By

Tracy Moffatt

Accompanying text

From www.mplus.org.hk

The Australian artist Tracey Moffatt developed the eight videos in her Montages series with editor Gary Hillberg, her long-time collaborator, between 1999 and 2015. In each work, Moffatt weaves together scenes from popular media that relate to a particular theme, often calling attention to archetypes and the dynamics of personal relationships.

Love assembles short excerpts from a range of mostly American films that depict heterosexual romantic relationships. It begins with scenes of intimacy and expressions of commitment; these interactions quickly give way to betrayals, verbal abuse, and physical violence. Its overall arc seems to align with a stereotypical romantic narrative, moving from infatuation to separation and reconciliation—a cycle of hope and heartbreak. The intensity of the scenes highlights the imbalance of power between men and women, a dynamic that feeds the work’s tension and emotional resonance.

Moffatt’s Montages series harnesses the language of film and film editing to concentrate attention on the means and power of storytelling. Moffatt has described the series as ‘hymns to cinema’; the works dive into the history and conventions of the medium, showcasing both its allure and its influence on our imaginations.

From www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au

Looking at Tracey Moffatt’s broad practice which includes photography, video and film, it becomes apparent that each new project brings a different stylistic approach. Throughout Moffatt’s work resides the influence of the conventions and history of cinema – its visual effects and dependency on narrative. This constant can be traced back to a suburban Brisbane childhood spent avidly consuming the rich visual drama (kitsch and classic) that television fed her. Further, Moffatt spent two years of her Fine Arts degree at the Queensland College of Art studying world cinema which she wrote ‘fuelled my inbred manic excitement for images and drama.’ [p5, ‘Tracey Moffatt: fever pitch’ 1995]

As an artist she has been described as a bowerbird, a ‘magpie of images’ sampling innumerable visual genres –cinema such as Disney, technicolour B-grade, b/w classic art house, and comics, documentary photography, and so on. Her video collaborations with film editor and movie buff Gary Hillberg are a natural extension of her wide-ranging interests. While Moffatt considers her film and photography distinct, ‘each discipline has its own rules I like to honour’ (in conversation with Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, ‘Tracey Moffatt’, MCA exhibition brochure 2003), the video montages created with Hillberg (‘Lip’ 1999, ‘Artist’ 2000, ‘Love’ 2003, ‘Doomed’ 2007, ‘Revolution’ 2008, ‘Mother’ 2009, ‘Other’ 2010, ‘The art’ 2015) present a new form of work, an amalgamation or even a bridge between her previous approaches to still and moving image.

In ‘Love’, the subtleties of first desires to climactic scenes of impassioned dialogue and action, to betrayal, disgust and violence that have played out over the history of film are ripped from original contexts and edited into a repetitive staccato rush, regurgitating, for our entertainment, horror and critique, the stereotypical, hyperbolic trajectory of (heterosexual) love. Through this process Moffatt unites the graphic punch and suggestiveness of the (movie-)still image with the satisfaction of a complete movie narrative. In the end, its only a movie.

‘Love’ embodies Moffatt’s desire to create work that has an ‘international look’ and deal with ‘universal predicaments’. ‘Love’ is both parody and pastiche, critical comment, and wryly humorous.