JUNTA DE COORDINACIÓN REVOLUCIONARIA ORÍGENES Y PERSPECTIVAS
NACE LA JUNTA DE COORDINACIÓN REVOLUCIONARIA
Between 1979 to 1981 Hall completed a Master of Fine Arts in photography at the Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester Institute of Technology in New York and returned to New York in 1987 to take up an Australia Council residency at Green Street Studios. Hall would have aware of the various postmodern debates current amongst North American artists in the later 1970s and early 1980s. Among these artists were female photographers such as Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, Martha Rosler and the
performance artist, Laurie Anderson who were producing work that was being actively championed as exemplary of postmodernist and feminist practice. Yet her influences are varied and idiosyncratic. She encountered the work of the American surrealist
photographer, Frederick Sommer, whilst at Rochester. The literary influences that were so evident in the her major transitional works of the 1980s were decidedly European.11
Sommer’s photographic works and writings the focus of a revival of interest in the later 1970s and throughout the 1980s. He was regarded as a photographer’s photographer; his surrealist collage work did not conform to American formalist concerns. With the ferment of postmodernist and feminist interventions in photography that had begun in the late 1970s, his work received a critical reappraisal. Since the mid-1950s and 1960s, Sommer had received coverage in a number of issues of Aperture, one of the leading photographic journals, and by 1980 the retrospective exhibitions, Venus, Jupiter and Mars at the Delaware Art Museum and Frederick Sommer at Seventy-Five at the California State University had produced two extensive catalogues. There was also a long review and discussion of his work in the Rochester Institute of Technology’s photographic journal, Afterimage in October 1980.12 Fiona Hall was studying for her
MFA in photography under Nathan Lyons at Rochester from 1979-1982.
Sommer’s quirky constructed collages comprise unlikely juxtapositions of detritus, such as chicken entrails, old bits of metal and wood, decimated doll parts, leaves and twigs, torn drypoint book illustrations, papercuts and painting, carefully arranged to
maximum effect before being photographed. A similar approach is evident in a number
11 I am indebted to Gael Newton for reference in her article, “Fiona Hall: Retro-spect Leura’s Theme”
in Stuart Koop’s, A Small History of Photography, to Frederick Sommer’s work and also to the influence of Frances Yates’s publication, The Art of Memory in relation to Hall’s photographic work in the 1980s.
12 David Jacobs, “Frederick Sommer: The Limits of Photography”, Afterimage Volume 8 Number 3,
of Hall’s photographic series produced during the 1980s. Sommer’s images Virgin and Child, St. Anne and Infant St. John 1966 (Plate 18), gelatin silver print and Moon
culmination 1951 (Plate 17), gelatin silver print are worth comparing with the following images by Fiona Hall: Temptation of Eve 1984 (Plate 15), a gelatin silver print from the
Genesis series, and Woman attempts to wake up the earth, Book XVII: Cultivated Trees 1991 (Plate 16), a Polaroid photograph from the Historia Non-naturalis series.
Hall’s carefully constructed ground of old roof flashing, bits of galvanised iron and a cut-up metal grater in Woman attempts to wake up the earth and the images torn from women’s magazines, children’s story books and advertising brochures in Temptation of Eve resonate with Sommer’s rock surface and old, floral linoleum in Moon culmination
and the scraps of children’s book etchings in Virgin and Child. Both artists use paint as texture with collage to create a sense of depth behind the screen. It is this mixing of worlds, the fusing of disparate fragments into a ‘meta’ world of collage that by being photographed becomes something other, a form of disjunctive quotation that becomes a cohesive object.
Equally significant was Hall’s exposure to Dame Frances Yates’ work on classical
memory and memory theatre. This scholarly text, The Art of Memory, which was on the reading list at British art schools, may have been introduced to Hall through Sommer’s images and writings and his interest in philosophy and aesthetics. Sommer was
interested in the writings of the sixteenth century, radical alchemist and medical scientist, Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus. It is this interest in Paracelsus’s scientific method derived from his Hermetic training that influenced Sommer’s interest in the integration of art, music, physics, aesthetics and philosophy. The photographer, Minor White’s comment that, “He (Sommer) contemplates his fragments until they are intimates of his living mind”, strongly echoed Yates definition of artificial memory in her text which also includes a discussion of the Hermetic cults and Paracelsus.13
For Hall, the revelations of the art of memory provided a vital link between her childhood interests in scientific and botanical systems of classification with the moral, historical, ecological and museological hierarchies of order that she explored and
13 “Frederick Sommers American 1905-1999”, text from Jonathan Green, American Photography: A
Critical History from 1945 to the present, Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1984 quoted in http:// www.masters-of-photography.com/S/sommer/sommer_articles2.html Accessed 8 October 2004
critiqued in her later works. Memory is the first of all meta-systems; all systems of knowledge are the result of memory. The Art of Memory in its detailed archaeology of a lost art explores the history of the organisation of memory in the naming and placing of knowledge as a system, its transmission and eventual transmutation into scientific method. Within this larger history are particular rules of practice and descriptions that trigger visual and interpretative associations for Hall. The classical function of artificial memory was to establish a system of symbols and relationships, images and places, that acted as a sort of aide memoire for words and concepts. The ancients regarded memory as the most important component in the rules of rhetoric.
In the 1980s, her photographic practice was particularly influenced by and benefited from postmodernist critiques of deconstruction and the blurring of boundaries between media . That this critique was particularly relevant in photography in Australia, at the time of her return, was fortuitous. Feminism, through its retrieval of marginalised narratives and the elevation of women’s handiwork to artwork, was, and continues to be, instructive to Hall’s working processes.
It is in the 1980s that Hall’s work began to open out in space and, more importantly, in time, ‘behind’ the frame of the camera lens. She made elaborately constructed sets, similar to those in her early Antipodean series, inhabited by bas-relief carved figures in metal as in the Words series, or she constructed collaged, multi-layered works
incorporating carved, metal objects; photocopied domestic or found objects; painted words, figures and backdrop; and corroded tin, scraps of linoleum and painted fabric. Sculptural space is manipulated in the process of construction; a temporal and spatial process of contemplation, accumulation and experimentation which blurs the
boundaries between painting, sculpture and photography. As Rosalind Krauss observed in her 1979 essay, “it is obvious that the logic of the space of postmodernist practice is no longer organised around the definition of a given medium on the grounds of material, or, for that matter, the perception of material.”14
14 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, in Hal Foster (ed), The Anti-Aesthetic, The