Selina Ou, Female Ushers [2003]

THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL IMPULSE: MORE THOUGHTS ON CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY BLAIR FRENCH With great enthusiasm, and a keen eye for detail, a collector recently pointed out to me the elements that particularly attracted her to a handful of photographs by Melbourne-based artist Selina Ou. These were part of Ou's first significant Sydney showing, a solo exhibition at GRANTPIRRIE [December 2003] of new metre square colour photographs of Chinese tourist industry workers. Whilst some of the images featured subjects at work, or at least engaged in activity, the most striking featured pairs of workers in matching uniforms posed rather self-consciously in full figure side by side each other looking straight at the camera. Female Ushers, for example, depicted two young women dressed identically in full-length red skirts, blouses and jackets, all trimmed in gold, with black slipper-style footwear. They stood on a polished floor in a neutral interior space made interesting only by a pot-plant taking the place of a third figure, and two spotlights, dropping below the upper edge of the image, casting two blank, apparently suspended and over-lapping wall panels into relief behind the women. Both held their hands in front of them, although the girl on the left barely grasped the tips of the fingers of her left hand with her right, whilst the other wrapped one whole hand in the other. This and other subtle points of differentiation held our gaze [the slightly protruding ears of one girl, or the opened-out position of the feet of the other]. Thinking in the once popular terms of Roland Barthes' metaphysics of the photograph, we treat these as punctums - small details that grab our attention, or that 'pierce' us. But to the eye of this collector, and I think more generally, they tend nowadays to perform a more anthropological function - they act as points of sociological discrimination, as deviations that confirm the normative condition of their photographic subjects. We look to such elements as evidence of societal meaning within the photographic image. We expect photographs to contain such discrete signs [photographs that have serious business to perform beyond the aegis of seduction, distraction and brand recognition]. From the perspective of this collector, such subtle points of difference forensically gleaned from the surface of two similar images came to stand in for the tensions and changes taking place in present-day China. Just like Female Ushers, both Hotel Security and Restroom Attendants featured uniformed pairs of figures within gleaning, super-modern spaces of functionality - a hotel forecourt and public restroom. Only the race of the subjects hinted at a specific geographical or cultural location [and even in this regard, global mobility and evolving urban diasporas destabilise the certainty of geographical place]. Each pair comprised one older and one younger figure. And it was in details pertaining to the younger that the collector suggested signs of an evolving, youthful, globally networked conception of 'modern' China. She spoke of the chunky metal watchband, casual shoes with silver detail and the over-large, loose fitting uniform of the younger, boyish security officer as indicative of some small sense of non-belonging within the strictures of this role, his subtle self-displacement of the codes of a particular form of social order and identification with a more apparently casual, certainly self-conscious and still overtly coded strata of 'youth' culture. And we noted the overtly self-conscious, ironising smile of the younger female restroom attendant, possibly more aware of her fascination for an 'outside' audience as photographic subject than her serious, older colleague. There is little doubt that desire and expectation contribute significantly to the 'reading' of such meaning within these images. But where does this impulse stem from? First of all, there's the long if only ever partially absorbed and understood history of photography as a conveyor of information regarding both the society and culture about us, and those far away. No degree of critical deconstruction of the medium will ever completely purge photography of this function. Indeed, we might speculate that in recent years exactly such processes of deconstruction have been quite deliberately countered by renewed celebration of this compulsive idea of the photograph as content bearer. The interweaving of photographic genre - photography as art, as advertising, as PR, as news, as matter of public record, as scientific investigation etc. - has also led to the situation where images sharing looks, structures and content may function and reverberate in quite distinct manners depending on matters of context and of their means of release into a public arena. What I'm rather loosely terming the anthropological impulse treats the photograph not simply as bearer of information regarding the social, economic and cultural make-up of a society and the behaviour of its subjects, but also as a sphere in which all this may be condensed into or sought within the most discrete of visual details. It is an impulse towards treating the image as a serious space of social meaning, photography as a form of social science. And so it does not serve to separate 'art' from 'documentary' or from 'commercial' photography as such, but to discriminate the images within each of these and other genres that collate, organise and provide some form of critical perspective upon information regarding the culture that they picture from those that do not bother with such intelligent acts. This impulse then is inextricably bound up with the privileging of 'serious' content and with the question of how [pictorially, structurally] this material is brought to view. Of course, we cannot voice this characterisation without evoking the historical connotations associated with the idea of photography as an anthropological practice: concepts of the controlling gaze; of the imposition of classificatory frameworks upon objectified subjects; of the [attempted] leaching of the identity of the photographic 'Other'. Surely to claim an anthropological impulse in contemporary practice is to reinscribe this politics of photography within the present, certainly with regard to reshaped modes of ownership, collection and knowledge. Or is it? For what I've identified as a general desire to read social commentary within the photographic image doesn't necessarily seem to be informed nowadays by this specific political dimension regarding the photographic gaze or its classificatory structures. So might this impulse actually involve, at least generally, yet another instance of the enervation of the political efficacy of the image through the performance of its criticality? On one hand, how is it possible to recuperate such politically charged photographic structures and traditions without [necessarily] engaging in a direct confrontation with that history? And on the other, how is it possible to reharness the more utopian energies of those traditions within a world in which photography's transformative political powers seem long since washed away in a plethora of imagery and the frightening impossibility of any longer encompassing the world even in some pretended manner? The once utopian model of photographic taxonomy1, which reached a zenith of sorts, as well as a point of exhaustion [as an 'artistic' strategy] within conceptualism, is now necessarily restricted to discrete, manageable structures that re-rehearse this impulse in the form of the photographic 'projects' and 'series' that characterise contemporary practice. Ongoing, open-ended photographic practices such as that encapsulated in Wolfgang Tillmans' extraordinary one thousand plus image publication, If One Thing Matters, Everything Matters, are rare indeed.2 I have no wish to write off the efficacy, actual or potential, of photography as a practice of social investigation, even for the sake of argument. But then nor do I wish to go down the path of celebrating the apparent seriousness of this impulse, even when the resulting work indicates the historical self-awareness and representational reflexivity that I generally value in contemporary practice. My ambivalence stems from the suspicion that no matter what the intention of the artist, or the discrimination of the spectator, this anthropological impulse marks another variation upon the murky relationship between the establishment and the pretence of critical visual relationships to culture within contemporary photography, particularly in the picturing of the human subject as a social subject [that is, within a social setting or either clothed or posed in a manner that signifies the subject's social function, status or cultural identity in some way]. This is where I think Selina Ou's work becomes particularly interesting, not so much for its clear positioning as critically cogent or otherwise, but because it simply suggests that we need to ask these questions of and through it - questions regarding an ethics of photographic images [a more general field of enquiry than questions regarding the ethical nature of any one particular photographic image]. There is no doubt that over just a few years Ou has developed a set of work that engages seriously with histories of photography as a practice of social anthropology, in particular those following a vaguely taxonomic model [that of August Sander is invariably cited]. And this in turn, no doubt in part, determines our expectation of new work. During the late 1990s she produced a number of images depicting the empty non-spaces of supermodernity as now famously articulated by French sociologist Marc Augé. These slick images dominated by the pristine surfaces and white light of the urban environment - images of a rail station, a gym, a service station - marked the start of a gathering suggestion in Ou's work that place, however generic and inhuman, remains meaningful. And yet, they also conformed to an expectation of what supermodern urban space looks like as pure image. They were both images of places, and images of the state of being image. This tension continues through her work. Ou has subsequently focused upon the picturing of contemporary labour, which means in fact not the picturing of bodies in activity but bodies located within over-determining pictorial spheres. So in the series Serving You Better [2001] we are presented with a white uniformed pharmacy assistant, staring blankly ahead, almost lost in the plethora of patterning and visual information of various drugs stacked up behind and before her, a schema repeated in a convenience store image. The alienation inherent within spectacle culture is both tagged and perpetuated in such images. Later work has focused more upon the actual figures within the images, but these nevertheless remain subject to their environments, their tasks and their uniforms, not to mention their status as objects of fascination. [This indeed is an important point - Ou does not seek to accumulate a wide field of visual data as a form of social research. On the contrary, single, visually alluring photographic images are set to the task of condensing and encapsulating this sense of a culture being faced with its self-image.] In the Enclosure series [2002] Ou depicted workers [tram drivers, ticket sellers, etc.] locked away in singular, restrictive spaces that also double as panoptic spaces in which they are made subject to our vision. Whilst in the Work [2003] series figures were posed in more dominant, full figure form, but again always locked into a signification through supplementary signs of labour [uniforms, work vehicles, etc.]. Just as in Ou's On Guard [2003] typology of leisure [cyclists, tennis players and the like], these images sit at the nexus of documentary-advertising-portrait photography in which the individual 'look' of the subject is far less significant than the 'look' of the image. Indeed, the subjects remain nameless, undifferentiated other than by category [police officer, footballer, etc.] - therefore standing in for as well as subsumed by a collective - or by second order signifiers [clothing styles and labels] and lacking in apparent value outside that identification. A picture of a generic and socially compliant culture is presented, but on the basis of a mere few images that themselves conform to type. Now this may be treated fairly as a critical presencing of the condition of service and leisure industry culture as well as a self-ironising rehearsal of the numbing hegemony of commercial lifestyle imagery and its capacity to subsume all forms of critical image structures preceding it. But what are the criteria by which such a project may be judged if such commodification of the image and of social consciousness at large is deemed to be so ubiquitous, as in fact the very form of Ou's images appears to suggest? Further to this, I believe that many of Ou's images lack a sense of subjecthood, something that appears at least to be deliberately set out and which sits in accord with a neo-'new-objectivity' trend in current photography- as-art picturing of the human subject [whether performative, narrative, or portrait-based] in degrees of mannered detachment. No doubt various degrees of negotiation between photographer and subjects underpin Ou's images. Some subjects may feel absolutely trapped by their picturing, others may 'perform' self - may pose - in some subtle manner that's not overtly present. But most have a sense of resigned detachment, I suspect not with regard to their depiction as indicative of some social strata or realm of labour, but with regard to their status as photographic subjects. They neither 'project', nor disappear within themselves, but appear to exist somehow in and out of time, as if their photographic selves are both somehow eternally present and yet void of significant self-worth. And if anything, it is this detachment which I find somehow stultifying in its burgeoning conventionality, even though it bears potential as implicit critical commentary. This sense of blank repose or studied indifference that permeates all registers and genres of the image; this performance of objectification that may be intended in some regards as a form of resistance to co-option within the social, or as an acknowledgment of the already pictured state of the self as photographic subject, or as a commentary upon the social alienation of contemporary life, or as an attempt to cast the human subject as a palimpsest for projected photographic meaning, or as just a downright cool and seductive look when it comes to fashion, advertising and the like - this risks exhaustion of all possible meaning through such relentless reiteration. Ou's paired Chinese subjects are at least clearly individualised subjects, if without name or even location, and this, perhaps, accounts in the end for the small purchase they have on our consciousness. I've focused a great deal upon Selina Ou's work here, not so much to undertake an analysis of her practice for its own sake, but as a sounding board for a set of ideas regarding its indicative elements. In drawing this to a close some comparative reference may be appropriate. My characterisation of the studied indifference of many of Ou's subjects brings to mind the very different work of Darren Sylvester. His clearly 'constructed' tableau scenarios within the God Only Knows What I'd Be Without You [2000] and If All We Have Is Each Other, That's OK [2003] bodies of work utilise models clearly posed in detached, quasi-narrative scenarios that above all suggest modes of fundamental societal alienation, whether it be in terms of the functioning of corporate 'culture', our relationship with forms of technology that ever increasingly relieve us of the burden of traditional human tasks, or the staging of interpersonal relationships in terms of mannered disconnection or mutual allegiance to brands and shared rituals of consumption or simply in terms of mass media culture. Perhaps there is a strange ethical honesty in the hyper-atrophy of subjecthood that is presented in Sylvester's extremely static images. Perhaps this sense of an absolute dependence upon the fabrication of self-image according to pictorial convention - to standards by which we judge our appearance as public beings - does act to crystallise certain conditions of present-day society. If so, however overtly fabricated as fictional scenarios, these images also partake in a form of photographic anthropology [a performed anthropology] of contemporary life. The figures in Sylvester's images appear incredibly wooden, even when communication between figures is taking place such as with the three identically dressed teenage girls sharing a joke over their KFC and Pepsi as depicted in the title photograph for If All We Have Is Each Other, That's OK [2003], or in the case of the engaging and unsettling group portrait of six young people decked out in Gap gear peering back into the camera, almost daring some form of judgement [The Object Of Social Acceptance Is To Forfeit Individual Dreams, 2003]. These, by and large, are figures waiting for something to happen [waiting for some mode of communication to kick in between them or via their various technological prostheses]. They are models posing as models, and this incessant doubling [and thus separation] of subjects - this repeated evasion of any sense of the self - ensures that any signification of identity is instantly negated almost the moment it is detected, erased in the endless repetition of the individual as image. So this work is very different to that of Ou, and tends towards the portentous in the enigmatic suggestions of fictionalisation and a sort of pseudo psychology of character established in Sylvester's long titles and associated fragments of narrative fiction [titles in the more recent of the two sets of work include We Cannot Live Without Regret; I Know, It's Not Practical To Follow Your Heart; Friends Then Lovers Then Friends To Lovers To Friends; and For The Most Part Humans Seem Ugly And Annoying]. Nevertheless, even putting aside the possibility of a deep, self-reflexive irony running through this work, we perhaps should not foreclose on the possibility that Sylvester's images also touch a nerve with audiences - speak to real experience - exactly because of this heightened sense of cool self-absorption. Perhaps the apparent seriousness of his project is not just in a kind of mannered casting into relief of the corporate structure of the photograph3, but something deeper regarding self-image in a society obsessed with such. Perhaps Sylvester's images do begin to lay out in these obvious equations of self and slogan, self and brand recognition, a sort of theatre of social dysfunction that encapsulates a deeply felt sense of aloneness experienced by individual subjects [and here primarily young people] within contemporary society, for these, above all, are images of being alone, whether in workplaces, amongst friends, with a partner, or just more obviously alone. However, for me at least, a profound sense of banality overrides everything. Even this sense of character experience - this aloneness - is reduced to a set of familiar, fairly perfunctory signifiers carefully orchestrated within fundamentally disengaged images. Photography, in Sylvester's work, is a forlorn medium, drained of either personal or social meaning. To a certain degree the anthropological impulse I'm suggesting in this text might be treated as one [key] aspect of the expectation of criticality that I identified as a determining element within photo-based contemporary art in a previous essay in Broadsheet.4 To an extent it complements that earlier discussion regarding the 'performance' of the [critical] subject.5 The work of Darren Sylvester is more overtly fictionalised than that of Selina Ou, but nevertheless partakes both in a commentary upon contemporary living and upon the place of the photographic image in filtering that experience. Thus the key point of comparison between the work of Ou and that of Sylvester is not to be found in a 'documentary'/ 'constructed' image schism, but in the manner in which whilst drawing upon different strands in the history of photography as a practice with anthropological functions and connotations - one concentrating upon a systematic, taxonomic mode of picturing, the other upon the narrativising tendency of the image - both still seek to privilege conceptions of the [human] subject as social subject within their work, indeed implying that this may be the key subject of photography per se. However, as I see it, the problem in the work of each - as in that of so many other photo-artists of the moment - is the rigidity of the photographic forms deployed and their formulaic modes of relation to their subjects. Absolutely nothing is unexpected about this work, so even when we find certain images pleasing, fascinating, even compelling, they do nothing to jolt our understanding or assumptions regarding their subjects, the world about us or the medium itself. Perhaps this is an impossible task given our familiarity with the medium. But surely our self-awareness and consciousness as photographic subjects - as inhabitants of a photogenic culture - is no longer a matter of revelation. We know how we look, as a society, or how we want to look, writ large in photographic colour. Might we not learn more about ourselves as social beings, and more about the continued potential agency of photography in that conception, through the unexpected, through the exploration of less [currently] conventional modes of pictorial encounter between photographer, subjects and viewer. The anthropological impulse in current photography would result in so much more provocative work if it didn't simply serve to confirm our current means of presenting and assessing self-image. Notes 1 Utopian in its desire to encapsulate an entire field of being or of knowledge, no matter how suppressive the actual effect of the resulting attempt upon its subjects. 2 Wolfgang Tillmans, If One Thing Matters, Everything Matters, London: Tate Publications, 2003 3 Indeed this is something that Sylvester's interlocutors have tended to put to one side stressing instead his own claim that this slick appropriation of the sleek figures, clothing, settings and lighting of corporate, advertising and lifestyle photography simply enables the form of the image to conform to current expectation and thus fade from our consciousness, allowing us to concentrate upon scenario rather than structure. I don't agree with this - the form, appearance and structure of these images is always foremost and thus necessarily meaningful. See, for example, Nick O'Malley's essay 'They Look Like Advertising' in Darren Sylvester: God Only Knows What I'd Be Without You [exhibition brochure], Melbourne: William Mora Galleries, 2000. 4 Blair French, 'What Makes Today's Photo-Art So Attractive, So Appealing...', Broadsheet, Vol 32 No 4, 2003: 12-13 5 Cherine Fahd's performative images - certainly her earlier work that utilises the material form of the veil - retain an anthropological element also. Or at least, they invite interpretation as forms of commentary upon cultural identity and the relation of the individual to social norms. And this suggests another element, no doubt the key element of the anthropological that I haven't addressed here, and that's how it is harnessed by indigenous artists, as well as artists from non-European cultural backgrounds, as a strategy through which to directly challenge and/or subvert the photographic status of their ancestors as anthropological subjects. This has been apparent in the work of artists such as Brenda L. Croft and Fiona Foley for well over a decade now, as well as in the recent work of Brook Andrew, Ricky Maynard, Darren Siwes and Christian Thompson. I hope to address the work of these latter four artists in a third and final essay on photo-based contemporary Australian art, that will focus on the human figure, and specifically models of indigenous portraiture, later this year.