Twisted Tales of Place, Identity and Politics
Susan Best
 
 
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Tracey Moffatt, Laudanum
toned photogravure on
rag paper, 76 x 57 cm,
set of 19 images, 1998

The theme of this year’s Perspecta, Living Here Now: Art and Politics, promises an engagement with the politics of locality. It is a welcome change to see "here" and "now" on the agenda again after a surfeit of survey shows that have showcased the placelessness of much contemporary Australian art, its adherence to the "anywhere" and "nowhere" in particular of International art. But what does (or can) locality mean after postmodernism, and after globalisation? Is it a return to the vexed questions of Australian identity and spirit of place or, this time round, does the question of Australian identity correlate with a more global concern with this issue?

This global concern with identity can be seen in the recent analysis of the fate of postmodernism offered by Hal Foster. He aligns the mid-90s with the return of questions about identity. In an essay titled "Whatever Happened to Postmodernism?", he argues that: "the death of the subject is dead in turn: the subject has returned in the cultural politics of different subjectivities, sexualities, and ethnicities, sometimes in old humanist guise, often in contrary forms - fundamentalist, hybrid, or . . . traumatic."1 While Foster does not explicitly call the mid-90s post-postmodernism - indeed he is careful to underscore the fact that history does not have such clean breaks - he nonetheless implies that the postmodern moment has all but past.

The implication is that the "new and ignored subjectivities" of the 90s have in no way partaken of the previous decade’s critical interrogation of identity.2 Indeed, Foster suggests the "death of the subject" was only the death of the universal subject claimed to be able speak for all.3 Foster’s nimble intervention enables the critique of subjectivity to be confined to a single blow - the critique was directed at the universal subject, thus exempting new, "specific" identities from a similar kind of scrutiny.

Fosters’s historicisation of the "crisis of the subject" has the effect of sealing off the bad, very singular subject of the past from the contemporary proliferation of good subjectivities. When this sealant is applied to the art world - and indeed it all too often is - it means some of the more fruitful and vigorous lines of inquiry about contemporary identity art are automatically closed off. For example, the construction of an historical rupture masks issues of debt, continuity and complicity. Questions that need to be pursued here include: How is the new identity art indebted to postmodernism? This may seem an obvious point, but all too often such work is posed as the pure emanation of the authentic identity in question, rather than the result of working within, and transforming, established art vocabularies.

It is my feeling that the earnest North American approach to identity that seeks to separate the art of the 90s from the critical interrogations of the 80s, has limited purchase for those of us that live here, now. Certainly, it makes sense to attend to such global descriptions to understand some of the broad forces that may be shaping contemporary art practice (even if this diagnosis emanates from a particular place) but we also need to attend to the particular ways in which such forces may be instantiated here. Two examples of Australian art that explore questions of identity and which are small p political might help to draw out this point.

My first example is Tracey Moffatt’s Laudanum recently exhibited at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney. This series of photographs is a loose narrative about an Asian maid and her white mistress. The work thus fits the identity theme insofar as it is unashamedly about race, class and gender, the holy trinity of any political discussion about identity. But the language in which these issues are articulated is not that of documentary, one of the favoured modes of expression for such serious political themes, nor is it deconstructive, another familiar form for the revelation of oppression or the exposure of inequalities.

Laudanum has an intensely emotional, almost operatic quality that is quite foreign to these kinds of political forms. This is the result of a startling combination of languages drawn from both film and photography: restrained nineteenth-century erotic photography like Julia Margaret Cameron’s work, the moody distortions of film noir, and the cloistered hysterics and dark longings of the so-called "women’s pictures" of the 40s. The torsions and tensions implicit in such a heady combination of styles are held together, if not in check, by the fine print photographic style. The photographs, toned gravure prints on rich vellum-coloured paper have a precious, restrained peculiarity. The shapes and formats - diptychs, lunettes, ovoids - are those more usually associated with painting and nineteenth-century photography.

This high art style provides a kind of aesthetic smoothing that unifies and contains the borrowed languages. It also functions as a distancing mechanism, underlining the artifice of the scenes depicted. However, this aesthetic distancing does not preclude identification with the highly charged images of intense states and limit experiences: death, despair, delirium. Indeed, the unusual combination of distance and emotional charge matches the fragmentary and elliptical nature of the narrative that suggests the intense but loosely related vignettes of dreaming.

In this fantastic world of drugs and dreams, things are not all that they appear. Take the classic upstairs/downstairs narrative: the mistress is coming down the grand staircase, the maid is scrubbing the floor, but the mistress is not in control as she has the far away look of a sleepwalker or a zombie, one possessed not even in command of her self. The maid, on the other hand, who at first sight appeared to be prostrated by her floor-cleaning, on second sight is in a highly sexualised pose. Her outstretched arms are not in the service of cleaning, rather they lie along the ground elevating her rear in order to be easily taken from behind.

The sexualisation of the maid reveals the political picture we have come to expect: the non-western, working class woman bears the mark of sexuality. To be sure, this orthodox reading of power relations can be made, but the maid’s provocative pose also complicates this tale of imposition and asymmetry by making a much more interesting point about entanglement and complicity. She is actively eliciting the gaze (if not more) while appearing to be merely playing her part. It is in this different, perhaps perverse, rendering of a tried and trusted colonial narrative that something of the here and now of Australian engagements with identity is apparent. Identity, in this instance, is not posed as the return of the repressed, the bobbing back up of the pure and authentic expressions of previously oppressed groups. Rather identity emerges through a complex process of appropriating and twisting both the tales of popular cultural and those told by high theory.

The second work I want to examine is Joan Brassil’s installation When Yesterday may be Tomorrow was exhibited at Campbelltown City Bicentennial Art Gallery as part of Australian Perspecta in 1997. This work is very much concerned with the landscape of here and now, but subjects this time honoured Australian concern with identity and place to a very radical revision. Our sense of place is refracted through a Pascalian understanding of infinity. Pascal describes his experience of the infinite in the following way: "When I consider the short span of my life absorbed in the eternity of all time, or the small part of space which I can touch or see engulfed by the infinite immensity of spaces that I know not and that know me not, I am frightened and astonished to see myself here instead of there . . . now instead of then."4 In other words, infinity disrupts emplacement and puts our existence into question. Certainly, the desire for an easy identification of person and place of settlement is not granted by such an experience.

In When Yesterday may be Tomorrow, the themes of emplacement and infinity were manifested by strong feelings of anchorage and awe; these were produced in equal measure. The sense of anchorage, being very much in place (even amongst the stars) was produced by the immersive nature of the installation and the clear sense of direction and purpose conveyed by the pathway that moved the beholder through the work.

The journey through the space seemed to unfold in separate but interconnecting tableaux, rather like the cells of a film. Indeed the installation had a cinematic feel in that it shared the sense of transport and focused or concentrated attention that the cinema produces. The tableaux were not scenes as such but more like elements or residues of the earth’s story: the greening of the earth was represented by brilliant emerald moss growing on rocks partly submerged in shallow water tanks; the death and afterlife of plant life was embodied by lustrous black coal; and the aftermath of bushfires was depicted by ash and highly evocative charred and smoky-smelling relics of recent fires in the Campbelltown district.

The sound components of the installation contributed significantly to the suggestion of fantastic voyages and other worlds. They consisted of two different sound-tracks: recordings by the Canadian satellite ISIS II of whistlers (the movement of electrical energy from pole to pole produced by lightening striking near either pole) which were played in the foyer area of the gallery; and pulsar registrations from the Parkes Telescope (the pulses of energy emitted by the rotating core of a collapsed star or pulsar) which appeared in the small side gallery where the installation was constructed.

These sounds, particularly the pulsars in the installation room, at once folded the beholder into the space and yet also suggested a world way beyond our ken: an infinite universe in which we are but a tiny particle. Our finitude is underscored by this very Pascalian experience of infinity: we are exposed to what we do not know and what "knows us not." This is a natural world in which we seem to barely figure and yet in Brassil’s hands it is not a natural world which evokes terror. This absence of terror is where the other contribution to our experience of anchorage is especially powerful - our earthed path on this journey.

The sense of being earthed was due not only to the sense of invitation and welcome conveyed by the paved path so clearly laid out for us, but also the subtle movement of the paving stones. They moved ever so slightly when trodden upon, making a slight scrapping noise. There was a sense of our footsteps, our movements in space being registered, drawn away from us and reverberating through the ground. Our footsteps were indeed in place.

The installation space is thus at once responsive to human bodies and movement, and yet elicits feelings of strangeness and unearthliness; this in turn produces a highly contradictory experience: a sense of being both grounded in a very material world and yet oddly displaced. Despite the clear accommodation for us, beholders are nonetheless in some way diminished and stripped of the customary human supremacy. Brassil thus uses the experience of infinity to question human sovereignty. The suggestion - that a postmodern questioning of the centrality and sovereignty of the human subject can be combined with a more phenomenological concern for the human place in the universe - is perhaps one of the greatest lessons of Brassil’s work.

Laudanum and When Yesterday May be Tomorrow, display much more complicated relations to both postmodernism and questions of identity than are suggested by Foster’s characterisations of the North American experience. Indeed, I would argue that their great strength lies precisely in the fact that they move the debate along without abandoning the critical insights of the 80s. Such works should be regarded as exemplary works of small p political art, not only because they engage with the messy stuff of contradictions (an all too necessary process in order to think about living here and now), but also because they suggest ways of living very differently.

Susan Best
1999

Endnotes
1. Hal Foster, "Whatever Happened to Postmodernism?" The Return of the Real, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1996 p.209.
2. ibid., p.212
3. ibid.
4. Pascal quoted in Rudy Rucker, Infinity and the Mind: The Science and Philosophy of the Infinite, Brighton, Harvester 1982, p.2

© the artist
Courtesy of the Roslyn Oxley9
Gallery and the artists.

   
   
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Joan Brassil, Where yesterday
may be tomorrow
, Campbelltown
CAG, 1997

   
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Tracey Moffatt, Laudanum
toned photogravure on
rag paper, 76 x 57 cm,
set of 19 images, 1998