critical writing – Page 3 – Thought Factory

Adelaide, architecture, critical writing, publishing, South Australia

Adelaide Photography 1970–2000

September 24, 2017

I have spent some time in the last week or so contacting people to invite them to participate in the Adelaide Photography 1970-2000 book that is to be produced by Adam Dutkiewicz and myself for Moon Arrow Press. This book builds on, or is a development from, the Abstract Photography book that we published in 2016, which recovered what was left of the abstract modernist work produced in the 1960s. These are companion volumes so to speak.

The result to the initial email that has been sent out has been positive, in that the people who have been contacted so far have all said yes. Several others are rather slow in responding to that email. However, the main problem that I have encountered at this stage has been finding the contact details for some of the names of the relevant people that have mentioned. As a result some people who made art photographs during that period will not be included. They disappear from our visual history.

Harts Mill, Port Adelaide

Adelaide Photography 1970-2000 is designed to fill in one of the many gaps of the national histories and timelines of art photography in Australia that leave out Adelaide. This gap, silence or absence gives the wrong impression, as it implies that nothing of interest happened in South Australia in art photography during the last quarter of the 20th century. The inference is that South Australia is just a fly over state, and if any photographic work happened during this period, it is provincial, and so of little interest with respect to the national canon. Hence the idea of alternate histories–namely a rethinking of Australian photographic history that questions our understanding and interpretation of the past.

abstraction, coastal, critical writing, digital, publishing

towards a photobook as photo-text

September 3, 2017

I have taken the plunge and started selecting the images I have made whilst on my coastal poodlewalks and putting them into a Lightroom folder as the next step towards constructing a photobook. I have been publishing some of these images on my Littoral Zone weblog, which I had set up in order to help me figure out what I am doing with the photographs that have been made almost on a daily basis. These are simple, low key photographs of humble things and fleeting moments encountered on my various poodle walks.

Venus Bay, Eyre Peninsula, SA, 2013

Since the photos in the poodlewalks blog were images-in-text, the concept behind the photobook is a visual poetics, or more accurately a photo-poetics; one that explores word image (textual-pictorial) relations. The book as a photo-text breaks with both the idea of the photographic image as a record of objects or events in the real world as in photojournalism’s narratives, and the standard conception of the photobook being images with minimal or no text. It is part of what Liliane Louvel, the French theoriest, calls an iconotext in which text and image merge in a pluriform fusion.

Such an approach breaks with a formalist modernism, as that held held that the literary and visual arts are substantially different and mutually exclusive; a view that reaches back to Lessing’s Laocoon with its distinction between the literature as a temporal art and the visual as a spatial art. With the decay of formalist modernism these rigid boundaries were breached with many theorists and artists positioning themselves against Lessing’s rigid borders. The mutual interdependence of images and words and the impure and mixed mediality of visual as well as verbal artifacts are now widely accepted in our visual culture. Photography-in-text is a hybrid product that gives rise to a hybrid textual genre–an intermedial photo-text. Continue Reading…

architecture, black + white, critical writing, history, landscape, South Australia, topographics

the spatial turn + topographic photography

August 25, 2017

The idea of linking the spatial turn in the humanities to my 1980s photos emerged whilst I was exploring my photographic archive for the proposed Adelaide Art Photography: 1970-80 book to be published by Moon Arrow Press. Noticing a shift in my photography from street to topographics, I started to make connections in my archive blog to the spatial turn in the humanities in relation to the landscape and space that had emerged in the 1980s. This spatial turn refers to the landscape and space being understood in terms of them being socially constructed and continuously reshaped.

The factory in this photo, which was situated near the railway bridge has long gone. So have the mangroves, replaced by a housing development that was designed to revitalise Port Adelaide. This then is an urbanscape whose history is that of being continuously transformed by the power of capital since the 19th century. It is not a landscape the traditional English sense of a picture of natural inland scenery, or the Australian sense of a national landscape painting associated with Romanticism as in the Heidelberg School. Landscape in this traditional sense usually veils historically specific social relations behind the smooth and often aesthetic appearance of “nature. The tradition of the landscape in the visual arts acts to “naturalize” what is deeply cultural, social and economic.

mangroves, Port River estuary

The emphasis of the Port Adelaide photography, which is on place and the mapping of place, is a part of the tradition of chorography that seeks to understand and represent the unique character of individual places. In chorography, the skills of the artist (painter and writer) were more relevant than those of the astronomer and mathematician, which were critical in geography. Choreography is a part of the pictorial topographic mapping tradition. Continue Reading…

critical writing, history

the modest vocation of photography?

June 26, 2017

I joined the library at Flinders University of South Australia as an alumni so as to gain access to books that could help with my research for some of my photographic projects, such as the Tasmania Elegies and the Mallee Routes ones. I also wanted to see how photography had been incorporated into the recent histories of the Australia visual arts after the boom in the 1980s and the postmodern revisions of modernism. Was it now on a par with the traditional mediums of the visual arts within their autonomous sphere, and was it accorded the same art-historical tenets in the context of the coexistence of the multiplicity of styles and tendencies?

I started reading Christopher Allen’s book Art in Australia: From Colonisation to Postmodernism that was published in 1997. Allen is currently a national art critic for The Australian, and if he is currently working as a conservative art critic, his 1997 text acknowledges that Australian culture has received its styles from elsewhere. There have been Australian impressionists, post-impressionists, cubists, surrealists, abstractionists, pop artists and postmodernists.

Allen’s argument is that no visual style is simply received: the history of Australian art, so far as it merits a history of its own, is the history of our adaptation of these foreign styles to our own unique purposes. This grounds Australian art deep in the broader currents of Australian history. Art becomes part and parcel of the history of our coming to terms with our unique physical, social and political environment. Whatever you do, you inevitably implicate yourself in a specifically Australian set of concerns, and to deny these implications is simply to implicate yourself further.

Wentworth Forest, Tasmania

No photographers are included in the colonial period and Max Dupain, Ponch Hawkes and Sue Ford are mentioned in passing. In his last chapter on postmodernism Allen says that postmodern photographers, such as Anne Zahalka, Fiona Hall and Bill Henson were unlike those photographers:

who work grew out of of the observation and documentation of their social environment –which is after all perhaps photography’s real, though modest vocation–these artists made picture of elaborately, prepared subjects….The most prominent of the photographer’s is, however, without a doubt, Bill Henson, if only because he achieves what is hardest for the photographer–that is to construct an imaginary world: in his case it is a night-world of naked bodies, ruins and disaster.

Fair enough. Yet there are no examples of a photography that is based on observation and documentation in his history. Nor is there any consideration of the changing views of what constitutes observation and documentation in relation to visual composition and the broader currents of Australian history; or to the way that photography represents how Australians have come to terms with their unique physical, social and political environment.

So we can infer that, for Allen, photography has a peripheral presence in terms of the visual arts. Photography is not listed in the index of the text. The core of the visual art in Allen’s aesthetic rationality is painting and photography is not considered to be on a par with the traditional mediums of the visual arts. Continue Reading…

critical writing, exhibitions, photography

The National: New Australian Art 2017

May 23, 2017

The National: New Australian Art exhibition is impressive. It is spread across three of Sydney’s major art institutions (the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) and Carriageworks), and it claims to provide a major focus on Australian art of our time. ‘Our time’, presumably, is the contemporary postindustrial era of digital media, global capitalism, mass entertainment, constant flux, culture of excess, and the proliferation of screens. This is a time of a profound shift in orientation and sensibility as 21st-century Australia seeks to reimagine itself and to secure its identity within an increasingly globalised and interconnected world.

This inter-institutional project of contemporary art continues Sydney’s claim to be the country’s leading centre of contemporary art. This claim had been previously based on the Sydney Biennale, and then the Australian Perspecta series from 1981 to 1999 at the AGNSW. The National in Sydney–Australia’s global city–is a six year initiative, with three editions in 2017, 2019 and 2021, and it will profile a mix of emerging, mid-career and established artists from around the country and practising overseas.The websites of the above three institutions say that the new and recently commissioned works encompasses a diverse range of mediums, including painting, video, sculpture, installation, drawing and performance.

There is no photography was my immediate reaction. This is confirmed by going though all the artists exhibiting in 2017. No photographers or photo artists. The closest is video art. Photography, one can infer, is not a part of contemporary art in post colonial Australia. Neither are artists working in South Australia. Or Tasmania for that matter. So why these exclusion? Do photographers and the contemporary artists in the two excluded states lack intellectual sophistication, critical nous and the requisite knowledge of art history?

Mt Lyell open mine, Queenstown

The exclusion of photography from this exhibition of contemporary art suggests the obsolescence of photography. It is outmoded, like the juke box.

My understanding of contemporary art—the works exhibited at international Biennali or Documenta — is that it refers to that period frequently characterised by an inherently decentred, cosmopolitan, digitalised and globalised world order. In Australia it would be the post conceptual art after the Australian Bicentennial in 1988, and in situating itself reflexively within the contemporary, it is art in which formerly peripheral Indigenous and Australian art now has a key role to play. There are different forms of artistic agency – aesthetic, poetic, social, political— in the present, multiple perspectives on contemporary life in Australia as a country, nation and state, the emergence of repressed histories, an archival impulse, and the turn away from medium specificities.

The question is, given the importance of digital images on the internet, why are art photographers not seen as a part of the networking of mainstream contemporary art? This is one that explores the fault lines in any fixed notion of Australian national identity, the different issues of contemporary life, and the ruins of modernity? It’s a puzzle, especially when you see this kind of Photography Festival; a puzzle that suggests the obsolescence of photography. Continue Reading…

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