Catalogue Essay:

Conor O’Brien, There Stands The Glass at Black&Blue Gallery, 2008
By Robert Cook

Up trees and not up trees

I can’t figure out Conor’s stuff.   Maybe that’s why I like it.   In fact, I’m sure it is.  And, yeah, that’s the point I conclude this thing on if you want to go ahead and just skip to the end.   Before I get to the mystery or whatever, though, there’re a few levels at which I do get what Conor does in a simple, straightforward way.  For one, he’s a plain great editor of his own work (and that of others’).   I mean, when you look at his shows and his books you never see just one image.  It’s always the case that he’s placing one photo against another photo against another photo.  The contrasts, when he does this, are sharp but not too jarring.  One way of thinking about it is that he’s making a really slo-mo movie, compiling or slicing the jump-cuts but the cuts don’t so much jump as linger and hang over and cast this ambient atmospheric haze or something.  And what’s foremost, or at least really important, is that with these cuts or slices, well everything actually, feels chosen, selected, pulled from a million other shots, or potential shots.  They seem necessary, right, inevitable.  That’s kinda vital.  It’s so easy to take a photo and so hard to take a good one.  So the very deliberate nature of them, where they all feel right, yet still tense and meaningful, shouldn’t be glossed over.  It shouldn’t be taken as a given.  Maybe it’s labouring the point but I want to stress, I suppose, that the individual pics and the total look like his own authored thing.   That’s important too cause hell it’d be so damned easy to come off as a Tillmans (if that’s how you spell his name) clone, you know, or yet another clone of a clone of a clone.  But in Conor’s work what we see, what we feel, is a voice, a pictorial style and speech, that carries with it the tone of him, and the tone of his vision.  You know what I mean.  It’s impressive to me that Conor had this down from the get-go.  It was in the first show I saw of his, Where the heart is… - in Perth, in a crummy little space where I have seen two other amazing shows (one being this deal Conor curated, the other by my friend Alin Huma, an equally brilliant photo editor) – and has been in everything else he’s done.  And on that, there’s been a lot of everything else.  He’s busy.  It’s like there’s been show after show.  His name’s around.  But, yeah, back to the beginning, as much as it is (his name being around), and as much as I completely get the formal nuances of the work, I still find the shots and layouts surprising and puzzling and hard to get my head around or at least hard to find sound and not-really-stupid words to describe.  It’s made harder by my vibe on the guy.  See, the thing is, I’ve met Conor a few times, and he comes off as so calm and centred.  He’s got a beard.  He’s got a strong, solid physical presence, despite not being super tall, just more or less medium height I suppose.  He’s also a skateboarder.  And I knew about that, and how he used to be in some skate shots in mags and stuff ages ago, but it shocked me at an opening in Melbourne last year when he said he had skated there.  I expressed some kind of dorky surprise and he said that his skateboard was just kinda an extension of him now since he’d been skating so long.  Yet again his sense of calm surprised me.  He wore a striped shirt!  And so, the cliche of the dumb-arsed skater scene with its Thrasher mag trash image seem a million miles from where Conor’s at as a human being.   But in his shots, there seems to be this push and pull between chaos and disorder (that seems to stem from the street scene maybe, though I could be wrong since I’m too old to know how these things operate anymore) and a deep, rich calm.  So that’s the thing that I find it hard to kinda get.  In his work, there are young people all over the place, having fun, falling over, up trees, pissing in the river, riding motorbikes and pushies too.  And then there are young people in repose, soulful, rested, swimming in the river.  And then there are trees with no one at all up them, and lawns, and empty galleries, and white walls.  And these are so quiet and soft and subdued.  But they are also strong pictures.  They are spaces not for meditation or anything like that, but spaces of passage, of the gentle post-night drift home, of the slow wake-up, of the end-of-the-trip, of a heavy-lidded glance.  Whatever, I think what I want to say is that they are peopled, even when there is no person in them.  They’re inhabited, lived, seen.  Seen.  That’s it.  Seen, obviously, by Conor and so there is that feeling again of authorship, of the world having a voice, his voice.  He’s invested.  He’s making something.  His images add up, they articulate a speech (again with that, it’s like I have no vocab at all), they make a language.  And like I said when I started this thing - precisely one glass of cheap, sweet, red wine ago – it’s something that I don’t understand, but it’s something I feel.  It’s that thing of seeing through someone else’s eyes and getting the emotional landscape that goes along with this, and it’s also the case that this thing is happening not in any romantic way, but in a hushed and mellow way that makes you not even aware that it’s happening.  Which is inherently mysterious, I think, inherently complex and hard to figure and hard to speak about and understand, which I think is a great gift, or offering, from Conor to us.  And maybe it’s one that’s best to shut the fuck up about, because really, you either get it or you don’t.  

By Robert Cook