exhibitions – Page 2 – Thought Factory

abstraction, coastal, digital, exhibitions, rocks

photography and abstraction

December 21, 2018

I notice that the Tate Modern has an exhibition entitled Shape of Light: 100 years of Photography and Abstract Art, one whose art historical approach refers back to the Museum of Modern Art’s landmark photography exhibition, The Sense of Abstraction in 1960. The Tate blurb states that this is the first major exhibition to explore the relationship between the photography and abstract art, spanning the century from the 1910s to the present day, and it includes some of the contemporary work by Antony Cairns, Maya Rochat and Daisuke Yokota.

The Tate exhibition basically re-inserts the history of photography into the well-writ narrative of art history to make a necessary point: – that photography merits serious consideration within the category of abstract art, and that the camera’s attraction to the shape of light rather than the shape of solid form as we perceive it, changed the way images of all kinds were composed. It also suggests that there has been a fruitful dialogue between abstract painting (Miro, Riley, Braque, Mondrian, Pollock, Kandinsky) and photography over the last hundred years.

This raises a question: has this kind of dialogue around abstraction come to an end in the 21st century rather than being continued?

King’s Head abstraction

The curators place the 20th century’s avant-garde’s photographic experimentations (ie., abstraction) in the context of wider developments in art, with examples of cubism, abstract expressionism, Bauhaus and op art providing benchmarks. The curatorial argument is that abstract photography has evolved in step with painting and that there is a shared history. The relationship between painting and photography has been a symbiotic one, a close mutualist relationship that has benefited both art forms.

An alternative interpretation is that abstract photography followed behind abstract painting, in that abstract painters influenced the way photographic artists understood image and that the photos are the monochrome equivalents of paintings. This interpretation reinforces the culturally conservative position of the supremacy of painting. This conservative interpretation overlooks the way that both Rodchenko and Lazlo Moholy-Nagy challenged the supremacy of painting by refusing to see any medium as more important than another, and by working in fields as diverse as film, graphic and theatre design, sculpture, painting and light shows. The common tendency in the Australian art institution is to adopt the conservative interpretation. 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…

colour, exhibitions, film, history, Indigenous, landscape

The Lumen Seed: Questions for a Conversation

March 20, 2017

The questions below were written by myself in order to facilitate a conversation at the launch of Judith Crispin’s The Lumen Seed book at the Atkins Photo Lab gallery in Adelaide on Friday, 17th March 2017. The questions were structured around The Lumen Seed book, and they were designed to give some background to the construction of the text for the audience. They place the emphasis on Judith’s photography rather than her poetry, given that the space for the launch at the Atkins Photo Lab is a photography gallery. The audience pretty much took over once we got the conversation rolling.

The images in the post are mine and they were made whilst I was at Lajamanu. There has been one review of the book so far: –namely, this review of The Lumen Seed at the F-Stop photography magazine.

Lajamanu

1. Since few people in the audience would have been to either the Tanami Desert or Lajamanu we will start the conversation here. Lajamanu is 4000 kilometres from Sydney and around 800 kilometres north west of Alice Springs. It’s remote and difficult to get to. So the first question is why Lajamanu Judith?

2. Remote indigenous communities have a negative profile in the mainstream media, and those on the conservative side of politics want to close them down and shift people to the bigger towns. This is currently happening in Western Australia with support from the Federal Government which has withdrawn funds for essential services including the supply of power, water and management of infrastructure.

When I was at Lajamanu I was surprised at how well the Warlpiri community was functioning. This indicated that more is going on here than Tony Abbott’s lifestyle choice. From my brief stay I gained the impression that the life of the community was premised on a synthesis of tradition and modernity.

Is that impression right? If so, can you tell us how the Warlpiri are succeeding and what they are trying to do? Can you answer in terms of the Warlpiri’s conception of their relationship to Australian modernity.

3. What do you think is the biggest threat to the Warlpiri’s future at Lajamanu? Is it the impact of climate change on the Tanami in the form of more droughts and floods? Or would it be the failure of the younger generation to continue to walk the difficult line between tradition and modernity?

Trunk + bone

Photography book

My experience when I was at Lajamanu in 2016 was one of being a cultural tourist. I was very uncomfortable in that role, and I wasn’t sure how to step beyond being a cultural tourist to photograph what I was seeing.

4. So Judith, was that your initial experience as a photographer at Lajamanu? When did you start moving away from being a cultural tourist to begin to formulate the ideas behind the Lumen Seed project?

5. Why did you decide to incorporate the broader historical context around the Warlpiri and Central Australia into your photographic project?

Most photography books adopt a similar format: a series of photos in the form of a visual narrative with a brief, written introduction, usually written by someone other than the photographer. The emphasis is on the images. The Lumen Seed, in contrast, is much more multilayered and intertextual.

6. Can you tell us why you took this approach to a photography book? Continue Reading…

architecture, exhibitions, film, Mallee

2016 Shimmer Photographic Biennale

September 3, 2016

The Weltraum exhibition at Magpie Springs for the 2016 Shimmer Photographic Biennale was finally hung this morning. All those who are participating int he exhibition chipped in. A big thanks to Jeff Moorfoot, whose expertise gained from running the Ballarat International Foto Biennale as creative director (he’s now the editor of Beta Developments in Photography), helped me put the finishing touches to the exhibition.

Seeing some of the silo images hung at Weltraum allowed to me to assess whether to continue to photograph the silos in black and white or colour in the future. This is an early colour image of a silo at Linga that I made with the 5×7 Cambo monorail.

silo, Linga

I’ve decided to go with black and white with the colour as a supplement since the colour doesn’t add that much to the project. Continue Reading…

abstraction, critical writing, exhibitions

Abstraction x 5 book launch

August 16, 2016

Abstraction x 5 is a forthcoming group exhibition that opens at the Light Gallery in Adelaide, Sunday 2nd October. The exhibition builds on my 2015 Australian Abstraction exhibition at the Light Gallery in Adelaide. Abstraction x 5 features work by Adam Dutkiewicz, Beverley Southcott, Graeme Hastwell, Stuart Murdoch and myself.

Adam Dutkiewicz and myself will be launching our book on abstract photography, which is published by Moon Arrow Press, at the opening of Abstraction x 5. The book recovers the abstractions produced by Adelaide based photographers in the 1950s -1970s and it establishes a tradition by linking this to some of the work in my Australian Abstractions exhibition in 2015.

Abstract Photography

Adam and myself plan to make this the first in a series of photography books. The next book planned features some of the underground photographers in Adelaide from the 1970s to 2000. Underground in the sense that the photographers produced a body of work that was largely ignored by the established galleries. Continue Reading…

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