stomachspeaklouderthanwords-blog

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So happy to touch the pages of this book, a work of so much consideration and acts of listening and sharing and opening. I look forward to reading in its entirety again and again such thoughtful and sincere and caring voices. Thank you editors Naomi Potter and Shauna Thompson, transcriber Kaylin Pearce, and all the artists, Raymond Boisjoly, Duane Linklater, Krista Belle Stewart,Jude Norris,Brenda Draney, Wally Dion, Dean Drever, Jeff Funnell, Jeffrey Gibson, Alex Janvier, Jonathan Jones, Glenn Ligon, and Kent Monkman who made the exhibition, which was so much more than an exhibition. Hearts and gratitude.

First page I opened to, spoken by Duane: "In my work I often talk about or contextualize collaborative work. I contextualize it within a model of treaty making. And in this particular area we are...Treaty number seven...This is an important thing. There were people in this particular area, ancestors of some of the people in the room, both First Nations and non-First Nations, who had something in place to agree upon something. i think about this as a model for my approach to collaborative artworks, but also perhaps as a way to keep moving forward politically in and outside of contemporary art, and the gallery and the museum. I often use the symbol of the treaty medal as a way to talk about it. So that image of the treaty medal: there's the European man on the one side, the First Nations man on the other side, and they're shaking hands. I think the idea embedded in that image as a model that our ancestors left for us...as a way to negotiate now..."

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Museum Walls, and the politics of giving voice vs. having a voice

Tanya Harnett’s photographs of blood-red lakes, creeks and rivers are direct and urgent. In unoccupied “natural” landscapes, with no mark of human subjects save a distant fossil fuel power station or a rusted oil barrel, the tides and pools of red liquid can’t be attributed to a person or body. It’s a crime scene without anyone or anything we’d normally recognize as a victim. It’s maybe reminiscent of a whale or hunting slaughter, but there’s no carcass. We might guess that the bodies and all their attachments have been removed or washed away- only the liquid, mixed and inseparable with the scene, remains. But then blood should wash away too. Whenever present, it signals immediate harm, rupture, emergency.

Image: Tanya Harnett, Assiniboine, 2011.

Blood, if an object of human consideration, is a thing that should remain hidden, out of sight. We don’t need a body in order to feel shock, fear and aversion at the sight of bare vital fluid, all on its own. Mimesis and identification are triggered at the first drop of it. Only maybe there never was a body. Perhaps a supernatural force has spoken, turning water to blood. The divine may have taken on human or animal form, so that we’d understand something, that a plague is imminent. The image carries deeper than Biblical or literary references, to the mammalian haptic nerves. Maybe the water bleeds. Is water sentient?

In these images the source of the bleeding is felt somewhere between human, natural and supernatural. In reality, the source of the red fluid is “artificial”, as in artificial colouring, by which I mean to draw an association with art or artifice as a technological extension of the human. As we find in Gilbert Simondon’s defence of technical objects within culture, the artist uses technicity (red food colouring) as an exteriorization of her biological existence, which sees itself threatened without access to clean water.1  If we are not used to perceiving human, non-human and post-human individualities as linked and co-constituting, the artist does it for us by triggering biological mimesis and empathy with a partly-animate/partly-inanimate entity in her visual construction. How else can the rivers and lakes, and their attendant ecologies speak to us of their state of crisis? For entire societies that have lost touch and communication with their bodies, their living environment, bold anthropomorphic mediations are necessary.

There is a lot of recent and not so recent debate about giving voice to inorganic, non-human or mute matter (See Elizabeth Povinelli’s “Geontologies of the Otherwise”.)2  How do we know what “it” is saying or not saying? And when it comes down to giving up our luxuries for the sake of other existents, will we actually enact an assemblage mentality? Environmentalist-academics such as Povinelli and Timothy Morton stress that humans are imposing our own perspectives and levels of measurement on that which is outside of us. Morton calls it the Age of Asymmetry wherein “The more we know about an object, the stranger it becomes. Conversely, the more we know about an object, the more we realize that what [we] call subject is not a special thing different from what we call object.” To approach this quandary of the “voiceless demos”3  or strange object, I would like to illustrate the flaws and assumptions inherent in the very question of exteriority itself, by way of a slight diversion describing my own penchant for divisions and tidy definitions. And for that I will approach the institution of art and display in general, this photography exhibition in particular.

***

On the Pitt Rivers Museum website, I saw that Tanya Harnett, a Canadian artist from Carry-the-Kettle band in Saskatchewan, had an exhibition at the museum’s ‘Long Gallery’. Having never been to the Pitt Rivers Museum, or Oxford, the website’s online presentation of her exhibition “Scarred/Sacred Water” gave me the impression that it was a large-scale solo exhibition in a devoted gallery space. I wanted to take in the haunting images up close as subsuming photographic encounters. I wanted the issues outlined in the online statement, which promised to address “five First Nations communities in northern Alberta, Canada, all of whom have environmental concerns about their water,” to be writ large, and seen by Europeans, who have little awareness in general of Canadian and indigenous, environmental and political issues.4

Image: Toys at my local pound-store in London. These would not appear on store shelves in Canada, at least not without causing great offence.

When I got to the Pitt Rivers, none of the museum staff I asked knew the exhibition by mention of its title or artist. Eventually a volunteer brought me to a hallway that led from the main collection to the toilets. That hallway was the “Long Gallery.” The space felt transitional and peripheral. Harnett’s photographs were hung on a wall that, coincidentally, on the opposite side, within the museum hall, held ceremonial masks from Coast Salish, Haida and other West Coast First Nations. As I saw it, Harnett’s six photographs were cut off, divided from the display of “historical Natives” as much as they were physically kept in contact by this wall. The contemporary and historical Native were like two sides of a coin, or treaty medal, I thought: the living and the dead Indian, to use Thomas King’s terms.5  And the walls of the museum, the system of classification and language, kept them separate.

Image: Both sides of the treaty medals. Given at treaty ceremonies between 1871-1921 in Canada, the medals were meant to be tokens of commitment to co-exist peacefully between sovereign nations. While many treaty laws were unjust to begin with, such as taking away first nations’ right to hunt, fish or trap on their land, the ways in which the existing laws have been and continue to be broken is astounding. Image source: http://www.icollector.com/Indian-Chief_i10734144, accessed April 24, 2015.

“For Native people, the distinction between Dead Indians and Live Indians is almost impossible to maintain,” says King, “[b]ut North America [and Europe] doesn’t have this problem. All it has to do is hold the two Indians up to the light. Dead Indians are dignified, noble, silent, suitably garbed. And dead. Live Indians are invisible, unruly, disappointing. And breathing. One is a romantic reminder of a heroic but fictional past. The other is simply an unpleasant, contemporary surprise.”6  Speaking of contemporary surprise, while I was witnessing Harnett’s photographic work, also on my mind were the recently circulated stipulations and likely consequences of Canadian Anti-terror bill C-51, which would specifically target and discipline “terrorists”. Of course the bill uses the terminology around “terrorist” broadly and vaguely enough that it applies to environmentalists, protesters, and anyone associated with activity that “undermines the security of Canada” if these activities interfere with “economic or financial stability of Canada” or “critical infrastructure.” Besides allowing for the surveillance of private correspondence including online circulation of anti-governmental sentiments, the bill sets out unheard of scope for CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) to become in effect a secret police where a private court hearing would give them ability to act unconstitutionally.

Many critics of the bill have seen through Prime Minister Harper’s Anti-Jihadist fear-mongering speeches that apparently necessitate such severe laws, to his ulterior motivation to exercise greater silencing power over his political dissenters. For instance, at one of the bill C-51 hearings in Toronto this March, Mi'kmaq lawyer Pam Palmater, who has been monitored by law enforcement within and outside of Canada, conveyed that the Idle No More movement would be captured under the bill. As First Nations people in Canada consider themselves belonging to their own sovereign nation, and were deemed as such through treaty law, all subsequent correspondences by such members is nevertheless incorrectly perceived as a potential threat to the sovereignty and security of Canada. As Palmater observes, "The second we do a round dance in the street without a permit, it becomes unlawful."7  Another witness to the hearing, Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs president Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, said, “We believe this bill is less about Jihadists under every bed … and more about increasing the output of the tarsands, and facilitating the heavy oil pipeline proposals across the country, and will serve to severely undermine the constitutional and human rights of indigenous peoples."8  The Harper government’s proposed actions with this bill confirm the reality of widespread conservative perception of King’s “Inconvenient Indian”- he and she who would jeopardize neoliberal capitalism’s unreserved expansion.

Considering this global political milieu of extreme censorship and surveillance, I rethought my initial criticism of the Pitt Rivers museum’s space delegation for Harnett’s work. It came to seem generous to give space to the living, “inconvenient” and progressive voice within a historical institution. I suspected, after speaking with Harnett, that her optimism and gratitude towards the museum staff and programming had something to do with her awareness of this precarious situation as well.

In fact she told me that even though the museum curators were obliged to maintain a classification system for their collection that is highly controversial within contemporary anthropology- based on development rather than geography or history- she felt they were very aware of and concerned with contemporary Indigenous politics. Having not dealt with the curators and anthropologists at the museum myself, I am less merciful than the artist. 

Unlike the unprecedented repatriation efforts of sacred bundles to the Blackfoot people by the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Alberta, spearheaded by late ethnographer and museum curator Gerry Conaty, the Pitt Rivers Museum declined requests for repatriation of sacred objects to the Haida people of British Columbia. Instead, the museum invited two Haida artists to create a replica of a Haida carved box artifact that came to the museum in 1874. The replica will go back to Canada to educate the community about techniques and traditions of one of its stolen masterpieces. However, as Conaty notes in his book We Are Coming Home, artists may learn material and technical sensitivities, but it is the community Elders that “tend to have had personal encounters with the kinds of historic objects held in museums or have knowledge of related oral histories referencing such objects.”9  Moreover, it is clear that the replica is not a replacement for a sacred ceremonial object, which, because of its history of presence with generations of community members, is considered itself a family relative. Harnett, fully aware of these ongoing difficulties between museum authorities and First Nations peoples, still sees collaboration as opportunity: “museums are tough. And I think Indians are starting to realize how they can play and work with them.” The curators sought out Harnett’s body of work to house in the only space they could freely program for contemporary material. Curating contemporary activist and counter-hegemonic work in a historical building that hosted Darwin himself, where he was said to converse with the museum’s founder about evolutionary theory, brings a whole history of colonialism full circle, “to where it all began,” Harnett notes.

While I was there a young boy and his father spoke about the photographs. I hadn’t seen this kind of sustained attention in children at museums for a long time. They both apprehended the affect of harm and danger right away. The image stirred a discussion of what could have caused the distress of the water. Despite this hallway being supposedly a transitional space, people lingered, and considered (and not because they were waiting for someone in the washroom). I imagine that this image of bloody landscapes, with its immediate message of warning and anxiety, will stay with these visitors as they stay with me. Far from images being static objects, they live, change and cause changes as information in the imagination, becoming real. In a very physical way, this art is a protest, an invention, an action.

Image: Tanya Harnett, Driftpule River from Swan Hills, 2011.

I realized the full power of this modest exhibition was not only in its scarring images of nature’s pleading, but also its ability to alter conventional modes of exhibition presentation. Moments of arrest were happening outside the main hall, the main discourse, the main attraction- even in passing. Art this strong is almost context independent; it didn’t matter where I encountered the images, because it was more like they encountered me. I realized that I had been so hung up on established exhibition practices that I was the one imposing walls on my experience. I had too quickly read the museum as an experience of boundaries, when it had the potential to be boundless. Groys was wrong when he said the museum, as a collection of dead objects, kept the outside or out-of-doors alive.10  Living and dead, alternate times and places, mix in the same informational pool. The institution couldn’t touch or change the Darwinian, colonial past that it laid bare, but it could invite the living to show itself too.

***

The reviving of museological spaces I hitherto considered outside or cordoned off, and the transversality that can happen between architectural, temporal and conceptual boundaries brings me back to the discussion of anthropomorphism and human language in relation to ecology and eco-aesthetics. Like my prejudice that divided dead from living, inside and outside the museum, the Western ontological claim of a real separation between psychic interiority and physical exteriority is equally a false dichotomy.

Many indigenous peoples of the world have always known about the world beyond their individuality, precisely because they never came to see themselves cut off from it. While the speculative realists from Meillasoux onwards, still clinging to epistemological barriers between self and other, reinvest Western philosophy with the concern for the world beyond human perception, “indigenous scholars and scholars of the indigenous will attest to the survival of alternative intellectual traditions in which the liveliness of matter is grasped as quite ordinary, both inside, and at the fringes of, European modernity,” as Jessica L Horton and Janet Catherine Berlo write.11  Harnett echoes this assertion of long-held inter-species tacit knowledge: “First Nations know the place that they have lived for centuries, the plants, the fish, the birds, the animals, the insects, the earth, the sky and the water. With contaminated water, there is no question that something is wrong. It's affecting everything and it's not very hard to see the changing factors.” As she followed one council member to troubled water on Lubicon territory, he “pointed in disdain” to a creek bed full of oil and walked back. From a Native epistemology, which Harnett calls “round”, because it perceives everything in the whole affecting everything else, people are not giving voice to some exterior form of nature. Rather, they are the voice of nature, because they exist in relation to it, and change when it changes.

However, we need to be careful not to assign this indigenous perception itself to another nature/culture divide, which sees animist beliefs outside of and fetishized by Western ones. Horton and Berlo stress, “While Europe transgresses the boundaries of its own making, the Native appears to be left on the other side.”12  Rather than asking indigenous artists and academics to provide a mirror or negativity to our follies, the scholars call for an appreciation of indigenous ideologies that can seriously alter a global approach to co-habitation among all living and non-living agents. The Western intellectual tradition has not been entirely without its holistic thinkers either. Simondon, already mentioned above, wrote in 1964 to disarm such concepts of a substantial difference between individualities by shifting the philosophical gaze from substance to process, or being to becoming. For him, individuation (of crystals, plants, animals, humans or technologies) occurs always in relation to a milieu of potential that undergoes a form of dephasing, or concretization, but is at the same time always capable of undergoing further change.13  Simondon, like Thoreau before him and Deleuze and Guattari after him, completely did away with Western essential divides of interior and exterior, or individual, pre-individual and transindividual. Especially now, when governments strain to silence ecological voices that would recognize non-living and living agents in a truly democratic habitus, we need to band together not only across species, technological and ontological borders, but across political and ideological ones as well.

---

1-See Combes, Muriel, Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual, trans. Thomas LaMarre (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013), p. 23. 2- Povinelli outlines the power dynamics at work within the ethics of life/non-life: “Since its inauguration as a field of philosophical reflection, ontology has been defined through the problems of being and nonbeing, finitude and infinitude, the zero and the (multiple) one, most of which create and presuppose a specific kind of entity-state, namely life.” http://culanth.org/fieldsights/465-geontologies-of-the-otherwise/

3-This is Povinelli’s wording from the title of her talk given at Haus der Kulturen der Welt’s The Anthropocene Project. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Th4Fsn0DTPw accessed April 17, 2015.

4-See https://web.archive.org/web/20150421193932/http://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/harnett.html

5-King, Thomas, The Inconvenient Indian, (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2012), chapter 3. That wall on which hung ceremonial masks on one side and Harnett’s photos of environments in peril on the other, divided what King calls the dead Indian, or “ the stereotypes and clichés that North America has conjured up out of experience and out of its collective imaginings and fears” from the living Indian. 

6-Ibid. p. 66.

7-http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/bill-c-51-hearings-first-nations-could-be-targeted-pam-palmater-says-1.3006731, accessed April 20, 2015. 8-Ibid. 9-Krmpotich and Peers quoted in Conaty, Gerald, We Are Coming Home, (Edmonton: Athabasca University Press, 2015), p. 31.

10-http://www.uoc.edu/artnodes/espai/eng/art/groys1002/groys1002.html, accessed April 6, 2015.

11- Jessica L Horton & Janet Catherine Berlo (2013): Beyond the Mirror, Third Text, 27:1, 17-28 12- Ibid. 13-See Combes, Muriel, Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual, trans. Thomas LaMarre (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013), p. 5.

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Scott Rogers Stretches the Imagination in Glasgow

This review was originally published on Canadian Art Online on March 10, 2014.

It was immediately apparent, even before entering the recent exhibition “Negative Miracle” at Glasgow Sculpture Studios, that Canadian artist Scott Rogers conspired to enliven or disarm what we might usually (and mistakenly) take as neutral gallery space. A canvas dropcloth covered the entire floor, uniting the exhibition’s sparsely laid objects as if they were part of a room-sized horizontal painting, and I wasn’t sure whether to proceed past the entrance for fear I might be stepping on the art. The artist’s scheme to implicate the viewer in the work (visitors’ footprints inevitably left traces on the canvas) was much more subtle and ambiguous than that of a Gonzalez-Torres piece.

In his earlier 2010 work Wireframe, shown at Calgary’s Stride Gallery, Rogers created a similar provocation that forced the viewer into a pitch-black space delineated with phosphorescent tape. Even while seeming to be Wireframe’s visual opposite, the light, spacious “Negative Miracle” slowed you down. Unsure of your place, like a rabbit crossing a city street, you walked in softer, lighter and more precarious steps.

Rogers’s surface alteration of the floor also identified a rift between appearance and actuality—a premise that ran throughout the show—as we knew of, but were unaffected by, the hard, concrete and codified gallery floor underneath the dropcloth. The space felt somewhat romantic and enchanting, if not surreal. Treading on what felt like a soft forest floor, the viewer wound haphazardly through small clusters of dried flowers, bronze-painted ginger root, hand-whittled wood, and rusted metal. Even the objects that one could recognize as coming from an industrial or commercial world of hypersaturated colours—such as high-visibility vests, trendy aluminum water bottles, and cans of Red Bull—were physically stripped of high-chrome sheen, appearing “naturalized” or faded. A kind of nostalgic, sepia-toned atmosphere set in.

The tension set up between appearance and reality was kept in question by a conflation between natural and artificial processes of decay or corrosion. Many of the surfaces of Rogers’s objects had undergone processes of simulated aging, while others had undergone instantaneous transformations, such as a piece of New Brunswick sidewalk concrete that had been shattered apart by lightning. Baudrillard’s counterpoint between “design” and “atmosphere” turned seamless as we slowly realized that this atmosphere of gentle decay and “natural” process was, more often than not, achieved by design.

Take, for instance, the work Like Water in Water (2013), in which four wooden chairs appear to have been carved from a natural, untreated piece of lumber. These are actually readymade chairs whose stain and sealant has been meticulously chipped away by the artist. An accompanying exhibition text asks what differences there are between “artificial” and “anonymous” sources of surface corrosion. Clued in by a wooden massage tool and a rubber hand-trainer sitting on or near the chairs, we guessed that yes, there absolutely are differences—differences at the level of labour and muscle exertion, even if we can’t see them.

We don’t need to turn to the recent philosophical developments of the Speculative Realists, who work against the privileging of man’s knowledge of being, to know that appearances can be deceiving. Like these thinkers, Rogers highlights that everything we think we know is based on accidental appearances that have no correlation to things as they really are. In the case of Pre-Trackers (2013)—resin castings of digital cameras with glow-in-the-dark pigment added in—our assumption of being able to access the “site” of the art was upturned when we discovered the glowing could only be perceived when the gallery was shut down for the day.

A camera which records nothing, and which has “no function other than to act as a reminder of what it once was and what it once did,” alludes to a world that happens outside of human use, and even out of human sight or mind. What function might such a recording device serve when it outlives us?

Two other pieces from the exhibition are also caught up in this question of human apocalypse. The video No Date (2013) chronicles the activities of non-human animals as they tend to their own directives within the city, as if humans weren’t there. Warholian in pace, the video follows a snail’s slow journey, among other phenomena. In the exhibition context, one pondered the intended use and misuse of this image-recording technology, as well as its place in a world without us. An audio piece, which perhaps added to the romantic, bucolic feel, offered a recording of Alexander Scriabin’s unfinished symphony Mysterium (1903–1915), which the late composer hoped would cause a kind of “armageddon” or a somehow-pleasant human apocalypse.

Through this audio piece and its references, the exhibition once again troubled any correlation between thought and reality. It seemed to ask, “Why shouldn’t the apocalypse be pleasant?” Our knowledge of death may be one thing, but there is evidence that death means something infinitely different to other beings. Death can even become a patina or surface element, as the constellation of altered or aged objects in the exhibition suggested. In these, we saw the limits to a “belief in surface,” as a bronze-painted ginger root continued to grow beyond the paint.

If the title “Negative Miracle” referred to a contradiction between intention and artifact, surface and essence, thought and reality, then maybe I should second-guess my first impression of the room’s romantic atmosphere. Then again, it might be with renewed optimism that I now comprehend life, vitalism, lastingness and complexity—beyond the gallery, beyond human sight, beyond human understanding. Like the accidental footsteps I left behind, unintentionally straining and distressing the art, Rogers’s exhibition drew attention to the parenthetical systems of meaning that exist between and beyond the ones we think we know.

Image Credits: Scott Rogers, Like Water in Water, 2013. Hand-carved chairs, metal water bottles, various distressed objects. Installation view at Glasgow Sculpture Studios. Found at https://canadianart.ca/reviews/scott-rogers-glasgow-sculpture-studios/ accessed on November 16, 2015.

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What Is Attention and Why Does It Matter?

Then why not rather know that images Flit hither and thither, many, in many modes, Bodiless and invisible?

-Titus Lucretius Carus, On the Nature of Things

Richard Serra, Hand Catching Lead, 16mm film, 1968

But the work of constituting the transindividual involves the formulation of a transindividuation process that cares not just for language but for things, allowing us not just to designate them but to think them, to make them appear, and finally to give them their place—by giving them meaning.

-Bernard Stiegler, Taking Care of Youth and the Generations

Material rhetorics states that information, as images or other forms of language, has a futurity, as in a consequential effect on the world. In this model images are not just objects or thoughts that have arisen from a context, but are objects and thoughts that can alter and be altered.1  A similar conception of images as causal objects is found in Gilbert Simondon’s notion of individuation, which manifests through all phases of becoming (vital, physical, psychic, collective and technological), and is a concretizing or dephasing of matter from a higher energy state to a more stable one.2   Accordingly, images as information are none other than the internal resonance of a physical system undergoing individuation (Combes 2013, 64). The concept of individuation contends that everything is always in the process of evolving and becoming between orders of magnitude, and therefore images, as part of that evolution, are necessarily one of the many causal elements of any system. In both conceptions of rhetorical objects, images are always causative and they always have a physical reality, whether this is apprehended as their moment of conception in the individual or collective body; in their ecological life as technical supports; or in their ability to cause physical effects in or upon other bodies- in other words, whether images are a mental or physical phenomenon.

Consequently, images never rise to an independent reality detached or exterior to physical beings, as some may conceive of them.3  They are never pure form, as an abstract quality imposed on matter from without, nor pure matter, as something beyond conceptualization. Either we are in contact with them ecologically speaking as physical objects in the same environment, mentally in contact with them as ideations (neuronal patterns) that arise from psychic individuations, or potentially as collective objects within a social milieu. However, as Simondon scholar Muriel Combes relates, images as cultural objects may appear to circulate outside of us, at a distance: “[t]he entire paradox of transindividual stems from how, as a process of self-constitution, it necessarily presents itself to us as if coming from without, for it inevitably emerges for us against the ground of interindividual relationships constituting our social existence that are found momentarily stripped away by its constitution (Combes 2013, 41).” In other words, objects of collective individuation, which have crystallized and stabilized out of the transindividual milieu, at the intersection of the psychic and collective, are at the same time always latent within the individual psyches, and partially constituted by it, though we may have internalized or forgotten these phases. By this same process of self-constitution, we forget to see that we are made from the same physical milieu as images as physical supports (magazine pages, paintings, etc.), or advanced technological objects such as algorithms. These latter also never obtain an exterior ontology outside of the same ontogenesis of which we humans are a part. Therefore, although it may sometimes seem as though images circulate in a world exterior to the self, as in a collective consciousness; exterior to human minds, as in an object-oriented ontology; or exterior to physicality altogether, as in an immaterial digital ether, these images always already exist as potential or actualized psychic or physical events within bodies, and hence are always already embodied.

As embodied and physical as images seem under the perspectives of both material rhetorics (as consequential objects) and Simondonian ontogenesis (as physical, collective, technological or psychic objects), the rate that they rise and fall in my consciousness- as will happen when scrolling through Tumblr or Instagram for example, or as they come and go from the world like movie posters on a bus stop-makes it seem as if they were nothing but air. This high frequency of transformation of images makes them feel more akin to Lucretius’ musing of images as thin skins that travel on the surfaces of bodies, rather than being of those bodies.4  Delving further into the processes of translation, deterritorialization and differentiation of images within various states, one may become concerned by the opposite of this continual transformation- that is, in stasis, or in how it comes to be, in our time of accelerating changes of context and content, of “nomadic subjectivity”5 , that any object of contemplation may ever linger long enough anywhere to be, as in continue being in its individuated state, to ever have its own gravity, before morphing onward. If images as thoughts or objects are basically the individuation of information within a particular physical system, as Simondon contends, then information cannot really be invisible, immaterial, or free of bodies. However, if and when thoughts or image objects appear and disappear without resting, or resonating, then to what extent are they really in and of these bodies? Why does it seem more and more that Hans Moravec’s fantasy of a disembodied consciousness- where an entire human brain can be transferred to a robot body with no change in function- has become a reality?6  Why does it seem like information has become bodiless?

This question, of the nature of the relation between a body, conduit or material support and the informational body traveling through it (or growing out of it), began to trouble me more and more as I myself, my own body, was trying to retain information in answer to this very question. As I searched through the history of cybernetic theory and the material turn within cybernetics, I realized that nothing was sticking. I felt like everything I read was comprehended, although it didn’t leave a mark, or register with me. Theories were flowing through me like water, with nothing taking hold, resonating or causing any friction on a subjective level. Why was this happening? And why was it so troubling that I didn’t feel altered or affected by any of this information? What happens to this information if it doesn’t stay in my body, or in anybody?

An image of Richard Serra’s 1968 video “Hand Catching Lead” came to my mind, like one of Lucretius’ free floating “skins”. It appeared as a translation of what I was feeling at that moment in the library, oversaturated by information that wasn’t soaking in. Serra’s simple, repetitive action of a hand catching, releasing, and sometimes missing a falling object, confirmed that feeling of brief capture and release, amidst incessant propulsion of matter through matter (Serra, 1968).

This continual diffusion of energy or information is what Deleuze and Guattari champion in A Thousand Plateaus as a Body without Organs. Taking inspiration for the concept from the surrealist Antonin Artaud, who they quote as saying, “…there is nothing more useless than an organ,” the BwO is pure intensity and immanence, preceding all matter of form and extension (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, 150).  This bears a similarity to Simondon’s preindividual as a milieu of potential. However, for Simondon, this potential is never disembodied, but always materialized as excess or disequilibrium within an environment of matter. In the end, Deleuze and Guattari’s BwO falls back upon a physical reality, though they maintain its abstraction from localized embodiments, which is effectively to disembody it: “Now we have the answer: the BwO is that glacial reality where the alluvions, sedimentations, coagulations, foldings, and recoilings that compose an organism—and also a signification and a subject—occur (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, 159).” And although they fiercely advocate escaping one’s own psychic and physical boundaries as they reify the notion of passage, they still clothe this naked deterritorialization with a caution: “You have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn; and you have to keep small supplies of significance and subjectification… to enable you to respond to the dominant reality (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, 160).” In other words, no matter how free-flowing information may be, without an organism (or its organs), these flows cannot exist.

Writing roughly thirty years later, Hito Steyerl reasserts the vertiginous free-fall of ungrounded subjects in her analysis of hyperreal representations of space and multiple-perspective tools of vision, wherein we find ourselves today. With multi-platform and distributed image-making technologies such as multi-screen projections and virtual reality, “[t]he viewer is no longer unified by such a gaze, but is rather dissociated and overwhelmed, drafted into the production of content (Steyerl 2012, 27),” she says. However, she seems to be fully embracing the total liberation from perspective and orientation, which she considers to be mental constructs that stabilize political and economic hierarchies and inequalities. Perhaps however, once one has already been pushed over the edge of an abyss, one has no choice but to embrace the descent. As she says, “[Falling] takes place in an opening we could endure or enjoy, embrace or suffer, or simply accept as reality (Steyerl 2012, 28).” But as this is just a “thought experiment” for Steyerl, she does not have to contend with the speculation of an indefinitely suspended or untethered subject- and hence does not have to caution any safeguarding of boundaries or dosages lest the subject fall to pieces completely.

Aesthetic theories such as David Joselit’s “transitive painting” pay heed to this unencumbered fluidity of information in/through material bodies as well, this time translated to its occasion within the art world. “Transitive painting,” Joselit says, “invents forms and structures whose purpose is to demonstrate that once an object enters a network, it can never be fully stilled, but only subjected to different material states and speeds of circulation ranging from the geologically slow (cold storage) to the infinitely fast (Joselit 2009, 132).” This seems to beg the question of dosages as well. For instance, what is the difference between this proposed new relevance for painting in a networked world, and Snapchat, which offers a social media profile “not as a collection [of information] preserved behind glass but something more living, fluid, and always changing (Jurgensen, 2013)?” Snapchat gives the viewer between 2-10 seconds to experience an image or video before it disappears from all storage servers (and our minds too?) forever. How fast should images move within transitive painting, within art, or within society in general? What is the proper dosage?

Bernard Stiegler asks the same question, but not because he is inspired or enchanted by a new notion of deterritorialization, free-fall, or transitivity. He, on the contrary, is deeply concerned with the flow of information in our contemporary world. Following Simondon, he frames the question of information circulation as an historical picture (and hence future one as well) of the particular relation between human beings as rational creatures and psychic information as that which comes out of/constitutes their very being. Unrestrainedly, he claims that if we lose our capacity to hold psychic information, to care for it, then we lose this information and ourselves. The crucial faculty at stake in this relation between people and psychic information, or in information’s very materiality, according to Stiegler, is attention.

Attention is a particular form of information’s passage through bodies that is differentiated by Stiegler from other forms of passage such as “vigilance” which is a sort of scanning or grazing of preverbal cues in aid of the individual’s survival, and “floating listening” which is also surfing through information, but involves a level of accidental language registration. Attention, on the other hand, or more properly speaking “deep attention” which is a term Stiegler picks up from N. Katherine Hayles, involves a level of awareness of the information passing through as form (Stiegler 2010, 72). In order for thought to be attended to, it must first become an object of contemplation, which is achieved through a type of formalization Stiegler, after Derrida, calls “grammatization”. Stiegler defines grammatization as “the process of formalization and discretization which permits, on one hand, the reproduction of what is discretized, and on the other, operations, of computing or control, and finally, a reflexivity, or critique, of what can be iterated, and which, by way of its iteration, is able to produce a difference, meaning also an individuation, meaning then again, a difference (Stiegler 2013, 25).” Part of this formal concretization of information, involves spatializing it, or giving it a formal support. And formalization, according to Stiegler who follows Simondon, always happens at the intersection of collective and psychic milieus, as transindividuation. Material supports, such as books, films, paintings, but also words, images and sounds, are what Stiegler calls symbolic media of tertiary retentions.8  These “mnemotechnical” or memory devices, once internalized, can then be passed through the generations that learn how to read them.

Prior to or concurrent with spatialization or formalization, information must be captured by a socially formed psyche, whereby it conforms to a system of meaning (formal and libidinal) that is woven out of many rule-based stitches, which themselves have been conditioned by tertiary media. This leads to the second most fundamental characteristic of attention: the breadth and depth of the relation between collective and individual psychic orders. This relation is again more spatial than temporal, as Stiegler says: “[a]ttention’s depth has less to do with duration than with the length of the circuits of transindividuation it activates… Each circuit (and its length) consists of many connections that also form a network, as another constituent of depth, a kind of texture, and like some material, a resistant (even thick [consistant]) fabric (Stiegler 2010, 80).” To reiterate, these transindividual circuits are formed from an intergenerational process of internalizing the desires and forms of the social body as one’s own. Therefore we can ascertain that the two fundamental aspects of internalizing, or paying attention to information as it comes into an individual psyche, are: its capture so that it may be formalized, or formed into an object of thought, and concurrently that this object of contemplation develops connections of meaning-or stitches- within the network of the psyche, which is also to change it, or let it grow. Both objectification and further individuation within the psyche require a pre-conditioned milieu of transindividual meaning.

Stiegler, like myself, is concerned that attention- as a material transindividual relation- is threatened today. He traces this diminishing attention to the media industry’s power to capture attention via drives instead of desires. This industrial power over minds, or as Stiegler calls it “psychopower”, resulted from capitalism running up against its inherent limit of out-producing its market. Therefore “[i]t is no longer a question, then—and today less than ever—of controlling the population as a producing machine, but rather as a consuming machine; and the danger is no longer biopower but psychopower as both control and production—production of motivations… (Stiegler 2010, 132).” In order to control the consumption of media, the media industries upset the intergenerational structure of moral values, which are the superego’s manifestation of desire in individuals, “replacing them with automata stripped of any reinteriorization process; that is, without critique, and thus without responsibility (Stiegler 2010, 134).”9  In other words, without social desire in place, which for Stiegler is always a Kantian desire to know, a Western heritage stemming from Plato to the Enlightenment, there is no desire to question received information, and no desire to pay attention.

Stiegler is not interested in claiming that new media forms such as social/online and televised media are inherently bad. He recognizes that these media, like the older technological forms such as films, dialogue and books, are all forms of tertiary retentions or symbolic media that carry meaning through time. However, like all media of social and psychic formation, they can either be put to good or bad use. This ambivalent nature of all material supports, or retentional supplements, based on their ability to either help us remember our heritage or help us forget how to live without them, and hence to think critically for ourselves, is what Stiegler calls pharmacology, or the art of healthy dosages and administration. In order to continually establish among humans the meaning of “good use” as society and technology evolve further, the social fabric must be kept intact. The social apparatus, as a mature population that is responsible towards its inhabitants, instills the very desire to maintain this goodwill towards others, the most fundamental constituent of society. And this goodwill towards others is based on the desire to know, to question, in a word, to care: “To take care, to cultivate, is to dedicate oneself to a cult, to believe there is something better: the non-inhuman par excellence, both in its projection to the level of ideas (consistencies) and in that this “better” must come (Stiegler 2010, 179).”

It may seem like information is disembodied when it moves in and out of our minds, or other circuits, without leaving a trace or lasting effect. But since information does not exist somewhere invisible on an ethereal plane of immanence, outside of all grounding in individuated form, to say that information is disembodied is to say that it doesn’t exist at all. That is why Stiegler advises the discipline of attention, as both a way to decide what should matter and that it matters at all. What initially appears as disembodied information is really just information without a particular kind of body- a considerate, reflective, and hence creative body. Or, it is a body without a particular kind of information: that which is desired, attended to, nurtured. But without this type of caring body (social and individual), intergenerational information will eventually dematerialize, which is to say, decease. There may be information perfectly intact within the circuits of Moravec’s robot, or buried deep in the ground, but this will not be human information unless continually apprehended by a human body. An appreciation of technological, psychical, physical and collective objects as material yet always capable of transformation urges us to pay attention to what we pay attention to. For attention determines this very materiality. Therein lies the task of mature members of society (artists included): to care for and hold onto what we already have as much as we care to cultivate something always better. Artists especially, as those who lend and create new forms of material or tertiary support for our psychic and collective information, must pay attention to what matters.

Footnotes

1- Laurie Gries, who I follow in my understanding of rhetorical images, defines her method of approaching the relatively new field of material rhetorics as such, “As an object of study, material rhetorics, then, seems counterintuitive; rather than set our sights on the material objects themselves, the object of study is the relations between human and non-human entities from which material and rhetorical consequences emerge, circulate, and become visible (Gries 2010, 7).” 

2-Of individuation Simondon scholar Muriel Combes states, “The emergence of an individual within preindividual being should be conceived in terms of the resolution of a tension between potentials belonging to previously separated orders of magnitude (Combes 2013, 4).” For example a plant is a resolution between a cosmic order or solar energy and and inframolecular order of mineral salts, oxygen, etc.

3-For instance, Plato’s theory of forms, or hylomorphism, contends that abstract forms or ideas underlie an impose upon all material reality (Wikipedia, 2015).

4- From the chapter “Existence and Character of the Images” Lucretius writes, “And thus I say that effigies of things, And tenuous shapes from off the things are sent, From off the utmost outside of the things, Which are like films or may be named a rind, Because the image bears like look and form With whatso body has shed it fluttering forth…(Lucretius 2008, 187).” Lucretius’ model of images that can become detached from objects involves hylomorphism, where form (image) and matter (body) are distinct entities. This, of course, is inconsistent with the Simondonian appreciation of images (information) as a dephasing or concretization of pre-existing material. However, Lucretius’ conception of images as skins illustrates my feeling of free-flowing information that can exist without a body.

5- Rosi Braidotti, author of Nomadic Subjects defines nomadic subjectivity as “…the kind of critical consciousness that resists settling into socially coded modes of thought and behavior (Braidotti 2011, 26).”

6- In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles writes, “[Moravec] invents a fantasy scenario in which a robot surgeon purees the human brain in a kind of cranial liposuction, reading the information in each molecular layer as it is stripped away and transferring the information into a computer. At the end of the operation, the cranial cavity is empty, and the patient, now inhabiting the metallic body of the computer, wakens to find his consciousness exactly the same as it was before (Hayles 1999, 1).” This fantasy implies that information is extractable from its environment.

7- See A Thousand Plateaus: “That is why we treat the BwO as the full egg before the extension of the organism and the organization of the organs, before the formation of the strata; as the intense egg defined by axes and vectors, gradients and thresholds, by dynamic tendencies…all independent of accessory forms because the organs appear and function here only as pure intensities (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, 153).”

8- Stiegler explains this process of projection and internalization: “Thus, materially and spatially projected onto psychotechnical supports—rendered tertiary—collective secondary retentions can be internalized…(Stiegler 2010, 18).”

9- Stiegler gives two examples of intergenerational collapse. They are: a French TV advertisement that derides parents and grandparents for not being capable of giving the younger generations enough contemporary information; and the new law in France that doesn’t judicially treat minors (those below voting age) any differently from adults for criminal behavior, making both adults and children equal before the law (Stiegler 2010, 1).

Bibliography

Braidotti, Rosi. (2011). Nomadic subjects. New York: Columbia University Press.

Combes, Muriel. (2013). Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual, trans. Thomas LaMarre. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp.149-166.

Gries, L. (2010). Still Life with Rhetoric. Ph.D. Syracuse University.

Hayles, N. Katherine. (1999). How we became posthuman. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press.

Joselit, David. (2009). Painting Beside Itself. October, Fall(130), pp.125-134.

Jurgensen, Nathan. (2013). The Liquid Self. [Blog] Snapchat. Available at: http://blog.snapchat.com/page/3 [Accessed 26 May 2015].

Lucretius Carus, Titus. (2008). Of The Nature of Things, trans. William Leonard 1st ed. [ebook] Project Gutenberg, pp.186-194. Available at: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/785/785-h/785-h.htm [Accessed 26 May 2015].

Serra, Richard. (1968). Hand Catching Lead. [16mm film] Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago.

Steyerl, Hito. (2012). The Wretched of the Screen. Berlin: Sternberg Press, pp.12-30.

Stiegler, Bernard. (2010). Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, trans. Stephen Barker. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.

Stiegler, B. (2013). The Most Precious Good in the Era of Social Technologies. In: G. Lovink and M. Rasch, ed., Unlike Us Reader, 1st ed. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, pp.16-30.

Wikipedia, (2015). Theory of Forms. [online] Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Forms [Accessed 30 May 2015].

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Tyler Los-Jones, We saw the reflected, inverted image of our own age # 9, 2014. Framed inkjet print on archival paper, 18 x 12 inches, 2014. Courtesy the artist and Walter Phillips Gallery, the Banff Centre. From canadianart.ca

I wrote about the work of Calgary artist Tyler Los-Jones for Blackflash Magazine:

“In the highly saturated colours and crisp details of Los Jones’ mountain photographs, there’s an effort to preserve or mimic the aura and feel of the National Geographic images, and to reference them as a type of cultural readymade. [...] The origami-like pieces of folds and valleys, flatten again and again— whenever a new image is taken, which mimics the original act of objectifying, framing, flattening, and consuming environments through photography.” 

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Keith Arnatt

published by this is tomorrow http://thisistomorrow.info/articles/keith-arnatt-absence-of-the-artist

Keith Arnatt: Absence of the Artist, Sprüth Magers,  1 - 26 September 2015 

Title : Keith Arnatt, Absence of the Artist, Installation View, Sprueth Magers London, September 1 - September 26, 2015

Website : http://www.spruethmagers.com/

Credit : Copyright Keith Arnatt Estate. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2015. Courtesy Sprüth Magers. 

Photography copyright Stephen White

During the late 1960s when first produced, Keith Arnatt’s conceptual artworks asked the viewer to define (or forego definitions of) just how much the artist needed to give of him or her ‘self’ in order to make a work. Sometimes this was asked outright, in pieces such as “Is It possible for me to do nothing as my contribution to this exhibition?”, a text work submitted to a group exhibition at the Camden Arts Centre in 1970. Other pieces dealt with acts of omission, withdrawal and not following through with the artist’s intended gestures, as the work. At a time when critics valued artistic bravado, bold performative gestures and creative autonomy, Arnatt confronted these claims, drawing instead on aspects of failure, doubt and contingency within his experience of being an artist. He once said “I’m not and never have been authentic.” (1)

Artists’ withdrawal from and disillusionment with the ‘turbo capitalist’ art-making machine and its normalizing mechanisms are ever more present today. Works by the Ladies Invitational Deadbeat Society (LIDS) or emerging Icelandic artist Saemundur Thor Helgason, for instance, point to the unimaginative and inadequate structures- whether financial or technological- that support most contemporary art exhibition practices. In their refusal-letter-as-contribution, the LIDS propose their return to refusal as “a move towards advocating for a radical change of pace in the arts … in the face of capitalist overproduction.” But contemporary art’s echo of Arnatt’s critical work of the 70s doesn’t mean we should find the latter easy, summative or pellucid.

As an artist who, parallel to Barthes’ writing of ‘The Death of the Author’, similarly rescinded his privileged role as the maker of meaning, his work was in making the audience work- whether in parsing the difference between said and saying, represented and representation or intention and realisation. In other words, he wanted to provoke action, curiosity and questioning in his viewers. Take, for example, the photograph ‘Invisible Hole Revealed by Shadow of the Artist’ (1968) wherein the making of an invisible hole likely represents a disappearing from the art world without trace, so that the act of self-negation cannot be recuperated as event or gesture. And yet the photograph, photographer and artist’s shadow all attest to this invisibility, contradicting the premise at the moment it is represented. Similarly ‘The Absence of the Artist’ (1968), a photograph of a sign bearing the titular words posted to a brick wall, speaks as much to the artist’s presence- the maker of this object- as to the absence alluded to in the text. If reception and concept are different things, as Arnatt so often draws attention to, then what does the current staging at Sprüth Magers, seven years after his passing and fittingly called ‘Absence of the Artist’, do to these original works? Or rather, following Stephen Horne’s call to critics and viewers to be affected and make active relations with works of art, what can we do to make this work strange, discontinuous and to maintain the questioning spirit it was made with? (2)

For this viewer, in the context of this exhibition, each work resonates with the artist’s precarity and the drama of loss, and is intensely affecting. Even if they were initially conceived as comments on his withdrawal from and disapproval of the art scene of his times, betraying a wry humour, I can’t help reading in them the literal death of the author and the transience of physical presence. Looking at ‘Self-Burial with Mirror’ (1969), where Arnatt’s face sticks out of the ground to gaze at the viewer through a mirror reflection, his knowing look of surrender suggests he was always thinking of this one final vanishing trick, wherein the photograph would be at its ultimate distance from reality, giving presence to a truly, yet noticeably, absent man.

(1) See http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/keith_arnatt1/

(2) http://cmagazine.com/2013_118_horne.htm

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Wonder and Resonance

Esker’s publication “Wonder and Resonance: Fiction/Non-fiction (2015)” is now out and available through their online shop here: Wonder and Resonance: Fiction/Non-fiction (2015). I wrote an essay included in the catalogue called “Tactics of Cultural Elaborations In and Around the Art Gallery.” It also has some transcriptions of great conversations with the artists of the exhibition: Raymond Boisjoly, Wally Dion, Brenda Draney, Dean Drever, Jeff Funnell, Jeffrey Gibson, Alex Janvier, Jonathan Jones, Glenn Ligon, Duane Linklater, Kent Monkman, Jude Norris, Krista Belle Stewart. Edited by Naomi Potter and Shauna Thompson.

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Hannah Collins

published by this is tomorrow http://thisistomorrow.info/articles/hannah-collins

Hannah Collins, Camden Arts Centre, 4 July - 13 September 2015

Artist: Hannah Collins 

Title: Installation view

Website: camdenartscentre.org

Credit: Mark Blower

Imposing in their scale and uprightness, yet warm and soft in tone and texture, Hannah Collins’ wall-sized, fabric-mounted photographs are as full of detail as they are void of people. While they invite through open interiors of mattress or cardboard floors, spacious, unpeopled desert or verdant forest floor, they are detail-rich representational walls that cannot be passed through. Perhaps this is what Dan Cameron meant when he wrote that Collins’ photographs are ‘charged with an anonymity that keeps the viewer from entering or exiting her pictures with ease’.

Following abandoned, marginal and unidentifiable places throughout her career, Collins collects hollow shells of human habitation that bare traces of the living, with haptic surfaces more alive than their departed ghosts. Time is evident across many layers in this exhibition and spanning her career to date, in the time it takes the photographer to find the right image of a place, the time that the now absent subjects have spent in a place indicated by their traces, the time since they have left, and the time that works through the artist herself as effluent motifs gather momentum in the works.

If anonymous these photographs are yet not without presence. I’m trying to get to know Collins; trying to figure out why she is different from other documentary photographers. But that question already reveals why she is not a typical photographer of anthropological subjects, and why dilemmas of exploitation, exoticism or othering don’t really apply to her work. Her photographs urge me to know her, the one behind the lens, rather than the thing she is pointing at in her images. This is because the photos mainly capture empty spaces, desolation and ruins, and also because she keeps mentioning the incompatibility of image and experience, which denies a transparency between representation and information.

During her introductory talk she says ‘I used to think of photographs as uncommunicative things.’ It’s not about the photograph, but the act of documenting, of being somewhere and trying to understand it. This is why for Collins there is no difference between a found image and one she has made. They are both mere indexes to an experience, something that cannot be fully represented, and something that fails in language.

Of her rainforest photos in ‘The Fertile Forest’ series (2013-15) she confesses that she didn’t always know what plant her guide pointed to among the tangled depths of greenery; but she took the photograph anyway. In the resulting installation of one hundred photographs of Amazonian plant species, the real subject is her search and her act of looking. One of the only photographs to house a human figure, ‘Camp in Columbia’, exposes the photographer’s gaze as a child aims a toy gun at the lens. Earlier works also underscore the photographer’s presence through flood light scenography, which evokes a sensory prosthetic to vision in the dark. At the opening introduction interlocutor John Slyce asks Collins whether she considered herself hunter or gatherer. ‘Forager’, she replies.

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Landscape digests Darwin- Decomp is nature’s translation scientific literature

Originally Published in FFWD December 5, 2013 in Books In the latest joint effort from Canadian poets Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott, the two are standing on the shoulders of giants. In this case the perch is evolutionary father Charles Darwin and his view of nature as a source for intellectual revelation. In 2009, Scott and Collis trekked deep into B.C. forests to begin research for their book Decomp (Coach House Books), bringing Darwin with them in the form of On the Origin of Species, which spawned modern biology. “If On the Origin of Species is Charles Darwin’s reading of nature,” say the authors, “Decomp is nature’s reading of Darwin.” What do they mean by that? The reason for bringing the book along on their nature walks (by which I mean five copies in five distinct ecosystems) wasn’t to use it, as you might expect, as handbook or guide for scientific observation, but instead to leave it behind, in the ground, so that nature could “observe” it.

A year of letting nature do its thing and the resulting wet bricks of words foraged from the forests became the authors’ prized field notes. Here the idea of “reading” as sifting through, digesting or metabolizing material is demonstrated physically by the landscape. As a result, the intellectual self is naturalized as a consumer of code, whether linguistic or biochemical in form. Words reordered, deleted and mashed up by nesting birds, earthworms and searching roots — these rotted, overgrown, shredded and transported living objects take on the significance of an illuminated manuscript, handed down from an invisible author. Decomp enacts a cyclical translation (nature’s reading of man’s reading of nature) in a plethora of forms: full-colour documentary photographs of the hikes and rediscovered books, interpretive poetry, observatory notes and transcriptions of the de- (or re-)composed books. These latter are the most poignant and succinct components of Decomp, and the transcriptions appear throughout in highlighted boxes called “The Readable.” Ruins of Darwin’s voice remain, if extremely truncated, in a brave move that repositions poetry beyond semantic meaning, such as: “during the period great piles of or life had erritory hardly.” This release from meaning echoes postmodern author Jean-François Lyotard’s warning that “To arrest the meanings of words once and for all, that is what Terror wants.” Linguistic deconstruction is apprehended here through the lens of speculative realism, which posits a reality beyond human thinking. We are not just asking ourselves to review the meanings of words, we’re asking a generative operation — which frees us from our imbedded perceptions — to do it for us. But this is more than appealing to random chance operations. Decomp proposes a new subjectivity or “mind” in nature itself — that doesn’t merely generate these words, but authors them according to its own context and purpose. It is William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch meets Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

Students of Derek Beaulieu’s English 315 class at the Alberta College of Art and Design (ACAD) are recognizing a new subjectivity found in nature too. Under Beaulieu’s assignment, they’re responding to Decomp in their own audio, visual and performative works. Student Mathew Lindenberg created a computer program that “goes through Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, sentence by sentence, and uses the words and characters in each sentence to make visuals and manipulate sound waves.” Another student Sarah Kelly, whose piece remixes primal screams recorded in one of ACAD’s stairwells, recognizes that “In our quest for individual identities, we let our own ‘taxonomies’ create distance between us, and forget that human beings are all part of the same Being….” In a world accelerating to the point where technology takes over, it is refreshing and heartening to see artists and poets letting nature do the talking instead.

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Review of Steven Cottingham "All My Faith To See" at Untitled Arts Society

Originally published in FFWD in Visual Arts In her book Ugly Feelings, Sianne Ngai references Herman Melville’s character Bartleby the scrivener as a near complete example of political and emotional inertness. In the story, a while into his new job as a wealthy Wall Street lawyer’s scrivener, Bartleby politely refuses to do his job with each renewed request. He also declines to move from his small office corner until finally, he is imprisoned. The scrivener is known to scholars of short fiction as a classic embodiment of clinical depression that results from powerlessness and suspended agency in a modern bureaucratic world.

Image courtesy the artist, from his website http://stevencottingham.com/faith There is a sense today that we are at a loss to change the face of government policies, our cities and even our daily lives. We seek retreat from the mechanical churning of ordered production to something personal, heartfelt and honest. These feelings of dysphoria are felt ever more acutely by artists attempting radical political change using a language that is incompatible or untranslatable within today’s political systems. Steven Cottingham, in his literature-soaked exhibition at (the fittingly equivocal) Untitled Arts Society, makes his subject this very incapacity to speak one’s truth in a world with no ears for it. The artist provides a simple pamphlet as a guide of sorts, reminiscent of Christian salvation propaganda found littered on the sidewalk, which bares the exhibition’s title: All My Faith to See. On the verso a quote by D.E. Ofullnaegjand offers, “I know your tongue yearns like a beast from a cave to find an unknown burrow, a new language, a new love.” Though the works referenced inside the pamphlet and exhibited in the small Beltline gallery are made from various materials and processes, each of them expresses this yearning, like the scrivener’s, to “break through” bureaucratic limitations.

Image courtesy the artist, from his website http://stevencottingham.com/faith In a bold gesture that brings the above-mentioned metaphor back to a physical instance, the front window is taped up as though a rock broke through it. A cardboard piece used as temporary repair was once a mailing package; postal stickers reveal that it contained a meteor rock shipped to the artist c/o the gallery. The metaphor is clear: in place of the real rock breaking the window, the action exists as idea, conveyed in language and circuitous administrative processes. The involvement of the postal service, Internet vendors, gallery administration and even gallery architecture within the making of the work draws attention to the invisible and ubiquitous institutions that govern our movements even within the art world. At the heart of it, the physical meteor as the cause of all this administrative work is nowhere to be seen. Unknown whether the meteor was actually thrown through the glass or not, this piece titled “Even here, even now, fate will find us out” stacks reality upon idea and questions the relevancy of real action in an abstract world. The other works in the show, arranged minimally and carefully under the guidance of feng shui’s spatial awareness, further this comparison of passion and inaction: a Kafka quotation from the unfinished novel The Castle is written in invisible ink; a Gabriel Garcia Márquez quotation is written on cardboard in precise and artful calligraphy by a dispossessed and homeless man Cottingham met on the street ; a cyanotype of personal items is made somewhat illegible by the inexact process of sun exposure; hearts are carved into a tree branch that was felled by the flood. The tragic romantic figure who inhabits each of these pieces expresses unrequited love that falls through the cracks of a concrete world, like the charged words of a formal letter between speech writer and politician, on a page covered in magnetic paint, in a piece called “I Know a Place in Santa Fe.”

Image courtesy the artist, from his website http://stevencottingham.com/faith For a show that positions itself as a yearning for love and personal expression, there is little trace of the artist’s own words or hand. Instead, all of the pieces enlist or appropriate the work or skills of willing or unknowing collaborators. Cottingham’s decision to portray himself as arranger or curator of his show, rather than creator or maker, potentially betrays a lack of faith in his own personal expression. But a more accurate assumption would be that he arranges world objects and processes because he seeks in others what he already knows in himself. Sincerity of emotion is plentiful within the art world — the problem is elsewhere, in the world beyond art, we might say. This move from personal material to that of other people’s reveals that this show has political questions, if not intentions. So what, if any, actions are proposed by the exhibition? Do the works chart a course for finding love in all the wrong places or does it simply say that love conquers all? Like his piece that frees Untitled Arts Society’s wifi network for any and all public use, the exhibition shows that bureaucracy is everywhere. But so is love.

Image courtesy the artist, from his website http://stevencottingham.com/faith

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Sobey nominated artist Mark Clintberg

Article originally published in FFWD For the 2013 Sobey Arts Award nominated artist Mark Clintberg words are images and writing is drawing. Like images, words have flexible and malleable meanings both in the way they are made to look and in what they can signify literally. Clintberg’s work emerges out of a note-making process, which imbues words with a personal voice and hand that he transposes to public spaces, proposing and effecting a situation of increased intimacy, vulnerability and transparency. Before pursuing a PhD and MA in art history at Concordia in Montreal, Mark was a student of ACAD, which he calls “a cultural bedrock for the province of Alberta and beyond.” He cites the lasting influence of teacher Mary Scott, “always such a subtle smart provocateur,” who lent him books by feminist author bell hooks, and encouraged his writing and text-based practice. He also recalls the high standards set by teachers such as “Geoff Hunter, Laura Vickerson, Susan Menzies and Blake Senini [who] definitely raised the bar for us every week of term.” Senini, in turn, remembers the energetic and eager student as “gentle, never arrogant or aggressive or eager to prove a point. He simply became involved in the `PLACE' of ACAD and his place in it.” Place as a specific coming together of landscape and community is a major catalyst for Clintberg’s work as he has demonstrated through recent residencies including Fogo Island Arts, and ACAD, which culminated in a solo exhibition at the Illingworth Kerr Gallery this past March. These two residencies were opportunities for Clintberg to work collaboratively with traditional rope makers and fiber/textile students, respectively, creating both a giant fishing net to be cast into the ocean and a massive theatrical curtain which resembled a 1979 lost Polaroid photograph by Daniel Boudinet. These grand sweeping gestures and others- such as his repurposed barn façade that reads and is titled, “Behind this lies my true desire for you”- materialize the literary device of oxymoron in their contradiction of scale. This physical poetry proposes that subjective feelings are felt much bigger than oft represented publicly. Now shortlisted as the Prairie and North contender for the $50,000 award, his empathetic and considerate body of work will be seen by an even greater audience. Despite recent newsworthy denouncements of similar prizes such as the Polaris Music Prize by winners Godspeed You! Black Emperor and last year’s smear of the Sobey presentation as “an appalling spectacle” of pageantry by critic Sholem Krishtalka, Clintberg is gracious and honoured “to be a part of the important cultural legacy that the award represents.” Past nominees and recipients have gone on to internationally reputable careers: 2009 shortlisted nominee Shary Boyle represented Canada in this year’s Venice Biennale. Part of Clintberg’s larger philosophical project is not just the negotiation of public/private languages, but also the coherent mediation of institutions and artists. For example, in an interview about his recent installation of the barn mural piece in the Art Gallery of Alberta, he says, “it’s useful to remember that [art institutions] function because of the very individual and subjective feelings and views of each person who works there. All of them have come together because they believe in art for one reason or another.” His originality, echoing Blake Senini’s above words, seems not a case of typical criticality, which is easy, but in the gentle, pulsating reminders of how we can keep lines of communication and understanding open between communities, which is harder.

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Big Ideas: Watershed +

Something in the water: How Calgary demonstrates a need for artists developing infrastructure Co-written by Andrea Williamson and Steven Cottingham, published in FFWD “What is an artist?” or, “What are artists for?” are uncouth questions with already-negative connotations. Definitions limit movement and freedom by their very nature. They can also be insulting if misleading or prescribed. Surely there is value in keeping terms open-ended so that they can transform and adapt to situations as needed. But, in an exceptional and unprecedented case made in Calgary by a collaborative group of two artists, the Public Art Program, and the Utilities and Environment Protection (UEP) department, the nomination of “artist” has come to receive as much standing, autonomy, and agency as the designations of “civil engineer,” “social geographer,” or “biologist.” Under the umbrella epithet Watershed+, this collaboration is a visionary model for long-term and sustainable collaboration between artists and the city’s water department in order to develop a meaningful relationship between Calgarians and their watershed. Conceived and piloted by artists Charles Blanc and Tristan Surtees, who work together under the name Sans façon, this vision started to gain foothold in Calgary just in time for the flood to hit. In a way, this underscored a point they were already trying to make: “[that] the unloved, un-imagined, and unknown water infrastructures could, and should, have a role in encouraging a sustainable and creative relationship between people and place.” Indeed, the flood illustrated that we are dangerously out of touch with the connection between what the pair call our city’s “function, efficiency, and economy” and the “culverted and hidden” watershed we depend on. Sans façon’s creative and constructive presence in the UEP department was facilitated by the Public Art Program – a municipal body that is also concerned with the geography (political and physical) of the city. And, according to the artists, this facilitation was miraculous in its happenstance. Outside of England’s “Artist Placement Group” of the ’60s – which removed artists from their hermetic institutions and inserted them into real business environments – an artist achieving a vital role within such contexts is unmatched; especially at the scale reached within the City of Calgary’s Public Art Program and UEP. Coming out of simultaneous 20th century “definitions” of artists as radical, unbound, and disruptive individuals and industry as efficient, goal-oriented, and streamlined, it becomes clear why the worlds of creative disorder and productive order are often segregated. It would be expected that trial by error or naïve points of view are undesirable traits in the workforce. Indeed, Surtees stresses that they do not feel a need to know the final product before beginning, as engineers or developers might. Blanc echoes that some of their initiatives with Watershed+ such as the artist residency program have “no direct purpose,” that is, no predetermined destination. So why are Calgarians with city budgets and occupations vital to the city’s daily operations jumping at these so-called unproductive traits of the artist? The answer came as a welcome surprise to both sides. Calgary’s unique position as a rapidly expanding but still-young city means that it can examine and re-imagine the precedents for dealing with even basic infrastructural challenges. Setting rather than following precedents, Calgary attracts those who boast a risk-taking nature or “pioneer” mentality. The businesses and government employees working here understand that risk is a necessity – not least of all because a “safe” or “proven” way has yet to been found. Artists, who specifically seek out and thrive in unexplored realms, feel comfortably uncomfortable working in this manner. In more ways than one, this pairing makes a perfect match. Sans façon’s socially responsible leanings are mirrored amongst the environmentally concerned and forward-thinking staff at the public facility. The artists note that the staff at the UEP are some of the most humble and hardworking people they’ve ever met. They are, after all, responsible for creating Canada’s largest manmade stormwater treatment wetland – no small feat. Another accomplishment unrecognized by most Calgarians is that their tap water ranks among the cleanest in Canada. Naturally, it makes sense that “environmental artists” would be invested in the development and implementation of sustainable infrastructure. Luckily, Calgary, unlike every other city receiving their proposal, took a risk and gave them the opportunity to really do something about it. As Heather Aitken with the Public Art Program said, “We weren’t really sure what to expect when we began this pilot. [But] it has been an amazing experience to see artists, engineers, educators, and field staff working together.” In addition to promoting the common goals of eco-friendly waste-management and wetland protection, this unlikely placement of artists within civic engineering allows the development of a new collaborative model for cross-pollination of skills and specialties. An environment of trust is created as bureaucratic structures are expanded and unrecognized possibilities for change are brought forth. Participants with different sets of expertise recognize specialized languages outside of their own ken and probe in search of a shared understanding. Alternative ways of thinking are enmeshed within one another, producing a relationship capable of enormous ingenuity. Within this democratic model where everyone is valued for what they bring to the table, an expectation is maintained that everyone must pull their weight. This expectation of the resident artists to contribute a great deal of labour and input is as much a sign of respect for their craft as that of giving them space and autonomy to do things their own way. One benefit to giving Watershed+ artists adequate freedom is that they are best suited to the task of visually representing what is abstract or hidden. Surtees and Blanc are concerned with the “social utility” of water processing systems, proposing that their public presence does not need to be diminished to fulfill their public service. Instead, by revealing these hidden systems, “[they] have an essential potential to … raise awareness of the complexity and fragility of our environment,” says the duo. One of Sans façon’s forthcoming public art projects that in fact led directly to the development of the Watershed+ program features a large “vanishing pond” situated in NW Calgary that represents the otherwise invisible processing of stormwater. As the neighbourhood’s incoming water is delegated, the pond’s water level rises and falls to mimic the act of breathing. The project elicits a visceral response where the landscape is an extension of our own bodies, resulting in both a poignant representation of the city’s working infrastructure and an emotional connection to our land. Sans façon identifies artists as those who ask questions: not looking for prescribed answers or venturing activist commentary, but attempting to promote curiosity as invisible processes are revealed. In addition to their desire to uncover the hidden and reveal the alchemical “magic” of how waste turns to water (not unlike lead turning into gold), the artist’s ability to imagine within and without constraints is also key. For instance, particular infrastructural assignments such as creating outfall alterations or highlighting catchbasins have inherent functional and design-based controls. But the perceptive creative individual can propose unforeseen potential options for such scenarios. Sometimes it takes an outsider to identify solutions. Through these defining moments wherein artists become key players in project development, the Watershed+ team is altering approaches to waste management just as much as they are changing how public art and the social function of artists is defined. They demonstrate that art can be a fluid process just as much as it can be a static sculpture. Unlike other politically concerned artists, Sans façon has a unique opportunity to do more than point and critique. They are facilitating conversation within the municipality rather than falling back on the avant-garde notion of the subversive or irreverent artist. This project demonstrates that artists are individuals who can find purpose out of the initial “purposeless” wanderings of their imaginations, who believe in a collaborative amalgamation of varied knowledges, and who can visualize the invisible. In a truly innovative and unprecedented way, Calgary has demonstrated that artists are instrumental to the development of cities.

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“The demographic leading the normcore trend is, by and large, Western Millennials and digital natives. Stylist-editors like Hot and Cool’s Alice Goddard and Garmento’s Jeremy Lewis are children of the nineties, teens of the aughts. The aesthetic return to styles they would’ve worn as kids...

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Bottles Under the Influence, Walter Phillips Gallery

Originally published in Color magazine 11.2

Proponents of a relatively new philosophy called object-oriented ontology (OOO) argue that: an object’s meaning cannot be exhausted by any or all of its particular relations to other objects, or to us. [1] In this model, the object is not only defined by our relation to it (that we made it, that it has use for us, that we perceive it, etc.), but also as a thing wholly outside of the human mind. The exhibition Bottles Under the Influence at the Walter Phillips Gallery by Tamara Henderson and Julia Feyrer creates a universe of objects that are self-governing and self-perpetuating.

Source: color magazine. Image by Feyrer and Henderson.

Henderson and Feyrer’s first major collaborative film also called Bottles Under the Influence imagines this speculative reality of OOOas a world that doesn’t revolve around us. Audiences lose sight of the representational strategies intrinsic to film, mass media, written language, body and facial cues. There are no voices, signs or texts—in short, no remains of denotative language. This disavowal of transparent meaning doesn’t necessarily indicate a cultural resistance, but a safeguarding of a space likened to dreams that have an unfading opacity and pre-linguistic knowing.

While following the logic of the film we either: turn towards our own non-verbal systems of meaning determined by instincts, emotions and object relations, or we try to learn a foreign visual vocabulary. Eventually, as we navigate to the best of our ability, a space emerges somewhere in between.

Source: Catriona Jeffries. Image by Feyrer and Henderson.

It is in this prismatic space that we are left to surmise the filmmakers’ intentions behind the staging, lighting and manipulating of objects, their afflictions and environments. With wondrous confusion, the objects are framed far outside of familiar use, challenging our perceptions in a way reminiscent of surrealist disjunction. In exceeding typical relations, we start to imagine the object independent of normative human use and perception: as a being in itself.

In Bottles Under the Influence, Feyrer and Henderson hint at this life of objects which surpasses our involvement with them. In the film’s barely there surfacing of a narrative turn, the characters are glass bottles or, “vessels of communication,” as the artists see them. At the Museum of Spirits in Stockholm the artists examined historic glass bottles, learning how they were made to contain specific recipes and represented various states of intoxication. In the film, the bottles withdraw from the concept of pure function or history to comprise what Henderson calls, “a bottle typography.” We enter a new language when the bottles are laid down under a blanket to rest, lowered onto the missing head of a statue or shot at in the snow. Here the paradox of OOO can be seen: our best attempt at imagining objects as their own centres of meaning nevertheless involves anthropomorphism. Even if we tried to imagine things outside of human cognition, we couldn’t.

Source: Catriona Jeffries. Image by Feyrer and Henderson.

Appealing to craft theories sheds some light on how this “being” of objects defines us and not the other way around. Crafted objects drastically alter the perception of private and public divisions by containing, on their surfaces, the evidence of material processes or encounters which imply the interior space of the creative process.

For this exhibition, the architectural effects of the artists’ handmade bottles are brought to the public space of the Walter Phillips Gallery. With titles like Old Hag Bottle (Valerian) and Pest Detective (Applewine), the bottles are portraits as much as objects. Visitors to the gallery are invited to contend with these caricatures of sentient beings, as their materiality starts to shape us within a context of intimate relations and personal associations.

Source: banffcentre.ca. Image by Feyrer and Henderson.

The pineapple yellow and violet glow of a neon sign within the gallery immediately triggers the presence of a night club, which here offers a hazy atmosphere: a round table, a book of drinking songs and a newspaper called Night Times containing “nocturnal journalism.” The host structure of the gallery encompasses a strange, interior landscape made of crafted objects and mottled surfaces. More than installation art, the fabricated space is a set for a film to be made during the exhibition. As we move through it, we’re refreshingly made aware that, for once, we are not the subjects of this movie. These objects and their associations don’t exist for us; they don’t need us.

[1] For more info about OOO see Ian Bogost’s blog http://www.bogost.com/blog/what_is_objectoriented_ontolog.shtml

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Book review: Knock On Any Door (A Revised History)

Originally published in FFWD on August 1, 2013 http://www.ffwdweekly.com/article/arts/books/the-art-of-politics-11041/

Artists Eric Moschopedis and Mia Rushton have made a name for themselves in Alberta as surveyors (in the literal sense) of local art and culture — collecting data pertaining to artists’ sometimes little-heard opinions and activities, archiving ephemera related to local events and landscapes, and now, creating a physical document chronicling local socially engaged politics. The data-oriented aspect of their work allows the crux of it to be accessed by and incorporated into non-art disciplines, such as ecology, social studies and economics. This translatability and the widespread reach of their projects speaks to the political and social motivations that underlie everything they do.

“If an artist is unaware or actively avoids politics in their work, they are not trying to change the political order and therefore maintain the dominant culture,” says Moschopedis.

Their new book, Knock On Any Door (A Revised History): Art and Social Engagement in Calgary, 1912-2012, responds to this need to work in contrast to the dominant culture by offering a collection of historical accounts of events and people that have done just that. The particular axe to grind with this one, stated right off the bat in the editors’ preface, is the rhetoric of Calgary 2012 and its alignment with the creative cities movement, i.e. market capitalism. The editors wish to recoup Calgary 2012’s slogan — “Creative. Connected. Community.” — with examples of real community-minded action and democratic processes previously undocumented.

Source: FFWD. Cover illustration by Heather Kai Smith.

The differentiating perspective of the collected essays, written by local artists and writers, is that the stories pertain to regular everyday events by non-artists that can be seen through an art historical lens or in relation to contemporary theories of art. Specifically, these activities are discussed in relation to the theories of authors Nicolas Bourriaud and Michel de Certeau, who propose relational aesthetics and everyday aesthetics, respectively, that boil down to favouring art’s social aspects and implications over its consumption.

Following such dispositions, each of the nine essayists sets out to blur the line between artist and non-artist, which stands as a dutiful reminder to both groups that they are not so different: that artists have social obligations; that ordinary citizens can and should be creative thinkers; and as Moschopedis says, “that our ultimate aim should be to eventually dissolve into a community.”

As a roadmap for artists working in practices similar to their own, the book is a prominent example of the duo’s politics of engendering the exchange of information, co-operation and helping others achieve a greater good. It works in direct contrast to art practices that demand primacy and secrecy among peers for the new and noteworthy, and competition for limited resources. In addition to being an exercise in democratic sharing, generosity and selflessness, the book does two other key things, both of which are rare occurrences in Calgary: It provides an opportunity for artists to practice academic writing and have their work published, and it creates a lasting testament to local histories otherwise forgotten.

In this last instance, the book surpasses an audience of other artists. It contributes rare but significant accounts of our city’s cultural history, such as musician Cal Cavendish’s illegal dropping of his audio recordings and cow manure over downtown from an aircraft in the ’70s; pre-Second World War community gardens; a performance-art-inspired babysitting co-op; and British architect Thomas Lawson’s unrealized utopic plans for the city from 1912, among others.

Although the preface and introduction state that the book is a record of art-related activities done by non-artists, this gets a little confused in the selection of essays, since almost half of them actually recount practices by bona fide artists, musicians or architects. The distinction of artists and non-artists also becomes a bit slippery when the editors offer the remark that community engagement by all citizens is foremost: “the idea that the artist isn’t necessarily required for creative acts of resistance to take place or generous social relations to develop,” as Moschopedis recaps. It raises the question whether the distinction of artist should exist at all in this model of engaged citizens.

Distinctions aside, the collected essays unquestionably provide examples of how to navigate inclusive politics and social justice within a pervasive capitalist atmosphere. Like the title’s suggested warmth and openness, Knock On Any Door is here for everyone.

Knock On Any Door, by Mia Rushton and Eric Moschopedis, 78 pp., is published by the Department of Forgotten Histories.

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Review of Janet Werner "Another Perfect Day" at Esker

Originally published in FFWD on July 25, 2013 http://www.ffwdweekly.com/article/arts/visual-arts/exposing-the-ugly-quest-for-beauty-11029/

Janet Werner’s painting “Crying Eyes” from 2010 seems strategically placed overlooking Esker Foundation’s window-view of Inglewood’s alleys and backyards. It’s a large oil painting of a cute shorthaired blond done up in 50’s style secretary attire, with daisies in her hair. Her cool blue elongated cat eyes that agitate the warm teal background emit tears. It’s as if she were peering out on the city with animalistic fear and anxiety. It’s as if the painting itself was doing the looking. But not quite.

Source: ex-chamber. Image by Janet Werner. 

The exhibition’s curator, Kent Archer says Werner’s recent body of paintings “invest nameless figures with human subjectivity and emotion.” However, as you walk around the space, filled with glamorous models and transposed celebrity images, you get the opposite sense of what Archer is saying. In the place of emotive individuals, there is the sense that these faces and figures look on with blank stares.

Source: gallerieswest.ca. Image by Janet Werner.

The models in the paintings- as in the media’s specular images- are robbed of the possibility of any meaning beyond their appearances. Likewise, the paintings have no background or context for the figures to live within. All they have is the topographies of their own bodies and outfits, sometimes overblown in a kind of body dysmorphia, the only context that matters. To further the idea of women as decoration, Werner represents ridiculous protrusions, appendages and ornaments on the heads and bodies of her women, such as top hats, oversized bows, clusters of ghosts, or else she replaces their heads with those of animals, alluding to the relegation of women to the luxury pet or the thoughtless beast.

 Source: canadianart.ca. Image by Janet Werner.

The paintings themselves are reminiscent of a genre called “Bad” Painting, where historical tropes of portraiture are laden with iconoclastic moves of expressive abstraction and seemingly clumsy execution. In truth, this deskilled aesthetic employed by Werner is farthest from the reality of her painting abilities. Rather, these apparent miscalculations and “mistakes” convey turmoil, in the manner of a Philip Guston or an Otto Dix. However, where Guston, Dix and others were consumed with representing the horrific new conception of humanity post WW2, Werner’s paintings posit a strange juxtaposition of horror with beauty.

Classical views of both the ugly and the beautiful are placed in uncomfortable proximity to each other, where they in fact emanate from the same figure. In “Kinder” blotches of brown paint become skin aberrations on an otherwise pretty face. The grotesque, exaggerated, and disproportionate- timeless markers of the “ugly” - interrupt the imminent experience of the beautiful, which is triggered and disallowed within the same painting. In other words, good taste meshes with bad taste, forcing us to become aware of our guttural reactions to images of women and aesthetics in general. This witnessing of simultaneous extremes-the grotesquely ugly and the idealized beauty- shocks us into the realization that this battle itself is abhorrent.

  Source: birchlibralato.com. Image by Janet Werner.

Whereas some figures deal with the monstrous overtly, others such as “Yellow Bow” make use of the perfect girl face, an undeniable draw for the eye. Underlying both the perfect and monstrous portrayals of girls, however, is this idea of the gap and struggle between the two, as well as society’s progression towards the post-human or cyborg, who is also a monster. Cosmetic surgery and unnatural beauty regimens are implied, both through the content of idealized models and in the technique of painting itself- a sort of Frankensteinian process akin to building a being out of inert matter. Anthropologist Michael Taussig’s calls it “cosmic surgery,” so named because when we alter our appearances through surgery, we alter natural creation, which has cosmic implications on our selves.

  Source: voltashow.com. Image by Janet Werner. 

It is hard to discern a solution to the superficial in Werner’s paintings (after all, she is a painter completely invested in surface quality.) But there is a warning and prediction. In our effort to escape at all costs the ugly, through surgery and repressions, we in fact become more ugly. The monstrous, in the case of Werner’s paintings, is not merely a superficial flaw or fault, but a horrific lack of feeling and individual centeredness. In this way, the ugly is the only way out of this struggle for beauty, because it is the inevitable result of it.

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Situational Bodies - Exhibition Text For Multifarious at Truck Gallery

Originally Published alongside the exhibition which ran April 26 - May 25, 2013

“Exploring the corporeal possibilities that have been foreclosed by a given culture's own imaginary, itself helps to bring into being a new imaginary--one that does justice to the richness of our bodily differences.” [1]

  We tend to think of the notion of the stereotype as incorrect, harmful, and shameful.  However it can be difficult to draw a line of distinction between a cultural stereotype and cultural traditions, practices, or “truths.” It can be said that the process of generating stories, rituals and folklore spills over into stereotyping and vice versa when statements become disproportionate to actual occurrences. As problematic as generalizing may be, the maligned interchangeability of stereotype with cultural fact means that both contribute to the formation of organized identification within and throughout a given public or social domain.

Lucie Chan and Marigold Santos, in their bodies of work comprising Multifarious, represent cultural stereotypes to which they- in one way or another- can be said to “belong.” However, as a term literally meaning “solid impression” these artists address the stereo-type as an initial situation, not a solid truth and not the initial situation. [2]

Image credit: multifarious, Lucie Chan & Marigold Santos, TRUCK Contemporary Art in Calgary, 2013. Photos by Rebecca Rowley

To set off her process of drawing and painting the work in Multifarious, Lucie Chan listened to and recorded stories of cultural traditions and expectations told by three women who count as Asian because of their geographical origins and/or appearances. Here within the artist’s choice of subjects is revealed how the process of stereotyping, or perpetuating a certain image without change[3], can be riddled with grief and difficulty, especially when associations are based on appearance alone.

In order to intersect with the cultural, economical and technological forces responsible for fixing certain associations, particularly those of the individual identity, Chan and Santos both recognize the restrictions of categorization as well as perpetuate multifarious images of cultural identity from within a particular categorization itself. By acknowledging cultural differences, they develop difference itself as a framework from which to create new possibilities of body image and individual identity. At the same time their working within particular cultural associations resists the nihilistic leveling of universalism by creating their imaginary morphologies within a specific set of cultural characteristics incorporated within their lived experiences.

Image credit: multifarious, Lucie Chan & Marigold Santos, TRUCK Contemporary Art in Calgary, 2013. Photos by Rebecca Rowley

Santos’ depiction of the mythical creature of the Manananggal from Filipino folklore lends itself to the idea of an imaginary body from which new body images can arise. The Manananggal monster, usually female, can separate parts of her body in order to fly around and in turn sever and consume another’s body. Santos represents the monster detached in several places along its body, either floating in its segmented position or decomposing into/becoming the ground. The spaces left between its separated body parts are presented as an absence and allow the body to be considered by the viewer as a non-whole or multiplicity- a thought which can be monstrous or abject in itself.

Similarly, Chan’s drawings of body clusters, segregated heads, feet and outstretched arms are articulated as points of being or presentation severed from an overall unified composition and pinned to the gallery wall, which represents a void space ready to engender new meaning. It is in this way that both artists represent an unidentified or undefined space within the context of a body/bodies wherein the imagination is set to the task of creating new body images. Gail Weiss’ description of Foucault’s understanding of dream space reveals its role in destroying stereotypes, fixed ideas and regimens of power over the individual’s self-concept:

Such dreaming… would disrupt the hold of any one image or set of images upon the imagination by hearkening back to the objective origins of human existence, where significations are not yet fixed, but are nonetheless present in all of their multiplicity, contradictions, and fluidity.[4]

In the sense that stereotypes, folk tales and cultural memories present a specific context of identity, they are ontological situations, which may contain what Badiou calls an “evental site,” wherein an event occurs “on the edge of the void.”[5] Depicted in Multifarious, the evental sites are the empty voids within the context of social bodies, wherein the “event” of new body conceptions and images emerge. To constitute as a true event in this sense, the new body conception would necessarily contain all the information within the situation depicted in the image as well as the completely new conception itself. In other words, the rendered impressions of stereotypes are both the situation and site of change.

Image credit: multifarious, Lucie Chan & Marigold Santos, TRUCK Contemporary Art in Calgary, 2013. Photos by Rebecca Rowley

Instead of coherent bodies shrouded from each other across a Cartesian divide of self/not self, Multifarious presents the event of perceiving a new fluidity within the idea of fixed cultural images as well as singular body images. Within the situation of particular cultural identities, mythologies and memories there are non-represented spaces (voids) forming a disjointed body, which proposes itself as a radically new event.

[1]Gail Weiss, body images: embodiment as intercorporeality (New York: Routledge, 1999).

[2] The term stereotype derives from the Greek words στερεός (stereos), "firm, solid"[4] and τύπος (typos), "impression,"[5] hence "solid impression".

[3] The first reference to "stereotype" in its modern use in English, outside of printing, was in 1850, in a noun, meaning "image perpetuated without change

[4] Ibid.

[5] Alain Badiou, Being and Event Trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005).