Into the Looking Glass

Daniel Palmer

[Originally published in the exhibition catalogue Coexistenz Australian/New Zealand Cultural Exchange (Happiness/Parallel Worlds), Curated by Charlotte Day & Zara Stanhope, Centre for Contemporary Photography and Adam Art Gallery, New Zealand, April 2001, 30-32]

Art and the photographic have long since converged in the expanded field of contemporary photomedia, within which various kinds of practice now coexist, informed by a plurality of artistic styles and theoretical models. While none is dominant, the current prevalence of encounters between photography and performance, between the camera and performing bodies, appears suggestive of certain latent tendencies within photo-based practice. Although the equation of photography as performance might seem paradoxical, given the camera’s traditional status as a truth-telling device, ‘acting up’ has always been central to photographic practice. Photography has adopted the performative mode at several moments in its history – including Victorian tableaux photography, fin-de-siécle pictorialism and surrealism – during which the image has ceased to be mere documentation, but stopped short of being pure fiction. Today, we find that much of the most powerful and interesting photo-based art in Australia explicitly equates the photographic with the performative.

The seeming correspondence of camera-based imagery to the ‘real’ world has made it a democratic and accessible vehicle through which to redefine aesthetic experience. Ambiguous by its nature, as an indexical and fictional medium, photography has demonstrated itself to be flexible enough for the construction of ordinary fantasies as well as offering artistically legitimate routes of access into the performative aesthetic of ‘multiple worlds’. This is a fact understood well by the makers of mass media imagery. We now take it for granted that our everyday engagement with the mass media is an action of making do, acting up, and imitating – repatriating global image-scapes to our own lives, incorporating and twisting corporate and advertising phantasms into a personal context. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that many Australian artists now seem to have left behind two decades of intense questioning around the veracity of the photograph and embraced the idea that the camera actively creates certain realities. Thus, in the past few years, we have seen a reemergence of the ‘photography of invention’, with artists endeavouring, above all, to produce new worlds.

Replete with self consciously theatrical scenarios, and artists carefully organising and staging scenes from everyday life, it may appear that photo-based art has become a decadent activity, a private humour that has forfeited the goal of revealing truths about the world. However, we are also able to view these practices as a dramatic move to action, a way of seizing the world by ‘acting it out’ for the lens.[1] The camera exorcizes the world through the instantaneous fiction of its representation, yet its image making still depends, for the most part, on an act of passage between bodies in the same physical space. A material complicity is thereby created between the viewer and the image, since the world is revealed as never anything more than a continuous move to action. This type of imagery privileges the point of view of the embodied observer, not as an isolated autonomous individual, but as a complicit figure in the drama. The images are at times uncanny, invariably directed towards eliciting the emotions, and focused on escapist, privatised utopias of the everyday.

Without being reductionist, we should ask what relation this highly theatrical photo-based art has with current social and economic conditions (difficult as these are to comprehend). Clearly, for instance, the fact that the responsibility for meaning is thrown back at the viewer suits our age of subjectivised truths, in which few retain faith in the ideal of a common social destiny. The mediation of almost all of our everyday intimate exchanges by the global marketplace, is, if we believe influential contemporary sociologists, producing an even more individualised culture.[2] In the face of an unbearable lightness of privatised consumer freedoms, individuals today feel an unprecedented impotence. We are more ‘critically disposed’, but the critique is the toothless one of consumers. As if in response, the performative mode of art is best suited to collaborations, with artists implicating their friends in their social masquerades in an effort to move beyond the private experience of artistic expression – to infiltrate the social desires that sustain self-other relations. As viewers of this work, we become a kind of audience, in the modern sense as an assembly of voyeuristic individual spectators. The camera, with its links to narcissism, has long been the ideal tool for exploring ideas about the mobile boundaries between the personal and the public. Its role is only extended today, when so-called reality television programs present us couples acting out their jealousy, and webcams upload images of ‘ordinary’ people to globally dispersed computer screens. Ironically, the private has expanded its universe to the point where we are unsure if anything remains genuinely public.

Appropriately, as in the popular media, a theatre of affect pervades the work in Happiness. As opposed to the art of Australian-style postmodernism – its resources of irony now over-stretched – the art on show here is composed of reality-fantasies, engaging emotional themes, experiences lived-through as thoroughly personal and subjective. But this is not an intoxicated return towards inwardness and self-scrutiny; these everyday dramas are elaborately, even excessively, staged worlds. In broadly psychoanalytic terms, the works overall seem to imply that we are suffering from a traumatic loss of the social. Individuals are presented as endowed with unfulfilled longings, identity has become a personal task. An ambivalent personal sincerity arises as a tone in the work, with artists’ mimicking highly conventionalised gestures of popular media culture, using it as a language of reinvention. The melodramas of advertisements, soap operas, and celebrities have become equally useful source material.

The performative tendency within Australian photo-based art today privileges art-as-activity over art-as-product, and ideas realised through documentary framing rather than self-expression. Visually eloquent, interested in suggestion, ambience and mood, its tableaux contain narrative details that never gel into a ‘story’, moral, or politics (questions of writing, of race, class, gender and sexuality are only subtly broached if not bracketed entirely). But alongside the occasions of fetishism and frivolity, this work also invokes a perpetual melancholy associated with the temporariness of the performative gesture. While the imagery hooks into a globally recognisable sea of signs, we seem to float in their oceanic worlds. We have no way of knowing what lies beneath the surface of these uncertain stagings, which work as complex mirrors, not simply to double or negate the real but to multiply it, complicate it, release other forms and pathways in it.

1 Jean Baudrillard, "Photography, or the Writing of Light", Trans. Francois Debrix, in C-Theory Vol. 23, No. 1-2 Article 83 (2000). [back]

2 For the thesis of 'individualization', see Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992) and Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000). [back]