AustLit

In 2010 Tracey Moffatt produced Other, a seven-minute video in collaboration with Gary Hillberg. It is a fast pace montage, which compiles scenes of film and television that are concerned with the notion of the outsider coming in. It was first shown at Roslyn Oxley 9 Gallery in Moffatt’s Plantation and Other exhibition of 2010 . Other is the final work in her series of compilation videos that span the last decade and like her previous compilations it is spliced together to create a didactic narrative arc. While it can be argued that Moffatt’s video compendiums are not as widely celebrated as her iconoclastic and experimental early work, they still reflect her unique ability to address universal themes and issues of a racial, social and sexual nature. ‘Other’ is perhaps one of the most hypnotizing in the series as it assembles popular culture’s cliché interpretations of interracial encounters through a revisionist sensibility.

It begins with first contact sequences of opposing perspectives. It depicts films where the beach and the water that surround them become the area of initial confrontation between the non-Europeans that originally occupy the land and European ships which have come to assert ownership. The images address the idea of the anxious encounter with otherness and the unknown through images of looking. It illustrates, as imagined by the gaze of popular culture, both people’s curiosity and trepidation with something that previously was outside their limited comprehension.

The next string of images changes from this distal encounter of lingering glances to first contact through touch. When the exotic touch, trepidation unites with desire and erotically motivated curiosity. Moffatt meshes together images of the exotic with the white protagonist; these physical encounters act as a culvert that releases the aesthetic pleasure of the gaze. The ‘Other’ becomes the object of the gaze . This gaze ignites into a bodily response. Entranced by the ‘Other’ the eyes become the avenue that erodes the conventional structures of social decorum. All are overcome by desire.

What follows are amusingly kitsch scenes of highly choreographed tribal gatherings that feature frenzied running and dancing. It portrays natives as a menacing exotic that seeks to dominate and eradicate white insurgence. These sequences are symbolic of the narratives conclusion that consummate in a highly erotized sexual climax. The closing clips culminate in primitive expositions of uncontrollable desire that transcend traditional racial and gender suppositions. Homosexual subtext is juxtaposed with conventional mainstream cinematic depictions of heterosexual couples. Moffat explores cliché cinematic techniques that symbolize ungovernable lust and sexual orgasms with fires burning, volcanoes erupting and finally and most hilariously planets exploding.

By employing predictable cliché representations of the ‘Other’ through sixty years of cinematic history, Moffatt’s work investigates how problematic a single perspective is in understanding the complexities of anthropological reality . Ewington argues by editing together these conventional renditions it discloses more about the cultures that made and consumed these films than the culture, history and ultimately people they claim to portray . The ‘Other' becomes this object of sexual yearning, the forbidden that cancels out Western respectability. Moreover, this fascination with the exotic allows the transgression of race, gender and cultural norms whether or not they are historically accurate. As the ironic clichés play out, Moffatt emphasizes the close interrelationship between the exotic, desire of the exotic and the power of cinematic experience to make people accept cultural stereotyping.