Column

Cara Benedetto is an artist. Her romance novels have been published with the Stuttgart Academy of Art and Design, and Badlands Unlimited. She is the editor of the _Contemporary Print Handbook_, published with Halmos. She is an Assistant Professor in Print Media at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is represented by _Chapter NY_.

Today we flex our right to romance, this pelvic floor   
potential, this pink hooded mobile.  
There are documents of this right, founded among the many,   
in order, around, and some other slips of tongue.

It seemed that even then, either pyramid or mound,  
We needed to measure, take account, write everything down.   
To what end, She couldn’t tell.  
But She saw what anyone could see, the two hills looked the   
same, top to down, but still, and still, and as a result, in these   
Institutional-mutuals, agreements, holistic plans and pans,   
There became a worm. Beauty held her slither, pre code or   
historic, Her plot was Her decision.  
The right to romance wept us up in a charm of dialogue.   
Some say it continues.

I wanted to meet this anti-star, not the lead per shout but,   
The Other Woman, so charming, professional, so under our guard.  
I wanted to know. So I drank from the tap. I drank her   
mouth and hair and fish seed in pond.  
I begged. There’s only one time, She responded. There are  
many other women,  
She went along, with several lists of verbs, but   
Lee Lozano’s was the first.  
The worm moved its mouth. Disclaims were made.   
Romantic rights moved into ivy, the ease of universities,   
with their rock star ambivalence, their confided affairs, the   
corduroy couch served them well, and  
why not? we ask. why not? they say. why not? we want.   
The lawyers could tell.  
Now and then a turnt up professor cries out declaring that   
we may love as we choose and freely do this thing of the   
heart as if there was no matter at larger.

Bored with these sights, I went back to the scape, the pan fed   
sacrifice, stairs too high to climb or offer much at all. I found   
the opacity of this ritual to move me into a romantic place.   
Because like Nora Roberts I can sing a view, to top a down,   
or whatever position empowers one in order to two. From   
here I summoned them, these popular writers of romance,   
even though  
We all know  
That the account is not the thing,   
That her voice died as we took note,  
Conjured to me as a chorus, they described her breasts as   
pyramids, while  
The Other Woman looked far over the hills to a plain spot.

The one where her rivals failed and fell.   
Where She manicures her nails.  
Where She can breathe and describe beauty in plain day, with   
light.

**Meeting Notes (2/14/15 18:15)**  
count to 7  
I drank another glass from the tap because I needed to forget  
to remember, to move my worm body into ritual, to sacrifice  
this privilege, this new awareness of a supposed Other Woman.   
I recalled when we fell in love, his wife and I watched from t  
he bar as he pricked his fingers twice With fairy tale pride.

He watched us love one another through flaming eyes. He   
coached our sprains in his own painted on disappointments.   
But still who can judge.  
He a teacher, Now me a teacher. Some of my students are  
here. Some understand. Some love. Some leave. Because…

**Meeting Notes (2/13/15 13:24)**  
take a drink  
My body is worth less.  
My body is the same as yours.  
And the other bodies? Really? A vendor deep calling. Towards tourists who forgot to purchase their tolerance, so   
brave in shame. I’m guessing.  
They asked me, so simply, Can we choose so freely this  
space? in the hotel where She waited and I stared through  
a fold on my knees, naked and begging. He interviewed me  
and they were nothing. They are nothing. I am interviewing   
you and it is just you and me. The smell was carpet. The taste   
marooned. I admitted my soul to a Hyatt monarch. She came  
in my mouth twice or three times, I watched the cloth burn   
violet pressure, the sockets were full I cried, but we knew   
where to find each new wound, She knew how to court every   
gap, every lack, every sucked out and in search of.

I’m hole, I’m hired. I heard a jaguar.  
and I catcalled back because I needed them to-hear my   
desperate play. I wanted to be inside their kitty yawn so I   
bought all the skulls I could buy, the woman between, buying   
deaths mask, in order to.

**Meeting Notes (2/13/15 13:24)**  
count to 7

**Meeting Notes (2/14/15 12:29)**  
take a drink

**Meeting Notes (2/14/15 18:15)**  
count to 7  
Break a safety net.  
I wanted them there. I decided to Dom. I returned to blue   
bubbled news.  
There She was, this how and then, this mother-lover from   
past,  
Mom as a character, always, and in, new, criminal, and killing  
the thing,  
that She gave or made,  
how sick they scream how wrong they shriek,   
the right to romance violated her monthly bleed.   
I barely escaped, I lived it again.

**Meeting Notes (2/14/15 12:29)**  
i lived it again 

Mom,  
yes dear,  
how did I get into you alive,   
I asked,  
I don’t know how She cried, I wanted you out, it was the right  
time, because I love you,  
you own me I screamed and She looked at me with eyes of pity,   
there is no way I can know, not until the curse finds you   
empty, She said slowly and calmly.  
Look me in the eye and I will tell you what sacrifice means,

it is not me to you,  
it is our difference that will save you.  
It begged her to feed so that it may warm her hidden parts  
with its strange brown flesh.  
Like the aliens, who built the pyramids, they had no lips to kiss.  
Because it’s true that the first Valentine’s Day was the first  
Dom that was Mom and She owned the globe as any mother  
should and will and can do and the rest will strip away as   
white falls in a  
Show storm.  
Searching, She held obsidian up to the light, and She   
wondered how to validate a parasite.  
She asked the curator and the critic, the student and   
manager, the husband and the wife. To which nearly each   
and all responded,

**Meeting Notes (2/14/15 18:18)**  
count to 7  
you have no right.

**Meeting Notes (2/13/15 13:24)**  
count to 3  
She wondered how She knows they think She must be  
A masochist with her debt and need and contingency  
She laughed so loudly in her whispered worm voice, knowing   
that every right to love and even a worm soaked and choked,   
was hers.  
her knowing and showing was of those scraps and corpses.  
She laid down on her next and with a pretty whip in her hand,   
She laid down to evict the others, and smiled at her choices  
because the worm inside of her made love like She wanted.

**Meeting Notes (2/13/15 13:24)**  
her choices   
The end.

Writer

Performance

issue-130-p8-10.pdf

Text

Love

Artist Cara Benedetto presents her performance script for She invented love not to die (2015).

On Writing: ‘She invented love to not die’ Script written and performed by Cara Benedetto

**Richard William Hill** is an independent writer and curator, and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Studies at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver. First debted in _FUSE_ Magazine, Close Readings aims to offer honest assessments of exhibitions of contemporary Indigenous art.

##### _Close Readings_ is a much discussed column that art historian and curator Richard William Hill debuted in the Spring 2013 issue of _FUSE_ Magazine. Responding to an imbalance in the number of Indigenous curators relative to Indigenous art critics, _Close Readings_ aims to offer honest assessments of exhibitions of contemporary Indigenous art. _FUSE_ Magazine, known for its incisive analyses of politically engaged art and culture, was published from 1976 until 2014\. We are grateful to _FUSE Magazine_ and _FUSE_’s final editor, Gina Badger, for permission to continue _Close Readings_ within _C Magazine_.
  
  
\_I especially like discarded things that are not useful. When you go to anyplace on the street and you see something that was so badly made it’s no longer useful, it’s really comforting … If they’re allowed to be useless they are free and they are the world in front of us. And then all sorts of meaning can happen at any time, or change at any time.\_[^1]  
—Jimmie Durham

Not long ago my three-year-old niece had a bad dream. When something upsets her, she likes to talk and be reassured. The first time she told me about it, I heard: “I dreamed I was following an eagle along by a river and I fell in the water. I was in the water and it was scary.” At this, my brain went off in two directions. My first priority was to be a consoling adult. But some other part of my brain also hared off, considering the momentous significance of dreaming about eagles. It felt culturally weighty. Eventually I reminded myself that my view of dreams falls closer to a psychological model than a mystical one. Still, I went on wondering why she was dreaming of eagles.

A few weeks later, I was talking to my niece again and she was obviously still working through her anxiety about the dream.  
“I had a scary dream,” she told me.  
“The one where you were following the eagle?”  
“No,” she said, and told me again. Again I heard, “I was following an eagle beside a river and I fell in the water.”  
“You were following an eagle?” I asked, confused.  
“No!” She gets frustrated when people can’t understand her. “Can you say it again?”  
She did, and I finally heard it correctly: “I was following a _seagull_.”

My interpretive powers faced a similar bruising in my encounter with Brian Jungen’s recent exhibition. I arrived knowing only that the works would be made from Nike Air Jordan shoes. Jungen’s breakthrough work was the _Prototypes for A New Understanding_ series: masks made from re-assembled Air Jordans that somehow manage to be reminiscent (and not) of Northwest Coast masks. I therefore entered the gallery with expectations, yet each encounter with a specific artwork seemed to challenge my wish to project significance onto a resistant object. For me, that process became what the exhibition is about: a test of both the desire for meaning and the way in which over-scripted meanings assert themselves.

Because the power of the work resides so fundamentally in the challenging process one goes through to make sense of it, I have chronicled my version of that experience rather than providing a purely retrospective analysis.

I learned about Jungen’s new exhibition from an email. At the top of the message was an image of Nike shoe components stitched together into … _what? Sections of shoe soles make a neck-like base, but is this a mask? Has he returned to making masks from shoes?_ I can’t tell from the image. _Perhaps the object is only intelligible in three dimensions?_ I skim the rest of the email for help. There’s no title given, but there are three paragraphs of press release text. They tell me that he’s returned to using Nike Air Jordan “trainers.” The design and colour of the shoes have changed but “so has the artist’s strategy for using them as representational objects of colonial and First Nation art histories merging with contemporary collective imagery.”[^2]

I read that last sentence again. It’s vague; the thing we want to know – the terms and character of this “merging” – are left to our imagination. Fortunately, the _Prototypes_ are so fecund with meaning that they have inspired much excellent analysis. I hope it won’t seem a travesty if I reduce it to a few points that I had in mind as I saw the new show. As Raymond Boisjoly said recently in a brilliant talk at the Or Gallery, the _Prototypes_ are not so much Indigenous art as they are art about Indian art. They are the site of a collision between two types of objects that have become the repositories of more significance than any object can perhaps legitimately bear: the Air Jordan as ultimate global consumer brand and perhaps the ultimate symbol of Indigenous alterity and authenticity, the Northwest Coast mask. The _Prototypes_, which both succeed and fail in their mimesis, implicate that apparent authenticity in a global economy that is all too eager to market and consume its “primitive” other. This might suggest that the power of the _Prototypes_ is purely negative; that there is nothing left to admire. But perhaps when the negated Nike brand and the negated category of Indian art collide they cancel one another out. What is left? As Boisjoly suggested: the pure possibility and potential inherent in the material manipulation itself. Many of us are so deeply estranged from the processes of mass production that manipulation of these materials seems almost the act of a magician. The process of misrecognition and failed mimesis creates space for the emergence of new possibilities.

Returning to the press release for the current show, I see that the final paragraph begins to explain just how the new works are different from the _Prototypes_, so I stop reading. Recently I have made a point of seeing new exhibitions cold and then doing the scholarship later. I never talk to the artist or curator. I want to see what I can make of an exhibition on its own terms first and then by using the information that is publically available about it. In this case, that approach made all the difference. If the exhibition will test your desire to find patterns in abstraction, that experience is all the more revealing if you do not start out knowing that in advance.

My first encounter with the work itself is at the opening, which, like all openings, is more a social event than an opportunity to look at the art. I know before I arrive that I will be back to really look when the gallery is less crowded. But it is a chance to see whether or not the show is something I would be able to write about. In that case, I will be back with my notebook.

Entering the gallery, I am looking to identify faces in the artworks and in the gathered crowd. I’ve only recently moved to Vancouver and I’m a little anxious that I will be slow to recognize a new acquaintance or colleague. As quickly as I can, though, I make my way to the work that I remember from the email. I want to see if it will be intelligible in person. I try it from every angle. Nothing. I look for a label, but remind myself that I’m not in a museum and can’t expect to find a title near at hand. I start gazing around at the other works. Are they all impenetrable? That one might be a Plains headdress. That other one looks like some sort of bird. Maybe. That other, a distorted face. As I’m doing this, I start to become conscious of the fact that, even in this crowd, I can see all the work because the plinths are unusually high. If modernism ended with sculpture shunted from its monumental plinth into an expanded field, as Rosalind Krauss famously argued,[^3] these tall plinths have reinstituted these objects as elevated monuments. These plinths, glaze-painted white so that the grain of the fir plywood shows through, are part of the work and are included in its dimensions. They evoke an austere yet materially luxurious modernist sensibility that characterizes so much of Jungen’s work. By this point, I know that I want to write about the exhibition, not because I know what I will say about it, but because I don’t and want to find out.

When I return a few weeks later, I have the gallery to myself, with the exception of the woman minding the desk. I ask for a list of works and she hands me the press release and gallery floor plan with the locations of works indicated by numbered circles. I start at number 1, in case sequence matters. It happens to be the work reproduced in the email. I see the title is _Broken Arrangement_, (2015–16). _So something was arranged and then broken? Or is it an arrangement of broken things?_ In either case, we are presumably seeing the aftermath of some damaging event. Is what’s left a pure abstraction? No, there is a semblance of a head sitting on a neck. The neck is made of vertically sliced sections of soles stacked, bolted together and set upright from heel to toe. These elements provide a rigidity and structure that is absent in the face area, which is made from the portions of the shoe above the sole. These offer a range of colours not available with the older Air Jordans: dark blues, reds and blacks, and not nearly so much white, except for the soles. Highlights of bright, almost fluorescent red.

There is the suggestion of a mouth gaping at the bottom and shoe parts are pinched together with a rivet in the centre to create the suggestion of a nose ridge. The upper right side of this face is composed of the entire right side of a shoe, sans sole, positioned right side up. The left side appears to be made from the other side, also sans sole, attached upside down. This creates an inverted (_broken?_) symmetry from side-to-side. Vertical symmetry is so characteristic of faces that we almost take it for granted. This inverted symmetry therefore both compels and resists our interpretation of the object as a face. Also, blue shoe tongues loll out across much of the “face’s” surface, interrupting its profile. A surplus of tongues suggests the bestial or monstrous, or at least a surfeit of oral sensation.

Can I infer that it is a mask? Perhaps the show is challenging me to take the object on its own terms? If so, I lean away from mask and toward portrait bust, just by virtue of its placement on the high plinth. But then I look at the work from the back. It is concave. Like a mask.

I move on clockwise to the second work: _The Nameless Fear_ (2015–16). The palette here is restricted to greys and blacks, with a few instances of contrasting white or red. Two elements stand out against a chaotic grey jumble of shoe parts. They are two whole black shoe tops, soles removed, that have been folded into distinctive shapes with their open bottoms facing forward. Because these shoes are black inside and out, except for a ring of white material where they were once connected to the sole, they grab our attention, the white edge defining a dark void within, all of which stands out against the grey. The black shoe on the left is pinched into a figure eight while the shoe on the right seems also to have been put into a figure eight, but then the bottom loop has been folded up and under, making the larger upper loop gape wider and the smaller one disappear. Some part of my mind desperately wants to read the smaller top loop on the left and the larger loop on the right as eyes, but it is a little more than I can do. Then I imagine tilting the object ninety degrees clockwise. Now I can easily interpret what would be the top figure eight as a pair of silly monster-Muppet eyes and the bottom, distorted figure eight as an equally comic snarling mouth. I suspect I’ve gone too far: from nameless fear to the Muppets. That can’t be right. I move around to the rear, where I see a chaos of shoe parts resting atop a neat, sturdily bolted arrangement of sliced shoe soles.

The next work, _Lay Down Tender Fire_ (2015–16), immediately brings to mind a Plains-style feather headdress. The object composes the familiar extended upside-down U shape of a headdress from shoe halves that are white, black and occasionally a bright yellow-orange. They alternate colours, but not in a clear pattern or symmetrically side to side. The shoe halves, with soles removed, are stacked into each other, their tops facing forward, right halves on the right, left halves on the left, creating an arc in each direction. Toward the top they are widely spaced, creating a broader band of each colour, while farther down they are more tightly woven together. The soles of the shoes have been removed, creating a concavity in the centre, as with an actual headdress. After struggling with the previous works, this one seems almost too easily pinned down, although I am fascinated by the cunning material manipulation. Then I move around to the back. Now I’m looking at a completely different object. The inner edge of each shoe is visible along the line that was once attached to the sole, stacked tightly together, except at the top where they spread wider and you can look into the interior of the shoe. What’s most notably different is that the curve of the instep is repeated over and over again, creating a powerful sense of movement, like a Futurist representation of flapping bird wings, or, with the inclusion of the orange-yellow shoes, curling, rising flames. _Is that one sense in which we might connect the object to the title?_ Yet even in the title we are torn in two directions. One can lay a fire and perhaps even imagine doing it tenderly, but laying down fire is a military phrase in which the fire in question comes from weapons. That sort of fire can only be described as tender with the greatest irony. Still, does that make this a war bonnet?

_King Capra_ (2016) looks like an owl to me, with wide outspread wings arcing up, a wide body (too wide, really, even for an owl) and big red eyes. (My friends think a crab is more likely and I wondered that too.) Where the other works are assembled from parts, this one appears more sculpted. The wings are made from thick sections of soles that provide enough solidity and structure to be shaped by carving. Whether this actually happened, or the parts were individually shaped and assembled, the appearance of a subtractive approach remains. The only Capra I can think of is the director Frank Capra. I can’t seem to get anywhere with that. My penchant for alliteration throws up “king cobra.” _A hypnotic snake and hypnotic owl eyes? Hypnotic Hollywood cinema?_ That seems like a stretch. And maybe it’s a crab anyway. A King Crab? It looks more like a Dungeness.

The final work, _Walk This Way_ (2015–16), is the most shoe-ish, so to speak. Facing it, we see the bottom soles of two shoes side by side forming a kind of face and then a cascade of shoe parts arcing out and down on either side, with the bottom shoes coming to rest against the plinth. The shoes have had their soles removed and are split in half down the centre in the front. This allows them to retain a great deal of their shoe appearance – at least from certain angles – while at the same time creating a strong sense of articulated bodily sprawl. This is also the only work in which the shape and the pattern of shoe colours is balanced symmetrically between sides. It really feels as though I ought to be able to make something out here. _Pleading arms stretched out at an unnatural angle? Elaborate hair ornaments? Monstrous, non-human features?_

I move around to the back. The work is fairly close to the wall, but there is room to circle it. The proximity to the wall is deliberate; there is plenty of space in the gallery. Presumably the artist wants us up close on this side: all the better to see, or because we need to feel what it’s like to be in this creature’s proximity? And now that I am on this side I’m not sure anymore that the other side was the front. The “front” of the face was the bottom of the soles of two pairs of shoes, but we do not find the rest of the shoe around back. Instead there is a tight stack of soles, one atop the other, building outwards, each layer a little smaller on the top and sides and sliced at roughly a forty-five degree angle, so that the stack slopes down and inward toward the base. _Is this the pointed face of an animal, with antlers arcing out behind it?_

_Walk this way?_ I’m not even sure which way is forward.

Back in my office, I return to the final paragraph of the press release. _Does my experience of the work lines up with the gallery’s statement?_ It tells me the: “…works are less a direct representation and contain more a suggestion of animal and human faces, taking advantage of how we innately search for and recognize these particular patterns.” So far, so good, although my own experience involved the conscious and unconscious folding in of many cultural expectations to whatever instinctive powers of recognition I might have.

It continues:

> This phenomena, oscillating between representation and abstraction, has historically been used in the visual representation of diverse mythologies. It could be argued that myths are always born from trauma and intertwine with the uncanny and supernatural, itself by definition unknown and indescribable.

I caught hints of this, but was not able to put it together on my own. At best, I had a sense of damaged order and occasional trauma. Allowing myself to think of these as masks or non-natural beings, I might have stretched to the mythic, but putting that all together was more than I was able to do on my own. Now I suppose it adds something more to consider.  
The last sentence reads:

> Considering our continued abstraction of faces and bodies through masks and dress, these works can be considered in direct relation to the diverse but unified aesthetics of contemporary global economic, political and cultural conflict.[^4]

Here, I am lost, because the link does not seem direct to me at all. It is certainly not explicit. I need to know more about this “diverse but unified aesthetics of contemporary global economic, political and cultural conflict” and what it might mean. But perhaps my own perspective is too parochial and too desperately optimistic. If these are misshapen creatures birthed from trauma, I find their indeterminacy not monstrous but liberating. I love the way in which they compound the dynamic of misrecognition we first saw in the _Prototypes_. In the current climate, where meanings around Indigenous art and culture often seems fixed and over-scripted, I think that Boisjoly is right; the refusal of mean- ing to settle and the ability to admit that sometimes we just don’t know is politically charged in itself. I’m glad to have met these strange creatures, neither eagle or seagull, and to welcome their becoming into the world.

[^1]: Kamloops Art Gallery, “Jimmie Durham Interviewed by Richard W. Hill,” Podcast: “http://www.kag.bc.ca/docs/4EAD93F01D99DF02.mp3”:http://www.kag.bc.ca/docs/4EAD93F01D99DF02.mp3 , 2007.
[^2]: Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Brian Jungen, press release, January 2016\. (Vancouver, Toronto, Berkeley: Vancouver Art Gallery, Douglas & McIntyre, 2005), 30.
[^3]: Rosalind E. Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” _The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths_, (Cambridge, Mass. & London: MIT Press, 1987), 276–295.
[^4]: Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Brian Jungen, press release, January 2016.

issue-130-p51-56.pdf

Indigenous

Exhibitions

Interpretation

Criticism

In this issue of Close Readings, Richard William Hill recounts his experience of viewing Brian Jungen’s new work at the Catriona Jeffries Gallery and considers Jungen’s new more abstract direction. Responding to an imbalance in the number of Indigenous curators relative to to Indigenous art critics, Close Readings aims to offer a honest assessment of exhibitions of contemporary Indigenous art. 

Close Readings: Brian Jungen Close 51 Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver January 22 – February 27, 2016

**The Maria Bamford Show**  
In 2007, comedian Maria Bamford had a nervous breakdown (this may or may not be true) and moved back into her parents’ house. From her attic guest bedroom, she created a series of videos for television. In them, she plays a variety of characters, signified by minor changes in clothing or different orientations around objects. As her therapist, she is holding a knife. As an employee, Maria is standing upright in a garbage can. As herself, she is simply lying horizontally on the daybed. She has succumbed to her context and is sending dispatches through a variety of throw pillows. Radically merging with the end table, speaking though the stuffed animal, she creates a lexicon from isolation and insularity to propose a raw and dark understanding of subjectivity in relation to environment. Like, what are the implications of speaking through a wall decoration that says “Live, Love, Laugh”?

**The Real Widow Diaries**  
My friend Robert Chirila, who I met in Montreal 10 years ago in the DIY art/music scene, is now studying speech therapy in his hometown of Mercer County, Pennsylvania. His YouTube monologue video series, _The Real Widow Diaries_, chronicles the struggles and woes of various American widows, whose personalities are inspired by the women of Robert’s hometown. These women, with names like Patty and Sandra-Lynne, express grief, hostility-tinged advice and quiet, yearning indignation in equal measure. “I’m callin’ you today to tell you about some horseshit that’s going on around here” (takes long drag of cigarette). These videos are private, though, so you’d have to message him directly to see them.

**_Outport Lesbian_ by Kathy Slade**  
In the late ’80s there was _codco_, a sketch comedy series produced in Newfoundland. In Kathy Slade’s music video _Outport Lesbian_, a tender, isolated fry cook at a chip stand is suddenly encroached upon and whisked away by a carload of lesbians, who then take her into the city to live the life she is meant to. “Outport Lesbian,/ sisterhood is powerful / let me have a plate of fries. Let me have a look / let me have a looky-look at those / Outport lesbian eyes.” As they drive away, the men look on, perplexed. The joint is called “Dick’s chip stand.” If Canadians are tired of trying to be cool (capitalism) maybe we should embrace being weird (outport lesbians).

**Maya Ben David and Snoopy’s Cousin Spike**  
In Charles Schultz’s _Peanuts_, Snoopy has a brother named Spike – a thin, ratty dog who wears a pandora hat, and lives inside a hollowed-out cactus located in the desert of Needles, California. He spends his time alone, playing the fiddle and writing letters to his brother. This week I watched Toronto artist Maya Ben David’s cosplay video, where she plays the air conditioner from the 1987 film _The Brave Little Toaster_. In the film, the appliance overheats, explodes and essentially dies (there are unclear suicidal overtones). Maya, performing in what is pretty much an air conditioner shaped-bra, contours sex, longing and despair without the human form necessarily at its core, and brings it into sharp and totally dank relief. Watching this video allowed me to realize that I want to give myself permission to write in and around Spike. Spike, staring listlessly at the ceiling of his cactus bedroom, waiting to feel different, pages scrawled with auto-fiction scattered around his hovel. Unsent love letters to the humans he meets when he hitchhikes into town to drink root beer. But not in the Kerouac beat-poet, male-writer way, of course. Spike is a dog, after all!

issue-130-p74-76.pdf

Artist Walter Scott shares his inventory of made at home performative youtube videos.

Inventory: Performance

Jessica Karuhanga is a Toronto-based artist working in drawing, video and performance.

“_A sign system promises meaning. A trace does not promise anything. It is something that seems to suggest that there was something before_.”

Flip through a spiral notepad until your index reaches the leaf that feels best. Produce a mark. This mark moves into a line. The line becomes text. These notations attempt to capture the exchange of sounds sliding off tongues. A form of record. This is not merely a trace. It is an index. Saliva becomes the site’s residue. Random marks, attempting an arrival, chase trails of speech. These notations are containers for fragments we are able to reach. Hold this vessel. It is through this action we necessitate re-experiencing through different frameworks and passageways.

The moments of enactment, a sacred vestibule between performers and those rendered witness, invariably become trace, echo, shadow. How do these shadows leave haptic marks through their absence, reflection and intangibility? We often long to revisit sites so that we may grasp their shape and retrace the contours of their form. The residue evaporates. It fades with each successive moment. Does one dig for marks somewhere in the fibre of memory? The way ink sinks into the crosshatch of paper? These textures become pools of refuse that we later scavenge or incessantly wade through. The enactment is a reflexive witnessing or experiencing of a work as it unfolds. A wound leaves a scar. A fracture fades. Unfolding is a process of becoming and disappearing. There is intimacy in our weaving threads. The creator is as much witness as the spectator who marks. We all experience – but differently.

The artist emerges as figure, as precariat, slow, fixated on the ritual gesture. In Francisco-Fernando Granados’ ongoing _spatial profiling and movement study_ series, the specificity of his body is anonymized. To say that _spatial profiling_ is simply in the spectrum of the racial is to collapse and flatten a space. In _movement study_, a standard strip search acts as both score and text dictating the desired gestures. A position without a subject is implicated at the threshold of all borders. However, there is a necessity to imagine this subject as subaltern – a process that may implicate anyone but which significantly affects specific sites and bodies. As these works expand, Granados turns away from any preoccupation with sites that can only hold space for his body. In order for someone else to perform the score, there must be time and space to hold. Time to respond and recover. There is also a responsibility to take care. In order to give up some control of these elements, one must be open to confluence. To ruptures. To flux. To randomization. In each iteration, the patterns blur and sway. They vibrate and colours seemingly trip, collapsing into each other. This process reveals a field of red, green and blue light.

Revisit the symbiotic energy of these two series. Seated on a bench, Granados quotes Spivak verbatim: “Democracy must always have an abstract subject. A position without identity.” These words roll off his tongue: A trace is not a sign for it promises nothing. Often it is the refuse that remains as the only evidence that there was something or someone present before. A haunting relic. A ruin. Saliva. Dust. Granados’ shadow is a profile becoming form undone. Lines extend from the mover’s movements. His extensions soon become my trace.

“\_The emptiness, the blankness that analogize with white spaces on the page are framed by the trace of a texting – an edge, a rim, a lip, a shore that lends depth to the emptiness, even direction\_.”

Press a pen into the blank space, then move along the curve. Draw until you feel the periphery. Caress this flesh. Nose. Lips. Chin. Repeat these steps thoroughly until exhaustion. Pivot to rest your cheek on the wall. Roll a die. The spots determine the minutes you endure a single stroke of colour. Our witnessing remains open, random, extending and immeasurable. Anybody can hold this pose and enfold their composure. Hold this position until you are trembling. Reproduce the covering and unveiling. Unveiled through this process is a field of positive and negative space. This veil is a spectre. Some language passes through the crosshatch. Some may grasp it. Others writhe in longing. Murmurs selectively caress, cradle and extol in air through lips. These sounds and pulses precede language. Marks, lines and sharp folds form under the weight of the body’s form. This edge is a shoreline. Its trace is an index of memories fading, passing, gone.

“_Nothing will ‘signify’ in this maelstrom of traces, always suggesting that someone, somewhere, made a move, or perhaps not_.”

[^1]: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. “Sign and Trace.” _An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization_. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012\. 489–98.

Artist

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Body

Conceptual

Jessica Karuhanga writes on artist Francisco-Fernando Granados’ performative practice. Karuhanga explores the traces left by the gestures around which Granado’s structures his performances.

Artefact: Performance

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Editorial

This issue goes back to the roots of performance art in the 1960s and ’70s to look at the use of performance texts and scores, and artists’ engagement with the political avant-garde. The idea of the avant-garde has changed radically since the 1960s, and it is worth thinking about why so many of the pitches we’ve received lately have wanted to examine this trajectory in performance. What does all this interest in the instigators of the recent past say about the current moment in art-making? And what resonates with present concerns in performance – a medium that now fits easily within the disciplinary boundaries of contemporary art?

This issue is also about _refusal_, which is a strategy that unites much of what appears in these pages. Refusal is a theme in Ara Osterweil’s article on the use of live radio in Ken Jacobs’ experimental film _Blonde Cobra_, in Jon Davies’ text on Chantal Akerman and her use of structural techniques of filmmaking, in Sabrina Tarasoff’s piece on the influence of Sylvia Plath on the work of Mike Kelley and others, and in Annie MacDonell’s artist project, _Notes for Performers_. In almost all of these essays and artist projects, artists use performance scores or structural techniques to facilitate an embodied refusal of power or ideol- ogy, often signalling a shift towards interiority and activating the imagination and unconsciousness of both artist and viewer. And this issue is also about other media and forms of expression – photography, film, radio, the voice – that are often part of live performance.

For example, in her essay on _Blonde Cobra_, Osterweil writes about how the screen goes black during the film, refusing to show viewers the scenes of orgiastic social transgression that the recorded voice of Jack Smith describes, and forcing us to use our imagination to construct these scenes. Both voice and live radio are key agents in this piece, which is performed live, using a performance score, with a radio played intermittently during the film that is suddenly turned off when the film’s protagonist smashes a radio with a hammer onscreen. Osterweil writes that the film moves back and forth between representation and reality, the black screen working as a form of “conscientious objection” to what she describes as “the mass orgy of media indoctrination,” whereby the film is not a static object, but a living, changing form embodied by its viewers. Similarly, in his discussion of Chantal Akerman, Jon Davies looks at Michael Snow’s structuralist films of the late ’60s and early ’70s and Akerman’s refusal of conventions of narrative film and her use of restraints to liberate the attention of viewers, engaging them emotionally through form. 

The cover of this issue depicts a performer from Annie MacDonell’s video work _Holding Still // Holding Together_ (2016), which uses photojournalistic images of protesters resisting being carried away by police as a performance score. Having become limp and heavy, the protesters neither strike back nor protect their faces, but instead use their bodies passively to resist and obstruct the efforts of the police and make visible the operations of power. In MacDonell’s artist project for the issue, these positions are abstracted from the physical context of the protest site. As the performer enacts the position of a protester, her closed eyes are replaced by the painted image that appears on her eyelids and she merges with the historical image that is the script for this piece.

This issue is also about the voice – not just the voice of Jack Smith in _Blonde Cobra_, but also that of the late composer Robert Ashley, for whom the voice was integral and which inflects Steve Kado’s writing about Ashley’s work. It also arises as a theme in Alison Cooley and Daniella Sanader’s essay on MONOMYTHS, a performance art series structured around Joseph Campbell’s 1949 text The Hero with a Thousand Faces; the series presents multiple forms of storytelling, and this strategy is reflected in Sanader and Cooley’s poly-vocal text, which combines notes, conversation and essayistic writing.

Something that has been steadily emerging from recent issues of _C Magazine_ is the idea of writing as performance, and their inter-relatedness. In this issue’s On Writing column, Cara Benedetto presents the script from her 2015 performance _She invented love to not die_. And in Close Readings, Richard William Hill takes us through Brian Jungen’s recent exhibition at Catriona Jeffries, in an extended review that is also a primer on looking. Throughout this issue – as we have throughout past issues of C – we consider writing as a performative act, and explore the intersection of writing and art. In different ways, these various media are critical forms that give structure to thought, feeling and politics. Many of the contributions to this issue do exactly this, and much more.

Amish Morrell is Assistant Professor at OCAD University, where he teaches Criticism & Curatorial Practice, and Visual and Critical Studies.

Editor

Kari Cwynar is a curator, writer and editor based in Toronto, where she is Director of Kunstverein Toronto and Editorial Director of _C Magazine_. She writes on contemporary art for publications and catalogues, contributes regularly to _Frieze_ and _Metropolis M_.

Assistant Editor

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Kari Cwynar and Amish Morrell introduce the theme of “performance” for this issue. 

Editorial: Performance

Feature

Ara Osterweil is an abstract painter, writer, and scholar of postwar film and art, as well as an Associate Professor of Cultural Studies in the English Department at McGill University. Her book, _Flesh Cinema: The Corporeal Turn in American Avant-Garde Film_ (Manchester University Press, 2014), examines the representation of sexuality in experimental film of the 1960s and 1970s. She has published essays in _Artforum, Camera Obscura, Film Quarterly, Little Joe, Framework, The Brooklyn Rail_, and _Millennium Film Journal_. She is currently working on two books: _The Pedophilic Imagination: A History of American Film_, and a collection of experimental prose entitled _Stains & Fragments_.

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Politics

Film

Ara Osterweil revisits filmmaker Ken Jacobs’ underground classic Blonde Cobra (1963) to explore the formal and conceptual innovation of the film as an ecstatic meditation on failure and mass media. Jacobs, a contemporary of infamous queer filmmaker Jack Smith, constructed Blond Cobra from the discarded parts of two hollywood parodies shot and then abandoned in the late 1950s by Smith and Bob Fleischner. Osterweil reflects on the film’s continued resonances and insights into contemporary American politics and “how it all went wrong”. 

Radio Daze: Why Ken Jacobs’ Blonde Cobra Still Matters

Jon Davies is a Montreal-based curator and writer. He recently received his PhD in Art History from Stanford University.

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Death

Gender

Feminism

Identity

Art History

In a tribute to filmmaker Chantal Akerman’s life and career Jon Davies explores her prolific oeuvre and life long negotiation of identity. Akerman’s highly influential films have been celebrated for their rigorous minimalism, structuralist innovations, and impact on feminist film discourse. Davis examines how Akerman’s ability to scrutinize the skin of the everyday continues to resonate in our volatile present moment. 

Every Home a Heartache: Chantal Akerman

Sabrina Tarasoff is a curator and writer based in Paris.

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Video

Poetry

Diary

Sabrina Tarasoff considers Sylvia Path’s enduring legacy and influence on artists Mike Kelly and Merlin Carpenter. 

Sylvia

Daniella Sanader is a writer and reader who lives in Toronto. 

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Storytelling

Collaboration

Myth

This article reviews MONOMYTHS, the performance series that launched FADO Performance Art Centre’s 2016 programme. The series examined the idea of “mono-myth” – the universal hero’s quest. The traditional narrative is deconstructed into seventeen stages transpiring over three acts, some inviting audience participation. Sanader and Cooley, mirroring the collaborative, multi-faceted nature of the series, review the series together by incorporating their conversations, notes during the performance and their personal reflections. 

Notes on Myth-Making

What happens to the work of an artist, whose personality is so central in their own work, when that artist dies? What’s left of works that were, one might fear, entirely propped up by the artist’s unique body, personality and magnetism? It’s a question relevant to the work of Robert Ashley, a recently deceased composer whose work is enduring a revival within contemporary art. Ashley believed that the most beautiful kind of singing was the American spoken voice, the sound of people just talking – and it was his own voice, both unassuming and immediately distinctive, that came to define his recorded works. It is a voice that is almost entirely unique in performance: not exclamatory, not strident, not tired, not bored. He had a dreamy, relaxed way of speaking that lies between soft chanting and conversation, which somehow sounded totally natural while also being stridently artificial. Ashley’s work can feel infuriatingly casual: people just talking, someone playing piano, not entirely connected but not entirely apart, a synthesizer sweeps through and then it’s back to someone talking. They’re telling you something about their day, about what they like to drink, about what happened at the bank, about the aliens, about theosophy, about the Renaissance, about how to play piano, the solar system, stumbling across gay men having sex in a park, about anything. And yet, the work never seems to lose some essential thread, no matter how vague or distant the divagations seem to be. Ashley’s work is wonderfully strange, the kind of thing that’s almost impossible to imagine people willing into existence; it has an accidental quality that the best moments of real life have, and yet it is so rich in these moments that it can’t merely be random.

Ashley’s best-known work is his “mature” work, which he started producing when he was in his forties. It was at that stage in his life that he came to believe that he was making operas for television, a feat he managed in earnest only once, with _Perfect Lives_ (1980). From that point on, he focused on how people chose to hear music everyday – which is to say we hear it on record or as part of our media landscape rather than in concert halls. As such, Ashley viewed his recorded performances as more or less the final word and tried to insert his work into the flow of daily channel-surfing life. In writings from the ‘80s, he is vehemently against recitals: “Whatever it is, you are not a part of it. You have been a watcher. The recitalist hopes that you have been entertained.” For most of his “mature” phase, live performance seemed to be something that Ashley tolerated – a hangover from a more performative time – rather than something he embraced. He called for an experience between audience and artist that would remind “the people who came” that what they were seeing was only “a surfacing of the continuing musicality of everyday life.” It seemed that live performance might be necessary just to let people know that he was still working, but this “surfacing” could happen anywhere.

So it seems like a vexing thing to try and figure out how to perform this music now, when the dominant personality that filled up so much of it has gone and when that personality was himself mostly ambivalent about the idea of you doing it. But, rising interest in Ashley’s work makes revivals almost inevitable. There were major performances of Ashley’s work after his passing but they were already substantially underway during the composer’s lifetime. _Crash_ (2014), the last opera he was able to finish, was premiered at the Whitney Biennial one month after Ashley’s death along with _Vidas Perfectas_, a Spanish-language reading of _Perfect Lives_, and a remount of _The Trial of Anne Opie Wehrer_ and _Unknown Accomplices for Crimes Against Humanity_ (1968), all of these organized and directed by Alex Waterman. Yet by now enough time has passed that we have to doubt the extent of Ashley’s contributions to new work that appears under his name. Recently, The Kitchen premiered _Quicksand_ (2015), which is maybe Ashley’s final work. From late interviews, it appears that Ashley was working on _Quicksand_ for at least five years before his passing. There have also been some recent remountings of historical Ashley, notably a revival of Alex Waterman’s revival of _The Trial of Anne Opie Wehrer_, performed at 356 S. Mission Road in Los Angeles in March.

Both recent productions have a pedigree behind them: Waterman, in addition to being the driver behind the Spanish renovation of _Perfect Lives_, produced (along with Will Holder) the hefty autobiography of Ashley culled from parts of his own scores, titled _Yes, But is it Edible_?[^1] He can take some credit for convincing Ashley to reverse his long-held opinion that his work should not be re-performed. This late-in-life Damascene conversion almost certainly contributed to the increased attention and stature Ashley’s work benefitted from right before his passing. _Quicksand_ for its part is performed by what might almost be called “The Robert Ashley Band without Robert Ashley” (the electronic “orchestra” is produced by Tom Hamilton who collaborated with Ashley on almost all his later work, the lights are by David Moodey) and also features luminaries who were Ashley’s contemporaries (the choreography is by Steve Paxton, who “co-starred” in a series of films Ashley made with George Manupelli in the late ’60s, among other connections). The only voice heard throughout _Quicksand_ is Ashley’s own recorded voice, so in a way he should also be added to the list of venerable collaborators.

Of the two recent productions, _The Trial of Anne Opie Wehrer_ fares the best, due in part to the mystery that shrouds early Ashley works. Ashley’s music only made it onto commercially available recordings when he was in his mid-forties, so it can seem almost as if he hatched out of an egg directly into his mature phase sometime around 1977\. Other than a dense boxed set of recordings from the once Festival, there are few recorded examples of how Ashley spent his twenties and thirties. So despite seeing mention of numerous early works in books and seeing their sometimes indecipherable scores, there are almost no opportunities for interested people to directly encounter the stuff. This makes sense in a way: Ashley’s earliest work appears almost exclusively within the confines of the once Festival, an experimental music/theatre/performance festival held in Ann Arbor, Michigan, from 1961 to 1966\. His works from that time tend to fall into two categories: those that were technically complex to produce, involving complex surround-sound set-ups, designed to produce effects that are hard to harness in mere stereo recording; and aleatoric, Fluxus-style happenings, social set-ups and gatherings of specific people doing specific, not necessarily musical, things that were likely difficult to capture on tape. _The Trial of Anne Opie Wehrer_ definitely falls into the latter category. The set-up is simple: a tape recording of Ashley’s voice asks 100 questions of Anne Opie Wehrer, who is sitting in a chair with her back to the audience, facing a television screen and answering based on her own personal experiences and opinions. Two additional inquisitors cross- examine her and are in turn answered by two surrogates for Anne Wehrer. The questions range from the banal (“Do you smoke, drink or habitually use any narcotic?”) to the provocative (“Please describe the most distasteful thing you have ever done for money”). In the original once production, of which only a grainy black-and-white video remains, Anne Wehrer was a scintillating conversationalist, and the main thrust of the work was to basically goad her into sharing this skill with an audience. Anne Wehrer died in 2007, so to replace this larger-than-life conversationalist, who is specifically named in the title, Waterman has brought in a rotating group of Annes. For the presentation at Mission Road, the burden of being interrogated fell to Wayne Koestenbaum on the first night and Mary Farley on the second. Farley bristled at questions that were clearly aimed specifically at Anne Wehrer and launched into long entertaining rants in response to other questions. The voices of the additional interrogators and respondents bunched and wove around the main questioning; there were uncomfortable silences as a terse answer left nothing more to be discussed until the next question rolled off the tape. Or was it a tape? Waterman, sitting behind the mixing desk can do a remarkably good Ashley impression so maybe he was taking the place of the tape recording?

Ashley frequently mentioned this piece as a watershed moment for him, and you can see how the piece shaped the work he would subsequently make, focusing on the personalities and speaking styles of a very specific group of people, relying more on talking than on any other technology and also using the form of interrogation, which he brings back in later operas like _Improvement (Don Leaves Linda)_ (1985) and _eL/Aficionado_ (1987). The one time I met Ashley, at a revival of another early once Festival work, _That Morning Thing_ (1967) in 2011, his comment on the performance was that “it’s definitely a product of its time.” This same critique can be aimed at _The Trial of Anne Opie Wehrer_, although its sparseness and single-mindedness keep it from devolving entirely into a historical exercise, it still had the crackling energy of an antique manifesto, a faded signpost pointing towards the amazing things that were to come. In contrast, _That Morning Thing_ – at least in its 2011 incarnation – felt almost as if war re-enactors were acting out the 1960s mid-western avant-garde instead of the battle of Gettysburg, with no actual territory at stake.

In his biographical monograph about Ashley, Kyle Gann[^2] tells us that _Quicksand_, then under construction, would be Ashley’s most ambitious, and his longest opera. Given that Ashley is prone to making long operas (_Now Eleanor’s Idea_ can run over five hours if played in its entirety), this is saying a mouthful. So when _Quicksand_ was finally produced earlier this year, its two-plus-hour running time seemed positively brisk. A recording of Ashley reading a narrative about an elderly composer who works as a spy on behalf of “The Company” – he’s in Asia accompanying his wife and her friends on a yoga trip and doing a little spy work on the sideplays out over a largely empty stage, one large sheet to the back changes shape a few times, the lights and smoke move around and two dancers occasionally appear, enacting Steve Paxton’s trademarked blend of everyday and not-everyday motion. Borrowing from thrillers is not unprecedented in Ashley’s work: _eL/Aficionado and Foreign Experiences_ are both detective stories of a sort, and a bank robbery is something like the central event in _Perfect Lives_. Yet _Quicksand_ is a frustratingly direct text for Ashley. Normally, discussions of the plot elements of Ashley’s operas have to be full of qualifications – things are “kind of ” happening, the bank “sort of gets robbed” – but in this case, it’s all plot. Essentially, Ashley reads you a story from start to finish: a geriatric composer assists a group of good “freedom fighters,” our hero hastens regime change in some Asian country aided by some hyper-violent contractors sent by “The Company” and makes an impression on a beautiful young woman – all before returning home to New York to pick up the rest of his life writing operas and thinking about how it will all end. The interaction between the linearity and the fantasy in the script is unsettling, or embarrassing, cutting this piece off from the casual, everyday feeling that normally gives Ashley’s work its basic power. The temptation is always to cover for the deceased artist, to say that had he lived, he would have made changes. As it stands, the work has multiple different endings – maybe he would have picked one, maybe he would have muddled the order of events? Of course, Ashley had already recorded himself reading the text in full, so that in itself it must constitute some kind of commitment to the material as it stands. I found myself sitting in the audience wondering when it was going to get weirder, when it was going to transform into something more than an adventure story.

At one point, David Moodey lights the stage full of smoke in a way that is unbelievably affecting. More than anything, that luminous hazy void made me feel Ashley’s absence. Hearing his voice playing out onto a stage that was empty except for smoke had the uncanny feeling of attending a séance. Paxton’s choreography, on the other hand, by remaining grounded in the everyday world, reminded me how good Ashley was at focusing his attention on the world outside his New York window, or in his past experiences in the midwest and California – and established a painful contrast to the work that was at hand. (Do we really need to hear what a white, American octogenarian has to say about Asia? There are, after all, plenty of people in Asia who could maybe do that job for us.) At its best moments, the text provides some moving reflections on the author’s mortality – signing off, as it were, catching his flight without luggage. The challenge, though, is to view these sections as if this were not his last opera. If this is just an opera by Robert Ashley, would I feel as worked up? Would I feel just as sad? Am I being manipulated? Are those moments really that different from any of the other meditations on aging and death in his other operas? More than anything else, the “surfacing” Ashley was searching for in the ’80s– where viewer and work seem to encounter each other at random, in the street – precludes the kind of catharsis that the conclusion to Quicksand’s trades in so heavily. Did Ashley wait until the final moment to get all maudlin on us?

I have the feeling that, in vaults somewhere in New York, there are hours and hours of recordings of Ashley’s talking. Which means there could well be productions and revivals of his works, featuring his own unique sing-song talking voice, for years to come. If I’m wrong, if after _Quicksand_, the vault is now empty, Waterman has groomed his own oral instrument into a very reasonable facsimile. In this scenario, it seems fitting that of any other American vocal performers who might rival Ashley, Elvis comes closest, because of how his work posthumously relies on impersonators. Other than as a scholarly exercise or to promote awareness of his oeuvre, I find myself siding with the old Robert Ashley – the recordings are enough – Ashley without Ashley really lacks, well, Ashley.

In grad school, I attempted to cover _Perfect Lives_. By the time I got clear of the haze of Ashley’s influence on my own enunciation and phrasing, when I was speaking as much like myself as the material would allow, I can’t say I improved or even reinterpreted the work – the score was curved too closely around the way he talked. The best that I could say is that some people saw the work who had not seen it before and that I had affected an odd kind of evangelism. So maybe another aspect of Elvis — the artist as religious figure — is appearing on the horizon for the work of Robert Ashley as well. And like fans of Elvis who make pilgrimages to Graceland, I will likely see every single performance of Ashley’s work that I can in the years to come, despite my reservations about re-performance. The material itself is too good to let any shadow of it slip by.

[^1]: Will Holder and Alex Waterman, _But is it Edible?_ (New Documents, Vancouver: 2014).
[^2]: Kyle Gann, _Robert Ashley_ (Champaign, Ill: University of Illinois Press, 2012).

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Sound

Music

What happens to an artist, who’s personality is so central in their own work when that artists dies? Steve Kado explores the tensions of recreating recently deceased composer Robert Ashley’s work without the driving force of Ashley’s personality. 

Ashley after Ashley

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**Annie MacDonell** is a visual artist whose practice is grounded in the photographic impulse to frame and capture. With interests that extend beyond photography, she makes films, installation and sculpture and also has a writing and performance practice. Her performances have recently been presented at le Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Toronto International Film Festival. In 2012 she was shortlisted for the AGO AMIA prize for photography, and was long listed for the Sobey Art Award in 2012, 2015 and 2016.

**Notes For Performers: Part Ⅰ**

**On the Ethics of Recreation**

It is strange and awful to remove these images from their original context. It is terrible to erase from them the extended struggles that preceded the split-second they represent. But that is what I am asking we do. Together, we will work to reproduce the various configurations of bodies depicted in the still images. But in restaging these events for the camera, the intention is not to memorialize them. It is to hijack and rewrite the power relations they describe.

To do this, we will temporarily set aside the imbalance between police and protester. We will erase the street, the violence, the swarming crowds, the yelling, the uniforms, billy clubs, guns and riot gear that are the essential constituents of the events. We will turn our focus instead to the bodies as they interact with each other. In the photographs, it is very clear who is who and where the power lies, but in our recreation we’ll ignore those distinctions. Instead of imagining ourselves in the role of police or protester, of state en- forcer or dissident, we’ll work together as equal and interchangeable agents in a collective experiment of holding still and holding together. We’ll remember the nature of the original events, but we’ll also think about the times we’ve held on to other bodies (friends, lovers, children) in very different situations from the ones depicted in the photographs. We’ll seek out these overlaps and others, in order to better understand what it’s like to put our bodies on the line for our politics.

**What the Images Show and What They Don’t Show**

These images do not represent the standard exchange between police and protester. These are instances in which the peaceful refusal of the protesters was met with fair compliance by authorities. These are events in which the cameras were present and so they are, by and large, peaceful images.

But it would be wrong to talk about these images without talking about violence. Most acts of resistance, peaceful and otherwise, are met with an aggressive response. Police regularly hit, kick, restrain and pepper spray protesters. Sometimes angry mobs form around the protesters and do this job on behalf of the police. Sometimes protesters kick, spit or charge the police with equal hatred and violence. Sometimes they break windows, set cars on fire, loot, destroy and provoke. Violence is not represented here, but that is an exception. We must remember that it remains both the condition and the horizon of these events.

If these images obscure the violence that is fundamental to them, what is it then that they show us?

In the images, we see protesters going limp in the streets as an act of passive protest. The police, strong and upright all around them, are carrying them away as best they can. Sometimes the limp bodies are being dragged along the pavement and sometimes they are suspended above the ground. The police hold on to the protesters in positions that are comic and tragic, horrible and strangely familiar at once. This is what makes the images confusing. Sometimes the protesters look like they are dead or hurt, and then it becomes hard to tell if the police are arresting them or pulling them to safety. Sometimes the police hold the protesters carefully in their arms, like children or lovers. This is confusing too. But when the police are turned towards the camera, we can look at their faces to better understand. Often there is hatred flashing there. Sometimes there is disgust or panic. Other times there is fear and concern.

The photographs document political protests from around 1940 to the present. They were produced in the Western World, mainly Canada, the US and the UK. They show people demonstrating for civil rights, racial equality, organized labour; against nuclear war, environmental destruction, the inequality generated by rampant networked capitalism. Often the protesters close their eyes and hang their heads to signal their absolute evacuation from the moment. But other times, they raise their faces to the cameras to smirk and mug. Sometimes the limp bodies are strong young women and men, sometimes they are fragile and old. In any case, you worry for them, because the police bodies are always strong, armed and uniformed; mostly male, mostly white.

**In Search of Complicated Images**

We are engaging in a project of recreation that is as much about looking as it is about moving, lifting and posing. Before we begin the physical work, we’ll look long and hard at these images that resist an easy reading. In a time when our outrage is most often expressed through hashtags and scrollable status updates, let’s engage for a moment in another type of consideration.

Look at these bodies tangled up all together. Trace the line of each limb to its conclusion. Gauge the weight of the body being lifted or dragged, and then calculate how it is shared among the lifters. Think about the places where these bodies touch, and how the skin must burn and twist there. See how closely these people grasp on to one another and consider how that experience might be confusing for those involved. Bone, muscle and flesh are conspiring here. They are describing the conditions under which we are bound up together. These bodies are diagrams of power and precariousness, and through them we see how those things form each other in every which way.

How does it feel to be locked deep in this contradictory embrace? What is it like to make yourself vulnerable in the arms of the state? What are the police thinking of as they hug these supple bodies in close to them? Where does the control lie in this situation? How was it established and how can it be maintained?

**The Act of Going Limp**

Resistance is never an isolated action. It is a series of reciprocal events arising between those with power and those without. Any effective effort of resistance must continuously adapt in response to that which it is resisting, and so there can be no one right way to perform it. But in searching through the disasters of the past for clues as to how to respond to the disaster of the present, these images of passive protest hold some kind of key. There is potential in this action that is not an action at all, but rather its opposite. Through their stillness, their limpness, their lassitude, the bodies are expressing their complete and total non-cooperation with the systems that exploit and degrade them.

As the authorities advance, the protester slumps over. Her fists unclench, her head rolls, her limbs go limp and heavy. She is still, but she is not dead. When she stops moving, she is transformed into a heavy burden, deeply inconvenient to the police who now can neither ignore her, nor kick her and cuff her like a common criminal. She becomes both absent and ultra-present at once.

Through this action, the protester is also generating an allegory. Her limp body caught up in the arms of the police shows that she is a being bound up with others, as we all must be, that her life and her freedom are subject to a matrix of power she did not design. Her limp body is signalling her refusal to continue within that system. The force of her action lies in this refusal, which is absolute and unmistakable. But the cunningness of this action lies in its capacity to suppress the power and action of the police. As long as she doesn’t fight, tense or resist, the police must match her restraint ounce for ounce. This act of passive protest, which looks just like surrender, is an inversion of the power system that keeps the political subject bound up in its web. Also, and perhaps most importantly, it is a declaration that new possibilities for revolt continue to spring up from everywhere and at every moment, even from the very centre of the oldest mechanisms of social domination.

Perhaps the authorities see these limp bodies as nothing more than a logistical problem that must be removed in order to quell dissent and return to order. But they would be wrong in that assessment. As the cameras rise up all around, these crumpled forms send out their message to those gathering around, all the better to see.

**Notes for Performers: Part Ⅱ**

How does a body move a body? Let’s look at the pictures to learn.

_If you find yourself one-to-one, flip his body upwards and slip your hands beneath his arms. Now lift him off the ground and pull him close to you. His heart beats fast in the back of his chest and your heart beats in the front of your own. Your heart is beating with the effort of the lift, while his is beating with the effort of the drag. One-to-one, his body is nearly impossible to move. It can only be displaced with a great deal of effort and sweat and the grasping of one body against another. His limp body gives way and folds at the hips, shifting the weight in an impossible direction. His shoulders slump and his arms hang low, weighed down by his hands, which do not make fists. His body, which could be taut and percussive, instead pours through your grasping arms like mercury or sand. You have no choice but to hug him in close to move him, and this closeness reminds you of holding your own child, or perhaps your brother, or someone else that you have held close at some moment entirely unlike this one. And can you imagine making your body so supple in the arms of the enemy? Can you imagine not raising your hands to ward off blows or protect your face? Can you imagine the fear of putting yourself in the hands of the one with the gun and the club, and hoping he will honour the precarious contract struck between you? Make your arms soft. Let your legs drag, and once you begin this process of emptying your form of action, you must hold fast to it. If you give way to the panic or pain, you will wake from your dream to find yourself already in the arms of the enemy. Here lies the paradox of your strategy: you are safe only so long as you are absent. Close your eyes in this moment if it makes it easier. Vacate your contours, for it’s your absence that makes your presence such an obstacle. When you are two-to-one, then the work becomes easier, for each man can take one arm, and hold the young woman more carefully for it. Her weight is divided between two and the intimacy is dispersed. You are more comfortable with this, and she is too, for certainly she doesn’t want to be held with both hands by one man. Offer them your arms and they will pull you up from both sides. Once they’ve got you off the ground, drop your centre of gravity and make your limbs heavy and loose. Your arms will burn where their hands are holding you and you will feel like your shoulders are being wrenched from their sockets. Your knees will scrape the pavement as they pull you away. But stay soft. Stretch your body out to achieve maximum contact against the ground beneath you. Let your sandals drag through the dirt and the mud behind you for everyone to see. Three men for the task is somehow more difficult than two. The symmetry is lost and the effort becomes disorganized. One man to each limb seems the best approach, but that leaves the last limb free. As you try to move him across the field, this loose leg bumps along the concrete, jerking you backwards each time it hits the ground. Your feet trip over themselves and over those working alongside you. You try to maintain your balance, but the whole configuration is teetering towards collapse. To be lifted by three men is to feel like an oversized object: a stuffed chair, or a rolled-up rug, or perhaps a dead body. But you are not dead, and so the places where they hold you at the wrists and ankles burn like fire. Your pants pull off your hips. Your T-shirt gets caught around your mouth and nose, and you can’t breathe. You don’t know which way you are moving or how long you will be carried in this way. But you can feel yourself teetering off-balance in their arms and that is a victory of sorts. Let your loose leg drag behind you as they heave you through the streets. Use every limp ounce of you to make their job more difficult. But don’t kick or buck, for that could be perceived as active resistance and the terms of the game would be changed. Four to one is clearly most effective, for one man can grab each limb. The body can then face the earth or face the sky. It is all the same to the lifters, who are more in control now as the weight is dispersed. The more men there are, the easier the task becomes. But there, in part, lies the problem: as the armed and uniformed figures accumulate around the limp civilian body, the optics get worse and worse. When there are four for the task, the weight is divided so evenly that sometimes you only need a single hand to grasp the ankle or the wrist. This leaves your other hand free, and then sometimes there is a club in that hand, or it hovers around the holstered gun by accident, and that too is bad optics. This is the trouble with the task. The more police there are around the protester, the worse it looks. And the papers will surely publish the pictures. If you find yourself surrounded by four cops, each one will take a limb and there will be no chance of escape. But escaping was never your intention. As they take you into their contradictory embrace, a crowd will gather and the cameras will rise up all around to see. Open your eyes wide now to show that you are not helpless, nor dead, nor dreaming either. You are mapping out a complicated set of oppositions for all to see: police and protester, state and dissident, submission and control. The image of your soft body caught up in their powerful network is a diagram. You are showing how power and precariousness are bound up together and that resistance can spring even from the dead centre of our domination._

Text written by Annie MacDonell, as preparatory notes for the performers who collaborated on the project _Holding Still // Holding Together_, a multi-channel video installation, on view at the Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto May 4 – August 21, 2016.

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Photography

Activism

History

Annie MacDonell shares the preparatory notes for her collaborative project Holding Still//Holding Together. By restaging gestures from historical protest photographs the performers attempt to highjack and rewrite the power relations they depict. 

Notes for Performers

Review

Cameron Hu lives in Chicago and plays in a band called Minor Life. His unfinished projects include a doctoral dissertation about a North Dakota oilfield, a translation of an Indonesian spy novel from the interwar period and a detective novella set at LACMA’s original Art + Technology program.

Visitors to _Factory of the Sun_ will feel obliged to make jokes about the 1982 sci-fi film _Tron_. Hito Steyerl’s most recent work plays in a dark room overlaid with a grid of fluorescent blue light, suggesting nothing so much as the lurid cyberspace where a young Jeff Bridges – having been sucked from the “real world” into the interior of an arcade game – battles for his freedom against a misanthropic machine intelligence. Reclining beach chairs scattered about the room only encourage reference to a movie about the descent of leisure into violence. 

The comparison is not, in the end, an unhappy one. _Tron_’s antagonist, a program gone rogue, enjoys dominion over a modest corner of primitive virtual reality; in _Factory of the Sun_ capital takes command of the deep structure of physics itself, presumably to make it work harder. The latest of Steyerl’s adventures through the post-1989 capitalist uncanny depicts a mutation in the global economy so advanced and so virulent that private enterprise can now further accelerate the speed of light. For Steyerl, the asymptotic line of technological advance curves toward the endless modulation of matter itself, as much if not more than it generates some increasingly hi-res, esca-pist alternative. This is a view from the (no longer “early”) 21st century, and the last decade of genomics, molecular engineering and nanotechnology would seem to confirm her position. 

In _Factory of the Sun_ it’s Deutsche Bank that has sped up sunlight. As the film opens, the bank’s PR man is offering a half-hearted defense of a recent killing – by drone, of course – of anti-acceleration demonstrators in Germany. Like any compelling image of dystopia, it mostly resembles our current, actually existing predicament: a neoliberalizing trajectory whose end game is a world where financial institutions are the most obvious apportioners of what used to be called “state violence.” Here, Factory of the Sun’s political tack is not the exposure of concealed malevolence in the world system (arguably the self-appointed task of the political arts of the 20th century) but an intensely focused presentation of what we already know to be the case. And in doing so, it adjusts a representational strategy at work in Steyerl’s earlier, more documentary videos like _In Free Fall_ (2010) and _Liquidity Inc._ (2014). Those oddly campy pieces isolated the signatures of the global present in the margins of the entertainment industry: Holly-wood airplane demolitions, amateur mixed martial arts. The trivia of the world system were served up as esoteric prefigurations of the future of the whole. But Factory of the Sun forgoes this indirect line of approach, instead forcing prevailing tendencies to-wards their latent extreme. One notes this way of working has more and more currency across media – consider, for example, the poet Keston Sutherland’s severe reformulation of poetry itself as “intensification pressed to the point of absolute impotence against the real limit of capitalist social reality.” 

Drone strikes having set the tone, what follows is a disjointed series of scenes that all belong, if obscurely, to a globetrotting heroes-and-villains scenario. _Factory of the Sun_ plays a bit like a big-budget thriller from which essential details have been removed. The Deutsche Bank spokesman reappears at intervals to insist that terrorists had been hiding behind the assassinated protesters. In a shooting range, a young woman fires bullets at digital busts of Stalin, and simultaneously recounts her family’s migration from the Soviet Union to Israel. Her brother, once famous on YouTube for a series of dance videos made in an Alberta basement, now gyrates gravely in close-fitting gold-lamé in a motion-capture studio. A narrator instructs us that this is “forced labour.” Is this the eponymous factory, a machine for the brute extraction of fungible energy from even human movement? Is it a video game in the making? The script gets harder to follow, and slips into a loop of self-reference. Gameplay options occasionally show up on-screen, layered above the action: “Press A for Total Capture.” Someone is running this show from outside it, although it certainly isn’t the viewer, empty handed in her reclining lounger. 

Later, the brother has fled to the roof of the Teufelsberg listening post outside Berlin, from which the US National Security Administration supposedly “intercepted all signals.” You have the dim sense that his liberation is hooked into some broader worldwide in-surgency. In the final minutes, a demonstrator “crush-ed in the 2018 Singapore protests” (improbably, this character is named “Big Boss Hard Facts”) has been resurrected as a clumsy digital avatar performing the very moves appropriated from the young Albertan. 

Despite the film’s winking deployment of a B-movie setup – and this is no small part of its surprising affability – _Factory_ works less through the subversion of a familiar narrative arc than a single motif re-iter¬ated from scene to scene. The tension between free¬dom and control is worked and reworked across the film in an exploration of a historical present in which nothing seems secure against subsumption by a sin¬gle greater power. Sunlight is made to travel faster than ever; house music supplies the rhythm for high-tech manufacturing; the revolution is a video game you may or may not already be playing. 

This will all sound rather dire. But Steyerl is less a moralist than a bemused observer of the contemporary situation, and she knows something about plea¬sure too. The lasting thrill of _Factory of the Sun_ is watching the dancer – an actual YouTube phenomenon with the handle takeSomeCrime – carry out his taut and geometric manoeuvres, a kind of manic blend of tecktonik and swing set to a techno beat. Perhaps this is appropriate: it’s in dance that control and freedom can become practically indistinguishable, that structure (groove) and agency (movement) effectively fuse, posing again the question of what can be subsumed and what can’t, whether all signals have indeed been intercepted, whether anything can escape “total capture.” 

_Factory of the Sun_ offers nothing like an answer. But on exit from the screening room, one does find a striking object lesson in the destiny of much insurgent culture. Across the street from MOCA, the line to enter the new Broad Museum – an insurance baron’s storehouse of the once radical, now collectible arts of the 20th century – stretched out to a vanishing point beneath the Los Angeles sun. 

Cameron Hu is a musician and anthropologist living in south Texas.

md_Installation view of Hito Steyerl Factory of the Sun 

sm_Installation view of Hito Steyerl Factory of the Sun 

thumbnail_Installation view of Hito Steyerl Factory of the Sun 

Installation view of Hito Steyerl Factory of the Sun 

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This article reviews Hito Steyerl’s exhibition Factory in the Sun at MOCA Grand Avenue in Los Angeles, presented from Feb. 21-Sept. 12, 2015.

Hito Steyerl: Factory of the Sun 

**Steffanie Ling** is a producer of criticism, pamphlets, stories, essays, exhibitions, reviews, bluntness, anecdotes, shout outs, wrestling storylines, proposals, applications, jokes, readings, minimal poems, poems, dinner, compliments and diatribes. Her books are _Nascar_ (Blank Cheque, 2016) and _Cuts of Thin Meat_ (Spare Room, 2015).

Ron Tran has been compared to a priest and a shop- keeper. For _Somewhat Mine: A Nanaimo Retrospective_, Tran plays the role of an artist who is having a retrospective. Retrospectives usually present a body of work in order to indicate a major period of development, a.k.a. the mid-career retrospective, or provide a complete survey of work produced over many decades. Since Tran just received the City of Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award for Visual Arts for emerging artists in 2015, we are either being introduced to a new modifier: _career-spanning-thus-far_, or _early career retrospective_, or better yet, this employment of the retrospective model suggests a creative misuse of the format.

In any case, the length of the gallery is bisected by a zig-zagging of silver, gridded construction fences where artworks are displayed amongst props from Keltie’s Photo, a local photo studio and prop house. While construction fences are typically eyesores that prohibit and alienate pedestrians, these aspects don’t apply here. By day, these fences are as ubiquitous as the sidewalk itself and we repress them as part of the milieu of a city’s visual noise. Here, this tedious-looking fence is employed sculpturally – or theatrically; as a prop among props. The fence continues to incite the kind of curiosity and rebellion that is inspired by the presentation of a barrier or authoritative object, however its effect as exhibition design is already the rebellion that we wish to launch against humdrum art installations. For instance, the exposure of the rear end of a picture frame or other unhidden sundries used for hanging Tran’s artworks was becoming, rather than unruly – in the same way an unsanctioned side- walk sale draws you in to excavate the wares.

Tran is already in the habit of recalibrating the designed purpose of objects, and social apparati are not excluded from his stripping of quotidian statuses and conventional use-values. This operation can be applied to works new and old in _Somewhat Mine_. Documented in this exhibition are some early ephemeral works, such as _Shelters_, where Tran retrieved umbrellas from the bus company’s lost-and-found and installed them at bus stops without shelters. Adjacent to this work was another early work altering the public sphere, _Lost Pets_. The gesture involved framing lost pet signage around the city. These subtle sculptural interventions hinge on a relational quality to meet their full poetic potential. On one hand, Tran could be seen as a sort of vigilante of good manners, providing shelter from the rain and reinforcing provisional signage belonging to worried pet owners but his actions underline how vulnerable innocuous public spaces are to being messed with, for artists to leave evidence of anonymous kindness, but also equal in their potential to be rendered austere by a contemptuous passer-by. Public space as an arena for complex intersections of intention is further exemplified by Tran’s _No Gay (Bolzano)_, a new work created in the context of Nanaimo, which consists of one of the city’s vernacular bus benches inserted with a kind of crude vacation destination banner for Bolzano, Italy. The advertising graphic features text reading bolzano in a warped shape reminiscent of PowerPoint headers paired with a portrait of the artist posing lackadaisically with a vacant expression on a public bench emblazoned in black spray paint with no gay! His presence on the bench is instantly complicated by his proximity to the homophobic statement.

This bus bench is positioned to view _Head Red Toes and Green (unintentional moments)_, a looping slideshow with Tran in various costumes. These portraits taken by friends using their cellphones and assembled here as a performative lookbook of the artist in his social habitat portray moments where curtains and house- hold kitsch become provisional couture. With our backs to the unsavory sentiments expressed in _No Gay (Bolzano)_, we try to take in Tran’s outfits, admire the craft and drapery borne of spontaneity, but the images change too quickly to scrutinize. As shyness, it’s unconvincing, but this work gives quick glimpses into Tran’s aesthetic sensibility, for fun, rather than art per se. In their underprivileged presentation, this sensibility for pattern, texture, and arrangement resonates as studies that might inform moments from projects reprised in the exhibition; projects such as _And You Can Do Anything With Them Under Such Circumstances_ (2008), a series of whimsical still-lives with furniture and other consumer objects made at portrait photography outlets like Photo Express and Sears, and _Kitchen Garden at Home/Store_ (2014), an experimental art and retail project in Chinatown Vancouver that combined sculpture as merchandise.

Retrospectives take place as tools to measure and canonize a period of artistic production for the history books, but the scope of time that gets privileged rarely includes the artist’s undergraduate school work. The presence of Tran’s grad project, _The Peckers_ (2007), a lighthearted twist on Paul Kos’ _Sound of Ice Melting_ (1970) whereby Tran filmed and recorded a flock of pigeons feeding upon a set of amplified instruments doused with bird food, begs the question of whether the notion of being in retrospect is taken to heart as a verb (to look back in hindsight and reflect) rather than a noun (an institutional device).

During the artist’s time in Nanaimo, some completed projects were re-investigated and managed to grow in their scope of collaboration – for example, 2011’s _It Knows Not What It Is_ now includes a neighbouring youth art program’s oil pastel and crayon rendition of the iconic wooden stick. Tran’s inherently polyvocal approach warrants extensive attribution to his collaborators and an exhibition map that borders on movie credits. The names are not necessarily those of a collector, but Tran’s incorporation of props and a “cast” of sorts hearkens to the artist as perhaps more of a director, a facilitator of novel experiences, than one who simply plays roles. Whether this is a retrospective _performed_, or a curatorial nudge at the pomposity of the format, Somewhat Mine sets a precedent for the continued subversion of it when “another” retrospective of Tran’s work comes around again

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This article reviews Ron Trans exhibition Somewhat Mine: A Nanaimo Retrospective at the Nanaimo Gallery in Nanaimo BC, presented from March 11- May 14, 2016.

Ron Tran: Somewhat Mine: A Nanaimo Retrospective

**Xenia Benivolski** is a writer and curator currently based in Toronto.

The sun’s light undergoes a profound change when it reflects off the moon’s cool surface to reach our planet. Mixed with ambient starlight and the light reflected by the Earth itself, its speed is measured in years. Over the course of each day, the moon surveys our entire Earth, both past and future bouncing off its surface. In countless books and movies, characters wax poetic about looking at the same moon at the same time, as if the celestial body is a mirror where time is of no particular consequence, a fictional portal to another. The sentimental phrase, “When I am looking at the moon, I imagine you looking at the same moon and somehow we are together,” is simultaneously proclaimed by a chorus of many through a long history of fictions, displaced from the real flow of time. It was thus a happy coincidence to find Rodrigo Hernández’ 2014 publication, \_What is the moon?\_[^1] resting on the counter at the entrance to his solo project exhibition curated by Chris Sharp, an American curator who relocated in 2012 from Paris to Mexico City, where he co-directs the small but influential gallery Lulu.

Hernández’s commitment to ambiguity is guided by a sense of responsibility to show his subject from all sides. In his work, he provides a lyrical reading of history as a series of non-linear aesthetic and ideological junctures of time and space, seeking to elaborate on a set of dichotomous assumptions that are inherent to his historical subject. Painted paper sculptures appear to be intricately etched metal plates, flattened by a hammer and covered in silver paint; however, the etched marks turn out to be fingerprints. Resting against the brightly coloured walls, the glimmering pieces depict vague scenes from pre-colonial Mexico. The images directly reference the anthropological illustrations of indigenous, pre-Columbian life that have become the celebrated domain of Mexico City-born artist Miguel Covarrubias (1904-1957).[^2] In the framework of these small, silvery sculptures, figurative elements from Covarrubias’ book, _Indian Art of Mexico and Centroamerica_ (1957), have been conflated with formal aesthetic elements of Italian Futurism, in particular the polemical 1915 text by Italian Futurist poet Marinetti _War, the World’s Only Hygiene_ \[3\] from which the artist borrowed the title of this exhibition: _Every forest madly in love with the moon has a highway crossing it from one side to the other_.

Rejecting the virtues of the Italian Renaissance, Marinetti announces the arrival of aesthetic liberty, a construct utilized in Hernández’s retrofuturistic reconstruction of the historical visual element “Let the tiresome memory of Roman greatness be cancelled by an Italian greatness a hundred times greater… \[sic\] there is nothing for us to admire today but the dreadful symphonies of the shrapnels and the mad sculptures that our inspired artillery molds among the masses of the enemy.” According to Hernández, Covarrubias similarly quotes a progressive visual ideology that promotes “simplicity and sensual realism in the shapes: vigorous and original concepts” in opposition to the “formalized and rigorous art from the highlands, and the baroque, unbounded art of the lowlands of the classic period, both impregnated with symbolism and ceremonial functionalism.”[^4] This sets up an oppositional premise between ontologies of the tenses, across continents. But the opposite of the moon is neither the sun, nor the Earth. A true dichotomy does not necessarily dictate a common ground. This exhibition conflates radical scenarios perched on the edge of a collective consciousness, only to collapse back into fiction. If both past and future have a historical potential, then the contemporary must lie at their intersection, one that clearly no longer needs to take place in the present tense. A tropic of contemporaneity turns out to be where such radicality is asserted through fictions. Both risking and resisting a nostalgia for an ideological now, the work addresses the contemporary historical subject in a nuanced way, propelling the _geodesic spacetime dynamic_ into an aesthetic that hosts a life of its own.

This combination is arresting in its flattening of not only the physical sculptural form but also of perspective and history itself. Citing a bird’s-eye view of pre-hispanic Mexican depictions of Indigenous living, seen through the lens of divisionist cubist perspectives that were prominent in post-World War I Europe, the aesthetic is obtained through the mechanization of production and the influence of photography. The meeting of these visual forms sets up a strange epistemological ground, breeding a serendipitous dynamic of human history through time: a history repeating variations on the manifestation of radical language and symbolism. Within this landscape, Hernández is a witness to a vastly different array of characters all singing the same song.

[^1]: “What is the moon?” is an adolescent and romantic question according to writer and curator Arnisa Zeqo, and the impetus for this publication: an appendix to an exhibition by the same name, held at the Bonnefantenmuseum  
in Maastricht. The four-page foldout was produced by Jon Frenken and edited by Hernández at the Charles Nypels Lab of the Jan Van Eyck Academie of Maastricht, Netherlands, 2014–2015, supported by the JVE Academie and the Laurenz-Haus Stiftung Basel.
[^2]: José Miguel Covarrubias, _Indian Art of Mexico & Central America_, New York: (Knopf, 1957) Mexico.
[^3]: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Guerra sola igiene del mondo (War, the World’s Only Hygiene) (1915), in Opere di F.T. Marinetti, vol. 2: Teoria e invenzione futurista, ed. Luciano De Maria (Mondadori, Milan, 1968).
[^4]: Oliver Martínez- Kandt, “Go, Gentle Scorpio,” February 2015, Terremoto, Mexico City.

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This article reviews Rodrigo Hernández’s exhibition every forest madly in love with the moon has a highway crossing it from one side to the other presented at Kurimanzutto in Mexico City from Feb. 6 – March 17, 2016.

Rodrigo Hernández: every forest madly in love with the moon has a highway crossing it from one side to the other

One of the best views of Aleksandra Domanović’s show _Mother of This Domain_, while it was featured at Plug In ICA, in Winnipeg, wasn’t from the inside of the gallery. On pitch-black winter afternoons, accidental passersby could experience the piece _Things to Come_ (2014) curiously spilling out of big glass windows on the east side of the exhibition space. From the sidewalk, a set of futuristic images printed onto thin sheets of polyester foil seemed ghostly, and appeared to be violating the familiar physicality of space. Inside, the installation gained some materiality. Hung from the ceiling, about 40 inches apart, soft transparent panels completely filled the room, and allowed just enough space for visitors to walk in between them, and get disoriented by the strange environment. Despite being presented in familiar formats – namely, as installations, sculptures, and video – all five works featured in Domanović’s show possess an uncanny digital dimension, allowing for unexpected connections between facts, probabilities and improbabilities, and generating a rich hypertextual interplay of perspectives.

Named after a 1936 sci-fi film written by H.G. Wells, _Things To Come_ features carefully selected allusions to significant portrayals of women and technology in popular science fiction. One such allusion reproduces an image of the MedPod – a device for automated, generalized surgical procedures that the patient himself operates – from Ridley Scott’s 2012 _Prometheus_. And I do mean _himself_, for when the female protagonist tries to perform a life-saving caesarean on herself, the interface informs her that the machine has been programmed for male bodies only. In Domanović’s work, this notorious enmity between human and machine in sci-fi is rewired back to socio-cultural reality, and exposed largely as a gender tension. This makes sense, considering that not only are most sci-fi films directed by men but most devices are also indeed programmed by men. This tension reaches a culmination in a superimposed detail from the MedPod image, which places a woman quite bluntly in the role of a technological extension, and comes, alarmingly, from a real-life historical document. Sticking out of a slot in the MedPod, as if from a giant typewriter, a copy of a 1938 rejection letter, typed on letterhead adorned with Snow White imagery, confronts the viewer. This letter from Walt Disney Productions advises an aspiring animator, Miss Mary V. Ford, that “women do not do any of the creative work in connection with preparing the cartoons for the screen as that work is performed entirely by young men.” Apparently, the only acceptable work for women consists of tracing the lines and colouring in, “according to directions.” This precious information-fossil resonatingly conveys the often-neglected aspects of modern knowledge production. Throughout modern history, and still today, women in the technological realm are widely abased to positions of automatic labour, commonly associated with robots. In fact, the word “robot” derives from the Slavic “rob,” meaning slave, and “robota,” meaning forced labour. At this point, the MedPod as typewriter – a technology that introduced women as extensions into the male-only business environment – sends a far-reaching intertextual message.

Aleksandra Domanović was born in the former Yugoslavia, the federation of countries best known for its largely popular form of communism, and brutal wars following the decline of the political system in the ’90s. I was born in Yugoslavia myself, and can confirm that this largely androcentric metanarrative is pretty much all that ended up in history textbooks. In the documentary video _From yu to me_ (2013–2014), Domanović again digs up unexplored archival rarities, this time in connection with the little known establishment of Yugoslavia’s first Internet domain: .yu. Slovenia – the country where the domain was registered – exited the communist party just a few months later, and claimed state independence, precipitating the federation’s breakup. The mother of this domain, honoured in the exhibition title, is Borka Jerman Blažič, who along with another female computer scientist, Mirjana Tasić, was one of the administrators of the domain. Blažič later explained that the domain had to be set up virtually, guerrilla-style, as she was “fighting a war” with the political establishment. Yugoslavian officials were strongly in favour of setting the Internet server either in Belgrade, the federation’s political centre, or in its geographic center, Sarajevo. After the breakup of Yugoslavia, the .yu domain lived a turbulent and politically charged life all the way until 2010, when it became the most heavily used top-level domain ever to be deleted. Contrary to common belief, Domanović shows again and again how the web was never a medium detached from systemic corporate and political realms. Furthermore, within such a mass of information created interactively, there are no trivial items. Highly personalized, culturally and contextually specific information constantly resists the standardizing process of so-called globalization.

This theme is restated in Domanović’s _The Future Was at Her Fingertips_ (2013–ongoing), a simple document in the style of museum captions that presents a personalized timeline of locally consequential events and underrepresented turning points in the history of technology. For instance: “1843: Ada Lovelace writes what is considered to be the first computer program,” and “1963: Rajko Tomović develops one of the earliest artificial limbs with a sense of touch known as the ‘Belgrade Hand’.” Domanović often recontextualizes disregarded information with an aim to revive and preserve._Untitled_ (30.111.2010), is a monument to the terminated .yu domain. The relics of the domain’s online life are printed on the sides of tall stacks of office paper, forming embellished cuboidal columns. Appropriately, the piece is available in a downloadable digital file, so that anyone with an ordinary office printer, and a willingness to tinker with the settings, can create their own copies.

During an event in which she was invited to respond to Domanović’s exhibition, artist and academic T.L. Cowan – or rather, her performative alter-ego, Mrs. Trixie Cane – ironically quipped about the _Untitled (30.III.2010)_ that women have finally learned how to use a printer. On a deeper level, however, she was right. By resetting the printer, Domanović manages to use its program in a highly improbable way, subverting the most expected, automatic outcomes embedded in the machine. I can’t think of a better way to resist the increasing tendency towards the standardization and automation of human creativity and knowledge production.

_Mother of This Domain_ was also exhibited at Oakville Galleries at Centennial Square, Oakville March 20 – May 29, 2016

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This article reviews Aleksandra Domanovic’s exhibition Mother of this Domain at Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art in Winnipeg, presented from Sept. 26, 2015- Jan.3, 2016.

Aleksandra Domanović: Mother of This Domain

Joel Herman is an artist based in Toronto

Near the door of Shane Krepakevich’s exhibition _Lightweight_ at Zalucky Contemporary hangs a very slight sculptural gesture. On the ceiling of the gallery is installed a small brass ball from which a long black cord extends downwards. At the end of the cord, nearly touching the floor, is a matching brass ball. The weight of the second ball holds the cord vertical. The set-up calls to mind a plumb line, an instrument used in building to ensure that constructions are vertical. The weight of the plumb bob, or plummet, used in a plumb line will slowly sway back and forth on its cord until it stops, indicating the centre of gravity, or a true vertical reference. A plumb line is multi-directional: it indicates the vertical axis by which buildings are constructed upwards, but similar tools were also used to measure the depths of the ocean. An instrument such as this marks a line that theoretically stretches to the earth’s centre of gravity (the nadir) and upwards infinitely into space (the zenith). It can be said, then, that one of the brass balls in Krepakevich’s construction, as far as Cartesian space is concerned, is directly above – or below – the other. The cord marks a vector aligned with gravity.

Slight as this seems, if we are to take it as an introductory mark, a key by which we can approach other works in the show, it establishes a vocabulary, both materially and theoretically, through which we can understand Krepakevich’s other installations in the gallery space. If what we are seeing is a system, such as a grammar, the materials and effect of gravity upon them in this first construction, establish a set of terms that are then elaborated upon in other works.

_Through path, weight, variance in weight, rhythm, and proportion, lines suggest distance, area, a pause, a tangle, a length of time. A line might move straight from one point to another, wander as much as possible within the course of its path, or cross over itself within a tightly bound space._

_The qualities of a line may be static, or they may vary. Whatever the extent of variation, the ends of a line bear the prospect of its form, suggesting further extension and elaboration._

The above lines were taken from a text written by Krepakevich titled _Between Two Things_. The text calls to mind the opening of Paul Klee’s _Pedagogical Sketchbook_ (1925), where Klee describes “\[a\]n active line on a walk, moving freely, without goal. A walk for a walk’s sake. The mobility agent, is a point, shifting its position forward.” The artistic temperament from the time of Klee’s words is very much in evidence in Krepakevich’s exhibition, as the works deploy a vocabulary reminiscent of the Russian avant-garde of the 1920s. The compositions, as well as the collapsing of art and design (Krepakevich is also a designer who produces lighting fixtures and furniture), recall the efforts of Suprematism and Constructivism.

On the back wall of the gallery is installed another work, and here we see the same vocabulary of materials: brass and black cord. This time, however, the cord is suspended on a horizontal axis. A small brass fixture on the left protrudes slightly from the wall, and following the cord the eye stops at another brass fixture – this one larger and affixed to the wall at an oblique angle – where the cord stops. Hung as if on a clothesline is a single photograph, and the weight of this photograph pulls the cord into a gentle downward arch. In another installation, the cord emerges from two points on a bulkhead near the gallery’s ceiling, and suspends a brass tube horizontally. Over it hangs a piece of foil, as well as two brass hooks holding photographs. Seen one way, the installations act like display structures, or elaborate framing devices, for the photographic images. Krepakevich has also painted the walls where these works are installed, bracketing them and further suggesting a sort of mise-en-scène.

Cinema also populates Krepakevich’s installations in _Lightweight_. The photographs that inhabit these installations are stills from films such as _In the Mood for Love, The Hustler_ and _The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant_. All show interior spaces. Krepakevich introduces a remove from these images by photographing them off a computer screen in his studio, allowing the reflections of overhead lights to obscure parts of the images. This functions as a means of reinforcing the surface of the image, but also introduces one interior over another: the artist’s studio over that of the filmic representation.

The distinctions between art and design seem to be fluid in Krepakevich’s exhibition. This is not, however, an art exhibition about design. Instead, we see permeability between the two disciplines, but what one is saying to the other isn’t clear. What does it mean for brass and black cord to be used in a lamp, and for those same materials to be used in a (non-functional) art object, made by the same individual? Is what we are seeing a conflation of art and design of the order endorsed in the 1920s? As an art historical reference point, we visually understand the types of abstract geometries of this period. What is perhaps less legible is the political and social milieu from which these geometries arose – a time of war, turmoil and revolution. But of course today we have our own wars, and our own turmoil. How do these echoes from the 1920s reflect our present circumstances? If these echoes are part of a modernity that T.J. Clark describes as “a social order which has turned from the worship of ancestors and past authorities to the pursuit of a projected future,” perhaps they are a means of bypassing present circumstances altogether. If the art of the past looked to the future, it would seem that the art of the present is increasingly concerned with looking to the past. For Krepakevich this seems to be a matter of engaging with historical formal experiments. Gravity, weight, line, surface, angles. His works are not effusive statements, but delicate constructions that demand close scrutiny.

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This article reviews Shane Krepakevich’s exhibition Lightweight at Zalucky Contemporary in Toronto, presented from Feb.20 – March 19, 2016.

Shane Krepakevich: Lightweight

Jaclyn Meloche is the Interim Curator of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Windsor, in Windsor, ON.

The exhibition _Carol Sawyer: The Natalie Brettschneider Archive_, curated by Heather Anderson at Carleton University Art Gallery both exemplifies a feminist intervention into a permanent art collection as well as an intervention into the ways in which women artists are represented – or rather, not represented – in Western art history. But beyond complicating the structure of the male-dominated canon, Canadian artist Carol Sawyer’s practice challenges the relationship between documentation, representation and reality by blurring the boundaries between portraiture, self-portraiture and performance.

Rooted in semiotic discourse, the concept of representation continues to beg the question of reality – particularly within photography and photographic art criticism. Although mimetic resemblances of a time, place or person, photographs function as a frame constructed and presented by the individual behind the camera. Notorious for his writings about the ontology of the photographic image, French theorist and critic Roland Barthes negotiates the photograph through a post structural and semiotic lens in order to ask what is a photographic image, and does it signify reality? In his own words, “I wasn’t sure that Photography existed, that it had a ‘genius’ of its own.”[^1]

Embedded within Barthes’ writing are three key notions that, in relation to Sawyer’s work, help to explain how the artist’s photographic and moving images contemplate reality: _representation, reproduction and repetition_. Moreover, with reference to the word “archive,” these three terms propose to challenge the very nature of fact vis-à-vis fiction within lens culture.

In the spirit of a feminist recovery project and research initiative, Sawyer’s work recalls the life and work of Natalie Brettschneider – a fictional artist whose contributions to feminist art history have remained overlooked. Throughout the exhibition, viewers are presented with archival documents, texts and various images that recall a life, a time and a place belonging to the late Brettschneider. In keeping with the traditions of a retrospective, Sawyer’s curatorial intervention questions both the omission of a woman artist from Canadian art history as well as the notion of biography. More specifically, does one’s life become intelligible, or rather real, through photography?

At the heart of his text _Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography_, Barthes argues that photography is not real, but rather the impetus for what he terms _the punctum_ – the moment or revelation of affect embodied within an image – through his _reflections_ on a photograph of his late mother found following her passing. Although the image is not her per se, it does recall her being, therefore bringing her back to life. Drawing from a Proustian analogy, Barthes explains that “I had no hope of ‘finding’ her, I expected nothing from these photographs of a being before which one recalls less of that being than by merely thinking of him or her.”[^2] Although a mechanical reproduction of his mother’s body, the photograph instills in him an overwhelming nostalgia that brings her back to life. Through their ability to reproduce an emotion and a time, Barthes suggests that photographs resurrect their subjects in print, forcing the viewer to reconsider what is real, and what is not real, in an image. In this example, the photograph of his mother translates into a recognizable representation of her through the ways in which it speaks to him, both metaphorically and emotionally.

The entangled relationship between photography, representation and reality, which Sawyer explores through the make-believe portraits of Brettschneider, exemplifies how a photograph, or moving image, can challenge notions of fact and fiction. For example, in _Natalie Brettschneider performs ‘Profile Mask’ (c. 1952)_ and _Natalie Brettschneider: Rapunzel and Medusa sit down to chat about war’ (c. 1947)_, the artist complicates the nature of self-portraiture and documentation through her use of the word _perform_ – a term that performance studies scholar Richard Schechner suggests means _to be_; that meaning is born from an ensemble of experiences that when brought together create consciousness.[^3]

With reference to the traditions of women’s self- portraiture in the works of Claude Cahun and Cindy Sherman, Sawyer too is drawing from methods of the latter to suggest an identity; that when captured within a frame, the likeness of a body perpetuates the notion that said body is real; that said body embodies a life; and that said body holds a place in history. Moreover, in keeping with her predecessors, Sawyer is appropriating her own body as an instrument for representation. The image presented to the viewer, while biologically hers, is not hers in a Butlerian sense. Her body instead becomes the result of performativity, adding another layer to the ways in which an identity is understood in material culture.

Arguably the strongest example of a self-portrait in the exhibition is _The Rehearsal (1948)_, a credited collaboration between Natalie Brettschneider and Maja von Derenstahl. In the projected black and white film, Sawyer performs Brettschneider, the lead character in the film. However, through her operatic voice, Sawyer loudly reveals herself as an imposter – both in the film and in the entirety of the exhibition. Likened to a performative confession, the film offers gallery viewers both a haunting soundscape of past representations of women in film and provides insight into the ways in which images produce, and reproduce moments of being in contemporary art.

This exhibition begs us to consider the question: does the use of the lens perpetuate the illusion that an identity is fixed? Moreover, does the lens inform the ways in which biography becomes the result of narrative – whether real or fictitious? In the form of an archival retrospective of Natalie Brettschneider’s life and contributions to Canadian art history, Carol Sawyer provokes the viewer to constantly question what is real in the exhibition, and what is not. Coupled with objects and textual documents that suggest historical proof of a life lived, the selection of photographs and video call into question the nature of reality by insinuating that reality is neither tangible, nor fixed in its singularity – just like Brettschneider’s life, which is not tangible, nor real.

[^1]: Roland Barthes, _Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography_. (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1980; New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 3.
[^2]: Ibid., 63.
[^3]: Richard Schechner, _Performance Theory_. (London and New York: Routledge, 1988).

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Narrative

Carol Sawyer: The Natalie Brettschneider Archive

Craig Francis Power is an artist and writer from St. John’s.

_Enter the fog_, co-curated by Josée Drouin-Brisebois and Mireille Eagan, brings together the work of four internationally celebrated artists – Maya Beaudry, Tiziana La Melia and collaborative duo Tamara Henderson and Julia Feyrer – all of whom foreground process over final product and invest heavily in a codified and extremely personal visual language that invites active viewer participation, as opposed to passive reception of the material and ideas manifested therein. At least, this is what we’re told the exhibition’s about. In truth, the works operate in much the same fashion as most exhibitions do – objects are offered up for us to con- sider, or not, as the case may be.

In an email conversation with Eagan, she talked about the exhibition as follows:

> For the visitor in particular, the show was an invitation – to understand that it is perfectly fine to draw like a child, to lie on the floor with a security guard in the room, to embrace the strange and uncomfortable, to make a mess and sit with it for a while. We wanted to promote a subjective experience, so we chose to keep the curatorial voice to a minimum and let the artists’ words act as clues in coded spaces. We asked the visitor to put aside expectations surrounding art – a positioning that may or may not have happened. This was the risk. Overall, it was a risk, but that was why it was important.

One cannot overstate the importance of explanatory wall text for the exhibition, given that the works presented are so very codified that your average viewer – maybe one of the parents here for the “Big Fun For Little People” weekly kids program, which includes finger-painting, drawing, singing and puppet- making (talk about active participation!) – would be hard-pressed to decipher the very good intentions of the artists whose work is on display. Enter the fog, indeed.

Maya Beaudry “creates physical and imagined mind spaces in which we are invited to take refuge or meditate and/or escape our reality and explore our thoughts.”[^1] Her _Prototype for Crisis Room (with Mind Home Mock-Up and Three Vision Boards)_ presents a corner of the gallery space marked off with shiny aluminum tape, three images on canvas of home interiors that look borrowed from an interior design magazine and a body pillow made in the shape of a stylized woman who seems to be jogging. This work “acts as a form of sanctuary where one can be mindful and exist in the present moment, free from distractions.” Beaudry’s ongoing _Jogging the Mindscape_ project, represented in the exhibition with her _Padded Lamp (with body pillow for Jogging the Mindscape)_ “reminds us that the goal of mindscape jogging, where we literally take our thoughts for a run, is to embrace and value excess energy by channelling it into a form of daily mental exercise.” Believe me, exhausted as I was from the daily grind of work and home life, if there’s one thing I wanted to embrace it was that body pillow, but the security guard in the gallery told me that I wasn’t allowed to touch the work. I’d have to sleep at home. 

Tiziana La Melia’s work “weaves together her paintings, sculptures and writings in layered installations that delve into personal narratives.” The works range from La Melia’s writing printed onto large-scale textile works, to spontaneous gesture drawings on sheets torn from the Yellow Pages, to a giant sculptural reproduction of Janis Joplin’s iconic sunglasses. La Melia is a poet as well as a visual artist and her installation _The Eyelash and the Monochrome_ addresses the act of writing itself. Confronted by the metronomic taunt of the blinking cursor in her Word program during a bout of writer’s block (the eyelash) and the unyielding white field of the page before her (the monochrome), La Melia created a sprawling installation where “each work is a piece of a greater puzzle, and together they form a series of symbols that have multiple meanings.” Writer’s block – now that’s some- thing I can relate to. It’s a symptom of an even greater anxiety, one no doubt La Melia has herself experienced: the suspicion that the creative life to which you’ve dedicated your energies is utterly meaningless. As a writer myself, I’m serious when I say there have been nights in bed where I was trying to sleep but all I could see behind my closed eyes was that intimidating blank page. For La Melia, the works in the installation “articulate an unusual and ambiguous language or code that we are invited to decipher and contribute to with our own interpretations.” But the question for the viewer remains: _Does the effort required to decipher this work pay off in terms of a greater, more revelatory meaning? Or is the unknowable quality of such personal explorations the whole point?_ I found myself remember- ing all those clichéd stories of artistic genius I’d learn- ed about in art school – Van Gogh cracking up in a solitary obsession, Baudelaire mad from syphilis, Pollock drinking himself to death, et cetera – a bunch of oracles totally losing their minds due to their deeply personal artistic visions. Is La Melia’s work an ironic critique of this well-worn history? Or does she embrace it? There is no answer – just ambiguity.

“Dreams, altered states and unconscious meanderings” proliferate the collaborative practice of Julia Feyrer and Tamara Henderson. Consisting of sculpture, drawing and painting, their installation, conceived specifically for this exhibition, takes its inspiration from the shape-shifting figure of the Old Hag, a nightmarish entity known outside of Newfoundland as sleep paralysis. Victims vividly hallucinate a witch-like being or other supernatural force present in the room, or sometimes sitting directly on their chests, which renders them immobile and suffocating. Feyrer and Henderson’s _Old Hag_, displayed in a room separate from the rest of the works in the exhibition and constructed using material scavenged from all over the Avalon Peninsula, is a towering figurative sculpture in a darkened room. It’s a collection of garbage– a busted basketball, kitschy miniature plastic trees, a lightning globe as her lone, bright eye – but the sculpture is the terrifying embodiment of our collective nightmares, junk and detritus reformed into a dark presence that dominates the room.

High up on one of the walls, two eyes constructed from neon lights open and close repeatedly, suggesting the doorway between dream and “reality” is in a constant state of flux. Four clocks, set at different times, covered in a melted, wax-like substance reminiscent of ectoplasm, hang underneath, while blown- glass bottles in the shape of the Old Hag, and filled with potions of some kind, rest on plinths nearby.

With its emphasis on open-endedness, play, the unconscious, personal narrative and process over product, _enter the fog_ presents a challenging exhibition of contemporary work. As the title of the exhibition suggests, viewers will be invited to lose themselves in the non-linear nature of the installation, relying not on a logical or rational interpretation, but rather an immersive experience where intuition and free association reign supreme.

[^1]: All non-italicized quotes come from the accompanying wall text for the exhibition.

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This article reviews enter the fog, an exhibition of the work of four artists; Maya Beaudry, Tiziana Le Melia, Tamara Henderson and Julia Feyer. enter the fog was presented at The Rooms in St. John’s from Feb. 6 – April 24, 2016.

enter the fog

Kenneth Hayes is an architectural historian and a critic of contemporary art.

In the early 1970s, I lived in the Dominican Republic for a year while my father worked on the startup of a ferronickel plant in Bonao. The plant’s smelter was fuelled by Venezuelan oil, shipped in by tanker from ports less than a thousand kilometres south across the Caribbean Sea. This tidy arrangement fell apart on October 16, 1973, when opec raised the price of oil by 70%, which instantly made it uneconomical to process the energy-hungry ore. The newly established smelter and the mining operations – in fact, the entire town site, with its large white-and-pastel-painted courtyard houses, leisure centre and model school – were rendered obsolete virtually overnight; expatriate workers quickly returned to their homes around the world; newly built buildings were shuttered and left to moulder, and the hopes of local people to hold stable, lucrative jobs were dashed. Ana Alenso would undoubtedly recognize this profoundly destructive and wasteful event as a distant reflection of the catastrophes repeatedly rained upon her home country of Venezuela by its resource extraction economy. Her recent work is dedicated to understand- ing and exposing the paradoxical cultural condition of growing poverty in the nation with the world’s largest proven reserves of oil.

In a single-room gallery, opening directly from the sidewalk, the artist installed a system of scaffolding both functional (it offered the means to climb to a second level within the relatively tall space and thereby gain novel perspectives on the sculptural assemblage) and symbolic (inasmuch as it signified a chaotic, perpetually unfinished project). From the gallery’s entrance, ramps rose to a low platform that supported an empty, green oil barrel held at an angle of about 15 degrees off the vertical by a system of ropes and pulleys. Although raised above the floor, the barrel appeared something like the nadir of a spatial vortex, as if the last drops were being extracted from an all-but-drained source. The barrel functioned simultaneously as a unit of wealth, a signifier of resources and as a sculptural volume. The artist’s statement reveals that the installation’s overriding form alludes to the infamous El Helicoide building in Caracas, a huge, multi-tiered construction built around a natural mound known as Roca Tarpeya. Inaugurated in the late 1950s as a drive-in shopping mall, the exorbitant, ziggurat-like project was left unfinished due to political indecision and inertia, and, since its abandonment, it has been put to various nefarious uses, from squatter settlement to headquarters of the repressive Bolivarian Intelligence Service. While the form of the scaffolding may reference the spiral Helicoide, the barrel makes it possible to recognize the installation’s spatial schema as resembling a particular exemplar of modern sculpture, Umberto Boccioni’s Futurist _Development of a Bottle in Space_ (1913).

The artist festooned the crude scaffold spiral with several discrete interventions seemingly designed to exhaust the means by which a sculpture installation may be supplemented: video, in the form of a small monitor that rewards the viewer for climbing to the second level; audio, in a recording of the trading patter at a commodities exchange, emanating from the barrel; movement, in a lump of asphalt displayed on a rotating platform near the entrance; by reflection, in a mirror that provided the base of a found-object assembly of hand tools that resembles the iconic teeter-totter structure of a pumpjack; and through drawing, left on the plastic-clad walls after a public discussion. Each of these inclusions merits more analysis than is possible here, but it is the video that best exemplifies the artist’s discursive, even didactic, intentions. Composed of found footage and running for just 3 minutes and 15 seconds, it collages together phantasmagorical scenes of a television game show in which paper currency is blown into a transparent chamber containing a contestant, archival footage of an environmental disaster at an oil pumping station, and a plaza full of people looting a shipment of flat-screen televisions, seemingly only in order to wantonly smash them on the ground. These images are bluntly overlaid with graphs depicting oil consumption levels and prices. The artist has sampled the broad array of social and cultural ills that accompany the unearned wealth that flows from the ground, and in doing so, demonstrates the perpetually disrupted, unfinished modernity of a nation grown both corrupt and dependant on a volatile international commodities market.

In effect, Alenso has invented a powerful sculptural idiom, one that might be described as a disenchanted version of the _Tropicália_ that has been referenced or represented in this space on other occasions. She makes work deliberately shorn of the ’60s movement’s exuberance and drained of its famed vibrant colour. Her sculpture reduces the informal vigour of naive art to a brutal aggression that nevertheless seems to gain in spatial interest. In doing so, she recalls the unlikely amalgam of Surrealism and Bauhaus formal- ism that strongly influenced post-war art throughout South America, but renders it with an acute awareness of contemporary macro-economic contradictions that verge on theatre of the absurd, and pursues a staggeringly direct material economy that shows up the high modern love of industry as just so much chrome fetishism. It is not by accident that this exhibition took place in Berlin, nor that the artist studied at the Bauhaus. Indeed, the industrial lamps incorporated into the installation cast harsh rays of light on and through the diaphanous scaffolding and various other perforated materials, producing shadows that vividly recall the \_Light-Space Modulator \_ that László Moholy-Nagy built at the Bauhaus between 1922 and 1930.

_Tropical Curse_ presents a deep cultural analysis of the precarity, social disorder, environmental damage and general profligacy that natural bounty seems to bring in its wake, especially for countries of the Global South. Alenso takes a gimlet-eyed look back on the Venezuelan experience of modernity and at the same time peers forward to the all-too-foreseeable consequences of her nation’s resource dependency. The artist has rendered a strange, tropical depression in a small room far removed from her home; she clearly expects it will develop into a hurricane.

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This article review’s Ana Alenso’s exhibition Tropical Curse at Kinderhook & Caracas in Berlin, presented from Nov. 7 – Dec.5, 2015.

Ana Alenso: Tropical Curse

Tess Edmonson is a writer and editor based in Toronto. She is the recipient of a 2019 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.

Much has been made of the negligence afforded to early 20th-century Swiss writer Robert Walser’s contribution to modernist literature, both during his lifetime and in its legacy. While authoring seven novels – _Jakob von Gunten_ (1909) most famous among them – as well as thousands of short stories, Walser supported himself in a variety of itinerant, low-paying occupations: bank clerk, copyist, butler. At 50, he checked into the Waldau Sanatorium, where he would remain the rest of his life.

_Looking at Pictures_, New Directions’ eighth book of Walser’s work, is among a number of 21st-century correctives in English translation. The collection consists of short pieces of prose – stories, scripts and critical writing – about art and its makers. Some of these were originally published in German-language journals and newspapers in the ’20s and ’30s, while others survive only in microscript form: an idiosyncratic shorthand Walser executed in pathologically small print on scraps and fragments of paper, an archive of which was thought to be inscrutable for decades after his death.

Among those microscripts reproduced here is “Diaz’s Forest,” written in 1924\. Describing an 1875 canvas by Narcisse Diaz de la Peña, the text exemplifies Walser’s interest in ekphrasis over its conventions. As in a number of the texts in _Looking at Pictures_, he begins by setting the painting’s subjects into narrative, activating them with a contextual fiction. In the forest, Walser writes, are “a little motherkin and her child”; the mother reprimands her child for its dependence. “I swear to you,” she tells it, “as truthfully as I am standing here with you in this forest painted by Diaz, you must earn your livelihood with bitter toil so that you will not go inwardly” (86). This is the first diegetic break, as the subject acknowledges her painter. The second comes as the painting’s leaves “murmur” about “\[w\]hat has been written in this brief essay” – the subjects acknowledge the critic. The effect is that of making indistinct what, in criticism, one takes for granted to be distinct: the artist, the subject, the writer, the reader.

A similar loosening occurs in “An Exhibition of Belgian Art,” whose title might mislead us to expect an exhibition review; its text, however, abruptly does away with the standard methodologies of art criticism, or rather with art altogether. Walser first tells us of the location of the exhibition; then of a coffee he drinks, a dream he remembers. In a conversational tone and with a structural non-sequitur, he asks if we’ve heard of the artist Niklaus Manuel, a 16th-century Swiss artist and dramaturge. He lets us know that Manuel was also a provincial governor in the town of Erlach, where Walser completed part of his military service during World War I. Walser’s cursory descriptions of the works on view –“now a vernal landscape, now a snowy one, now a flower painting, now a picture of a lady” (66) – make it clear that assessing their formal qualities is not the task at hand; this work will inevitably be performed by those whom it interests. “Everything I have neglected to say,” he writes, “can be given voice by others” (70). Rather, it is Walser’s peregrinations around the exhibition proper, the literary digressions that looking at pictures makes possible, that become central to art’s meaning-making.

Similarly circuitous is “Apollo and Diana.” In it, Walser considers Lucas Cranach the Elder’s c. 1530 painting of the twin gods of sun and moon, a photograph of which hangs in the rented room of the story’s narrator. His landlady, unimpressed by the display of nude figures, removes the picture from its place on the wall, leaving it face-down on a table. He reproaches her for this act of “falsely construed morality” (42), insists on hanging the image; she acquiesces, and even offers to mend his pants. The seeming nowhereness of this story– its lack of insight or allegory – points again to Walser’s privileging of the incidental over the willful, the anecdotal over the schematic. And as in “An Exhibition of Belgian Art,” these misdirections give evidence – managing both sentimentality and sarcasm – of the social life of the artwork.

Material considerations are also taken up in “Scene from the Life of the Painter Karl Stauffer-Bern,” which consists of a fictional dialogue between real historical figures: the painter of its title and his patron and mistress, Lydia Welti-Escher, a 19th-century Zurich heiress. In love, they escaped from Welti-Escher’s husband to Rome where, exercising his considerable political influence, the husband has Stauffer-Bern arrested. Both heiress and painter spent time committed to mental institutions; both exited and committed suicide shortly thereafter, within months of each other. In Walser’s script, they appear negotiating the matrices of art and power in which their love is bound up (“It offends and infuriates me to be financially dependent on you,” says Stauffer-Bern).

Walser’s historical fabrications extend equally to the biographies of Watteau (“As I attempt now to sketch his portrait, he seems to me like a wish, a longing” \[124\]); of Van Gogh, whom he concludes must have painted _L’Arlésienne: Madame Joseph-Michel Ginoux_ (1888–89) out of love and not for money; and of Aubrey Beardsley, whose life he envisions in detail: “If I am imagining him accurately, he would often lie all day with a graceful and very exact indolence in his luxuriously outfitted bed” (111– 112). But these are fictions that ring true, making possible unconventional modes of engaging with and writing about art. The pages of _Looking at Pictures_ give breadth to the ludic and the miniature, including insights both exceptional and mundane. One hundred years after their composition, released into contemporary art publishing’s thinkpiece economy, the texts’ purposefully limited scope gives way to a kind of linguistic play that has little currency in today’s writing about art. Of Beardsley, he writes: “Among other pages, there exists one by him depicting a burning candle. It may be that never before has an illustrator reproduced the flickering of a candle in so candle-like a manner, so flickery” (112).

issue-130-p71-73.pdf

This article reviews Looking at Pictures, a collection of prose by 20th century Swiss writer Robert Walser.

Robert Walser, Looking at Pictures (New Directions, 2015) 

Fan Wu is currently seeking synthesis between _qi_, Daoist energy cosmology, and _libido_, Freudian erotic drive. He loves to be in touch: write to him at fanwu4u@gmail.com.

##### **Ⅰ.**

The power of a poem so depends on its expressive performativity. “Dave’s, Lake Michigan, Early June” (published in the _London Review of Books_, October 2015) performs a flowing scene of non-identity through the mouthpiece of its speaker. (We will call this speaker “Anne” for the sake of convenience, acknowledging our ignorance of her connection to the Anne who authors her.) How I mean non-identity: the poem performs a specific textual self, but it cannot exhaust the self that is its object, the self that the poem creates in its composition. Something of the self shimmers beyond the poem as a mystical lining. Some evoked feeling remains unspoken. What poetic language creates is greater than itself.

Anne has her own ideas about inexhaustibility:

> old monk saying.   
> Don’t look for a kernel

> of \[whatever you need\]   
> in the forms of things,

> seems to be the message.   
> You peel off the shell,

> get another shell.   
> Thunderstorms (evening)

Poetic non-identity is turtles (hells) all the way down; each reader peels a different layer away to reveal a different self underneath, endlessly. Just as things in the world resist your desire to pull “whatever you need” out of them, in this poem-object, there is no locatable essence that would grant Anne the coherence of an identity. The self never coincides with itself, as a moment never coincides with its occurrence. The non-correspondence between language and its subject casts a shadow from poetry upon our daily lives. Even when Anne sings of the “same joy and joy and joy,” no two joys are the same. The second and third utterances bear the temporality of repetition with a slight but undeniable difference. This poem speaks on behalf of the non-repeatability of each instant; the self is a layered thing infinitely unpeeling.

##### **Ⅱ.**

Anne’s poem begins with a PJ Harvey quote, “…\_until my middle name is excess\_…”, a scrap of lyric excised from the song that includes it, “We Float.” Another clue to the intertwinement between Anne’s mood, half-adrift in limbo, and the lake in which she swims.

Lake Michigan is the poem’s excessive middle; it is the tumultuous or restive vessel between two shores. First shore:

> I will sit on the porch and   
> try to think.

> Prepare for thinking   
> (in the car as we go)

The shore that opens the poem is the present casting a wish upon the future. My journey has a destination only through my _will_. Yet already some things are in the way of thinking, namely the verbs “try” and “prepare.” There is so much concern with forethought, which takes the form of laying the ground for thinking. Who knows what distinguishes thinking from its attempt, from its preparation. And Anne won’t tell: the poem is structured exclusively in tight-lipped free-verse couplets that hint at psychological depth without showing you what’s inside. The second shore:

> on the lake.  
> Packing up I consider

> how I mostly spent my time here  
> avoiding thinking.

Thinking, which at the trip’s outset was Anne’s goal, turns out to have been the evaded kernel that the poem circles around. The lake overwhelms the thinking self with its wealth of possible experiences, its crickets, its overhead lightning, its bone-chilling depth. It becomes for Anne the perfect place to arrest the question of thinking. (Of course, this excerpt investigates its own performative self-contradiction: doesn’t one need to think in order to write? Doesn’t the composition of the poem demand thought to put it into place?) Another question that reaches straight to the reader: Is there something traumatic or disturbing in thinking itself that she was avoiding by avoiding thinking? No answer. Only more avoidance when Anne invokes “some monk advice / to prevent / lofty thoughts on departure.” Leave them both behind, the thought and the thought of failing to think. Between two shores:

> Nightlong thunderbolts   
> move me from thinking

> to rethinking.  
> A lake,

Here, nature is the trigger for an unusual movement whose distinctions are unclear. What’s the difference between thinking and rethinking? Anne suggests that rethinking is not a matter of generation or creation, but a shift of perspective. After reading about “\_leac\_ (leek or garlic)” and “\_luxus\_ (excess, of ‘plants / growing obliquely or too much.’),” she begins “Rethinking garlic and bent plants.” We’re hardly able to find an instance of thinking that is not rethinking: where did the original, unrepeated idea go? Poetic language turns the world over for us again and again after the world is realized as devoid of a first thought.

##### **Ⅲ.**

The poem is divided into three parts. Roughly there is a chronology: I. Arriving at the lake; II. Settling in at the lake; III. Departing from the lake. Time takes place at most as a rough template, and within time the poem moves by free association. Anne switches registers; she looks at the root _men_ – in her book of etymology and discovers its relationship to monks; whereby she recalls an old monk’s parable, turns it around in her mind, before then turning her attention to the material world and how “A burning haystack / topples cleanly, ingeniously / into the lake.” Anne mixes the descriptive technique of haiku, which attends to the objective landscape, with the hushed lyricism of confessional poetry. In doing so, she stages poetic language’s passage from interior to exterior, its liminal position between psyche and lakescape.

So the poem, against the stability of identity, performs not a personality with qualities fixed by arrangements; but rather the impression of a process of thought whose loops and whorls are wildly connected, moving outward into the world, only to involute back into the non-identical self:

> Generally I admit  
> my spirit strays all over the place

> but there  
> in the numb stream

> it narrows to an absolute.   
> An absolute what?

> An absolute crossroads.   
> Breathe or die,

As her spirit strays, splitting herself from itself, the poem’s attention keeps wandering away until a dire moment erupts. Suddenly the body, closed into stillness by the cold of the lake, “narrows to an absolute” and locks into place as a locus of identity. But even here, in the absolute centre of the poem, nothing is absolute except an option, a possibility, a “crossroads. Breathe or die.” And, having chosen breath, Anne’s spirit strays forward, onward.

The poem gently invites you into the space of the Lake: I remember the calm of the body expiring in a minor pond in North Ontario, storm piling clouds into the pebbles. And thinking plainly about loss, and inquiring about language, all while the duskladen shore loaded up against me. Anne from the poem merges with my remembered self, in thunderstruck intimacy. Two non-identical moving spirits passing each other in the nightlong depth.

issue-130-p72-74.pdf

The article reviews Anne Carson’s poem “Dave’s, Lake Michigan, Early June”.

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