Exhibition: ‘Brancusi, Rosso, Man Ray – Framing Sculpture’ at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

Exhibition dates: 8th February – 11th May, 2014

Curators: Francesco Stocchi and Peter van der Coelen

Installation photograph of the exhibition 'Brancusi, Rosso, Man Ray – Framing Sculpture' at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 2014

Installation photograph of the exhibition Brancusi, Rosso, Man Ray – Framing Sculpture
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 2014
Foto / Photo: Gert-Jan de Rooij, Amsterdam

What a magnificent exhibition. We all know Brancusi and Man Ray but it is the work of Medardo Rosso that surprises and delights here, an artist I admit I knew nothing about before this posting. What a revelation, both his sculptures and photographs. I must try and do a whole posting just on his photographs!

The two self-portraits of the artists in the studio are telling… Rosso, pensive, brooding, with a stack of chopped wood surrounding him, face wreathed in shadow, head titled slightly down and hands stuffed in pockets; Brancusi, seated on a plinth, legs crossed, swarthy arms folded replete with large hands, staring directly at the camera and surrounded by his work. Rosso in malleable darkness, Brancusi in towering light. The photographs reflect their respective personalities and inform the art which represents them.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the image for a larger version of the art.

Alessio delli Castelli considers the Italian sculptor’s photographic legacy.

“Medardo Rosso was born in Turin in 1858 and died in Milan 1928. However, he spent most of his life away from Italy, in Paris especially, from where he travelled to all the major European capitals. It was in Paris that, towards the close of the 19th century, he emerged alongside Auguste Rodin as a serious contender for the title of father of modern sculpture. Yet it was Rodin who achieved universal recognition. In spite of Rosso’s influence on sculptors such as Constantin Brancusi – whose Sleeping Muse (1909-10), with its radically abstracted features of a female head, is strongly reminiscent of Rosso’s Madame X (1896) – he was long held hostage by a provincial criticism which saw his practice confined, chronologically, thematically and formally, to the 19th century. Although it is true that Rosso only created two original sculptural works in the 20th century, to claim that he was no longer a practicing artist would be to overlook the variations he made of his sculptures, and the copies from antiquity. More importantly, it would be to dismiss his photographic work of that period merely as images of sculptures that already existed. This would mean ignoring the fact that his photography showed all the signs of rigorous artistic investigation – and was not, as critics in the 20th century often declared, indicative of either an accident that injured his leg and made him weak or a more general creative block.

It is only in recent years that Rosso’s photographs have acquired the status of art objects in and of themselves…”

Installation photographs of the exhibition Brancusi, Rosso, Man Ray – Framing Sculpture
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 2014
Foto / Photos: Gert-Jan de Rooij, Amsterdam

In mythology, Leda is a girl who is seduced by Zeus who turns her into a swan. In the Brancusi sculpture, Leda (foreground, above) is that metamorphosis. The swan is an animal whose body is often associated with a hybrid identity between male and female. His neck is close to a phallic shape while her body has feminine attributes. The bird and woman, male and female mingle in the same sculptural movement. This transfiguration is reflected in the complex forms of sculpture, asymmetrical contours, the offset top shape intersecting with the lower form, giving rise to multiple passages and perceptions.

In 1932, Brancusi sculpture adds a large polished steel disc which suggests the presence of water and Leda is reflected in the mirror which changes its shape. Modifications qu’accentuera still provide a motor and a ball bearing arranged in the circular plate. Within the workshop, the body of Leda is in a state of constant metamorphosis. The shimmer of light on the surface of polished bronze sculpture blends with its reflection in the steel circle and absorbs its environment. Leda becomes a pure luminous presence. Weight and lightness, balance and imbalance are the same event within a continuous time duration in the sculptures of Constantin Brancusi.

Translated from the French on the Constantin Brancusi web page of the Centre Pompidou website [Online] Cited 05/05/2014. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Installation photograph of the exhibition Brancusi, Rosso, Man Ray – Framing Sculpture
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 2014
Foto / Photo: Gert-Jan de Rooij, Amsterdam

In the spring of 2014 Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen brings together works from all over the world by three artists who were decisive for the development of modern art. This is the first exhibition to combine sculptures by Brancusi, Rosso and Man Ray together with their photographs, affording a unique insight into the artists’ working methods.

Masterpieces that have rarely or never been seen in the Netherlands will be lent by important museums such as the Centre Pompidou, MoMA and Tate. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen will show more than 40 sculptures and hundred photographs by Constantin Brancusi (Hobita 1876 – Paris 1957), Medardo Rosso (Turin 1858 – Milan 1928) and Man Ray (Philadelphia 1890 – Paris 1976). The exhibition will feature sculptures such as Brancusi’s Princesse X (1915-1916) and Rosso’s Ecce Puer (1906) alongside works by Man Ray from the museum’s collection, including the sculpture L’Énigme d’Isidore Ducasse (1920 / 1971). Presenting the sculptures together with the artists’ photographs of their sculptures reveals their often-surprising perspectives on their own works.

Framing Sculpture

Brancusi, Rosso and Man Ray employed photography not so much as a means of recording their work. The photographs show how they interpreted their sculptures and how they wanted them to be seen by others. Brancusi is considered the father of modern sculpture with his highly simplified sculptures of people and animals. In his photographs he experimented with light and reflection so that his sculptures absorb their environment and appear to come to life. Rosso is the artist who introduced impressionism in sculpture. The indistinct contours of his apparently quickly modelled figures in plaster and wax make them appear to fuse with their surroundings. Rosso cut up the soft-focus photographs of his work, made them into collages and reworked them with ink so that the sculptures appear even flatter and more contourless. Man Ray is best known as a photographer but was also a painter and sculptor. His choice of materials was unconventional: he combined existing objects to create new works, comparable to the ‘readymades’ of his friend Marcel Duchamp. Man Ray’s experimental use of photography led him to make photographs without the use of a camera. He made these so-called ‘rayographs’ by placing objects directly on photographic paper and exposing them briefly to light, leaving behind a ghostly impression.

Press release from the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976)
L’Énigme d’Isidore Ducasse (The Riddle of Isidore Ducasse)
1920 (1971)
Iron, textile, rope, cardboard
45.4 x 60 x 24cm
Collection Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
© Man Ray Trust / ADAGP, c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2013.

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976)
L’Énigme d’Isidore Ducasse (The Riddle of Isidore Ducasse)
1920 (1975)
Gelatin silver print
47.5 x 59cm
Courtesy Fondazione Marconi, Milan
© Man Ray Trust / ADAGP, c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2013

Medardo Rosso (Italian, 1858-1928)
Enfant à la Bouchée de pain (Child in the soup kitchen)
1897 (1892-1893)
Wax over plaster
46 x 49 x 37cm
Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome

Medardo Rosso (Italian, 1858-1928)
Enfant à la Bouchée de pain in the Cézanne room at the Salon d’Automne
1904
Felatin silver print
12.3 x 15.5cm
Private collection

The Italian sculptor Medardo Rosso (1858-1928) is the oldest and most traditional of the three artists. He stands in the Impressionist tradition of French sculptor August Rodin. Rosso has made many portraits of children, which he adored. They were one of his favourite subjects. Rosso kept working on the same pieces throughout his career, making changes to their titles, shapes or materials. Sometimes he combined materials or poured another substance over the original. A work of plaster then became a wax sculpture. Other times he made two different versions of the same image, using different materials…

Rosso… used his camera to present his art in the way he preferred. By taking pictures and displaying them next to the actual sculptures he could show the audience what was, in his opinion, the right angle to look at his piece. Of course, everyone is free to walk around the sculpture, but the photographs show what the artist had in mind when he created it. Many times he would cut up his pictures, tear away corners or colour them with ink. This way he even reinterpreted his interpretations. Together the sculptures, photographs and collages give a complete picture of the work by Medardo Rosso. Never before have there been so many of his works on display in the Netherlands.

Text by Evita Bookelmann on the Kunstpedia website [Online] Cited 05/05/2014. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Constantin Brancusi (Romanian, 1876-1957)
Tête d’enfant endormi (Head of a Sleeping Child)
1906-1907
Plaster, coloured dark brown
10.8 x 13.6 x 15.2cm
Private collection

A previously unknown sculpture by Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957) can be seen in Brancusi, Rosso, Man Ray – Framing Sculpture, the exhibition opening at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen on Saturday. The museum is especially delighted by the arrival of Tête d’enfant endormie (Head of a Sleeping Child, 1906-07). This early sculpture is an important key work in Brancusi’s development of his famous ‘ovoid’.

The exhibition, which features more than forty sculptures by Constantin Brancusi, Medardo Rosso and Man Ray and a hundred vintage photographs taken by them, runs in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen for three months from 8 February. The plaster sculpture was purchased at a sale by a French private collector. Leading expert Friedrich Teja Bach has recently confirmed that it is a version of the ‘head of a sleeping child’. Curators Francesco Stocchi and Peter van der Coelen remarked, “It is unusual for a previously unknown work by Brancusi to turn up at a sale. Works by Brancusi are rare and almost all of them are in prominent museum collections like those of the Centre Pompidou, the Tate and MoMA.”

The Road to Abstraction

The child’s head with natural features is in the tradition of the contemporary Impressionists Auguste Rodin and Medardo Rosso. At the same time, this early work is a starting point in Brancusi’s journey towards a more abstract style, which culminated in an entirely smooth oval form, devoid of any facial features. This process can also be seen in the photographs taken by Brancusi himself, in which he pictured Tête d’enfant endormie in his studio with Le Nouveau-Ne II, a work he made ten years later. The exhibition in Rotterdam examines the artistic practices and development of Brancusi, Rosso and Man Ray by showing the sculptures alongside the photographs they took of them.

Painted Bronze

Brancusi’s oeuvre contains a number of recurring subjects, which the artist executed in a variety of materials, including plaster, marble and bronze. This allowed Brancusi to explore various effects, such as the reflection of light. The signed Tête d’enfant endormie is an early version in the series. It is unusual that Brancusi painted the plaster, making it look like bronze.

Press release from the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen

Constantin Brancusi (Romanian, 1876-1957)
La Muse endormie (Sleeping muse)
1910
Bronze
16.1 x 27.7 x 19.3cm
Arthur Jerome Eddy Memorial Collection. The Art Institute of Chicago
© 2013 c/o Pictoright Amsterdam

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976)
Noire et blanche (Black and white)
1926
Gelatin silver print
18 x 23.5cm
© Man Ray Trust / ADAGP – PICTORIGHT / Telimage – 2013

Man Ray’s Noire et blanche is a photograph exemplary of Surrealist art. The striking faces of the pale model and the dark mask have a doubling effect. This repetition is a reminder that a photograph is a double of what it represents, namely, a sign or an index of reality. In Surrealism the act of doubling indicates that we are all divided subjects made up of the conscious and unconscious. In reading this photograph as typical of primitivism, the woman can be understood as European civilisation and the mask as “primitive” Africa. The image draws a parallel between the two faces presenting them as related to each another. The title “black and white” is a word play because the order is reversed when reading the image left to right. The artist also printed a negative version of this image. The photograph was first published in Vogue. It is a portrait of Kiki of Montparnasse, Man Ray’s lover and model at the time the photograph was taken.

Text from the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam website [Online] Cited 05/05/2014. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Medardo Rosso (Italian, 1858-1928)
Enfant malade (Ziek kind)
c. 1909
Aristotype
7.9 x 6.3cm
Private collection

Medardo Rosso (Italian, 1858-1928)
Enfant malade (Ziek kind)
1895 (1903-1904)
Bronze
25.5 x 14.5 x 16.5cm
Collectie Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Milan

Medardo Rosso (Italian, 1858-1928)
Madame X
1896
Wax
300mm
Venice, Ca’ Pesaro

Con una coerenza assoluta, insensibile alle polemiche e alle controversie che la sua arte suscitava, e più ancora al disprezzo oltraggioso di cui lo faceva segno la cultura ufficiale, il Rosso deduceva alle estreme conseguenze le premesse fondamentali della sua visione. Davanti ai nostri occhi una sgomentante superficie d’ombra da cui emerge la lama trepida e vibrante di un essere vivente, che contesta al nulla misterioso che lo incalza e in cui in un soffio si dissolverà, il suo diritto alla luce, cioè all’essenza vitale. Le premesse letterarie, le suggestioni filosofiche o vagamente esoteriche sono totalmente assorbite nella suprema qualità stilistica: lo scultore modula ed assottiglia la materia al limite del possibile, sull’orlo dell’astrazione assoluta, ricercandone spasmodicamente ogni vibrazione musicale; l’equazione scultura-luce-pittura poteva dirsi verificata.”

“With absolute consistency, insensitive to the controversies and disputes that his art aroused, and even more outrageous contempt of which he did hold official culture, Rosso deduced to the extreme the basic premises of his vision. Before our eyes a daunting shadow surface which shows the blade trembling and vibrating of a living being, which criticises the mysterious anything that presses him and when you blow in a dissolver, its right in the light, that all ‘vital’ essence. The premises literary, philosophical or vaguely esoteric suggestions are totally absorbed in the supreme quality of style: the sculptor modulation and tapering the matter to the extent possible, the absolute brink of abstraction, seeking spasmodically every musical vibration; the equation of light-sculpture-painting could be said to be verified.

Terrible translation by Google translate of an anonymous text = but so beautiful at the same time!

Constantin Brancusi (Romanian, 1876-1957)
Princesse X (Princess X)
c. 1930
Gelatin silver print
29.7 x 23.7cm
Collection Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Paris
© 2013 c/o Pictoright Amsterdam
Photo: Bertrand Prévost

Constantin Brancusi (Romanian, 1876-1957)
Princesse X (Princess X)
1915-1916
Bronze
61.7 x 40.5 x 22.2cm
Collection Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Paris
© 2013 c/o Pictoright Amsterdam
Photo: Adam Rzepka

Princess X is a sculptured rendering of the French princess, Marie Bonaparte, by the artist Constantin Brâncusi. Princess Bonaparte was the great-grand niece of the emperor Napoleon Bonaparte…

According to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Brâncusi had been “at the center of two of modern arts most notorious scandals.” One of the scandals being that the Salon des Indépendants, in Paris where Brâncusi practiced his trade, discontinued the display of Princess X from its establishment for its apparent obscene content, as some thought it looked like a penis. After having his art taken off display, Brâncusi was shocked. He declared the incident a misunderstanding. He had created Princess X not as a sculpture depicting a more masculine subject, but the object of feminine desire and vanity.

After much accusation, Brâncuși insisted the sculpture had been his rendition of Marie Bonaparte. Brâncusi discussed the comparison of the bronze figure to the princess. He described his detest of Marie, as a “vain woman.” He claimed she went as far as placing a hand mirror on the table at mealtimes, so she could gaze upon herself. The sculpture’s C-like form reveals a woman looking over and gazing down, as if looking into an object. The large anchors of the sculpture resemble the “beautiful bust” which she possessed. Without knowing the context, to a viewer Princess X could look like an erect penis. Brâncusi allows the princess to gaze upon herself in an eternal loop locked in the bronze sculpture.

The style of Brâncusi is one that “was largely fuelled by myths, folklore, and primitive culture,” this combined with the modern materials and tools Brâncuși used to sculpt, “formed a unique contrast… resulting in a distinctive kind of modernity and timelessness.” The technique Brâncusi was known for and used on Princess X could be mistaken for a penis, but in fact it was the simple form of a woman.

“What my art is aiming at, is above all realism; pursue the inner hidden reality, the very essence of objects in their own intrinsic fundamental nature: this is my only preoccupation.” – Constantine Brâncusi.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Constantin Brancusi (Romanian, 1876-1957)
View of the Studio with Maïastra
1917
Gelatin silver print
23.9 x 17.8cm
Collection Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Paris
© 2013 c/o Pictoright Amsterdam

According to Constantin Brancusi’s own testimony, his preoccupation with the image of the bird as a plastic form began as early as 1910. With the theme of the Maiastra (1910-18), he initiated a series of about thirty sculptures of birds.

The word maïastra means “master” or “chief” in Brancusi’s native Romanian, but the title refers specifically to a magically beneficent, dazzlingly plumed bird in Romanian folklore. Brancusi’s mystical inclinations and his deeply rooted interest in peasant superstition make the motif an apt one. The golden plumage of the Maiastra is expressed in the reflective surface of the bronze; the bird’s restorative song seems to issue from within the monumental puffed chest, through the arched neck, out of the open beak. The heraldic, geometric aspect of the figure contrasts with details such as the inconsistent size of the eyes, the distortion of the beak aperture, and the cocking of the head slightly to one side. The elevation of the bird on a saw-tooth base lends it the illusion of perching. The subtle tapering of form, the relationship of curved to hard-edge surfaces, and the changes of axis tune the sculpture so finely that the slightest alteration from version to version reflects a crucial decision in Brancusi’s development of the theme.

Seven other versions of Maiastra have been identified and located: three are marble and four bronze…

Extract from Lucy Flint. “Constantin Brancusi: Maiastra,” on the Guggenheim website [Online] Cited 17/03/2021. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Constantin Brancusi (Romanian, 1876-1957)
Self-portrait in the studio
c. 1934
Gelatin silver print
39.7 x 29.7cm
Collection Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Paris
© 2013 c/o Pictoright Amsterdam
Photo: Philippe Migeat

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976)
Rayographie (Rayograph)
1925
Photogram
50 x 40.5cm
Collection Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
© Man Ray Trust / ADAGP, c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2013

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976)
Le Violon d’Ingres (Ingres’s Violin or The Hobby)
1924
Gelatine silver print
17.2 x 22.4cm
Private collection Turin
© Man Ray Trust / ADAGP, c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2013

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976)
Self-portrait with the lamp
1934
Gelatin silver print
10. 8 x 8cm
© Man Ray Trust / ADAGP, c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2013

Medardo Rosso (Italian, 1858-1928)
Self-portrait in the studio
c. 1906
Modern contact print of the original glass negative
12.7 x 13cm
Private collection

Brancusi, Rosso, Man Ray – Framing Sculpture exhibition poster

Constantin Brancusi
La Muse endormie
1910
Arthur Jerome Eddy Memorial Collection
The Art Institute of Chicago
© 2013 c/o Pictoright Amsterdam /

Medardo Rosso
Enfant malade
c. 1909
Private collection

Man Ray
Noire et blanche
1926
© Man Ray Trust / ADAGP – PICTORIGHT / Telimage – 2013

Design: Thonik.

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
Museumpark 18-20
3015 CX Rotterdam
The Netherlands
Phone: +31 (0)10 44.19.400

Opening hours:
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Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen website

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Review: ‘The Paper’ by Rosemary Laing at Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 5th April 2014 – 3rd May, 2014

Rosemary Laing (Australian, 1959-2024) 'The Paper, Monday' 2013 from the exhibition 'The Paper' by Rosemary Laing at Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, April - May, 2014

Rosemary Laing (Australian, 1959-2024)
The Paper, Monday
2013
C Type photograph
110 x 214cm
Courtesy the artist and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne

I always look forward to new work by the incomparable Rosemary Laing with great anticipation. I have never been disappointed. This magnificent group of five images is no exception, one of the photographic highlights so far this year in Melbourne.

These large, Type-C analogue landscape format photographs feature decomposing newspapers literally (being words) carpeting the forest floor. These site-specific interventions feature no digital manipulation and, as the erudite catalogue essay by George Alexander observes below, investigate the replacement of our daily newspaper by online information bytes, “the graphic graphic newsprint breaking down like typographic stew,” the “transmigration of matter from one form to another,” “a meditation on time,” recycling, deforestation, information overload. These concepts build on earlier fragments from work by the artist (such as groundspeed, 2001) into something transformational, transnational and, even, otherworldly.

These entropic panoramas, which hang mysteriously between words and worlds, are indeed meditations on time and space. As Annette Hughes states,

“Laing’s pictorial space, like that of cinema, is generally art-directed, constructed, rehearsed, performed and shot in physical time and space, and though it could easily be Photoshopped these days, that’s not the point. The art object is only the end product of the making of these images. Being able to see the many human hours devoted to their execution is also a way of building duration back into the photograph.”1

Here’s my tuppence worth on Laing’s new work.

This suite of photographs has a panoramic immersiveness. The viewer feels as though time has stood still when looking at these photographs, where the newspapers are analogous to snow upon the ground, imparting something of a dream-like existence to the images. There is a talismanic quality to the images, like a standing stone circle that is believed to have magic powers and cause good things to happen. And they are full of symbols, such as arrows, to mark the way (see The Paper, Wednesday, earlier, 2013, below).

These are not unquiet images, suspended midway between fantasy and reality, but (un)quiet images – a subtle but pivotal difference. They possess the quietness of the forest but also the isolation and loneliness. They are based on a harmonic instability, like a minor chord at the beginning of a Beethoven symphony, which is then eventually resolved in the major. These images are the journey of that resolution. The words, the flesh of the textural body, has been pulped: that immersive instability of the fecund body laying down in the soil of mother earth.

The viewer is disorientated. We have no idea where we are, the paper (the word and world) creating for the body this foggy, dream-like atmosphere. As in all of Laing’s work, there is an inquiring instability here, one that seeks the resolution of stability through the love of the human body and of our existence. I stand still before them.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Hughes, Annette. “ABIGAIL SOLOMON-GODEAU Rosemary Laing,” Review on The Newtown Review of Books website 3th July 2012 [Online] Cited 27th April 2014. No longer available online

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

Rosemary Laing (Australian, 1959-2024) 'The Paper, Tuesday' 2013 from the exhibition 'The Paper' by Rosemary Laing at Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, April - May, 2014

Rosemary Laing (Australian, 1959-2024)
The Paper, Tuesday
2013
C Type photograph
110 x 209cm
Courtesy the artist and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne

Rosemary Laing (Australian, 1959-2024)
The Paper, Wednesday, earlier
2013
C Type photograph
110 x 203cm
Courtesy the artist and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne

Rosemary Laing

The Paper

A forest is carpeted with truckloads of newspapers. A cacophony of printed voices layers the soil horizon of the ground. The former surface litter of loose and partly decayed organic matter is overlaid with pulped tree product. The 21st century cultural carpet of current events and mercenary babble is already time-lined by weathering, which is fast-tracking the decomposition of the worded pages. The graphic of newsprint is breaking down like typographic stew, falling apart like old lacework, dissolving like paint – it’s losing its imprint as fallen branches and leaves scatter over it. It seems to expect that over time it will disappear beneath what comes after, what fresh coats some future century will lay over it.

For this undertaking, Rosemary Laing located her activity among the woodlands of Bundanon, a casuarina forest peppered with eucalyptus and Burrawang. Located in the Shoalhaven of southern New South Wales, the site was originally the land of the Wodi Wodi people of the Yuin nation. Layered with subsequent occupations since the early 19th century, in 1993 the properties were gifted by Arthur and Yvonne Boyd and became the Bundanon Trust – a place for artists of all disciplines to work and a place for all people to draw inspiration.

Two unique opportunities here were made possible by the Trust to Rosemary Laing. The opportunity to develop and consider her actions unhindered by a time frame; together with access to the Bundanon collection of the influential gnarled ceramics that Arthur’s father Merric Boyd (1888-1959) made with their blue and green underglazes and swaying lines of treescapes on clay.

As it happened, while making this work, the place was inundated with floodwaters. Natural disaster has often enclosed her work, as in swanfires (2002-2004), with its incinerated sheds and buildings, following bushfires in the Sussex Inlet area – also part of the Shoalhaven. Destruction sculpts and re-sculpts the world, and Laing joins the material cycle, the perpetual transmigration of matter from one form to another. A “terrible beauty”, as a friend remarked.

This series is called The Paper, for the daily newspaper – our long time companion and a primary fix for information of the world – that is swiftly being superseded by the new material technologies of our times. If the overwhelming flood of data and culture and spin is hitting us with some 500,000 discrete bits of information at any time, then we may be faced with inabilities to absorb that Total Noise. We probably missed the 25 bits that were important. The latest innovations of the Infosphere replay confections of overstimulation and boredom, sugar-hits of overload followed by emotional numbness.

Yet the covering of the ground that we saw in 2001 with groundspeed – not far geographically from this site – isn’t the same as here in the series The Paper. The point of loungeroom carpets in groundspeed was as an index of the latecomer’s sense of belonging. A kind of comfort zone for the non-indigenous, bridging old world and new. The carpeting this time – as she writes in her notes – “seems to be composting the present as a past about to happen; taking a once-upon- a-time not-that-long-ago standard as the ground-amendment-of- tomorrow already.” It is, among other things, a meditation on time.

Every new presentation of Laing’s work is also a running commentary on her previous corpus of work. The Paper explores themes touched upon in – Natural Disasters (1988), groundspeed (2001) with its patterned loungeroom carpets out in the ‘wild’ and in 2006, weather with its cyclone of newspaper shreds – while constantly replenishing what had remained surplus to that work. And this compost of earlier fragments, that are dismembered and scattered and gathered again, expands her material formation on this site.

From top to bottom the planet is being transfigured. Something essential is changing now and forever. The “global” has become everyone’s “local”. The human race is going through things it has never experienced before – as we are forced to join the caravan of this moment in time.

Hellish or heavenly? Promised Land or Wasteland? Take your pick. You do get the sense – with the dramatic shiny green of the ancient Burrrawang palms scattered about – of human impermanence against the bedrock temporal dimensions of the primitive Gondawan rainforest margins. As anyone who has spent time slogging through genuine bushland, and sensing the century’s long pulse of trees: we’ve fallen out of tune with the eternal present of the animal world, we’ve fallen into Time with its past and future, the chopped-up time of daily newspapers.

Find tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones … wrote Shakespeare (As You Like It, 2.1). The quote recalls the medieval idea of the Book of Nature that we are here to read, whose infinite pages unfold enormous landscapes: some see good, some evil, some both, some neither. Laing’s art takes root in a fissure, in that crack in the covenant between word and world, and the historical moment is right: we are in the age of the “trans-book” with the rise of the Kindle and iGoogle, and with it the end of newspapers, the demise of print and the retrenchment of journalists.

So as you enter the space, walk around the room with the suite of images – named for the days of the week – there’s an entropic feel with their grubby matte and muted beauty. Underfoot, things fall apart, the riggings of the page disintegrate into tissue, print naturalises into leaf mould, and words on paper are composted back into wood pulp and waste slurry. Accordingly, to make the images this time around, she put her dalliances with digital cameras and print-output machines aside, in favour of analogue, for all the lovely limitations and imperfections of light on cellulose triacetate, and the physical shadings of Laing’s printer in the darkroom.

The curving earth is a body, and these lacework landscapes show off the marks of ageing. The woods are a damp chamber, with a thick carpet of newspapers, and many doors open to the wind and faraway light. The images enclose you in brushwork of soft jade while the soggy colours of disintegration make time tangible.

There’s nothing said about the world here (recycling, deforestation, information overload) that you couldn’t find more reliably elsewhere. It’s rather Laing’s process of invention, through the hinterlands of her material imagination, that communicates her unexpected vision, tells her story of an imagined afterwards of along-the-way. There’s a stand of trees in these pictures still growing inside the shellacking and composting of our times.

George Alexander
September 2013

Published with permission

Rosemary Laing (Australian, 1959-2024)
The Paper, Wednesday
2013
C Type photograph
110 x 197.5cm
Courtesy the artist and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne

Rosemary Laing (Australian, 1959-2024)
The Paper, Thursday
2013
C Type photograph
110 x 207cm
Courtesy the artist and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne

Rosemary Laing (Australian, 1959-2024)
The Paper, Friday
2013
C Type photograph
110 x 196.3cm
Courtesy the artist and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne

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Level 4
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Melbourne VIC 3000
Australia
Phone: 61 3 9654 6000

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Sat 1pm – 4pm

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Exhibition: ‘Paris as Muse: Photography, 1840s-1930s’ at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Exhibition dates: 28th January – 4th May, 2014

Curator: Jeff L. Rosenheim

Eugène Atget (French, Libourne 1857–1927 Paris) 'Quai d'Anjou, 6h du matin' 1924 from the exhibition 'Paris as Muse: Photography, 1840s-1930s' at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, January - May, 2014

Eugène Atget (French, Libourne 1857-1927 Paris)
Quai d’Anjou, 6h du matin
1924
Albumen silver print from glass negative
17.7 x 22.8cm (6 15/16 x 8 15/16 in.)
Gilman Collection, Purchase, William Talbott Hillman Foundation Gift, 2005

If there is one city in the world in which I would really like to live, it would be Paris. I have loved her since first going there as a teenager and she has never foresaken that love: always romantic, beautiful, intriguing, Paris is my kind of city. As a flâneur there is much to observe, much to digest and assimilate through periods of reflection.

Where do you start? Steichen, Stieglitz, Fox Talbot, Marville, Brassaï, Jeanloup Sieff, Cartier-Bresson, Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, Nadar, any photographer of note but above all Atget – all acquiescent to her charms. Strange as it may seem, it is not that the photographer takes photos of Paris (as though possessing an object of desire), but that the city allows these revelations to occur as a kind of benediction, a kind of divine blessing. Am I making any sense here? Perhaps I am just too much in love, but having photographed in Pere-Lachaise Cemetery for example, there is nothing quite like the feeling I get when in the City of Light.

The photographs in this posting are magnificent. The intimacy of the Brassaï, the tonality of the Steichen; the dankness of the Marville and the informality of the Stieglitz. The first two Atget are cracking images. Note how the auteur éditeur uses the darkness of the tree trunks to divide the picture plane, better than anyone has done before or since. It is a pleasure to be able to show you Atget’s Work Room with Contact Printing Frames (c. 1910, below), an image I have never seen before in all the years I have been looking at his work. Make sure you enlarge the image to see all the details including the simplicity of the trestle table: “On the table are the wooden frames the photographer used to contact print his glass negatives; at right are several bins of negatives stacked vertically; below the table are his chemical trays; on the shelves above are stacks of paper albums – a shelf label reads escaliers et grilles (staircases and grills).”

I am particularly taken by the feather duster, the parcels wrapped in newspapers and tied with string, and intrigued by the print of a moonrise(?) over a bridge high up, tacked to the wall (see detail image below). Obviously this image meant a lot to him because it is the only one in the room and it would have taken a bit of an effort to put it up there. I wonder whose image it is, and what bridge it is of…

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

“Oysters and a glass of wine, a corner café, the Sunday bird market on the Île de la Cité, a lover’s stolen kiss: Paris has loomed large in the imagination of artists, writers, and architects for centuries. For 175 years, it has attracted photographers from around the world who have succumbed to its spell and made it their home for part, if not all, of their lives.

Paris as Muse: Photography, 1840s-1930s (January 27 – May 4, 2014) celebrates the first 100 years of photography in Paris and features some 40 photographs, all drawn from the Museum’s collection. Known as the “City of Light” even before the birth of the medium in 1839, Paris has been muse to many of the most celebrated photographers, from Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (one of the field’s inventors) and Nadar to Charles Marville, Eugène Atget, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. The show focuses primarily on architectural views, street scenes, and interiors. It explores the physical shape and texture of Paris and how artists have found poetic ways to record its essential qualities using the camera.”

Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Eugène Atget (French, Libourne 1857-1927 Paris) 'Nôtre Dame' 1922 from the exhibition 'Paris as Muse: Photography, 1840s-1930s' at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, January - May, 2014

Eugène Atget (French, Libourne 1857-1927 Paris)
Nôtre Dame
1922
Albumen silver print from glass negative
18.2 x 22.1cm (7 1/8 x 8 11/16 in.)
Gilman Collection, Purchase, Joseph M. Cohen Gift, 2005

Atget likely avoided Nôtre Dame during his early career as it was already well documented by other photographers. In his old age, however, he worked more for his own pleasure and during the last five years of his life photographed the cathedral regularly. He always viewed it in an eccentric way – either in the distance, as here, or in detail.

Eugène Atget (French, Libourne 1857-1927 Paris)
Untitled [Atget’s Work Room with Contact Printing Frames]
c. 1910
Albumen silver print from glass negative
20.9 x 17.3cm (8 1/4 x 6 13/16 in.)
Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1990

This straightforward study by Atget of his own work room offers a rare glimpse of the inner sanctum of an auteur éditeur, as he described his profession. On the table are the wooden frames the photographer used to contact print his glass negatives; at right are several bins of negatives stacked vertically; below the table are his chemical trays; on the shelves above are stacks of paper albums – a shelf label reads escaliers et grilles (staircases and grills). Atget used these homemade albums to organise his vast picture collection from which he sold views of old Paris to clients.

Eugène Atget (French, Libourne 1857–1927 Paris) 'Untitled [Atget's Work Room with Contact Printing Frames]' c. 1910 (detail)

Eugène Atget (French, Libourne 1857-1927 Paris)
Untitled [Atget’s Work Room with Contact Printing Frames] (detail)
c. 1910
Albumen silver print from glass negative
20.9 x 17.3cm (8 1/4 x 6 13/16 in.)
Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1990

Eugène Atget (French, Libourne 1857-1927 Paris)
Marchand de Vin, Rue Boyer, Paris
1910-1911
Albumen silver print from glass negative
21.5 x 17.6cm (8 7/16 x 6 15/16 in.)
Gilman Collection, Purchase, Joseph M. Cohen Gift, 2005

Eugène Atget (French, Libourne 1857-1927 Paris)
Boulevard de Strasbourg, Corsets, Paris
1912
Gelatin silver print from glass negative
22.4 x 17.5cm (8 13/16 x 6 7/8 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gilman Collection
Purchase, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gift, 2005

Atget found his vocation in photography in 1897, at the age of forty, after having been a merchant seaman, a minor actor, and a painter. He became obsessed with making what he termed “documents for artists” of Paris and its environs and compiling a visual compendium of the architecture, landscape, and artefacts that distinguish French culture and history. By the end of his life, Atget had amassed an archive of more than eight thousand negatives, which he organised into such categories as Parisian Interiors, Vehicles in Paris, and Petits Métiers (trades and professions).

In Atget’s inventory of Paris, shop windows figure prominently and the most arresting feature mannequin displays. In the 1920s the Surrealists recognised in Atget a kindred spirit and reproduced a number of his photographs in their journals and reviews. Antiquated mannequins such as the ones depicted here struck them as haunting, dreamlike analogues to the human form.

Marie-Charles-Isidore Choiselat (French, 1815-1858)
Stanislas Ratel (French, 1824-1904)
Untitled [The Pavillon de Flore and the Tuileries Gardens]
1849
Daguerreotype
15.2 x 18.7cm (6 x 7 3/8 in.)
Gilman Collection, Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2005

Taken in September 1849 from a window of the École des Beaux-Arts, this daguerreotype exhibits the dazzling exactitude and presence that characterise these mirrors of reality. True to the daguerreotype’s potential, stationary objects are rendered with remarkable precision; under magnification one can clearly discern minute architectural details on the Pavillon de Flore, features of statuary and potted trees in the Tuileries Gardens, even the chimney pots on the buildings in the background along the rue de Rivoli.

Daguerre himself had chosen a nearly identical vantage point in 1839 for one of his earliest demonstration pieces, and it may well have been with that archetypal image in mind that Choiselat and Ratel made this large daguerreotype a decade later. Choiselat and Ratel, among the earliest practitioners to utilise and improve upon Daguerre’s process, first published their methods for enhancing the sensitivity of the daguerreotype plate in 1840 and had achieved exposure times of under two seconds by 1843. Unlike Daguerre’s long exposure, which failed to record the presence of moving figures, this image includes people (albeit slightly blurred) outside the garden gates, on the Pont Royal, and peering over the quai wall above the floating warm-bath establishment moored in the Seine. Still more striking is the dramatic rendering of the cloud-laden sky, achieved by the innovative technique of masking the upper portion of the plate partway through the exposure.

William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 1800-1877)
The Boulevards at Paris
May-June 1843
Salted paper print from paper negative
15.1 x 19.9cm (5 15/16 x 7 13/16 in. )
Gilman Collection, Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2005

Talbot traveled to Paris in May 1843 to negotiate a licensing agreement for the French rights to his patented calotype process and, with Henneman, to give first hand instruction in its use to the licensee, the Marquis of Bassano.

No doubt excited to be traveling on the continent with a photographic camera for the first time, Talbot seized upon the chance to fulfil the fantasy he had first imagined on the shores of Lake Como ten years before. Although his business arrangements ultimately yielded no gain, Talbot’s views of the elegant new boulevards of the French capital are highly successful, a lively balance to the studied pictures made at Lacock Abbey. Filled with the incidental details of urban life, architectural ornamentation, and the play of spring light, this photograph, unlike much of the earlier work, is not a demonstration piece but rather a picture of the real world. The animated roofline punctuated with chimney pots, the deep shopfront awning, the line of waiting horse and carriages, the postered kiosks, and the characteristically French shuttered windows all evoke as vivid a notion of mid-nineteenth-century Paris now as they must have when Talbot first showed the photographs to his friends and family in England.

A variant of this scene, taken from a higher floor in Talbot’s Paris hotel, appeared as plate 2 in The Pencil of Nature.

Alfred Stieglitz (American, Hoboken, New Jersey 1864 – 1946 New York)
A Snapshot, Paris
1911, printed 1912
Photogravure
13.8 x 17.4cm (5 7/16 x 6 7/8 in.)
Gift of J. B. Neumann, 1958

Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, Stieglitz trained to be an engineer in Germany and moved to New York in 1890. His lifelong ambition as an artist (and advocate for the arts) was to prove that photography was as capable of artistic expression as painting or sculpture. As the editor of Camera Notes, the journal of the Camera Club of New York, and then later Camera Work (1902-1917), Stieglitz espoused his belief in the aesthetic potential of the medium. He published work by photographers who shared his conviction alongside European modernists such as Auguste Rodin, Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, and Francis Picabia.

Michel Seuphor (Belgian, 1901-1999)
Paris
1929
Gelatin silver print
11.4 x 16.4cm (4 1/2 x 6 7/16 in.)
Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1994
© 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The Belgian painter, poet, designer, and art critic Seuphor moved to Paris in 1925 and entered the artistic community of such expatriate artists as Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and Theo van Doesburg. Little is known about his work with the camera except that this photograph was made the year Seuphor founded Cercle et Carré (Circle and Square), a group dedicated to abstraction that would include Kandinsky, Mondrian, Jean Arp, Kurt Schwitters, and Le Corbusier.

Marie-Charles-Isidore Choiselat (French, 1815-1858)
Stanislas Ratel (French, 1824-1904)
Défilé sur le Pont-Royal
May 1, 1844
Daguerreotype
Gilman Collection, Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation, 2005

In January 1839 the Romantic painter and printmaker Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787-1851) showed members of the French Académie des Sciences an invention he believed would forever change visual representation: photography. Each daguerreotype (as Daguerre dubbed his invention) is an image produced on a highly polished, silver-plated sheet of copper.

Using an “accelerating liquid” of their own devising, the daguerreotypists Choiselat and Ratel were able to reduce exposure times from minutes to seconds, which allowed them to capture events as they happened. Here the mounted guards stationed along one of Paris’s most famous bridges registered clearly on the daguerreotype plate, but even with a short exposure time the moving crowds and rolling carriages became a blur of activity.

Charles Marville (French, Paris 1813 – 1879 Paris)
Rue Traversine (from the Rue d’Arras)
c. 1868
Albumen silver print from glass negative
34.8 x 27.5cm (13 11/16 x 10 13/16 in. )
Gift of Howard Stein, 2010

Brassaï (French born Romania, Brașov 1899 – 1984 Côte d’Azur)
Street Fair, Boulevard St. Jacques, Paris
1931
Gelatin silver print
22.9 x 17.1cm (9 x 6 3/4 in.)
Purchase, Alfred Stieglitz Society Gifts, 2007
© The Estate of Brassai

Born in Transylvania, Gyula Halász studied painting and sculpture in Hungary and moved to Paris in 1924 to work as a journalist. About 1930 he changed his name to Brassaï and took up photography. The camera became a constant companion on his nightly walks through the city’s seamier quarters, where he aimed his lens at showgirls, prostitutes, ragpickers, transvestites, and other inhabitants of the demimonde. His first and most famous book of photographs, Paris de nuit (Paris by Night), published in 1933, includes a variation of this scene of three masked women tempting men into a sideshow.

Edward J. Steichen (American born Luxembourg, Bivange 1879 – 1973 West Redding, Connecticut)
Untitled [Brancusi’s Studio]
c. 1920
Gelatin silver print
24.4 x 19.4cm (9 5/8 x 7 5/8 in.)
Gift of Grace M. Mayer, 1992
Reprinted with permission of Joanna T. Steichen.

Steichen lived in Paris on and off from 1900 to 1924, making paintings and photographs. A cofounder with Alfred Stieglitz of the Photo-Secession, Steichen offered his former New York studio to the fledgling organisation as an exhibition space in 1905. Known first as the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession and later simply by its address on Fifth Avenue, 291, the gallery introduced modern French art to America through the works of Rodin, Matisse, Cézanne, and, in 1914, Constantin Brancusi.

Steichen and Brancusi, who met at Rodin’s studio, became lifelong friends. This view of a corner of Brancusi’s studio on the impasse Roncin shows several identifiable works, including Cup (1917) and Endless Column (1918). The photograph’s centrepiece is the elegant polished bronze Golden Bird (1919), which soars above the other forms. Distinct from Brancusi’s studio photographs – subjective meditations on his own creations – Steichen’s view is more orchestrated, geometric, and objective. Golden Bird is centred, the light modulated, and the constellation of masses carefully balanced in the space defined by the camera. A respectful acknowledgment of the essential abstraction of the sculpture, the photograph seems decidedly modern and presages the formal studio photographs Steichen made in the service of Vanity Fair and Vogue beginning in 1923.

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Text / review: ‘A Vocabulary of Printing and the Syntax of the Image’ from the exhibition ‘KHEM’ at Strange Neighbour, Fitzroy, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 11th April – 3rd May, 2014

Curator: Linsey Gosper

Artists: Jane Brown, Ponch Hawkes, Siri Hayes, Ruth Maddison, Lloyd Stubber, David Tatnall, Claudia Terstappen

Emmet Gowin printing mask for The Hint That Is a Garden: Siena, Italy 1975 (below)

A Vocabulary of Printing and the Syntax of the Image

“No matter how slow the film, Spirit always stands still long enough for the photographer It has chosen.”

“One should not only photograph things for what they are but for what else they are.”

Minor White

As an artist who originally trained in the alchemical, analogue art of photography, the magic of this process will always hold sway in my heart. No matter how many excellent digital photographs I see, there is always a longing for silver – that indescribable feeling of looking at a master printers work, an image that literally takes your breath away. I hardly ever get that in a digital print. For me, it’s the difference between the fidelity of a CD and the aura of an LP, with all its scratches and pops, hisses and, yes, atmosphere.

Minor White, that guru of enlightenment, knew how difficult it was to capture spirit in a photograph. To make a connection between photographer and object, back through a glass lens and a metal box onto a piece of plastic or glass (completing a Zen circle), then printed onto a piece of paper. There are three ways it goes: you see something (you previsualise it) and you don’t capture it in the negative; you don’t see it, and the negative surprises you; but, best of all, you see it and you capture it – the object of your attention reveals itself to you. Then all you have to do is print it – easier said than done. Much testing and assessing, dodging and burning to balance the print knowing that, as MW says, each negative is like a dragon that an image has to be wrenched from.

No longer for ears …: sound
which like a deeper ear,
hears us, who only seem
to be hearing. Reversal of spaces.

Extract from Rainer Maria Rilke Gong 1925

When you do the analogue printing yourself (or when assessing a digital test print at a lab such as CPL Digital), the most important thing is to understand the vocabulary of printing. In both analogue and digital printing it all starts from the negative/file. If you don’t understand your negative or digital file, what hope have you of attaining a good end result? You must study the negative to understand its pushes and pulls, what needs to be held back, what other areas brought forward in the image. You have to feel the balance within the negative/file in the sensibility of the print. Darren from CPL observes that he has a lot of photographers and students come in and say, “I don’t want it to be like that,” but then they can’t explain what they do want it to be like or how they can get there. They have no vocabulary of printing or how to get the “feel” that they want from the print. I believe this is where training in the analogue darkroom can stand digital photographers in good stead.

What photographers need to understand is the syntax of an image, “the system of organization used in putting lines together to form pictures that can stand as representations of particular objects,”1 where they is a clear association between the structure of photographic prints and the linguistic structure that makes verbal communication possible. Photographers are the Keepers of Light and photography broke the boundaries of the visual field that had been delimited by etchings and prints, to allow human beings to see far beyond the physical field of view, to have photographic power over space and time which fundamentally changed the scope of human consciousness.2 Photography makes drawing unnecessary in the physical sense, but through previsualisation photography is predicated on mental drawing (with light) and through the physical form of the photograph, the print, photography has a syntactical basis – which comes from the languages of the photographer inherent in human consciousness and the chemical, optical and mechanical relationships that make photography possible. Both feeling and technology.

I believe that these two things go hand in hand and when photographers have no language, no vocabulary to describe what they want from a photographic print, then they are basically coming up against the limitations of their feelings, technologies and the machine. “Genius is constantly frustrated – and tempered – by the machine.”3 As William Crawford observes, “You simply cannot look at photographs as if they were ends without means. Each is the culmination of a process in which the photographer makes his decisions and discoveries within a technological framework.”4 “Each step in the photographic process plays a syntactical role to the degree that it affects the way the information, the sentiment, the surprises, and the frozen moments found in photographs actually meet the eye.”5 In the case of the photographic print, this means understanding the emotional linguistic vocabulary of printing through the syntax of the image.

With these thoughts in mind, the two standouts in this delightful group exhibition are Claudia Terstappen and Ponch Hawkes. Terstappen’s Brazilian rainforest photographs are as well seen and exquisitely printed as ever but this time they are slightly let down by the nearness of the frame and the colour of the moulding, both of which seen to limit the breathe of the image. Hawkes’ photographs are sublime (especially the two reproduced below), the best silver gelatin photographs that I have seen by an Australian artist in since Terstappen’s last solo exhibition In the Shadow of Change at Monash Gallery of Art. They have wonderful tonality and presence, and a quietness that really lets you contemplate the image through the beauty of the print – and a snip at only $800 each framed!

Other artists in the exhibition have singular images that are interesting (pictured below), but the major disappointment are the prints of Jane Brown. When I first saw the images of Brown’s Australian Gothic at Edmund Pearce Gallery in 2012 I said that they were, “small, darkly hewn, traditionally printed silver gelatin photographs… surrealist tinged, film noir-ish mise-en-scènes, the ones that emphasise the metaphorical darkness of the elements gathered upon the stage. Photographs such as Big Trout, The Female Factory, Adelong, New South Wales and Captain’s Flat Hotel, New South Wales really invoke a feeling of unhomely (or unheimlich), where nature is out of kilter. These images unsettle our idea of Oztraliana, our perceived sense of Self and our place in the world. They disrupt normal transmission; they transmutate the seen environment, transforming appearance, nature and form.”6 This was again the feeling that I got when I saw the series at a later exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Photography.

Not this time. The prints shown here are much darker and have become almost ungrammatical; where the syntax of the image has broken down so that the linguistic structure of the image makes communication nearly impossible. It is not enough just to make prints darker and darker, hoping for some mystery to magically appear in the image because it won’t. This is a case of overprinting the negative, forcing the vocabulary of the image through a wish to impart something emphatic, some condition of being from the negative that has been imperfectly understood. Is this because this is Edition 2 out of 7, a different printer and a different size? I don’t know the answer to those questions, but Brown really needs to go back to the negatives and reassess the results, especially as these nearly incomprehensible prints are selling for an overinflated $2,000 each framed.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Footnotes

1/ Crawford, William. “Photographic Syntax,” in Crawford, William. The Keepers of Light: A History and Working Guide to Early Photographic Processes. Morgan and Morgan, 1979, p. 2

2/ Ibid., p. 5

3/ Ibid., p. 6

4/ Ibid., p. 6

5/ Ibid., p. 7

6/ Bunyan, Marcus. Review: Jane Brown / Australian Gothic at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne, 6th May 2012 [Online] Cited 21st April 2014

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

Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941)
The Hint That Is a Garden: Siena, Italy
Dedicated to Frederick Sommer, 1975
Gelatin silver print
19.5 x 24.5cm (7 11/16 x 9 5/8 in.)
Gift of Mrs Saul Reinfeld

William Crawford. “Photographic Syntax,” in William Crawford. The Keepers of Light: A History and Working Guide to Early Photographic Processes. Morgan and Morgan, 1979, p. 6.

Claudia Terstappen (Australian born Germany, b. 1959) 'Jungle I (Brazil)' 1991 from the exhibition 'KHEM' at Strange Neighbour, Fitzroy, Melbourne, April - May, 2014

Claudia Terstappen (Australian born Germany, b. 1959)
Jungle I (Brazil)
1991
From the series Ghosts at the Jucurucu
Silver gelatin print
46 x 68cm

Lloyd Stubber (Australian) 'Untitled' 2012 from the exhibition 'KHEM' at Strange Neighbour, Fitzroy, Melbourne, April - May, 2014

Lloyd Stubber (Australian)
Untitled
2012
Fibre-based silver gelatin print
11 x 14 inches

David Tatnall (Australian, b. 1955)
Clifton Springs Jetty
2012
From the series Coastal Pinholes
Silver gelatin contact print
20 x 25cm

Ruth Maddison (Australian, b. 1945)
Bellambi, NSW
1989
Hand coloured gelatin silver print
19.6 x 49cm
Vintage print, unique state

Ruth Maddison (Australian, b. 1945)
Self-portrait #2
2004
From the series Light touches
Sun print on black and white photographic paper
Vintage print, unique state

“The process of analogue photography is created through darkness and light. To celebrate the launch of the Strange Neighbour Darkroom this exhibition brings together a group of artists who pursue and extend the practice of analogue and darkroom photography. These artists work across many of the countless possibilities of the medium: 35mm, medium format and large format photography, and their diverse processes include pinhole photography, photograms, sun prints, fibre printing and hand colouring. Contemporary photographers are driving the current resurgence in analogue photography and Strange Neighbour is excited to be able to facilitate this irreplaceable art form. Darkroom practice is unique and magickal, alive and well.”

Press release from the Strange Neighbour website

Khem; a possible derivative of the word alchemy, the native name of Egypt, is thought to mean black. Some scholars maintain that Khem is derived from a root meaning wise.1

Alchemy is described as chemistry endowed with magic, and alchemists as those who work with metals and keep these operations secret.2 Apart from the obvious associations of working with metals (silver) and chemistry, there are more subtle and intimate parallels between the art and science of alchemy and darkroom practice.

It is common among darkroom practitioners to consider the process as ‘magic’. When most people encounter printing their first photograph in the darkroom, the simple sight of an image appearing on the paper in the developer tray seems ‘magical’. Even experienced darkroom practitioners never lose this special feeling. Exhibiting artist, Siri Hayes notes, “Watching images come up in developing tray is as mysterious and exciting as any magic show. Perhaps more so as there are no tricks except that the photographic product is the grandest of illusions.”

Distinct from many other forms of photography, darkroom based practice is now specialised, with few people having access to the knowledge, equipment and skills associated with the medium. Like a secret esoteric order, few share this wisdom, and even those willing to teach it may keep special recipes, techniques and discoveries to themselves or within a select dedicated group. Some of this information, although scientific, is not completely understood in rational terms of facts or calculations, but is more related to intuition and perception. It is technical and it is intuitive.

The complex rituals associated with the process allow practitioners to get into a headspace that is conducive to contemplation, bringing forth intuition, allowing space for chance and universal cause and effect. In this art and science there are so many variables with endless possibilities. Ruth Maddison‘s Sun prints are made without camera, film, enlarger or developer. She states, “the tonal range depends on variables like paper stock, length of time in sun or shade, whether the objects are wet or dry … and an unpredictable magic that happens when light sensitive paper is touched by light.”

In this unpredictable environment often mistakes lead to new ideas and create new methodologies. One of the charms of analogue processes is the discovery of beauty through error. Ponch Hawkes recalls this as disasters and wonderful happenstance. Claudia Terstappen remarks it is the number of variables in the darkroom that leaves the creative process wide open and it is often these inaccuracies caused by chemical reactions that lead to a new meaning. This is what makes analogue processes so valuable and irreplaceable. There are many effects in the analogue process that one can recreate with digital technologies, but not invent.

Imperfections caused by these variables or ‘mistakes’ may imbue the image with a ‘spirit’ and otherworldliness, as if the energy of a place or person has been captured. Black and white photography too has the ability to transcend time, memory and death. Jane Brown says, “I examine this a lot in my work – landscapes seem to have vestiges or traces of past life and memorials become otherworldly.” Claudia Terstappen‘s work, “is motivated by the stories, beliefs and histories of the people who live there. Here people spoke about the forest spirits that one should be aware of. B+W images suggest a kind of silence.” At a symbolic level, silence is part of most sacred traditions3, and it is part of darkroom practice.

Using analogue processes and working in the darkroom can be aligned to the slow movement, of valuing quality over quantity and returning to a feeling of connectedness. For the images in this exhibition David Tatnall has used an 8 x 10 inch pinhole camera and made contact prints. He expresses of this technology, “my reasons for using this slow, cumbersome and fickle means to make photographs is because I feel it conveys the interaction of the sky and water, the presence of wind and the pulse of nature. I am particularly interested in how the long exposures and lack of sharpness make these features merge into something else… (The) simplicity: no lens, shutter or batteries, no need to upgrade, no click or buzz, no flashing lights or mega pixels no viewfinder and no distortion.” For Ruth Maddision, “she says of working with hand colouring, the pleasure of it – I love working on the real object again, and away from the screen.”

Clearly there is belief and an element of trust in the medium. Lloyd Stubber‘s images in this exhibition are taken from a one-month round the world trip. On return he processed the 15 rolls of film in his laundry. Perhaps the potential fear of loss is overwhelmed by the sense of anticipation, surprise and the flood of memories that return on seeing the work at a later date, as compared to digital, which is immediate and holds none of the mystery.

Another important distinction of darkroom and analogue practice from other forms of photography is the presence of artist’s hand throughout the entire progression of creation to final outcome. In each step of the process, significant choices are made from the many possibilities, from exposing light sensitive film in the camera, developing the film, to printing and finishing the art object. The artist’s mark is therefore not only discernible but also inherently valuable. To Ponch Hawkes, being the maker is of significance. For Terstappen, The physicality of arriving at the ‘perfect’ Gelatin Silver print – with its deep tonal ranges – is something that I highly value.

Contemporary artists are driving the current resurgence in analogue photography. This is a treasured, magickal4 and irreplaceable art form. It is with great pleasure that I declare the Strange Neighbour Darkroom open, and may it provide the space and opportunity for the love of darkroom practice to be enjoyed, shared and fostered.”

Linsey Gosper, curator, darkroom lover, 2014

1/ Francis Melville. The Book of Alchemy. Quarto Publishing plc, 2002, p. 6
2/ Kurt Seligman. Magic, Supernaturalism and Religion. Pantheon Books, 1948, p. 84
3/ Ami Ronnberg (ed.,). The Book of Symbols. Taschen, 2010, p. 676
4/ Magick, in the context of Aleister Crowley’s Thelema, is a term used to differentiate the occult from stage magic and is defined as the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will, including both mundane acts of will as well as ritual magic

Jane Brown (Australian, b. 1967)
Decommissioned Art History Library, University of Melbourne
2012-2013
Fibre-based gelatin silver print
44 x 49.5cm
Edition 2 of 7

Jane Brown (Australian, b. 1967)
Lathamstowe
2011- 2013
Fibre-based, gelatin silver print
46 x 44cm
Edition 2 of 7

Ponch Hawkes (Australian, b. 1946)
Silken Seam
2005
Silver gelatin print
34 x 34cm
Courtesy of the artist and Chrysalis Gallery, Melbourne

Ponch Hawkes (Australian, b. 1946)
Rouleau
2005
Silver gelatin print
34 x 34cm
Courtesy of the artist and Chrysalis, Melbourne

Siri Hayes (Australian, b. 1977)
Aquatic listening device
2009
Silver gelatin print
39 x 45cm
Courtesy of the artist and M.33, Melbourne

Strange Neighbour

This gallery has now closed

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Review: ‘Stephen Dupont / The White Sheet Series No. 1’ at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 2nd April – 3rd May, 2014

Stephen Dupont (Australian, b. 1967) 'Untitled #16' 2010 from the exhibition 'Stephen Dupont / The White Sheet Series No. 1' at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne, April - May, 2014

Stephen Dupont (Australian, b. 1967)
Untitled #16
2010
Silver gelatin print and ink
20 x 16″ (51 x 40.5cm) / edition of 5 + 2 AP’s

This is a wonderful exhibition by Stephen Dupont at Edmund Pearce Gallery. Using a 4″ x 5″ Polaroid type 55 and striping away the emulsion, Dupont is left with a fine grain large format black and white negative (which he can use in an enlarger) with the “Polaroid frame look”, which he incorporates into the silver gelatin prints.1

Most of the photographs are glorious, notably the ones where Dupont pulls back from his subject to reveal the context of the sitter (much like taking the mat off a Daguerreotype to reveal more of the studio hidden underneath). I particularly like where you can see two hands poking over the top of the white sheet hiding the person behind (see Untitled #08 2010, below). The spontaneity and improvisation of this act is very appealing.

As Dupont observes this allows him “to reveal the audience gathering and the environment around the sheet. This is meant to give the viewer a real sense of place and time, and a window onto the streets of Haridwar.” This technique gives the images real presence, they fairly “sing” to me from the gallery wall. And then! to surround the silver with hand printed Indian textile stamps in red ink… these images are really something.

Dupont’s incisiveness at the coal face of the pictorial plane is also exemplary. Notice the construction of Untitled #14 (2010, below), and observe the arms of the protagonists. An arm is raised aloft mirroring the arm of the swami in the photograph behind and also the supporting pole of the tent at top right. His other arm points to the earth but this is crossed by the arm of an out of focus man at left, which forms a strong diagonal intervention into the image as he reaches out. The money and mobile phone, at bottom left, add to the incongruity of the scene.

I am less enamoured with Dupont’s riff on Richard Avedon’s contextless background portraits. They don’t really possess the power or presence of the photographs mentioned above or of Avedon’s portraits from the series In The American West. I would have also liked to have seen the field journal (the small images at the bottom of the posting) in the exhibition. It would have been fascinating to read the text and view the other textile stamp designs. Finally, a couple of prints at a much larger size would have been good to see, to break the regularity of the series.

Having said that, you really have to see these images in the flesh for they look so much better than when reproduced online. The red is luminous and it is a joy to see good silver gelatin prints instead of so-so digital failures (Polly Borland I hope your ears are burning). This exhibition is a perfect example of what Bill Henson was talking about in his recently curated exhibition Wildcards: Bill Henson shuffles the deck at Monash Gallery of Art (MGA) where he states that his interest “is in the photograph as an object, in the physical presence of the print or whatever kind of technology is being used to make it…”2 where the images appeal not just to the eye but to the whole body, “because photographs are first and foremost objects, their size, shape grouping and texture are as important as the images they’re recording.”3

These photographs have, as Henson notes of some photographs, “the ability to suggest some other thing and that’s what draws you in.”4 You stand in front of the best of these images and contemplate them with a sense of wonder, for they suggest to the viewer – through the hand and eye of the artist in the analogue process, through the hand of the artist when applying the wood block printing which was made with much spontaneity and feeling – other worlds of which we know very little brought close to our imagination.

Through their inherent textures and tonalities, their physical presence, there is a sense of the people who populate that place, but more than that, there is a sense of our own fragility and mortality. A feeling of anOther existence for our life if we had been born into such worlds.

That is what makes these images so compelling.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Footnotes

1/ According to Wikipedia, “Type 55 negatives are the famous source of the “Polaroid frame look” … the Polaroid reagent / gel is squeezed between the negative and positive. Some of the reagent is trapped underneath the onion-skin-like frame that crops the print into a perfect 4 x 5 image. This reagent however creates an impression of that frame on the negative, which is not protected. The result is a perfect negative, but with imperfect frame-like image surrounded 3 of the four sides, while the 4th side shows the impression of the connective mesh that controls aspects of the Polaroid packet’s sleeve functionality.”

2/ Interview with Bill Henson by Toby Fehily posted 01 Feb 2014 on the Art Guide Australia website [Online] Cited 18/02/2014. No longer available online

3/ Fiona Gruber. “Review of Wildcards, Bill Henson Shuffles the Deck” on the Guardian website, Wednesday 12 February 2014 [Online] Cited 16/03/2014

4/ Fehily op. cit.,

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

Stephen Dupont (Australian, b. 1967) 'Untitled #08' 2010 from the exhibition 'Stephen Dupont / The White Sheet Series No. 1' at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne, April - May, 2014

Stephen Dupont (Australian, b. 1967)
Untitled #08
2010
Silver gelatin print and ink
20 x 16″ (51 x 40.5cm) / edition of 5 + 2 AP’s

Stephen Dupont (Australian, b. 1967)
Untitled #14
2010
Silver gelatin print and ink
20 x 16″ (51 x 40.5cm) / edition of 5 + 2 AP’s

Stephen Dupont (Australian, b. 1967)
Untitled #04
2010
Silver gelatin print and ink
20 x 16″ (51 x 40.5cm) / edition of 5 + 2 AP’s

Edmund Pearce is excited to present a solo exhibition by legendary Australian photographer Stephen Dupont, entitled The White Sheet Series Number 1. This new series was shot during India’s most important Hindu Festival, Kumbh Mela, and features portraits of pilgrims and visitors combined with hand printed Indian textile stamps.

Stephen Dupont has produced a remarkable body of visual work throughout his career; hauntingly beautiful photographs of fragile cultures and marginalised peoples. He captures the human dignity of his subjects with great intimacy and his images have received international acclaim for their artistic integrity and valuable insight into the people, culture and communities that have existed for hundreds of years, yet are fast disappearing from our world.

Mark Feeney of the Boston Globe states, “Inevitably, Dupont is an outsider; yet he’s an engaged outsider, full of calm, clear-eyed curiosity. There’s not just a sense of place in his work but also something that matters even more: a sense of the people who populate that place.”

Stephen’s work has earned him a number of photography’s most prestigious prizes, including a Robert Capa Gold Medal citation from the Overseas Press Club of America. His work has featured in influential publications such as The New Yorker, Aperture and The New York Times Magazine; and he has had major exhibitions in London, Paris, New York, Sydney, Canberra, Tokyo, and Shanghai. His photographic artist books and portfolios are held in numerous private collections and by prestigious institutions such as the National Gallery of Australia, the National Library of Australia, the British Library and the Library of Congress in Washington DC to name but a few.

Press release from the Edmund Pearce Gallery website

Stephen Dupont (Australian, b. 1967)
Untitled #07
2010
Silver gelatin print and ink
20 x 16″ (51 x 40.5cm) / edition of 5 + 2 AP’s

Stephen Dupont (Australian, b. 1967)
Untitled #13
2010
Silver gelatin print and ink
20 x 16″ (51 x 40.5cm) / edition of 5 + 2 AP’s

Stephen Dupont (Australian, b. 1967)
Untitled #12
2010
Silver gelatin print and ink
20 x 16″ (51 x 40.5cm) / edition of 5 + 2 AP’s

Stephen Dupont (Australian, b. 1967)
Untitled #18
2010
Silver gelatin print and ink
20 x 16″ (51 x 40.5cm) / edition of 5 + 2 AP’s

Richard Avedon at work

Richard Avedon (American, 1923-2004)
Bill Curry, drifter, Interstate 40, Yukon, Oklahoma, 6/16/80
1980
From In the American West, 1979-1984

This body of work is a selection of portraits I made in 2010 at India’s most important Hindu festival called the Kumbh Mela. In one of four locations every four years Hindu pilgrims and visitors descend into the holy waters of the Ganges River to purify the soul in a spiritual ritual considered the largest peaceful gathering in the world. The photographs were taken in Haridwar of pilgrims and sadhus I chose randomly during that festival.

Inspired by an earlier series I made of anonymous portraits of Afghans in Kabul titled Axe Me Biggie, or Mr Take My Picture, but instead of an existing Afghan outdoor studio backdrop I chose the white sheet this time for its purity and simplicity. My subjects were asked to simply stand and pose before my camera. I use a white bed sheet to create an outdoor studio that not only captures my subject but also allows me to reveal the audience gathering and the environment around the sheet. This is meant to give the viewer a real sense of place and time, and a window onto the streets of Haridwar. Had I used the backdrop in a conventional way, to solely isolate a person, you’d have the impression that they were taken anywhere – New York, Sydney, or in a studio. This process is a creative choice and allows me with some control over my sitter but brings with it the spontaneity and surprise of what may take place around the zone I am working in: the gaze of someone holding the sheet that has no idea they are in the frame, or a hand holding the sheet or something else that crops up in front or behind. In the end my portraits are environmental or even landscapes.

Over many years of travel throughout India I have been collecting textile stamps and I decided to use them on my photographs. The research and experiments started in my field journal and then to the final hand printed images in this show. I wanted to create a relationship with Indian design and cloth, the Polaroid borders and the people in my pictures. Much like my photographic practice here the wood block printing was made with much spontaneity and feeling. The photographs have been handcrafted by Chris Reid at Blanco Negro using warmtone paper and processed in a specialised developer for unique tonality.

Stephen Dupont
Sydney, February 28, 2014

Edmund Pearce Gallery

This gallery has now closed.

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Exhibition and book launch preview: ‘In the Folds of Hills’ by Kristian Laemmle-Ruff at The Field Institute, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 1st – 8th May, 2014

Exhibition opening and book launch: Thursday 1st May, 6 – 8.30 pm

To be opened by Robert McFarlane
Stories by Charlotte Laemmle

Kristian Laemmle-Ruff (Australian)
In the Folds of Hills book cover
2014

One of my favourite contemporary Australian photographers has a new book and exhibition!

Hopefully a review to follow but having seen a digital copy of the book, the sensitivity of the work feels admirable… unrecalled stories and photographs of people’s lives and the environments in which they live.

The book retails for $60 AUD and will be available in selected book stores nationally. It is being published by Pearce Press and includes a foreword by former prime minister Malcolm Fraser and an essay by Robert McFarlane.

Marcus

Many thankx to Kristian Laemmle-Ruff for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Kristian Laemmle-Ruff (Australian)
Barn in the Mist
2014

Foreword

In the Folds of Hills depicts a life in the secluded valleys around Lima, a little over 100 kms from Melbourne, Victoria. Kristian Laemmle-Ruff not only has great technical control of his craft, but translates this skill into truly artistic photographs.

His images of ordinary objects from everyday life invite the viewer to slow down and contemplate. These photos create a narrative that offers us insight into the way these people live.

The portfolio focuses on individuals who have lived most, if not all their lives in this area. They would all be hard-working and modest in their possessions. Their individual characters shine through the photographs with a rugged determination and strength.

In the Folds of Hills will come to have historic significance because it captures aspects of Australian rural life, which in many parts of this country are fast disappearing.

Rt Hon Malcolm Fraser AC CH

Kristian Laemmle-Ruff (Australian)
Lima East Valley
2014

Kristian Laemmle-Ruff (Australian)
Ralph Pearce
2014

Photographer’s Note

This project began with a curiosity to discover something that is quietly going unnoticed. As our cities grow and society increasingly relies on technological advances, there remain those older generations whose lives are still rooted in a past era: the early to mid 20th century. This was an era where small-scale labor-intensive livelihoods could thrive. In the face of changing needs and corporate competition these kinds of livelihoods, such as the family-owned farm, are disappearing.

Susan Sontag wrote in her book On Photography that “a beautiful subject can be the object of rueful feelings because it has aged or decayed or no longer exists … Photography is a twilight art.” This photo-series also lingers in some kind of twilight zone and has a sense of urgency; indeed one person has passed away since being photographed.

I first intended to capture day-to-day life and work in these secluded rural valleys. With subject matter so steeped in romanticism, I felt a need to explore beyond the ‘countryside’ clichés and idealisation common in the attitudes of city people. After meeting the subjects and gaining their trust, I sensed personal stories that needed to be told. To my surprise these stories were told not so much in the words spoken, but rather in the person’s material surrounds. Domestic interiors scattered with objects became allegories for human experience. These environments were full of memory.

It wasn’t uncommon for someone to still live in the house they were born in. An empty chair, a leaning barn, a clock ticking on the wall: these once mundane objects became potent symbols of their owner’s past, their hopes and their reality. Some objects suggested loss and melancholia, others embodied feelings of pride and even humour.

In the Folds of Hills is an exploration of the wisdom and rich humanity found in the characters living and working on this land. In celebrating and acknowledging them and their stories, the photo-narratives also offer a somewhat poetic insight into their inner worlds.

Kristian Laemmle-Ruff

Kristian Laemmle-Ruff (Australian)
On Mother’s Bed
2014

Kristian Laemmle-Ruff (Australian)
Old Flowers
2014

Ralph Pearce

Ralph’s knowledge and understanding of this part of the world is humbling. Rainfall patterns, geography and vegetation are things that matter to Ralph. He invites us to climb into his ute and drives to a stand of fabled Lima stringybarks. Few now exist in the valley. Our gentle giant is very much at home amongst the tall timbers that have been his livelihood for so many years.

“I still love mucking about in the bush,” chuckles Ralph with a twinkle in his eye. He shows us his tools, most importantly his axes, and carefully describes their variations and uses. The sheds back at the homestead hold a treasury of farming history and Ralph proudly shows us the old dairy, his shearing shed and a faithful companion, a Honda 110 motorbike. The land continues to give Ralph what he needs. His vegetable patch is impressive and the old gnarled fruit trees bear their gifts seasonally. Once a fortnight Ralph drives to Benalla for groceries and a chat. Every second Tuesday evening he travels to the nearby Moorngag Hall for a round of cards with friends from the district. Charlie Jensen, his childhood mate, collects him.

When next we visit Ralph he shows us around the rest of his house. His mother was clearly a significant influence. She died in 1985 aged ninety-eight and was blind for the last nine years of her life. Ralph cared for her. Her suitcase, packed for hospital, still sits in her room. Little has changed in the house since she died.

ABC Radio keeps Ralph informed. And informed he is. Television has never made an appearance in this house. Ralph speaks to us with the wisdom of someone who has seen many fashions and many politicians come and go. One cannot help but be touched by the simplicity and integrity of this man’s life. Ralph is a quiet gentleman, unassuming, self-reliant and comfortable within his skin.

Extract from stories by Charlotte Laemmle from the book In the Folds of Hills

Kristian Laemmle-Ruff (Australian)
Ralph’s oven
2014

The Field Institute at The Compound Interest (Centre for the Applied Arts)
15-25 Keele Street, Collingwood, Victoria

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Exhibition: ‘James Turrell: A Retrospective’ at The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)

Exhibition dates: 26th May 2013 – 6th April, 2014

Curators: Michael Govan (LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director) and Christine Y. Kim (Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at LACMA)

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

James Turrell (American, b. 1943)
Breathing Light
2013
LED light into space
Dimensions cariable
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by Kayne Griffin Corcoran and the Kayne Foundation
© James Turell
Photos: © Florian Holzherr

James Turrell (American, b. 1943) 'Bridget's Bardo' 2009

James Turrell (American, b. 1943) 'Raemar Pink White' 1969

James Turrell (American, b. 1943) 'Key Lime' 1994

James Turrell (American, b. 1943) 'Light Reignfall' 2011

'James Turrell: A Retrospective' installation view at LACMA 2014

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents James Turrell: A Retrospective, the first major U.S. survey of Los Angeles-native James Turrell since 1985. The exhibition features approximately fifty works tracing five decades of the artist’s career. In addition to early light projections, holograms, and an entire section devoted to his masterwork-in-progress, the Roden Crater project, the exhibition features numerous immersive light installations that address our perception and how we see. LACMA’s retrospective is complemented by concurrent, independently curated exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) (June 9 – September 22, 2013); and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (June 21 – September 25, 2013). Additional Turrell exhibitions on view this year include the Academy Art Museum, Easton (April 20 – July 7, 2013); and Villa Panza, Varese, Italy (October 24, 2013 – May 4, 2014).

“The theme of light has preoccupied artists for centuries,” says Michael Govan, CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director of LACMA and exhibition co-curator. “No one, however, has so fully considered the ‘thing-ness’ of light itself – as well as how the experience of light reflects the wondrous and complex nature of human perception – as James Turrell has for nearly five decades.” Christine Y. Kim, exhibition co-curator and Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at LACMA adds, “There is nothing quite like the experience of a Turrell work, which is truly about and for the viewer and his or her perception. Perception is the medium for Turrell, as his work provokes viewers to see themselves see.”

Turrell’s revolutionary use of light in art makes for an experience that is both physical and optical – requiring visitors to spend anywhere from five to twenty minutes with one artwork, often alone in a gallery or with a limited number of fellow viewers.

Exhibition overview

In the mid-1960s, James Turrell was inspired by a beam of light from a slide projector while sitting in the darkened room of an undergraduate art history class at Pomona College. The sight provoked a question: what if light wasn’t the tool that enabled people to see something else but rather became the thing people look at? Thus began an inquiry that has led to a vast, prolific career.

James Turrell: A Retrospective comprises works that range in scale from an intimate watercolour made in 1969 to a 5,000-square-foot “Ganzfeld” installation – designed to entirely eliminate the viewer’s depth perception – offering visitors multiple entry points into Turrell’s practice. Evident in the array of works is the artist’s interest in perception, psychology, religion, astronomy, meditation, and science. The exhibition also draws connections between the artist’s light installations, architectural projects, and his famous masterwork-in progress at Roden Crater, in the high desert of Arizona. James Turrell: A Retrospective presents the most expansive installation of Roden Crater works shown to date, presented in the form of models, drawings, photographs, holograms, and other documents from the 1980s through the present.

Exhibition Organisation

The work of James Turrell requires a vast amount of exhibition space. James Turrell: A Retrospective presents nearly fifty works exhibited in 33,000 square feet populating two venues across LACMA’s campus: the 2nd floor of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) and the east galleries of the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion (Resnick Pavilion). BCAM’s east galleries begin with works that Turrell completed at his Mendota Studio in Santa Monica from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, followed by a succession of full-room installations that feature projections, holograms, a “Shallow Space” – a large room designed to challenge a viewer’s depth perception – and a “Cross Corner Projection,” in which light is projected in a way that suggests weight and mass. A subsequent gallery contains information and media highlighting a selection of site-specific projects and commissions around the world. BCAM’s west wing is populated with a “Magnatron” work – consisting of an aperture in the shape of an old television screen – followed by three full-scale installations: Key Lime, a “Wedgework” in which the illusion of walls are created through light and architecture; a “Wide Glass,” a type of work that adds a temporal element to Turrell’s light-based installations; and St. Elmo’s Breath, a “Space Division Construction,” which appears to be a flat surface but upon closer inspection reveals itself to be light emitted from a seemingly bottomless cavity in the wall.

Upon entering the Resnick Pavilion, visitors first encounter work that resulted from Turrell’s collaboration with artist Robert Irwin and Dr. Ed Wortz as part of the Art and Technology program at LACMA in 1969, namely a “Perceptual Cell” called Light Reignfall; Dark Matters, a “Dark Space” that presents a seemingly blacked-out room with only a minimally perceivable trace of light; and Breathing Light, a “Ganzfeld.” The Resnick Pavilion also holds an expansive gallery dedicated to the Roden Crater project, including large-scale mixed media drawings and a model contoured with actual cinder from the crater, as well as other models for autonomous spaces.

Press release from the LACMA website

James Turrell (American, b. 1943) 'Roden Crater Model (Large Overall Site)' 1987

James Turrell (American, b. 1943) 'Roden Crater Project, view toward northeast' 1987

James Turrell (American, b. 1943) 'Twilight Epiphany' 2012

James Turrell (American, b. 1943) 'Afrum (White)' 1966

James Turrell (American, b. 1943) 'Raethro II (Blue)' 1971

James Turrell (American, b. 1943) 'Bullwinkle' 2001

James Turrell in front of Roden Crater Project at sunset, October 2001

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

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

LACMA website

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Exhibition and book launch preview: ‘THE RENNIE ELLIS SHOW’ and ‘Decadent 1980-2000’ at Monash Gallery of Art, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 3rd April – 8th June, 2014
Exhibition and book launch: 3-5 pm Saturday 5th April, 2014

Rennie Ellis (Australian, 1940-2003) 'Fully equipped, Albert Park Beach' c. 1981 from the exhibition 'THE RENNIE ELLIS SHOW' at Monash Gallery of Art, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne, April - June, 2014

Rennie Ellis (Australian, 1940-2003)
Fully equipped, Albert Park Beach
c. 1981, printed later
Digital colour print
© Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive

I saw a digital preview of the new book Rennie Ellis – Decadent 1980-2000, shown to me by the delightful Director of the Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive, Manuela Furci – and I must say I was mighty impressed… it was absolutely, colourfully, outrageously FAB !

My god Rennie Ellis was a fantastic artist, what an eye, and what a sense of humour he imparts in his work. And in colour this time. The exhibition draws work from BOTH books – Decade 1970-1980 and Decadent 1980-2000. The colour images in the posting are from the Decadent book and are also in the exhibition. Do come along to the opening and book launch… it will be a solid gold event!

Marcus

Many thankx to Manuel Furci and the Rennie Ellis Archive for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“Without my photography life would be boring. Photography adds an extra dimension to my life. Somehow it confirms my place in the world”

Rennie Ellis

Rennie Ellis (Australian, 1940-2003) 'Berlin Party, Inflation Melbourne' c. 1981 from the exhibition 'THE RENNIE ELLIS SHOW' at Monash Gallery of Art, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne, April - June, 2014

Rennie Ellis (Australian, 1940-2003)
Berlin Party, Inflation, Melbourne
c. 1981, printed later
Digital colour print
© Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive

Rennie Ellis Decade 1970-1980 and Decadent 1980-2000

The photographer Rennie Ellis (1940-2003) is a key figure in Australian visual culture. Ellis is best remembered for his effervescent observations of Australian life during the 1970s-90s, including his now iconic book Life is a beach. Although invariably inflected with his own personality and wit, the thousands of social documentary photographs taken by Ellis during this period now form an important historical record.

The Rennie Ellis Show highlights some of the defining images of Australian life from the 1970s and ’80s. This is the period of Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser, Paul Keating and Bob Hawke; AC/DC and punk rock; cheap petrol and coconut oil; Hare Krishnas and Hookers and Deviant balls.

This exhibition of over 100 photographs provides a personal account of what Ellis termed ‘a great period of change’. Photographs explore the cultures and subcultures of the period, and provide a strong sense of a place that now seems worlds away, a world free of risk, of affordable inner city housing, of social protest, of disco and pub rock, of youth and exuberance.

Text from the MGA website

Rennie Ellis (Australian, 1940-2003)
Dining Out, Inflation
1980, printed later
Selenium-toned silver gelatin print
© Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive

Rennie Ellis (Australian, 1940-2003)
At the Pub, Brisbane
1982, printed later
Selenium-toned silver gelatin print
© Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive

Exhibition and book launch preview: 'THE RENNIE ELLIS SHOW' and 'Decadent 1980-2000'

Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive
Level 1 / 26 Acland Street
St Kilda 3182
Victoria, Australia
Phone: +61 3 9525 3862
E: info@RennieEllis.com.au

Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive website

Monash Gallery of Art
860 Ferntree Gully Road, Wheelers Hill
Victoria 3150 Australia
Phone: + 61 3 8544 0500

Opening hours:
Tue – Fri: 10am – 5pm
Sat – Sun: 10pm – 4pm
Mon/public holidays: closed

Monash Gallery of Art website

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Review: ‘Wildcards: Bill Henson shuffles the deck’ at Monash Gallery of Art, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 1st February – 30th March, 2014

Curator: Bill Henson

Warning: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers should be aware that the following posting may contain images of deceased persons.

Installation photograph of 'Wildcards: Bill Henson shuffles the deck' at the Monash Gallery of Art

Installation photographs of Wildcards: Bill Henson shuffles the deck at the Monash Gallery of Art
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

1/ stygian gloom
2/large grouping of 14 works by Wesley Stacey

Unknown photographer
Untitled
c. 1900
Cyanotype print
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Acquired 2012

vapid [vap-id]
adjective
lacking or having lost life, sharpness, or flavour

Origin:
1650-60; Latin vapidus; akin to va·por [vey-per]
noun
a visible exhalation, as fog, mist, steam, smoke diffused through or suspended in the air; particles of drugs that can be inhaled as a therapeutic agent

This is an unexceptional exhibition, one that lacks jouissance in the sense of a transgressive kind of enjoyment, an investigation of the subject that gives pleasure in taking you to unexpected places. At times I felt like a somnambulist walking around this exhibition of photographs from the Monash Gallery of Art collection curated by Bill Henson, pitched into stygian darkness and listening to somewhat monotonous music. It was a not too invidious an exercise but it left me with a VAPID feeling, as though I had inhaled some soporific drug: the motion of the journey apparently not confined by a story, but in reality that story is Henson’s mainly black and white self-portrait. The photographs on the wall, while solid enough, seemed to lack sparkle. There were a couple of knockout prints (such as David Moore’s Himalaya at dusk, Sydney, 1950 below; the Untitled cyanotype c. 1900, above; and Mark Hinderaker’s delicate portrait of Fiona Hall, 1984 below) and some real bombs (the large Norman Lindsay photographs, modern reproductions printed many times their original size were particularly nauseous). And one has to ask: were the images chosen for how they were balanced on the wall or were they chosen for content?

Henson states that there was no concept or agenda when picking the 88 photographs for this exhibition, simply his INTENSITY of feeling and intuition, his intuitive response to the images when he first saw them – to allow “their aesthetics to determine their presence… our whole bodies to experience these photographs – objects as pictures as photographs.”1 Henson responded as much as possible to the thing which then becomes an iconography (which appeals to his eye) as he asks himself, why is one brush stroke compelling, and not another? The viewer can then go on a journey in which MEANING comes from FEELING, and SENSATIONS are the primary stuff of life.

One of Henson’s preoccupations, “is an interest in the photograph as an object, in the physical presence of the print or whatever kind of technology is being used to make it.”2 He would like us to acknowledge the presence and aura (Walter Benjamin) of the photograph as we stand in front of it, responding with our whole bodies to the experience, not just our eyes. He wants us to have an intensity of feeling towards these works, responding to their presence and how he has hung the works in the exhibition. “There are no themes but rather images that appeal to the eye and, indeed, the whole body. Because photographs are first and foremost objects, their size, shape grouping and texture are as important as the images they’re recording.”3

Henson insists that there was no preconceived conceptual framework for picking these particular photographs but this is being disingenuous. Henson was invited to select images from the MGA collection with the specific idea of holding an exhibition, so this is the conceptual jumping off point; he then selected the images intuitively only to then group and arrange then intuitively/conceptually – by thinking long and hard about how these images would be grouped and hung on the wall of the gallery. I would like to believe that Henson was thinking about MUSIC when he hung this exhibition, not photography. Listen to Henson talk about the pairing of Leonie Reisberg’s Portrait of Peggy Silinski, Tasmania (c. 1976, below) and Beverley Veasey’s Study of a Calf, Bos taurus (2006, below) in this video, and you will get the idea about how he perceives these photographs relate to each other, how they transcend time and space.

This is one of the key elements of the exhibition: how Henson pushes and pulls at time and space itself through the placing of images of different eras together. The other two key elements are how the music rises and falls through the shape of the photographs themselves; and how the figures within the images are pulled towards or pushed away from you. With regard to the rise and fall, Henson manipulates the viewer through the embodiedness of both horizontal and vertical photographs, reminding me of a Japanese artist using a calligraphy brush (see the second installation image above, where the photographs move from the vertical to the square and then onto panoramic landscape). In relation to the content of the images, there seems to be a preoccupation (a story, a theme?) running through the exhibition with the body being consumed by the landscape or the body being isolated from the landscape but with the threat of being consumed by it. Evidence of this can be seen in Wesley Stacey’s Willie near Mallacoota (1979, below) where the body almost melts into the landscape and David Moore’s Newcastle steelworks (1963, below) where the kids on the bicycles are trying to escape the encroaching doom that hovers behind them.

One of the key images in the exhibition for me also reinforces this theme – a tiny Untitled cyanotype (c. 1900, above) in which two Victorian children are perched on a bank near a stream with the bush beyond – but there are too many of this ilk to mention here: either the figures are pulled towards the front of the frame or pushed back into the encroaching danger, as though Henson is interrogating, evidencing un / occupied space. Overall, there is an element of control and lyrical balance in how he has grouped and hung these works together, the dark hue of the gallery walls allowing the photographs to exist as objects for themselves. Henson puts things next to each other in sequences and series to, allegedly, promote UNEXPECTED conversations and connections through a series of GESTURES.

As Henson notes,

“Maybe it’s the fact that the photographs have the ability to suggest some other thing and that’s what draws you in – that’s that feeling, the thing that slips away from thought. These are really the same things that apply to our meetings with any work of art, whether it’s a piece of music or a sculpture or anything else. There’s something compelling, there’s something there that sort of animates your speculative capacity, causes you to wonder. Other times, or most of the time, that’s not the case. Certainly most of the time that’s not the case with photography.”4

.
For me, there was little WONDER in this exhibition, something that you would go ‘oh, wow’ at, some way of looking at the world that is interesting and insightful and fractures the plaisir of cultural enjoyment and identity. While the photographs may have been chosen intuitively and then hung intuitively/conceptually, I simply got very little FEELING, no ICE/FIRE (as Minor White would say) – no frisson between his pairings, groupings and arrangements. It was all so predictable, so ho-hum. Everything I expected Henson to do… he did!

There were few unexpected gestures, no startling insight into the human and photographic condition. If as he says, “Everything comes to you through your whole body, not just through your eyes and ears,”5 and that photographs are first and foremost objects, their size, shape, grouping and texture as important as the images they’re recording THEN I wanted to be moved, I wanted to feel, to be immersed in a sensate world not a visible exhalation (of thought?), a vapor that this exhibition is. Henson might have painted an open-ended self-portrait but this does not make for a very engaging experience for the viewer. In this case, the sharing of a story has not meant the sharing of an emotion.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Interview with Bill Henson by Toby Fehily posted 01 Feb 2014 on the Art Guide Australia website [Online] Cited 18/02/2014. No longer available online

2/ Ibid.,

3/ Fiona Gruber. “Review of Wildcards, Bill Henson Shuffles the Deck” on the Guardian website, Wednesday 12 February 2014 [Online] Cited 16/03/2014

4/ Fehily op. cit.,

5/ Fehily op. cit.,

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

MGA Collection: Bill Henson on Leonie Reisberg and Beverley Veasey

Bill Henson talks about the photographs of Leonie Reisberg and Beverley Veasey from the MGA Collection in WILDCARDS: BILL HENSON SHUFFLES THE DECK, Monash Gallery of Art, 1 February to 30 March 2014.

John Eaton (born United Kingdom 1881; arrived Australia 1889; died 1967)
Sheep in clearing
c. 1920s
Gelatin silver print
15.6 x 23.8cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Donated by Janice Hinderaker through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2003

Fred Kruger (born Germany 1831; arrived Australia 1860; died 1888)
Queen Mary and King Billy outside their mia mia
c. 1880
Albumen print
13.4 x 20.8cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 2012

David Moore (Australia 1927-2003)
Himalaya at dusk, Sydney
1950
Gelatin silver print, printed 2005
24.5 x 34.25cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection donated by the Estate of David Moore 2006
Courtesy of the Estate of David Moore (Sydney)

Wesley Stacey (Australia, b. 1941)
Willie near Mallacoota
1979
From the series Koorie set
Gelatin silver print
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by Christine Godden 2011

Published under fair use for the purpose of art criticism

David Moore (Australia, 1927-2003)
Newcastle steelworks
1963
Gelatin silver print
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Acquired 1981

Published under fair use for the purpose of art criticism

One of those preoccupations is an interest in the photograph as an object, in the physical presence of the print or whatever kind of technology is being used to make it. Part of the reason for that is that photography, more than any other medium, suffers from a mistake or misunderstanding people have when they’ve seen a reproduction in a magazine or online: they think they’re seeing the original. A certain amount of photography is made with its ultimate intention being to be seen in a magazine or online, but most photography, historically, ended up in its final form as a print – a cyanotype, or a tin type or a daguerreotype or whatever it might be.”

Interview with Bill Henson by Toby Fehily posted 01 Feb 2014 on the Art Guide Australia website [Online] Cited 18/02/2014. No longer available online. Used under fair use for the purposes of education and research.

Leonie Reisberg (Australia, b. 1955)
Portrait of Peggy Silinski, Tasmania
c. 1976
Gelatin silver print
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Donated by Janice Hinderaker through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2003

Beverley Veasey (Australia, b. 1968)
Study of a Calf, Bos taurus
2006
Chromogenic print
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Acquired 2006

I think when you look through any collection, you’re often struck by the kind of pointlessness and banality of photography. It doesn’t matter which museum in the world you look at. It’s like, “is there any need for this thing to exist at all?”. It probably comes back to the capacity of the object, the image to suggest things, the suggestive potential rather than the prescriptive, which is a given in photography of course, the evidential authority of the medium preceding any individual reading we have of particular pictures. Maybe it’s the fact that the photographs have the ability to suggest some other thing and that’s what draws you in – that’s that feeling, the thing that slips away from thought. These are really the same things that apply to our meetings with any work of art, whether it’s a piece of music or a sculpture or anything else. There’s something compelling, there’s something there that sort of animates your speculative capacity, causes you to wonder. Other times, or most of the time, that’s not the case. Certainly most of the time that’s not the case with photography.

Axel Poigant (born United Kingdom 1906; arrived Australia 1926; died 1986)
Jack and his family on the Canning Stock Route
1942
Gelatin silver print, printed 1986
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Acquired 1991

Tim Johson (Australia, b. 1947) 'Light performances' 1971-72

Tim Johson (Australia, b. 1947)
Light performances
1971-1972
Gelatin silver print
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Acquired 2011

Cherine Fahd (Australia, b. 1974)
Alicia
2003
From the series A woman runs
Gelatin silver print
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2011

Wesley Stacey (Australia, b. 1941)
Untitled
1973
From the series Friends
Gelatin silver print
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Donated by Bill Bowness 2013

That was one of the things that interested me and continues to interest me about photography: how these things inhabit the world as objects. And indeed we read them not just with our eyes but with how our whole bodies read and encounter and negotiate these objects, which happen to be photographs. And that’s very much a thing that interests me in the way that I work. I feel sometimes that I only happen to make photographs myself and that it’s a means to an end… So there’s a sense in which I’m interested in these objects that happen to be photographs and the way that they inhabit the same space that our bodies inhabit. Everything comes to you through your whole body, not just through your eyes and ears – it’s a vast amount of information. Watching something get bigger as you draw closer to it, not just matters of proximity, but texture or the way objects sit in a space when they’re lit a certain way – all of this is very interesting to me, always has been.”

Interview with Bill Henson by Toby Fehily posted 01 Feb 2014 on the Art Guide Australia website [Online] Cited 18/02/2014. Used under fair use for the purpose of art criticism. No longer available online.

Mark Hinderaker (born United States of America 1946; arrived Australia 1970; died 2004)
Fiona Hall
1984
Gelatin silver print
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Donated by Janice Hinderaker through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2003

Lionel Lindsay (Australia 1874-1961)
Norman Lindsay and Rose Soady, Bond Street studio
c. 1909
Gelatin silver print, printed 2000
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Donated by Katherine Littlewood 2000

Mark Strizic (born Germany 1928; arrived Australia 1950; died 2012)
BHP steel mill, Port Kembla, 1959
1959
Gelatin silver print, printed 1999
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Donated by the Bowness Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2008

Monash Gallery of Art
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Victoria 3150 Australia
Phone: + 61 3 8544 0500

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

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

Opening: Tuesday 22nd July 6-8pm
Nite Art: Wednesday 23rd July until 11pm
Artists represented: Philip Potter, John Storey, John Englart, Barbara Creed, Ponch Hawkes, Rennie Ellis

Curated by Dr Marcus Bunyan and Nicholas Henderson

Rennie Ellis (Australian, 1940-2003 'Confrontation, Gay Pride Week Picnic, Botanical Gardens 1973' 1973, printed later from the exhibition 'Out of the closets, into the streets: gay liberation photography 1971-73' at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne, July 2014

Rennie Ellis (Australian, 1940-2003)
Confrontation, Gay Pride Week Picnic, Botanical Gardens 1973
1973, printed 2014
Silver gelatin photograph
© Rennie Ellis

Five days, that’s all you’ve got! Just five days to see this fabulous exhibition, so make a note of it now in your diaries…

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

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

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

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

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

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

Phillip Potter (Australian) 'Queens' 1971 from the exhibition 'Out of the closets, into the streets: gay liberation photography 1971-73' at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne, July 2014

From a series of photographs of the very first gay rights demonstration which attracts 70 people outside NSW Liberal Party headquarters in support of the pre-selection of Tom Hughes against a right wing challenge following his support for homosexual law reform.

Unknown artist
Cricket is homosexual!
Melbourne, c. 1971-1973, printed 2014
Giclee print on Hahnemuhle william turner 310gsm
© Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives

Barbara Creed (Australian, b. 1943)
Stills from a Super 8mm film of a Women’s Liberation march
Melbourne, 1973, printed 2014
Still from a Super 8mm film
Digital C type print on Kodak Endura Matte
© Barbara Creed

Still from a super 8mm movie of a Women’s Liberation march, Melbourne, 1973.

John Storey (Australian, 1950-2019)
I am a Lesbian and Beautiful
1971, printed 2014
Digital C type print on Kodak Endura Matte
© John Storey

Phillip Potter (Australian)
Policeman reading ‘Camp Ink’ magazine
1971, printed 2014
Digital C type print on Kodak Endura Matte
© Phillip Potter

Supported by

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

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

Edmund Pearce Gallery

This gallery has now closed.

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Exhibition dates: 8th February – 11th May, 2014

Framing Sculpture

The Road to Abstraction

Painted Bronze

Exhibition dates: 5th April 2014 – 3rd May, 2014

Rosemary Laing

The Paper

Exhibition dates: 28th January – 4th May, 2014

Exhibition dates: 11th April – 3rd May, 2014

A Vocabulary of Printing and the Syntax of the Image

Footnotes

Exhibition dates: 2nd April – 3rd May, 2014

Footnotes

Exhibition dates: 1st – 8th May, 2014

Exhibition opening and book launch: Thursday 1st May, 6 – 8.30 pm

Foreword

Photographer’s Note

Ralph Pearce

Exhibition dates: 26th May 2013 – 6th April, 2014

Exhibition overview

Exhibition Organisation

Exhibition dates: 3rd April – 8th June, 2014Exhibition and book launch: 3-5 pm Saturday 5th April, 2014

Exhibition dates: 1st February – 30th March, 2014

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

Curated by Dr Marcus Bunyan and Nicholas Henderson

Sponsored by

Supported by

Exhibition dates: 3rd April – 8th June, 2014
Exhibition and book launch: 3-5 pm Saturday 5th April, 2014