Alan Constable (Australian, b. 1956) Konica Pop 2009 Ceramic 21 x 32 x 10cm
“For me, art is what is most animal in us … It is the most noble thing because it’s a celebration precisely of the forces of the body and the forces of life.”
Elizabeth Grosz
This Saturday, after a journey around the galleries of Albert Street, Richmond (underwhelming) and a visit to Sutton Gallery to see Simon Terrill’s photographic exhibition Phantom (an exhibition that I was going to review but when I saw it I changed my mind: two excellent photographs, Balfron Tower 2010-2011 and Rivoli #2 2010-2011, let down by three “empty” long exposure photographs allegedly showing traces of humanity, residues of presence) had left me a little deflated, I ventured to the opening of Alan Constable’s twenty-year retrospective Viewfinder curated by Dr Cheryl Daye at Arts Project Australia.
What a breath of fresh air this exhibition is!
The exhibition shows beautifully in the gallery space. Hung chronologically, the more tightly controlled early series feature luminous pastels that investigate themes: landscapes, birds (rarely figures) – the rubbed and layered medium building up an almost translucent surface that reminded me of the pastel work of Odilon Redon. Later work, such as the two paintings Not titled (person with binoculars) 2009 and Not titled (figure with camera) 2006 (both below) show a greater engagement with the world and a freeing up of technique – running figures, Barak Obama, Dr. Who, suited men with headdresses, football players: happenings – with exaggerated form (hands for example), wonderful spontaneity and an essential simplicity that engages the viewer directly. All the paintings evidence a spatial flatness that brings everything onto the same plane, gives everything equal importance within the image (denying Renaissance perspective; as Cliff Burtt notes in the catalogue the converging lines and horizons act as elements of design, forming the scaffolding of composition). This technique is one of the most powerful elements of Constable’s work. A wonderful understanding of light and use of colour are other essential elements. The transformational, rough hewn, playful clay cameras (such as Konica Pop, 2009, below) are a particular favourite of mine. The glazes on the cameras, their tactility, the colours – are luscious. To hold them, to pick them up and feel them in your hands is a very special experience for me. Outstanding.
Constable has a unique way of seeing and imaging the world; his working method is unique. After carefully selecting source images from journals, magazines (for example National Geographic) and newspapers, Constable visually scans the photograph from a few inches, holding it up to his eyes and carefully manoeuvring his way across the surface of the image, then making what he sees – a direct pointing to reality. Without a concept to worry about, through an enabled fluidity and freedom of expression, the artist cuts to the essential form of what he wants to make and because of this directness his work contains absolute kernels of wisdom. His observation is fantastic.
These are exuberant works that are a celebration of the body and of life. They have great spontaneity. What Constable sees, he feels and makes: the mark of the maker writ bold. They made me feel so alive. After the disappointment of earlier exhibitions in the day, this work made me laugh and smile!
You really can’t ask for more. It made my day.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Sue Roff, Melissa Petty, Sim Lutin and everyone at Arts Project Australia for their help and for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Alan Constable (Australian, b. 1956) Untitled (three-lens camera) 2011 Ceramic
Alan Constable (Australian, b. 1956) Not titled (person with binoculars) 2009 acrylic on canvas 71 x 71.5cm
Alan Constable (Australian, b. 1956) Not titled (figure with camera) 2006 gouache on paper 65.5 x 45cm
Alan Constable is both a painter and a ceramicist. Alan Constable: Viewfinder is a major survey exhibition that will include paintings, drawings and ceramics, opening Saturday 30 April until Wednesday 1 June 2011.
Showcasing more than 60 works selected from over a 20 year period, Viewfinder offers new and rich insights into the unique art of Alan Constable. Legally blind, Constable has been able to create a body of work that is highly regarded. He is been a finalist in numerous Australian Art Awards and his ceramic cameras are highly collectable.
‘Often when a painter is faced with a scene, there’s simply so much that’s appealing it’s hard to choose what to focus on’, says Dr Cheryl Daye, founding director, Arts Project Australia. ‘This is where a viewfinder comes in useful; as it helps you focus on particular parts of the scene, enabling you to decide what will make the best composition, both in terms of focus and format’. Daye has worked closely with Constable from the time he joined the Arts Project studio in 1987.
Viewfinder the title of his survey suggests the artist’s process and methodology as well as the composition and subject matter of his work.
In Constable’s two-dimensional works this can be traced from very early self-portraits (1992), through to carefully observed depictions of birds and animals to the series based on silhouettes framed in industrial or stormy landscapes, a fascination with light and energy and, more recently with colourful interpretations of political and cultural figures, all of which are sourced from photographic images carefully and sometimes painstakingly selected by the artist.
Based on imagery from newspapers and magazines, Constables recent paintings are notable for their vibrant kaleidoscopic effects and strong sense colour and patterning. Though Constable’s works are often centred on political events and global figures, his thematic concerns are frequently subjugated by the pure visual experience of colour and form.
His three-dimensional works, most notably the cameras, also sit well within this theme and given the fact that Constable is legally blind is also obliquely referenced. Constable’s ceramic works reflect a life-long fascination with old cameras, which began with his making replicas from cardboard cereal boxes at the age of eight. The sculptures are lyrical interpretations of technical instruments, and the artist’s finger marks can be seen clearly on the clay surface like traces of humanity. In this way, Constable’s cameras can be viewed as extensions of the body, as much as sculptural representations of an object.
Arts Project Australia supports people with disabilities to become practitioners in the visual arts. The studio and gallery nurtures and promotes artists with an intellectual disability as they develop their body of work.
Press release from Arts Project Australia
Arts Project Australia Artist Profile: David Hurlston on Alan Constable
Alan Constable’s ceramic cameras have seen international acclaim for their tactile, poetic resonances. In this video David Hurlston, Senior Curator of Australian Art at the National Gallery of Victoria, talks through Constable’s process, Constable’s highly idiosyncratic practice and why he believes Constable is one of the most important contemporary artists working today.
Alan Constable (Australian, b. 1956) Red NEK SLR 2011 Ceramic 5.5 x 12.25 x 4.75 inches
Alan Constable (Australian, b. 1956) Orange AKI SLR 2011 Ceramic 6 x 10 x 4 inches
Alan Constable (Australian, b. 1956) Not titled (explosion II) 1996 pastel on paper 50 x 66cm
Alan Constable (Australian, b. 1956) Not titled (fruit) 1993 pastel on paper 66 x 50cm Arts Project Australia Permanent Collection
Arts Project Australia
Studio 24 High Street Northcote Victoria 3070 Phone: + 61 3 9482 4484
Gallery Level 1 Perry Street building Collingwood Yards Enter via 35 Johnson Street or 30 Perry Street, Collingwood Phone: +61 477 211 699
Hot on the heels of my reviews of Stormy Weather: Contemporary Landscape Photography at NGV Australia and Sidney Nolan: Drought Photographs at Australian Galleries, Melbourne comes the exhibition Photography & place: Australian landscape photography, 1970s until now at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. An insightful, eloquent text by Vigen Galstyan (Assistant curator, photographs, AGNSW) accompanies the posting.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Susanne Briggs for her help and to the Art Gallery of New South Wales for allowing me to publish the photographs and the text in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Australian born and American based photographer Douglas Holleley has experimented with many aberrant photographic techniques over the course of his career. Holleley received a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology in 1971 at Macquarie University before relocating to America to undertake a Master of Fine Arts, studying at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York between 1974 and 1976. Founded by Nathan Lyons in 1969 and affiliated with important photographers including Minor White and Frederick Sommers, the Visual Studies Workshop was a bedrock institution that fostered innovative photographic practice from the 1970s onwards. It was here that Holleley received tutelage from Ansel Adams in 1975. His early photographic output includes hand coloured black and white photographs as well as photograms and gridded arrangements of Polaroids. He later began experimenting with digital photography, applying the same principles of the photogram to his experiments with a flatbed scanner.
During the time spent studying photography in America in the 1970s Holleley became interested in Polaroid technology. When he returned to Australia in 1979, before later relocating permanently to America, Holleley commenced an extensive photographic project of documenting the Australian bush with a Polaroid SX-70 camera, effectively becoming one of the first professional practitioners of the medium in the country. The resulting images were presented as a series and published as a book – Visions of Australia – in 1980. Employing a refined formalist vocabulary, Holleley produced photographic mosaics by arranging his Polaroids into gridded compositions.
Dissected, disassembled and then collated within the pictorial frame, the landscape in Holleley’s works becomes slightly unnatural and detached. These works negate linear single point perspective by focusing on the ground and reducing the scene to a formal composite. Here, the expanse of the view and the horizon does not dominate the space of the image. The tessellating images produce a ‘whole’ that is slightly misaligned and unsettled. In some works, the photographer’s shadow is visible. It asserts itself as an ambivalent presence that is not tethered to the scene. This spectral form heightens the sense of disquiet that pervades the images.
Text from the Art Gallery of New South Wales website [Online] Cited 16/01/2020
Ian North is an Adjunct Professor of Visual Arts at both the University of Adelaide and the University of South Australia. He is a photographer, painter and writer, and was the founding curator of photography at the National Gallery of Australia 1980-1984. Throughout his career, he has been concerned with the legacy of Australian landscape, the impact of colonial narratives and their established visual conventions and, as a consequence, the politics of representing the subject. …
North’s methodology is concerned with the processes of vision and interaction as they have shaped the landscape. In Canberra Suite North presents an encyclopaedic record of Walter Burley Griffin’s intricately designed city, exploring the spatial interface between nature and humanity. The works are absent of human life – reminiscent of Ed Ruscha’s Twenty-six Gasoline Stations. The emotional ambivalence of the images is reflected in their use of colour, like that of postcards. As one of the first instances of larger format colour art photography in Australia, the images topographically map space as a depersonalised, banal subject. Yet their colour, like that of landscape painting, highlights flora, revealing the number of non-native plants included in Canberra’s design. As such, these artefacts of North’s private wanderings and systemic mode of looking are able to subtly critique colonialism.
Text from the Art Gallery of New South Wales website [Online] Cited 16/01/2020
EARTH SCANS AND BUSH RELEVANCES: Photography & place in Australia, 1970s till now
For many of us, landscape is a noun. A view from the window or the balcony, a strange immaterial ‘thing’ that makes people exclaim in awe, point to in pride, recall nostalgically, pose in front of or be used to bump up real estate prices. If one is an urban dweller, which most Australians are, then the landscape exists essentially as a mirage, something to create in the backyard, occasionally look at on holidays or hang on the walls. However, noted American cultural theorist and art historian W. J. T. Mitchell has proposed that we should think of landscape as a verb: an act of creation on our part that engenders cultural constructs, national identities and shared mythologies.
Photography & place is an exhibition that investigates this process of ‘landscaping’ through the work of 18 Australian photographers between the 1970s and now. Their significant contribution to representation of landscape broke new ground in what has always been a confounding topic. Indeed, as Judy Annear has pointed out in a 2008 essay in Broadsheet magazine, the practice of documenting and interpreting the notion of ‘place’ in Australian photography has been fragmentary in comparison to traditions in America, Europe or New Zealand. This reluctance to focus on the natural environment is perhaps a residue of the ‘terra nullius’ polemic, which shifted the attention of many photographers on the building of colonial Australia. Photography from the mid 19th to the early 20th century by photographers such as Charles Bayliss and Nicholas Caire actively documented the conquest of nature by white settlers, or presented views of untouched wilderness as epitomes of the picturesque: endless waterfalls, lakes, forests in twilights, enigmatic caves and an occasional nymph like creature prancing. Despite Bayliss’ efforts to show the indigenous people on their land, they are, as Helen Ennis observed in her 2007 book Photography and Australia, conspicuous by their absence: the land that we see surrounding them in early Australian photography by the likes of J.W. Lindt is often a mass-produced painted studio backdrop.
The advent of modernism in the 1930s only served to entrench the photographers deeper into the urban space. ‘Place’ is the city and it is here that industry, progress and culture shapes the Australian identity. It is still difficult to dislodge the iconic images of Max Dupain and David Moore as epitomes of Australianness, promulgated as they were through countless renditions in mass media and consumer culture. But as post-modern anxiety started to seep through the patchwork of the Australian dream, it was landscape that many critically informed photographers turned to as a tool for analysis and revision.
A number of factors conflated in the mid 1970s, engendering a radical shift in perspectives. One of the primary forces that began to reshape the approaches to landscape in Australian photography was the awareness of new artistic movements taking place in USA and Europe. The enormously influential exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape held in 1975 at the George Eastman House, Rochester, consolidated the spread of minimalist and conceptually informed photography which was avidly embraced by a younger generation of Australian photographers. One can also cite the rise of the Australian greens movement in Tasmania, the increasing awareness of Indigenous cultures and rights and not the least, the phenomenon of university-educated photographers as key milestones during this decade.
Lynn Silverman, Douglas Holleley, Jon Rhodes, Wes Stacey and Marion Marrison were among the practitioners who pointed their lenses out of the city, often exploring the fringes of human settlement and sometimes as in the case of Silverman, Stacey and Holleley, venturing into the desert. The element that collectively stamps their work is the ostensible fragmentation of the landscape. Instead of the holistic, positivist postcard views of Australia, we get something resembling a lunar vista. The palpable sense of alienation in American expatriate Lynn Silverman’s striking Horizons series from 1979 echoes in the disorienting grid-based Polaroid assemblages by Holleley conjuring up a space that appears hostile and to a degree indifferent to our presence. The foreignness of these landscapes is not necessarily a malevolent force as was customary to show in a slate of Australian New Wave films of the 70s and 80s. Rather a much more meditative stance is taken in regards to our relationship to a place which has been claimed without being understood or in many ways respected. Ingeborg Tyssen’s photographs hint at existing presences, forms and phenomena which are full of life and meaning that remain perpetually unresolved to an outsider. The imported paradigms of Western culture can not take root in this environment. One could easily define the landscape photography of this period in Lynn Silverman’s words as “an orienting experience” and a belated attempt at a proper reconnaissance of the land.
The coolly detached outlook that underlines the investigative drive of most of these photographers is magnified by their adoption of serial or multi-panel formats. It was certainly a way to expand and collapse the accepted faculties of the pictorial field, challenging and questioning the accepted notions of photographic ‘truth’. Jon Rhodes demonstrates the inherent power of this simple device in his cinematically sequential Gurkawey, Trial Bay, NT 1974, which transforms a seemingly wild and uninhabitable swamp into a joyful playground of an Aboriginal child.
In some instances the photographic approach is more concerned with elucidating the nature of the photographic image itself and the way it can influence and control our perception. As Arnold Hauser has lucidly described in his groundbreaking Social History of Art, images have always been used to secure and infer political power. As such, the metamorphosis of a visual representation into an iconographic one carries within it an element of danger as images begin to seduce the viewer away from objectivity. Indeed, images of Australia have been the most relentlessly and carefully used signifiers in promoting a (colonial) national consciousness by political, commercial and cultural institutions. In this light, it is not difficult to see the works of Wes Stacey and Ian North as acts of iconoclasm. Stacey’s droll and gently parodic series The road 1973-1975, charts a snapshot journey that goes nowhere. Seemingly random, half-glimpsed shots of empty dirt roads, sunburnt grass mounds and endless highways emanate a sense of rootlessness and displacement, negating any possibility of objectification or identification with the landscape. Instead of epic grandeur and jingoism we get something that is confronting, uncomfortably real and in no way ‘advertisable’.
‘The Real’ is even more startling in Ian North’s subversive Canberra suite 1980-81, where the utopian dream capital has been reduced to banal ‘documents’ of depopulated, custom-made suburbia. The hyperreal concreteness of North’s Canberra gives the city an aura of a De Chiricoesque waking nightmare. In line with the set practices of conceptual photography of the period, North has distilled his images from any sign of formal mediation, forcing the viewer to focus on the raw content. It is through this forensic directness that the strange incongruity of human intervention within the landscape becomes ostensible.
Daniel Palmer has noted that North’s images “are highly prescient of much photography produced by artists in Australia today”. Certainly by the 1980s photographers became more actively engaged in analysing the nature / culture median. Strongly influenced by feminist and post-colonial theory, a number of practitioners used photography as a medium to document ideas rather than objective reality. Anne Ferran and Simryn Gill are particularly notable in this regard. Both artists are concerned with the historical and political dimensions of the locations they chose to photograph, resulting in multi-layered and complex strategies that require more involved intellectual interaction from the audience. Gill’s ‘staged’ photographs relate to us the agency of nature and time upon the cultural environment. Synthesis and amalgamation of outwardly irreconcilable elements – imported plants, Australian bush, cotton shirts – slowly, but surely melt into new, as yet unknown entities in Rampant 1999. The force of inevitable decay is absolute yet imbued with generative power as well. Exploring the constantly shifting certainties of what constitutes a ‘place’ the artist draws the audience into questioning its own role in this transformative process.
Ferran takes a more archaeological position in relation to her subject matter. Her eerie surveys of rather ordinary grass mounds in the series Lost to worlds 2008 become evocative paeans to obliterated lives, once we learn that the mounds are all that remain of the factories where convict women were sent to work. Looking at these shimmering ghost worlds one is reminded of Walter Benjamin’s essay The Ruin where the writer analyses the capacity of ruins to reveal the “philosophical truth content”. It is through this allegorical device that Ferran achieves a degree of rehabilitation for the absent histories she photographs.
History, in its manifold and troubling guises, is directly ‘exposed’ in the landscapes of Ricky Maynard, Michael Riley and Rosemary Laing. As Indigenous photographers, Maynard and Riley have played an important role in translating the cultural and political status of Aboriginal peoples into a ‘language’ that is universally understood. Their work remains firmly rooted in the traditions of contemporary art, yet the heavily symbolical slant shows a more ardent and personal engagement with the Australian landscape. Riley’s expressionistic series flyblown 1998 sums up in a few strategically juxtaposed metaphors the spiritual dimension of the landscape, while simultaneously revealing the diverging connotations of Australia’s fundamentally divided identity. The colonial legacy is shown as one of conquest and domination that clashes with the artist’s engagement with country. Maynard’s Portrait of a distant land 2005, explores the same dichotomy in more site specific terms. After permanently settling in Flinders Island, Maynard decided to return to the portrayal of Tasmanian Aborigines, taking a more collaborative approach. He sees this as a way of bypassing the propensity of the photographic image “to subjugate its subjects”. The resulting series is a profoundly poetic treatment that rises above social documentation to suggest the wider implications of historical change and disclose the ability of people to overcome what the artist has described as victimisation through a deeply compassionate relationship with the land. Ultimately Maynard gives us an edifying testimony to the affirmative power of the landscape as collective memory.
Interest in the political aspects of landscape photography has continued unabated into the 21st century. Yet a more philosophically inclined thread has become evident in the last two decades. No longer is it enough to deconstruct and pull apart ideas about landscape’s relationship to identity and nationhood. What photographers like Bill Henson, David Stephenson, Simone Douglas and Rosemary Laing question is the very possibility (or impossibility) of seeing itself. If positioning oneself in relation to nature seems like a distinct, albeit problematic proposition in the 1970s and 80s, the later works in the exhibition are resolutely ambivalent on the subject.
What can one grab onto when faced with the endless expanses of white in Stephenson’s The ice 1992, the terrifying darkness of Henson’s night scenes or the infuriating haze of Douglas’s twilight worlds? Perhaps the only recourse is to dissolve into the beckoning ‘forever’ of the vanishing point in Laing’s To walk on a sea of salt 2004. This void is not a boundary point between nature and culture – it is where culture ends and an entirely new state of consciousness begins: the realm of the sublime and the imagination. As history seems no longer to be trustworthy, ‘place’ can only be constructed as a metaphysical entity. It is a curious turnabout in some ways that echoes some of the early, turn-of-the-century encounters with the Australian landscape by photographers such as John Paine and Norman C. Deck. The sense of fear and awe towards the unfamiliar environment permeates their images, transcending the merely investigative / didactic motives of most colonial photography. What has eventuated from walking into this environment? Subjugation? Destruction? Incomprehension? Indifference? By going back to the point zero of the void and the sublime, contemporary photography negotiates a second attempt at engagement with nature through a renewed and deeper understanding of humanity’s symbiotic relationship with this life-giving force.
Vigen Galstyan Assistant curator, photographs1
1/ Galstyan, Vigen. “EARTH SCANS AND BUSH RELEVANCES: Photography & place in Australia, 1970s till now,” in Look gallery magazine. Sydney: Art Gallery Society of New South Wales, 2011, pp. 25-29.
Michael Riley received his first introduction to photography through a workshop at the Tin Sheds Gallery in Sydney, 1982. A Wiradjuri / Kamilaroi man, the artist moved to Sydney from Dubbo in his late teens. He became part of a circle of young Indigenous artists drawn together in the city at that time. A founding member of the Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative Riley was also a key participant in the first exhibition of Indigenous photographers at the Aboriginal Artists Gallery, Sydney in 1986 (curator Ace Bourke). In 2003 Riley’s work was selected for the Istanbul Biennial, and in 2006 his work was permanently installed at Musée de quai Branly, Paris. A major retrospective toured nationally in 2006-2008.
Riley’s fine art photography began in black and white but he quickly progressed to large-scale colour, a format that also expanded the cinematic qualities of his images, no doubt reflecting the influence film and video were having upon the artist as he worked simultaneously with these media. He produced, for example, the documentaries Blacktracker and Tent boxers for ABC television in the late nineties.
The photographic series flyblown bears a close relationship to the film Empire which Riley created in 1997. Like the film, these photographs give expression to the artist’s concern with the impact of European culture upon that of Australia’s Indigenous population, specifically, as he described it, the ‘sacrifices Aboriginal people made to be Christian’ (Avril Quaill, ‘Marking our times: selected works of art from the Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander Collection at the National Gallery of Australia’, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 1996 p. 66).
Christian iconography looms large in the series, as it has across much of Riley’s work. In flyblown, an imposing reflective cross is raised in the sky. Repeated in red, gold and blue its presence is inescapable. A symbol capable of inspiring awe, fear, devotion, Riley also engages with its elegiac qualities so that it functions as memorial marker. Another image depicting a bible floating face down in water conceptualises the missionary deluge, perhaps; submersion and loss through baptism, definitely.
flyblown reverberates with a subtle ominous hum – the quiet tension that precedes a storm. The parched earth beneath a dead galah seems to ache for the rain and water promised in the other images of clouds and dark skies. The nourishment Christianity offered and the inadvertent drowning of traditional culture that often followed is implied.
Visually linking the natural environment with religious symbolism Riley articulates Indigenous spirituality’s connections to country and widens his examination beyond to examine the sustained environmental damage. The negative side effects of pastoralist Australia are indicated by contrasting images of the long grass of cattle pastures with that of drought and wildlife death.
Riley’s success in articulating these issues and complexities, incorporating religious iconography so laden by history and meaning is a testament to his sensitivity and subtlety. Allowing room for ambiguity, Riley provides space for the mixed emotions of the subject and its history.
Text from the Art Gallery of New South Wales website [Online] Cited 16/01/2020
In Rampant, Simryn Gill turned her eye once more on Australia ‘… to see if I could find friends among the local flora’. This series of photographs was shot in sub-tropical northern New South Wales and shows unnerving images of trees and plants dressed up in clothes. In the photographs these ghostly forms are seen lingering in groves of introduced plants such as bamboo, bananas, sugar cane and camphor laurels. The plants are dressed in lungis and sarongs, generic clothing from South and South- East Asia, where many of these plants originate. Rampant is a form of memento mori, a record of the aspirations that saw plants only too successfully introduced into a pristine terrain which was unable to offer any resistance to their feral ways.
French philosopher Gaston Bachelard condenses his complex thinking on creativity and the human imagination into the metaphor of a tree, with its living, evolving growth and the simultaneity of being earth bound and heaven reaching, symbolising both the real and ideal.1 However, what happens when that tree is a camphor laurel, an admirable thing in its native land but out of place and wrecking havoc along the creeks of rural New South Wales?
Many once-useful species are now noxious weeds and over-successful colonisers, despised for their commonness, their success, their over-familiarity, and for being where we feel they should not be. They disrupt the order we would like to impose and remind us of our fallibility when attempting to play god and create our own earthly Edens. The language of natural purity that we use to protect our landscape also resonates with the nationalist rhetoric used to police our borders and to decide who are acceptable new arrivals and who are illegal aliens, often determined through scales of economic and social usefulness.
Text from the Art Gallery of New South Wales website [Online] Cited 16/01/2020
1/ Gaston Bachelard, ‘The totality of the root image’, On poetic imagination and reverie, editor and translator Colette Graudin, Spring Publications, Quebec, 1987, p. 85.
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Couple Seated on Porch, Gunlock, Utah 1953 Silver gelatin photograph Brigham Young University Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by Jack and Mary Lois Wheatley
“The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.”
Dorothea Lange
Lange observes the minutiae, the precise details that go to make up the lives of these three towns and puts them together in a wonderful symphony of beautifully calculated, seemingly happenstance associations. Masterful!
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Doorway, Toquerville, Utah 1953 Silver gelatin photograph Brigham Young University Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by Jack and Mary Lois Wheatley
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Mulberry Tree, Neagle Home, Toquerville, Utah 1953 Silver gelatin photograph Brigham Young University Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by Jack and Mary Lois Wheatley
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Riley Savage, Toquerville, Utah 1953 Silver gelatin photograph Brigham Young University Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by Jack and Mary Lois Wheatley
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Hands, Toquerville, Utah 1953 Silver gelatin photograph Brigham Young University Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by Jack and Mary Lois Wheatley
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Eggs, Toquerville, Utah 1953 Silver gelatin photograph Collection of John and Lolita Dixon
In August 1953, renowned American photographer Dorothea Lange travelled to southern Utah where she met up with her long-time friend Ansel Adams. The two photographers spent three weeks photographing the landscape and people of Toquerville, Gunlock and St. George with the intention of publishing the work in LIFE magazine.
Lange’s enthusiasm for her subject yielded hundreds of photographs from which she composed an extended essay of 135 photographs, including images by Ansel Adams. Thirty-five of those photographs with text by Daniel Dixon appeared under the title Three Mormon Towns in the September 6, 1954 issue of LIFE.
“Dorothea Lange’s Three Mormon Towns,” a new exhibition at the Brigham Young University Museum of Art, features 21 of Lange’s photographs from this series acquired by the museum. The exhibition also draws from the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago, and the collection of John and Lolita Dixon.
The 62 vintage prints in the exhibition, accompanied by excerpts from Dixon’s original text, examine Lange’s lasting interest in the people of southern Utah and their relationship with the land, their heritage and the transformation of the West in post-war America.
“Subtle and poetic, the series of photographs that has come to be known as Three Mormon Towns is a bridge between Lange’s famous Depression Era photographs and her detailed photo essays of the 1950s,” Diana Turnbow, Curator of Photography at Brigham Young University Museum of Art, said.
Utah attracted Lange’s interest when she and her first husband, Maynard Dixon, spent the summer of 1933 camping and working in Zion National Park. She originally intended to photograph southern Utah with the support of a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship in 1941; however, a family crisis, followed by the onset of World War II prevented Lange from traveling to Utah. Yet, the desire to photograph the Mormon towns of southern Utah never faded. In 1953, Lange returned to the place that had captured her attention decades earlier.
“While Lange’s photographs depict communities bound together by hard work and religion in the formidable landscape of the Colorado Plateau, they also explore the changes that were beginning to affect not only Utah, but rural communities throughout the United States,” Turnbow said. “Three Mormon Towns was a study of contrasts – of old and new, of quiet villages and a growing city, of deep roots and transient highways. In this series, Lange memorialised the dignity and simplicity of agrarian life in light of post-war urbanisation.”
Published in the September 6, 1954 issue of LIFE magazine, the series of photographs that has come to be known as Three Mormon Towns bridges Dorothea Lange’s famous Depression era photographs with her detailed photo essays of the 1950s. Featuring sixty-two vintage photographs from the series, this exhibition considers Dorothea Lange’s lasting interest in the people of southern Utah and their relationship with the land, their heritage, and the transformation of the West in post-war America.
Known for her candid and sympathetic depiction of people, Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) is one of the most revered photographers of the twentieth century. For over four decades she explored the human psyche through portraiture and documentary photography. The probing portraits of her early career prepared Lange to photograph the people involved in the tumultuous events of the San Francisco labor strikes of 1934, the Great Depression, and the Japanese internment during World War II. Her 1935 photograph, TheMigrant Mother, is one of the great icons of the American century.
In the 1950s, Lange began to create photographic essays for the popular picture and news magazine LIFE. She eventually completed five major essays for publication, with two of the essays, including Three Mormon Towns, printed in LIFE. In addition, Lange was a founding member of Aperture magazine and played a role in organising the influential Family of Man exhibition that premiered in New York in 1955.
In the later part of her life, Lange photographed and traveled extensively with her husband, Paul Taylor, in conjunction with his work in international development. Her photographs of South America, Africa, and Asia were deft and subtle, exploring a rich visual landscape populated with diverse objects and people.
In 1964, Lange was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Sustained by determination, she worked steadily to complete a number of projects including a retrospective exhibition of her work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. She passed away on October 11, 1965, content with the life that she had been able to live.
Text from the Brigham Young University Museum of Art website [Online] Cited 24/03/2011 no longer available online
Gunlock, Utah
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Sky and Clouds, Gunlock, Utah 1953 Silver gelatin photograph Brigham Young University Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by Jack and Mary Lois Wheatley
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Jake Jones’ Hands, Gunlock, Utah 1953 Silver gelatin photograph Brigham Young University Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by Jack and Mary Lois Wheatley
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Horseplay, Gunlock, Utah 1953 Silver gelatin photograph Brigham Young University Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by Jack and Mary Lois Wheatley
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Four Young Riders in Summer 1953 Silver gelatin photograph Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago
St. George, Utah
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Anne Carter Johnson, St. George, Utah 1953 Silver gelatin photograph Brigham Young University Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by Jack and Mary Lois Wheatley
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Young Woman, St. George, Utah 1953 Silver gelatin photograph Brigham Young University Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by Jack and Mary Lois Wheatley
Brigham Young University Museum of Art North Campus Drive, Provo, UT 84602-1400
Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea pictures two creatures dancing between sea and sky, surrounded by arabesques, spirals, and stripes. The forms “have no direct association with any particular visible experience, but in them one recognises the principle and passion of organisms,” Rothko said. For him art was “an adventure into an unknown world”; like the Surrealists before him, Rothko looked inward, to his own unconscious mind, for inspiration and material for his work.
Gallery label from Abstract Expressionist New York, October 3, 2010 – April 25, 2011
What a privilege to post all of these works together.
Aaron Siskind has to be one of my favourite photographers of all time (and space). His Martha’s Vineyard (see photograph below), like most of his work, is superb: the abstraction and counterpose are magnificent. Team this with a couple of Rothko, a Motherwell, a de Kooning and a knockout of a Hartigan and you certainly have the start of ‘The Big Picture’. I wish I could have been there to see this exhibition – sigh!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to The Museum of Modern Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Installation view of the exhibition, Abstract Expressionist New York: The Big Picture at MoMA, New York October 3, 2010 – February 28, 2011 Photograph by Thomas Griesel
In the early 1940s Pollock, like many of his peers, explored primeval or mythological themes in his work. The wolf in this painting may allude to the animal that suckled the twin founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus, in the myth of the city’s birth. But “She-Wolf came into existence because I had to paint it,” Pollock said in 1944. In an attitude typical of his generation, he added, “Any attempt on my part to say something about it, to attempt explanation of the inexplicable, could only destroy it.” The She-Wolf was featured in Pollock’s first solo exhibition, at Art of This Century gallery in New York in 1943. MoMA acquired the painting the following year, making it the first work by Pollock to enter a museum collection.
Gallery label from Abstract Expressionist New York, October 3, 2010 – April 25, 2011
Installation view of the exhibition, Abstract Expressionist New York: The Big Picture at MoMA, New York October 3, 2010 – February 28, 2011 showing at right, Jackson Pollock’s painting Number 1A, 1948 Photograph by Thomas Griesel
While the style of “drip” painting has become synonymous with the name Jackson Pollock, here the artist has autographed the work even more directly, with several handprints found at the composition’s upper right. Around this time Pollock stopped giving his paintings evocative titles and began instead to number them. His wife, artist Lee Krasner, later explained, “Numbers are neutral. They make people look at a painting for what it is – pure painting.” Collectors did not immediately appreciate Pollock’s radical new style, and when first exhibited, in 1949 (then titled Number 1, 1948), this painting remained unsold. Later that year the work was shown again in the artist’s second solo exhibition (Pollock added “A” to the title to avoid confusion with more recent work) and shortly thereafter was purchased by MoMA.
Gallery label from Abstract Expressionist New York, October 3, 2010 – April 25, 2011
Bradley Walker Tomlin (American, 1899-1953) Number 20 1949 Oil on canvas 7′ 2″ x 6′ 8 1/4″ (218.5 x 203.9cm) Gift of Philip Johnson
Although some of the ribbons and bars that animate Number 20 are recognisable letters of the alphabet (E, X, or Z) these and their more abstract neighbours evoke calligraphy without constituting it. A critic described these symbols as “hieroglyphs that lack only the appropriate Rosetta Stone for their deciphering.” Tomlin distributed his nonobjective imagery evenly on the canvas, depriving the work of a traditional focal point and creating a staccato rhythm and allover design that invites the viewer’s glance to travel across its surface.
Gallery label from Abstract Expressionist New York, October 3, 2010 – April 25, 2011
Installation view of the exhibition, Abstract Expressionist New York: The Big Picture at MoMA, New York October 3, 2010 – February 28, 2011 showing at left, Barnett Newman’s painting Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950-1951) Photograph by Thomas Griesel
Vir Heroicus Sublimis, Newman’s largest painting at the time of its completion, is meant to overwhelm the senses. Viewers may be inclined to step back from it to see it all at once, but Newman instructed precisely the opposite. When the painting was first exhibited, in 1951 at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, Newman tacked to the wall a notice that read, “There is a tendency to look at large pictures from a distance. The large pictures in this exhibition are intended to be seen from a short distance.” Newman believed deeply in the spiritual potential of abstract art. The Latin title of this painting means “Man, heroic and sublime.”
Gallery label from Abstract Expressionist New York, October 3, 2010 – April 25, 2011
Installation view of the exhibition, Abstract Expressionist New York: The Big Picture at MoMA, New York October 3, 2010 – February 28, 2011 showing at right, David Smith’s sculpture Australia (1951) Photograph by Thomas Griesel
At the time of its completion, Australia was Smith’s largest sculpture. By welding together thin rods and plates of steel he created a work that is simultaneously delicate and strong, a masterpiece of tension, balance, and form that he described as a “drawing in space.” Sculpture has traditionally been defined by volume and mass; Australia is, in contrast, built of lines. In what might be described as an allover sculpture, the linear activity is greatest at the perimeters, while the center is nearly empty. Because of its title, the work is sometimes read as an abstracted kangaroo, its lines capturing the spring of the animal’s leap.
Gallery label from Abstract Expressionist New York, October 3, 2010 – April 25, 2011
Installation view of the exhibition, Abstract Expressionist New York: The Big Picture at MoMA, New York October 3, 2010 – February 28, 2011 showing a wall of photographs by Aaron Siskind including at second right, Martha’s Vineyard (1954-1959) Photograph by Thomas Griesel
In the 1940s Gottlieb began to emulate the art of early Native American and Middle Eastern cultures, explorations that eventually inspired his Pictograph paintings, including Man Looking at Woman. This work and others like it feature hieroglyphic-like script distributed across the canvas in a series of gridded compartments. Gottlieb avoided using decipherable signs. In 1955 he said of these works, “I frequently hear the question, ‘What do these images mean?’ That is simply the wrong question. Visual images do not have to conform to either verbal thinking or optical facts. A better question would be: ‘Do these images convey any emotional truth?'”
Gallery label from Abstract Expressionist New York, October 3, 2010 – April 25, 2011
The evocative title of this work and the fiery intensity of the palette signal a departure from Gorky’s more lyrical abstractions of the preceding years. Agony, a blazing, impassioned scene, is often understood in relation to the traumatic events of the artist’s personal life, including a fire in his studio and cancer.
Gallery label from Abstract Expressionist New York, October 3, 2010 – April 25, 2011
Subtitled The Big Picture, this installation of 100 Abstract Expressionist paintings and a rich selection of some 60 sculptures, drawings, prints, and photographs, occupies the entire fourth floor of the Museum and chronicles the era of Abstract Expressionism. The movement drew together a host of artists with greatly varying stylistic approaches, but with a common commitment to the power of an abstract art that could express personal convictions and profound human values.
Organised in a loose chronology, intermittently interrupted by monographic galleries that allow for the in-depth study of an individual artist’s practice, the installation opens with a selection of paintings and drawings that attest to the acutely self-conscious sense of new beginnings present in the work of individuals such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, they and their peers – not yet a cohesive group – created imagery that evoked primitive man or ancient myth, and conjured an aquatic or geological pre-human world.
Upon entering the galleries, visitors are greeted by Jackson Pollock’s The She-Wolf (1943), which was featured in the artist’s first solo exhibition, in 1943, and was the first work by Pollock to enter a museum collection when MoMA acquired it the following year. Made before Pollock developed his signature “drip” style, the canvas shows that a free-form abstraction and an unfettered play of materials were already parts of his process. Also on view is Mark Rothko’s Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea (1944), a canvas picturing two creatures floating between sea and sky, surrounded by arabesques, spirals, and stripes that betrays the influence of Surrealism on Rothko’s early work.
A monographic gallery devoted to the work of Barnett Newman includes Onement, I (1952), which the artist later identified as his breakthrough painting. Modest in size, it consists of a monochromatic background divided in half by a vertical band, or “zip” as the artist later called it. Every successive painting by Newman, as seen in the seven works in this gallery, features this particular compositional motif, although their formal and emotional differences are apparent. The scale and proportions of the paintings, as well as their palette and brushwork, vary from work to work, as do the number of zips and their location in the field of colour. At the other end of the spectrum from this relatively small canvas is Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950-1951), an 18-foot-wide, vibrant red expanse that was Newman’s largest painting at the time of its creation.
The distinctive materials, techniques, and approaches developed and practiced by the Abstract Expressionists can be seen in a number of other works from the late 1940s and early 1950s. For Painting (1948), Willem de Kooning used oil and enamel sign paint to create a densely packed painting in which the paint drips, bleeds, congeals, or dissolves into delicate streaks. Lee Krasner’s Untitled (1949) shows that she applied thick paint – sometimes directly from the tube – in rhythmic and repetitive strokes, giving equal attention to every inch of the canvas and creating an allover composition. Bradley Walker Tomlin, in Number 20 (1949), and Adolph Gottlieb, in Man Looking at Woman (1949), distributed imagery evoking the alphabet and hieroglyphics evenly across their canvases.
A large gallery focusing on the work of Jackson Pollock includes Full Fathom Five (1947), one of earliest “drip” paintings, and Number 1A, 1948 (1948), the first drip painting to enter MoMA’s collection (in 1950). For One: Number 31, 1950 (1950), a masterpiece of the drip technique and one of Pollock’s largest paintings (8′ 10″ x 17′ 5 5/8″ (269.5 x 530.8 cm)), the artist laid the canvas on the floor of his studio and poured, dribbled, and flicked enamel paint onto the surface, sometimes straight from the can, or with sticks and stiffened brushes. The density of interlacing liquid threads of paint is balanced and offset by puddles of muted colours and by allover spattering.
Eight paintings made by Mark Rothko over a 14-year period are presented in a single gallery. The earliest examples from 1948, such as No. 1 (Untitled), feature variously sized abstract forms caught mid-motion as they shift on the canvas. Beginning in 1950, Rothko’s “classic” style forms as the artist creates a composition from horizontal planes of thinly layered paint and highly modulated colour, simplifying the compositional structure of his paintings and arriving at his signature style. No. 10 (1950) is divided horizontally into three dominant planes of blue, yellow, and white that softly and subtly bleed into one another. Acquired by MoMA in 1952, it was the first Rothko to enter the Museum’s collection, and was considered so radical that a trustee of the Museum resigned in protest.
MoMA’s practice of making in-depth acquisitions of work by artists that its curators judged to be of greatest importance was complemented by acquisitions of smaller numbers of works by other artist who played roles too significant to be forgotten. The Big Picture includes paintings and sculptures by more than 20 artists.
There is a gallery devoted to a selection of photographs made by individuals who used a camera to explore kindred artistic concerns – often resulting in work with striking stylistic similarities. Aaron Siskind may be the photographer most closely associated with Abstract Expressionism, and numerous works of his on display suggest the depth of this connection. Also featured in this installation is work by Harry Callahan, Robert Frank, Minor White, and others, revealing the variety of ways in which the sensibility or structure of paintings from this period manifested itself photographically.
The exhibition includes some 30 items from the MoMA Archives, documenting the relation of the Museum to Abstract Expressionism. Materials represent the institution’s influential series of “Americans” exhibitions, organised by Dorothy C. Miller, which included several Abstract Expressionist artists in four of its iterations. In addition, documentation regarding the internationally circulating New American Painting show (also organised by Miller) is presented. This important exhibition travelled to eight European cities in 1958-59 and propelled the homegrown Abstract Expressionist movement onto the international art scene. A third section includes photographs of artists and their own statements and letters. Highlights include: exhibition catalogues, installation photographs, news clippings, and ephemera; photographs of artists in the studio with their artworks; a letter from Robert Motherwell to Miller describing the four themes of his art (automatic means, pure abstractions, political or a kind of “disasters” series, and intimate pictures), a letter from Ad Reinhardt to Miller recommending a different installation of his paintings, and a statement by Grace Hartigan identifying her subject as the “vulgar and vital in American life, and the possibilities of its transcendence into the beautiful.”
Text from the Museum of Modern Art press release
Installation view of the exhibition, Abstract Expressionist New York: The Big Picture at MoMA, New York October 3, 2010 – February 28, 2011 showing a wall of the photographs of Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Photograph by Thomas Griesel
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Paris 1952 Gelatin silver print
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Mississippi, St Louis 1948 Gelatin silver print
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) New York c. 1949 Gelatin silver print
This sculpture represents Kwannon (also known as Kannon), the Buddhist goddess of mercy and an attendant of Buddha. Lassaw thickened steel wire with molten bronze, creating an openwork metal scaffolding of irregular lines and voids – what he called a “drawing in space.” Lassaw wrote of this abstract figure, “Although I never try to depict or narrate or communicate, I feel that something of Kwannon entered this piece of sculpture.”
Gallery label from Abstract Expressionist New York, October 3, 2010 – April 25, 2011
De Kooning famously said, “Flesh is the reason oil paint was invented,” and although he often worked in an abstract style he continually returned to the figure. Woman I took an unusually long time to complete. De Kooning made numerous preliminary studies then repainted the canvas repeatedly, eventually arriving at this hulking, wild-eyed figure of a woman. An amalgam of female archetypes, from a Paleolithic fertility goddess to a 1950s pinup girl, her threatening gaze and ferocious grin are heightened by de Kooning’s aggressive brushwork and intensely coloured palette.
Gallery label from Abstract Expressionist New York, October 3, 2010 – April 25, 2011
In Memoria in Aeturnum (Eternal memory) Hofmann remembers five American painters who died in their prime: Arthur B. Carles, an early American Cubist, and four abstract painters whose work is on display in this exhibition – Arshile Gorky, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, and Bradley Walker Tomlin. Painted near the end of his life, Hofmann’s work is a tribute to the preceding decades of abstract art, incorporating a wide range of techniques that evoke the spirits of the departed: stains, drips, drawn-out brushstrokes, and smooth-edged geometric forms.
Gallery label from Abstract Expressionist New York, October 3, 2010 – April 25, 2011
Installation view of the exhibition, Abstract Expressionist New York: The Big Picture at MoMA, New York October 3, 2010 – February 28, 2011 showing at right, Mark Rothko’s painting No. 5 / No. 22 (1950) Photograph by Thomas Griesel
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Image No. 9 from an Untitled sequence 1977 1977 Gelatin silver print
This is an exquisite exhibition by one of Australia’s preeminent artists. Like Glenn Gould playing a Bach fugue, Bill Henson is grand master in the performance of narrative, structure, composition, light and atmosphere. The exhibition features thirteen large colour photographs printed on lustre paper (twelve horizontal and one vertical) – nine figurative of adolescent females, two of crowd scenes in front of Rembrandt paintings in The Hermitage, St. Petersburg (including the stunning photograph that features The return of the prodigal son c. 1662 in the background, see below) and two landscapes taken off the coast of Italy. What a journey this exhibition takes you on!
Throughout his career Henson has carefully and thoughtfully mined the history of art to create personal mythologies that have wider universal implications. His work is a spiral feeding back into itself. As it ascends so it expands. His inquiry has been consistent and persuasive – themes and techniques that were evident in the very first photographs still appear many years later. For example, the very early photograph Image No.9 from an Untitled sequence 1977 (above) features a Mannerist-influenced elongated body, a form that appears in the latest exhibition in several of the works. Other influences have been, in early work, the Baroque (Untitled 1983/84, below), Rembrandt’s use of chiaroscuro in the Paris Opera Project (Untitled 21/51, below), the Pre-Raphaelite (used in most of his figurative work, especially in the faces, see below). In the current exhibition the influence of Caravaggio on the form of the body and the relationship between a work and Leonardo da Vinci’s Head of Christ (c. 1494-1495, below) is evident as is the implementation of a flattened perspective that is opposed to the principles of linear perspective, used in Dutch still life of the 17th century (see ‘The Art of Describing’1) that Henson employed in early photographs of crowds (Untitled 1980/82, below) – now reappearing in the two photographs taken in front of the Rembrandt paintings.
Henson’s vulnerable bodies have always been marked, bruised and subject to distress, emerging into the light in fragments – unsure in their relationship to life, spirit and mortality. His naked adolescent subjects occupy interstitial spaces: the gap between spaces full of structure, between childhood and adulthood – fluid spaces of adventure, exploration and problematic transience. Using this metaphor the photographs invite the viewer to examine their own social identity for this is never fixed and stable, is always in a state of flux; we, the viewer, have an intimate relationship to this period in our life not as some distant memory but with a sense of wonder and appreciation.
The new photographs, with their languorous, limpid figures have a certain malaise to them – the disintegrating body, the surface of the skin all blotchy hues of blue, pink and purple as if diseased – are translucent like a chrysalis … the inner light seeming to magically emerge from under the skin. As John McDonald in his excellent article (an essential read!) in The Age comments,
“The bodies of teenagers are transformed into living sculptures, infused with a slivery-blue sheen, every bruise and blemish captured in unsettling detail. Henson does not provide us with fantasy objects; he makes us feel how lonely it can be within our own skins. These are disturbing images but not because they feature naked adolescents. They are disturbing because they have the beauty of old master paintings or antique statuary but depict beings of flesh and blood. They are disturbing because they touch parts of the psyche we might prefer to avoid, stripping away the social self, leaving us as defenceless as a snail without its shell.”2
As McDonald notes, these bodies are more melancholy than erotic although they do possess, powerfully, that ability to image “the primeval deity who embodies not only the force of love but also the creative urge of ever-flowing nature, the firstborn Light for the coming into being and ordering of all things in the cosmos.”3 In this sense they emerge from darkness into the (dying of the) Light and possess a foreboding sense of death as well as elegiac sensuality: the placement of a hand, the hair of a person enveloped in darkness languidly resting on an exposed stomach, easily missed if not being attentive to the image.
Henson’s photographs have been said by many to be haunting but his images are more haunted than haunting. There is an indescribable element to them (be it the pain of personal suffering, the longing for release, the yearning for lost youth or an understanding of the deprecations of age), a mesmeric quality that is not easily forgotten. The photographs form a kind of afterimage that burns into your consciousness long after the exposure to the original image has ceased. Haunted or haunting they are unforgettable.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ See Alpers, Svetlana. The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. University Of Chicago Press, 1984
2/ McDonald, John. “Bill Henson,” in The Age newspaper. April 9th 2011 [Online] Cited 17/04/2011
3/ Anon. “Eros,” on Wikipedia [Online] Cited 17/04/2011
All photographs published other than the ones supplied by Tolarno Galleries are published under fair dealing for the purposes of criticism or review (Commonwealth of Australia Consolidated Acts: Copyright Act 1968 – Sect 41).
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled 1980/1982 Gelatin silver photograph 28 × 47cm
David Bailly (Dutch, 1584-1657) Self-Portrait with Vanitas Symbols c. 1651 Oil on canvas
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled 1983/84 1983-1984 Triptych Type C colour photograph Each 98.3 x 73.6cm
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled 21/51 1990-1991 Paris Opera Project Type C photograph 127 × 127cm Series of 50 Edition of 10 + 2 A/Ps
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled #125 2000/2003 LMO SH163 N15A Type C photograph 127 × 180cm Edition of 5 + 2 A/Ps
Sir John Everett Millais (English, 1829-1896) Ophelia 1851-1852 Oil on canvas Tate Britain
Tolarno Galleries is pleased to present Bill Henson’s most recent body of work.
Comprising 13 photographs depicting glowing interiors, stunning landscapes and softly lit figures, this exhibition shows, as David Malouf declared in 1988, that ‘Bill Henson is a maker of magic.’
Henson’s spellbinding new works push photography into the realm of painting. His masterly compositions, captured at twilight, remind us of Caravaggio. Hauntingly beautiful, they express a palpable tenderness through subtle gestures and exquisite modulations of colour. Such photographs tell us why Bill Henson is one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists.
Born in Melbourne, he had his first solo exhibition, at the age of 19, at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1975. Since then he has exhibited extensively in Australia and internationally. In 1995 he represented Australia at the Venice Biennale with his celebrated series of cut-screen photographs.
In 2003 his work appeared in Strangers: The First ICP Triennial of Photography and Video at the International Center of Photography, New York.
A major survey of his work was held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the National Gallery of Victoria in 2005. This landmark exhibition attracted record visitor numbers for a contemporary art exhibition in Australia. The following year he exhibited a major body of work in Twilight: Photography in the magic Hour at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Press release from Tolarno Galleries
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled 2010/2011 NH SH346 N10B Archival inkjet pigment print 127 x 180cm Edition of 5
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled 2009/2010 CL SH733 N35B Archival inkjet pigment print 127 x 180cm Edition of 5
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled 2009/2010 CL SH767 N17B Archival inkjet pigment print 127 x 180cm Edition of 5
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled 2009/2010 NH SH353 N33D Archival inkjet pigment print 127 x 180cm Edition of 5
Leonardo da Vinci (Italian, 1452-1519) Study for the head of Christ for The Last Supper [Testa di Cristo] c. 1494-1495 Drawing on paper 40 x 32cm Pinacoteca di Brera, Milano
Tolarno Galleries Level 4, 104 Exhibition Street Melbourne VIC 3000 Australia Phone: 61 3 9654 6000
Sam Shmith (Australian born England, b. 1980) Untitled (In Spates 2) 2011 125 x 75cm Pigment print on archival rag
The Digital Punctum
Spate, definition: A sudden flood, rush, or outpouring
This is a visually strong body of work by Sam Shmith that thematically hangs together beautifully in the Arc One Gallery space. The mystery, the sublime and the journey are well handled by the artist. As a spectral ‘body’ the photographs work together to create a new form of hallucination, one that haunts and perturbs the mind, like a disturbing psychological thriller a la David Lynchian ‘Twin Peaks’. The work, as a whole, becomes a meta-narrative and as Shmith develops as an artist, they seem to me like work that has journeyed to the point of departure. The viewer is (not really) flying, (not really) floating above the clouds observing the meta-narrative, creating a visual memory of things. Spectral luminescences, not-quite-right perspectives, the photograph as temporal hallucination.
Shmith’s photographs are constructed from “30-40 photographs per pictorial narrative” taken during the day and then digitally darkened: the clouds from Queensland, the cities from here, the cars from there. To be honest the clouds and cities could be from anywhere they are just part of the process. Shmith’s technique is interesting to know and then is quickly forgotten when looking at the photographs – like reading, it does not become the meaning (just a layer) of the work. The images, when constructed (however!) take me to other spaces and memories, opening up new vistas in my imagination.
Shmith’s series acts as a punctum, working to create an unitary impression on the mind that pricks my consciousness. The whole work becomes punctum. This is a very interesting and powerful proposition.
The punctum, as argued by Barthes in Camera Lucida, relies on the QUESTION OF INTENTIONALITY – the detail that pricks and wounds is an unconscious act on the part of the photographer – not one of intention. It cannot be perceived by the photographer or indeed anyone else in the present. In other words, when the photographer photographs the total object, he cannot not not photograph the part object, which is what the punctum is:
“Hence the detail which interests me is not, or a least not strictly, intentional, and probably must not be so; it occurs in the field of the photographer thing like a supplement that is at once inevitable and graceful; it does not necessarily attest to the photographer’s art; it says only that the photographer was there, or else, still more simply, that he could not not photograph the partial object at the same time as the total object … The photographer’s “second sight” does not consist in “seeing” but in being there. And above all, imitating Orpheus, he must not turn back to look at what he is leading – what he is giving to me!” (CL 47/CC 79-80)
As Michael Fried observes in his analysis of Camera Lucida, the punctum is “antitheatrical” in the sense that we see it for ourselves and are not shown it by the photographer: it is not consciously constructed by the photographer but unconsciously captured as part of the total object:
“As Fried has argued, the experience of the punctum lives or dies for Barthes according to the absence of presence of intentionality on the part of the photographer; if there is visible intention, there is no punctum. That the punctum can exist only in the absence of intention is consistent, Fried claims, with his distinction between “seeing” (understood positively as antitheatrical) and “being shown” (understood negatively as theatrical). The possibility of the punctum is cancelled if bound to the photographer’s intention – if we are shown what can only be seen. As Fried states: “The punctum, we might say, is seen by Barthes but not because it has been shown to him by the photographer, for whom it does not exist; as Barthes recognizes, ‘it occurs [only] in the photographic field of the photographed thing,’ which is to say that it is not a pure artefact of the photographic event.”1
This changes in digital photography, especially with photographs such as Shmith’s constructed from 30-40 photographs. Here the construction can only be intentional (or can it?), dissolving the relation between referent and photograph, the unseen nature of punctum and the ability to not not photograph the part object:
“Fried mentions the subject I have in mind when he says digital photographs undermine the condition of the punctum by making it impossible that “a partial object in the photograph that might otherwise prick or wound me may never have been part of a total object, which itself may be a digital construction” (Michael Fried, “Barthes’s Punctum,” Critical Inquiry 31, Spring 2005, p.563). In the sentence just preceding that, Fried notes that digitalization “threatens to dissolve the ‘adherence’ of the referent to the photograph,” thus ending the fundamental claim that “the photographer could not not photograph the partial object at the same time as the total object.”2
But the digital punctum still exists. Shmith’s work is evidence of this. It exists in the mind of the artist and viewer, external to rather than strictly “in” or “of” the image:
“Curiously, however, Barthes does claim in Camera Lucida that the punctum may also be of the mind, or at the level of remembrance, rather than strictly “in” or “of” the image: “… the punctum (is) revealed only after the fact, when the photograph is no longer in front of me and I think back on it. I may know better a photograph I remember than a photograph I am looking at, as if direct vision oriented its language wrongly, engaging it in an effort of description which will always miss its point of effect, the punctum” (Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 53.) Indeed, the punctum is a most difficult thing to pin down, or, should one say, to prick. Fried recognizes the truly aporetic [characterised by an irresolvable internal contradiction or logical disjunction] nature of the punctum when he points to certain affinities between the literalist work of the Minimalists and the punctum, whereby the Minimalists understood the relationship between the literalist work and the beholder as ’emphatically not determined by the work itself’, suggesting that meaning in literalism was essentially indeterminate.”3
As James Elkins has observed, the punctum, or the image’s antitheatricality, is not necessarily threatened by digitalisation either through the detaching of the referent from the photograph or through the detaching of the part object from the full object within the image itself.
“The presence and efficaciousness of the part object are independent of digitalisation because the concept of the part object arises from a certain understanding of the internal structure of pictures and objects. Part objects can be found as readily in photographs of galaxies, which are assembled from layers of cleaned and enhanced digital images, as in the background of Wessing’s Nicaragua. Nor does the detachment of the photograph from its referent threaten the operation of the punctum because photographs with subjects that are wholly digitally constructed can be understood as having overlooked elements waiting to be discovered by each viewer.”4
My belief is that the digital photographer can evidence punctum in the construction of image through an anticipation of it’s affect – either consciously or unconsciously. Not through the ‘placement’ inside disparate texts but a holistic embedding through intertextuality. The punctum becomes the (non)intentional ground of discovery – the part part object if you like – the prick among many photographs now created as one, in this case 30-40 turned into one pictorial narrative. The punctum does not have to be part of a total object and digitalisation does not undermine the punctum; it may even enhance it so that, in this case, the whole series becomes punctum.
Shmith’s series and individual photographs within the series work best when the artist lets go of his consciousness and lets the ‘thing itself’ emerge, like a Japanese haiku poem. While consciously constructed by the artist the haiku takes on a life and meaning of it’s own outside the confines of intentionality.
“The artist can proffer a ‘releasement toward things’ (Heidegger, Martin. Discourse on Thinking. New York: Harper & Row, 1966, pp. 55-56), a coexistence between a conscious and unconscious way of perceiving which sustains the mystery of the object confusing the distinction between real time and sensual time, between inside and outside, input and output becoming neither here nor there. The mystery of the image is not to be found in its emasculation (in the sense of it’s deprivation of vigour) but by being attentive to the dropping a way of awareness, of memory, imagination, and the fixed gaze of desire through the glimpsing of a coexistence between a conscious and unconscious way of perceiving, a ‘releasement towards things’ which enables the seeing of the ‘Thing Itself’.”5
While Shmith’s series works as a whole and there are some wonderful individual images occasionally the artist has become too conscious of the punctum, the marks he intentionally makes. There are too many planes in clouds, the marking of these planes loosing their aura of (in)significance. They should be discovered afresh, “overlooked elements waiting to be discovered by each viewer,” not intentionally placed and shown by the artist. The series needed other themes embedded within them to allow the viewer to discover, to journey – more! As I said in the opening paragraph the photographs seems to me like work that has journeyed to the point of departure.
And what an exciting departure it is, for what happens next is in his, and our, imagination.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Fried, Michael. “Barthes’s Punctum,” in Critical Inquiry 31, Spring 2005 quoted in Hughes, Gordon. “Camera Lucida, Circa 1980,” in Batchen, Geoffrey (ed.,). Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009
2/ Elkins, James. “What Do We Want Photography To Be?” in Batchen, Geoffrey (ed.,). Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009, pp. 176-177
3/ Haraldsson, Arni. “Fried’s Turn,” on Fillip website, Spring 2004 [Online] Cited 12/04/2011. fillip.ca/content/frieds-turn
Many thankx to Angela Connor for her help and to Arc One Gallery for allowing me to publish the text and photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Sam Shmith (Australian born England, b. 1980) Untitled (In Spates 7) 2011 50 x 30cm Pigment print on archival rag
Sam Shmith (Australian born England, b. 1980) Untitled (In Spates 14) 2011 50 x 30cm Pigment print on archival rag
Sam Shmith’s photographs resemble the opening scenes of a Hollywood blockbuster. By harnessing our collective imagination, each image is charged with mystery and intrigue, leaving the viewer to draw their own conclusions about the narrative embedded in each of the works.
Digitally layered from an image bank of over 60,000 self-shot images, Sam’s twenty-two new landscapes choreograph a series of temporal clues into single images that simultaneously obliterate all references to a particular locality. His works are a hybrid of images from his personal archives, composited so that each journey is no longer distinct, but melded to create their single, artificial realities.
Influenced by François Truffaut’s film Day for Night (1973), the works are shot during the day, and meticulously transformed into twilight scenes. Reworking and repeating particular motifs, these elaborately constructed works are broken up into four distinct groups – sky, mountains, cities and roads. The centre of the frame concentrates an immediate human intervention enveloped by mountainous panoramas, vaporous clouds or close foliage to create a murky tension between the encompassing landscape and specks of synthetic light. Intuitively composited from between 30 to 40 photographs per pictorial narrative, the works are shot from cars, aeroplanes and hot air balloons producing mood scenes that have athematic unity.
Through his methods Sam fashions an unconventional approach to landscape photography. Citing the melancholic landscapes of Bill Henson, the suburban malaise of Gregory Crewdson and drawing motivation from Alfred Stieglitz’s Equivalents, In Spates communicates the artist’s devotional dedication to the emotive importance of the genre. Though isolation appears as a common theme in his work, Sam’s observations should also be considered as an arbitrary moment viewed from afar, evoking a feeling of alienation and disengagement between the environment and ourselves.
Text from the Arc One Gallery press release
Sam Shmith (Australian born England, b. 1980) Untitled (In Spates 5) 2011 125 x 75cm Pigment print on archival rag
Sam Shmith (Australian born England, b. 1980) Untitled (In Spates 21) 2011 125 x 75cm Pigment print on archival rag
Arc One Gallery 45 Flinders Lane Melbourne, 3000 Phone: (03) 9650 0589
Arthur Wigram Allen (Australian, 1894-1967) We left Medlow at 10.15 am & drove through Blackheath & Mt Victoria to Bathurst Nd Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales
Arthur Wigram Allen (Australian, 1894-1967) AWA & Boyce at lunch Nd Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales
Arthur Wigram Allen (Australian, 1894-1967) Kitty and Katha working at the drawn work Nd Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales
Family and friends
Arthur Allen spent many hours recording his home life and outings with family and friends. The Allens’ circle comprised a large extended family and a close-knit group of friends, who came and went as they liked and were always welcome at the various Allen households. They often stayed at the Allens’ properties on the coast and in country New South Wales, as did visiting celebrities, particularly those from the theatre.
While the social and legal status of Australian women improved toward the end of the 19th century, the Allen girls, their cousins and a small group of friends were still taught by governesses. This in turn helped to foster close ties between the members of their social class.
Sydney society among the wealthy classes was like a big, familiar club of relatives and friends, with a continual round of visiting, parties and picnics that also included, for example, visiting naval officers. There were also lively, large-scale social events organised to coincide with special occasions, such as the visit of the Duke of York in 1901, and charity fundraisers for causes in Australia and abroad, including annual Red Cross charity balls and local functions to support soldiers serving in the war.
Arthur Allen owned many cars but drove only one type – Detroit Electric broughams, one of which is now in the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney. Its batteries needed charging every 60 kilometres, but the recharging device was formidable.
Arthur Wigram Allen (Australian, 1894-1967) Wedding Group at ‘Merioola’, Saturday 23rd December 1911. Wedding Group consisting of Lieutenant Knowles (best man), Joyce Pat and Kitty, Alex Leeper’s two daughters Valentine and Molly [Kitty’s half-sisters] December 1911 PX*D596 Negative 240 Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales
Arthur Wigram Allen (Australian, 1894-1967) 11 November 1917 Mrs Frank Osborne and Miss Catterall wait in the back of one of Arthur Allens Detroit Electric broughams 1917 Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales
An Edwardian Summer, a new book and an exhibition opening 11th December 2010 at the Museum of Sydney showcases for the first time an extraordinary collection of photographs that capture Sydney at the turn of the century at one of the most rapidly changing times in Australia’s history.
A talented amateur photographer, lawyer and Sydney identity Arthur Wigram Allen was fascinated by the social and technological changes that occurred during his lifetime, 1862-1941. Allen created 51 albums now held by the State Library of NSW.
In 1885 after the sudden death of his father and uncle and at the age of just 23, Allen was thrust into the role of heading up the family law firm founded by his grandfather George Allen, known internationally today as Allens Arthur Robinson. While Allen’s photographs span 1890-1934, the book and exhibition concentrate on the Edwardian years, 1890s-1915, a brief often overlooked but important period in Australia’s history that heralded a new century of significant inventions and social changes, including powered flight, the rise of the motorcar and a new federated Australia.
Through Allen’s lens, we see the first mixed bathing on Sydney beaches, sporting events, pageants and processions, dramatic shipwrecks, the latest fashions as well as intimate family events such as motoring and harbour excursions and bush picnics. Meticulously captioned by Allen, his exquisitely personal and beautiful photographs capture a time of optimism and new ideas as Sydney emerged from the strict moral codes of the Victorian era.
Both the book and exhibition feature art works from the era by Australian artists including Arthur Streeton, Rupert Bunny, Grace Cossington Smith and Theodore Penleigh Boyd. The exhibition will also showcase items from the Historic Houses Trust collection and from the Powerhouse Museum, including examples of Edwardian fashion, children’s dress up costumes, jewellery and accessories and furniture.
Text from the Sydney Museum website [Online] Cited 08/04/2011 no longer available online
Sydney lawyer and identity Arthur Wigram Allen, a tirelessly enthusiastic photographer, was fascinated by the social and technological changes occurring during his lifetime. His talent for amateur photography produced extraordinary pictures that offer a fresh insight into the Edwardian years in Sydney.
The Edwardian era was sandwiched between the great achievements of the Victorian age and the global catastrophe of World War I. The death of Queen Victoria in January 1901 heralded a new century of significant inventions and social changes, including powered flight, the rise of the motorcar and a new federated Australia.
An Edwardian Summer will present a selection of Arthur Allen’s beautiful images, depicting intimate moments with family and friends, motoring and harbour excursions, theatrical celebrities, bush picnics, the introduction of surf bathing on Sydney beaches, processions, pageants and mass celebrations, and new freedoms in fashion. Most have never before been published, and they form an unrivalled personal pictorial record of these rapidly changing times.
The exhibition will also include artworks by Rupert Bunny, Ethel Carrick Fox, Arthur Streeton and Grace Cossington Smith, examples of male and female fashion including evening and day wear, motoring ensembles and children’s dress-up costumes, jewellery and accessories, furniture and decorative embellishments characteristic of the Edwardian era.
Installation views of the exhibition An Edwardian Summer: Sydney & beyond through the lens of Arthur Wigram Allen at the Museum of Sydney, December 2010 – April 2011
Arthur Wigram Allen
Sydney lawyer and identity Arthur Wigram Allen, a tirelessly enthusiastic photographer, was fascinated by the social and technological changes occurring during his lifetime. His talent for amateur photography produced extraordinary pictures that offer a fresh insight into the Edwardian years in Sydney.
Arthur Wigram Allen was born in 1862 into a large family of wealthy Sydney solicitors. One of 11 children and third in a line of six boys he attended Sydney Grammar School before moving to Melbourne in 1880 to study law at Trinity College at the University of Melbourne. In 1885 after the sudden death of his two elder brothers Arthur assumed control of the familíes Sydney firm and many business interests.
Allen married Ethel Lamb in 1891 and they went on to have four children: Ethel Joyce, born in 1893, Arthur Denis Wigram in 1894, Ellice Margaret in 1896 and Marcia Maria in 1905.
Fascinated by the new inventions of the era, he became interested in photography, purchasing the latest cameras. He soon proved to be a talented amateur photographer, capturing images of his family and friends, the city and its surrounds.
Arthur died in 1941, aged 79; his photographs, taken from the 1890s through to 1934, provide a detailed photographic record of a changing society and the emergence of the great city of Sydney.
A man of extraordinary vitality, Allen was fascinated by the times in which he lived, and tried to photograph everything he saw: family and friends; visiting ships and theatrical celebrities; bush picnics; the first mixed bathing on Sydney beaches; dramatic shipwrecks; processions, pageants and mass celebrations; coal miners; domestic life and fashion; house interiors; and sporting events. These photographs, contained in 51 albums, are now held by the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, and provide a view of the dramatic changes that took place in Edwardian Sydney.
Arthur Allen’s photographs span 1890 to 1934, but the Edwardian Summer exhibition and book concentrate on those depicting the Edwardian years, a brief, often-overlooked but important period in Australia’s history. The photographs, most of them never published before, form an unrivalled personal pictorial record of these rapidly changing times.
Arthur Wigram Allen (Australian, 1894-1967) Self-portrait August – October 1890 PX*D 562 negative 162 Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales
Arthur Wigram Allen (or AWA as he often referred to himself) was a man of many interests and a talented amateur photographer, capturing images of family and friends, city and surrounds. He is seen here on the steps of Wantabadgery homestead, site of a famous siege in 1879 between police and the gang of bushranger Captain Moonlight.
Arthur Wigram Allen (Australian, 1894-1967) Album 05: Photographs of the Allen family August 1890 – October 1890 PX*D 562 FL576221 / FL576430 Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales
Arthur Wigram Allen (Australian, 1894-1967) Cecil Healy in the dinghy, ‘Port Hacking’, October 16 1904 1904 PX*D 575 negative 858 Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales
Cecil Healy (1881-1918) found fame as the captain of Manly Surf Club and a champion swimmer; he won gold and silver medals in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics.
Cecil Patrick Healy (28 November 1881 – 29 August 1918) was an Australian freestyle swimmer of the 1900s and 1910s, who won silver in the 100 m freestyle at the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm. He also won gold in the 4 × 200 m freestyle relay. He was killed in the First World War at the Somme during an attack on a German trench. Healy was the second swimmer behind Frederick Lane to represent Australia in Swimming and has been allocated the number “2” by Swimming Australia on a list of all Australians who have represented Australia at an Open International Level.
Arthur Wigram Allen (Australian, 1894-1967) [Roller skating on the verandah at Moombara] Nd PX*D575 negative 836 Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales
Roller skating on the verandah at Moombara, September 24, 1904. “Ethel and I and the children came down this afternoon for the Michaelmas holidays bringing Janet & Bob Rabete also. Immediately on arrival Joyce, Denis & Bob began to skate on the verandah and they used Janet & Margaret as horses to pull them along. Margaret also had some splendid rides on her tricycle”
Perhaps the greatest joy for the Allen children was the family’s waterfront holiday house, Moombara, where they played, swam, rode horses and roller skated around the verandah. Roller skating was a popular pastime of the era, with numerous rinks being built from the inner city to the beaches in the late 1880s. The Sydney Skating Club was formed in 1906 and skating displays were a common form of entertainment.
The four Allen children had a happy home life. Their somewhat reserved Victorian mother was balanced by their gregarious father, and as in many affluent families of the era they had numerous domestic helpers, including a nurse, Florence, who remained with the family until the children were almost grown.
The family enjoyed many excursions to local Sydney attractions as well as seaside visits, picnics and journeys further afield, including to their beach property at Port Hacking. The children celebrated birthdays with elaborate parties and were dressed in the latest fashions, which were still very much influenced by Britain. Little girls had to contend with layers of petticoats, profuse frills and, during the 1890s and 1900s, increasingly wide-brimmed hats; and neither boys nor girls could be seen in public without hats, gloves, coats and shoes.
Public education in New South Wales, established in the 1860s, also grew steadily towards the century’s end. The three Allen girls, however, like many children from wealthier families, were tutored at home by a governess. The only boy, Denis, attended a private boarding school and was then sent to England to complete his schooling.
Arthur Wigram Allen (Australian, 1894-1967) This afternoon Marcia Lamb [centre] and I took Lord Orford and Lady Dorothy Walpole [right], also Nell Knox [left] for a drive to South Head, Bondi and Coogee February 22, 1911 PX*D594 negative 4188 Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales
Brief stop on a drive to South Head, Bondi and Coogee, February 22, 1911. As Sydneysiders embraced the outdoors, they began picnicking at every opportunity, flocking to local beauty spots or favourite retreats such as Coogee Beach. Although the beach was thronged with bathers and spectators, Coogee’s headland provided a quieter spot for picnicking and, for Arthur Allen, taking photographs. Seen here is his camera equipment, including the box of his Guardia and Newman camera that took 5 x 4 inch (13 x 10 cm) photographic plates. The women are wearing elaborate motoring hats with scarves, which were also useful for securing their hats on a windy cliff to prevent their hair from blowing out of style.
The pleasures of sea-bathing had been discouraged in colonial Sydney on the grounds of both risk and indecency, and early laws prohibited bathing during daylight hours. People gradually defied the daylight bathing laws and by 1900 there were reports in the press of whole families bathing. In 1902, a male swimmer at Manly Beach entered the water at midday. Although arrested, he was not charged, and by 1903 new laws were introduced that permitted surf bathing but required neck-to-knee outfits and prohibited the sexes to mingle. Mixed bathing soon followed, but swimming attire continued to be stringently regulated for some years to come.
Sydneysiders increasingly flocked to the coast to enjoy the cooling summer breezes and the glorious ocean views. The ‘pleasure palaces’ near many beaches provided popular entertainment for all ages. For picnics, families sought out Clark Island, quiet beaches around Middle Harbour or the popular Manly Beach.
Bondi and Coogee beaches in Sydney’s east were connected to the city by public transport and provided the ideal day-trip for large crowds of visitors. With growing numbers of people taking to the surf, the dangers of beach bathing became apparent, and in 1906 the first surf lifesaving club in the world was founded at Bondi Beach.
Arthur Wigram Allen (Australian, 1894-1967) Sea bathing: Coogee January 27, 1900 PX*D 582 negative 2563 Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales
The immense and immediate popularity of sea bathing: Coogee Beach on a summer’s day. The boy in the tie and straw boater contrasts with the enthusiastic swimming groups clad in simple black singlets and shorts or cut-down dresses. In truth, most are just paddling, as few had learnt to swim properly.
Arthur Wigram Allen (Australian, 1894-1967) Wonderland city near Bondi December 26, 1906 PX*D580 negative 2002 Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales
Wonderland city near Bondi (there were 26 000 people there today). Wonderland city, a large amusement park, the Royal Aquarium and Pleasure Grounds at Tamarama near Bondi, December 26, 1906. By 1901, Bondi Beach was already a fashionable tourist destination. A tramline had been built to the beach in 1894, and a large amusement park, the Royal Aquarium and Pleasure Grounds, had opened at nearby Tamarama in 1887. Wonderland City – promoted as ‘Sydney’s Great Playground’ – opened in December 1906, also at Tamarama. Described as the Coney Island of Australia, its 50 major attractions were ‘designed by artists in architecture and landscape gardening’, with ‘no expense spared in achieving the highest standard of excellence’.1 The wooded slopes featured pleasure palaces, brightly coloured sideshows, a switchback (roller-coaster), scenic railway, slippery dips and underground rivers.
1/ Caroline Mackaness (ed.), An Edwardian Summer: Sydney and Beyond through the Lens of Arthur Wigram Allen, Historic Houses Trust, Sydney, 2010
Arthur Wigram Allen (Australian, 1894-1967) Walter resting after lunch November 19, 1898 PX*D566 negative 3649 Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales
Rex Walter and I went to day to Bulli mainly to see some land which had been offered to us to purchase but also to show Walter (Who had never been to Illawarra) the scenery. We lunched at the fig tree not far from the Pass Road at the Bulli “B” pit.
Renowned for its beauty, the Illawarra district was home to towering forests of turpentine and fig trees and tangled, dense stands of ferns and cabbage palms, tinted by the conspicuous red flowers of the Illawarra flame tree. Arthur Allen, his brother Walter and brother-in-law Rex travelled in a horsedrawn wagonette to Bulli, a small coal-mining town in the northern Illawarra, via the steep Bulli Pass road, which was built in 1867. The journey down the Bulli Pass afforded many spectacular views of the south coast.
In the later 19th century, city dwellers’ attitudes to the Australian bush changed. Formerly a foreign wilderness, it now became a place of Arcadian bliss, offering something peculiarly Australian and very different from the more familiar urban landscapes.
Nationalism increased in the 1890s, and with it the Australian bush legend was born. Artists such as Tom Roberts and Frederick McCubbin created nostalgic bush scenes, depicting rural life as a simplistic and uniquely Australian ideal. Writers such as Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson fashioned similar impressions in poetry and prose, strengthening the link between the bush and the Australian national identity.
By the early 1900s, the attributes of bush life were seen as an intrinsic part of the nation’s greatness. Bush characters were imbued with the same pioneering qualities as the diggers on the goldfields. By World War I these characteristics would be identified as uniquely Australian traits in our soldiers.
Expanded road and railway networks in the second half of the 19th century opened the bush to city visitors. Roads were cut to link sights of interest, and clear tracks were carved into the bush to allow access to vantage points. Swathes of descriptive tourist guides promoted the state’s many health, holiday and tourist resorts.
Arthur Wigram Allen (Australian, 1894-1967) Crossing a creek, Belmore Falls, south of Robertson, on the edge of the Illawarra escarpment February 13, 1899 PX*D567 negative 3822 Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales
The Belmore Falls, south of Robertson, are on the edge of the Illawarra escarpment at the headwaters of Barrengarry Creek. They cascade into the Barrengarry Creek Valley, with the main fall dropping a spectacular 78 metres. A road from Robertson was cut through the scrub in 1887, making the falls accessible to tourists, who had been arriving in increasing numbers since the Southern Highlands railway to Mittagong was opened in 1867. The picturesque scenery and cooler climate of the Southern Highlands had made the region a popular summer holiday retreat for well-to-do Sydneysiders. Guesthouses and country homes were built from the 1870s, encouraging the expansion of road networks to connect various sights of interest.
Arthur Wigram Allen (Australian, 1894-1967) “Lunch at the head of the river” Royal National Park. Frida, Herbert, Ethel, William Wate, Jack, Hilda Nd PX*D566 negative 3656 Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, November 26, 1898
In 1879, an area 32 kilometres south of Sydney was dedicated as Australia’s first national park. It could be reached by road or rail, and swiftly became ‘a national pleasure ground’1 and a popular destination for Sydneysiders on a day-trip. Picnic sites were fashioned throughout the park, rustic bridges and furniture decorated the landscape and imported flora and fauna enhanced the native scenery. By 1886 a boatshed and jetties had been established, enabling visitors to hire boats and explore the park via its waterways. Parties of ladies and gentlemen favoured the freshwater river above the dam, rowing to suitable locations for a relatively informal picnic on the rocky banks by the water.
Arthur Wigram Allen (Australian, 1894-1967) One of the new boilers just installed at the mine November 22, 1907 PX*D581 negative 2403 Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales
One of the new boilers just installed at the mine. November 22, 1907.
Mt Kembla was one of a series of towns established in the Illawarra region in the mid 19th century after coal mining began at nearby Mt Keira in 1848. The first coal export from the Illawarra left Wollongong harbour in 1849 destined for Sydney. Coal was mined at Mt Kembla from 1865, and in 1880 the Mount Kembla Coal and Oil Company was formed, building a loading wharf at Port Kembla in 1883 and installing a rail link from Mount Kembla to Port Kembla in 1886. By 1900, the Illawarra mines employed 2300 men. In 1902 a disastrous gas explosion, caused by the naked flames of the miners’ torches, killed 94 men.
During the Edwardian era, touring became immensely popular. With the introduction of better working conditions and shorter working hours many people had more leisure time, and took every opportunity to enjoy it. Even before the arrival of the motorcar, a growing love of the outdoors led the people of Sydney to flock to beauty spots in the Blue Mountains and Southern Highlands. Rural and waterside retreats around Sydney were as popular then as they are now, and the Allen family and their friends spent many weekends and vacations at their holiday houses at Port Hacking and Burradoo in the Southern Highlands.
To escape the hectic and at times unhealthy city, Sydneysiders sought the more relaxed lifestyle offered in rural locations. People began to enjoy the physical pleasures of life outdoors and the benefits of sun and clean air, and this was reflected in the way they behaved and dressed away from the confines of the city.
People who lacked their own transport could still enjoy tourism via the ever-expanding railway network. For those with private carriages and later motorcars, the ability to travel was only limited by the condition of the roads. The coming of the motorcar changed both the physical development of Sydney and the way people spent their leisure time, as they toured ever further.
Arthur Wigram Allen (Australian, 1894-1967) Florence and the children on the lawn at Moombara July 1903 PX*D 572 negative 6 Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales
One of the most important people in the lives of the Allen children was their nurse, Florence, who remained with the family until the children were almost grown. She is shown here relaxing with her charges on the lawn at Moombara, the family holiday home that Arthur Allen purchased in 1903. Located between the unspoilt landscape of the Royal National Park and the beaches of Cronulla, it was built on a steep slope with a magnificent view over the river and pristine bushland. Soon after Allen bought the property, a second storey was added to accommodate the family and their many visitors. It was a popular place for family and friends to spend their honeymoon, and came to be nicknamed ‘Honeymoombara’.
Arthur Wigram Allen (Australian, 1894-1967) ‘Moombaha’. 5.45 pm on the wharf, Jacob having just caught a large conger eel, Little Turriell Bay at Port Hacking December 7, 1904 PX*D 575 negative 921 Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales
Moombara was located on Little Turriell Bay at Port Hacking. In 1901-02 nearly a third of a million tonnes of sand had been removed from the Simpsons Bay area of the estuary to create access to a fish hatchery in Cabbage Tree Basin. This helped to make the area more navigable for boating and better for fishing, both pastimes that the Allens and their friends enjoyed. With increasing numbers of residential subdivisions, the area’s waterways became popular for recreational use.
Arthur Wigram Allen (Australian, 1894-1967) Joyce preparing to dive 15 January 1905 1905 Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales
Out and about
Edwardian Sydney offered entertainment for every taste. Apart from the large-scale parades, military displays and massed bands that accompanied public celebrations, annual events such as the Royal Easter Show and the Public Schools’ Amateur Athletics Association carnival drew crowds from all walks of life. Expanding tram and rail networks carried passengers to venues such as the Zoo (then at Moore Park), Sydney Stadium at Rushcutters Bay and the Glaciarium Skating Rink, which operated at Ultimo from 1907.
Among the more popular leisure activities was horse racing, with racecourses as far afield as Randwick, Canterbury, Moorefield and Warwick Farm. The annual amateur picnic race held at Bong Bong, near Moss Vale, was as popular with Sydneysiders as with locals.
The growth in international sporting competition also provided spectacles for large crowds. Due to Australia’s success in rowing, the world championship sculling contest was regularly held on the Parramatta River, while in 1909 the Davis Cup tennis tournament came to Rose Bay. Cricket, cycling, athletics and football were also popular, with the Sydney Cricket Ground a versatile venue.
Arthur Wigram Allen (Australian, 1894-1967) Ladies double championship rowing race held on the Parramatta River between Abbotsford and Mortlake Saturday 4 August 1906 PX*D 579 negative 1817 Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales
On Saturday 4 August 1906, eager onlookers crowded the banks of the Parramatta River and hundreds of launches, boats and steamers plied the water in anticipation of the veteran scullers’ handicap and the ladies’ double sculling championship, contested by a field of ten crews. One week earlier, Stanbury and Towns had competed for stakes of £500 each plus a lucrative share of the steamer takings, but on this day the ladies rowed for a more modest £20. On the 1.5-mile (2.4-km) course between Abbotsford and Mortlake, the Newcastle team of Mrs Hyde and Mrs Woodbridge narrowly beat Misses G and K Lewis of North Sydney for first place.
Arthur Wigram Allen (Australian, 1894-1967) Joyce and Denis at the ostrich farm 15 November 1903 PX*D 573 negative 580 Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales
Children hold baby Emus at Ostrich Farm at South Head, 15 November 1903. Joseph Barracluff’s Ostrich Farm at South Head was established in 1889, when ostrich feathers were a popular women’s fashion accessory for boas, hats and fans. Arriving in Australia from Lincolnshire in 1884, Barracluff originally established a small business selling feathers from a shop on Elizabeth Street, before setting up the farm with birds reportedly imported from South Africa and Morocco. A trip to Barracluff’s farm soon became a popular excursion, and patrons could select feathers to be cut directly from a flock of 100 birds. In 1901, as a memento of her visit, the women of Sydney presented the Duchess of Cornwall and York with a gold mirror and fan embellished with tortoiseshell and Barracluff’s feathers, grown and curled on site.
Arthur Wigram Allen (Australian, 1894-1967) The ‘Electra’ … T. H. Kelly, Denis, Miss Kelly, Joyce, W. Kelly. The children’s first experience of yachting Arthur Allen. The children’s first experience of yachting 14 April 1901 PX*D 571 negative 95 Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales
Yachting built up a strong following among the wealthy during the Edwardian years, with boats from the Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron regularly competing in organised races on the harbour. Joining Arthur Allen and his two elder children, Joyce and Denis, in this photo are members of the Kelly family: Thomas, William and their sister. Thomas Kelly was managing director of the family firm, the Sydney Smelting Company, and chairman of the Australian Alum Company; his brother William was a politician. Both brothers were considered dashing young men about town. The Kellys were keen yachtsmen and closely involved with Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron, founded in 1863.
A day on the harbour
Sydney’s waterways were the focus of both industry and pleasure in the Edwardian era. From its colonial foundations Sydney Cove had developed as the hub of a trading port and working harbour with a strong shipbuilding industry and other maritime trades.
During the Edwardian years, full-rigged ships gradually disappeared from Sydney Harbour, and after the bubonic plague arrived in 1900, large areas of residential and commercial buildings around Darling Harbour, Millers Point and The Rocks were resumed by the government and rebuilt.
By the early 1900s Circular Quay was dominated by ferry wharves and served as an interchange for all the traffic – pedestrian and vehicular – between Sydney and the north shore. This was the heyday of the harbour ferry, with commuter craft dominating the waters during peak hour. On weekends, the ‘great picnic trade’ ferried Sydney’s multitudes to the harbour’s pleasure destinations, many of which were owned and operated by the ferry companies.
Other Sydneysiders preferred to spend a day on the water, enjoying a leisurely steamer excursion, messing about in a small boat or sailing a yacht. Sporting events provided a further form of entertainment, with annual yachting and rowing regattas held on the harbour.
Arthur Wigram Allen (Australian, 1894-1967) Another who is not quite so sure Nd Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales
Arthur Wigram Allen (Australian, 1894-1967) The ‘Euryalus’ in dock 17 August 1905 PX*D 577 negatives 1279 Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales
HMS Euryalus was the flagship of the Australian station of the Royal Navy between 1904 and 1905. The 144-metre armoured cruiser was built in England in 1901, and Arthur Allen photographed it in August 1905, while it was being overhauled in the Sutherland Dock at Cockatoo Island.[1] Soon afterwards the Euryalus was replaced by HMS Powerful, and in 1920 it was broken up in Germany. On its completion in 1890, the Sutherland Dock was the world’s largest dry dock. The island’s smaller Fitzroy Dock had been built by convicts between 1839 and 1847. Cockatoo Island became the Commonwealth Naval Dockyard in 1913 and shipbuilding continued there until the dockyard closed in 1991.
Museum of Sydney cnr Bridge & Phillip Streets, Sydney
Installation photograph of one of the galleries in the exhibition NETWORKS (cells & silos) at the newly opened Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) with Nick Mangan’s Colony (2005) in the foreground Photo: Marcus Bunyan
This is a vibrant and eclectic exhibition at MUMA, one of the best this year in Melbourne. The curator Geraldine Barlow has gathered together some impressive, engaging works that are set off to good effect in the new gallery spaces. I spent a long and happy time wandering around the exhibition and came away visually satiated and intellectually stimulated.
The exhibition “explores the connections between artistic representation of networks; patterns and structures found in nature; and the rapidly evolving field of network science, communications and human relations.” (text from MUMA)
Networks connect – they describe (abstract) connections between people and things. Networks map simple or complex systems and can be real or an abstract representation of those systems. Networks form a nexus, “a sort of concentrated nodal point among a series of chains of markers” that reveals the centralising structure of networks (such as Facebook and Google). Robert Nelson in his review of this exhibition in The Age notes, “Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter [in their catalogue essay] describe the way networks paradoxically disorganise you, creating a disempowering messy grid of protocols that colonise your headspace … It’s commonplace to celebrate networks because they stimulate excitement about belonging, about extending your reach and joining in. These hopes are as pervasive as the networks themselves. But in structural terms, networks are also insidiously colonising and hierarchical, built on the principle of the rich becoming richer and the poor becoming more dependent.”1
I believe that networks can also be altruistic and non-heirarchical, offering a horizontal consciousness rather than a vertical one: points of view and perspectives on the world that open up these (virtual) spaces to fluidity, mutation, transgression and subversion. Catherine Lumby observes that,
“The contradictory, constantly shifting nature of contemporary information and image flows tends to erode the moral authority of any social order, patriarchal or otherwise. It is this very collapse which has arguably fuelled social revolutions such as feminism and gay and lesbian rights, but which equally disrupts attempts by some to ground them in identity politics.”2
Critical to understanding the construction of these constantly shifting networks in contemporary society are the concepts of weaving and intertexuality. Intertextuality is the concept that texts do not live in isolation, “caught up as they are in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network… Its unity is variable and relative (Foucault, 1973)“3. In other words the network is decentred and multiple allowing the possibility of transgressive texts or the construction of a work of art through the techniques of assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari) – a form of fluid, associative networking that is now the general condition of art production.4
Infection of the network (by viruses for example) disrupts the pattern/randomness binary and may lead to mutations, ‘differance’ in Derrida’s terminology, spaces that are both fluid and fixed at one and the same time;neither here nor there.
On to (some of) the work.
Masato Takasaka’s series of fibre-tipped pen and pencil on paper, Information Superhighway (2006-07), are wonderful, kaleidoscopic works – inventive and fun, full of rhizomic, multi-layered dimensionality. Nick Mangan’s mixed media sculpture Colony (2005, see photograph below) is a spiky, totemic, figurative creature made of axe, shovel and hammer handles and riddled with holes like driftwood that looks like a bizarre, Medieval torture instrument.
Bryan Spiers paintings Shadowmath and New descending (both 2010, see photograph below) are excellent, puzzle-like reinterpretations of delicate, Futuristic movements. As he describes them, “I think of my paintings as puzzles or visual toys. They are images to be manipulated by the viewer; reconfigured, recomposed, expanded upon. Trajectories of change are implied by repeated shapes and graded colour transitions. They describe a continuum to be followed to its logical conclusion outside of the picture plane. This leads to the dissolution of the image, proposing new images yet to be made.”
Heath Bunting’s 3 panel work from The Status project (all 2010) features interrelated data sets that reach a “level of absurdity in attempting to relate radically different but inter-related information.” This mind mapping schematic of connections (coloured connections with labels, markers and legends) based around Bristol, England has some unbelievable entries if you look really closely:
~ A1072 Able to provide natural person date of birth 2010 ~ A1073 Able to access the Internet ~ A1003 A terrorist ~ A1047 Providing instruction or training in the use of imaginary firearms such as sticks ~ A1088 Providing training in leopard crawling
Aaron Koblin’s beautiful video Flight patterns (2010) offers a mapping of thousands of plane journeys across the USA over time (based on East Coast time) so that the explosion of their frequency becomes like a fireworks display. Andrew McQualter’s fantastic acrylic paint wall drawings Three propositions, one example (2010-11), painted directly onto the gallery wall show various people, isolated from each other and from the viewer, talking and listening to their iPhones. As Robert Nelson comments, “They’re isolated individuals, all on their own plane, presumably doing social networking or communicating. If you walked past them, they wouldn’t respond because, with heads bowed, they’re absorbed in another reality. Their hands and minds are busy with a reality elsewhere.”
Present but not present, (not) here and there at the same time. This is a critical debate in contemporary culture: do these type of networks lessen our ability to build friendships and connections in the real world or are they just another element in our rhizomic network of associations that help with our interconnectivity: utopian or dystopian or equal measure of both? Does it really matter?
From the UK Kit Wise’s large digital print on aluminium series (including KTM SEA MOW RUH 2010, see below) are effective, offering solarised, negative, brightly coloured collages of seemingly atomised cities (the titles refer to the cities airport abbreviation codes). Mass Ornament (2009) by American artist Natalie Bookchin is one of my favourite works in the exhibition. In a horizontal panel of wall mounted screens play videos of people dancing in their bedroom. Bookchin has gleaned these gems from uploaded personal videos on YouTube – there are handstands, contortions, tap dancing, all manner of performances (some then deleted by the performer) – then collated by the artist and set to a Broadway-type music number. Mesmeric and amazing!
Koji Ryui’s spatial constructions Extended network towards the happy end of the universe (2007-2011, see photograph below) are made of bendy, plastic drinking straws of different colours, encased and moulded into cellular shapes (reminding me of the white of the Melbourne Recital Centre exterior). Trailing off these structures in different colours are airborne-like filaments similar to the plant Old Man’s Beard. “Ryui repeats and arranges these objects in space to create peculiar environments and accidental narratives. In his installations, relationships or spaces between objects are equally as important as the objects themselves.” Wonderful.
Last but not least my favourite work in the exhibition: heart of the air you can hear by Sandra Selig (2011, see photographs below). The photographs do not do the work justice. Made simply from spun polyester, nails and paint this Spirograph-like construction is beautiful in its resonance and colour, captivating in its complexity. Built into a corner of the gallery the work floats at eye level, twists and turns and changes intensity of colour when viewed from different angles. From the front it looks like a spaceship out of Star Wars woven by light!
There are many other excellent works in the exhibition that I have not mentioned. Some of the work disrupts the continual reiteration of norms by weaving a lack of fixity into the network’s existence. Other work visually makes comment on and reinforces the structure of such networks. Whichever it is this is a truly engaging exhibition that no single body, let alone a networked one, should miss.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Nelson, Robert. “Networks, Cells and Silos” review in The Age newspaper. Melbourne: Fairfax Media, 23/02/2011 [Online] Cited 23/03/2011
2/ Lumby, Catharine. “Nothing Personal: Sex, Gender and Identity in The Media Age,” in Matthews, Jill (ed.,). Sex in Public: Australian Sexual Cultures. St. Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1997, pp. 14-15
3/ Foucault, Michel cited in Thumlert, Kurt. Intervisuality, Visual Culture, and Education. [Online] Cited 01/04/2011 no longer available online
4/ “To understand the production of art at the end of tradition, which in our lifetime means art at the end of modernism, requires, as the postmodern debate has shown, a careful consideration of the idea of history and the notion of ending. Rather than just thinking ending as the arrival of the finality of a fixed chronological moment, it can also be thought as a slow and indecisive process of internal decomposition that leaves in place numerous deposits of us, in us and with us – all with a considerable and complex afterlife. In this context all figuration is prefigured. This is to say that the design element of the production of a work of art, the compositional, now exists prior to the management of form of, and on, the picture plane. Techniques of assemblage, like montage and collage – which not only juxtaposed different aesthetics but also different historical moments, were the precursors of what is now the general condition of production.” Fry, Tony. “Art Byting the Dust,” in Hayward, Phillip. Culture, Technology and Creativity in the Late Twentieth Century. London: John Libbey and Company, 1990, pp. 169-170
Many thankx to Monash University Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the text and photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Kerrie Poliness (Australian, b. 1962) Blue Wall Drawing #1 2007-2011 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Hilarie Mais (British/Australian, b. 1952) The waiting – anon 1986 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
An interview with the curator: Geraldine Barlow
Where did your interest in networks come from?
I’ve long been fascinated by network maps of human relationships – the graphical representation of something seemingly so complex and multi-layered. The structure of the brain and how this relates to theories of mind is also an area of personal interest. Our society, bodies and relationships are all made up of different kinds of networks, and artists have long been interested in mapping out these structures. I realised some time ago that the visual representation of networks might make for an interesting exhibition, from this point on I collected and ‘tested’ different ideas of what the exhibition might include.
How is this explored in the exhibition?
Human relationships feature in some of the works in the exhibition, but not all. I hope the exhibition offers a wide variety of links between people’s familiar world and daily experiences on the one hand, and more abstract ideas on the other.
There are a number of works from the Monash University Collection included in the exhibition. Can you tell us about these and why you selected them?
The Monash University Collection is a great source of inspiration, it is a wonderful collection, but also, I think any artwork considered closely and over time opens up in surprising ways and offers unexpected insights, working with the works in the collection over a period of years allows me to think about them in a long and slow way.
Dorothy Braund’s work Christ with the disciples listening 1966 was given to the University in 1974. It is a very beautiful formal painting of a series of shaded circles and ellipses. At first glance it is simple and seems to represent a ring of figures, their heads and bodies gathered together. On closer examination it is not so clear where one figure ends and another begins, as a whole the clustered forms seem to operate more like a cell. Historically this cell of men and the ideas attributed to them has had a profound impact, in their day they might have been seen as a kind of terrorist cell.
Through the sensitive composition and balance of abstract form, the artist has created a complex representation of the relationships between people: the ways in which we are both connected to each other, and yet might also circulate ideas in a tight ‘Chinese whispers’ type circle. This work was painted in 1966, long before our current awareness of social and telecommunications networks, but it can still offer us insights in our contemporary world and the way we relate to each other.
How did the new gallery space affect the installation of the exhibition?
The exhibition was slowly forming in my mind, even as Kerstin Thompson’s wonderful gallery space was being designed and built. The gallery has offered a wonderful armature and character for the exhibition to work with, hopefully in the manner of a conversation. Kerstin was been very interested in understand and reflecting the essential structure of the building, not building over what was pre-existing. The exhibition like-wise has an interest in structural models, geometries and patterns – in finding a balance between the regular and the slightly warped. In the central corridor which runs down the spine of the gallery, Thompson has chosen to leave the mechanical services exposed, to allow the essential structure of the building to be a form of ornament. Many of the artists in the exhibition also have an interest in the relationship between structure and ornament.
Sandra Selig (Australian, b. 1972) heart of the air you can hear 2011 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Sandra Selig (Australian, b. 1972) heart of the air you can hear (detail) 2011 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Koji Ryui (Australian/Japanese, b. 1976) Extended network towards the happy end of the universe 2007-2011 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
The connections between artistic representations of networks and the rapidly evolving field of network science are the subject of the latest exhibition at the Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA).
Presenting the work of Australian and international artists, NETWORKS (cells & silos) reflects the organising principles and dynamics of our increasingly networked society, and related patterns found in organic, social and engineered forms.
MUMA’s Senior Curator, Geraldine Barlow conceived and developed the exhibition as a way of continuing the dialogue about the role and effect of different networks in society.
“Art and aesthetics are often treated as very separate enclaves from science, physics and mathematics,” Barlow says. “But art offers us a way to re- contextualise our associations and interactions with the networks around us and look at the effect they have on us. I hope the exhibition will prompt people to think about the networks in their lives and how they mould and shape us.”
A key inspiration for the exhibition was Annamaria Tallas’ documentary, How Kevin Bacon Cured Cancer, which features the work of network scientist Albert-László Barabási.
“The documentary explores the thesis that all networks – both natural and man-made – conform to a similar mathematical formula, with the same patterns emerging over and again,” Barlow said.
The artworks featured in NETWORKS (cells & silos) explore networks as diverse as those found in urban planning and cities, biology, organisations, travel and of course social networks, as well as the dual qualities of hyper-connectedness and isolation that technology has heightened in modern life.
Extending the dialogue about the possibilities of networks is of great interest to MUMA Director, Max Delany, particularly in the university context.
“Within a university we have a vast array of specialist disciplines – science, technology, humanities – all having conversations about how the world is and where we want to be heading,” Delany says. “Often these conversations are held in isolation from each other, but considered together, and from the standpoint of artists, the possibilities of collaborative networks become very exciting.”
This collaboration can be seen in Kerrie Poliness’ work Blue Wall Drawing #1 (2007/2011). Students from Monash University have created the piece, following the formal and conceptual guidelines set out by the artist. Each version of Poliness’ work creates unique patterns and networks as the collaborative team choose how to implement the drawing rules which are structured to allow a different outcome in each space where they are applied.
The exhibition’s accompanying publication contains essays from curator Geraldine Barlow, network and social theorists Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter, and science documentary filmmaker Annamaria Tallas, all exploring the exhibition’s theme. Digital and hard copies are available on request.
Press release from the Monash University Museum of Art
Bryan Spier (Australian) Shadowmath and New descending (installation view) both 2010 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Kit Wise (Australian born England, b. 1975) KTM SEA MOW RUH 2010 Digital photograph
Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) Ground Floor, Building F. Monash University Caulfield campus 900 Dandenong Road Caulfield East, VIC 3145 Phone: +61 3 9905 4217
“In the meantime the landscape presents scenes of desolation which mark the memory of all who see it. Thousands of carcasses are strewn on the baked and cracked plains. There is a brooding air of almost Biblical intensity over millions of acres which bear no trace of surface waters. The dry astringent air extracts every drop of moisture from the grass, leaving it so brittle that it breaks under foot with the tinkling of thin glass.”
Sidney Nolan. Epic Drought in Australia 1952
“Peering into the pantry, which held a particular fascination for me, my eye was caught by several jars of preserved fruit that stood on the otherwise empty shelves and by a few dozen diminutive crimson apples on the sill of the window darkened by the yew tree outside. And as I looked on these apples which shone through the half-light … the quite outlandish thought crossed my mind that these things … had all outlasted me …”
W.G. Sebald. The Rings of Saturn 1988
This is a superb exhibition of 61 black and white photographs by Sidney Nolan. The photographs were shot using a medium format camera and are printed in square format from the original 1952 negatives. They were taken near the Birdsville Track in Queensland and were commissioned at the time by the Brisbane newspaper The Courier Mail. Although not intended to be studies for the later ‘Drought paintings’ they have become, were the beginning of, can be seen as, preparatory ideas pre sketching and painting.
There are two proof sets of the Drought Photographs (including the one displayed on the gallery wall) that are printed on a cool-toned Type C photographic paper (analogue to digital to analogue) at about 8″ square. These are the less successful of the prints for the “beauty is in the box.” The more impressive prints are the edition of 10 that is for sale, either as individual prints or as a whole folio, that are printed at approximately 10″ square on a slightly warm-toned Canson Infinity 310 gsm archival inkjet paper (analogue to digital). These are the knockout prints with lots of mid-toned hues – for the warm tone of the paper more closely matches the feel of the dusty Outback. They possess a very “inky” atmosphere and wonderful light. Make sure that you get the gallery staff to show you some of these prints!
The work itself is a joy to behold. The photographs hang together like a symphony, rising and falling, with shape emphasising aspects of form. The images flow from one to another. The formal composition of the mummified carcasses is exemplary, the resurrected animals (a horse, for example, propped up on a fifth leg) and emaciated corpses like contemporary sculpture. Here I am reminded of some of the work of Henry Moore.
The handling of the tenuous aspects of human existence in this uniquely Australian landscape is also a joy to behold. Through an intimate understanding of how to tension the space between objects within the frame Nolan’s seemingly simple but complex photographs of the landscape are previsualised by the artist in the mind’s eye before he even puts the camera to his face. Unfortunately I don’t have any photographs to show you of these works but for me they were one of the highlights of the exhibition, rivalling any of the work of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers photographing in the American Dustbowl during the 1930s. Finally, some great Australian landscape photographs!!
As the curator Damian Smith notes of both strands, “Throughout the series emphasis shifts from detached observation to intimate contemplation – between the forces of the outer landscape to the darkness of the animals’ inner being.”
I would not say the landscapes are ‘detached observation’. Both forms require intimate contemplation.
Let us investigate the presence of these images further.
“Barthes mentions the apparently “universal” experiences of birth and death, experiences that, he points out, are in fact always mediated by historical and thus political circumstances. Echoing a famous remark by Bertolt Brecht, he contends that “the failure of photography seems to me to be flagrant in this connection: to reproduce death or birth tells us, literally, nothing.””1
“To reproduce death or birth tells us, literally, nothing.” Hence, you could argue, through an appeal to nostalgia for a mythology of the Australian bush we are held at the surface of an identity. Drought, desolation, despair, death. But these photographs go beyond the reproduction of death, go beyond mere nostalgia, by pushing the prick of consciousness, Barthes punctum, into a sense of spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority – an experience Barthes “sums up as the “having-been-there” that is the basis of every photograph’s sense of witness.”2
The new punctum becomes other than the detail – no longer of form but of intensity, of Time: conjuring past, present and future in a single image.3 We, the viewer, bring our own associations to the image, our knowledge of drought in this big land – the knowledge that this drought has happened, it did happen and it will happen again and again and again in the future, probably with more frequency than it does now. The photograph becomes an active, mental representation of the material world. It becomes the world’s ‘essence’.
The photographs stand for something else, some other state of being, much as this work can be seen as one small aspect of Nolan’s art that stands for the whole – a close examination of a small part of something that represents the whole, like a sail represents a yacht, a metonymic resonance. They tell us something through time, of life and death. As the great author W. G. Sebald eloquently observes in his quotation at the top of this posting these things outlast us – in our imagination.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Batchen, Geoffrey. “Palinode: An Introduction to Photography Degree Zero,” in Batchen, Geoffrey (ed.,). Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009, p. 6 2/ Ibid., pp. 8-9 3/ Ibid., p. 13
Many thankx to Ingrid Oosterhuis (General Manager Melbourne) for her help and to Australian Galleries for allowing me to publish the text and the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Sidney Nolan (Australian, 1917-1992) Untitled (calf carcass in tree) 1952 Archival inkjet print 23 x 23cm
In 1952 Sidney Nolan was commissioned by the Brisbane newspaper The Courier Mail to travel through far northern Queensland to record his impressions of one of the worst droughts in Australia’s history. Throughout this journey Nolan took numerous black and white photographs using a medium format camera, resulting in a host of startling and memorable images. Focusing on both the macabre spectre of the many animal carcasses strewn across the landscape and on the singular dwellings announcing a tenuous human presence, Nolan created numerous iconic images.
Having returned to Australia after an extended period traveling in Europe, Nolan commented that the animal carcasses reminded him of the petrified bodies he had seen at Pompeii. Throughout the series emphasis shifts from detached observation to intimate contemplation – between the forces of the outer landscape to the darkness of the animals’ inner being. With their carefully composed compositions the photographs represent a dramatic shift from the artist’s earlier photographic experiments. In place of a prior spontaneity, drought-stricken animal carcases are framed in formally rigorous compositions, the moment seemingly trapped in time.
For the first time this exhibition includes the complete and unabridged series of Sidney Nolan’s Drought Photographs, including images previously unavailable for public exhibition.
Damian Smith Archivist for the Nolan Estate 1996-1999
Australia has not a very long history, but it is long enough to indicate that she must expect a major drought once every decade. Even so the present drought which the north and west of the continent is enduring, is by far the worst in living memory.
Rivers which have not been dry for over a century are now beds of hot sand, and even the aborigines can find no parallel in their mythology for a drought of this magnitude.
To cattle raising areas, failure of the annual monsoonal rains spells near tragedy. Of a total of 11.4 million beef cattle 1.5million have already perished.
The position is complicated by the lack of a railway connecting the North-centre of Australia with the eastern seaboard. Had such a railway been in existence many thousands of cattle could have been shifted to agistment areas and saved. As it is, the cattle must survive journeys from 500 to 1500 miles on stock routes, and this is generally impossible owing to the weakened positions of the animals. Thus cattle men must face the prospect of watching their herds dwindle until at least the end of the year when there is the probability of early summer storms bringing relief.
In the meantime the landscape presents scenes of desolation which mark the memory of all who see it. Thousands of carcasses are strewn on the baked and cracked plains. There is a brooding air of almost Biblical intensity over millions of acres which bear no trace of surface waters. The dry astringent air extracts every drop of moisture from the grass, leaving it so brittle that it breaks under foot with the tinkling of thin glass.
Death takes on a curiously abstract patter under these arid conditions. Carcasses of animals are preserved in strange shapes which have often a kind of beauty, or even grim elegance.
Over the whole country there is a silence in which men and animals bring forth the qualities necessary for survival. Patience, endurance – and for many Australians, a bitter and salty attitude of irony.
Sidney Nolan, August 1952
Text from the Australian Galleries website [Online] Cited 18/03/2011 no longer available online
Sidney Nolan (Australian, 1917-1992) Untitled (cow in tree) 1952 Archival inkjet print 23 x 23cm
Sidney Nolan (Australian, 1917-1992) Untitled (Brian the stockman mounting dead horse) 1952 Archival inkjet print 23 x 23cm
Australian Galleries is delighted to present this fascinating exhibition of selected photographs by Sidney Nolan curated by Damian Smith, Archivist for the Nolan Estate 1996-1999.
Smith states in the accompanying exhibition catalogue:
“In 1952 Sidney Nolan was commissioned by the Brisbane newspaper The Courier Mail to travel through far northern Queensland to record his impressions of one of the worst droughts in Australia’s history. Throughout this journey Nolan took numerous black and white photographs using a medium format camera, resulting in a host of startling and memorable images. Focusing on both the macabre spectre of the many animal carcasses strewn across the landscape and on the singular dwellings announcing a tenuous human presence, Nolan created numerous iconic images. This exhibition includes the complete and unabridged series of Sidney Nolan’s Drought Photographs, including images previously unavailable for public exhibition.”
In his 1952 essay Epic Drought in Australia Sidney Nolan remarked on the poignancy of the images, noting the following:
“Death takes on a curiously abstract patter under these arid conditions. Carcasses of animals are preserved in strange shapes which have often a kind of beauty, or even grim elegance.”
To coincide with the exhibition Drought Photographs, Australian Galleries will be showing a selection of Drought Drawings by Sidney Nolan that include works previously exhibited at the National Gallery of Victoria, in it’s landmark survey of Nolan’s work Desert Drought in 2003.
Sidney Nolan Drought Photographs Curated by Damian Smith
In 2010 Damian Smith established Words For Art, a consultancy specialising in art writing and curatorial projects.
Damian has always had a strong interest in Nolan’s work, he was appointed the inaugural archivist for the estate of Sidney Nolan in 1996. Since that time he has curated numerous Nolan exhibitions including a major exhibition, Unmasked: Sidney Nolan and Ned Kelly 1950-1990 for the Heide Museum of Modern Art in 2006.
Building up to the Heide exhibition, Damian was based at Sidney Nolan’s home ‘The Rodd’ at Herefordshire, a 16th Century manor on the border of England and Wales. During that research period he developed an interest in Nolan’s life-long engagement with photography. He discovered vintage prints of Nolan’s photographs of outback Australia and the devastating drought in far northern Queensland, which were included in the landmark survey Sidney Nolan: Desert and Drought, at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2003. The exhibition included previously unseen photographic images from 1949 to 1952.
In the NGV exhibition, numerous small-scale contact prints showing Nolan’s ‘Drought animals’ were featured, as were larger black and white prints from the same series. Additional small-scale prints were sourced as well through Nolan’s step-daughter Jinx Nolan. Of note was Nolan’s now famous Untitled (Brian the stockman mounting a dead horse at Wave Hill Station), 1952, a startling image that first featured in the 1961 Thames & Hudson monograph Sidney Nolan, where it appeared titled Desert.
Having researched and written about these images, Damian recognised that Nolan had spent many hours studying the images, notating them and ultimately using them in the development of his now famous Drought paintings. Nolan offered the photographs to Life Magazine, New York in a bid to bring this extraordinary series to public attention. This bid was unsuccessful.
After all of the years since these photographs were taken, Damian made the decision to resurrect Nolan’s photographs working closely with Sidney Nolan’s widow Mary Nolan, nee Boyd. The result being this exhibition at Australian Galleries, Melbourne in 2011.
Keen to preserve the artist’s vision, the photographs have been produced to a scale consistent with the vintage prints and all are printed from the original negatives which were discovered at ‘The Rodd’.
Text from Australian Galleries Melbourne
Sidney Nolan (Australian, 1917-1992) Untitled (cow carcass and cow skull) 1952 Archival inkjet print 23 x 23cm
Sidney Nolan (Australian, 1917-1992) Untitled (cow and calf carcass covered in dirt I) 1952 Archival inkjet print 23 x 23cm
Australian Galleries 35 Derby Street [PO Box 1183] Collingwood 3066 Phone: +61 3 9417 4303
Vanila Netto (Brazil, b. 1963) Pole Relief 2011 50 x 50cm Archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper
“There’s an odd diaristic quality to Vanila Netto’s photographic, still life, video and neon works. What at first might seem like a hotchpotch of gestures, assemblages and moments reveals a lateral narrative – still points on a fluid map.”
Dan Rule in The Age newspaper
Netto’s work moves from one place to another, Navigating Widely. Some elements are more successful than others. The grainy colour field photographs of extruded objects (foam packing, the detritus of cardboard) fail to impress lacking the fidelity that the subject matter requires and the ability to integrate successfully into the lateral narrative. The Super 8 film transferred to digital video It is time to bridge (2011) is excellent, evoking as it does the utopian ideals of industrialisation, planes and rockets becoming “permanent and sedentary residents” of an abandoned dream park. The diptych neon installation Elation, Deflation (Inner Tubes) (2011) is also effective in evoking the interface between human and machine.
The best work in the exhibition is the series of small square format, analogue colour photographs that have been printed digitally (see photographs below). There is a lovely spatial resistance in these photographs – hints of colour, slices, markings on walls, the collision of opposites – that elevates them above the rest of the exhibition. In these photographs, the punctum pricks our consciousness but is it enough? Although these are interesting photographs, are they photographs that you would remember in a week, a month or a year? More was needed to hang your hat on, perhaps an ambiguous sense of Time that stretched the frame of reference.
Overall, the hotchpotch of gestures, assemblages and moments needed a more substantial grounding and, for me, became points on a confused map: a collection of complexities, both global and personal, that needed a focusing of rationale and conceptualisation. Less is more! Drawing what are some good ideas and threads together in a simplified form would add to the strength of the work for there is talent here. Perhaps concentrating on one idea and exploring it more fully would be a step along the path. I look forward to the next literation.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thanxk to Angela Connor for her help and to Arc One Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photograph for a larger version of the image.
Vanila Netto (Brazil, b. 1963) Colossus 2011 100 x 100cm Archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper
Vanila Netto (Brazil, b. 1963) Mir 2011 50 x 50cm Archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper
Vanila Netto (Brazil, b. 1963) Wheeling Consorts 2011 50 x 50cm Archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper
Vanila Netto (Brazil, b. 1963) Solaris 2011 50 x 50cm Archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper
Vanila Netto (Brazil, b. 1963) Air Buzzing 2011 50 x 50cm Archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper
Arc One Gallery 45 Flinders Lane Melbourne, 3000 Phone: (03) 9650 0589
![Leonardo da Vinci (Italian, 1452-1519) 'Study for the head of Christ for The Last Supper [Testa di Cristo]' c. 1494-1495](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/leonardo_da_vinci_head_of_christ_c1494_5.jpg "Leonardo da Vinci (Italian, 1452-1519) 'Study for the head of Christ for The Last Supper [Testa di Cristo]' c. 1494-1495")
![Arthur Wigram Allen (Australian, 1894-1967) 'Wedding Group at 'Merioola', Saturday 23rd December 1911. Wedding Group consisting of Lieutenant Knowles (best man), Joyce Pat and Kitty, Alex Leeper's two daughters Valentine and Molly [Kitty's half-sisters]' December 1911](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/arthur-wigram-allen-wedding-group.jpg "Arthur Wigram Allen (Australian, 1894-1967) 'Wedding Group at 'Merioola', Saturday 23rd December 1911. Wedding Group consisting of Lieutenant Knowles (best man), Joyce Pat and Kitty, Alex Leeper's two daughters Valentine and Molly [Kitty's half-sisters]' December 1911")
![Arthur Wigram Allen (Australian, 1894-1967) '[Roller skating on the verandah at Moombara]' Nd](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/allen-roller-skating.jpg "Arthur Wigram Allen (Australian, 1894-1967) '[Roller skating on the verandah at Moombara]' Nd")
![Arthur Wigram Allen (Australian, 1894-1967) 'This afternoon Marcia Lamb [centre] and I took Lord Orford and Lady Dorothy Walpole [right], also Nell Knox [left] for a drive to South Head, Bondi and Coogee' February 22, 1911](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/allen-afternoon.jpg "Arthur Wigram Allen (Australian, 1894-1967) 'This afternoon Marcia Lamb [centre] and I took Lord Orford and Lady Dorothy Walpole [right], also Nell Knox [left] for a drive to South Head, Bondi and Coogee' February 22, 1911")
Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive 
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