Technics and Tradition Inside-Out
It may be objected however that this perspective now belongs to the past, to an avant-garde movement now completed. This is the art historical view of avant-garde but an alternative exists in the conception of avant-garde formulated in historian Matei Calinescu’s argument that “avant-garde” is not primarily the name of a stylistic movement but refers to a mode of temporality that is open to the unforeseeable, to what is fundamentally incomplete. (2) His proposal leads to a construction of art viewing on a performative model.
Sarat Maharaj, a Duchamp scholar equally conversant with the craft and artisanal traditions defended the “non-knowledge” of artistic activities in the face of dominant perceptions that “nothing counts unless it has the systematic rigour of ‘science.’” His argument against modeling art practice on scientific rigour rests on what he perceives as a need for activities that “resist being wholly taken under the wing of systematic methodological explication.” (3)
This topic of tradition and technics could be considered on the basis of almost any contemporary exhibitions, however, a few seen in recent years in Montreal would be adequate. We could take a look at the subtle yet sensuously resonant paintings of Chris Kline, bringing them to contrast with the computer generated video animations of Yam Lau, who co-incidentally began his art practice as a painter. These two artists make works of great refinement and are therefore susceptible to being described as skilful. Recent exhibitions by Montreal photographer Lynne Cohen equally emphasize enquiry into the status of building/making in the era of technical abstraction. A retrospective of video work by Nelson Henricks represented this artist’s preoccupation with issues of narrative construction and the existential conflicts between the temporality of the video medium and that of one’s own life. In the video/architectural work by Emanuel Licha, Pourqouoi Photogenic, the war in Iraq was viewed by way of the mise-en-scene created by the American military as a training site. Finally, a glimpse at the installation by Lani Maestro at the Darling Foundry suggests further evidence of any “return to tradition” as paradoxical.
To describe a work of art as “well-made” or “skilled” is usually to fall short of saying anything pertinent. Works of art ”in themselves” propose not the hierarchical vocabulary of the “well-made” but the anarchical “well-enough-made.” Nelson Henricks video retrospective held last year at the Ellen Gallery presented a number of video works narrating, as a subject, Henricks own struggle to write for video. The arbitrariness that results from immersing oneself in contingency as a source leaves the artist with the task of sorting through memory and it’s attachments and disconnections in the social or historical milieu. Writing as a performative task as Henricks formulates it is a kind of Proustian quicksand with which one engages in the search for artistic form. From this perspective the notion of well-made art looks absurd or at least, anomalous. As an everyday art critical concept, “well-made” at least requires further and very precise contextual elaboration if it is to be meaningful. I might think of a shirt as “well-made” if the sewing was tight, the fabric durable and the design to my liking but would I ever spontaneously describe an art work as “well-made” unless I was speaking ironically, or in a context where the phrase would be understood as a casual generalization?
These perceptions arise the moment we encounter Lynne Cohen’s photographs where the “making” consists of documenting a play between virtual and actual space, a play revealing their reciprocal and complementary status. French critic Marie de Brugerolle has called Cohen’s path a “metaphysical investigation…guided by clues”, asking also, “…what are we to make of the strangeness that is the subject of these images?” (4) Descriptions of Cohen’s photographs often stress terminologies both spatial and temporal, with the favoured terms being “transitional,” “temporary,” “artificial,” and “alienating.” “Veneer” is a word that comes up frequently and the manufacturing process by which veneers are made is particularly relevant to our consideration. Veneer is often produced using a photographic process to replicate wood grain, substituting a superficial image for a tactile material. It also comes into play as a metaphor attached to attitudes and behaviours or even to describe or contemporary practices of dwelling. Veneer implies covering over, and art such as Cohen’s often works to point out that what has been covered over is the uncanny thing, the strange returning in the guise of something familiar. In relation to the topic of “making” Cohen’s photographs present insights into how our current building practices present a fullness that is virtual and that is as empty as it is full. The interior rooms that are always the subject of her photographs present not a damning sociology of current design but consist of observations toward our contemporary designing practices that no longer oppose the virtual to the actual, where full may also mean empty and vice versa.
Yam Lau’s computer animated video installation Rehearsal at Galerie B312 last spring would seem to be a good example of a skilled use of digital visual production technology. In this video Lau begins with a schematic rendering of a view from an “outside” into the “interior” of a built space. Two modes of viewing are initially proposed: we see the schematic animation, but also Lau integrates images of an “actual” room with a real occupant. This interior “takes place” in the ongoing imaging process which inhabits a stage-like space that rotates and while rotating, shifts views through transparent veils of animated architectural rendering. I used the adjective “skilled” just now to refer to this work but where is the skill and what is this artist’s relationship with it? Could we not locate this skill within technics itself rather than in the artist’s use of it? What I suggest is that Lau’s process actually deconstructs “the skill dimension” of the computer video animation that is embedded in the technology. By layering multiple viewpoints and visual modes he takes apart whatever we might think of as technical sophistication, substituting for it a gentle and meditative proposal regarding our inhabitation of place.
Genuine works of art often act by incorporating non-art entities and materials into their own workings. Even if this became explicit with early Modernist works such as Dega’s dancer or Picasso’s still life with chair caning, or the various fragmentations of traditional procedures such as bronze casting, fragmentations such as Medardo Rosso’s refusal to take his wax models to their final step toward permanence, the history of this notion could be pushed back beyond the days of Modernism’s inception. The art works I am discussing embrace this tendency toward an incorporation of non-art materials and practices along with aspects and fragments of artistic and artisanal traditions in order to reflect on contemporary modes of “making.”
For example, Chris Kline’s paintings shown at Galerie Rene Blouin in 2008 make of fragile woven cotton fabric an explicit concern, an apparently simple material pushed to an extreme, and the same may be said of the work’s facture. In this particular series Kline’s paintings have no paint on their surfaces at all, simply a single line sewn (drawn) across horizontally forming a seam that joins two slightly differing fabrics. The simplicity of these elegant works reinforces the attention given to the seam, the drawing (pulling towards) that stitching does and the joining it accomplishes. In such a reduced work like this, tension is everything, and tension is not an object but an encounter with the rythmn of perception itself. Tension is now: tension is the gap about which Duchamp wrote, “the art is not what we see, it’s the gap.” (5) In Kline’s “paintings” this tension is the felt sense of the joining, the being held together in the breathing of inside and outside, above and below. Kline’s seams look merely well-enough made without attempting to demonstrate virtuosity of crafting or technique. Skill is largely bound up with issues of control whereas what we see in works of art such as Kline’s, is care. Control is rigid behaviour directed by the dictates of means and ends efficiency but care is ultimately a concern for time, not only in terms of mortality but for the dimension of futurity. From a Duchampian perspective, (the relationship of art and life modeled on breathing), works of art would consist of a “letting go” behaviour rather than any exercise in controlling.
At the SBC Gallery last year, Emanuel Licha presented his video and architectural installation Why Photogenic? In this cinematic construction based on an actual military training facility in the California desert, Licha presented a mise-en-scene in which walls form corridors and rooms, and openings in walls frame windows that open into a room with a pair of flat screen video monitors. Licha proposes what are apparently views of an “outside.” In this case, “the outside” that takes place on the video screens is also a theatre, the theatre of military/media operations through which we access events such as the wars in Iraq, Libya, or anywhere. It is also a theatre in which is being staged the performance of a rehearsal or a repetition, filmed by the artist and incorporated into his space built within the gallery. This performance is a frame for the other theatre, the military scenario. These various appearances of the site, the territory, the stage, exist in ways both virtual and actual, but what is always there is the factor of control. This control is in some ways benign, after all, architecture uses walls to separate and divide but also to connect and include, as do our electronic “bridges.” A video image watched through a window creates a certain shock since we already regard the photograph as a window. In this video installation Licha implicates the gallery and the viewer in a process of cinematic “making” and it’s application in the field of globalized warfare. We are here immersed in a problematic of viewing, where outside and inside are interwoven. Licha however resists availing himself of the total skill and control that are the subject of this work, leaving ambiguity and indeterminacy to undermine such a trajectory.
In 2010 Lani Maestro, in collaboration with composer/violinist Malcolm Goldstein created the site-work L’oublie de l’air, at the Darling Foundry in Montreal. This apparently simple installation covered the Foundry floor with a black sand surface punctuated at random intervals by reflective pools of water registering the passing of sky and cloud from the overhead clerestory windows. Obviously a different sort of work from that of Yam Lau or Chris Kline yet there is a similar interest in discerning building/making in terms of a play that redefines the opposition of inside and outside, or the empty/full. Such a play is remarked by Anja Bock who wrote, ““…didacticism would be an imposition and a constraint on the work’s poetic logic, which opens a far more expansive, if less easy to define, territory.” She goes on to say, “…its materiality and music wraps itself around us to the point of rendering us immobile, caught in the spell of its most modest monumentality. It is as if the vast hollow space of the foundry is full, so full that it does not allow time to enter.” (6) Bock notes the connection here with a tradition, that of monumentality, precisely the tradition of sculpture itself. However, in this installation the tradition and the practice of sculpture have not defined the work stylistically but simply exist as threads among others from which the work weaves, ultimately leaving us, as Bock has written, “…with our intellectual handles and habitual ways of being (now) unanchored.”
Art works such as those mentioned here engage with our building and dwelling practices, with issues of making, of materials and their virtuality such that the interpenetration of each with it’s other is reciprocal, reversible: materiality becoming virtual and the pictorial/virtual revealed as a bodily materiality. The artists and exhibitions mentioned above present diverse investigations of spatial and temporal construction in which non-knowing, emptiness, and the unforeseeable are privileged modes of being and doing destined to perpetually undermine the realm of skill, know-how, technique, all the behaviours that belong to the realm of pre-determined goals and the criterion of “efficiency”.
1. Chris Kline. Galerie René Blouin, , 2008; Yam Lau, Galerie B312, 2011;, Lynne Cohen, Art 45, 2011,; Nelson Henricks, Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery, 2010,; Emanuel Licha, SBC Gallery, 2010, Lani Maestro, Fonderie Darling, 2010, (Montreal)
2.Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, Duke University, Durham, 1987, 95-148
3.Sarat Maharaj, Know-how and No-How, Art & Research, Vol 2, No. 2, 2009, 2.
4 .Anja Bock, Lani Maestro: L’oublie de l’air,BorderCrossings, 80, 81, (March, April, May 2011), 80, 81,
4. M. de Brugerolle, Lynne Cohen, (ed) France Choiniere,Montreal, Dazibao, 2011, 6
5. Marcel Duchamp as quoted by Arturo Schwartz, the Complete Works of Marcel Ducham 2nd ed. (New Yoek. Abrams 1970), 197 6. Anja bock, Lani Maestro, L’oublie de l’air, BorderCrossings, (March, April May, 2011) A slightly modified version was published in ESSE, an issue on the topic of Savoir-Faire or Reskilling, Winter 2012