IN CAMERA

2008 / RESOLUTION GALLERY / JOHANNESBURG

TWO-PERSON SHOW WITH DAVID ROSS

CATALOGUE ESSAY

JUST DO IT

Sean O’Toole­­­­, In Camera Exhibition Catalogue (2008)

Alexandra and David Ross, siblings, photographers, and here, in a manner of speaking, collaborators, have created an oblique body of work. How do we read these furtive, longing images? I don’t know. In a way this is an occupational hazard, not knowing, and then having to explain why. Nick Cave sings about this dilemma on his most recent album, concisely moaning: “We call upon the author to explain.” So let me explain. (Like the photographers, I’ll avoid being obvious.)

In June 2007, summer in Russia, Igor Markin, owner of the Moscow plastics manufacturer Proma, Proplex & Realit, opened a new contemporary art museum in the city that had made him rich. Known simply as Art4.ru, Russia’s first privately owned contemporary art museum is by all accounts an unorthodox venue, Markin providing felt-tip markers in the loos for writing on the bathroom walls. One can tut-tut all one wants at this brash display of post-perestroika excess, but at the end of the day Art4.ru offers what is key to any decent museum: an impressive collection of art. Kazimir Malevich aside, Art4.ru’s collection includes work by, amongst others, Ilya Kabakov and Boris Mikhailov.

It is easy to dislike Mikhailov’s photographs. Over the years he has assembled a sordid oeuvre, obsessively taking photographs of outsiders, degenerates and tramps; nudity also features quite a bit, oftentimes in conjunction with his portrayals of society’s outcasts, but not always. Abject might be one way of describing his photographs, but this seems too limiting, too obvious. As it is, Mikhailov is represented in Art4.ru’s collection by a throwback piece of modernist photography, a whimsical sequence of photographs showing the photographer playfully mucking about in the garden with his naked wife. On one level amateurish, this oddball body of work is also steeped in the history of photography, which itself is really just an accumulation of stories about the antics of fools and dreamers.

But let me be pertinent. Why, after all, this spiel about Mikhailov when I should be commending Alexandra and David Ross? Truthfully, it’s because I didn’t feel I could say much about Erich Salomon. Somehow the German photographer’s work, which probed the boundaries between licit and illicit in photography, seems pertinent, and yet not at all: after all, Salomon, despatched to an early death by the Nazis, is best remembered for sneaking secret photos of court proceedings and political meetings in the 1930s. Man Ray, whose iconic nude studies were the product of wilful experiment, oftentimes naïve and searching, presents a similar problem. Local boy Sam Haskins too. How much does one say about these influential figures, whose highly individual bodies of work ring and echo in both the two Ross’s work, how much do you say about them without making things sound strained?

That said, Mikhailov is worth lingering on. Looking at his photographs, one realises the extent to which South African photography has lapsed into dour formalism over the last few years, how morally constrained it is in its present tense, basically lacking in contingency and experiment, unwilling (unable?) to brave incompletion and failure. Otherwise put, and here I’ll strip all varnish off what I’m trying to say, if it is not a declaratory photograph that is clearly in focus and illustrative of some or other familiar and/or easily decipherable subject, then sure as shit it isn’t going to find a critical public. We want, it seems, to see what we already know.

There are many reasons for this, some of them tied up in the complex history of abstract image making in this country, also its ambiguous public reception. In photography, though, this stifling rectitude is about more than just the contest between figuration and abstraction. Something else is at stake. Perhaps, and I venture this speculatively, it is the fear of using this most mechanical of arts to become unhinged, fucked-up, out there. True, negotiating the everyday is trauma enough locally, but ask yourself this: is social-realist photography the only way to evoke it? Where’s the chaos, the anguish, the intimacy, the love? Where’s the daring? Where is the evidence that a photographer is willing to fail, failure being the gateway to the new?

Am I making sense? Maybe it is time local criticism, like photography, stops making sense, that it too tempts failure. After all, and I say this explicitly within the context of Alexandra and David Ross’s allusive photographic projects, why mete out formalist criticism when the images demand a different sort of engagement. Which reminds me why I mentioned Markin’s museum in the first place. When the venue opened to the public last year, the organisers revealed a touching orthodoxy by publishing a catalogue. Its introduction was anything but conventional: “If anybody thinks he or she can draw a square better than Malevich, he can come on and fucking do it.” Now there’s a construction of words equal to the chaos of contemporary Russia. Which leaves me with only one thing to say: if you think you can make a photo using a low-tech camera better than the Ross’s, go on, fucking do it.

CCATALOGUE ESSAY

GAZED AND CONFUSED: SCENES OF PRIVATE LIFE (1)

Anna Cowen, In Camera Exhibition Catalogue (2008)

i like my body when it is with your body.

it is so quite new a thing.

e.e.cummings

“When, in the nineteenth century, Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus (c1650) was hung in Rokeby hall in Yorkshire, it was placed high above the chimney-piece, in order we are told, that ‘the ladies may avert their downcast eyes without difficulty, and connoisseurs steal a glance without drawing the said posterior into the company.’” (2)

 These two bodies of work by siblings artist Alexandra Ross and photographer David Ross that have human intimacy, male/female sexual relations and the female form as subject, were produced with no reference to or knowledge of the other. Each body of work comfortably stands alone. David’s sensual, melancholic and intimate work beckons the viewer into a daylit lovers’ world, a private yet familiar place. Alexandra’s erotic, playful and referential work, summons the viewer into a darker, more forbidden world of sexuality on display – a less sanctioned realm than a lovers’ retreat. These counter positions or binaries are the familiar territory of how we are accustomed to construct meaning: dark/light, night/day, illicit/celebrated, hidden/seen, playful/serious, ironic/nostalgic. Yet, whilst the differences between David and Alexandra’s work are manifold, it is their current proximity, their relationship in exhibition, which opens a dialogue that explores the tension that arises through their polarities and moreover, shifts the familiar critique of the Gaze into an interesting, and possibly radical place.

The Gaze is a conceptual tool used in visual culture analysis that describes how the viewer looks at, or gazes upon the people presented and represented in any work of art. Whilst it offers a powerful conceptualisation of all social power relations, it is particularly useful and widely employed when exploring power dynamics between men and women, providing a barometer as to how we, as human culture, view the way we relate to one another. It raises the following questions:

Who are these images for? Who is taking the photographs? Does the subject know that she is being made object? Is the female body being exploited for male consumption, women merely passive recipients of the male gaze, reduced to body parts? Or do women collude by maintaining the status quo? Is the spectator forced into the role of voyeur? Who is the spectator? This fiercely contested space has formed the proving ground for the fascinating emergence of the post-modern turn in the visual representation of human sexual relations, offering a counterpoint to and evolution beyond the certainties, assumptions and  “universal truths” presented by Modernity. More contemporary readings on the Gaze have elaborated on the now simplistic position expounded by Laura Mulvey in her seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975). Mulvey constructs female/male relations in a binary subject/object manner - an antagonistic relationship where male exploits female. Mieke Bal, a contemporary cultural critic, integrates this position but points to a more subtle complexity, one where there are multiple view points in any given image, each offering resistance. “That each point possesses powers of resistance creates a far more complex and volatile arena of power in vision than the Gaze, as a concept, has been able to suggest: power not as a monolith… or a possession of the powerful, but rather a set of relations or a “swarm of points” (Foucault) such that the possibility of reversing the power relation is present at each node of the image’s focalisation [point of view].” (3)

How is the Gaze evident in the work on show?

 In David’s work, the focal subject is his female lover. The Gaze asks: is she merely a curved hip, enticing long limbs, a bared breast and inviting lips, a body bent in submission for his pleasure. Where is her agency? Who’s Reverie? Yet, he includes two self-portraits/self-references. In Dreamer, his eyes are closed, in Vision, one eye gazes directly into camera. In so doing, he provokes comment on his role as voyeur/adoring lover and simultaneously invites the viewer into an intimate, vulnerable place, a space of relationship, and one that includes the viewer. Each point then, offers resistance, and is in dialogue with the others.

 In Alexandra’s work, she is the focal subject, The Violin Player. She is displayed as female for consumption, offering herself to her laptop, the viewer and to herself. The male spectator, The Second Fiddle, is Rodin’s Head of Balzac. He is disembodied, all head, she all body and no face. He is relegated to the floor, his gaze oblique, whilst the laptop camera holds the front row seat, cigar in hand, a confusion of desire. The inferred relationships then include sex object and consumer, male and female, female and female, spectator and artwork, and critically, self-and-self. Again, each point offers resistance, engages in dialogue. As these are self-portraits, the questions around female agency focus more around the complicit role that women play in the perpetuation of patriarchy, but then provocatively suggest: Isn’t there a voyeur in each of us?

 The paradoxical nature of this question is further reinforced when we examine the apparent binaries represented in David’s and Alexandra’s work. Neither body of work is quite what it seems. At first glance, David’s work appears a love poem, a light-filled offering. Yet a closer viewing reveals more unsettling territory; the transitory, elusive nature of youth and human love. Does time really stand Still? Is love real, or possibly just a dream state, the world of Morpheus, a soft-focused, poppy induced state of oblivion? Do we, quite literally, lose our selves in love, becoming dazed and confused? So embedded in light is darkness. And in Alexandra’s work, that at first viewing seems charged with a dark and erotic narrative, with its references to the daguerreotype and Victorian pornography, a playful innocence is revealed. She is playing to herself and for herself, first and foremost. This interdependent play of light and dark is eloquently represented in the familiar, ancient Chinese symbol of feminine and masculine forces, the Yin/Yang symbol. David Deida, a contemporary tantric master and writer on human intimacy and sexual politics articulates masculine and feminine as two poles describing each end of a continuum, and humans as fluid entities, occupying varying positions at any given time. In other words, we each contain both masculine and feminine. Feminine is change, life force, the constant play and drama of life itself, Masculine is unchanging, the witness, the ‘voyeur’ in all of us.

 These perspectives begin to shift the role of the voyeur into a dramatically different and potentially transformative place. Lacan (a psychoanalyst and one of the originators of the Gaze concept) provides further insight into how the way that we are seen by the other (the way that we are witnessed) can provide the container for healthy psychological growth. He theorizes how the ‘mirror stage’ is a crucial stage in an infants’ psychological development:  infants gaze at actual mirrors, siblings, or caregivers. Movements and sounds are then mirrored back to them, and in this way, the development of human agency is supported (healthy ego emergence). This process of mirroring continues through our adolescent and adult lives, its meaning changing as our ways of seeing mature, both the view of ourselves-in-relationship, and our self-view. The Gaze then evolves from the subject/object binary of Modernity, manifest in human intimate relations in a dependent kind of relationship (beefcake marries spring princess), through the subtleties, complexities and multiple viewpoints offered by Post Modernity, manifest in intimate relations where each party is an independent, self-authoring entity, through to a new and emergent space suggested in the interplay of David’s and Alexandra’s work. This is an interdependent space of relationship where what I see in you, what is mirrored in you, is really just some aspect of my own being. The way that we view each other then, has the potential to move each one of us from the hazy, soft focus self image that Velazquez’s Venus sees in the mirror, to an increasingly clear and compassionate self-view.

 And this has fractal potential: Each person in this gallery, holding this catalogue on opening night, carries their own sexual histories, their own prejudices and preferences, their own narratives about the work on show. We each mirror the other, paradox in paradox, into infinity.

 From this perspective the illusion that we are distinct and separate selves falls away. The confusion becomes a fusion, the Gaze a path to liberation. Umtu ngumntu ngabantu – people are people through other people.

ENDNOTES

(1) Balzac, the male “voyeur” in Alexandra’s work, and one of the first realist novelists, who broke from the Victorian tradition of romanticizing the human condition, in his La Comedie Humaine of Honore Balzac (1899) explores both the public and private life of Parisienne citizens, creating a clear distinction between the public and private realm. He subtitled his novels either “Scenes from Private Life”, or “Scenes from Parisienne Life”.  Interestingly, devices like cellphone and laptop cameras, the tools of Alexandra and David’s work, have contributed to the contemporary erosion of the distinction between the public and private spheres through their capacity to capture private worlds for public consumption in a seemingly non-invasive fashion.

(2) Quoted in Bohm-Duchen, Monica, The Nude, Scala Publications, London, 1991. It was Velazquez’ Rokeby Venus that was slashed with a meat cleaver in the National Gallery in London in 1914 by Mary Richardson in response to Emily Pankhurst’s arrest. Emily Pankhurst was one of the leaders of the suffragette movement campaigning for women’s rights at the beginning of the 20th Century.

(3) Norman Bryson’s introduction to Bal, Mieke, Looking In: The Art of Viewing, G+B Arts International, London, 2001

CONVERSATION

SONATA DA CAMERA: A CONVERSATION

 Alexandra Ross and David Ross, In Camera Exhibition catalogue (2008)

Alexandra: Hello Dreamer. I’ve been thinking about music and art. The music-based titles of my works were partly inspired by Man Ray’s famous Violin d’Ingres, itself inspired by Ingre’s Turkish Bath. There’s music in all of this. These pictures play on the cliché of woman as musical instrument, or as (man’s) plaything. Only in mine, the woman is not merely the violin but is The Violin Player too. She’s both player and played, playing and plaything.

David: Olé, Player! I like the fact that your female subject plays by and for herself. The concept of women performing for men, being objects of their desire and instruments for their pleasure, has been a major theme in the dance between men and women for thousands of years. What I find interesting is that though our images were made independently, we’ve created two bodies of work that echo each other’s themes and motifs. They whistle a similar tune.

Alexandra: Would that be a wolf whistle? Sonata da camera is Italian for chamber music. Camera = “chamber”. The chamber referred to is a small, private, often domestic environment, in which the music was played. Hence “chamber music”.

David: The camera itself is a chamber too – a “small room” where a performance is recorded.

Alexandra: In Camera is music and conversation with cameras, held “in camera”.

David: That’s a lot of cameras. Ironic, considering that not a traditional camera was used. Instead, we both have used modern Instamatic, low-tech cameras, concealed in other instruments, designed for quick and easy image capture.

Alexandra: Laptops, cell phones, hidden cameras – so many conversations. There’s also a dialogue between past and present, players and musaicians, and between lovers. Chamber music is “conversational” because it’s dialogue-based. Goethe said that it was “: four rational people speaking”.

David: Or four irrational people. Is that a ménage a quatre?

Alexandra: Or a conference call? Matters of the heart (which have their chambers too) and love is, is often irrational, unreasonable. So is sex – another kind of “chamber music”, I suppose. Bedrooms were once bedchambers…

David: Where sleeping and dreaming happen too.

Alexandra: Private moments. Chamber musicians would often gather simply to play for their own pleasure, without an audience.

David: In Camera was originally conceived without an audience and made in intimate spaces but in the gallery, the work is taken “ex camera”. The private moment becomes a public performance. Although my nude wasn’t performing then, she’s now in the spotlight and on public display and though your nude might play for herself she’s also aware of performing for an undeniably voyeuristic audience…

Alexandra: … who is represented by the “invisible guest”, (Rodin’s Head of Balzac, c1898). Actually, he’s quite two-dimensional and unseeing.

David: In what sense is he unseeing?

Alexandra: He reminds me of those Victorian paper portraits – featureless silhouettes. Also of busts of composers that stood on pianos and mantelpieces. Here he’s relegated to the wings, sidelined.

Alexandra: He’s just a head, a non-interactive prop. The performance theme appears in both our series but in mine, the nude’s movements are impromptu and more natural. Your nude’s poses are rehearsed and considered. Also, my photographs are more spontaneous and they are looser. Like snapshots, they’re candid and unplanned. Snapshots are often taken by amateurs.

Alexandra: In its early days, chamber music was played by amateurs in their homes.

David: Snapshot sonatas in the bedchamber. But while my photographs are improvised, yours seem to be read from a musical score.

Alexandra: If only to emphasise that there is one.

David: Here you’re inverting and reinventing the old score by posing and performing for yourself. My nude is possibly rehearsing for a performance – she’s still behind the curtain, backstage. I’ve captured the mundane act of dressing or undressing and turned it into a beautiful performance in its own right. 

Alexandra: Performance and music are both transient and the tone of your work is temporary and dream-like too (you refer to this in your titles). There is time and memory in your photographs and also in music. Clocks and metronomes are reminders of time. They “keep time” and measure it. In my work, time and memory emerge as History and Tradition.

David: I noticed that the curtain in both our sequences, the pause point or rest (in your Interval and my Curtain) occur at the same place and reflect each other from opposite sides of the gallery. It’s the same theme but played on different instruments.

Alexandra: Each has its own particular timbre.

David: There’s harmony.

Alexandra: And dissonance.

David: I’m thinking of the relationship between time, memory and music. Image and sound are some of the most powerful triggers for memory, which can also precipitate a flood of concealed emotion.

Alexandra: Your work strikes a chord (in B flat minor?). It’s emotive. In 1914, James Joyce published an anthology of love poetry called Chamber Music. Your series is like an anthology of visual poetry or picture-poems. Roland Barthes writes poignantly in Camera Lucida about the futility of trying to hold onto the memory of his mother. He repeatedly enlarges a photograph he has of her but ultimately, is left only with paper and film grain. In the end, the photograph obliterates memory by asserting its two-dimensionality.

David: Before the digital era, photography used to be a much more physical process, when people used real film and metal plates, and hand-printed their images in darkrooms. So even though photography is mostly connected with seeing and looking, it was, and still can be, about touch too. My enlarged images have become highly textured because the grain of the original low-tech files is now very visible. The digital images have become tactile. In your work, the blotches and marks created by the salt-printing process, and the scratches on the aluminium plates make them objects that you want to touch, not just pictures for looking at.

Alexandra: And they have been handled. Like a laptop or a printing plate. Woman-handled.

David: Edward Weston said that “the camera should be used… for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh”.

Alexandra: Palpitating flesh and polished steel. Quite erotic. Playing an instrument can be an erotic experience. But while you can feel music, you cannot touch it. I think the ambiguity in “see or hear me, but don’t touch me”, is what stimulates the erotic imagination. It’s the power of suggestion at play.

David: Please do not touch the photographs. Let them touch you. 

REVIEW

DIALOGUE ON THE NUDE FEMALE FORM

Mary Corrigall, The Sunday Independent (February 1, 2009)

This exhibition may share the title of a Kathryn Smith exhibition held at the Goodman Gallery in 2007, but the themes it explores are quite disparate. In Camera is a Latin phrase meaning “in private” or “in secret” and, though Smith unpacked its use in the legal context where testimony is presented in private chambers instead of in open court, the Rosses apply the term to a study of intimacy and its relationship to photography.

 Rather appropriately, a female nude forms the center of a dialogue between the two artists, with each creating a corresponding body of work. The female nude is a staple leitmotif in the tradition of painting and, therefore loaded with historical connotations so it is interesting to note how differently these siblings engage with their common subject. Their differing approaches seem to be informed foremost by their gender.

 As a woman, Alexandra Ross is unable to represent the female form without referencing and subverting its representation in art’s canon. The male spectator is represented by the silhouette of a bust of an older man, which appears in the background of a number of her photographs and then on its own in a photograph entitled Second Fiddle (2008).

 This is a wonderful reversal of the old order, so to speak; firstly, the male observer is inserted inside the pictorial frame, rather than outside and, secondly, although he is a mythologised figure that haunts these images, he is a static and passive viewer without any agency. As the title of the photograph implies, he has been relegated to a subordinate role trather than a defining one, as was traditionally the case.

Alexandra used a laptop camera to execute the photographs, which facilitates a level of intimacy that conventional photography is unable to achieve because it renders the author of these images obsolete – there is no witness. In this way the relationship that predominates becomes the one she has with herself and her own naked body.

It is a vexed one influenced by the tradition of the female nude. Fittingly, Alexandra recalls the work of photographer Man Ray, his famous Violon d’Ingres (1924), (Ingre’s violin: a French idiom for “hobby”), in which the form is likened to a musical instrument, a plaything. Once again, Alexandra inverts the relationship; she becomes the object of her own gaze and enjoyment, and in showing poses of her back and derrière, she is able to discover parts of herself she is normally unable to view. In this way, the act of observing the nude becomes a journey of self-discovery rather than one of objectification.

 For her brother David, viewing the female nude is a less politically loaded act. His photographs of a female nude (apparently his lover) suggest a desire to delve beyond appearances, to uncover the essence.

Thought he result – large blown-up images of isolated parts of a naked body – infers a formal reading of his subject, it isn’t a clinical investigation. His piercing gaze seems to be motivated by a desire to penetrate those intimate physical spaces of another, the ones that no-one else is privy to.

In Close (2008), David concentrates on the soft curve of his subject’s back, which is contrasted with the thick strands of her dark, straight hair. David isn’t just interested in the subtle lines of her body, he revels in a view of her that only he appreciates and knows. In photographing these intimate moments, he is able to hold on to both a point in their relationship and her body – with time, both will transform.

Using a cellphone camera, David has also chosen a lo-tech, unconventional camera to achieve his ends. The cellphone camera is not only easy to manipulate in small spaces, allowing for more intimate shots, but, as Aryan Kaganof’s SMS Sugarman – a movie shot entirely with cellphones – showed, it is a medium that is associated with intimacy and technically geared for close-ups.

David has blown up his cellphone photo’s so that the pixels can be seen, imparting a grainy texture that serves as a constant reminder that the image is mediated.

 Alexandra allows the process of developing the image – stains of the chemicals used in the developing process – to be visible. In this way, photography’s lifelike representational character is obviated and the specks, grains and stains operate like the brush-strokes on a painting, imparting a sensual, physical quality to the images. The medium becomes tangible. In David’s work this practice underpins his subject’s ephemeral existence; just as the uniform pixels have coalesced into a recognizable form, it looks as if they could just as easily disperse and scatter, making it impossible to possess her.

 This is an exquisite exhibition not only in a visual sense but in an intellectual one too. The siblings provide not only a striking counterpoint on the female nude but their intellectual and visual engagement with photography is also refreshing. They make a well-balanced collaborative team; wheras Alexandra is clearly more intellectually adept, creating more conceptual work that engages with art history, David has a gift for creating striking visuals that are more viscerally driven.