Stephen Horne: writing on art

Contemporary Art

[stephenhorne]

 Yam Lau: The Present Re-Turns

When I say you are dreaming, I am dreaming too. Chuang Tzu

 There is a painting done by Edouard Manet of his friend Claude Monet and his wife, as they float about in their boat/studio on a lake. Monet is pictured at his easel on this drifting studio, a portrait of a painter in pursuit of reality, an artist hoping to anchor some sort of appearance to a surface by way of his magical touch.  Or an artist living the art of serenity having created a pocket of repose with his garden habitat.

 Monet painted this landscape as it came to him, approaching and surrounding him as he turned about on the sensuous surface of a water body with its reflections and ripples. And for him, always the sky with its clouds, the clouds with their sky reflected, adrift with the lily pads: things and their images reflected in their intermingling. Adrift would be, as Agnes Martin said, borrowing from Lao Tzu, “free and easy wandering.” This is also a nice image of the slowness proposed by film artist Trinh t. Minh-ha who wrote, “Slowness as a strategy of resistance is much needed in the speed of urban routine life.”

 Experiencing an installation by Toronto artist Yam Lau is to be similarly adrift in a floating studio, gliding, slowly touring, following the unfolding flows of an evanescent imagery that appears in its very disappearing.  Such movements, these comings and goings, have their parallel in Lau’s everyday life. When Lau left his home in Hong Kong as an adolescent, on his own, he was perhaps following the advice of Chuang Tzu, the 4th century BC poet, who wrote “Leap into the boundless and make it your home.”  Although it’s not easy to think of his first Canadian home, Edmonton, Alberta, as “the boundless”, we can try.   

 And for the past fifteen years this is what Lau has been working on through his pursuit of digital video animation and installations that adopt architecture and daily life, even autobiographical passages, as supports. Lau moves through these as if on a tour, even as we realize that the field of digital animation is in fact a “detour” in which the camera is a fiction, and that there is nothing, no “ already there” being recorded, the image on screen is always in the making, partially present and partially absent. This is quite a serious diversion from the reality given in analogue media. In the digital paradigm, algorithms do the work, not our hands or eyes. The image only rarely assumes the movement of a human body. However, now existing perpetually in process, the image is irreducibly bound up with the body, a new “intimacy.”

 It’s amusing that the notion of a “tour” is connected to that of “a turn” if we consider their meaning in French, (un tour is a turn), and that “return” (in French retour) is one of the characteristics of Lau’s video, as is the strategy of the de-tour, which is a matter of pluralizing the viewer, allowing the film to be simultaneously fiction, documentary or home video.

 And these are the concerns Lau has been pursuing in recent years, deploying tactics that often belong to the field of play such as diversion, distraction, wandering, detouring, and all these he has submitted to the processes of digital media. And yet finally it seems that Lau is not actually using the digital media as an instrument or apparatus but in fact he does present a phenomenology of the animated digital video experience.

 Earlier pieces include Scapeland 11 (2007), Room: An Extension (2008), Hutong House (2009), and the three more recent works to be discussed here, Rehearsal (2010), Between Past and Present: Lived Moments in Beijing (2012), and just now being completed, the wonderfully resonant Nüshu: Echo Chambers, (2014)

 Rehearsal, a video animation “film”, opens into a room of models floating in layers of varying opacity. The point of view or “camera” position, is itself a creation of the digital CAD software Lau has adopted to perform this art work. In this case “the camera” tours through layers of variable density as they dissolve and rotate. If there are images, they are schematic depictions of rooms in the style of architectural renderings. Equally prominent is the audio element, the sound of rain falling vigorously. The camera wheels through the unfolding spaces that refold while the camera pans left, turning around multiple and changing pivot points. If this is a room, an interior we are in, there are shadows cast on its walls by the schematic framings of the other rooms wheeling around in “the space.” Perhaps at this point what has become most obvious is the consistency of the speed, it feels invariable, like a drone. The audio on the other hand, gestures toward something natural or episodic, a storm with rain, thunder and lightning.  Meanwhile, imagery shot with an actual camera slips into the frame, a sequence through a window into a room interior where a woman sits quietly smoking, inwardly absorbed in a private moment while the rain falls in the surrounding space. She is reflected to us in a mirror on the wall opposite the window. The camera withdraws back out through layers, leaving her in this introspective moment, possibly wiping tears from her eyes, an interior echo of the rain falling “outside.” These elements all take place as screens, veils, mirrors, partitions, walls and windows and as such participate in a climate of uncertainty or even anxiety.

 Lau, as a former painter, is preoccupied with the screen as a motif. In the history of Chinese painting traditions, the screen, according to the art historian Wu Hung, is the single most important item. Lau’s ways of presenting the screen are multiple; a screen can be an object in a room, or nearly transparent itself, a screen may be operating as a veil or a window, or even as a mirror. In this sense, alongside Wu Hung’s observations on the role of screens in art, there are interesting western examples of transparency and reflection in architecture such as the Mies van der Rohe pavilion in Barcelona, or the fabulous Centre Cartier in Paris, built by Jean Nouvel.

 Between Past and Present: Lived Moments in Beijing opens with a close-up shot of a candle burning, inserted, superimposed, in a rotating and multiplying ensemble of screens and images of screens. Simultaneously, we hear traditional wind chimes. These screens have been drawn, are being drawn, erased, and refilled according to the technique of the televisual apparatus. Semi-transparent, these screens both reveal and obscure the view of a person seated at a table. Meanwhile the camera is panning, wheeling in a long arc, as a shadow image obviously replicated from the person at the table is now displaced close up to the physical frame and surface of the projection wall, what I think of as the actual wall of the room I am in. The architecture of this room is being drawn with computer assisted design software, drawn algorithmically in other words, no hands no eyes, no linear narrative of mortality; weightless in other words.

 As in Rehearsal, the camera tours and re-turns amongst the screens, lattices and veils with constant variations of transparency and opacity, all occurring with the same feeling of “robotic” or automated speed, a feeling that is perhaps familiar, seen in Kubrik’s film 2001 Space Odyssey, or further back, in the cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni with its persistent mapping and framing of interior architectures, exploring in slow motion an architectural everyday. It’s a feeling that something is being suspended, held up even while ongoing.

 The person at the desk in the film is on a platform that floats on dark waters. Behind him one wall is formed by a traditional “moon gate” or portal to “the outside.” Through the semi-transparency of the scene we can also see a night sky with stars and a quarter moon, although their artificiality is exaggerated, leaving us not with the real thing but with its apparition, or ghostly double. Meanwhile the chimes and the sounds of running water continue. The camera pans, the zoom deepens, all the aspects are rendered as apparition, echoing and interwoven.

 At this point, after several minutes of slow motion in this long pan and zoom of the camera, an entirely new event emerges, that of a street scene in conventional real-time camera footage. Even so, this footage has been composited within the program of the design software, erasing any possible sense of  a hierarchy as to which is more “real.”  The street scene is likely one in China, a busy urban site with buses passing and shoppers rushing here and there, quite in contrast to the refined slowness of this film experience. Alongside the street scenes there are street sounds, with faintly detectable sounds of the wind chimes. As the camera zooms into the street scene and as that scene prevails the sounds intermingle. The street scene in its filmic mode of realism is momentarily dominant.  However, after a pause, the camera leaves the street scene through an increasing layering of transparencies, until we are back to the always multiplying and dissolving screens and images of screens, to the moon gate, to the walls of the studio, and back to the designers table with its candle, its starry night, its wind chimes. And yet, again the scene returns to the street documentary, first by way of vignettes, and then to a full screen, and a zoom to the street, perhaps Beijing, this time fully in night’s darkness. And then, back to the studio, starry night, chimes, softly running water. Tranquillity, we might suppose.

 With the title of this 2012 video animation Between Past and Present: Lived Moments in Beijing Yam Lau announces his interest in what artist Pierre Huyghe calls “connectivities.” These are ways one inhabits the transitional space between then and now, here and there. Or the paradox of bridging that takes place “in between” but without attachment to fixed points, avoiding any anchoring to the relative permanence of solid shores.

 The interspersing of live camera documentary in Lived Moments is an example of how in some accounts memory works as an anchoring that operates by securing us to a perpetually past reality.  In Lau’s case, such a past becomes an imagined or uncertain past, hence provisional and itself transitional, a past in a presentness that is as mobile as it is fixed, as absent as present.

 But there is little new thought in this, what is of real interest and import is the value for life that we can find mapped out in Lau’s work in general. That is his bridging of east and west, of past and present, of carrying over practices for life that have emerged and endured over centuries. Lau integrates the momentous changes in the west through post-mechanical, post-historical, electronic technology with long standing traditions from Asia.  It seems possible that Lau’s work contributes to a vision that may take us beyond the current dystopic turn of technological culture toward the phronesis proposed by Aristotle, that most western of mystics.

 Nüshu: Echo Chambers (2014), Lau’s newest video animation, following recent researches in China, is initially just an ellipse of lighting on a floor invisible in darkness. Through a gradual expansion of lighting, a space emerges, paradoxically closed, as if made from stone without openings, and yet appearing simply by way of light, and lighting. As the room slowly fills with light it simultaneously fills with the voice of a woman chanting a song. In this “echo chamber” the song resonates with a return of the past: this is the voice of an elder. And again, as the room is shaped by lighting it is occupied and shaped by shadows of calligraphic script that float across the walls. This script, if we pursue its story, is a syllabic script, a lost language, created and used exclusively by women in Jiangyong Prefecture. Forbidden formal education for many centuries the village women developed the Nüshu script in order to communicate with one another. They embroidered the script into cloth and wrote it in books and on paper fans. Sung in Nüshu the song Lau has recorded presents again his concerns with a disappeared local history in the context of our global culture’s intense de-localization.

 New York based artist and writer David Court has written with great sensitivity on Lau’s practice. What Court finds most pertinent is Lau’s “calling up…thoughts of play, relaxation and the activity of refreshing oneself.”  Court appreciates what he calls the conviviality of Lau’s work, and this seems to identify what must be an important contribution of resistance to the current environment of contemporary art, competitive and consumerist as it is. He has observed that Lau proposes “a space of quietness, slowness and intimacy,” and that these qualities are only seemingly at odds with the aesthetic of digital culture. Perhaps in this he is thinking of the “Hollywood” culture of special effects, and the visual violence and noise of video games.

 To experience a Yam Lau film is to undergo something that loops the time of its own making, simultaneously an enactment and re-enactment of its own building process. We are immediately caught up in a space that is less concerned with movement or motion than with being in time. That is, neither fully present nor fully absent. Curiously on paper “in time” looks like the French “intime” which as a noun means intimate and as a verb means to hint. With this Lau performs a most unique and valuable intertwining of an “eastern” practice of non-attachment and a loosening of “western” technology.

  Stephen Horne, Le Fresse / Peyrat la Noniere, 23130 France

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[stephenhorne]

Painting Places Painting: Dagmar Dahle, Chris Kline

Published in Bordercrossing Sept 2014

  “The feeling of past time is a present feeling.” William James, 1890

  Painting is a field, a breathing space, before it is anything visual. Painting is also a site of labour, or arbeit as Freud had it, a site for the working through of experience. The painter’s search for the materiality of painting is one that opens a space of anamnesis or lived memory. Historically speaking of course the field is a principal image for work space, a place of labouring, the name of one’s call, for which the painter awaits, listening.

  The painter, Chris Kline, has mentioned his attraction to fabric, textiles, and this is a theme we see unfolding in the works of these two painters, Kline, and Dagmar Dahle.

  Concerned with a sense of place, these two artists practice an artistic “here and now,” one that is always simultaneously an “elsewhere,” fissured by memory, history and experience.  In Kline’s case this elsewhere is the hidden, kept back or deferred, folded within the creases that pass through memory, or nature, whereas for Dahle, it is a place more revealed, that is, in the terrain we call “historical,” some place written, political even, perhaps what we call national culture, that of Germany, and the city of Berlin.

  If current contemporary art has gone over to the field of screens and the electronic media, painting remains as memory in the present, a continuation of the realm of the “handmade.” In spite of, or perhaps because of this, painting retains its audience. This would suggest that it continues to have something to give.  My sense of painting’s continuing value has been inspired by the remarkable works of these two mid-career painters, one in western Canada, Dagmar Dahle, and one in Quebec, Chris Kline. There may of course be others but Dahle and Kline, in their mutually divergent practices, open a way for what Dahle described as, “taking painting back to its essential core,”(1) which would be to say, always beginning again. If such a core exists, perhaps it could best be described as that “…labour of care in aesthetic experience.” I’m thinking of course of the role played by care in Donald Winnicott’s remarkable explication of creativity and psychoanalysis, as well as his emphasis on “play” in place of the more Calvanistic “labour” and so with this in mind we could also say, “the play of care in aesthetic experience.” To my mind, this is actually much more accurate, bearing in mind the several meanings of the word “play.”

  And by way of introduction I will make a brief mention of one of the more interesting recent texts on painting, that of Isabelle Graw, an art critic working in Germany. Her essay, The Value of Painting: Notes on Unspecificity, Indexicality roots the considerable value of a painting in its connection, its continuity, with its maker. Graw suggests following the anthropological notion that artworks are equivalents of people. The mode of this connection between painter and the painting, Graw states, is that of indexicality. She proposes that “painting’s signs can be read as traces of the producing person.” There is some resonance of Barthe’s descriptions of photography in her statements but more importantly she sends us in the direction of  painting’s baggage. That is aura, presence and immediacy, all of which belong to the fundamental question of painting’s materiality, in other words, labour and therefore, the lived body. My proposal here is that all these belong to the project of apprehending painting’s materiality. A painting is worked in time, that is to say, its material being is intertwined with its temporality, its making process, and its mode of connection with the “viewer,” that is, by way of its intertwining vision and touch.

  From the perspective given by painting and what Lyotard called “anamnesis of the visible”, there is little getting around the persistence of aura. This can be inferred from Graw’s mention of Charles Pierce’s “indexicality.” Pierce called indexicality a “firstness, a contact with the world unmediated by sedimented linguistic constructs.” Such is the basis of Graw’s interest in the painter’s mark being continuous with the person rather than a substitute. There is then the possibility of a claim for “site-specificity” here long after any interest in medium specificity has been lost. In fact, site specificity, the touch of the painter, is a “here and now” that is a source point of aura, the “thisness” of the thing, its flesh, that sensuous materiality of the aesthetic event. In the aesthetic event as constructed by Adorno, aura and autonomy were pretty much synonymous.

  Perhaps this could all be simplified just to say that painting tends to be the practice that works with that sense of place described as the  “here and now.” And Graw’s privileging of indexicality reinforces an understanding of the role of touch in painting and it’s argument for the place of the hand-made.

  Dagmar Dahle and Chris Kline have each, in their separate ways,  taken these terms as a path to pursue into depth projects that express painting as a way of working out artistic identities amid the labour of “taking painting back.” Such a provocative statement is made more complex as Dahle elaborates, “ ‘what I’ve been thinking about has to do with gender in a sense, and hierarchies of painting. In the Van Gogh research, I was interested in a framing of his work around weaving and craft.”

  Looking at the various series and groups of work Dahle has produced in the last decade one sees a distinct focus on “place” as a question or a theme. In her case this would mean giving some degree of relevance to her personal history as a first generation Canadian of German immigrant parents having arrived in the wake of WWII. In any case, many of her projects involve cultural memory, for example, the series Prussian Blue, the Brandenberg Gate, or Berlin/Paris Walking works on paper.

  With Dahle’s Van Gogh Drip project there is the landscape of Provence, southern France, and with Prussian Blue, and the Brandenberg Gate obviously there is a turn toward German culture, “the homeland.” Her words on Berlin are passionate; “A hot spot, a core, the essence of all of this and a strange de-centred fragmented city. Residues of past events, seen and felt. The masses of graves, such as the 6,000 Russian soldiers buried in Treptower Park. Public markers, such as monuments and statuary and ruins and unintentional monuments (like the Albert Speer heavy load test), and destroyed markers and the choices that are made about what to mark and not mark and unmark.” (in unpublished correspondance from Dahle)

  In Dahle’s Van Gogh Drip Paintings, she has drawn out a remarkably “resistant” project, resistant in the sense that it undoes the genius model and the patriarchal underpinnings of the painting tradition by crossing it with procedures taken from weaving, a mere artisanal occupation, and thereby disrupting the purity and status of the tradition. And at the same time, she has created works of stunning material force. Her initial procedure has been to analyze a selection of Van Gogh’s paintings individually and systematically for their colours and then to recreate, painting by painting, these once pictorial scenes “reduced” to threads of colour pulled across the canvas  to form a woven” grid. She explains that this has been done “…by dipping the handle of an artist’s paint brush into latex house paint and letting the paint fall off the end of the handle in horizontal and vertical threadlike lines, mimicking the warp and weft of weaving.”

  These lines are regular, but ragged. They vibrate and tremble with the energy of a material gesture, with the time of their making, the resistance between the tool and the matter, between liquid and gravity. And in these primary colours combined with the ragged/regular texture their impact is a bursting out of that landscape experience Joyce described as a “blooming, buzzing confusion.” At the same time, these paintings, considered individually have no internal or relational organization beyond that of a non-hiearchical weave and in this sense owe something to the more pristine look of minimalism but here, haunted by Pollock’s threads of paint entangled with the force of gravity.

  If Dahle’s colour choices in this project were determined by an exactitude to their Van Gogh origin, in the series titled Prussian Blue her material is equally a bearer of memory, as the artist has written “the constant residue of suffering and genocide and rape and torture and poverty and turmoil is washed away by Prussian Blue, Berlin Blue, paint it ALL blue!!! The myth of FORMER GLORY. Prussian Blue, discovered in Berlin, beautiful intense pigment in the chemistry lab, from which comes Prussic Acid and then Hydrogen Cyanide (Zyklon B gas) and then Prussian Blue residue, by-product of Zyklon B found on the walls of gas chambers and today Prussian Blue is a life-saving antidote to radio-active contamination.”

  This suite of fifteen images is drawn in the single colour sometimes called Berlin Blue. A synthetic pigment, that is, a relatively modern technical sort of entity, it exists in quite opposed contexts as  either toxic or medicinal, a condition known as pharmakon, that is, capable of killing or curing. It’s also the blue used to make blueprints, that is, disposable technical reproductions.

  Dahle’s treatment of this highly specific and intense colour takes as its focus various monuments located in Berlin. Some are classical sculptures dedicated to goddesses such as Diana, or the more modern figure of Kathe Kollwitz, but most are victory commemorations such as the Berlin Victory Column, or Seigessaule.  These water colour drawings are restricted to the monument itself void of any surroundings, alone on the empty page.The wateriness of their facture, the flow of transparency is suggestive of memory and its transitory wanderings, even while the context of monumentality is suggestive of history’s “authority” through permanence. Perhaps the drawing titled Hitler-Triumphal-Arch is the most forceful image with its aggressively dense blue blockish form and ragged edges. This is a drawing based on a small sketch that Hitler made for his architect, Albert Speer, and had it been built it would have been ten times the size of the Arch de Triomphe in Paris.

  The Brandenberg Gate is a neoclassical edifice constructed as a monument to peace at the end of the 18th century but which the Nazis marched through to celebrate their rise to power. Dahle has created a series of nine paintings that commemorate the tumultuous history of this remarkable architecture. As a gate of course the arch functions to regulate traffic to and from the city but more importantly it commemorates the nation. Its twelve Doric columns support the Quadriga, a chariot drawn by a team of four horses and driven by Victoria, Roman goddess of victory. This all out monumentality is turned into fluidity in Dahle’s watery blue, its rigid stone brought back into fleshly materiality. This water colour paint, once liquid and flowing, dispersing, is now solidified. However even in this state, it “remembers” its fluidity and we sense it according to our own fluidity. In Dahle’s treatment, the Gate appears in a state of shock, an image bleeding itself, melting down, a traumatic bleeding of colours on the page, perhaps a bleeding of memory even… This flooding of the page, and of the image, bears the memories of its people through extremes of conflict, and finally, reunification.

  Are Chris Kline’s sparse but nuanced paintings really concerned with “painterly abstraction” or is he in pursuit of enigma and the criticality of its place in aesthetic experience? Kline has mentioned his interest in a key work, that of the Jacob Van Ruisdael painting (1670) The Linen Bleaching Grounds Near Haarlem. In this landscape painting, the rectangular fields or “grounds” are shown from a distant viewpoint, with their hundreds of rectangles of whitening fabric spread out in grids on the earth, under tumultuous cloudy skies. In Montreal, at Galerie René Blouin in 2007 Kline exhibited a group of seven medium scaled nearly identical paintings remarkable for their commitment to the reductive format of a single rectangular bar of neutral aqua blue colour placed within the painting’s shape so as to echo that shape. Perhaps more notable is the support surface of these paintings; bare, thin, cotton poplin fabric, nearly transparent, possibly re-purposed bed sheet material. The bar of opaque pale paint rests evenly, touching that surface with a feeling of great precision on this otherwise nearly see-through cotton fabric. This mark is a block where our vision is barred, stopped in relation to an elsewhere in the painting where we see through the support to the painting’s stretcher frame, and to the wall, even if filtered, screened out by the fabrics woven threads. The mark of the support with this opaque rectangle functions as a kind of “clothing” in relation to the bareness of the fabric. Being a single gesture but nevertheless a “presence,” this mark, symmetrical in every aspect except in its division of the surface into upper and lower, is finally and entirely enigmatic. A strange conclusion considering the simplicity and the transparency of the materials of these paintings in which apparently nothing is hidden. And yet we might equally say, nothing appears either. Although, we might in a slight burst of romanticism, propose that the enigma is that of the beautiful by way of the mark of opacity, a beauty deferred, held in suspension.

  Right at the end of 2008 Kline exhibited a group of eight new works, again medium scale, and near square format. These paintings are almost not that, as least in so far as they lack paint, and are constructed only of fabric, and as in the previous group, the fabric is simple cotton poplin. In this case though each painting presents a joining of two pieces of fabric, each slightly different in colour and texture from its partner in the pair, and paired in varying proportion to the rectangle. They are joined always as an upper and a lower panel with a machine sewn but raw seam running horizontally from one side to the other. The folded seam traverses the painting and ambiguously becomes the subject of the paintings. This seam is only relatively straight, having been drawn “free hand” with the sewing machine. As in the previous group of works, the near transparent fabric allows the stretcher to haunt the otherwise empty rectangles.

  With this hand made material seam as the principal “issue” presented in these paintings, there is not much space for illusion in the usual sense. At least in the sense of visual perception, although the seam is clearly a site inviting interpretation. Without that, it is simply a division that has been drawn together, two fields meeting in a point of rift, that of opening/closure. Some of Kline’s titles are as resolute as the painting are suggestive, having words like names like Rise, Raft, Rim, Disappearer,  or Enclosure. But,it is the repetition of the horizon theme that is most important, the horizon being the great source, a space of transition, an in-between, the sought after “breathing space.”

  Kline’s works in general, present us with the difficult pursuits of slowness, subtlety and richness that accompany experiences of transition, the space of the horizon being a site of such transitioning. Perhaps the challenge Kline is faced with is that of the perversity of any “here and now”; in its propensity to reverse and become pure abstraction, a pure present.

  Kline completed another set of works around the same period, Motes. Strangely, even dust is a material and a theme of much interest amongst artists. Motes (2009) is a group of five large scale watercolour paintings, five versions of the same theme gathered or distributed around the form of an organic grid. Dust motes are particles, tiny bits of the world suspended in currents of air. We usually encounter them in a slant of sunlight where they scintillate in a rustic fashion. Their attraction is their ordinariness, that sense of ennui that belongs to an old family house in the rural countryside on a certain kind of day when you find yourself watching the dust as it catches the light. Painting dust motes could be about as interesting but in this case it is the exactitude and repetition of the gesture, and this is perhaps a play on the word, but it is their particularity, that is so pertinent. As particles drifting in air currents, in the lighting, these tiny ambient elements literally touch us with their fragile, mundane dailiness, and with their quality of past time. And then this touch is repeated in the artist’s brush mark.  In any case the particles of dust are the particulates of memory, a Proustian moment.

  For Kline, foregrounding “the measure”, is a consistent theme, a sort of cosmology of architecture in which above and below, sky and earth are the principles.  The poet Holderlin had a name for this, calling it “the architecture of the skies.” In fact one of Kline’s most consistent subjects is the practice of “division” and states of “being-in-division.” With the more recent exhibition of works at Diaz Contemporary in Toronto he made this interest more explicit, giving the show an actual title, The Dividers (2012).

  In Blake’s painting The Ancient of Days, god is presented as the great geometer with compass/dividers in hand sorting out the universe. Kline’s ambition with dividers probably runs more to their role in working with diagrams and in particular, map reading, sorting out the land, proportioning, and in these paintings, gradation becomes an item.

  Here, relatively purely geometric “zips” are cut on a slight bias at top and bottom and wherever they “break” is enhanced by the graduated colouring of the bars as they subtly shift from warm through cool or light through dark along their lengths.

  This matter of gradation recalls some of Kline’s earlier dealings with light, colour on the painterly surface. Gradation means diffusing, a graduated dispersing suggestive of rainfall slanting in over distant fields, but flashed with sunlight. These subject details are less important for Kline than is the aspect of lighting in its revealing as concealing and it’s turnabout concealing as revealing. These attributes of visual perception could also be applied to an understanding of memory in its ways of working that are, in their subtleties, often so much like the touch of lighting.

  Both artists discussed here have concerned themselves with practices of place, memory and their intertwining in touch. Many of Kline’s  works indicate a discreet but persistent return to places as sites of personal memory. Passed down through his family there is a cottage at Lake Mazinaw, west and north of Kingston, Ontario. Frequent visits to this “retreat” over the years have offered Kline access to that space of the out of doors we often call “nature.” Such “place” can also be thought of as a field of memory and if we think of a field in the sense of one’s vocation, then a field would be the name of one’s calling. Painting in this sense is a call, or perhaps just the practice of waiting for the call; listening. In recent years many writers and artists have considered and demonstrated the interweaving of memory with place.

  For Kline, “presence” occurs as a tactful withholding that is sometimes called either deferring or differing. His folding, sewn, and bare simple fabric is like the materiality that we might associate to Richard Tuttle’s works of the late 60’s such as his Cloth Octagons, placed either on the floor or the wall, perhaps  Franz Erhard Walther’s folded fabrics, or the architectonic paintings of the Support/Surface painters in Paris and Nice of the 70’s such as Pincemin or Vialet with their foldings and stained fabrics.

  Painting as found in the works of Kline and Dahle is a place where artists work from the perspective of, and through, the immediacy of everyday, embodied tactile-spatial experience. While it is the case that a few painters, for example Cheney Thompson or Wade Guyton, are working with prosthetic memory in the production of “paintings” these seem to result in something similar to what Alan McCollum called his “Surrogates” in the early eighties.

  With regard to the perspective established with Dahle and Kline’s art practices, this search for the materiality of painting is that of hand work, and is concerned with keeping that field open, incomplete. Kline and Dahle according to their individual paths, have interwoven the immediacy of painterly handwork with that of lived memory, presence and the artisanal world of textiles. The expansion of painting they have pursued does accord with Isabelle Graw’s expansion, however Dahle and Kline share rather more the trajectory described by Luce Irigaray in her remarkable essay, To Paint The Invisible. There, it is the hand as well as indexicality that are “expanded” in her use of the term “flesh.” What becomes evident through the practices of Kline, and of Dahle, is that the tangible is the matter and memory of all the sensible.

  FYI:

Helen A. Fielding. "Luce Irigaray, To Paint the Invisible, translation and interview" Continental Philosophy Review 37.4 (2004): 389-405.

[stephenhorne]

A Laying On of Hands: Lani Maestro

Sensorial memory…it’s the memory of the fingers. Cecilia Vicuna (1)

  The beautiful alone enables us to be satisfied with that which is.  Simone Weil, (2)

  Aesthetic and religious experience are related at least in so far as the two each claim to offer a transformative encounter. Art, usually understood as painting, and the crafts such as weaving, are traditionally based in practices of hand work, and in this way of touch are productive of “aura,” sometimes known as the sense of a “here and now” or in art theory as “site specificity.” Aura overlaps with the notion of numena, or the numinous, which as sociology explains, means the idea of a magical power residing in an object and which for centuries has been identified as the basis of religion in the west. This idea of the magical is something at odds with the banalization the world undergoes in the era of consumer capitalism and technological science. Strangely though, this conception of a “here and now” is identified with materialist critique as well as with religious experience. Strange because materialist critique is typically affiliated to the social sciences with religious experience excluded.

  In the Little History of Photography Walter Benjamin describes the aura as a strange texture of time and space. Perhaps this mention of texture could be made concrete and called a weave, after all, Benjamin does refer his description of aura to clothing, that is, textile, in his situating of aura in the folds of a mans coat.

  However, it is Luce Irigaray who has taken this trajectory of the touch furthest where, in her writing on painting, she describes how “…seeing amounts to being touched – by light, by colours, and, in a way, by the world and by things.” (4)

  With this notion of touch we may follow the threads of the aura into considerations of tactility and bodily experience, even into artistic activity as a ritual “laying on of hands” that appears both in the context of religious and therapeutic practices. An analysis of touch as an artistic practice would include that of aural experience (being touched by sound), and its many correspondences with religious practices such as the litany, song and the chant. Apparently religious and poetic speech were once inseparable.

  The intertwining of religious and aesthetic experience can be perceived in the work of many contemporary artists and with the Montreal artist Lani Maestro the case is consistent and clear. This is not to claim that her work is itself religious, or that this perception exhausts her work, but merely to propose with her work a correspondence between religious and aesthetic experience. We can review this trajectory in the light of specific works done over the past couple of decades. What would be most interesting would be to observe how this artist has appropriated and re-purposed aspects of her exposure to Catholic ritual and practice, such exposure having been inevitable due to her childhood in the Philippines.

  Maestro’s installation a book thick of ocean (1993), demonstrates some aspects of what we are here calling religious experience and its overlapping with aesthetic experience. This work, a very large book resting open on a solid wood table in an empty space, invites being touched, in using manual involvement intertwined with the visual sensibility. On its pages, we can perceive an image of something elemental, numinous; an ocean with its cycle of waves in their to and fro, the tide with its rising and falling, the gravitational work of the moon with its cycle, all collapsed into the form of the book with its repetitiveness and its expansion of the present moment. The anxiety of looking is perhaps subordinated to the calming gesture of repetitive page turning, a turning that paradoxically goes nowhere, each page being identical to every other. This mode of encounter is suggestive of the Taoist practice of “letting-go”, for example that expressed in Chuang Tzu’s words that it is “…better not to move, but to let things be.” Such “letting-be” is an antidote to the striving we usually call a “self,” that urge and compulsion to unify and secure that dispersal. It was with this that Freud explained his conception of religious experience as something oceanic. Such a presentation invites “getting lost” as a mode of involvement, a distinct alternative to our culturally prevalent desire for certainty, domination and control.

  In 2006 Maestro adopted an explicitly religious architectural site for her installation je suis toi.  L’Eglise de Saint Nicolas de Caen is situated in Caen, a city on the coast of Normandy, in northern France.

On entering the cathedral we are swept out of our habitual physical selves and up into an experience of voluminous space. Continuing Maestro’s previous interest in the ocean and its wave formations, this space is literally filled with waves of wooden benches although in this case not conforming to the expected or conventional orientation of the rows of benches in churches. The benches in their wave-like formation recall the oceanic sense of the earlier work as well as the similar use of vernacular wooden furniture and as Paris based curator Catherine Grout has written, “…make one think of waves at high tide” in their “…punctuation of the space” (5). These benches are made things,” The hand is solicited along with every other part of the body that comes into contact with the bench, setting up a kind of dialogue beyond words.”  (6) The cathedral’s traditional benches with their regular and conventional construction have been replaced by irregular, improvised and individual creations that conform to the task of providing seating and roughly to the model of “bench.” The rustic hand-built improvisation of the benches is explained by the fact that volunteers constructed them from recycled fragments of wood.  The temporality proposed with the benches is equally in strong contrast with the durability of the stone architecture, the benches having been knocked together could conceivably be collapsed just as readily. The re-purposed materials bear the marks of having had previous life in other furniture, buildings or as packing material.

  These benches in their improvised status suggest a sense of dispersal like that of the hundreds of identical pages in a book thick of ocean. That is, the benches are at least potentially extendable in number and facture as far as the infinite in a sort of parallel with the verticality of the Cathedral space. Such verticality is the shape of religious experience.

  This vernacular furniture form, the bench, presents both collectivity and community. It’s distinguished by the style of accommodation it offers, that of communal seating. One sits with and beside one’s neighbor, a style of

in-habitation Maestro has carried forward in Ces Mains, a recent work with a move that invokes the memory of philosopher/activist/mystic Simone Weil. Here Maestro has occupied a workspace rather than any traditionally sacred place, the artisanal work place of a small local usine, or factory for the hand crafting of precious jewellery, an enterprise and community now folded up, lost in the sweepings away of globalization and outsourcing.

 Ces Mains (2013), commemorates the lives of workers and their community based around a former workshop in l’Ardeche, a rugged and de-populated department of rural France. Here on the invitation of curator Valerie Cudel for the Regional Park and the Fondation de France Maestro created Ces Mains in the former Usine Murat de Saint Martin de Valamas. The  factorie’s activity was highly skilled goldsmithing, a craft with its roots in medieval alchemy. With such artisanal work in this environment of collectivity and community there would have been a “hands on” sharing of knowledge in the form of practical wisdom and village life, now traumatically shattered by the forces of globalization. (7)

  On the exterior, the building of the former Usine Murat is a modest and aged industrial structure in the centre of this small town that once produced highly refined works of the goldsmith’s craft. All the atelier’s windows have been closed over with blue panels.  On the street side an exterior wall supports a sign in blue neon SI VOUS DEVEZ PRENDRE MA VIE LAISSEZ –MOI CES MAINS. (8) Opening the door, we are confronted with a flood of small hand tools lying spread out on work-benches. These hand tools are well worn, and some appear to have been modified to accomplish very specific miniature tasks in the making of precious jewellery. These sorts of tools would be typically used in one hand, requiring a squeezing grip to accomplish their work and this being the case, the unforgiving hardness of the tool would likely be at least uncomfortable after a few hours of working. This would seem to be the rationale for the fact that each of these hundreds of pairs of pliers and cutters is bandaged on one side of its two handles. The bandaging of the handles is itself well worn, and layered through repetitive reparations. The bandaging, having been improvised with various materials such as fabric, or plastic tape, is multicoloured.  Such a sense of materiality proposes many diverse considerations of hand-work, touch, repetition, and even the sedimented layerings of memory. The diverse materials used for the bandaging, and even the variations of the basic tools themselves, suggest an interesting demonstration of touch and it’s place in hand work, and take us to the process rather than the product. These benches or tables have been specially shaped to “hold” or support the individual artisan at his or her task. 

  In their collectivity, the agglomeration of tools presents an animated gathering of “voices.” This notion of “voices” is reinforced by workplace sounds emanating from various quarters of the room space within which the tables and their tools are spread out. Upon listening to this euphonious but not quite harmonious rhythmic sound some continuities and trajectories become apparent. Identifying the source of the sound as a recording, we hear a woman’s voice calling out a whispered command, “reviens, reviens.” Following, there is a sound ambiguously suggestive of a work place such as a small atelier like this one would have had when operating, but also an almost musical dimension as well. There are various hammerings and bangings but also finer sounds such as metal being cut or filed and the murmuring of words and other vocalizations, and these diverse sounds are not entirely random recordings but appear also to have been worked into a rhythmic and percussive composition that we could call “musical” in the “chance” mode of John Cage, the percussive detail of Steve Reich or the “industrial” music of Einsturzend Neubauten.  The continued repetition of the command “reviens” (meaning “return, come back, or, again”) frequently weaves through the composition until after a break of silence, and some metal sawing sounds, a different female voice softly enunciates the possibilities of the word “bleu,” a term belonging to the history of work and labour, not only in France but certainly to the Americanism of “blue collar” work.

  Seeing this workplace environment “through” the reading, which is certainly a litany, renders our envelopment in a site interlaced with the “gravity and grace” so intensely presented in the writing of Simone Weil. As a litany, this reading of “blue” belongs to the tradition of the Kyrie Eleison, described as a “sweet and pleasing chant”, done in the spirit of the supplication expressed by Weil in her mysticism of the modern industrial workplace. I suspect that if one were to ask the anthropologist’s question as to what is the colour of the sacred, the answer has to be “blue.” And as the reading continues, we hear an emphasis, a step back, given in her repetition of the word blue before each phrase, as in “bleu, bleu de soleil, bleu, bleu de rencontre, bleu, bleu de nuage, bleu, bleu de desire, bleu, bleu de repetition.” Meanwhile, work sounds and threads of the musical arrangement drift through the air, a composition that includes such surprises as a veiled fragment from Jimi Hendrix.

  These workbenches incorporate a relation to the body that is not simply individual but to a body that is shared, processual, rather than objective. This is a body that shapes, and is shaped by the layering of habit and ritual that is often called “memory” but is also the site of inhabitation, as well as the means by which this is accomplished. The sense of a collectivity expressed here embodies what is usually called “solidarity,” especially in the sense of “working-class identity”. The work done in an atelier like the Usine Murat is not only that of producing a product, it is the work of making and keeping life together with others, the solidarity that binds a collectivity with its material infrastructure but more importantly, it’s spirit, it’s community, that specific sense of solidarity with which we want to describe existence being accomplished as a “being-with-others.”

  Ces Mains is not a work of nostalgia but of the compassion that works through touch. The trauma of losing the capacity we call memory would be to lose that place we think of as “memory.” The memory that makes experience possible. What has taken place here, and in so many similar places worldwide is precisely what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben called “the destruction of experience.” (7)

  As one might imagine, amongst the local community of former workers at the Usine Murat, the considerations the artist initiates with her situating of this art work in a locale of “obsolescence” and lost solidarity are provocative. Foremost of course is the sense that, with the arrival of institutional attention, (perhaps the factory may become a museum) one’s “living” is about to be displaced by a recounting that rests in a contrary mode of temporality, that of modern administration. In the French historian Pierre Nora’s words what this means is that what was once a milieux de memoire is to become a mere site of memory. For Nora the former means affectivity and magic while the latter means only a reconstruction of the past and even worse, a reconstruction that erases any lived, material connection with the past. This living with memory of both what is past and what is future is the commemoration of enigma that is often the heart of both religious and aesthetic experience.

1. Cecilia Vicuna, in David Levi-Strauss, From Head To Hand,  Oxford University Press, 2010, 59

2. Simone Weil, Le Presenter et la grace, Librairie PLON, Paris, 1947, Gravity and Grace, trans. Crawford and von der Ruhr, Routledge 2002, 180

3. Helen A. Fielding. "Luce Irigaray, To Paint the Invisible, translation and interview" Continental Philosophy Review 37.4 (2004): 389-405.

4. Catherine Grout, Réciprocité, in je suis toi, Centre d’art contemporain, Basse-Normandie, 2007,

5. Grout, op cit

6. Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: An Essay on The Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron, Verso London, 2007

7. Maestro was assisted by the participation of former Usine Murat artisans Jöel Haond and Jean-Paul Munier, and the voice of the reader is Christine Cardeur. Musicians Rico Entico and Ron Francisco collaborated on the production of the music.

8. This text is a line from a poem (2012) by Philippine poet Jose Perez Beluya. In English we would read, If you must take my life, leave me these hands.

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[stephenhorne]

Out of Time: Tacita Dean and a Seeing That Touches

“It is creative apperception more than anything else that makes the individual feel that life is worth living.” D.W. Winnicott, (1)

Tacita Dean is a British artist of the YBA generation. Her practice is one of retrievals, detritus, recycled surfaces, found pictures and lost subjects and most notably, of a time and space integrated. It’s bricolage, the flaneur and all the Baudelarian poetics brought together very carefully with great concentration and tenderness. She works primarily with film “installations” and yet her exhibitions confront us with, and solicit from us, a style of haptic attention that is almost painterly. That is to say, touch is of utmost importance to Dean, a point that is made with the various series she has made with over-painted (re-touched) photographs and postcards, as well as her large scale “blackboard” drawings in chalk. Her concern with film and photography practiced alongside her dedication to tactile experience feels almost paradoxical, however, it is on the model of a seeing that touches and a touch that sees that she intertwines tactility with technical reproducibility, presence with absence. Dean finds touch imbued with the feel of memory, whether as Benjaminian recollection or as Proustian reminiscence. Touch requires a surface; she has noted that the appeal of working on a single surface, as painting does, holds less interest for her than does a series. Dean’s process is a strategy of anachronism, an artisanal making of things in a world from which thingly being is disappearing in favour of information.

Dean is best known for her commemorative works done in 16mm celluloid film and for bookworks comprised of found photographs such as the remarkable Floh, 2001, a book that not only foregrounds the book form but the indiscriminate quality of photography. At one time her films would have been characterized as “experimental documentary” but now they are destined for the much looser category of “artist’s film”, work intended primarily for the gallery and the museum. Even so, three of the directors with whom she might be most aligned are Werner Herzog, Chantal Ackerman, and Chris Marker. Her films are typically loops of about a half hour in length and rely primarily on techniques to emphasize the durational aspect of viewing as well as the possibility of fiction with documentary. That is, the long take, static cinematography, fragmentation and close framing of the subject, minimal narrative, abundance of still shots, natural lighting, and optical sound all contribute to an awareness of the time and space of production. In many cases, the projection apparatus itself is part of the gallery installation, and as was the case with her film Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS shown in Montreal last year and in which multiple projectors were “choreographed” into the film installation. These various practices and techniques lead toward a work of art that works by commemorating it’s own existence in time and space, as well as that of the viewer, whose sense of time is inevitably conditioned by an awareness of mortality, of time running out, or down. Dean’s concern for memory is in fact her compassion for the momentary, for the event, that extended and ambiguous happening of a “now” that is the flux of time.

JG is a 26 and a half-minute 35mm anamorphic (wide screen) film loop projection for gallery or museum space. Dean has more typically used 16mm but in this case the larger format was required to accommodate an ingenious system she invented by which stencils are inserted into the camera’s aperture gate. These templates add an intensified mechanical/physical impact to the projected image, and this reaches an intense point in a screen-filling spiral through which orange sunlight floods, moving first from right to left and later, from left to right. The tactile mechanicity of the stencilled spiral in juxtaposition to this flood of sunlight highlights the consistently hand-worked drama of Dean’s engagement with the technology of reproducibility.

As a proponent of dystopian vision, JG Ballard is an explicit precursor to Robert Smithson’s concern with time construed as an entropic process of decline, of time running out or down. Ballard’s titles read like memos sent across time or left in waiting for Smithson: his short stories The Voices of Time (1960), The Drowned World (1962), The Crystal World (1966) all sound like instructions whispered in Smithson’s ready ear, instructions that he developed both in written explication as well as his “earthworks” that include the Spiral Jetty. This latter piece is the ostensible topic of Dean’s film JG. The sculpture Spiral Jetty is pertinent for its having been “lost,” under water since its construction by Smithson in 1970. In a narrative of remarkable coincidences Ballard actually proposed to Dean, just prior to his death in 2009, that she “solve the mystery of Spiral Jetty.” Coincidence and its mysteries are in fact already the stuff of Dean’s art practice, the principal one being her use of analogue film to commemorate its own disappearance. Strangely however, in this case, Spiral Jetty has re-appeared, the waters to which it was lost as the Great Salt Lake rose in the 70’s having now receded. The film plays out Dean’s interest in extreme and unusual landscapes and incorporates images seemingly taken from Ballard’s dystopian vision of once futuristic machines now encountered as dysfunctional artefacts, wheels autonomously and gratuitously churning canals of sluggish salt and water. This uninhabited landscape is overlaid with phrases voiced-over quoting Smithson and Ballard, one of the more remarkable being Ballard’s “Robert, I have to tell you. Even the sun is growing colder.”

A series of over-painted postcards are also included with JG in Dean’s recent Paris exhibition at Galerie Marion Goodman. The original cards are all anonymous but for one which caught my interest by way of its identification as a work of Caspar David Friedrich, the quintessential German Romantic painter. Of the dozen or so images, it was the only one with any source identified, marking the figure of Friedrich as particularly relevant. Dean’s affinity for German romanticism is further evidenced with her film commemorating Joseph Beuys and his biophiliac vision for healing and his earthy fundamentalist social program. (Dean has been living in Berlin for the past ten years.)

Dean has made a number of other films commemorating creative individuals whose work has also involved the themes of narrative, history, memory and writing: W.G. Sebald, Michael Hamburger, Cy Twombly, Mario Merz and many others. What they all have in common is their interest in correspondences between writing or “indexicality” and the phenomenon of aging, mortality and a proximity to death, that is to say, nature, but also the problem of ending as it is for narrative structures, narrative mortality. Her films in good romantic spirit engage intimately and even playfully with mortality, its charisma, and the charisma of creativity. This reference to nature is made explicit with her many films featuring events of nature such as sunset (The Green Ray, 2001), eclipses of the sun (Banewal,), (Diamond Ring, 2002), birds (Pie, 2003) and her vast personal collection of clover leaves of the four, five and six leaved variety. Dean has no aversion to superstition and the magic of coincidence.

This world in which touch and memory intertwine is the world of experience as described by H-G Gadamer among others in the tradition of hermeneutics. When Gadamer discusses experience, art is a fundamental reference in his analysis. Crucial to his notion of experience as something we “undergo” is that of the “event,” “…something unforgettable and irreplaceable, something whose meaning cannot be exhausted by conceptual determination.” (2) His sources are in that romantic subjectivism concerned with challenging modern technicity and in this sense aligns with Winnicott especially as appropriated by Bernard Stiegler. These figures are all pertinent to a discussion of both Smithson and Dean on the basis of their concern with what Smithson called “continuance.”

What Ballard, Smithson and Dean mean by invoking this sense of a lost “continuance” was that sense of a lost belonging in time and place, a loss of solidarity within collectivity, of place within an ancestry and participation toward a shared future but also that sense of futility regarding human being as an unfinished project alongside the adventure of shared uncertainty. In this sense the explicit longing and nostalgia that characterize Dean’s work are not only a nostalgia where the subject is the past but more importantly, what she identifies as a future being lost into an ever greater technological anomie. The evaluation that sidelines artists such as Stan Douglas, Eija- Liisa Athila or Tacita Dean on the basis of their concern for recollection and memorialization is simply another demonstration of contemporary alienation.

JG Ballard’s focus on a past dystopian future echoes that of Kafka whose decription of an autonomous technology, that de-humanized version of post-humanism in which the space of human lack is made up for by a culture machine that works by itself.

With regard to this issue of “continuance”, it is helpful to situate the work of Dean with respect to the recent writing of Bernard Stiegler, philosopher of technology, whose critique in recent years has been prodigious and influential. Echoing Winnicott and as a former student of Derrida’s, Stiegler’s most recent writings emphasize his concern that the path of technology has bifurcated and the version now in the ascendancy has taken on a distinctly dystopic anti-humanitarian direction of the sort predicted in Ballard’s stories of the sixties. Stiegler’s view argues that the ongoing shift toward totalizing efficiency refuses value and the spiritual connection to durable objects that can make life worth living. What is also intriguing in his analyses is his position with regard to the relationship of technology to nature: no simple luddite he argues for the c0-determination of one by the other, saying that humanity invents itself by inventing technology, which is the invention of time and space, and here his account overlaps with Ballard, Smithson and Dean: the end has meaning for us, but technological becoming is endless, and that its “progress” relentlessly disrupts embedded cultural formations (Smithson’s “continuance”) in its drive toward order, calculation and efficiency. Dean’s consistent involvement with obsolescence and decay is not a retrogressive perspective but is an attempt to sustain an opening from which alternative futures and differance may be drawn. What is remarkable in Dean’s practice is her ability to celebrate the uniqueness of a person’s existence, an artistic achievement, and event of nature, or a moment in time, within the paradox of technical reproduction, once believed to be an overcoming of uniqueness and the aura in favour of a democratized culture. Dean’s memorializations exemplify a concern for a “continuance” of the future as a human project, and as a resistance to the totalitarian project of reality lived as order, calculation and efficiency.

1. Winnicott, D.W. Playing and Reality, Tavistock, 1971, this version Routledge, London/NY, 2005, p. 87 2.Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Truth and Method, trans. Weinshiemer and Marshall, Continuum, New York, 1975/2004, p. 58

Stephen Horne Le Fresse, Peyrat la Noniere 23130, France

[stephenhorne]

Pierre Huyghe: Between Belonging and Disorientation

“Today the only works that really count are those that are not really works at all.” Theodore Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music

“The question of place itself is put into play.” Samuel Weber, Theatricality as Medium

“Now just have a look at this machine. Up till now a few things still had to be set by hand, but from this moment it works all by itself. (…) It’s a remarkable piece of apparatus…” Franz Kafka, The Penal Colony

Adorno had it right, although I’m not sure he had in mind the developments in which we are now enmeshed. The important aesthetic activities today may not really be works at all but are better described as slippages, or as “plays” or simply, play, especially in the sense meant by Samuel Weber above.

What the work of art has, as Adorno meant it, is a unified and unique organicity, a mode grounded in an ontology of bodily belonging in time and place. These characteristics served to provide a potential for historical specificity that would serve to ground critical reception as well for the important body of art practices within the post-modern called institutional critique. Even so, effective deterrents to the demand for history and the linear time that such a critical program rests on were provided by both feminist and post-colonialist perspectives. The problem with the concept of “history” in the sense it was being used is that it rests on a linear sense of time, and that it gathers events around a centre, such as the West, or patriarchy. This is an important dimension of the resistance staged by artists such as Huyghe, his collaborators or affiliates such as Rirkrit Tirivanija, Liam Gillick, and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster.

Where we have been for the past few decades situates us quite differently with respect to reception. As art historian and critic Hal Foster put it in the context of his ongoing diatribe against the pluralism he identified with postmodernism, “…criticism without history is aimless.” Criticism, often oppositional, by definition rested on “history” and from this perspective most of the art of the epoch has been considered “complicit” in maintaining the social status quo. Such a charge of complicity continues to be leveled against much media art from those same quarters, however innovations in digital media and communications culture have so “revolutionized” the situation that such a critical perspective seems increasingly out of touch and unable to offer a relevant commentary. Such a commentary should now rest on explicating the impact and implications of such technology for the human project.

This would be one way of explaining the malaise that characterizes contemporary society. Another path would be to explore the notion of complicity as presented in the practices of Pierre Huyghe. Complicity in this case means having at least an ambiguous if not outright collusive relationship with the ne0-liberal consumer capitalism embodied and enacted in the mass media. Attempts are often made to locate our situation in the context of an ever expanding cinematic perception of the world, however this needs to be theorized more profoundly in relation to technology. The philosopher Bernard Stiegler has described our current situation as one in which technology has bifurcated with one tendency increasingly dominant, a tendency sometimes identified superficially as a “post-humanism,” but that could more accurately be identified as a maverick trajectory within technology that Kafka had already recognized many decades ago. His description of a torture machine as a self-regulating disciplinary device, a dispositif or “apparatus” well applies to the trajectory of maverick technology that is defining our epoch. Kafka’s device, “working all by itself” expresses our current situation, the protection and growth of life becoming the administration of death.

The work of art now works as play and plays as work. This is a proposal Pierre Huyghe presents with Trajet (1992), a piece performed live and later presented as a print work consisting of a map and a photograph (1996). This repetition and displacement in time and place is a frequent occurrence with Huyghe and demonstrates his concern with reconfiguring our sense of time by re-placing time, that is, shifting the placing of events in time by technological means. For example, in Trajet, if we pursue the later poster “version” we see a map describing a route through a district in Paris. The route is apparently an appropriation of the actual path taken by the person performing the work documented in the accompanying photograph. In this case “actual” refers to a past situation in which the actor occupied a previous role “in reality” on his way to and from a “real” job. Huyghe hired the worker and his comings and goings, and put them on stage, in this case, a moving stage in a glass sided cube van. The worker’s play consisted of walking a treadmill while the truck communicated back and forth along the actor’s previously habitual route walking to and from his job in “the real world.”

This piece, concerned as it is with the “psycho-geography” of an urban site is a nod to one of Huyghe’s important affiliations. The Situationist project of the 50’s and 60’s applied practices of surrealistic disruption to everyday life. One of their favourite interventions relied on the making of maps and of mapping the urban terrain in ways that involved shifting the realities of time and place in ways that could also be called “play” especially in the sense Gadamer meant when he referred to play as the play of gears or parts of machinery.

The work place and the temporality of the work place figure prominently in Huyghe’s career. Chantier Barbes-Rochechouart (1993) was in a series of photographic displacements that invoke Huyghe’s interest in Robert Smithson. If we were visitors at the making of Chantier we would have encountered a billboard photograph apparently documenting the scenario in front of the billboard. Which came first, which conforms to which? However, Chantier is now encountered by most of us in yet another photograph. We see a photograph on a printed page and this photograph depicts a billboard photograph of a scene that appears to either model or document a subject. In this case two equally possible conflicting actualities were superimposed: a billboard size photograph of a scene or scenario and a photograph of the scene contained within the scene. In the photograph a group of construction workers fabricate a cement foundation for a building. This photograph is the partial subject of another photograph juxtaposing the photograph with what looks like the original scene for the first photograph: a group of workers, same clothing and positions as in the “interior” photograph are constructing a foundation. One thing remains however and that is to note that in the printed version, the point of view from which the final photograph was taken is not congruent with that of the internal camera relationship. While the workers and the site are believably the same, the camera position is altered for the final shot so that buildings in the background are different buildings or the same buildings from a different point of view. It may also be more than a chance coincidence that Huyghe has chosen a work-site specifically concerned with constructing a foundation, the name in another context for metaphysics, the belief that reality is a sort of permanence that underlies appearance. That permanence is in fact the work site or chantier of post-industrial production.

Chantier places us as worker-viewers, on a work-site where the mode of work is that of cinematic production. We labour as spectators in the deterritorialized factory constituted by means of television, computers, cinema and the internet. This is the everyday world into which Pierre Huyghe’s projects intervene with the ambition of reconfiguring our relationship with time. What is most important is to recognize the mode in which his projects operate, that of complicity and pluralization, those very characteristics so consistently condemned in the historically oriented criticism of writers such as Hal Foster and Benjamin Buchloh. This post-historical mode of art practice has sometimes even been labelled post-critical however what is really at stake is the challenge Kafka identified in his description of the technological apparatus.

Huyghe frequently deploys appropriation as an aesthetic/critical practice. For example, his film and video pieces Third Memory and L’Eclipse are in a sense remakes that operate by way of temporal folding based around gaps and repetition that develops something like a cinematic echo. That is, he finds a film situation that already embodies a particular handling of narrativity and inhabits that configuration, reconfiguring their potential for re-deployment in the mode we recognize as a “re-make.” In a sequence of displacements, Huyghe reconfigures our recognition of actuality and fiction in ways that disrupt our desire for recourse to a foundational reality. We are put into the play of time, or what Huyghe calls “freed time.”

This is precisely where Huyghe’s inhabitations and displacements take effect. It’s the question of there being “a person,” an ethical subject as demanded by a notion of artistic efficacy in which personal transformation results from the encounter with art. It’s been nearly fifteen years since the Harvard Business School published Gilmore and Pine’s book The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre and Every Business A Stage. For many years we used the phrase “service industry” only to arrive at it’s transformation into the “experience economy.” The import of Huyghe’s project lies in his use of practices of complicity to disestablish the ideological notion of authenticity that rests just behind the phrase “experience industry” where authenticity is rendered marketable. And equally entangled here, the question of what is happening to personhood in the epoch of maverick technology. If the ideological version of authenticity rests on uniqueness and originality, the critical conception of authenticity is identified with notions of responsibility and “dealing with it”, while inauthenticity would be identified with denial. These all have significant bearing on how we read Huyghe’s project, especially in a composition such as Streamside Days (2003).

A more recent creation of Huyghe, Streamside Days would best be described as an event, with Huyghe acting a role as an event designer. This terminology fits in very well with the notion of an experience economy in which “artists” are those who design authentic experiences for the market. The notion of designed authentic experience is of course oxymoronic and this is perhaps a source of the melancholy that characterises his work. Streamside Days grew from Huyghe’s fortuitous encounter with a suburban housing project or “village” being fabricated near the DIA Foundation’s Beacon establishment. Huyghe met with the various official and resident representatives and proposed an inauguration event for Streamside Knolls, just being completed and populated. The press release explained that the celebration was intended to provide Huyghe with raw material for a new, quasi-documentary film, and that “your attendance will constitute your consent for the artist Pierre Huyghe and Dia Art Foundation to make use of such photographs and recordings as they may depict you, for any purpose.” Huyghe adopted the village as a site to be used in a film that would document an inauguration festival of his design in collaboration with the village officials and citizens alongside the administrators of the DIA Foundation who would host a version of the completed project at the Chelsea DIA in 2003.

This event establishes an ethical quandary. That is, what about the possibly exploitative “relationship” between the director (Huyghe, an artist of major reknown and vast backing) and the new inhabitants of the as yet unfinished housing development who are not entirely in the know? How much latitude can the artist have in the pursuit of a project? In this case, Huyghe developed the plan for an inauguration ceremony as an event that would serve as a subject and a material for his own personal presentation later at the downtown DIA. At best, the inhabitants had a fun day with hot dogs and beer and got to “know one another.” As a ritual event, a festival even, there was a notion built in that the event could become “authentic” for the village and perhaps an ongoing annual feature that would somehow benefit the residents. The piece involves important slippages between the various perspectives of control, authority, manipulation and passivity and it’s not really possible to believe Huyghe saw the piece as anything more than a scenario to be used for his film installation. Events such as this were the target of Hal Foster’s rant Arty Party as published in the London Review of Books.

In any case, the reality of this village from one perspective at least was in fact that of an operative community with inhabitants going about their daily lives. In another perspective the village festival was a film set under the direction of the artist. Huyghe’s interest lies with the slippage between these dimensions, being in-between. Part of his rhetoric includes notions of participation and collaboration, and this derives from his assertion that he merely initiates, then relinquishes control at various points in his events. Of course, in this context relinquishing control may well be just another move, another artistic strategy. At best, the narrative is freed from any pre-existing position of authorization, and proceeds without Huyghe. Watching the film Streamside Day is a relativised viewing, much depending on what we might call one’s class affiliation. If one is a worker-suburbanite for whom the vision of this housing development represents a true enough sense of home, or perhaps a step up, then all is well. However, if one is from the “bohemian” outsider class of art lovers, then the life presented in this new town might look simply fake, cheap and depressing. On the one hand Huyghe’s event expresses a sense of solidarity with the people of Streamside Knoll, and if this is the case then it also represents a send up of the “critical” viewer for whom the village is just a scene to be seen through, a vision that will soon be just more sad America with foreclosed houses surrounded by dead lawns and uncollected garbage. In the end however, it’s certain that Huyghe has put his money on the malaise of inauthenticity in this venture rather than be co-opted for the “experience” market. This is the sense in which he typically adopts “failure” as a mode of operation.

In a recent book dedicated to Huyghe’s career Amelia Barakin defends the artist’s commitment to ambiguity, collusion and complicity, against the critiques such as that of Roberta Smith’s New York Times review of Streamside Day. There, Smith accuses the work of ”weak, amorphous sociological musing” and of passively dwelling in a pop culture zone. I would say that Smith’s critique may rest on an adequate description but an inadequate interpretation, failing to recognize the deliberate use of “weak musing” as a strategic practice and a philosophical position. Nevertheless, art that dissolves itself in its mode of operation runs the risk of being reduced to a supplementary text itself, of which there is an abundance in Huyghe’s case.

Stephen Horne Le Fresse, Peyrat la Noniere 23130 France 011 33 (0)5 55 61 08 62

[stephenhorne]

Sheilah Wilson’s Performance The Visible Inside the Invisible

Searching for something lost may be arduous or amusing, frustrating or transformative. It may be play or it may be in the form of a game. Uncertainty is a given in the case of searching. One has to some extent be ignorant of the object searched or there would be no need of the search, but at the same time have enough knowledge to recognize the searched when it is found. The process is circular and in this case, playful. In play everyday seriousness is suspended. Wilson has shifted the terms from commonplace activity to speculative deception with all the attractions of festival or what artist Pierre Huyghe calls “freed time.” She has invited us onto a terrain of undecidability: as the philosopher Gadamer, (following Huizinga) noted it is the indecisiveness of the playing consciousness, which makes it impossible to decide between belief and non-belief. “In our concept of play the difference between belief and pretence is dissolved.” (1) Is this search serious in its own right or is it an instigator with which to open a space of imagination and fiction? Again, its’ contingent and undecidable.

Wilson’s search began with the story told by a friend and journeys into the space of landscape and psyche, materials on the way to becoming a performance. The search eventually took shape as an event in which the lost object was a site not quite historic but rather anamnesic; a subject held in memory and story. Not entirely physical or substantial in other words and feeling strongly of nostalgia for a remembered place in another time, the past. We might add that many of Wilson’s other works stage a mock spiritualism’s dimensions of dream, memory and imagination with the aim of destabilizing oppositions between the psychic and the substantial, the rational and the unconscious. On this basis her work is affiliated with artists such as David Askevold and Susan Hiller, both well known for their journeys into the soul and its dreamed landscapes.

Wilson’s search for a place lost in the past is the stuff of imagination and play that exists before that of science and common sense. Searching for a place lost in the past is also a compression of popular notions as to what remembering is. For example, thinking that memories are “in our heads,” one’s head and one’s memory being storage place. In this case the place is an event staged by Wilson around a “lost” place but still situated by local folklore.

Wilson’s performance also proposes “drawing” as the name of a practice relating to the past. She draws out the past from memories enduring through stories and descriptions, through local legend and gossip. She also literalized the process by re-drawing the racetrack with lime, leaving a visible white trace, which she then photographed, from the air.

Wilson’s performance had several dimensions. In good quasi-anthropological style she interviewed local inhabitants, finding only one person who had actually seen the long vanished racetrack. In a typical account, the track was reported to be “out there. You know, everyone said it was. But I never did see it.” Versions of the phrase “…so I’ve been told” recur, as does “…that is where it was.” The performance was extended into print with a “flyer” and audio installed at the local Quikmart, and at Lee Tik’s gas station. The flyer presents an aerial photograph of the racetrack, drawings, and quotations from stories explaining the location of the track gathered from residents.

Perhaps what made the race track attractive for use as an ostensible goal was it’s provisional importance: for its community of the time it likely had real value as a site at which people could gather together, and from which stories would be generated. Wilson refers to the lost racetrack as a ghost and likens it to a trace held only in local memories but no longer having any substantial existence. However, Wilson’s performance serves as an instigator of recollection amongst the descendents of its original community and a symbolic signpost or marker that such recollection exists amongst communities. Such a premise for a search suggests that success is by no means simply a matter of finding the lost object but that performing the search itself is the real motivation, the performance becoming a staged or ritualistic event that could include the local community in the process, and in this case such activation would not take place as spectacle but rather by way of authentic exchange. Such an event allows for a break in daily routines and the ongoing nature of quotidian life. If the notion of searching for a chimera racetrack is initially whimsical, the dynamic Wilson has instigated begins to undermine the opposition between what is serious and what is play. Play even sets its open-ended character against the closure of art. While art is not play, play is a practice which artists draw on to ensure ongoing destabilizations, disorientation and the other forms of interruption by which art differentiates itself from routine behaviours.

1. Huizinga, Johan, Homo Ludens, quoted in Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Truth and Method, London, 2004, 105

Bio: Stephen Horne is an art writer living in France.

Le Fresse, Peyrat la Noniere, 23130 France

[stephenhorne]

PATTISON: Garry Neill Kennedy at OR Gallery, Nov 1 Dec 7 2013

I’d like to be known for the art and museum more than real estate. Bob Rennie (1)

Like many artists who have worked through phases of minimalism, conceptual art, and institutional critique, Kennedy takes familiar and commonplace environments as a starting point In his installation at the OR Gallery. Kennedy’s approach fragments into complexity, provoking the pursuit of a network of pluralized connections. In this case, as he has often done in the past, Kennedy reflects on the historical relationship of typeface design, Modernism, and the techniques of contemporary globalized corporate media activity. What is perhaps immediately noteworthy is his continuing embrace of complicit rather than oppositional practices, in the sense that he uses parody to implicate his perspective in what is most essential to contemporary art’s relationship with neo-liberal culture. Instead of presenting a polemical conclusion, he simply confronts us with a fact, an example, and allows the context to provide the satirical twist whose incisiveness depends upon the viewer.

The circulation of Kennedy’s work also speaks to these complicities. A year ago, Kennedy presented PATTISON at the G Gallery in Toronto., a different exhibition under the same title as the Vancouver show, highlighting the role of repetition in brand identity. To further add to the repetitions and disjunctions in the story, nearly thirty years ago Kennedy presented an exhibition with a similar interest in corporate media stars at OR Gallery, and C Magazine carried a review of this show. These repetitions of time and place disrupt the convention of linear time, an important aspect of the exhibition ritual and the museum convention. Such play derives from the fact that PATTISON refers to the media corporation whose logo is familiar from its attachment on thousands of billboards, repeating a consumer message across the country.

At the OR Gallery, Kennedy interpellates a viewer vis a vis the tradition of art and the convention of its exhibition in the museum. In this case, portraiture of prominent individuals is the tradition and the ritual is that of naming. His slight adjustment substitutes a fragment (the personal name) for the person’s likeness, but otherwise adopts the convention with which a noteworthy figure is commemorated. A proper name calls what is named into its belonging, into its place, but with PATTISON it’s as if we are calling or hailing somebody but the response only arrives as a placeless logo. Or, more likely, a logo is calling us into a system of visibility based in reproducibility.

PATTISON, that is, Jim Pattisson, is a father of and for the Vancouver business milieu and beyond. And Bob Rennie, a younger and very successful real estate marketer would be one of his corporate progeny. Pattison is known as Canada’s richest man, and Rennie is recognized not only for his marketing success but also for his dedication to the Rennie Collection and its museum of contemporary art that includes celebrated artists such as Mona Hatoum, Brian Jungen and Louise Lawler. What we might already want to ask at this point is if these affinities between the corporate rich and the role of the artist don’t suggest some loss of the possibilities for difference ? This issue of an apparent malaise is an aspect of Kennedy’s own line of questioning. As the critic Hal Foster once put it, “…criticism without history is aimless,” meaning that for him criticality is 0ppositional and grounded by a linear mode of time, however such a dynamic is eroded in the anything-goes pluralism of our epoch. What is more interesting however is the question of what’s in it for the affluent and powerful, what does involvement in the world of contemporary art have to offer those who can afford to buy and to own almost anything ?

If the art museum is the art world’s bank, as art historian David Joselit says, what can be withdrawn from such a bank? Mostly cachet, which is another form of currency in a culture revolving around the image. To be “known” in this case means “renowned.” In other words, to be somebody, to be a somebody, to have recognition, subject status, are here rendered as aspects of the desire to be seen, that wonderful Warholian insight into the desire for celebrity as the path to becoming “real.” If one is a billionaire corporate father,what is left to desire except identity and aura? As Bob Rennie says, he can derive this from art and his museum if not from real estate. What could promise more authenticity, in the sense of self-sufficient presence than a collection of serious “world class” art? What else could so effectively validate one’s call into existing? Yet the paradox here is that the environment “developed” by these fathers of corporate desire is exactly destructive of the very rewards they seek.

The exhibition in its banalized contemporary form offers mere display and de-sign. This is the terrain into which Kennedy ventures with his carefully neutral gesture. Neutral in the sense that in the current situation any appeal to the aura or to history will be immediately co-opted to reinforce the position of corporate media, as we see occurring in the example of Bob Rennie with his art museum and collection. This is the crux of complicity as an art practice in this moment. The challenge is now to pursue the benefits of mass media’s pluralizing dispersal of reality without reinforcing its production of banality, irrelevance and malaise. Kennedy has adopted the insights of Warhol regarding media celebrity status and of Haacke’s into the art/real estate connection and astutely applied these to the malaise within which we are now immersed. What is most remarkable is the deftness with which he pulls this out of that simple device, the corporate logo. With this exhibition Kennedy identifies a collusion in which, for a change, it is the sphere of corporate capitalism seeking the rewards that serious art seems to offer, those of the “authenticity” described above. This is what’s left for a billionaire developer to desire in a world where the media systems of his very own corporate culture melt it all down.

1. Bob Rennie, Huffington Post, December 27, 2013

[stephenhorne]

Hal Foster’s Art and Architecture Complex

Published in Menlo Park, 2013

With this title, The Art - Architecture Complex, Foster invokes that sense of capitalist conspiracy first expressed in the 1960’s phrase, “military/industrial complex.” The book is massively informative but characterized by the author’s trademark polemic with regard to the pluralism that is post modernity in general.  Foster has long made clear his preference for purity over plurality. Here, his target is the current work in design produced by “starchitects” such as Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Jean Nouvel and others whose activity Foster terms “image building” and “pop civics.” Foster indicates his awareness that his view of the spatial arts having been co-opted by spectacle, by theatricalizing narrative, or that they have become mere “decorative design” will be received as yet another puritanical gesture from “old socialism.” He likes to refer to these designer’s productions as “commercial pursuits” and to Rem Koolhaas as a “dandy.” There may however be traces of Foster’s own (perhaps defensible) star-gazing to be found between the lines here, that Foster perhaps objects too much.

By “image building” we surmise a reference to the seminal essay Society of the Spectacle written by Guy Debord in 1967. Capital and spectacle, these are the concepts by which Foster navigates the tyranny of contemporary culture. Why not take the first few lines from Debord’s book as predictive, “Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.” (1) This still seems close enough as a description of our current situation, although what it means and how it came about will be debated. For Foster it seems adequate to blame Capital and to rest with the predictable commitment to a theoretical perspective drawn from the Frankfurt School.

Following Debord’s thesis we would note that apparently there was once a time when the world was “directly lived” and to apply this to architecture we would argue that in former times buildings were not constructed with “images” and surfaces, or facades, but were in the round and made of substantial stuff like stone, glass and steel. That is, their materiality was bodily, although understood in the sense of a physicality that stops short of recognizing “flesh,” that wonderful term of Merleau-Ponty’s that now encompasses the electronic environment.

This metaphysics, the foundation for Foster’s criticism in general, is oppositional in form.  He typically opposes resistance and transgression to complicity, outside to inside, the real to the illusory, and the virtual to the actual. This marks a limit to his analyses, and for some would render his conclusions helplessly conservative, even when his objections to “capital” might seem necessary. This is the crux of his situation; critical for his historical consciousness, conservative for the same, his oppositionality leaving him without traction with regard to a historicity of experience now re-composed by way of electronic “abstraction.” In this new situation, Foster refuses to acknowledge how antiquated his use of “the image” and “spectacle” has become, clinging as this does to some notion of an objective foundation, a reality that would offer an external standpoint from which critique proceeds. His fervent conviction that there is an “outside” from which criticism can orient itself and from which critical attacks may be mounted, that distance is definitive of criticality, fails to account for and integrate the pluralizing impact of electronic communications media with which the post modern is to be identified.  Even a likely sympathizer such as Bruno Latour asks, “Are we not like those mechanical toys that endlessly make the same gesture when everything else has changed around them?”   (2)

Foster’s attitude with regard to electronic media culture makes him a traditionalist. Another writer afflicted with what is often called “Benjaminian nostalgia,” the historian of architecture, Kenneth Frampton, invoked a practice he called “critical regionalism,” in which architechtonics, truth to materials, site specificity and other such dreams of the decade were the key aspects of building. His essay on the topic was included in The Anti-Aesthetic, a 1983 anthology edited by Foster. (3) Here, Frampton lays out a heartwarming defence of real things, place as the here and now, and an actuality that is understandably founded in a longing for “the” body. The phenomenological version of realism adhered to in Frampton’s essay runs right up against the theorizations of media expressed in my own other favoured text on architecture, the interview between architect Jean Nouvel and Jean Baudrillard, media theorist. What is perhaps intriguing is the parallel between Foster’s perspective which targets the use of digital media in so far as they are the tools that have facilitated architecture’s having become image, and that of the Nouvel/ Baudrillard dialogue, in which the electronic media facilitate a general dematerialization and a world without “outside.” Baudrillard, informed by the media theory of Marshall McLuhan, developed a more “performative” vision of architecture’s relationship with new media. Although the literary character of his thought has often been anathema to traditionalists such as Foster, his observations are acute if expressed in apocalyptic language. His willingness to embrace the media as environment means he spends less time spinning his wheels on a positioning of critique now no longer available as it was in the nineteen eighties.

Perhaps what is needed, following Foster’s denunciations of design as mere consumerist manipulation in the service of greater efficiencies for capitalism, is recognition of a more general outline. That would be one that attributes the root of the problem more deeply in a description of the rationalist prejudices that dominate our thinking and being. For the style of critique demonstrated by Foster and his colleagues this would be bad news, leaving them revealed as a part of the problem in so far as their project is itself inextricably dedicated to the founding of criticality in a modernity already itself a practice of instrumental rationality.  In this sense, the critique mounted from Foster’s “leftist” optimism has become a rearguard defence inevitably and finally supporting and requiring those elements of purification and linearity so essential to the drive of technics (including capital) for ever greater efficiency.

1. Guy Debord,  Society of the Spectacle, Black and Red, trans, 1970, Detroit, 5

2. Bruno Latour, Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam, Critical Inquiry, Winter 2004, University of Chicago,  225

3. Kenneth Frampton, Towards a Critical Regionalism, in The Anti-Aesthetic, ed. Hal Foster,  Bay Press, Seattle, 1982

4., Jean Nouvel and Jean Baudrillard, The Singular Objects of Architecture, University of Minnesota, trans. Robert Bononno, 2002

[stephenhorne]

Yam Lau at Katzman Kaymen Gallery, Toronto, Nov. 24 – Dec 22, 2012

Between Past and Present: Lived Moments in Beijing proposes to bring digital design capabilities into proximity with traditional concerns such as memory, home, building, and the question of time’s movement, which is also the question of mortality, the answer to the question of what could be between past and present.

“Projection” is a term carrying a strong sense of temporality, that of planning, imagining, building, imposing, and remembering. In Lau’s past works these also typically exist in revolving layers of superimposition. The boundaries of the work become pertinent, this being an illuminated wall drawing, a drawing done with shadows on a wall, a memory space most people carry forward from their early childhood, a contemplation with which to occupy oneself while waiting to fall asleep. In this case, the wall is both screen and built space.

Lau counters the desire for home as permanence, for what is fixed, a secure(d) site. However the house and home that Lau proposes in this particular housing project doesn’t seem to offer that kind of stability and protection at all, being drawn and re-drawn perpetually, favouring a finally “full/void.”

Surrounding Lau’s house there are scenes of reverie, quiet waters lap at the edges of this house that floats like an island and that other times seems to be drifting through a starry night complete with sickle moon. Of course in this case we can’t miss recognizing the faux treatments that protect us from falling too far into one or another moment. The stars are “clumsily” out of focus; the waves on this water are softened with devices adopted from the tools of this relatively simple deployment of CAD technology

These images of contemporary street life in China collaged into the grids of these ever changing webs may be memories from a Beijing childhood, displaced in time. We depart from the realm of an idealized China when the present moment of today’s busy street life bursts in with all the noise one would associate to life in a modern industrial giant. Lau inserts actual scenes into the CAD drawings, marking the claim to a “now” in the ideal space of the projection. As screens within screens, transparency within opacity, inside within outside, Lau’s building erases as it goes, neither process gaining on the other, leaving us in the tranquillity of a walled garden “somewhere.”

Unlike conventional film viewing, Lau attempts to give us not a static object but the dynamic activity of viewing. Lau’s focus is on our role as viewing subjects. Although there is apparently complex technology in his installations Lau’s video undermines any display of technological power, his video often displaying its own internal limitations, such as, for example, the strobing shadows that mark the limit of the computer’s capacity to render movement, or the misalignments that occur in various overlappings The tools of digital imaging are made discreetly visible inside this imaging field while the work reveals itself as a revealing of its’ own processes of construction.

Where Lau leaves us, in this space between past and present, is in a place of ambiguity, a place of the serious tension that arises between our human and our technological being. Lau’s project seems to make this a place where the challenge is posed and made “liveable” by way of our relationship with the past, a futural home in time, time as the place of dwelling. 

[stephenhorne]

Lorna Bauer 
“Grey is a Colour, Gray is a Color”

November 24th, 2012 to January 19th, 2013, Galerie Nicholas Robert, Montreal

  The title of Lorna Bauer’s exhibition at Galerie Nicolas Robert offers a simple model of what she explores with her series of photographs.

  Many of the fabrics in these storefronts have decorative floral or geometric patters; that is, they resemble modernist abstractions.  These are not subjects of documentary interest but contribute to the overall sense of reflection and refraction that make up a particular temporal experience. For example in 41 Street  a window with layers of reflection projects aspects of the street scene behind the photographer into a space where we see, mingling amongst the bolts of patterned fabrics, a parked scooter with the mirage of a chair inside the store. If we take this hybrid mix of the actual and the virtual, the inside and the outside to be a spatial confusion, this is only so in relation to time understood according to the convention of linear, historical evolution.  In that sense, the photograph documents or illustrates a scene in the past, an endpoint. However, when looked at freed from the demand of historical consciousness, a photograph becomes a window to the future, a projection and not a record of a past event, a beginning rather than a terminus.

  Bauer has reinforced this disruption of convention with her two sets of photographs titled  Bracket. In these two sets of three images, each of trios of the “same” scene is presented through three different densities, light, medium and dark. If we return to the title, “grey is a colour/gray is a color” we note Bauer identifying two different practices for spelling words, presenting Canadian and American English spellings of the words, “grey/gray” and “colour/color”.

  In anglophone Canada, at the Globe and Mail for example, the “e” is used rather than the “a” of standard American usage. This is apparently true for the anglophone world in general with the USA being the exception. We could then say that this differential signals a difference, it functions as a codification. Or, we could also call it a projection, an action with a futural effect, it’s performative, it enacts the difference it’s referring to, it’s rehearsal/repetition makes it be so. We could see that this model applies equally well to the situation of language in general. There is nothing essential about using either “e” or “a”, it’s a matter of its doing; its enactment.

  For example, in the pieces titled Bracket, the trios are of three kinds of grey, or is it gray? They were after all photographed in the USA. And so Bauer proposes some questions as to the nature of veracity in photographs, that is, the potential of any photograph to operate as evidence. If all three grey/gray photographs are equally true to life this would mean that the historical accuracy and reliability of photographs rests on an essentialism, in this case, that the grey/gray window she has photographed has a true and real grey/gray, we just don’t know which it is, and so photography’s function as record is undermined. The grey/gray of Bauer’s storefront in three alternate versions is just that, three alternatives, all perhaps equally viable. This suggests that our apprehension of reality and truth is a matter of convention and the belief that convention entails. However this leaves aside the dilemma of invention; could there be invention without convention, or are these two sides of one coin?

  Bauer has inflected her apparent subject matter with an important detour; we are confronted not with images recording past  moments but with windows becoming screens on which appear both reflections and projections of further screens. By “screens” in this case I mean the peculiar, active spatiality of windows and the interplay of these that make up not a fixed image but a perpetually emergent perception, futural rather than historic. The claim Bauer makes is actually couner Barthian, not the photography as “that has been” but “this will be.” This gives a very different sense to her image of a storefront crowded with dressmaking scrolled fabrics with its handwritten  sign inviting us to “come in.”

  The photo from this perspective does not describe or document anything, it rests on nothing, a void, if we are thinking in terms of recording a past/passing. This could be seen as a virtue, this “resting on nothing.” It is counter foundational, post historical, and anti-essentialist. Contrarily, it also invites us to acknowledge the power of convention in belief and the role of belief in convention. That is, to the extent that convention works, it is because we believe in it. In this sense, convention is not mere repetition but is an enactment of social interaction.

  Bauer’s photographs finally ask a simple question; why do we speak of taking a photograph? Does the act of taking not imply also a having? We take in order to have.

[stephenhorne]

On The Doing(s) of Art Criticism

   I’ve been trying to think about what art criticism is, what criticality is – or could be – and I keep coming up with the image of Jeff Koons’ giant sculpture of a dog, (Puppy 1992), a topiary made of living plants, growing and changing with the seasons. And its location is intriguing, posed as it is outside the Frank Gehry–designed art museum at Bilbao, Spain. For many viewers, the work is ambiguous: on the one hand, playing off the architecture’s serious, high-tech look; on the other hand, proposing a playful seduction.

Does mention of “criticism” inevitably invoke modernity with its framework of foundations, history and progress; its linear temporality? Such begins the commentary called postmodernism and the question of where we are with regards to modernity. This embeddedness of criticism in modernity is often termed its “crisis” –  its apparently inevitable attachment to what it is turned against, its familial loyalty.

In the last few years, there have been dissenting voices regarding the viability of criticism, critique and perhaps criticality in general. Books, lectures and essays have appeared with titles such as “post-criticism,” or “the post-postmodern,” and even “alter-modern.” Paradox abounds in these critiques of critique and this leaves us between the extremes of two models: the modernist one of a hierarchy as viewed from a central point (the patriarchal West) or the postmodern one of a field levelled by mass media.

And so, the task of criticism becomes one of an ongoing defamiliarization, of “taking down the house.” Criticism’s work is thus that of “making strange,” revealing the uncanniness at the heart of the quotidian, reworking the dichotomy of the familiar and the foreign and shifting its components to build differently – or even giving up building altogether in favour of cultivating, as did Koons. Le Corbusier identified the house as a “machine for living” and we can see the museum as another form-giving equipment. Carl Andre’s rug sculptures helped us to wake up to the groundlessness under our feet, the same with Sol Lewitt drawing on that limit that makes the play of near and far possible, just blowing away the continuity imposed by the museum with its walls. To be regarded as temporal as well as spatial, a museum’s walls see to it that a certain convention around time is installed – linear sequence becomes foundational, as the museum organizes temporality into time – into a particular social reality.

Criticality and modernity are inextricably intertwined, to the point that we could almost describe rationalist modernity as a project whose objective finally comes to be the dissolution of every horizon and every stability. This conversation usually takes place under the name of “postmodernism” and it is important to note that in this space criticism cannot avail itself of history or progress, these notions having been put on the shelf, along with the rationalist conception of linear time – and therefore perhaps criticality itself. What is left is to pursue the new connectedness offered by electronic communications media, which may very well be the true and future postmodernity.

Faced with these sorts of entanglements, Jacques Rancière responded to an interviewer’s question with: “For me, the fundamental question is to explore the possibility of maintaining spaces of play.”[1] In this statement, Rancière suggests a “doing” that is itself a maintaining of spaces of play. Here we are “playing” on the multiple senses of this verb, including its use in the theatrical context. When actors are playing a scene, they are unmaking and remaking it in their space of repetition and rehearsal. In this space, the notion of a more fluid reality that follows from an emphasis on “doing” is another way of being-in-time besides our former social order based on “making.” Making suggests a certain way of regarding time: it builds an object, moves from a plan (concept) towards completion and end-product, with the result being a material object that already “gives” a market relation. As we begin to recognize how our understanding of technology has until now rested on a mechanical model, we can start taking up the possibilities of social reality offered by electronic connectivity – a reality that no longer rests on binary oppositions like subject to object or inside to outside.

Following this description of modernity, the art museum is an apparatus for formatting space and time and their model of continuity. This “continuity” maintains the model of “the new” as a negation of “the established.” It is also the place where encounters between the subjectivity of the artist and that of the viewer are staged. In addition, the exhibition is an arrangement that ensures these encounters are apprehended as a one-on-one situation, (by contrast to the theatre, where we immediately recognize that the event is to be understood collectively). This relationality is called for by the made thing, the work of art. Thus, the art critic is simply one who waits on this call in all its unforseeability, dedicating him or herself to this waiting through the work of listening for and to this call and doing his or her best to respond. The critic’s response consists of asking the usual questions about issues of mortality – who, when, where – and then relating an opinion that is a sizing up or measure. This evaluation has to do with ascertaining relevance and whether the “made thing” bears all its conviction alongside all its uncertainty.

The work of the exhibition apparatus is that of formatting. What is “formatted” is a home place (a museum), a time (historical), works of art as objects/products, and the viewer/subject. It is this homely place/time that criticism infiltrates. As an intruder, criticism startles with its shock, defamiliarizing, or “making strange” as the historical avant-garde put it. Unfortunately the avant-garde’s reliance, like oppositional criticality in general, rests on the bad spatial metaphor of an “outside” that is deployed against convention – against an “inside” – without recognizing how its own constitution is within and by means of convention. This failing of the historical avant-garde is repeated across the story of “socially” oppositional, subversive and resistant art, a story that hasn’t recognized its own already social embedded character. In our time, art simply does not exist “outside.” So-called critical art, usually self-righteous or self-serving, is on thin ethical ground in that it fails to recognize or admit its own religiosity. This is not however to cast any aspersion on either the historical avant-gardes, or their contemporary relevance as a modeling of thinking shaped by a conception of the future as the unforseeable.

If one admits that there is no “outside,” the terrain becomes more interesting and, paradoxically, less familiar. For an alternative to orthodox criticality, we might instead pursue our inveterate tendency to wander in a circle, traversing paths already traversed. As critical practice, this circling embraces uncertainty, allowing space for the uncanny happening or event that disrupts the homely enclosure, breaks it apart and creates the possibility of openness to something strange and alien. The uncanny marks the possibility of an opening, of change, of that glitch in time that repetition with a difference is.

If “waiting” is conventionally understood to be passive while “doing” is active, the space that is art disrupts the binary in favour of a space that is in play. Gianni Vattimo has proposed just such a fluid reality, a space in which “…experience regains the characteristics of relationality, disorientation, and play.”[2] His postmodern “place” is not one of artistic fashion, nor the march of progress described by art historians from the perspective of historical consciousness, but rather a reality “weakened” by the pluralizing shock effect of mass media. Countering the conventional critical position regarding mass media’s standardizing impact, Vattimo argues that it actually diversifies, representing a perpetually dispersing effect on consensus. In other words, the mass media is doing the critical work we always thought only art could do, that is, “creating difference” and thinking differently about what “thinking” could be.

Clearly practice and theory intertwine, but perhaps it is also possible to see where they can be discerned – and in a way that doesn’t prejudice one over the other. Speaking at a conference at a Montreal university on the relationship of art to theory last October, Toronto artist André Jodoin proposed the following:

Art theory concerns art works as they are received (by a public or an audience) and art practice concerns the practice of making art. Art theory and art practice are two different practices and two different theories. [3]

There are mountains of writing on critical theory and critical practice but less on what artists do from the perspective of art understood as “doing and making” rather than from the perspective built up from received commentary. Practice is difficult to specify: it concerns “doing,” making space where change “happens.” Change is expressed in what changes me. Speculating that art, as ontological, brings about “new realities” would be to speak of art’s role in change – but as art, rather than as publicity for good and serious causes. This concept implies that a work of art does something and that this differs from theorizing that it “says” something. Situating art in this way takes the perspective that a work of art is performative rather than an object of art historical discourse. The urge to contain, to package and to present is disrupted in practices of letting go: dispersal, discontinuity, distracted perception and dissolution. In other words, it is an abandonment where one becomes “other” – or beside oneself – no longer a subject mastering an object but allowing oneself to be acted upon.

In a further text on the same subject, Jodoin refers to Aristotle’s distinction between knowledge deployed as a demonstration of sophistication and knowledge deployed as wheel-spinning rhetorical ability. Jodoin sees knowledge embedded in the more Nietzschean perspective of its value for the living of life; a question that enfolds the ethical realm. He goes on to quote Aristotle:

What I mean by the practice of art is the practical knowledge of art, what Aristotle distinguished from sophia as phronesis. Aristotle says that phronesis  “is not simply a skill…as it involves not only the ability to decide how to achieve a certain end, but also the ability to reflect upon and determine good ends consistent with the aim of living well overall.” The trouble is that practical knowledge in art practice has been generally bound up and confused with making things (techne), i.e. the production of art works.” [4]

Perceiving art in terms of practice and event rather than object/product allows us to recognize our own assumption that, as Jodoin says, “there is nothing inherently critical in art.”[5] Correcting this assumption allows us to consider that art is critical just by being art, as ontological and not as a contribution to mere critique. Critics, and even more so artists, could afford to have more confidence in art.

The efficacy of criticism rests in the critic’s call; opinion and evaluation are an actualization, the risk is greater than habitual domestication – namely, the art market and its apparatus – permits us to perceive. Evaluation is performed by criticism in the discovery of relation, the opening of an interval, an in-between that is essentially intermittent, which thus allows for the “play” that is temporality. “Play” in this case invokes action: doing, acting, slippage or misalignment. These terms suggest that “time” is an ongoing continuity – a construct that contains – whereas what is intermittent is a matter of gaps, openings, spacings, re-starts. As gesture, action and activity, the critic’s call, is a “play,” even in the sense of its usage in sports. Art criticism need not be concerned with scholarly defence as much as the writer need be engaged in an academic context. This work of having an opinion is the first item that distinguishes the “doing” of art criticism from the “saying” of art theory or the discipline of art history. Critical practice speculates and responds without establishing authoritative theoretical positions nor adherance to a predetermined notion of a professionalized intellectual procedure.

Obviously there is a multitude of ways critics present opinions, ranging from the American-style populist language of Dave Hickey to the nuanced differentiations of Sarat Maharaj, or the cinematic intervals of Trinh T. Minh-ha. In any case, critical practice comes back to opinion and evaluation. This is the productive ground of confrontation with established authority and with authoritative discourse in general. Whatever authority criticism may have has been initiated through the practice of opening a space through assertions of opinion and evaluation ­– with their feet in aesthetic feeling, these are the basics of interpretation.

Attending to art as event means taking a step back to a place where the art critic enacts critical practice in an attempt to discover art. In effect, this means taking the standpoint of art, of something that is not, or that was and that may again be. This is the paradox of taking the impossible standpoint of the unforeseeable. As a living through of such an encounter, the critic is lost in the task of discovery.

I have proposed an affinity for practices of criticism like that of the avant-garde’s “defamiliarization.” In turn, this makes it attractive to raise “the” idea of the uncanny, whereby its destabilization of binary oppositions and the familiar versus the strange, makes it a privileged term for criticism. Uncanny gets lost in itself, being neither presence nor absence. As critic Leo Bersani demonstrates, uncanny thinking is that of difference, a difference that disrupts the technological relationship between a dominating subjective power or force and its “object,” allowing instead for a relative passivity, a space of relationality where the home place and the lost become unfixed.

.

In former times, the work of art criticism grew from individuals whose primary work was poetry and playwriting. Of course the obvious example is Baudelaire, but in the mid-20th century, Mexican poet Octavio Paz’ publications include an important study of Duchamp as well as writings on peers Robert Rauschenberg and Antoni Tàpies. Samuel Beckett’s Three Dialogues is one of the best pieces of writing anywhere on painting. The American critic Michael Fried is also essentially a poet although he has been employed as an art historian. The writing of Vietnamese-American filmmaker and writer Trinh T. Minh-ha is now well acknowledged for its vigorous use of literary procedure. Immediately preceding Baudelaire, the Romantics proposed a conception of aesthetic experience that included Wordsworth’s notion of epiphany, Browning’s “infinite” moment and Coleridge’s “revelation.” What makes these historical figures pertinent here is the importance given by them to the constructive role of discontinuity in their conception of aesthetic experience, an isolated momentary that meets its response in a participatory and relational mode of attention. The near and the far trade places, as do the familiar and the strange in their crossings from sense perception to symbolic order.

These examples suggest that the critics of 20th-century art have not always been art historians nor cultural studies “inter-disciplinarians” but rather individuals getting lost. It seems accurate to say that art critics perform their critical practices between other occupations, such as that teaching and researching in the field of art history. While this particular occupation would seem somehow foundational to art criticism and for studio practice, closing the gap between these roles imperils the marginality and instabilities shared by critical and artistic practice. Art historians are primarily employed to do the academic work of teaching and research, with ongoing positions in institutions such as universities and museums. The day-by-day sequence of the institutional passion for continuity must see art in a timeline of progress. To its credit and benefit, art criticism as such appears rarely on the curricula of university studies. Without the ambiguous benefits of institutional employment, critical practice operates in a mode of discontinuity where it is the servant of a sporadic unfolding rather than any progressive regularity, of being rather than any becoming. In a culture of administration, the reliance on established authoritative points of reference encourages a professionalized self. The increasing conceptualization of art practice as research follows the corporatization of the university with its lived experience evaluated in terms of excellence. In turn, this practice displaces that of the aesthetic understood as a feeling for life.

Distraction and “filmic” perception is the dominant mode of attention in our epoch. In this condition we cannot really expect the kinds of concentration and dedicated practices of attention that once belonged to the aesthetic realm. Disseminated meanings replace the aura and genius. Perhaps in an absence of the work of art, in the absence of its attendant modes of perception that belong to the aura, new possible worlds will appear and to which artists and critics will attune. With technology no longer understood in terms of mechanization, discontinuity, spacing and interruption take on a new excitement. If the digital/electronic media environment is an overcoming of various dichotomizations – such as subject and object, or inside and outside – then what were previously understood as deficiencies must be re-evaluated.

 The art critic’s task is to pursue complex and sometimes obscure aesthetic situations with the aim of evaluating their relevance as art within a conception of art. This vision is one embracing its own disappearance in kitsch, utopia or silence. The critic drives in a wedge, fragmenting space into an in-between, a space of multiplicities, otherness and difference. This is the practice: a breaking up of the house in a play of near and far, then and now, disorienting reception as the work of art enacts an antidote to modernity’s success.

Stephen Horne has published on art in periodicals, journals, anthologies and catalogues in Canada, the US, Europe, Latin America and Asia. He taught media arts at NSCAD University in Nova Scotia, and theory of art at Concordia University in Montreal for many years and now lives and works in Montreal and France. In 2011-2012 he was Visiting Scholar at the Jarislowsky Institute in Montreal. His essay Abandon The Future was published in German by Verlag Dumont and included in Jochen Gerz’s Art Anthology. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal recently published his essay on Pierre Dorion. 

1.Jacques Rancière, Interview, Artforum, March 2007, 258

2.Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society, 1992, Johns Hopkins/Polity, Baltimore, 59

3.André Jodoin, UAAC Conference panel on Criticism in Art and Design, October 2012

4.André Jodoin, “Practical Knowledge for Art and Design,” Menlo Park, online journal edited by Andrew Forster, http://menlopark.ca/, 3

5.op cit, 3

[stephenhorne]

If Becoming This: Sheilah Aanchen Wilson

Journeying and placing are central practices in Sheila Wilson’s performance and site related art works.  It is pertinent to a discussion of her work titled The Invisible Inside The Visible to mention that she was born in a place named Caribou River and has a house at a place called River John. And that this performance work adopts the form of a story about searching for a place that has been lost, has disappeared having been discarded. We don’t need to know where these rivers are in the factual terms of geography, but the figure of the river as an image of time is important to Wilson’s concern with narrative.

We can see in her work a treatment that takes a terrain or a territory as an unconscious whose maps are already there in latent form waiting to be revealed, or conjured. These “summonings” Wilson carries out as if she were a 19th century spiritualist or a medium. She calls herself a “translation machine.” Her actions, in which the stories of individual tellers are arranged to focus on the dimension of absence take the confluence of place, memory, and story as a starting point, as a material, which paradoxically is ephemeral, provisional, or transitory.

In the environment of daily life, spiritualism and mysticism are not usually very interesting. However, when doubled through their insertion, as practices, into the environment created by an actual art work they suddenly become once again reflective and revelatory. The boundary between materialism and spiritualism is made permeable, their opposition foiled.

The performance titled The Invisible Inside The Visible is resonant with such spiritualist and mystical leanings. Artists have often employed practices deriving from this perspective in their search for alternatives to the rationalism of our current artistic and critical orthodoxies. Surrealism, for example, has insisted on the dream and visionary experience as a higher form of knowledge, as a bridging to a universe that would work as an instrument of healing and divination. The bricolage practices of Dada have equally provided a means to re-orient our temporality, abolishing the rational disposition of time and space, the near and the far, all in favour of disorientation.  The British critic Jean Fisher wrote “Dream itself is a repository of the discarded – the traces and fragments of memory, of the ‘day’s residues’ and unfulfilled wishes – and in this sense finds companionship with the impulses of the artistic avant-garde.” (1)

In this space and time of a favourable disorientation the lost becomes the found and vice versa. Wilson has created a performance work around the search for such a discarded fragment, an element of local folklore and rural culture, the horse racing track popular amongst its rural community around the turn of the 19th century, long since disappeared. Such a finding however is not of the sort substantiated by quantifiable verification, but is rather a more ghostly apparition hinted at in the sort of oral narratives that often make up local knowledges. In a sense a “ghost,” the track existed and vanished nearly one hundred years ago. Searching out the history of this place involved Wilson in a psuedo anthropological process, asking local residents as to the whereabouts of the racetrack and then gathering their responses, later publishing them in the local newspaper as a dimension of her installation/performance. Most of the responses were characterised by uncertainty, for example, “Like I say, I haven’t seen it,” or,  “It’s funny because I know it was out there,” and “It will be hard to see it.”

In another work, one that is essentially photographic, Wilson took a copy of Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, (a writer whose work raises silence to a fine degree), and physically excised the word silence each and every time it appears. She then blacked out the rest of the page so that each page, presented as a photographic transparency which when projected, acts as a foil to the silence as light projection. This piece thus employs a practice of doubling the negative, absenting the absence.

In the performance titled A Line Drawn Continuously Without Looking persons are invited to participate by literally drawing from “out of body experiences.” In this work performers drew a single line while narrating an account of an out of body experience. The resulting line, drawn continuosly and without looking, was then transferred onto mylar to create a twenty by twenty four inch photographic contact print, leaving Wilson with indexical proof of what remains an unverifiable activity.

In her artistic practice Wilson has proposed an overlapping of populist inclusivity and rural sentiment with that slice of conceptualism best represented by artists such as Susan Hiller, Roni Horn or David Askevold.  This tendency proposes an important alternative to the academic “criticality” claimed by the prevailing orthodoxies in contemporary art. Such an alternative subverts or undermines the rationalism that critical analysis rests on and perpetuates. Wilson whose trajectory is that of wonder and the uncanny binds experience to narrative, memory to place, dream to history and reality to enigma. With these practices the  conflict between unity and alterity is avoided as dreams work to abolish the rational disposition of time and space, mind and body. Apparently even the barrier between the living and the dead may be overcome, and even if not, the attempt to do so has all the intrigue of failure. We can identify such an orientation with the commitment to the view that truth in art is aligned with poetry rather than the social sciences.

Notes: 

(1) Jean Fisher, Truth’s Shadows, in Dream Machines, ed. by Susan Hiller, Hayward Gallery, London, 2000, 

[stephenhorne]

Pierre Dorion: Spaces of Estrangement

Being human means being in a certain relation … that is not marked by identity or a common possession but rather by the “experience of strangeness.”  Maurice Blanchot1 

The feeling of past time is a present feeling.  William James

Oblivion is the life force of memory and remembrance is its product.  Marc Augé

The painting Minerva Medica (1994) shows the ruin of a building once thought to have been a temple dedicated to “Minerva the Doctor” but later identified as a nymphaeum, dedicated to the nymphs and functioning as part of Rome’s water supply. The viewpoint adopted by the artist has allowed him to include the railway tracks that now run past the ruin toward a complex of modernist architecture on the distant horizon. With this anachronistic inclusion Dorion introduces us to his concern with spatial and temporal displacements, and to his personal consideration of memory and its role in “giving place.” Also in the genre of urban landscape or cityscape, Overpass (via Casilina) (1994) and Landscape with Lamppost and Blue Building (1995) present a similarly timeless and dystopian vision that carries echoes of the bleak universe elaborated in the writings of J. G. Ballard.

In La chambre à l’atelier (1996) Dorion reveals his passion for creating uncomfortable spaces. In this work, he shows a room with a metal-framed single bed in the style of the recent past - made up, with two pillows, one over the other - and a black chair pushed tightly up against a radiator. Displayed on the back wall are numerous small images, some in frames some not. The framed images are propped up and re-framed within window-like insets in the wall that function as shelves. These details add up to a very cramped space where all the elements are crowded into one corner to form, most importantly, a composition that clearly manifests a photographic style of framing and fragmentation. An aspect of this type of “snapshot” composition is its ability to confer an ambience of exaggerated familiarity with the subject: the room is like a fragment of a memory of a place that one has never actually experienced but that reeks with familiarity. This recognition is combined with the sense that the room itself, or perhaps our memory of it, is situated at some distance in time, perhaps in the time of the previous generation. Temporal displacements like this, which are often the focus of Dorion’s work, serve to disrupt any identification with “culture” understood in terms of a general and mythologized worldview or socially determined daily routine. Culture in this sense can be used as a device for hiding from the knowledge that the world is not as familiar and homelike as it might seem.

Another painting of a bedroom, Chambre à coucher (1999), also presents an awkward and perceptually intense space. This room is basically a box. The viewpoint is located at one end, looking toward an outside wall that has a window jammed up against one corner, identifying the setting as an apartment constructed in the 1960s or 1970s. There is nothing in the room but a baseboard heater running along the wall with the window and a small plank of wood leaning against one of the longer side walls. The singularity of the plank particularizes the space and gives it a sense of having been “there” for the viewer/artist in some way that is significant. The image is nearly monochrome, with everything except for the plank painted in tones of blue-grey. This colouring emphasizes the artificiality of the scene - its constructedness by way of photography - as does the extreme lighting and the distortion of the room’s box-like shape.

In her 1995 essay on the artist Catherine Crowston emphasizes the relevance of Barthes’s essay on photography to her interpretation of Dorion’s art practice. She notes that “unlike painting, the camera captures an instant, immobilizing a time ‘that-has-been.’”2 What is remarkable about Barthes’s Sartrean phenomenology of photography is his failure to mention the place of “the uncanny” in his subject - all the more surprising since his essay makes morbidity and mortality a central theme. Equally remarkable, perhaps, is that Freud’s renowned essay on The Uncanny never once mentions photography.

It is tempting to proceed by saying that the paintings of Pierre Dorion are manifestations of something intensely human. This approach would take into account the way these works seem to engage us through mood, affect and the potential for compassion in the face of mortality. In a 2007 article on Dorion, David Deitcher discusses the conventionally derisory use of the term “sentimental” and argues that Dorion successfully re-codes and rehabilitates this disparaged perspective.3

This initial mention of the human dimension needs to be at least partially tempered, however, if we are to explain the origin of the unsettling strangeness and even obscurity that has always persisted where Dorion’s paintings are concerned. This dissonance may be a result of his painting’s infection by an underlying architecture, or by “picturing” as Gerhard Richter called photography. It may also be due to an overall softness of detail that leaves the images distant, fogged or “lost.”

Dorion’s use of the camera is singular, and so is his application of paint in accordance with a photograph. What is the contribution of the camera, of the photograph, in constructing his paintings? How is the photographic image an aspect of this painting’s dominant sensibility, that particular mood composed of melancholy, oblivion and destitution?

The estrangement that is so evident in a painting such as Bowring Park III (2006) exemplifies what has led to the prevailing view of Dorion’s work as concerned with loss, emptiness and absence. This perception draws us into considering the conflicted relationship between distance and intimacy: on the one hand, Bowring Park III is despairingly “minimal,” yet on the other it is replete with longing. In this “landscape,” desolation and melancholy are characteristics of the space presented. Dorion’s pictures seem almost to conjure the image of ruin itself, although they could equally be said to reveal a ruin of the image.

Strangely softened by the painter’s touch, Bowring Park III is typical of Dorion’s production from the period between 1994 and 2006. Liminality and ambivalence are prominent presences in these sombre paintings, which speak so strongly of destitute times. The mutedness of each painted image is contradicted by the sense of an underlying architecture, a support that has been blurred over by means of the painting process. A look back at Minerva Medica reinforces this impression of a tension - tension, perhaps, between history and memory, between the sort of factuality assigned to what has been recorded and the facticity that pertains to the realm of individual human life.

In Minerva Medica, Dorion takes us along the path of melancholy by picturing destitution. This is painting itself worked through as a ruin, the image and the picture as ruin. We can pursue this path by considering Dorion’s exploration, in earlier years, of the ruin of Catholic ritual (Mes Confessions, 1985), of the “new world” portrayed in the paintings of the 19th-century Hudson River School (Temperance, 1998) and of modernist abstraction and its affiliated social program. These subjects function as intimations of personal, individual loss, but also of  “the disaster” as elaborated in the writings of Maurice Blanchot. This “disaster” might be conceived of as violence, illness or trauma. Or, more abstractly, as the shattering of thought by time, or the picturing of “impossibility” itself.

Turning once again to Bowring Park III, we find a point of view impelling us to look slightly upward across an expanse of bare ground that rises to meet the sky at the horizon. Standing out against the sky is a fence of the sort that often surrounds a school sports field - a long, horizontal grid that stretches nearly right across the shallow rectangle of this very horizontal canvas.

The horizon line is very important to this painting and the fence is clearly its subject, there being little else in the picture. Blocked by the fence, our passing through to the crest of the rise fails. We remain in the lower range of this landscape, in the foreground, this side of the barrier. In other words, we are prevented from attaining the transitional space of the horizon. The horizon thus becomes an unattainable space of emergence and disappearance, the space of nature, a cyclical space of emptiness, a space of estrangement. It is also a space where painterly composition is challenged by a more photographic kind of “picturing” in which details have a specificity that would typically be removed. These details in turn challenge us with their undecidability: should we consider the fact that the fence includes a single tall post standing above all the rest, and should we be looking for a meaning in this particular, or is it just a “fact” as it would be from the perspective of photography? Like Luc Tuymans and Gerhard Richter, Dorion prefers to stay with ambiguity. 

There exists in this painting a space just between the upper edge of the rising field and the lower of the three fence rails posed against the sky. Within this framed space (but actually in the distance) can be discerned a ragged, dark ribbon that runs across almost the entire breadth of the painting. If we look at the right-hand side of the image, it is revealed that this ragged strip is formed by the tips of spruce trees growing beyond the hill. The treatment of this “horizonal” space denotes a photographic way of seeing and organizing, it smells of framing, of composing with a viewfinder and a lens. In the composition of a painting, the awkward and visually conflicted element of this space between the land and the fence rail would not typically be included. Its presence reflects the intrusion of a mechanical device, the camera. The painting is now a composition disrupted by photographic seeing.

Photographic seeing obviously depends on the apparatus of the camera, a machine for defining and creating pictures. Functioning as an automatic eye, the camera displaces and overtakes the supremacy of the human eye. In every photograph there is this “other-than-human” dimension. The photograph conforms to the logic of the automaton, it has an objectivity, a veracity, conferred by the camera’s “automatic” status. This is what undermines any possibility of photographic “meaning” in a conventional humanistic sense. This suspension of meaning has contributed to the photograph’s distinction as something uncanny. And such has been the basis of its appeal to the Surrealists.

Dorion’s body of work represents a case where the photographic medium is inserted into painting without it becoming affiliated to the genre of photo realism. It could be said, more precisely, that Dorion inserts the uncanny into the midst of painting by way of the photograph. This is the source of the “space of strangeness” that has frequently been associated with emptiness, desolation and loss. If we look at the uncanny as defined by Heidegger, rather than the more popular Freudian version, we find an interesting liaison with Dorion’s practice. For Freud, the uncanny is something that intrudes by creating a passing moment of anxiety, whereas for Heidegger there is no moment of anxiety that is exposed and then covered over by the veil of publicness or culture. Samuel Weber has explored this dialectic and explained how for Heidegger the uncanny happening or event disrupts the circular routine of understanding, breaks this circle apart, and creates the possibility of an openness toward something other, something strange and alien. Weber’s reading of Heidegger focuses on the uncanny as the possibility of an opening, of change, of repetition with a difference.4 From this perspective, there is a clear kinship between the uncanny and art such as Dorion’s. It is also the perspective of a still operative avant-garde – understood not as a style but as an orientation toward time and temporality, particularly futurity. This is the significance of the frequent use, in descriptions of Dorion’s paintings, of such terms as “emptiness,” “desolation” and “loss.”  It is essential, however, to see how his mobilization of such notions is not at all pessimistic but in fact represents a radical response to a preoccupation with mortality’s earthward pull and the temporal nature of existence in general.

If Dorion’s paintings establish a speculative space where the relationship between photography and painting is thoughtfully considered - an observation that could also be applied to the works of Luc Tuymans, Gerhard Richter and Thomas Demand - what is the personal vision served by this set of concerns?

The crux here is Dorion’s concern with the nature of memory in its relationship to place and his questioning of the role played by this relationship in establishing identity. It is culturally conventional to think of reality as a place, as the “really there,” as an underlying and ongoing continuity, a permanent support to which we have recourse in order to legitimize our interpretations. This begins to sound like memory, at least a commonsense version of it, and it was to this that Nietzsche was reacting with his notion of “active forgetting,” a process through which one lets go of unity, self-sufficiency and groundedness.

Dorion’s paintings have everything to do with our understanding of place and home, with dwelling as “being-in-place” as well as “being-with.” We see painting after painting that feature empty rooms, views into domestic interiors, antique ruins and desolate urban scenes. Recent works continue in this vein but with a closer focus, so that what we see are “facades.”  It is notable, though, that the eye Dorion turns on “architecture” and dwelling in general is a suspicious one: with his works we are (in the language of the recent past) “decentred.” His perspective is that of an outsider to the notion of an existence secured by the concept of permanence and an underlying fixed reality. This observation has little to do with the factual details of Pierre Dorion’s personal life but arises from a repeated confrontation with his paintings. These works are remarkable for a mood of melancholic estrangement that is not simply “critical” but is homeopathically turned toward acceptance and compassion in the face of “the disaster.”

1. Maurice Blanchot, as paraphrased by Gerald L. Bruns in Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 217. The source of the second epigraph is William James, The Principals of Psychology, vol. 1 (Boston: Harvard University Press, [1890] 1950), p. 627; and of the third, Marc Augé, Oblivion (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), p. 21.  

2. Catherine Crowston, “A Backwards Glance,” in Pierre Dorion (Toronto: Art Gallery of York University, 1995), p. 15.

3. David Deitcher, “The Missing: Pierre Dorion and the Art of Emptiness,” Canadian Art, vol. 24, no. 3 (fall 2007), pp. 102-109.

4. For a detailed discussion of Weber’s analysis, see Susan Berstein, It Walks, The Ambulatory Uncanny, in Experimenting: Essays With Samuel Weber, ed. Simon Morgan Wortham and Gary Hall (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007) p. 201

[stephenhorne]

DWELLING: A SET-UP

“Now just have a look at this machine.  Up till now a few things still had to be set by hand, but from this moment it works all by itself. (…) It’s a remarkable piece of apparatus…” Franz Kafka, The Penal Colony, (1)

[stephenhorne]

Mowry Baden: What's He Building In There?

Stephen Horne, published in Canadian Art, 2004

Surveying the span and depths of Baden's artistic practice leaves one little choice but to be amazed at the singlemindedness of his commitment to one idea: that is, incorporating the viewer’s bodily participation in the work, one of the most difficult practical challenges in the realm of art making. Literally, he actually makes work for people to walk on, sit on, pedal, or perform with. He once proposed that his starting point with sculpture is the body in motion and this he has pursued with conviction through four decades, intermingling the depths of ordinary life with those of art.

When it comes to this question of ordinary daily life, wherever I am, if I look around, the first thing I find is that I am in the midst of a panoply of things in use, things that make up an environment, indeed, construct and create my environment. And what strikes me  obliquely is the thought that this phrase "construct and create" involves two different levels of meaning.  The first is the obvious in which I mean to refer to the use of a tool to build something else.  The second is the sense in which the very presence of tools, devices and equipment, just by being there, sustain, or build, this very same "there." It's an ensemble that in the most encompassing sense is concerned with habitation. In other words, we build our human dwelling place with tools but the building is often itself a kind of equipment,  a piece of equipment that we live right inside.  And then of course there are those bits of equipment that operate inside the human body, prostheses inserted, for example, right into the heart of things by robotic microsurgery. It's striking, the intimacy and circularity of this relationship with tools and equipment, and how seldom it becomes a focal point for observation. And if the works of Mowry Baden often look like some kind of  equipment, do not be fooled by appearances; these sculptures have an intimacy that unfolds in a homeopathic process of modelling the thing being explored. In other words, they take on the being of technical devices, albeit with humour and style, the better to reveal the nature of our relationship  with these devices which make up so much of our daily environment. Looking at even just a few of his works gives a sense of his concerns regarding our built spaces, and more importantly, a contact with what happens when built space is exceeded or disrupted, where art begins.

Hudson Street Tomato, a sculpture of Baden's built in 1984 and first exhibited by Artist's Space on the street in New York, could be an example of such equipment. Most of us have some equipment for leisure; skiis, a bicycle, rollerblades, computer games, whatever.  Now that we are saved from labouring by our marvelous devices, keeping fit and entertained becomes a bit of a problem, and so a new need arises, with a whole new industry to serve it, and strangely enough, it becomes necessary that some people actually work on leisure. And so there are parks, weight rooms, yoga classes and skateboarding facilities. And perhaps art fits in here somewhere.  Baden seems to think so. In Hudson Street Tomatohe has re-combined the divided pair, work/leisure, back into one entity, an exercycle with live plant attached. Pedal, and the plant receives water. Or, in one version of the piece, a plant receives air pumped into the plastic bag enclosing it. Here is the ancient formula; working for food, spinning off into the elaboration of a world drawn out from natural resources.  Indeed, this is a very small circle, work to eat/eat to work. Not to mention the work done as art, that is, if I, or any occassional viewer, step up onto the exercycle, then I become a part of the working of the artwork and of its exhibition value. And of course, I would then be integrated into the circuit of that funny question as to where does art come from. Although we may have the answer right there on the front end of the exercycle, provided one gets into the action. Pedalling keeps the plant alive and growing.  Pedalling keeps the artwork going, "completes" it. This circular wisdom would seem to answer many questions, and then, to question many answers. 

My thought, occasioned by this work; where does any particular work of art come from? Can it just be there on its own? I remember one time twenty some years ago Baden saying to me that art comes from art.  At that time, this sort of answer smelled badly of formalism, the dreaded enemy of relevance in art, I suppose because it implied that a work of art exists in isolation from social and historical circumstance. Fortunately those days of simplistic reasoning are over and newer interpretive conceptual tools have revealed for once and forever that truth does exist in art, but that it is dialogical and relational by nature. So Baden's statement that art comes from art was in fact rigorous and pertinent.  Art comes from art, this or that work of art comes from art, and art comes from this or that particular work. Does circularity invalidate this answer? Not at all, or not until time stops anyway. Movement, being in motion, is fundamental for Baden, and we will find few of Baden's works that don't rest on this view.

This question of movement is linked to Baden's quest for subordinating the visual surface to sculptural experience, and leads to such things as reduced lighting, as we find with Freckled Gyres, a sculpture of 1999 and first exhibited at Galerie Christianne Chassay in Montreal. Here, Baden darkened the gallery, leaving us to explore in search of the work. Looking like a piece of equipment to be used in some form of testing or perhaps entertainment, this chair-like sculpture, occupied, slowly spins, bends and twists. Hundreds of tiny beams of light issue from a box attached to an extension of the chairback and these threads of light are directed forward, ensuing from just over the head of the seated person and these pinpoint beams illuminate walls, defining a room as the chair is rotated. The work can be observed like this until the moment occurs when the apparatus becomes empty and one may become the operator, or perhaps I should say operant. Once in the chair a peculiar mobility is possible, catching one up in a relational experience, observing and bringing into being a particular spatiality, sinuously sculptural. Paradox; there, at the centre we can experience being decentred. This is so because Baden has engineered certain possibilities into his chair apparatus; a central pivot device replaces legs and this pivot is cantilevered and off centre, allowing a range of movement that while complex is ultimately dictated by the device. The gliding smoothness of the ride allows the chair apparatus to momentarily disappear, according to one's focus. But the process of defining the room that takes place in the lighting is tied, in part, to the movement supplied by the operator and in part to the restriction or guidance built into the pivoting device. To ride this chair is to revisit our bodily implication in the built environment, as "there" becomes "here," and vice versa. The same reversal applies to our common sense understanding of inside and outside; the space of the room, "an inside", takes on shape according to the operator's motion, which is circumscribed by the movement allowed by the design of the decentred pivot chair, and from the perspective of this fluid motion, any division of space into inside and outside is revealed to be a definition not fixed but rather, in a condition of flux and relative to the viewer's perception.

Clearly, Baden has made of the wheel and centripetal sorts of movement a recurrent thematic in his sculptural activities.  It may be as obvious as it is in the works based on the standard exercycle, to the slightly more oblique reference in a work such as Wall of Death, 1994. This latter piece lies in a sort of crossroads under an urban freeway overpass in the City of Seattle.  With the vast weight of an urban freeway overhead,  this oppressive but complex place is saturated with the smell of urban car culture.  Actively nihilistic, this sculpture's teeth like spikes support a circular band canted like a quarter size race track for cars. "Wall of Death," the title of this work, is a piece of memorabilia recuperated from an American entertainment of the era between the world wars. Celebrating speed and danger, this carnival spectacle invokes a spirit carried over from those early avant-garde lovers of risk, noise and exhaust smoke,  the Futurist adventurers of early Italian modernism. That original Wall of Death combined two of Baden's concerns, movement and gravity.  In a cylinder with a dropaway floor, motorcyclists could race around the walls until having attained sufficient speed, when the floor dropped away, centrifigual force would hold the riders against the wall, racing around the cylinder in defiance of gravity. Baden's Wall of Death is a work of art in a public space, a provocative work certainly, and one must wonder how it ever succeeded through the commissioning process.  Aren't works of art for public spaces meant to be inanely benevolent, restrained from sending out such signals of impending crisis and doom as does Wall of Death? Isn't "death" a prohibited word, not to be used except under strict guidelines?  And isn't juxtaposing "death" to entertainment a little brutal? Well, perhaps not, remembering how our media industry loves to reproduce scenes of war, accident and violent crime for the context of home entertainment. Eerily, this sculpture juxtaposes the realms of leisure and work.  Overhead on the freeway, lines of traffic commute back and forth between the domains of the job and the home. And now, in this post-employment era, perhaps the freeway is more a place of recreation, taking us to and from those vast pleasuramas of the urban mall where work consists mostly of shopping. If art in public places tends toward affirmations of social unity and utopian togetherness, this piece, with it's invocation of death, of mortality's permanent proximity, serves more as a reminder of the momentariness of one's own existence.

Many many artists have been concerned with this theme of tools, instruments, but why not just look at a well known example.  In 1914 Marcel Duchamp presented his Bottlerack sculpture. A bottlerack is just a tool for drying a few dozen wine bottles, and the large version he used belonged in the environment of the wine producer.  In other words, completely standard and unsurprising within its routine environment. Much has been made of Duchamp's substitution of a mass produced industrial object into an art environment, but then even such a simple description already sustains various deceptions and paradoxes, for example, we might propose that Duchamp's strategy actually "exhibits" the gallery more than it does the bottlerack. Certainly Duchamp has more than anything inspired a century of debate about art and the conditions under which an entity may be considered as a work of art. To be rigorous, implicitly, any artist composing a work "after" would need to pursue to some degree the question of art's existence, what makes something a work of art, and refuse or refute any and all definitive conclusions regarding this question. The ambiguity and indeterminacy that result from this process seem to be pretty much at the root of twentieth century art experience, and where this is lacking, the works in question will, as works,  quickly perish, although of course they may go on to persist in alienated form as commodity or institutional cipher.

Ordinary equipment; table, lawnmower, aeroplane, most up to date laptop. We use them all, or so we say. They assist us in getting some things done, or in looking after other things. And usually they're pretty innocent, disappearing nicely into the background, or into the task at hand. After all, what would happen if I actually had to think or be inventive each time I wanted to mow my lawn?  So a lot of that knowledge is stored right in the tool itself, like memory whether it's the toothbrush or the tablesaw. It's labour and time saving. Of course sometimes there are glitches, or breakdowns, and then the fact of the tool intrudes, becomes an issue or a problem for me. I suppose it's almost a cliché to mention that sometimes we humans think we are machines, describing perhaps some aspect of our bodily behaviour as if it was mechanical or even electronic. And even there we might find the same strange re-appearing of the thing as a fact in a moment of "malfunction" or in the case of a serious illness. That's when we get the feeling we call "uncanny," isn't it? When vertigo suddenly intrudes, reminding us of the abyss beneath our feet.

 A lot of tools are aimed at measuring and many more arise from our desire to keep things on hand, in storage ready for retrieval. Of course when we think of measuring, it's usually with some idea of sizing up some aspect of our material environment. Tools, I suspect, belong to the work environment, but then a lot of leisure activities make use of devices that are pretty much like tools; a skateboard for example auguments the velocity at which we can cover ground. Tools often extend our capacities or talents. For example, I can do woodwork with a router and a table saw that doesn't look too bad even though I'm a complete novice. The skill is stored in the tool, along with the labour that is saved. My ability is enhanced by what has been designed into the tool. Of course, this must be forgotten in the interest of efficiency. (expediency)

I suppose one of our typical preconceptions regarding modern science is that it deals with investigations into the nature of materiality. Tools and instruments are used in this pursuit of course and certainly those very instruments themselves already belong to that same material environment. This raises the odd question of how one could investigate something using the very same thing that is to be investigated (the reality we call physical reality, the material world). Leverage is needed, perhaps a wedge, that could separate the observer's tools from the observer's observation. Baden's sculpture takes on this challenge, proposing by way of art, a non-instrumental approach to understanding our relationship with the techniques and concepts normally used to manipulate our environment, whether that be our built environment or the environment of nature. Since this is the realm of art, any specific application of our experiences with Baden's work is subject to its radical open-endedness, however this does not prevent readings of the work with regard to, for example, a critique of architecture, as we have seen with the case of Richard Serra's work or that of Gordon Matta Clark .

Duchamp, no stranger to the bicycle wheel, must have known that wonderful phrase, the "wheels of industry." But of course thinking of all these things, skateboards, exercycles and motorcycling, why not perhaps speak of the "wheels of leisure?"  Somehow this sounds right to describe a culture that rests on mandatory consumption, enforced leisure and other such circular logics by which the world becomes such an unworld, a place where we could be asking why nothing rather than something? I do think Duchamp was the first to really put his finger, in art, on this phenomenon of circulation, circulation for its own sake, a process by which history and memory are increasingly erased. Baden too is concerned with these "things that go round." Sometimes these are called cycles, for example "the business cycle," "the cycle of the seasons," or even "the cycle of birth, death and rebirth." This "going around" is also sometimes another way of speaking about circulation as in for example, a rumour, a joke or a disease. It may also be a nice metaphor for culture, in the sense of culture as transmission.

Baden once said "This body (possibly mine) runs into other things, but more importantly, it runs into itself." This suggests a sort of folding process that brings us back from our involvement in equipmental contexts, from a shared world, back into the "self" in a process of recollection. The importance of this process is not the recollection of a self that is lost in a world of equipment, but a remembering from a second order of forgetting, the forgetting that we have forgotten. This artistic terrrain of Baden's is formed not with objects but with the relationality of viewer to object. Invitations to participate, his works bring us into situations which self-reflexively foreground the impact of our tools on modes of experience.  That these works solicit interaction becomes the work’s praxical or “task” orientation. Participants are confronted not with a work to contemplate, but with something to "figure out," by engaging in a task or an experiment, the goal of which is not immediately apparent. It may be that “task” is too Protestant a term, but neither “play” nor “experiment” seem quite right either, the first suggesting some vague Platonism and the second implying something free of consequence. What we find here is a give and take between the viewer and the equipment, a process in which space is "built" and even sometimes unbuilt. The conventional manner of viewing a work has been replaced by one in which the visual is far less dominant, and the usual division of artist, viewer and work is surpassed. That is, the sculpture is not a thing "over there" in front of me, but rather, it exists on the basis of my bodily and subjective engagement. We form a crossed relation, the sculpture and I; my exertion makes it while it makes me.

\

[stephenhorne]

COVER: A Book of Rooms Inside/Beside Rooms

Cover, recently put out by the French publisher Le Point du Jour, presents the work of Montreal-based photographer Lynne Cohen. Cohen began photographing domestic interiors and has been pursuing a documentary-style description of institutional interior spaces for three decades. This book, her third, is dedicated to her work in colour, which she began to exhibit in this decade.

The subject of Cohen’s recent photographic project can be described as the institutional spaces that make up the technical and professional habitats for various sorts of research, training, and recreation. The project could be classified as anthropological documentary, even though the absence of people in the photographs might then seem paradoxical. Many stylistic indicators argue that the work belongs with an audience made up of art specialists, and this perhaps is the source of the ironic humour revealed throughout the work.

It strikes me as provocative that in the catalog, Cohen has given each photograph a number rather than a title. This is drawn to our attention before we even open this elegantly simple-looking book: on the front cover is a photograph with its number (111) printed by its lower right-hand corner, just outside the edge of the photograph mounted, not printed, on the cover. The number is significant in itself, as it indicates that repetition is the name of the game. What then is meant by the fact that of the total of one hundred and eleven (111) pages there are eleven (11) blank but numbered pages, all of which fall on the left? A perfect one hundred images in total – perfect given the subject of the project.

This may be a fanciful observation, but the number on the cover leads right into, or out of, its photograph. The photograph presents an “empty” room tiled on every surface and feeling like a utilitarian space due to traces of scuffing around the frame of the single door. In one corner, a trapdoor is incised into tiled floor, and the single rectangular light embedded in the false ceiling gleams white. While the floors and ceiling are more or less white, the three walls match the canary yellow of this book’s cover, and, strangely, the tiles are in an orientation and proportion matching that of the number 111 printed below in the corner. My sense is that Cohen is not referring to an actual system but is invoking the sense of something lying outside of human intention or control – something akin to photography’s dimension of “automation.” It is in these environments that we can also sense the eerie reverse of automation: the human working for automated processes – for example, the photographer working for the camera.

I have mentioned three walls, but what of the unseen, implied fourth wall? Could that invisible wall actually be the one at the rear interior of the camera box? This would propose a continuity between the room and the camera, a possibility to which I am disposed as it introduces two important dimensions of the habitat: the grid and the technical image. We need to remember that the “grid” is not only a feature of the built spaces that we are seeing into here but also the name of our global electrical distribution networks, and I think we could also use this word for what is often referred to as “the spectacle.” Throughout the book, the grid appears in some form in nearly every situation, whether the interior is military, corporate, scientific, medical, or recreational; as Rosalind Krauss has noted, the grid is “an introjection of the boundaries of the world into the interior of the work”1

 Jian-Xing Too, with her phrase “boxes within boxes,” also introduces this notion in her essay in the book. This is one aspect of the grid form – the other being, of course, “boxes beside boxes.” The combination of the two explains the urge to call upon Kafka, or perhaps Freud, to elucidate the sense of threatening morbidity that not only haunts photographs in general but already exists in the sites that Cohen has been photographing for the past three decades. For these reasons, it is tempting to affiliate her work with the surrealist concern with the alien or unhomely and its connection with death. By setting her subjects in a context of aesthetic contemplation, Cohen imbues what might otherwise be merely banal or even repellent subject matter with an attractive aura, and it is the resulting dissonance that invokes a desire to refer to surrealism. On the other hand, there is evidence of affiliation with minimalism and conceptual art through an interest in practices such as repetition and automation.

It is certain that many of the photographs in this collection document these practices, although their context is always sites such as laboratories, recreation places, and military training facilities – locations in which measurement and control systems prevail. What all the rooms have in common is their inhabitation by equipment. Even the furniture featured in some photographs resembles a form of equipment, but images such as sixty two (62) and sixty three (63) present classic control rooms occupied by steel cabinets filled with dials, buttons, and switches. In these two rooms there is no furniture or windows; they are simply airless, generic units.

In their simplicity and absence of detail, these two rooms become so ambiguous that they challenge our ability to separate fact from fiction: they could easily be movie sets. This ambiguity is important, as it implicates the viewer in the subject. Finally however, Cohen’s response to this circumstance is to keep her distance, to remain “objective” and in a position of control, and this is what gives her work its documentary dimension. Other photographers have pursued this ambiguity differently, often by locating themselves within the by nihilistically short-circuiting the distance that allows for control. Cohen respects the boundary of complicity, refusing the relationship with illusion or fiction.

If Cohen presents a documentary project that reveals our passion for surveillance and control, does this make her project a social and political critique, as has been sometimes proposed? Her subtle identification of the factors that sustain the uncanny in the realm of the familiar and the ordinary allows her to present the elements of inexplicability and wonder that are generally valued as art. It is less clear how this project is one of political practice, or that this should be demanded of it. She has followed, as photographers must, the imperatives of the technical apparatus: frame, isolate, fragment, repeat, and attend to the lens/shutter capacities with regard to lighting and motion. What is most pertinent is the relationship that she identifies between her means (photography) and her subject (the contemporary habitat). The continuity that she describes is that of a single apparatus, that of the technical image deployed variously in our habitat.

Rosalind Krauss, “Grids,” October, vol. 9 (Summer 1979): 50–64.

[stephenhorne]

Lynne Cohen: Rooms of Screens/Screens of Rooms: June, 2011

  A recent work, Untitled (White Boots), 2010, demonstrates Cohen’s allegiance to seeing the extremes that rest in our typical environments. This image places us in a hallway, looking down into the deep space of this corridor toward an exit door at the distant end. This is a clinical and ordered space, perhaps belonging to a production laboratory or other technical facility. On one side, racks hold white labcoats hanging in series and on the opposite wall windows with blinds down run the full length of the corridor. As is frequently the case with Cohen’s photos this one documents an in-between sort of space but a space that conforms to a strictly rational model of organization. Every surface is constructed to a grid: even the shining terrazzo floor reveals such hints. Production line order is the ambience here. For all we know this could even be a facility where technical images are produced. Again, as a mise-en-scene there is the ambiguous sense that something may happen, or is happening invisibly or conversely, that absolutely nothing will ever happen, the site being suspended outside of any past or future.

  This image, as most of Cohen’s photographs are, is typical for its inclusion of the various grids that her chosen sites offer. In White Boots she has placed her camera centrally looking down a long corridor. Both floor and ceiling are marked by the grids of tiles and these grids recede to a vanishing point in the doorway at the distant end of the corridor.

  Another recent work Untitled, (Red Cushions) 2009, places us looking into a room, specifically the corner of a room, probably a waiting area of sorts. This room is empty except for it’s furnishings and this emptiness exaggerates our view into a nearly symmetrical composition with a vanishing point through one of three chairs that are positioned almost symmetrically in the room and gathered around a circular rug and circular table. This compositional ordering renders the space unstable, dynamic, and ultimately theatrical, a mise-en-scene. Viewing into this space we can find ourselves “cornered.” As a waiting area, this is a particular social scenario, that of being trapped in the room, and this is ultimately the sense of the photograph itself, it holds us, arrested or “cornered” in the photographic suspension. Perhaps even more important is the artist’s continuing emphasis on the grids that support both her image and the construction of the photographed room spaces. In this case, as the trajectory of the white tiled floor rises toward the centre of the image it’s grid pattern slopes slightly downward toward the left corner of the image and this spatial incongruity reflects the positioning of the camera and its angling. This aspect of framing is both on the side of the “made” and the “found” in terms of how a photograph appears. The camera delivers the frame “readymade” while being at the same time subject to the artist’s creative taking of a viewpoint (made).

  It’s possible and perhaps rewarding to propose two different trajectories within Cohen’s work. There are the more “disturbing” images such as White Boots with it’s clinically oppressive perspectival construction or Circle and its maniacally incongruous construction and décor features. The difference between the two directions suggests a question regarding Cohen’s selection of sites for photographing. Some of her sites are called “control rooms,” “laboratories” or “military installations” while others are the more innocuous “spas,” “lobbies” or corridors and transitional places that make up the everyday environment. Obviously the images could be sorted by subject classifications and groupings arrived at that would supply either a topical, even documentary meaning, or on the other hand, an embrace of ambiguity and self-referential opacity. Were they to lack irony, would these photographs be received as documentary work of an architectural or cultural/anthropological sort? Irony is of course the distanciation functioning in the neutral, obscure, or detached images, it is the “play” that Greenberg identified with a medium’s opacity and in which he located the possibility and indication of social dissent. On the other hand, the topic of irony opens the question of artistic autonomy and we slide into the territory of Michael Fried’s recent taking of photography onto the walls of the art museum. Can the museum as destination handle photography’s ontology of realism? Can photography handle the museum as destination without merely becoming the convenient tool of “conceptual” artists?

  What there is to see in the photographs of Lynne Cohen is the mode of seeing that is photography. The craft of photographic transparency is here preserved by way of artistic opacity. Opacity emphasizes the “made,” shifting attention toward a performative, activated relationship between observer and observed along the lines articulated by Barthes in his “death of the author” moment. Emphasizing the “made” in photography means considering the temporality that a photograph is, and this is a path toward understanding the materiality of a photograph. Cohen refers to her subjects as “readymades,” or “installations.” Although this seems accurate when applied to the subject of her images, these terms could also refer to the machinic, automated dimension of photography.  Such an emphasis detracts from the “made” dimension of photography, tending toward an indexical grounding of transparency and documentary factuality. As photographs her images document a “found” scene but ultimately her production itself falls on the side of “the made” rather than “the found.” The emphasis is thus on creating subtle tensions between the already or “found” photographic aspect of her subject and the photographer’s play with the realm of photographic technicity. Lynne Cohen’s photographs are not ciphers, but present a complex resistance to conceptualization, that is, to being disposed of as cultural references, resting instead on photography understood as embodying a history of perception, a history that includes the photographic constructedness of contemporary reality.