First, the Received Information:

Peculiar Culture is an alternate dimension of the AGGV’s Baroque extravaganza, aiming to “explores contemporary expressions of the Baroque”, bringing together Uvic’s Luanne Martineau with notorious Young British Artists Jake and Dinos Chapman. We read that Martineau and the Chapmans like Baroque artists, “combine beauty, perversity, humour and horror to engage the audience with their elaborate executions”.

The notion of extending an ethos beyond its historical context here is provocative and potentially relevant; especially as the accompanying Misshapen Pearl exhibit works to flesh out said context. As the promotional material notes, the Baroque period saw the exploitation of high production values to communicate religious themes in a direct, theatrical manner that implicated the viewer’s emotional involvement, and that the aristocracy also saw the dramatic style as a means of expressing wealth, power and control…the artwork as counter-reformation propaganda, a spectacle of force that conjoins religious experience with the language of power for the last, definitive time in Western Culture before the Age of Reason took hold.

Perhaps you could posit that Baroque imagery creeps into our own millennial zeitgeist as an exposition of the morally freighted power relations of the Neocon era with their ever -elaborating of modes of promotion, commodification, security and surveillance. Contemporary visions of the Baroque, like the films of Peter Greenaway or the pickled sharks of Damien Hirst, call to mind a culture voyeuristic to the point of moribund ‘pornocracy’, obsessed with the palpable possession of material prestige (as in real estate) in an abstracted, information-based society.

All this is by way of relating to some of the information posted with the exhibition: that
Martineau’s felt sculpture – “addresses social realism, racism and conceits of high modernism”, by using traditional felting techniques to create “beautifully grotesque soft sculptures”. The Chapman brothers are billed as ‘collaborating’ with Goya, taking some of the imagery and much of the look of his famous Disasters of War and Caprichos etchings, and combining them with their own lexicon: stabbing middle fingers, swastikas, and mushroom clouds.

Chapman Fingers

Recently a student reminded me that a lot of the Chapman brothers’ images might emerge from a 1970’s adolescence: the mushroom cloud everyone learned to expect (as in Generation X writer’s Douglas Copeland’s many and varied suburban nuclear apocalypse fantasies), the swastika’s Holocaust as not-quite-fiction agitated into an open sore by the middle-fingering sex pistols. But there are other implications that build through the consistencies and inconsistencies of the staggered prints. The image of a hanging man (cribbed from the Disasters of War) appears as a repeated emblem…Like the Chapmans’ swastika of severed fingers, it is the gesture created out of dead parts, bringing to mind something that is acted upon but does not act – human meat as emblem, but not agent. The image breaks out of a stew of loose marks and scratches (a mannered nod to old-master facture) to become an intractable revenant…a body without an internal organizing principle that has been shaped into its present condition by terrible force.

This suggestion of invisible, violently oppressive or torturous forces working on the body recalls French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s writing about another displaced expression of Baroque: Francis Bacon’s images ‘screaming’ Popes, drawn from incomplete quotations of Titian and Velasquez.[1] Deleuze suggested that Bacon’s incomplete figural expressions amount to a kind of mapping of call and response from the painted body to our own, a catalogue of twitches, reflexes, starts, pains, rushes and jitters, what Bacon referred to getting across the sensations of ‘the nervous system’.[2]

The trouble with the etchings is that what happens on a physical, ‘nervous’ level with Bacon (and, as I’ll go on to say, in Martineau) is literalized into sensationalistic illustration the etchings. The smudges in the etchings look quoted: they’re too deliberately positioned in relation to the source of their quotation to be felt directly, rather than through historical reference-making, so the sensation is not immediate, informal and rich with crude/sophisticated ambiguities as in original Goya, but is a slightly queasy ‘slippage’ (there’s that word again) from reference to an implied content.

The confluence of the etchings (as an accumulative experience, as in their staggered hanging) is a stain or a smear – linguistically, a kind of slur, a word that doesn’t have its own meaning but refers only to the indignity of another word or identity…as the bodies are not ‘whole’ bodies, they suggest a syntax that is not whole. As a totality, they don’t add up to anything like the imminent sense of the farcical or monstrous that develops in Goya. Instead, they look like public toilet scrawls or the marginalia in a high-school notebook. I like the idea that hysterical, circumspect, self-defeating adolescence owes something to Goya & vice versa –because it does- but it gets a lot more mileage in ballpoint on notebook paper than in the overcultivated replications that are the etchings.

Bacon and Goya both assembled a visual syntax language out of parts: Bacon’s consisted of film stills, stop-motion-photography, art historical reproductions, newspaper clippings and his own photographic studies of models. Goya’s was cobbled together from first-hand Velasquez, second-hand Hogarth and Rembrandt, and probably some influence of his one-time acquaintance with Piranesi. In both cases, there was an expedience or impoverishment of resources that retained its fragmentary character in being deployed in the service of an incomplete subject. Goya’s etchings are filled with elements of visual obscurity that the look and mode of printmaking accommodates…the viewer feels that clarity is being deferred, and both desires or dreads a sharper view; Bacon, for his part, could not assemble his compositions without an accidental mark. I love that the Chapman Brothers have made dioramas using old Airfix WWII modelling kits. My feeling is that by sticking with an as-yet-unconsolidated vernacular (late 20^th century male adolescence), the sense of the unformed body as the potential threat or liberator of the pictures would have some serious power.

Figure Felt

By comparison Luanne Martineau’s felted pieces are more immediately affecting.

The nature of the felted material, and its unsuitability in creating sculptures that look like bodies presents the most obvious superficial tension. The pieces remind us of clothing, blankets, upholstery or cushions, but up close reveal parts (appendages, limbs, extremities) creating confusion over whether they are passive (as in garments or furniture, porous and domestic) or active (tactile, potentially responsive, alive, becoming).  Standing close to them, it is hard not to feel ticklishness in the spine or fingertips at the dramatic physical character of this contradiction.

What allows this contradiction to become durable, surviving the initial impact of their own visual/tactile hook, is the unresolved nature of the felting and sewing. Felt itself is already an aggregate, and in the errant stitches and half-formed structures, there is an aggregate of time and attention. There is a suggestion of denseness in both the immediate look and feel of the work, then, that is met by the implicit labour the work took to produce. The sense of handwork keeps getting bumped out of the way by the gestalt of the pieces as figures, however, so that something ‘uncanny’ emerges in the struggle, like the growth of a bacterial culture from spilled milk or a stalagtite from mineral runoff…a mindless, continuous development that threatens to take on the stature of a full-blown organism.

Like the Chapmans, Martineau places her work in opposition to a formal/ historical mode of viewing, in this case the body in relation to architectural elements that enclose, elevate and define it: plinth, table and chamber. Martineau’s figures are forms that become agglomerations of form before and after they are singularities, and the linear frameworks they are presented in allow them to seduce, beguile and mislead from unified approach to irreconcilable diversity. Here again I’m tempted to refer to Bacon, recalling John Berger’s note that the details of rooms, furniture and tailoring invariably survive the contortions of his figurations intact, supplying an institutional foil for the crisis of the body[3]. These stage-dressings (preciously complex in the early work, cruelly simple in the late) were part of Bacon’s interest in the motif of the crucifixion.

Martineau’s tall piece that runs from the floor to the wall in fact resembles a similar form in Bacon’s Three Studies for a Crucifixion Three (1962). It seems to simultaneously slump and rear up. Like certain insects, what we first assume to be the ‘head’ might just as easily be the tail. This also recalls the figuration of Philip Guston’s late work, all legs that don’t lift and noses dangling like worn out genitals. The analogy is to these painters more than superficial: both Bacon and Guston employ a stroke that hangs suspended from its impetus, looking both dead and alive. Matineau’s handwork is a series of episodes like a painter’s bouts and flurries, and their own deft absorptions belie an inert centre.

In this sense, we could also read the ‘uncanny’ as an cancerous outgrowth of Baroque complexity as the conspicuous display of power … a spider’s web might be creatively misread as  ‘Baroque’ (indeed it was a common 18^th century image in music, literature and decoration), but the mummified body of an insect or a bulging egg sack tightly bundled at the centre of the web is a bit uncanny. It implies that a stylistic mode that has been made to contain more than can be demonstrated or comprehended from the usual point of its attraction. I say, ‘cancerous’, because display without communication becomes an endless repetitious cycle, a multiplication without fertility, an elaboration that becomes self- referential and self-consuming. Martineau’s pieces present an unseen, unaccountable process posed in the attitude of disconnected, explicit display.

Wrapping Up

Where I would like to go with the spider analogy is to say that awful stopping-point of repetition/complexity versus display/inertia in Martineau’s presentations always offers more: there is a weird, conciliatory the possibility that the web can be rebuilt again and again, and that the subject represented may be neither dead or alive for certain. More pointedly, that its means of continuity may not fall under the usual categories of dead or alive, but instead present an array or bacterial or insect behaviours: superficial appendages, camouflage, cannibalism, feigned death or sexless reproduction. What they present is the sub-human as possibly more than human, which I suspect is their connection to issues of racism and genocide.

In that essay on Francis Bacon, Berger ultimately condemns Bacon as a conformist, for presenting behaviours without offering relief from them, a state which Berger compares to the implied abjection latent in a Disney cartoon character (here supplied by a grainy illustration of a 1960’s Donald Duck). I think that Berger is off the mark…he touches on, but fails to reveal a more complex operation in Bacon’s work that demands a more open reading: David Sylvester’s early essays on Bacon identify a problem with Bacon’s use of background space in relation to his figures that gets closer to the point.[4] In any case, I was led to the Disney/Bacon contrast in part because of Martineau’s references (via the text panel and her drawings) to early pulp cartooning like R.F. Outcault’s “Yellow Kid”. Berger suggests a static presentation of either a Bacon or Disney image with the imagined caption “This is all there is”. What he implies is that both Bacon and seminal Disney possessed a transfixing power in presenting a fully realized language of distortion as if it were a state of open transition. That is, you think the cartoon characters are flexible, but their grotesqueness is in fact terribly consistent, surviving temper tantrums and falling pianos without noticeable consequence. Bacon seems to present a character in metamorphosis, but has swept away all but the most superficial cues to the picture as a narrative construction. There is no way out or in, only display.  

In many of his early, darker pictures, Bacon employed certain props that now seem arch, notably putting sheet glass in front of his work in a way that caught the viewer’s reflection, teasing out the question of a more direct, visceral engagement of the viewer that broke through the convention of ‘illustration’ that Bacon both condemned and mastered. I want to put Martineau’s work on one side of the glass and the Chapman’s on the other. I want to say her work connects you more directly with all of these problems in a way that goes on connecting, altering, offering possibilities; while the etchings are a footnote, a closed episode, a look in on Goya’s content of fantasy, depravity and gravity that proves to also be a bore: a definitive, limiting spectacle.  

[This review originally appeared in Fault Line in the Spring of 2006. Rommer had previously exhibited at the Slide Room Gallery and I had help to install the work, in the collaborative, intuitive way the artist prefers. When she exhibited again at the Fifty-Fifty, it afforded m the opportunity to address this experience a second time.] 

“Yes that’s better. It’s like before, Baroque.” I am helping to hang a show of Inga Romer’s paintings in the front room of the Fifty-Fifty Arts Collective. This is the second time we’ve worked together this way, and the language used to communicate questions of placement has become pared-down. “Yes, that’s it”, or “It’s too much”, are momentarily enough: the relative colour, scale, and proximity of the paintings in relation to one another, how high or low on the walls they need to be, and also what kinds of correspondences the different works maintain between their own tenuous connection and the architectural foibles of the space. But why “Baroque?” Romer is hanging the work in what she refers to as a ‘rhizomatic crawl’: paintings spread out across space, hopscotching from low to high, paired off or strung along. The paintings are not evenly sized or spaced, and a lot of their impact as a grouping would seem to depend upon a certain random energy in their placement. Having said that, our discussion when hanging the pieces is distinctly contemplative. The first time I stepped into a roomful of Rommer’s work (the MFA graduate show at the University of Victoria) I sensed the space drifting apart from the raucous concourse: it became distinctly open and light, drafty even. Trying to read Romer’s paintings as forcefully energetic fails: there is a specific awkwardness in their coming together compositionally. The painted forms – overlays of variously coloured line-work depicting objects but especially parts of places – mostly do not create a central concern of the kind that agitates a speculative view and absorbs and throws back a direct gaze. Areas of ignition between the overlays -and there are many- do not gradually arrive at some bigger constellation or vortex of attention. Instead, they shift the penetrative gaze to one side. The eye catches one form, is drawn into another, and can often seem to slide right off the surface. In this sense, the pictures are not ‘tight’: old-school painting-argot for a will to self-reflexivity, autonomy and implied pleasure-as-rigour whose most famous name-check is Cezanne. Trailing off of the edge of one of Rommer’s painting, the viewer’s attention might as easily slip onto a piece of nearby ductwork as onto the loose strands of an adjacent picture, most likely both. The pictures can be almost vacuously clean looking, but the relations are promiscuous and run to plurality. Looking for ‘rhizomatic’ I refer myself to an essay by Gilles Deleuze, “Rhizome Versus Trees”…Deleuze says that the model of fragmentation so ingrained in the modern experience (from cubist collage to The Wasteland to twelve-tone music) always refers back to a centre, which has been lost but is still present as a conspicuous, magnetic absence. The rhizome is something else: a network of independent parts whose relationship is not held together by the anti-matter of loss, but by momentary, arbitrary contingencies…Modular, but endlessly incompatible. The week I read this definition, I went to see the Fantastic Frameworks show at the AGGV and wandered into Yayoi Kusama’s tentacle-like polka-dotted forms sprouting from the floor. The pieces look uncannily sensible (sensitive and/or sense-able), meaning that the dots -which one gradually recognizes have all been painted by hand- keep pushing the bright, matte colour-shapes into an optical-tactile tug of war that makes them visually very mobile. One minute they’re a bit of graphic interference, the next minute they’re rigid silhouettes against a flat blur of wall. The accumulative effect of repeatedly apprehending the forms from different points of view is a powerful sensation of stasis (those hand-dotted dots) fighting with a creeping suspicion of immanent animation. My suspicion is that Rommer’s works are also working out of the confusion of static/ dynamic relations. Her colours effect a shift from form to form via inscrutable likeness –tone on tone, as in the steely grey blues descending into cast iron blacks or oily flat browns – or analogous hues, typically vibrating yellows, oranges, reds or crimsons, whose juxtaposition seems to create a ‘third man’, an added sense of richness and profusion. This kind of palette could be traced back through painters the artist is certainly very familiar with, Oskar Kokoschka and (a generation earlier) Lovis Corinth. Both use a slippery palette and a demonstrative, generous hand to create leaps from stroke to stroke and form to form. Thus a lot of classic Kokoschka (and much late Corinth) looks like meat falling off the bone, recalling the cook’s definition of the verb ‘render’. This approach deployed in heroic figural tableau expresses a compressed version of the Baroque ‘grand tragic drama’, as in Kokoschka’s Windsbraut of 1912, or Corinth’s fin de siècle scenes of the deposition. Romer’s compositions lack the urgency engendered by the presence of dramatis personae, thus the ‘weakness’. It is replaced with a connection to the space, and colours that no longer look as if their flesh (as it were) wears any bones at all, at least within the limits of the support. Instead, the grounds of her canvasses (tailor-mades with flat, titanium-acrylic finish) collude with the walls of the space, and the slips of colour half-fixing the forms, the outer-extent of the grasp of our sensations, like afterimages of glare, roving from one blank spot to another. There is a figure, then, in Rommer’s installations, that is, the viewer as a passive character, gradually pulled apart by the tangents of experience. At its best, Romer’s installations feel ‘Baroque’, because the development of a subject through a dynamic (yet monumental, = encompassing) movement from one state through many others is –as in The Ecstasy of St. Theresa or a Fugue by Purcell- a subject of the Baroque. Recently I found myself at a Christmas party with the artist, leaning over a living room railing that opened out onto a sudden drop. It turned out to be an indoor swimming pool that had been drained for ages, and was dark, cracked and patched, magnifying its depths. To look at it, was to feel an internal lurch forming in the chest, a convex-surface-of-the-moon. One became much too conscious of the rail as part of a formula in which the torso needed to supply its rightful half of some obscure but resonant angle. “You’re going to use this space aren’t you” I said. “Yeah, I guess I have to”, she said.

[Originally Published in Fault Line, July 2006] 

 The invitation for Robert Randall’s installation at the MoCL is made up like a realtor’s ad, a dig that wins more mileage in real-estate obsessed Victoria than it might elsewhere, and that is just the point. Randall has been making images culled from real estate photos of houses (mostly blandly ideal 1960’s split-levels) for about twelve years, and to some extent, wondering what to do with them. During that time his interests in the urban landscape, and attendant notions of ‘place’ and personal history have broadened and become richer through exploration and contrast, as indicated at a recent artists’ talk at the Vancouver Island School of Art in which he showed photographs from a recent trip to Europe –notably pastoral, mended battlefields of the First World War- with sites of natural and artificial anomaly within Victoria’s downtown area. Considering the current installation in view of this lecture, as well as Randall’s more recent exhibition history, sheds some light on the possible outcomes of Randall’s subject matter and his treatment of the house pictures in particular. Randall’s houses have tended to occupy a space between romanticism and irony. The presentation is often dark and a little blurred or soupy, vacillating between opacity (as obstinate, fixed, awkward or dingy) and an ephemeral translucence. The outcome of that struggle has often occurred to me as the mingling of two kinds of lapse: the persistence of places we have known and the oddity of architectures that were once forward-looking, when they’ve begun to fall into the past. Split the difference and you might have the suggestion that pasts laid out on ideal terms are harder to digest on a personal level. Even as bright and impersonal modern utopias suffer an inevitable reduction of scale (reducing in space as they recede in time, as Milan Kundera said of old people) so they resist, their materials not having been designed for a gentle, more naturalistic move into the scenery. Scale has been important. Part of the enjoyment of Randall’s original house paintings was the fact that a glossy-yet-murky bit of glazing on panel had originated as a minute clipping in a realtor’s paper. The ‘miniature’ feel of many of the paintings has tended to work nicely with their subtle, unexpected heterogeneity in group presentations, as in his grid of paintings on tiny frosted Mylar rectangles at the AGGV’s Interface some years back. I recall Randall discussing alternate presentations at that time (Mylar, mural-sized presentations, a/v components) and his expressed desire to experiment with installation. Some of the challenge has been to avoid the miniature’s preciousness, and Randall has tended to explore the possibilities in a modest rather than arch manner. At last year’s Deluge Christmas show, his landscapes on found wood (also displayed in grid formation, depicting rather featureless European fields that were in fact the aforementioned battlegrounds) succeeded in playing the soft persistence of a heavily knotted grain under paint that was mostly devoid of affect. At Roy Green’s recent roundup – Domestic Bliss- at Open Space, Randall offered two variations on presentation that I interpreted as largely aesthetic rather than conceptual decisions. On the north wall, the houses were painted on banners of Mylar hung from the ceiling away from a wall with open windows, allowing the pieces to be viewed from a ‘front’ and ‘back’ side of the translucent material, and also resulting in the natural light backlighting the imagery. This latter feature emphasized the ‘existential’ material nature of each brushstroke, underscoring the contradiction of this painterliness as both the tool and enemy of depiction. On the south wall a larger image of a house had been painted directly on the wall in a very physical manner that included drips running down the surface of the wall. The problem seemed to me at the time that the materials had been denied their sense of distance from the viewer…perceptually, there was no point at which it became difficult to ‘read’ the picture, no interference in the flat-footed frontality of ‘narrative’ (as such) to be engendered by the usual dark tones, slipped lineation, or reflecting gloss. As a result, we were left with the straightforward painting index, which went nowhere because Randall is a great success as a painter of conservative means rather than a virtuoso, and because technique is something that in his work comes across as a private issue rather than a social one. It is the contrary combination of self-effacement and public subject matter that has made his irony rich, and without the former the latter looked flat and stagy. The Ministry of Casual Living is primarily a window space, with a shallow back gallery that is usually only available to the public during the night of an exhibition’s opening. Randall’s window display consists of long sheets of Mylar hanging in narrowly spaced vertical rows and curling slightly at their lower edges. The Mylar has been block-printed at regular intervals, creating a grid of houses and apartment buildings, not without repetition. Taken together, the grouping looks careful and vaguely curatorial, but closer in the idiosyncrasies of the prints make the mood more convivial. The drawing in the prints is filled with skewed angles and generalized rendering, suggesting a deadpan set-up for a cartoon strip. The graphics are unevenly produced, and the thinly inked ones look like a flicker of the cleaner prints, suggesting a looped scene in old-style animation. The serial quality brought out by the repetitions is not forced (the repetitions occur in no particular order), but it’s hard to miss…one alpine-style peaked roof keeps cropping up, recalling both the architecture of the ‘60’s and Disney’s Snow White, indicating generally how one kind of confusion (such as nostalgia) breeds another. On the occasion of his opening, Randall had also complimented a window display of house images with a table out front offering the lino and EZ-Cut blocks used to make the prints, still wet with ink. The back gallery featured a computer monitor with a ‘slideshow’ of digital photographs. The images in the slideshow are of apartment building entryways, mostly from the period Randall favours (suppose, the era of his parents’ first family home…), with their host of pretentious names (many of which the artist correctly identifies as ‘Hispanic-kitsch’) and pseudo-heraldic devices. Who hasn’t visited a lapsed parent or ailing family friend in one of these apartments and passed through the doors with their gilt italics (“…Gardens”, “Manor”, “Court” or “Place”), and run the lobby’s gauntlet of false fireplaces and tired furniture? Maybe not so much tired as tiring, since its insistent evocation to a certain notion of hospitality or propriety surely never had any real takers, but wears one out with the sheer possibility. The pictures are unremarkable and direct, rehashing the same spatial scenarios: the doors, the bit of space beyond the doors not quite visually accessible and therefore shallow, and strips of curve-edged sidewalk or overhang above or below that nudge the eye into the big rectangle of the doorway, encouraging the horizontality of the original aesthetic. The pictures are pleasurably mesmerizing. Like Randall’s house paintings, difference is a subtle motif, but an attention develops in catching the variations, and one suspects it has been the artists’ experience as well. Unlike Ed Ruscha’s famous photo-book ‘Every Gas Station On The Sunset Strip’, Randall does not declare an exhaustive catalogue, and it’s the sense of curiosity, as well as a suspension of disbelief that the subject might be bottomless, that tickles the viewer’s staying power. The question I have about the show as a whole is to what degree the rhythm of Randall’s window of lean-looking prints can feel of a piece with his shuffling doorways. There is a question about community and privacy in these presentations, perhaps the way in which models of seclusion (as in the postwar house, all garage and no porch) ultimately become a lived-with encumbrance on both sides of the wall. The more elusive issue is the promise of community as enacted through casual tokens of affection, defined against a ground of uneven familiarity. This brings up certain points that are subtle and open to discussion, and which might become more salient with Randall’s next (or next, next) show: the Ministry’s place as part of a suburban neighbourhood’s storefront strip, it’s odd routine of making work available through the window but only offering occasional access to the space beyond, and Randall’s decision to allow himself for once a glimpse into an opening, if still a façade.

[This review appeared in the first edition of an art review bulletin cum blog I started with Tyler Hodgins, in the spring of 2006 called Fault Line.]

Sandra Meigs at Deluge.

            This show has been written about in three separate venues (nothing short of a miracle in Victoria), yet little of the critical attention seems to have been focussed on what goes on inside the paintings, how they work. Despite the fact the ‘expressionistic’ (read awkward, grotesque, silly or morose) aspects of Meigs’ subject matter –as well as the artists’ biography- tend to attract attention, there are formal elements to the work that should be talked about. In part because they lead to a fuller understanding of the conventions of expressionistic painting in general, and in part because throughout this installation (of older work that the artist has revisited), there are examples of a thoroughly controlled use of colour, texture and especially space.

There is an old art-historical distinction between ‘optical’ (the view at a distance, as in painting) and ‘tactile’ (touchable, as in sculpture)…in modern times, painters (such as Rothko or Newman) have requested a tactile distance of the viewer -within the ‘personal space of arm’s length- and used the vibration of saturated colour to mark the subtle switch from regarding to touching that takes place as we move closer. Meigs’ work at a distance fulfills the role of a narrative series, as related to their connection to song lyrics.  Up close is where they are properly experienced as individual events, about working distance (eighteen inches), so that the supports turn from rectangles to open spaces, the frames dissolve and the colours begin to soften and merge with reflected light.

Colour, space and line (including the texture of the paint body) can’t be separated here. In one piece, for example, a simplified torso appears, as a red field of colour, inside of which is a knotted lump of paint, illegible as chewing gum. The knot is a visual problem, one gets hung up on its texture, while the red field, momentarily ignored- begins to swell and contract. This is a way of creating friction – smooth versus striated space- the smooth space allowing the eye to hover and the striated form attractive but also agitating, granular, like sand in an oyster.

Van Gogh is an accessible example to look at for contrasting the frisson of texture with the radiant effects of embedded, intense colour. A closer reference might be Chaim Soutine, once declared a supremely ‘oral’ painter by Robert Hughes -a description that also fits here- for the curiously cramped-yet-heaving compositions of his paintings of the village of Ceret…A horizon that becomes a figure or vice versa, a drooped, lumpy line that suggests presence by implying mass, like a saddle or a uterus. In terms of the tight fit of a figural image to its immediate space, I’d compare them to the impasto work (such as the ‘hostages’) by Informel painter Jean Fautrier, the way in which the image is not (yet?) clear but hovers in the space where we expect the readable image ought to be. Look for this same occlusion in the abstract pictures of Philip Guston. Meigs uses this device with great control in the Mary paintings: there is a great instinct for scale as it relates to a sense of physical closeness with the viewer, and her colours and forms are deliberate-looking but also atmospheric.

Are the painted frames too intrusive? They look too strict in Deluge’s bright southern light at midday, defaulting to a hard graphic black (only close up, the colour swims a bit and the frames do what they should)…this is not necessarily a problem at other times of day, however. The frame of each piece creates a long (‘landscape’- oriented) picture on the left and a vertical (‘portrait’). The device could look a little contrived at a distance, but is very effective close in at competing for the viewer’s attention by offering two interfaces which, in terms of the usual sympathetic visual scan (the search for a figure to identify with in the picture) are unsatisfactory. The landscape images seem to be scenes in which a tiny figure may be just visible or churned into some mastication of strokes (too far), and the portrait segment gives us something of a face – a chunky silhouette, rope for hair, three orifices- that is more a smudge (too close).

Wendy Welch (writing in Monday Magazine) has suggested that the open expanses of colour in some of Meigs’ compositions recall Minimalist colour field painting. It seems an odd connection at first, except that looking back to seminal statements from that era (like an interview with Frank Stella and Donald Judd from the ‘60’s) one sees that so much of what defined that period was the sense of immediacy that was meant to break with European ‘composing’…The famous insistence on a presentation of ‘wholes’, rather than a representation incorporating parts. This meant no metered introduction into the space, no contrapuntal balancing of hard and soft elements, no narrative tension in the splice between figure and ground. The works demand the space around them and become figures themselves. As such, classic Minimal presentations (such as Stella’s Black Paintings) have a tendency to stare –there is no other word for it –which is to say, direct their mass toward the viewer in a way that can’t be deflected. Meigs has used devices in other work (paintings lined with reflective Mylar, compositions with light bulbs, title placards) that cast her work into the space around it, and her paintings stare as well.

What kind of stare? There is a delay from the recognition of these forms to the sense of their becoming fluent; they are clear but obtuse. This gap belongs to all kinds of indicators of ‘expressionist’ or emotive painting that came after Pop art, as potentially not (or not only) a way of depicting feeling, but its quotation. The nature of Meigs’ characters has often underscored this problem, as figures that don’t amount to identities: ‘resin heads’, ‘orifaces’, ‘Canadians’, and most compellingly, ‘dummies’. The figures are exactly that: projections, quotations, questions, or formulations, like De Chirico’s composite mannequins, tailors’ dummies and statue-shadows, or Guston’s Klansmen…A way to get the figure into the picture and yet not. A blank stare as no feeling is forthcoming. Although these comparisons have already risked being too varied and distracting, one important one is Munch’s foetal nerve-bundle from The Scream. The figure is not a person but an anecdote (“then I heard the scream”), a pictogram for a non-visual phenomenon. Not a reflection of the viewer or a summation of the artist, but a sign stuck between our space and the space of looking, pressed up against the former by the baldness of its facture and appended to the latter by the most passive of painterly drags.

[Review originally published in Monday Magazine in August of 2004. RogueArt was an early incarnation of Deluge Contemporary Art.]

Bedazzled!  Claire Wood makes some sparkling observations at the RogueArt Gallery

The Bedazzling of Andreas Vesalius, RogueArt Gallery August 13^th-29th

One way to look at art, both ancient and contemporary, is as the practice of making things visible that otherwise would go unnoticed. This might entail a painstaking illustration of the facts of nature or simply pointing out something which is already there in a way which somehow makes it more apparent, more existent, more…itself. Claire Wood, a recent graduate of UVic’s Visual Arts program who describes her art as “taking things out of their hiding places”, would certainly agree.  The starting point for her work currently on display at RogueArt in the Bay Centre was the illustrations of Andreas Vesalius, a pioneering Renaissance surgeon whose investigations of the human body rescued our notion of anatomy from a fog of scholarly and religious controversy. 

In the age of forensics-as-entertainment, we tend to forget that the mysteries of the body were once the site of a profound crisis:  that of science versus faith. Vesalius both tested and excited his own beliefs by probing deeper into ‘the workings of creation’, and looking at Wood’s recreations of his engravings one feels this tension afresh. Blown up (using an overhead projector), in many cases to larger-than life proportions and mapped out on large plywood panels, the figures of Vesalius’ illustrations spring to life. Vibrant, grotesque and darkly comic, they strike graceful poses typical of the heroic or divine characters in historical paintings, while at the same time flesh peels back to expose bones and ligaments. Seen in such large scale, the hatch-lines of Vesalius’ engravings become weirdly sensual – strips of skin and muscle seem pliant and palpable, like petals or peels (recalling the Renaissance use of withering flowers and fruit as symbols of human mortality).

Wood has also superimposed flowers onto many of her images… A floral pattern borrowed from chair upholstery (and, perversely, applied with metallic auto enamel) wends its way around the macabre figures, adding something baroque to the seeming agony of one, contributing to a sense of deathly calm in another. Faux-jewels dot the lines of another set of bodies, creating a feeling of gaudy luxury. Wood considers the flowers and jewels: “they remind me of a typical idea of being ‘feminine’, decorative or domestic”; noting that they bring something temporary – reminiscent of the shopping mall, even – to the subject of eternity.

Perhaps Wood chooses to characterize the source of her inspiration as ‘bedazzled’ because (apart from the obvious pun – a dig at a kitschy device for fastening jewels to clothing) she finds her own relationship to this material involving and complex, not cut-and-dried. “Even though I’m working from photocopied transparencies, it’s never simple”, she hesitates, “…something always happens that makes me question the whole process.”

The largest piece in the show is a massive cross-section of the top of the head and brain, in which Wood found herself reducing the complex networks of the original illustration to flame-like shapes that recall current pop-culture’s interest in brain-chemistry imbalances and (mis)firing synapses.  The head hovers on the wall opposite the others, as if it were the doctor/artist/author himself, brain ablaze with the wonder of his observations. 

 [Christopher Butterfield is a composer who teaches at the University of Victoria. This review appeared in Musicworks magazine, in the spring of 2005.]

The Lab 3.5:  “Pavilion of Heavenly Trousers”

February 13 – March 28, 2004.

“ Some mornings I roll our of bed thinking it’s 1913…”

Chris Butterfield makes this remark during a talk for the opening of his installation, “Pavilion of Heavenly Trousers”, in the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria’s Lab space.  You’d assume that this comes from Butterfield’s work as a composer, which includes homage to such seminal modernist icons as T.S. Eliot and Yves Klein, but it is also perhaps a reference to life in Victoria.  In a city where most central neighborhoods were laid out during an Edwardian building boom (1911-1912), and which repackaged its English origins in the 1930’s to capitalize on tourism, a very particular relationship persists between the colonial and contemporary.  The result might be perceived as an overlap of the ‘post’-modern, and the modern before it properly knew itself to be ‘modernism’, as such.

What Butterfield has created does rely on a classic modernist baffle:  that of the tension arising between a multiplicity of voices invoked by an absent-yet-presiding authorial control.  And yet it is the way the artist allows the use of collaboration and chance to reveal, rather than dominate, the nature of his subject that gives the work its curiously liberating quality. 

The installation consists of rows of yellow notepaper – 600 in all – mounted on the walls from floor to near-ceiling level.  The papers are Butterfield’s handwritten transcription from two novels: Pearl S Buck’s Pavilion of Women, and The Maker of Heavenly Trousers by Daniele Vare.  Butterfield’s undertaking is to ‘interleave’ the books, by working sequentially through both texts writing a full sentence from each author in turn (repeating the latter a second and one-half time as it is shorter).  The transcription itself becomes a performance of devotional labour (a reference is made in the artists’ statement to the “extraordinary Chinese work ethic”[i]), for one hour each day over two hundred days.  Also in the space are two Chinese chairs of the kind commonly exported to the West in the early 1900’s, a vitrine with circa 1930’s editions of the novels, and a small speaker relaying a recording of Butterfield’s voice reading the reconstituted script.

The audio recording is important.  The visual elements provide many well-produced pleasures:  the respective and varied artifactuality of the books and chairs; the orderliness of the pinned yellow sheets (the ‘Emperor’s Colour’ Butterfield notes), their relative illegibility confirming their status as objects of process.  It is in the presentation of the writing as a seamless narrative, however, that this deliberate confusing of voices abandons the charms of labour, accident and archive for the more ambiguous territory of interpolating between writing and reading.

This action was apparent in the examples of text that Butterfield read at the show’s opening.  As one might expect, each sentence tended to both bond with and distinguish itself from predecessor and successor, but the presumed game of reassembling two separate narratives as distinct proved unexpectedly difficult, as association between the sources seemed more elastic, yet less obvious, than one would expect.  Each sentence persuasively presented itself as both part of a distinct narrative history and a new narrative which was constantly being formed and unformed.  That this tended not to break down into self-referential theatrics of free-association – a self-reflexive scattering of sentences into words, words, words – amounted to the miracle of sensibility that holds this piece together. 

Listening to or reading the text invokes a multiplicity of voices rather than just two.  As characters recollect, connect and reflect, their thoughts open up spaces in the narrative line, forwards, backwards and between.  Recalling especially the auditory qualities of a work like The Wasteland, in which tone (in literary terms) becomes the overriding means of apprehending continuity, this opening within the narrative forms becomes artificially but gracefully compounded by the interleaving.  The closeness in tone of Butterfield’s sources should be acknowledged here; Butterfield credits the ‘crystal clear prose’ of the writing with allowing him the flexibility to conduct his exercise with such facility.  Within this greater literary gesture, the clashing of incidentals – who is speaking to or about whom, who is male or female, young or old, etc. – seem like symptoms of acceleration or nostalgia.  The smoothness and deliberateness of the form, like the behaviour of these characters encountering catastrophe or epiphany, clings all the more tenaciously to the camouflage of its tact as it becomes threatened with incoherence.

In one passage, an aristocratic woman, Madame Wu, rushes uncharacteristically from her home to see a foreign priest who has been beaten in the street and is dying.  This event is interwoven with a monologue (interior?) from the Vare text, in which an aging dandy takes ceremonious pains in describing habits of comportment.  The contrast mingles flavors of occidental and oriental; colonialism and imperial decay.  The emotional moment becomes caught in a play of interval in contrast to which the mannered broaches on the ritualistic.  Voices distinguish themselves through their connection to place and object as the shifts break them up – by turns disembodied, exemplary, or possessed by urgency and agency.

In a passage incorporating the final page of the Buck novel, Madame Wu’s experience of a kind of salutary epiphany ([she] knew that she was immortal) meets with the description of someone being lead through an apartment.  Distinct motifs seem to emerge:  here, a description of place coincides with a mental event.  Elsewhere such conditions reoccur in form of various contrasts between internal and external, both of which are stylized, the former as the rather formal and reticent exposition of feeling, the latter as the abstraction of foreignness.  Often the cataloguing and codifying of the traditional (a private school uniform) occurs within the precincts of displacement (the foreign house), with the question of whose tradition and whose estrangement already at issue in the original material.  The stylistic characteristics common to both novels – being circumspect, indirect, and given to revelation of character through incident and epiphany, rather than analytical description – seem compounded by the misdirecting, reflexive yet synthetically unifying action of Butterfield’s exercise.

The result is a surprising and cogent sense of the relationship of ‘foreignness’ to self-conception.  A correlative that comes to mind is the recent novels of Kazuo Ishiguro – particularly, When We Were Orphans and the more important but often overlooked The Unconsoled.  Ishiguro’s narrators, stranded between poles of oriental and occidental find the overturning of the world not within themselves, but a world of terms, architecture, and relationships which shift, stretch and overlap precipitously as if to accommodate a painfully subjective mental flux. Their internal voices however, are usually complacent and understated to a fault, obliquely hinting at a personal unraveling that never comes.  Instead, the world itself is unshelled by degrees, with fragments of relationship and memory commingling in their fall.  

It is worth recalling a question asked at the opening regarding the choice of process: whether Butterfield might have chosen to interrupt the continuity his authors’ sentences as he reached the end of his own lines on the page, rather than the end of each full sentence.  By distinguishing his action from a gesture which more obviously privileged the exercise of chance, Butterfield does not create a demonstration of principle (organized randomness vis a vis repetitious, automatistic labour), nearly so much as he uses juxtaposition to create a new and different literary experience which, at its most successful, refers back to both his source works and issues fundamental to their ethos. 

Crucial to this understanding is to read the work just not as an intriguing cross-section of a process, but as a fait acompli, and in doing so we come to recognize it as a machine; a progression that could continue on after the effort of writing stops.  Buck’s longer text will not always be laid alongside Vare’s in the order in which it appears in this presentation; the shorter text conceivably revolves endlessly within the longer, generating new compositions.  In this way the principle relationship of the piece as a whole – that of work to work to reader, rather than of works to artist – operates continuously, with each component opening up our notion of the other in turns, from moments of static and obstruction to clarity and fluidity.

The principle at hand, for both the characters caught up in our new text and we ourselves as readers, is that the modern subject – as we know it or have known it – requires an infinitely responsive sense of scale and resistance in order to constitute itself.  These un-completing sentences are from texts about ‘others’:  women, foreigners, members of classes remote to us and to one another.  Finding parity within the stylization that reorders them is an alternate code of relationship that, even as it dismays, conserves, rather than objectifies, their civility.

When does chance become purpose – not an ad hominim ‘intentionality’ that unravels a work’s most obvious origins, but a less definable will to form?  Cues slip into the nuance of an open scene like the accents of characters:  Butterfield’s own speech patterns recall the benignly paternalistic voice of the Edwardian children’s book narrator; the clarity is accumulative, specific to the before and after of event.  This is also a biographical performance.  Written down mostly at the composer’s home or in Chinatown, it refers to aggregate tense, filled with floating contracts, which in the greater agreement of the gallery empty into absence, as the purgative that consumes our idea of industry.  The writing as affect grounds an imponderable listening in the score’s illegibility, creating a sense of levity – not the confrontational weightlessness of a formal demonstration, but the more gracious weightlessness of a masterful artifice made new.