DRAMA QUEEN

Tracey Moffatt takes time out from preparingg a newn body of work for the Venice Biennale to speak to Jane Albert.

“MY WORK IS OFTEN BASED ON MY FAMILY HISTORY, BUT IT NEVER STAYS THERE”

Tracey Moffatt is at her exuberant best. She is hosting brunch to talk about her top-secret exhibition for the Everest of art shows, the Venice Biennale, and her performance almost threatens to detract from her art. Almost, but not quite. We are seated in a restored weatherboard cottage Moffatt has borrowed for her studio. Resplendent in its isolation, the former military hut is perched atop a rugged, windswept Middle Harbour headland looking straight across Sydney Harbour to the open ocean and the horizon beyond. In the midst of it all stands Moffatt, ever stylish in a vibrant shirt and slim black pants, ready to entertain. “Yes, I baked, so busy, I baked scones, and the quiches as well,” the artist exclaims, gesturing with an expansive sweep of her arm toward the platters of jam and cream scones, and cheese and bacon quiches that adorn a nearby table.

“It’s been a treat to be here,” she continues, “although it’s a bit like visiting your country cousins and they tell you you’ve got a cot on the verandah and you just know there are going to be snakes out there. Have you seen the bathroom?!” she asks rhetorically. Later she will tell me with a mock roll of her eyes that the art-making process for Venice has been “a nightmare, hell, and the failure … I have had to experiment and eight months in it still wasn’t looking good” before striding over to a wall and purposefully ripping off a blank piece of butcher’s paper hanging incongruously on a nail on the back of the door, noting: “Like this would be my show and I’d phone [ Venice Biennale commissioner Naomi Milgrom] and say: ‘It’s looking great, not quite there yet, but there will be a show for Venice.’” Later still, as the sun bears down relentlessly, she will begin to remove her shirt, gleefully eyeing me and laughing. (“Oh, the journalist is still here.”) Her curator, Natalie King, shakes her head amusedly, murmuring: “Oh no, she’s taking her top off, sorry, she’s getting naughty and it’s not even cocktail hour. She’s in form today, she’s on point.”

An exhibition of butcher’s paper? Did she really bake? Has the process for the Venice Biennale, the most significant event on the international contemporary art calendar, really been so tortuous? Maybe yes, but probably not. It doesn’t matter. Welcome to the inscrutable world of Tracey Moffatt, a world carefully constructed by Moffatt to leave you feeling like you’ve tumbled down Alice’s rabbit hole. And what a world it is.

But first the facts, what we know to be true: Moffatt remains one of Australia’s most well-known artists locally and abroad, a photographer and filmmaker highly regarded for the inherent drama and stylistic experimentation she explores through her bodies of work. From her most well-known image, the first in the cinematic Something More series (1989), depicting a stylised yet depressed rural scene of dust and decay in the midst of which Moffatt, stunning in a deep red cheongsam, gazes out pensively; to Scarred for Life (1994), in which characters enact people’s painful childhood memories; and the humorous hand-tinted First Jobs (2008) series inspired by Moffatt’s own early jobs in factories shelling prawns and peeling pineapples.

She is unquestionably successful commercially – the Something More series of nine Cibachrome images went for $227,050 in 2004, making them the most valuable Australian photographs to be sold at auction – and popular with critics and gallery-goers alike. As a filmmaker she has had two films selected to screen at the Cannes Film Festival, Night Cries (1990) and beDevil (1993); and in 1997 she was the first Australian to have a solo exhibition at the esteemed Dia Center for the Arts in New York, consolidating her international reputation.

Pieces of Moffatt’s own life may inspire her artworks, but she veers sharply away from describing them as autobiographical. She is Indigenous, but doesn’t like being labelled as an Aboriginal artist. She studied at Queensland College of Art and was involved with the Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative before moving to New York in 1997, where she lived for 12 years in a studio apartment in the edgy Chelsea district. She partied with the likes of Tom Ford before returning to Australia, drawn back, she says, by her innate need to be near nature. Moffatt has had more than 100 international exhibitions and numerous retrospectives. She is Australian, yet doesn’t like being labelled an Australian artist. In fact, she doesn’t like labels: she wants her work to be taken on face value, interpreted at will, not predetermined by the nationality of its artist.

Ask those who know her to describe Moffatt and you’ll get a vast array of responses. Milgrom says Moffatt is “her hero”, someone with whom she now shares a deep and unexpected friendship; art critic John McDonald describes her as “mercurial”; while Moffatt’s Venice Biennale curator Natalie King says she is “absolutely meticulous, extremely tenacious, single-minded and ferocious in her approach”. She is a woman who likes being enigmatic and is notorious for being hard to read in the rare interviews she gives.

But what of it? Her work has provoked, astonished, made people laugh and elicited more than the occasional tear. Moffatt’s art fires up the imagination, allowing the viewer to fill the gaps with their own interpretations and life experiences. Surely that is the mark of the successful artist.

If she has a signature style, it’s not having a signature style. Moffatt says she would grow bored repeating her art; she seems constantly out to challenge herself and, as a result, her viewers. And her new artworks for the 57th Venice Biennale promise to be just as compelling. In commissioning Moffatt as Australia’s sole artist at the Australian Pavilion, Milgrom requested she create all new work. “That’s quite unusual, but I felt it had been a long time and Tracey has a very clear mark about her work and I wanted her to do something new and exciting,” she says. “Tracey is an incredibly compelling artist: frankly, I couldn’t believe she hadn’t been selected before.” Although Moffatt has exhibited at Venice as part of a group, she is the first Australian Indigenous artist to present a solo exhibition in the Biennale’s prestigious Giardini. It is a career-defining moment.

And what a treat she has in store. Vogue has gained exclusive images from Moffatt’s Biennale exhibition, My Horizon: two short films that will be projected on the exterior of Denton Corker Marshall’s award-winning Australian Pavilion and two suites of large-scale photography, Passage and Body Remembers. The former was inspired by film noir and 1940s-era imagery and features 12 images set in fictional docklands where figures move in and out of shadows – a young mother with a baby, a motorcycle cop and a boat coming in to the harbour. “My work is often based on a fact of personal family history, but it never stays there,” Moffatt says. “It develops into another realm, a fiction. My Horizon is open to interpretation: it can represent escape or looking out towards the future – someone’s future, my future, my horizon.”

The Body Remembers series was motivated in part by Greek modernist poet CP Cavafy and his eponymous poem exploring the physical effects of the ravages of time and the longing for lost youthful desire. All 10 images are shot in a crumbling ruin in a barren wasteland – Moffatt never reveals her locations, noting “the image is coming out of my imagination and it’s not about place”. In Spanish Window, a self-portrait, we find the lone figure Continued on page 170

of Moffatt, dressed in a 1950s maid’s outfit and adorned simply with black Victorian mourning earrings. We view the woman from behind, lost in her own memories and taking refuge in her isolation, gazing out again to an unseen horizon.

“I think it’s a lament, pointing to the history of domestic labour for women and girls within Indigenous communities,” says King, pointing out that Moffatt’s mother worked as a domestic for a doctor in the 1950s while her grandmother, Maggie Moffatt, was a cook on a central Queensland cattle property. “Many of them were forcibly placed in what was really a form of domestic slavery. That’s one dimension of this work.”

Worship, another work in the Body Remembers series, portrays the full vista of the ruin, with Moffatt perched carefully on the edge of the shadow it casts. It’s a beautiful, still image save for the edge of Moffatt’s apron fluttering gently in the wind, while a halo of light glowing above the ruin gives it an ecclesiastical feel.

Moffatt’s approach to photography is more akin to that of a film director than a photographer. She meticulously storyboards ideas, seeks out locations, even casts models and everyday people as characters in her shoots. Then follows a methodical postproduction process to finesse her work. “I’ve never been technically good with cameras: they baffle me,” says Moffatt, who acquired her first camera, a second-hand Pentax, when she was 18. “I mourn the loss of analogue, my old Nikon; it all looked good. Now we shoot 100 images and it’s hard to find even one that looks good. If I’m using new technology it’s to make it look like something from the past.”

This is the third time King has worked with Moffatt, and she describes her semi-regular studio visits during the 15 months as a privilege. “There’s incredible pressure on an artist exhibiting at Venice,” King says, pointing out the normally private process of making art is here made public, given the role both the commissioner and curator must play in ensuring the project is on track.

A significant advantage to King being involved and the bird’seye view it’s given her is that the Biennale exhibition will be accompanied by a new anthology edited by King. Also titled My Horizon, it includes a new novella from Miles Franklin-awardwinning author Alexis Wright; reflections on Moffatt’s work by local and international authors, including the director of Fondazione Prada; a reproduction of Camille Paglia’s 1992 Penthouse essay Elizabeth Taylor: Hollywood’s Pagan Queen; and a 10-page chronology of Moffatt’s life revealing her personal and political history, compiled by King’s Indigenous curatorial assistant Hannah Presley. Moffatt herself has contributed a section, “Thought Patterns”, a stream-of-consciousness set of ideas and reflections that include references to Wagner, the smell of diesel, the nape of someone’s neck – thoughts that flit through Moffatt’s mind and provide the kernel of an idea, or not.

Given the choice, Moffatt would always choose solitude when creating art. “I wouldn’t let the interns speak to me, apart from when we had lunch,” she says. “I’m real strict when I work and when you enter the studio it’s like a temple and you have to respect my silence. And just because I’m not talking, it doesn’t mean I’m a grump; it means I’m concentrating.”

In fact, Moffatt has had to bend a few personal rules, but is savvy enough to appreciate the Venice Biennale follows its own rules. “That’s the frustrating thing,” she says. “As an artist I’m so used to working by myself, in my own time. But with Venice you work to a timetable. I haven’t minded the deadlines: a deadline can be good. And that’s the Venice gig, it’s a schedule; you have to talk to the press – normally I wouldn’t. But it’s not a commercial show. It’s a spectacular art event called the Venice Biennale.” My Horizon shows in Venice from May 13 to November 26. The anthology Tracey Moffatt: My Horizon will be published by Thames & Hudson in May.