A Small Measure Of Menace
The Age
Wednesday May 7, 2008
DAN O'DAY
Still II. Catherine Asquith Gallery, 130 Flinders Street, until May 10 PAUL BATT Service Station Portraits 2006-08. Shifted, 15 Albert Street, Richmond, until May 17 THE titles of Dan O'Day's photographs match the pictures: they are anecdotal. O'Day's staged images at Catherine Asquith Gallery are ingeniously composed and lit; but the content tends to be literal and sentimental, with names such as Shhh or What now, Watch it and I can see you too. However, sometimes both image and title rise to the poetic, as with Don't move.In this image, a crouching woman in a shift at the edge of the woods looks towards us, as if caught by the headlights of a car. The words "don't move" belong with photography, where the model is asked to hold his or her position. But the command also has threatening connotations, as of a raid or hold-up, where the speaker has the power of firearms. Pretty and vulnerable, the model acts out both roles in this haunting photograph.The somewhat predatory quality of photography must also have been on Paul Batt's mind in creating his Service Station Portraits. His works at Shifted were conceived with a clandestine method, where the artist - like a sniper - positioned himself in a flat above a petrol station, cloaking his dark form with surrounding light, so that he remained invisible to the customers at the bowser.Using a telephoto lens and high-speed film, Batt has all the privileges of a prowler with a plan. His vantage point gives him a beautiful angle on the guys who stand perfectly still while holding the nozzle (below shot) to their tank, absorbed, caught in momentous inwardness. Pausing in their work-a-day routine, they look heroic, just like movie stars, with formidable bearing and moody concentration. Against the "noir" backdrop, they assume great presence, as if wrestling with thoughts and time. There's no sense of the patrons appearing like a passive target; rather, they have the serious air of agents assessing their chances for a brave action.Life imitates art, and the people least likely to be caught acting nevertheless follow the templates of cinematic drama. Unlike O'Day, Batt shoots his heroes unawares. They aren't performing for the camera but nevertheless take on the valiant frowns and slightly open mouth that you know from all those heavy-breathing films with the scary minor chords on the soundtrack.But the menace is meaningful. Batt's unwitting customers are engaged in the least ennobling action imaginable: filling up the car with petrol. Consuming this fuel means draining the planet of its remaining fossil reserves, draining the family funds, draining your time, as the gauge ticks over with ecological damage. The nervous hand on the hose pumps up the bill and pumps up the atmosphere with greenhouse emissions. Like a hunter in pursuit of mighty carnivores, Batt has shot and captured the most threatening species in the ecology of our age. It's the guys at the petrol station who think anxiously of their time, their family's interest, their next automotive holiday, their work and their ambitions. They're so much of an epoch: the Age of Unsustainability.Batt's pictures transform the idea of portraiture and go beyond the telephoto tradition of artists such as Beat Streuli or the scopophilia around the pouting teens of Bill Henson. Batt's photography has a haunting quality that matches the idea. It is grandiose, connecting the everyday realities with a cosmic burden, almost reaching beyond the photography to a higher level of moral consciousness.While at Shifted, check out the self-portraits of Michael Brennan, Me (at the). The artist paints himself in front of great museums in Tokyo, leaving the institutions sketchy and blank, as if he has no access or means to get inside. Like Batt's anti-heroes at the bowser, Brennan emerges as somehow compromised by the circumstance, as if his personality is perforated by the discomfort of passivity. This is the portraiture of disempowerment, which is arresting and lingers unsettlingly in the mind.robert.nelson@artdes.monash.edu.au
© 2008 The Age
