Charles Anderson with Paul Carter
The latest instalment of Charles Anderson and Paul Carter's projected seven -part dis/appearance series extends the previous collaborative work of this artist-writer partnership. 'A work in parts' declares the show's subtitle- referring both to its staggered staging over two Melbourne art spaces, as well as to the whole work itself. And partial, too, are its manifold components. Thus materially, geographically and temporally fractured, the show's concern lies in the spacing and timing of the appearance of the 'art forms' themselves. Our encounter with these forms is suspended, in a continual state of deferral.
The first part of the show, at the Centre for contemporary Photography (CCP) in Fitzroy, initially appears architecturally modernist. In fact, it's bubbling with 'amodern' noise. In dimmed lights, Anderson's chaotically arranged sculptural 'forms'-polygonal shapes constructed from pale fibreboard-emerge from the darkness. Several of them, and one on the wall, act as light boxes. The colour transparencies they frame and illuminate-which are also projected on a wall-are difficult to recognise. Beautiful and formless, some show severed legs, and corners of ceilings, but most are blurred splashes of light, lines, and pastel colour. Many are cut dramatically in half, the chemical photographic process having generated cloudy folds of emulsive energy at the edges of ragged vertical breaks.
Carter's accompanying essay- less a catalogue than an essential and amplifying component of the show-tells us that these (non)images are what in German are called Nullbilder. the camera exposures made, contingently, at the beginning and end of a roll of photographic film before it reaches the place of conscious, intentional light-writing. They are, then, pure transcriptive analogia that have no place in the age of simulative digital code. And in one