Now and then a show of international significance appears in Perth, and Erwin Olaf’s work is in this category.  Mounted by the Australian Centre of Photography in association with the Flatland Gallery of Utrecht, in the Netherlands, it comprises works from six series of meticulously-staged photographs (plus a DVD) made between 1999 and 2005 by this Dutch-born artist, who originally studied to be a journalist.  Collectively, they represent some of the most challenging contemporary images you’re likely to encounter.  But in this review I shall concentrate on the Rain series, which is positioned in the gallery to open the show.  Made in 2004-2005, this series of four digital C-prints (and the DVD) represents Olaf’s latest work and it’s arguably the most interesting, considering that the images in the earlier series are less subtle and gain much of their power from ‘shock’ value.

In Rain a cast of dour characters appears singly or in pairs in the various photographs and collectively in the DVD.  But when you crack the code of these works they are in fact hilariously funny and loaded with multi-layered meanings.  The key is that these images are entirely about the history of Dutch painting, together with its achievements, conventions and concerns.  Thus, in The Dancing Lesson, where a black couple attempt a dancing lesson with a template of dance steps on the floor, Andy Warhol’s images in this vein immediately come to mind.   But the deeper meaning becomes clear when we realise that the pattern of the woman’s dress echoes Piet Mondrian’s late-career painting in New York, Broadway Boogie-Woogie, and she is standing on the template.  Mondrian, of course, was a Dutch painter and an innovator during the Modernist era, and he famously loved jazz (created by Black-American musicians) and dancing (to jazz music).  And it can be argued that in his lifelong quest to simplify his paintings to essential line and colour and eliminate sentiment, he provided Warhol (and other New York artists) with an artistic ‘template’, or ‘dancing lesson’.   But there’s much more to be uncovered by keen eyes in the Rain series.

A good starting point to more easily identify the many references to Dutch art in Rain is the Arnolfini Marriage, painted by the ‘inventor’ of oil painting, Jan Van Eyk, in the 15th Century.  When you study Erwin Olaf’s four digital C-prints it can be seen that they contain many features which parody this classic work.  Close viewing of the four photographs shows that they echo Van Eyk’s fascinations with plays of light on glass, metal, wood and fabric surfaces, and the stylised poses and deadpan expressions of their human figures.  Within these four photographic images there is a reference to virtually every visual element contained in the Van Eyk painting, including the faithful dog.  But Olaf also parodies other achievements of classic Dutch art, such as its creation of the ‘Vanitas’ genre, which speaks of the transience of human life and the ephemeral nature of possessions.  Olaf evidences this latter aspect in the usual way through a ‘cataloguing’ of outdated material goods.  They include Bakelite radios, typewriters, nibbed pens, anodised lamps, soda syphons, linoleum floor coverings (another reference to Mondrian, who’s grid paintings greatly influenced linoleum patterning) and hard-copy filing systems.  A Vanitas reference in The Dancing Lesson which is particularly subtle is a clock on a wall with the time showing four minutes past six.  It took me a while to figure this out, until I realised that a pocket watch in one of the most famous Vanitas images, Pieter Claesz’s 17th Century painting, A Vanitas Still Life, registers the time at six o’clock.  In Vanitas art clocks always symbolise that time is moving on.  And so, with Olaf’s depiction of the time at four minutes past six, we may assume that this refers to the passing of 400 years from the 17th to 21st Centuries, with each minute representing 100 years.

The Rain DVD is even more interesting.  On the surface it depicts a family of people who are unable to ‘communicate’.  Considering that they sit at a dining table without speaking or moving (except through the blinking of eyes or some other slight involuntary movement) and wait for a meal that is never served, this is a valid interpretation.  But when you consider this as a contemporary treatment of a classic Dutch ‘painting’ of a family at table, a wider meaning breaks through, and this ‘motion picture’ without ‘action’ becomes very funny.  There is brief movement to set up the exposition of this ‘living picture’ through the entry of a servant carrying a platter containing a huge roasted turkey.  But this person then also locks herself into a frozen pose short of the dining table, holding the loaded serving dish.  If she and the others are models posing for a ‘painting’, this is entirely natural.  Models must not move, and in the conventions of Dutch group paintings they must also maintain the expressionless decorum that is expected of respectable people.  Olaf’s camera now pans across the table and around the group to explore and linger upon the many cliches employed in such paintings.  The steaming vegetables, the roasted meat, the reflected light from candles on cutlery, glasses and the physical features and body language of the sitters are all variously highlighted in the way that a viewer’s eyes would note them within a painting.  In this regard we are helped by Olaf to discern his intentions by occasional uses of freeze frames.  Mondrian makes an entrance again, in the patterning of the tablecloth.  It’s an exquisite exercise, running just over five minutes, and in my view, the highlight of the show.

The five other series of images in this exhibition can be described as more ‘overt’.  Overall they explore aspects of contemporary culture including the foibles, fads and fetishes of people.  They can be viewed variously as didactic, moralistic, nihilistic or exploitative, depending on viewers’ interpretations.  But they are never dull.  See this show and decide for yourself.