(Installation View, pp. 315328)
Underlining the importance of the exhibition to contemporary art, ‘installation’ became the dominant form for art in the 1990s. Artists working with photography incorporated sculptural elements alongside prints, or otherwise presented their images to activate the gallery space in an attempt to engage viewers in new and more embodied ways. For instance, in Pat Brassington’s In My Father’s House, 1992, viewers encounter three plain wooden doors open against the wall of the gallery, inside two of which are monumental black-and-white images of a child’s naked back, juxtaposed with a smaller framed colour image of a long red tongue. Deeply invested in a surrealist exploration of the unconscious, Brassington transplanted the domestic architecture of the door to enhance the unhomely effect of the sexualised combination of found images. In a later version, viewers encountered the doors slightly ajar rather than wide open, and had to open the creaky doors to see the photographs inside. Brassington’s ambitions had become apparent in work such as Cumulus Analysis, 1987–88, shown at Perspecta in 1989, a sequence of black-and-white images presented in the shapes of crosses on the wall, and were also apparent in Rising Damp, 1995, a wall-size grid of thirty-five black-and-white images of crumpled, stained underwear designed to overwhelm the viewer with their suggestion of bodily excretions.1 In 1988, Brassington had declared: ‘My photographic work consists mostly of multiple images, in which the interaction between images is a major factor’.2
Rosemary Laing emerged in the early 1990s as an artist interested in the new possibilities offered by digital imaging as a way to explore questions around speed, vision and spatial dislocation. One of her early untitled works from 1992 featured abstract colour images contained in small Perspex boxes speared by a long machine-steel javelin. In her series greenwork, 1995, Laing began her explorations of the interface of nature and technology, digitally reworking four panoramic landscapes of trees by photographer Peter Elliston by transforming all points into lines. Printed on vinyl, the series was first shown at Sydney Airport in 1995, where the artist had also created images that recorded jet-streams as ambiguous blurs. greenwork was selected for the 1995 Istanbul Biennale, where it was presented on walls painted to a chroma key blue. brownwork, 1996–97, also centred around the airport. While focussing on the in-between spaces and materials associated with flight, such as metal shipping containers, the work also featured a panoramic image of woman throwing a javelin into an open Qantas cargo plane – anticipating Laing’s later performance-based work with women in flight.
Brassington’s Rising Damp and Laing’s brownwork both featured in the defining exhibition of this period, Photography is Dead! Long Live Photography! curated by Linda Michael at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Sydney in 1996. The very fact that the MCA devoted its spaces to thirty-two artists working with photography was notable.3 The exhibition, as the museum’s website notes, presented ‘photography at a moment of technological transition’. It ‘embraced works concerned with testing the formal limits of conventional photography [and] work “produced using the latest techniques of digital imaging”’.4 The work was squarely made by artists rather than ‘photographers’, with many of them combining element of other visual media such as sculpture, painting, collage and drawing. The exhibition included no documentary photography, and even the more conventional photography was spatial. For instance, Merilyn Fairskye presented black-and-white portraits of acquaintances, identified by first name, profession and nationality, but they were printed on large transparencies, which cast wavering shadows on the wall. As if coming to terms with the cavernous curved ceiling, Laing even presented one of her large images from brownwork on the ceiling. Geoff Kleem’s work included a metal ladder, while Julie Rrap’s work comprised a series of curved metal strips attached to the wall at different heights, viewers standing inside them to see the portraits of a missing person distorted by mirroring. Susan Fereday’s installation involved mirrors and suspended objects that worked to deconstruct the mechanics of photographic vision. Bill Henson presented more of his cut-screen work seen at Venice the year prior. Throughout, large colour images were either pinned to the wall to emphasise their materiality, or backed on aluminium for a clean aesthetic. Notably, there was no glass or any frames at all. Reviewer Jacqueline Milner noted the materiality of so many of the works: ‘Artists like Fiona McDonald, Bill Henson and Lindy Lee play with the material of the photograph; hacking, weaving, overpainting’5.
The impact of digital imaging on photography was in fact represented by only a handful of artists in Photography is Dead! Long Live Photography! Jane Eisemann updated the surrealist impulse to cut up bodies in a wallpaper image of two female bodies joined at the hip. Most strikingly of all, and also foregrounding the female body, Patricia Piccinini presented her early series Your Time Starts Now, exploring genetic manipulation and consumerism through the glossy look of advertising. This included the iconic work Psychotourism, 1996, a 2.7-metre-wide vertiginous digitally produced Grand Canyon-style landscape, against which the television celebrity Sophie Lee stands holding a ‘mutant’ futuristic lifeform in her hands. In a solo exhibition the same year at the Institute of Modern Art (IMA) in Brisbane, Piccinini presented photographs on lurid green painted walls, together with a car in the gallery (prefiguring later sculptural work made using glossy fibreglass as a form of technological skin). The Melbourne artist Darren Sylvester also commenced exhibiting at this time, borrowing the slick look of advertising and building elaborate sets to explore the bittersweet language of desire within popular culture, remarkably free of irony or critique. His signature tableau of adolescent girls eating KFC, If All We Have is Each Other, That’s OK, 2003, a digital Lambda colour print mounted on aluminium first shown at William Mora Gallery, can almost be read as an update to Anne Ferran’s Scenes from the Death of Nature, 1986. Increasingly, Sylvester incorporated video, sculptural objects and music in the exhibitions themselves – including bronze computer mouses, death masks, coloured sand, and daybeds with McDonald’s wrappers – culminating in his retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in 2019, which took on the appearance of a glamorous studio set whereby the photographs are almost props.
In February 1996, the conservative Prime Minister John Howard had come to power, succeeding Labor leader Paul Keating, who, as well as advancing reconciliation with Indigenous Australians, had furthered economic and cultural ties with Asia. One of Keating’s cultural legacies had been the rising prominence of Asian-Australian artists, out of which emerged Sydney’s 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. 4A’s inaugural show in March 1997 featured photography prominently. Curated by Melissa Chiu, 4A’s first curator and later director, the exhibition included three Asian-Australian artists: Emil Goh’s The Last Nonya, 1996, comprised of images from his mother’s wedding; Hou Leong’s Autobiography: With Chairman Mao, 1994, and An Australian: Cricket Hero, 1994, applied the artist’s face onto appropriated photographs; and an abstract painting by Lindy Lee (who often incorporated photocopies into her work).6 A particularly notable exhibition at 4A was Dacchi Dang’s The Boat in 2001, which was made of rice paper printed with photographs that were collated from Sydney’s Vietnamese refugee community, tracing their boat trips to Australia following the Vietnam War. Gary Trinh, Xiao Xian Liu and Aaron Seeto also presented photography at 4A that departed from straight prints on the wall (Seeto presented photographs on teaspoons). Notably, exhibitions of photographs by ‘Asian Australians’ have often resulted included found objects, materials and archival elements. Liu’s Reincarnation – Mao, Buddha and I, 1998, featured three giant portraits each made up of 100 A4 inkjet prints in turn comprised of tiny portraits of one of the other subjects, exploring the complexity of identity.
Keating opened up a broad public debate about the Stolen Generations of Aboriginal children taken from their parents, and in the 1990s Tracey Moffatt produced powerful exhibitions addressing the topic. Scarred for Life, 1994, was a series of nine poster-like images on cream paper, produced using an offset printing process, with printed captions to resemble Time magazine, via which she re-enacts true stories of childhood told to her by friends. Up in the Sky, 1997, was a suite of twenty-five photographs, produced as soft-focus duotone offset prints in two different colour tones, thereby shifting the Stolen Generations narrative into something closer to the substance of dreams. Moffatt’s diverse forms of presentation have been defined by her cooperation with technical collaborators, and her connoisseurial references to historical modes of reproduction.
Since the 2000s, various artists working with photography have increasingly explored the sculptural qualities of photographs, often enlarging photographs to life-size or bigger. Earlier generations of artists had used laborious mural-sized darkroom printing to achieve scale, handcolouring to refer to various historical visual style, or using Cibachrome to refer to the glamour of high-tech reproduction, but digital technologies allowed a bigger palette of effects. It was precisely such photogenic qualities, as well as photography’s new intimate relationship to video installation, that was on display at the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA) during the 2004 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art , which was devoted to ‘Contemporary Photo-Media’. Curated by Julie Robinson, the survey exhibition pointed to photography’s (and video’s) prominence in contemporary art but without making any particular claims about the medium. Held during an art market boom before the 2008 global financial crisis – and ranging from Henson’s large colour photographers to Silvia Vélez’s thousands of Post-It notes with digital line drawings abstracted from online photographs of anti-Iraq War demonstration – its critical reception suggested both a level of maturity in critical discourse around photography and a certain exhaustion with medium-specific exhibitions.7
In a time in which we can readily access high-quality digital photographic reproductions via our networked digital devices, artists have become increasingly aware that work presented in the gallery must offer an embodied experience for the viewer for it to become memorable. Along these lines, artists such as Cherine Fahd, Izabela Pluta and Justine Khamara have explored the new scales and flexibility afforded by digital printing. For her exhibition The Chosen, 2003, at Gitte Weiss Gallery in Sydney, Fahd presented life-size individual portraits of unsuspecting Parisians cooling off in a public shower on the Seine during a heatwave. Overtly echoing paintings of religious ecstasy, the photographs were hung slightly lower than usual to present a direct confrontation with the viewer, and with the surface exposed so that ‘the viewer could have an encounter with the body up close … without the mask of glazing and glare’.8 Pluta has repeatedly produced exhibitions with wallpaper-scale landscapes, while Khamara produces photo-sculptural portraits by physically cutting and slicing the print surface. The design of Petrina Hicks’ exhibition Bleached Gothic at the NGV in 2019 included floor-to-ceiling images interspersed among framed photographs. The towering but disposable images, enabled by digital advertising technology, served to blur the art with exhibition design – aligning with the new role of the art museum as a site of experiences and events, destined for further circulation via Instagram.
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Brassington’s development was comprehensively articulated in a 2002 survey exhibition at the Ian Potter Museum of Art in Melbourne curated by Helen McDonald. ↩
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Pat Brassington, quoted in ‘Cumulus Analysis’, Art Gallery of New South Wales online catalogue. Online at: https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/313.1989.a-q. Accessed 25 October 2019. ↩
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The artists were Stephen Bram, Pat Brassington, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, Stephen Bush, Christine Cornish, Destiny Deacon, Simone Douglas, Jane Eisemann, Merilyn Fairskye, Rose Farrell & George Parkin, Susan Fereday, Fiona Foley, Matthys Gerber, Fiona Hall, Graeme Hare, Bill Henson, Felicia Kan, Geoff Kleem, Rosemary Laing, Lindy Lee, Fiona MacDonald, Tracey Moffatt, David Noonan, Debra Phillips, Patricia Piccinini, Jacky Redgate, Julie Rrap, Kaye Schumack, Robyn Stacey, Justene Williams, Anne Zahalka. The exhibition was associated with Biennale of Sydney, Jurassic Technologies. ↩
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Online at: https://www.mca.com.au/artists-works/exhibitions/33-photography-is-dead-long-live-photography. Accessed 1 July 2020. ↩
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Jacqueline Milner, ‘Photography is not dead! Long live photography’, Globe E-journal of Contemporary Art, vol. 4, 1996. Online at: http://www.artdes.monash.edu.au/globe/issue4/pidtxt.html Accessed 25 October 2019. Accessed 1 July 2020. ↩
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Tian Zhang, ‘Talking and not talking about race: curating Asian-Australian identities in the early years of 4A’, 2018. Online at: http://www.4a.com.au/4a_papers_article/talking-not-talking-race-curating-asian-australian-identities-early-years-4a. Accessed 25 October 2019. ↩
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See for instance Blair French’s critique in Broadsheet, ‘Surveying photomedia: The 2004 Adelaide Biennial of Australian art’, collected in his book Out of Time: Essays Between Photography & Art, Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, Adelaide, 2006. ↩
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Cherine Fahd, personal email communication with Daniel Palmer, 25 June 2019. ↩