Tracey Moffatt, Laudanum #11 [1999]

TRACEY MOFFATT: THE INTERNATIONAL LOOK RUSSELL SMITH Tracey Moffatt is probably Australia's most internationally successful contemporary artist. Now based in New York, she has joined the relatively small group of genuinely global contemporary artists, exhibiting in 2001 in Australia, New Zealand, the US, the UK, Taiwan, Korea, Germany, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Sweden, Finland, Greece and Slovenia.1 This exhibition of over one hundred and forty photographs and seven film and video works, over three floors of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, provides an excellent chance for Australian audiences to assess her work to date. Moffatt's high international profile is no accident. There's no question of the quality of the work: it's sexy, sophisticated, witty and provocative, and draws on a diversity of sources that give it both hip accessibility and theoretical complexity. Photography is currently hot in the art world2, and her photoseries, in particular, readily lend themselves to reproduction in catalogues and magazines, and allow for several simultaneous exhibitions of the same material. And despite her success, Moffatt has refused to settle into a 'signature style', but has continually reinvented herself through experimentation with different media and techniques. But perhaps the key factor in Moffatt's success is her conscious cultivation of an 'international look'. In an often-reprinted interview with Gerald Matt in 1998, when asked whether there is a political intention behind her work, she responds: I don't want to make some grand statement on race - it isn't about being politically correct, perhaps it's about always striving for an 'international' look to my work... I want to say that if people want to read my art that I'm making now from a political perspective then they are welcome. I just get a little exasperated because this reading usually comes from the 'left' and they are most of the time ignoring how I strive for poetry and make statements about the human condition - they can't see that I'm trying to play with form and be inventive. I think that the fact that I'm trying for a 'universal' quality, not just 'black Australian' is the reason why my work is getting attention. But try telling that to some writers...3 As an artist, Moffatt has always had to fight off the limiting power of these adjectives. For instance, since 1992 she has not permitted her work to be shown or reproduced in exclusively Aboriginal or black-artist shows.4 Now 'Australian' is the latest adjective she must contest: I don't think that my early work was recognisably dealing with Australia. I simply told stories using Australians in an Australian setting because that's where I lived. In fact it is the international look, the different people I have photographed in my work and their universal predicaments that has taken me and my images out to the world.5 But Australians are notoriously suspicious of exiles, sensing rejection, needing reassurances. Take Patricia Anderson's interview with Moffatt in The Australian: "It's all about the human condition, not necessarily the Australian condition," Moffatt suggests. "I have something to say. I don't paint, I can't draw, but I can make pictures... I find a location and spin a yarn around it." Now that's a very Australian idea.6 Whew! Thanks Patricia, our national pride is saved! Moffatt's insistence on the 'international look' raises broader issues than just the parochial question of how Australian her work is. As Rex Butler and Morgan Thomas point out, there is sometimes an awkward tension in the reception of Moffatt's work between the critical and theoretical language of cultural difference and hybridity, and Moffatt's own language of universal concepts such as poetry, form and the human condition.7 Butler and Thomas make the general point that "often a preoccupation with the problematic of cultural identity and difference in the critical writing on indigenous artists in Australia works to displace - if not actually rule out - aesthetic considerations".8 Thus, where Moffatt wishes to claim the international/universal ground of aesthetics, stressing that "I'm just trying to make images that 'hold', using beauty and composition"9, much of the critical writing on her work, especially on the photoseries, reads it as anti-aesthetic critique, praises its deconstructive indeterminacy and its postcolonial hybridity, and sees it as exemplary of what Adrian Martin calls "the episteme of radically muddled identity".10 Hybridity can be said to be the dominant mode of interpretation of Moffatt's work, which is read both as an anti-aesthetic challenge to falsely-universal Western notions of beauty, and a post-colonial challenge to essentialist Western conceptions of identity. Such readings emphasise Moffatt's iconoclasm, her fusion of high and low culture, her juxtaposition of culturally incommensurate visual languages, her challenge to stereotypes, and her subversion of dominant narratives. While all these things are certainly there in Moffatt's work, such an emphasis on its messages and its meanings can deflect attention from its aesthetics, the formal compositional qualities that, alongside her thematics, give her best work its uncanny resonance and power. Butler and Thomas make this point: There is something insufficient about seeing Moffatt's work in terms of this post-colonial hybridity, for all of its explanatory power. There is always 'something more' to these images. But what is this 'something more'? Moffatt's commentators have been reluctant to admit it - it is almost unspeakable today - but it is beauty.11 Moffatt's statements about her work indicate, I think, an ambition not simply to critique the international paradigm of Western aesthetics, but simultaneously to occupy that position, to appropriate the universality of the aesthetic - the beautiful - as a vehicle for the expression of hitherto excluded or marginalised narratives and identities. In other words, Moffatt's work is not so much critical, as seductive: an acknowledgement of its beauty becomes an acknowledgement of the claims to universality of the narratives and identities she presents. However, Moffatt's work is rarely analysed in aesthetic terms, and it's easy to see why she sometimes becomes exasperated with critical discussions of her work. In fact, Gael Newton, with her careful pictorial analyses, is the only writer I know of who consistently moves beyond discussions of the postcolonial thematics of Moffatt's work to analyse its formal and aesthetic qualities.12 I'd read several books and articles on Moffatt before I saw this exhibition, so I was familiar with the issues her work raises and the critical discussions it generates. What I was looking for, in other words, was not the intellectual but the aesthetic experience of the Tracey Moffatt oeuvre. The overall impression I got was that it is the video and film works, rather than the much-acclaimed photoseries, that deliver the most impact. One of the reasons for this is undoubtedly that many of the photoseries suffer from over-exposure. Indeed, Moffatt has withdrawn permission for the iconic Something More series [1989] to be reproduced in catalogues and print media.13 There are full reproductions of several photo series in Gael Newton's excellent Fever Pitch and in the catalogue edited by Martin Henstchel and Gerald Matt, and various other works are featured in many publications. Moffatt's work reproduces so well at this scale that there is something perhaps inevitably disappointing about going to the gallery to see the real thing and expecting 'something more'. Of course, the photographs are bigger, but in most cases the increased scale does not translate into an increased aesthetic impact; if anything, it imposes a distance that works against an engaged reading of the work. They say contemporary photography is 'the new painting', big not just in terms of the prices paid for it - an edition of Moffatt's Something More sold at Christie's in 2002 for an Australian record of $226,57514 - but also in terms of scale. Moffatt can be seen as one of the pioneers of this trend, having always worked on a relatively large scale [the format of Something More is 98 x 127 cm]. But, as Geoffrey Batchen asks in a recent article in Art Monthly Australia, how has the ever-expanding scale of contemporary photography begun to impact on the quality of intimacy historically associated with photography as a medium?15 Something like this happens with many of Moffatt's photo series, which are more legible in their reproduced forms, where it is easier to study the relationships between the photographs and to piece together the fragmentary narratives, than in the gallery, where slight gains of detail or texture fail to compensate for the loss of intimacy their scale imposes. In my experience of the MCA's retrospective, the photographs that really packed a punch in the gallery setting were the two Scarred for Life series [1994 and 1999] and the 'homage to Andy Warhol' series Beauties [1994 and 1997]. Scarred for Life has attracted perhaps the most critical attention. Moffatt uses a combination of images and captions to depict moments of childhood and adolescent trauma in the milky, slightly greenish tones of 1960s Life magazine photospreads. Each caption records a traumatic moment of humiliation or hurt; for instance: "She glimpsed her father belting the girl from down the street. That day he died of a heart attack". The text appears to offer an explanation of the picture, but we never actually see the events described, opening up a disquieting disjunction between image and text. As Butler and Thomas put it, "both image and caption may be seen as a sort of delayed traumatic reaction to the other".16 So too, although the events pictured and described appear to be the unique experiences of singular individuals, they nevertheless invoke an uncanny recognition, as if, through the reverberations of delay and disbelief, we ourselves might remember these experiences. The series is atypical of Moffatt's practice. Most importantly, perhaps, these are the only photographic works to incorporate text. Also, they are among the few that use locations rather than conspicuously artificial studio sets, and, as a consequence, are among the few that invoke the 'reality effect' that haunts photography as its naive ideal. That is, where much of Moffatt's work draws ironically or parodically on a kind of pre-existing cultural image-repertoire [from art-house cinema to trash TV], Scarred for Life depicts, with a studied pictorial awkwardness, private moments of shame or humiliation that are not already encoded into familiar narrative conventions. Of course, the images are staged, and the mimicry of the Life magazine look deliberately invokes the image-repertoire's connotation of nostalgia, but this nostalgia merely serves as another mechanism by which trauma is distanced and displaced, complicating the movement of confrontation and withdrawal that characterises the series' reverberating emotional effect. In Beauties, Moffatt performs a Warholian makeover of a found image of an Aboriginal stockman. Each of the three works, Beauty [in cream] [1994], Beauty [in wine] [1994] and Beauty [in mulberry] [1997], overlays the same monochrome image with vibrant colour, encoding it with subtly inflected distinctions of glamour [leading man, action hero, rebel without a cause]. Like her 1985 photograph The Movie Star: David Gulpilil on Bondi Beach, and her 1986 series featuring male Aboriginal dancers, Some Lads, the image functions in a complex way, as both a challenge to cultural stereotypes and an appropriation of their power. The insertion of an Aboriginal stockman into a cultural reference point connoting beauty, glamour and stardom is not only an anti-aesthetic act of critique, foregrounding the historical whiteness of Hollywood's supposedly universal appeal, but also, as Moffatt's title implies, an act of aestheticisation, where aesthetics is understood not as the universal, but as the particular universalised. There's a yearning and ungraspable gorgeousness about these works, something to do with the luminous clarity of Moffatt's colours, that doesn't quite carry over into the reproductions: they have an 'aura', in other words. Many of Moffatt's other photo series, however, lacked this aura. Having seen them in reproduction, the original didn't always offer the 'something more' I was [perhaps wrongly] expecting. While GUAPA [Good Looking] [1995] presents female sporting aggression with an iconoclastic sexiness, the images, for all the blurring, lack dynamism. For instance, in the second image, the central figure looks anchored, as if she's leaning on the barrier rather than being thrown over it, while in the first image, the angles of the skaters' bodies, if travelling along the arc implied, suggest a speed not much above walking pace. I know Roller Derby's supposed to have the camp staginess of the World Wrestling Federation, but these photos don't convincingly present the illusion of speed or violence, undermining their aspirations to aggro glamour. Up in the Sky [1997] is perhaps Moffatt's most ambitious and complex photographic series to date. These twenty-five photographs, tinted in either blue-green or copper tones, resemble a series of film stills which, when read in sequence, present an elliptical, tantalisingly ungraspable narrative. But for me it tended to be only single images that really 'held' in the manner Moffatt describes: the muscular woman standing on a wrecked car wielding a sledgehammer; the girl in the nurse's uniform throwing [badly] a frisbee; the skinny, scruffy, visibly 'crazy' old man clutching a bird while his trailer-trash neighbours look on. Any one of these images might suggest a range of imagined narratives, but their juxtaposition with others in the series tended to bring down these flights of fancy, giving you the sense, not of a dreamlike improvisation, but of an occluded actuality that is known, but withheld, like a documentary film to which the soundtrack has been lost. That is, the indeterminacy of the narrative tended to limit, rather than multiply, the possible readings of each of the images. Laudanum [1998] is a similarly fragmented narrative concerning a sado-masochistic relationship between a nineteenth-century mistress and her Asian maidservant. The sequence is jam-packed with clever touches of anachronism, quotation and parody. It self-consciously employs the obsolete technique of photogravure, and presents the images in some of the more idiosyncratic formats of nineteenth-century photography. The implied narrative draws on the conventions of Victorian pornography and colonial erotic fiction. Several diptych images use an exterior shot of the mansion, framed by a Moreton Bay fig, as a cinematic establishing shot, and there are clear references to F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu [1922]. The chandelier and convex mirror in image fourteen might even be a reference to Jan Van Eyck's The Betrothal of the Arnolfini [1434]. However, what struck me most about Laudanum - I may be alone in thinking this17 - was the vague impression it gave of a 1970s Aussie soft-porn shocker [something starring Wendy Hughes, perhaps]. In image three, for instance, there seems to be a calculated 1970s look about the mistress's hair, eye-shadow, lipstick and fingerless lace gloves, and even the 'type' of her beauty [note also the mole in image thirteen]. Other details reinforcing this impression were the corset in image seventeen [don't real ladies have corsets that lace up at the back, as a signifier of class distinction?], and the fuck-me boots in image eighteen. I may be wrong, but this reading at least fits with Moffatt's relish for trashy pastiche. If so, it tends to make this postcolonial S&M fable a little too camp, overbalancing it into sensationalism and melodrama. The trip to the MCA was well and truly worthwhile for the chance to see Moffatt's film and video works. Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy [seventeen minutes, 1989] perhaps still ranks as Moffatt's masterpiece, a thoroughly avant-garde film that is distinguished by a kind of classical correctness in each of its artistic decisions, where the distancing effects [garish saturated colours, stylised sets, denaturalised soundtrack and elliptical narrative] magically combine to produce a film of raw emotional power. Equally it was a treat to see Moffatt's earlier film Nice Coloured Girls [sixteen minutes, 1987], where her gift for stylistic pastiche is already evident in, among other things, the Godardesque interludes and the 70s blaxploitation look of the bar-scenes. After Night Cries and beDevil [ninety minutes, 1993], Moffatt's subsequent video work, Heaven [twenty-eight minutes, 1997], was a radical departure, in which she and a number of female collaborators surreptitiously videoed surfers changing out of their togs at Bondi Beach, turning the tables on the gendering of voyeurism. As Chris Chapman notes, with its awkward pans and zooms, and characteristic misregistering and flaring of colours18, it remains true to home movie aesthetics, while presenting a narrative that is both comical and erotic, playful and morally ambiguous. One of the highlights of the show was Moffatt's most recent video Love [twenty-one minutes, 2003]. Made in collaboration with Gary Hillberg, it continues a series of works constructed of short clips from other films. Drawing on a range of sources - black-and-white Hollywood classics, foreign art-house cinema, 1970s telemovies - it begins with girls and guys locking lips, and traces a broad narrative arc, bombarding the viewer with rapid-fire samples of generic moments and gestures: girl throws water over man, girl slaps man, man slaps girl, man calls girl a whore, girl grabs gun, man says "you wouldn't dare", girl shoots man, etc. With a backbeat soundtrack that dips around the snatches of dialogue, its complexity transcends its MTV-aesthetic, with the accumulation of violent backhanders and sassy comebacks sketching out a thesis about the ideological power of visual clichés and narrative conventions. It's like being the alien visitor in The Man Who Fell to Earth [1976] - Nicolas Roeg is one of Moffatt's favourite filmmakers - who simultaneously watches dozens of TV screens in an effort to understand the human. Firmly anchored in the global image repertoire of Hollywood and TV, this is international work of the highest calibre. Nothing particularly Australian about it, except perhaps the Channel 7 watermark in the corner of one of the clips. Oh yes, of course, and the clip of 'our' Olivia Newton-John at the end. Notes 1 Paula Savage and Lara Strongman [eds.], Tracey Moffatt, Wellington: City Gallery, 2002: 98­99 2 see Lyndal Crisp, 'Buyers Catch the Shutter Bug', Financial Review, 1 November, 2003: 36 3 Martin Hentschel and Gerald Matt [eds.], Tracey Moffatt, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 1998, 20, reprinted in Michael Snelling [ed.], Tracey Moffatt, Brisbane: IMA, 1999: 67; Savage and Strongman: 35 4 Gael Newton and Tracey Moffatt, Fever Pitch, Annandale: Piper Press, 1995: 18 5 Tracey Moffatt and Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, 'Tracey Talks', in Tracey Moffatt, Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2003: unpag. 6 Patricia Anderson, 'Polished Rituals of Looking', The Australian, 3 January, 2004: B19 7 Rex Butler and Morgan Thomas, 'Tracey Moffatt: From Something Singular to Something More', Eyeline 45, 2001: 24 8 Ibid: 23 9 Moffatt and Macgregor: unpag. 10 Adrian Martin, 'The Go-Between', World Art 2, 1995 : 26 11 Butler and Thomas, 'Tracey Moffatt's Beauty', in Savage & Strongman: 40 12 Newton and Moffatt; Newton [ed.], Tracey Moffatt: Invocations, Canberra: ANU Drill Hall Gallery, 2001 13 Rosalie Higson, 'A Singular Perspective', The Australian, 16 December, 2003: 14 14 Anderson: loc. cit. 15 Geoffrey Batchen, 'Does Size Matter?' Art Monthly Australia 166, 2003: 33 16 Butler and Thomas, 'Tracey Moffatt: From Something Singular to Something More': 30 17 Perhaps not: I've just noticed Lara Strongman's comment that "Laudanum's points of reference include... Russ-Meyeresque 'vixen horror' movies" [in Savage and Strongman: 65]. 18 Chris Chapman, 'Hallucination: Notes on the Aesthetics of Tracey Moffatt's Film and Video Work', in Savage and Strongman: 78