https://www.donnawestbrett.com/photography-disaster daily 0.75 2025-09-07 https://www.donnawestbrett.com/photography-disaster/what-london-saw-gawkers-sensation-and-zepp-sunday monthly 0.5 2025-09-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/eab4460f-0132-4b00-b189-d6384e26c153/2BW2BR1.jpg Photography & Disaster - “What London Saw”: Gawkers, Sensation and Zepp Sunday - Make it stand out Crowds on the road to Billericay trying to see the wrecked Zeppelin. 1916. Alamy https://www.donnawestbrett.com/photography-disaster/catastrophe-and-calamity-picturing-british-disaster monthly 0.5 2023-09-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1695531253646-PJYT8NORF18ALTER540V/the-shooting-down-of-a-german-dirigible-over-london-97b8ef-1024.jpg Photography & Disaster - Catastrophe and Calamity: Picturing British Disaster https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1695531240324-NA4Y7R9699K1PQA2YGF9/the-shooting-down-of-a-german-dirigible-over-london-e68666-1024.jpg Photography & Disaster - Catastrophe and Calamity: Picturing British Disaster https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1695531261142-9UHUS8OTZJN943I3IX6F/the-shooting-down-of-a-german-dirigible-over-london-e34904-1024.jpg Photography & Disaster - Catastrophe and Calamity: Picturing British Disaster https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1695531273924-ZVMF2L06X2J8LJIGNHW5/the-shooting-down-of-a-german-dirigible-over-london-c2eaf2-1024.jpg Photography & Disaster - Catastrophe and Calamity: Picturing British Disaster https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1695531300364-NZT5D47ST6789RRXASLY/the-shooting-down-of-a-german-dirigible-over-london-1f5424-1024.jpg Photography & Disaster - Catastrophe and Calamity: Picturing British Disaster https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1695531279718-CCEV8VZB4QDWYDBL5QCL/the-shooting-down-of-a-german-dirigible-over-london-31d030-1024.jpg Photography & Disaster - Catastrophe and Calamity: Picturing British Disaster https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/5cb0ecb1-157c-4f58-8736-db4f1ed9c5e7/699694-1501667877.jpg Photography & Disaster - Catastrophe and Calamity: Picturing British Disaster - Make it stand out H. Scott Orr, (1881-1972) The destruction of airship SL-11 near London Sep 1916. Gelatin silver prints | 13.4 x 8.3 cm (image) | RCIN 2503180. Royal Collection Trust, London. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1695529905837-VT8KQ723LHH2TF7NTV0Z/Henry+Bedford+Lemerre%2C+Clerkenwell+Gaol%2C+December+13%2C+1867%2C+Victoria+and+Albert+Museum.jpeg Photography & Disaster - Catastrophe and Calamity: Picturing British Disaster https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1695530112353-S0CDYS2NKLY84UW8I824/Henry+Bedford+Lemerre%2C+Corporation+Raod%2C+Clerkenwell%2C+December+13%2C+1867%2C+V%26A+Museum.jpeg Photography & Disaster - Catastrophe and Calamity: Picturing British Disaster https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1695530430406-K2ZKE7HLADDLJIF8TVZZ/Effects+of+the+Explosion+at+Clerkenwell%2C+Illustrated+London+News.jpeg Photography & Disaster - Catastrophe and Calamity: Picturing British Disaster https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1695530432271-THPNHK0QNY25Q6NV6V7V/clerkenwell-explosion.jpg Photography & Disaster - Catastrophe and Calamity: Picturing British Disaster https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1695530558311-5LMNRC76SAP0CY8P5SDW/HN3100074769_Page_1.jpg Photography & Disaster - Catastrophe and Calamity: Picturing British Disaster https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1695530847509-KCVF6GDX5UOZ9H3L115H/1916-dated-zeppelin-postcard_26465_pic1_size3.jpg Photography & Disaster - Catastrophe and Calamity: Picturing British Disaster https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1695530885056-T0JQ3RSFQ83Y04ZIDJY8/G3B15N.jpg Photography & Disaster - Catastrophe and Calamity: Picturing British Disaster https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1695530939162-JO540HO6MNPK703TOXBW/G3B15J.jpg Photography & Disaster - Catastrophe and Calamity: Picturing British Disaster https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1695530982781-B7FFVCZ0497B4L9F9WL4/ID3227689017+%281%29.jpg Photography & Disaster - Catastrophe and Calamity: Picturing British Disaster https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1695530995397-VZ0C3QNU5P54376PFI86/IE1776867_FL1781694.jpg.jpg Photography & Disaster - Catastrophe and Calamity: Picturing British Disaster https://www.donnawestbrett.com/modernist-photobooks daily 0.75 2025-09-07 https://www.donnawestbrett.com/modernist-photobooks/a-strange-tissue-of-space-and-time-modernist-photobooks-and-reproductive-value monthly 0.5 2025-09-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/aea97fd4-092e-4f26-a944-8795de61b805/HERO_AUGUST_SANDER.jpg Modernist Photobooks - ‘A Strange Tissue of Space and Time:’ Modernist Photobooks and Reproductive Value - Make it stand out August Sander, Brick Layer, 1928 https://www.donnawestbrett.com/modernist-photobooks/modernist-photobooks-propaganda-amp-the-everyday-bodleian-lecture monthly 0.5 2024-07-08 https://www.donnawestbrett.com/modernist-photobooks/zx3vgb3chxdfts14f8tdzjb9qnaype monthly 0.5 2023-09-10 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/60ea9f67-127e-43ba-8a33-766c12738534/40887647573_e3744c16ff_o.jpg Modernist Photobooks - Interview: Researching Modernist Photobooks - Make it stand out Karl Blossfeldt’s Urformen der Kunst (1928) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1694305482645-Z5NBZ7T47CPUX4C534RE/Germaine+Krull+Metal.jpg Modernist Photobooks - Interview: Researching Modernist Photobooks https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1694305511386-LYQ4FS1B5KJPIKVSLL1F/IMG_8791.jpg Modernist Photobooks - Interview: Researching Modernist Photobooks https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1694305520127-V1CWG6D7F8H89R2BIN1R/Part+of+the+Bodleian+Libraries.jpg Modernist Photobooks - Interview: Researching Modernist Photobooks https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1694305529673-8ARWV5AS86FO94SFLELJ/The+Weston+Library.jpg Modernist Photobooks - Interview: Researching Modernist Photobooks https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1694305539228-TQKYWLU2OP4110ENAPOI/View+of+Oxford.JPG Modernist Photobooks - Interview: Researching Modernist Photobooks https://www.donnawestbrett.com/stasi-surveillance-photography daily 0.75 2025-05-24 https://www.donnawestbrett.com/stasi-surveillance-photography/policing-the-berlin-wall-the-photos-taken-by-the-stasis-hiddennbspcameras monthly 0.5 2024-04-02 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/6ed66033-6004-461b-a72c-458fa7612a35/Figure+4+copy.jpg Stasi Surveillance Photography - Policing the Berlin Wall: The Photos Taken By the Stasi’s Hidden Cameras - Files like this evidence of a successful tunnel escape of the Thomas Family, 7th of May, 1962, are now available to the public, including individuals subject to surveillance. Stasi Records Agency, Berlin, BStU MfS HA I 3278 S. 0181 Files like this evidence of a successful tunnel escape of the Thomas Family, 7th of May, 1962, are now available to the public, including individuals subject to surveillance. Stasi Records Agency, Berlin, BStU MfS HA I 3278 S. 0181 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1712024706386-C8DO4RFQW2KN8RBXORBY/MfS%2BHA_XVIII%2BFo%2B46%2BBild_0023.jpg Stasi Surveillance Photography - Policing the Berlin Wall: The Photos Taken By the Stasi’s Hidden Cameras - Observations with a hidden camera around 1975. BStU MfS HA XVIII Fo 46 Bl. 36 and 23. Courtesy of the BStU Stasi Records Agency Berlin. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1712024717276-XWQ3QJ36GUKQ60JE1OEF/MfS%2BHA_XVIII%2BFo%2B46%2BBild_0036.jpg Stasi Surveillance Photography - Policing the Berlin Wall: The Photos Taken By the Stasi’s Hidden Cameras https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1ab20c7c-61cf-46a7-ab37-45f05de48a6d/Figure+1.jpg Stasi Surveillance Photography - Policing the Berlin Wall: The Photos Taken By the Stasi’s Hidden Cameras - The escape harness the Holzapfel family used to cross the wall, photographed for a newspaper article on the escape. Anonymous: Refugees, GDR, Flight of the Family Holzapfel to the West, 1965 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1712025334112-K5TD7MARFG8GV9TUNY63/Fig+12+copy+square.jpg Stasi Surveillance Photography - Policing the Berlin Wall: The Photos Taken By the Stasi’s Hidden Cameras https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1712025590326-73R09Q0UIW42O709FR57/MfS%252BHA_II%252BFo%252B865%252BBild_0013%2Bcopy.jpg Stasi Surveillance Photography - Policing the Berlin Wall: The Photos Taken By the Stasi’s Hidden Cameras https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1712026392643-97WNDB1Z8TTU6SS62B5G/3.jpg Stasi Surveillance Photography - Policing the Berlin Wall: The Photos Taken By the Stasi’s Hidden Cameras https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/f07d4659-2d02-45c5-996e-db387fa6c23f/Figure+3+copy.jpg Stasi Surveillance Photography - Policing the Berlin Wall: The Photos Taken By the Stasi’s Hidden Cameras - Make it stand out Suspected defectors are photographed meeting friends in a car. Observation of a possible escape incident near a checkpoint in Berlin, August 26, 1962. BStU MfS HA I 13255, Bild 0123 8. Courtesy of the BStU Stasi Records Agency Berlin. https://www.donnawestbrett.com/newsblog daily 0.75 2025-09-07 https://www.donnawestbrett.com/newsblog/blog-post-title-one-t3d83-5hzkw monthly 0.5 2024-10-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/66f1dfd0-0535-465a-9bce-1461b30f9e5d/Modernist+Aesthetics+Cover.jpg News - New Anthology: Modernist Aesthetics in Transition How did German aesthetic values change during the Weimar Republic and after its immediate collapse at the beginning of the National Socialist period? Contrary to conventional narratives that depict modernist aesthetics as static, shaping principles of modern art and design, this volume argues for their complexity and ever-shifting nature. Illuminating the vital exchanges that occurred across multiple art forms during a period of unmatched cultural activity, this multi-disciplinary volume explores the cultural transition between Weimar- and National Socialist-era Germany and offers a fresh perspective on the fate of modernism during a time of censorship and social stigma. https://www.donnawestbrett.com/newsblog/awarded-sloan-fellow-in-photography monthly 0.5 2024-10-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/4957285c-cfbe-403e-84f5-9c4db19b4cfc/305300_original.jpg News - Sloan Fellow in Photography Germaine Krull, Métal (Metal). Paris: Librairie des Arts Décoratifs, 1928. https://www.donnawestbrett.com/books daily 0.75 2025-09-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1627707392361-36WI2E14ZJE0J1N4YWWA/30013003.jpg Books https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1627627920141-YJ6P7ODP7BYFX2CQSEHF/PI_28-A-0026+copy.jpg Books https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/c5842910-1d0e-4562-8cbc-ac95e4638b0f/Retoucherin+copy.jpg Books https://www.donnawestbrett.com/home daily 1.0 2025-11-09 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/34135c71-563c-446e-a5cf-b196e3152bdf/Donna_EDIT+copy.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1729299019589-A1XY212YVTCCMBCD72E3/9781350442528.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1627706944550-QIHQSCLUKPESANJCAFZV/9780815374299_cover+image+only.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/335870ef-ef8e-43ac-a955-b9bb9cc711b0/61lF%2B04K%2B2L.jpg https://www.donnawestbrett.com/research-projects daily 0.75 2024-10-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1632957049972-5IX4MLDYZE0X8F1876IV/Fig+12+copy+square.jpg Research Projects https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/16f82811-fef0-4f1f-a95c-b20c05dd02ac/305300_original.jpg Research Projects https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/ee26284f-f3d4-4e47-955c-d379148ce1a6/699694-1501667877.jpg Research Projects https://www.donnawestbrett.com/about1 daily 0.75 2025-11-09 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/843b6eff-470b-4332-8be5-8548d1e4120d/Donna_EDIT+copy.jpg https://www.donnawestbrett.com/contact-me daily 0.75 2024-10-19 https://www.donnawestbrett.com/bookchapters daily 0.75 2025-11-09 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1627714939389-LUN147VF67XCJ1QFWSZF/GEH.jpg Book Chapters https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1627715150226-TS46J6742JPN8PTHB2XN/Fig+8+copy+2.jpg Book Chapters https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1627715393540-X2NI5DGS5VLW1OVZ0KR6/2630145.JPG Book Chapters https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1627715764997-CB9WIR8LF329ELHQMX2Y/Figure+2.1+copy.jpg Book Chapters https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1627794478665-2X4BV6YHRWEMXVUTJNIL/Fig+3.jpg Book Chapters https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1627794924859-3AWQ789TQCJ3U7WGYMGC/villa-1-formerly-lake-alice-hospital-wanganui-2004-1200x.jpg Book Chapters https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1627795010385-G1H2QKFEYW8PVF4S0Q2P/16.2005%23%23MM.jpg Book Chapters https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1627789006994-R9XDDG2DRDOYE1ZCKXQF/Messmer.jpg Book Chapters https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1627795279951-3MYHV8QLMGWY5BUTKQ9V/Fig+2+DVH+60+Bild-GR35-10-016.jpg Book Chapters https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/8377c809-be48-419a-8bde-ba3096cc6e10/ST1998.0062_01_H02-Large-TIFF+detail+copy.jpeg Book Chapters https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/b45ccf58-146b-4de0-b2cd-d05fef8bc685/Fig+3.6+copy.jpg Book Chapters https://www.donnawestbrett.com/journal-articles daily 0.75 2025-11-09 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1627711126650-6Z1BPFEIURGP4FRGTAA0/Fig2+copy.jpg Journal Articles https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/69a4a68f-0812-4833-9d57-a4f72426ae5b/MfS%2BHA_II%2BFo%2B865%2BBild_0007%2Bmast+copy.jpg Journal Articles https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1627717169457-19X0JNLGD0AULFM1JPX0/Fig+3+copy.jpg Journal Articles https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1627717456472-JRFFDH19WJSVKKITPHHE/L2010.36__MM.jpg Journal Articles https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1627795624914-W0P4BU0OHPZQBKJ91FVS/The+Uncanny+Return+Documenting+Place+in+Post+war+German+Photography.jpg Journal Articles https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1627796021390-ZVBME5DSWENPS1OL3TUY/Untitled+copy.jpg Journal Articles https://www.donnawestbrett.com/conference-papers daily 0.75 2025-11-09 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1627711126650-6Z1BPFEIURGP4FRGTAA0/Fig2+copy.jpg Conference Papers https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1627711368286-H6YM8YFYQIYNEQFM8C9U/HNE8A8+2.jpg Conference Papers https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/69a4a68f-0812-4833-9d57-a4f72426ae5b/MfS%2BHA_II%2BFo%2B865%2BBild_0007%2Bmast+copy.jpg Conference Papers https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1627712291759-91NRPR8P49PRCUGHCI4D/MfS+HA_I+Fo+1429+Bild_0007+mast.jpg Conference Papers https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1627788839469-WFMTMRCNE2OO30FJZW5B/25.7+Thomas+Struth%2C+Hermannsgarten%2C+Weissenfels%2C+1991.jpg Conference Papers https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1627789006994-R9XDDG2DRDOYE1ZCKXQF/Messmer.jpg Conference Papers https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1627789163610-ZR8TXFMNW5FP33KEE2XE/Picture+1.jpg Conference Papers https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1627789289101-RGUHTCEXJTW0EM0PMRCL/walker-evans-workers-loading-neon-_damaged_-sign-into-truck-west-eleventh-street-new-york-city-1928-1930.jpg Conference Papers https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1627800208639-TKXGE0SGVEEGV7GC2S1N/16July_Sept11_800x600.jpeg Conference Papers https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1632957834857-EFDLCLH794VZ2AX7IL4M/Fig+2.jpg Conference Papers https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1640495337350-L827SCXL51NK922D1AZ4/699692-1501667865.jpg Conference Papers https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/ee26284f-f3d4-4e47-955c-d379148ce1a6/699694-1501667877.jpg Conference Papers https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/818b4805-81e1-4889-b2ef-fa5db3a8c64e/Brett+Fig3.jpg Conference Papers https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/8607d9a2-018a-482c-b181-12805be82278/Menner+Spread+2+copy.jpeg Conference Papers https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/eab4460f-0132-4b00-b189-d6384e26c153/2BW2BR1.jpg Conference Papers https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/aea97fd4-092e-4f26-a944-8795de61b805/HERO_AUGUST_SANDER.jpg Conference Papers https://www.donnawestbrett.com/news daily 0.75 2024-07-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1627706944550-QIHQSCLUKPESANJCAFZV/9780815374299_cover+image+only.jpg News https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1627715764997-CB9WIR8LF329ELHQMX2Y/Figure+2.1+copy.jpg News https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1627709881824-G6HE62QIYHIUCXDPMT1J/MfS%2BHA_II%2BFo%2B865%2BBild_0013+copy.jpg News https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1627715393540-X2NI5DGS5VLW1OVZ0KR6/2630145.JPG News https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/16f82811-fef0-4f1f-a95c-b20c05dd02ac/305300_original.jpg News https://www.donnawestbrett.com/art-writing daily 0.75 2025-07-27 https://www.donnawestbrett.com/art-writing/coen-young-2020 monthly 0.5 2025-07-27 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/02473429-fcd0-47bb-9dd9-bb355ff28982/25-06-27_CY_WebRes_28-scaled.jpeg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/42082912-45f0-4537-8161-0f27fdfe4407/2025-2020_WebRes_05-1-scaled+%281%29.jpeg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/bc65349a-72e7-49bb-bb47-20ab7cddb90f/25-06-27_CY_WebRes_19-scaled.jpeg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/d97562af-a94a-439d-a7cd-5de5b91d7728/25-06-27_CY_WebRes_26-scaled+%281%29.jpeg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/9de5f46b-d062-42f7-99c8-01a8020590e6/25-06-27_CY_WebRes_25-scaled.jpeg https://www.donnawestbrett.com/art-writing/13 monthly 0.5 2021-08-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1627778223155-53BJB75MZTQUH6UOBOC2/58694125_2182078815208379_12310200904056832_o.jpg Art Writing - EUGENIA RASKOPOULOS: MY BODY AGAINST YOUR BODY - EUGENIA RASKOPOULOS: MY BODY AGAINST YOUR BODY I4-25 May 2019, Kronenberg Mais Wright, Sydney. I imagined that I was awake, while still drowsing, and I enacted to myself with tenuous shadow-shapes on the screen of my slumber the various scenes of which it deprived me but at which I had the illusion of looking on. Marcel Proust[1] At the Paris Annual Salon of 1847, Auguste Clésinger’s Woman Bitten by a Snake, caused quite a stir, scandalising the public and critics. The marble sculpture depicted a female nude writhing in pain from a snake bite, the culprit suggestively winding its way around her wrist.[2] It was not the lascivious snake that created the scandal, nor the hint of intimated ecstasy, but rather the dimpled thigh of the curvaceous figure apparently moulded directly from the model Apollonie Sabatier. So real was the effect that Delacroix referred to it as a sculpted daguerreotype, intimating its photographic likeness and hence its indexical qualities.[3] The critic Théophile Gautier went so far as to claim that the body was not a sculpture but rather a genuine body, asserting that one can almost make out blood-filled veins under the marble surface.[4] Gautier’s suggested corporeal qualities of marble brings us to the recent photographic work of Eugenia Raskopoulos. Like Clésinger, these images render not the body itself but its indexical representation, alluded to here in the surface of the marble, the fleeting shadows of corporeal form, and traces of the hand in written form. The history of art is littered with representations of the human body hewn from marble, a large proportion being of the female form inspired from myths and legends. Raskopoulos draws on these art historical references to photographically capture the projected bodily form and its indexical trace as shadows cast across the marble surface. Any suggestion of a body is made abstract, the mutability of the shadow stimulating a continuous sense of motion. Indeed, the shadows appear as if they are in-between, fragmented, and temporal. This sense of in-between-ness is also present in the largely indecipherable text translated from English and scrawled onto the marble with the wax of red lipstick. The initial layer of text is written in Czech—the first language Raskopoulos heard as a child, the second layer is Greek—her mother tongue, and the third is in English—each layer forming and un-forming both meaning and memories. The fragments of individual letters merge and collide with a sense of quiet violence making nonsensical transformations that the viewer attempts to visually penetrate, looking into and through the multiple layers in a failed attempt to decipher the indecipherable. While the words are seen here in written form, sound and language are also suggested in the use of lipstick as a writing implement, the repetitive forms producing a stutter or shudder across the image surface like an echo in time. Each photograph hosts different words that poetically and nonsensically relate to the body in a form of automatic writing, positioned both physically and metaphysically in an oblique manner to the shadows. Furthermore, traces of previous image-making efforts become apparent in the remnants of lipstick colour that flow into the rivers of marble-veins forming stains reminiscent of blood. The space of the stain is mimetic as it inscribes the body into the picture as a doubling, like sunspots on the inside of your eyelids, it is suggestive of something unseen.[5] The mimetic and mnemonic qualities of the stain also resonate in the shadows as an indicator of something that lies outside the picture frame, it both doubles and disrupts. The “black bodiless stain” recalls an artistic lineage of the shadow in modernist art epitomised in the work of Brancusi, Man Ray, Moholy-Nagy, Duchamp and others. As Man Ray stressed, “the shadow is as important as the real thing,” its presence indicating an absence of the casting object, in this case the artist’s body.[6] As Victor Stoichita also alludes, the cast shadow gains autonomy from the object that causes it, entering the realm of ambiguity it shifts from causality to resemblance.[7] Forever the other to the body, a shadow is both attached and detached, fixed and unfixed in its mutability, its temporality, and in its seductive illusory qualities. It is no wonder that the shadow has attracted artists such as the Surrealists, writers from Plato to Proust, and film directors such as Fritz Lang or Hitchcock who draw on its unconscious and illusive potential. The shadow’s otherness resonates across Raskopoulos’ extensive artistic practice, which along with the use of language renders these works as strange, alien, and other. The sense of in-between-ness is a position of marginality, embraced by Raskopoulos as a performative and transformational act that both makes and unmakes identity. As ‘self-portraits’ these works challenge our understanding of the photographic record and its performative qualities in rendering the physical form across time and space. Time, as manifested here, appears in different temporalities. First, is the time of the shadow, cast across the marble as a performative fleeting gesture, the remnants of the figural stain rendered only in the image. Second is the multiple layers of text, handwritten in lipstick over and over again. This performative gesture connects the body in motion with the surface of the onyx marble in a different temporal mode, its stain forever marking and penetrating the surface. Third, the marble itself with its palimpsest of the written form marking one temporality while its metamorphic graph marks geological time. The tension between temporalities creates a disquieting and unsettling sense of being out of time, of a plurality that stretches the moment in an uneasy way. This discontinuous sense of time and space is manifested also in the textual neon works. Drawing on the mutability of language Raskopoulos draws on the surrealist sensibility of wordplay that transforms meaning. Being is Plural is both a nod to Jean-Luc Nancy and the recognition of multiple sets of individual and collective states of meaning and existence. For example, one can be Australian and Greek, here and not here, an individual or member of a group, the self and also the other. This oblique wordplay is also present in Colour Only Comes in One Blood, as the reworking of a vernacular phrase manipulates meaning to reference the body and racialised difference. The handwritten phrases, that are doubled as the colour bleeds into the background, also denote bodily performativity through the written text. The neon works have their own sense of motion and temporality, one driven by electric energy that pulses through the letters bringing them to vivid life. Intimate in their physicality and visceral sense of touch these works share a bodily, personal and sexual sense of being that is itself mutable, temporal and discontinuous. They elicit the phantom shapes of Plato’s cave or Dante’s Purgatorio in which a shadow approaches the poet to affectionately embrace him and yet the poet clasps at nothing.[8] The “shadow of the flesh” is here revealed to be an indispensable quality of the body, one that cannot be grasped. While “a body doesn’t breach its shadow,” as Hollier put it, both Breton and Dante come to realise that it is the flesh that casts a shadow as both a sign, and as a potential autonomous object, that can be rendered in the photographic image.[9] Both the shadow and language of the flesh is made palpable in Raskopoulos’ works as a visceral index of the body made visible in its photographic rendition. [1] Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, The Guermantes Way, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff (London, Wordsworth, 2006). [2] Auguste Clésinger, Femme piquée par un serpent, 1847, marble sculpture, Musée d'Orsay. [3] Eugene Delacroix, Journal, 7 May 1847. [4] Theophile Gautier, “Femme piquée,” La Presse, 10 April 1847. [5] See George Baker, “The Space of the Stain,” Grey Room 5 (Autumn, 2001): 5–37. [6] Victor I. Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow, trans. Anne-Marie Glasheen (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), 194. [7] Denis Hollier, “Surrealist Precipitates: Shadows Don't Cast Shadows,” trans. Rosalind Krauss, October 69 (1994): 110–132. [8] Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow, 45. [9] Hollier, “Surrealist Precipitates.” https://www.donnawestbrett.com/art-writing/14 monthly 0.5 2023-11-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1627774993751-TMIGKDT4AS9R6EEF4QYC/LRG%2Bcover.jpg Art Writing - LYNNE ROBERTS-GOODWIN: BEYOND THIS POINT - LYNNE ROBERTS-GOODWIN: BEYOND THIS POINT @ Kronenberg Mais Wright, October 2020 In the 1780s, the Lucchese daredevil balloonist Vincenzo Lunardi, traversed the skies over the British Isles, Italy, Spain and Portugal, famously accompanied on one journey by a pigeon, cat and dog. Renowned for his antics as a pioneering aeronaut, he was equally infamous for many navigational disasters in his hydrogen flying machine. Intrigued by Lunardi’s aeronautical ventures, Lynne Roberts-Goodwin took to the “unknown realm of the atmosphere” in an air balloon to follow sections of Lunardi’s flights along the latitude of 37° North.[1] Commencing in Lunardi’s Italian birthplace of Lucca, Roberts-Goodwin travelled along various historical routes to the Convent of the Friars Minor Capuchin, in Sintra Portugal, the site of Lunardi’s demise in 1806. A vertical notion of airspace, particularly in terms of navigational failures, has long occupied Roberts-Goodwin in her renditions of geopolitically contested sites across the globe. BEYOND THIS POINT extends this research with navigational satellite images, photographs, and traces of topographical terrain as a way to reflect on spatial ambiguity, navigational complexity, and the vertical notion of aerial terrain. Embracing multiple levels of vertical space from the ground to the atmosphere the photographic series ‘everything remains’ reveals the tension between orientation and disorientation, between knowing one’s location and being lost to the spatial temporalities of flight. The diaphanous lungs of the air balloons engulf the surface of ‘everything remains’ as if in the act of inhaling and exhaling, their corpulent volume billowing in the effort to soar. Indeed, the red fabric of one balloon seems almost volatile in its capacious hold on space with its luminous surface and volume, bearing a striking contrast to the sensual folds and creases in the depth of the image. A disorienting sense of vertigo pervades the senses here as visual perception slips in and out of register. Airspace over cities is increasingly capitalised and regulated making an aeronautical endeavour over cities such as Rome impossible to navigate. So, in addition to her own adventurous air journeys, Roberts-Goodwin worked with a German company to obtain satellite images over specific locations along the path Vincenzo took as a failed aeronaut. These black-and-white images of ‘the north parallel’, in both positive and negative, trace the flow of air across the atmosphere, the cloud formations denoting a sense of anywhere and nowhere. These elusive images, captured by a machine situated in space, are nevertheless renditions of the earth and the air above from a view none of us will physically see. Such is the nature of scientific imagery that is used to measure our planet, weather systems, land erosion, and global conflict. And yet, these images are strangely corporeal in the visualisation of the earth’s lungs and the physical surface of its global form; they seem both familiar and strange. Our capacity to interpret such images highlights Jonathan Crary’s claim that the sudden emergence of subjective vision in the nineteenth century “grounded the truth of vision in the density and materiality of the body.”[2] One of the consequences of this shift, as Crary puts it, is that vision “became dependent on the contingent physiological makeup of the observer, thus rendering vision faulty, unreliable, and even, it was argued, arbitrary.” Such is the nature of vision, as is the nature of navigation, subject to both science and human frailty. The concept of seeing from a distance—from either a celestial or terrestrial perspective—is continued in two further bodies of work. In ‘37 Parallel North’ we encounter the sublime vision of mountains of salt shimmering under the warm blue tones of an open sky. Captured at a distance, such industrialised salt evaporation ponds have been an inextricable part of the global terrain for centuries, and this site occupies a tectonic depression fed by ground and rainwater. The salt here shimmers from the sun’s reflective rays as it highlights the surface and seems to hold the flowing traces of the waters within its molecules. In one image, the ebb and flow of the salt landscape, forms waves of sumptuous creases and folds across its form mnemonically referencing the billowing qualities of the air balloon’s fabric. Roberts-Goodwin has grounded these salt mountains quite literally in the photographs, the horizon line pressed into the edge of the picture field compressing our view and enhancing the claustrophobic tension between the land and the sky. Similarly, in Terrain seen here in both photographic and sculptural form, the terrestrial surroundings of the salt lake have been mapped and rendered in multiple dimensions. Optical perception is put under pressure in these renditions of a site which is both somewhere and nowhere, and where notions of distance, near and far are contested. In BEYOND THIS POINT Roberts-Goodwin takes us on a perceptual journey to hidden topographies that are subject to being contested, industrialised, regulated, and capitalised. By following the route taken by Lunardi in the 1700s Roberts-Goodwin reveals glimpses of celestial, geographical and terrestrial views that are subject to the slow and fast time of geological and geo-political shifts. Donna West Brett, Sydney. [1] Inaugural Affiliated Mordant Family Artist-in-Residence Fellowship from the Australia Council for the Arts. [2] Jonathan Crary, “Unbinding Vision,” October 68 (1994): 21–44. https://www.donnawestbrett.com/art-writing/12 monthly 0.5 2021-08-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1627779588885-DR2SZ9B5N0QOI5CBTHXF/Kurt+Sorensen_Widows+Creek+%234_2010.jpg Art Writing - UNCONSCIOUS PLACES: PHOTOGRAPHY & HISTORY - UNCONSCIOUS PLACES: PHOTOGRAPHY & HISTORY Curated for GCS Gallery, Sydney 2018. Artists: Jane Brown, Richard Glover, Lynne Roberts-Goodwin and Kurt Sorensen. In 1976, the German photographer Thomas Struth, commenced a series of photographs of the city of Düsseldorf, where he studied art under the renowned artists Gerhard Richter, and Bernd and Hilla Becher. In taking photographs of rather ordinary streets in an unremarkable fashion, Struth constructed a typological map of the urban fabric. This still ongoing series, in which he captures quintessential views of cities around the world, reflects an interest in the ways in which places bear the marks of history, or what he refers to as the unconscious of the city. Unconscious Places: Photography and History takes Struth’s concept as a touchstone for considering the ways in which photography can capture traces of events that occurred at a location before the photograph was taken. For Struth, this means that photographs can reveal the unconscious nature of place and its past. The exhibition features four contemporary Australian photographers, Jane Brown, Richard Glover, Lynne Roberts-Goodwin, and Kurt Sorensen, whose work engages with themes of place and location such as the urban-scape, or remote landscapes and environments in Australia, Japan, and the Middle East. The locations captured in these enigmatic photographs evoke narratives of belonging, loss, dislocation, and renewal. In keeping with a specific aesthetic affect used predominately by contemporary photographers of place, human presence is largely evacuated from the photographs. It is the absence of people that complicate these images and renders them strange. The artists presented in this exhibition also use the photographic series format as a narrative tool, constructing connections between singular images that take us on a journey through history and time, drawing us into the unconscious nature of place. Jane Brown’s handprinted and intimate photographic series Black Ships is loaded with symbolic meaning, the title referencing the pitch-black Portuguese ships and western sea-faring trade vessels that travelled to Japan from the sixteenth-century, which the Japanese referred to as kurofune. After the rebellion in 1639, the trade route was closed, and Japan instigated a period of isolationist policy called the Sakoku. The opening up of Japan to the west was led by Americans in the early 1850s and it was at this point that the term kurofune became synonymous with the ending of Japan’s trade isolation. The now mythologised arrival of the kurofune struck fear into the local population of Edo, who created artistic renditions of the steamships in ink drawings and paintings, some of which were published in the news broadsheets. In many ways Black Ships epitomises the duality of Japan, as it embraced modernist aesthetics and contemporary pop culture, whilst keeping an eye to the past and its traditions. Nearly one hundred years after the arrival of the kurofune, in the midst of a world war, Japan’s cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima were largely vaporised by atomic bombs in August 1945. The tragedies of the twentieth century are recalled in several photographs that picture the cities’ memorials and urban renewal projects that embrace the ruins alongside contemporary structures. The symbolic references to restoration and repair are also seen in exquisite photographs of trees and stumps that are bandaged in white cloth, as if healing past wounds, becoming corporeal relics that recall the damaged landscape, and damaged bodies. The transient nature of life and time is also embodied in the richly symbolic cherry blossoms that reference mortality and reincarnation, popularised by kamikaze pilots who painted the flower on the side of their planes. In one photograph that features a view of the Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima, twisted and gnarled black pines remind us of the power of warfare, death and renewal. Several trees in the area survived the bombing and in the following spring locals saw the recovering buds as a sign of survival and peace. These trees, collectively referred to as Hibakujumoku meaning survivor tree include eucalypts, oleander, camellia, and willows. The Chinese Parasol trees that survived at the epi-centre have been renamed the phoenix trees, rising from the ashes they now have descendants around the world. This sense of transience and of new life is palpable in Brown’s series with the peaceful scenes of Miyajima and Kyoto’s pavilions, parks and natural reserves, or of the Buddhist cemetery forming a hyphen or pause for contemplation, reflection, and memorial. Themes of troubled memories and the past are further suggested in a quiet yet optimistic photograph of tree roots, Untitled (after Resnais), that invokes the 1959 film Hiroshima mon amour directed by Alain Resnais. As if in conversation with Brown’s photographic series, Resnais’ unconventional narrative techniques, along with Marguerite Duras’ film-script, draw the past into the present through notions of memory and forgetfulness, destruction and regeneration. Like Struth’s uncanny images, Richard Glover’s rendering of the urban environment in his panoramic views seem to tap into the unconscious of the city as a site of conflict between the past, the present and the future. Glover’s Paradise series picture the tension between the urban fabric’s past and its present under constant stages of renewal rendering the scenes alienating and strange. The disconcerting and melancholic views of Ultimo, an urban centre in inner Sydney, engage with the peculiarity of local sites whose contested and multiple histories continue to press up against urban regeneration. This inherent sense of temporal tension is echoed in the name of the suburb itself, which is derived from Latin. As the legend goes, Ultimo was originally the estate of Sir John Harris, so named for a clerical error in a legal case, where Harris’ offence was listed as ‘ultimo’ (last month) instead of ‘instant’ meaning the current month.[1] The horizontal framing of the scenes in Paradise becomes a visual device that compresses our view, the narrow focus draws our attention to the weight of the sky and the mass of architectural structures. This affect is unsettling for example, in Millers Point, Sydney, where an intrinsic element of suburbia—the wooden fence—cuts through the image like a wound, separating the footpath from the tops of houses that poke up above the newly painted structure. The roughly applied paint nevertheless highlights the scrappy wooden sign with hand-painted letters, “DO NOT PARK HERE (opposite garage),” which draws our eyes to the discarded paint container and the empty beer bottle below. This strange seeing is also evident in Glover’s photograph of a factory building in Waterloo, where the geometry of the structure is repeated by the erection of temporary fencing, with the hint of a menacing crane hovering in the distance. The photograph’s minimal tonal range enhances the melancholic hue of this vista, and as in many of the images in this series, the framing of the scene adds a claustrophobic weight. The oppressive tone in these images butts up against a pragmatic optimism for a future in which nature and culture intertwine, as can be seen in the Bulwarra Road photograph where a lone tree persists in its claim for space. In another, an elevated roadway is shown from an oft-overlooked viewpoint from underneath the pervasive concrete structure. Poking out from under the weight of progress, a row of saplings is anchored to the site determined in their collective struggle for air and light. While the history of many of these places is being erased and rewritten, these photographs stand as a record of these sites in a moment of transition, with their “capricious aesthetic uniquely aligned with their transitional state,” as Glover puts it. One can see Paradise then as a trace of the present becoming the past; and as picturing the tension between personal stories of people who lived and worked in these areas with those whose aspirational dreams will see new stories unfold. The expansive series by Lynne Roberts-Goodwin, #navigational failure, brings us to the Middle East. Contrasting the urban environment and contested occupied sites of the West Bank with unspecified aerial photographs taken from an air balloon over Jordan and Turkey, these works present an ongoing theme in Roberts-Goodwin’s work, exploring the tensions borne out between geopolitically contested locations. In keeping with her interest in trade routes, colonisation, migration and cultural displacement, these photographs traverse geopolitically contested locations and borders, offering two vantage points, aerial and oblique, that contrast human scale with a larger sense of space and history. These sets of contrasting views are presented as diptychs, or what Roberts-Goodwin refers to as geographical pairings; each including an aerial view of remote landscapes and an eye-level view into the dense urban fabric of the West Bank. Two diptychs present aerial views over Wadi Arabah, a large tract of land that is the extension of the Great Rift Valley, which runs between Israel and Jordan. In one pairing, located in the centre of the image, is an almost indiscernible campsite of a nomadic clan with a large tent, a utility truck, animals, and washing on a line; all evidence of inhabitation and everyday life. Surrounded by a seemingly endless range of emptiness, this small gathering appears to hover between space and time in this ancient location. In the accompanying image, a settlement at the West Bank stands in stark contrast with its permanent structures stacked up the hill, visually filling the composition. The contested site of the West Bank is shown here in slumber. Evidence of inhabitation is marked throughout the scene, such as automobiles, aerial-dishes for receiving television and radio signals, water-tanks, mattresses and blankets placed in the sun for airing, carefully manicured pot plants, and washing on the line. In another diptych similar viewpoints again reveal traces of human activity. On the left an electrical tower, wires, and dirt roads form patterns against the stretch of dirt and scrub. On the right the suburban scene is punctuated by everyday life, most strikingly the coloured sheets drying on a balcony, and nearby a set of Winnie-the-Pooh children’s sheets are highlighted against the blandness of the houses. There is something painfully poignant in these visual counterpoints of emptiness and fullness, the past and the present, forming optic, social, political, and historical tensions. The remaining two diptychs contrast the West Bank with the Göreme Valley, a national park and world heritage area near Cappadocia. The spectacular landscape has been sculpted by time, with the erosion of rock formations creating abstract patterns, which seen from the air become disorienting. Rock-hewn sanctuaries have been forged into this ancient location which hosts examples of Byzantine art and remains of habitation dating back to the fourth century. The contrast between this ancient terrain and traces of humanity with present-day West Bank, forms a historical rupture drawing us inevitably to notions of displacement and a sense of loss, compounded by a failure to navigate and orient ourselves as we shift our focus across space and an endless sense of time. Kurt Sorensen’s haunting series Widow’s Creek traces the history of a singular event reported in the Sydney Morning Herald on the 8th June 1915 as A Bush Tragedy. The article reports the tragic and mysterious shooting three days prior of Samuel William Dainer, a 45-year-old farmer who lived with his wife and three children not far from the town of Jindabyne. On a Saturday afternoon Dainer delivered a load of wood to his mother who lived at Malory’s Hut about 3 miles away. Dainer was reportedly shot in the back and died a few yards from the house in the dark of night.[2] Some two months later in the Government Gazette, the coroner deduced that the mortal wound was inflicted “by some person to me unknown, but whether such wound was inflicted maliciously and feloniously or accidentally, the evidence adduced does not enable me to say."[3] A reward of one-hundred pounds was offered for information leading to a conviction and a generous pardon for any accomplice. Sorensen’s eerily coloured photographs do not respond to this unfortunate event in any literal or illustrative way, but rather as an evocation, by rendering feeling and a sense of foreboding. Using an analogue camera and available light, Sorensen searches for locations of tragic or traumatic events in regional Australia presenting a social and historical visualisation of the landscape through the lens of colonisation. These narratives form the basis for photographic representations of unseen and overlooked histories, or what are essentially personal tragedies. Erased from memory over generations and of little importance to historical accounts, these moments fold into time, away from public scrutiny and interest. The landscape in Widow’s Creek fills the visual frame with anticipation with the location itself seemingly unmoored from history itself, much like the story of the doomed farmer. Rolling paddocks meet acid skies, and skeletal tree branches reach into the darkness, emphasised by the touch of moonlight that punctuates the inky depths of night. Cultural myths of loss and of being lost pervade our collective unconscious, in film, music, and novels, serving as a constant reminder of the dangers inherent in the bush. The original picturesque village of Jindabyne, settled in the 1840s, is now under water with its memories soaked in the waters of the hydro-electric Snowy Mountain Scheme in the mid-twentieth century. So too are the stories of those lost to the mountains erased from public memory, swathed in the veils of darkness such as the remnants and traces of this local murder. In a particularly elusive photograph, a lone tree stands in the grassed paddock, its branches reaching into the acrid night as if testimony to the lost soul of Dainer, whose remains like many others of the original town were relocated to the new Jindabyne in the late 1950s. Sorensen’s renditions of these expansive landscapes are strangely intimate, our view framed by the moody skies and oddly inviting land that nevertheless fills us with trepidation and ambiguity. Through these hauntingly uncanny photographs that are steeped in suggestive modes of melancholy, apprehension, and a foreboding fear of darkness, we experience an uncertain beauty. Donna West Brett, University of Sydney. Curated for GCS Gallery, Sydney 2018 [1] See Frances Pollen, The Book of Sydney Suburbs, (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1990), 257. [2] Sydney Morning Herald, 8 June 1915. [3] George Black, “Notice £100 Reward,” [954] Chief Secretary’s Office. Government Gazette of the State of New South Wales, Wednesday 18 August 1915 [Issue No.149], 4847. IMAGES: Richard Glover, Millers Point, Sydney, 2016-2017, Ultrachrome inks on Hahnemühle Photorag, 100 x 53cm, Image # SP21-034 AND Kurt Sorenson, Widows Creek 1910 # 4 2010. Installation Images: Richard Glover. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/659f12fb-3d17-4c17-8845-94b62b53ad28/1194-001_high-res.jpg Art Writing - UNCONSCIOUS PLACES: PHOTOGRAPHY & HISTORY https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/4f9ac18e-17e7-43cc-8096-95dff0bcde2d/1194-002_high-res.jpg Art Writing - UNCONSCIOUS PLACES: PHOTOGRAPHY & HISTORY https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/b8f0eeaf-bf24-430e-8880-00b5108ab9a0/1194-003_high-res.jpg Art Writing - UNCONSCIOUS PLACES: PHOTOGRAPHY & HISTORY https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/77c7e5fa-28ab-4579-a585-5d7adc9e4b39/1194-004_high-res.jpg Art Writing - UNCONSCIOUS PLACES: PHOTOGRAPHY & HISTORY https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1b91d54d-87f8-4ceb-8093-a8c5c31330d8/1194-006_high-res.jpg Art Writing - UNCONSCIOUS PLACES: PHOTOGRAPHY & HISTORY https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/eece748d-c78c-430c-b78d-59343352f136/1194-010_high-res.jpg Art Writing - UNCONSCIOUS PLACES: PHOTOGRAPHY & HISTORY https://www.donnawestbrett.com/art-writing/11 monthly 0.5 2021-08-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1627781067872-6I4KJXG5UGCLRZ8WS6AS/LSG03192616.jpg Art Writing - DAVID SERISIER: WHITE DOGS, HOARFROST, SILVER + GOLD - DAVID SERISIER: WHITE DOGS, HOARFROST, SILVER + GOLD Bathurst Art Gallery, curated by Sarah Gurich, 2019. The Square is not an image, just as a switch or a socket is not yet an electric current. Kazimir Malevich[1] In The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings ‘0.10’ (Zero-Ten) presented in Petrograd in 1915, the Suprematist Kazimir Malevich hung his painting titled Black Square high in the corner of the room, in the place of traditional religious icons commonly seen in Russian homes.[2] With this single act, Malevich took painting beyond the realm of mere representation to something more akin to sensation, perception or indeed experience, embracing “zero” as the essential core of painting, denoting both an end and a beginning.[3] The concept of zero, as embraced by the Suprematists, does not equate to nothing but rather it is something that is definable and undefinable, illusive, and slippery. It denotes a beginning but also alludes to infinity, to a sensation of openness and an expanded sense of space much like the endless stars in the night sky. As a non-representational painter, David Serisier naturally looks to Malevich—as a founding artist of the modernist monochrome—in his renditions of a painterly language that can be thought of as a process that reduces the painting to itself as a “unique contrast of feeling [Stimmung] in colour,” as Wilhelm Wundt puts it.[4] Sensation, perception and experience are words that emerge in conversation with Serisier about his work for this exhibition and its intimate links with place; in particular his current surroundings in the vicinity of Orange, a large rural town in New South Wales. In George Orwell’s 1939 novel, Coming Up for Air, the main character George Bowling returns to the town of his childhood only to find that much has changed. It is only over time that the place of his past becomes apparent through the present, a sensation that Serisier relates to in his return to the town of Orange, where generations of his family have made their mark. The concept of return permeates both our conversation and the work—a return to place, a return to memories, a return to paints that have waited for a decade, and a return to colours long lost in his oeuvre. In preparing this new body of work Serisier found a new “impulse to use some paint which I hadn’t used for years,” and in so doing he made a new claim for the paint.[5] As he started using some of these old paints along with the new he came to realise that the changing tones in the whites were connected to different times of the day in the studio, the works became “paintings of perception and very much about place.” This place called Summer Hill, just outside the town of Orange where he lives with his wife Gillian and their two large white dogs, Milo and Borgia, imbues these new works with a particularity of place that adds something nuanced, unknown and mysterious. As Serisier himself notes, the works are an action and a reaction to the location, an accumulation of experiences over the last twelve months that formed an impulse to make works using colours that connect to the past and to the present, to memory, and to this particular environment. These experiences are filtered through memory, through connections with friends, family, places and events; they are moments glimpsed from the corner of one’s eye. For Serisier’s painting practice, this means at times using colours that reference or recall favourite movies, walking, the sky, swimming in the sea, the clouds, light as it reflects off a surface, or the dogs; each experience being both tangible and intangible. For example, the return to using silver is intimately connected to winters in Summer Hill when the hoarfrost settles on the old willow trees producing an icy-cold white, silvery colour. It seemed immediately appropriate for Serisier to start to use this type of non-colour on his canvases.[6] The combination of what he refers to as stable white and unstable silver creates a tension, a contradiction that makes sense given the natural events occurring just outside the studio, framed by the windows. Nature here is dramatic. In winter, the landscape is cloaked in the whites and silver of hoarfrost, of snow, of vivid greens, highlighted by hovering mists and moody skies. The gentler seasons of blossom and falling leaves are underscored by blistering hot summer days when the light is harsh and the greens of the trees are tempered by the weight of the heat; the view punctuated by vividly bright splashes of irises, and the golden hues of the setting sun. Gold The gold paintings in this exhibition are puzzling entities; ephemeral, reflective surfaces that seem to suck the light in and spit it back out.[7] The changing ambient light, much like the setting sun, produces a constant visual mutation, which along with the paint’s intrinsic qualities of the known and unknown, hold the works in scopic suspension. In the studio, the raking light accentuates the luscious brushwork, and the colours seemingly throb back and forth through the many layers of paint. In their reduced form, the expansive fields of colour bring the works in a self-referential loop to the very medium of paint and its endless possibilities. To say that there are five gold paintings in this exhibition is to imply some kind of likeness, a series, a cohesive whole, and while in a way this is true, it is also the opposite. This is typical of Serisier’s work. It is both one thing and another; the moment you think you have a grasp on what you are seeing or feeling—it evolves, disappears, reappears, and undulates. The gold paintings cohere in their connection to a format based on archetypal examples of painting structures, for example the square monochrome, which adheres to a painting convention. In this way, they imply a system of sorts that sets up a process of variation in which they work as both isolated canvases and as a series, an effect common across the paintings in this exhibition. But while Serisier may have an elusive hold on a defining process—what he refers to as intention—much is determined by chance, such as the source of the paint, the differing batches, the abnormalities of paint drying, the brushwork, or the flaws in the canvas. Chance is also determined by the time of the day, the light, the feeling, the memory, the ready-made paints or the individual strokes of the brush. As the viewer encounters these works, a process that for Serisier completes the painting, one becomes immersed in the surface and depth of the object, which sits on the wall as if weightless. The viewing experience itself is active and physical—encompassing the action of walking toward the painting and stepping back in order to see what is in essence—elusive and ephemeral. Looking deeply into the depth of the canvas one searches for something yet to be revealed. The anomalies in the surface of the canvas, the variations in the warp and weft of the thread, the act of priming the canvas, the layers and layers of paint applied over days and over weeks, are all held within its own object-ness and within its own time. Each process of making leaves its trace in the body of the paintings, made evident in the surface, depth and edges, evoking a sense of the works’ own history. Graphite While the gold, silver and white paintings tenuously reflect light; the graphite works absorb it into the void like a black hole in space. Ad Reinhardt thought of the colour black as the medium of the mind; it is perfection, cohesive and purifying.[8] As the surface in Serisier’s Graphite Black Oxide Painting 1, falls away and gives in to infinite depth, the work opens up into a paradoxical sensation of near and far—the sense of space and also of time twisting, bounding and then settling into the feeling of a warm bath or floating in the sea in the dead of night. Serisier’s grey paintings are also reminiscent of the sensation of water, the moment of swimming across the surface of the sea where the tonal qualities of the water meet the horizon and the sky on a murky day. The density of this work, and the graphite and silver paintings, is startling in the duality of simplicity and complexity, becoming void and projection simultaneously. An enduring memory of this place of Summer Hill is the intense blackness one experiences when walking along the road toward the gate; it is as if you are walking into nothingness and yet every sensation is heightened. The brush of a tree branch across an arm, the feeling of dirt underfoot, the sounds of steps and quiet murmurs, of the gentle breeze, all enhanced by the endlessness of the blackened sky punctuated by bright silver and gold stars. It is total immersion, much like the experience of encountering these works. In the 1950s and 60s post-war American artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt followed in Malevich’s footsteps with their own experimentations in black monochromes. Rauschenberg thought of his black paintings, constructed between 1951 and 1953 to have “complexity without their revealing anything—the fact that there was a lot to see but not much showing.”[9] On recalling what he felt like painting an entirely black painting titled Abraham as early as 1949, Newman said “the terror of it was intense…I call it terror. It’s more than anxiety…Where do I get the nerve…”[10] Newman tried to paint anything but a pure black painting, but he couldn’t. “I had to make it black,” he declared, “I think that every stroke one makes is violent; because once you make it, it’s there and…you’ve got to move with it.”[11] Serisier’s own atmospheric renditions of blackness are, as William Wright once noted, “analogously reductive… a subtle, reflexive, intuitive investigation.”[12] And yet, one would have to say that like Newman, Serisier’s graphite black paint was brought forth almost by its own volition into sensorial existence. White The surface tension present in these paintings continues in the white works, which with their iridescent pearl-like qualities carry a different mass, the weight of non-colour and a density that defies their apparent weightlessness. The brushed or lagged surfaces reflect and carry light as an amorphous quality that defines the work in a simultaneous process of making and unmaking, their frontality bearing a corpulent presence that is both comforting and unnerving. In keeping with the visceral qualities of the gold, silver and graphite paintings, the surface of White Mica Painting is lusciously inviting, its plane of apparent emptiness caressed by marks and tonal variations that evoke the fur of the white dogs, the hoarfrost or the glint of the hot summer’s sun on metal. White White Painting recalls Malevich’s own rendition from 1918 in which an uneven, white square floats atop a white background, defined not by line but by tonal variation. This radical attempt at reductive pictorialism reinvented the medium and the space of painting, alluding to infinity and the limitlessness of the canvas. White for Malevich signified a realm of higher feeling, saying, “I have overcome the lining of the colored sky… Swim! The white free abyss, infinity is before you.”[13] In 1951, Robert Rauschenberg extended his painting practice with several versions of modular panels of white paintings, their surface reduced to pure colour with little evidence of the artist’s hand. In 1961, the composer John Cage, known for his minimalist music and experiments in silence and endlessness famously and ironically referred to Rauschenberg’s White Paintings as airports for lights, shadows and [dust] particles.[14] In so doing he understood the works as receptive surfaces that respond to the world around them. Cage met Rauschenberg the year after he made the white paintings and so enamoured was he by these works, which Rauschenberg himself identified as emoting “organic silence,” that Cage composed his famous silent score 4’33”.[15] Rauschenberg himself thought of these works as clocks saying that their surfaces were sensitive enough to tell what time it was and what the weather was like outside.[16] Serisier’s white paintings, in their lack of gravitational hold, also seem to evoke time and the weather with light itself mediating the viewing experience. As much as paint is the medium of each of the works in this exhibition, these physical and visual apparitions are equally determined by other factors, such as light, time, and the tension created both in the individual works’ surfaces, and between them as they hang together on the wall. Each grouping creates a new sentence or stanza; indeed, in their state of togetherness they become symphonic. Just as a conductor brings together known and unknown elements into the rendition of a piece of music, so too Serisier orchestrates a visual symphony of colour that plays on variance, and on the tension between predictability and unpredictability. Each work plays with and against each other, one minute forming a soliloquy, the next a cacophony. Harmony and dissonance become the musical score for the paintings as they move and shift according to the accompanying works, the light, the time of day or with the viewer’s perception, mimicking their creation in the studio. Silver This becomes clearly apparent in the White Silver paintings and the White Silver Phase paintings, in which white paint floats above the surface of silver enamel, the tension between the two surfaces becoming apparent over time. The square within the square has a multitude of variances, from cold to warm, from opaque to transparent, creating a fluctuation in tonal differences that make some of the phase paintings clearly present while others mutate back and forth. Some seem to slip out of visual register in an alarming manner. The grid formation grew from the repetitive production of the paintings; in as much as they demanded it, drawing additional works together to form not just a series but also a singular entity. Hanging together they seem to form a musical score, reaching a crescendo punctuated by pauses, high tones and low. Much like looking at hoarfrost on the willows, highlighted by the crisp winter sun, or the movement of white dogs across the field, these pictures refuse to stay still, they may be quiet but they are certainly not silent. The vibration between the white and silver is palpable, with the crisp edge of the white square in the larger paintings denoting the frame of silver as if a majestic mirror or a gilded renaissance painting. Here the square is doubly defined, first by the white central shape and secondly by the edge of the painting, with the two surfaces acting in harmony whilst simultaneously establishing a rhythmic motion, much like a shudder. The silver enamel is startling in its presence, even more so in the large monochrome where it melds into the threads of the linen canvas accentuating the rippling surface. The silver paintings in oil, on the other hand, have a subtle sensuousness and quietude that highlight the extraordinary textural encaustic surfaces that like the gold and graphite paintings both unveil and reveal their making. Punctuating the large works in the exhibition are small, highly textured gold and silver works that act almost as hyphens. Painted over a fifteen-year period these floating jewels of heavily impastoed colour connect the past to the present. Despite their hefty presence of gestural mark-making these works have a distinctive sense of unfinishedness as if they are still in the process of forming and making. Out of all the paintings, each of which convey differing affects or feelings, these seem highly emotive recalling Brice Marden’s thoughts on his own early paintings that they should not be admired for any technical, nor indeed intellectual reason, but rather to be felt.[17] So while one can analyse and think about Serisier’s works in terms of their formal strategies and position them in terms of the post-painterly and colour-field abstract painters of the twentieth century, we can also think of them in terms of their subtle emotive referential qualities. Summer Hill As we drive through the rolling hills of the countryside heading toward Lithgow, Serisier momentarily rolls down the windows to let the crisp air of the morning mist float into the car. Breathe it in, Serisier suggests. Looking across the valleys with the morning light penetrating the mist and gently highlighting the complex greens, greys, charcoals and whites, one can see the attraction Serisier has for this area. He shows me a photo on his phone of his white dogs lounging happily on the grass with a light of a thousand different tones of gold enveloping them as the sun sets over the garden. I comment that the paintings will always remind me of the dogs. “Well,” says David, it’s about the dogs, but it’s not about the dogs. It’s about the light, the memory of the sunlight shining on the dogs, the moment… but it’s not even that. It’s what happens to the memory of that moment, in the studio, the changing light, the sensation…. actually, it’s the paint, it’s all about the paint.” Robert Ryman also aimed to emphasise the objecthood of a painting by using paint saying, “I wanted to make a painting getting the paint across. That’s really what a painting is basically about… I wanted to point out the paint and paint surface and not so much the objectness.”[18] The essence of time also becomes an agent of radical viewing in these paintings, in its ever-changing nature and its temporal capacity to encompass the past, the present and the future. Time, like the paintings and the act of viewing is mutable. It is the time of making, the stretch of the day as light makes it mark across the studio, designating moments and seasons; it is the framing of the outside world as it passes from summer, through autumn, winter and spring. It is the white dogs, the white and silver of the hoarfrost, the gold of the sun as it caresses the landscape and the pitch black of the sky at night punctured by silvery and golden wavering stars. It is Summer Hill. DONNA WEST BRETT, 2018 [1] Achim Borchardt-Hume, “An Icon for a Modern Age,” in Malevich (London: Tate Publishing, 2014), 24. [2] Suprematism linguistically found its Latin roots in the Catholic liturgy Supremacia, meaning superiority. Reportedly Malevich altered the date of the Black Square to 1913 to coincide with the production of the futurist opera Victory over the Sun, which premiered at Luna Park, St Petersburg on 2 December 1913. See Borchardt-Hume, “An Icon for a Modern Age,” 24. [3] See Christina Lodder, “In Search of 0,10 – The Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting,” The Burlington Magazine 158 (2016): 61-63. [4] Wilhelm Wundt, Principles of Physiological Psychology, 1874. See also John Gage, Colour and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism (London: Thames and Hudson), 252. Monochrome painting in a representational form has a long history back to artists such as Jan van Eyck, Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt van Rijn, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. See Lelia Packer and Jennifer Sliwka, eds. Monochrome: Painting in Black and White (London: National Gallery, 2017). [5] All quotes are from a conversation with the artist at Summer Hill, 10 –11 January 2018 unless otherwise noted. [6] Martin Kline, Lucio Fontana and John Nixon for example have made various series of silver monochromes and more recently Cohen Young has worked with silver monochromes using painting and photographic techniques. [7] Robert Rauschenberg made a series of gold monochrome paintings in the 1950s and is also credited with some of the earliest black monochromes of the post-painterly abstract movement. Yves Klein and Lucio Fontana also painted gold monochromes. Fontana experimented with white, copper and other metallic surfaces. [8] Ad Reinhardt, Art as Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 90. [9] Andrew Forge, Robert Rauschenberg (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1968), 64. [10] Interview with Karlis Osis, transcript, 1963, 15 and 20, Barnett Newman Foundation Archive. Quoted in Richard Shiff, “Whiteout: The Not-influence Newman Effect,” in Barnett Newman, Ann Temkin, ed. (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2002), 81. [11] Interview with Karlis Osis, 15-16. Quoted in Shiff, “Whiteout,” 82. [12] William Wright, “A Matter of Light,” in David Serisier: Colour, Real and Imagined (Canberra: Drill Hall Gallery, 2015), 21. [13] Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition: White on White, 1918, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Quoted in Larissa A. Zhadova, Malevich: Suprematism and Revolution in Russian Art, 1910-1930 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982), 124, n.39. Other white on white painters include Brice Marden, Robert Ryman, Barnett Newman and Agnes Martin. [14] John Cage, “On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist and his Work, in Silence (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 102. See also https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/98.308.A-C [15] See Kristina Stiles, Concerning Consequences: Studies in Art, Destruction, and Trauma (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 303. See also page 433, n.84 where Stiles considers the wry sarcasm and competitive nature of Cage’s comments on Rauschenberg’s works. 4’33” (Four minutes thirty-three seconds) was composed as a three-movement silent composition composed by John Cage in 1952. [16] See interview with Robert Rauschenberg, https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/98.308.A-C/research-materials/document/WHIT_98.308_005/ [17] Brice Marden: Statements, Notes, and Interviews,” in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, ed. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 138. [18] Phyllis Tuchman, “An Interview with Robert Ryman,” Artforum 9, no. 9 (May 1971): 44–65. See also Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 27. https://www.donnawestbrett.com/art-writing/10 monthly 0.5 2021-08-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1627781826901-FHTG4RIG8NVM95T2AT14/2016_deadcalm-distance-100-closeupatadistance-2016-series1.jpg Art Writing - LYNNE ROBERTS-GOODWIN closupatadistance - LYNNE ROBERTS-GOODWIN closupatadistance Kronenberg Wright Artist Projects, September 2016 closeupatadistance presents a dialectical spatial opposition that unfolds over photographic and video works and engages with the aftermath of human action on Earth’s topography. In keeping with Roberts-Goodwin’s interest in trade routes, colonisation, migration and cultural displacement, the works traverse geopolitically contested locations at two extreme points of elevation: the Dead Sea and the Himalayan Mountains. The Dead Sea, at the lowest elevation point on Earth, is a salt lake made famous by its waters that are largely absent of life and are highly buoyant enabling tourists to float aimlessly. The feeling of stillness experienced by floating in the almost motionless water is condensed in the series deadcalm, with their intensely flat and disorienting surfaces. The artist was drawn to this ever-changing landscape, as a contested site of desolation, sublime beauty and conflict, to work with a team of environmentalists. Roberts-Goodwin researched and photographed the landscape as akin to engaging with a ruin aesthetic, established in the western tradition as sites of contemplation on humankind’s past achievements. Here, the images of stillness belie the ongoing environmental destruction and human conflict over settlement rights that continue along its banks that lie between Palestine and Jordan. deadcalm distance 100 and 101, taken from elevated points on the opposing banks of the occupied territories and Jordan, are images not only of stillness but of endless time that is seemingly embedded into the very pigments of the prints. To look at these photographs is to look into the vast unknowable space of time and history recalling Walter Benjamin’s musings on the decay of the aura. In illustrating his concept Benjamin turns to what he refers to as the aura of natural objects, “to follow with the eye—while resting on a summer afternoon—a mountain range on the horizon or a branch that casts its shadow on the beholder is to breathe the aura of those mountains, of that branch.” Aura’s decay, according to Benjamin, rests on the increasing significance of the masses to get closer to things both spatially and humanly, and their desire to assimilate a thing’s uniqueness as a reproduction such as a postcard or a magazine that one might find in the possession of an armchair traveller. Time and space seem to unravel in these photographs; and in one image a technology tower hovers on an islet in the bottom third of the picture and what appears to be frothy waves are indeed salt deposits formed over eons of endless time. The Dead Sea research undertaken by Roberts-Goodwin also encompassed studying archival photographs from the Library of Congress Matson Collection in Washington, a rich historical source for images of the Middle East. The majority of the archive’s 23,000 glass and film negatives and photographic prints depict Palestine from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, many taken by the American Colony Photo Department. This photo studio serviced the large tourist trade documenting Middle Eastern Culture from the end of the Ottoman Empire to the Palestinian Exodus in 1948. Roberts-Goodwin has selected a number of these images depicting the landscape from an oblique aerial view and etched the negative image into aluminium plates forming a reversal of sorts. Presented in a grid formation the photographs can be read across and through time, space and history with a myriad of narratives forming in the interstices between the images. Tales of migration, colonisation, tourism, industrialisation, erosion and archaeological finds flow across the surface of the grid as a woven historical map of human conquest and destruction. elevation is conceptually positioned against the deadcalm series and takes us to a high altitude located at the end of the Himalayan Mountains on the border of China and Vietnam. The video comprises two layers composited together, one being of the last river that flows from the mountains at Ha Giang, the other at the altitude of the last mountain range. This conflation of image and place establishes a non-place that is interrupted by sounds of the water flowing, birds chirping and wind blowing all that one expects to hear and sense in such remote locations. Woven through these mesmerising aural treats are sounds of urban life, motorbikes, planes and cars that interject and create a sense of dislocation and disorder. Through these works Roberts-Goodwin critically explores the conditions of human mobility and colonisation of these extreme locations as sites of displacement, slippage and alienation. They disrupt and interrupt our understanding not just of time and history but what it is we see and what it is that photographs do. As fragments of lives lived and places encountered, photographs, much like their creators, traverse the globe and migrate into postcards, memoirs, archives and as reproductions in newspapers, magazines and on screens. Much like Benjamin’s aura or Hito Steyerl’s wretched screen photographs flow through time and space, like the Jordan River flowing into the Dead Sea or the rivers of the Himalayan Mountains, depositing their debris like cast-out memories along the shorelines of history. Donna West Brett, September 2016 https://www.donnawestbrett.com/art-writing/4 monthly 0.5 2021-08-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1627785597738-V7T8GBNMLQ4NX5RRNO84/CoenYoung_Mirrors2_7.jpg Art Writing - COEN YOUNG: ALL YOUR INFLUENCES - COEN YOUNG: ALL YOUR INFLUENCES William Wright Artist Projects December 2014 http://williamwrightartists.com.au/index-1/#/coen-young/ In 1839 on the announcement of the daguerreotype process, largely considered to be the birth of photography, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre wrote a broadsheet announcing the invention. Part of it reads as follows: “The daguerreotype is not an instrument to be used to draw nature, but a chemical and physical process which gives her [nature] the ability to reproduce herself” implying an ontological connection between nature and image.[1] When exposed to light the daguerreotype copper plate, coated with silver, captures everything before it in great detail, no matter how near or far, but in a reversed mirror image of the subject. It was often reported that the daguerreotype revealed things that the photographer could not see with their own eyes suggesting mystical attributes. Seeing a daguerreotype is also contingent on light conditions. The object must be held at a certain angle in order to see the elusive image in the highly reflective, mirror-like surface; the image appearing to be either a negative or a positive depending on whether a light or dark background is reflected in the photograph. The labour intensive and alchemical process produced unique images that were mounted under glass in elaborate cases in order to prevent oxidization of the silvered surface and to enable the precious object to be carried on one’s person. Although a painter, Coen Young has turned to the elusive chemical processes of photography to reconsider the gesture toward image making that Daguerre implies is both designated and ontological. Using a photographic methodology, Young applies various media and chemicals in multiple layers such as gesso, marble dust and enamel onto a sheet of cotton rag paper; the last being silver nitrate, which is applied, fixed and washed just like a sheet of photographic paper. Each process leaves its trace on the paper, evident at the edges, and evokes a sense of the object’s history as it slowly reveals itself to the viewer. The result is a highly polished surface that claims a certain objectness that is also its antithesis, revealed in the tension between the surface and the ‘image’, which is only manifested in the reflection. The works gesture towards an experience or temporal moment that like a memory remains ungraspable and somewhat illusive. The idiosyncratic nature of the surface is made evident in the viewer’s attempt to contemplate the image, an image that is brought to the object by the viewer in their corporeal reflection but also emerges, unbidden from the surface itself. But this image is not a picture per se, but rather a contradictory, ever-changing manifestation of what we expect to see. In fact, if these mirror studies have a subject at all it is contradiction itself. They are both paintings and photographs, images and non-images, illusions and objects and the ‘imperfections’ in the works bring the viewer back to the surface, which like a daguerreotype is pressed up to the glass as a reminder of its mutability. The works’ refusal to translate as a static image is evident in any attempt to capture them in photographs and in the constant struggle between surface and depth. A perceived emptiness in the images also presents a contradiction because it asks us what it is we expect to see in what we think of as an unmediated visual experience. A mirror, or looking glass – is in and of itself – empty.[2] It contains no signifying information and all that it is – is what we – the ‘looker’ bring to it; and without light a mirror is but a blinded instrument full of potential. The unpredictable nature of Young’s mirror studies challenge this perceived emptiness in the uncertain tension of the surface, and by uncertain I am referring here to the quiet assertiveness the images have in their claim for autonomy. For while they are made at the same time, the crafted nature of the process combined with the artist’s intentionality, creates a series in which the images are the same but different. Even in ambient light the image persists as the reflective surface captures that which surrounds it. The uncertainty of the image is what drives us to keep looking, a process Young thinks of as ‘expectation’, a desire to see and to know, which is often thwarted and complicated by a surface that denies any medium specificity. In the age of the post-medium condition, in which the pursuit of a purity of medium is seen as antiquated, various commentators ask What is photography? What is painting?[3] This question regarding categorisation of the medium is prevalent in the work of the German painter Gerhard Richter who provocatively claims that he paints photographs: “I’m not trying to imitate a photograph; I’m trying to make one. And if I disregard the assumption that a photograph is a piece of paper exposed to light, then I am practicing photography by other means.”[4] Young too is not ‘making’ a photograph in the way that we think of a ‘photograph’, with a camera and a lens, but rather evokes in many ways the earliest ventures of image making such as the camera obscura where the image remained unfixed; and also references other contemporary iterations of non-lens based media. While Young’s previous experimentations with the photographic process were reminiscent of the Claude glass these new evocations are closer to the reflective surface of the daguerreotype.[5] The Claude glass was a tinted, blackened convex mirror used to produce a stable, reflected image reminiscent of the paintings of Claude Lorrain, which gave a rather weak reflection that dulled the details, while colours were toned like those of varnished paintings. The glass was used by travellers who would hold it in their hand so as to see a reversed image of the landscape behind them and for the purpose of composing pictures.[6] The pictorial properties of the Claude glass, reducing everything to a visual equivalence as Geoffrey Batchen puts it, are strikingly like those of the photograph. As one aficionado commented in 1839 on seeing a daguerreotype “The best idea I can give of the effect produced is, by saying that it is nearly the same as that of views taken by reflection in a black mirror.”[7] Although Young’s current mirror studies evoke a sense of a ‘looking glass’ they are neither faithful to projecting an unmediated sense of the real, nor are they stable in their reflective qualities. Rather, they are unpredictable and at times disturbing objects, which will continue to intrigue and mesmerise as we look for that which lies beyond the surface. For Bill. Donna West Brett [1] Beaumont Newhall, ‘Eighteen thirty-nine: the birth of photography’, in Photography: discovery and invention, J Paul Getty Museum, 1990, 19. [2] See Norman Bryson, ‘The gaze in the expanded field’, in Hal Foster ed. Vision and visuality, Dia Art Foundation Discussions in Contemporary Culture no 2, Bay Press, Seattle, 1988. [3] See Rosemary Hawker, ‘Idiom Post-medium: Richter Painting Photography’, Oxford Art Journal 32.2 2009, 263–280. See also David Green ed. Where is the photograph? and Diarmuid Costello and Margaret Iverson, Photography after conceptual art. [4] Gerhard Richter in an interview with Rolf Schön, 1972, Hans-Ulrich Obrist ed. The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings 1962–1993 (Thames and Hudson, Anthony d’Offay Gallery: London, 1995) 73. [5] First Mirrors. 2014 at William Wright Artist Projects, Sydney [6] Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with desire: the conception of photography, MIT Press, Mass 1997, 73. [7] Batchen, 74 DONNA WEST BRETT11 DECEMBER 2014 https://www.donnawestbrett.com/art-writing/3 monthly 0.5 2021-08-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1627786005257-H9ER22LTQR1NNKCQ4IIZ/FeltSuit.jpg Art Writing - JOSEPH BEUYS AND THE 'ENERGY PLAN' - JOSEPH BEUYS AND THE 'ENERGY PLAN' Curated for the University of Sydney War Memorial Gallery, 2012 http://sydney.edu.au/museums/events_exhibitions/beuys.shtml Joseph Beuys’ fascination with medicine, science, myth and history forms the basis of his diverse body of work. Shaman-like, his art transforms natural and found materials, combining an interest in politics and education. His Energy Plan for the Western Man was described by the critic and photographer Werner Krüger as ‘the transformation of Beuysean aesthetic-artistic creativity, his cosmos of ideas, his plastic imagery into photography’. The exhibition focuses on the relations between Beuys and Krüger who documented many of his installations and performances. Krüger also played a key role as both a friend and advisor to Elwyn Lynn, curator of the Power Collection. Joesph Beuys and the 'Energy Plan' is the first of four exhibitions celebrating the 50th anniversary of the JW Power Bequest, co-presented with the Power Institute. Curated by Donna West Brett. IMAGES: Joseph Beuys, Filzanzug (Felt suit) 1970 and Joseph Beuys, Overcome party dictatorship now 1971, JW Power collection, The University of Sydney, managed by Museum of Contemporary Art, © Joseph Beuys/Bild-Kunst. Licensed by Viscopy https://www.donnawestbrett.com/art-writing/1 monthly 0.5 2021-08-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1627786836497-H8UFLRRMXTRW2JR64B2T/_acp-b9a0b0b237c88cb96837a9bd3639f6ee.jpg Art Writing - ANN SHELTON, in a forest - ANN SHELTON, in a forest Ann Shelton's photographic series, in a forest will be exhibited at the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney 1 December 2012-17 February 2013. The photographic works of Ann Shelton oscillate between conceptual and documentary modes of image making. The images from in a forest engage with history in relation to the social and cultural memories and meanings of a particular group of trees. These trees, sometimes erroneously said to have been given by Hitler himself, were presented to the gold medalists at the Berlin 1936 Olympic Games in Nazi Germany as seedlings and are often referred to colloquially as ‘Hitler Oaks’. Shelton’s new work charts the complex nature of these tree signs and their shifting ideological status from her hometown in Timaru, where one of the trees grows, across North America and Europe. Artist talk: 11–11:30am Saturday 1 December 2012 Free Admission http://tmp.acp.org.au/current/ http://www.annshelton.com/ https://www.donnawestbrett.com/art-writing/8 monthly 0.5 2021-08-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1627801153344-CC1HEF2GLATSE39QHXG9/villa-1-formerly-lake-alice-hospital-wanganui-2004-1200x.jpg Art Writing - HOME AND HOMELESSNESS: ANN SHELTON'S AESTHETICS OF DISPLACEMENT - HOME AND HOMELESSNESS: ANN SHELTON'S AESTHETICS OF DISPLACEMENT Donna West Brett, 2016. Published in Ann Shelton: Dark Matter, Auckland Art Gallery, Toi o Tāmaki, NZ, 2016. I was in the room, or rather I was not yet in the room since she was not aware of my presence … Of myself … there was present only the witness, the observer with a hat and travelling coat, the stranger who does not belong to the house, the photographer who has called to take a photograph of places which one will never see again. The process that mechanically occurred in my eyes when I caught sight of my grandmother was indeed a photograph. — Marcel Proust, 1925[1] On 30 September 1957 at 12.20 pm in the city of Wellington, a ‘spinster’ named Nancy Martin signed a house mortgage with Australian Mutual Provident Society for the princely sum of three thousand one hundred pounds. Purportedly, the first single woman in Wellington to obtain a mortgage to build her own home, Martin was unusual in many ways. In 1948, as a young teacher, she travelled to England to study music, courtesy of a British Council scholarship, and on her return she introduced the recorder to New Zealand primary schools, an action many parents would undoubtedly not have appreciated. By 1952 Martin was responsible for music education at Victoria University and started collecting art by local artists. In the meantime, the Czechoslovakian-Jewish architect Frederick Ost and his wife Greta escaped from wartime Europe and migrated to Wellington at the other end of the world in 1940.[2] What brought these two individuals together – Martin and Ost – was a house: a home for Nancy and a chance for Frederick to exercise his European modernist aesthetic principles. These narratives from two ends of the earth have at their centre concepts of displacement and loss, experiences of belonging and not belonging, of home and of homelessness. What drew Ann Shelton to these intertwined narratives was the house, perched on the side of a hill, overlooking bush on one side and facing towards the city centre on the other. Shelton now lives in this house with her partner, along with traces of Martin whose presence continues to echo in the rooms, through her singular vision of building a home and from the narratives that Shelton has overlaid through her photographic series in the artist book A Spoonful of Sugar and the site-specific project House Work, both from 2015. Shelton’s photographic process has consistently engaged with uneasy places, sites of fractured and anxious histories, and with events that have been displaced in the landscape. Drawing on her earlier career as a newspaper photographer, Shelton approaches her subjects much like a private investigator or a domestic archaeologist, gathering material that forms a skin and a framework for the resulting work. The artist book A Spoonful of Sugar features photographs of both the inside and the outside of the house and includes a selection of house plans, the mortgage document and rubbings of various surfaces from the house, as if Shelton is determined to build familiarity with every textual and textural component of her new home. The site-specific project House Work was also a performance of sorts that began with participants walking through the bush and up the hill to the house. Here, they were met with almost-empty rooms bar some of Shelton’s artworks and stools and the sound of an intriguing, evocative spoken narrative emanating from the built-in speakers.[3] The actions of the participants echo those at an open house viewing, when prospective purchasers can inspect a property, just as Shelton did; it is a mostly anonymous process and a chance to objectively view a house or peek at your neighbour’s possessions. In this instance, the participants were instead implicated in the fictional aural narrative wafting through the rooms, intertwined with elements of the real narrative about the real place, which they were now visiting. This dialectical action of real and not real sets up an uneasy feeling of not being at home: although the house may seem familiar because of its likeness to home, it is anything but. For Frederick Ost, home is but a distant memory, an apartment somewhere in Prague, from which he and Greta were driven by the burgeoning threat of war and the rise of National Socialism throughout Europe. The visual conditions of migration and exile, or what can be referred to as an aesthetics of displacement, offer an opportunity to consider the ways in which photography conveys loss or reveals a lack of feeling.[4] This sense of loss and displacement was explored in the writings of German film and cultural theorist Siegfried Kracauer, who also found himself in exile in the early 1940s. Throughout much of his writing, Kracauer considered the concept of the homeless image, in which photographic meaning is transformed by the loss of the referent, suggesting the state of exile and echoing his own condition of being extraterritorial.[5] Kracauer used the concepts of extraterritoriality and of the homeless image to explore the uncanny sense of displacement and alienation when the familiar and the unfamiliar butt up against each other to form a schism or an inversion of homeliness. Shelton delves into the psychological state of alienation in those of her works that engage with concepts of home and homelessness, such as room room, 2008. On visiting the abandoned site of the Salvation Army’s former drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility on Rotoroa Island in Auckland’s Hauraki Gulf, Shelton photographed the women’s wing of the Phoenix building before the site was demolished. Places such as this, in their empty and abandoned state, become unlived spaces and have a melancholic atmosphere much like a crime scene. In looking at photographs of abandoned places, we imagine that something has happened there and the photographs somehow open the spaces up to our forensic enquiry. These bland, cheaply decorated yet functional rooms reek of despair and anxiety, with their fading or peeling wallpaper and nasty floor coverings evoking a sense of punishment rather than a sense of home. For these spaces are temporal locations for their inhabitants, and despite the poor attempts at personalisation, such as a mirror or pasted images of mountain views on the walls, the stained single mattresses and deteriorating conditions speak of unfortunate, desperate stories. This feeling is enhanced by the circular and ocular nature of the images, which convey a sickening sensation of surveillance and voyeurism. The photographs not only use the convex form but also the images themselves are reversed, recalling the proto-photographic tool of the Claude glass. The Claude glass was a tinted, blackened convex mirror used to produce a stable reflected image reminiscent of the paintings of Claude Lorrain and which, with its rather weak reflection, dulled the pictorial details. The glass was held up so the viewers could see a reversed image of the landscape behind them. The pictorial properties of the Claude glass reduce everything in its view to a visual equivalence, becoming strikingly like those of a photograph, as photographic historian Geoffrey Batchen puts it.[6] room room is an elegy in part to Virginia Woolf’s 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own, based on lectures she delivered at women’s colleges in Britain. In the essay Woolf ruminates on the desire of a hypothetical female author to have a room of her own and a modest income in order to write. Rather than evoking a sense of literary or creative freedom, these rooms instead recall Proust’s horrid sense of estrangement at the unexpected sight of his grandmother when the ‘instant photograph’ conjured in his mind becomes a screen that hinders involuntary memory.[7] room room is the anathema of both Woolf’s desires and of Kracauer’s idea of photography being a medium without artifice – for what in these photographs can be seen as true when their inhabitants used hallucinogenic substances to escape reality and photographic meaning itself elides solidity? In once more from the street, 2004, Shelton turned her lens to another institutional site, that of the former Lake Alice Psychiatric Hospital in Wanganui. Opening in 1950 and closing in 1999, the complex comprised ten two-storey villas with eleven beds in each, four villas with fifty beds, its own fire station, swimming pools, library, chapel, morgue, garage, garden, rugby grounds and cricket pitches.[8] Apart from the reference to ‘psychiatric’, one could be forgiven for thinking this description is straight out of Brideshead Revisited, the novel by Evelyn Waugh written as a memoir of a young student at Oxford University, and published just five years before the opening of Lake Alice.[9] Instead, this abandoned site, much like that of the drug and alcohol rehabilitation centre, references stories of extreme trauma: the abuse of patients here led to calls for a royal commission into their mistreatment and resulted in compensation payments.[10] These photographs and those of room room also recall the photographic and psychiatric practices of Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, where the camera flash and photographic apparatus were used, supposedly objectively, to capture and reveal the hidden, deceptive traits of the hysteric. Photography’s ability to capture moments that have the potential to be experienced but fail to register in the subject’s own consciousness is described by Ulrich Baer as being akin to the structure of traumatic memory.[11] Baer takes up this concept from Sigmund Freud’s reflections on memory and photography: Freud describes the unconscious as the site where memories are stored until they are developed, alluding to a delay in the recognition of memories and images.[12] Likewise, Walter Benjamin contends that the camera catches that which the photographer does not see, an optical unconscious that Benjamin likens to the discovery of the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis.[13] Unlike the series room room, the photographs in once more from the street do not show us interior spaces but rather that the villas are situated in the landscape, perched uneasily it seems on the unkempt grounds. Shelton’s inversion of these photographs, as in many of her works, seems not just an optical illusion but also a doubling effect that creates a schism in vision and in mind, reflecting her interest in the association between trauma and time, and between the photographic image, the past and the present.[14] The use of doubling or inversions in Shelton’s works critiques the monocular nature of photography and recalls early photographic techniques such as the stereoscope, developed in order to see photographically as if by the duality of human vision. For Jonathan Crary, the stereoscope became a crucial indication of the subsumption of the tactile within the optical, with the doubling of the image forming a phenomenological effect on the viewer.[15] The invention of this optical tool was closely aligned with theories of optical illusion, after-images and other visual phenomena but the central question, according to Crary – given that the observer perceives a different image with each eye – was how is the subject then experienced as a single or unitary image?[16] For Shelton, two or more identical or almost-identical images present a particularly strange experience, which constitutes a slippage or a schism that departs from monocular vision and ‘foregrounds the role of the camera in the construction of fields of representation’.[17] It is this slippage in vision, or a stammering that disrupts the reception of images, that Shelton suggests references a kind of trauma, violence or pathology. Hence, the reversed images in room room, or the doubled images in once more from the street, suggest darker narratives and evoke an observational unease. The concept of doubling in the Lake Alice project is present in many of Shelton’s works, including a kind of sleep, 2004, and Twenty six photographs of a house from 2007, in which the original photographs of a house taken by its architect James Walter Chapman-Taylor in 1930 are juxtaposed with Shelton’s images. In a classic rephotography project, the images form a schism in time, with the space between the images representing the lives lived in this rather peculiar Arts and Crafts house. Besides very minor changes to the kitchen and garden, the house remains largely in its original condition as if, in being charged with the time of its making, it lies outside of time at its site in rural north Taranaki. Rephotography has a long tradition in survey or scientific expeditions and, in re-recording sites with a comparative image, it offers a unique means to explore and analyse even the most insignificant changes in the landscape. The comparative topographic photograph is also anticipatory and incomplete, as it hangs in an air of expectation with both the ‘before’ and ‘after’ images situated in a state of constant referral to the other. In this sense, the repeat or return image is doubly displaced from time and history; the space of time between the comparative images forms a gap, an empty space or fissure, that reveals the traces of history.[18] One of Shelton’s earliest photographic series, Abigail’s Party from 1999, has personal and aesthetic resonances with her most recent series in that it features her home at the time, a share-house in Auckland. Like House Work, this series has both biographical and historical resonances and yet is reminiscent of a house magazine article from the 1970s. With its atonal colourings of yellow, cream and burnt reds, and featuring empty rooms with vintage furnishings, the series has an eerie quality of a deceased property, as if the owner, who we imagine in a bouffant wig and a flared pantsuit, has gone on a long cruise and never returned. The series was inspired by the 1977 Mike Leigh stage and television play Abigail’s Party, which evokes the same garish colour scheme and kitsch aesthetics. The one-room play tells the story of Beverley and Laurence who invite their new neighbours Angela and Tony over for drinks, accompanied by the divorced Susan. Susan’s daughter Abigail, who is never seen, is having a party next door. As the night wears on and the alcohol takes effect, an argument breaks out over an artwork and the much-maligned Laurence has a fatal heart attack. This dry and cruelly observant play focuses on the British class system and the bitter efforts of the growing middle class to forge a new life in 1970s suburbia. The photographs in Shelton’s Abigail’s Party are all titled with references to women, such as Calendar Girl, Modern Girl or Show Girl, as if attempting to place the absent Abigail back in the picture. We see her bathroom, living room, dining and sitting room, and her kitchen with Barsony-style dancing figures on the wall, the latest in wall ovens and forlorn and empty countertops bereft of any evidence of a party. Instead, the curtains are drawn, everyone has gone home and a feeling of loss ensues. Women often feature in Shelton’s work, present in portraits in her earliest works and later designated through their physical absence but poignantly present histories. There is the absent Abigail with her kitsch and groovy apartment and Nancy with her modernist Wellington dream house and in between are references to classical women, working women, incarcerated tragic women, lost girls and murderous girls. Their lost stories become the focus of Shelton’s lens and, like in a Claude glass, we glimpse into their world as if from the edge of a precipice, from the corner of our eye or in the reflection of a mirror. They remain ungraspable and, as if in a dream, we anxiously search for them but all that remains are traces displaced in obscure narratives, in urban myths, lost to history and to memory. This sense of loss and the concomitant desire to reclaim the past through photographs as a form of unconscious remembrance is what makes Shelton’s work so poignantly and painfully present. These empty spaces of domestic and institutional homes, bereft of occupants, are reminiscent of Kracauer’s homeless image where the image is torn from its referent, reflecting a sense of loss and an anxious desire for the past, which is displaced and irreconcilable. This sense of loss, evident throughout Shelton’s photographic oeuvre, like the homeless image, conjures stories of displacement, of belonging and not belonging, and reveals hidden views, lost histories and invisible, numinous presences.[19] In thinking about Nancy Martin, I imagine her as privy to Proust’s ruminations on photography and memory, so appropriately described by Kracauer in ‘The Photographic Approach’. Kracauer writes of Proust’s passage in The Guermantes Way as identifying the photographer as a witness, an observer and a stranger – all types, he considers, who are characterised by their ‘common unfamiliarity with the places at which they happen to be’.[20] In the passage, Proust sees his grandmother in contemplation, and for the first time sees her as if through the indiscriminating eye of a camera, and he recoils at the dejected old woman sitting before him who he does not know or recognise. In describing Proust as being so overwhelmed by involuntary memories that he could no longer register his present surroundings to the full, Kracauer quite rightly identifies Proust’s recognition of the photographic approach as being akin to the psychological state of alienation.[21] It is this state of alienation, an aesthetics of displacement, that Shelton evokes through her doubled and inverted images, in photographs of lost places, sites of violence, trauma and anxiety, or in forgotten histories. Shelton is the observant visitor who stands at the elbow of Proust and, rather than recoiling at the horror of it all, photographs it. Donna West Brett, 2016. Published in Ann Shelton: Dark Matter, Auckland Art Gallery, Toi o Tāmaki, NZ, 2016. [1] Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, in Remembrance of Things Past, vol 1, trans CK Scott Moncrieff, Wordsworth Editions, London, 2006, p 971. See also Siegfried Kracauer, ‘The Photographic Approach’, in The Past’s Threshold: Essays on Photography, eds Phillipe Despoix and Maria Zinfert, Diaphanes, Zurich/Berlin, 2014, p 66. [2] Leonard Bell, ‘A Series of Displacements: An Introduction to the Art of Frederick Ost (1905–1985)’, Art New Zealand 86, Autumn 1998, p 64. [3] The narrative was written by Pip Adam. [4] On migratory aesthetics, see Mieke Bal, ‘In Your Face: Migratory Aesthetics,’ in The Culture of Migration: Politics, Aesthetics and Histories, eds Sten Pultz Moslund, Anne Ring Petersen and Moritz Schramm, IB Tauris, London, 2015, pp 147–70. [5] Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans Thomas Y Levin, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1995, p 340. [6] Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1997, p 73. [7] Kracauer, The Past’s Threshold, p 19. [8] Lake Alice Hospital website: http://www.lakealicehospital.com. [9] Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, Chapman & Hall, London, 1945. [10] Simon Collins, ‘Terrible Legacy of Lake Alice, New Zealand Herald, 26 October 2001. [11] Ulrich Baer, Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2002, p 8. See also Batchen, Burning with Desire, p 187, and Jennifer Good, Photography and September 11th: Spectacle, Memory, Trauma, Bloomsbury Publishing, London, 2015. Good expands on Freud’s concept of belatedness in relation to photography, memory and trauma. [12] For Freud on the conditions of memory, trauma and photography, see, for example, Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, trans Katherine Jones, Vintage, London, 1952, p 152, and Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans James Strachey, Avon Books, New York, 1965, p 574. [13] Walter Benjamin, ‘A Small History of Photography’, in One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, Verso, London/New York, 1997, p 243. [14] Donna West Brett and Ann Shelton, ‘The Event Horizon: Returning “After the Fact” ’, Memory Connection, vol 1, no 1, December 2011, p 336. [15] Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1992, p 62. [16] Ibid, pp 118–119. [17] Ann Shelton, Doubling, http://www.annshelton.com/texts-and-media/artist-texts/doubling/. [18] For rephotography projects, see Mark Klett, Ellen Manchester and JoAnn Verburg, Second View: The Rephotographic Survey Project, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1984, and Donna West Brett, ‘Afterimage: Rephotography and Place’, in Photography and Place: Seeing and Not Seeing Germany After 1945, Routledge, New York/London, 2016, pp 99–123. [19] Thanks to Tom Loveday for discussing the relevancy of numinosity to Ann Shelton’s works, Sydney, March 2016. [20] Kracauer, The Past’s Threshold, p 67. [21] Ibid, p 68. https://www.donnawestbrett.com/art-writing/7 monthly 0.5 2021-08-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1627783696190-BF7SLYYZAYAXOK1SQMB3/final+image+Davis.jpeg Art Writing - GREYSCALE - GREYSCALE Peter Burgess, Julia Davis, Adrian Gebers, Pollyxenia Joannou, Lisa Jones. Rayner Hoff Studio, National Art School Postgraduate Centre, September 2015. In his Remarks on Colour from 1950, Ludwig Wittgenstein ponders the philosophical challenges of colour and luminosity and asks, “Was macht Grau zu einer neutralen Farbe? Ist es etwas Physiologisches, oder etwas Logisches?”[i] The concept that the neutrality of grey could be seen as either physiological or logical reveals the complexity of an often overlooked, yet essential achromatic colour. The earlier work of German chemist Wilhelm Ostwald similarly quantified colour from a psychological and physical point of view, drawing on the 19th-century experiments of G.T. Fechner who had shown that stimuli relate to sensations.[ii] Ostwald applied his colour theories by firstly establishing a scale of greys that ranged from white to black, essentially forming a greyscale against which he measured an atlas of colour-sensations. Harmonic balance was achieved when sections of his atlas showed complementary hues that had equal measures of value on the greyscale, an effect that was particularly pleasing.[iii] And yet grey is ambivalent, often ambiguous and tends to be measured in terms of indicating or defining a spectrum between the two binaries of black and white, filling in and describing the void between the two opposites. In terms of cultural theory, grey is more than the in-between of black and white—it is in fact both a mix of and a harmonic tone for all colours—it is a perceptual and experiential phenomena.[iv] The self-titled “grey anthropologist” Nils Bubandt, along with other commentators use greyness to understand dimensions of contemporary life, particularly in terms of politics, identity, labour and the economy. He claims that “grey may in fact be the universal colour of the contemporary moment.”[v] The uncertainty of grey, its in-between-ness, and its ability to reflect and absorb light, uniquely enables the form and structure of our strange nuances of existence. Grey is the colour of melancholy, loss, or transition and in its monochromatic existence enables a space for contemplative reflection that is strangely alluring and comforting. Grey is also murky and mysterious—it is the site of the shadowy unconscious where we form our dreams and store our memories until they are developed, which Freud alludes to as being akin to the photographic process.[vi] This sense of stasis or belatedness that Freud refers to forms the sensation of a pause, a space, a gap—in essence, it has a sense of waiting that is anticipatory and incomplete. For the artists in Greyscale, this sense of in-between-ness and anticipation assuages a logical space for investigation of both the colour grey and its place in the cultural imaginary. Grey is used here to rework how we perceive matter, how we embody place, the ways in which we encounter, remember or retrace time and remnants of existence. It is also fundamental for the possibilities of recording the world through the intricate materialities of graphite, felt, paint and photography or lava and ash. Adrian Gebers physically takes the greyscale, in the form of a standard reference card used by photographers and designers to measure colour, and re-presents it as a large wall drawing. As a filter from which photographers measure reality, the greyscale is itself forever mutable, altered by the warmth and coolness of light, or reflecting the ambient conditions around it. The greyscale is drawn here in graphite, denying its accuracy as a truth meter; it is void of function and instead becomes a symbol of futility. Behind the drawing is a grey painted wall, the colour of which is drawn from the process of a paint company’s camera, designed to recreate reality as accurately as possible. What emerges from the dichotomous arrangement is a visual schism where the attempts to portray reality are undone by their own representation; the work is seemingly only completed by the photographic reproduction, which is itself calibrated by a computer monitor. The greyzone in Peter Burgess’s series Made in England, 2013–14 takes everyday ideograms as a cultural reference system for the construction of meaning. Set against a backdrop of surveillance symbols, solitary figures or figural groups are measured by the grid in a form of mapping that locates the body in space. Alluding to the process of recording everyday activities by surveillance cameras and camera phones, ‘via cruel lens’ is formed by its specific location and the work is only completed by the presence of the visitor who becomes part of the surveillance greyzone. Burgess also refers to the mechanism of the camera obscura and inverts the sacred English oak tree as a linguistic sign following in the footsteps of Rodney Graham’s Oak series 1989/2001. The anagrammatic text piece ‘surveillance’ and the visual representation of the camera operate as a liminal zone—a narrative void that places the spectator in the greyzone, which is brimming with potential. Pollyxenia Joannou, Lisa Jones and Julia Davis also take up this sense of measuring or recording place in their works. Joannou, for example, uses grey as a tone of possibilities, enhancing and mediating the world around us. The works are centred on elemental properties of materiality, line and organic environments that are stripped back to geometric and tactile forms; each becoming part of a larger serial narrative. Delineating space, shape and form, grey is used here to structure narratives that recall modernist icons from Malevich, Albers, Mondrian or Lissitzky. Joannou intertwines elements of drawing, painting and 3D with materials such as acrylic paint, conté and felt to reflect upon migratory history and its remnant traces in the urban landscape. With its simplified forms, Chair Mugshot, 2015 can be read on several levels, such as a memory canister for a former sitter or owner. It also signifies setting up home, sharing meals, or indeed, being photographed for an identity card or police record. These ideographic pictures evoke a sense of signification that recalls Barnett Newman’s epistemological paradox of the aesthetic act as a pure idea, and the pure idea as an aesthetic act.[vii] Lisa Jones also uses grey as a signifying element for memory and erasure, and as a formal element to map the world and the body in two and three-dimensions. Jones’s interrogation of the relationship between the body and place takes the form of mapping, both cartographic and cultural, resulting in drawings or sculptures that reinterpret human and made systems. These systems, which include transport lines, bodily organs or cracks in pavements, are symbolic of dislocation, order and chaos, history and time. Cracks in the World is emblematic of this process as it explores place and its erasure, observation and mapping; or moment and time through the witnessing of human presence by mark making. Inherent through the works are the notions of memory and forgetting, evidenced through erasure, the dissolving of time and place and the traces of marks and stains that suggest a lived experience. Our place as embodied humans in the world is also key to Julia Davis’s work, which explores the effects of time and how this underpins our sense of self and place. Working in active landscapes such as deserts, volcanic areas or salt lakes Davis spends long periods interacting with the location and accumulating data and materials. In a recent iteration of this ongoing project, Ru(a)pture #2, 2015, Davis utilises research gathered from an erupting volcano with the title alluding to contradictory feelings of foreboding and rapture. The ecstatic instability of the violent imagery and our physical reaction to it forms a tension between anticipated loss and subsequent renewal. Here, grey is represented in a photograph of the turbulent volcanic event, which spews ash and smoke into the atmosphere—the ash forming the grey tonal range of the image. Next to this hangs a plastic sheet into which lava and ash has been physically ground, forming an anxious trace of the event in an act that unites the sublime and the romantic in raw materiality. According to Newman, the idea-complex discussed in his essay on ideographic pictures, makes contact with mystery, the mystery “of life, of men, of nature, of the hard, black chaos that is death, or the grayer, softer chaos that is tragedy. For it is only the pure idea that has meaning. Everything else has everything else.”[viii] [i] “What makes grey a neutral colour? Is it something physiological or something logical?” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, G.E.M. Anscombe, ed., Linda L. McAlister and Margarete Schättle, trans. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 27–27e. [ii] G.T. Fechner, Elemente der Psychophysik, 1860. See John Gage, Colour and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999), 257. [iii] Gage, Colour and Meaning, 258. [iv] Nils Bubandt, “Coda: Reflections on Grey Theory and Grey Zones,” in Ethnographies of Grey Zones in Eastern Europe: Relations, Borders and Invisibilities, Ida Harboe Knudsen and Martin Demant Frederiksen, eds. (London: Anthem Press, 2015), 194–95. [v] Bubandt, “Coda,” 188. [vi] For Sigmund Freud on the conditions of memory, trauma and photography see for example, Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, trans. Katherine Jones (London: Vintage, 1952), 152 and Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Avon Books, 1965), 574. [vii] Barnett Newman, “The Ideographic Picture,” Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, 1947. Quoted here from Art in Theory: 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 566. [viii] Newman, “The Ideographic Picture,” 566. IMAGES: Julia Davis https://www.donnawestbrett.com/art-writing/5 monthly 0.5 2021-08-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1627785143144-C3OV9Q0H3QM2VNW4BJAU/julie-rapp-cloud.jpg Art Writing - ANNE GRAHAM: MNEMONIC OBJECTS - ANNE GRAHAM: MNEMONIC OBJECTS Anne Graham, William Wright Artist Projects, 28 August–13 September 2014. Shifting sands and falling trees, Articulate, 19 September–5 October 2014. Published in Craft International 2015 Visiting Anne Graham’s studio several years ago was akin to a child visiting a lolly shop – eye’s darting everywhere, settling on one object only long enough to be enticed towards another. Etched into my memory were boxes of combs, fossils, horsehair, gatherings of wood and wax, shells, pins and needles, all of which I likened at the time to a Foucauldian community of monsters.[1] These objects pop up now and again in various artworks, and while some find themselves permanently attached to a work others go back into the library of things for a future incarnation. This gathering of life’s minutiae and detritus, from lint, coal, dust and dog hair to bowls, feathers and Japanese stools all reflect Graham’s interest in the way that ordinary things are imbued with meaning.[2] Susan Pearce’s observations on the compulsion of collecting acknowledges that the peculiar qualities of objects open up the possibility of forming relationships with the distant or relatively distant past, and in doing so achieve some sense of continuity.[3] The objects themselves have been collected over several decades from travels around the world or from Graham’s own backyard, hearth or the local laundrette. She also has an uncanny ability to persuade unsuspecting victims, including her curator husband Anthony Bond, to participate in her folly and this is how some of the works in two recent exhibitions in Sydney came to be. The first exhibition was held at William Wright Artist Projects, and the second, Shifting sands and falling trees was held at Articulate. Both exhibitions contain works that are made from either found objects – a distinctly Duchampian trait – or works that are made from earthbound materials, such as felt constructed from dog hair or pieces of discarded wood and metal reflecting Graham’s deep interest in the work of Joseph Beuys.[4] Beuys believed that materials such as copper, felt and fat could generate restorative energy. In the upper gallery at William Wright Artists Projects Graham installed a number of works from a series she has been working on that involved several friends and their canine companions. Over a period of time two artists, a curator, a writer/designer couple and other friends collected the hair discarded by their dogs. Through the ancient process of felting, Graham combined the dog hair with merino wool and made large sections of felt, which were then cut and sewn to make coats, hats or scarves for the pet owners, the resulting garment depending on how much hair was collected. In the exhibition, the garments hang on the wall next to a large photograph of the subject wearing the felt costumes, accompanied by their beloved canines. The tactility of the felt is reinforced by the subjects, who in wearing the garments are in the process of becoming ‘dog’, swathed in the warmth of their animal friend who not unexpectedly resembles their owner. The objects in both exhibitions are highly enigmatic, tactile and mnemonically charged – one work bares the trace of a cooked fish in Japan, another recalls the singing sands of a long lost Japanese beach, and yet another, the wings of currawongs or dancing dervishes. These objects evoke memory-images, fluid as in a fictive narrative or a ‘contaminated memory’ as Graham puts it, and yet they are rooted in the mere object-ness of the thing before us. This process recalls the writing of WG Sebald, whose inconsistencies between his meandering writings and the photographic images he includes to give veracity to the text, form layers of meaning that are shaped by both Sebald and the reader. Graham’s works, like Sebald’s texts are from the position of being the outsider or the observer who, like the character in The rings of Saturn, collects experiences and stories along the way that become merged into new forms.[5] Several of the works in both exhibitions fall into this category – such as the works resembling Japanese fans made from cedar salvaged from an industrial cooling tower that were combined with copper, aluminium or Perspex shelves. The various shelves hosted living organisms such as a grevillea root or mini native orchids. These objects become contemplative and meditative spaces where something new is formed from often seemingly conflicting materials. This is true also of the sculptural installation Ziggurat, which is reminiscent of a shrine, consisting of a number of Japanese stools piled on top of each other and various glass and wooden vitrines. On the central stool at the top of ziggurat is a bottle containing water from the Cox’s River in the Blue Mountains and on each side are vitrines containing bird feathers, lint from the Lithgow laundry and cinders from Graham’s fireplace. Placed on the remaining stools are brass bowls with ash from the home hearth. All of these objects have a visceral connection to the artist and to her sense of place, whether in a local or global sense. This sense of place comes very much from mnemonic connections to objects but also in Graham’s ability to situate herself in a place through various artist residencies that build up an archive of memories, stories and things that she can draw upon to make her art. The story of the lint from the Lithgow laundry provides a narrative that draws on Graham’s wit and her interest in detritus. On chatting to the laundry owner “Mrs Washalot” (as she calls herself), Graham became intrigued with the role of the laundry as the place where local workers and miners have their uniforms washed, and she requested the lint be collected for a possible project. What resulted were sheets of fibrous lint that contain layers of various colours and textures from the uniforms plus the coal dust, hair, and other fibres pressed into rivers of patterns. These lint sheets, like the dog-hair felt, contain traces of various lives all interwoven into the textiles presenting a tension between their corporeal forms and incorporeal qualities. In the exhibition these textiles are somewhat severed from their associations and “reside as treasures in the sober rooms of our later insights—like torsos in a collector’s gallery” as Walter Benjamin puts it.[6] Benjamin likens memory to an archaeological report in which the subject digs through the layers of strata to locate traces of the past. The sculptural installation Singing sands is a reconstruction of a piece Graham made for the 2009 Niigata Water and Land Art Festival in Japan. Like Benjamin’s archaeologist the work located the connection between Shinohara Kozaburo’s house in the village of Gokahama, which had been relocated from Kakumihama, a small village that disappeared due to erosion and was famous for its singing sand.[7] By creating Singing sands as a site-specific piece in the house, Graham reunited the building with its former location through the memory of the singing sands. The ‘singing’ sound is formed from friction when the grains press against each other in movement such as when a foot presses on the dry sand or in Graham’s work, when the glass beads and carborundum are funnelled through the centre of the glass and bronze columns. Singing sands keeps the memory of the former village alive but also brings with it other related stories that blogger Noi Sawaragi discusses in relation to Graham’s exhibition in Gokohama.[8] The villages of Niigata and Kakumihama are connected, not just through the relocation of Shinohara’s house, but also through the legacy of Atomic warfare. According to Sawaragi, Niigata was identified as a potential atomic target at the end of World War II, fortunately averted due to bad weather. In 1969 it was proposed that a nuclear plant be situated on the remaining site of Kakumihama, which thankfully never went ahead given its unstable foreshore. Graham’s new iteration of Singing sands in Sydney keeps these connections fresh and creates new relationships between her mnemonic objects and us in forming memories of them. [1] See my catalogue essay, Anne Graham: The alchemy of becoming, Sherman Contemporary Art Gallery, Sydney, 2003 and Michel Foucault, The order of things 1966. [2] See Janet McKenzie, Anne Graham interview: ‘The ability to see things as if for the first time is for me the essential quality necessary to make art’, Studio International, 1 October 2014. http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/anne-graham-shifting-sands-falling-trees-sydney?id=2501&tmpl=component&print=1&layout=default&page= [accessed 6 October 2014]. [3] Susan Pearce, On collecting: an investigation into collecting in the European tradition, Routledge, Oxon, 1995, 250. [4] Marcel Duchamp, 1887–1968 and Joseph Beuys, 1921–1986. [5] WG Sebald, The rings of Saturn, Michael Hulse trans. The Harvill Press, London, 1998. [6] Walter Benjamin, Excavation and memory, c1932, Rodney Livingstone trans. in Michael W Jennings et al, Walter Benjamin: selected writings, vol 2, part 2, 1931-1934, Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1999, 576. [7] McKenzie, Anne Graham interview, np. Shinohara Kozaburo [8] Noi Sawaragi, A Restatement: The Art of 'Ground Zero' (Part 10) Nukes and Niigata III, http://www.art-it.asia/u/admin_ed_contri9/4cQ9STGKWCqUFJBYf2Mi/ [accessed 7 October 2014] IMAGE: Anne Graham, Julie Rrap and Cloud, 2014 https://www.donnawestbrett.com/art-writing/2 monthly 0.5 2021-08-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1627786383313-CCT1QBPTDSYLIO2HDIQE/6%2B-%2BGrid%2Bx%2B4%2B300dpi.jpg Art Writing - THE STRANGER'S EYE - THE STRANGER'S EYE The Stranger's Eye presents four artists who, in various ways, utilise the photographic view of the urban environment to explore the liminal spaces of public and private, the visible and the invisible, and notions of place in terms of inhabitation and homelessness, alienation and strangeness. In lived cities and in those that are inhabited temporarily, the stranger's eye is one that lies between that of the flâneur and that of the spectator or tourist -- seeing the 'out of place', the strange and odd. These photographs utilise modes of the documentary and photographic construction to present the urban landscape from Sydney and Melbourne to Berlin, London and Seoul as dis-placed, alien, odd, sinister and strange. Curated by Donna West Brett. Artists: Yvonne Boag, Richard Glover, Tom Loveday and Anne Zahalka IMAGES: Anne Zahalka, Hotel Suite, 2008, Type C print, 75 × 92.5 cm each http://peloton.net.au/e/the-stranger--s-eye https://www.donnawestbrett.com/art-writing/9 monthly 0.5 2021-08-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1627782230059-JHV5IKFDY5X664ZOW351/Dominik-Mersch-Gallery-Dani-Marti-Fools-Paradise-Arrangement-in-hospital-green-and-golden-peaches-1.jpg Art Writing - DANI MARTI: FOOL'S PARADISE - DANI MARTI: FOOL'S PARADISE DOMINIK MERSCH GALLERY. September 2016 You took me up to heaven When you took me in your arms I was dazzled by your kisses Blinded by your charms I was lost, in a Fool's Paradise Good and lost, in a Fool's Paradise …and so goes the lyrics sung by Buddy Holly in 1958.[1] The illusory charms of a fool’s paradise promises a state of happiness that is bedded in the pure folly of false hope. The phrase first appeared in 1462 in a collection of English letters by William Paston — I wold not be in a folis paradyce — then used by William Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet in 1592 when Juliet’s nurse contemplates the young lovers’ doomed romance.[2] By the time George Bernard Shaw used the phrase in Misalliance in 1910 it had become a cliché.[3] Dani Marti’s new series Fool’s Paradise takes this mysterious concept as the foundation for his illusory paintings made from reflectors in varying arrangements with titles as if from an ancient poem or song. Compositions and arrangements of moon yellow and dawn, coastal blue and honey sizzles, hospital green and golden peach, endless green and morning wisps sit alongside others of night-tide forest and sizzling thirst, deep victory and howls in blue and yellow; lastly slippery silvery stones and fading histories. Each arrangement weaves words, colours and emotions into a seamless, floating poem that draws the beholder into its mysteries and tales composed from reflectors that twist and writhe across the surface. These paintings of folly and illusory promises are an alchemist’s dream of a fool’s paradise that seems just out of reach much like Caravaggio’s Narcissus (1597–99) who stares into the water forever fixated by his own reflection. As myth has it, Narcissus neither recognised himself nor realised that the mirror was a boundary between reality and fiction, an illusory trope that led to his demise.[4] This almost melancholic desire of Narcissus for an unreciprocated love that was in fact only an image is played out in Marti’s sculptural paintings in the tension between touch and vision. The seductive surfaces of colourful reflectors, which are used in daily life for safety and protection, are presented here to be consumed and to be experienced as a mirage or a portal of endless screens much like the reflection of Narcissus. The series plays with the history of painting, such as colour, painterly surface, perspective and the ways in which light defines the surface of a thing. Painting, as Pliny the Elder knew only too well is illusion itself, as he witnessed Zeuxis’s painting of a bunch of grapes that appeared so real that bird’s flew down to peck them. Instead of paint, Marti uses everyday materials, favouring process over image making and follows in a long line of artists challenging what painting is and what it does. Barnett Newman’s evocative black painting Abraham from 1949, whilst minimally painted, is indeed a portrait of his father. As he wrote in 1948 “We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been the devices of Western European painting. Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man or ‘life,’ we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings.”[5] Marti also uses the genre of portraiture to deconstruct painting, rejecting paint and brush but embracing the structure of painting to represent pleasure, desire and his own mother. In the two series, The Pleasure Chest and Mother Marti weaves together vintage necklaces collected from charity shops for over two years. The weaving and tying of the individual necklaces reflect notions of time and labour, processes related to work and making. As a form of collective portraiture, the Mother series in compositions of gold, white and black, weave together necklaces made from beads, fake pearls, silver and gold, all of which are typical of costume jewellery discarded over a lifetime. They are the bits and bobs left at the bottom of a jewellery case perhaps worn lovingly, purchased on a whim, or precious gifts forgotten on the passing of the wearer. The baroque minimalist pieces evoke layers of histories and emotions of the former wearers with their stories woven together to form a sea of lost narratives. The Pleasure Chest series similarly suggests the secret lives of the former wearers, jewels received from partners, lovers or children with the title referencing a chest of treasures or the chest of the wearer on which the necklaces rest with their caressing touch. As in many of Marti’s works the layers of arcane meanings and narratives simultaneously intertwine and counter each other. The Pleasure Chest, whilst denoting sensuality and desire in its reductive minimalist surfaces, also brings to mind a queer dress-up box or sex shops where fantasies can be bought in the form of sex-toys and bondage wear. The paintings evoke a Freudian fetishist assemblage of sexuality, repression, motherhood, ecstasy and desire, themes that Marti has explored in earlier works. As if in a dream the works function through an irrational signifying chain of associations and an incongruous condensation of objects much like Max Ernst’s strange meeting of objects in the sewing machine and dissecting table, drawing on Freud’s notion of the Oedipal complex and unconscious desire. In addition to the lusciousness of the paintings are two video works that continue the visceral experience from touch to sound and moving image. Continuing the themes of Narcissus and a fool’s paradise, Fallen Screens, comprising of 4 plasma screens in their fallen state, display glitter shimmering on a red carpet, writhing and pulsing as the light bounces off their glorious surfaces. The final work, Ice Blue is a video about Mark, a former antique dealer who lives in a small flat in New York City. Mark’s story unfolds over a sequence of vignettes, a succession of broken spectres of his former life that are caressed by the camera much like that of a lover’s intimate touch. As our eyes wander over the enigmatic surfaces of antique possessions that fill the space, sounds of the city and a dripping tap emanate through the layers of colour and tone. An unspoken narrative of loss and failure evolves and scatters throughout the video reflecting his physical decline and addiction to the destructive forces of the drug known as Ice. Mark, or Iceblue as he is known on a gay hook-up website, appears here as a baroque sculptural figure, still and contemplative as if already frozen in time much like his discarded and lost past. Donna West Brett, August 2016. [1] Written by Norman Petty, Horace Linsley, and Sonny LeGlaire. [2] Alison Westwood, The Little Book of Clichés: From Everyday Idioms to Shakespearian Sayings (Canary Press eBooks, 2011). [3] Christine Ammer, The Dictionary of Clichés: A Word Lover's Guide to 4,000 Overused Phrases (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2011). [4] Miele Bal, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 237. [5] Barnett Newman, ‘The Sublime is Now’, Tiger’s Eye 1.6 (December 1948): 51-53 quoted in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds. Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (MA: Blackwell, 2002), 581-82. https://www.donnawestbrett.com/art-writing/6 monthly 0.5 2021-08-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/b6407dbb-0ba3-436d-be96-84db0f462b2e/Dark-Mofo-Laundry-10-Jun_EVE-1440x865.jpg Art Writing - DOUGLAS MCMANUS: LAUNDRY OF THE TERMINAL PSYCHE - DOUGLAS MCMANUS: LAUNDRY OF THE TERMINAL PSYCHE Laundry of the Terminal Psyche, Dark Mofo 2015, Rosny Barn Hobart. 10–28 June. One of my earliest memories of Douglas McManus is of him striding through the university halls looking much like a Scottish warrior sporting a shaved head, a beard (before it was fashionable), facial piercings, tattoos and the most fabulous kilt with long socks and biker boots. Even then he wore his queer masculinity with panache and wit. His early works reflected this sense of hybridity along with an historical sensitivity that saw him creating exquisite works from men’s handkerchiefs and ties. In recent years McManus has explored masculine sexuality through experimental textile techniques and digital technologies resulting in sculptural interactive installations and three-dimensional fabrication. This is complemented by photographic interventions, montage and printmaking that further investigate the tension between perceptions of societal hetero-normative masculine ‘action’ and the deeper masculine ‘psyche’, where the male body goes to battle against conjured zombie gimps in the midst of a mysterious Tasmanian forest. For Laundry of the Terminal Psyche, McManus has created an interactive installation in Hobart’s historic Rosny Barn, in which the viewer is physically immersed in the deep recesses of the masculine psyche. This is a work that challenges preconceptions of masculinity; it tears at the flesh to reveal the fragility of the body that, despite the depiction of hunky men bearing weapons, it simultaneously reveals that body as subject to wounds, deterioration and demise. Somewhere between these two manifestations of physicality lies the male psyche camouflaged for survival. The body as a site for desire, for pain and for difference is at play here, each revealing the fragility of the flesh as open to physical and psychological wounds.[1] On entering the space the viewer is faced with a hoard of men bearing axes, sledgehammers, chainsaws and firearms. The target of their violence being mythical, digitally enhanced zombie gimps that enter from the edges of the scene. On the left, a fierce warrior lies mortally wounded, another is anxiously curled up in a laundry basket and bearded fellows armed with weapons chase an attacker from the picture frame. The scene conjures up numerous b-grade films where humanity is at risk from alien invaders and yet is saved at the last moment by a bloke with a rusty knife. But unlike these filmic renditions of hetero-masculine heroism, McManus’ rendition reveals men with their pants down and as everyone knows you have to wear pants if you want to fight evil.[2] This enormous panoramic view can be read not only from left to right but also from the surface to the dark depths of the image. For a start, it is an environmental nightmare with numerous deer having met their demise evidenced by the discarded antlers; a crashed car, clothing and household items are scattered across the landscape while a hoard of zombies exit the deep recesses of the dark forest marching toward us. Meanwhile, several figures seem apathetic or lost in the scene with their naked forms marking them as Other and as vulnerable. At the very centre and positioned at the extreme edge of the image is a man dressed only in a jacket of leaves, as if, like the mythological Green Man depicted in Kingsley Amis’ novel, he has left the forest to chase his prey.[3] But this Green Man figure is melancholic, displaced and inactive with his acanthus covering failing to protect him from our gaze.[4] This dichotomy of man as defender and man as fragile is in unison with the life forces of the forest as both protector and protected. Last Stand of the Ursine Clan is transparent (and can be read in the reverse) and through this work can be seen further leaf-like forms titled Flourish and Damage, and in the centre, Psyche is found surrounded by a Jungle Skull Vine. Looking back through these works to Last Stand of the Ursine Clan the viewer experiences the layers of texture, movement and shadow that cast a mysterious scene against the huge panorama of men and zombies. Here in the epicentre of the work the Psyche is in torment, its form is blackened like a cancerous cell and its fragility is clearly defined in the leafy limbs. It is surrounded by a jungle vine of skulls that figure mortality and draw upon the arch aesthetic of British designer Alexander McQueen. Both Flourish and Damage are three-dimensional works, intricately fabricated as Gothic renditions of bodily organs, and mounted on a dark polished surface in which the spectator is captured in reflection, becoming part of the interior psyche. These tactile central works are all sound activated and respond to the visitor in the exploration of the space in which the masculine psyche is constantly at war with itself and the body is subject to neurological disarray. Conversation of Gentlemen also employs sound in an interactive sculptural installation of two historically inspired gentlemen's garments created from laser engraved and digitally printed microfibre. The ‘figures’ are physically and visually connected by sound activated electro-luminescent wire and micro speakers embedded in the garments that respond to the interaction of the audience as they circumnavigate the work. As the visitor encounters the Gentlemen, the connecting wire transmits a glowing cascade of colour between them. An intimate conversation commences with projected voice and ambient sound that adds to the conception of the psyche as a playground for subtle nuances, for introspection, for memories. The Gentlemen are reminiscent of the ambiguous Wildean Dandy with their shocking wit, always in need of an audience to display their charm and otherness.[5] Laundry of the Terminal Psyche presents the dichotomy of masculinity through contrasts of the vigorous body and one that is flawed. The queer body is already marked as different and like discarded laundry it is seen as being soiled but also as being dangerous. The rampantly violent and visually explosive romp of the zombie battle is countered by the interplay of several images of men as contemplative, broody, melancholic, damaged and erased. There is nothing reparative about these pictures that place the masculine body in states of solitude, of internal anxiety or external danger. The damage cannot be undone. In the series Momentary Erasure, the tightly contained and cropped figures merge into the fabric of the canvas, camouflaged by the textural markings of the flora that one sees repeated throughout the installation. They have become part of the internal depths of the psyche, they look inward, and the tension between immersion and exclusion becomes palpable in front of these works. The semiological play of the exhibition title alludes to key elements of this exhibition. Each word can be deciphered in multiple ways allowing for a fissure in meaning that leaves interpretation floating between the elements. While laundry is discarded into a pile at one end of the installation, it waits in vain for the remediating actions of washing, cleaning, and the erasure of stains and corporeal traces of skin, blood or semen. The function of the stain, according to Lacan, “is recognised in its autonomy and identified with that of the gaze, we can seek its track, its thread, its trace, at every stage of the constitution of the world, in the scopic field.”[6] The stain here is written on the body through the terminal marking of the flesh as damaged, as deteriorating, and as Other. Its trace can be found through the representation of the body in the margin between saviour and victim, between warrior and survivor. The gaze of the male figure in Stain is, like the other renditions of maleness in this work—internalised—it is not directed at us. This work, which counters its opposite entitled Burnt, is evocatively internal, intimate and shrouded in a cacophony of blackness, of texture and melancholic darkness. In contrast the figure in Burnt, strides into the dark expanses of the image, into the depth of the psyche with his head alight with a burning flame, concealing his identity. The violence in this work is conspicuous – it forms a stain across the surface, marking a dark space of domination, of singularity, despair and of strange determination.[7] Laundry of the Terminal Psyche is both overtly and subtly transgressive. The men depicted here in their flannel shirts, jeans and beards fighting off alien creatures are overtly masculine and are here to save the day. But as their discarded laundry reveals, underneath that macho exterior are black translucent underwear. Beyond the surface of the skin, male flesh is subject to bruising, wounding; the organs, bones, nerves, flesh and sexuality are exposed to damage, deterioration, violence and death, but also love.[8] McManus depicts masculinity as contradictory with its public exteriority of bravura and private interiority of vulnerability, battling alien invaders one minute and contemplative solitude the next. From macho men, soft textural organs and hard fetish underwear, to exquisitely manufactured sound activated organs, McManus takes us deep into the male psyche where we too become part of the dialogue. Donna West Brett, May 2015 Conversation of Gentlemen 2015, features in the group exhibition, Electric Craft at CRAFT, 21 August–3 October 2015 during the National Craft Conference organised by the National Gallery of Victoria and the National Craft Initiative. [1] For a discussion on masculinity and anxiety see Calvin Thomas, Male Matters: Masculinity, Anxiety, and the Male Body on the Line, University of Illinois Press, Chicago, 1996. [2] In Mystery Men (1999), ‘The Bowler’, played by Janeane Garofalo tells her naked compatriot ‘Invisible Boy’ that “Maybe you should put some shorts on or something, if you want to keep fighting evil today.” [3] Kingsley Amis, The Green Man, 1969. [4] Commonly, the Green Man is made from fig, oak, vine or acanthus leaves. [5] On the Dandy and Oscar Wilde, see Edouard Roditi, Oscar Wilde, New Directions Publishing, New York, 1947. [6] Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Karnac, London, 2004, 74. [7] For a discussion on the stain see George Baker, ‘The Space of the Stain’, Grey Room 5 (Autumn, 2001): 5-37. [8] On wounding see Mark Seltzer, ‘Wound Culture: Trauma in the Pathological Public Sphere’, October 80 (1997): 3-26 and Amelia Jones, ‘Performing the Wounded Body: Pain, Affect and the Radical Relationality of Meaning’, Parallax 15 (2009): 45-67. https://www.donnawestbrett.com/art-writing/hilarie-mais monthly 0.5 2023-11-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/2713d092-d001-438b-ab43-5d20c50ff023/77819_0108.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/fa859990-5d6f-4378-bd24-527824c0a911/77819_0089.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/1e60e168-a9da-4c4a-b103-156d9fd805a7/77819_0006.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/fb555f76-4b9d-4c1c-b57b-eabf1320d95a/77819_0034.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/610386ac8715bc599730d600/5546af52-e1d8-48f5-b579-4a661f37143b/77819_0108.jpg Art Writing - HILARIE MAIS: MELT + FOLD - HILARIE MAIS: MELT + FOLD @ Kronenberg Mais Wright, February 2023 The grid is just the beginning… In 2018 Hilarie Mais travelled to a snow-topped mountain retreat in New Zealand with fellow artist Rosemary Laing. Immersed in the blue colour keys of snow and sky Mais turned to the aesthetic foundations of the grid as a means to explore the disorientation of the surrounding nature. Using a spike to pierce the snow on the cabin deck she formed a grid pattern in which voids created by the piercing action revealed the inner blue of the reflecting sky. Over the ensuing days Mais photographed the grid as the snow melted and morphed into irregular shapes as a form of unmaking. On her return to Sydney, Mais developed this simple repetitive action of forming a grid in snow by first making a wooden maquette representation, which together with the photographs became the basis for working with a glass artist to construct a series of fused glass works. Sandblasted into creation the MELT sculptures are both traces of the performative action of piercing the snow and echoes of the ensuing photographic rendition. The already disintegrating formal qualities of the grid are revisited in a further version of cast aluminium, a 3-dimensional interpretation—rather than a strict representation—of the original action and its grid form. The corporeal resonance of the initial event in multiple media reveals an ongoing tension in Mais’ work that plays out across the spatial elements of repetition and time. Found in both nature and the made-world, the grid is the basis for geometrical transcendence, or as Rosalind Krauss once noted “the grid is a staircase to the Universal.”[1] Although Krauss was referencing Mondrian and Malevich, her observations on the spatial and temporal qualities of the grid as a visual structure resonate with Mais’ life-long investigation of the form. While Krauss often refers to the grid’s formal qualities of flatness, Mais uniquely takes this ubiquitous form into a multiplicity of interpretations and reinterpretations across various media and dimensions. In encountering time as both linear and folded spatial elements in the world we come to understand the grid as a means by which we can measure time’s universal, but also impossible ephemeral presence. Folded time, for instance, can be thought of in terms of memory, a repetitive often involuntary process that brings moment of the past into the present like a long thread of knotted twine picking up traces of debris along the way. Mais considers the fold of time through material qualities of timber, paint, glass or metal in her ongoing investigation of the grid’s capacity to integrate and disintegrate spatial planes. The concept of the FOLD and the act of folding appears here in various iterations, thought of by Mais in its more literal sense of to “fold” but also in the sense of reflection and mirroring. FOLD Still Standing 2022 invites the viewer to circumnavigate its folded forms that appear, at its most obvious as a folding screen, but also in more subtle ways as surface and depth disintegrate and fragment across painted and bare timber. Its solidity and transparency are imbued with unfolding rhythmic fragility. This sense of disorientation is often seen in the Grid works, in which specific systems of directional impetus, shape, rhythm, and colour both comply with and break Mais’ applied rules. Such systems, as used across minimalist, geometric, and conceptual art, such as those of Brice Marden and others, offer structures for working that are always already endlessly adaptable. The contradictory complex systems of duality and harmony can be seen in GRID VII /WEB 2023, and Willow 2019, that extend the periodic Grid series Mais commenced in the 1980s. Both GRID VII/WEB and Willow, embody personal experiences, as in most of Mais’ structures. The first being a journey to Japan where Mais encountered Shou Sugi Ban made by the traditional Japanese method of Yakisugi to preserve wood through the process of charring. The barrier of the blackened surface protects the wood and acts as a life-preserving shield. Here the blackened structure is countered by blue interventions at startling angles that confuse space in their irregularity as they either stop abruptly or break over the edge of the work in ordered chaos. This unsettling rhythmic sensation can also be seen in Square Play 1, 2, 3 and 4 from 2021 and in Willow. Here the irregular structure suggests the fragility of porcelain, its blue tones reminding us of the chinoiserie willow pattern found throughout British homes since the late eighteenth century. Produced by Thomas Minton and others by adapting motifs of blue-and-white wares from China, the willow pattern supposedly narrates a constellatory tale of two separated lovers who meet once a year when the stars align. For many the pattern is a reminder of family dinners, lost generations and lovers. The layers of colour seen here and across Mais’ structures are themselves built up over time on a base of white primer that illuminates the works from beneath, much like porcelain. Despite the perceived coolness or distance that can be experienced across minimalist artwork such as those from the 1960s—think here of the Specific Objects of Donald Judd, or works by Carl Andre, Anne Truitt, or indeed Barnett Newman’s paintings—such works at times respond to origins that lie beyond themselves. Newman famously painted a portrait of his father Abraham as an abstracted representation in varying tones of black. Similarly, throughout Mais’ oeuvre lies a biographical spine that permeates the works in a quiet, subtle way as it ebbs along at the edge of things. The Diary series embody the personal in the ways in which these works mark time throughout any given year as a reflection on life’s journey, with experiential traces embedded in the form, shape, and colour. They comprise paints that Mais and her husband Bill Wright accumulated over many years; paints that symbolise a relationship’s time, reflected through friends and places lived. The chosen palette embodies a particular overarching mood, painted in rotating triangles across a surface that is punctuated by varying depths in shallow relief. The system here is strict until it is not. The language-based codes and systems of Mais’ sculptural evocations are revealed through colour that makes its presence felt at the work’s edge or underside, often emanating a reflected glow on the gallery wall. These often-brilliant colours, as seen in the Diary series, are at times muted by white, a purity of colour that in its very presence allows the contrasting colours to breathe. This sensation, seen in the Diary and Willow structures, is reminiscent of Mais’ Ghost series that explore loss and the transient qualities of life. Throughout, Mais honours the voice and essence of the material, whether it be wood, glass, or metal. The works evolve gradually, over time—a month, a year, a life-time—each pulling a narrative thread from one to the other as a temporal gauge embodied in structural unity. Mais thinks of the grid as a beginning, as “a meditative point on which to overlay the emotional, the experiential and the narrative—indeed, the feminisation of minimalism.”[2] The ubiquity and power of the grid resonates throughout Mais’ oeuvre in these experiential terms that underpin moments of time as it imposes itself in a narrative that modulates the temporal, the chaotic, and the systematic. This ongoing sense of the grid unravelling, unmaking and making is suggestive of Nietzsche’s thoughts on memory as “loose sheets from the scroll of time,” an imperfect tense of “it was” that remains in ongoing oppositional presence.[3] Donna West Brett, University of Sydney February 2023 [1] Rosalind Krauss, Grids: Format and Image in 20th Century Art, 1978 (New York: Pace Gallery, 1980), UP. [2] “Hilarie Mais in conversation with William Wright AM,” in Blair French and Manya Sellers (eds), Hilarie Mais (Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, 2017), 36. [3] Friedrich Nietzsche, “Unmodern Observations,” from Hilarie Mais, Visual Diary, 2023.