This is content for Art Gallery NSW
A sea of beautiful faces swims past our eyes – Taylor, Bergmann, Newton John – kissing stern, handsome men – Burton, Peck, Beatty. But then there is an about turn: the slap, the thrown drink, the backhand, the judo throw, the gun. The abrupt shock of violence conducted in the name of love shatters the Hollywood fantasy of the fairy tale romance.
This entanglement of highly charged filmic fragments is stitched together in Love, a video montage that photomedia artist Tracey Moffatt made with the editor Gary Hillberg. Moffatt is one of Australia’s most successful contemporary artists. Next year, her work will travel to Venice to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale, but if you don’t have a plane ticket to Italy, the Art Gallery of NSW has the largest collection of Moffatt’s work, and is currently showing a tightly curated selection of her celebrated work.
Alongside Love (2003), the exhibition features another video montage, Other (2009), also made with Gary Hillberg, as well as a selection of the photographs from her Plantation (2009) series and the headline work, Laudanum (1998).
For the cinema buff, there are rich pickings thanks to Moffatt’s bowerbird approach to imagery. Follow the chain of hand-coloured photographs printed on hand-made paper in Plantation, and the game is on. Haven’t we seen that colonial house before? Or the shadowy stranger staring into it? Who set those cane fields afire? Remember Mandingo, set in the American South, back in 1975? Or South African slavery film The Grass is Singing, in 1984? Too far back? Try the 1991 version of Cape Fear. The hand-coloured photographs suggest a story that is never quite told.
“We’re not sure what’s going on, but there’s a sense of foreboding, signs of menace,” says the Art Gallery of NSW’s assistant curator of photography, Isobel Parker Philip.
It’s Moffatt playing with our minds, making us work. “Her narratives are oblique and unresolved – she invites you to bring your own references and memories to the viewing while teasing you down the path a little.”
The rest of the story is up to us. She’s triggered our memories, hinted at the cultural references. Now she gives us glimpses, drawing us in as voyeurs, complicit in the action, using the classic cinematic device of framing a shot that lures us in, and gives us freedom.
Peep through the keyhole. Peer around a corner. Capture a glimpse of a scene through a barred window or a door left ajar: she’ll let you do that, but she won’t tell you the full story.
“What’s been left unsaid or out of shot possesses dramatic force,” says Parker Philip. In the 19 photographs that make up the Laudanum series, Moffatt unearths another colonial home to enact a melodrama between a servant and mistress. The commanding mistress are entwined in a narrative in which fear and desire overlap and states of power and abjection fluctuate. Is this domestic turmoil the product of a complex sadomasochistic relationship or a drug-induced fantasy?
“The intensity is fuelled by a sense of foreboding and is cultivated through suggestion. Ominous scenes unfold in tightly focused psychological spaces,” says Parker Philip.
While you were watching, did you see the homage to the German Expressionist Nosferatu, made in 1992? Or perhaps the British class drama The Servant, adapted by Harold Pinter and directed by Joseph Losey in 1963?
Not only does cinema inform the themes and imagery that appear across Moffatt’s practice, it also influences the composition and formal structure of her photographic work. As Parker Philip notes, “a direct visual quotation from Murnau’s Nosferatu is embedded in Laudanum but the series also borrows filmic devises used in this and other German Expressionist film. The dramatic suspense that this series induces is heightened by Moffatt’s use of repetition and ruptures in sequential continuity as well as her suggestive use of shadow, foreshortened interior space and constricted framing devices. These are all filmic techniques were crucial to the look and structure of German Expressionist film.”
High art and low entertainment, there’s no snobbery in the work, says Parker Philip. “Moffatt accepts cliché and pop culture, weaving allusions to low-brow Hollywood film as well as German Expressionism into her work without discrimination.”
“Television is also itself a hugely important cultural force in her practice,” she adds.
In the montage films Moffatt has fast-edited scenes so we feel like we’re channel surfing, except instead of a mish-mash of cooking shows, sport scenes, news and soaps, she’s connected a stream of movie moments with themes of love, attraction, violence and eroticism.
“She plays with pace in a very interesting way, compositing footage from hundreds of movies,” says Parker Philip, “where each video montage creates a climactic crescendo from the mass of found footage. This sensitivity to rhythm is also present in her series of still photographs – where the drama enacted across the sequence pulsates with intensity.”
Moffatt demands involved, not passive, viewership says Parker Philip. “There are demands made on the viewer – as they lure you in, you must surrender yourself to their oblique narratives and their rhythmic pull.”
Tracey Moffatt: Laudanum and other works is on show at the Art Gallery of NSW until September 4, 2016.
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Isobel Parker Philip will speak about the cinematic references in Moffatt’s work in a free talk as part of the Art After Hours series on Wednesday 10 August 2016 5:30-6pm at the Art Gallery of NSW.
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