Anne Ferran's 1-38
This dispassionate title, 1-38, might suggest a method drawn from the heyday of conceptual art. Or if not a method, an attitude: 1-38 recalls what Mel Bochner described as the serial attitude.1 The serial attitude is neutral, detached, focussed on cataloguing the results of a proposition, like a scientist would, or as Sol Le Witt so clearly perceived, like a bureaucrat. Le Witt described his own aims in precisely these terms:
The aim of the artist would not be to instruct the viewer but to give him information… One would follow one’s predetermined premise to its conclusion, avoiding subjectivity. Chance, taste, or unconsciously remembered forms would play no part in the outcome. The serial artist does not attempt to produce a beautiful or mysterious object but functions merely as a clerk cataloguing the results of the premise.2
And does 1-38 conform to these aims? Partly, but the attitude of detachment and the method of repetition are perversely turned to expressive ends. It is this reinvention of seriality that is the focus of this essay.
The serial attitude is most evident in the central component of Ferran’s recent exhibition at Stills Gallery in Sydney; the component, like the exhibition, is titled 1-38 (2003). This work is my central concern. It is comprised of thirty-eight separate but identically sized inkjet prints on paper, assembled into a long continuous sequence running along one wall and turning the corner onto the next. The sequence is punctuated by strips of white which join and separate individual photographic cells. From a distance the photographs have a pristine, crisp quality, the carefully controlled tones and consistent format recall the self-imposed limits of Bernd and... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline