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TRACEY MOFFATT
(b. 1960 in Brisbane, Australia. Lives and works in Sydney, Australia and New York, USA.)
Tracey Moffatt is one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists of international renown. Since her first solo exhibition in Sydney in 1989, she has had numerous exhibitions in major museums around the world. Working in photography, film and video, Moffatt first gained significant critical acclaim when her short film “Night Cries” was selected for official competition at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival. Her first feature film, “Bedevil,” was also selected for Cannes in 1993. In 1997, she was invited to exhibit in the Aperto section of the Venice Biennale, and a major exhibition of Moffatt’s work was held at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York in 1997/98, which consolidated her international reputation.
Having begun her career as an experimental filmmaker and as a producer of music videos, Moffatt eventually focused on filmmaking and cross-media practices after gaining acclaim as a photographer. Her investigation of power relations, which by the late 1990s often revolved around the relationship between Australian Aborigines and white colonial settlers, more recently engages contemporary media and the nature of celebrity.
Known for her non-realist narratives reconstructed from pre-existing sources, Moffatt uses experimental cinema devices such as audio field recordings and low tones to provide playfully ironic commentary on the subjects of her found footage.
Major survey exhibitions of Moffatt’s work have been held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2003–4), the Hasselblad Centre in Göteburg, Sweden (2004), the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (2011), the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2014) and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2016). In 2006, she had her first retrospective exhibition Tracey Moffatt: Between Dreams and Reality in Italy, at Spazio Oberdan, Milan. In 2007 a major monograph, The Moving Images of Tracey Moffatt by Catherine Summerhayes was published by Charta Publishers, Milan. A solo survey exhibition featuring all seven video montage works at the Museum of Modern Art, New York opened in May 2012. In 2016, Christine Macel curated Moffatt’s montage film Love in Prospectif Cinéma at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. She has been selected for the Biennales of Gwangju, Prague, São Paulo, Sharjah, Singapore and Sydney. In 2017 she represented Australia at the 57th Biennale of Venice, with the exhibition My Horizon curated by Nathalie King.
Moffatt was the recipient of the 2007 Infinity Award for Art by the International Center of Photography, New York honouring her outstanding achievement in the field of photography. Her work is held in major international collections including the Australian National Gallery, Canberra; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate Gallery, London. In 2016 Moffatt was made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for distinguished service to the visual and performing arts as a photographer and filmmaker, and as a mentor and supporter of, and role model for Indigenous artists.
GARY HILLBERG
Gary Hillberg worked with Tracey Moffatt on all 8 films in the Hollywood Montage series, spanning 16 years of their collaborative practice, from the first montage work created in 1999 to the latest in 2015. The films, all playing with and upon our fascination with cinema, are: Lip (1999), Artist (2000), Love (2003), Doomed (2007), REVOLUTION (2008), Mother (2009), Other (2010), The Art (2015).
Gary Hillberg received a Certificate of Proficiency, Film and Television Editing from AFTRS in 1981 and has been working as an experimental filmmaker and music video producer since the late 1980s.Hillberg has edited three commercial films: With Time to Kill (1984), Broken Highway (1993), and Hayride to Hell (1995), and presents regular movie reviews on RRR Melbourne’s weekly Film Buff’s Forecast. He currently lives and works in Melbourne, Australia.
DOOMED
2007, Video, 9 min 21 sec
This fast-paced montage of film clips takes Hollywood’s fixation with death and disaster to its ultimate cinematic end. “Doomed” comprises cut-and paste editing techniques in a highly entertaining and blackly-humorous take on the bleak side of our current psychological landscape. Moffatt’s film looks at both entirely fictional and reconstructed disastrous events. Each scene carries a particular cargo of references. They occupy their own unique symbolism and filmic territory – the poignant, sublime and epic, the tragic, the B-grade and downright trashy. The accumulation of scenes creates a narrative whole comprised of parts. Moffatt plays with the ‘disaster’ genre, re-presenting representations.
Looking at the forms of filmic entertainment, as well as ‘art as entertainment’, she addresses what it is about death and destruction that we invariably find so entertaining. Music manipulates. The soundtrack builds and peaks – emotive, and a central device in journeying through the sequence to climactic effect. It is important that the title ‘Doomed’ has the quality of the not yet destroyed. It is a description that is applied to individuals, families, lovers, politics, and nations – an observation made from the outside and yet containing the possibility (read hope) that situations can be salvaged.
OTHER
2009, Video, 6 min 30 sec
“OTHER is a fast-paced montage of film clips depicting attraction between races. Marlon Brando looks at Tahitian girls and Samantha from Sex and the City ogles an African American football player in the men’s locker room. Seven minutes of gazing and touching and exploding volcanoes. Very funny, very hot.” – Tracey Moffatt
Tracey Moffatt’s fast-paced montage videos compile scenes from film and television programs selected in response to a particular theme or coding. This is the penultimate work in a suite of 8 videos made over the last decade; the previous works include ‘Lip’ (1999), ‘Artist’ (2000), ‘Love’ (2003), ‘Doomed’ (2007), ‘Revolution’ (2008), ‘Mother’ (2009), and more recently, the final work in the series, ‘The Art’ (2015). ‘Other’ (2009) is one of the most mesmerizing of the series as it edits together scenes of interracial encounters. It opens with first contact sequences, films in which the beach and the shallow waters are a zone of encounter between ships and canoes, between Europeans and non-Europeans. It then moves to images of looking, of two different peoples meeting for the first time and appraising each other visually. As imagined by Hollywood and TV directors, this is a moment of both curiosity and desire, where glances become lingering and erotically charged.
The next sequence moves from first encounters to quite literally first contact, when brown and white touch. Again curiosity is mingled with desire and an erotic tension crackles through these images. From touch we shift back to the eyes, but now vision is highly eroticised, looking has become a physical conduit to arousal and the gaze is embedded into a bodily response. Intercut are scenes of Westerners losing their sense of propriety and themselves when encountering an ‘other’, a moment when their own social structures erode.
A kitsch frenzied depiction of the other as threatening, feverish, abandoned and erotic informs the next selection of scenes in which running and dancing, from faux-tribal gatherings to frenzied hysterical choreographed sequences move closer and closer to orgiastic sexual abandonment.
In the final sequences desire is consummated in wild encounters which transgress race and gender. Humorously intercut with these are images of men hugging each other, an implied repressed homosexual subtext which is still unable to be depicted in mainstream cinema while we see frenzied hetereosexual couples and women making love to each other with abandonment. The video culminates in some literally explosive moments in which revel in the clichés of cinematic sexual orgasm: fires burn, volcanoes erupt and finally planets explode.
Moffatt utilises the clichés of cinematic representation of the ‘other’ to trace a pop culture history of how the west has represented its encounters with countries and peoples that are not itself. These mainstream representations somewhat hilariously reveal more about the cultures that made and consumed these films than the countries, peoples and histories they purport to depict. The ‘other’ here is a people and a place where the transgression of race, gender, and cultural norms can be imagined but which has little to do with any anthropological reality. As the clichés pile up this work is hugely entertaining, fast paced and sexy as it rolls through 60 years of moving image history. It also reiterates how desire, looking, power and the cinematic experience are so closely intertwined.
– From Art Gallery of New South Wales Collection page: https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/143.2011/