August 30: What do those intangibles air and atmosphere evoke; and how do they relate?

At Castlemaine Art Museum this Sunday 3 September we farewell David Rosetzky‘s commissioned project, titled Air to Atmosphere, which triangulates experiences of the LGBTQIA+ community on Dja Dja Wurrung Country in Central Victoria using video, photography, publishing, performance, and an extensive website.

Known for his collaborative approach, Rosetzky recognised the diversity within the community so engaged with local LGBTQIA+ artists, writers, lyricists, and performers to illuminate their challenges and strengths against ongoing issues they face in terms of violence and stigma and share their personal narratives.

Rosetzky’s cooperative process extends beyond content creation to his meticulous and holistic execution.  In a fusion of ideas the video portion of Air to Atmosphere captures participants in their daily lives, engaging with the camera and performing choreographed movements set to a song composed by the local music collective &so. The lyrics of the song, titled ‘Deep Kissing Under Siege,’ incorporate excerpts from participants’ interviews and a sonnet by participant Terence Jaensch.

I engaged most with the photographic portraits,  understanding that, like all parts of the project, they are again collaborative efforts in which, as for the video, each subject, alone or with partners, frankly addresses Rosetzky behind the camera.

Each picture connects with the interviews, excerpts of which are displayed on a spectrum of posters on the wall in a separate space and around Castlemaine, and in the novel form of unique covers for each copy of the accompanying catalogue publication.

The statements they proffer for the audience’s acceptance or rejection are pithy, challenging grabs from each participant’s thoughts and beliefs; like the capital letters on paper, the subjects in the portraits consciously take their stance and present bravely as both vulnerable and defiant.

Anne Marsh, in her catalogue essay Plural Selves and the Art of David Rosetzky provides a comprehensive survey of Rosetzky’s oeuvre, emphasising the way he turns the confessional performances in his videos Custom Made (2000)  and Manic De Luxe (2004) around so that the audience is implicated in their voyeurism, for example by having them seated in the very space in which his subjects were recorded (Custom Made, 2000). Marsh frames Half Brother (2013), dealing with Rosetzky’s memory of his recently deceased father, and Composite Acts (2019-21) concerning the death of an intimate, as being less confrontational and more gentle and which, for her, are works “that create the conceptual avenues that provide a path into Rosetzky’s recent video works, where real people tell their stories,” rather than being characters, or ‘fictions’ as Rosetzky’s called them in earlier works who “are not as essential as what they represent – the yearning, experiencing, feeling subject, forever reflecting, chewing over and throwing up themselves in carefully choreographed scenes that repeat endlessly.”

It was affecting to see the people in them at the opening reacting to their picture in front of a crowd of both friends and strangers; some shyly, some performing lightheartedly and others, with dignified modesty. In each squarely and unpretentiously composed, almost ‘deadpan’ picture is a powerful, wonderful personality.

So yes, these are real people and they appear in a real place, one which participant Sky Falcon, on arriving in Castlemaine found was;

“this magical, rocky, beautiful valley paradise, I remember writing in my journal, ‘It’s the end of the world but I am living in the best place on the earth ever.’ I was so grateful we landed here.It felt so safe and so tranquil and so healing. It felt like finally we could just breathe.”

Rosetzky extends such ‘breathing space’ around the centrally placed subjects, so that these associate, on first glance, with the genre for which Arnold Newman coined the phrase ‘environmental portrait.’ Newman’s however were famous sitters, particularly artists, whom he photographed, starting in the 1940s, for magazines Fortune, LIFE and Harper’s Bazaar, (“it is what they are, not who they are, that fascinates me,” he stressed) but here, visitors only come to know these otherwise anonymous people from what we learn of them in the exhibition, not as icons but from the extensive videoed interviews and their transcripts in the catalogue, and whose words we read on the coloured posters.

The landscape or interiors here refuse the role they play in Newman’s typologies and instead provide a pictorial equivalent of the haven Sky Falcon eulogises; a plum tree branch may embrace, a gnarled trunk comfort, or flowing water lull, but they remain themselves and are not symbolic. These are places in which these people take comfort. Only the striking portrait of Anna Schwann endearingly but surreally resting her head in a pool of tapioca, directly references her occupation, but obliquely; she is an artist known to work with edibles, and we might catch a glimpse of Rhett D’Costa‘s imagery.

The work in these pictures is the collaboration, in Rosetzky’s enjoining his subjects’ confessional input and reflecting to them the respect he feels for their courage.  He injects a professional seriousness into the transaction, and Marsh rightly quotes him talking about ethics when interviewed about Composite Acts:

…there is this ongoing checking-in with the participants that I feel needs to occur to ensure that they are comfortable with what material is being used and how it is used, and also how it is described after the work is made. There’s a responsibility that comes with working in this way – one that I don’t take lightly – because one has to respect people’s privacy and what they want known, or not known. And also respect that to contribute to an art project in this way is hugely generous – it’s an act of generosity and belief in the process.

Standing at this interface between subject and photographer, many of us have sought strategies that will impress on the occasion its gravity, attempting to dispel the trivial, throw-away attitude that pervades and debases the photograph in the age of Elon Musk and the selfie-stick. Rosetzky underlines his intentions by making the video as well as the stills, and trust is built from the give and take of his interviews. He achieves that also in using a large medium-format camera and film and having scans of the negatives made by Peter Hatzipavlis into prints invested with the depth and mellow warmth of the oil paintings on the surrounding walls.

Anne Marsh concludes that Rosetzky “represents what it is to be human,” but truly this is beyond the ‘new humanism’ she mentions in her article ‘Art History In A Post Medium Age’ (Artlink, vol 26, no. 1, March 2006, pp. 41-45); what he accomplishes is a novel elision of art and documentary, transforming what might have been a conventional documentary investigation into a creative endeavour. An air may be a song, the lyrics of these interviews, and atmosphere, the environment for these portrayals. Both are as tenuous and intangible as identity.

An exhibition not to miss… open 12-4 tomorrow, Thursday 31 August 2023, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, when it finishes.