Joel Markham: Heaven & Earth - Essay

JOEL MARKHAM

Heaven and Earth Abstraction, reality, the human experience...

Wagga Wagga Art Gallery Summer 2019-20

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elcome to Heaven and Earth, my third exhibition of photography at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery in recent years. This body of work builds on The Quest: The Pursuit of Meaning and Time and Place, both of which were shown in the E3 art space, in 2014 and 2017 respectively.

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n approaching this project, I was aware that harnessing my practice to an exploration of heaven and earth would constitute a significant responsibility.

But on another level, it also felt like an inevitability, due to the fact, no doubt, that like many people, I have been cultivating a relationship with these realms since childhood. Earth, after all, is the place we call home - the realm we embrace on a daily basis - and hovering enticingly above it, according to popular belief, is heaven - the realm that awaits our arrival when we have cast off this mortal coil. But even so, finding my way into the project was no easy task. While cloudscapes and landscapes were an obvious consideration, it was only when I started associating heaven with abstraction and earth with reality that my way forward began to genuinely reveal itself. These states thereby became metaphors for the realms on which I had been ruminating, and in the process, the project was afforded the means to float the possibility that the human experience - which is popularly perceived as being anchored in the ‘real’ world is actually is as much about abstraction as it is about reality.

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t is widely acknowledged that the imaginative world of childhood is often reined in – even erased – by a combination of educational and societal constraints. Personally, I have never wavered in my commitment to maintaining a relationship with the world of possibilities that I inhabited as a child, and a lifelong involvement with the arts – and abstraction - has thereby ensued. But in moving beyond my own story, I did not have to look hard or far to appreciate the ways in which, and the extent to which, life in the world at large - the socalled ‘real’ world - is shaped and coloured by abstraction. Thoughts, after all, are abstract; emotions are abstract; and ideas, concepts and aspirations are abstract. Despite our best efforts to standardise it, time is abstract, and as we lay down each night to sleep - even though sleep is a physical state - the experience of closing our eyes and drifting off is also fundamentally abstract.

And what of the dreams that we generate within the sleep state - could anything be more abstract? Well, the answer to that question is an emphatic “Yes!” The big sleep that awaits us at the end of our allotted time sees us embracing what is surely the most mysterious and abstract state of all!

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ven after a relatively cursory consideration of abstraction’s relationship with the real world, I was in no doubt that these disparate states not only coexist,

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but that they also complement each other – like black and white, day and night and yin and yang. It was consequently sobering to acknowledge the extent to which this fundamental duality is largely ignored in the west, particularly in light of the rich and long-standing relationships that eastern and Indigenous cultures enjoy with a range of abstract realms. The materialism associated with life in a capitalist society undoubtedly encourages a focus on the tangible as opposed to the intangible, and I dare say that the increasingly secular nature of life in the west also plays a part in stymieing our capacity to engage with abstraction.

In days gone by, a teacher of mine – the celebrated Japanese philosopher and theatre director, Tadashi Suzuki – threw another possibility into this heady mix, and in doing so, planted a seed that would eventually became a trigger for the Heaven and Earth project. At one of our training sessions in the Japanese village of Toga in the early 1990s, Suzuki shared a story with those of us who had assembled to partake of his wisdom. The story concerned a man who had become lost in the desert, and as night fell - as if for the very first time - the man was so overwhelmed by the enormity and mystery of the night sky, that in an act of desperation, he clasped a stick to his chest, as if to anchor himself against all that was bearing down on him. From that point on, the stick became the man’s friend – his means of surviving the challenge at hand, as he waited, in hope, to be rescued.

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he points that emerged from Suzuki’s story were numerous, emphatic and profound. The man befriended the stick to alleviate his fear – his fear of the night sky and the threat that it posed. But did the stick make the threat go away? No, of course not – it simply distracted the man from it. Similarly for us, by fixating on the minutiae of daily life – the supply of which is seemingly endless - we are afforded the opportunity to turn a blind eye to the big picture to which we belong. A stick, after all, is far less onerous to comprehend than the infinite nature of the universe! But as with the man in the desert, turning away does not make ‘the problem’ disappear – it simply waits for us until next time, and in our heart of hearts we know this. Suzuki’s challenge to us was to find the courage to put down the stick, to embrace the enormity and mystery of the night sky, and in doing so, to open ourselves to the big picture – a picture that is as abstract as it is real. For Suzuki, it is thus that we begin to glean a sense of who we are, our raison d’être, and our place – however small – in the matrix of heaven and earth.

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t comes as no surprise that these are the sentiments of a man who has lived and worked at the very core of contemporary theatre, and by extension, it is not difficult to understand why the arts – with their promise of all things abstract – constitute an invitation that some find difficult to resist. Perhaps philosophers, theologians, psychologists, astrologers, magicians and dreamers – to name but

a few – are similarly called. The history of recent art reveals that abstraction was thrust into the limelight as part of the advent of modernism in the first half of the twentieth century. It thereby joined an illustrious line-up that included Impressionism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Dada, Surrealism, Pop and the like.

And while some swooned at the sight of the abstract made real – courtesy of line, form and colour – traditionalists dug in their heels and tightened their collective grip on the stick that Suzuki would eventually speak of. But even if abstraction was intent on wreaking ‘havoc’ across a range of artistic genres, at least the Box Brownie could be relied upon to keep delivering the recognisable images of known quantities that people had become so attached to. Or could it?

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he camera quickly gained a reputation for documenting reality and disseminating the truth – it was, after all, a piece of precision machinery that was born of science and fitted with an unwaveringly objective eye. Even so, it did not take long for some to start questioning the ‘cut and dried’ nature of both the device and its outcomes. After all, could something that flattened three-dimensional content into two-dimensional representations be seen to be genuinely replicating the truth? And riding in tandem with this flattening process was the loss of colour that was one of the hallmarks of early photography. And what of the camera’s ability to prioritise some content by placing it front and centre within the frame, while other content languished at the back and/or sides?

And by extension, what also of the camera’s ability to render some content in focus, while other content was ‘soft’, sometimes to the point of abstraction? What was beginning to emerge, of course, was that far from being mere operators, photographers were actually contributors who could exercise their will, take control of the camera and influence what and how it saw. And while the camera’s eye was objective, the photographer’s eye was subjective, and crucially, what this meant was that an idiosyncratic vision and aesthetic was being fed directly into the photographic mix.

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n keeping with Heraclitus’ pronouncement that the only constant is change,1 some photographers inevitably started pushing against the medium’s parameters. In some instances, this was accidental, and in others, it was fed by the spirit of enquiry and experimentation that is often associated with the arts and those who practice them. As early as 1850, the English botanist and photographer, Anna Atkins, placed dried plant matter on cyanotype paper,2 and the stark white-on-blue photograms that resulted - despite being intended for scientific purposes – were so ethereal as to constitute the start of photography’s 1 Heraclitus ‘The Obscure’ was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher from the city of Ephesus.

2 Cyanotype is a photographic printing process that produces a cyan-blue print.

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relationship with abstraction. Inevitably, as modernism gained traction in Europe in the first decades of the twentieth century, photographers began to actively embrace the possibility of non-representational outcomes. In Prague, practitioners like František Drtikol and Jaroslav Rössler sought inspiration from the Cubists and Futurists; for Man Ray and Maurice Tabard, it was the Dadaists and Surrealists who showed the way; while at the Bauhaus in Germany – as if to inspire all concerned - László Moholy-Nagy declared, “The enemy of photography is the convention, the fixed rules of how to do. The salvation of photography comes from the experiment.”3

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ustralia was a long way from Europe in more ways than one, and while modernism took its time to reach our far-flung shores, when it did, photographers like Max Dupain and David Moore responded by turning their backs on the Pictorialists’ “romantic, picturesque and sentimental visions of nature,”4 in favour of a leaner, cleaner aesthetic that they harnessed to subject matter of the day.5 While the work of these photographers was by no means exclusively abstract, their passion for design, pattern and composition did give rise to non-representational outcomes. By extension, courtesy of isolating natural, industrial and/or architectural content from its context, and highlighting the purity of its form or the detailed patterns within it, anyone with a camera could become an abstractionist! And in nudging this overview of photography’s relationship with abstraction into the present day, it would be remiss of me not to acknowledge the advent of digital technology and compositing. While cameras still play a part in the compositing process, much of the work actually takes place on a computer in an image-editing program like Adobe Photoshop. It is here – thanks to the program’s sophistication – that compositors can fuse visual material from diverse sources, giving rise to creations that readily transcend the parameters of the world as we know it.

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n my consideration of the Heaven and Earth body of work, I had little interest in separating each of the realms and states I was working with – what I was interested in was their capacity for coexistence. Not coincidentally, the dissolution of dividing lines is also key to my perception of practice, where I

3 “Abstract Forms”, PhotoPedagogy, accessed 12 June 2019, https://www.photopedagogy. com/abstract-forms.html 4 Sandra Jane, Photography: Production and Appreciation (Milton: John Wiley & Sons Australia Ltd, 2009), 183 5 While the Pictorialists attracted the ire of the modernists, they nonetheless played a significant part in photography’s evolution by encouraging practitioners and the public alike to embrace photography as an art form, as opposed to a medium that was ‘limited’ to documenting reality and disseminating the truth.

regard the conceptual and technical facets of the process as complementary halves of the same whole. Accordingly, when it came to the Heaven and Earth photography, because I was dealing with concepts and subject matter that were as much about abstraction as they were about reality - material that is not normally associated with photography - I suspected that I would need to renegotiate my relationship with my camera to some extent. And while this prospect was daunting, it was also exciting because I knew that my practice would be propelled forward in the process, and for any artist, I doubt that there can be a more welcome and valuable experience.

personal, it is through forging a connection with others that one’s work genuinely comes into its own. Accordingly, it is my hope that within their consideration of the realms of heaven and earth, those visiting the exhibition will also open themselves to the possibility that the human experience - our experience - is as much about abstraction as it is about reality. And in inviting people to lower the stick that Suzuki spoke of – the one we have all clung to under the night sky - I hope that what is revealed will encourage those people to lower the stick again, of their own volition and on an ongoing basis, long after this exhibition has been and gone.

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JOEL MARKHAM Summer 2019-20

s a photographer, my primary work is done with camera-in-hand at the time of capture. I have never relied on a cavalcade of Photoshop effects and filters in post-production, and I knew instinctively that the Heaven and Earth photography would be no different. Experimentation, however, is a key component of practice, and with this in mind, I was keen to investigate the photographic equivalent of the inkblot test that was developed by the Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Dr Hermann Rorschach. While Rorschach developed this test to gauge insights into his patients’ personalities, my interest was fuelled by the idiosyncratic visual nature of the test outcomes. Within the Heaven and Earth body of work, I felt a genuine need to acknowledge the end of the spectrum – the facet of the mix – that approximated pure abstraction, and it is thus that a number of my Rorschach-style experiments have made their way into the exhibition line-up. Crucially, apart from some basic duplicating, flipping and stitching in Photoshop, these works remain relatively pure, and it is for this reason, I believe, that they sit so comfortably within the overall body of work.

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eyond the Rorschach-inspired images, the remaining Heaven and Earth photography was shot ‘as per normal ‘, but then again, perhaps that is something of an over-simplification. Yes, I was shooting in the real world, but what I was actually hoping to capture was a succession of triggers – photographs that would conjure the realms of heaven and earth and the states of abstraction and reality through floating possibilities as opposed to being prescriptive. Accordingly, as the photography began to lock itself in, I found myself at the centre of something akin to a diorama, encircled by clusters of images that were simultaneously familiar yet elusive, and that could be read cumulatively as a meditation, a provocation, or even both. In terms of my trajectory as an artist, Heaven and Earth is one more step – and a significant one at that – in my quest to understand the nature of my journey and the terrain through which it passes. In this respect, the work builds directly on my previous exhibitions at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery – The Quest: The Pursuit of Meaning and Time and Place. But while the photography is of my making and inevitably

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