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24/11/2004

Two exhibitions

Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts PICA, Perth

City of Perth PhotoMedia Award
November 25 - December 19

The new biennial City of Perth PhotoMedia Award replaces the City of Perth Photographic Award and encourages entries from artists working in photography, digital and online or computer based disciplines. In its inaugural year, the City of Perth PhotoMedia Award will present work by around twenty artists from all over Australia, reflecting the popularity and currency of this diverse art form area.

Twenty-two artists from across Australia, working in photographic based media have been invited to exhibit contemporary work in this prestigious biennial award exhibition featuring this rapidly developing and exciting art form. The City of Perth PhotoMedia Award is offering a $10,000 prize for excellence (acquisitive), as well as a $2,000 commendation prize (non-acquisitive).

Exhibiting artists: Danica Chappell, Anthony Curtis, Simon Cuthbert, Christian de Vietri, Allison Gibbs, Michael Gray, Siri Hayes, Martin James Hurley, Derek Kreckler, Belinda Mason Lovering, Kate McMillan, Graham Miller, Tony Nathan, Conor O'Brien, Polixeni Papapetrou, Therese Ritchie, Matthew Sleeth, Helen Smith, Ben Sullivan, Janet Tavener, Jay Younger, Anne Zahalka.

"The inseparable toy of the other"

To live in Perth in 2004 is to acknowledge that we are at the same time somewhere and nowhere. The place we inhabit is at once increasingly fragile, calling for introspection, forethought and acts of concrete regional resistance (at the level of politics, culture, heritage, town planning, architecture); but it is also robust, busily performing dynamic exchanges with other fragile places and cultures, strong and weak economies, redundant information systems and fluctuating markets.

Twenty years ago, the American academic Kenneth Frampton warned of the globalisation of the city and the transformation, via freeway and high rise, of locally inflected culture into universal civilisation. We are still attempting to negotiate this 'somewhere or nowhere' position in order to arrive at an idea of ourselves that is faithful to both our local place and the demands of a (post)modern world culture.

The transformation of a regional award for photography (City of Perth Photographic Award 1992 - 2002) into a national award for photomedia acknowledges the increasing complexities of both contemporary identity and artistic practice. The works of the twenty-two finalists testify that both regions and practices are marvellously invigorated by a dialogue beyond established boundaries. It is not simply a matter of states and nations, nor of artists and audiences, but of the ways in which the works before you extend the concept of photography to enter into dialogue with realms outside their apparent frames.

Frampton wrote of the tendency of modernism to privilege the tabula rasa. Both a certain idea of art and a certain idea of the built environment have favoured the use of earthmoving equipment; "… a totally flat datum is regarded as the most economic matrix upon which to predicate the rationalisation of construction." Photographic art, like the built environment, has always been imbricated in ideas of place, trace and memory. It can never be a blank slate, but comes with historical baggage intact.

In the 19th Century, when photographic technologies emerged, debate raged as to whether this new medium could in fact be called Art. Photography, it was argued, is mechanically produced, free from the discriminations of human eye and hand. Like science, it is an objective, accurate record. It is evidence, not witness, with the latter's insecure base in subjectivity. Harnessed to science and to exploration, photography was thought destined to be the faithful servant of reality.

As photography became more ubiquitous, it was embraced by mass culture - tourism and portraiture. In celebrating the ordinary, 19th century photography challenged the pretensions of Art. It is in the photograph, wrote Lady Elizabeth Eastlake in 1857 that "minor things - the very shoes of the one, the inseparable toy of the other - are given with a strength of reality which art does not even seek" (see Wells, 2000).

In the early twentieth century Moholy-Nagy argued that photography's pure mechanical form and apparent objectivity would purge the world of old forms and outmoded aesthetics. Yet, pictorial conventions of painting and perspective - and now cinema and television - have governed much of the way that the image is framed and constructed. And given its associations with mass media and advertising, photography could never claim the tabula rasa that modernism demanded.

In the 1970's the American critic Susan Sontag wrote that photography's relationship to reality is inescapably linked to its indexical nature, like a footprint, or a death mask. It was there! declares the photograph. I was here! declares the photographer.

The relationship of the photograph to reality was undermined long before the digital era gave rise to the computer-based manipulations that have put in doubt our faith in a faithful friend (who believes the media any more?). Mechanical reproduction, argued German critic Walter Benjamin (1892 - 1940) unhinged the fingerprint from the finger. With the copy, formerly unique objects lost their singularity, their aura. Lest we are all drowning in simulacra (a copy for which there is no original), it is worth remembering that the artist and the market - and a competition such as this - still convey singularity on the image, both by controlling the number of reproductions (the limited edition) and by conferring authority through the signature.

Represented in this year's Award are photo-installation, analogue image and digital media. Contemporary Australian photomedia registers photography's ongoing dialogue with reality, sometimes returning to us a statement of seemingly unmediated representation, sometimes invoking studio practice and manipulated image to stage and reinterpret the cultural imaginary.

Computer-based digital imaging and printing technologies continue to challenge the old truism of the relationship of reality to the photograph. With the extension of photography to include the hybrid play of photomedia we are opening our minds to the assemblages and creative couplings that inform contemporary Australian practice.

If the works before you are proof of anything, it is of the reality of the multiple influences and trajectories in current photographic and photomedia work in Australia. Photography is central to war, art, the media, science and medicine. It has been utilised as a weapon in cultural and philosophical wars. Does reality stand apart from our consciousness of it? The answer might seem obvious: there is reality! There! After all, we are not all artists, but we all take photographs. Perhaps our obsessive private documentation is a sign that we are indeed anxious about our current reality. Perhaps the desire to remember our place (in home movies, snapshots of the kids) is predicated on the fear of forgetting and the anticipation of the passage of our known reality - our world, our lived experience - into the fugitive space of the image.

In this exhibition you will discover traces of the past, hints at future directions in Australian Photomedia. Like all places worth going, there is more than one way of getting there.

References:
Kenneth Frampton, "Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance," in Postmodern Culture, Ed. Hal Foster, Pluto Press, London and Sydney 1985.

Liz Wells, Photography: A Critical Introduction, Routledge, London and New York 2000.

- Josephine Wilson

Public Opening: Wednesday November 24, 6pm
(winner announced at 6:30pm)
Exhibiting: November 25 - December 19, 2004

catalogue available from PICA from the opening night for only $5

For information about the Award contact: Helen Curtis, Arts and Cultural Development Coordinator on 9461 3154 or Email helen_curtis@cityofperth.wa.gov.au
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BankWest Contemporary Art Prize
November 25 - December 19

In its fourth year, the BankWest Contemporary Art Prize brings together a selection of Western Australia's finest contemporary artists to exhibit together. A cross-section of Perth's painting styles and techniques will be selected for showing, and to be judged for the $15,000 first prize and a $2,000 People's Choice Award.

Exhibiting artists: Merrick Belyea, Susanna Castleden, Galliano Fardin, Indra Geidans, Katherine Hall, Richard Gunning, Giles Hohnen, Nick Horn, Joanna Lamb, Serena McLauchlan, Sine MacPherson, Tom Múller, Jánis Nedéla, Lucy Anne O'Dea, Annette Orr, Concetta Petrillo, Kevin Robertson, Alessandra Rossi, Longin Sarnecki, Alex Spremberg, Jon Tarry, Paul Uhlmann, Rick Vermey, Gosia Wlodarczak, Lisa Wolfgramm.

Public Opening: Wednesday November 24, 6pm

Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts
1 James Street
Perth

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