We publish quality short stories, poetry, extracts from forthcoming novels, and articles and essays on topics of social, environmental and cultural significance.ISSUE NO. 112
AUTUMN 2008
REVIEWS
NON-FICTIONPat Brassington - This is not a Photograph - Quintus Publishing, 2006
Like Brassington’s photographs, this is an ambiguous book. Is it a book of reproductions of Brassington’s work, supplemented by an essay about Brassington by Anne Marsh? Or is it a book made by Anne Marsh who chose the photographs and wrote the essay? If the latter, why does Marsh’s name not appear on the book’s cover or spine? The spine and cover offers only one name: Pat Brassington, and the back cover a place name: Tasmania. ‘Pat Brassington is Tasmanian’ we can surmise, or ‘Tasmania is proud of her’ perhaps. The preliminary pages of the book highlight the authorship of Anne Marsh, on both the title page, ‘Pat Brassington’, and on a subsequent subtitle page, ‘This is not a Photograph’. The front endpapers talk about ‘the author’ without naming her and the back endpapers give a biographical note and photograph of Brassington followed by a shorter note about Marsh sans photo. It seems the ambiguous and unresolved quality of Brassington’s remarkable photographs has infected the author/s and book designer too. They are not sure what kind of a book this is or even perhaps whose book this is.
As a reader I’m not sure either. The structure seems straightforward enough to answer the authorship questions: an essay by Marsh is followed by a number of sumptuous images of Brassington’s work placed in a chronological order (presumably to deliver a narrative about her artistic development over time) but I don’t know who chose or curated these images. Was it Brassington or Marsh, or some third, unnamed party? There is an odd detachment, again so evident in the images in themselves, that pervades this book as an object. Why won’t the author stand up and say who she is and what she’s responsible for? Why don’t we know why these particular photographs are the ones we are seeing, who decided this for us and why? If Marsh chose the images for the book, why doesn’t she give page references to help us find the images she discusses in the essay? Why doesn’t the essay say what it has to do with this particular book? What is Brassington’s role in the book despite being the only name on the cover and the first named ‘author’ in the endpapers? As space for this review is limited, I will leave these questions and focus my response on the photos – as that is what I think this book is ‘about’.
Brassington’s images, as I have already suggested, are similarly evasive. But where the book’s lack of candour about its own provenance is disappointing, the unresolved nature of Brassington’s images is at once exhilarating, unsettling and intriguing. They conjure unnameable feelings and strange stirrings: ‘fragments of memory’ (as Brassington herself names some of the work), disturbing dream imagery, dis- and re-membered bodies, and strange erotic scenarios all claustrophobic and familial – both adult and childlike at once.
Many don’t look like photographs at all but subtle, exquisite, finely wrought drawings. Brassington is clearly a skilled and enthusiastic mistress of digital imaging techniques. The images combine elements of the real and the unreal, twisting a limb this way or that, removing a breast, some lips, putting body parts together that don’t normally meet. They play with your eyes and your expectations. In ‘Twins’ (p 49) two pairs of thin but cellulite-afflicted legs hang below a skirt. We are voyeurs looking up at these legs from almost ground level and this is where our eyes are meant to go: the light coming from inside the skirt leads our eyes to the top of the picture frame just short of where we would expect to find a woman’s ‘private’ parts. There is a looseness to the limbs that, combined with the pinkish tones of the billowing skirt, suggest the owners of the legs are dancing close together. The image is whimsical and feminine but something is awry. The four legs rise up under a single skirt and we realise this is too intimate, claustrophobic, sick – even for the ‘twins’ of the title – the women should have separate bodies, they shouldn’t be joined ‘at the hip’ as the image suggests. We turn our eyes away but then turn them back, unable to stop looking at the lollipopcoloured
freak show with its soft colours and fine lines.
Or are the two sets of legs two aspects of the one woman? While the bumpy cellulite is what one first notices as one’s eyes compulsively travel the normally forbidden path under the hemline a second glance reveals that one set of legs are smooth and less wasted. Are the twins of the title an older and younger version of the woman who owns the skirt, yoked together as our older and younger selves inevitably are: the older woman’s cellulite legs waiting to sully the young woman’s perfection; the younger woman trapped inside the older long after her looks and youthful energy have fled? Is the image an image of the older woman’s memory and desire, or the younger woman’s burden, the fate that inevitably awaits her highly valued youth and beauty; the very reason we want to look up her skirt?
Perhaps Brassington is directing her rebuke at us, the voyeurs so willing to look where we should not. Perhaps the bizarre image is simply our due – the artist’s way of saying: ‘If you must look up her skirt, I’ll fix you!’ The strength of this book is these remarkable images, so ambiguous, unresolved, suggestive and elusive. Each one takes elements of the familiar and makes them strange; from the appealing but disturbingly blind child-fish on the cover to the dismembered bodies that fill its pages. The images are worth spending time over even though they won’t let you settle on any one reading and they won’t make it easy for you. In her essay Anne Marsh refers to Brassington’s insistence that she has a sense of humour, that her images are not simply ‘dark’ (p 25). This humour is insistent and intellectual, it is her detachment from manipulating our responses – the artist’s refusal to resolve the images (p 29). Brassington poses riddles without offering answers. She wants us to think or see for ourselves but I don’t think she minds what it is that we see or feel as we look at these strangely domestic and intimate scenes, what fears, desires or memories they conjure.
CHRIS DEW is a photographer, writer and researcher. Prior to her recent move to Brisbane, she was a Senior Lecturer in the History Program at La Trobe University and an ARC Research Associate working on a multimedia history project with residents of Melbourne’s Kew Cottages. Her book, Uncommissioned Art: An A-Z of Australian Graffiti, was published by Melbourne University Press in 2007.
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