Art Gallery of NSW photography exhibition focuses on plaster casts

An exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW ponders the idea of the direct imprint.

Juliana Swatko’s Imbedded Infant (1978) was produced with an early Xerox photocopier.

Drawing, as we saw in a recent discussion of the Lloyd Rees exhibition at the Museum of Sydney, is anything but a straightforward matter of copying the visible world. It is a complex process of analysis and synthesis in which an experience of the world, inherently non-objective, is converted into an artificial, ­abstract graphic object.

Painting, too, is a thing of the mind, a cosa mentale as Leonardo put it. Taking part in a portrait masterclass recently with Andrew Bonneau reminded me that the process seems to become only more artificial the more closely you attempt to give an account of the optical data of perception. Here, too, there is no such thing as copying: as 17th-century French theorist, and sometime gadfly of the Academy, Roger de Piles, pointed out, colour is always a subtle process of constructing equivalents where no literal matching is possible.

Despite, or indeed because of, the difficulty of painting, there have long been myths about images produced without the intervention of the human hand. In ancient literature there are references to miraculously fine works supposedly made by the divine artificer Hephaestus — Homer even delights in imagining him as the inventor of robotic assistants and other automata, passages that could be con­sidered prototypes of science fiction.

The Orthodox Church is particularly fond of what are considered acheiropoietic images, made without the intervention of the human hand. The most interesting of these are artefacts such as the Veil of Veronica, the Shroud of Turin or the so-called Mandylion, a cloth that Jesus was said to have imprinted with his own features while still living and that he sent to heal the king of Edessa. This image served, in later centuries, as a powerful rebuttal of the iconoclastic claim that images contravened the Second Commandment.

In the Renaissance, the idea that an image could make itself, so to speak, by direct projection on to a painted surface, was given a new and quasi-scientific plausibility by the theory of perspective. If a painting could be considered as an intersection, at a given distance from the eye, of the pyramid or cone of vision, then in principle it could be virtually present on a sheet of glass or a fine muslin veil held at that point in space. All that remained, in theory, was to trace the image on that veil or sheet of glass, and such ­devices are in fact extensively discussed and ­illustrated in early treatises of art theory.

But neither these devices nor the even more mis­understood camera obscura made the process easy. It was only with the late 18th century camera lucida, used by Ingres, that something like tracing the motif became possible, though even then it would be of little use to any but a highly skilled artist. The 18th-century craze for ­silhouettes also led to the invention of another device that allowed the shadow of a sitter’s profile, cast by back lighting, to be traced on a sheet of paper.

In this way, as it has often been pointed out, much of what we might consider the theory and optics of photography had fascinated artists for centuries before advances of chemistry in the late 18th century led to the discovery of chemical treatments of paper that finally would allow the world to imprint itself directly on to a flat surface. Thus photography was anything but a random technological breakthrough: it was the fulfilment of what had been a dream for centuries.

And it was the fact the photographic image is literally an impression of the world that endowed it with the prestige of authenticity, even from its most modest beginnings, and even if, more closely considered, it was not quite what it seemed. For this impression is really only of the light reflected from things, so that what we see is the result of the interaction of the energy of light with the energy-absorbing or repelling properties of what we presume to be the matter of the world, in turn interpreted and given shape by retina, visual cortex and learned habits of the mind. In other words, we are still in a world of shadows; we don’t escape from Plato’s cave so easily.

Whatever its ultimate validity, however, that prestige was very real in the early days of photo­graphy and naturally caused painters much anxiety. But in the 20th century, as we have ­observed before, the status of photography as a witness to truth gradually was eroded by the abuses of political and commercial manipulation, and then it was almost entirely destroyed by the advent of digital technology: for a digital photograph is no longer an imprinting of light but a capturing of data that can then be ­altered and reconfigured before any image is printed at all. The promise of truth evaporated, and many contemporary photographers have taken to playing with ambiguity and artifice.

It is from this perspective that it becomes ­interesting, with the present exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW in Sydney, to ponder the idea of the direct imprint, in this case through a selection of photographs of plaster casts and other objects that are also, in their way, more or less direct imprints of the real or at least allude to the idea of a direct imprint.

One of the oldest photographs in the exhibition is at once ostensibly the most straight­forward and one of the most mysterious. It is Roger Fenton’s picture (1854-58) of the bust of Homer from the Townley Collection in the British Museum. Vivid as the image appears, it is really at several removes from its implicit origin in the real world. In the first place the portrait is an imaginary one, made by a highly skilled Hellenistic artist perhaps five centuries after the lifetime of the great poet; and then the Townley version is a Roman period copy made several centuries later still.

Now Fenton sets up his camera to photograph this object that seems to fall so squarely under Plato’s condemnation of imitations of imitations, but he unexpectedly achieves that strange reanimation of which art is so often capable. Perhaps it is because of the very slow ­exposure still required in these early days of photography, but the result is a softly lambent illumination over the whole surface of the features, with deep, dark and yet subtle shadows that make the face seem surprisingly alive compared with any of the high resolution contemporary images you can see of the same work.

The capacity of early photography to instil life and feeling into its subjects is also evident in Edward Steichen’s photograph (1908) of Rodin’s Monument to Balzac, the author of the colossal novel-sequence of La Comedie ­humaine, written throughout the 1830s and 40s. Steichen had seen, in an American newspaper, a picture of the plaster model first exhibited in 1898 and had come to Paris to meet its sculptor. But though the work had been commissioned, it was not well received; the sculptor had tried to capture the larger-than-life character of the author rather than to produce a more conventional portrait — after all, Balzac had been dead for a half-century so it was impossible to work from life — and the model was rejected.

It was only in 1939, many years after Rodin’s death, that the work was finally cast in bronze and set up on the Boulevard du Montparnasse, where many readers may have encountered it. When Steichen came to Paris, the plaster model had returned to the studio unloved and rejected, and the photographs that he took at Rodin’s ­request were designed to evoke its life and power. Hence the dramatic, almost mystical ­illumination in which the statue is seen, facing towards what must be the full moon at midnight, on a long exposure that surrounds the ­figure with a mist of light.

Several other photographers in the exhibition work with plaster casts: Horst P. Horst, in 1937, produces a more modernist and formalist study of a classical bust with a white sphere in front of it and a concave disc behind it. The ­impassive and symmetrical features of the bust, framed by the two circular forms, become the perfect foil for a complex play with direct and reflected light effects in which everything ­becomes disturbingly ambiguous.

There are interesting dialogues between living figures and plaster casts in several cases: Harold Cazneaux, for example, sets Norman Lindsay beside Beethoven’s death mask in a composition that incidentally shows up the difference in their features and character, even though Lindsay appears to be emulating the solemnity conveyed by the mask. They are not facing each other, as in a conversation, but almost at right angles: the picture recalls one of those group portraits in which a standing figure leans over the shoulder of a seated one, and the suggestion is of two friends absorbed in listening to music together.

Herbert Greer French’s portrait of a woman with a cast of the Winged Victory of Samothrace (1908) shows her emulating the sweep of its torso in her general posture, but assuming in the attitude of her head and hands — missing in the statue — an expression of late romantic self-­absorption that is completely foreign to the original. A similar shift in meaning is introduced in Horst P. Horst’s Barefoot Beauty (1941), in which the feet of a classical cast, perhaps of the Medici Venus, are juxtaposed with those of a real woman who caresses one of her ankles as though rubbing her legs in perfumed oil. The more abstract and ideal form is as it were ­replaced with a living and sexual image, like Pygmalion’s carved girl coming to life.

Very different in technique, Juliana Swatko’s Imbedded Infant (1978) is produced with an early Xerox photocopier, a machine capable of making multiple exposures. Elusive at first and subtly erotic as it reveals itself to the viewer, the image appears to condense successive instants of ecstasy; and the title suggests that this is the record of the moment of conception.

For a small exhibition, there are a lot of interesting pieces, including Fiona Pardington’s photographs of 19th-century Maori life casts. Two particularly odd works foreshadow doubts about the veracity of the camera, for in each photography serves the cause not of truth but of illusion. The picture, by an unknown artist, of a bust of Elsa Asenijeff (c. 1900) is distinctly ­eccentric in the way a marble statue has been made to look like a living woman.

But stranger still, and more sinister, is Werner Rohde’s Wachspuppenkopf (Wax Dollhead, 1928), in which a shop mannequin has been deftly lit and photographed from just the right angle to produce the momentary illusion of life. Here we have an ­unexpected anticipation of the Frankenstein technology of contemporary digital manipulation.

Imprint: Photography and the Impressionable Image

Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, to May 18.