Abstract
This is a series of notes on the art of Australian photomedia artist and scholar Jo-Anne Duggan (1962–2011) addressing works from the last decade of her career that engaged with museums, public spaces, material culture and histories. More than an exegesis, this is a dialogue: conversations, comments, jokes and written notes we shared throughout our friendship, and in particular during the last year of her life.
Susan Sontag (2005: 120): Between two fantasy alternatives, that Holbein the Younger had lived long enough to have painted Shakespeare, or that a prototype of the camera had been invented early enough to have photographed him, most Bardolators would choose the photograph. This is not just because it would presumably show what Shakespeare really looked like, for even if the hypothetical photograph were faded, barely legible, a brownish shadow, we would probably still prefer it to another glorious Holbein.
But would we prefer the faded picture of a model, or Matisse’s Odalisque with a Tambourine, or a brownish shadow of Mont Saint-Victoire?
We looked at Gerhard Richter’s Ema (1992), in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, a 1:1 photograph of the painting painted from a photo of Ema walking down the stairs. Document of art, document or art, document and art, document as art.
‘Did you see the recording of the speech at your opening in Prato?’, I asked her after she had left the hospital. Yes, she is a historian … curious how, other than the document, other than the accuracy of the colours, she did not see much else.
Candida Höfer, Überseeclub Hamburg VI (2000).
© Candida Höfer/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Candida Höfer’s works, she said, are a study of light, space, and light as space, and composition. In my work a chair is still about the chair.
Jo-Anne Duggan, Administration #1 (2008) ©
Two chandeliers, but Jo-Anne’s, slightly out of line with the door, provides an immediate contrast to the desks. And why desks, under a chandelier in a palace?
Höfer’s whiteboards, arranged symmetrically, and Jo-Anne’s desks with their ageing computer screens, there is something that does not allow the eye to rest, to interpret. I look for relationships between objects and space, stories and histories, but in the end this is about the chandelier.
Jo-Anne Duggan, Impossible Gaze #15 (2005) ©
The camera angle pushes the chair into a curve that does not fit its shape as a chair. I must readjust my way of looking, while the chair becomes something both inside and beyond the idea of ‘document’. This kind of estrangement happens across the series.
I focus on the physicality of the Italian museums themselves.
Sebald and Tripp (2005: 84): Art needs ambiguity, polyvalence, the reverence of a darkening and illumination, in short the transcendence of that which in an incontrovertible sentence is the case.
Scholarship #1
(from the series Sites of Convergence, 2008) ©
The Caravaggio-like light of Scholarship cuts the room like a Vocation of St Matthew, but points towards the teacher’s desk. The baroque light is then reduced to the cheap reproduction of Filippo Lippi’s Praying Madonna above the door, the clock, the compulsory (by law, in Italy) crucifixes.
And on the blackboard a possible key: ‘forza fede!’. ‘Fede’ is a shortening of the name Federica, popular among adolescents and this makes it ‘Let’s go, Federica!’, most likely written by a student, but more literally it translates as ‘Let’s go, faith’.
Calle Knorr, Höfer and Struth share a post-war European background and produce work from inside that landscape. My perception as a post-colonial artist geographically removed from the cultural centres of Europe grants me the opportunity to re-interpret historic European culture and portray it with a pervading sense of wonder and curiosity.
Jo-Anne Duggan, Impossible Gaze #11 (2002) ©
Raphael’s infinitely reproduced self-portrait, condemned to pose for millions of avid, bored, interested or oblivious eyes, and thousands of photographers. Here he is caught in a moment of distraction. Did he notice Jo-Anne’s camera, or something behind her?
But this Raphael is made of photography. Look at it long enough, the black, regularly ornate strip takes its own curve and the pattern seems to wave.
It is about embodied gaze, about engagement.
Jo-Anne Duggan, Ufficio Palazzo Ducale
(from the series Wondrous Possessions, 2010) ©
What is most striking in the Wondrous Possessions series is the subtle, yet crucial role of the formal orchestration; the curve of the ceiling, the portion of window – cut and off-centre – introduce a disruption of the space that is perfectly coherent with the questioning of its use, its histories, its layers. And the cornice, this time in line with the floor, provides unity, continuity – could these images exist alone?
‘Malcolm, sorry to bother you: how do you translate Wondrous Possessions into Italian?’
Jo-Anne Duggan, Depositario, Palazzo Te
(from the series Wondrous Possessions, 2010) ©
We laughed about the ‘signature of photography’ effacing the top-right portrait with a stain of light, while the rest is so ‘real’, so ‘as it is’…’ Absolutely delightful!’
Why do they always have to use the word rigour?
Jo-Anne Duggan, Sala dei Cavalli, Palazzo Te
(from the series Wondrous Possessions, 2010) ©
Palazzo Vaj, in Prato, May 2010, the opening of Wondrous Possessions, with Jo-Anne in hospital. We do not know yet that she will still have some months, some time for books, phone calls, tea. Someone cries. In the end the only thing we can do is celebrate her, her ‘rigour’ and her art. We clap our hands. Small groups are forming. They stop in front of Sala dei Cavalli, Palazzo Te. Wondrous Possessions faces the celebratory gaze, just as the ‘Horses Room’ was itself a celebration of the horses owned by the Gonzagas.
So there I was, looking at the small group of mainly Australian expatriates looking at Jo-Anne’s images of Palazzo Te, and I would have loved to ask her more about her post-colonial gaze and what she sometimes called ‘identity’. I would have asked her about the lines of disruption, the cracks, but also about the continuities, the celebrations.
Of course I could see the reference of the shell in the centre, linking with the left image, and the line of the ceiling linking with the right one, and the contemporary lights and the fittings, and the green of the emergency exit and – incredibly moving – the half of the modern bench, its surface in line with the legs of the Renaissance table in the back room, but I kept being distracted, wandering for the sake of wonder.
Jo-Anne Duggan, Galleria Degli Specchi, Palazzo Ducale
(from the series Wondrous Possessions, 2010) ©
Footnotes
Biographical Note
MALCOLM ANGELUCCI is a Senior Lecturer in International Studies and Communication at the University of Technology, Sydney. He researches and publishes in the fields of aesthetics and stylistics, and currently works on the nexus between human voice, poetry and technology.
Address: Faculty of Arts and Social Science, University of Technology, Sydney, PO Box 123, Broadway, Sydney, NSW 2007, Australia.
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