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the art life

"...it's just like saying 'the good life'".

Tracey Moffatt: Adventure Series

So what did those people mean when they said “[the work] just lacks any kind of edge”? It would be a mistake to think that Moffatt’s photography was edgy, and disappointing to go to her shows expecting some sort of aesthetic challenge. Moffatt’s work has always been self consciously ‘artistic’ – the framing, the use of colour, the treatment of the medium and the subjects - have always been resolutely middle-of-the-road and the work of someone with an average imagination. The works are also undemanding, opting instead for a beguiling use of humour that tends to defuse any feelings of resentment one might feel for being compelled to view such relentlessly mediocre work. And so it is with Moffatt’s latest Adventure Series. Although they are lacking many things, the photos are funny. The goofy looks on the model’s faces, the angles of the shots, the toy town placement of aircraft and other hardware, the faux-porn styling, are all genuinely amusing.

Harking back to her staged photographs from Something More, Moffatt uses fake environments to create a heightened sense of unreality and her people and locations are glossy and superficial. And that is where the pictures start to fall apart. One of the problems we have had with Moffatt’s work over the last 15 years is that her grasp of montage and narrative is so vague. Perhaps this is intentional, but these works don’t really add up to a coherent story, alluding instead to something beyond the frame of the picture. Montage theory proposes that the meeting of two images creates a third meaning, but in Moffatt's work the arrangement of images - usually four in the frame - are simply decorative. We can’t for the life of us figure out what, if anything, the pictures in Adventure Series are meant to mean beyond a camp celebration of their fakeness and, perhaps, it’s just the look of narrative that Moffatt is celebrating, but that would mean the works are just a collection of images, colours and poses without reference to anything very substantial… That can’t be right, can it?

It’s interesting to compare Moffatt to other artists using photography in a similar way. Moffatt is certainly not unique in her use of photography as a form of narrative, or narrative quotation, but the most disturbing aspect is how ordinary her work looks in comparison to people like Jeff Wall,Geoffrey Crewdson or Sam Taylor-Wood. Not only does Moffatt’s work look unrealised and amateurish in comparison, technically Moffatt’s work is found wanting as well. The Adventure Series images are flat, harshly lit and, in some instances, the deep etching around models is dodgy. Moffatt’s work may be many things, but technically accomplished it is not. One need only look at works like Invocations and Laudanum to find poorly executed works that balance precariously on the edge of the seriously bad.

Also on exhibition with Adventure Series is a video piece called Love. Since Moffatt has only come up with the idea and the editing is left to an accomplice, the work is credited as a collaboration with Gary Hillberg. It’s a pity the backdrop painter who creates so much of Adventure Series’ zest languishes in obscurity. Like Moffatt’s recent video pieces Artist and Lip, Love is a compilation of moments from preexisting Hollywood films. Featuring shots of women being beaten down, up and sideways by a variety of men, the video is a 21 minute excursion through sheer obviousness, a defiant statement that cares little for subtlety.

Moffatt has wisely stayed away from cinema since the disastrous misadventure that was her feature film Bedevil in 1995 and her excruciatingly awful short films. Video, that handmaiden to mediocre photography careers, assists Moffatt in creating work that neither delivers a coherent statement nor an adequate narrative. Her video montages are rather like cut ups from the 1980s or cable TV now, where rapid-fire montage irony is a transport mechanism for promos and ad breaks. The cable station TV1 has taken exactly the same sort of approach as Moffatt to promoting everything from I Dream of Jeanie and The Brady Bunch to The Six Million Dollar Man and Star Trek, complete with sound bites that create a kind of staggered monologue. If contemporary art does nothing else, it at least creates a sense of difference from the mundane reality of day-to-day media. Andreas Gursky's work may well have the look of advertising but there is no mistaking his work as anything but art. Moffatt, instead, inverts the process and makes art look like a commercial.

There are five stages to coping with tragedy: denial, anger, bargaining, resignation, and then, finally, acceptance. Looking at our own reactions to Moffatt as an art star and as an artist we think we are finally beginning to accept that our view is the minority opinion, that the vast numbers of people who like and love her work are the majority, and that we should quit our moaning and get on with our lives. We understand now that, like governments, we get the artists we deserve.
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