Art Gallery of South Australia: The Black Rose Reviewed …

Richard Butler. Review of The Black Rose exhibition at AGSA. Monday April 20, 2015 © Richard Butler 2015

A video recording of Trent Parke greets all people descending the long staircase to the dark basement of the Art Gallery of South Australia. This is the place where Trent Parke welcomes us to his monumental exhibition The Black Rose. “Dear all, I am not a writer …”

With the catastrophic end of his mother’s life, the universe profoundly deceived Trent Parke and denied him a maternally nurtured future. In order to survive the little boy in traumatic stress, expelled memory. Just as a lizard drops its tail.

I wondered how I would have survived if my mother died when I was ten. What worldly assumptions would I not be able to make. What separateness would I have needed to endure, and how hard would I have interrogated the Roman god Chaos (whose father was Chronos – Time) to find answers. Chaos is appropriately described as a dark formless mass, before the birth of the earth, oceans and heaven. At 10, particularly to a sensitive and creative child – Mother is all of those.

So here I was in this lower ground floor space and the beginning of The Black Rose. The gallery walls in this space not hanging the exhibition but becoming it. They are covered from ceiling to skirting board with a vast image meters long, and the often over used descriptor ‘immersive’ is well used selected.

My first circumnavigation of the show was one where I read all the artist’s exhibited words.

Trent’s writing is considerable, mounted onto large panels and its inclusion is the antithesis of the last great Australian photographic exhibition event in my memory. The Bill Henson retrospective was bereft of text, and whilst everything was shown, nothing was ever said.

The text on large panels is essential. It provides the keel upon which many seemingly disparate images can be successfully connected, and arguably without the text the context of the show might be rendered without access or clarity. Even so, some people went from image title to image title reading each and perhaps missing the bigger point.

So I wonder how we begin to accommodate and assimilate the various aspects of The Black Rose. Before Trent was 8 and nearly 40 years ago the late American author Susan Sontag wrote ‘On Photography’ . It was then a ground-breaking critique on the issues affecting the ways we approach photographs. Photography then, as if we now needed reminding, was about preserving things vanishing, creating a record of an event, a person or thing. Sontag is frequently used today as a lazy crutch within essays. Photography has shifted seismically since then and so has the way we reference ourselves to it.

The massive kicker in the Parke show is that many of the images were made as a result of no experience and of no memory, but as part of his interrogation of Chaos and his attempt to uncover truth. As Trent himself says with regard to his engagement with the world – “I am continually asking Why”. Many of the images feel as if they have been made from that uneasy unquenchable sense of enquiry. The dead, the mummified, dehydrated and broken. Wrecked houses, broken portraits, and a rabbit in a spotlight, near a moon-drenched road that goes up a hill and into nowhere towards anywhere, but anywhere from here.

Even if the photographic exposure was made with steely conscious intent – many images are not about an affirmative statement to preserve. Instead they are made about the absence of memory and record.

Curators report the work took 7 years to assemble. I submit it has taken every year since he was 10, and that the images latent and undeveloped have swirled around the artists internal universe in chaos, since then. Even the early use of his Mother’s Pentax seems an essential part of his being in contact with, and seeing the world through her.

That the work is both as much about things seen and as metaphor is of significance. The Black Rose has confused many photographers and frustrated some. I have had many uneasy discussions. I think the source of this is our prejudice towards what Photography is. The way photography is taught in this shallow regional euro-centric culture is still largely modernist. Photographers should see The Black Rose both in and outside the prison of its medium. If these were all etchings, I submit there would be less of an issue.

Trent has prosecuted images to backlit vinyl, to gelatin silver and as inkjet or pigment. As explained before, there are also video recordings played from DVD, and there may be other processes used. A vast 3 sided wall receives the projected video recording of the surface of a squid. Mottled and amorphous, changing – just as the 365 sunsets taken cross a year and sent by email daily to colleagues describing a universal beginning and ending and a connection from shared experience. Had she been alive, he could have shown her.

Showing you his soul

Parke is showing you his soul. Don’t go looking for it with your head.

I also spoke to many non photographers. None of them were confused.

I stood next to a young woman with 2 boys. In front of us, in the great white and second gallery hung a beautiful triptych. The first and left image was of a single strand of his mother’s hair, revealed as finely as a Harry Callahan or Emmet Gowin print. The next – his fathers watch without an hour or minute hand; and the third an image of tadpoles circling a round shape that could be an egg. Love. Time. Creation.

I asked her what she felt. “I am a mother (pointing) and they’re my 2 boys. I feel two things here – his search for answers, and her loss.”

The 3 images connected us. We stood there for a long time.

The Black Rose is mostly devoid of pathos or sentimentality, and given the underlying thematic material and context – this is a superb achievement and testament to the integrity of the artist and the Gallery. I saw many people understanding. I didn’t see anyone cry.

I was transported in that first great darkened hall, because it was like lying in the dry gravel river bed at Christmas Creek in the Kimberley looking up into the night sky, with my dear friend Lloyd Kwilla explaining the aboriginal meaning of the black areas. “you white fella see only the white … we black fella – we see only the dark.” Trent Parke has seen both and he can take you there.

I returned on 3 occasions. There is a book and you should get it. It presents most certainly another view. Neither the exhibit or the book should be compared, but each serve to support The Black Rose. The book provides an instant intimacy not easily possible from the grand celebration of this most worthy body of work. The book also provides a view of the images possibly closer to the way they were seen at the time they were first made. I am referring now to the extreme level of enlargement, from the diminutive 35mm negative (or tiny pieces thereof) through to wall-sized images. At times this works. Some of the subtle sensitivities and tonalities have been lost and although the tonal register of Parkes’ images does not appear to be a dominant imperative for the artist, I think some are extraordinarily finely balanced between the referential and the totally disintegrated.

The Black Rose isn’t an easy subject, and the context behind it unfathomable. It is ringfenced with the sense of awe we have for one of the revered Magnum Agency’s most prolific and visually interesting. A perfect storm. But if you have a heart and it still beats and if you take time, and sit in the spaces and be very very quiet. It will come to you …

And you will be blown away.

Richard Butler