MAKING LIGHT WORK

Hamish Tocher's Time's New Roman

McNamara Gallery Photography, Whanganui, 8 - 28 May 2010


Deconstruction was all the rage a decade or so ago. Being one of the brightest gems in the jewellry shop at the intellectual mall it was seized upon eagerly and soon just about everyone was wearing it. How much deeper this went than being a fashionable look is probably too soon to tell. Over-use syndrome doesn't just apply to wrists though, and it wasn't long before the hubbub turned to a hush. Probably about the time it took for the texts to disappear from Fiona Pardington's matts. Given deconstruction's flirtation with popular culture it's perhaps suitably ironic that such a penetrating idea fell victim to its own popularity.

Looking back, although there was lots of talk about deconstruction, most of its art-making application turns out to have been somewhat self-conscious posing, an eagerness to appear progressive, a stage set rather than the play, remaining genuinely superficial even when superficiality was, as they were wont to say, privileged and the subject of interrogation. It was as if Humpty Dumpty had to find his real yolk to know he was an egg.

More interested in making art than omelettes, a younger generation seems to have absorbed more completely, somehow, the central notions of Post-structuralism and it's showing up in their work. In photography's simpler analogue days light was part of the process, subsumed into the resultant print. With an artist like Tocher, the process has been broken down into its constituent parts with the element of light becoming an active, continuing ingredient in the artwork's existence.Light's part is no longer assumed and done with, it's central to the artwork's presence and the viewer's experience of it. Not much room here for posturing when the material's so raw and vivid. Bomb disposal units aren't routinely supplied with plinths.

These works, existing in time like music, have the tentativeness and fragility of the first photographs by Niepce, Daguerre and Fox Talbot. In this respect the images are akin to ambrotypes and other revived techniques paying homage to this pioneering period. The progressive agenda of Modernism had consigned these antique methods to the then of history - surfacing from time to time merely as curiosities - but Postmodernism's broader project accommodates them within current practice, if only to illustrate the tenet that history-as-then is dead because it's always alive as-now.

"Alive as now" pretty much describes in a nutshell what Tocher's up to with Time's New Roman. Conventionally, "Roman history" comes to us in fragments, and quite often in ways that almost entirely misrepresent their original appearance. No matter how compelling the research, it's hard for us to come to terms with the fact that much of the free-standing figurative Roman sculpture was painted naturalistically. Like it or not we're all the children of Modernism here, attuned to preferring our classical imagery austere rather than polychromatic. Tocher not only "re-colours" some of these images but he does it through transparent overlays of, for instance, young fellas wearing beanies. Which, as head-gear, fit surprisingly well over the stylised head-gear of the aristocratic Roman haircut. Salve, bro!

It's not easy to describe meaningfully Tocher's installation. The two wall-mounted and movement-triggered light-boxes in the first room are simple enough, but the assemblage of gear in the larger inner darkened room defies an accurate description whereby the state of the thing illuminates the mechanics of the project. You just have to be there, OK? Halfway down the room straddling the space there's a two-metre high metalish sort of frame from which hang transparent images of, mostly, Roman sculptural busts. At either end of the room crouch various light sources and head-high shelved slide carousels which go through their paces at regular/irregular intervals. Fragments? You ain't seen nuthin' yet.

Out of this technical mayhem comes visual mayhem. Well, initially. All good things come to those who wait. Just as your eyes refocus in the darkened interior, your mind refocuses too, and a pattern of layering emerges that richly suggests an inter-action of imagery paralleling the fluidity of classical myth. Reviewing three contemporary novels which do this too, Daniel Mendelsohn (New Yorker 5 April) writes that they not only revisit Greek stories but, far more interestingly, do so in a Greek way, playing with the texts of the past in order to create, with varying degrees of success, a literature that is thoroughly of the present.

Mendelsohn points out that one of the intriguing aspects of Homer's Odyssey is that amid all the yarn-spinning you begin to wonder what words like "real" and "true" mean in a work that is itself a fiction, and later, in acknowledging that all this playfulness has the serious intent of exploring the nature of identity, he asks what does it mean, after all, if your cleverness, the trick that at once defines you and which you need to stay alive, reduces you to being "no one"? At the end of the Odyssey, you get the answers to questions that start forming in the first line, the first word of which is andra, "man": to be a man, a human being, wildly inventive and creative but inevitably subject to dreadful forces beyond our control - which is to say, death - is to be something wonderful and, at the same time, "nothing". The clever games that the Odyssey plays are, in the end, games worth playing.

Tocher's visual teasing is of this order. It's not just a chance to show that Caesar Augustus looks great in a check shirt. (A lovely bonus though.) There's no serious Modernist statement-making here, just a series of balls in the air. But, what balls, what air!

There is, however, a slight sense that the ideas behind Time's New Roman have out-paced the technical means of realising them, or at least the means available to the artist. The abrupt changes of image in a project already embracing disjointedness can be a test of viewer tolerance, and the clacking of the successive slides is as distracting as ducks at a seance. It could be that some sort of fading in and out on a silent loop might've served the enterprise better. On the other hand, the equipment's air of debris, the noise and the visual abruptness may be Tocher's way of symbolising the chaotic forces of history, and that despite these elements of dispersal a coherence not only survives but serves to thread past to present.

And present to past. That's part of the point. The contemporary faces suddenly appearing where you were seeing - and can still see - a Roman head is a startling image of a family resemblance where the second word in that phrase becomes redundant. It's not some cutesy, milky Family of Man notion either. It's a tough endurance running all the way from Clytemnestra to Tony Soprano. Albert Wendt once published a book called Inside Us the Dead. Tocher shows they're not so dead after all.