Catalysts For Social Change

The Age

Saturday January 6, 2007

PENNY WEBB, REVIEWER

VISUAL ART REVIEW: JUAN DAVILA and AFTER IMAGE Until February 4 and April 1 respectively. Both exhibitions at National Gallery of Victoria, St Kilda Road

FOR 30 years, Chilean-born Juan Davila has been a provocateur on the Melbourne art scene, creating paintings, collages and assemblages that express a relentless critique of art and society. As a gay man and a migrant, Davila is acutely aware of the necessity in daily life for masquerade ("I am not a man: I impersonate a man," he courteously informed an audience member at a forum at the old Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, years ago). But a compulsion to unmask is the other half of the equation - to unmask hypocrisy, say, in the Australian Government's treatment of refugees.

And there is no respite for the viewer in this gigantic show. Davila raids art history, popular culture, Latin American folk art, Freudian psychoanalysis and mass media for the forms and iconography that spill from the first to the last of the 100 or so works.

So why also direct your attention to a concurrent show of 38 small photographs in an upper gallery? Because although some of the photographs (by Bill Brandt, for example) record a changing world, others are by photographers who believed realist photographs, effectively used, could bring about social change.

Davila's later work is in a realist tradition. You may come out of his exhibition feeling that you've been confounded by language games and stared down by elephant-footed giants and giantesses, but with them, Davila posits a world that he would change. If, after you've walked the length of this immense gallery, you feel you can't bear another moment with Davila's shanty-town aesthetic, where images are barely held together by threads of meaning, you may find relief upstairs in gazing at Walker Evans' small black-and-white photograph of Floyd Burroughs' Alabama bedroom. Its austerity speaks volumes.

Indeed, Evans, who was one of the photographers engaged in Roy Stryker's project to record the effects of the Great Depression on rural America for the Farm Security Administration, was no mean wordsmith. His advice is quoted in the exhibition checklist: "Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, and eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long."

Die knowing something: it could well be Davila's credo and the viewer's imperative.

By the way, the Davila retrospective comes with a warning about sexual imagery. I'm here to tell you that After Image, Social Documentary Photography in the 20th Century contains images of cruel social inequalities (Brandt, David Goldblatt, Roger Mayne and David Potts), the horrors of war (Robert Capa, George Gittoes), homelessness (Evans), child labour (Lewis Hine), extreme poverty (Russell Lee, David Moore); fascism (Felix H. Man) and people and places left behind in a changing world (Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange, Erich Salomon, Chris Steele-Perkins, Alfred Stieglitz, John Thomson and Roman Vishniac).

There's a lot to learn from these two shows.

LINK

? ngv.vic.gov.au

© 2007 The Age

Back to News Index | Back to Home