Review: ‘Jenny Holzer’ at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 17th December, 2009 – 28th February, 2010

Jenny Holzer (American, b. 1950) 'Projections' various dates from the exhibition 'Jenny Holzer' at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne, December 2009 - February 2010

Jenny Holzer (American, b. 1950)
Projections
Various dates
With poetry by Wislawa Szymborska

“I draw from everything – from the National Security Archives collection to old material from the FBI’s website to postings by the ACLU. I concentrate on the content. It tends to be very rough material about what’s happened to soldiers in the field, about the good and bad choices they’ve been forced to make, and what has happened to detainees and civilians. I also go to material that’s almost completely gone, either whited out or blacked out, because that represents the issue. You don’t have to spill words when the page is completely black.”

Jenny Holzer

This is a patchy but ultimately redemptive exhibition by Jenny Holzer at the Australia Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne. The main exhibition space at ACCA is filled with one installation created specifically for the space titled For ACCA (2009) that in essence is the same as the installation for The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MOCA)(see photographs above).

The work is projected by a Cameleon Teleprojecteur into the large space and features poems by Wislawa Szymborska with titles such as “The End and the Beginning”, “The Joy of Writing”, “Children of Our Age” and “The Terrorist, He’s Watching” scrolling a la Star Wars opening credits from the bottom upwards into the darkened space. The words that flow into the mis en scene are distorted at the edges like a fish eye lens distorts reality. EVERYTHING IS IN CAPITAL LETTERS TO EMPHASISE THE IMPORTANCE OF THE WORDS, JUST IN CASE WE MISSED THE POINT. It feels like you have been metaphorically hit over the head with the artist’s concern and frankly, I soon lost interest in the mobilisation of meaning:

“I don’t require changes
from the surf,
now diligent, now sluggish,
obeying not me.”

“The Bomb in the bar
will explode at thirteen twenty
Now it’s just thirteen sixteen
There’s still time
for some to go in,
and some to come out.”

“There’s one thing
I won’t agree to:
My own return.
The privilege of presence –
I give it up.”

“I survived you by enough,
and only by enough,
to contemplate from afar – “

“After Every War
Someone has to tidy up.
Things won’t pick
themselves up, after all.”

More interesting are the 4 bean bags placed on the floor that are covered in matt grey heat sensitive fabric. As you sit in the bags your indentation heats up the fabric. Upon standing the mark of your body, your body temperature, forms silver Yves Klein-like paintings of glowing phosphorescence. Looking back into the projector from your recumbent position you get an eerie view of the words coming towards you on the floor and going away on the ceiling, your body illuminated in words. What spoils the installation for me is the didactic nature of the protestations, their proselytising soon wearing thin on a body more attuned to the pithy, insightful phrases of Barbara Kruger.

The electronic sculpture Torso (see image below) “emphatically addresses the private body enmeshed and lost in information and government operations.” (catalogue text). Featuring 10 doubled LED projectors programmed with case files of American soldiers accused of war crimes in the Middle East, abuse questions of detainees, ‘For Official Use Only’ texts and personal messages of love the sculpture is at first seen from a distance, framed by two rectangular doorways of the previous galleries. The mainly blue background and pink lettered light emanating from the sculpture is beautiful and quite magical and as one enters the empty space of the gallery the light focuses the eyes on the moving words, their repetition, their flashing, their running at different speeds and colours, all with the same message – words that seem to appear out of the wall and disappear back into it. The effect soon wears thin however; when you delve into the guts of the torso fascination begins to wane and you are left with repetition for repetition’s sake and with ‘pretty’ words that are just that: patterns of perniciousness displayed for our pleasure.

The reason that you must visit this exhibition is the last body of work. Working with declassified documents that relate to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan Holzer’s Redaction paintings address the elemental force that is man’s (in)humanity to man (in the study of literature, redaction is a form of editing in which multiple source texts are combined (redacted) and subjected to minor alteration to make them into a single work).1 Silkscreen printed as oil on canvas these paintings are some of the most poignant, moving, terrifying, enraging pieces of art that I have seen in a long time. I was moved to tears. They are tough works and they deserve to be.

Autopsy reports, a “Wish List” for alternative interrogation techniques (Wish List/Gloves Off 2007), a handwritten letter from an Iraq student detailing his experience of torture (By the Name of God 2006) and palm prints – (some totally illegible as the censor eradicates human identity, erases with a double violence – to the person themselves, to the validation that they existed) – document a government’s malfeasance.

What a word malfeasance!
Etymology: mal- + obsolete feasance doing, execution …

In these paintings the artist pulls back and lets the work speak for itself – and it is all the more powerful because of this. Using the physical process of the hand in the making of these images implicates every one of us in the complicities of the faceless bureaucrats and military personnel that hide behind blacked out names. The most moving of the hand prints are the partial prints taken after death where some ‘body’ has pressed down the deceased detainees hand to make an impression, mapping an identity already deleted (Faint Hand 2007 – unfortunately I don’t have any images of these paintings to show you). One is even presented as it was taken, upside down (Right Hand Down 2007). These are indescribable images, they tear you up inside.

I left the exhibition feeling shell-shocked after experiencing intimacy with an evil that leaves few traces. In the consciences of the perpetrators? In the hearts of the living! Oh, how I wish to see the day when the human race will truly evolve beyond. We live in hope and the work of Jenny Holzer reminds us to be vigilant, to speak out, to have courage in the face of the unconscionable.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

“Date of birth; 1947
Date/time of Death: 26 Nov 2003
Circumstances of Death: This Iraq _____ died in U.S. custody”

“We are American soldiers, heirs to a long tradition of staying on the high ground. We need to stay there.”

Jenny Holzer (American, b. 1950) 'Torso' 2007 from the exhibition 'Jenny Holzer' at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne, December 2009 - February 2010

Jenny Holzer (American, b. 1950)
Torso
2007
LED projectors

Holzer became well-known in the 1980s for her text-based works and public art. Her first series, Truisms (1977-1979), contains concise, aphoristic statements that reveal and question truths, beliefs, and ideologies. While Truisms first appeared on posters placed in the urban environment, Holzer’s texts later took a number of forms including light projections on high-profile public buildings, LED (light emitting diode) signs, stickers placed on surfaces such as parking metres and telephone booths, and public furniture such as marble and granite benches. While Holzer still at times relies on the thirteen texts she wrote from 1977-2001, her recent practice has turned to incorporating the writings of others, including works by internationally celebrated poets and declassified government documents. Like her own texts, the borrowed writings and documents address personal and public calamities in a range of voices and tones that approximates the complexity of daily life.

Though Holzer has used words and ideas in public spaces for the past thirty years, she has also created large-scale projects for prominent institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum (New York), the Guggenheim Museum (Bilbao), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), and the Centre Pompidou (Paris).

For ACCA’s main exhibition hall, Holzer will project poetry in the form of light onto the floors, ceilings, and walls, making the language something felt as well as read. In addition, she will display works from a series that began in 2005 where she translates declassified government documents into paintings. The documents are left exactly as they were found when rendered through silkscreen onto oil-painted grounds. The marks of a censor are seen in the text blocked out by a black scribble or box. These works come, as Holzer has said, from her “frantic worrying about the war and attendant changes in American society.” The projections and paintings will be supplemented by an LED installation titled Torso. In this work, Holzer stacks ten semi-circular signs that display in red, blue, white, and purple light the statements, investigation reports, and emails from case files of soldiers accused of various crimes in the Middle East. Providing these voices, part damning, contradictory, sympathetic, anecdotal, and evidentiary, Holzer layers accounts of abuse and blame.

“Jenny Holzer’s words ask us to consider our thoughts and actions in the world. This essentially humanist and philosophical project encourages us to seek self enlightenment through examining our prejudices, false beliefs, fall back positions, and habits, to reach a new level of tolerance, understanding and self awareness”

Juliana Engberg, ACCA’s Artistic Director

Text from the ACCA website [Online] Cited 01/06/2010. No longer available online

Jenny Holzer (American, b. 1950)
Left Hand (Palm Rolled)
2007
Oil on linen
80 x 62 in. (203.2 x 157.5cm)
Text: U.S. government document

What truly adds substance to the style are the Redaction Paintings. These blown-up pieces of censored materials, silk-screened on to stretched canvas, afford an unnerving glimpse at how we fight wars. Authored by countless bureaucratic functionaries, they feel both predictable and eye-opening.

All of the embedded journalists in the world couldn’t produce as clear a picture as the government did in documenting its own malfeasance. Many of these documents feature the blurred type of countless reproductions, a sign that time is burying these paperwork tragedies until they become illegible and unactionable.

Holzer didn’t have to doctor these documents for heightened effect; the black bars that enshroud the names of victims and their tormentors speak for themselves. One autopsy report describes the fatal suffocation of a prisoner of war forced to maintain a stress position. In some cases nearly whole documents are ominously blacked out, like a national Rorschach test.2

Jenny Holzer (American, b. 1950) 'DODDOACID 008769' 2007 from the exhibition 'Jenny Holzer' at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne, December 2009 - February 2010

Jenny Holzer (American, b. 1950)
DODDOACID 008769
2007
Oil on linen

Jenny Holzer (American, b. 1950)
Right Hand (Palm Rolled)
2007
Oil on linen
80 x 62 in. (203.2 x 157.5cm)
Text: U.S. government document

Jenny Holzer (American, b. 1950)
Wish List/Gloves Off
2006
Oil on linen

“WISH LIST” document:

A captain in the US Army human intelligence division requested a “wish list” from subordinate interrogation teams for, “innovative interrogation techniques that will prove more successful than current methods.” One person interpreted this request to mean, “the captain wanted suggestions legal, illegal and somewhere in between.” The WISH LIST document is a summary of alternative interrogation techniques that the 4th Infantry Division, ICE, devised, including phone book strikes, low voltage electrocution and muscle fatigue inducement.

The document can no longer be found on the American Civil Liberties Union website. The “WISH LIST” is on p. 59.”3

Jenny Holzer (American, b. 1950)
Right Hand DOD-044403
2007
Oil on linen

Footnotes

1/ Definition of redaction on Wikipedia website [Online] Cited 6 February 2010

2/ Arizona, Daniel. “Jenny Holzer and the Influence of Anxiety,” on More Intelligent Life.com website [Online] Cited January 2010. No longer available online

3/ Anon. “Jenny Holzer Projections.” on the MASS MOCA website [Online] Cited 17 January 2010. No longer available online

Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA)
111 Sturt Street
Southbank
Victoria 3006
Australia

Opening hours:
Tuesday to Friday 10am – 5pm
Weekends and Public Holidays 11am – 5pm
Closed Monday
Open all public holidays except Christmas Day and Good Friday

Australian Centre for Contemporary Art website

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Photographs: Marcus Bunyan. ‘There But For The Grace of You Go I’ 2009

December 2009

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

There But For The Grace of You Go I (2009) series

Marcus Bunyan website

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Review: ‘Scenes’ by David Noonan at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 15th August – 27th September, 2009

Commissioning Curator: Juliana Engberg
Coordinating Curator: Charlotte Day

Installation view of Scenes by David Noonan at ACCA
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Thoughts

Limited colour palette of ochres, whites, browns and blacks.

Rough texture of floor covered in Jute under the feet.

Layered, collaged print media figures roughly printed on canvas – elements of abstraction, elements of figuration.

The ‘paintings’ are magnificent; stripped and striped collages. Faces missing, dark eyes. There is something almost Rembrandt-esque about the constructed images, their layering, like Rembrandt’s Night Watch (1642) – but then the performance element kicks in – the makeup, the lipstick, the tragic / comedic faces.

Mannequin, doll-like cut-out figures, flat but with some volume inhabiting the tableaux vivant.

Twelve standing figures in different attitudes – a feeling of dancing figures frozen on stage, very Japanese Noh theater. Spatially the grouping and use of space within the gallery is excellent – like frozen mime.

The figures move in waves, rising and falling both in the standing figures and within the images on the wall.

Looking into the gallery is like looking through a picture window onto a stage set (see above image).

“The fracturing of identity, the distortion of the binaries of light and dark, absence/presence in spatio-temporal environments.

The performance as ritual challenging a regularized and constrained repetition of norms.” (Judith Butler).

Excellent, thought provoking exhibition.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Photograph from 'Scenes' by David Noonan (installation view)

Installation views of Scenes by David Noonan at ACCA
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Noonan often works with found photographic imagery taken from performance manuals, textile patterns and archive photographs to make densely layered montages. These works at once suggest specific moments in time and invoke disorientating a-temporal spaces in which myriad possible narratives emerge. The large-scale canvases framing this exhibition depict scenes of role-playing, gesturing characters, and masked figures set within stage-like spaces. Printed on coarsely woven jute, collaged fabric elements applied to the surface of the canvases further signal the cutting and splicing of images.

Noonan’s new suite of figurative sculptures, comprise life size wooden silhouettes faced with printed images of characters performing choreographed movements. While the figurative image suggests a body in space, the works’ two dimensional cut-out supports insist on an overriding flatness which lends them an architectural quality – as stand-ins for actual performers and as a means by which to physically navigate the exhibition space.

Press release from the Chisenhale Gallery website [Online] Cited 20/09/2009. No longer available online

For the Helen Macpherson Smith Commission, he will bring the characters depicted in his signature collage works off the wall and onto an imagined ‘stage’. Several life-size, wooden cut-out figures will inhabit the ACCA exhibition gallery, frozen in choreographed movements.

Noonan’s dancing figures will be framed by several large-scale canvas works, printed photographic and film imagery gleaned from performance manuals, textile patterns and interior books. Printed on coarse woven jute, he cuts, slices and montages images together constructing compositions that hover between two and three dimensionality, positive and negative space, past and present, stasis and action.

“‘Scenes’ recalls the experimental workshops and youth-focused exuberance of a more optimistic era, coinciding with the artists own childhood in the 1970s” says curator Charlotte Day. “With these new works, Noonan re-introduces the idea of ritual, of creating a temporal space beyond reason that is filled with both danger and hope.”

David Noonan (Australian, b. 1969) is the fifth recipient of the Helen Macpherson Smith Commission, one of the most significant and generous commissions in Australia. The partnership between ACCA and the Helen Macpherson Smith Trust offers Victorian artists the opportunity to create an ambitious new work of art, accompanied by an exhibition in ACCA’s exhibition hall.

Press release from the ACCA website [Online] Cited 20/09/2009. No longer available online

David Noonan returned to Melbourne with this significant project which extended his abiding interest in time and space. Using ACCA’s large room as a field of encounter, he created an ensemble of works in 2 and 3 dimensions that make purposeful use of the audience’s own navigation through the gallery. Visitors walking between David’s free-standing figures performed like time travellers in a landscape that had been paused. His enigmatic wall based works appeared to trap momentary scenes in a layered time warp.

This major commission allowed for an ambitious project by a Victorian artist who had reached a significant platform in their own practice. Elements of the commission were gifted to a Victorian regional gallery. In this case the recipient was Bendigo Art Gallery.

Text from the ACCA website [Online] Cited 24/04/2019

Photograph from 'Scenes' by David Noonan at ACCA (installation view)

Installation views of Scenes by David Noonan at ACCA
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Australia Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA)
111 Sturt Street, Southbank, Victoria 3006, Australia
Phone: 03 9697 9999

Opening Hours:
Tuesday to Friday 10am – 5pm
Weekends & Public Holidays 11am – 5pm
Open all public holidays except Christmas Day and Good Friday

ACCA website

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Review: ‘Ivy’ photographs by Jane Burton at Karen Woodbury Gallery, Richmond, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 2nd September – 26th September, 2009

Jane Burton (Australian, b. 1966) 'Ivy #1' 2009 from the exhibition 'Ivy' photographs by Jane Burton at Karen Woodbury Gallery, Richmond, Melbourne, Sept, 2009

Jane Burton (Australian, b. 1966)
Ivy #1
2009
Pigment print
89 x 75cm

This is another outstanding body of photographic work on display in Melbourne. Featuring 10 large and 2 small sepia toned, vignetted pigment prints Burton’s work creates dark enchanted worlds of faceless female figures placed in the built environment that balance (meta)physical light and shade creating ambiguous narratives of innocence tinged with a darker edge.

The eponymous photograph Ivy #1 (above) is the seminal image of the series: a dark brooding house, hunched down positioned low in the photographic space, covered in ivy with black windows and dark eves has an ominous almost impenetrable presence and sets the tone for the rest of the work.

There are wonderful references to the history of photography if one cares to look (not simply generic references to Victorian daguerreotypes, postcards and family photographs). Ivy #2 (below) is a powerful photograph where the female figure is blindfolded, unable to see the encroaching tumescence of vegetation that surrounds and is about to engulf her. The placement of the hands is exquisite – unsure, reaching out, doubting her surroundings – with the 3-bladed fan hovering behind ready to devour the unwary. This photograph has resonances of the magical photographs of the garden by the Czech photographer Josef Sudek.

Ivy #3 (below) has echoes of the work of the American photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard and his placement of masked people within built environments. In Burton’s photograph the broken umbrella becomes like insect wings, the faceless whiteness of the three-legged and three-armed creature cocooned among the overhanging predatory ivy, the luminescent sky offering the possibility of redemption. Other photographs such as Ivy #6 (below) and Ivy #7 with their wonderful colours, depth of field, heavy shadows and elegiac romantic feel have references to Eugene Atget and his photographs of the parks of Versailles (see photograph below).

Still further references to the history of photography can be found in the photographs Ivy #9 and Ivy #10 (below). In Ivy #9 the intersection of the two female bodies through double exposure forms a slippage in (photographic) reality and the disappearance of original identity in the layering of the photographs and into the empty non-reflection of the mirror. This non-reflection is confirmed in Ivy #10 where the faceless nude woman holds a mirror with no reflection. These photographs remind me of the photographs of New Orleans prostitutes in the early years of the 20th century by the photographer Bellocq with their masked faces and the ornamentation of the wallpaper behind the figures (see below).

I feel that in these photographs with their facelessness and the non-reflection of the mirror investigate notions of ‘Theoria’ – a Greek emphasis on the vision or contemplation of God where theoria is the lifting up of the individual out of time and space and created being and through contemplative prayer into the presence of God.1 In fact the whole series of photographs can be understood through this conceptualisation – not just remembrances of past time, not a blind contemplation on existence but a lifting up out of time and space into the an’other’ dark but enlightening presence.

The greatest wonder of this series is that the photographs magically reveal themselves again and again over time. Despite (or because of) the references to other artists, the beauty of Burton’s work is that she has made it her own. The photographs have her signature, her voice as an artist and it is an informed voice; this just makes the resonances, the vibrations of energy within the work all the more potent and absorbing. I loved them.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to Karen Woodbury Gallery 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 'Ivy' by Jane Burton at Karen Woodbury Gallery, Melbourne

Installation views of Ivy by Jane Burton at Karen Woodbury Gallery, Melbourne
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Jane Burton (Australian, b. 1966) 'Ivy #2' 2009 from the exhibition 'Ivy' photographs by Jane Burton at Karen Woodbury Gallery, Richmond, Melbourne, Sept, 2009

Jane Burton (Australian, b. 1966)
Ivy #2
2009
Pigment print
75 x 75cm

Jane Burton (Australian, b. 1966) 'Ivy #3' 2009 from the exhibition 'Ivy' photographs by Jane Burton at Karen Woodbury Gallery, Richmond, Melbourne, Sept, 2009

Jane Burton (Australian, b. 1966)
Ivy #3
2009
Pigment print
75 x 75cm

Jane Burton (Australian, b. 1966)
Ivy #5
2009
Pigment print
75 x 75cm

Jane Burton (Australian, b. 1966)
Ivy #7
2009
Pigment print
75 x 75cm

Jane Burton’s exhibition, Ivy comprises a series of photographs captured in black and white. The final prints are rendered with a sepia, peach-champagne tone, with many displaying a mottled hand-coloured effect in faded pastels of pink and green. These works hope to suggest an era past, perhaps Victorian. The imagery is evocative of old picture postcards from Europe and old photographs from the pages of family albums.

Central to the series is an image of a house covered with ivy. Depicted as dark and malevolent, the house is ‘haunted’ by the traces and stains of family history, habitation, and the buried secrets of all that occurred within.

Anonymous female figures are seen in garden settings where the foliage is rampant and encroaching and the shadows deep. There is an air of enchantment perceived with unspecified darker edge. The figures are innocent and playful. The viewer is asked to question if the and girls aware of the camera capturing their activity? Are the poses staged or caught spontaneously. In another photograph, a dilapidated male statue stands broken and armless, the texture of stone worn, and bruised with dark lichen and moss.

In the interior photographs, several nudes are depicted in the style of 19th century French daguerreotype photographs. These vignetted images display women against wall-papered backdrops with theatrical props reminiscent of earlier works by Burton such as the series ‘The other side’ (2003). Posed suggestively for the camera and the viewer’s gaze, the subjects themselves are faceless, their own gaze and features hidden behind dark hair. The surface and texture of these particular works suggests the patina of decay and the damage and wear of time.

Text from the Karen Woodbury Gallery website [Online] Cited 20/09/2009. No longer available online

E. J. Bellocq (American, 1873-1949)
Untitled [prostitute of Storyville, New Orleans]
1912

Jane Burton (Australian, b. 1966)
Ivy #10
2009
Pigment print

Eugene Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Versailles, France
1923
Albumen print

Jane Burton (Australian, b. 1966)
Ivy #6
2009
Pigment print
75 x 75cm

Karen Woodbury Gallery

This gallery has now closed.

Jane Burton website

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Review: ‘Connection is Solid’ by John Nicholson at Sophie Gannon Gallery, Richmond, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 25th August – 19th September, 2009

John Nicholson (Australian, b. 1970) 'Untitled' 2009 from the exhibition 'Connection is Solid' by John Nicholson at Sophie Gannon Gallery, Richmond, Melbourne, Aug - Sept, 2009

John Nicholson (Australian, b. 1970)
Aerial Navigation
2009

You could say that the essence of the cosmos is not matter, it is consciousness.

It is not the external world that is real – it is “maya”, an illusion, for the real world lies within.

These works, with their striations, strata and suspension are emanations of that spirit – projections of the inner reality.

In terms of the ancient Chinese philosophy Lao Tzu we dream the butterfly and the butterfly is us. If you don’t ‘get’ these works, let go all pretensions and feel their colour as sound, as vibrations of energy.

Submerge yourself in their shape and form. Like DNA structure, a heart beat or the record of a seismic shock these works are music as art, the length of harmony quivering and slipping in our minds, before our eyes.

This is the colour music of Roy De Maistre’s paintings of the 1930’s updated to the 21st century. They are fugues of sound made physical entities, intertwining, coming and going. Here lines, tones and colours are organised in a parallel way – tone after tone, line after line. They are wavelengths of the interior made visible. The connection is solid and fluid at one and the same time; there are many connections to be discovered, many journeys to be made.

I hear them, I like them.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

John Nicholson (Australian, b. 1970) 'Under the radar' 2009 from the exhibition 'Connection is Solid' by John Nicholson at Sophie Gannon Gallery, Richmond, Melbourne, Aug - Sept, 2009

John Nicholson (Australian, b. 1970)
Under the radar
2009
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of 'Connection is Solid' by John Nicholson at Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne

Installation views of Connection is Solid by John Nicholson at Sophie Gannon Gallery
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

John Nicholson (Australian, b. 1970) 'Thrill seeker' 2009 (detail)

John Nicholson (Australian, b. 1970)
Thrill seeker (detail)
2009
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Roy de Maistre (Australian, 1894-1968)
Arrested Movement from a Trio
1934
Oil and pencil on composition board
72.3 × 98.8cm

John Nicholson (Australian, b. 1970)
Slip
2009

John Nicholson (Australian, b. 1970)
The wire might sense
2009

John Nicholson (Australian, b. 1970)
Swoop
2009
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of Connection is Solid by John Nicholson with on the wall Satellite Graffitti (2009) and on the floor Cascade (2009) and Swoop (2009)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Sophie Gannon Gallery
2, Albert Street, Richmond, Melbourne

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Saturday 11am – 5pm

Sophie Gannon Gallery website

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Opening: ‘Long Distance Vision: Three Australian Photographers’ at The Ian Potter Centre, NGV Australia, Federation Square, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 28th August 2009 – 21st February 2010

Opening: Thursday 27th August 2009
Artists: Christine Godden, Max Pam and Matthew Sleeth

Opening night crowd for Long Distance Vision at NGV Australia, Melbourne with Senior Curator of Photography, Dr Isobel Crombie, at left of photograph
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

A small but social opening of the latest photography exhibition at NGV Australia. Wonderful to see Edwin Nicholls and Sophie Gannon from Sophie Gannon Gallery, Richmond in attendance along with Dr Isobel Crombie, Senior Curator of Photography at the NGV and Susan van Wyk, curator of this exhibition and Curator of Photography at the NGV. Also in attendance were the NGV Director, Gerard Vaughan and Frances Lindsay, Deputy Director of the NGV. The exhibition was opened by Associate Professor Christopher Stewart from RMIT University.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to Alison Murray and Sue Coffey for allowing me to take photographs of the opening, and for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Opening night crowd for Long Distance Vision at NGV Australia, Melbourne
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Long Distance Vision will include over 60 photographs from the NGV Collection exploring the concept of the ‘tourist gaze’ and its relationship with the three artists.

Susan van Wyk, Curator Photography, NGV said the exhibition provides a fascinating insight into the unusual perspective brought by the three photographers to their varied world travel destinations.

“There’s a sense in the works in the exhibition that the photographers are not from the places they choose to photograph, and that each is a visitor delighting in the scenes they encounter.

What is notable about the photographs in Long Distance Vision is that rather than focussing on the well known scenes that each artist encountered, they have turned their attention to the ‘little things’, the details of the everyday,” said Ms van Wyk.

From the nineteenth century, photography has been a means by which people could discover the world, initially through personal collection and albums, and later via postcards, magazines, books and the internet.

Dr Gerard Vaughan, Director, NGV said that both contemporary photographers and tourists use the camera as a means to explore and capture the world.

“Through their photographs, the three artists featured in Long Distance Vision show us highly individual ways of seeing the world. This exhibition will surprise and delight visitors as our attention is drawn to not only what is different but what remains the same as we travel the world,” said Dr Vaughan.

Long Distance Vision: Three Australian Photographers is on display at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Federation Square from 28 August 2009 to 21 February 2010. The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia is open every day 10am-5pm. Entry to this exhibition is free.”

Press release from the NGV

Opening of 'Long Distance Vision' at NGV Australia, Melbourne

Opening night crowd for Long Distance Vision at NGV Australia, Melbourne looking at the work of Max Pam from his Tibet series (see the four images below)
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Max Pam (Australian, b. 1949)
Tibetan man
1977
Gelatin silver photograph
20.1 × 20.1cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1979
© Max Pam

Max Pam (Australian, b. 1949)
Feet, Thiksè, Ladakh
1977
Gelatin silver photograph
20.1 × 20.1cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1979
© Max Pam

Max Pam (Australian, b. 1949)
Rinzing lama and his drinking friend, Meru Ladakh
1977
Gelatin silver photograph
20.1 × 20.1cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1979
© Max Pam

Max Pam (Australian, b. 1949)
Man on Tibetan pony, Leh Ladakh
1977
Gelatin silver photograph
20.1 × 20.1cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1979
© Max Pam

Edwin Nicholls and Sophie Gannon at the opening of 'Long Distance Vision' at NGV Australia, Melbourne

Sophie Gannon and Edwin Nicholls at the opening of Long Distance Vision at NGV Australia, Melbourne
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Dr Isobel Crombie, Senior Curator of Photography at the NGV (left) with Susan can Wyk, Curator of Photography at the NGV and curator of the exhibition (right) at the opening of 'Long Distance Vision'

Dr Isobel Crombie, Senior Curator of Photography at the NGV (left) with Susan van Wyk, Curator of Photography at the NGV and curator of the exhibition (right) at the opening of Long Distance Vision
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Opening night crowd for Long Distance Vision at NGV Australia, Melbourne looking at the work of Max Pam from his Tibet series (see two images below)
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Max Pam (Australian, b. 1949)
Sisters
1977
Gelatin silver photograph
20.1 × 20.1cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1979
© Max Pam

Max Pam (Australian, b. 1949)
Tibetan nomads
1977
Gelatin silver photograph
20.1 × 20.1cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1979
© Max Pam

The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia Federation Square
Corner of Russell and  Flinders Streets, Melbourne

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 5pm

National Gallery of Victoria website

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Review: ‘Double Infinitives’ by Marco Fusinato at Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 25th June – 25th July, 2009

Marco Fusinato (Australian, b. 1964)
Double Infinitive 3
2009

Double Infinitives by Marco Fusinato at Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne is an excellent exhibition of large UV ink on aluminium images sourced by Fusinato from the print media.

The images are made up of a dot pattern familiar to those who have examined photographs in the print media closely. Larger and smaller clusters of dots form the light and shade of the image. As you move closer to the works they dissolve into blocks of dots and become and optical illusion like Op Art from the 1960s. Fusinato contrasts this dot structure with the inclusion of flat panels of black ink to the left and right hand side of the images. The section lines that run through the images (for they are not one single image but made up of panels) also adds to the optical nature of the work as the lines cut the conflagrations, literally stitching the seams/scenes together.

Each image contains an individual holding a rock enclosed in the milieu and detritus of a riot; the figures are grounded in the earth and surrounded by fire but in their obscurity, in the veiling of their eyes, the figures seem present but absent at one and the same time. They become ghosts of the fire.

Fire consumes the bodies. The almost cut out presence of the figures, their hands clutching, throwing, saluting become mute. Here the experience of the sound, colour and movement of an actual riot is silenced in the flatness and smoothness of the images. The images possess the intensity of a newspaper reality ‘blown up’ to a huge scale by Fusinato (see the installation photograph below to get an idea of the effect). The punctum of the riot, that prick of consciousness that Barthes so liked, is translated into a silenced studium of the aluminium surface; an aural history (the sound) / oral history (the telling of the story) trapped in the structure of silence.

There is a double jeopardy – the dissolution of the image into dots and the disintegration of the body into fire. In one of the images the upraised arm and hand of one of the rioters holds a rock with what appears to be a figure on it, surrounded by fire. To me the arm turned into one of the burning Twin Towers with smoke and fire pouring from it (see the first photograph in the installation photograph below).

My only concern about the images were the black panels, perhaps too obvious a tool for the purpose the artist intended. Maybe the needed some small texture, like a moire pattern to reference the contours of a map and continue the topographical and optical theme. Perhaps they just needed to be smaller or occasionally placed as thin strips down the actual image itself but these are small quibbles. Overall this is an fantastic exhibition that I enjoyed immensely. The images are literally ripped from the matrix of time and space and become the dot dot dot of the addendum. What Fusinato does so excellently is to make us pause and stare, to recognise the flatness of these figures and the quietness of violence that surrounds us.

Music – Noise – Silence
Flatness – Advertising – Earth – Fire
Rock – Space – Memory

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.

Marco Fusinato (Australian, b. 1964) 'Double infinitive I' 2009

Marco Fusinato (Australian, b. 1964)
Double infinitive 1
2009

Marco Fusinato (Australian, b. 1964)
Double Infinitive 4
2009

A selection of images from the print media of the decisive moment in a riot in which a protagonist brandishes a rock against a backdrop of fire. Each image is from a different part of the world, from the early twenty-first century, and is blown up to history-painting scale using the latest commercial print technologies.

Text by Marco Fusinato on his website

Installation of Marco Fusinato Double Infinitives exhibition at Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne

Double Infinitives

“Unheard music is better than heard.”

Greek proverb of late antiquity

“That music be heard is not essential – what it sounds like may not be what it is.”

Charles Ives, Essays Before a Sonata

“The proposition of Jacques Attali’s Noise is different. He says that while noise is a deadly weapon, silence is death.”

David Rattray, “How I Became One of the Invisible,” Semiotext(e), 1992.

The explosive communal act of rioting is most commonly delivered to an audience suspended in the stillness and silence of a photographic image. Noise is not removed in this process, it is almost amplified: the sound and action that deliver this singularly captured moment into existence are infinite, as all things remain while they are imagined, before they are anchored down by express articulation.

Photographic representation can easily be accused of subverting the truth of events, not because what is seen in the image has not transpired, but because static images leave so much space around them for multiple narratives to be constructed. The still image is totally contingent on the consciousness that confronts it. By contrast, the near-totality of videos can give too much away …

Sourced by Fusinato from print media published in the last few years, these images of rioting all contain an individual clutching a rock, bathed in the refractory glow of a nearby fire. The image has become prototypical, so much so that it lacks the sensation of spontaneity requisite to produce a riot. (Apropos to this predictability, Fusinato would check global newspapers after every forum or conference of global financial authorities, often finding the image he was looking for).

Double Infinitives is a succinct allegory for the reluctance to compromise comfort overpowering radical impulses. Conversations suggest this is a conflict frequently experienced by artists. Deprived of a volatile political reality, we experience radicalism through images that act as small ruptures, reminders that the world we live in might be more severely charged than our individual experiences allow. Fusinato’s works flatten these images of volatility onto a smooth slate: they are similar and radiate with the vexed beauty of sameness. A riot is a mad and brutal spectacle, a theatre that is often documented as if it were a play. Hugely expanded in scale and rendered in the suffused gloss of advertising, the real possibility of violence that these works infer deepens the layers of the fiction rather than comprising an indicator of human concern. Those things with which we come into such gentle contact that their thorns barely prick …

Liv Barrett
June 2009

Text from the Anna Schwartz Gallery website [Online] Cited 10/07/2009. No longer available online

Marco Fusinato (Australian, b. 1964)
Double Iinfinitive 2
2009

Marco Fusinato (Australian, b. 1964)
Double Iinfinitive 2 (detail)
2009

Marco Fusinato (Australian, b. 1964)
Double Iinfinitive 5
2009

Anna Schwartz Gallery
185 Flinders Lane
Melbourne, Victoria 3000

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Friday 12 – 5pm
Saturday 1 – 5pm

Anna Schwartz Gallery website

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Exhibition: ‘LE MONDE v. DER MOND’ by Matthew Hale at The Narrows, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 18th June – 11th July, 2009

Matthew Hale. Installation view of DER MOND v LE MONDE at The Narrows, Melbourne

Installation view of LE MONDE v. DER MOND by Matthew Hale at The Narrows, Melbourne with n.n. (2008) centre bottom, and Page 93 of MIRIAM DIVORCEE (2008) centre right

Below is the only text I could find on the work – some of which was displayed in London earlier this year.

Many thankx to Warren from The Narrows for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. Photographs 1, 4 and 6 are © Tobias Titz 2009.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

DER MOND v LE MONDE is Mathew Hale’s first solo exhibition in London for five years. It consists of five works: one two-projector and one three-projector slide piece; a constructed painting (that could equally be described as a wall-mounted sculpture); and two large collage works …

Hale’s work has many possible points of departure: a found photograph, a scrap of paper, a page torn from an instructive and obscure book, a bit of out-moded pornography, some anachronistic advertising from the 1970s or 1980s and so forth. Once plucked from a huge collection of such material amassed in his domestic studio space, the work evolves like an unplanned journey – both moving away and turning back on itself … The path of discovery in Hale’s work is the subject of his work, providing it with narrative and process.

With its roots in the collage traditions of political photomontage, dadaist assemblage and free associative surrealism, Hale’s work prioritises process over methodology or style. It activates a complex web of references that takes in history, politics, literature, and philosophy, as much as it does sex, religion, art, architecture and popular culture. To engage with the work is to become carried along by clues that lead to other clues and then circuitously lead somewhere else unexpected yet somehow familiar. Sometimes the clues are visual, sometimes they are language based, often they are both. Even when the work is finished and exhibited it is in a state of flux, the meaning is not fixed. Hale likes slippage of meaning and this constant state of ambiguity and openness for (mis)interpretation or confusion. He explains the title of the show as follows: ‘[in German] … and strikingly weirdly, “der Mond” means “The Moon” and, as we all know, “Le Monde” means “The Earth”. How can a word flip so totally by crossing a border? I am making a work for the show which hinges on their being apparently identical (almost) and yet meaning precisely the opposite – I wonder how it happened.’

Text from the London exhibition of this work (note with title reversed!), on the Peer website [Online] Cited 23/06/2009. No longer available online

Matthew Hale (British, b. 1962)
Page 93 of MIRIAM DIVORCEE
2008
Paper collage
69 x 103cm

Matthew Hale (British, b. 1962) 'Page 150 of MIRIAM DIVORCEE' 2008 (detail)

Matthew Hale (British, b. 1962)
Page 150 of MIRIAM DIVORCEE (detail)
2008
Paper collage

Matthew Hale (British, b. 1962)
n.n.
2008
Rifle, paper collage
69 x 153cm

Matthew Hale (British, b. 1962)
Page 145 of MRS. GILLRAY
2009
Paper collage

Matthew Hale (British, b. 1962)
Page 48 of DIE NEUE MIRIAM
2008
Paper collage

Review in Art Monthly, June 2009 from the Peer website [Online] Cited 23/06/2009. No longer available online

The Narrows

This gallery has now closed

The Narrows website

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Opening 2: ‘In-Sight’ by Lisa Roet at Karen Woodbury Gallery, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 17th June – 11th July, 2009

Opening 17th June, 2009

'In-Sight' by Lisa Roet opening at Karen Woodbury Gallery, Melbourne

Opening night crowd in front of the work In-Sight (2009) by Lisa Roet at Karen Woodbury Gallery, Melbourne

Another excellent opening this time of the work of the delightful Lisa Roet. If you visit the gallery don’t forget the upstairs exhibition space with further work by the artist including a marvellous large bronze Orangutan Foot.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to Karen Woodbury Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All photographs © Marcus Bunyan

Lisa Roet (Australian, b. 1967)
In-Sight 1
2009
Polyurethane & Neon/LED
60.0 x 60.0cm
Edition: 3

Lisa Roet (Australian, b. 1967)
In-Sight 4
2009
Polyurethane & Neon/LED
120.0 x 120.0cm
Edition: 3

Installation view of Lisa Roet's work 'Cross Bones' (2009)

The artist Lisa Roet in front of one of her works Cross Bones (2009)

Lisa Roet (Australian, b. 1967)
Cross Bones
2009
Led, Perspex, Polyurethane
95 x 70 x 30cm

Installation view of the work Orangutan Foot (2007/08) by Lisa Roet at the opening of In-Sight exhibition at Karen Woodbury Gallery, Melbourne

Karen Woodbury Gallery

This gallery is now closed.

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Review: ‘Blight’ photographs by Josephine Kuperholz at Gallery 101, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 3rd June – 27th June, 2009

Josephine Kuperholz (Australian) 'Themognatha pascoci' 2008 from the exhibition 'Blight' at Gallery 101, Melbourne, June, 2009

Josephine Kuperholz (Australian)
Themognatha pascoci
2008
Woven hand coloured silver gelatin photographic image

Josephine Kuperholz presents a beautifully engineered set of photographs in her exhibition Blight at Gallery 101, Melbourne. Featuring hand coloured silver gelatin photographs of endangered Australian insects sourced from the Entomology collection of the Victoria Museum, Kuperholz literally weaves multiple narratives into the photographs. The execution (an apt word for the circumstances of extinction facing these insects) of these images is fastidious, the weaving superlative, almost clinical.

The layering of the photographs disrupts their surface tension. There is a disjunction between the dead specimen and the singular photograph of it, a disruption of the smooth surface of the photograph by the hand colouring and a further fragmentation of the original photograph by cutting and weaving. Through these processes the photographs become intertextual in their construction, assemblages, creating new tissues of past citations: animal, colour, silver, artist, text, photograph, environment. At their best the work subverts the concept of the text as self-sufficient and hermetically sealed, blurring the outlines of the fixed image, “dispersing its image of totality into an unbounded, illimitable tissue of connections and associations, paraphrases and fragments, texts and con-texts.”1

Kuperholz’s mutations, ‘differance’ in Derrida’s terminology, produce spaces that are both fluid and fixed at one and the same time; neither her nor there. Though the original specimens and photographs are already narrativised, already textualised, Kuperholz disrupts this marking, the continual reiteration of norms, by weaving a lack of fixity into her objects; in her reconceptualisations of space and matter Kuperholz redefines the significations of the body of the animal in the fold of inscription, through a process of materialisation. Kuperholz attempts to ground these re-inscriptions through the naming of these disrupted surfaces, equating the images back to the scientific labels for the original specimen, Trapezites eliena for example (see below), and through the box frames surrounding the work that are much like museum cases. Unfortunately I found the constant reference to the habitat of the insect, it’s Latin name inscribed in pencil under the images and the use of plain brown box frames somewhat irritating. These tropes are not necessary for the work is strong enough to stand on it’s own without having to tell the viewer what to think.

The singular beetles (as seen above) are beautiful images and the multiple images where the weaving intermingles, the self decentred and multiple, fluttering and vibrating like the strobing of a time lapse photograph caught in three-dimensional space, are fantastic. Other photographs are less successful: the reflected beetles are a little passe, while the grid photographs of insects lack presence and intensity (see bottom installation photograph below). Where the concept works it is pushed hard, the fragmentation and interweaving causes an anxiety of identity and a meditation on the problematic nature of existence, revealing the changing sizes, shapes and rhythms of space and structure.

Perhaps a loosening of the rigid structure surrounding the works (the text, the frame, the incantations) would have let the photographs ascend into the ether, further releasing the work from the constraints of author, text and earth. It will be interesting to see future developments of this work. Perhaps the incorporation of gentle, subtle physical elements into the photographs (through the sowing of patterns, through the sowing of objects directly onto the photograph?), will elevate these already beautiful photographs to an-other plane of existence.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to Gallery 101 for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Josephine Kuperholz (Australian) 'Trapezites eliena' 2008 from the exhibition 'Blight' at Gallery 101, Melbourne, June, 2009

Josephine Kuperholz (Australian)
Trapezites eliena
2008
Common name – Eliena Skipper
Woven hand coloured silver gelatin photographic image

Josephine Kuperholz (Australian)
Dryococelus australis
2008
Common name – Lord Howe Island Phasmid
Woven hand coloured silver gelatin photographic image