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PART
2 MAKING A SCENE
PHOTOMEDIA
TABLEAUX OF THE 20TH AND 21ST CENTURIES
Curated
by Alasdair Foster
Curated by Alasdair Foster
CALUM COLVIN,
ROSE FARRELL
& GEORGE PARKIN,
LES KRIMS,
ROSEMARY LAING,
CLARENCE JOHN LAUGHLIN,
BRENDAN LEE,
ANGUS MCBEAN,
DUANE MICHALS,
TRACEY MOFFATT,
JULIE RRAP,
ARTHUR TRESS,
JERRY UELSMANN,
WILHELM VON
GLOEDEN
and GUGLIELMO PLUSCHOW
Visual
Puzzles, Arcadian idylls, gothic nightmares,
dysfunctional families, wistful dreams. The artists
in the concluding part of Beyond Real create
whole new worlds - sometimes strangely familiar,
and others totally alien. While some images are
created through digital manipulation or darkroom
trickery, many involve the creation of elaborate
settings that are then faithfully recorded on film.
With the camera no longer wedded exclusively to
notions of neutral documentation, the exhibition
explores photography's other romance with worlds
beyond the real.
Wilhelm
von Gloeden
(1856-1931)
and Guglielmo
Pluschow
(1852-1930)
various Arcadian studies c1900-10 albumen prints
Private collection
Wilhelm von Gloeden was a Prussian aristocrat who
settled in Taormina in north-eastern Sicily and
later, having fallen on hard times, made a living
selling photographs of naked and lightly clad
youths in Arcadian tableaux to the upper echelons
of European and American society taking the Grand
Tour. His relationship with the people of Taormina
was productively symbiotic since his photographs,
not to mention stories of the sexual licence he
shared with the community including the local
priests, was what put Taormina on the tourist map.
He established the first system whereby each model
received a percentage of every sale of their image,
which they received when they reached their
majority, and many of the established businesses in
that now major resort were built on the capital sum
great grandfather acquired from his modeling. Such
was the fame of von Gloeden that he had many
copiers, not least his cousin Guglielmo Pluschow
who frequently visited von Gloeden's villa and
photographed many of his models and props.
Rose
Farrell (1949-) & George Parkin
(1949-)
from Random Acts 2005 type C prints Courtesy
of Arc One, Melbourne
The
oeuvre of Rose Farrell and George Parkin has proved
remarkably consistent yet continuously imaginative
across the three decades in which they have
collaborated. They began at a time when ironic
citation, self-conscious anachronism and the
deconstruction of power were mainstays of
postmodernism. And they have plotted their creative
course through to the present day with its blurring
of reality and fiction, of high art and popular
culture, of the spectacular and the sublime. Yet
their work maintains its integrity and distinctive
signature. Looking at first glance like
enlargements of antique etchings these photographs
are staged exactly as they appear and do not rely
on post-production manipulation in either the
darkroom or the computer. The artists build the
sets and fashion the costumes by hand from
papier-mâché and aluminium sheet. The
resulting works are allusive and not simply
decoded. They evoke feelings and associations but
avoid the ponderous didacticism associated much
art-about-art.
Angus
McBean (1904-1990)
various photographs 1938-49 gelatin silver prints
Collection of the National Gallery of Australia
Angus
McBean was a theatre photographer and, along with
Cecil Beaton, one of the last great avant-garde
studio photographers in London. In the thirties he
became enamoured of European Surrealism and, again
like Beaton, evolved a more whimsical British take
on the style. In the years leading up to World War
II, McBean undertook a series of elaborate
portraits in the surrealist manner (and in this
exhibition, we see one such along with a wider shot
revealing the paraphernalia of the illusion). After
the war, he developed a more serious and
introspective approach using props that more
directly reflected the personality of the subject.
The more whimsical surrealist approach survived in
his personal Christmas cards, which were produced
from this period until well into the seventies.
Jerry
Uelsmann (1934-)
from Jerry N. Uelsmann Portfolio 1959-77
gelatin silver prints Collection of the National
Gallery of Australia
The work of Jerry Uelsmann bridges the transitional
period between the mid-twentieth century
fascination with surrealism and the decades of
counterculture with its emphasis on individual
freedom, human rights and spiritual adventure. His
works involve many separate negatives printed
together as sandwiches or sequentially to create
images that harmoniously blend the natural and the
fantastical. His ironically coined motto -
'Robinson and Rejlander live' - acknowledged the
traditions of multiple negatives and artificially
constructed imagery that were central to the work
of two leading 19th-century photographers August
Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson. It is this link
back to the early decades of the medium that
perhaps lends their strange iconography such a
curious completeness and persuasively
'photographic' quality.
Rosemary
Laing (1959-)
groundspeed (Red Piazza) # 3 2001 type C
print Courtesy of Sally Couacaud and Tolarno
Galleries, Melbourne
What initially hooks the imagination in the works
of Rosemary Laing, aside from the sumptuous colours
and spectacular sweeping composition, is that they
look as though they are tricks and they are not.
While Jerry Uelsmann's prints played with the
tension between our expectations of the photograph
and his darkroom manipulation, half a century
later, when popular awareness of digital
manipulation has, at last, made the likelihood
manipulation a widely understood caveat to any
photograph, Laing's images are unadulterated
records of what existed before the camera. And some
sixth sense that intuits fact from fiction
acknowledges this.
Calum
Colvin (1961-)
Narcissus 1987 and Cupid and Psyche
1986 type C prints Courtesy of Michael Nagy
Gallery, Sydney
The
highly individual modus operandi that Calum Colvin
evolved while still studying at the Royal College
of Art in London relies on a very specific point of
viewing to reveal two distinct levels of image.
Working at the interface of installation, painting
and photography his images involve apparently
chaotic but painstakingly constructed scenarios
onto which paint is applied so that from the unique
vantage point of the camera a second image resolves
within the space. Drawing, as so many artists
before him, on the humanist archetypes personified
in Greek mythology, he explores the nature of
identity, desire and national belonging.
Julie
Rrap (1950-)
from Fleshstones 2003 digital prints
Courtesy of Arc One Gallery, Melbourne and Roslyn
Oxley9, Sydney
In
Julie Rrap's lyrical landscapes, the fiction is
undeniable but softly stated. Using digital
manipulation in much the same way that Uelsmann
sandwiched negatives, Rrap moulds various male
torsos into the contours of boulders which lie, a
little uncomfortably, in the landscape. These are
not the buff torsos of classical antiquity or their
latter-day clones that parade through so many
tableaux images of the past century, but aging
flesh, slightly sagging and lived in. For some
(myself included) the relation of aging torso to
timeless landscape contains a certain piquant
poetry, for others the imperfect, incomplete bodies
smack of violence and death, while others focus on
way the forms resemble the heavy modernist
sculptures of Henry Moore.
Clarence
John Laughlin
(1905-1985)
various photographs 1941-57 gelatin silver prints
Collection of the National Gallery of Australia
Clarence
John Laughlin lived and worked in New Orleans. His
photographs are some of the most extraordinary
produced in post-war America. His images are not so
much about the subject as seen as about the
internal ideas they suggest. "Everything," he
wrote, "Everything, no matter how commonplace and
how ugly, has secret meanings. Everything."
Although clearly within the cadre of Surrealism,
his works have a distinctive feel of the febrile
and the fetid. His sense of the gothic, which saw
him dubbed 'the Edgar Allan Poe of New Orleans', is
different from Ralph Eugene Meatyard's cooler take
on the grotesque - here we sense the lush
entanglement of the bayou and the thick sweet
perfume of decay.
Arthur
Tress (1940-)
various photographs 1970-78 gelatin silver prints
Courtesy of the artist and private collection
Arthur
Tress also evolved a form of tableau image making
in the seventies. He began by bringing a fresh and
more immediate take on the surrealist interest in
the unconscious though a series of works that
dramatised the dreams of children. But over the
decade, his work focused on fantasy and the
semiotics of an increasingly visible gay community.
Created in a period when 'desire' was a highly
politicised notion his images both celebrated and
gave concrete visual form to desires which had,
until then, tended to remain clandestine or at
least allegorised as in the works of George Platt
Lynes and before him Wilhelm von Gloeden. Tress'
men were real and while the situations they played
out were somewhat unlikely the sexual language and
practices (cruising, gender bending and power play)
were drawn directly from the mores of the gay
sub-culture of the time.
Les
Krims (1943-)
from The Only Photographs in the World to Cause
a Kidnapping and other images 1970-79 gelatin
silver prints Collection of the National Gallery of
Australia
The
photographs of Les Krims herald a new phase in the
history of tableaux photography and rapidly became
a lightening rod for highly polarized views. The
work began in late sixties with relatively simple
but bizarrely staged images, usually of nudes set
in stark institutional or kitsch domestic
environments and evolved into complex,
multi-layered tableaux with increasingly long
mock-sardonic titles. His 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 that cohabited in
postmodern thinking. Undeterred he took this as a
point of leverage and has delighted in confronting
and confounding the sanctimonious ever since.
Brendan
Lee (1974-)
Shootin' from the Hip 2004 video Courtesy of
the artist
In
a synthesis of two cinematic formats - the trailer
and the slomo sequence - Brendan Lee pays homage to
the gun slinging hero of the classic Western and,
more recently, the Hong Kong gangster movie. Like a
trailer, the video does not aim to unfold a
narrative but to give a brief and tantalising flash
of action that suggests a storyline without
revealing it. This flurry of action is then slowed
down and endlessly repeated in the manner of the
'significant movie moment' where intense action or
fleeting gesture are stretched into a poignant
adagio.
The
result is highly suggestive, the movement of the
body rendered graceful, sexy even, by prolongation,
but the whole remains elusive in terms of concrete
meaning. Once again, the orchestration of casting,
costume, setting and action seeks to engender a
feeling rather than report an incident.
Duane
Michals (1932-)
from
Homage to Cavafy 1978 gelatin silver prints
Collection of the National Gallery of Australia
Less
elaborate in form but more emotionally complex in
nature are the works of the poet and photographer
Duane Michals. His photographs are mostly modest in
size and often accompanied by handwritten text -
like annotated snaps-shots. Much of his work
consisted of narratives that unfold across a
tightly choreographed sequence of images, but here
we see a series created to accompany poems by the
Greek poet Constantine Cavafy. Michals' images have
about them a kind of magic realism that carries
within it the yearning for simple connectedness (to
a loved one or to the universe) and the poignant
resignation of one who knows his quest is
ultimately futile.
Tracey
Moffatt (1960-)
from Scarred for Life II 1999
lithographs Courtesy of Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery,
Sydney
The
signature quality of Tracey Moffatt's oeuvre has
been its chameleon-like approach to art making that
ensures a stylistically distinct and internally
complete artwork. While much of her work involves
the staging of action before the camera, she goes
much further, presenting each series in a medium,
scale and format consistent with the idioms and
technologies of the period it evokes. Here a series
of lithographic posters depict, somewhat in the
manner of didactic panels or public information
bulletins, the casual cruelties of family life. Set
in the era of the artist's own childhood and
adolescence, the prints have the muddy hues
associated with cheap colour reproduction of the
period. The text is set in the modernist sans serif
font of the time. This precision in form and detail
hones the edge on her cutting social
observation.
FLOORTALK 1.00pm Saturday 19 November - FREE
Breaking free from notions of the truth of
photography, the artists in this, the concluding
part of the Beyond Real exhibition, create
worlds of fantasy and illusion. Discussing the joys
and challenges of such an approach will be some of
the contemporary Australian artists included in the
exhibition.
This exhibition is presented under a Partnership
Agreement with the National Gallery of Australia.
The NGA Partnership program aims to provide greater
public access to the Gallery's collection and marks
the continuation of an alliance with ACP.
Image Credits:
• Angus McBean no title,
c1938 Collection of the National Gallery of
Australia
• Rose Farrell & George Parkin
Random Acts - Unforseen Circumstances - Part
2 2005
• Angus McBean no title (Robert
Helpmann), 1948
• Calum Colvin Cupid and Psyche
1986
• Julie Rrap Fleshtones: Richard
Cliff 2003
• Clarence John Laughlin Narcissica
in the Bathtub-Coffin, 1957 [1978]
• Arthur Tress Stephen Brecht, Bride
and Groom, New York 1970
• Les Krims from The Only Photographs
in the World to Cause a Kidnapping 1970
• Brendan Lee Shootin' From the
Hip 2004 (Photo: Paul Batt)
• Duane Michals Just to light his
cigarette was a great pleasure from Homage to
Cavafy 1978
• Tracey Moffatt Pantyhose Arrest
1973 from Scarred for Life II 1999
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