ALI McCANN - 'Polytechnic'
Tristian Koenig: 15th March – 7th April 2018
A show of nineteen digital prints, available in
two sizes, (70 X 46 cm and 46 X 30.5 cm, editions of five), announced the
artist’s move into digital graphics. Trained as a photographer at the VCA
(1998) and completing a masters there in 2017, she was previously noted for brooding
portraits in extreme chiaroscuro, elsewhere dark, ambiguous surfaces and at
other times video and installations pursuing these interests. To these one can
also add her participation in the all-female pop group, Beaches. The title for
the Koenig show, Polytechnic, flags
this versatility while funnelling her interest in found materials into
surprisingly formal tableau. Initially the pictures read as sober assemblies, a
kind of studio exercise in composition but the game is really in their identity
as sheets of coloured and folded paper, wooden blocks of a certain scale and
shadows of an uncertain angle and diffusion.
Figure #9 (2018) Digital Type-C print
The works are notably restrained, concerned with the placement of an
obvious volume within an ambiguous or problematic plane, and although
suggesting basic Photoshop compositing, are actually ingenious tableaux
involving the placement of prints of previous versions of the composition or
similar as a base or support. Despite the difference in technique, the results
are surprisingly similar. In Figure #9
for example, shadow does not match up with the wooden block, nor is focus or
depth-of-field consistent across the supporting plane. Realism or even a
convincing fantasy is plainly not the goal. The work teases at a consistency or
coherence to a three dimensional rendering, that might recall Surrealism or
perhaps its metaphysical precursors in the work of Giorgio De Chirico or Carlo
Carra, but on terms that are now entirely the property of the digital age, with
the added ease of photographic printing. The aim is not so much a philosophical
conundrum or a disturbing departure from pictorial norms, as a measured
attenuation of pictorial properties for a range of related objects. The work is
a deconstruction rather than a Modernist reconstruction, a quiet but rigorous
catalogue of depth, proportion and shape identities.
Figure #1 (2016) Digital Type-C print
In Figure #1 the foreground edge to what at first glance would appear a
brown shadow is given a distinct thickness and roughed edge, as cut paper, with
a delicate drop shadow, all cancelling any plausible function as shadow to the
white frame, which may have a window or mirror mounted on the left side. Yet
how realistic are we to take any of the arrangement? On what level does
pictorial consistency need to operate? We are not dealing with a familiar
object (even though a plausibly concrete one) or a situation of any greater
consequence. The folds to the top of the white frame perhaps declare its
identity as a repurposed photograph, but so much argues with a convincing
illusion, at best one appeals to unusual properties or circumstances for such a
frame. We are in a realm every bit as hypothetical as a De Chirico but shorn of
nagging clues to time and place the concern narrows to identity of object as
volume or plane, on a generally small or intimate scale, with qualities of
light as colour and surface played against focus. It is these delicate matters of consistency
that provide the artist with a range of formal elements with which to construct
her modest but deceptively complex tableaux.
More abstract compositing has generally taken the route of more
elaborate fictions or illusions, combining and merging improbable, at times
paradoxical objects. McCann’s work stands in stark contrast to such practice. Perhaps
the most telling comparison would be with Thomas Ruff’s imposing Photograms series of 2012-14, constructed
in a 3-D modelling programme as a massive virtual darkroom with an array of
geometric objects in degrees of transparency and overlap with one another as
well as nominal light sources.
Files took up to a year to construct and ran to a staggering sixteen terabytes
for a single image. Little wonder the artist resorted to a super-computer for
rendering. McCann’s project, needless to say, occupies the other end of the technological
spectrum, but nevertheless shares an underlying concern with three-dimensional
rendering pursued as an end-in-itself or an abstraction.
Figure #5 (2018) Digital Type-C print
We think of pictorial abstraction as declaring a naked
two-dimensionality, establishing a basis for pictures against rival schemes for
notation and pattern or geometry. But since two-dimensionality is really of
most interest for pictures where it supports the rendering of three-dimensional
objects, abstraction might equally be pursued through the many conventions that
support such objects and their relations in standard practice.
Under this more
conventionalised view, photography naturally assumes prominence and the means of
isolating or dismantling its conventions take on greater precision with the
advent of digital technology. Compositing allows far greater manipulation than
mere photomontage for example. 3-D modelling programmes enable still greater
intervention - as Ruff amply demonstrates - in matters of surface, lighting, focus,
scale and even motion. What Polytechnic
lacks in spectacle or pyrotechnics in comparison with a Ruff, it makes up for
in subtlety and serenity. Abstraction on these terms is less a battle of
‘flatness’ or a misplaced sense of opticality than one of coherence or
continuity with photographic practice.
Figure #13 (2018) Digital Type-C print
In a work such as Figure #13 McCall can allude to an earlier mode of abstraction, to a priority to the painterly, but in general Polytechnic shuns this kind of Post Modern reflexivity in favour of more hermetic arrangements. At most, upright elements might vaguely denote a figure claiming ‘its own space’. A more expressive or personal meaning may then rest upon the attention given to the precarious foundations for such a stance, a nagging insecurity
Figure #14 (2018) Digital Type-C print
A more evident feature is the subdued palette with its warm light blues,
oranges through to golds, that steers objects and planes clear of any familiar
context and reinforces the degree of abstraction. Much of the sense of
refinement and contemplation rests with choice of palette.
Figure #11 (2018) Digital Type-C print
As
yet little criticism addresses these issues, in the work of McCann or others.
Part of the reason for this is because of the diffuse nature of digital
options, the seamless integration of photography with video, graphics
(including text) sound or music, 3-D modelling and from there to automated
fabrication, conceivably to installation and sculpture. Artists of McCann’s
generation and inclination understandably explore the full breadth of these
options and often give equal weight to each so that it is difficult to know how
far an issue like pictorial abstraction will be explored before issues of, say,
sound or motion prompt it in entirely new directions. This is part of the great
challenge for art in the digital age. And while her efforts so far are modest,
their implications decidedly are not. Developments within the digital sphere in
turn suggest options for painting, sculpture and printing and it is this
awkward and unpredictable exchange between traditional issues and contemporary
means that properly drive art history, rather than some reductive insulation of
categories. We do well to scrutinise these as yet marginal developments in
gauging the art of our times.
