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Staring
in the Dark
13
June - 20 July,
2003
Tue - Sun: 11.00am - 6.00pm
Galleries One, Two and Foyer
Staring in the Dark is the second in a
season of three exhibitions exploring the interface
between art and popular culture. This exhibition
features the work of photomedia artists who
appropriate or reapply pornographic styles and
formulae in a subversive way. Through video,
photography and photo-textiles, these artists draw
elements of social documentary, community history,
post-ironic humour and radical chic from the potent
pulp of porn.
The pornography industry in the USA has a turnover
three times that of Hollywood. It is the most
prevalent 'underground' 'minority' form in the
West. The influence of the pornographic style is
wide - for example, many photographers working in
the field of fashion draw heavily upon its
mannerisms. Rachael Cassells, who showed in the
first exhibition in this season (No more than I
know) explained that she was drawn to seventies
porn because of its 'authenticity'. Pornography is
obsessed with demonstrable proof - the opening out
of closed sexual acts to make them available to the
camera, the emphasis on the 'money shot' as
guarantee that this is not a simulation. Even its
amateurish look and hackneyed plot-lines are an
assurance of transparency. Nothing is being put
over on us. What you see is what you get. In an age
of sophisticated illusion and seamless gloss, porn
takes on the role of bawdy ingenue. It is, as the
artist Scott Redford has suggested, "More honest
than art".
Rod
McRae and Thomas Jordan
/ New South Wales
The
Club, 2003
While the pornography industry is now big business,
it is a relatively recent phenomenon. Prior the
1970s, erotic imagery was more often circulated in
the form of photographs and postcards shot by
amateurs in brothels and sex clubs. In The
Club, Thomas Jordan and Rod McRae suggest such
photographic imagery - recreating scenes from a
now-mythical gay sex club operating in central
Sydney in the mid-twentieth century. Such images
were rare and often destroyed by anxious families
upon the death of the owner. Homophobia and
intolerance forced suppression. But an oral
tradition continued and these images are informed
by the stories of the club that have passed down
through gay community.
Thomas Jordan is a performer and theatrical
designer; Rod McRae is a photographer and
graphic designer. The artists have worked together
meticulously to recreate both the look and feel of
period photographs. Each scene, the props, the
body-types and the style of play are all true to
their specified period - 1947, 1959, 1965 - as are
the physical and tonal qualities of the prints
themselves. The prints are 'distressed' to give
them the feel of old photos kept tucked away out of
sight, passed from hand to hand - a patina of
surreptitious value. Each is presented here as a
carefully mounted museum artefact.
"The Club
project seeks to recreate a gay visual history
- not as falsehood or farce - but as a visual
montage of times remembered… For those who
operated outside the social norms of their time
'fun' and 'family' were not often recorded."
Jordan &
McRae
Paul
M. Smith /
UK
This
Is Not Pornograph, 2001
Former army Sapper turned award-winning
photo-artist, Paul M. Smith received
immediate acclaim for his first body of work, the
Rifle series, when it was bought by the Saatchi
collection. Subsequent series have addressed a
drunken lads' night out, the action hero (with
lightbox works displayed on the gallery ceiling)
and, most recently, pornography. In each series he
has used digital manipulation to insert himself,
often several times, into the image. It is a
technique he used to great effect when he was
commissioned to make the images for Robbie
Williams' Sing when you're winning
album.
Here digital manipulation has been used to blend
and reassign roles and body parts in a series of
images that refer back to pornography of the
seventies. This was the first great boom in
mass-market pornography that produced stars such as
Linda Lovelace and the mustachioed John Holmes. The
title, This Is Not Pornography, which refers
back to Magritte's Ceci n'est ce pas une
pipe, reminds us that this is not pornography
but the representation of pornography - a
postmodern play on relative intent.
Cee
Sparét /
Northern Territory
Girlcome
Welcome, 2003
Cee Sparét is one of a small number
of women who ejaculate during orgasm. She has used
this facility materially in her work by ejaculating
onto colour photographic paper. This bodily fluid
reacts chemically with the paper so that vivid
coloured patterns appear upon development. The
artist prints these splatter patterns onto fabric
along with life-size photographs of parts of her
body. And the fabric is then turned into clothing:
gowns, dresses, t-shirts and jeans.
Cee Sparét's garments play with the notions
of pornographic authenticity manifest in the 'money
shot' - the externalised, closely scrutinised
moment of (male) ejaculation that guarantees that
what we witness is indeed the real McCoy and not
just simulation. The artist sets this in a
radically different context, asserting her sexual
presence - through a direct 'mark' - and inverting
the fashion/porn appropriation.
"I'm inspired
by my own sexual desire. My art and my life are
bound together in this work. It's about a different
way of approaching consumption and luxury … My
gowns are guaranteed to get you a husband, wife,
boyfriend… or at least another wanker." Cee
Sparét
Mimi
Kelly and Clint Woodger /
South Australia
Seven
Stars, 2001
Mimi Kelly and Clint Woodger work
collaboratively, and produced Seven Stars
following a two-year period documenting their sex
life. The work caused unprecedented debate within
the South Australian School of Art when it was
first shown in October 2001. The still images are
taken from a video in which the couple have sex.
The heightened colours and filmic framing turn the
private sexual act into a performance, and serve as
way of considering intimacy as display.
"Seven
Stars addresses our sexual relationship and
our relationship with the wider media around us. We
have photographed ourselves having sex in an
attempt to understand the transgressive nature of
representing a private act within the public
sphere. This transgression shared with a complicit
audience is generally called pornography. Porn is a
multi-million dollar business and the porn
corporations have the power to channel certain
ideas about the look and practice of sex and
therefore to influence the private realities of sex
at large. Our work grows out of this
fantasy/reality dichotomy by way of mimicking what
we have seen, so that we can view our own sexual
reality as a videographic fantasy… We liked
the idea of becoming stars of our own making."
Mimi Kelly and Clint
Woodger
Linda
Erceg /
Victoria
Punchline,
2003
Linda Erceg is establishing an international
reputation for her work on the aesthetics of
digital culture. In particular she explores the
paradoxical impulse towards intimacy and voyeurism
that computer gaming shares with pornography.
In order to engage with her latest work,
Punchline, one must stoop and enter the
cubicle, Once inside one can view the overhead
screen and listen to the soundtrack through
earphones. But in doing so the viewers also becomes
the viewed, their reactions being the only clue to
what lies inside the installation. On the
soundtrack one voice after another recounts a dirty
joke. The jokes have been recorded several times
and each telling overlays the last; diverging and
re-syncing as the timing changes. It is a process
that heightens the nervous energy behind telling
the joke. Will they get it? Will they find it
funny? Meanwhile, on the overhead screen,
computer-generated figures perform various acts of
sexual self-gratification whilst the voyeuristic
camera circles and zooms - scrutinising. The
figures are at once closed and self-absorbed, and
at the same time wantonly displayed.
"Punchline
questions psycho-sexual dynamics through the
shifting of a solitary pleasure into a series of
social relationships." Linda
Erceg
Linda Erceg would like to thank:
Character animator
Andrea
Blundell
Voice actors
Steve
Cox,
Helen
Gibbins,
Ben
Harper,
Harriet
Parsons
Sound technician
Jerremy
Yuille
David
Rosetzky /
Victoria
Commune,
2003
David Rosetzky is developing a growing
reputation for his critique of the urban Generation
Y. His works often address the failure of intimacy
and the banality of personal ambition. In
Commune, a work made especially for this
exhibition, he presents six half-life-size cut-out
figures. The three males and three females are
fresh-faced and posing - they could have stepped
out of the pages of a lifestyle magazine. Each
figure is perforated and snake-lights coil through
and around the figures, binding them into a
group.
"I am
interested in the how our modes of interaction and
communication are influenced by popular culture
such as television, music video, advertising,
lifestyle magazines and pornography. It fascinates
me how people attempt to objectify each other, and
the emotions that we can feel for inanimate objects
and images. Commune attempts to render this
emotional attachment visible." David
Rosetzky
Scott
Redford /
Queensland
Clown
Fuck Punk, 2003
Scott Redford works across a range of media,
often addressing themes from popular culture, but
always with a certain subversive edginess. In
2001/2 he was the Australian artist in residency at
the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien under an Australia
Council Fellowship. Whilst there, he shot two
important new video works: I Need More and
Clown Fuck Punk. The exhibition includes
this latter video along with production stills from
the former - the video itself being deemed to fall
outside of the Australia's narrow censorship
laws.
Both films explore the sexual mores of a group of
gay Berliners who dress like punks and skinheads
(without necessarily subscribing to the politics
associated with that latter style), whose range of
sexual interaction is intense, hardcore and way
beyond the average. I Need More documents
an evening of sex in the local leather bar. It
resists any notion of narrative, simply and
directly documenting the various actions and
interactions as they occur. It is an in-your-face
celebration of sex which goes far beyond the
anodyne half-truths of mainstream erotica and, as
the title indicates, demands more. Much more.
"In I Need
More I wanted to dispense with the camp
narrative and purposefully set out to record men
having sex." Scott
Redford
Clown Fuck Punk, a shorter narrative work,
unfolds the story of a punk officeboy and a generic
clown. The punk sees the clown from an upper window
and engineers (or daydreams of) his own fantasy
rape by this unlikely 'attacker'.
"The boy is a
real-life punk and holds very much to the punk
ethic. The clown is my own invention - don't know
where he came from. But meeting the Punk who'd
worked in porn in Berlin, gave me the idea."
Scott Redford
Image Credits:
• Rod McRae and Thomas Jordan,
The Club, 2003
• Paul M. Smith, from This is Not
Pornography, 2001
• Cee Sparét, Girlcome
Welcome, 2003
• Mimi Kelly and Clint Woodger, Seven
Stars, 2001
• Linda Erceg, from Punch Line,
2003
• David Rosetzky, Commune,
2003
• Scott Redford, from I Need
More, 2002
• Scott Redford, from Clown Fuck
Punk
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