Art Talk with Anne O'Hehir

Hi. I'm sitting at home, sitting on the unceded lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people. I would like to play my respects to their elders, past, present and emerging.

My name is Annie O'Hehir, and I'm one of the curators of photography at the National Gallery of Australia. It's my great pleasure to be having a wee chat, today, about three works by Robyn Stacey, that are included in part two of Know My Name. At the moment they are waiting patiently on the wall, covered in black parisilk, waiting for people to come back in and look at them again. Well, who knows what they're doing while our backs are turned? You can never trust a photo.

They're works that were given to us, in 2018, by the artist. And I'd like, just, to take this opportunity to thank Robyn for her generosity. And I'd also like to acknowledge my good friend and colleague, Shaune Lakin, here, who did a lot of the work to bring the works into the collection. Hurrah for Shaune!

I'm a woman in my fifties. This is what I look like. And I'm wearing ... and this is true ... the same brand of cardigan that I've worn for the last seven weeks of lockdown. I have short brown hair that could do with a wash.

So, let's crack on to the works. What have we got? Three relatively large, colour photos, each around 80 to 60 centimeters each, and all from 1985. Two show women in extreme situations; one sprawled across the floor in a fantastic blonde wig; the other shown with her hands wrapped around naked male legs, looking away, stony faced. This one is called The Way of All Flesh.

The high drama that accompanies lockdown life ... The last is of a guy, locked in behind bars, with his head collapsed in his hands in despair, called Nowhere to Go. Well, seven weeks into lockdown in Canberra, and we've got off lightly, and it's a feeling we probably can all relate to.

They are printed in Cibachrome, also known as silver dye bleached prints, or dye destruction positive-to-positive processes. Process is always so boring. So it's essentially a print made from a colour transparency. The main thing to know about it, I guess, is, that it's a process that has a very particular look, often with a very glass-like surface, beautiful saturated colour, and a luscious, over the top quality. It has been around since the early 60s; 63, I think, they patented it, or whatever you do. But it seems, somehow, to be made for the extravagant, hedonistic, big shoulder-padded 1980s, and it knits so well with the histrionic imagery of the work. Or to quote Stacey, "The super-glossed finish suited the bad or seedy nature of the characters and the scenarios."

If the images, themselves, haven't already given away that they're riffing off of pulp fiction and B-grade Hollywood film, most notably the film noire genre, then the title of the series, Kiss kiss bang bang, that Nowhere to Go, and The Way of All Flesh were included in, gives the game away. I love that title, Kiss kiss bang bang, it makes me think of, what's her name? Nancy Sinatra.

Stacey lights the images like she's on a film noir set, employing low key lighting and hard lights that throw dramatic shadow. Stacey had read pulp fiction ... It seems strange, but it's apparently true ... and loved the almost surreal style of writing. She was intrigued by the female protagonists, tough clever desperate women, cast as both treacherous femme fatales, leading their men into all sorts of trouble and scrapes. It makes you think of that moment in Double Indemnity, when you see that little anklet, worn by Barbara Stanwyck, and you think, "Oh god, here's trouble!" And interested, also, in their complexity and ambiguity, for they were also seen as victims.

Okay, so, we're talking about images that are appropriating forms of representation found in other art forms, in order to decode them. We're into postmodern territory; a scary place indeed. There is no doubt that postmodern photography represents a great moment in Australian visual culture. If you're not sure it's postmodern or not, the first names of the artists will give it away: Anne, Barbara, Helen, Susan, Deborah, Julie, and of course Robyn. As a general rule, photographers who are now referring to themselves as "photo media artists," because I guess they were, so photo media artists, were retreating to the studio and making images, rather than shooting them.

Once you'd read your French theory, or, at least, listened to someone who had, there was no way back into going out naively onto the street and shooting stuff. There was no truth. Images, as found everywhere in art, from high to low, served to preserve and maintain the status quo and dominance of late capitalist culture and power structures. Artists like Robyn, sought to make this transparent rather than hidden.

Postmodernism, or POMO as we like to refer to it, sounds like it's going to be a bit dry; all that French theory and earnest desire to critique dominant power structures. And yet, because the artists often used the language of the thing they were critiquing to critique it, a language of desire and seduction, and in the case of pulp fiction and film noir, of camp and irony, and overblown and overawed emotions, and sensational storylines, it is far from dull and academic.

Stacey had planned to be an art historian until she came to her senses, and done her undergrad degree in Fine Arts. During which time, she'd become interested in the development of photography as a democratic medium, and the role that it played in society as a mass-communication tool. As the 80s rolled around, Stacey was well placed to be casting, and playing an important role in the story of Australian photo and its response to the postmodernist movement.

When you look closer at these images, or maybe you don't have to look that close, you realise something a bit strange is going on in them. The images, in fact, contained within these pristine, almost surface-less prints, are hand-coloured; something that's usually associated with surface texture and a highly individual response. Stacey first encountered the process at a workshop run in 1979, by the prominent feminist photographer, Micky Allan, in the Tin Sheds Gallery in Sydney. It was, to Robyn, as to many other artists, a revelation; something that didn't make it into the standard texts about the history of the medium.

Images shot in black-and-white would then be coloured in a variety of medium: pencil, gouache, watercolour, oil. Stacey's hand-colouring reflected, both her highly experimental approach to making art, and her desire to post-analyse the mechanically produced and emotionally austere photograph. As she later noted, hand-colouring photographs seemed a good way to visually reinforce the personal and intimate quality of the prints, as well as being sympathetic to the subject matter. Hand-colouring, also, was traditionally something that was done by woman. Throughout the '80s, Stacey was one of a number of high profile, feminist artists, who hand-coloured photographs, at least, in part, because of this history, and the way that its skills and techniques have been passed down through matriarchal lines.

Stacey's significant peers included Micky Allan, Janina Green, Ruth Madison, Fiona Hall and Julie Rrap.

The extraordinary run of hand-coloured originals, and you see one here, were kept by Stacey but not exhibited at the time, or intended to be exhibited at all. A couple of years, though, Stacey agreed to make the original hand-coloured prints available to the National Gallery, and we are now really lucky to have a number of them in the collection. The combo of pulp fiction, film noire, hand-colouring and Cibachrome printing, found here, was inspired and cracking.

These works play an important role in telling the story of Australian photo, as it really hits tracks in the 1980s. Stacey went on from, let's face it, this really extraordinary beginning in the 1980s, to build a career full of, in a sense, of unexpected turns, making big, surreal, digitally manipulated images. And then into a 12-year-long engagement, through analogue; that is, shooting pretty straight with a camera; working with historic collections of plants and objects, exploring the relationship between science, nature, mythology, colonialism, culture identity and photography. And from that, in around 2013, to a long exploration of what she calls, "the way that vision creates our sense of self, through the use of the camera obscura".

These works, on show, at the moment, at the National Gallery, seem to me to embody the notion that sometimes artists are able to find the perfect process to convey what they want to say; a way of making or realizing the work, so that you think there is no other way that these works could have been made. This seems particularly true of Stacey's career as a whole, as she is following her passion, being led by curiosity and inquiry. Stacey has spoken about being led by the work, if you'll let it.

And I'll leave the last few words to her. "Once you know what you want to express, the language that you want to say it in, seems to follow naturally."