Playing Cowboys and Indians: John Lake's photographs at Toi Poneke

By Mark Amery Courtesy of The Dominion Post

The Decline of Western Civilisation Part One is a celebrated 1981 film about the Los Angeles punk scene, featuring agitated young bands with fantastic names like the Circle Jerks, Black Flag and Fear. It's a film about a subculture largely ignored by the music press at the time - a yell from white suburbia. In title and theme it strangely recalled Edward Gibbon's classic 18th century book The History of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, a book known for its pessimism and detached use of irony - attributes of a punk perspective.Gibbon's thesis was that the Roman Empire crumbled in the face of invasions because the defence of the empire was outsourced to barbarian mercenaries and the Romans themselves had become indifferent. It remains the great history lesson of how civilisation corrupts from within.

Now in Wellington in 2008 we have John Lake's The Rise and Fall of Western Civilisation: Part One, an exhibition of selected works from this outstanding Wellington photographer. It is an exhibition from suburbia, the outskirts of the empire, a view of the weekend roleplaying of those rarely in the lifestyle media spotlight.

Photographed mostly in the Hutt Valley this is a gallery of weekends full of incongruously paired activity: young adults drinking and playing cowboys and Indians, kids on suburban streets trick or treating or donning military cadet uniforms to stand on parade. It's a place where the castles are inflatable and people dress up for preposterous pageantries: as knights and maids for the Medieval fair, in gowns for schools balls, and uniforms for real life military service. Inflatable swords and guitars and plastic guns and scythes are waved at the world, and yet you wonder what happens behind the big quiet hedges and roller doors.

Gibbon's attributed the Romans indifference to their situation in part to their embracement of Christianity, and its belief that a better life existed after death. In Lake's photographs people wear uniforms not just to escape reality but to play with fantasies around death. Loaded with irony and detachment, the closeness of boredom in these images is as troubling in its potential to go awry as it is amusing. Looking at a beautifully caught composition of a gaggle of cigarette-toting girls hanging out at the races, seemingly totally detached from their surroundings, is to witness contemporary social life in all its idle absurdity, and to sniff at its potential collapse from lack of connection to any real action.

Two key images in the exhibition feed into this. The first is of a seated young soldier, wearing combat protective jacket and knee pads. Photographed up close from the ground it's not just his sculptural monumentality that troubles but his genuine gentle smile. The second is of a disturbingly young looking group of male and female air force cadets parading in a suburban street on Anzac Day.

Whether it's a soldier or folks out for a night on the town, Lake's eye continually finds the strong moments when people let their emotional guards down and the photograph transcends the ever-ubiquitous social snapshot. His portraits of society are at their best in the waiting moments when the action is supposedly happening elsewhere. In this and in their care and sincerity I'm reminded of Ans Westra.

Lake constantly looks to find the absurd pairing of grand allegorical themes and suburban reality. The gumboots that top off a boy's Grim Reaper get-up; a group dressed as Native American Indians in full warrior dress, selling CDs from a suitcase amongst caravans. Yet like Penelope Spheeris's film with its grand title, he doesn't seek to laugh at his subjects but reveal the genuine nobility of their pursuits. In its celebration of the unpreciousness of performance of those on the margins Lake's work is very much in the grand documentary tradition.

As an exhibition of selected images Lake provides a series of loosely woven open-ended narratives. It sprawls across the gallery, not only refusing to close off into subject groupings but also, like cluster bombs, arranged in a range of sizes (from a scattergun selection of snapshots to large singular prints) at all levels across the walls. Large portraits are paired with cooler images of suburban, from the arm of a pedestrian overbridges to the elbow of a waterslides. They suggest that grand heroic narratives may be found in suburbia, without actually exploring them.

In this way Lake's approach to the exhibition is as frustrating as it is liberating. He suggests possibilities rather than explores them, breaking up and interweaving the storytelling to open out possible new fictions. While the presentation of the images across the walls breaks down expected arrangements and the hierarchy between big glossy image and snapshot, this scheme lacks a rigour and shape to support the work, as might be found say in an installation by Gavin Hipkins. It's as if Lake has been found mid-process of breaking things up in order to find new ways of putting them back together.

All this nevertheless marks this out as an exhibition to catch. Lake's strong intuitive eye for the telling contemporary human moment, coupled with interesting conceptual ambitions will make where he goes next even more interesting.

The Rise and Fall of Western Civilisation: Part One, John Lake, Toi Poneke Gallery, until 30 June.

16/06/08