Artist’s Book: Audience 2017 (two volumes)
ISBN 978-0-6480057-0-4 Edition of 500, with 25 numbered limited editions.
Ross Coulter’s Audience is a work that takes a number of forms. Although I hesitate to simply describe it as ‘a work’. Perhaps a better way of thinking of it is as a project, which produces a range of different works, or bodies of work. At the National Gallery of Victoria, Audience was presented as an exhibition, an explicitly photographic exhibition. It was certainly that, with some 445 black and white photographs included. The exhibition was also programmed and marketed as part of a Festival of Photography that included exhibitions by Bill Henson, Zoë Croggon, Patrick Pound and contemporary photographic works from the National Gallery of Victoria’s (NGV’s) collection. Audience is also an artists’ book, in two volumes, with images organised into what appears to be a chronological sequence—the first volume covering 2013-2015, the second, 2015-2016. But what underpins the body of images is what I think we should think of as a series of individual performances, in which an audience is gathered in a gallery space and some photographs are taken.
Scanning the images quickly, a degree of uniformity emerges. There is not only a similarity in the general look and feel of the images—each showing a group of people who appear to be looking at some object or event within an otherwise empty gallery space—but also a certain sameness in the spaces themselves. Here we have presented to us an audience standing within the ubiquitous ‘white cube’—some pristine spaces, others a little rough around the edges. It is such a familiar frame, so much so that these images might