Rennie Ellis
No one wants to be trapped inside a fantasy! 1975
gelatin silver photograph
15.6 x 23.2 cm
© Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive

With a predominance of Melbournian subjects, No Standing Only Dancing: Photographs by Rennie Ellis at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia presented a range of images from the 1970s and 80s capable of evoking both curiosity and nostalgia with a mood of address that was mostly celebratory. Subjectivity was clear in this exhibition — these photographs reflect Ellis’ personality, their subjects are both specifically and generically recognisable, and their audience is met in open terms. To borrow the title of an earlier exhibition of his, the figures are to be realised as ‘Aussies all’; audiences may chart their position in relation to the socio-historic images presented.

At NGV International, Andreas Gursky provided a valuable counter-weight, with self-selected examples of a significant body of work from 1989 to 2007, much of which plays with the depiction, evocation and reception of contemporary environments. Subjectivity and the singular photographic record are destabilised through the differing degrees of digital manipulation of colour, perspective or proportion that enhances both the formal and object qualities of Gursky’s work. This destabilisation occurs at the same time that the visual pleasure of observance seemingly confirms the individual subjectivity of the exhibition’s audience.

To that end, Ellis and Gursky are akin to two different types of popularist art fantasies: the former as charming, nostalgic; the latter as challenging, spectacular.

The pervading mood of No Standing Only Dancing was the warm glow of a remembrance of things past. The significant majority of works were gelatin silver prints, which had the effect of furthering the gentle anachronism of historical recognition. The photographs, mostly standardised in scale and evenly distributed through the galleries, invited registration of historical selves, whether in the form of political, celebrity or sporting figures or in broader social types. To this end, the exhibition created the effect of normalising the variant constituent parts of Ellis’ oeuvre into a surprisingly uniform experience. It was as if the particular experiences and responses of the photographs to their time had been reoriented as tropes of a provincial documentary photographic mode.

In this way, there was a strong sense that visitors were invited to recognise the figures in these photographs as benign shadow-selves. Visitors could both chart a temporal distance from these works selected only from the 1970s and 80s whilst recognising and responding warmly to persistent social characteristics or traits. The particular quirks of dress or attitude shifted from what at the time could have been revealing of specific social conventions, mores or tensions to more a generalised evocation of a more straight-forward time.

Ellis treats his photographs of demonstrations, for example, with a level of intimacy that, thirty years on, deflects their contemporaneous political urgency. The subjects of Demonstrators, Carlton 1973, for example, are caught in repose; three people waiting for something. Even moments of acute political acrimony, as in They Shoot GGs Don’t They? 1976, are softened, tensions eased. Whilst it is true that hazing of the particulars of political dissent can naturally accrete with time, the mood of the exhibition worked to enhance that effect of safe distance. The result of which was that photographs that were quite particular in tone and address such as these were rendered as shared aspects of a social adolescence that is now over.

Rennie Ellis
Boys with surfboard, Burleigh Heads, Queensland 1978
type C photograph
34 x 50.8 cm
© Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive

The structure and organisation of the exhibition enhanced this overarching feel. The preponderance of gelatin silver prints, for example, at once reflected what one takes to be the mainstay of Ellis’ exhibited work but also marked out the images as not only historical but historicised by the method of printing. While there were some examples of colour work presented alongside the other photographs (which reveal an inventive and equally nuanced aspect of his practice), the majority were taken from 35mm colour slides and presented in looped suites of images presented on plasma screens. Although providing a means of showing those archival slides, in the context of the exhibition the screens raised tricky questions of selection and presentation: why were these images relegated to screens with a relatively fast turn-over time; what was the resulting hierarchy of photographic objects as opposed to photographic images; what were the governing intentions of sorting through the work of a prolific artist; what were the organising principles of the exhibition; and to what end?

Similarly, the installation within the installation, a suite of photographs of King’s Cross, presented on dark red walls, struck a perplexing note. Whilst The Cross is a significant early body of work of Ellis’, it seemed an easy solution to single it out in this fashion. In the context of the exhibition, the level of attention on what was a small selection from this group of works (their isolation in an internal room, the different wall palette, the concentration of the subject) pushed audiences to view these as historical artifacts a little too hard. It risked replacing engagement with the specifics of the works with mere recognition of photographic tropes. While that is a character of the works, they are more complex than the mode of installation suggested.

Secondly, the room created a bizarre alleyway or corridor around its exterior perimeter. The photographs that were hung here were made to feel marginalised and claustrophobic — a quality that was not to do with any innate character of the works themselves but was made so by the manner of their installation. This was unfortunate and seemed to misjudge the strength of these images — which, though different in mood or subject, were just as strong and just as able to command attention as those clustered in the maroon room. For example, in the perimeter were photographs that at once reflect and subtly interrogate authority and masculinity (from the footy-field virility of Robert McGhie or Robert Di Pierdomenico to the political passivity and feminising of Andrew Peacock); or those that present individuals who helped shape contemporaneous social and cultural identity (Jeanne Little at the Melbourne Cup, Derryn Hinch and Allyson Best at the Hilton or Fred Williams in his studio).

Rennie Ellis
Derryn Hinch with playmate Allyson Best at the Hilton 1979
type C photograph
29.2 x 44.0 cm
© Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive

Of course, the proposition of the exhibition was a difficult one — how best to represent someone so prolific and how to present work that is such an empathetic record of the chosen twenty-year period of his output. While individual photographs did evade a singular or normalising narrative or affect there was a struggle for them to achieve that connection with audiences freely in this exhibition. I suspect that a significant factor in this was the reduction of the number of photographs, the standardisation of their production and of their presentation — each of which were factors that constrained the capacity of the exhibition to convey fully the exuberance, insight and range of Ellis’ work.

The eccentricities and foibles of Ellis’ work, its sunny disposition alongside its acute awareness of a more complex set of social and emotional affects also at play, were muted in this too-neat and too-orderly show. It was as if the curatorial project had been to try to create a singular focus of nostalgia and in so doing had overplayed the works’ inevitable capacity to evoke it. While this did enable the humour and a degree of self-deprecation or insight to come forth it did so in a way that was entirely historic. These works are rather more unruly, more socially and emotionally ambiguous than their deployment in an overarching nostalgic narrative would initially suggest and these qualities weren’t given enough opportunity to show through.

At the entrance/exit to the exhibition was a quote from Alfred Stieglitz that evinces Ellis’ practice: ‘art or not art, that is immaterial — I continue on my way, seeking my own truth, ever affirming today.’ Although there was clearly an individual vision present in the exhibition, the exhibition itself did not enhance or advance that vision. To affirm today, to reflect, capture, re-enforce and present Zeitgeist is not a tidy project. It’s a project that is not constrained; there are invariably elements that are scratching at the surface, looking to break out. Difficulties emerge, as here, when an exhibition seems to counter that messiness.

It might be curious to seek connections between Ellis’ work and Gursky’s. If anything, they would seem to be utterly different. Gursky’s project consciously refuses what Stieglitz claimed was immaterial — this is demonstrably art, the works openly question and confuse what might be understood by, or as, truth and the project, whilst clearly of a particular time, is hardly affirming. Indeed, the instability of what Gursky presents and the relationships he initiates between work and audience is a key feature of the reception of his work. Against the immediacy and domestic intimacy of Ellis’ work, the spectacular and distancing qualities of his photographs became accentuated. Hung low in the galleries at St Kilda Road, the works still loomed over audiences by virtue of their scale, the careful manipulation of perspective and the impressive demand they made of visitors.

The physical materiality of the photographs commanded both attention and respect. Their canny combination of intimate detail of content with the monumentality of the object established a complex viewing relationship that, to some extent, meant the desire visually to consume the work could not be sated, the diverse experiential demands made by the artist could not be reconciled except under the broad banner of their visual spectacle or their capacity almost to overwhelm. Hence audiences continually traversed the gallery space to get so close to the surface as to recognise individual details (figures, consumer objects, flecks of paint, geographical details) but had to retreat from that surface in order to reorient and regain a sense of the whole image and what was depicted.

Andreas Gursky
Madonna I 2001
C-Print
281 x 206 x 6.2 cm
Copyright: Andreas Gursky / VISCOPY, Australia
Courtesy Sprüth Magers, Berlin / London

The most unhinging example in this exhibition was Madonna I 2001, which was compositionally and spatially the most challenging of the works shown. Gursky’s manipulation of perspective and proportion in this work is almost radically overplayed. The tipping of the closely raked seats of the concert creates a concave space that magnifies the claustrophobic nature of a populous event. At the same time, this unnerving level of distortion establishes a level of uncertainty and discomfort that undoes the highly managed and choreographed surface of a major pop concert — of which a Madonna concert would be among the most assiduously managed. Such play within the image is what sets up a wrenching of space that seems consciously baroque to the extent that it is bodily enveloping rather than simply pictorial.

That retreat from the surface and what might otherwise be a risk of being overwhelmed is indicative of a spatial difference between the two exhibitions that followed from the material differences of the works shown. The margin for distance in Ellis’ case was controlled by the works’ size — the recognition of subject and apprehension of detail in the image prescribed a stable, repeating viewing distance. The rhythmic coherence of the installation of the Gursky works was similarly normalised by virtue of their consistency of scale but what happened directly as a result of that scale was this to-and-froing of how audiences attended to the object and that which it depicted.

The exhibition included a suite of more recent works that ratcheted-up such concerns. The F1 Pit Stop works of 2007 seem to chart a development away from the abstracted compositions of, say, Bahrain I or Rhein II, the romantic inflection of some of his landscapes or the pictorial repetition of his architectural photographs. In the F1 Pit Stop works there is a deliberate and complex engagement with a different pictorial antecedent — the history painting.

Andreas Gursky
Bahrain I 2005
C-Print
302.2 x 219.6 x 6.2 cm
Copyright: Andreas Gursky / VISCOPY, Australia
Courtesy Sprüth Magers Berlin London

The scale of Gursky’s work has always echoed this seeming apotheosis of pictorial craft. They’re approximately a similar scale to the NGV’s Tiepolo The Banquet of Cleopatra upstairs. Although smaller than many of the great examples (larger works such as those by Rubens, Rembrandt, David, Gericault or Courbet) the scale clearly establishes a link with those antecedents. Gursky’s control and manipulation of image evokes a similar degree of fascination with the methodologies of image construction. In his work is a conscious address of the normative expectations of history painting and its depiction of the human figure engaged in an event.

The narrative appears simple enough. In a theatrically lit ground level, two liveried pit crews work on F1 cars in a collective, highly choreographed manner that accentuates the controlled verisimilitude of the composition. Viewer attention is directed by single choric figures (young women, camera operators). The affect of these parts of the works is cool and ordered, remaining on the cusp of active. Emotionally, they hold something of the vaguely disturbing emptiness of Gursky’s tower blocks or factory interiors.

Above these groups, a line of spectators stretches out in a long oscillating curvature on an observation platform spanning the two pit stop areas. The narrative expectation of these figures is that they are watching the activity below. Some hold cameras or lean up against the transparent barrier of the platform while others seem to stare into the space before them. Curiously, however, there is little or no engagement between them, nor with the activity depicted. Compared with the concentrated masses of coloured figures below, each spectator figure seems strangely listless, distant. They are presented as if watching but they appear not to be seeing (or at least not to be looking). The uneasy discombobulation this creates is not unlike the way in which the pit crews, although posed in clusters of orchestrated movement, are unexpectedly static and fixed.

It may be that the F1 Pit Stop works are akin to a pictorial laying-out of Gottfried Leibniz’s distinction of monad and body — the upper zone conveying that sense of individual units (in this case seemingly unfocused); the lower, bodies (in digitally manufactured collectives and following a relation of one-to-the-others). Indeed, in discussing this aspect of Leibniz’s thinking Gilles Deleuze deploys the analogy of the two floors of the baroque house, split along these lines.

What interests me about this philosophical position is the extent to which the relations in these images mirrored or echoed the relations in the gallery. In the immediate context of St Kilda Road, the spectators-as-individuals shifted about in a circumscribed but variable curvature that was matched between the captured activity of the grand prix watchers and the real-time fluidity of audiences looking at them. Moreover, Gursky’s body of work may be taken to be the sort of inactive body that is realised by its appearing to a perceiving spectator. In the gallery (where the F1 Pit Stops were objects not images) the actualising of the digital print could be considered a condition made solely available by its act of appearing, which, again, is only made real by the activating presence of the perceiving individual. Then again, the registration that the image is determinedly not what it seems thwarts any sense that the work is whole or actual in that sense — even its identification as ‘photography’ is potentially compromised by the methodology of the image’s manufacture.

The listless spectators on the observation platform might seem antithetical to the reality of highly engaged audiences in the gallery. Yet, with only a modicum of reflection, it becomes increasingly apparent that the emptiness of their depicted gazes may well echo the incapacity of the gallery audience to apprehend fully the object on display. Although all the mechanisms of visual cultural construction are in place, any level of recognition of the failures or mendacities of either (or both) of the composition’s zones calls into question the veracity of the act of looking at art. Like the spectators of the deck, we lean towards the transparent divide between ourselves and the appearing body but do we actually look, see or realise?

Rather than affirm a mind/body division Gursky steers attention to its problem. Given the manipulation and challenge of Gursky’s project (the F1 Pit Stop works are perhaps better described as digital collage than anything else) the interlocking of these ideas is an expansive suite of propositions around a central subject/object concern; a concern that, crucially, he refuses to solve and makes it fairly impossible for audiences to believe they might do so.

If Madonna I neatly strips back the surface of the pop concert and performance, the F1 Pit Stop works seductively and beguilingly strip away the surface of the exhibition and work. Gallery-goers might not be depicted as the fans are, but there is assuredly a parallel level of implication, complicity and complication that refuses any neat binary divide between themselves and Gursky’s subjects. Hence rather than endorsing or enhancing the capacity of the gallery-going perceiver to make real the body of work on show, Gursky fractures that proposition.

It’s plausible that these characteristics were more recognisable in the exhibition because the artist selected the works himself. In any case, it was an easier curatorial project to manage than the Ellis; certainly it was simpler in terms of number of available works, the strategies of presentation and the way in which the pictorial demands of the large prints determined their placement in the gallery.

Nevertheless, it’s the careful revelation of the snares of image-based and in-the-world fantasies that gives a particular quality to Gursky’s work. It reaches beyond a simple critique of appearance as simply another trap and, instead, affords a doubling of experience for his audiences — we perceive and are perceived, which, as Hannah Arendt argues, is crucial to being human. By comparison, and although Ellis’ individual photographs can trigger a not unrelated complexity of perceptual engagement, No Standing Only Dancing was so constructed as a unitary world as to risk walling its audience in.

Tags: Andreas Gursky, Issue 1, National Gallery of Victoria, Rennie Ellis