joseph mcglennon awakening · john mcdonald, 2020 full essay on page 13 thou wast not born for...

J O S E P H M c G L E N N O NAw a k e n i n g

http://www.michaelreid.com.au/



McGlennon’s parrots stand in opposition to the cultural roles that have been mapped out for these birds. They are not subject to human whims, nor obliged to play the comedian to an audience. In these impossibly sharp-focused vignettes they appear as indigenous warriors standing guard over their ancestral lands, their plumage exhibited with pride and defiance. They are lords and guardians of the bush overseeing the grand,

Romantic spectacle of life returning from the ashes.

John McDonald, 2020 full essay on page 13

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale

Joseph McGlennonAwakening #1 - Embers One, 2020Giclée digital print on Archival Hahnemuhle Fine Art Paper

112 x 80 cm edition of 8 + 2 AP $4,000 unframed


168 x 120 cmTwo ‘Hero’ Editions + 1 AP $8,000 unframed


Joseph McGlennonAwakening #2 - Embers Two, 2020Giclée digital print on Archival Hahnemuhle Fine Art Paper





Joseph McGlennonAwakening #3 - Red Ridge, 2020Giclée digital print on Archival Hahnemuhle Fine Art Paper





Joseph McGlennonAwakening #4 - Yellow Tails, 2020Giclée digital print on Archival Hahnemuhle Fine Art Paper





Joseph McGlennonAwakening #5 - Flowering Dry, 2020Giclée digital print on Archival Hahnemuhle Fine Art Paper





Joseph McGlennonAwakening #6 - Fire Rain, 2020Giclée digital print on Archival Hahnemuhle Fine Art Paper





Joseph McGlennonAwakening #7 - Yellow Harvest, 2020Giclée digital print on Archival Hahnemuhle Fine Art Paper





Joseph McGlennonAwakening #8 - Quiet Dawn, 2020Giclée digital print on Archival Hahnemuhle Fine Art Paper





Joseph McGlennonAwakening #9 - Ridge Light, 2020Giclée digital print on Archival Hahnemuhle Fine Art Paper





Joseph McGlennonAwakening #10 - Hard Land, 2020Giclée digital print on Archival Hahnemuhle Fine Art Paper





J O S E P H M c G L E N N O NAw a k e n i n g

In pursuing his great, impossible project of painting all the birds of America, John James Audubon would first shoot a specimen, then arrange it in a theatrical setting that echoed its natural habitat. Killing the bird was the most expedient way of getting it to stand still, and Audubon, like all the famous naturalists of the 19th century, was unsentimental about his subjects. Other specimen hunters such as Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace were equally sanguine about killing birds and animals to facilitate their studies. In Borneo, Wallace shot at least 20 orangutans, a primate he saw as a close relative to humankind.

Today we would be horrified if David Attenborough went around with a rifle shooting every creature in his documentaries. As we have become conscious of the damage human beings have inflicted on the natural world over thousands of years, we have developed an uncompromising attitude. We view the loss of habitat and extinction of species as crimes against the planet. There is an increasing hostility towards those that kill animals in the name of sport or science.

Joseph McGlennon jokes that in the series called Awakening he is a postmodern Audubon armed with a camera instead of a gun. Yet where Audubon worked to breathe life into his feathery victims, McGlennon portrays living birds with a clarity and level of detail that seems to transcend nature. It might be vaguely possible to classify McGlennon as a natural history or wildlife photographer, but study his images for a minute or two and their profound strangeness begins to emerge.

McGlennon’s photographs appear to defy the laws of optics, with no loss of sharpness as we look from the birds in the foreground to the landscape and sky. He has abolished the effects of perspective which blurs colours and contours when we gaze at a distant scene. His photos even defy the logic of the camera lens, which has to choose if it will focus on the foreground or the background.

There is something unusual about the way McGlennon’s birds disport themselves, as if they were holding a pose for the camera. Their heads are almost always captured in a three-quarter turn, self-consciously displaying their best side to the portraitist. The central subjects are framed by smaller birds, plants and insects arranged in a broadly decorative, harmonious manner. All the natural elements are present, yet the images are not simple windows onto the world but uncanny rearrangements of it.

It’s no revelation that these photographs have been digitally manipulated - it’s the degree of manipulation that is mind-boggling. McGlennon’s pictures can be made up of dozens of layers, requiring weeks of work in the studio in collaboration with master photographic printer, Warren Macris. Birds, landscapes and branches are shot separately, with light falling from the same direction. These components are painstakingly stitched together to produce an effect that might be described as ‘hyperreal’.


Although the technical aspects of the work are a source of fascination for the artist he ultimately views such feats as only a means to an end. Regardless of the way pictures are created it’s the work on the wall that counts. In this, McGlennon is no different to a painter who would prefer us to examine an image rather than get caught up in a discussion about the way a canvas is stretched and primed.

These photos may be feats of technical virtuosity but they entail extensive work in the field. This series began with the artist making a road trip around the Australian countryside in the wake of last year’s bushfires, studying the scale of destruction and the speed with which nature was hastening to repair the damage. The site that left the most forcible impression was Kangaroo Island, where McGlennon saw scorched bushland and the woeful remains of animals consumed by the blaze. He was thrilled to find, elsewhere on the island, new vegetation forc-ing its way through the blackness, reasserting the strength and fertility of the land.

McGlennon was conscious of the need to tread carefully in his references to the fires. The scale of the tragedy was so overwhelming in the toll it took on both human beings and wildlife, it would have been awkward to appear to be exploiting the event for aesthetic purposes. Neither did he feel the need to send an overt political message, trusting that such sentiments might be implicit in the work. Besides, as every artist knows from experience, viewers will read whatever they like into an image regardless of one’s best intentions.

In Awakening McGlennon presents the native Australian birds as heroic survivors of the bushfires displaying themselves triumphantly against bare landscapes and brooding, cloudy skies. They are romantic figures: as in-domitable as the earth itself, as proud as soldiers who have won a victory over a deadly enemy.

It was a tenet of Romanticism that the regeneration of nature symbolised the need for a broader spiritual regeneration. Nature was revered as an antidote to the spiritual desolation of an age seduced by materialist and rationalist thinking, and despoiled by the industrialism of Blake’s “dark satanic mills”.

McGlennon is an admirer of Romantic art, particularly the landscapes of J.M.W. Turner, whose glowering skies are emulated in these photographs. The Romantics saw birds as symbols of freedom and inspiration, occasionally of melancholy. Think, for instance, of the over-sized owl perched on a coffin in Caspar David Friedrich’s late ink drawing, Landscape with Grave, Coffin and Owl (1836-37). Even amid this wretchedness, plants are shooting up out of the earth in the foreground. If they appear to be weeds this reveals how Friedrich’s state of mind has poisoned his spiritual aspirations.

Before they became associated with wisdom owls were habitually seen as harbingers of death. Parrots have enjoyed a more complex status in western culture, their colours making them consummate emblems of exoticism; their talkativeness giving them a reputation for prophecy, wit or lewdness.

In his book, Parrot, Paul Carter finds another meaning in the way these birds have been framed in western culture. He argues: “the long history of parrot subjugation is a mirror in which we can see darkly inscribed our collective self-enslavement.” Carter is referring to the way parrots have been sought after as domestic pets and,


in taxidermied form, as ornaments. There are countless paintings in which a parrot appears perched on a stand alongside some richly dressed man or woman. They are included in pictorial inventories of the riches of the east, next to pineapples and bananas, or caskets of gold.

The parrot has been viewed as a reliable slave because of its readiness to simply repeat the words of its lord and master. This takes on a more subversive aspect when an statement is mechanically repeated at an inappropriate moment.

McGlennon’s parrots stand in opposition to the cultural roles that have been mapped out for these birds. They are not subject to human whims, nor obliged to play the comedian to an audience. In these impossibly sharp-focused vignettes they appear as indigenous warriors standing guard over their ancestral lands, their plumage exhibited with pride and defiance. They are lords and guardians of the bush overseeing the grand, Romantic spectacle of life returning from the ashes.

John McDonald, 2020John McDonald is art critic for the Sydney Morning Herald & film critic for the Australian Financial Review

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Michael Reid Sydney


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joseph mcglennon awakening · john mcdonald, 2020 full essay on page 13 thou wast not born for...

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