TIMELINE
Canberra Contemporary Art Space Board and Staff respectfully acknowledge the traditional custodians of the Canberra and the ACT region, the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples on whose unceded lands our galleries are located; their Ancestors, Elders past and present; and recognise their ongoing connections to Culture and Country. We also respectfully acknowledge all traditional custodians throughout Australia whose art we have exhibited over the past 40 years, and upon whose unceded lands the Board and Staff travel.
Front cover left: ALEX ASCH Corporate embrace (detail), 2021, Photographic collage printed on Dibond, painted plywood and graphite anti grip powder, 82 x 289cm Photo by Brenton McGeachie Front cover right: PAT HOFFIE Countdown to Midnight, IV, 2020, Archival inkjet and screen print on paper, 120 x 86cm Photo by Brenton McGeachie
TIMELINE ALEX ASCH PAT HOFFIE CURATED BY DAVID BROKER
Following Page: PAT HOFFIE I am scared, I stand up 2019-20, Watercolour and gouache on architectural drafting paper, 220 x 300cm, Photo by Brenton McGeachie
TIMELINE Throughout the latter part of the 20th century and into the 21st, the development of photo media technologies not only offered what appeared to be unbridled opportunities for visual artists, but, paradoxically, at the same time posed mounting challenges for artists who found themselves in the critically compromised position of contributing to what was rapidly becoming an over saturated environment of images. From the late 1950s, the machinery of popular culture gathered speed that catapulted towards a torrent of electronic imagery. Canadian thinker Marshall McLuhan envisioned the world wide web some 30 years before it became reality, foreseeing an incredible shrinking planet or “global village”. McLuhan could see beyond the generalisations of media expansion, predicting that the medium of choice would itself define the message it conveyed. French Marxist theorist Guy Debord’s (1931-1994) The Society of the Spectacle (1967) also offered a preceptive indictment of our image-saturated consumer culture, providing an analysis where the “Spectacle” was argued to appear as everyday manifestations of capitalism in action through advertising, film, television, print media and celebrity. Decades later, in 2021, in this exhibition titled Timeline, works by Pat Hoffie and Alex Asch explore and confront ways in which these topics have metastatised, at times inverted, and doubled over in new and at times contrary ways. If the sense of being overwhelmed by images seemed hyper-critical at the turn of this century, our everyday immersion at this point of history is stratospherically more complex. As the twists, turns and straights of the ‘information superhighway’ are barely negotiated by the delinquent speedster that is social media, the “Timeline” that is part of that new roadmap has become integral to the lives over 50% of the world’s population. It’s a race where privacy is thrown to the wind in a scramble to be “world famous for fifteen minutes”, as Andy Warhol quipped as far back as 1968. Before Warhol, McLuhan had laid the theoretical foundations through which to critically consider how new technologies like social media could be considered as an extension of the self. He suggested that it was not the machine, “…but what one did with the machine, that was its meaning or message”. (Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man by Marshall McLuhan ©1964)
Terms, as well as our understanding of space and self, have changed as a result of these changes. Not so long ago, the term ‘timeline’, the title of this exhibition, referred to the graphical representation of a chronological list of historically ordered events. With the advent of social media, however, the terminology has become more closely associated with the series of posts shared on social media such as Twitter, Instagram, TikTok or Facebook to curate and identify personal identity. Generally visible from a profile page, personal timelines are widely accessible and tend to reveal considerable amounts of personal information. While Hoffie and Asch are active on platforms like Instagram and Facebook their generation has experienced other understandings of the relationship of time, place, space and identity. Their works in this exhibition, therefore, evidence the present as both a legacy of the past, and the inheritor of a precarious future. As Hoffie set out to produce her Clustrfkk series (2019-21) she was dubious about the point of further saturating an overserviced image-market; it occurred to her that adding images to “the soup”, even if they offered different points of view, could be seen as complicity rather than criticality. However, these works are also evidence of historical instances where, despite the complexities of their times, artists have persisted in attempts to generate different world views. While the events of the present are constantly described as ‘unprecedented’, works throughout history bear evidence of the fact that catastrophes that include battles, routs and devastation have continued to provide content for painting throughout history. For Hoffie, the genre of “the epic”, offers a version of the spectacle that “joins some of the dots of info-bytes and media-bytes that float like free-flowing signifiers through our own personal media bubbles”. (Pat Hoffie artist’s statement) While Hoffie searches for a way around the problem, Asch salvages detritus from the information-flood; rearranging, reconstituting and re-presenting images from the Time and Life series of journals published during the 1970s. The artist discovered several volumes of this trove, sunburnt and water damaged and with weathered worn out covers in a box left by his Aunty. Inside, however, the pages were pristine. From 1936 onwards, Time Inc. - covering art, politics, science, environment, technology, and entertainment - dominated global publishing for sixty-five years. The power of Time’s iconic photographs situated photojournalism at the forefront of a communications revolution with a distinctly American brand of humanitarian philosophy at the core of its values. Asch’s collages reconfigure fragments from these publications, re-focusing on the rising spectacle of visual inundation while arguably stripping the images of their initial potency. In so doing, these works are, in part both a study in time and a celebration of the opulence and beauty of the popular printed/published image. Hoffie’s Countdown to Midnight (2020) series was the first that drew my attention to the ways past, present and future might coexist within the frame of an artwork. Both seduced and repelled by a high-key fluorescent palette, described by Hoffie as the “colours of a pre-pubescent bedroom”, these seven pieces at first lull the viewer into a kind of soporific complacency. In the format of vintage travel posters, each is emblazoned with the word TOMORROW, implying the possibility of a soft landing at journey’s end. The fact that the faint silk-screened white text, is not quite registered, suggests otherwise. The shaky artistic device insinuates a kind of double vision – a failure of accurate eyesight, and a growing queasiness that tomorrow may not be the most desirable destination after all. In these works, the titular ‘countdown’ is recorded from 11.53 to 11.59 pm, every minute addressing a particular example of the outcomes of unbridled economic growth. The exploitation of human and environmental resources, and the consequences: degradation, destruction, disaster, death and ultimately extinction emerge as the subjects. The grim scenarios of the minutes leading to TOMORROW include a group of carpetbaggers sifting through the bodies of men and creatures to see what might be salvageable, a work team digging mass graves and a working party attempting to dig deeper for water in a poisoned landscape ringed by the bodies of animals who had assembled to drink. The content of this work expands to fill the realisation that TOMORROW may have already arrived; that we are already amidst the tragic consequences of a continuously catastrophic past.
Timeline installation, 2021, Photo by Brenton McGeachie
PAT HOFFIE Countdown to Midnight, I - VII, 2020, Archival inkjet and screen print on paper, 120cm x 86cm each Photo by Brenton McGeachie
PAT HOFFIE Countdown to Midnight, I - IV, 2020, Archival inkjet and screen print on paper, 120cm x 86cm each Photo by Brenton McGeachie
PAT HOFFIE Countdown to Midnight, IV - VII, 2020, Archival inkjet and screen print on paper, 120cm x 86cm each Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Asch’s photographic assemblages draw upon a personal romance with his past through the ‘silver gelatin’ filter of prints reproduced in the Time Life series of photographic annuals that comprehensively reflected the year in which they were produced. During its heyday, the global reach of the Time Life brand was rivalled perhaps only by Coca Cola. Despite the general spirit of scepticism of the current era, generations growing up during this era share Asch’s nostalgia. He writes, “Although I was five years old in 1970, I always think of myself as a child of the 60s. I remember this time in black and white: the outstretched arms pointing over the balcony after King’s assassination; the Vietnamese girl running crying, covered in napalm burns; the dead student bleeding at Kent State. These searing images that showed America’s descent into madness were always in black and white. This dystopian kaleidoscope seemed to point towards our future.” (Alex Asch artist’s statement) The complex and at time contrary questions surrounding appropriation and authenticity are also shared as issues of concern in the works of Hoffie and Asch; both mess with media, mashing content from a range of sources. Hoffie’s Countdown to Midnight series is composed of images first created as water colours, subsequently transposed as machine produced giclée prints, that are in turn silk-screened by hand. If the ‘authenticity’ of the original iteration of the work, can be argued as having been subsumed by the mechanical reproduction of the giclée print, then it is subsequently ‘restored’ by the artefactual production of its final form as a silk-screened, ‘one off’ image. In its first exhibited iteration, her composite painting I am scared, I stand up (2019-2020) was printed on archival paper. For this exhibition as with all the works from her Clusterfkk series included in Timeline, are ‘original’ watercolour and gouache on paper. Paying homage to artists who include Colin McCahon, Henry Darger and Pablo Picasso, this visual sampling also establishes the current practice of visual art within the context of those who have travelled before her. Asch speaks of his works as having much in common with the art of sampling in electronic music, “… cut out moments that may specifically speak to historical events or collective social experiences.” The inclusion of the works of Asch and Hoffie within the ambit of one exhibition theme reflects, in part, an ongoing, if at times uncomfortably contradictory engagement with the ideas expressed by Walter Benjamin in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935), where authenticity or aura is defined as that integral quality of an artwork that depends on the presence of the artist; one that cannot be communicated through mechanical reproduction techniques such as photography. While methods of reproduction are important to both artists: their timelines of production exist within an era of fast changing technologies, each also explores the extent to which the finished artwork might remain, however obliquely connected, to their respective crafts.
ALEX ASCH The man through his industry poisons his son (detail), 2021, Photographic collage printed on Dibond, painted plywood and graphite anti grip powder, 82 x 330cm Photo by Brenton McGeachie
ALEX ASCH The man through his industry poisons his son, 2021, Photographic collage printed on Dibond, painted plywood and graphite anti grip powder, 82 x 330cm Photo by Brenton McGeachie
ALEX ASCH
The Legacy of Forgetfulness, 2021, Photographic collage printed on Dibond, painted plywood and graphite anti grip powder, 82 x 168cm Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Hoffie’s Clusterfkk series is materialised in water colour and gouache on fragile sheets of architectural tracing paper. These are semi-transparent substrates; open to wounding and damage; surfaces that dent and curl in response to the layers of paint. As a result, the finished work has an organic quality, one that is simultaneously dynamic yet precarious. The misalignment of panels cut in slightly different sizes gives the impression that this is work that eschews refinement for the production of a more intense viewing experience; one where the viewer must take up the task of visually joining together the gaps between each panel. As has been described, the series is in part an homage to the reclusive American ‘folk’ artist and writer Henry Darger (1892-1973) who illustrated his stories using a technique of traced images cut from magazines and catalogues, arranged in panoramic landscapes and painted in water colours. Hoffie’s Clusterfkks echo the timeless theme of the battle between good and evil that provide the subject of Darger’s heroic spectacles while shifting the terms and references in which the disquieting miasma in which contemporary apocalyptic predictions are currently being set. The tradition of the visual ‘epic’ - a form that tended to be to be painted onto architecture or some more permanent structure to offer a world view that attempted to make sense of the issues of the day… is carried forward with hesitancy through the use of the most fragile, transparent of mediums - Bosch, Breughel, and Rivera, are among the many artists who have been historically associated with ways of harnessing spectacle in order to address the lacunae of their own times. In this era of fake news and scepticism, Hoffie harnesses a visual tradition upheld by history and attempts to recalibrate it through using a medium that seems to be dangerously out of its depth for the purpose, as well as out of its time. In Earthquake (2019-21), for example, cataclysmic climate events seem totally out of control. In the background a tsunami rises to engulf; fires break across the surface of the earth, while earthquakes rumble underground. There is general chaos among ‘the people’, as they float suspended in the web of their cell phone and data communication; only an evil little underground rabbit seems capable of exhibiting restraint. The global havoc continues in I am scared. I stand up (2020). The title is borrowed from Colin McCahon’s painting Scared (1976) where McCahon’s existential anxiety is followed by a decisive declaration of fortitude and faith. More mysteriously, The Cave (2019-21) moves viewers into a dark underworld; one capable of arching over the mythical river Styx where souls of the dead were ferried across to the other bank the underworld. This work responds closely to Henry Darger’s 31 At Jennie Richee (circa 1940-60) where silhouetted figures of his Vivian Girls prepare for battle with the Glandelineans, a tribe of malevolent adults. In Hoffie’s prescient chthonic nightmare, four apparitions of her daughter Visaya emerge from and are consumed by the almost terrifying shadowy shapes of the underground realm. Beginning in the 1970s a fifty-year timeline of various technologies is reflected in each of Asch’s assemblages. This particular timeline begins with the recording of an original decisive moment (photograph), its publication and removal from that source, its enlargement, and as a collage, it is scanned to produce a final print on dibond paper. Despite the technologies employed, Asch carefully maintained the sense of the handmade; as he transferred collages to high-quality prints where each fragment is framed by its white edge, the scars of removal are revealed as an integral part of the original image’s context. Asch, too, maintains an abiding interest in the crafts of making and while his works may have the surface appearance of photographs, the object within which images are contained is also considered by the artist as an essentially sculptural consideration of the final object. The artist describes his methodology of placing and organising disparate images as akin to the kind of emptying of the mind described by Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung (1875-1961) as ‘unconscious drawing’ - a process reveals archetypal forms representing the ‘Self’.
ALEX ASCH Corporate embrace, 2021, Photographic collage printed on Dibond, painted plywood and graphite anti grip powder, 82 x 289cm Photo by Brenton McGeachie
ALEX ASCH The end of meritocracy, 2021, Photographic collage printed on Dibond, painted plywood and graphite anti grip powder, 82 x 371cm Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Asch insists that any attempts to identify the maker and time of the “original” photographs he deploys as part of his subject matter as a purposeless exercise. Instead, his assemblages are less about their source and more about the context of where, why and how they first appeared. The placement of images reflects the books and magazines of a time where portraiture, landscape, fashion, scientific innovation, architecture and popular culture merged with the disasters of humanity. Seen through magazines such as Time and Life, this conflation of images was accepted by audiences at the time. Today, audiences engaging with Asch’s works must accept this same conflation as part of the origins and structure of the work. Painted plywood and graphite panels frame collages that reflect the luxurious patina of the original published images. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as photography continued to struggle for acceptance within the parameters of ‘fine art’, the production and publication of fine prints increased. Proponents of photography’s value as a high art form went to great lengths to produce images of immaculate clarity; images where the high skill level of practitioners was fully evident. While the minimal tones of Asch’s panels could be analysed in terms of the qualities of minimalist painting, I am also reminded of American photographers Ansel Adams’ and Fred Archer’s zone system where the photographic print was organised into nine shades of grey ranging between pure black and white. Where Asch has used paint, each section highlights a shade on the grey scale of the photographer’s ‘palette’, reminding the viewer that in the darkroom photography is also a craft. Despite a range of critical positions, photography continued to occupy an ontological limbo between science and art. This also contributed to the difficulties of including it within existing artistic paradigms. While painting suggested or reflected reality, the photograph was seen as ‘evidence’ of ‘the real’. As critics of photography came to accept the notion of authorship, that an image was not simply the dispassionate work of a machine, it was also understood that the ‘truth’ of a photograph was dependent how it was interpreted and the context in which it is shown. In this instance, positioned by the core values of Time Life, and reframed by the location of a contemporary art gallery. While Asch expresses concern at his use of hundreds of unacknowledged appropriated details of other artists’ work, he includes them not as single entities, but rather as parts of a conglomeration that addresses a particular artform as it was received at a specific time in his life and practice. As argued in this essay, it is possible to interpret Asch’s works as sculptural rather than photographic; their source material conserves the ‘melancholy’ that French semiotician/philosopher Roland Barthes (1915-1980) described as the pathos that comes with the end of a time that will never be repeated, (Camera Lucida/ La Chambre Claire © 1980). The work in Hoffie’s Clusterfkk series, on the other hand, exerts up-tempo melancholia, a kind of regenerative grieving over a recalcitrant world that constantly spins off course. In this way, the works of both artists operate as of mementa mori; symbolic reminders of the inevitability of death that collapse the boundaries of past and future, leaving humanity in a zone of endless purgatory. Unlike the materiality of printed images electronic and social media imagery flash before our eyes with alarming speed, where every surge is replaced by a new wave. Through holding this media-wash into objectforms, the work of both Hoffie and Asch harness images capable of surviving beyond the next few minutes. While both allude to the phenomenon of the flood of endlessly recycled imagery, their respective contributions temporarily postpone that flow, detouring it in pools of animated contemplation.
The stark visual contrasts between Hoffie’s and Asch’s work initially made Timeline a risky project. Hoffie’s large colourful works using the most brittle of materials provoke a kind of material struggle of their own, as paint, gouache and tracing paper coalesce in panels that threaten their own continued existence. The myriad of eccentric, often exaggerated, characters populating her tenuous “canvas” can be compared with those in a medieval morality play - allegorical figures that personify moral and ethical conundrums. Her work offers the potential for viewers to take on the role of interpreting how these values might reflect the issues of the day and as such, may perform the role of harbingers of what is to come. These works harness ‘the epic’ as a means through which to bypass the facile immediacy of communications associated with social media. In comparison, Asch’s works seem highly refined. A triumph of hard-edged design, their didactic monochromatic tones show no sense of doubt as to where humanity has been and where it is going. The fragments of photographs from the 1970’s carry with them a certain authority emanating firstly from their Time Life origins and secondly as a result of their status as monochromes. At the time of their origins, the black and white image was considered to convey greater gravity than those that depended on the ‘superficialities’ of colour. These were the days before ‘fake news’ when audiences trusted what they saw and what was printed. While the energetic physicality of Asch’s black frames, grey panels and dramatic content demands voice within a space occupied by Hoffie’s heroic ephemerality, the gallery offers no battleground. On the contrary, Timeline draws strength from such contrasts, and coalesces at that point where the media harnessed, manipulated and reconstituted by each artist to create their responses to the current times, continues to be capable, as McLuhan, predicted, of ‘being’ the message.
David Broker, July 2021 Alex Asch is represented by Beaver Galleries, Canberra Alex Asch is supported by artsACT and the Capital Arts Patrons’ Organisation
PAT HOFFIE The Cave, 2019-20, Watercolour and gouache on architectural drawing paper, 120cm x 325cm each Photo by Brenton McGeachie
ALEX ASCH The border, 2021, Photographic collage printed on Dibond, painted plywood and graphite anti grip powder, 82 x 371cm Photo by Brenton McGeachie
SANCINTYA MOHINI SIMPSON drawings Dhūãna akase 2020, ROBBIE KARMEL Untitled (detail)mararai, 2020 - 2021, 32 archival pigment each and 14 x220gsm 8.5 cm cartridge paper, 42 x 60cm Graphite and coloured pencil prints, on 110gsm Photo byMcGeachie Brenton McGeachie Photo by Brenton
PAT HOFFIE The Earthquake, 2019-20, Watercolour and gouache on archival drafting paper, 220 x 300cm Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Timeline installation, 2021, Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Timeline installation, 2021, Photo by Brenton McGeachie
TIMELINE ALEX ASCH PAT HOFFIE
CURATED BY DAVID BROKER 23 RD JULY - 26 TH OCTOBER CATALOGUE BY ALEXANDER BOYNES
CANBERRA CONTEMPORARY ART SPACE 44 QUEEN ELIZABETH TERRACE, PARKES, CANBERRA ACT 2602 TUESDAY - SUNDAY, 11am - 5pm
|
www.ccas.com.au
