Polixeni Papapetrou: Tales from Elsewhere @ Australian Centre for Photography

There is one truly beautiful and fascinating photography show in Sydney right now, and it isn't Annie Liebovitz. The Australian Centre for Photography on Oxford Street is home to 'Tales from Elsewhere' a gorgeously hung, vivid and provocative retrospective of works by Polixeni Papapetrou. Like the fairy tales she plays with (the dominant and recurring theme in her work) Papapetrou presents scenes of apparent whimsy that even with the slightest pause seethe with undercurrents of ambiguity. Again and again we are pulled below surface and between so many images and ideas in tension, between the innocence and sexuality of children, the dangers lurking between fantasy and reality and the questions between meaning and response.

The title 'Tales from Elsewhere' is apposite for the show.  It's hung in darkened rooms where light picks out big luscious photographs and you feel transported from the harsh summer light outside.  What's clear is that 'Elsewhere' isn't and external place though, it's very much an interior landscape, specifically that of children and our own memories of childhood.  The first room of note shows a series of black and white portraits of children wearing masks and fancy dress outfits. Together with the costumes the children wear the blacked out studio and the silvery black and white place the images somewhere timeless and indeterminate, between the Victorian child exploitation and the sexualised tots of today's child beauty pageants.  Papapetrou creates a sense of dislocation by placing the children in lush featureless black backgrounds, each child has a costume but what makes them disturbing is the masks, oversized and of adult eyes, that each wears.  The difference in scale is disconcerting, it demands you look again and recalibrate and that's the point at which the very adult gaze out, the child's body and the pantomime of adult posture come together.  Little girls in harem outfits are not intrinsically disturbing, even in a world where the dress-ups chest has become a sinister Pandora's box.  These pictures aren't that either, they're just slightly off, they're displaced and at once lush and cold.

Polixeni Papapetrou creates worlds that, even as they are fantastic or contrived, are intensely affecting thanks to their colour.  The ability of pigment to effect us very directly is often overshadowed by the symbolism of colour, Papapetrou is better than that she has such an eye that images can hum or clatter with tonal washes and crashes. The sensual saturated colors reveal mental shadows and even that brightness has a sumptuary lasciviousness that scares us. The imagination and the senses are unruly, it's why they scare bigots and puritans of every stripe. A line of red in the piping around the pocket of a schoolgirl's blazer is so subversive it could be can enough to set off populist palpitations.  This subtle accretion of provocative detail loads each image with meaning, but it's the human presence that translates it into something meaningful.

Countless adaptations and retellings of Lewis Carroll's Alice books have never managed to erase the presence and power of the original's characters.  In her 'Wonderland' series of pictures Papapetrou creates tableaux from these books, built up with vivid stylized painted backgrounds and one or two figures.  The effect is charming but that shouldn't take away from how effective it is.  The Alice figure. Papapetrou's daughter Olympia is played straight, the girl poses with the just the right amount of seriousness and one can't help but note that she's not the classic blonde Alice but rather an intense dark haired girl who reminds us that this is a child playing a role.  The painted backdrops add are another link to the ideas of dress-ups and school plays, but their primary colouring and the just rough enough brushwork help retain an air of unreality.  These aren't just artless puns though, the interactions of girl and image are a crafted blur, in one the face of the Queen of Hearts oddly echoes that of Alice and you are left knowing it can't just be happy accident.  The girl playing a girl in a fantasy world, or even, a girl playing a girl playing past representations of that girl, in such a sombre way reminds us of the way that even our imagination is subject to complex mediation and also the serious business of fantasy.

The pretty constant presence of Papapetrou's daughter, the tenderness of some treatments of her and the strangeness of others, helps this body of work retain a personal dimension rather than disappear into structuralist rabbit holes or other theoretical cul-de-sacs.  As a model she is a still and deep centre to many of the images, so that the child characters she represents seem to have a flesh and blood presence whilst it is the set-ups and backdrops that swirl.  That centre allows the dominant conceit to develop, the odd, askew, loaded landscapes around the girl are representative of both her internal worlds and the lens through which others see her.  Without making the work specifically biographical we also watch this girl grow through the course of the retrospective Papapetrou follows this and themes shift and evolve.  It makes the images feel very intimate, like a conversation between two women full of care and fascination.

It looks like no accident that many of the images in the who touch on, explicitly or otherwise, the Victorian era when childhood was first romanticized. It's more remarkable that Papapetrou manages to use that era without creating some kind of photo essay. Measure of Papapetrou's craft is the affect she creates from an economy of means.  When we see girls in Victorian smocks fainting on stony outcrops in the Australian bush it's easy to see 'Picnic at Hanging Rock' and assume these are nothing but pastiche.  However, when one looks again it's plain to see that so much is achieved through subtle means.  In her series of works that explore tales of lost Australian children Papapetrou manages to touch on cultural archetypes and current anxieties, but her work is never dependent upon these contexts alone.  When the booted and bonneted children are replaced by sullen, modern teenagers  it's inevitable that we reconsider our assumptions.  Quaint historical children are in danger from something unknown, whilst messy warm-blooded contemporary kids are a threat to us.  If this makes the works sound like cultural studies lectures by other means I'm doing them a huge disservice as they work in their own right as beautifully balanced and composed frozen narratives without the interpretation.

Later works create fantastic characters, masked, role playing, part-human, part-animal they can be amusing or deeply moving and their protagonists have the presence of characters in fairy stories.  Folk tales have proved a ripe and fruitful source material for many female artists and writers, and Papapetrou works in some of the same spaces explored by Angela Carter in fiction, Marina Warner in popular cultural studies and Paula Rego in painting.  What all of these have in common is a sense of the danger and sex that rub up so insistently against female childhood.  The format of the folktale allows artists to apply the sane distance of metaphor to that subject, it allows us to escape the tabloid hysteria about bad girls just as it rejects the titillation that the same media thrives upon.  Whether hyper-real or stage set daubed you see something of the heady strangeness of childhood here. What is always notable is the impassive nature of the girls in the photographs, as all this weird shit happens it is almost a challenge to the adult viewer, and let us be honest they mainly will be, to deal with and process the ambiguity that suffuses childhood.

On Alfred Stieglitz @ AGNSW

Perhaps nothing is so hard to look at and value as photography. The ubiquity of the photographic reproduction, the infinite possibilities of photoshop and the blur between art and advertising has meant that art photography is less and less compelling. That makes an exhibition such as Alfred Stieglitz: The Lake George Years (worth a click for the excellent video introduction) at Sydney's AGNSW all the more shocking. A show that might have been of interest for its historical content, exploring the work of genuine pioneer, eschews trickery, celebrity and massive scale and delivers something quietly breathtaking.

I didn't expect to have my prejudices about size and art reinforced here but they were. It's refreshing to see images so small and so perfect. Some of my nervousness about photography is in its easy default to massive prints that bludgeon the viewer. This monumental urge undermines an art form that has an enormous potential for intimacy. Intimacy is precisely what we see here. Fittingly the Stieglitz exhibition is situated a couple of floors above the AGNSW's abstraction show. Stieglitz uses the camera and film as neutral tools for expression, much of the work here is virtually abstract, tiny essays on light and dark and the music of nature. It's difficult to imagine how strange these images must have looked. Roughly contemporaneous with cubism and expressionism the earliest works here cut up urban America and arrange it in grids of silver grey and black.

The studies of light and weather might be Stieglitz's most radical contribution to art. In painting they would be both impressionist and expressionist, in the context of photography they show how the camera could compose in light and form rather than simply record, that it could capture some of the sublime effect nature has upon us without simply describing it. These series, the 'Equivalents', 'Songs of the Sky' and 'Music' get close to the central paradox of photography: How does a technology that chemically records the fall and reflection of light on objects allow an artist to express their own vision? Stieglitz uses the light bouncing off and passing through clouds to turn them into abstract expressions, we don't see clouds as much as we see the shine and depth of greys that seems to capture the sublimity of nature. The cloud images are more romantic than they are meteorological.

Stripping the images of earthbound reference Stieglitz relies instead on the way that the natural light interplays with the structural formation of the clouds. He isn't a child seeking familiar or anthropomorphic shapes in the skies rather he's exploring the possibilities of dark and light and how they might provide analogues for emotion and experience. This isn't stage set chiaroscuro but a sensitive play with pattern and contrast and how they might evoke something deep within the viewer.

Photographic portraits have had a profound and disruptive effect on the painted portrait, what has been for centuries the core of art and patronage. Stieglitz's portraits of friends and fellow artists show a restraint that's touching and rare today but, at the same time, betray the stylistic signatures of an auteur. These understated image often include a compositional element of a framing device, as shape or object, within the rectangle of the image and behind the sitters head. It's a simple device that borrows from the painted technique. The sitters head is isolated, we focus on the essentials. The effect also creates a perspectival link somewhere behind the sitter, so we can't help but feel Stieglitz has taken us into their space. But perhaps most touchingly Stieglitz has created a fragile halo, a remnant from an ancient tradition, behind these naked faces conferring on them some kind of modernist beatification.

The series of studies by Stieglitz of his lover and later wife Georgia O'Keefe are stunning in the tender proximity between subject and artist. Taken over a period of thirty years they are a clear a melding of obsessive love and pictorial technique as any set of pictures, perhaps even those Bonnard painted of his wife Marthe over almost fifty years. These photographs might be unique as the added frisson of O'Keeffe as artist/muse adds layers of possible meaning.

O'Keeffe has suffered as have other female modernists, Frida Kahlo and Camille Claudel come to mind, from a feminist tendency toward hagiography that privileges biography over work. It's understandable but it lessens the impact of the artworks themselves and that's a shame. What makes the portraits of O'Keeffe so remarkable is that they feel so unmediated by culture, history or interpretation. It's a raw vision of an artist that is a meditation in flesh and geometry and light. When seen as a series these pictures are achingly beautiful, they paint a portrait of love and trust but their repetition also reminds us that Stieglitz, who can't of been short of sitters, was simply endlessly fascinated by his lover and wife.

The portrait, from 1931, when they had been married for seven years, reduces the artist to her hands cradling a sun bleached cow's skull. Of course that skull is a familiar and powerful motif from O'Keeffe's paintings but here it looks chalkier, like unglazed porcelain, as she cradles it in tanned hands. The skull serves as reference to both art and nature but most powerfully to the omnipresence of mortality, the way the hands hold it is almost an embrace, one doesn't need to understand the relationship between artist and sitter here to get a whiff of the complex and profound feelings at play.

Stieglitz's intention is clearly to capture the essence of someone. This makes his use of hands fascinating, they appear as body parts, almost abstracted, but they are always more than objects and retain the essential personality of their owner almost like ones voice. Hands and gestures are fascinating because we never perceive them as still, so even in a hundred year old photograph they seem to be captured at a point between movements. Similarly whatever this human essence is it has infinite manifestations, people are too complex despite what we might believe of an artist's powers and a single image will never suffice. Stieglitz is like someone chasing light around the facets of a diamond, he seems to know the best he can do is capture moments and angles in light. He uses O'Keefe's hands, her human geometry but never tries to reduce her, just to capture something fleeting. Many of these photographs, and in a sense all of them in their totality, are like haiku in gelatin silver.

Stieglitz is too easily bundled in amongst a rush to the reductions of modernism and cubism, the time he inhabits and the new technology he is stretching make that almost inevitable. On looking at the images here it feels like a mistake to label him that simply. We can see hints of the abstract, the grids of Mondrian or the blocks of Braque, but his work is as human and as smudged as a fingerprint. It is this sense of flaw and serendipity is what makes him so different to photographers like Man Ray for Stieglitz seems to embrace the beauty of imperfection. The memorable works here inhabit a world of infinite shining gradations between black and white, they are expansive and open rather than reductive and finished, in doing this Stieglitz's greatest innovation might be to take a static form and make it so intensely moving.

On Fiona Foley @ MCA

My relationship with avowedly political art is always a strained one. Even when I find myself in agreement with a particular stance or issue I find the didactic approach problematic, in particular I dislike the implicit demand that my political or social position ought to override my critical faculties. Fiona Foley's retrospective 'Forbidden' at the MCA makes me feel like that again and again, as so many of the works are underwhelming in their impact even while the issue she deals in, the historical atrocities committed against aboriginal people and their cultures and their effects in our world today, is urgent, compelling and righteous.

The 'Nulla 4 Eva' series of photographs are the works with the most obvious contemporary resonance, they stage (in contemporary dress) a range of scenes that characterise the troublesome issue of race, whether between white Australians, Chinese and Muslim immigrants or indigenous Australians. The Cronulla riots have become a complex and little (at least seriously) discussed eruption of tension around ethnicity, Foley's point here is that the hostility about who belongs where between two waves of migrants is misplaced, the aboriginal people are the true owners. The problem here is that everything looks so half-hearted, the art direction is amateurish and the models make unconvincing pantomime gestures. What we're left with are photographs that make not much more than an ironic observation on race and belonging, somehow that doesn't feel enough.

'Land Deal' is the major installation in the show. A series of objects, scissors, axes and blankets flank a spiral of flour on the floor. These represent a pittance of trade goods that were exchanged with the Wurundjeri people in 1835 for ownership of vast tracts of Victoria. The work is striking intellectually, the rank inequity is clear. Emotionally it is less successful. The spiral of flour might indicate an appropriation of the goods into indigenous culture, or it might not and I'm not sure why it would. I was also struck how by formalising these objects into a gallery installation they become more rather than less. It is as though by giving them the status of artwork the pitiful nature of the exchange is lost, this undermining the intent. However shocking the subject matter it seems fair to expect art to work on multiple levels.

The show is being promoted with the striking images from the 'HHH' series. These are large photographic portraits of black men wearing robes and hoods that evoke the Klu Klux Klan, however these hoods are black and the robes are brightly coloured and printed with African and Egyptian symbols we associate with Afro-American black nationalism and in this case HHH stand for 'Hedonistic Honky Haters'. The images are strong and vivid, the silhouette of the hood alone carries immense cultural baggage and the gaze of the sitters is direct, the eyes disembodied. They might be a part of a forbidden anthropology, one that presents images of strong black men who want more than reconciliation.

That anthropological strain is also responsible for the most striking work here, the photographic series 'Native Blood'. In these sepia photographs Foley restages the classic poses from Victorian anthropological studies of aboriginal tribespeople. The works are moving. Foley's own nudity and naked vulnerability fill these museum pieces with a humanity and empathy for the original sitters. That raw human touch only helps shine a dark light on the more abstract notion that these are works about a people's ownership of their images, it's a satisfyingly coherent work.

I want to like the work of Fiona Foley more than I do, but too often the pieces appear fractured, form and content or intellect and emotion are out of synch. Pieces like the large sculptural work 'Dispersed' where the D is threateningly composed of rifle bullets are successful as the unity of the concept gives it power. However a work like the series of gorgeous etchings of opium bulbs, each one entitled clumsily and successively with the words 'Queensland', 'Government', 'Aboriginal', 'Indentured' Labour', 'Shackled' feels bloodless, and that sense of Foley's concepts being unable to communicate the human dimension of the issues she deals with is a real flaw.

On The Henson Case

The high farce of last year's stand-off between millionaire aesthetes and provincial philistines, as internationally acclaimed photographer Bill Henson had an exhibition raided by police at the start of a media storm about child pornography and art, ought to have made a delicious and thought provoking read. However, David Marr's book, 'The Henson Case' proves to be simply another round in this intractable bout of snobbery and incomprehension rather than the analysis of the issues raised that we need.

The carefully contrived apoplexy of talkback, tabloids and Today is indeed vile, but we would be wrong to assume that when an issue is taken up by populist demagogues it is immediately invalidated.  The essential problem here is the simple denial in the art world that anyone could actually care about nude photographs of underage children sold in galleries.  At no point in the book does Marr acknowledge that the whole affair is fuelled by anything more than the philistinism and prejudice of the masses indeed dismissing their concerns as "a mishmash of anxieties".

There are issues to be answered.  One can legitimately debate, without being a prude (although this as a tough one since Marr states saying "I'm not a prude" is the surest sign you are),  whether photographing nude children, and presenting that as art, normalises their bodies as objects of desire and whether that is healthy in a society that does have concerns over their sexual exploitation.  The 'porn versus art' polarisation precludes this debate, neither side is willing to have it and it is entirely false for either to suggest they do.

Modern art, and its economies, feeds on the oxygen of transgression.  Ever since the Salon Des Refusés artists, critics and gallery owners alike have taken the breaking of norms, first of aesthetics and then social or moral, to be a mark of both progress and quality.  To be 'dangerous' or 'challenging' is wholly desirable.  This the art world claiming no offence could or should be taken is disingenuous in the extreme.  We ought to ask ourslves if Henson's work would be so valuable or lauded if it did only feature clothed children.

This is where Marr's, and the anti-censorship lobby's, arguments become disingenuous and implicitly deny opposing parties the possibility of any nuanced or subtle objections.  At this point the defence, such as I understand it, descends into farce.  Let us call it the 'Wank Fallacy'.  In short this runs something like:  

• Does something banal, let's say a shoe, become pornographic if someone masturbates over it?  Clearly not.  Thus ANYTHING that anyone masturbates over is by definition not pornography.
  

I struggled with that one as well.  Other claims remain wilfully unexamined, the idea that what was good enough for the art of earlier centuries should be good enough for us conveniently ignores that these took place in societies where child labour and pre-pubescent marriage were common, and we probably don't want to resurrect those particular artifacts.  Similarly the argument of the kids willing participation certainly does demonstrate the complexity of the issues, but it also runs uncomfortably close to the 'but she wanted it' defence.

Comedy enters the narrative with Cate Blanchett, make that "Politically committed and beautiful Blanchett".  Seemingly unaware that  most of the nation were guffawing at the preposterous 2020 summit we learn that the group of creative people involved were an organised force.  Cate Blanchett tells us that "2020 had asserted that artists were citizens' said Blanchett' that they had a place at the centre of national life'".  This betrays the sense of entitlement that is so irksome, the arts have become marginalised because of their choice or inability to be relevant.  Marr's chief contempt is reserved for Kevin Rudd, and it's informative to see why, "This was the new scholar Prime minister, the Mandarin man, the leader who had lately consorted with Cate Blanchett at the 202o summit.  But with these remarks on 'Today' Rudd killed Camelot" in short Kevin Rudd has proven himself to be a class traitor.

Class is THE great unspoken theme of the book, the effrontery of  the uneducated, of those who had never registered Henson's existence in the past, the prudery of the religious, how dare any of them pass judgement on what the consensus of a group of rich sophisticates deems to be serious.  Bob Debus offers a rare glimpse of sanity here, pointing out that as a politician he does actually have to respond to the views of vast majority of his constituents.  This is heresy to Marr, elites should stick together and just as they demand the approbation of the masses they deny them the dignity of a voice.

Not even when we hear of QCs, heiresses, publishers and national broadcasters at the Henson opening do we get a hint that this is a very exclusive club, dealing in very expensive commodities.  The operational realities of the art world are only ever dealt with to demonstrate how the moving, storage and appreciation of art are Byzantine rites conferring a priestlike status on their participants.  Never are the commercial realities spoken of, price tags, commissions, super-funds or auction prices don't belong in this world.  With Hensons trading for upward of $20,000 dollars a piece it's hard to imagine a more bizarre omission but people are 'supporters', never customers or investors.  Given the importance of notoriety you would imagine that the whole affair would be money in the bank for his brave supporters. 

And me?  Well I like censorship as little as I like the snobbery and hypocrisy of elites, I find Henson's images beautiful and cliched, a kind of portentous kitsch that is anything but challenging or insightful.  Henson and cohorts are presented as Candides, blithely unaware that they may ever cause offence, which given their experience, exposure to the trajectory of art debate in the last forty years and their very worldly success is difficult to believe.  But this lies at the crux of the issue.  When novelty and transgression are your measure of artistic worth one ought to be willing to expect a heightened and aggressive response from those who hold the norms you seek to break.  To expect otherwise is essentially juvenile, and has its echo in derivative driven financial institutions who want all of the rewards of risk but for the rest of society to pay for its downside.

The Henson affair, or something very like it will happen again.  If the art world desires both a privileged place in the government and shaping of society whist it continues to proclaim 'art pour l'art' and feed on the economics of shock that much is inevitable.