Duet
review by Stephen Horne, Canadian Art
Andrew Forster, like Montreal’s other compelling video installation artist Bettina Hoffman, relies on cyclical gesture as a structure in recent performance/video work. For the past few years Forster has presented works that use video, performance, text and installations to challenge us in the certainty of our self-reflections. In 2004, he presented MOAT, a performance event in Trafalgar Square that utilized live video mixed with pre-recorded materials. Cinema (2005) was a hugely ambitious and confrontational performance split into two parts, one staged in a Montreal public park and one in a glass fronted theatre space across the street. Both sites presented performers as audience, and vice versa, each for the other. Currently, Duet (2008), Forster’s recent video installationcontinues his interest in stalled movement, opacity and a loss of time where the viewer’s possessive movement is refused. The motif of cyclical repetitions here stages a Sisyphus-like program of unproductive labour.
In Duet we find a wall-sized video projection in an otherwise empty black room. Approaching this video we inevitably enter at a random point into an ongoing narrative. However, it’s not long before the narrative is arrested and the actions repeat; the beginning of which is marked by the narrative action of a man in a suit and tie removing his jacket, his tie and finally his shirt, leaving him in pants and T-shirt. The T-shirt he struggles with, as if he can’t resolve to remove it, or as if some hidden force is blocking its removal. A woman appears and begins to assist, and she also supplies calming gestures to curb the man’s obvious angst. The success of the T-shirt’s removal is undercut when the action reverts to it’s beginning again the whole process of removal.
This is one cycle. However what we have been watching includes gestures and actions repeated by the performers, and these make up another level of repetition. When I refer to Forster’s interest in gesture, I am referring not only to the gestures of the performers represented in the video but more principally to the gesture of the film structure itself which consists of cyclical repetition. Gestures on the part of the two performers go nowhere, being subjected to fragmentation and repetition. And so the images of the two actors playing out a sequence of gestures which ultimately fall short, failingco inconclusively, are also repeated at the level of the filmic structure itself and we are left facing the performer’s isolation as our own, as a frustration proportionate to our desire to grasp control over the work of art.
These performers are staging a highly abstracted re-enactment of a TV news fragment. The original source that has been presented on a small flatscreen monitor in the gallery office has been left open to chance discovery by viewers and its information may or may not be pertinent to our investigation. Turning to this elided news fragment we discover that the story features a young boy apparently responding to orders; orders by which he is commanded to remove a large awkward bundle attached to his body. Many viewers would recognize this bundle as an explosive suicide vest as worn by suicide bombers. And the boy’s movements resemble those of the male performer in the video, or is it vice versa? In any event, the news imagery is necessarily that of a specific place and time, a document.
And so the two screens, almost entirely separated, each present a narrative of which the subject is conflict. What is most pertinent is the location of this struggle within the desire for communication, here presented by way of gesture, the filmic gesture taking the form of a narrative failing to narrate, of time caught in a loop with an ensuing sense of remoteness that asks us to rethink the nature of our attachment to the other.