Christl Berg, Inhabitation
Here is not a group exhibition, but a set of juxtapositions. While a surfeit of photographers are still harassing themselves over 'identity-crisis' or otherwise sombre material, we are presented with something which is sombrely perverse, adding irony without bitterness.
It is now casual to identify most photography with fixed and tired tropes. There are the Ansel Adams and Max Dupain traditions which, while ostensibly different, are the best exemplars of the face-landscape genre endemic to most of
Western art (the 'facialising ' of any surface); that of Cartier-Bresson with his understated photojournalistic eloquence; and the Eisenstein tradition which is the most problematic and abused of all. Photography at its worst is structured around the film still, the celebrated image that Roland Barthes said was not apprehendable by any sign system, a new release of feeling that was ineffable. Carried away with the same bemused euphoria, many photographers play at aping cinematic effects which is more or less playing slave to what is not their master. Matt Feeney's installation of works posed not only a critique on the poorly filmic but as well the recent proclivity in Australian art toward a twee religiosity and a banal mourning, encapsulated in the epithet for Perspecta, Australian Gothic. In typically minimalist vein, the works are presented in squares of nine. There are two of these, face to face on either wall, forcing an effect of ceaseless rebounding into which the viewer is cast, his/her gaze switching from one to the other. In the small space, one is alienated rather than included. The images are mock-Wagnerian, with the same brazen rhetoric of films starring Lugosi or Karloff. It is no coincidence that Nietzsche's condemnation of