Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958) Missing in Action (horizontal kenosis) No.4 2010 Digital photograph
Missing in Action (horizontal kenosis)
A body of work, Missing in Action (horizontal kenosis) (2010) is now online on my website.
There are nineteen images in the series which can be viewed as a sequence, rising and falling like a piece of music.
Below are a selection of images from the series.
Marcus
Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a digital colour 16″ x 20″ costs $1000 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my Store web page.
Kenosis
“In Christian theology, Kenosis is the concept of the ‘self-emptying’ of one’s own will and becoming entirely receptive to God and his perfect will.”
Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958) Missing in Action (horizontal kenosis) No.5 2010 Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958) Missing in Action (horizontal kenosis) No.6 2010 Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958) Missing in Action (horizontal kenosis) No.8 2010 Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958) Missing in Action (horizontal kenosis) No.9 2010 Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958) Missing in Action (horizontal kenosis) No.16 2010 Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958) Missing in Action (horizontal kenosis) No.17 2010 Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series There But For The Grace of You Go I 2009 Digital colour photograph
There But For The Grace of You Go I
A body of work, There But For The Grace of You Go I (2009) is now online on my website.
There are twenty images in the series which can be viewed as a sequence, rising and falling like a piece of music. Below are a selection of images from the series. The work continues an exploration into the choices human beings make. The silhouettes and landscapes of planes are taken from found copyright free images; the people from my photographs captured as they crossed the intersection outside Flinders Street Station, Melbourne. Other images are paintings from the Renaissance and POW’s during World War II.
I have always been creative from a very early age, starting as a child prodigy playing the piano at the age of five and going on to get my degree as a concert pianist at the Royal College of Music in London. I have always felt the music and being creative has helped me cope with life, living with bipolar.
These days as I reach my early 50’s ego is much less a concern – about being successful, about having exhibitions. I just make the work because I love making it and the process gives me happiness – in the thinking, in the making. I can loose myself in my work.
When Andrew Denton asked Clive James what brings him joy, James replies “The arts,“ and then qualified his answer. “What I mean is creativity. When I get lost in something that’s been made, it doesn’t matter who it is by. It could be Marvin Gaye singing ‘I Heard it Through the Grapevine’ or it could be the adagio of the Ninth Symphony …”
What a wise man.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a digital colour 16″ x 20″ costs $1000 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my Store web page.
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series There But For The Grace of You Go I 2009 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series There But For The Grace of You Go I 2009 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series There But For The Grace of You Go I 2009 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series There But For The Grace of You Go I 2009 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series There But For The Grace of You Go I 2009 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series There But For The Grace of You Go I 2009 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series There But For The Grace of You Go I 2009 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series There But For The Grace of You Go I 2009 Digital colour photograph
Siri Hayes (Australian, b. 1977) Gunnai man land 2008
A handsome group of large photographs in crisp white frames is displayed in the large space of Gallerysmith, Melbourne. Undoubtably they are well taken and printed photographs but conceptually their thematic development is confused. The photographs purport to investigate how industrialisation has changed the Gippsland landscape since colonisation whilst referencing human interactions that ‘are sometimes’ associated with Western art.
Gunnai land man (above) is very effective in this quest juxtaposing as it does an Indigenous Australian and fallen tree on a bare track with a smoke billowing power station (symbolic of the industrialisation of the area) looming in the background. Other photographs are less successful. What a man flying a kite has to do with the pre-colonial Gippsland landscape is beyond me and the juxtapositional incongruity sought by the artist simply does not work, despite the presence of the power station on the plains in the distance. The symbology has more to do with Japanese art than it has to do with Western art.
The conceptual narrative of the photograph Moe Madonna (below) works only partially as well. The destruction of the landscape has been caused by pastoralisation not industrialisation. In the image that Hayes is referencing the Madonna is front and centre set in an idyllic landscape. In the work by Hayes the incongruity has to be explained, has to be verbalised in text for the association to be didactically made. The interpretation leaves no room for personal reflection and when I looked at this image, the mother and child were so small in the landscape, the placement so obviously constructed that there incongruity turned to disbelief: namely that I simply did not believe the mise en scène being created.
Other narratives are equally confusing. In Paper bag lovers (below) I had to ask the gallery director what was going on in the photograph because the bodies where so small in the landscape (in fact it looks like one body) and you can’t really see the paper bags on their heads because the bodies are just an amorphous mass containing no detail at all (you can just see the body in the photograph below in the mid distance just below the large central tree). Why paper bags anyway? If something intentionally odd and incongruous is sought to be portrayed in the landscape perhaps Hayes should look at the work of Eugene Meatyard (see below) to see a real subversion of the body/landscape dichotomy.
The one standout photograph of the exhibition is Plein air explorers (below). This is confirmed in the sales of the show as all six prints of this photograph have been sold. One can see why!
The title is perfect, the construction of the image faultless. The naked white man stands proudly surveying his conquered domain, the land, whilst around him artists (reminding me of the dilettantes of the Victorian age going on day trips), hunker down into the ground with their easels oblivious to the desiccated trees around them. Here the photographer just observes, doesn’t construct, the incongruity of it all. The artists draw the white man based on direct observation of him and not on their conceptions or conventional images or memories of him while ignoring their surroundings.
Here is the paradox, the ironic perfect storm that the artist was conceptually seeking: the representation of landscape based upon direct observation “in the open air” ignored for a perfect white arse while on the horizon smoke stacks of a power station stand in silent witness to the present and imminent destruction of the world.
What a photograph! Can I have one now please?
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Gallerysmith for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Siri Hayes (Australian, b. 1977) Moe Madonna 2008
Siri Hayes (Australian, b. 1977) Kite 2008
Raphael (Italian, 1483-1520) Madonna of the Goldfinch 1505-1506 Oil on panel 107 x 77cm Galleria degli Uffizi
Siri Hayes (Australian, b. 1977) Paper Bag Lovers 2008
I have predominantly focused on the parts of the Gippsland landscape that have been impacted by white settlement. I have composed various human interactions that are sometimes associated with Western art and its construction. For example, Moe Madonna references Raphael’s Goldfinch Madonna. The narratives are intentionally odd and incongruous with the surrounding location. My son and I seem out-of-place in a barren paddock while the autumn mist shrouds distant gum trees and electricity pylons. The soil here has been compacted beyond repair by cattle hooves – an inappropriate animal in Australia’s delicate ecosystems. As we sit on this barren plain, I read to Oliver from a European pre-schooler book titled Autumn, creating an interesting juxtaposition with the antipodean equivalent season.
The work in this exhibition considers the pre-colonial Gippsland landscape and how industrial ‘progress’ has altered it. Hopefully it provides pause for thought.
Siri Hayes exhibition notes. March 2009
Siri Hayes (Australian, b. 1977) Plein air explorers 2008
Gallerysmith 170-174 Abbotsford St, North Melbourne, Victoria, 3051 Australia
“Ruff is aware, while so many of us are unaware. He is fully conscious and observant of the processes and effects of contemporary digital photography. And yet. And yet, these fractured images approach the sublime in some mysterious way.” Dr Marcus Bunyan
I greatly admire this series of work. It takes a very special artist and a very special person to look at the world – and specifically how the world is represented and presented to us in scrappy, low quality jpgs – and recognise a different perspective, an alternate reality that is staring us in the face, that is confronting us every single day. No body but Ruff did.
Great artists are always ahead of their time, always probing beyond, offering up a mirror to an inchoate, uninformed society. Robert Frank did it with The Americans in the 1950s, and the Americans didn’t like what they were being shown by an outsider, a foreigner. Lee Friedlander did it in the 1970s with his segmented images and reflections, his informality and perspicacity. Now Ruff abstracts an already abstracted and distracted world, a world flooded with meaningless images. He makes giant the landscape, war, eruption, disruption and destruction until when we approach too close… the image dissolves before our eyes. Into nothingness. We retreat in confusion.
Ruff is aware, while so many of us are unaware. He is fully conscious and observant of the processes and effects of contemporary digital photography. And yet. And yet, these fractured images approach the sublime in some mysterious way.
“How much visual information is needed for image recognition? A pretty small quantity of data will go a long way for the brain and the computer, both of which take shortcuts for the sake of speedy comprehension. In the Jpegs series, German photographer Thomas Ruff exploits this imprecision in digital technology, locating online JPEGs and enlarging them until the pixels emerge in a chessboard pattern of near abstraction. A closer look at these images reveals that, in addition to the degeneration of the image into a digital grid, the colour and brightness generated by the algorithms of the compression also become visible. Many of Ruff’s works in this series focus on idyllic, seemingly untouched landscapes, or conversely, on scenes of war and nature disturbed by human manipulation – subjects ill suited to disruptive pixelation, and therefore perfect for Ruff’s purposes. Taken together, these images constitute an encyclopaedic compendium of contemporary visual culture that also engages the history of landscape painting. A fittingly deluxe and oversize volume, Jpegs is the first monograph dedicated exclusively to this monumental series.”
Thomas Ruff is among the most important international photographers to emerge in the last fifteen years, and one of the most enigmatic and prolific of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s former students, a group that includes Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Candida Höfer, and Axel Hutte. In 2007, Ruff completed his monumental and very timely Jpegs series in which he explores the distribution and reception of images in the digital age. Starting with images he culls primarily from the Web, Ruff enlarges them to a gigantic scale, which exaggerates the pixel patterns, until they become sublime geometric displays of colour. A fittingly deluxe and oversized volume, Jpegs (Aperture, June 2009) is the first monograph dedicated exclusively to the publication of Ruff’s remarkable series.
When viewed up close the images in Jpegs look abstract; as you move away they merge into decipherable photographic images. Like Impressionistic paintings, Ruff’s photographs require the viewer’s active participation and shift in perspective in order to make a complete assessment of the image content. The work ranges from idyllic, seemingly untouched landscapes and popular tourist spots, to scenes of war and nature disturbed by human manipulation. Places and global events that have defined the visual media world of recent decades are represented, including the familiar, almost iconic pictures of atomic bomb tests; 9/11; scenes of warfare in Baghdad, Beirut, and Grozny; the killing fields of Cambodia; and the ravaged Asian coasts after the 2004 tsunami, among others. Taken together, these masterworks create an encyclopaedic compendium of contemporary visual culture that also actively engages the history of landscape painting. Jpegs is a testament to the effects of the digital age on the medium of photography.
Dale Frank (Australian, b. 1959) The Big Black Bubble (installation view) Left to right: Timothy Oliphant (2008), Ryan Gosling (2008/2009) and Matthew Macfadyen (2008) 2009
This is a brilliant exhibition by Dale Frank, one of my favourites so far this year in Melbourne.
Six large varnish on linen landscape paintings are presented in the beautiful Anna Schwartz gallery space in Melbourne. Photographs really do not do the paintings justice – they can only give an impression of the size and scale of the work but not of their intimacy or smell. The smell of varnish permeates the air. The serendipity of the natural convulsions of the varnish and the facilitations of the hand of the artist, his performance, have been caught like bugs in amber in the final molecular structure of the painting. Here are pendulous, globular goops of varnish, immersive heroic tone poems that form images in the mind of the viewer. Moving close to the paintings you are surrounded by flows and eddies, the macro and the micro; details become more apparent as you study the work.
While disagreeing that these paintings are the viewers to create (the viewer as author) what I can say is that the artist offers the viewer the ability to generate their own resonances with the painting, to use the imagination of ‘equivalence’ to suggest what these paintings stand for – and also what else they stand for. States of being, of transformation, wonder and joy emerge in the playfulness of these works. Perhaps this is where the titles of the paintings come from, referencing film actors in the pop tradition, but this is the only thing that did not ring true with the work, their titles. The use of this trope seems to me a bit facile given the nature of the work.
The hot pink painting Rupert Grint (2008/2009, above) is hotter and lighter than in the photograph below, the varnish more translucent, the effect altogether mesmeric. You are drawn into the work, the intensity of the colour, the thickness of the hanging varnish. Two cosmological galaxies (Timothy Oliphant (2008) and Matthew Macfadyen (2008)) surround the most complex painting in the exhibition, the darkness and light that is Ryan Gosling (2008/2009, below).
This painting is a tour de force. With the poetic structure of an oil spill, the varnish forms intricate slick upon slick contours that are almost topographical in their mapping. The black oozes light, becomes ‘plastic’ black before your eyes, like the black of Rembrandt’s backgrounds, illusive, illuminative and hard to pin down – perpetually hanging there in two dripping rows, fixed but fluid at one and the same time (you can just see the suspensions in the photograph above).
The painting reminds me of the black paintings of Mark Rothko that he undertook for The Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas (see below). As with the Rothko paintings, this painting is not just black (physically there are swirls of purple as in the Rothko paintings), not about darkness at all. What both artists do is create a contemplative, transformative space – in Frank’s case for a world on the edge of oblivion. This is a post post-modern landscape: process and nature, performance and chance coalescing in the colour : black!
This painting is one of the most overwhelming syntheses of art and nature, of universal forces that I have seen in recent contemporary art. This exhibition is an electric pulsating universe of life, landscape and transformation.
Magnificent!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Anna Schwartz Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Dale Frank (Australian, b. 1959) The Big Black Bubble (installation view) Left to right: Daniel Radcliffe (2008/2009), Khan Chittenden (2009) and Rupert Grint (2008/2009) 2009
The immersive scale of these new paintings at Anna Schwartz Gallery Melbourne allows us to experience their inner qualities of landscape and of transformation. This is painting at fundamental authenticity. The paint is its own agent; it is allowed to act, to behave. The artist is the facilitator of these phenomena of nature and natural forces, whose residue is a metaphor for nature itself.
Black contains all colours, contours and depths. A pink monochrome is transformed by pure varnish into an expressionistic moment of process and performance. All colour is absent from elemental silver aluminium and form and gesture alone survive. New dynamics are possible through an innovative colouration: the emergence of colour through black, and its equivalent power.
Dale Frank’s painting is one of poetry, performance and nature. It represents both the macro and micro. Huge universal forces pulsate with molecular, atomic activities. Imagination is gifted by the artist to the viewer. These are our paintings to create.
Anonymous text from the exhibition flyer.
Dale Frank (Australian, b. 1959) Ryan Gosling 2008/2009
The Rothko Chapel Houston, Texas
Anna Schwartz Gallery 185 Flinders Lane Melbourne 3000 Australia Phone: +61 3 9654 6131
“Remembering is an ethical act. It is also a voluntary act. We can choose not to remember. We can choose to forget. In this photograph I choose to remember, to not let pass into the dark night of the soul.” Dr Marcus Bunyan
March 2009
Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958) Oakland, 7-’51 from the series The Shape of Dreams (restored) 2009
“Fragments of harmonic lines assemble and collapse as the meaning of each interval must be continually revised in light of the unfolding precession of further terms in an ultimately unsustainable syntax. The mind’s ear tries to remember the sum of passing intervals, but without the ability to incorporate them into larger identifiable units each note inevitably lapses back into silence, surrendered to the presence of the currently sounding tone, itself soon to give way to another newly isolated note in its turn.”
Craig Dworkin1
The Passing of Memory
Thinking about this photograph
I bought an album on Ebay that contained an anonymous aviator with snapshots of his life: photographs of him in Oakland, California, Cologne in Germany and flying out of Italy – photos of his buddies and the work they did, the places they visited, the fun they had.
This one photograph has haunted me more than the rest.
Who was he? What was his life like? Do he get married and have children? Is he still alive?
When scanned the image was so dirty, so degraded, that I spent 7 weeks of my life cleaning and restoring the photograph working all hours of the day and night. I was obsessive almost to the point of obstinacy. Many times I nearly gave up as I thought the task impossible – thousands of dots and hairs inhabited the surface of the image and, surely, it was just another photograph one of millions that circle the world. Why expend so much energy just to resurrect this one particular image?
Some things that can be said about this photograph
It is small measuring only 9cm high by 7.5 cm wide
It is printed on cheap glossy photographic paper which now has a slight yellow tinge to it.
The image is creased at top left.
The back is annotated ‘Oakland, 7-’51’
The dark roundel with the wing on the side of the aircraft has faint text that spells out the words ‘AERO ACE’.
There is no engine in the aircraft and it looks from the parts lying on the ground that the aircraft is being broken up or used for spares.
The man is wearing work overalls with unidentifiable insignia on them, a worker on the aircraft being dismantled or just a fitter on the base.
Someone standing on the ground has obviously called out the man’s name and he has turned around in response to the call and lent forward and put out his hand in greeting – a beautiful spontaneous response – and the photograph has been taken.
Some other things that can be said about this photograph, in passing
The sun splashes the man’s face. He smiles at the camera.
His arm rests gently on the metal of the aircraft, shielded from the sun.
Perhaps he wears a ring on his fifth finger.
He is blind.
This photograph is an individual, isolated note in the fabric of time. It could easily pass into silence as memory and image fade from view. Memories of the individual form the basis for remembering and photographs act as an aide-memoire both for individual memory and the collective memory that flows from individual memory. Memory is always and only partial and fragmentary – who is remembering, what are they remembering, when do they remember, what prompts them to remember and how these memories are incorporated into the collective memory, an always mediated phenomenon that manifests itself in the actions and statements of individuals, are important questions.
Images are able to trigger memories and emotional responses to a particular time and place, but since this photograph has no personal significance what is going on here? Why did I cry when I was restoring it? What emotional association was happening inside me?
“To remember is always to give a reading of the past, a reading which requires linguistic skills derived from the traditions of explanation and story-telling within a culture and which [presents] issues in a narrative that owes its meaning ultimately to the interpretative practices of a community of speakers. This is true even when what is remembered is one’s own past experience… [The] mental image of the past … becomes a phenomenon of consciousness only when clothed with words, and these owe their meaning to social practices of communication.”2
His blindness stares at us while underneath his body walks away into his passing.
I have become the speaker for this man, for this image.
His brilliant face is our brilliant face.
In this speaking, the phenomenon of making the image conscious, the gap between image and presence, between the photo and its shadow has collapsed. There is no past and present but a collective resonance that has presence in images.
“Such reasoning questions the separation of past and present in a fundamental way. As a consequence it becomes fruitless to discuss whether or not a particular event or process remembered corresponds to the actual past: all that matters are the specific conditions under which such memory is constructed as well as the personal and social implications of memories held.”3
‘The personal and social implications of memories held’. Or not held, if images are lost in passing.
It is such a joyous image, the uplifted hand almost in supplication. I feel strong connection to this man. I bring his presence into consciousness in my life, and by my thinking into the collective memory. Perhaps the emotional response is that as I get older photographs of youth remind me of the passing of time more strongly. Perhaps the image reminds me of the smiling father I never had. These are not projections of my own feelings but resonances held in the collective memory.
As Susan Sontag has observed,
“Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead. So the belief that remembering is an ethical act is deep in our natures as humans, who know we are going to die, and who mourn those who in the normal course of things die before us – grandparents, parents, teachers and older friends.”4
Remembering is an ethical act. It is also a voluntary act. We can choose not to remember. We can choose to forget. In this photograph I choose to remember, to not let pass into the dark night of the soul. My mind, eyes and heart are open.
This is not a simulacra of an original image but an adaptation, an adaptation that tries to find resonances between past and present, between image and shadow. As such this photograph is no longer an isolated tone that inevitably lapses back into silence but part of a bracketing of time that is beautiful in its illumination, its presence. The individual as collective, collected memory present for all to see.
The form of formlessness, the shape of dreams.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Dworkin, Craig. “Grammar Degree Zero (Introduction to Re-Writing Freud)” (2005) [Online] Cited 23rd March, 2009. No longer available online
2/ Holtorf, Cornelius. “Social Memory,” part of a doctoral thesis Monumental Past: The Life-histories of Megalithic Monuments in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (Germany) submitted 1998 [Online] Cited 23/03/2009
3/ Ibid.,
4/ Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003, p. 103
An interesting exhibition is presented in the [now closed] permanent third floor photography gallery at NGV International, Melbourne on a subject that deserved a much more rigorous investigation than could been undertaken in this small gallery space. Presenting single works by Ed Ruscha, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Patrick Pound, Robert Rooney, Simon Obarzanek, Penelope Davis, Candid Hofer, Linda Judge and Charles Green and Lyndell Brown the works seek to investigate the nature of the relationship between photography and the archive, between the semi-permanences of an archival memory and the spaces of a transgressive intertexuality marked by fragmentary, ironic counter-performances.
As noted in the catalogue essay by NGV curator Maggie Finch the archive is a place for holding knowledge that contains elements of truth and error, order and disorder; archives are able to shape history and memory, depending on how, when and by whom the records are accessed. Any disruption of order, governance and authority can lead to alternative readings and interpretations as the arcane ‘mysteries’ of the methods of classification are overturned. Since Victorian times when the body came under the self-surveillance of the camera and was found wanting, photographs have documented the faces of criminals, the physiognomy of degeneration and the fever of war.
As Yiannis Papatheodorou has observed when reviewing Jacques Derrida Mal d’Archive,
“Derrida declares that since the dominant power of the archive derives from the economy of knowledge, it also provides the institutional responsibility of the interpretation. The localisation of the information transforms the inscription, provided by the function of the archive, into the impression of a memory’s trace, conscious or unconscious …
The preservation of memory, the access to information, the “resources” of the sources and the working environment are not just the representation of a future memory. They are active practices and discourses that create hierarchies and exclusions. The archives are the languages of the past, activated however dialogically, according to scientific and social demands. The content of our choice is marked by the way we are seeking information. Far from being an abstract principle, our choice is an ideologically oriented negotiation closely related to the politics of interpretation.”1
And there’s the rub.
Not only is this exhibition a reordering of an unpublished memory (for that is what an archive is, a unique unpublished memory), it is also a reiteration of the authority of the gallery itself, the “institutional responsibility of the interpretation.”2
Deciding what was in this exhibition and what to leave out creates hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion – and in this case the inclusions are mainly ‘safe’ works, ones that challenge the ontology of existence, the cataloguing of reality in a slightly ironic way but oh – nothing too shocking! nothing too disordered! Nothing here then of the archive of images that substantiate the horrors of war, the trans/disfiguration of men in both World Wars for example. There are few images to haunt us, none to refresh our memories in a problematic way.
The more successful pieces, the works that challenge the order of the archive (“what is no longer archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way”)3, are the ones by Ed Ruscha, Penelope Davis and Simon Obarzaneck (all below).
Ruscha’s vertical inverted cityscape is trapped in a display cabinet opened out on the horizontal plane in concertina format, like one of those optical illusion images in which you see an image looking from one direction and a different image from the other direction. Ruscha’s personal experience of driving down Sunset Strip in Los Angeles and his anthropological recording of the urban experience has been disseminated in a mass produced ‘artists’ book. No unique unpublished archive here. Beneath the facades of the shops other narratives emerge – images are stitched together, cars chopped off, people dismembered – all in a very linear, conceptual way; a journey from one point to another, one that is both subjective (the voice and hand of the author) and objective (the en masse production of the book).
As Chris Balaschak has noted, “The images, taken during the day, capture only the facades of the buildings. Ignorance is given to cars or people, both of which are often cut in half between separate exposures. The imperfections of matching the facades are cracks along Ruscha’s drive. Through these cracks we find Ruscha, not such an anonymous author after all. Splitting cars in two, and mismatching facades we become keenly aware of the passage of time. The facades of buildings may appear as stage sets but they are active points on other itineraries, anticipating future and past narratives.”4
This is Ruscha’s trace through the city but also our intersection with his journey, our chance to make our own itineraries as Balaschak (in his insightful writing) rightly points out. The fragmentary dismembering becomes the space between, the disorder of the linear into a heterotopic space of remembering. We the viewer create our own narrative, flitting through the cracks in the archive of memory, the photographer, the author of our own journey.
Penelope Davis photograms are luminous objects. She makes resin casts of the spine of discarded books and places the casts directly onto photographic paper and then exposes them to light. The books glow and hover in the blackness, the words on the spine reversed. Stripped of their context, of their memory, they become ethereal books, phantom texts, liminal images that hover between what is known and what is imagined. As Davis has said, “Most people assume that when they look at a photo that they are looking at the thing photographed – but they are not. They are looking at a photo. Books and photographic images and archives are enigmatic – you can’t be sure of a singular definition or meaning.”
Davis is ‘messing around’ with the idea of veracity, the truth of photography and the ordering of the archive of our mind through the images we collate. We seek to grasp the original memory of an event, of the reading and ordering of our life through images and none is available to us, for as Foucault has observed memories are only ever fragmentary and distorted representations, partial truths a best. Like Jorge Luis Borges’ journey into the infinite universe of The Library of Babel, for Foucault the psyche is not an archive but a mirror, like the shining silver foil surface of the cover of the Ed Ruscha book:
“The search for the self is a journey into a mental labyrinth that takes random courses and ultimately ends at impasses. The memory fragments recovered along the way cannot provide us with a basis for interpreting the overall meaning of the journey. The meanings that we derive from our memories are only partial truths, and their value is ephemeral. For Foucault, the psyche is not an archive but only a mirror. To search the psyche for the truth about ourselves is a futile task because the psyche can only reflect the images we have conjured up to describe ourselves. Looking into the psyche, therefore, is like looking into the mirror image of a mirror. One sees oneself reflected in an image of infinite regress. Our gaze is led not toward the substance of our beginnings but rather into the meaninglessness of previously discarded images of the self.”5
This leads us nicely onto the images of Simon Obarzanek.
In a fantastic series of photographs, the only ones of this exhibition that seemed to haunt me (as Susan Sontag says images do), Obarzanek photographs people in an ordered, almost scientific, manner. Photographed face on against a non-contextual background using a low depth of field, these repetitive, collective, unnamed people remind me of the images of Galton. But here the uniformity is overwhelmed by quirky differences – the placement of eyes and lips seem large offering a strange, surreal physiognomy. These images resonate, the challenge, they remain with you, they question the order of things as no other photograph in this exhibition does. From simplicity comes eloquence.
To finish I must address the elephant in the room, in fact two elephants!
There is not one digital photograph contained in the exhibition, the work being collage, Type C colour or black and white silver gelatin prints. There is no mention in the catalogue of the crisis of cultural memory that is now permeating our world. Some believe the ever-expanding digital archive, the Internet, threatens our lived memories “amidst the process of the ‘digitisation of culture’ and the new possibilities of storing.”6
This vision entails the fear of losing cultural content, hitting the delete button so that memory passes into forgetting. This is a vision to which I do not subscribe, but the issue needed to be addressed in this exhibition: how are digital technologies altering our re-assemblance of memory, altering photography’s ability inherent ability to record, store and organise visual images? What about the aura of the original or was there never such a thing?
Furthermore, it would seem that with photographs becoming less and less a fixed essence; with the meaning of the photograph more and more divorced from its referent; with the spectators look the key to reading photographs; and the performance of the photograph a cut and paste reality… then perhaps we are left not with the two polar opposites of order and disorder but some orthogonal spaces in-between.
The second elephant in the room in the gallery space itself.
Whilst the curators of photography at the National Gallery of Victoria do an amazing job running large exhibitions such as the Andreas Gursky and Rennie Ellis shows that have starred this year, the NGV ‘International’ is shooting itself in the foot with the current permanent photography gallery space. Small, jaded and dour it seems an addendum to other larger spaces in the gallery and to be honest photography and Melbourne deserve better. Personally I feel more alive in the fashion gallery that is on the floor below and that, for a photographer, is a hard thing to say.
As the theme for this exhibition deserved a greater in-depth investigation so the gallery needs to expand its horizons and give the permanent photography gallery a redesign and overhaul. Where is the life and passion of contemporary photography displayed in a small space for all to see in a gallery that sees itself as ‘International’?
In an occularcentric world the key word is intertexuality: the gallery space should reflect the electri-city, the mixing of a gallery design ethos with images to surround us in a space that makes us passionate about contemporary photography. Now that would really be a new order of things!
2/ “The archive is understood as a collective reservoir of knowledge fulfilling diverse functions and conditioned by three main factors: conservation, selection and accessibility. How are contents stored and which media are used to conserve them? What is selected for storage and what is decided to be cleared out and thus forgotten? Who decides what is archived and who has access to the resources? All these questions paint the archive as a political space where relations of power cross aspects of culture and collective identity.”
Assmann, A. Erinnerungsräume, Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnis. [Memory Spaces, Forms and Transformations of Cultural Memory] Special paperback editon, 1st edition publ. 1999, München: Beck, 2003, p. 343-346
3/ Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever, A Freudian Impression. Transl. by E. Prenowitz, 1996, p. 18 orig. publ. as Mal d’Archive: une impression freudienne. Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995
4/ Balaschak, Chris. Itineraries [part 3] [Online] Cited on 20th March 2009. No longer available online
5/ Hutton, Patrick. “Foucault, Freud, and the Technologies of the Self,” in Martin, Luther and Gutman, Huck and Hutton, Patrick (eds.,). Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. London: Tavistock Publications, 1988, p. 139
6/ Featherstone, M. (2000) “Archiving Cultures,” in British Journal of Sociology, 51(1), pp. 161-184
Many thankx to the National Gallery of Victoria for allowing me to publish the images in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Penelope Davis (Australian, b. 1963) Shelf 2008 From the Fiction-Non-Fiction series 2007-2008 Type C photograph 90 x 70cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2008
Archives contain elements of truth and error, order and disorder and are infinitely fascinating. As both collections of records and repositories of data, archives are able to shape history and memory depending on how, when and by whom the materials are accessed. Their vastness allows for multiple readings to be unravelled over time.
Photography is naturally associated with archives because of its inherent ability to record, store and organise visual images. With this in mind, this exhibition brings together artists drawn largely from the permanent collection of the NGV who explore the idea of archives as complex, living and occasionally mysterious systems of knowledge. Several of the selected artists act as archivists, collecting and ordering their own unique bodies of photographs, while others create disorder by critiquing the ideas and systems of archives.
Bernd and Hilla Becher (German, 1931-2007 and 1934-2015) Coal tipple, Goodspring, Pennsylvania 1975 From the Artists and photographs folio 1975 Gelatin silver photographs 24.0 x 33.9cm (image and sheet) 40.7 x 49.6cm (support) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1976
These images form an interesting body of work: levitating bodies suspended between heaven and earth, neither here nor there, form a hyper-real image grounded in the context of the fluorescent aisles of French supermarkets. The mainly anonymous humans look like mannequins in their inertness, frozen at the moment of throwing themselves/being thrown into the consumer environment.
After his brilliant series La Chute (The Fall) Darzacq has taken people gathered in a casting call from around the town of Rouen and made their frozen bodies complicit in the mass production of the supermarket and the mass consumption of the image as tableaux vivant: the mise en scène directed by the photographer to limited effect. There is something unsettling about these images but ultimately they are unrewarding, as surface as the environment the bodies are suspended in, and perhaps this is the point.
Suspension of bodies is not a new idea in photography. Jacques Henri Lartigue used the freeze frame to good effect long before Henri Cartier-Bresson came up with his ‘decisive moment’: playing with the effect of speed and gravity in an era of Futurism, Lartigue used the arrested movement of instant photography then afforded by smaller cameras and faster film to capture the spirit of liberation in the ‘Belle Epoque’ period before the First World War.
“All the jumping and flying in Lartigue’s photographs, it looks like the whole world at the turn of the century is on springs or something. There’s a kind of spirit of liberation that’s happening at the time and Lartigue matches that up with what stop-action photography can do at the time, so you get these really dynamic pictures. And for Lartigue part of the joke, most of the time, is that these people look elegant but they are doing these crazy stunts.”1
One of the greatest, if not the greatest ever, series of photographs of levitating bodies is that by American photographer Aaron Siskind. Called Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation (sometimes reversed as Terrors and Pleasures of Levitation as on the George Eastman House website) the images feature divers suspended in mid-air with the sky as their blank, background canvas. The images formal construction makes the viewer concentrate on the state of the body, its positioning in the air, and the look on the face of some of the divers caught between joy and fear.
“Highly formal, yet concerned with their subject as well as the idea they communicate, the ‘Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation’ photographs depict the dark shapes of divers suspended mid-leap against a blank white sky. Shot with a hand-held twin-lens reflex camera at the edge of Lake Michigan in Chicago, the balance and conflict suggested by the series’ title is evident in the divers’ sublime contortions.”2
Perhaps because of their air of balance and conflict we can return to these vibrant images again and again and they never lose their freshness, intensity and wonder.
The same cannot be said of Denis Darzacq’s Hyper photographs. Slick and surface like the consumer society on which they comment the somnambulistic bodies are more like floating helium balloons, perhaps even tortured souls leaving the earth. Reminiscent of the magicians trick where the girl is suspended and a hoop passed around her body to prove the suspension is real these photographs really are more smoke and mirrors than any comment on the binary between being and having as some commentators (such as Amy Barrett-Lennard, Director Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts) have suggested.
There is no spirit of liberation here, no sublime revelation as the seemingly lifeless bodies are trapped between the supermarket shelves, as oblivious to and as anonymous as the products that surround them. The well-shot images perhaps possess a sense of fun as Darzacq plays with our understanding of reality… but are they more than that or is the Emperor just wearing very thin consumer clothing?
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Kevin Moore (Lartigue biographer) quoted in “Genius of Photography,” on the BBC website [Online] Cited 15/03/2009
2/ Text from the Museum of Contemporary Photography website [Online] Cited 15/03/2009. No longer available online
Many thankx to the Australian Centre for Photography for allowing me to publish the Darzacq photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All other images are used under “fair use” for the purpose of education, research and critical discourse.
Denis Darzacq (French, b. 1961) Hyper #8 2007
“The astonishing photographs that make up Hyper involve no digital manipulation, just close collaboration between young dancers and sportspeople as they jump for the camera to form strange, exaggerated poses and body gestures. Denis Darzacq was drawn to the trashy, consumerist nature of the French Hypermarkets (the equivalent of our supermarkets) and the hyper-coloured backgrounds they provided. These supermarkets offered a sharp juxtaposition to the sublime, almost-spiritual bodies that appear to float in their aisles.
Hyper is the latest series of works by French photographer Denis Darzacq, who continues to explore the place of the individual in society, a theme which has been crucial to his work in the last few years.”
Text from the ACP website [Online] Cited 15/03/2009. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986) Bichonnade, 40, Rue Cortambert, Paris 1905 Gelatin silver print
Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986) Mr Folletete (Plitt) et Tupy, Paris, March 1912 1912 Gelatin silver print
Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986) Fuborg 1929 Gelatin silver print
Herni Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004) Behind Saint Lazare Station, Paris, France 1932 Gelatin silver print
Aaron Siskind (American, 1903-1991) Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation #37 1956 Gelatin silver print
Aaron Siskind (American, 1903-1991) Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation #47 1954 Gelatin silver print
Aaron Siskind (American, 1903-1991) Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation #93 1961 Gelatin silver print
Aaron Siskind (American, 1903-1991) Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation #99 1956 Gelatin silver print
Aaron Siskind (American, 1903-1991) Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation #491 1956 Gelatin silver print
Denis Darzacq (French, b. 1961) Hyper #3 2007
Hyper picks up on La Chute while explicitly focusing on the artist’s message on the consumerism which hovered in the background of several previous series. In Casques de Thouars Darzacq explored the connecting power and the limits of a consumer product; here the critique is more biting. Hyper opposes bodies in movement and the saturated, standardised space of mass distribution outlets. In this totally commercial setting, the body’s leap expresses the freedom and unhampered choice of its movement. It is a clear challenge to the marketing strategies which seek to control our behaviour. Some of the figures, glowing with an aura, impose glory and give off a sense of spirituality in total contrast with the temples of consumption in which they are found.
“Hyper 1, 2007-2010,” on the Denis Darzacq website Nd [Online] Cited 13/06/2022. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
“Richter’s spontaneous musings, his amorphous worlds, his bleeds and blends crack open the skin of our existential life on earth.’ Dr Marcus Bunyan
Exhibition dates: 20th February – 12th April, 2009
Curated/organised in conjunction with the Museum Morsbroich in Leverkusen, Germany, and edited/curated by museum director and art historian Markus Heinzelmann
Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932) 9.4.89 10.1 x 14.8cm Oil on colour photograph
There is something unsettling in Richter’s serendipitious interventions. Using his own prosaic 10 x 15cm colour photographs that have been commercially printed as the basis of the works, Richter overlays the surface of the photograph with skeins of paint that disturb the reflexivity of each medium. Dragging the photograph through the paint or using a palette knife to apply layers of colour, the surfaces of paint and photograph no longer exist as separate entities. The process produces punctum like clefts rent in the fabric of time and space. If the intervention is judged unsuccessful the result if immediately destroyed.
In 5.Juli.1994 (below) blood red fingers of paint strain upwards as they invade the solidity of a dour suburban home, echoing the invading trees branches at top right of picture. In 11.2.98 (below) green paint slashes across the mouth and forehead of a woman in a floral dress, her eyes seemingly bloodshot and pleading stare into the distance to the left of our view, the silent scream strangled in her throat by the vibrations of paint. These are the instantaneous responses of the artist to the photograph, a single mood expounded in irreversible gestures, the actions of the painter’s hand disturbing the indexical link of the photograph and it’s ability to be ‘read’ as a referent of the object it depicts. Richter’s interventions challenge the concept of momentary awareness and offer the possibility of a space between, where the image stands for something else – access to Other, even a contemplation of the sublime.
“The colour of paint applied corresponds or contrasts the tonalities of the underlying photograph but link the two through formal relationships of the layers … Often a tense relationship, the results run the gamut of the surreal to the beautiful to the disturbed. It is all the more surprising that each in its perceived completeness was in essence accomplished by chance and trial and error.”1
“Richter’s painterly gestures bounce off the [photographs] content in peculiar ways, sometimes interacting with it, sometimes overlaying it and sometimes threatening to eclipse it altogether. The final effect is to cause both photography and painting to seem like incredibly bizarre activities, disparate in texture but often complicit in aspiration.”2
I love the violence, the sometimes subversive, sometimes transcendental ‘equivalence’ of these images: where a Steiglitz cloud can stand for music, where a Minor White infrared photograph posits a new reality, Richter offers us an immediacy that destroys the self-reflexive nature of everyday life. His spontaneous musings, his amorphous worlds, his bleeds and blends crack open the skin of our existential life on earth.
Here, certainly, are ‘the clefts in words, the words as flesh’.
“By placing paint on photographs, with all their random and involuntary expressiveness, Gerhard Richter reinforces the unique aspect of each of these mediums and opens a field of tension rich in paradoxes, as old as the couple – painting / photography – which has largely defined modern art.”
Gerhard Richter is justly famed for the photorealism of his early canvases, but it is less well known that he has also painted directly onto photographic prints. These (mostly small-format) pieces were reproduced in books as early as the first Atlas, but practically all of the works themselves are housed in private collections and rarely exhibited in public. Overpainted Photographs gathers this body of work, which unites the labor of the hand with the work of mechanical reproduction to produce a kind of art as conceptually rich as Richter’s better-known paintings, neutralizing the expressive powers of each medium to reach an indifference to their potency. In an overture to Duchamp’s “degree zero” found objects, the original photographs are frequently bland in content – an empty office, a ball, a beach scene or tourist snapshot – and Richter’s painterly gestures bounce off that content in peculiar ways, sometimes interacting with it, sometimes overlaying it and sometimes threatening to eclipse it altogether. The final effect is to cause both photography and painting to seem like incredibly bizarre activities, disparate in texture but often complicit in aspiration. This monograph offers a unique opportunity to savour what had previously been a neglected but copious aspect of Richter’s work.
“The public scenes, whether on the beach or the ski slope or children’s theatre, are beset with sudden surges of colour that tend to resemble interventions of the sky or elemental forces, more than the moods of a decorative or ornamental painter annotation. Sometimes they seem like catastrophic visions. Blood-red snowflakes dance above the white fern. The photo shows skyscrapers in the urban morning sun – and the oil paint adds to the sulpherous fire that pours over the city from the sky”
Louise Paramor (Australian, b. 1964) Show Court 3 (II) 2009
Boarding a train at Flinders Street we emerge at South Yarra station to stroll down to River Street for our third opening of the night at Nellie Castan Gallery. We are greeted by the ever gracious Nellie Castan who has just returned from an overseas trip to Europe where she was soaking up the wonders of Rome amongst other places. For the latest exhibition in the gallery Louise Paramor is presenting two bodies of work: Show Court 3 and Mood Bomb (both 2009). Lets look at Show Court 3 first as this work has older origins.
Originally exhibited in 2006 at Nellie Castan under the title Jam Session the sculptures from this exhibition and many more beside (75 in all) were then installed in 2007 on show court 3 at Melbourne & Olympic Parks, hence the title of the installation. In the smaller gallery in 2009 we have six Lambda photographic prints that are records of this installation plus a video of the installation and de-installation of the work.
While interesting as documentary evidence of the installation these photographs are thrice removed from the actual sculptures – the sculptures themselves, the installation of the sculptures on court and then the photographs of the installation of the sculptures. The photographs lose something in this process – the presence or link back to the referentiality of the object itself. There is no tactile suggestiveness here, no fresh visual connections to be made with the materials, no human interaction. The intertextual nature of the objects, the jamming together of found pieces of bright plastic to make seductive anthropomorphic creatures that ‘play’ off of each other has been lost.
What has been reinforced in the photographs is a phenomena that was observed in the actual installation.
“The sculptures created a jarring visual disruption when placed in a location normally associated with play and movement. The stadium seating surrounding the tennis court incited an expectation of entertainment; a number of viewers sat looking at the sculptures, as though waiting for them to spin and jump around. But mostly, the exhibition reversed the usual role of visitors to place where one sits and watches others move; here the objects on the tennis court were static and the spectators moved around.” (2007)1
In the photographs of these objects and in the installation itself what occurs is an inversion of perception, a concept noted by the urbanist Paul Virilio.2 Here the objects perceive us instead of us perceiving the object: they stare back with an oculocentric ‘suggestiveness’ which is advertising’s raison d’être (note the eye sculpture above). In particular this is what the photographs suggest – a high gloss surface, an advertising image that grabs our attention and forces us to look but is no longer a powerful image.
In the main gallery was the most stimulating work of the whole night – experiments of abstraction in colour “inspired by the very substance of paint itself.” Made by pouring paint onto glass and then exhibiting the smooth reverse side, these paintings are not so much about the texture of the surface (as is Dale Frank’s work below) but a more ephemeral thing: the dreamscapes of the mind that they promote in the viewer, the imaginative connections that ask the viewer to make. Simpler and perhaps more refined than Frank’s work (because of the smooth surface, the lack of the physicality of the layering technique? because of the pooling of amoebic shapes produced, not the varnish that accumulates and recedes?) paint oozes, bleeds, swirls, drips upwards and blooms with a sensuality of intense love. They are dream states that allow the viewer to create their own narrative with the title of the works offering gentle guides along the way: Girl with Flowers, Lovers, Mood Bomb, Emerald God, Mama, and Animal Dreaming to name just a few. To me they also had connotations of melted plastic, almost as if the sculptures of Show Court 3 had dissolved into the glassy surface of a transparent tennis court.
These are wonderfully evocative paintings. I really enjoyed spending time with them.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ O’Neill, Jane. Louise Paramor: Show Court 3. Melbourne: Nellie Castan Gallery, 2009
2/ Virilio, Paul. The Vision Machine. (trans. Julie Rose). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994, pp. 62-63
Many thankx to Nellie Castan Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Louise Paramor (Australian, b. 1964) Show Court 3 (VI) 2009
Louise Paramor (Australian, b. 1964) Show Court 3 (detail) 2009
Louise Paramor (Australian, b. 1964) Show Court 3 (detail) 2009
Louise Paramor (Australian, b. 1964) Opening night crowd in front of Sky Pilot (left) and Mama (right) 2009 Paint on glass
Louise Paramor (Australian, b. 1964) Opening night crowd in front of Green Eyed Monster (right) and Sky Pilot (right) 2009 Paint on glass
Louise Paramor (Australian, b. 1964) Opening night crowd in front of Pineapple Express 2009 Paint on glass
Louise Paramor (Australian, b. 1964) A Dog and His Master (detail) 2009 Paint on glass
Louise Paramor (Australian, b. 1964) Lovers 2009 Paint on glass
Dale Frank (Australian, b. 1959) 2. One conversation gambit you hear these days: ‘Do you rotate?’ An interesting change of tack? No suck luck. ‘Do you rotate?’ simply fishes for information about the extent of your collection. Do you have enough paintings to hang a different one in your dining room every month? 2005
Louise Paramor (Australian, b. 1964) Mood Bomb 2009 Paint on glass
Louise Paramor (Australian, b. 1964) Slippery Slope (detail) 2009 Paint on glass
Louise Paramor (Australian, b. 1964) Green Eyed Monster (detail) 2009 Paint on glass
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