Should art museums think of themselves as ‘collections’ or ‘archives’?
Martyn Jolly
Photography has always been a numbers game, and the bigger the number the better. In the context where words like ‘exponential’ or ‘ballooning’ barely begin to describe the current state of the medium, is the notion of a photographic ‘collection’ relevant any more?
I’m talking along with Robyn Stacey
Art Gallery of New South wales, this Sunday 10.30am.
Edward Steichen at work on the Family of Man
The Variety Club mural before the Rolfoclasm
Rolfoclasm continues. Not only has he now been stripped of his Australian Honours, but he’s been painted out of the Variety mural at Victoria Markets and replaced with Stuart Wagstaff! But, hang on a minute, wasn’t Wagstaff the face of Benson and Hedges for decades? Didn’t the 116 ciggie ads — ‘when only the best will do’ — which he knowingly made right up until the day cigarette advertising was finally banned in 1976 (then remaining on the B & H payroll until 1993) lead to the deaths of thousands of innocent Aussies? This shows the moral ambiguities which await any ‘clast when they self righteously take upon themselves the power of ‘clasm.
Martyn Jolly NLA projection for Enlighten Canberra
My ANU colleagues Lucien Leon, Kit Devine, Marcia Lochhead, Zoe Tulip, and myself, each designed an Enlighten Canberra projection for the National Library of Australia. Mine was derived from one of the hundreds of beautiful hand tinted magic lantern slides in the Library.
The explanatory text: The Reverend John Flynn was Superintendent of the Australian Inland Mission for almost forty years from 1912. A keen photographer, Flynn used magic lantern slides in the lectures he gave to publicise the work of the mission in providing medical, nursing and pastoral services to the people of the inland. The Library now holds a large collection of these beautifully hand-tinted images. The one used for this projection was taken in 1926 by a ‘Miss Colley’ and documents the Oodnadatta to Alice Springs Mail. Presumably it was used by Flynn to illustrate the vast distances of the inland.
National Capital Motors from Google Street View
Braddon
The world snorted with derision when, for the second year in a row, the OECD nominated Canberra as the world’s best city. Critics pointed out that, although it had come out with the biggest numbers in the OECD’s nine ‘wellbeing indicators’, which included education, jobs, incomes and environment, this did not make for a great city. In fact, they chortled, Canberra is a terrible city. In The Guardian’s words: ‘Canberra is a deathly place. It is a city conceived as a monument to the roundabout and the retail park, a bleak and relentless landscape of axial boulevards and manicured verges, dotted with puffed-up state buildings and gigantic shopping sheds. It is what a city looks like when it is left to politicians to plan.’ None of that is wrong (the ‘gigantic shopping sheds’ bit is particularly right). But it is very much an attenuated view from lofty London that begs many questions for those of us who are actually making a go of living here. For instance, maybe its monumental conception — Griffin’s grand design for utopian civic virtues — gives our city its brittly surreal, hyperreally heterotopic character for which many of us have developed a cool, wry affection. And maybe some of us like the regular irruptions into our day-to-day travels of raw bush and depthless sky, afforded by the skeletal nature of the relentless axial boulevards. And those axes have also begun to shelter at their fulcrums some fragile urban micro-climates which have slowly been developing over the years.
Since the 1960s, coincidentally Canberra’s heyday, urban discourse has shifted from the macro of the master plan to the micro of the precinct —the local area dense with textures, memories and experiences. Since the 1960s, across the world and without exception, many neighbourhoods of poverty or industry have been remade as waves of gentrification have swept over them. Artists have been the shock troops, reinforced by designers and architects, and followed by developers and trendies in a pattern as familiar and repeated as the tides. For fifty years urbanists have become adept at sniffing out the fluctuating nuances of the ‘local’ as waves of gentrification sweep back and forth. Antonioni’s 1966 masterpiece Blow Up, set in swinging London, is not only a film about the limits of knowledge in photography, it is also a film about the ever-transforming psycho-geographies of the postwar city. In his restless need to have everything he sees, the photographer visits a quiet nondescript London street to see a rundown junk shop he wants to buy. As soon as he notices two gay men incongruously walking a poodle there he knows, and the audience knows, that the local area’s character is already changing, and he must snap up the shop quickly. In Blow Up nothing is stable and nothing, not even the city, can ever completely becomes as it seems, before it must become something else. This is now the state for every city in the world, even Canberra.
For instance, ranged around the urban doughnut-hole of Civic are separated sites of local regeneration such as New Acton, Childers Street and Braddon. Of these perhaps only the transformation which Braddon is currently undergoing is intimately and intricately embedded in its past, however brief and prosaic that past may be. Braddon is basically only three parallel streets, and its car yards, hardware stores, panel beaters, takeaways and camping shops are only gradually giving way to coffee shops, restaurants, boutiques, bike shops and apartments. On their brief visit to Canberra the New York Times was kinder than The Guardian, identifying Braddon as Canberra’s ‘decidedly hipster underbelly’.
Pioneers such as the Helen Maxwell Gallery, once upstairs on Mort Street, predicted this urban renaissance many years ago, but couldn’t survive long enough to benefit from it; and some of the temporary pop-ups (who for a few months kept real estate spots warm before the temporary fencing went up around them) such as The Chop Shop, which was briefly located down an alley in Lonsdale Street, recognized past usages in their names. This rich and dense texture was just what sophisticated urbanists want, and is certainly what Canberra needs, probably more so than all the other ‘normal’ cities on the planet, so who am I to quibble?
Only to wish that because Canberra is different, there is the utmost delicacy as Braddon continues its inexorable makeover. Of course delicate urban renewal is what everyone wants, not least the developers themselves who love underbellies just like the rest of us, and for whom creative grunge has an intangible commercial value if handled correctly. But when it comes to the bottom line of the balance sheet, where income has to be plotted against expenditure down to the last percentile point over each individual square metre, the delicate presence of the past, or the tenuous tenancy of the under resourced, sometimes still lose out.
For instance Braddon has always been a car precinct (just as Canberra has always been a car city). From 1920 it was the site of Canberra Garage Limited, servicing the city’s fleet; and up until just a few years ago rev heads would spend their Saturday nights cruising up and down past the car yards, doing the circuit by languidly swinging round the roundabouts at Lonsdale and Torrens Streets; every now again pulling into the Caltex near the Mandalay at Girrawheen Street to pop their hoods for the admiring gazes of their mates; sometimes even attempting a burnout at the top of Lonsdale Street. If they ever ventured back to Braddon now the only circling they would be doing would be looking for a park.
One of the handsomest facades in Braddon was the delicate, white, open brickwork curtain that surrounded National Capital Motors on the corner of Mort and Elouera streets (perhaps the original site of Canberra Garage Limited?). But that piece of delightful architectural texture was flicked over like a house of cards to be replaced by a building of depressing, generic nastiness, with less architectural charm than the Centrelink office around the corner. All of the acres of recycled, undressed timber cladding, Dynabolted to the newly poured concrete walls of Braddon, can’t replace the authenticity of that lost texture. The only ghost I can find now of the facade is on Google Street View. The Google car had driven by National Capital Motors in 2010 and, thankfully, hasn’t been back to Braddon since. When it eventually does come back it will find quite a bit changed, but will implacably wipe away all the old ghosts with one sweep of its robotic camera.
In the meantime the de-Fyshwicking of Braddon continues, and for the pedestrian the mingling smells of gasoline and grease are regularly displaced by doughy, oily, blasts of hot air from each successive bistro kitchen’s exhaust. The pop-ups have popped off, and replacement aluminum and glass apartments have been cad-cammed into instantaneous existence. Street shop fronts have become enclosed retail experiences, and the artists left walking outside on the streets of Canberra’s erstwhile underbelly are beginning to feel the backs of their necks prickling as they are distantly surveilled by the area’s new residents from their be-Webered fifth-floor balconies.
These changes to Braddon are not just inevitable, they will probably end up being, on balance, ultimately good for Canberra too. They are nearly identical to the changes in a thousand similar inner city neighbourhoods around the world. But only nearly identical, not completely identical, because Canberra is different, Canberra, as we are frequently reminded by the rest of the world, is a special case. This makes any more than an absolutely necessary lack of delicacy in the ongoing gentrification of Braddon especially tragic, not that there will be of course.
Martyn Jolly (Thanks to Erin Hinton and Ursula Frederick for the tip-offs)
Oliver Wainwright, ‘50 years of gentrification: will all our cities turn into ‘deathly’ Canberra?’, The Guardian, 13 December, 2014
Emma Pearse, ‘36 Hours in Canberra, Australia’, New York Times, 5 June 2014
National Capital Motors from Google Street View
Sarah Dellmann, from the Department of Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University, kindly profiled my research in the newsletter of the Magic Lantern Society of the United Stats and Canada. The relevant pages are below. The newsletters of both the UK and US societies are always chock full of interesting stuff, and as Sarah demonstrates connect enthusiasts and collectors and researchers.
Magic Lantern Society News, October 2014
Magic Lantern Society News, October 2014
Below are simulations I reconstructed using digital copies of the slides we projected at the National Film and Sound Archive performance, and an NFSA recording of Peter Tregear and Kate Bowan’s wonderful performance. Unfortunately, in this recording Kate’s perfect piano is somewhat soft, except in Blue Bell and Holy City. I’ve selected two transitions from the video editing menu: a dissolve, which I wasn’t able to do on the night, but which was a very popular effect in the nineteenth century; and left-to-right/right-to-left slide transitions, which at least give a hint of the mechanical slide changer I used, but which are a lot smoother than mine! Unsimulated is the flame effect I produced in the window during Jane Conquest by flashing some red gel in front of the lens.
My article on Australiana photobooks of the 1960s has finally come out. Follow this link to the History of Photography journal to get my citation rate up!.
Projection beams at Enlighten Canberra
Photograph at MCA Biennale
Rubbish bin at Cai Guo-Qiang audience participation drawing activity
UQAM boardroom through a crack in the door
Floor talk at UQAM
Cai Guo-Qiang show at GOMA
We climbed Whites Hill in Brisbane to visit the camera obscura, price of entry sixpence, one penny for children. We were disappointed to find it wasn’t there. Apparently it hasn’t been operating since 1928, some kids last saw some remnants attached to the dilapidated tea-rooms in the 1940s, all we found was a council plaque. In the 20s it had a 360 degree rotating periscope in the roof of a two storey tower projecting an image onto a viewing table 9 feet across, which viewers saw from a surrounding mezzanine balcony. My source, Judy Rechner’s Where Have All The Creeks Gone: Camp Hill Heritage Drive Tour, published by the Brisbane East Branch of the National Trust of Queensland, says that the viewing table was conical, perhaps to keep the whole field of view in focus because of the periscopic optics? I seem to remember that the Edinburg camera obscura and Santa Monica camera obscura had tables that tilted, perhaps for the same reason of different points of focus across the width of image? Whites Hill isn’t all that high, but when you get to the top you can see why a camera obscura would have worked there, with the city to the west and Moreton Bay to the east, and flatness in between. The trees have all grown now, obscuring most of the view, except for a gap towards the city helpfully left by the council to frame the distant towers. This scopic vector was the only real remnant of the Whites Hill camera Obscura. But I remembered another camera obscura from my childhood, the one at Picnic Point near Towoomba. The NLA has a wonderful shot of it by Glen Rees. My googling said that the Picnic Point one had been built by W.M. Lowe in 1966, and had a ‘dished’ viewing table. Were each of these room camera obscuras designed and built independently? Or was there a template?
Whites Hill today with gap in trees
Whites Hill
Whites Hill camera obscura
Picnic Point, Toowoomba, camera obscura
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It was great hanging out with Campbell Gray, Gordon Craig and Michelle Helmrich at the UQAM, as well as s well as Maurice and Camilla from the QCP, and meeting the dealers for James Casebere and Yao Lu at the No Place, opening. The only bead I could get on their work and the work of Lori Nix and Giacoma Costa for my opening speech, was ‘apocalypse’, the text is below.
No Place show at UQAM
No Place
‘Hasn’t the weather been strange lately, could it be a warning?’ Perhaps you found yourself saying this, or something like this, to one of your friends recently. It sounds so contemporary, so much part of our current anxieties, but in fact it is the strap-line from the poster for a 1977 Australian film by Peter Weir called The Last Wave. The film ends with a huge tsunami hitting modern Sydney, as foretold earlier in the film by local aborigines with their ancient wisdom, and ignored by whites with their hubristic civilization. I’m starting with films of apocalypses because that is the only point of entry I can find into this intriguing show. I’m afraid that Gordon Craig’s title for his show, No Place, just doesn’t do it for me, nor does the idea of ‘home’which he floats in the catalogue. And ideas of dystopias and utopias, the ideas I first started with in an attempt to wrap my head around this difficult show, also didn’t get me very far. But I think the idea of apocalypse does give me a point of entry, because apocalypses are about contradictions, and I think that this is also a show of contradictions.
Peter Weir’s movie is only one of a long stream of apocalyptic movies, and it comes from the same period of the disaster movies that have influenced some of the artists here, movies like The Poseidon Adventure 1972 (from which I still bear the scars) and others like Towering Inferno and Earthquake from 1974. Before the wave of seventies disaster movies we had nuclear apocalypse movies like On the Beach 1959 or Doctor Strangelove 1964; and now there are a new crop of disaster movies, many featuring zombies, such as Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, 2002, where this generation’s anxieties are played out. I think apocalypses must be hard wired into us as humans. They are certainly a fundamental part of all the world’s major religions, and vivid apocalyptic scenarios can be traced back to the millenarian cults of the Dark Ages. I grew up in Brisbane in the shadow of another potential apocalypse — all-out nuclear annihilation, and now in Canberra my children cheerfully tell me that they will be dead before they reach my age because I’ve personally brought on climate change for them and, as a result, the sea levels will rise and the crops will fail for their generation.
And this is the thing about apocalypses, they unite the micro with the macro, the seemingly inconsequential with the cataclysmic, and the personal with the epochal. In the Dark Ages, or in certain parts of the South in the United States, if we didn’t individually pray to Heaven we’ll be left behind at the last trump. In the sixties, if we didn’t adequately prepare, we would be left as a thermonuclear shadow on the ground. And now, if we don’t each reduce our carbon footprints, sea levels will rise. And this is where apocalyptic scenarios come in, my personal carbon footprint will raise sea levels less than a micron, but collectively we are all in trouble.
Apocalyptic scenarios are personal: they are about our individual responsibilities and our personal failures, but they are our failures scaled up, from the human to the cosmic. And this is why I think a lot of work in this show is apocalyptic: it does not simply recreate scenarios that might be familiar to us from science fiction movies, but the activity of the artist’s labour itself, working with an exacto knife, fome core, polymer clay and glue, day after day, to create intense miniature worlds, which are then reproduced at massive scale, I think taps into a deep redemptive impulse. It takes Lori Nix seven months to build one of her dioramas, at about a metre across, of cities drowned by time; and she then photographs them, from the precise angle for which they were built, on an 8 x 10 view camera — the highest-resolution of recording there is. This shift from the hand-crafted table-top world do the high-resolution print creates a strangely uncanny image — one reminiscent of dreams, of the aftershock of the psychic impact on us of movies we were really too young to see at the time — but it is also a measure of the distance that needs to be bridged between the personal and the epochal.
There is labour in the digital too. One just has to stay to the end of the long roll of credits at the end of any contemporary science fiction film to realize that Hollywood’s outsourced CGI and VFX labs are the sweatshops of the post-industrial age, building cathedrals of illusion pixel by pixel, rather and stone by stone. The digital artists in this exhibition have also sweated laboriously to maneuver pixels into place with their Wacom Tablets. Yao Lu’s collages, of sublimely monumental piles of rubbish in China, use revered and ancient compositional references which project China’s mountains of rubbish, to which a blind eye can still be turned, into the future where they will — apocalyptically — come to define ‘Chineseness’ itself.
Giacomo Costa’s digital illusions unite urban architecture with geology and climate in an extended epochal timeframe where the human is so ephemeral it cannot even register. But their main impact on us as images comes, again, from the contradictions in scale: the microscopic detail of his vectoral models and texture maps, against the breadth of his vistas.
So there are contradictions within the images that I think are really important. The contradictions are essentially those which the very oxymoronic phrase ‘photographic fictions’ sets up. But these contradictions are also an essential truth: the Earth indeed will drown if we don’t change our ways. We will steal the future from our own children unless we can imagine — fictionalize — future scenarios scary enough to make us change, and compelling enough to connect or own micro lives with the macro fate of humanity.
Not only are there contradictions within the images, but Gordon Craig has also set up a contradiction within the show. James Casebere has been doing table-top work since the seventies, when Thomas Demand was still a boy in short pants, and his work has always been about the American mythos, often with a touch of postmodern irony. But here I think the irony is getting more pointed. At first glance the cardboard houses of Dutchess County have a Tim Burtonesque quirkiness, like the opening shots to Beetlejuice or Edward Scissorhands. These houses, with their cheap-ass, hokey and homey Americana architecture, probably hold all the normal suburban secrets, but nothing too challenging — at first glance, that is. Casebere’s table-top fiction was inspired by an actual scene which he saw from a freeway where, he says, he: ‘discovered the spread of cookie-cutter McMansion subdivisions, all mixed up with the unplanned ad-hoc triumph of vernacular taste, and a carbon footprint spun out of control.’ The Global Financial Crisis, with its Sub-Prime Mortgage fallout for Americans, had just hit; but rather than just photographing an historical crisis, or an aesthetic crisis in taste, Casebere had also presaged on apocalyptic crisis. It is the everydayness of this scene, with its ‘carbon footprint spun out of control’, that we must continue to imagine and reimagine, fictionlise and document, in order to keep all of its implications for our future in mind.
Martyn Jolly
Martyn Jolly 