Exhibition dates: 29th April 2023 – 4th August 2024

Curator: Katrina Liberiou

Installation view of the exhibition Photography and the Performative at the Chau Chak Wing Museum at The University of Sydney showing at left, photographs by Michael Riley including at second left bottom, Moree women (1991, below)

It’s great to see another Australian museum taking up the mantle of staging challenging photography exhibitions after the ball has been so gloriously dropped by both national and state galleries in recent years.

Of course, photography and performance have been associated with each other since the birth of photography. The very act of posing for the camera is a performative act. Indeed, one of the earliest self-portraits in the history of photography, Hippolyte Bayard’s famous Le Noyé [The Drowned Man] (1840) is a performance by the artist protesting against the lack of recognition for him as one of the inventors of photography. His humorous, yet biting text read:

“The corpse of the gentleman you see here…. is that of Monsieur Bayard, inventor of the process that you have just seen…. As far as I know this ingenious and indefatigable experimenter has been occupied for about three years with perfecting his discovery…. The Government, who gave much to Monsieur Daguerre, has said it can do nothing for Monsieur Bayard, and the poor wretch has drowned himself. Oh! The precariousness of human affairs!” (Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website)

With interesting sections such as ‘Photography as witness’, ‘Performative document’ and ‘Performing spaces’ – any one of which could have provided the basis of a large exhibition in their own right – the only problem with this exhibition is that it’s too small, particularly in the limited number of works that illuminate each section. For example, having a small body of early Bill Henson Untitled crowd photographs (1980/82), a small body of Mark Ellen Mark’s photographs of Ward 81 (1979), and one Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook photograph to illustrate the section ‘Photography as witness’ is barely adequate to begin a conversation on the subject.

Even as the exhibition tries to cover too much ground with too little resources one must congratulate the museum for even attempting such an insightful examination of how photography records performative actions in fields such as visual, architectural, spatial, gestural and gendered. The problem is that it needed to be either a/ focused on one section, or b/ much larger with more resources in order to encompass the breadth of the subject being investigated.

Having said that, I wish other galleries around Australia had such get up and go, such inquisitiveness vis a vis the history of photography and its place and influence in the modern world. I’ve not heard of any recent photographic exhibitions in Australia which attempt such a complex visual and intellectual investigation into one subject, which says a lot about the state of photographic exhibitions in Australia.

I have added hopefully interesting referenced texts to provide information on some of the art works and artists in the posting.

The exhibition is held at the same time as the exhibition The Staged Photograph at Chau Chak Wing Museum at The University of Sydney (finishes 4th August 2024). A posting on this exhibition to follow soon.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

An exhibition exploring the intersection between photography and performance.

This exhibition examines recent ideas and theories that frame performance as a phenomenon that is everywhere. Performative actions may include the manifestation of ideas, whether literal, oral, spoken, or written. Such forms can be visual, architectural, spatial, gestural and gendered. This exhibition looks at how these different modes may be ‘recorded’ via the medium of photography.

Since the 1960s, photography and performance have experienced a shared history. Artists have embraced the possibilities of this time-based medium by deploying a documentary mode – capturing the fleeting, the happening, the ephemeral. The camera becomes an extension of the artist’s body, documenting their actions and interventions.

Text from the Chau Chak Wing Museum website

Installation view of the exhibition Photography and the Performative at the Chau Chak Wing Museum at The University of Sydney showing at front, Polaroids from Imants Tillers’ If I close my eyes (2021)

Installation view of the exhibition Photography and the Performative at the Chau Chak Wing Museum at The University of Sydney showing at left photographs from Bill Henson’s Untitled 1980/82 (1980/82, below); at centre, photographs from Mary Ellen Mark’s Ward 81 (1979, below); and at right, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s Village and Elsewhere: Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes, Jeff Koons’s Untitled, and Thai Villagers (2011, below)

Installation view of the exhibition Photography and the Performative at the Chau Chak Wing Museum at The University of Sydney showing at back left, photographs from Bill Henson’s Untitled 1980/82 (1980/82, below); at back centre, photographs from Mary Ellen Mark’s Ward 81 (1979, below); at back right, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s Village and Elsewhere: Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes, Jeff Koons’s Untitled, and Thai Villagers (2011, below); and at front, Polaroids from Imants Tillers’ If I close my eyes (2021)

Installation view of the exhibition Photography and the Performative at the Chau Chak Wing Museum at The University of Sydney showing at back centre, photographs from Mary Ellen Mark’s Ward 81 (1979, below); and at front, Polaroids from Imants Tillers’ If I close my eyes (2021)

Installation view of the exhibition Photography and the Performative at the Chau Chak Wing Museum at The University of Sydney showing at left, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s State Theatre, Sydney (1997, below); at second left, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Seagram Building – Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe (1997, below); at third left, Olive Cotton’s Clarence Street, Sydney (c. 1942, below); at third right, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Packed public building, project for Sydney (1969, below); and at right, Grant Mudford’s From Ocean boulevard, Long Beach (1979-1980, below)

Installation view of the exhibition Photography and the Performative at the Chau Chak Wing Museum at The University of Sydney showing at left, Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Eye to Eye (c. 1973, below); at fourth left, Guilio Paolini’s Incipit (1975, below); at fourth right, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s State Theatre, Sydney (1997, below); at third right, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Seagram Building – Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe (1997, below); at second right, Olive Cotton’s Clarence Street, Sydney (c. 1942, below); and at right, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Packed public building, project for Sydney (1969, below)

How photography captures performance

Some of photography’s best-known luminaries feature in a new Chau Chak Wing Museum exhibition examining the interaction between photography and performance.

From Olive Cotton’s Clarence Street, Sydney (c. 1942) to Imants Tillers’ If I Close My Eyes (2021), the images in Photography and the Performative capture performers, performance spaces and audiences over an 80-year period. The punk aesthetic of 1980s New York, Hollywood B-grade movies and generational discrimination faced by Aboriginal communities are among the diverse phenomena examined in this exhibition. Cindy Sherman, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Bill Henson, Barber Kruger and Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook are among the featured artists.

“Performance as a concept is everywhere,” said Chau Chak Wing curator Katrina Liberiou. “This exhibition conveys performative elements from the widest imaginable range of settings including streets, studios, villages, institutions and performance spaces.”

“Since the 1960s, photography and performance have experienced a shared history. The camera became an extension of the artist’s body, documenting their actions and interventions.”

Rather than record performances, works in Photography and the Performative look at the supporting roles of space, the human body and ideas in performance. International works include disturbing images from the hospital where Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was filmed. Mary Ellen Mark spent 36 days living at the Oregon State Hospital to document the lives of women incarcerated there, a year after she worked as the Oscar-winning film’s set photographer.

Closer to home, Christo’s Packed public building, project for Sydney (1969) imagines wrapping Sydney’s Australia Square, then a new skyscraper designed by architect Harry Seidler. This work was a precursor to the artists’ epic Wrapped Coast, created with support from Harry and Penelope Seidler. Hiroshi Sugimoto’s long exposures of the State Theatre and Seagram Building, also in Sydney, play homage to mid-twentieth century modernism. Imants Tillers If I close my eyes (2021, on display until August 2023) is a grid of Polaroid photographs interspersing portraits of Tillers’ friends, family and fellow artists with images of Sydney’s harbour. The latter depict the same view, from Tillers’ home in Mosman, captured over a three-year period.

The photographs in Photography and the Performative range from vintage black and white prints to alternative processes (including solarisation and photograms) to early colour photography and digital prints. All featured works have been selected from the University of Sydney Art Collection.

Photography and the Perfomative is one of two photographic exhibitions currently on show at the Chau Chak Wing Museum. The second, The Staged Photograph, presents a range of staged images taken in Australia between the mid-19th and early 20th centuries.

Anonymous. “From Henson to Christo,” on The University of Sydney website 24 April 2023 [Online] 12/06/2024

Olive Cotton (Australian, 1911-2003)
Clarence Street, Sydney
c. 1942
Gelatin silver print
Chau Chak Wing Museum

Christo Vladimirov Javacheff (American born Bulgaria, 1935-2020) and Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon (American born Bulgaria, 1935-2009)
Packed public building, project for Sydney
1969
Synthetic polymer paint, cotton fabric, cotton thread, pencil, coloured pencil, pressure-sensitive tape on photographs, synthetic polymer weave and staples on cardboard
72.0 x 76.9cm
Donated by Chandler Coventry, 1972
J W Power collection, Chau Chak Wing Museum

Optronic Kinetics (active c. 1970-72)
Cubed Tree
1971
Black and white photograph
61 x 42cm
Donated by the artist 1973
J W Power collection, Chau Chak Wing Museum

Optronic Kinetics (active c. 1970-72)
Feathered Office
c. 1973
Black and white photograph
61 x 42cm
Donated by the artist 1973
J W Power collection, Chau Chak Wing Museum

Optronic Kinetics

Optronic Kinetics was an art collective that emerged from the University of Sydney’s infamous Tin Sheds Art Workshop in the early 1970s. At this time, the Tin Sheds was a hotbed for radical thought, student activism and a celebrated ‘alternate art space’, where ideas about conceptual and post-object art were explored and put into practice. From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, the Tin Sheds gave rise to some of Australia’s most progressive and political creative practitioners.

Renowned sculptor and artist Bert Flugelman (1923-2013) was the Tin Sheds’ coordinator from 1968 to 1973, and under his guidance encouraged students from across the University’s disciplines to explore the Art Workshop’s offerings. Combined with the enthusiasm of artist, critic and theorist Donald Brook (1927-2018), a University of Sydney academic at the time, a small cohort of medical and engineering students began to investigate and experiment with electronics and movement. Initially the students had wanted to create ‘very conservative paintings’, so in response Flugelman gave them an introduction to sculpture and convinced them to push the boundaries of their own studies and skills. Flugelman and Brook believed that you did not need to master a creative discipline in order to understand it, but you had to be familiar with its ideas and processes. It was this guiding principle that brought Optronic Kinetics into being.

Spurred by the desire to amalgamate science and technology with art, the collective’s founding members included Fine Arts student Julie Ewington, now a recognised writer and curator, and electrical engineering students David Smith and Jim McDonnell. Together with Flugelman they created conceptually ambitious and humorous works such as Cubed tree, Feathered office and Flashing boob. Other works such as Electronic colour organ and Reflector employed cutting edge technological innovations and theories to bridge the perceived divide between art and science.

Madeline Reece. “Optronic Kinetics,” on the Take 5 Flinders University Museum of Art website 2020 [Online] Cited 21/06/2024 © Flinders University Museum of Art

Cecile Abish (American, b. 1930)
Mail-Art: Field Coil (detail)
c. 1973
Black and white photographs (template and typed documentation not exhibited)
25.5 x 20.4cm
Donated by the artist 1973
J W Power collection, Chau Chak Wing Museum

Cecile Abish (born 1930) is an American artist known primarily for her works in sculpture and photography.

“Field Coil was specifically made for the lower level space at 112, with its unobstructed linear run and uncluttered cement floor. The work consisted of 104 separate coiled kraft paper units that were placed one next to the other. Each section before being rolled measures 36 × 46″, the slits were 36″ long, cut at 1″ intervals and parallel to the 46″ length. The 104 separate units lost their intrinsic apartness as the coils were placed one next to the other, leaving only the uppermost part of each unit exposed to form an extended field. The dimensions of the entire work were 7″ high x 3′ wide x 49′ long.”

Excerpted from Brentano, R., & Savitt, M. (1981). 112 Workshop, 112 Greene Street: History, artists & artworks. New York: New York University Press cited on the White Columns website Nd [Online] Cited 21/06/2024

Petr Stembera (Czech, b. 1945)
Mail-Art: (rolling a sleeve; 8 parts) (detail)
c. 1973
Black and white photographs
24.0 x 17.8 cm
Donated by the artist 1973
J W Power collection, Chau Chak Wing Museum

His [Stembera’s] Daily Activities, a series of performances for a camera from the early 1970s, dealing with routine actions, such as rolling up sleeves, typewriting, tying shoelaces, or fastening buttons are mainly found in collections outside Czechoslovakia and, thus, virtually absent from Czech collections, as the artist stopped displaying his photographic works after he turned to live performance in 1974. …

[Petr] Rezek wrote about photographic documentation as a basis for communication. Speaking about the Czech context and leaving aside the different financial and technical possibilities, Štembera’s use of photographic documentation was not especially innovative. Photography served for many as an easily reproducible medium, as the lingua franca of performance art. Its importance was rooted in its utility rather than its aesthetics. However, the specific form of the use of this almost universally understood language depended on many factors. If we look more closely at its uses and direct our focus towards the various dialects, idiolects, and sociolects it encompasses, we can also learn more about the nature of the art it transmitted.

The fact that the Daily Activities series was crucial for Štembera at the time is confirmed, for example, by a reproduction of a photograph showing him buttoning his shirt, which was used on the poster for his solo exhibition in Antwerp organized by D’Hondt in 1974. Such low-quality reproductions, which appeared in non-profit publications in the West as well as in unofficial and semi-official publications in the East were one of the typical outputs of these exchanges. In addition to gelatin silver prints, photomechanical reproductions played a crucial role in facilitating international transfers. Besides the posters and invitation cards, the reproductions in exhibition catalogues and in foreign magazines were seminal in distributing the original art piece to a wide audience. Through the catalogs, some of the exhibited works reached a secondary audience but also returned to the archives of the authors and to libraries, where they continue to serve as a source of information to this day.

Hanna Buddeus. “Photography: The Lingua Franca of Performance Art?” on the Art Margins website 14th March 2024 [Online] Cited 21/06/2024

Krzysztof Wodiczko (Polish, b. 1943)
Eye to Eye
c. 1973
Gelatin silver photograph
47.6 x 59cm
Donated by the artist 1973
J W Power collection, Chau Chak Wing Museum

Giulio Paolini (Italian, b. 1940)
Incipit
1975
Torn photograph, canvas, wood, in Perspex frame
91.0 x 61.5cm
Purchased with funds from the J W Power Bequest 1976
J W Power collection

Mary Ellen Mark (American, 1940-2015)
Untitled
1976-1978
From the series Ward 81, Oregon State Hospital, Salem, Oregon
Silver gelatin photograph
20.3 x 30.5cm
Purchased with funds from the JW Power Bequest 1978
JW Power Collection, Chau Chak Wing Museum

In 1975, photographer Mary Ellen Mark was assigned by The Pennsylvania Gazette to produce a story on the making of Milos Forman’s film of Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, shot on location at the Oregon State Hospital, a mental institution. While on set, Mark met the women of Ward 81, the only locked hospital security ward for women in the state: The inmates were considered dangerous to themselves or to others. In February of 1976, just before the ward closed (it ceased to exist in November of 1977, when it became the female section of a coeducational treatment ward), Mark and Karen Folger Jacobs, a writer and social scientist, were given permission to make a more extended stay, living on the ward in order to photograph and interview the women. They spent 36 days on Ward 81, photographing and documenting. Jacobs recalls their slow, inevitable assimilation: “We felt the degeneration of our own bodies and the erosion of our self-confidence. We were horrified at the thought of what we might become after a year or two of confinement and therapy on Ward 81.”

Text from the Google Books website

Mary Ellen Mark (American, 1940-2015)
Untitled
1976-1978
From the series Ward 81, Oregon State Hospital, Salem, Oregon
Silver gelatin photograph
20.3 x 30.5cm
Purchased with funds from the JW Power Bequest 1978
JW Power Collection, Chau Chak Wing Museum

Grant Mudford (Australian, b. 1944)
From Ocean boulevard, Long Beach
1979-1980
Black and white photograph on paper
60.3 x 50.3cm
Purchased with funds from the J W Power Bequest 1980
J W Power collection, Chau Chak Wing Museum

Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955)
Untitled 1980/82
1980-1982
Gelatin silver photograph
43.1 x 39cm
Donated by University of Sydney Union 2019
University Art Collection, Chau Chak Wing Museum

“A selection of photographs from the Crowd Series (1980-1982) by Bill Henson. Snapped in secret these black and white journalistic surveillance photographs (‘taken’ in an around Flinders Street railway station in Melbourne) have a brooding intensity and melancholic beauty. Henson uses a flattened perspective that is opposed to the principles of linear perspective in these photographs. Known as The Art of Describing6 and much used in Dutch still life painting of the 17th century to give equal weight to objects within the image plane, here Henson uses the technique to emphasise the mass and jostle of the crowd with their “waiting, solemn and compliant” people.

“When exhibiting the full series, Henson arranges the works into small groupings that create an overall effect of aberrant movement and fragmentation. From within these bustling clusters of images, individual faces emerge like spectres of humanity that will once again dissolve into the crowd … all apparently adrift in the flow of urban life. The people in these images have an anonymity that allows them to represent universal human experiences of alienation, mortality and fatigue.”7

Marcus Bunyan. “Un/aware and in re/pose: the self, the subject and the city,” review of the exhibition ‘In camera and in public’ at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne on the Art Blart website October 16, 2011 [Online] Cited 12/06/2024

6/ See Alpers, Svetlana. The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. University Of Chicago Press, 1984

7/ Anon. BILL HENSON: early work from the MGA collection. Education Resource. A Monash Gallery of Art Travelling Exhibition [Online] Cited 14/10/2011. No longer available online

Todd Watts (American, b. 1949)
On the 21st century
1982
Silver gelatin photograph
49.0 x 59.2cm
Purchased with funds from the JW Power Bequest 1986
JW Power Collection, Chau Chak Wing Museum

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
State Theatre, Sydney
1997
Silver gelatin photograph
42.3 x 54.6cm
Purchased with funds from the Dr M J Morrissey Bequest Fund in memory of Professor A L Sadler 2017
University Art Collection, Chau Chak Wing Museum

I loved Sugimoto’s time lapse movie screens, where the exact length of a movie was captured by the open lens of the camera, the substance of time and space evidenced by a seemingly empty screen. There was something wonderfully poetic and transformational about that gesture, about the notion of compressing the narrative, reality and action of a movie into a single frame of light: “the ‘annihilation of time and space’ as a particular moment in a dynamic cycle of rupture and recuperation enables a deliberate focus on the process of transition.”1 The process of transition in the flow of space and time.

Marcus Bunyan on the exhibition “Hiroshi Sugimoto: Past Tense” at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, Los Angeles on the Art Blart website June 3, 2014 [Online] Cited 21/06/2024

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Seagram Building – Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe
1997
Silver gelatin photograph
University Art Collection, Chau Chak Wing Museum

Michael Riley (Australian / Wiradjuri/Kamilaroi, 1960-2004)
Moree women
1991
Gelatin silver print
40.0 x 56.5cm
Donated by University of Sydney Union, 2019
University Art Collection, Chau Chak Wing Museum

Anne Ferran (Australian, b. 1949)
Untitled (Bodice)
1998
Gelatin silver photogram
82.0 x 93.5cm
Donated by University of Sydney Union 2019
University Art Collection, Chau Chak Wing Museum

In 1998 Australian artist Anne Ferran was offered an artist-in-resident’s position at an historic homestead not far from Sydney that had been occupied by successive generations of the same family since 1813. Ferran spent six months systematically making contact prints using the dresses, bodices, skirts, petticoats, and collars still contained in the house. Hovering in a surrounding darkness, softly radiating an inner light, the ghostly traces of these translucent garments now act as residual filaments for a century of absorbed sunshine. Many of them have been patched over the years and their signs of wear and repair are made clear. This allows us to witness a history of the use of each piece of clothing, seeing inside them to those small and skilful acts of home economy – the labour of women – usually kept hidden from a public gaze.

Wall text from the exhibition “Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph” at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery / Len Lye Centre, New Plymouth, New Zealand on the Art Blart website July 31, 2016 [Online] Cited 21/06/2024

Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954)
Untitled #131
1983
C-type photograph
139.9 x 100cm
University Art Collection, Chau Chak Wing Museum
Purchased with funds from the J W Power Bequest 1984
JW Power Collection, Chau Chak Wing Museum

The Twilight Girls (Helen Hyatt-Johnston and Jane Polkinghorne) (active 1997 – present)
The Power and the Glory i (detail)
2004
Colour photographic print
75.9 x 50.5cm
Donated by University of Sydney Union 2019
University Art Collection, Chau Chak Wing Museum

Hyatt-Johnston and Polkinghorne’s work is a hilarious celebration of the endless potential to personalise Hollywood fantasy so as to enjoy the vicarious glamour and tack without foreclosing either individual expression or the subversion of mainstream codes. The artists confuse genres and disciplines, feminist aspirations and sacred cows, in a mad comic brew that speaks more of the pleasure of play and friendship than of the construction of sexed identities. And this is the point, to evade the strictures of accepted feminist strategies by putting inclusive play back on the map.

Jacqueline Millner. “Twilight Girls: Helen Hyatt-Johnston and Jane Polkinghorne,” on the Contemporary Art and Feminism website October 22, 2013 [Online] Cited 21/06/2024 © Jacqueline Millner, 2002

Polit-Sheer-Form Office (PSFO) (active 2005-2009)
Mr Zhang
2008
C-type print
170.4 x 135.5cm
Donated by Gene and Brian Sherman through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2021
University Art Collection, Chau Chak Wing Museum

Polit-Sheer-Form-Office (PSFO) is a China-based art group established in 2005 by artists Hong Hao, Xiao Yu, Song Dong, Liu Jianhua and curator / critic Leng Lin. Born in the mid-1960s, as children they all experienced the late Cultural Revolution, a period of Communist ideological orthodoxy that powerfully affected the preceding generation.

Drawing on this personal history, PSFO’s artistic practice strives to create a collective way of life while removing the political content historically associated with it. In its activities and artworks, PSFO attempts to create a framework – albeit tongue-in-cheek – for collective life in today’s consumer-oriented China. Within this framework, individuals may find the ties that bind them to others. At the same time, “sheer form” without content allows room for the individual to grow. By eating, drinking and playing together, the PSFO members revive a collective way of life associated with the Communist era of their youth, reawakening a long-lost state of being, by which they contend with contemporary China’s ideology of consumerism. But this is not nostalgia for one of the most controversial periods of Chinese history. The very emptiness of the political rhetoric of their childhood is what inspires the group’s name. Instead of political content, we have sheer, unadulterated political form – hence “Polit-Sheer-Form-Office.” The fact that the group calls itself an “Office” is another ironic reference to officialdom. …

Mr. Zheng is a digital amalgam of the faces of the five PSFO members in the form of a generic identification photo. This artwork straightforwardly embodies the union of the group’s five members, each sacrificing his individuality to become this new single entity. As a nod to the so-called “leader portraits” of Chairman Mao that were hung over buildings in China during the Socialist era… This virtual leader combines the characteristics of all five members, and is therefore not a portrait of authoritarianism, but of collectivism.

In American culture, individualism is a core value, yet a new understanding of the need for the collective has emerged. Similarly, while collectivism has been a core Chinese value, there has been increasing interest in individual pursuits. Is doing a good deed human nature’s need or a need for ideology? What is the real content and meaning of collectivism?

Ruijin Shen, curator, Guangdong Times Museum. “Polit-Sheer-Form-Office (PSFO) Polit-Sheer-Form!,” on the Queens Museum website 2014 [Online] Cited 07/07/2024

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook (Thailand, b. 1957)
The Two Planets: Van Gogh’s The Midday Sleep 1889/90, and the Thai Villagers
2008
Digital print
75.7 x 75.7cm
Purchased with funds from the Dr M J Morrissey Bequest Fund in memory of Professor A L Sadler 2014
University Art Collection, Chau Chak Wing Museum

Araya explores the relational potential of the tableau most fully in two video installation series: The Two Planets (2008) and Village and Elsewhere (2011), both of which are composed of short audiovisual vignettes that are usually exhibited as multichannel video and photographic installations. The individual works in each series are almost identical in terms of visual composition. Araya re-situates one or two large-scale, ostentatiously gold-framed reproductions of famous western paintings in outdoor or neighborhood spaces in the rural outskirts of the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai. The video camera frames these reproductions and their visually associative physical surroundings in a straight-on shot. On-screen, the framed reproductions are frontally displayed in the background. In the foreground, small groups of people are visible from the back, and their murmurings, chatter, gossip, speculations, and digressions as they look at the reproductions audible. …

In each of these audiovisual vignettes, the duration of the scene displayed approximates the duration of spectatorship by a figural group whose faces we do not see. The visualization of the group signifies “Thai Villagers,” or “Thai Farmers,” transfiguring people who, in everyday life, live in the same suburb as the artist. In each tableau, the group is sitting on the ground, their backs to us, facing the framed reproduction. The shortest of these videos are nearly ten minutes, and the longer ones about twenty-five. Someone comments on a detail that strikes them about the picture in the frame. Another person observes something about this face or that body, this plant, that tool, this hat, or that dish. The group amuses itself, speculating wildly on the backstory in the displayed scene. Sometimes they prod one another to dart up to the framed picture and point out a small detail – or to caress the image of a face, the skin, a body part. With the van Gogh reproduction, the group contemplates the placement of the sickle, the number of wheels on the wooden cart, the total number of oxen legs visible, and the casting of the sunlight on the haystack, all in order to decipher winning lottery numbers. Their conversation flows easily, often straying from the framed reproduction to random neighborhood gossip. Each video is unscripted and staged as a one-take piece using a static shot. The editing is minimal, involving discreet jump cuts to crop out of parts of the conversation without changing the visual composition, giving the impression that the vignettes are displaying spectatorial experiences in real time.

May Adadol Ingawanij. “Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s Relational Tableaux,” on the MoMA Post website August 9, 2023 [Online] Cited 21/06/2024

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook (Thailand, b. 1957)
Village and Elsewhere: Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading, Holofernes Jeff Koons’s Untitled, and Thai Villagers
2008
Purchased with funds from the Dr M J Morrissey Bequest Fund in memory of Professor A L Sadler 2014
University Art Collection, Chau Chak Wing Museum

The tableau display of the gold-framed reproductions references and aggrandizes museum conventions of hanging and presenting artworks on walls, an exhibition apparatus that lays claim to addressing everyone. Yet the spectators in The Two Planets and Village and Elsewhere exceed the boundary of that universalizing assertion with their actualization of what, following Elaine Castillo, we might call the spectatorship of the unintended.14 At the same time, their encounters with the reproductions take place in spaces that do not cohere with the museological value of suspending the time and space of daily life. The “Thai Villagers” and “Thai Farmers” in Araya’s tableaux are shown engaging with framed reproductions of art in neighborhood spaces – the local field, temple, and bamboo forest. The spectatorship of the unintended that they enact is a kind of unruly hosting, an extending of hospitality to the foreign, an unpredictable engagement with mobile artifacts from distant lands, cultures, and times.

May Adadol Ingawanij. “Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s Relational Tableaux,” on the MoMA Post website August 9, 2023 [Online] Cited 21/06/2024

Chau Chak Wing Museum – The University of Sydney
Level 1, University Place, Camperdown, NSW 2006
Phone: 02 9351 2812

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