Review
Re-constructed Vision : Contemporary work with photography 25th July-23rd August, 1981
Review by Max Dupain
published The Sydney Morning Herald, Tuesday August 4th 1881
This online version of the review by Max Dupain is as published with the addition of one paragraph that was editted out for space reasons.
The essay by Gael Newton.
The Catalogue pages - with artists' details.
Heard by an eavesdropping photography critic: "How unusual" (female);
"Frustrating stuff, isn't it?" (male); "Mad" (young schoolgirl).
All three near the mark, but then it is a big target.
Gael Newton, who assembled this exhibition of work by young Australian photographers, is to be complimented for having the courage to hang up such provocation.
Reconstituted photography is what this exhibition is all about.
The wheel has turned full circle – and more – since Niepce first fixed an image on a silver plate.
The early photographers were fully occupied making the thing work as a recording instrument and had little regard for its sociological potential.
The "artists" inevitably arrived in due course and worked with control techniques like paper negatives, (whereon the image was modified by soft pencilling) gum bichromate and oil pigment processes. All these techniques destroyed the intrinsic quality of the photographs for a rather private product. |
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Warren Breninger Expulsion of Eve, Series1, #29 |
Later, a photography was born to work in its own right and the documentary picture was exemplified by the photojoumalists sponsored by Life and Picture Post magazines.
Now we are back with photography mixed up with paint brushes, screen printing, scissors and paste. Once again, we are corrupting the pure and beautiful image made by straight camera technique.
The full impact of this collection is disturbing. It makes you feel you are in a kind of ward for photo-psychos. The air is thick with the psychologists' terms of trade: narcissism, love-hate relationships, anxiety neurosis, sexual deviationism, ego-centricity syndromes, and anal fixations.
The angst is tangling with the id and, believe me, the kookaburras don't sing anymore.
It is an ingrowing toenail of an exhibition and in order to probe beneath the skin you'll have to give much more to it than you'll get back.
Nevertheless, after one leaves the gallery in a cold sweat of despair wondering where photography goes from here, images keep being recalled and asserting themselves on the conscious.
The Expulsion of Eve by Warren Breninger comes back again and again. Three pictures are shown from a set of 29 which are all based on the one image. They proffer a religious connotation with appropriate emotional overtones and have been subjected to technical manipulations which have little relation to photography. But their spiritual beauty outweighs this. They resemble faded frescoes.
The superego of Mike Parr in Black Box/Theatre of Self Correction is expressed in his performance art – photographed with careful consideration by John Delacour.
This bipartisan operation is in a sense an extension, of the liaison of any photographer between himself and his model or portrait sifter. In a world of jaded senses, Parr can still shock.
Micky Allan's eight pictures of "Twenty past Three" is one of the few joyous notes of the exhibition. Allan shares the sense of freedom expressed by paraplegics just out of school by asserting her own independence in using a„ photo base for hand-applied colour. Not much photograph shows through.
In contrast to the metaphysics of his colleagues, Douglas Holleley’s split image pictures which constitute a radical statement twelve months ago are now almost a formality. One sense relief at being able to absorb his images with complete and pleasurable comprehension without strenuous and abstruse psychological envelopment.
The evolution of the work of Fiona Hall moves from close relationship with black and white scenes (1970s) of backyards, wheelbarrows and delicate textures to the exploration of wide-open urban panoramas to an allegorical essay, with a touch of Dada, about The Marriage of the Arnolfini – a colour montage of assorted images parodying the painting by Van Eyck. She gives us three different styles difficult to reconcile.
A search for the intelligible in this exhibition is in vain, as is a search for some common denominator connecting the 56 works with the surge of life around us. What we see instead is work on a very personal level, the product of insular introspection put to paper.
It is self-indulgence making a mockery of photographic life and in terms of art history this exhibition must surely be classified trivia.
Max Dupain 1981
2022 note from Gael Newton: Obviously at the time, Max Dupain did not take too kindly to the exhibition. Despite this, we remained very good friends. The freedom of the arts critic to express their views publicily need not be a hindrance to a successul relationship between the critic and the subject of the piece - in this case myself, the artists and the exhibition.
Introduction to the 1981 Re-constructed Vision exhibition
1. essay >>> The 2022 online version of the 1981 Re-constructed Vision essay
2. catalogue >>> The 2022 online version of the 1981 Re-constructed Vision catalogue
3. review by Max Dupain >>> 1981 Sydney Morning Herald Review (this page)
Gael Newton was the Curator of Photography AGNSW (1974-1985)
more of Gael Newton's Essays and Articles
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