Entries Tagged 'NEWS' ↓

is the title of an exhibition of digital photographs at the National Film and Sound Archive. The images are derived from David MacDougall’s latest film Gandhi’s Children – the Canberra premiere of which will be held at 2.00pm this Sunday at Arc Cinema. Gandhi’s Children was filmed in late 2005 at the Prayas Children’s Home for Boys, in Jahangirpuri, New Delhi.

What do we think of when we talk of “stills”, and how we might think of the framed prints on the wall, extracted from the imagery on screen? There’s still a photography gallery in Sydney called “Stills”. Seems to me it’s almost an outdated concept. “Still photography” still invokes the mystique of “the decisive moment” – being in the right place at the right time – remembering to have your camera with you – alert to the circumstances, finger on the button. But recently, this has become a less auratic concept, now that Robert Capa’s famous image of the death of a young Republican militiaman in the Spanish civil war has been proven – seventy years later - to be a work of fiction.

That will never be the case with these images. Here we are experiencing the distinctively 21st century condition of photography, where digital technology enables an editor to distinguish between images at the rate of 25 frames per second. Despite the capacities of Photoshop to distort the truth of an image, in this instance the authenticity of the original will never be in question. The original is no longer just “in the can” but on half a dozen servers.

What David has done in this exhibition is to reverse the mad contemporary proliferation of images, in a world where Flickr expands exponentially, in a world where most of us are carrying a video camera in our pocket. As of last night there are two billion images on Flickr, all of which have been recorded (or uploaded, made accessible) since it started less than five years ago.

Sometimes, for an artist, the trick is to learn how to surf the wave. However art also happens when you swim against the tide. So how has someone like MacDougall reversed the direction of this digital tsunami, slowed down the flow of data, in order to produce images we can comprehend, that we can reflect on? In a form that enables reflection, rather than just momentary exposure?

Analogue film, 35mm film, had it built in. You could separate the frames with a pair of scissors. Video is much more slippery. There is still the editing process, by which you agonize over the formal conjunction of transitional frames, in that subtle and almost invisible formalist play of transitions. But these images are not edit points in that sense at all – they are rather images which are chosen to evoke the before and after, the continuity of the moment, confirmation for us of the sequence, the flow from which they have been selected, the continuity of both the author’s and the subject’s common experience.

Recognition of the flow has a quite different aesthetic consequence to that of the decisive moment. The image taken from the flow connotes Realism in its original art-historical sense – imagery which says, this is how it was, not just how it looked. It is through these images that David’s subjects tell us about more than the look, rather they convey the context, the existence of each individual subject, the moment, and all it connotes – fragility, survival, yet also hope and a future, and a certain post-traumatic dignity.

The ethic at work in David’s films, and now in these photographs, is one which is moving, compelling and convincing.  Somehow David has extracted from the mass of his video data a series of individual frames which has slowed down experience to the point where we might take heart from the resilience of these children, and children anywhere.

P.S. for the curious, the print size is about 285 x 505, printed on A2 Hahnemühle Photo Rag paper at the ANU School of Art. They are video stills from HDV (high definition video) recordings, exported via Quicktime to Photoshop and de-interlaced, colour-corrected, level-adjusted, etc. before printing.  None are cropped — they are all the original full frames.

Two visitors look at Warhol’s Mao Zedong in Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Photograph: Kaveh Kazemi/Corbis

A sharp correspondent reveals how vulnerable one is to false projection: not unlike the line taken by The Guardian in 2007 (the source of the image above). But apparently the pile of modern art collected by the Pahlavis has just been on show – for the second time. And hardly a reflection of an era of liberalism! One could have argued this in relation to its first showing during the time of President Khatami  – but now? The contradictions are salutory.

Gertie Huddleston: Garden of Eden II 1999

Iconophilia proposes Cath Bowdler’s  Colour Country: art from Roper River at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery as a contender for the contemporary Aboriginal Art exhibition of the year. Why? Because it tells us so much about the potential of an art which develops outside the mainstream, and by contrast, some of the limitations of its near neighbours. Of all the remote communities which have participated in the Indigenous art renaissance of the past three decades, only Ngukurr has been able to develop in its own (myriad) directions, relatively free from the interventions and restrictions of the art advisors who have guided the aesthetic character of most remote art centres. True, some big city gallerists sought to corner the outputs of some of the original significant figures in the first generation of Ngukurr artists, however this exhibition shows how extraordinarily resilient that first generation proved to be.

Based on Cath Bowdler’s original scholarship, the fifty works in this exhibition trace the origins of this complex “movement” since 1987. The major figures of this first generation are artists such as Ginger Riley Munduwalawala, Djambu Barra Barra (above), Willie Gudabi, Gertie Huddleston and Amy Jirwulurr Johnson. Many of the works in this exhibition have not been previously exhibited.

Roper River borders the southern boundary of Arnhem Land, and Ngukurr is the site of the original Anglican Mission. This is a community which has benefitted from its remoteness, even though it has not enjoyed the protections and independence of other Arnhem Land communities. Despite the absence of a high-profile arts centre,  Ngukurr Arts, the artist-run community art centre, has produced arguably the most consistently innovative forms and styles of any remote community.

Louise Hamby comments: “The week following the long weekend in June was a high point in openings for Aboriginal art. Some of the same people from the Melbourne opening of Lindy Allen’s Ancestral Power and the Aesthetic at the Potter made their way to Cath Bowdler’s opening of Colour Country at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery. The art from the Roper River area of Arnhem Land was a strong contrast to the eloquent barks from eastern Arnhem Land from the 1930s.  I was instantly drawn to the lime green wall of the gallery. Hanging there the Sambo Sambo Burra Burra paintings were demanding attention. I have always had a soft spot for his work because of the inclusion of baskets in, on and inside the bodies of the figures he depicts. The other major draw card for me were the storyboard paintings of Gertie Huddlestone. Here the strong colours are more like threads and spots of colours stitched and quilted together. This exhibition is well worth a trip to Wagga Wagga to see such an unusual group of works all together making a different statement about colour and country.”

If these installation photographs prove too tempting, hike on down to the Wagga. If you miss it at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery (until August 2), see it at the Flinders University Art Museum, Adelaide, the Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra or the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin, finishing in July, 2010. A full-colour catalogue is also available.

Congratulations! You made it across from ArtWranglers-in-mothballs!

If you enjoyed reading ArtWranglers, this is the same voice at iconophilia, and I invite you to resubscribe by entering your email at SUBSCRIBE on your right (to become an iconophile) and then follow the prompts. See the incentive in the next post…

To save you from blognagging, my policy will be to post on Fridays, ready for the weekend, unless there’s breaking news that just can’t wait…