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| home | news lSomething more - after record yearBy Geoffrey Maslen 4 February 2002 - When Tracey Moffatt, the internationally renowned Australian artist and film-maker, held her first solo exhibition in Sydney in 1989, a set of photographs from her now famous Something More series sold for $2500. On Wednesday, the same set will be offered at a Christie's sale in London where it is expected to fetch up to $250,000. The images for auction at Christie's are six large colour prints and three black-and-white photographs. They tell the story of a young woman's ill-fated journey to seek success - "something more" - in a big city and are, says Gael Newton, senior curator of photography at the National Gallery of Australia, more like photographs of a local theatre company's performance of some play about desperate lives in the hinterland. "The cinematic quality arises from the frequent inclusion of blur and frozen motion as well as rather claustrophobic low angles and close-ups," Newton says. "These strategies impart a voyeuristic intimacy with the heroine who is only shown from the neck down after the initial frame." The head of contemporary art for Christie's in Sydney, Annette Larkin, says the influence of cinema on the images reflects Moffatt's career as an experimental film-maker before she became an artist. "They also point to her wider interest in popular culture, suggesting her desire to draw on the collective memory embodied in traditional stories as well as in film." That her work has become highly collectable was shown last July at a Phillips auction in Sydney when Melbourne dealer Joan McClelland bid a record $74,000 on behalf of businessman James Darling for an artist's proof of the first image from Something More. Four months later, that Australian record was smashed when Gold Coast dealer Win Schubert paid almost $120,000 for the same image (in much larger format) at a Deutscher-Menzies sale in Melbourne. The price exceeded the upper estimate by $40,000 and established a new benchmark for a saleroom photograph. The artist's proof that sold at Phillips was about two-thirds the size of the one at Deutscher-Menzies which was from the original edition of 30. In New York early last year, Sotheby's sold a similar picture for $US38,000 or roughly the same price paid by McClelland. Fiction and reality intermingle in the dynamic Something More series. In the first - and best-known - image, the artist herself poses as the central figure in front of an overtly staged, surreal landscape. She is flanked by a cast of characters all focused on her as she steps forward. On the right a frowzy blonde poses provocatively with her knee gesturing toward Moffatt's character. Behind her, inside the shack, an Aboriginal man (her father?) smirks with a bottle of beer to his lips. On the left two young white boys are blurred as they appear to slow-clap and jeer at Moffatt's dreams, while a young Chinese man springs from behind the shed, eyes fixed on the scene ahead. Subsequent images reveal her to be abused, abased, thwarted and finally lying dead in stockings and lamé dress on the road to the big city. "The image is volatile, surging with the energy of a moment captured out of an elaborate drama," writes Mitra Abbaspour, the assistant curator of exhibitions at the University of California's Museum of Photography, in a catalogue for an exhibition of Moffatt's work. "As one moves through the images in this series the perspectives shift. The images become more closely cropped and the angles slant as the interaction between characters becomes increasingly ambiguous," she says. Moffatt, who was adopted by a white family, is influenced in her work by her experience of growing up female and Aboriginal in a predominantly white, working-class suburb of Brisbane. Abbaspour argues that her images "deconstruct the socially accepted divisions of gender, sexuality, and racial identity, drawing inspiration from the popular films and television series she grew up with in the 1960s and '70s". Now living in New York, Moffatt has said she prefers to think of herself as a "director of photo-narratives" and that she often approaches her work as a painter would a tableau. In her photographs and films, highly choreographed sound, lighting, colour and composition form the structure of a complex and multi-layered narrative. In some cases, as in Something More, she casts herself as the protagonist, blurring the line between fiction and autobiography. Although Moffatt will get nothing if her work at Christie's does sell, her Sydney dealer, Roslyn Oxley, says she has benefited from the high prices being fetched at auction. Oxley says her pictures are in great demand so she can charge from $1500 for a single photograph to $70,000 for a series. A show called Fourth at the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery last year was a sellout and the dealer expects the same will happen when she holds a new exhibition there later this year. "The series Something More has really taken off," Oxley says. "We have one set left but won't sell it as it belongs to Tracey." Source: Sydney Morning Herald related links :
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