The Australian Centre for Photography’s end of year exhibition is usually something special. Alasdair Foster, art tsar of the palatial Oxford Street gallery, curates a show and everyone is invited. This year’s end of season show is Beyond Real Part 2: Making A Scene, a collection of work by Australian and international artists that is somehow engaged with examining, exposing or celebrating the illusion of making images. It’s the kind of work that stands in direct contrast to the traditions of documentary photography and its claims to impartially recording a scene. The artists include some well known Australian names next to even more well known international artists with examples drawn from the collection of the National Gallery of Australia.
Of course, it’s a bit of an illusion in itself to assume that documentary image making is without its own artistic interventions as recent documentaries on Frank Hurley and James Nachtwey demonstrated. But as a curatorial gambit, creating a show such as this is a great way to define what has become one of the major themes of contemporary photography, namely, the recognition by artists that an image is ‘fake’ and using a number of different techniques to foreground that ‘fakeness’ – digital manipulation, theatrical sets, make up, costumes, dramatic settings. In other words, this stream of work is just like fashion photography, only with brains.
The history of this kind of work in Australia goes way back to the 70s and those artists who used photography to create tableaux – John Lethbridge springs to mind – but in the gold fish like memory of the Australian art world it all began with Tracey Moffatt. Her work is represented in Making A Scene by a selection of her work from the Scarred For Life series from 1999. It is her best work because Moffatt’s usual brand of high camp hysteria is missing while the humour and the ‘real world’ settings provide a point of identification for the audience. It’s odd that Something More – a more coherent historical place to start – was not included but viewer fatigue for those overly familiar images is beyond exhaustion. Foster was wise to choose something else for his show.
Arthur Tress, Stephen Brecht, Bride and Groom, New York, 1970.
Silver gelatin print.
Courtesy Australian Centre for Photography.
Other exclusions are more perplexing. Anne Zahlaka, for instance, has been doing this kind of work for years. Her much publicised images from the 1980s of what appeared to be historical art images but with hidden clues as to their real period [wrist watches for example] were astoundingly obvious but extremely popular at the time. Some very well known examples of recent work in this style such as the recent photo series by Darren Sylvester are notable by their absence. The idea then appears to be to give this work some historical context and the audience a rest. That however, wouldn’t explain the key missing artist – Lucas Samaras – who was one of the major figures in this kind of work in the United States from the 1970s onwards. The NGA has some good examples of his work, but he’s not included. But you know, as we always say about imported or mystifying shows, we mustn’t grumble and just be happy with what we’ve got.
One Australian artist who is included who seems a bit out of place is Julie Rrap. Her work in the show is a series from 2003 called Fleshtones where the artist has taken a series of shots of rocks and boulders. Using computer technology, Rrap has altered the shots so the rocks look as though they are partly flesh, or are flesh in the process of turning to rock, or maybe the rocks have nipples – who can really say? The artist’s manipulation of images is certainly in keeping with theme of the show, but they are also completely unremarkable, dull and lifeless images, underscored by weighty intent and pretentious execution – pretty much par for the course in Rrap’s work.
Les Krims, The Only Photographs In The World to Cause a Kidnapping, 1970.
Silver gelatin print. Courtesy of Australian Centre for Photography.
Another unusual inclusion is the work of Brendan Lee. The piece is Shootin’ From The Hip from 2004, a balletic recreation of moves from double gun action movies, the kind that John Woo brought to Hollywood from Hong Kong. We don’t know that much about the limits of photography but when the images start to move we think that’s called “video”. There are some prints on the wall, but you know, we’re not convinced they should be there. Les Krims’ images taken from the NGA collection demonstrate the artist’s increasingly elaborate stage settings, starting with nudes in a room – The Only Photographs in the World to Cause a Kidnapping from 1970 as an example –to hugely complicated images of the artist in the nude with dozens of props and his penis caught by a fishing rod. Oh baby… Writing on the work in the catalogue Foster says:
“Krim’s humour is often black, targeting political and sexual hypocrisy, and alluding to racial prejudice. It found him increasingly at odds with the notions of political correctness that evolved as the sticky tape that held together the free-wheeling relativism and doctrinaire factionalism of post modernism.”
We sincerely hope it was that sticky tape that attached Krim’s member to the hook. Krim’s nudity is typical of a certain approach to image making in the 70s and 80s. Taking you clothes off for some reason implied sincerity and seriousness and it’s a fashion that really ought to come back. Duane Michael’s images carry the same kind of sincerity – intimate, homely and honest – eschewing overt theatricality for downplayed realism. It’s a pose, too, but compared to Krim’s latter works, it’s like comparing Cats to Mother Courage.
The other approach is to dress up. Rose Farrell and George Parkin take fancy dress to extremes with a series of pieces from 2005. You could have fooled us – they look as they could have been done anytime in the last 20 years. Backdrop, costumes, classic poses… there should be a law! Arthur Tess’s work Stephen Brecht, Bride and Groom from 1970 and Clarence John Laughlin’s Narcissica in the Bathtub Coffin from 1957, go a long way to explain where a certain strand of unbelievably bad student work comes from. You know the drill – people in costume striking poses in ruined buildings or lolling about in bathtubs while dressed like Dracula. Tess and Laughlin have the advantage of having done it first and done it extremely well which is sadly no excuse for Callum Colvin. Colvin did a series of works in the 1980s that were classical images painted over the interior of a room, creating a kind of three dimensional double image. The whole thing appeared to have been lifted directly from Salvador Dali and made the pages of magazines including The Face which was once considered the place to be, but turned out to have been a huge aberration. And what’s Colvin doing these days?
