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Vues de Beyrouth (Videos from Beirut)/ Galerie B-312, Montreal

Maria Eichhorn / Espace VOX, Montreal

9 Evenings Reconsidered: Art, Theater and Engineering, 1966 / Concordia University, Montreal

Vida Simon: Excavation Drawings / Hôtel de la Montagne, Montreal

Vues de Beyrouth / Galerie B-312, Montreal
[Art Papers, Atlanta, Jan./Feb. 2007]

Artists: Ziad Antar and Marc Casal Liotier, Mireille Eid Astore, Mansour El-Habre, Khaled Ramadan, Rima Saab, Louma Salamé, Shawki Youssef, Akram Zaatari
Curators: Ricardo Mbarak, Wadih Safieddine

This program of videos curated by Ricardo Mbarak and Wadih Safieddine includes work both by artist who are relatively well known outside Lebanon (such as Akram Zaatari whose work has been seen at the Sydney and Sao Paulo biennales) as well as artists whose work has not been widely circulated. Several exhibitions of the work of Lebanese artists such as “Out of Beirut” at Modern Art Oxford (UK) this year and the wide circulation of the work of Walid Raad / The Atlas Group attest to a desire for an alternate view on the events of the last decade in the middle east and in Lebanon in particular. Though widely varied the works of these artists present an attempt to re-witness or reprocess decades of conflict and foreign intervention not through the distorting eye of the media but through the creative methodologies of cultural production. It is the power of the imagination to make conjecture and creative propositions in the real world which fact-based methodologies like journalism, politics, and the social sciences simply can not approach because of their responsibility to divide ‘fact' from ‘conjecture' (which is possibly no more that a form of sanitization).

It is one thing to judge works of art with an eye to relative quality in the terms of the criteria of contemporary international art and it is quite another to approach this work as a continuing and necessary collective unfolding of the construction of truth, history and event in a region constantly being interpreted through journalism with its preoccupation with facts and news, where history is written not only by the victors but through the casual expediency of the media, where image dominates analysis and the news event is valued precisely because it can be presented as a surprise with no roots in historical or lived reality. These videos have a vital place in our world because we need to know more. The quality of these works, in formal terms, is quite variable and the strategies occasionally clumsy but together they are evidence of the slow processing that the trauma of violent disruption entails. The tapes predominantly deal with the civil war (1975 - 1991) and its aftermath, slowly sifting through 'the facts' to uncover something real,   to make lived sense out of it - a need which is ongoing so many years later. Further, they offer alternative ground for assessing the most recent violent acts such as the Harriri assassination and the Israeli invasion.   

Mishwar by Ziad Antar and Marc Casal Liotier deals directly with the aftermath of war as Hadi searches for confirmation of the fate of his brother who disappeared during the conflict. Told through interviews juxtaposed to recent shots of public demonstrations surrounding the Syrian withdrawal the video reinforces the continuity between past and current events. He knows that it is his brother's body which has be exhumed from a grave because he recognizes the t-shirt his brother was wearing but he is waiting for confirmation of DNA evidence from France before telling his mother. The wait for scientific proof which will allow closure for the family is agonizing and in fact does not happen in the video. We are left suspended between doubt and certainty like so many caught in the massive erasure of continuity that is one of the unseen destructions of armed conflict.

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Maria Eichhorn / Espace VOX, Montreal
[Art Papers, Atlanta, Mar./Apr. 2007]

This exhibition is a selection of six works which present a cross-section of German artist Maria Eichhorn's production. The pieces range from documentation of older work to works which actively engage the viewer and this exhibition situation in the present tense. As such the exhibition present an interesting set of examples of the limitations and possibilities of conceptual or information-art practice and its ability to activate discourse on different levels. The pieces include presentations of Eichhorn's early work in collaboration with pioneering conceptual art curator Seth Siegelaub around artist's contractual rights (a model “Artist's Agreement” asserting the artist's right to a royalty on the increased value of a re-sold work) and documentation in the form of video interviews of Billboard Istanbul Biennial (1995) in which the artist created a place of discourse by installing a large billboard in a public square and commissioning local activist groups to design posters to be displayed there.

There is an elegant side to conceptualism as object-making, a presentation fetish which is now a convention for information-oriented art practice, especially work which employs non-narrative strategies of institutional critique. It consists of a gallery presentation method which involves luxuriously produced and framed documents, display cases, videos, and so on. These documents-as-object allow us access to works which activated a particular set of conditions at a particular time, often outside the gallery system, a quasi-academic and quasi-aesthetic archive which makes a compromise between the presentation necessities of the marketplace, the museum or the traveling exhibition and the realm of (non-visual) critical discourse.   At best, the pieces allow us to think about similar conditions elsewhere, offering an example of an alternate take whose strategies can be considered in detail as they are now ‘out of the fray'. As such the documentary pieces have no greater or lesser strength than a text about the work—they make the work palatable and open to consideration.

Occasionally the document-as-object adds an extra dimension by allowing us to consider primary material evidence. Such is the case of Prohibited Imports (2003). The project involved repeatedly sending a potentially controversial group of books from Germany to Japan in an effort to provoke the Japanese custom's practice of submitting books to censorship. In the gallery exhibition in Japan a display case housed the two dozen books which, like a scientific probe, had passed through the censoring apparatus. This case is in the current exhibition.   A shelf on top allows us to examine two copies of a book of photographs by Robert Maplethorpe, one of which was censored and one of which was not. An extraordinary physical delicacy is juxtaposed to a metaphorical violence as the contour of the penis which is the center of the photograph has been meticulously and finely sanded removing the layer of ink and leaving the white paper beneath.

The most compelling work in the exhibition is Film Lexicon of Sexual Practices (1999-2005). It is compelling because it activates this space at this time; it implicates the viewer in a set of circumstances which are predicated on the conditions of reception of the work in the present tense. One enters the gallery to find a projector. A gallery attendant (following the explicit directions of the artist) explains that   Film Lexicon is a set of 3min films with titles like Breast Licking, Ear Licking, Eyes, Mouth, Cunnilingus, French Kissing and Love Bite . We may see one or any number of them. The films themselves are static shots, more or less clinical representations of exactly these things. The level of engagement is simultaneously heightened and dried out. The work attenuates the mystery, exoticism, transgression and amplifies the commerce/power relationship upon which the sex industry is based. Once you see one film you know that this is not going to get more or less interesting. What is heightened by the piece, is a kind of exchange in the absence of pleasure or connection: the alienation which is one of the conditions for commercial pornography is flipped on its head as the privacy or anonymity or the sex-shop or web site encounter is reconfigured as an two-way encounter of an entirely different sort.

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9 Evenings Reconsidered / Concordia University, Montreal
[Art Papers, Atlanta, May/June 2007; co-written with Anja Bock]

The 1966 performance series 9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering , organized by Billy Klüver, was conceived as an open-ended experiment. What would happen if artists could collaborate with engineers in the early phases of a work's production, thus giving them access to innovative technology as a new creative material? Klüver invited four dancers (Deborah Hay, Yvonne Rainer, Lucinda Childs, Steve Paxton), two musicians (John Cage, David Tudor), and four visual artists (Robert Rauschenberg, Öyvind Fahlström, Alex Hay, Robert Whitman), to collaborate with over 30 engineers from Bell Laboratories in developing elaborate performances presented over nine evenings in New York's Armory to audiences of up to 1500.

9 Evenings Reconsidered: Art, Theater and Engineering, 1966 , curated by Catherine Morris, [Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, March 9 – April 21, 2007] includes extensive documentation, artifacts and a catalogue containing articles published contemporaneously with the event as well as current reappraisals. The exhibition allows us to reassess the historical significance of 9 Evenings and simultaneously provokes questions about the restitution of past artistic events and the increasingly dominant role of technology in cultural discourse.

Due to the wealth of documentary materials (color photographs, video footage, sound recordings, excerpts of interviews, etc.) in 9 Evenings Reconsidered , it is possible to construct a fairly clear picture of the individual pieces. Taken together, the disparate sources offer a detailed understanding of the event's production that no one sitting in the bleachers in 1966 would have been privy to. The hierarchical privileging of original presentation over subsequent representation is thus questionable. Convention continues to assert that documentation only serves to index the work in its absence, but it is important to note that, firstly, all artwork depends on mediation to be understood (whether it is present or not), and secondly, as the case of 9 Evenings demonstrates, the picture may be in greater focus now, after the fact and heavily mediated.

In its “reconsidered” version, viewers can follow the artistic process and study up close some of the technological devices designed by the engineers, such as Robert Rauschenberg's modified tennis racquets and archaic-looking relay boards replete with uncountable wires. Despite this emphasis on authentic artifacts and schematic diagrams, which falls in line with the art world convention of aura, the curatorial framework offers simply another interpretation: it is brought to the work; it is not in the work in any essential way. 9 Evenings Reconsidered allows viewers to explore the formal residue of the works while leaving their content relatively under-interpreted.

The catalogue fills in some of the missing information: Lucy Lippard's and Brain O'Doherty's articles from 1966 question the viability of the incorporation of technology in the creation of a new theatrical form and the survival of the avant-garde. Lucy Lippard defines two basic conundrums in the meeting of art and technology that are still relevant today. Firstly, technical errors and miscues often took center stage, shunting aside a focus on the synthesis of aesthetic and technological inquiry. Secondly the conception of work itself “was not radical enough.”

9 Evenings made use of technology in ways that are now quite ubiquitous: the amplification or rescaling of audio and visual material; the translation of one effect into another (eg. sound into light); the wireless communication of instructions; and the use of sensors to transpose inaudible or invisible effects and data into the range of human perception. The first three are simple extensions of stagecraft, different in technology but not in nature from better known theatrical machinery. The last, particularly in the work of John Cage and Alex Hay, creates the potential of a critical dialogue with technology. None of these projects succeed by virtue of impressive technology but by how that technology is critically framed in relationship to the viewer.

Lippard articulates failures in the stagecraft as a kind of elephant in the room, marring many pieces in 9 Evenings . But a different approach to failure is revealed in John Cage's work and illustrates a sophisticated and implicitly critical relationship to technology. Variations VII gathered sound signals from many sources: through microphones offsite, radios, fans, blenders, etc. and the electronic “central control” used for the whole event. These feeds were then manipulated and layered into a dense soundscape. As one participant put it, Cage wanted to make a piece using all the sound there is. His piece was predicated on a kind of failure. Not only would the utopian conjecture of using all sound simply cancel itself out if it could ever succeed but the technical apparatus itself (at the Armory and around the globe) produced most of the signal, though interference, line hum, short circuits, etc. Interference was the piece. This was Cage's critical gesture, which, unlike much of the work in the event, engaged the ideological baggage of technology.

Conversely, Yvonne Rainer's Carriage Discretions reveals that sometimes technology is only stage machinery. In the piece performers moved apparently randomly and interacted with various objects while slapstick films were projected behind. Rainer used radios to communicate instructions from the director to the performers, which were heard as part of the soundtrack. This work shows that, while we have to be attentive to the use of machinery, it need not necessarily occupy the centre of critical discussion. Many of the uses of technology in 9 Evenings prefigure their use in the following decades but do not represent a significant shift in meaning-making anymore than when the opera houses of Europe began to engage marine engineers to invent the complex rigging of backstage machinery.

Looking at the discourse generated by the individual pieces, as opposed to the facts of their production, is not part of the exhibition's objective, for then it would quickly become conceptually and logistically unmanageable. With every instance of mediation and diffusion, there is inevitably both a loss and a gain of meaning, but which information is considered primary and which secondary is a matter of debate: the curator is stuck with the role of interpreter. 9 Evenings Reconsidered implicitly delimits the event under the rubric of today's preoccupation with “new” media, thus continuing the very dynamic that Lippard criticized: the enhancement of technological effects at the expense of artistic content and a lack of “radical” ambitions.

Cage's foregrounding of interference as content and Rainer's relegating of technology to a supporting role in the service of wider meaning reveal two rigorous approaches to the use of technology. The co-sponsoring of the Montreal version of 9 Evenings Reconsidered by the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art and Science and the university's faculty of engineering, indicates a desire to frame the event as a precursor to a discipline of art and technology. The lasting success of the original 9 Evenings was its interrogation of the neo-avant-garde's oppositional tactics, which, as O'Doherty argues, had become conventional by 1966. The lasting success of 9 Evenings Reconsidered will be that it allows us to question this reinstatement of beaux arts disciplinary territoriality around a particular medium and to see the rich potential of these cross-disciplinary trajectories.  

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Imagined Passage: Vida Simon / Excavation Drawings
[Fuse, Toronto, summer 2007]

Performance-installation, Hôtel de la Montagne, Montreal (part of VIVA, art action event by Skol Gallery); 10 October – 15 October 2006

Vida Simon's Excavation Drawings was a performance that took place in a hotel room over six consecutive days. An art-audience visited this space outside the normal cultural circuit, waiting in the lobby to be escorted up to the room where the artist was living, dreaming and drawing. Inside, t he room's surfaces were covered with newsprint; the floor, walls, sofa and all the furniture. On the evening I visited, a tear in this neat ‘inside skin' made a hole through which I could see the dresser mirror. The room's windows look out over downtown and if they wished, visitors could go out onto the balcony and look down de la Montagne towards St-Catherine (around the corner is the hotel where John and Yoko conducted their 1969 Bed-In ). The artist made eye contact, a kind of welcome or acknowledgement that we are not strangers, or don't have to be, that we are simultaneously confined and not confined within a theatrical construction. In this instant there was a deft and precise articulation of the special rules of this real but exceptional situation. For a few minutes we are to convene within this exception. Then the performer slides into the chair-space underneath the desk, curls her back against us and is gone. My companion and I explore the room, which is littered with charcoal drawings, some simple, like note takings, some worked and heavy with soot. A few drawings are pinned to a line stretching across the room.

Eventually Simon comes out from under the desk to write stories on the paper-covered floor at our feet for us to read (one story is about the chamber maid who came to work and may have been alarmed by what she saw). She works on drawings and interrupts this concentrated activity at one point to hand us walnuts as a gift. She never speaks. Simon works with charcoal in our presence, erasing, rubbing, drawing and writing, erasing again, until each piece of Arches paper has, it seems, held and released a thousand thoughts and images. These stories-as-drawing emerge from the process of living, eating and sleeping in this place. Some are about growing up not far from here; sometimes they are surreal and autobiographical, sometimes more political. They are about a personal history of this place but also touch on matters of urban culture, economic disparity and in another mode of inquiry (in academia), might be defined as urbanism. As visitors we witness a slice of this inquiry, the accumulated dreams-on-paper, stories told through writing and gesture. In an inversion of normal artist-run performance practice we only see a fragment of a longer process (a half-hour out of six days) rather than an event that is a highly compressed and heightened moment or “show.” I find this distinction important. Even if we could consult the archive of drawings, a whole is not accessible since many drawings took place on every sheet.

Excavation Drawings also involves a writing collaboration with Canadian poet Erin Moure. A text on Excavation Drawings by Moure is available in the room. Though physically contained in a pamphlet on a table by the door, conceptually this text expands outwards into a new geography. Like the clothesline of drawings, it cuts a rich diagonal across this plane, across the room and out into spaces beyond. In conventional terms this is a cross-disciplinary collaboration. Better to say they breathe together for a while. A little duet in which our reading crosses her drawing crosses her writing and enucleates a few more layers of this imagined space laid-up over the richness of this real space. Moure's text, in English, French and Galician, draws on her own preoccupation with translation as a boundary-crossing and redrawing act. To translate is to redraw language on a different ground, on a different basis of knowledge. Why this deliberate subversion / sub-version? Moure writes,

To be hearing then a translation practice opening, a practice of interpretation conducted under closed-air conditions: the sound of charcoal, motion, rubbing that extends and opens time's small room or “cabina.”… There is an element thus of swim in this excavation of erasure and setting down, till all that forms the “pictural” is the gesture itself, the floating bowl que reborda fluídico , and real spoon, “a dream of ash teeth”… the burnt fist of wood, madeira queimada, and the calcination, out of ash, (is there still, yet, metaphor) comes gesture, as if ash is not the end but is a diction, a fistula, passage outward.

What is left of Excavation Drawings is the last layer worked out of each drawing and the last draft of Moure's text. Layers of charcoal and typeset words become a metaphor for memory. Or become memory. The material itself becomes a sign of transformation and occasionally of mortal dread; soot caked on the inner surfaces of being. Charcoal dust is transformed into depictions of charred forest, of shelters, of graves. Simon performs in striped pajamas, simultaneously whimsical in the rhyming of a childlike morning playfulness and ominous as a faint echo of a concentration camp uniform. This work seems to treasure the complexity of multiple meanings. At the same time the process is articulated by an awareness of the theatrical devices being used. I am not very interested in drawing, but I come and sit, and I am “drawn to” by Simon: drawing becomes storytelling, communication in the present tense, rather than object making or archiving of experience. Performance art (which I am only tentatively more interested in than drawing) is twisted out of its cabaret event-splash cliché and becomes an action of meditative duration with which we interact for a few moments.

I was interrupted in writing this review by seeing an interview with Jean Genet, recorded in the writer's last years. In the conversation, the interviewer prods for biographical details. Genet squirms and gently rebuffs. What further meaning is to be taken from the facts of his life as a piece of theatre? Is his homosexuality a political act? He likens the interview to a police interrogation. Eventually, exasperated by the situation he asks the film crew (who can't be seen) if they would not like to put an end to this, push him off the chair, flip this ridiculous and conventional construction. The interviewer has tried to reinforce the image of Genet as a rebel and iconoclast but Genet seems to know that the real subversion lies elsewhere, not in the surface image of rebellion reinforced by biographical anecdotes. How do you pass the time? I eat in restaurants and watch people… Where do you live? In Morocco… You have a house? I live in a hotel…

Genet sees a distinction between the image of rebellion which the interviewer is trying to mine and the actual forms and boundaries that hem our thinking and need to be carefully and knowingly stressed into rupture. He refuses to be corralled on the surface of things, insisting on the right to provoke below the surface and across boundaries in such a way that no single work remains safely in its genre, but rather they become ‘events' (as opposed to a representation of a position), spilling across boundaries to provoke conversation. I like this as a definition of performance. I see the image of hotel room that Genet pokes towards the interviewer as a refusal of family and normalcy, an acknowledg ment of class division, of passage as the only permanence, of separateness and solitude as givens of human existence. To “inhabit” a hotel is emblematic of the normalness of these things; an unbinding of the static fabric of normalcy . In this sense the room is a trope, a word at play. As John and Yoko's hotel room down the street decades ago is much different (a stage for a media event made out of a bed) yet at play in the same way. And Simon's room also.

Do performance art practitioners sometimes only mimic the postures and tropes of outrageousness, supplied by the archive of performance practice; repeating the event-style of the happening, the shock of the stressed body or the cabaret of transgression? We have entered the era of the professional marginal artist where the image of marginality we cultivate may to some extent only be conventional thinking, marginally funded. The challenge to artists is to weave a path out of this “marginal as normal,” to understand the theatre of culture in a different way and activate or engage it on layers other than those that are most obvious. It is precisely this block (this possibility/impossibility) that draws me towards performance. In this sinking ship, I search from room to room for portholes that lead away from a repetition of formal strategy. In this context the evolution of Genet's subversions ( and Moure's sub-versions) are a useful reference.

In this preoccupation I have learned something from Vida and Erin in their excavations. With Excavation Drawings the points of escape come in between the layers of language and the mapping of knowledge; in the translation. Not on the biographer's surface, not on the surface of the everyday, not on the surface of polished professional moves, but in the poetic excavation. Heroic upheaval can sometimes be passed over in favour of a careful dig in the light of a subtle understanding of this theatre of culture — the activated space between the work and the visitors. Simon's Excavation Drawings begin this exploration at a place where I would not have expected it, in a little escape hatch that has opened in a wall made of paper.

© 1998- 2004 Andrew Forster (all rights reserved)