Everything under the Sun
The Australian Summer this year has been marked by scorching temperatures and unprecedented heatwaves across the country. It is therefore fitting that an exhibition exploring the iconic photograph titled ‘The Sunbaker’, by renowned photographer Max Dupain, is currently on display in Sydney. The image of the dripping wet bronzed Aussie, a lean and muscular male Adonis, lying face down in the warm sand, has come to exemplify the relaxed, sun-drenched lifestyle on the Australian coast.
This photograph, taken back in 1937, is now eighty years old yet appears timeless. However it also typifies a white Australia that no longer exists. This new exhibition titled ‘Under the Sun: Reimagining Max Dupain’s Sunbaker’, features fifteen contemporary artists, who have all reinterpreted this classic seemingly innocent image, in light of a new twenty-first century political and social climate, exploring issues of multiculturalism, sexuality and gender, as well as indigenous rights. Curator Claire Monneraye has selected artists who primarily work in photographic media, yet some have expanded their practice to incorporate video, installation and sculpture. Most of the participating artists also come from indigenous or ethnically diverse backgrounds.
In his series of photographs taken from the 1970s to the 1990s, William Yang celebrates rather than critiques the sensuality of Australian beach culture, with his home-erotic portraits of young male surfers and lifesavers. In her bronze and steel sculptural relief, Julie Rrap provides an inverse imprint of the ‘Sunbaker’ image, making it appear like a photographic negative. The work reverses the white male figure into a black figure, perhaps alluding to the twentieth century antipathy towards native Australians, as well as referring to the ‘head in the sand’ attitudes towards racism and the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of our colonial history.
Indigenous artist Destiny Deacon views sand as central to the Max Dupain photograph and therefore uses the image to denounce the destruction of our ecosystem by sand mining. In her large-scale photo she has replaced the male reclining figure with kitsch black dolls and ‘gollIwogs’ seemingly unearthed in the red sand, acting as both guardians of the earth and alerting us to the environmental devastation caused by the mining industry.
New Zealand born Samoan artist Angela Tiatia, creates a video entitled ‘Dark Light’ that presents a young naked Samoan woman in luxuriant surroundings, her pose not dissimilar from a Gauguin painting. The work is both sensual yet unsettling. The girl wears a female-Samoa tattoo, the ‘malu’, which signifies protection and shelter for a young female entering womanhood. However, the heavy imagery of opulence, such as a grand chandelier, suggests the dominating colonial forces that often forced such young women into oppressive submission. The artist notes that in some Samoan communities women are still forbidden to publicly expose their ‘malu’.
Anne Zahalka’s 1989 photograph ‘The Sunbather #2’, replaces the olive skinned sunbaker with a red-haired, pale and freckly bather, representing the less idealised physical reality of most Anglo-Celtic ‘Aussies’ from British backgrounds who represented the first European migrants to Australia.
It is ironic that the subject of Max Dupain’s 1937 image, was actually an English traveller, named Harold Salvage, who back in the UK was a pipe-smoking bookseller. So perhaps even the original version of this mythical sun-kissed sunbather, was in fact a fictionalised image. This exhibition as a whole, whilst somewhat disparate at times, reflects the complex reality of today’s multi-cultural, multi-racial Australia, a culture which is all the better off for its ethnic diversity.
As an added bonus to this exhibition, a retrospective of black and white photography by Max Dupain and his first wife Olive Cotton, is concurrently on show at the Hazelhurst Arts Centre, in Gymea, south of Sydney, over the Summer season.
(Under the Sun: Reimagining Max Dupain’s ‘Sunbaker’, is on display at the State Library of NSW, Sydney, from 18 February-17 April, 2017, then at Monash Gallery of Art in Melbourne from 6 May until 6 August 2017).
ART WRITER AND EDITOR, VICTORIA HYNES
