The road outside Gitte Weise Galleries [Sydney/Berlin] is a parking nightmare and with the slabs of newly laid bitumen, random cones and bollards, if you end up at Gitte Weise Galleries it’s because you really meant to be there. We know we’ve said some rough things about the GWGS/B and the work we’ve seen there, but as we got out of our Art Life bus we really wanted to give the latest show by Cherine Fahd a good review. We had started to think that our high handed dismissal of her entire body of work as being the redux-Moffatt we all had to have was just too mean and we’d gone way too far. This time we’d go in with an open mind and hopefully we’d come out smiling.
A giant squid, yesterday.
The latest show, Looking Glass, is a suite of 11 large scale (90x120cm) lambda prints on metallic paper, all tastefully mounted and highly polished. The room notes to the show lay out the artist’s conceptual gambit:
When looking through the viewfinder into that beautiful framed world everything moves in slow motion; our daily rituals, the ways we exist in cities, the ways we observe nature and each other. Gestures too, appear charged in some way. As if at any moment, a sudden glance or movement captured by the camera, opens up a window onto a world, which is ordinarily denied the casual everydayness of looking. As if the very act of looking, the choice to look is what put us there. Or perhaps it is the reality of seeing things through a zoom lens; everything appearing closer and nearer…
It would be cruel and unusual to rip into this excerpt from the room notes because artists aren’t paid to write and we should just be reading this for clues to artist’s intentions, but this miasma of half thoughts and unfinished sentences is actually a fair reflection of the work. Fahd’s latest work is a series of images of people ‘existing in cities’ – tourists, people on their lunch break, lovers in a city park, an artist painting and so on. After photographing them, Fahd has used a computer to blur the image around the central figures so they stand out from the background in a sharp edge contrast.
The works are among the worst contemporary art we have seen in a very long time. Hoisted out of the artist run scene into commercial gallery representation well before she had developed anything resembling a personal voice or a sophisticated idea, Fahd’s new work fails on nearly every level. Aesthetically it is so poorly conceived and executed you wonder just what the artist thought she was doing. Although there is an international school of photography that posits a bland or flat aesthetic akin to casually snapped pictures, the selection of images, the framing and the ways in which the works are sequenced mark them out as thoughtful contemporary art. It’s one thing to use the aesthetic, it’s entirely another to be that aesthetic. Fahd’s work aren’t pretending to be dull and falt, they are dull and flat.
Fahd’s work’s use of computer technology is naive and ordinary, akin to the result one might get from a guided tour of Photoshop. The technique adds little to the image. It may well be that a carefully selected shot may open “up a window onto a world, which is ordinarily denied the casual everydayness of looking” but it doesn’t necessarily make it interesting. Adding in a bit of gaussian blur doesn’t do much for either the concept or an image already suffering such a lack of aesthetic distinction. The images are reminiscent of real tourist snaps and if it weren’t for the anodyne and absurdly literal conceptual gambit, you’d give them little time as either art or someone’s holiday happy snaps. Unfortunately the concept is so weak it wears off as soon as you look away, a rather sad denial of the casual everydayness of looking itself.
