Photography and the Seduction of Death
Anne MacDonald is a misunderstood artist. Not that this has disadvantaged her still young career, although it might have curiously affected her reputation. In the eighties, of course, it is difficult to distinguish artistic personae from critical methodologies (attempting to do so is regarded as an anachronistic resurrection of "interpretation": the hip critic instead should fashionably compound the charade of meaning by jettisoning the "first degree" of his writing). Indeed, over this last decade a generation of artists have established their careers on fortuitous critical misnomers and on crnics' misapprehensions of vaguely intellectual fashions.
"Theoreticism" might be the mannered disorder produced by the inferiority complex of an art world eagerly recruiting in its ego-defence any polysyllabic impresario who can wield a few mottos of postmodern philosophy at a canvas or photograph and seemingly animate its "textuality". These days a few "plain speaking" Sydney critics belligerently and indiscriminately denounce all speculative soliloquies on art as a kind of curatorial hubris, diagnosing the condition as "artspeak". What these critics equally belligerently fail to discern is that the grotesque contortion of ideas and language performed by the "methodolatory" and theoreticism of the 1980s has more often than not been motivated by sheer ignorance of the properly "aesthetic" determinations of those postmodern mottos. Meaghan Morris, more good-humoured and careful than most in her misunderstandings of art, once responded in a Biennale forum on postmodernism and art criticism to succinctly describe the proceedings as "junk".
"Junk" is what has critically defined Anne MacDonald's work, good humoured "junk": but both useless residue and addictive dope…feminist junk. One catalogue essay asserts that her diptych Love I & II, censored when on display in the 1985 Perspecta... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Altar-piece I - In Search of the Myth, 1987. Gelatin silver print, 174.5 x 99.5cm.
Detail: The Romance, 1986. Gelatin silver print, approx. 200 x 129cm.
