Accident & Process 2012 – 2015

Many a slip… 2012

Series ‘Accident&Process’, 2012

Digitally printed C-Type photograph, dimensions: 170 cm x 170 cm

“Many a slip… is another version of a museum photograph. Another painting by von Guérard, Cabbage Trees near the Shoalhaven River (1860), is located directly behind the model, along with other idyllic landscapes (one of them barely indicated at the far left edge of the image, and represented by its label, which is to say, reduced to another form of information). ‘Accident & Process’ presents us with three kinds of photographs of accidents: the digitally-generated fake one in Many a slip…; the ‘real’ (analogue, indexical) photograph of a faked scenario in Document one (tree); and the

(presumably) real photograph of a real if confounding accident in Document two (car). By now these all seem equally unstable. So there might be a temptation to say that the real emergency, the event that counts, is to be located in relation to the historical painting —nothing less than a history of the colonial degradation of the landscape and Indigenous people (a history in which von Guérard’s paintings and their like have typically been implicated) — but ‘Appropriated Circumstance’ has already demonstrated that the painting’s status is also mutable. As was the case in Kreckler’s early investigations of performance, the spectator of ‘Accident & Process’ is denied a comfortable line of sight:, it’s all glitch, no system. The work of Many a slip…, in the end, is to foreground the epistemological emergency that is the contemporary condition of photography.”

Frazer Ward, Working For You from ‘Accident&Process’ 2015, ed Talia Linz and  Hannah Mathews, Perimeter Editions, Melbourne 2015