The following essay was written for the catalogue of Tess Mackay’s Social Realism.
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When Tessa MacKay first got in touch to suggest that we meet for a coffee and a chat, I did what everybody does these days and immediately fed her name into Google. What I discovered were some remarkable paintings, but also – and less remarkably – a creation entitled ‘Tessa Mackay’ whose talents, successes, ambitions and interests had been (to some extent) curated in the ‘experience machine’ that is the Worldwide Web. To say this is in no way to imply any shallowness or showiness on Tessa’s part. It is simply to point to the situation that all of us now find ourselves in: of being our own publishers, of having our own avatars, of assembling our own identities. This is our reality. It’s where we are.
The paintings comprising Social Realism take us back to a less self-conscious time in the development of the digital technologies that today dominate our waking lives. The images are drawn exclusively from Facebook’s servers in the late 2000s, when early social-media platforms collided with digital photography, resulting in a sudden efflorescence of image-sharing on the major platforms. By today’s standards, the images are clumsy and naïve, but it is precisely this that gives them their power. They seem to me to talk to a time of promise and possibility. They are the sweaty saturnalia before the official parade.
For those of us on the ‘material Left’, the late noughties were an exciting time, not least because of the intersection of a certain style of activism and social-media platforms. In the heady years between the global debt crisis and the rise of rightwing populism, we witnessed revolutions in the Levant and the Maghreb, the Spanish Indignados and the Occupy movement. All of these developments were characterised by a ‘horizontal’ politics inseparable from the rise of social media: indeed, we spoke of Twitter Revolutions, Facebook Revolutions and the like. More exciting still, these technologies promised to upend the usual business models: because data can be stored and shared for free (or as close to free as makes no difference), it is not consistent – or so we theorised – with the priorities of the profiteers. Some of us even spoke of post-capitalism. Despairing statements to the effect that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than of neoliberalism gave way to a new sense of future potential.
In their fleshy humanity and compositional crudity, the images of Social Realism (or the images of which they are one small sample) are adjacent to this political moment. Rendered and retouched in oils, they speak to a time before our lives were sucked into the reputational economy of likes, retweets and followers – a time before the mask of social media began to eat the face beneath. It is no coincidence (though it may be unintended) that nearly all of them show young adults at play: even that exquisite coastal still life is pregnant with the promise of joyful sociability. No one in these paintings has an ‘Instagram face’; no one is signalling wealth or virtue. The images are a record of (embodied) conviviality.
If Social Realism invites our nostalgia, however, it is also in a critical relationship to that phenomenon. Tessa has come to this subject honestly, which is to say on her own artistic terms. As one of Australia’s finest photorealists, she has earned both the Archibald Packing Room Prize and the indifference of an art establishment in thrall to modish notions of value and a too-theoretical approach to new work. But in persisting with that derided tradition, and in discovering its limitations as she goes, she now takes photography itself as her theme, singling out one catalytic moment in the evolution of that revolutionary technology for intelligent and meticulous attention. What constitutes an image worth painting? What is the artistic and social role of the painter in a time of ubiquitous image-making? These are the questions Social Realism asks, and invites us to contemplate for ourselves.
The late Mark Fisher used to say that we were nostalgic for a time when a different world seemed possible – that we were, in effect, nostalgic for the future. Notwithstanding that the nostalgia apps are probably all over it by now, exploiting these feelings for algorithmic gain, I think there is an important place for an art that investigates such sentiments, and in doing so helps us to resist the fatalism that characterises mainstream debate about new and emerging technologies in general. At any rate, that is what I get from these paintings: a sense of what we might have had, and could have still, if we rouse ourselves: a more convivial dispensation; a technics in the service of human dreams, as opposed to one destructive of them.