GALLERY - University of South Australia

SASA
GALLERY
8 August - 31 August 2007

Artists:
Di Barrett, Program Director: Visual Arts, SASA, UniSA
Greg Donovan, Program Director: Graduate Diploma/Master of Visual Art
& Design, Coordinator International Students, SASA, UniSA
Andrew Hill, Portfolio Leader: Teaching & Learning, SASA, UniSA
Mark Kimber, Studio Head: Photography & New Media, SASA, UniSA
Toby Richardson, Lecturer, Photography, SASA, UniSA
Olga Sankey, Program Director: Visual Arts Honours, SASA, UniSA
Editor: Mary Knights, Director, SASA Gallery, UniSA
Catalogue Design: Visual Communication Honours, SASA, UniSA,
Shane Keane, BVC, UniSA & Ryan Smith, BVC, UniSA
Catalogue Essays:
Jim Moss, Senior Lecturer, Visual Art History & Theory, SASA, UniSA
Dr Anne Marsh, Associate Professor of Theory, Associate Dean
Research, Faculty of Art & Design, Monash University
Front cover design: Shane Keane and Ryan Smith

Mark Kimber, SUN and MOON PICTURE 2, 2007, Giclée print
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Contents
Introduction
Mary Knights
Digital Phantoms: A Reality Check.
Dr Anne Marsh
Transmission
Jim Moss
Acknowledgements
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Toby Richardson, “What use do I have for it now my granddaughter has grown up”, Goodwood 5034, 2007, Giclée print
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Introduction
Transmission is a group exhibition by members of the Digital Art Research Experiment (DARE) which was
established to ‘investigate practices and boundaries around the evolution of digital media’. 1 This exhibition is the
fifth in a series that invites external scholars, as well as local, interstate and international artists and designers, to
participate in the SASA Gallery’s exhibition and publication programs. Dr Anne Marsh, Associate Professor, Theory
of Art & Design, Faculty of Art & Design, Monash University, is the external scholar participating in this exhibition.
Her research areas include photography, feminism, postmodernism, psychoanalysis and performance art. Marsh
has been published extensively in arts journals, exhibition catalogues and edited collections of essays and she is
the author of Body and Self: Performance Art in Australia, 1969-1992 (Oxford University Press 1993) and
The Darkroom: Photography and the Theatre of Desire (Macmillan 2003).
Jim Moss is a lecturer in Art & Design History & Theory at the South Australian School of Art (SASA). He has
published a considerable number of catalogue essays and critical texts that engage with visual arts discourse, both
historical and contemporary. Current interests include the resurgence in aesthetics which, Moss argues, has been
largely generated by the digital colonization of imagery.
The SASA Gallery supports a program of exhibitions focusing on innovation, experimentation and performance.
With the support of the Division of Education Arts & Social Sciences, UniSA, and the Division Research
Performance Funds, the SASA Gallery is being developed as a leading contemporary art space publishing and
exhibiting high-quality research based work, and as an active site of teaching and learning. The SASA Gallery
showcases South Australian artists, designers, writers and curators associated with the South Australian School
of Art and the Louis Laybourne-Smith School of Architecture in a national and international context.
Mary Knights
Director, SASA Gallery
1.
DARE SASA Gallery exhibition proposal, 2006
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Greg Donovan, White As, 2007, synthetic polymer paint, digital print on German etching paper
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Digital Phantoms: A Reality Check. Dr Anne Marsh
When Juliana Engberg directed the first Biennial of Contemporary Art
in Melbourne (1999) she became famous for saying that “video was the
tapestry of the twenty-first century”. The idea seemed to resonate with
artists and the public alike and it is a way of conceptualising photo-based
and electronic media that recognises the history of its evolution and
underlines its provenance. There’s always talk about new media and
often this noise tends to foreclose on history. Making a comparison
between tapestry and video may seem a bit far fetched but what Engberg
was getting at is that these forms of art and image making have a popular
appeal, they are also functional and able to be adapted across different
levels of skill. Tapestry was both a private, domestic form of image
making and a public display of virtuoso talent. Today we can say the
same about digital photography which allows the amateur operator to
compete with professionals.
Zara Stanhope curated an exhibition at MoMA at Heidi recently – titled
Perfect for Every Occasion: Photography Today – where the everyday
and the street photograph re-surface in recent photo-based practice.
Artists are consistently looking for new ways in which to challenge the
mainstream, and, after a decade or so of spectacular, performative
museum-sized photo prints, it comes as no surprise that artists once
again search out the mundane and the ordinary and try to insert some
sort of balance. Stanhope introduced her exhibition with a small suite of
photo-journalist shots - some taken by professionals, some by amateurs,
but all reproduced on a very small scale, as if clipped from a magazine.
The artists in Perfect for Every Occasion are not photojournalists nor
social documentary photographers in the traditional sense but many of
them look to street photography and the art of the everyday, including
conceptual art, as a way of distancing themselves from performative or
directorial photography.
The accessibility of photography to a population of producers was
made famous in George Eastman’s advertising slogan for Kodak in the
1880s: “You push the button, we do the rest” became an emblematic
slogan for photography’s utilitarian value. 1 This democratic aspect
of the medium makes photography an amateur image making process
which has enormous popular appeal. Although the mass production
of millions of family snap shots has been analysed as a ‘middle brow art’
by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, other critics have expanded on
the psychological aspects of the medium that seduce the photographer
and the viewer. 2
There has been an increased interest in amateur photography in recent
times. The most powerful digital images to infiltrate our electronic
networks were the mobile phone camera pictures of Iraqi prisoners
being tortured by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib. These images have
shocked the world because we believe them to be true accounts of what
happened. No amount of postmodern theory is going to convince us that
these are inauthentic copies without an original experience.
The digital age brings with it the potential to manipulate and invent
images in new ways, using various software packages and electronic
interfaces to produce fantastic results. This world of fantasy and the
phantasmagorical has a long and spectacular history that begins when
people first started to gaze at the stars.
Walter Benjamin suggests that the history of photography begins when
people start to interpret the configurations of the night sky. 3 When they
see pictures written in light. For Benjamin, “reading – and therefore the
possibility of knowledge in general – begins in the reading of stars.” 4
This is a compelling metaphor that propels Benjamin into meditations
on philosophy and history. All reading and writing is interpretation, all
languages are synthetic systems of one sort or another. What Benjamin
and a host of artists are interested in is the mysterious side of this process.
This is not to say that this is an a-political desire, on the contrary, it is a
dialectical thinking that acknowledges that modes of mechanical and
technological reproduction change the way in which ideology thinks
and seduces. The phantasmagoria of modernity and post-modernity
(shopping malls, advertising, the World Wide Web, photography, film,
computer games and virtual worlds) enmesh the subject/spectator within
a sophisticated techno-psychological experience, one in which the real has
already become a simulacra. 5
The most positive outcome of this era is that the subject/spectator
becomes increasingly involved as an active participant, choosing and
selecting one form or idea over another—supporting both established
stereotypes and sub-cultural identities. For Benjamin, like the Surrealists,
it was a matter of harnessing the powers of the phantasmagoria to the
revolutionary struggle; using the phantasmagorical and dream elements
to precipitate dialectical thinking.
The meeting of art and science within mechanical and digital forms of
representation produces a discourse that is rich and multi-layered. On one
hand analogue photography promised (scientifically) to reproduce what
was in front of the camera’s lens. The photograph was to be an index of
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the real. However, because of human intervention, this real was always
manipulated in some way. Framing, cropping or contextualising the real,
was there from the very beginning: this was the way in which the stars
were transformed into signs.
Although many histories of the mechanical/digital image are grounded in
the progress of technology as a means of analysing modes and styles, it is
not the technology in itself that is captivating. It is the way in which the
technologies are capable of exploring the meeting of magic and science,
the way in which they engage us psychologically.
It also needs to be noted that mechanisms, technologies, programmes,
instruments and software are all tools that have been designed to do
particular things. The camera obscura, for example, was said to reproduce
Renaissance perspectival space, a one point perspective which positioned
the subject/spectator at the centre of the viewing experience. But the
camera obscura is much older than the Renaissance, Helmut Gernsheim
notes that: “The optical principle of the camera obscura images was
known to Aristotle (384-322)”. 6 The scientific minds of the Enlightenment
may have valued the camera for its indexical and mimetic qualities,
however, it quickly became a very popular device. In the hands of the
operator the camera obscura was a theatrical device, a darkroom, a mini
stage upon which nature and culture converged.
From the inception of cameras, there has always been a desire by
practitioners and operators to stretch the limits and capacities of the
instrument. Add to this the desire and the imagination of the operator
and the spectator and one has an intricate map rich in metaphors which
impact on belief, memory, history and psychology.
Digital photography has been described as a kind of demon. A monster
that annihilates the analogue and indexical qualities of the medium.
These qualities were supposed to anchor photography to the real. The
promise of photography, in the service of art and science, was that it
would reproduce reality without the interception of the operator. The
idea that nature did the work was exploded by the simple fact that
humans pushed the button. The famous and relatively ‘innocent’ case of
the Cottingley Fairy photographs is just one example of the performative
nature of the medium in the hands of children and at the whim of desire. 7
This photographic hoax, like recent day UFO photographs, was spun out
for years and given credibility by Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the
Sherlock Holmes mysteries. The point is that human intervention is bound
to spoil science. In the realm of the visual, it’s predictable and endearing
that humans would want to mess up.
There has been a lot of debate about the status of the medium in art in
recent years. A kind of hysteria emanating from the October group and
Rosalind Krauss in particular. She fears that too much inter-media art and
installation results in the disappearance of the medium. This seems
to me to be strange from a scholar who championed “sculpture in the
expanded field” and did so much to support the postmodern impetus
in art which essentially undermined the medium as it had been described
by the late modernists in America. Yet retrospectively both Krauss and
Hal Foster, who now believes that design has infected the fine arts, have
come to question the pluralism of postmodernism which they believe is in
the service of global capital. 8 Thus those who once heralded a postmodern
turn now turn away and impel artists to return to the essentials of the
medium. To me this sounds like a retreat into high formalism, a return
to the ivory tower where art and popular culture are safely separated.
It also seems implausible, like a bid to stop time, to return to the glory
of a safer formalist avant-garde enshrined by Clement Greenberg in
the 1940s, and now by Rosalind Krauss who follows Greenberg in her
allegiance to the medium. 9
This tendency to retreat into the past cannot stem the flow of new
media and technologies. The time of mediums is over in its formal sense.
One must ask what is the medium of photography? Is it its analogue,
indexical and empirical truth, which has come under so much scrutiny and
criticism? Is it its filmic substance, those layers of skin that are stolen and
saved? 10 And then one would ask: is it not the magic and mysticism of this
process that is actually compelling rather than the thing in itself? Is it not
the process that enchants us? The promises that fairies actually might be
photographed? And, if this is the case, then surely what we are talking
about is the desire to invent things that are improbable. And now in the
twenty-first century the digital enters centre stage and says you can have
all of this and more. The digital and electronic media disperse the concept
of the medium. Each new media is predicated on the past but looks to the
future, to new possibilities, new means of production and distribution.
You push the button or click the mouse to invent your own fantasies.
Make fairies, ghosts, UFOs; create heroes out of miniature models,
crime scenes from ordinary suburban houses. Invest in your imagination,
photoshop will do the rest.
There is no going back to the medium as an essential entity but it is
apparent throughout digital photo and lens-based practice that artists
are looking to the past as much as to the future. Toy cameras and old
technologies are often combined with digital means of presentation.
My recent research suggests that the scanner, arguably a fairly mundane
piece of equipment, is the tool that is used the most in photo-based
production. 11 The scanner allows artists to scan almost anything (now
even three dimensional objects) and to create enormous digital files which
then allow the artist to print at scales unimaginable to the photographers
of the 1970s. It also allows for the picture to be printed on virtually any
surface. There’s nothing magical about a scanner, it’s essentially a copier.
But it’s probably the most important conduit in the chain of production.
Much like the simple modem that allows us to participate in the World

Di Barrett, Crucifiction III, 2007, archival photomedia on paper
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Olga Sankey, Forked Tongue (diptych), 2007, inkjet print and sand blasted perspex
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Wide Web. The modem itself is a fairly dumb piece of equipment
but it opens the door to an incredible world of information sharing
and mass distribution.
The bid to return to the essentials of the medium of photography or
painting or sculpture seems a retrograde step, one engineered to promote
a return to formalism. It is at once nostalgic and a-political: a desire to
return to a bygone time when things were less complicated and fashion
and advertising, along with popular culture and design, were kept
separate from the high arts. This is one of the greatest modernist myths.
Other eras in history have championed the closing of the gap between
art and life, between art and science, between design, art and
architecture. The Gothic era, the Arts and Crafts Movement, the
Bauhaus and arte povera spring to mind.
The fear that installation art and new media arts will somehow poison
the arts or detract from the main game is misplaced. We communicate
in virtual spaces everyday. As soon as we have a telephone conversation
or go on line we are in a virtual space. Furthermore, the idea of the
virtual image is not new, it was imagined and written about early in the
prehistory of photography. 12 Perhaps what is frightening for some people
is that the concept of virtual reality has become a real phenomenon in
today’s society. People regularly engage and perform in virtual spaces such
as MySpace and You Tube where they can create identities for themselves.
The idea of the real is slipping away and it makes some people nervous.
The digital age ushers in new zones of contact and connection between
people. The screen environment has become an intimate and personal
environment for many people. Over 180,000,000 people have a presence
on MySpace, a seemingly clean and safe arena for chat and making friends
– friends that may not exist as they present. This new environment creates
fear as does the taking of photographs in public spaces. Photography itself
has become a kind of crime. The slash through icons once only aimed at
smokers and drinkers are now accompanied by the slashed camera icon.
We are in a rapidly changing environment where the photograph, after
supposedly losing its indexical relationship to the real (via the digital), is
now punished because the digital allows the real to be distributed in the
instant of a second. This argument is somewhat contradictory. On one
hand the digital is supposed to move away from the indexical, to mess
with the essential medium of the photograph, its promise to represent
the real; on the other hand the moral panic associated with photographs
of children being electronically distributed is predicated on the idea that
the photograph does represent the real. 13 This suggests that we haven’t
moved as far away from the index as we may have thought. Despite
the performative and manipulative qualities of the digital, many images
still begin life in association with the real. This is most apparent in art
photography where any degree of manipulation would be acceptable
under the banner of creative licence. Contemporary photographers do
utilise digital tools, but they haven’t turned their back on the object;
like their colleagues before them, they usually start with the thing in
front of the lens.
1. Helmut Gernsheim, The Origins of Photography,
10. For a discussion of the spectral spheres of the body
London: Thames and Hudson, 1982, p. 116.
and the ways in which photography might steal
2. See Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on
them, thus literally proposing death by photography
Photography, trans. Richard Howard, London: Fontana, see: Nadar, ‘My Life as a Photographer’ (1900), and
1984 (first published in French as La Chambre Claire, Rosalind Krauss, ‘Tracing Nadar’, October, no. 5,
1980); Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The
Summer, 1978, pp. 7-28 and pp. 29-48. See also Susan
Conception of Photography, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Sontag On Photography, pp. 158-160. It was probably
MIT Press, 1997; Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A
Oliver Wendell Holmes who first wrote about ‘spectral
Middle-Brow Art, Oxford: Polity/Basil Blackwell, 1990, spheres’ and photography, see ‘The Stereoscope and
(first published in French 1965); Cadava, Eduardo,
the Stereograph’ (1859) in Beaumont Newhall (ed.)
Words of Light: Thesis on the Photography of History, Photography: Essays and Images, London: Secker and
Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997. Warburg, 1981, pp. 53-61.
3. For a compelling analysis see Eduardo Cadava, Words of 11. My research is on Contemporary Australian Photography
Light, pp. 26-30.
since 1980 and will result in a searchable website and a
4. Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light, p. 28.
book to be released in 2008.
5. Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Precession of the Simulacra’, in 12. For a discussion of the virtual image in early
Brian Wallis (ed.), Art After Modernism: Rethinking
photography see Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Detours:
Representation, New York: New Museum of
Photography and the Camera Lucida’, Afterimage,
Contemporary Art, 1984, pp. 253-282.
vol.18, no. 2, September 1990, p. 14.
6. Helmut Gernsheim, The Origins of Photography, p. 7. 13.
The issue of paedophiles utilising the World Wide
7. Anne Marsh, The Darkroom: Photography and the
Web is a huge social problem and I am not meaning
Theatre of Desire, South Yarra, Victoria: Palgrave-
to belittle this here. The interesting issues is that these
Macmillan, 2003, pp. 164 and Susan Bright, Art
producers are using digital and electronic means to
Photography Now, London: Thames and Hudson,
represent the real.
2005, p. X.
8. See Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded
Field’ in Hal Foster (Ed.) The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on
Postmodern Culture, Seattle, Washington, Bay Press,
1983, pp. 31-42; ‘“. . . And Then Turn Away?” An Essay
on James Coleman’, October, no. 81, 1993, pp. 5-33;
‘A Voyage on the North Sea’: Art in the Age of the Post-
Medium Condition, London: Thames & Hudson, 1999;
and ‘Reinventing the Medium’, Critical Inquiry, winter,
1996, pp. 289-305. Also Hal Foster, Design and Crime
and Other Diatribes, London/New York, Verso, 2002.
9. Kraus started her career as a formalist, preferring
Greenberg’s approach to art criticism over Harold
Rosenberg’s more romantic and literary approach. She
was a close colleague of Michael Fried’s in the 1960s
and an editor of Artforum during its formalist period.
She later turned away from Greenberg and fell out
with Fried but her recent insistence on the specificity of
the medium promotes a return to formalist concerns
in contemporary criticism. For a lucid analysis see Amy
Newman, Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974, New
York: Soho Press, 2000.
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Mark Kimber, SUN and MOON PICTURE 56, 2007, Giclée print
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Transmission by Jim Moss
The text below is in response to an invitation from the DARE group
of artists to address their work in essay form for the catalogue of the
exhibition Transmission. There’s always an element of risk in such an
undertaking and one is never more conscious of this than when writing
around the work of six artists. The common thread that has drawn the
work of these artists together in this exhibition is the incorporation of
digital imaging technology in the construction of their work. All six
artists were trained in pre-digital technologies in the areas of photography,
printmaking, painting and drawing and each of them has adopted
digital ways to facilitate specific requirements, from the technical to the
conceptual. Thus, it has been around this common denominator that the
writer has spun his words, sometimes focusing on cause and other times
on effect and sometimes (but, with a greater degree of difficulty) on
things in between.
It is not, however, the role of the catalogue essayist to critique the work
– that is for others to do. The role of the catalogue essay is to address the
work in an expository manner as possible while also contributing to the
textual ‘hum’ of the exhibition.
Musing on the large images of mattresses by Toby Richardson the writer
is reminded of the 15th Century Flemish masters and their obsession with
details, particularly in their rendering of cloth and of the clothes worn by
the personages in their paintings. Flanders gained much of its wealth from
transforming English wool into cloth prior to sending it south to the dyers
of Florence. Fine clothes were highly distinctive items in early renaissance
Europe and the Flemish artists were in a league of their own when it came
to rendering the materiality of cloth, furs and embroidery (and a range of
other commodities like books) with such exquisite verisimilitude that one
cannot help thinking that herein such exactitude lay a primary purpose for
the work. (A similar subtext can be gleaned from the ubiquitous presence
of mathematical perspective in Italian painting of the same period).
However, as the acquisition of verisimilitude signified a growing technical
virtuosity in the case of the Flemish painters, it was also indexical of a
cognitive shift in the ritualistic and symbolic order of things. In a manner
not dissimilar to the way Flemish realism celebrated the commodity form
in the age of Gutenberg, visual culture in the new digital age also appears
to be in the thrall of an intense hyper realism.
The digital aesthetic displays an overriding obsession with the replication
of natural form, and in this it paradoxically demonstrates a return to a key
concern of artists during the Renaissance: verisimilitude. Contemporary
computers can simulate practically anything, to such an extent that it is
becoming increasingly difficult to immediately distinguish between that
which is real and its simulation. Verisimilitude has become the holy grail of
the Digital Age. 1
Not to be confused with the super-realism of 1970’s painting, hyperrealism,
like its Flemish antecedent, brings home the astonishing capacity
of contemporary imaging technology to facilitate a new paranoid-critical
discourse with reality. How is it that these almost life-size images of
mattresses in various stages of decomposition appear to us as a vision
splendid? Why is it that used mattresses hung vertically against the wall
would simply look drab or even abject? Well, simply because actual
mattresses and these images of mattresses bear no relation to one
another, The images are not made from the same material as mattresses;
neither are they three dimensional and neither do the images have any of
the qualities of actual mattresses - other than that they are perfect visual
simulations of actual used mattresses down to the microscopic detail of
their fabric structure with every stray fibre in exquisite delineation. These
images are handsome, even beautiful, and they are faultless examples of
Roland Barthes’s famous dictum – A photograph is a message without a
code: 2 codes obscure and give alternate readings, whereas the beauty of
these images lies in the pristine verisimilitude of their mattressness. And if
it is the case, as Baudrillard has stated, that images murder the real, then,
surely these are mattresses that have died and gone to heaven.
Heaven is a place opposite to that where Olga Sankey would like to
send authoritarian perpetrators of the word. As an artist, who has
worked predominantly in the discipline of printmaking, Olga Sankey is as
fascinated with the heritage of Gutenberg as she is with the heritage of
Albrech Dürer and for a number of years now Olga’s work has zeroed in
on variations of the image/text relationship, a field that continues to offer
a wealth of deconstructive options.
Her current work maintains a critical commentary on language or, more
specifically, on our assimilation of the codes of language. In Forked
Tongue written text is reduced to its semiotic essentials – the ‘Ur’ marks
of children learning by rote hark back to narratives of authority that
have been millennially sheeted home to a belief in and obedience to
manifestations of the word - and the voice of the law first spoke from the
interior of a burning bush and instructed Moses to lead the children of
Israel, the descendents of Abraham and Noah, out of captivity and into
the promised land. However, while the children of Israel may have escaped
the clutches of the Pharaoh, they were never to escape the omnipresence
of their vengeful god.
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And so it is with all children: those of a certain generation can well
remember the school black-board with its chalk simulations of copperplate
script signifying not just the ultimate in pristine literacy but the promise
of perfection at the conjunction of obedience and knowledge.
Verily... the promise of enlightenment has always been predicated on
the acquisition of the word and it is on this specific issue that Olga
Sankey, the visual artist, confronts the voodoo qualities of the word as
it’s been conjugated in Judeo- Christian doctrine and makes a little
mockery out of it.
And for an artist who has worked primarily as a print maker, what
does digital technology offer compared with traditional printmaking
technologies? Well, apart from providing a radically more efficient
technology, digital also facilitates the acquisition of and the layering of
imagery, greater precision and more intense colours.
It appears that, as Tennyson wrote in another context, …the old order
changeth, yielding place to new and… gone are the arcane practices
that hark back to the Middle Ages; the plates, the inks, the stones, the
presses; the materiality that was printmaking. But not gone is the mystery
of ancient things; after all, the lineage of digital software can be traced
to the origins of binary calculus in India a millennium before Christ. In
place is another mystery – the mystery of transference from the materiality
of things to the immateriality of things. The shift from the physical
transference of information to the ideational transference of information,
is a shift that is most marked in the digital transformation of printmaking.
Di Barrett is particularly enthusiastic about the sheer scope of what
software has to offer her photographic practice and doesn’t lament the
passing of traditional ways. As a photographic artist Di’s career was honed
on film stock and darkroom alchemy, but, photography is not a category
that immediately springs to mind when viewing the Crucifiction images 1,
11 & 111. Clearly, photographic images constitute the raw material of this
work but the images have been ‘cooked’ 3 and re-constituted into surface
arrangements of graphic intensity, heightened by a compositional tension
between symmetry and chaos and a content dichotomy that fluctuates
between the sacred and the profane.
What is consistent in this suite of work is the overall tenor of Judeo-
Christian symbolism, the presence of which belies the less obvious fact
that all three works are thematically quite inconsistent and what appears
to be a symphony of repetition within each image are in fact variations on
a theme, occasionally subverted by shards of ambiguity and discord.
These works are in response to what the artist perceives as an increasing
lack of spirituality in the world, while this writer would suggest they are
also ‘about’ an incredulity with the sheer scope of what the software
has to offer. Such a presumption suggests a digital path may lead to an
increase in spirituality. And, why not? We are going to have to become
more spiritual to save this planet and essence of digital may well be a
crucial ingredient in a re-growth of our world.
Another implication here is that while Di Barrett’s work is a response to
a perceived lack of spirituality it’s not necessarily about that. It could be
suggested that this work is no more about spirituality, or its lack, than
is the Book of Revelations about Christianity. There are complex links, of
course, but they’re not the same stories.
The title, Crucifiction, is common to all three images, with each displaying
a variation on the sign of the cruciform but only one of which is a crucified
figure. But is it He? The bottom left crucified figure in Crucifiction 11 has
demonic qualities not shared by the other three. All four crucified figures
share a somewhat blurred, ghostly presence against the finely chiselled,
arcane symbolism. The trans-gendered Christ-like figures in ecstasy
(and contraposto) from Crucifiction 111 float, suspended over a vista
of black cruciforms that could be read as a rendering of a mother-board
or matrix within which the ritual division of zeros and ones (female
and male integers) may collude in the production of a third order of
phantasmic possibilities.
The vicissitudes of the human condition are inscribed in more prosaic
tones in the work of Andrew Hill, the emotional impact of which is
facilitated through his appropriation of the building blocks of digital
imagery – pixels. Pixels are the result of the extraordinary facility of digital
imaging technology to store colours and tones in numerical sequences of
zeros and ones. When the ‘light picture’ is admitted through the aperture
of a digital camera it strikes a chip that has a mega number of electronic
nodes, each of which translates into numerical form a ‘byte’ of the colour
and tone of the ‘light picture’. Each byte can be downloaded as a pixel
that collectively construct an image and the more pixels in play the greater
the verisimilitude of the image. However, unlike many digital imagemakers,
Andrew emphasises the pixelated look of his images to the point
where he actually makes painterly simulations of highly pixelated images.
Painting pixelated images could be interpreted as a postmodern conceit,
were it not for this artist’s discovery that pixels have, amongst other
things, metaphorical qualities.
The subjects of Andrew Hill’s photography and painting are refugees and
other such victims who have been displaced and/or traumatised by wars
and other conflicts. A visibly pixelated image of, say, a woman’s face can
have an expressionistic quality as if the subject’s emotions are made visible
in little packages, or quanta, of colours and tones, the jagged edges of
which signify emotional and physical stress, as if the realities of a
person’s existence had started to fragment. Conversely, these images
also bring to mind Jean Luc Goddard’s quip – This is not a just image,
it is just an image.

Andrew Hill, Undefined, 2007, digital image
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And just images they may well be, but as is the case with both the refugee
subjects of this work and the work of the other artists in Transmission,
these images occupy zones in between: between disciplines, between
oeuvres and between realities.
In the catalogue essay for an exhibition Mark Kimber: Sun Pictures in
Sydney of this year, the writer, Amy Patterson, makes the observation
that the images …recreate elusive visions half sighted out of the corner
of the mind’s eye, apprehended in glimpses but never fully known. 4 The
inference here is that the images can be read as psychically glimpsed
alternatives to the generally perceived ubiquity and mundaneity of day
to day visual experience. Indeed, the Sun Pictures shown in Transmission
foreground relatively ordinary things from the urban landscape, an arena
of profound photographic potential into which the artist has only recently
returned. 5 The urban landscape is, after all, an invention of photography
- indeed, it has long been the promised-land of the photographic image,
accommodating a range of genres amongst which the surreal ‘look’ has
been omnipresent.
And yet, Mark Kimber isn’t offering some clichéd surrealist fare. While the
collective sub-text of his Sun Pictures suggests the artist is keeping one eye
cocked for an evocation of the marvellous, the images are encoded with a
highly conscious sense of composition and authorship. Sun Picture #2 is
a classic (a Smart!) quotation and is indicative of this photographer’s eye
for spotting manifestations of art from amongst the detritus of the real.
The artist best sums up his modus operandi – For me the compelling force
that drives my work is finding a situation where the play of light, form and
landscape converge in time and space to create an elusive and ephemeral
piece of theatre. 6
Given the possibilities inherent in digital editing software, this
photographer’s focus has shifted from the enquiring gaze of the latest
Canon, et al, to ‘slumming it’ with a basic plastic camera, the single
shutter speed of which is more analogous to the psychic glance. This
minimalising of front-line equipment also privileges the photographer
as the creative eye – indeed, in Sun Picture 2 Mark ‘appears’ as mise
en scene in his own shadow. Additionally, the basic camera technology
also provides a dark-room fix (for those apparatchiks weaned on film)
before the negative is scanned and uploaded as electronic integers
of zeros and ones.
Digitally scanning an image prior to working it further is a technique
also used by Greg Donovan. However, with this artist, a digital
engagement is primarily a means to an end. Initially, Greg creates a
first order image using traditional drawing and printmaking techniques,
including image transfer. He then has the work digitally scanned and
printed into a high resolution simulation of the original. Finally, in what
might seem an act of faith, he again works back ‘into’ the digital image,
re-appropriating its lost origins.
While the artist’s authorial gesture reclaims the work in an ontological
sense, it firmly locates digital technology as just another process or
technique amongst a range of others. Simultaneously, however, the digital
intervention renders the ‘original’ image superfluous; just another origin
in a potential procession of origins. Consequently, the digital component
is, inevitably, more than just another process in Greg Donovan’s imagery,
but how do we gauge its presence? After all, it’s both visible and invisible.
The absent presence of the digital image is, ironically, an analogy for
what has been described as, …an endless cycle of the reduplication and
overproduction of sign, images and simulations that leads to an implosion
of meaning…(a) transformation of reality into images… 7
Of particular concern to this artist is the manipulation of the real by media
based infotainment and associated surveillance technologies and his
images are …an attempt to reinterpret and undermine…the seductive and
manipulative power of selective image production whilst reinstating the
image as other than reportage. 8
It may be, however, that we are now so locked into Baudrillard’s fourth
stage of the image that attempts to undermine our counterfeit reality
will remain just that –attempts (although, as apparent in the above,
it has led to some interesting art). It may also be that the pleasure of
the simulacrum runs deep, evolutionarily deep. And if that’s the case,
modern art’s resistance to technology’s appropriation of the real is
one of the great resistance movements in history and will always be
remembered as such.
1. Marvel, L. The Digital Imaginary, Photofile 68, 2003
2. Barthes, R. (trans. Stephen Heath) (1977),
Image Music Text. P43
3. William Gilpin, one of the three Englishmen who theorized
the idea of the ‘picturesque’ used the term when
commenting on the condition of nature - Nature is all very
well but it needs to be cooked.
4. Patterson, A. (2007) Catalogue Essay, Mark Kimber:
Sun Pictures, Stills Gallery.
5. Artist’s statement from Sun and Moon Pictures (2007)
6. Ibid.
7. Featherstone, M. (1995) Undoing Culture, Globalism,
Postmodernism and Identity, SACE Publications, London.
8. Artist’s statement from Distant Image-Surveillance (2007)

Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements
The Director, SASA Gallery, would like to acknowledge the contribution
to the development of the 2007 SASA Gallery exhibition program by
the SASA Gallery Advisory Committee and Exhibition Programming
Committee; John Barbour, Portfolio Leader: Research & Postgraduate
Degrees, SASA, UniSA; SASA Gallery staff; Prof. Kay Lawrence, Head of
School, South Australian School of Art, UniSA; Prof. Drew Dawson, Dean:
Research, Division of Education, Arts & Social Sciences, UniSA; and Prof.
Michael Rowan, Pro Vice Chancellor, Division of Education, Arts & Social
Sciences, UniSA. The Director, SASA Gallery, thanks Tony and Connie Perrini
for the generous support of the 2007 SASA Gallery exhibition program
by Perrini Estate.
The Director, SASA Gallery, thanks the artists Di Barrett, Greg Donovan,
Andrew Hill, Mark Kimber, Toby Richardson and Olga Sankey; essay
writers Anne Marsh and Jim Moss; and graphic designers Fred Littlejohn,
Lynda Kay, Shane Keane and Ryan Smith and for their participation and
involvement in this exhibition and catalogue.
Published by the South Australian School of Art (SASA) Gallery
University of South Australia
Adelaide SA 5000
August 2007
ISBN 978-0-9803062-5-5
Artists: Di Barrett, Greg Donovan, Andrew Hill, Mark Kimber,
Toby Richardson & Olga Sankey
Editor: Mary Knights
Catalogue design: Lynda Kay & Shane Keane & Ryan Smith
Printed by Cruickshank Printers
SASA Gallery staff:
Mary Knights, Director, SASA Gallery
Louise Flaherty & Keith Giles, Gallery Administrative Assistants
Mark Siebert & Marie Hodgeman, Gallery Assistants
Julian Tremayne, exhibition installation and lighting consultant
The exhibition, catalogue, visit by external scholar and associated events
were developed by the South Australian School of Art with the support
of the Division Research Performance Fund; the Division of Education,
Arts & Social Sciences, UniSA and Arts SA.
Mark Kimber is represented by Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide,
and Stills Gallery, Sydney; Toby Richardson is represented by Helen Gory
Galerie, Melbourne; Olga Sankey is represented by Dianne Tanzer
Gallery, Melbourne.
17

Experience. The Difference