratives and are already textualised but Loder disrupts this marking, the continual reiteration of norms by weaving a lack of fixity into her objects. In her reconceptualisations of space and matter Loder redefines the significations of the body in the fold of inscription, through a process of materialisation. But this materialisation, like the image seared into the fabric of the Shroud of Turin, still somehow eludes us. This is what makes this work so tantalising…
This interweaving of texts culminates in the body inscribed on another plane existing in, as Loder herself describes it, a “de-constructed non-space somewhere between image, imagination, identity, language and being,” which, as Stuart Koop observes, “is… not a removal or deletion but a reconfiguration beyond verisimilitude, beyond our appearance to others and ourselves.” This is the navigation through a virtual space that Sherry Turkle posits in the quotation at the top of the posting, where the self is decentred and identity is fluid and multiple.
Loder’s exquisitely sensuous description of disappearance allows us to see the phenomenal word afresh. I look forward with a sense of anticipation to the next voyage of discovery the artist will take me on.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Nicola Loder, Stuart Koop and Helen Gorie Galerie for allowing me to publish the text and photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Fredric Jameson wrote that in the postmodern world, the subject is not alienated but fragmented. He explained that the notion of alienation presumes a centralized, unitary self who could become lost to himself or herself. But if, as a postmodernist sees it, the self is decentred and multiple, the concept of alienation breaks down. All that is left is an anxiety of identity… In simulation, identity can be fluid and multiple, a signifier no longer points to a thing that is signified, and understanding is less likely to proceed through analysis than by navigation through virtual space.
Sherry Turkle. Life on The Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995, p. 49.
Tourist #5: Disappearing Project 1-41Â by Nicola Loder, installation photograph at Helen Gorie Galerie Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Photographer Nicola Loder explores the way in which people see.
The purpose of photography is largely to make things visible. Inspired in part by her experiences teaching blind children photography, Loder reverses photography’s function using it instead to capture objects and experiences that aren’t visible. She embraces Photoshop but counters its typical role of improving clarity and focus, rather using it to collapse images into layers of pattern and colour.
Tourist #5: disappearing project 1-40 is a multi-faceted project that teases out notions of seeing and being seen and the role of creator as truth teller. Loder sent out a flyer inviting people who had disappeared to send her a full-length image of themselves with a written description of what happened when they disappeared. The stories and images she received range from out of body near death experiences to the mundane act of sleeping, each shedding light on what people identify as disappearing. Loder then manipulated the submitted images into highly colourful digital patterns, resonant of her earlier photographic work. She took the reworked images to India where they were embroidered onto muslin by local women in West Bengal. The result is beautiful hand-embroidered works that reflect the women’s personal interpretations of the images and incorporate their rich history, cultural patterns and iconography.
“The obliterated, atomised, reconfigured portraits ‘rematerialise’ as tapestries executed by women from a small rural village, at the margins of Indian society, who – but for NGOs dedicated to overcome disadvantage, in this case Street Survivors empowering rural women through skills development – are largely invisible to their communities, to politicians, as well as their castes.
Of course, Loder has paid these women, a means of recognising and honouring their work, a means of bringing them into view, at the margins of economy, welfare and community. Indeed, she has taken their portraits and documented them at work, and it’s a startling contrast. Our middle-class stories, anxieties and interests ending up in the careful hands of these women in colourful saris, sitting and working together, our (largely) passing concerns darned into the muslin cloth in their laps, our own saturated photographic hues indistinguishable from the bright chaos of folded cloth and pleated skirts, with their nimble fingers tracing our desires and cares in bright lurid threads.” (Stuart Koops, 2012)
For Loder India is a central tenet of the project given its multiple associations with disappearing, from the focus on meditation to the burning of bodies at the Ghats in Varanasi, the final act of disappearing. On a personal level Loder lived in Calcutta as a child and views her experience of leaving India as another act of disappearing: both her Indian Ayah (Moti) and India physically disappeared from her life. Involving the women from her Ayah’s village is Loder’s reflection on and tribute to those experiences of disappearing.
Press release from Helen Gorie Galerie website
Nicola Loder (Australian, b. 1964) Tourist #5: Disappearing Project 1-41 (no 11)
2012
Polyester thread, muslin
86 x 69cm
Nicola Loder (Australian, b. 1964) Tourist #5: Disappearing Project 1-41 (no 16)
2012
Polyester thread, muslin
86 x 69cm
Catalogue Essay by Stuart Koops
Nicola Loder has facilitated childrens’ photography projects before, on several occasions working with marginalised groups, including kids from low socio-economic and non-English speaking schools and kids from the Royal Victorian Institute for the Blind. Indeed she chose these groups with purpose, to consider the role of photography in highlighting certain communities most often occluded on the basis of an incapacity – making the invisible visible, making those who cannot see visible to us, giving those without the means of expression a language we can understand – in many ways, reversing the polarity of familiar concepts, disrupting our conventional understanding.
In teaching blind kids especially, Nicola told me she felt like she was disappearing. Not surprising, I guess, when you try to describe the camera, the lens, optics, focus, framing, composition. When your identity or your role as a photographer dissipates along with the explanatory power of these foundation terms and concepts. And practical demonstrations must at first seem frustratingly pointless.
That profound experience seems to have led Loder to use photography in reverse, as the means to decompose images; to utilise PhotoÂshop’s algorithms, not to augment or highlight certain attributes in her portraits she ultimately took of these kids, but return images to an undifferentiated field of static, the digital correlate to the original photochemical chaos, the entropy of raw silver halides, which the ‘irrefutable sun’ miraculously sorts into resemblance. In short, to unphotograph the kids somehow, commensurate with their disability and her own disappearance in the workshops.
But it’s not just Loder who has had the experience of disappearing. It’s a profound sensation shared by many and for different reasons, and Loder has collected different accounts of the experience which illustrate the further registers in which one may ‘disappear’; from spiritual attainment in transcending physical reality to out of body transcendental near-death experiences, from relief at escaping a difficult situation, to feelings of terror as a child abandoned, or worse, abducted, from the social isolation and alienation of teenagers and adults, to a freedom or liberation from social constraint and physical containment, wanting to leave behind an unhappy circumstance or just wanting to be magically, wonderfully invisible.
Practically speaking, there’s considerable interest in – and information on – how to disappear, especially in America. In 2008 artist Seth Price published How to Disappear from America, excerpted text from found sectarian tracts, paranoid rants and helpful DIY tips to assist anyone wishing to get off the grid without a trace (burn your credit cards, dump your car, hide your tracks, grow your own, etc) including great suggestions about where to go (motorcycle hangouts, punk rocks groups, new age dance studios, soup kitchens, churches, and homeless shelters).
But Loder’s more interested in the personal, individual experience of disappearing. She asked for photo-portraits to accompany people’s descriptions of disappearing, from which she has seemingly excised each subject, using Photoshop as she did before with the blind kids, leaving a whorl of digital effect in the vacant space within their outline, set in high relief against a lounge-room, or a yard, or other family members. Yet on closer inspection this is perhaps a matter of transformation, since ‘disappearing’ may be very different from ‘deletion’.
In Photoshop we are each just so much chroma, luma and shape. A touch of the magic wand and we are separated from the rest of our lives, ‘lassooed’, a godly power to designate liberated from special-effects cinema by the Knoll brothers in 1988 and given to every geek with a Mac II. Since when it’s just too easy to be deleted; two clicks and we’re in the trash.
But in Loder’s work our data is recast, colour intensified, details blurred, outlines softened, curves modified, screens overlaid and so it seems Photoshop’s myriad algorithms – set against their intended technical imperative to optimise appearances – might provide a metaphor for our disappearing, which is indeed not a removal or deletion but a reconfiguration beyond verisimilitude, beyond our appearance to others and ourselves. And while we might lose visual coherence as an image, we are inscribed upon another plane altogether, one at odds with photographic realism, and which Loder describes as a “de-constructed non-space somewhere between image, imagination, identity, language and being.” Like the shimmering dissipation of Kirk on the teleporter’s deck in Star Trek, these subjects are transported to another realm, different orders of reality merging into a new volatile blend. Perhaps it’s a higher plane too where all souls mingle and coalesce as either zeros or ones, a digital afterlife in which everything is equivalent and a new digital equanimity prevails.
Stuart Koops 2012
Nicola Loder (Australian, b. 1964) Tourist #5: Disappearing Project 1-41 (no 8)
2012
Polyester thread, muslin
86 x 69cm
Nicola Loder (Australian, b. 1964) Tourist #5: Disappearing Project 1-41 (no 17)
2012
Polyester thread, muslin
86 x 69cm
Nicola Loder (Australian, b. 1964) Tourist #5: Disappearing Project 1-41 (no 18)
2012
Polyester thread, muslin
86 x 69cm
West Bengali women embroidering the Disappearances
The photographs in this posting highlight the conceptual diversity in contemporary art practice and emphasise the talent of the practitioners working today. Just an observation: how serious are the portraits – it’s as if no’body’ is allowed to laugh or smile anymore. Perhaps this is a reflection of the times in which we live, full of malaise, anxiety and little wonder. Fear of being replaced, fear of discrimination, fear of growing up, fear of dying. Or dressed up in a women’s dress and pink hat, having the “courage” or ignorance (the opposite of fear?) to look like a stunned mullet with a blank expression on the face (deadpan photography that I really can’t stand). Or, perhaps, simple effacement: defiance as body becomes mannequin, body hidden behind a mask or completely cloaked from view. These grand photographs have the intensity, perhaps not a lightness of being.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to PICA for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Trish Morrissey (Irish, b. 1967) Hayley Coles, June 17th, 2006 2006
Courtesy of the artist and Elaine Levy Project, commissioned by Impressions Gallery
Front deals with the notion of borders, boundaries and the edge; using the family group and the beach setting as metaphors. For this work, the artist travelled to beaches in the UK and around Melbourne. There, she approached families and groups of friends who had made temporary encampments, or marked out territories and asked if she could be part of their family temporarily. Morrissey took over the role or position of a woman within that group – usually the mother figure. The artist asked to take the place of the mother figure, and to borrow her clothes. The mother figure then took over the artist’s role and photographed her family using a 4 x 5 camera (which Morrissey had already carefully set up) under the artist’s instruction. While Morrissey, a stranger on the beach, nestled in with the mother figure’s loved ones.
These highly performative photographs are shaped by chance encounters with strangers, and by what happens when physical and psychological boundaries are crossed. Ideas around the mythological creature the ‘shape shifter’ and the cuckoo are evoked. Each piece within the series is titled by the name of the woman who the artist replaced within the group.
Text from the PICA website
Bindi Cole (Australian, b. 1975) Ajay 2009
From the series Sistagirls
Courtesy of Nellie Castan Gallery
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 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 the religious right. Even today many Sistagirls are excluded from their own tribes and suffer at the hands of others.
Text from the PICA website
Maciej Dakowicz (Polish, b. 1976) Pink Hat, 23:42. Cardiff 2006
Courtesy of the artist and Third Floor Gallery
St Mary Street is one of the main streets in central Cardiff, the capital city of Wales; a city as any other in the UK. Unassuming during the day, on weekend nights it becomes the main scene of the city night life, fuelled by alcohol and emotions. Some of Cardiff’s most popular clubs and pubs are located there or in its vicinity. The very popular Chippy Lane, with its numerous chip and kebab shops, is just a stone’s throw away. Sooner or later most party-goers end up in that area, whether looking for another drink, some food or in search of another dance floor.
Everything takes place in this public arena – from drinking, fighting, kissing to crying and sleeping. Supermen chat up Playboy Bunnies, somebody lies on the pavement taking a nap, the hungry ones finish their portions of chips and the policemen stop another argument before it turns into a fight. Nobody seems to worry about tomorrow, what matters is here and now, punctuated by another week at work, until the next weekend rolls around again.
Text from the PICA website
Laura Pannack (British, b. 1985) Shay 2010
Courtesy of the artist
Represented by Lisa Pritchard Agency
What’s so special about this picture are the details. The tattoo – not just what it says but the way it mimics the Nike Swoosh on her shirt – and the cigarette, that although it is not in focus, one imagines has a large line of ash on it, as if time has stopped. This is echoed in the expression on her face, deep intensity and focused on something ahead although the car is obviously stationary. From a distance one could be mistaken that this is an American photograph from the 70s but on closer inspection – the piercing, the Nike Swoosh, the car door handles – one realises that this is contemporary and British. And yet of course that stare is timeless.
Harry Hardie on the Foto8 website [Online] Cited 22/03/2012 no longer available online
Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin Culture3/Sheet72/Frame3 2011
Courtesy of the artists & Paradise Row, London
HIJACKED III interview with PICA curator Leigh Robb
… Artists are notorious for their ability to hijack; meaning to stop and hold up, to seize control by use of force in order to divert or appropriate, a deliberate attempt to action a change of direction.
Hijacked III: Contemporary Photography from Australia the UK draws on the success and unique energy of Hijacked I (Australia and USA) and Hijacked II (Australia and Germany), to once again bring together two geographically distant but historically connected communities through a range of diverse photographic practices.
This exhibition will be simultaneously presented across two sites: PICA in Perth, Western Australia and QUAD Gallery in Derby, United Kingdom, and has been timed to coincide with the launch of the luscious, full colour and 420 page Hijacked III compendium, published by Big City Press. Utilising portraiture, digital collage, archival images, documentary snap shots, internet grabs and refined photographic tableaux, the 24 artists and over 120 works in this exhibition explore themes as diverse as curious weekend leisure pursuits, gender politics and displaced Indigenous culture.
Artists: Tony Albert, Warwick Baker, Broomberg & Chanarin, Natasha Caruana, Bindi Cole, Maciej Dakowicz, Christopher Day, Melinda Gibson, Toni Greaves, Petrina Hicks, Alin Huma, Seba Kurtis, David Manley, Tracey Moffatt, Trish Morrissey, Laura Pannack, Sarah Pickering, Zhao Renhui, Simon Roberts, Helen Sear, Justin Spiers, Luke Stephenson, Christian Thompson, Tereza Zelenkova, Michael Ziebarth.
Press release from PICA website
Sarah Pickering (British, b. 1972) Land mine 2005
Courtesy of the artist and Meessen De Clercq, Brussels
The Explosion pictures document the literal theatre of war – the detailed level of artifice used to prepare men and women for combat on the front lines. They also reveal the minutiae of packaging war as entertainment. The beauty of the pictures lies in their perverse seductiveness, and this attraction underscores the distance most of us have from real combat.
Pickering’s Explosion images, by distilling an aspect of the war that is a fiction, question the reliability of seemingly objective historical accounts, such as news reports and photographs that influence how war is communicated and remembered. By extension they question how we come to know what we know about it. We learn about war from a variety of sources, from history books, first-hand accounts, news media, and movies, all of which can get confused and merged in our minds as memory.
The dual purpose of the explosives – training and re-enacting – forms a fitting parallel to how we cope with trauma, a process of both anticipation and reconciliation.”
Simon Roberts travelled across England in a motorhome between 2007 and 2008 for this portfolio of large-format tableaux photographs of the English at leisure. We English builds on his first major body of work, Motherland (2005), with the same themes of identity, memory and belonging resonating throughout. Photographing ordinary people engaged in diverse pastimes, Roberts aims to show a populace with a profound attachment to its local environment and homeland. He explores the notion that nationhood – that what it means to be English – is to be found on the surface of contemporary life, encapsulated by banal pastimes and everyday leisure activities. The resulting images are an intentionally lyrical rendering of a pastoral England, where Roberts finds beauty in the mundane and in the exploration of the relationship between people and place, and of our connections to the landscapes around us.
Tony Albert (Australian, b. 1981) No Place 2009
Courtesy of the artist
Tony Albert is a Girramay rainforest man from the Cardwell area… The No Place series references The Wizard of Oz ‘there’s no place like home’. For No Place Tony returns to his tropical paradise home with a group of Lucho Libre wrestling masks from Mexico. His family adorn these masks and again become warriors protecting their paradise. These seemingly playful masks share much with Aboriginal and particularly rainforest culture. Body and shield designs from this area represent animal gods or spirit beings. The use of these masks brings a prescient new layer of armour for a new generation of warrior.
The colour scheme of solid blocks of red, black and yellow also speak to traditional rainforest aesthetics. There are strong elements of the sublime and the fantastical within these works. Viewing Aboriginal people in iconic north Queensland locations masked in Mexican wrestling paraphernalia carries more than a hint of the surreal and absurd.
Anon. “Tony Albert and No Place,” on the Big Art website, 2010 [Online] Cited 22/03/2012 no longer available online
Christian Thompson (Australian / Bidjara, b. 1978) Untitled #7 from the King Billy series 2010
Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi
King Billy, is an ode to his great great grandfather, King Billy of Bonnie Doon Lorne. The initial inspiration was a photograph of King Billy, standing alone wearing his ‘name plate’. Despite its colonial overtones, for Thompson, this image of the senior tribesman exudes wisdom and kindness and reminds him of his father. In much of Thompson’s work his processes are intuitive, he delves into a rich dream world and draws out fabulous images. He manifests his own mythological world. In this series his figures are clad in fabrics patterned with Indigenous motifs, mainly cheap hoodies in lurid colours; a modern / ancient skin for a magic youth culture. He has made a triptych, three views of a pink hooded figure spewing cascading pearl stands from the face; opulent, decadent, excessive and sensual.
Another image shows a crowned figure swathed in fabrics bearing the markings of various clans, perhaps indicating the domain of this regal form. In the hands a (poisoned?) chalice – the sawn off plastic bottle a warning about petrol sniffing? His self-portrait as psychedelic godhead/Carnaby Street dandy / flower child is spectacular and arresting. He is wearing a tailored suit, patterned with more Indigenous motifs and he cradles a bouquet. His skin is green and his eyes are purple flowers. What can this otherworldly creature tell us?
Thompson seems to emphasise a theme of disparity in this work; the ‘hoodie’ with the cascading pearls, the crown with the plastic bottle, the opulence with the desperate. These works are both beautiful and confronting.
Text from the PICA website
HIJACKED III interview with Christian Thompson
Petrina Hicks (Australian, b. 1972) Emily the Strange 2011
Courtesy of the artist and Stills Gallery
Petrina Hicks’ Beautiful Creatures appeals to our senses. Immediately alluring, the large-scale, hyper-real photographs, are all rendered so clearly and with such control they are reminiscent of advertisements. But with a series of little ruptures, within images and between them, Hicks disrupts our usually beguiled response to such artistry. For her, photography’s capability to both create and corrupt the process of seduction and consumption is of endless interest.
Hicks loads her images with history and associations but denies us a clear message. Along with the ambiguity, there is a visceral quality in these new works; her depiction of flesh, hair and veins stops the viewer short of being lulled into consumption. Hicks engages a playful yet confronting approach to confound our expectations. A cat, naked without fur, in the image Sphynx, contrasts a beautiful blonde with a face full of it in Comfort. In Emily the Strange the hairless creature reappears with a young girl whose piercing green eyes, skin-pink dress, and latent defiance, make her eerily akin to her pet. Alluded to, in the title of the exhibition, this duality is present in much of the work. Her subjects are not simply beautiful or simply creatures.
Text from the PICA website
HIJACKED III interview with photographer Petrina Hicks
Tereza Zelenkova (Czech, b. 1985) Cadaver 2011
Courtesy of the artist
Luke Stephenson (British, b. 1983) Diamond Sparrow #1 2009
Courtesy of the artist
Stephenson finds birds and the world surrounding them wonderfully fascinating. The birds he has photographed all belong to avid bird breeders who on the whole have been keeping birds their whole lives. It’s a hobby people generally don’t come into contact with, unless you are active within it. The artist does not keep birds but finds them beautiful in all their variations and colours, so has set out capture these birds in a way that would show them at their best.
There are many criteria to breeding a prize-winning bird, from shape and form to its pattern, and this is something Stephenson has tried to convey whilst also attempting to show some of their personalities. He set out to photograph every breed of bird within the ‘hobby’ of keeping birds but soon realised there were thousands of variations, so decided to keep this as an ongoing project; realising instalments every couple of years which people can collect and, hopefully one day, the dictionary will be complete.
Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025) New Brighton, England From the series Last Resort 1983-1985 Pigment print Edition of 5 102 x 127cm Image courtesy of the artist and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
This is a fine exhibition of the work of celebrated English photographer Martin Parr at Niagara Galleries, Richmond, albeit with one proviso. The mainly large colour prints are handsomely displayed in plain white frames within the gallery space and are taken from his well known series: Last Resort, Luxury, New British and British Food. Parr’s work is at its best when he concentrates on the volume of space within the image plane and the details that emerge from such a concentrated visualisation – whether it be the tension points within the image, assemblage of colour, incongruity of dress, messiness of childhood or philistine nature of luxury.
The best photographs have a wonderful frisson about them, a genuine love of and resonance with the things he is imaging. This frisson can be seen in all of the photographs in this posting but most notably in :
~ The incursion of the surreal red colour to left in England. New Brighton (above) and Parr’s masterful use of vertical and horizontal lines within the image. Note the verticality: of the child’s toy, the two children themselves, the pillars of the pavilion and the lighthouse holding the whole image together at right. If this lighthouse were not there the eye would fall out of the image. As it is it is contained, forcing the viewer to look closely at the absurdity of the melting ice cream and the splashes that have fallen on the ground.
~ The complexity of the photograph England. New Brighton (below) where the eye does not know what to rest upon, constantly jumping from object to object. Do you look at the women on the ground, the shoes to right, the piece of fabric to left, the screaming baby, the sunlit pink umbrella, the women in blue bikini up the ramp, the long elongated shadowed wall with peek-a-boo heads leading to the outlined figures at the vanishing point of image – the top of the ramp. The understanding of light (with the use of flash) and the construction of the image is superlative. Wow!
~ The incongruity evidenced in the photograph England, Ascot. 2003: the over tight pink sateen dress with unfortunate stain (which the eye is irrevocably drawn to), applique bow linked through to hideous flower embossed handbag which then contrasts with the seated women behind in hat and purple floral dress. In the large print in the gallery the background is more out of focus than in the small reproduction here, allowing the viewer’s eye an avenue of escape via the grass and deck chair beyond.
~ The delicious, choreographed mise-en-scène of Australia, The Melbourne Cup. 2008 – the suits, ties and glasses, the teezed hair, the alcohol – where none of the participants is looking at the camera, where only the ladies hand clutches at the back of the man’s shoulder. They look down, they look left, they look right, they look away, they never engage with each other or the viewer. The critical space in this assemblage is the distance between the man and the woman’s noses, that vitally small space of separation that is a synonym for the interactions occurring in the rest of the image. The blindness of Lux’ry, its crassness, its stain.
And so it goes. The dirt under the fingernails of the child eating a doughnut, the lurid colours of the popsicle and jacket of the kid with dribble on his face, all fantastic. There are moments of stasis, for example in the contemplative photograph Australia. South Hedland. Blackrock Tourist Park. 2011 (below) taken from Parr’s new series Australia, where Parr has photographed Australian life in three Western Australian port cities, Fremantle, Broome and Port Hedland. See the video at the bottom of the posting and listen to Parr talk about his work.
This is all fine and dandy, dressed up in polka dots and a lurid bow tie, but when the photographs become too reductive, as in the large photograph in the exhibition England. Dorset. West Bay. 1997 (see first column, fourth down) there is really not enough to hang your hat on. This feeling of over simplification, as though the photographer has said to himself “here’s something I have seen that you haven’t recognised, and I think it is important for you to recognise it” – the perceived essentialness of the object – can become a bit strained. I know that these type of images are part of the series about British or Scottish food or about objects from a specific place but do they really have this grand an importance in the scheme of things? This feeling is reinforced in the exhibition, and this is my proviso to show, when the images such as Scotland. Glasgow. Fairy cakes. 1999, England. Blackpool. 1995 (bread and butter on a plate on red check cloth) are presented at A4 size surrounded by heavy white frames. These photographs have to be large to have any chance of working at all and at the small size they fall flat.
The size of a photograph raises interesting questions about the display of contemporary photography. The giant light boxes of Jeff Wall, the huge group portraits of Thomas Struth, the huge portraits of Thomas Ruff, the huge environments of Candida Hofer and the huge panoramas of Andreas Gursky (to name but a few) are all points in case. Would they work at a smaller size? No. They rely on scale and detail, visual impact for their effect: the same with Martin Parr. What is really ‘In Focus’ is the visualisation of the artist, his ability to envisage the final print at this large size. The A4 prints in this exhibition simply do not work at that size, for these photographs.
Think of Ansel Adams’ famous Monolith, The Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, Calif., (circa 1926). Originally printed as a contact 8″ x 10″ from the negative, Adams gradually increased the size of this image till it became a huge print as tall as a man in his later life. The image works at multiple sizes, it spoke to him (and the viewer) at all these sizes: the small contact is intense and gem-like, the larger imitating the monolithic structure of the Face itself. I feel that some large contemporary photographs are quite vacuous at this large size, that there is no reason for them to be at this size. In other words it is not appropriate for the image. Conversely it would seem that artists previsualise for this size in the end print, which is fine, but that the print cannot exist, cannot breathe in the world at a smaller size. Is this a problem? Does this matter? I believe it does, especially when a photograph is displayed at a size that simply doesn’t work. I was always taught to print a photograph at an appropriate size for the image, whatever size(s) that may be (and there can be multiples), as long as it has resonance for that particular image.
As evidenced in this exhibition, if the photograph cannot “work” at the size that it is to be exhibited then it should not be displayed at all – it is a diminution not just of the artists vision but of the resonance of the photograph, in this case going from large to small. In an upcoming posting about the retrospective of the work of American photographer Fransceca Woodman, there is an installation photograph of the exhibition at The Guggenheim, New York (see above). Her vintage prints (seen in the background) – small, intense visions – have been printed at a huge scale (with her permission) and they simply do not work at this floor to ceiling height. They have lost all of their intimacy, which is one of the strengths of her photography. Again, I believe it is a diminution of the artists vision and the integrity of the photograph, this time from small to large. Artists are not always right. The same can be said of the retrospective of Cartier-Bresson that I saw at the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh in 2005. One room out of four had very small, intense vintage prints in brown hues and the other three galleries had large 20″ x 24″ grainy prints with strong contrast that really ruined any response I had to the work as evidenced by the vintage prints. They were almost reproductions, a simulacra of the real thing. I had a feeling that they weren’t even by the artist himself. The same could be said here.
To conclude I would say this is a fine exhibition of large photographs by Martin Parr that would have been even more focused without the small A4 prints. They are joyous paeans to the quirky, incongruous worlds in which we live and circulate. They evidence life itself in all its orthogonal absurdity. I love ’em!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the artist and Niagara Galleries for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Francesca Woodman installation photograph at The Guggenheim Museum, New York. Note the small, vintage prints on the far wall.
Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025) New Brighton, England From the series The Last Resort 1983-1985 Pigment print Edition of 5 102 x 127cm Image courtesy of the artist and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025) Blackrock Tourist Park, South Hedland, Australia, 2011 From the series Australia 2011 Pigment print Edition of 5 101.6 x 152.4cm Image courtesy of the artist and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025) Ascot, England, 2003 From the series Luxury 1995-2009 Traditional C-type print Edition of 5 101.6 x 152.4cm Image courtesy of the artist and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025) The Melbourne Cup, Australia, 2008 From the series Luxury 1995-2009 Pigment print Edition of 5 101.6 x 152.4cm Image courtesy of the artist and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025) Ramsgate, England, 1996 From the series New British 1994-1996 Traditional C-type print Edition of 5 105.5 x 157.5cm Image courtesy of the artist and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025) Car boot sale, Bristol, England, 1995 From the series British Food 1994-1995 Traditional C-type print Edition of 33 18 x 25.5cm Image courtesy of the artist and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
No Worries: Martin Parr – FotoFreo 2012
Magnum photographer Martin Parr was asked by FotoFreo Festival Director Bob Hewitt to photograph three Western Australian port cities, Fremantle, Broome and Port Hedland. Photographer David Dare Parker was assigned to document the project, the work titled No Worries.
Robyn Hosking (Australian, b. 1948) Dodgem Discourse
2011
Mixed media
Although not the first to promote the concept, Anita Traverso Gallery must be congratulated for exhibiting nine unrepresented emerging and mid-career artists in the AT_SALON exhibition program. This inaugural exhibition features hand-picked artists practicing over a variety of media including ceramics, textiles, drawing, painting and photography allowing them to exhibit in a professional gallery environment which bridges the gap between artist-run spaces and full gallery representation.
Out of the nine artists it was the hilarious work of Robyn Hosking that was the standout for me. While guffaw inducing one couldn’t help but be entranced by these waggish, chimerical creations and wonder at their technical brilliance. Every detail, every nuance is meticulously observed and the sculptures are beautifully made (mostly using glazed ceramics). Every observation on contemporary politics, war and beauty regimes is concisely conceptualised and executed with panache and humour. For example, in the work Dodgem Discourse (2011) Senator Bob Brown, leader of the Australian Greens, is the only diver figure not to be in his dodgem car while everyone else is bashing into each other, having got out to push his car because the solar power has failed. What you cannot see in the photograph is that the lights atop the dodgem poles flash on and off on every other car except his! While Julia Gillard’s car is emblazoned with the number 1 on its side, another gem is that the number plates say “Question Time” referring to question time in Parliament, but also a double entendre as the viewer questions the supposed wisdom of our elected officials.
HMAS Ineptitude (2011) assiduously comments on the white elephant that is the North South pipeline while the slowly revolving HMAS Obfuscation (2011) – how I love that word: the hiding of intended meaning in communication, making communication confusing, wilfully ambiguous – spins the SPIN, spelt out on the wing-like form at the top of the sculpture, on the machinations of our politicians who are mounted on rearing ceramic kangaroos with the large, gold lettered word PARLIAMENT on the base. Profound, amusing and beautifully made.
My favourite has to be The Wing Walker (2011) as an irate Julia Gillard tries to get rid of Kevin Rudd once and for all, even poking him with a stick to push him off the edge of the biplane. Balanced on a slowly revolving turntable with the world at its centre, this political merry-go round is panacea for the soul for people sick of politicians. This is brilliant political satire. The planes are all ends up and even when Julia thinks she has got rid of Kevin there he is, hanging on for dear life from the undercarriage of one of the planes. Priceless…
Reminding me of the fantasy creatures of Tom Moore, these whimsical manifestations deal with serious, life changing and challenging issues with purpose, feeling and a wicked sense of humour. I really enjoyed this art (and joy is the correct word) because it takes real world issues, melds fantasy and pointed observation and reflects it back, as the artist observes, in a funfair’s distorted mirror. Magic!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Anita for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Robyn Hosking (Australian, b. 1948) Dodgem Discourse (detail)
2011
Mixed media
Robyn Hosking (Australian, b. 1948) The Wing Walker
2011
Mixed media
Robyn Hosking (Australian, b. 1948) The Wing Walker (detail)
2011
Mixed media
Robyn Hosking Artist Statement
My work launches a humorous, freewheeling attack on our desensitisation to the white noise and emptiness surrounding us. Looking like a hybrid between art, machine and toy, my sculptures maintain a circus-like sense of amusement and curiosity for the viewer, all the while sending up societal norms and politics.
I like to celebrate the lavishly eccentric design of past eras and the sense of possibility it embodied. As hackneyed as it sounds, a Brave New World is upon us, stranger perhaps than our imaginations can conceive of. While my work casts a disparaging eye at the use of technology for inane and selfish reasons – from Botox to weaponry – it retains a playful, humorous edge. I am not interested in producing depressingly macabre images. Every work becomes a caricature or parody, as though the world is being viewed in a funfair’s distorted mirror.
Robyn Hosking (Australian, b. 1948) HMAS Ineptitude
2011
Mixed media
Robyn Hosking (Australian, b. 1948) HMAS Ineptitude (detail)
2011
Mixed media
Robyn Hosking (Australian, b. 1948) HMAS Obfuscation
2011
Mixed media
Robyn Hosking (Australian, b. 1948) HMAS Obfuscation (detail)
2011
Mixed media
Many thanx to Jason, Magali and Kent for inviting me to the gallery, and Kim for asking me to open the exhibition – it was fun!
I have known Kim since the early 1990s when we both did our Bachelor of Arts in photography at RMIT University so it was wonderful to have opened her show yesterday. Reprinted below is the speech I gave at the opening with its musings on the (in)visibility of asylum seekers arriving by boat in Australia. I hope you enjoy reading the text. Marcus.
Opening speech by Dr Marcus Bunyan, 10th March 2012
Out of Sight, Out of Mind __________________
“What I am about to say, my musings if you like, are inspired by Kim’s wonderful installation. The work before you is the basis of my inquiry. The issues involved are difficult and not to be dealt with lightly but I hope you will follow my drift, my traverse if you like.
I would like to take you on a journey – physical, metaphorical and maybe even philosophical. I want to ask questions of the world, questions about the journey we all take as human beings. These questions are prompted by my personal response to two elements of Kim’s work – water and the journey, specifically the image of asylum seekers arriving here in Australia. Imagine being an asylum seeker making that journey.
Now let us move our line of sight. What about a visual parentheses?
Asylum seekers are almost invisible from Australia living over there. They are over the horizon, out of sight and out of mind. When they journey across the sea – an open ended journey passing through a liminal space, a forgotten space – they suddenly appear as if by magic washed up on the shore, unseen despite surveillance planes, ships and other forms of tracking and reconnaissance. Think, for example, of the sudden and surprising arrival of the boat SIEV-221 when it was washed onto the rocks of Christmas Island in December 2010. The invisible made visible caught in a non-place.
This (in)visibility can be evidenced in other ways. The specks of humanity waving from the deck of the Tampa, the asylum seekers being escorted from arriving boats, seen for a few brief seconds on the evening news and then disappearing from view, almost like being sucked into the depths of the sea. Here and not here; here and there. Halfway between nothingness and being: they walk between one state and another, forward and backward, backward and forward.
Displacement
Diaspora
Disruption
The spectacle of the asylum seekers is despectacularised by and for the viewer. We remove ourselves from the emotion of these people, the presence of these images. They become ordinary as if seen from far away – glimpsed every so often as though viewing the world of another. They become Other.
The movement of the ship, the movement of the sky, the movement of vision is a constant decentering through a push / pull with something else – some other order of the world. Their journey into the unknown is a journey to submit to the ordering of another: the socially constructed system of classification: “refugee,” “asylum seeker.” The axis of visibility3 that operates in relation to subject, object, and space is not interrogated as to the representations that are constructed. This is what I am interested in here. These vital, alive human beings come from one taxonomic system (of ordered death, persecution, injustice), become visible from a brief instance, and are then fed into another taxonomic system of order – that of the detention centre.
Taking the metaphor of the horizon line further, I would argue that detention centres are like an inverted Panopticon. The Panopticon “is a type of institutional building, a prison, designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late eighteenth century. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe all inmates of an institution without them being able to tell whether or not they are being watched.”4 The guard sits in a central tower and can observe and inspect all prisoners on the outer 360 degree circle, while the prisoners cannot see the guard and can only presume he is there (an omnipresent God) and hence they behave.
Let us invert this concept.
Now the asylum seekers sit in the tower looking outwards, seeing the promised land but unable to touch it and the guards (prison officers, government, the Australian people) are all around but most are blind. They look inwards but cannot see / they look outwards and most go about their daily business. The perimeter fence of the detention centre becomes the horizon line of the sea. As in Kim’s red lined horizons, over the horizon is out of sight, out of mind _________________
What Kim’s eloquent, minimal, brooding installation does is hold our attention and ask certain questions of us as human beings. If photography is a mode of visually addressing a certain order in the world – be it horror, war, peace, human tragedy, public, private – and then destabilising it, then Kim destabilises the binary sea / sky through fragmentation and isolation. She redlines our experience and asks us to inhabit the non-space, the non-place of the gallery, allowing us to hover between boat and image, between sea and sky, between seeing and feeling. Through her work she asks us to become more aware. She asks us to see things more clearly. Above all she asks us to have faith in the compassion of human beings.
The asylum seekers have faith: faith to get into a fragile boat to venture upon the sea in search of a better life. If we had more faith in ourselves then we would have less need to rely on the images of the past, a white colonial past.
I will finish with a quote from Jeff Brown.
“Sometimes we have to surrender to the not knowing. At other times, it is helpful to adventure outward and explore new possibilities. Like swashbucklers of the spirit, we bravely seek out any experience that might inform our path. When we are afraid of something, we live it fully and see what floats to the surface in the doing. We participate in our own revealing. We have faith in the shaping of what we cannot see.”5
The seekers surrender to the not knowing and have faith in the shaping of what they cannot see. These risk takers are the strong ones that are going to make a difference in a new society by the very fact of their strength and determination to survive and live in a free society, for the very fact of the risks undertaken. This exhibition informs their path as it informs our path. Be aware of the doing, be bold and forthright in the being. Enjoy.
Exhibition dates: 16th December 2011 – 14th March 2012
Foam Curator Colette Olof on Joel Sternfeld
In mid-December Foam will present the first major retrospective exhibition in the Netherlands of the work of Joel Sternfeld (1944, New York), one of the pioneers of colour photography. Foam will be showing more than one hundred photos from ten different series in an exhibition spanning two floors. A highlight is Sternfeld’s early work from the 1970s, which has never been previously exhibited. A large selection from famed series such as American Prospects, the result of his legendary journey through the United States, and Stranger Passing will also be on show. A constant factor in his work is his native land America, its inhabitants and the traces left by people on the landscape. With a subtle feeling for irony and an exceptional feeling for colour, Sternfeld offers us an image of daily life in America over the last three decades.
New Color Photography
Along with William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, Sternfeld saw to it that colour photography became a respected artistic medium in the 1970s. Until that time, colour was used widely in advertising and amateur photography, but was rarely seen in museums and galleries. Sternfeld was influenced by the colour theory of the Bauhaus and by the work of William Eggleston, whose exhibition in MoMA in 1976 marked the official acceptance of colour photography in the art world.
Early Work
A typical ‘street photographer’ style can be recognised in Sternfeld’s early and as yet unknown work, using a 35mm camera, to record everyday life in America. This work already contained the characteristics that made his later work so successful. In 1978, Joel Sternfeld began a long journey through the United States. For eight years he crisscrossed his homeland and recorded everything he encountered with his large-format camera. His investigation into the landscape and people moving within it resulted in the American Prospects series (1979-1983). In Stranger Passing (1987-2000) Sternfeld concentrated on people. He photographed them in an unambiguous way: from the same distance and looking directly into the camera. This series is a portrait of a society, comparable to the magnum opus of August Sander in the early twentieth century. Just as in American Prospect, there is evidence of a light absurdism as well as sympathy for those being portrayed.
The American Landscape
For the On This Site series (1993-1996), Sternfeld photographed urban and rural locations which were at first glance unremarkable. In the accompanying text, however, it becomes clear that these were the locations of ‘crime passionnels’, racial violence and stabbings. The photos thus acquire an entirely different connotation. In Sweet Earth (1993-2005) Sternfeld shows alternative lifestyles and communities which have arisen in America over the past two centuries. He travelled to the homes and communities of people that do not fit into conventional lifestyles and instead pursue another way of life. In Oxbow Archive (2005-2007) Sternfeld depicts the effects of the changing seasons on the landscape and how human behaviour influences nature.”
Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive 
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