| | | Marian Drew
Still Life / Australiana
"The kitchen provides a site for familiar and sustaining narratives. Still life painting from Renaissance Europe presented seemingly abundant produce taken from the land for our pleasure and eventual consumption but hidden beneath this image of sensual pleasure was an allegory.
The animals I photograph are killed by cars, power lines or domestic pets and are found in the course of daily living. They remind us of the consequence of our insatiable consumption and of the many other species that share our landscapes. The shifted perspective from distant wildlife photography to the intimate domestic table, from historic to contemporary, European to Antipodean and painting to photography urges us to re-examine our position in relation to the subject matter."
Marian Drew (2006)
Marian Drew: Australiana/Still Life
Russell Storer
Laid across tables as if for a feast, the creatures that populate Marian Drew‘s recent body of photographs are repellant in their limpness, and quietly shocking in their rupturing of domestic order. The excessive fussiness of starched, embroidered linen and patterned china is heightened by these carcasses, which retain a certain brutality no matter how elegantly they might be arranged. The air of anticipation and optimism that accompanies a splendidly laden table is infused here with the unmistakable stench of death. Drew‘s prints however, with their seductively rich colours, pleasing compositions and sensuous textures, harmonise these violent contrasts into seamless images, sidestepping sensationalism in conveying the horror of their subject matter. Instead it seeps out slowly, like blood.
For the animals and birds in Drew‘s photographs are all Australian natives: pelicans, fruit bats, magpies, rosellas, bandicoots, wombats, galahs and kangaroos. Each has met its demise through the encroachment of humans into its habitat - hit by a car, killed by a domestic pet, or stunned by power lines. They are part of the residue of environmental degradation, littering roadsides and washed up on beaches: the collateral of the clash between nature and culture. Since European settlement, Australia has had one of the highest rates of species extinction in the world, its unique and fragile ecosystems eroded or destroyed through land clearing, industry, urban development and the introduction of alien predators. Roadkill is widely accepted as part of the landscape, with wandering animals considered an occupational hazard on rural highways, necessitating roo bars and insurance policy clauses.
Titling the series Australiana, Drew places this material evidence right before our eyes, into the heart of what is held dear and true: the home. It is presented in the form of still life, the artistic genre that has represented the domestic space for centuries, reflecting abundance and refinement back to ourselves like a mirror. These creatures are not viewed from behind car windows or hanging from lines high above; they are there on the kitchen table, amongst the props that confirm to us that we are a breed apart from beasts. Their presence disturbs this comfort, implicating our involvement in the carnage, whether knowingly or not. For it is precisely the maintenance of this veneer of civilisation, in this ancient and inscrutable place, that has resulted in the dreadful body count that shows no evidence of abating, with little effort undertaken to determine its full scope.
While appearing as perhaps the most direct of Drew‘s works in terms of its processes and the urgency of its subject matter, the Australiana series continues the artist‘s exploration into the possibilities of photographic truth. The photograph, as a document of an event or moment, retains a relationship to real, lived experience, no matter how much it is manipulated. Its ability to cohere disparate elements into a single image has been a key aspect of Drew‘s photographic work over the past two decades, which incorporates elements of painting, drawing, performance, installation, sculpture and projection in richly layered images that maintain a sense of process and the unfolding of time. With their blurred bodies, lines drawn in light and ghostly traces of figures come and gone, Drew‘s earlier photographs capture the transformation of objects, bodies and materials as they shift between states. Although definitively still, the Australiana works nevertheless retains a sense of temporality, as their elaborate constructions, set up for the camera, record the passing of tiny lives.
Drew‘s images have an obvious referent in European still-life painting, which flourished throughout the continent in the seventeenth century, particularly in Holland, France, Italy and Spain. Reaching its zenith at a time when market economies, fuelled by trade and exploration, were expanding rapidly in scale and sophistication, still life painting not only depicted the fruits of wealth and the breadth of ownership, but was also a desirable commodity in itself. Often gathering together the products of the owner‘s estates with the exotic spoils of colonialism, ripe for the taking, the still life represented human control over the natural world, breaking the bonds of space and time. The four corners of the earth come together in this singular, domestic space: numerous species of flowers bloom simultaneously, every fruit is in season, diverse objects gain a pictorial equivalence and everything has its price.
However, there is tension inside the frame of some still life paintings, precisely when their domain extends beyond the local. The unity of the domestic zone is fractured by displays of wealth and commerce, the tactile qualities of humble objects and foodstuffs - rendered so precisely by the medium of oil paint - left behind when the objects become shiny or alien. Norman Bryson, in his indispensable writing on still life painting, notes that in these works, the table becomes like a graveyard, and the treasure house ‘where objects come to die‘.1 The space of the still life in these paintings opens out to vast horizons, and the distances between people grows as competition and market forces overtake the communal coming together of the humble table.
It is this tense and unresolved, not to mention deathly, aspect of still life painting that is also present in Drew‘s works. The idea of the local is instantly made problematic: the animals are Australian natives, while the objects, fabrics, flowers and fruit are from Australia, Europe, Asia, Africa and the Pacific. In Raven rock and rockmelon, for example, a Persian carpet and a large mask from New Guinea are featured, while in Kitchen view with mask, kiwifruit and coriander are arranged on a marble bench, overlooked by another large New Guinean mask. The corpses of a fruit bat and a long-nosed potoroo lie on the window sill, beyond which can be seen a vista of an Australian bush hill. Marsupial with Protea features a more tightly focused view of the same room and outlook, with the potoroo draped alone on the sill, and a dramatically lit African protea flower on the bench. The hermetic space of the still life opens onto a wide natural landscape, while the items of a cosmopolitan kitchen form stylish and knowing arrangements.
In the process of producing her still lifes, Drew creates a sequence of displacements. The most obvious is the translation of historical painting into contemporary photography, a strategy utilised since the dawn of the photographic medium. Yet it is a relatively simple transformation, as evidenced by the popularity of photographic still life from the beginning. The ‘mechanical‘ nature of still life painting, rendering intimate, inanimate objects realistically with an absence of narrative, makes it easy to simulate in a photograph. The directness of still life finds a parallel in the function of the camera in photography, often considered as a tool of replication than of creative endeavour (Drew herself has exploited the passivity of the camera in her work, stating that ‘For me the camera is a stupid recorder, predictable, open‘2). For these very reasons, both photography and still life painting have been considered in their time as relatively low forms of art, less worthy of esteem or scholarship than more ambitious genres such as narrative painting, a status that has been rectified substantially in recent decades.3
The second displacement is the location of the photographs in Australia. The context of European still life painting is that of a comfortable centre, the source of the genre and the natural site of its subject, with its connotations of wealth and privilege. Transferred to peripheral Australia, with its strange, awkward animals and rugged landscapes, the European fabrics and tableware appear here as ghostly and forlorn, pervaded by the melancholy that accompanies all colonial attempts at approximating the old country. In Rosella in alabaster, the brilliant colours of the bird appear jarring against the monochromatic fruit bowl and muted wood panelling behind, the brazen thrust of its body a contrast to the filigreed fruit bowl and overhanging picture frame. In Plate and fruitbat, the blue and white design of resting kangaroos on the china plate recalls the famed Willow pattern, itself an eighteenth-century British emulation of a Chinese design. The idealised, bucolic scene of Australian nature is slyly undercut by the lifeless body of the bat, its tightly curled wings having offered little protection against human threat.
The third key shift is in the replacement of fish, game or domesticated animals with wildlife. Drew‘s removal of ‘use value‘ from the animals depicted provides much of the visceral shock of the images, as there is senselessness to their deaths. There is no further ‘life‘ for these creatures as food; they will merely be discarded. In this sense, they represent an even greater severance of connection with nature, as they have no pre-ordained human relationships. Still life painting is marked by its absence of human figures, yet every object within it bears the trace of human endeavour: farming, fishing, manufacture and trade, as well as eating, drinking and collecting. The animals in Drew‘s photographs correspond to none of these functions or processes. Their wildness is extreme, with no relation to the domestic environment in which they are placed. Their only attribute is death.
Because of this, the Australiana series relates most strongly to the vanitas subgenre of still life painting; allegorical pictures that contain various references to death and decay. Reminders of the transience of life and its worldly pleasures, vanitas paintings may include worm-infested fruit, wilting flowers, cracked china, skulls or timepieces amongst their arrangements. With their tone of Protestant moralism, vanitas paintings presented their owners with dire warnings against overindulgence and hubris, while contradictorily being luxury objects themselves.4 Drew‘s work also embraces this paradox, using seductive, desirable photographs to make her point; yet the message is clear. Inside the homes of the well-informed, comfortable middle class, who recycle their rubbish and donate to good causes, lies the tools of destruction. Our lifestyles are deadly, and ultimately finite.
- Norman Bryson, ‘Abundance‘ in Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays in Still Life Painting, Reaktion Books, London, 1990, p.128
- Marian Drew, interviewed by Alexandria McClintock, Eyeline, Autumn 1992, p.25.
- The explosion of critical writing about photography in the 1970s was followed by its increasing use by artists in the 1980s and its growing profile in the art market in the 1990s. Similarly, still-life painting has undergone critical reassessment in the second half of the twentieth century, by scholars such as Bryson, Charles Sterling, Sybille Ebert-Schifferer and William Gerdts, with a proliferation of books and exhibitions on the genre, both historical and contemporary.
- Bryson, pp.115-117.
© Russell Storer (Used with permission)
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