EXHIBITION FOOTNOTES

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From the exhibition Anonymity by the Filipino artist Poklong Anading at Cross Art Projects in Sydney. Anading was the winner of the 2006 Ateneo Art Prize Studio Residency Grant selected by Jo Holder the director of Cross Arts Projects, after being one of the three short-listed winners selected by Ateneo Musem, the premiere museum for contemporary art in the Philippines. The exhibition ran from November 10 - 19, 2006 & included a curators talk by Richie Lerma the Director & Curator of Ateneo Museum Manila.

The famous, the infamous and the anonymous - each in turn are rich subject matters for photographers, it is the latter however which is the focus of Poklong Anading’s series of photographic installation which was shown at the Cross Arts Projects in Kings Cross in 2006.

Anading was one of the three prize-winners of the annual Ateneo Art Awards held by the Ateneo Art Gallery in Manila, the premiere museum for modern art in the Philippines. The other winners being Wawi Navarozza and Maya Munoz of Hiraya Gallery. Of the three, Anading was chosen by Jo Holder the director of Cross Arts Projects as the recipient of the Sydney Studio Residency.

The work is comprised of 14 A3 light-boxes of backlit Duratrans based on black and white portraits photographs of various individuals shot in-situ in the streets of Cubao in Manila. The difference here (as opposed to traditional portraits) was that as the shot was being taken Anading asked each of his subject to hold a mirror in front of their face - so that the flash was reflected back to the camera (its point of origin) and all traces of their features as a result, was obliterated in a circle of white light in the final image.

Simple and conceptually elegant, the work is part performance, part processed based work and part photographic installation. Jose Tence Ruiz describes the process in the exhibition catalogue; “He requests strangers and on occasion, acquaintances, to stand naturally, facing a digital camera, in the center of the viewfinder to the point that, as with Renaissance convention, the subject is framed by the perspective of its background and is its compositional nexus. This subject/nexus is asked to hold a six-inch circular mirror in front of his/her face. Photography is usually done near noon and the mirror is made to catch the blinding reflection, resulting in a quotidian portrait whose visage is an unbearable white shimmer. Each subject has particularities, say a specific street, an ice-cream cart, a political mass action, an amputated limb yet all faces collapse into one over-illuminated, anonymity.”

The Blind by Sophie Calle. Photographic Installation

http://www.spence.net/collection/artwork.php?artid=75

The voyeuristic and parasitic tendency of the photographic image is well known and has been the topic of many discussions. I recall an old issue of Parkett that focused on the French photographer Sophie Calle documenting a “monospondence” of some 35 postcards sent to Calle by another artist called Joseph Grigely.

According to the article he was neither a friend nor an acquaintance but someone who was simply moved to write to her his thoughts after viewing her work The Blind, a photographic exhibition at the Luhring Augustine Gallery in New York some two years before the magazine’s publication…

I remembered the exhibition, having seen it second hand from somewhere else - a series of black and white head shots of blind people with text printed next to it based on what each person’s image of ‘beauty’ was -

“Green is beautiful. Because every time I like something, I’m told it’s green…”

“… I’m told white is beautiful…”

“…The sea must be beautiful too. They tell me it is blue and green and that when the sun reflects in it, it hurts your eyes…”

And next to the text - colour photographs of the very things described.

I remembered it for the ambivalence I felt – seduced by the work for giving me access to an experience not my own, of the other – in this instance the world through the eyes of the sightless…and yet disturbed because the access had to come, it felt - at the expense of someone else’s misfortune or position of marginality along the way… That because of its visual modality and therefore failed representation of the experience of blindness, The Blind represented not the experience of blindness by the blind – but the blindness of those of us with sight, perhaps the blindness of the photographer if she – and by complicity -we - believe that by representing the experience of those not our own, she/we could understand physiological otherness – or any other the state of otherness for that matter…

“It is easy to tell disabled people what they are missing; much more difficult to listen to, and understand, what they have.

Deafness, as Victor Hugo once said, is an illness of the mind, not of the ears…”

Dear Sophie… Grigely writes, “Beguiled now, I am almost afraid to face the photographs that supplement these texts, almost afraid to go past the honest audacity of this language to that which lies beyond: images that presume to be of the objects, people, places, and passions described. Yet, the most troubling part remains: your photographs of the faces of these blind people, their signatures. I am arrested by the fact that these images do not, because of their visual modality, return themselves to the blind… Since your face is not available to me, why should my face be available to you? An echo from somewhere, but I cannot pin it down. Something seems wrong to me: I am able to gaze, look, stare into the faces, into the eyes, of faces and eyes that cannot stare back. “Subjects,” they are called. I feel I am in the presence of a social experiment…. ”

Taking a rather eccentric route, Grigely’s correspondence with Calle crystallises aspects of photographic representation that is problematic and which Anading in a simple gesture has managed to subvert and upend.

As photographers - we frame a subject, capture and shoot… Even the language we use – capture, frame, shoot – are predatory as Susan Sontag has noted; and not dissimilar to the language we would use if we were at an African hunting safari.

We often impose our subjective passions, ideas and sometimes even well-meaning intentions upon those we gaze at. Photo-journalism, social anthropological photographic studies, even tourist snapshots are all guilty in one way or another - of never being objective.

As with deafness - blindness too is at times an illness of the mind, not of the eye…

Taking photographs in the Philippines - a country well known for its overwhelming economic and class problems, it is all together possible to face people living in abject poverty - and simply aestheticize the experience. To turn it into an object for retinal fodder. To see its representation but not understand what it means.

Some cultures believe that having a photograph taken of oneself is akin to having one’s soul stolen - and given the amount of subjective reframing that happens when dealing with experiences outside our own, perhaps the belief is not so much a superstition - but the precaution of a more advanced wisdom.

Anonymity

By deflecting our photographic gaze, Anading in this instance has shifted some of the imbalance of power away from himself and back to those who through their generosity lent him of themselves for a fraction of moment in time and space. The images – black and white not quite sharp photographs – reminds one of the quality of reportage photography. Something that a photojournalist-flaneur doing a study of locals from Cubao might have taken. By giving his subject a mirror however – Anading turns the tables – and frames a different set of relationships – no longer a portrait of a subject – but a portrait that asks a question – who are your really taking a photograph of? Is this about me the subject or you the photographer? For what is a mirror but a tool we use to view our own reflection?
It seems as if the subject has learnt to talk back. To further complicate things however it is neither the subject nor the photographer who is represented in the final work - but the blinding illumination of the sun’s reflected light.

Since your face is not available to me, why should my face be available to you?
A voice interjects from somewhere…

Hirst’s For the Love of God - a memento mori in the face of blinding BLING.

In the age of the hyper-celebrity and the artist as surrogate rock star (the [not so] Young [anymore] British Artists of the 90s – Damien Hirst, Tracy Emin, Sarah Lucas et all who were representative of this phenomenon) - one can read this work as a critique of the shallow vain-gloriousness that has permeated many aspects of our lives- which have just accelerated and become even more pronounced as time have passed, more than a decade later.

These days from Friendster postings (very popular in the Philippines) to YouTube (whose tagline is broadcast yourself) to Multiply blogs– every Tom, Dick and LonelyGirl5 can have their lives posted online for immediate momentary fame or infamy.

Savvy marketing trend-spotters have even come-up with a neologism - of demographic ‘youniverse’. No longer content in watching the famous be famous - these days we believe that our lives are just as worthy and just as interesting as those we read about in the daily press… From MyFace to RealityTV we get our fill of self-validation, praise and fame in our virtual lives if not in our real one.

Our narcissisms have been given full flight by the tools at our disposal. So much technology to do a myriad of things - and sections of a generation (this author not discounting) simply hole up at home to gaze at the glassy surface of a computer screen and bask in the reflected glory of our online nemesis. We bespoke our clothes to our furniture - trying to find that small difference that would differentiate us from our peers- who are themselves trying to do the same. We no longer want to be like the Joneses - we want to be the Joneses that others try to emulate through our superior taste, flawless custom-designed goods and celebrity-status earned via 6 weeks on Big Brother or top of the charts on YouTube. To rephrase a caustic wit - I guess we all believe that we are special and unique in a way that no one else have been before or ever will be - all 6.5 billion of us.

Anonymity

The metaphors therefore pile up in a series of nuanced readings in Anading’s work. In alternating cycle of references it reminds one of Icarus who falls crashing down to earth for having flown to close to the sun, of Louis XIV of France who was known as the Sun King (for everything revolved around him), of photography and over-exposure figuratively and literally speaking - even the blinding flash-photography of the paparazzi in pursuit of the celebrity-god. Of mirrors as aide-ccomplice to our narcissistic tendencies and at the same instance - if used thoughtfully - can provide us with a brutally honest vision of all our deficiencies.

A more positive reading given by many in the audience during the curators talk was the images’ similarity to religious representation of saints where a halo of light are often found behind the subjects head. If I was to follow this track I suppose I would say that real illumination is achieved when we move from the self-conscious and self-important “I” - to the “we” that is represented by the anonymous every-man.

As the director of the Ateneo Museum Richie Lerma recounted, during their deliberation for the prize, many in the nine person judging panel commented that because the subjects’ face is not available to the viewer, because of each subjects’ anonymity – “it is no longer about one man but instead becomes a collective portrait of every man… of humanity itself. ”

According to the artist the process he used when taking his photograph is not so much about capturing or framing or shooting – but in some ways akin to begging. By asking random strangers in the streets of Cubao, a lower middle class suburb of Manila where he currently resides - who may or may not be receptive to an artists’ inspired compulsion to follow a train of thought peculiar to no one else but his own – he puts himself at the world’s mercy, at the disposal of random stranger’s kindness. The process becomes one of a favour given or a gift bestowed by the subject to the photographer – rather than a license taken for granted.

It’s a process quite different from earlier representations of photographers, specifically the male photographer as a mythic figure in popular culture – of Thomas from Antonioni’s film Blow Up who with camera in hand and long lens attached as surrogate penile extension ‘all but fucks the model Verushka who erotically twists and writhes on the floor…’

Instead of representing an otherness that cannot be represented Anading presents several mirrors -metaphoric and literal - to who we are.

Perhaps photography is often exploitative, but not necessarily so. As with many things, individual sensitivities comes into play.

Its interesting because it shows us the exploitation we might not be aware of, and the exploitation we think we, in our sophistication are above off. More importantly it shows us that there are ways of participating, interjecting and shaping the world around us - always.

That agency is never impossibility whatever the relationship - and what is exploitative - is only exploitative to the point where we follow the rules given us.

It stops at the point where we make our own rules to go by.

December 2006

This post is tagged anonymity, ateneo art awards, damien hirst, Photomedia, poklong anading, portraiture, sophie calle, street photography, YBA