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dedicated to a happier year


dedicated to a happier year 

November, 2020

Living in a society defined by profit, power, and dehumanisation, it seems as if our feelings were not meant to survive. Much of contemporary art today is made in this vein; preoccupied with aesthetics at the expense of life outside the gallery. Particularly now, where few words, if any, can describe the heft and strangeness of pandemic life, the space to feel — and express our feelings — is even more necessary. In recognition of this, artist Jason Phu has created a project that expresses shades of feeling, documenting the things we feel, but don’t articulate. 

Jason Phu, be as strong as a mountain and as fluid as a river they said. they were wrong, the mountain was a mound of old tv monitors and the river was a dry bed of ox bones, 2020, photograph, photographed by Sly Morikawa, 80 x 120 cm, framed. Image courtesy Chalk Horse.
Sly Morikawa, yev – psyklz clubsport, 2020, photograph. Image courtest Sly Morikawa.

In collaboration with photographer Sly Morikawa, best known for her ethereal portraits saturated with glamour and sex, what we used to be, where we used to go Jason Phu’s research into Chinese history, culture and mythology. Across twelve photographs — whittled from five-hundred images — Phu has imagined this folklore through his peculiar, but recognisable punk-graffiti-irreverent aesthetic. In a soft focused haze, Phu dismantles these histories, sifting through what matters most to him and plunging these scenes into the borders of narrative. Phu notes “there are strands of mysteries in the show. It’s a reference to us as creatures, to the big bang, the future, the expansion of the universe and how an artist might interpret that. It’s about all these grand narratives, and the petty, small ones. That’s what I enjoy the most… the big and small in the same place, not where things are big or small, but just exist.” 

In be as strong as a mountain and as fluid as a river they said. they were wrong, the mountain was a mound of old tv monitors and the river was a dry bed of ox bones (2020), eight colourful figures, dressed in fluorescent cloaks wear roughly hewn cardboard masks decorated with long strands of hair — a reference to Chinese antiquity, where long hair constituted Confucian piety and respect. These sages, shot in a suburban swimming pool, are a manifestation of the Chinese dragon King — the god of weather and water. Unlike the original folklore’s four dragons, Phu has multiplied them into eight dragons — an act of mistranslation that reflects the ever-changing whittling down and workings of oral history traditions like the Chinese diaspora culture of which Phu belongs. He says, “that’s the thing about ancient mythologies. They’re mutable, especially when retold in the new country. There is a shallow shell of authenticity from the mainland that is frozen in time and doesn’t exists anymore.” 

In the daytime counterpart of this tale, imagine being the eight dragon kings of all the seas with all the power of the forces of nature and mystical powers of everlasting life and wisdom of the ages and still drowning in your own soup of feelings and left-on-read messages, 2020 depicts the same water dragons with a different and stranger unremarkableness that drains them of any higher spiritual authority. In this contradiction — depicting serious subject matter through the comical pointlessness of the everyday — lies the magic of these works. The jumble of individual jokes, references and poetry of the titles correct, contextualise, and revise each other. If you are deeply attentive to the chaos, your mind will be quieted by the subtlety of the works.  

Jason Phu, imagine being the eight dragon kings of all the seas with all the power of the forces of nature and mystical powers of everlasting life and wisdom of the ages and still drowning in your own soup of feelings and left-on-read messages, 2020, photograph, photographed by Sly Morikawa, 80 x 120 cm, framed. Image courtesy Chalk Horse.
Image: politics and history of men’s hair in China. Courtesy Nancy Duong.

It is jumble of artistic strategies which stirred Morikawa and Phu to collaborate. Phu describes this collaboration ‘a bit more fun, a bit more intuitive’ than his recent history projects, including The Burrangong Affray at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, where the artist explored Australian Chinese race riots during Australia’s gold rush in 1860 – 1861. While the stakes might seem lower, without having to carry the load of academic research, field work and community stakeholders, what we used to be, where we used to go still carries Phu’s hallmark sense of complication and expansion — blurring conceptions of identity, community relationships and history. Into this mixture of conceptual interests, he drops into the ingredients of deadpan humour, non-sensical narrative, biographical details and poetry in order puzzle, awaken and torment his audiences as they spend time with these compositions. 

Through mutual respect, the artists were able to find a familiar dialect, fusing the gap between their different backgrounds — fashion photography and fine art respectively. Phu tells me, “Sly brought a whole new language to the project, how to talk to the models, how to position them. Those instructions are like brushstrokes. It was a nice collaboration; giving up control.” By working together, the pair have created a time capsule of a moment in culture and their own lives. The result is a set of images that explore identity through poetic metaphors, critical intelligence and a humour and irreverence that is never heavy handed or laboured. 

Jason Phu, what we used to be, where we used to go (installation view), Chalkhorse Gallery November 2020. image Credit: Docqment.

Gliding through different registers, mythologies and moods, each scene in what we used to be, where we used to go forms a loose web that adds up to a wider picture. By leaning into the photographic medium, Phu has tapped into a new language to express the ideas of his practice. And in doing so, these works open a new emotional register; straining with unacknowledged feeling and a mystery that speaks to the current moment. It is this sense the knowing and unknowing of these scenes that gives this series their potency. This is classic Jason Phu — something new from something gone. 

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This text was originally commissioned by Chalk Horse.

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robert mapplethorpe: phillip prioleau, NYC (on pedestal side facing)

robert mapplethorpe: phillip prioleau, NYC (on pedestal side facing)

March 2020

American studio photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe’s (1946 – 1989) lens has roved across taut skin, muscled limbs, leather harnesses, fabrics, flowers and phalluses. Conferring a classical glow to these subjects, his identifiable photographic style is marked by his meticulous and flawless black and white technique that emphasises the sculptural beauty of his tight and geometric compositions. Speaking about his portrait photography he said, “I want the person to look at least as interesting as they can look … I try to catch something unique in him that no one else has/ That quality is what I want to come across, not the superficial prettiness, even though I love photographing beautiful people.”[1]

Robert Mapplethorpe: phillip prioleau, NYC (on pedestal side facing) (1979), gelatin silver print, 348 x 348mm. Image courtesy of Webbs.

In 1978, Mapplethorpe would produce his infamous portfolios of themed imagery, “X” of masochistic images and “Y” of floral still lives. These portfolios would highlight the formal connection between flowers and genitalia; using metaphor and allusion to breathe desire and life into flowers, while ossifying sex acts into cool geometries. This image, Phillip Prioleau, NYC (on pedestal Side Facing), 1979 was created following this period, when Mapplethorpe worked on his subsequent portfolio that could complete the series, “Z” nude portraits of African American Men released in 1981. Prioleau, who Mapplethorpe hired to work in his studio and then convinced to pose, regularly featured in the Z portfolio and sat for images that typify Mapplethorpe’s classicising figure studies of this period. 

Robert Mapplethorpe, Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter (1979) photograph, gelatin silver print on paper, 61.2 x 58.6 x 3.8 cm. © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. 

This elegant and crisp arrangement of Prioleau perched on a pedestal highlights Mapplethorpe’s undeniable interest in Classical Greek and Roman sculpture. Admiring this genre for its pursuit of idealise male forms, Mapplethorpe sought to reinterpret this practice by inviting chiselled young men to strike Michelangelo like poses. In this example, Prioleau is lit with a heavenly beam of light, creating a chiaroscuro effect that brings the mottled shimmer of the sitter’s muscle to the fore. In many of Mapplethorpe’s images, he used beauty as a means to provoke and challenge viewers to not avert their gaze from the troubling societal topics of his time. Here, the idealised image of African American man, sitting prized on a pedestal, is at odds with the troubling African American race relations of the time — revealing a deeper agenda that runs throughout Mapplethorpe’s work.

Robert Mapplethorpe, Tulip (1985), gelatin silver print on paper. © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. 

This image of Prioleau also foreshadows the movement in the early 1980s from taking erotic pictures — which have always occupied a disproportionate importance in his canon — to his concentration of nudes, portraits and still lifes. Remarking “I’ve already recorded that,” Mapplethorpe’s icy and idealised forms — which is beginning to become apparent in this image — would take centre stage for the rest of his career until his death in 1989, at age 43. The legacy of Mapplethorpe’s work would crest in 1990, when prosecutors indicted the Cincinnati Contemporary Art Centre, along with its director, on obscenity charges for exhibiting a touring exhibition of his work, interpreting his elegant geometries as offensive S&M scenes paid for using public funds (the National Endowment for the Arts granted $30 000 towards the exhibition). While Art Centre ultimately won the case, conservative politicians, led by North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, led a national debate on the self-indulgent excesses of culture and art during this time. Through this case, the name Mapplethorpe in American culture, would go on to become a byword for controversy and the culture wars of the 1990s — speaking to the frictions, tensions and contradictions that give Mapplethorpe’s images their undeniable energy.    

END.

This text was originally commissioned and published by Webb’s Auction House.

[1] Mapplethorpe, quoted in “Robert Mapplethorpe, Portraitist and Photographer of the Erotic.” In Robert Mapplethorpe: Perfection in Form (New York: teNeues, 2009).

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in any given moment: eugenia raskopoulos

in any given moment: eugenia Raskopoulos

August 2020

Representations of women in visual art have historically defined female experience through difference, weakness, passivity, sexual availability, domesticity and, perhaps most unintelligent, an object to be represented in art rather than a maker of art. For centuries these assumptions have dangerously masqueraded as normal; however, successive generations of artists have worked to rebut this putrid sexism that lies beneath the filthy bandages of Western art history. Eugenia Raskopoulos is part of this chorus of artists, producing work that untangles the relationship between women, art, identity and the veiled patriarchal power relations in Western society.

Eugenia Raskopoulos, (dis)order (2019). Installation view at The National, Carriageworks, Sydney. Image: Zan Wimberley.

In her most recent large-scale installation, ORDER-(DIS)ORDER (2019) for ‘The National’ at Carriageworks, Sydney, Raskopoulos staged a performance where she topples a tower of discarded white goods, which was then projected onto the same site to achieve a ghostly palimpsestic effect that stretches conceptions of time and place. Alongside a topography of the destroyed white goods, the video-installation was framed by a neon pendulum sign alternating the words ‘order’ and ‘disorder’. Challenging the sexual power system of the patriarchy, Raskopoulos selected the whitegoods for their connotations of the domestic, feminine and servile, repurposing these objects and their meaning in a shattering act of apocalyptic and dystopic proportions.

Eugenia Raskopoulos, (dis)order (2019). Installation view at The National, Carriageworks, Sydney. Image: Zan Wimberley.

In this process of creation and destruction, Raskopoulos confronts Western society’s conception of women as masters of the domestic universe. Conceiving of herself as a master-hero figure of a different sort, the work uses metaphor and symbolism to remind her audience that supposedly innocent objects, words and their associations have come to embody the status quo of structural sexism and a class system. And while these systems continue to restrict many women, small act of resistance like this are possible and available. In this way, Raskopoulos asserts text, images and objects are never simple, neutral tools that describe the world. They are coded by conventions and rules that reflect broader power relations. To understand any differently, is to be complicit in this system.

Throughout Raskopoulos’ forty-year career, the artist has maintained a deep interest in changing the present by challenging the ways in which we describe the past. She has woven her own image and experiences into a series of photographs, films and installations to articulate the constant negotiation that migrant bodies face in foreign cultures. She notes, ‘I am interrogating the concept of the fragmented body. As an immigrant – a Czech-born woman of Greek descent – my identity is made up of different parts that don’t always sit neatly together. And in the same breath, I want to defy all these labels and break apart traditional conceptions of the body, identity and art.’

Eugenia Raskopoulos, rootreroot (2016), HD video, 8:45 and routereroute (2016), murano glass neon, dimensions variable. Installation view, Tarrawarra Biennial 2016: Endless Circulation. Photo: Andrew Curtis.

Rootreoot (2016) embodies in this interest. The split frame video filmed in an aerial shot features two female figures played by the artist. In the upper section, the figure drags an olive tree in an ongoing clockwise circle, while in the bottom section the same figure simultaneously drags a wattle tree in the opposite direction. Moving at their own rhythms and in opposing parts of the video frame, the circles created by each figure eventually intertwine, creating a moment of completeness as the bodies meld into one another and then dissolve away, concluding the work.

Eugenia Raskopoulos, Rootreroot  (2016), HD digital video, 8:45. Image courtesy the artist.

The circular journey of the characters mirrors the complexities of migrant and female bodies, capturing something important about their daily experience. While not a strict self-portrait, Raskopoulos plays the central figure in the composition as she does in many of her other works. By drawing upon the tradition of the self-portrait, Rootreoot explores the interface between the way we present ourselves to others and how others see us. This technique forms part of the many artistic strategies employed by Raskopoulos to explore and challenge codes of thought and behaviour.

Complementing Rootreoot is Routereroute (2016), two circular neon signs that spell the title of the work – one in Greek, the artist’s first language, and one in English. Reflecting the duality of video work, these neon works depict the tectonic reality of migrants in which meaning, identity and conceptions of self are slippery and language (particularly the foreign language of a migrant’s new home) serves both to elucidate and limit these understandings. This particular experience – one of many experiences faced by migrants – speaks to Raskopoulos’ own experiencing growing up in Australia, when she was often required to translate English to Greek for her grandparents; ‘I was a translator from a very young age. That’s when I learned its power. If ever anyone would say anything mean to my grandparents, I would mistranslate the words and protect them … the discrimination we would face.’

Eugenia Raskopoulos, diglossia #1 (2010), digital pigment print on archival paper, 142cm x 95cm. Image courtesy the artist.

Reflecting on her methodology, Raskopoulos notes, ‘I’m at my best when I’m in the studio. I’m happiest in the making process where you get to read and research. It’s all part of it, looking and relooking. I love the repetitive kinds of traces and motions that the body is working through. It’s an important life lesson – just doing this type of work and being diligent about it.’

In thinking about the next set of milestones, Raskopoulos gives little away about her upcoming project at Arc One Gallery, Melbourne. Scheduled for 2021, the works continue the artist’s lifelong flirtation with the power of language and photography as poetic metaphors for life. After all, as Raskopoulos conveys in her work, art is not simply a dream or a vision of a female nude; it’s the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundation for a future of change and a bridge across our fears to new ideas, to experiences and (if we’re lucky enough) to where we have never been before.  

END.

This article was originally commissioned and published by Artist Profile.