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| home | news lJust don't call me an Aboriginal artist - Tracey Moffatt's roots play a big part in her spellbinding new work.By Sebastian Smee
Moffatt has work hanging in Tate Modern, at New York's Museum of Modern Art, and now in three concurrent shows in the UK. Her latest series of photographs, "Invocations", is showing at Victoria Miro. A selection of old and new Moffatt films and videos will be shown to dramatic effect at the Wapping Project, in the wonderfully converted hydraulic power plant. And a whole survey of her work can be seen at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh. Both Moffatt's personality and her work attest to a ruthless capacity for self-invention the kind that would seem to erase origins. But, of course, Moffatt's beginnings help explain a great deal about her. Her Aboriginal mother adopted her out to a white, working-class family in Brisbane. "My real mum lived in town and would come and visit, occasionally," she says. "But she wasn't one for raising kids." Moffatt never found out the identity of her father, despite several attempts. She has described both her mothers, however, as strong role models who grounded her in both Aboriginal and white culture. Her foster family had "lots of kids of their own, some of whom had kids our age ... I was the eldest girl. As a teenager, I never got into trouble because I was bloody working! Every Friday and Saturday night, from age 13 through to 17, I was looking after kids. I'd make them go to bed early, so I [could] stay up late at night and watch lots of great films. And read books. Look for dirty books, mainly." Moffatt's films and photographs have always been political but in ways which tend to complicate simple readings. She says she stumbled into politics and feminism in particular by mistake: "I picked up The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer because I really liked the cover, and it looked a bit rude." But Moffatt is quite adamant about having her own stories to tell; she doesn't want to be co-opted as the spokeswoman for some pre-ordained political agenda. In 1992, in a published exchange of letters with a curator, Moffatt wrote forcefully about her desire not to be "ghettoised' as an Aboriginal artist. "I only said that because it was always the left-wing social-worker element and the anthropologists who wrote about my work. It was never looked at as art. I was written about as a social commentator. My inventiveness and my playing with form were ignored, so I had to say radical things like that in order to be written about as an artist. You would mention the words 'imagination', 'fantasy', 'poetry' and 'beauty' to these people and their eyes would close over." In fact, there's nothing Moffatt's images describe that doesn't somehow slip towards the unknowable. "Invocations" is a febrile set of fantasy images. They were created using elaborate sets in a New York studio, then spending months manipulating the photographs to achieve "painterly" effects right down to "cracks" on the surface. There's something funny and likeably trashy about the results. Several show a little girl with hair ribbons wandering into a menacing forest of trees with bogey-man faces. Others show a "fallen" woman in a torn, satin nightie standing against a telegraph pole in a desert, beckoning to blackbirds flying overhead. In others there are floating witches and baying dogs,close-ups of naked bodies in various states of abandon. Moffatt has always loved painting ("I'd really like to paint," she says. "Nothing hypnotises more than painting."). But for all the fun to be had from the effects she creates, she can also seem to be striving too hard for novelty. Yet Moffatt's films especially the rivettingly strange Night Sky shouldn't be or couldn't forgotten. Tracey Moffatt: Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh 2001 Source: The Independent related links :
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its one year on from the Australian Governments controversial intervention into NT Indigenous communities
action Roll back, listen to Indigenous community voices speaking about the intervention |
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16 April 2001 - Meet Tracey Moffatt and you sense it straight away: beneath the chatty, congenial veneer, a manic gleam, a taste for mayhem. Her photographs, which have made her easily the best-known Australian artist in the world today, draw on a seemingly limitless array of sources, from Life magazine photographs to Goya, from Disney to erotic pulp fiction and from Mad Max to Tiepolo. All these she mixes and layers, DJ-fashion, underpinning it all with her own jumpy blend of politics, humour and eroticism.
