Putting it out there!

November 2019

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Untitled from the series (How I) Wish You Were Here
2020
Colour photograph
© Marcus Bunyan

Dear friends of Art Blart. A call for help!

Just putting this out there in the ether of the cosmos because you never know, its spirit might hear you.

I am looking for a research fellowship or postdoc work in photography anywhere in the world.

I have been working at Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne for years, 4 days a week making websites. This is because of my bipolar and anxiety disorder. It has been a job to get me through the tough times. But after my recent photographic research trip to Europe, I realise that I need more stimulus – to fully concentrate on photography at an elite level. To research and write a book on photography.

In 2021 I will have been an artist for 30 years and my first writings date from 1998. I have been writing Art Blart now for 10 years… a lot of research and writing for this cultural memory archive, perhaps used as the basis for a book on the spirit of photography in the 21st century. But I am open to any research project. I have to do something to be able to immerse myself fully in photography.

If you have any ideas or knowledge of friends with connections please let me know at
bunyanth@netspace.net.au.

Thank you!

Marcus

New work

All photographs are from a new body of art work I am working on for 2020, provisionally titled ‘(How I) Wish You Were Here’, taken during my recent European research trip. These are difficult photographs to understand but please take the time (critical in looking at photographs) to feel them.

My mentor and friend said: “This is the most difficult work to organise yet. There is something to see in every picture – but it is so subtle – not everyone will see it, but it is for people who look at pictures a lot. MG0028 (the yellow entrance with stone pillars) is lovely – the entrance painted a warm sickish colour, a sort of terrible colour aesthetically – and the cropping is just a little brutal: what is it really showing at this camera to subject distance?

But it all works brilliantly, and they are all like that – there are subtle things that can’t be traced: i.e. are they the photographer: or are they the camera or are they just inevitable in this world? It is a type of anti-spirituality meets spirituality… and any number of other meeting points.”

And my friend Elizabeth Gertsakis said: “Spatial as well as surface tactile. Fascinated randomness. The human figure appears as a singular frozen device. Post-apocalyptic as well.”

I said: the spirit has left the earth, the body; something NQR. Eventually, the whole purpose of the series is not to tell the viewer where they are in the world, just give little clues as the viewer moves through time and space… something that photography is very good at: disrupting time and space.

Marcus

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Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.