Décollage

Rudi Williams

catalogue essay, Haydens Gallery, Melbourne, 2025

2018, Canal Street I, New York City, United States of America (2025)

Philippe Garrel’s debut Le Révélateur (1968) is a silent, black-and-white 62 minute film that presents a suite of around 20 vignettes, each of which stages a mini-psychodrama involving its three actors: a father, a mother and a child. Performative poetics guide this non-narrative marvel, filmed mostly in single uninterrupted shots in a variety of chance locations in Munich. The title is a play on the verb révéler—to reveal, unveil or expose. Here it is aligned with celluloid photochemical film procedures. Suggestively, it confers a quasi-magical ability on the filmmaker bringing something to light, illuminating a subject, and revealing a secret interiority of those placed in front of the camera. Yet the film is remarkable in not revealing anything of its narrative logic, structure or purpose. Instead, it gives us the epidermis of the people, bodies and faces that appear within the frame. They remain as inscrutable as every unknown person you pass by on a busy street.

Rudi William’s new series of prints collectively grouped under the title "Décollage" performs in a hauntingly similar fashion. The prints capture variably deteriorated and defaced public hoardings, posters and walls. Such is the skin of our urban imagescape: advertising imagery everywhere, endlessly destroyed and decayed by the acidic palimpsests of a ceaseless present and its overwhelming replaceability. Its distressed aesthetic is definitely familiar, but Rudi’s sharp eye and precise framing creates something deeper than the first year photo class assignments to ‘photograph the city’ full of its street-postered temp walls hiding accelerated developments intent on raising real estate values.

In essence, these large prints ‘reveal’ rather than document. Each titled with a date and location, they capture a moment that captured Rudi’s eye, snaring her field of vision with something enigmatic, arresting and inscrutable. That sensation is passed on to the viewer contemplating the prints in a gallery environment. The effect is not as if we are transported to where those locations exist, but as if we are the surface onto which Rudi’s images have been developed. The original advertising posters discernible in many of the prints fabricate an illusion of the world, one which is inhabited equally by the desiring consumer (who projects themselves into the depicted environments, settings and stages) and the disaffected flaneur (onto whom is projected the same). Rudi thus engages in ‘revelation’ through photochemical processes to reveal, develop and expose a sensorial and embodied capture of what it is to be rendered absent from the illusory world fabricated by the advertising imagery.

The starkest demonstration of this is 2023, Heidelberg, Victoria, Australia (all works 2025). The left quarter shows the remnants of a bleached beach panorama on a brilliantly white sunny day. The rest of the image is the exposed walls onto which a dense coalescence of preceding posters have been affixed. A jagged tear is frighteningly thick, indicating the density of advertising that accrues unknowingly in our shared traversal consciousness. It’s like seeing a surface gash on beautiful skin in microscopic detail. Confusing this shock is the calm consistency of the exposed wall’s illumination: it appears to have been taken on a bleached sunny day just like that of the holiday locale. Which is the real and which is the unreal? This is not what advertising asks; it is what it never answers.

In John Carpenter’s They Live (1988) aliens have taken over corporate America and beam insidious subliminal Kruger-style directives via media broadcast channels and public billboard displays to keep the nation ignorant and passive. The hero secures special polaroid glasses through which he can see the real: a drab black-and-white world run by skeletal aliens hiding behind cosmetic human visages, with posters blaring “conform”, “yield”, “consume”, “buy”, “submit”, “obey”. It’s a cheap accusation of the media—especially as ‘subliminal advertising’ persists as one of the great 20th century urban legends. (It was debunked by the advertising industry itself in 1958 after the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising exposed the fabrication of data in the most acclaimed cases.) The film’s pulpy tenor and gross plasticity makes these imagined LA streetscapes sardonically joyous: how fitting that arsehole aliens would have read McLuhan’s “media is the massage” before landing, and weaponized the same post-war ideas that inspired and birthed Pop art.

In fact, 2023, Heidelberg, Victoria, Australia is a wonderful Pop-aligned demonstration of how subliminality is an entirely misguided concept for grappling with how advertising imagery works. Rudi’s scarified print presents a utopian day in the sun as nothing but a faded smear of Photoshop filters and Benday dots, reducing the human figure to a microbe of duped energy. If it were a sci-fi, those figures could be imagined as beached maritime organisms finding pleasure in a melatonin hell holiday. In contrast to the pastoralism of that print, the diptych 2018, Canal Street, New York City, United States of America (I and II) is a crowded fantasy realm peopled with faux-Asiatic warriors in a CGI battlefield of heroic glory. Their serious countenances have been savagely interlaced with two female facial orbs, beaming with cosmetic perfection and flirtatious looks. Flesh and fantasy fuse in an imaginary genre-spliced slasher flick born of acid skin peels colliding with Mongolian torture techniques.

From apocalyptic landscapes to ravaged portraits to abject abstraction: this third category is evident in the trilogy of 2017, Flinders Street Station, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia (I, II and III). Their vertical dimension suggests shop windows or bedroom mirrors—both in which one catches sight of oneself in moments of private analysis—but here the Self is obliterated. Their intense peeling, scratching, striating and tearing evoked a de Kooning-like destruction of all recognizable form. The opposite of the growth rings of exposed tree trunks, the dense inter-layering of pasted paper shards implies a depth of temporality without disclosing any contents. Fragments of smiling faces, yellow Capri pants, mysterious circle charts and tinned bake beans compress Surrealist impact, aleatory excitation and image overload.

The original artistic appropriation of torn billboard sheets arrives with Wolf Vostell coining the term "Décollage" in 1954, referencing the French term ‘to become unstuck’. Postwar European cities—still recovering from massive urban decimation—were in the process of accelerating their economies, which in turn amped up the output and presence of street level product advertising in public print media. The resultant imagescape was the polar opposite of America’s post-war booming industries, which were oppositely promoted through large scale hoardings raised high above buildings. The US images were neither defaced nor destroyed; they were replaced through clear scheduling and rental costs. American Pop Art benefited from this comparatively more glossy, airbrushed environment, wherein both signifier and signage remained untouched and undisturbed. ‘Affichiste’ mixed-media artists like Jacques Mahé de la Villeglé in France and Mimmo Rotella in Italy didn’t replicate or appropriate populist media promotion; they baldly took it from weather-beaten street walls and placed it on climate-controlled gallery walls. Their images were in fact objects and things; assemblages in their own right. It is this ‘thingness’ that Rudi’s framing of contemporary ‘decollagation’ seems to stress—all within the distinctive photochemical fabric of enlarged 35mm colour grain, overstating its flatness while swimming in its granularity.

Yet all is not as clear cut as it seems. A cryptic trilogy of prints seems unaffected by either violent defacement or exposure to the elements. Three cropped close-ups from a single large poster comprise 2017, Eyes, Trades Hall, Carlton, Victoria, Australia (and Lips and Ear). Those titles label the older man’s selected anatomy, all cast in shadowy gold. The original poster might be printed on brown-paper; it could be aged yellow, or toned as such by the dim Victorian light fixture in Trades Hall. Whatever, it appears quaintly aged, its ontological legacy invitingly ambiguous. A closer look reveals a variety of scratches, pin-holes, scuffs—and a shower of red lipstick kisses across his jaundiced skin. It’s an image of devotion, obsession, fawning, fandom. This being Trades Hall, you’ll have to try and figure out who it is for yourself (but if you stop and think whose image would still be there, still covered in kisses, you should be able to guess correctly).

Overall, Rudi’s imagery reveals by prioritizing its photochemical reality. Her lens stares impassively at the world in front of her. An unreal world, yes, but one that bares down on us all, like a bulky presence crammed into public transport at peak hour. The locations for Rudi’s sourced posters are on noisy streets, in laneways and underpasses, on freeways and thoroughfares, in hallways and corridors. These are images you can’t escape: where you go, they are already there. Her camera faces them off while snapping the shutter. Though highly evocative when on display in a gallery, they are neither phantom presences nor wispy evocations. They are palpable blockages, impenetrable surfaces, chronic irritants—for this is how imagescapes are formed and maintained. And this is how to ‘photograph the city’: as a realm that has already imaged itself and defaced itself.

Philip Brophy - May 27th 2025

Text © Philip Brophy. Image © Rudi WIlliams.