Gordonton Pony Club, Gordonton, 28.06.2002, 7.55

Hamilton East Pony Club, Hamilton, 22.03.2002, 6.57

Hamilton East Pony Club, Hamilton, 15.03.2002, 6.55

Hamilton Gardens Pony Club, Hamilton, 30.10.2002, 6.33

Rotongaro Branch Pony Club, Huntly, 22.07.2002, 6.01

Statehighway #1, Ngaruawahia, 2.10.2002, 6.15

Statehighway #1, Ngaruawahia, 12.10.2002, 6.20

Waikato Equestrian Club, Hamilton, 30.10.2002, 6.33

Wooden
2002

'Empty Fragments of a Missing Subject'

Pony clubs. Dreary black and white photographs of pony clubs. Awkward, low-perspective photographs with nothing to break the monotony except a few fallen jumps. Calling them 'Wooden' seems about right.

There are all sorts of stereotypes about pony clubs. They have a middle-class suburban weirdness about them. But instead of being sites where things happen, the spaces in Fiona Amundsen's Wooden are empty and silent. This is because her work isn't about the pony clubs or the people that use them. It's more about the practice of photography, and about a theory of representation.

Amundsen has a typological rather than a narrative approach. Her last five series have all been 'typologies', recording subjects such as tenement housing (Dwelling), public parks (Pedestrian), motorways (Modern), speedways (Time Trials) and now pony clubs. Despite her attempt to avoid narrative, all five are coherent in that all of their subjects are designed for human use. They're dependent on activity, and a lot of it, to gain their functionality. But it's not only that they need people, as such. All of them need a certain type of people, so that each series has a kind of malaise brought about through the partial presence of signifiers of class.¹ As a result, it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that Amundsen's work is a kind of social documentary. But it's not.

The major thing that challenges this reading is that there aren't any people in Amundsen's photographs. She obsessively removes all of them. But straight away this sets up a tension because, given the purpose of those spaces, there's always a trace of human presence, a sense of someone having been there. And the strangest thing about the way she strips people from sites so dependent on occupation is that she has a degree in anthropology.

The photograph has always had a special role within anthropology, giving it much of its 'evidence' because of the presumption of its veracity, the fact that the thing had to have been in front of the lens at some point for it to be recorded. In recent times, however, anthropological and related documentary modes of photography have been criticised for the way they exoticise their subjects. Amundsen is well aware of all of this, so her removal of people could be seen as a critique of 'documentary'. While this is an underlying theoretical concern, her depopulation is not about the politics of the camera. Instead, the emptiness of her images has an eerie effect, creating an agoraphobic stillness, a creepy 'already been' consistent with contemporary art photography's interest in the gothic and cinematic.

The use of photography as a critical strategy is a well-established feature of feminist art practice. At the heart of it is an exploration of 'the politics of representation', an appropriation of the male gaze that unsettles scopophilic desire by presenting the female subject as active rather than passive. However, contemporary women artists are challenging this essentialist construction. Whereas once the cause was clear and earnestly pursued, a shift has occurred that has resulted in the corrupted politics of new feminist photography. Artists like Anna Gaskell and Justine Kurland make work about young women, laced with an implicit sexual content. It's a far cry from the performance and photographic work of the seventies and eighties, much of which confronted male desire with an active and aggressive female presence. By contrast, this younger generation (of which Yvonne Todd could be considered a part) seems to fly in the face of much of the feminist ground gained by earlier artists.²

The current focus on young, often pre-adolescent girls as possibly sexual objects seems to not only feed directly into male desire, but also the worst kind, paedophilia. As a result, the extent to which their work is concerned with the 'return of the gaze' is unclear, because the girls in the photographs are passive-aggressive, occupying an awkward space between agency and exploitation. However, like the representation of an active female subjectivity, this passive-aggressive imagery 'unsettles', makes viewers uncomfortable. These artists still admonish, only they do it by feeding perversion and male fantasy rather than confronting it with directive politics. To further complicate established feminist politics they embrace contemporary culture's emphasis on seduction by printing their images with fashion-shoot lushness. The result is a kind of post-Jeff Wall feminist tableau for Alice or Lolita-like fantasies, middle-class gothic narratives which focus on a passive-aggressive feminine subject that has its roots in suburban, affluent, adolescent whiteness.

Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida is an important moment in the development of a theory of photography. In it, he reflects on his own 'experiences' of photographs and weaves them together to examine the specific aspects of photography's relationship between the sign and the referent. For him, the uniqueness of this relationship, as opposed to painting or literature, is that the photographic referent is 'not the optionally real thing to which an image or a sign refers but the necessarily real thing which has been before the lens, without which there would be no photograph.'³ So unlike other representational mediums, the 'thing' had to have been there. As a result, every photograph has an 'already been', meaning that the photographic subject is neither present nor absent, or maybe more to the point, that it is both.

Perhaps the most crucial idea to come from Camera Lucida, and one intimately connected to issues of presence and absence, is the relationship between punctum and studium. For Barthes, the distinction is crucial to the experience of photography. The studium is the more common response we have to photographs, that acceptance of its banality, its recording of culturally understood events and images. By contrast, the punctum is the thing that, in Barthes view, gives photography its 'peculiar subjectivity'. It is a single moment in a photograph, a single tiny feature in an image that evokes a powerful response, a disturbance. Given that the punctum is driven by the individual viewer's relationship to that image, it cannot be universal. As a result, by giving us these two 'tools' for looking, Barthes breaks down positivist assumptions about photography's objectivity, not by analysing the process of its production, but by focusing on its effects, on its intimacy with individuals and its 'desire effects'. Whereas discussions of photography so often focus on its 'politics', Camera Lucida and the punctum give us a 'theory of photography', a way to deal with its compulsions, opening the door for an understanding of our desire or mourning for the photographic medium and/or its subject. Content, therefore, gives way to form, and 'politics' give way to 'theory'.

One of the more 'epic' undertakings of modern photography is Bernd and Hilla Becher's project documenting industrial architecture. Since the fifties, the pair has been recording buildings like water towers, blast furnaces and grain elevators. Their images carry a sense of modernism's failure, a nostalgic grandeur that comes from the 'sculptural monumentality' of cold, functional buildings.⁴ Until recently, their project has been spoken about as 'conceptual art' rather than art photography, largely because of their typological approach, their attempt to document specific 'types' of buildings with an obsessive attention to detail. However, recent discussions have begun to focus on the nature of their 'photography'. Thierry de Duve explains the Bechers' approach:

The photos are taken with a technical camera, early in the morning, on overcast days, so as to eliminate shadow and distribute light evenly. The subject is centred and frontally framed, its parallel lines set on a plane as close to an architectural elevation as possible. No human beings and no clouds or birds in the sky interfere with the starkness. Not a mood is conveyed in the image, not the slightest touch of fantasy disturbs its ascetic neutrality.⁵

So they subject their photographs to rigorous control. Everything about the image and its presentation is predetermined; nothing is left to chance. This attempt at total neutrality, at no seduction, is crucial, and it's only through the repetition of these elements that we recognize the function of their work. Contrary to the emphasis on narrative in much contemporary photography, their typological practice focuses on the relationship between the sign and the referent, the role of the camera and the photographer who operates it. But in this there is a contradiction because the consistency of this presumed 'objectivity' can only be produced through obsessive levels of control, and obsession is ultimately a subjective reaction. Because of the images' lack of seduction, it's easy to see why they've been bracketed with the anti-aesthetic projects of conceptual art. But it is also clear that the scale of their project and its attention to detail destabilise simplistic readings of the work as 'documentation'. Consequently, there is a generation of photographers working at the forefront of contemporary practice today who have been directly influenced by the typologies of the Bechers, such as Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth, who similarly explore the boundaries between documentary and art modes.

Fiona Amundsen likes the Bechers. She makes no secret of the impact their work has had on her own. In fact, the Thierry de Duve quote in the last section could almost be directly transferred to Wooden. There's the use of the technical camera, the early morning, the overcast skies, the elimination of shadow and the even distribution of light. But these similarities belie that fact that her approach is more mimicry than imitation. It's not a straight-faced copy of the original influence. Instead, Wooden is a strategic failure, a project that points out its own excesses and knowingly winks at the context it inhabits, a context that includes conceptual practices, typology, anthropology, performance and landscape pictorialism.

One of the major ways that Wooden 'fails' is that the photographs don't really have a 'subject'. The series has a subject (pony clubs) but the images themselves don't really focus on anything. So whereas the Bechers present industrial architecture with a 'sculptural monumentality', Amundsen gives us virtually nothing. Just a few empty pony clubs. There's nothing monumental or monumentalizing about them. Fallen jumps, the odd horse, a house in the distance. But nothing major for us to cling to. Instead, they're a collection of empty, banal sites.

This issue of collection is significant. Like someone who collects teaspoons, or coins, Amundsen gathers images, records their information and presents them like any serious collector would - with precision and control. Generally, a big feature of any type of collection is the infrastructure that gets erected in order to protect and preserve those objects - things like albums, display cases, keeping things in their original boxes. Often this takes on an obsessive-compulsive aspect, a slightly unsettling fetishism that has less to do with the function of the objects themselves than with the psychological significance they hold for their owner. For Amundsen, the tools of her medium act as that infrastructure. Like the Bechers, the process of documenting her sites and the methodology employed is far more important than the content of the images. As a result, the medium of photography itself becomes the referent in her photographs, the subject for collection and display.

The composition of each photograph reveals her obsessive focus on the potential of the medium. First, there's the horizon line, which is identical in each image. Scanning along the prints, it creates a steady, consistent rhythm, and also gives the series a grid-like aspect (again, a feature borrowed from the Bechers). Its central placement creates a wide expanse of gloomy sky in every image, almost sublime in its presence, which hints at a reference to New Zealand's history of landscape pictorialism. But then, Amundsen strips any possibility of gentle contemplation by taking the photograph from an awkward midway space. You either want her to take half a dozen steps back or move her six steps forward. Cropping adds to this sense of unease. Often there's a barrel chopped in half, or a puddle, or a power line. So instead of offering us the quiet completion of pictorialism, the images walk a fine line between stability and instability. Of course, this is also the hallmark of obsessive-compulsive behaviour - a slight tilt in either direction and the sufferer is likely to flip out.

When producing the photographs, Amundsen strives for perfection with a meticulous attention to detail. Everything has to be as close to identical as possible. She takes all the photographs with the same camera, the same film, even the same batch of film. They're all printed on the same paper. In the past she's gone to the extent of printing them at the same time of day, as though there would be a difference between printing them at three in the afternoon or four. While for previous series she's used analogue processes, Wooden embraces the ultra-control offered by digital technology. However, this doesn't change the fact that in her office there is test sheet after test sheet, proof after proof (but don't think for a moment that these are scattered all over the place). The differences between them are miniscule. For anyone untrained in photographic printing, they all look virtually the same. But when I say this, she snaps that 'those ones are too blue', or 'those have got too much pink in them', or whatever.

So there's a tension between this obsessive 'performance' and her very real desire for the images to be 'perfect'. The moment this really plays out is when the images are put into a public arena. As a result, the way she displays Wooden, and for that matter all her other series, is crucial to understanding the work. The photographs are hung identically, with even spaces between each. Ideally, they stay on one wall. This single line of near-identical images lets us see their most important aspects - their monotony, their emptiness, their control. Viewing them individually doesn't do this. The titles are equally important in conveying their repetition. Each label gives us the series title, the name of the location, the date and the time the photograph was taken - completely banal details that make us think there must be something else, some other referent which would make the project 'make sense', make it 'say something'. But there's not. The titles make everything seem even more ordinary. The fastidious recording of those details again gives the photographs an obsessive aspect, particularly given that all of them are taken at almost identical times of their respective days. This 'information' refers back to conceptual art's focus on documentation and recording data and also suggests an objectivity which, if we listen to Barthes, simply isn't there. And what is perhaps most significant about all this control, all this attention to the way the work is produced and presented, is that none of it has anything, at all, to do with pony clubs. The content is simply a vehicle for form. Or perhaps more accurately, the form is the content. Forget the pony clubs. Wooden is about the way we make and display photographs, about photography's peculiar relationship between the sign and the referent, about an obsessive-compulsive performance that strategically explores and undermines accepted conventions of art and documentary practices.

A lot of contemporary photography is about 'staging'; about a theatricality and excess that sets up a range of 'unsettled' relationships - form/content, narrative/subject matter, original/copy, conceptual/documentary, viewer/work. Much of this goes back to Barthes on the one hand, with his exploration of photography's subjectivity, and 'the politics of the gaze' on the other. The blurring of the lines between these traditional dichotomies is to a large extent achieved by artists 'performing', self-consciously 'playing' their role in the photograph's production. For artists like Anna Gaskell and Justine Kurland, this performance and its consequent excess emerges through a gothic treatment of passive-aggressive adolescent female sexuality, an unsettling look at desire, both of and for the subject, which simultaneously nods its head to eighties feminism while challenging its fundamental tenets. Similarly, Amundsen unsettles photographic tropes by reconciling form and content, theory and politics. While drawing on conceptual art, anthropology and documentary, she laces her images with all the hallmarks of an obsessive-compulsive. Like the passive-aggressive, this behaviour makes the images, and our response to them, anxious. Wooden is awkward on every level. Its emptiness gives it an airless beauty and makes it unhomely, a series of agoraphobic sites that suggest a creepy 'already-been'. This tension between dreariness and instability drives the project. She copies the Bechers, and fails. She knowingly pushes the limits of her medium, and our toleration of it, by stripping every last vestige of seduction from her work, so that nothing is left except an excessive performance of anxiety, which we have to look hard to find. Don't be fooled by the title. Wooden isn't as boring as it first seems.

By Anthony Byrt, 2002

Notes

I first raised this issue of the relationship between 'malaise' and signifiers of class in Amundsen's work in a short essay published in Pavement Magazine, #55, October/November 2002, p.60.
For an excellent discussion of contemporary photography by women, see Nancy Pricenthal, 'Body Count: Recent Photographs of Women by Women, and some Precedents' in Art & Text, 72, February-April 2001, pp.65-71.
R. Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, (trans. Richard Howard), Vintage, London, 1981.
For a general discussion of the Bechers' practice, see T. de Duve, 'Bernd and Hilla Becher or Monumentary Photography' in Bernd and Hilla Becher: Basic Forms, Schirmer/Mosel, Munich, 1999.
Ibid., p.7.