seminar paper on Tracey Moffatt

MCA seminar February 2004 on Tracey Moffatt
© Judy Annear

Tracey Moffatt's very early work - from the mid 1980s - presents in
miniature many of her ongoing concerns, for example:
- the diverse social fabric of which she is part
- her acute understanding of desires and fears
- her equally acute sensitivity to the history of image making
especially the still and moving image and how images can be composed
in order to impart information.
The movie Star 1985 is a colour photograph of the Australian David Gulpilil
who first came to public notice as a young man in the 1971 movie by British
director Nicholas Roeg - Walkabout.

Photographed on Bondi Beach, Sydney, wearing board shorts and face paint,
Gulpilil reclines on the bonnet of a car, cradling a ghetto blaster and a
tin of Fosters beer. This single image presents, nearly 20 years on, an
exceptional amount of information which is revealing of the local
condition. The title The Movie star is both factual and ironic. Gulpilil is
a movie star with a career spanning 30 years, yet the actuality of
Aboriginal movie stars registering as normal, or for that matter not
registering at all because it is normal, is a fairly recent phenomenon.
When Moffatt made this photograph, seeing Aborigines on Australia's iconic
beach would have been highly unusual, and so it remains today despite the
supposed egalitarianism of Australian beach culture – let alone Australian
culture in general.


Moffatt, however, presents Gulpilil with a disarming matter of factness.
There is no reason why a man might not lie on a car bonnet at Bondi beach
wearing face paint, for example, zinc cream, board shorts and be holding a
ghetto blaster and a can of beer. At issue, then, is the subject's
blackness, and even more, his race, that of being Aboriginal.

The cleverness of Moffatt's work, however, lies in her often quite
straightforward reflection of society and its inhabitants, their hopes,
fears, amusements, failures, rather than necessarily taking issue with the
issues. It is this inclusive and transcendent aspect whereby the ironic yet
almost accidental collisions of information force recognition in the viewer
of the layers of human experience which is compelling. The work tends not
to be evacuated of meaning over time because it, at least in part, triggers
a complex emotional response which retains a currency precisely because of
the complexity of what can be seen. The viewer must analyse why this is so
in relation to what often appears to be a simple image.

The experience of David Gulpilil as a movie star is instructive: cast in
Walkabout as an embodiment of nature and 'other', the film has subsequently
been described by Michael Leigh in the 1988 publication Back of beyond:
discovering Australian film and television as one of a genre of Australian
films which were made throughout the 20th century, including Crocodile
Dundee. This genre always depicted the Aborigine as part of an exotic and
often menacing landscape rather than as a normal inhabitant of an
environment.
Moffatt depicts Gulpilil as normal, and it is the title which could be seen
to be ironic. The Movie star could be any handsome young man big noting
himself at the beach.

Condensed into a single image then is a wealth of experience to do with the
status of the Aboriginal man in Australia. The fullest possible reading of
this work, then, could probably only occur in Australia – this is unlike
most of Moffatt's subsequent works which move beyond the specific and
local, and into the global.

In 1989 Moffatt produced her most famous series Something More. The
beautiful young woman, played by Moffatt herself, dreams of betterment and
sets out for the big smoke only to be left for dead on the road. I will
return to this series later but here Moffatt introduces for the first time
in her still imagery a polyglot cast of characters where a narrative can be
presumed but in actuality slips and slides.

One point in relation to The Movie Star, Something More, as well as Some
Lads(1986), Pet Thang (1991), and Beauties (1994) is that the central
subject is 'good looking' on any terms and often beautiful. In 2001, Rex
Butler and Morgan Thomas wrote in Eyeline magazine #45 on aesthetic and
theoretical considerations – amongst other things – in Moffatt's work, and
I quote:
"Is there not something else occurring there, an indefinable 'something
more', which escapes this post-colonial, critical understanding of it? …
these identities are mediated and constructed, historically produced and
contingent. And, yes, this is a marked feature of her work.
The bodies we see here are not natural but theatrical, stylised,
demonstrative – as are the images themselves. But for all this we
nevertheless have the sense that their identities lie elsewhere. Or to put
it another way, these images, these bodies, are seductive, even beautiful…"

Butler and Thomas' article is one of the more interesting on the artist
because they attempt to go beyond conventional post-colonial and post-
modern readings of the work while analysing the artist's generalist
statements about striving for a 'universal quality' and an 'international
look'. (see Gerald Matt 1998 Cantz book on the artist, reprinted in WCAG?).


Over the last dozen years Moffatt has consistently refused to be
categorised as 'black, female artist' though in 1990 she wrote in an
exhibition brochure for the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane when
Something More was shown:
'My work in all … mediums continually centres around my people, be they
urban living or traditional living. This is not only for political reasons
eg. struggle for land rights and economic dependence etc, but an
unspeakable and powerful natural urge to be around my rich Aboriginal
cultures, living in them, rightfully belonging, feeling most comfortable,
respecting, sometimes not understanding, learning from, always being
inspired and loving them.'

This is probably the last, overtly political statement Moffatt has made in
public. It is these sort of statements which helped make her and her work a
vibrant addition to the vanguard of new Aboriginal art in the 1980s, while
at the same time her work was seen as typically post modernist existing in
relation to other Australians such as Anne Zahalka, and Robyn Stacey.
Constructed, theatrical, and political as these artists' works were,
Moffatt always added another ingredient of glamour. Glamour is to do with
being made beautiful rather than beauty which is understood to be innate.
Glamour is showbiz, the projected image - and glamour has a slightly tacky
edge, as Elizabeth Taylor has in her various roles. Taylor needless to say
is greatly admired by Moffatt. Glamour broadcasts itself, and the
aspiration to be glamorous is allied to camp. This edge in Moffatt's work
immediately differentiates her from her peers and from a clear cut
political understanding. Though her work was quickly reread by the mid
1990s as an example of post-colonial hybridity it then equally quickly sped
away from fashionable theoretical critiques due at least in part to its
increasing international currency. The subjects of Moffatt's photoseries
persistently transcend their supposed origins just as Moffatt herself has
been seen in her travels as part of many different racial groups despite or
because of her own uncertain post-colonial heritage and parentage.

For the Dia centre catalogue in 1998 British artist Isaac Julian wrote
about Moffatt's work and quoted the artist's response to hearing of his
commissioning: 'If you write about me as a woman artist of colour I will
kill you!" Julian, who is black, continues, "…critics writing about
Tracey's work tend to emphasise her ethnicity and often ignore the extent
to which her work explores constructions of whiteness and masculinity in
postcolonial Australia, and the interdependency of Aboriginal cultures with
the so-called white culture.'

He goes on to say, '…even if Tracey's art is in no way defined by race and
gender difference, it is clearly and crucially inflected by her particular
experience of their effects, which contribute to it some of its most potent
themes.' In essence, Moffatt could not make the work that she does if she
was not speaking from the position of a black, female artist. As a white
male artist, for example, the work could be read less as inclusive and
expansive and more as part of a continuing colonialist tradition of co-
option. This is a simplistic inversion intended to highlight the complexity
of the work and its possible readings.

If we go back to Moffatt's 1990 statement and drop the single word
'Aboriginal' then one may find the statement naïve, somewhat defiant and
defensive. It is clearly a statement which any member of a dominant group
in any society would not need to make. Moffatt has been criticised
subsequently for her refusal to continue to engage in any overt way with
stereotyping, labelling and clichés either in relation to herself or in
relation to the subjects of her works. If we analyse the characters who
appear in Something more for example then all are poor, with the possible
exception of the shadowy motocycliste, because their environment and their
dress tells us this. All can be seen to be eccentric to mainstream urban
society because of their behaviour and their location, yet the title of the
work is universal in meaning. Who amongst us can say we have never wanted
'something more'?


The settings for Moffatt's work are as critical to an understanding as any
other element. With 2 exceptions this is constructed in a studio: the
exceptions being Up in the sky 1997 which was shot around Broken Hill, NSW,
and Laudanum 1998 which was shot in Elizabeth Bay House, Sydney and a
country NSW property. The remote and wide open spaces around Broken Hill
have been the settings for films such as Mad Max 2, Wake in fright, A Town
Like Alice, Razorback, amongst others. For Moffatt the location was as much
about the dust, emptiness, vast skies and getting out of the studio as it
was about necessarily being Australian. Her interest, however, in earlier
artists such as Albert Namatjira and his depiction of the landscape is
apparent not only in Up in the sky but also in her earlier, studio, work
such as the films Night cries and Bedevil, as well as the photoseries
Something More.

Looking at the work of Namatjira (Morning at Simpsons Gap 1952) in relation
to Moffatt is useful. Namatjira was of the western Aranda people and grew
up on the Lutheran mission of Hermansburg, west of Alice Springs. In the
1930s he began painting landscapes in watercolours not only using the
materials of the settlers but also their pictorial codes in order to depict
his country. Admired by white Australians for being an example of an
Aboriginal who had assimilated and could emulate their style of painting,
Namatjira was later understood to be an artist who continued a tradition of
the depiction of sacred sites in order to care for and protect them. The
European landscape tradition and watercolour technique perhaps provided a
smokescreen which allowed for the survival of knowledge and place rather
than their possible destruction.
This method of adoption and adaption in order to protect has appeared in
numerous cultures around the globe over the centuries.

I do not wish to infer from the above that Moffatt does the same in her
work, however, there is an element which can be seen variously as post
modern pastiche, or modernist montage, or post-colonial hybridity which
could also be described as a layering and melding of various cultures in
order to ensure continuance in the image and therefore memory, of sets of
ideas, thoughts and feelings, regardless of origin.

In pursuit of this, Moffatt has incorporated an extraordinary range of
material including earlier Australian film such as Charles Chauvel's Jedda
(1955) of which Night cries is in many ways a sequel. Up in the sky expands
on Pasolini's film Accattone (1961) and that film director's interest in
the outsider and the important role that such a character can play in
altering a social group. Whether conscious or not, Moffatt also uses the
look and the mood of earlier images in her series so that Walker Evan's
photographs shot in Cuban country towns in 1933 reappear in Up in the sky
right down to the placement of a telegraph pole. Moffatt includes a group
of ghostly figures who may have stepped out of a 1960s or 70s horror movie
such as The Stepford Wives (1975).

There is a never ending stream of influences in Moffatt's work and it is
fun to research them. Moffatt remains a great admirer of Georgia O'Keeffe,
probably as much for the force of her personality as for her paintings.
This is a terrible slide of a 1926 painting by O'Keeffe entitled Old maple,
Lake George, alongside another painting by Namatjira from c 1940 Palm
valley. These next are from Invocations, and a photograph by Annie Brigman
from 1912 The Pine Sprite.
Brigman, like O'Keeffe was a protégée of Alfred Stieglitz. Brigman stayed
on the west coast of the US and spent much of her adult life photographing
herself and other friends naked in the high Sierras. Both Brigman and
O'Keeffe were forceful personalities and pioneering feminists who believed
in the healing power of nature – both its violence and its beauty. The
image of the fearless little girl running into the haunted forest from
Invocations refers to O'Keeffe, Brigman and Namatjira, as much as it does
to Walt Disney.