GALLERY - University of South Australia

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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