We Used To Talk About Love: Balnaves Contemporary Photomedia
What does it say about contemporary photo-media that the most poignant work in a recent exhibition of it, We Used To Talk About Love, was one composed only of words?
Grant Stevens’s imageless projection, Crushing (2009), miraculously ignited feeling; it displayed the gagging pathos of the language routinely used about relationships today. ‘I wish I could stop thinking about this’, ‘you said you didn’t know if you still loved me’, ‘without you my life feels hollow’.
Its laboured clichés, set to a stock piano mantra, brought up the horrifying loneliness of the lover’s predicament. A tangle of pain in a net of prosaic phrases—‘hoping for you to call’, ‘your housemate never liked me’, ‘baby I’m really tired’, etcetera, etcetera.
But then, Rapture (silent anthem) (2009) was its antidote. Angelica Mesiti’s filming of the transcendent silence of the slow-motion crowd’s ecstasy put the viewer in touch with feeling, pure and simple. An experience is had by the mass, together, but in their own solitude; nothing is communicated of their reaction to a performance that remains off-camera, except their delirious affects.
These two pieces were the stand-out works in an exhibition that struggled to meet the schema of its curatorial contrivance. What does a short story by American writer Raymond Carver (‘What we talk about when we talk about love’) have to do with new Australian art? The ‘mile-wide inch-deep’ approach did not work to capture much about the works themselves.
The catalogue aggravated the effect, dragging in the usual philosophical suspects with which to decorate the margins. Under the heading ‘love and photography’, Natasha Bullock reminds us of Roland Barthes’s revolutionary approach to photography in which he ‘does