Kate Woods & Sue Jowsey/Len Gillman/Andrew Denton

Sites and Settings

Kate Woods

Northart

1 June – 27 June 2022

Time’s Strange Tissue

Sue Jowsey, Len Gillman and Andrew Denton

Nga Wai Hono: WZ Building, AUT

2 June – 8 June 2022

Reviewed by Andrew Clark for PhotoForum, 21 June 2021

Auckland Festival of Photography exhibitions

In both Kate Woods’ Sites and Settings and Len Gillman, Sue Jowsey and Andrew Denton’s Time’s Strange Tissue,digital photos are presented in ways that force the viewer to question photography’s status as a reflection of the real. In the forty years since Jean Baudrillard advanced the idea of the image as “pure simulation,”(1) unmoored from any underlying connection to reality, photography’s evidential status has remained largely intact. Despite the software needed to modify and simulate photography becoming more and more accessible and widely understood, the ways photographs are actually used still reflect an instinctual sense that they are traces of the real that can stand in for a missing original. The works discussed here present a valuable opportunity to question the ways that digital photography is held distinct from other forms of digital media, and whether it ought to be seen as part of a continuum of digital experiences.

Kate Woods’ work, as seen in her current exhibition, is intriguing in that it both makes apparent its artificiality and conceals the means of its production. The works are densely constructed, chimeric hybrids, incorporating painted cardboard elements that are photographed and reincorporated into composites of original and found photographic material. The use of polygonal forms evokes retro digital iconography, but their handmade imperfections ground them in the analogue, as does the decision to present the works as large-scale prints, aligning them with the physicality of painting.

This particular body of works are explicitly concerned with how representations of landscape in culture colour firsthand experiences of the natural world. Woods utilises both her own photographs of her local creeks and bush environment and similar historical photographs, asking the viewer to consider the rhetorical and art-historical implications of turning land into landscape. In Wairakei Stream, Smithson/Matta-Clark, Woods invokes the names of both land art practitioner Robert Smithson and “anarchitect” Gordon Matta-Clark. The work shows a group of leaflike polygonal forms superimposed on a hand-coloured photograph of a stream that evokes nineteenth-century representations of the New Zealand landscape as an edenic, uninhabited backdrop to the colonial project. The invocation of Smithson and Matta-Clark is particularly interesting in the context of a discussion about the status of the image, because although their works were deeply concerned with the physicality of landscape and architecture respectively, they were primarily viewed and engaged with as photographs, due to their site-specific nature. In their works, as in New Zealand’s geography viewed from the turn of the century, the real becomes irrevocably entangled with its representation—the land becomes a postcard of itself, while the building or sculpture becomes its own documentation. Woods is clearly interested in the way a photograph of an artwork intersects with and complicates the aura of the original.

In particular, Sun Tunnels, Waitītiko Creek, shows Woods successfully manipulating the viewer’s expectations about the veracity and readability of photography. This work is divided up into three planes: a foreground layer of Woods’ leaflike geometric forms, blurred to appear out of focus; a digital photograph of the titular creek, showing water and vegetation, and behind them, framed by “windows” in the photographic layer, what appears to be a painting of an ocean scene. This complex scheme attacks the integrity of the photographic picture plane from multiple angles, placing the viewer in an uneasy viewing position that whiplashes between surface and depth. This strategy also has the effect of complicating the simplistic assumptions that still collectively govern the way photographs are viewed, in which the camera is equivalent to the photographer’s eye, and the photograph is equivalent to a window on reality. This has, of course, never been entirely the case; in 1968, Marshall McLuhan wrote that “to say that “the camera cannot lie” is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practiced in its name. (2) However, as Woods points out in these works, when the subjectivity and arbitrariness of the photograph is brought front and center, the result is still unease and confusion; our useful shorthands for viewing and understanding such images are exposed as the crutches they are.

Meanwhile, in Time’s Strange Tissue, Len Gillman’s photographs of Antarctica are manipulated and recontextualised into an exhibition by his collaborators Sue Jowsey and Andrew Denton. Some of these images, particularly those taken with the assistance of drones, are breathtaking, showing the vast scale and emptiness of the continent. The decision to alter some of the images digitally is also interesting, challenging the viewer’s expectations of verisimilitude in a similar way to the works discussed above. However, perhaps the most arresting feature of this project is the decision to display the images in the form of a slide show on an immense television in the foyer of AUT’s WZ building. This viewing environment imparts a passive role onto the audience, the parade of images taking on some of the properties of a video, controlling and directing the gaze along a single path. This in itself is a potentially interesting choice, but the qualities of the screen used also have a dramatic effect on the work, as large pixels become individually visible at medium-to-close distances and there is a noticeable flickering effect, especially during the transitions between images. If this sounds like a complaint, that’s because, in part, it is—the work is difficult to look at and parse, in a way that somewhat undermines its effectiveness. However, I raise this point to underline the amorphous nature of digital works, and the dramatic transformations that may occur in the transition from file to screen, print or projection. Perhaps the best way to view this presentation of the work would be as a passerby, catching fragmentary glimpses as the images blend into the sensory background—and maybe this was the intention.

The title of this exhibition is drawn from Walter Benjamin’s essay on The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and the accompanying material states that the work is concerned with “exploring physical and psychological isolation”(3) in the context of the aura of the original. Benjamin saw the aura of an artwork as arising from its unique coordinates in space and time, an immovable point in reality that cannot be transmitted or reproduced. This idea is essentially mystical in nature, as it assumes some quality that even a perfect replica would not possess. Indeed, he speaks of natural phenomena as having this aura: “If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch.”(4) Linking this concept to an exhibition of digital photographs raises some interesting questions, as it is arguable that the aura of a digital object is markedly different to that of a physical one, if it even exists. Digital objects are everywhere and nowhere; their authenticity is irrelevant. This still causes people considerable discomfort, as made evident by the recent interest in non-fungible tokens, which attempt to recreate the aura of the artwork in the online sphere, albeit in a transactional, rather than metaphysical, sense.

What, then, of the aura of Antarctica itself? It surely remains unknowable save to those who, like Len Gillman, have actually been there. Trying to find traces of it in these images would be futile, by definition—but then that is, perhaps, the point. Any loneliness or isolation derived from viewing these works would be not the desperation of a frostbitten explorer, but the despair channeled by Baudrillard when he writes of “the desert of the real,”(5) a sense of being lost amidst a blizzard of self-sustaining, self-replicating simulacra.

Andrew Clark is a writer and editor based in Auckland. He has a background in fine arts and a PhD in English. His areas of interest include art, photography, literature, film and science fiction.

Footnotes

(1).Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulations” in Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 368.

(2). Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 192.

(3). “Aura and Time’s Strange Tissue,” Project website, AUT, accessed June 11, 2021 https://timesstrangetissue.wordpress.com/home-2/aura-times-strange-tissue/

(4). Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (London: Penguin Books, 2008), 8.

(5). Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations, 366.

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