Deadpan Vernacular: Questioning Authenticity

Abstract

My practice-led research draws on my lived experiences of growing up on the Queensland’s Gold Coast—a city where the 1950s postwar real estate boom led to many motels, hotels, and suburban and holiday homes built in the American architectural vernacular postwar style of cities such as Los Angeles and Las Vegas. This style, described by Juliana Engberg as the transaesthetic, has been copied throughout the world. As such, it is uncoupled from determining factors such as culture and climate and understood as inauthentic. At the same time, its ubiquity and familiarity make it the subject of extensive study and critique. My research focuses on questioning authenticity and its judgement by enabling an authentic experience of such buildings through photography. I ask how can photographs of models of vernacular architecture be used to critique concepts of authenticity within contemporary culture? My studio methodology combines handmade models of buildings, the poetic imagination, and deadpan photography. I am indebted to Aron Vinegar’s discussion (2009) of Ed Ruscha’s deadpan photography, which highlights deadpan’s relationship to authenticity and what Vinegar terms an open way of being-in-the-world in reference to Martin Heidegger’s philosophy. Vinegar explains how deadpan photography allows us to sit alongside the subject as it is, which enables an open and authentic experience with the models. By creating spaces triggered by involuntary memories that stem from familiar experiences of my childhood on the Gold Coast, I refer to Gaston Bachelard’s idea that intimate spaces of childhood epitomise the object of daydreaming and the poetic imagination. In addition to Bachelard, I draw on Susan Stewart in considering the role of the miniature as an object of imagination, memory, and authenticity that transcends time and places. As a handmade, unique object, the miniature activates an imaginative realm which enables an authentic experience between the past and the present from the Gold Coast to Los Angeles I place my work within the field of constructed photography and see parallel interests in the built environment and its affects in the work of Callum Morton, Thomas Demand, and James Casebere. These artists also construct models and photograph them to challenge the parameters of photography and engage with issues of authenticity, truth, and personal and collective memory. This project addresses how the handmade model object, poetic imagination, and deadpan photography can be linked to communicate a sense of being and authenticity. In combining these elements, I achieve an authentic experience when engaging with so-called inauthentic architecture, demonstrating how the representation of this style of architecture enables new perspectives, interactions, and understandings by being. At the beginning of the project I was working on the Gold Coast, my childhood hometown, and photographing in its intense natural light. I am now using the soft natural Hollywood light in the backyard of my home in Santa Monica, Los Angeles; the light draws together experience, place, memory, imagination, and photography to create an image that evokes the almost blurred experience we have when travelling and encountering a familiar, generic childhood space. The photograph that results from my studio process activates the poetic imagination creating an authentic experience across time and space.