Fortune was smart and engaging. Inexplicably, Fortune, at the IMA, was also contained, and produced limited excitation or disturbance. While the validity of holding such expectations might be debated, it may yet be pertinent to ask why Fortune did not impart the chance exhilaration implicit in its title.
The dilemma posed by Fortune is the difficulty of identifying with accuracy the absence within the exhibition. Was the perceived tarnish due, for instance, to the work, to critical absence, bland packaging, overly familiar and unresistant combinations, or lack of curatorial thesis? An optimum sighting of Fortune may lie not in the panoramic view, but in the close-up, for the show was important in terms of its individual works, which were on the whole very significant. Where the show fell down was in regard to its overall presentation and conception. In terms of a theme we were only given "the photographic", and its central role in postmodern discourse, as the key link between the work of Anne Zahalka, Jacky Redgate, Geoff Kleem, Jeff Gibson, Janet Burchill and Geoff Weary.
But the individual artist's particular engagement within the postmodern photographic discourse, and with history, was not defined within the exhibition. Neither was the rationale for artist selection defined. Rather it appears as if by "fortune" that this fortuitous grouping of artists and writers materialized. The two catalogue essays by Adrian Martin and co-authors John Conomos and Mark Jackson speak broadly around postmodern photographic practices and theory, but do not begin to explicate the exhibition. In actuality an artist-run "initiative", Fortune presents a voiceless and authorless whole which can only be accessed by interrogating the coexisting parts.
At the IMA, Fortune appeared as
Geoff Kleem, Untitled, 1988. Cibachrome.
