Flights of fancy.

TRACEY MOFFATT: LOVE AND ADVENTURES

VICTORIA MIRO GALLERY 

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM

JANUARY 20-FEBRUARY 18, 2006

TRACEY MOFFATT: LOVE

STEVEN KASHER GALLERY

NEW YORK, NEW YORK

MARCH 7-APRIL 29, 2006

Tracey Moffatt's "Adventures" series begins with a bang: the top panel of the exhibition's first digital print is ablaze with flying bodies and debris silhouetted against a golden pyrotechnic explosion worthy of James Bond or Indiana Jones. In the next panel, Moffatt herself copilots a plane with a glamorous blond, and in the final panel, the plane spirals down toward a tropical island. At 132 x 114cm, the print has the form and sheen of a cinema still or publicity poster, every image a high-octane moment from an action sequence. Previously shown at the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney, Australia, in 2004 and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney in 2003, the digital color prints of "Adventures" and the single-channel video montage Love were recently shown for the first time in London at Victoria Miro Gallery. Continuing the gallery's recent program of video and photographic experiments with postproduction, narrative construction, and representation--including the work of Thomas Demand, Alex Hartley, and Isaac Julien--Moffatt's recent image manipulations add a dash of popular cinematic flavor to the mix.

In another print, the blond pilot stands alone with her dune buggy, dressed in 1960s safari khakis, illuminated by a purple sky and virulently orange desertscape. In the second panel, an iguana watches, alert and knowing. In the third, we see the pilot again, in a makeshift shed lying undressed in bed, post-coital and brooding darkly. Her partner--one presumes--stands at the door gazing out into the technicolor landscape, whose tints peek through the windows and cracks of the shed. Who is he? How did he get there? How did she get from the plane to the tropical island, to the desert, to him? Why was she separated from the brunette? This image, like all the other images of "Adventures," is a simulacral construction down to every minute detail. The protagonists were cast from the streets, bars, and beaches near Brisbane, Australia, where Moffatt headhunted potential players. Their northern Australian landscapes--rendered so ambiguous they could fill in for a superhero outer space adventure--were painted by local set designers. After shooting, the photographs were digitally altered by a team of professionals until their aesthetics mimicked cartoon animation in a gleeful disavowal of naturalism.

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The hyper-real quality of these images is the result of Moffatt's direction: every element cast and storyboarded before execution, the traces of editing deliberately revealed in the airbrushed quality of skin, the digitally enhanced contrast, and maxed-out color saturation. As a result of their staged quality, the mixing of the photographic with the painterly, the adventure comic-book aesthetics, and a self-conscious dramatization of setting, pose, and gaze, these almost iconic images allude to film stills and movie posters, particularly in their size and finish. However, these are film stills without the films; their images depict unreal or fantastic moments, evoking inscrutable narratives through the complexity of their editing and construction.

These narratives shift restlessly on the threshold between the real and the imaginary--such are the narratives of fantasy, in their unstable meanings, incomplete sentences, and withheld conclusions. Moffatt's photographs suspend the viewer in a state of constant speculation; each print in "Adventures" is divided into three panels suggesting the Flying Doctors comic books that Moffatt loved as a child. However, where diachronic structure or signposts of time and causality are unavailable, the tableaux of these panels create dangling narratives. The replication of this indeterminacy throughout the series offers more puzzles than solutions. In Moffatt's staged world, many meanings are possible, but none really make sense. Viewers' attempts to grasp meaning are frustrated by the jumbling of formulaic love scenes, moments of exposition, danger, seduction, and introductory sequences. The viewer is moved far from photographic facticity and verisimilitude and into the explicit creation of slices of reality, narrative, and situation. By flirting with our expectations of type and formula, and emptying out the content of stock cinematic adventure or soap opera types (the dark-haired temptress, the blond love-interest, the muscular, bronzed-skinned heroes) reminiscent of the movies or 1970s adventure series like The Rovers, Moffatt underscores the constructions of "Adventures" as self-substantiating images.

At first glance, "Adventures" calls to mind a cinephilic Cindy Sherman, however, the disparities within their practices distinguish the two. Moffatt's renderings of identities retain the safe homogeneity of the silver-screen starlet, rather than the ambiguities of everyday insecurity, ugliness, and the unremarkable evident in Sherman's depiction of types. Furthermore, Moffatt's characterizations do not attain the mythic potency of Sherman's representations, as the brooding protagonists of "Adventures" never approach the hallucinatory nuance or complexity of character that Sherman's constructions manage to evoke.

"Adventures" is a joyriding, technically complex exercise in medium experimentation that thins out the social and historical engagements of Moffatt's previous work such as the film Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (1989), which grapples with politically orchestrated racial assimilation practices in Australia. In "Adventures," we do see echoes of such engagements: in one panel a blond woman perches coquettishly in a director's chair, every inch a movie starlet, while two Aboriginal men in ritual paint stand in front of her, their gazes blank and inscrutable. The panel above shows a buxom actress heavily made up in a parodic rendition of Aboriginal paint and costume, opposite a swarthy actor in military whites--an image that suggests the stereotyping and artifice of Aboriginal representation in popular culture. Such anti-essentialist rhetoric and critique continue Moffatt's photographic and filmic constructions of Aboriginal men in urban or fantasy environments, evoking discourses of assimilation and representation in Australian racial politics. Although Moffatt frequently refuses to be pigeonholed as an Aboriginal or black artist, and tries to avoid showing in exhibitions organized around purely racial thematics, parts of "Adventures" reflect such politics of representation. However, the kitsch of Moffatt's parody compromises the force of such readings. The self-conscious critique, performed by emulating high-octane colors and pop aesthetics, shortchanges and dilutes the series' capacity for depth and complexity through portrayals of class, race, and fantasy--features of her previous photographic series like "Up in the Sky" (1997) and "Something More" (1989).

The formal inverse of "Adventures" is the film Love (2003) at Steven Kasher Gallery, a pastiche of footage from adventure, romance, drama, action, and comedy films. Moffatt revisits the montage structure used in the films Lip (1999) and Artist (2000), each a respective construction of black servants talking back to their masters, and cinematic depictions of artists, articulating the filmic representations of race and art through a procession of filmic evidence. Love advances her work by focusing on popular cinema's more recent depictions of romance, starring a host of actors and actresses including Marlon Brando, Joan Crawford, Errol Flynn, Jane Fonda, Katherine Hepburn, Burt Lancaster, Meryl Streep, Sigourney Weaver, and Renee Zellweger. Love is, at moments, comparable to Candice Breitz's Mother + Father (2005), as both works' rapid-fire succession of cinematic climaxes exude the melodrama, hysteria, violence, and emotion of cinematic representations of relationships. Love segues from the fledgling promises of love and shifts toward betrayal, cat-fighting, and misogyny, finally giving way to an exuberant pulverization of romance in violence, revenge, and death. Moving from vows to slaps, tears, punches, action sequences, and punchy dialogue--"a woman's no good to a man unless she's a little bit frightening"--every second of Love is a heightened monument of melodrama, explicitly rendering the conventions of cinematic formula. With a sarcastic anti-Valentine caption and the incorporation of an added soundtrack of soaring strings, Love depicts romance with a smirk. Although some might argue it delivers a feminist critique of cinematic imagery through the postproduction framework that Nicholas Bourriaud used to characterize much of 1990s and post-1990s video, Love's obsessive chronicling of cinema is more punchy and playful than provocatively subversive.

As cheeky homages to every orgasmic moment in cinema, television, and cartoon, Love and "Adventures" both depict the scripting of dramatic, forceful images in cinema and popular culture. Such images set out to seduce, and like the best temptress, they make us anticipate by suggesting and withholding answers to keep us in their thrall--and Moffatt's hyperbolic interrogation of verisimilitude both evokes and meta-narrates such seduction. Ultimately, these images are entertaining, but not resonant. Previous engagements with political and racial content lent Moffatt's experiments with image construction more relevance. As video and photography's toolboxes of medium innovation and emotional manipulation expand and create increasingly spectacular images, artists are compelled to keep up with such strategies--however, perhaps it is the images that say a little more that stay with us longer.

JEANNINE TANG writes about modern and contemporary art and culture and is currently based in London, United Kingdom.