Contemplating Maraya

I’m thinking about a few things, all fittingly reflective, as I ponder the Maraya project. First, I want to keep front and centre Rita’s reminder to consider the absences all too often made invisible by a material present – when we look at a landscape, urban or architectural, how do we keep in sight what is no longer or differently ‘there’? Second, I want to remain mindful of Glen’s warning about the dangers of simply recirculating images that conform to what he calls a ‘knee-jerk’ criticality that sanctifies the position of the artist-as-social-critic. Both these positions are integral to an understanding of what the Maraya project is, and also to the portals it can open for us. The position of the artist/creator as a social conscience is one that haunts us, even as we recognize the value of a gaze that is (apparently) without economical or political investment. Of course, this is rarely the case, as within any socio-political ideology, we stake claims, stick by them, or move through choppy waters as these positions change (or change us). But the artist-as-voyeur, objective observer, presents a journalistic fallacy, and worse, suggests the possibility of a disinterested notetaker who records and then spells back the simple truths of this act. It seems inescapable that we are, to considerable extent, our own stories, if not the centrepieces then significant waystations along the narrative.

What I am trying to point to here is that Maraya – let’s call it the activity of the project rather than the creative process as the former does not ascribe any intentionality, which is important in this case – can work on multiple levels. Just, as Rita points to, it can record an absence almost palimpsestically by recording the ‘newness’ afforded by a space-once-something-else. In such a case, this activity does not necessarily exceed the documentary, attempting to encapsulate a moment in history through image-making. It is left to the critical viewer to understand – to add to – the project by seeing downward-focussed photographs as a sign of progress, inhabitation, degradation, capitalism gone wild, etcetera. But the relative lack of agency imposed by the documentary style can also do something else – like the journalist who insists on recording the present moment without implicating the journalistic gaze, replete with binary perspectives and value-laden ideologies, the ‘straight up’ photograph can also lend itself to and blend itself into an existing status quo.

In circuitous fashion, this brings us to an old thorn, the notion of the social responsibility of the cultural producer. That is where Maraya becomes so interesting. Does the project present a tableau and gaze upon it with marvel? Clearly not. But nor does it emulate One Ride with Yankee Papa 13, an undeniable surface of inquisition and evident criticality.

Certainly we have shifted from the almost pornographic photojournalist revelation of the Vietnam war to a space and time that is ultimately more complicated, infused with exponentially greater amounts of information, and nuanced by such radically different and competing forces that even trying to understand the idea about a place is a challenging political act. Perhaps there is where we must begin to engage with what Maraya suggests to us. Far from Tolstoy, what we are presented with are the disturbing and yet enticing possibilities that the familial is not easily blocked off into categories of satisfaction and difference, but rather is a stack of undulating options that progress and recede from our line of sight in patterns, insisting that we explore the absences and presences that we already envision, and those we do not yet see.

Entry written for the Centre-A blog site for the Maraya Project