Rosemary Hawker looks at the recent work of Melbourne-based photographers, Peter Hennessey and Patricia Piccinini, and finds their analysis of our received notions of history and of representation at once witty and disconcerting. The installation, Heretical Gestures at the Birth of Enlightenment, was shown at the Swanston Street Gallery, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, in April, 1991.
Artworks and particularly photographs were traditionally seen as seamless media but in the works of Peter Hennessey and Patricia Piccinini the process of production is made obvious through the layering of images. The artists' collaboration in photography is a paradox in terms of the traditional view of the medium as capturing a place and an instant in time from a single point of view. Perhaps it is a common programme now for artists to avoid having photography assessed in terms of its adequacy of representation to an object. But Hennessey's and Piccinini's photography stands in opposition to a photography of verisimilitude, a photography as ' faithful record' . What essential truths could be claimed for a view which is collaborative, and discursive? Piccinini and Hennessey present photography as a decision making process, with the finished work a result of numerous choices, multiple exposures of paper and film, multiple photographers. This discourse continues into the exhibition space to envelope our 'look' at the works, their narratives, the process of their production, our taste and decipherment. In the layering of these images many decisions and various subjectivities either side of the image window are made visible.
Hennessey' s and Piccinini' s exhibition of collaborative works is principally made up of C-type photographs and precisely rendered drawings. The drawings are presented as photocopies on large... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline