More fully:
This exhibition and its accompanying events and texts speak to an attempt to produce “finance-proof” knowledge—that is to say, a space in which to consider the notion of value and its forms that is immune to the economic categorical imperative. That imperative, of course, is that of growth and profitability: the dominion of measurement, of the readability of indexes, of statistical commensurability.
In the place of this, the curatorial position statement suggests, are a set of rival propositions or possibilities that would rescue value while deliberately calling for the “destitution” of the market while lionizing the possibilities (“‘the future as cultural fact,’ as Arjun Appadurai has written”) of these alternative forms of use value.
However, the works that make up the exhibition scarcely offer much in the way of value, continually subverting their own loose suggestiveness with formal contradictions, which are further juxtaposed in ways that deny them any seriousness. This extends to the accidentally hilarious fact that the full curatorial reflection has to be purchased and is only made available in part as a kind of advertisement.
To its benefit, the show is funny, likely more so than intended. This is not simply because in its four advanced tactical manoeuvres it is already completely parodic of (and parasitic upon) the notion of a market, but because it is so consistently incapable of interrogating or providing an alternative to capitalist representation.
Curated by quartet (Erik Bordeleau, François Lemieux, Marilou Lemmens and Bernard Schütze) and using artists from around the globe (Amy Balkin, Núria Güell, arkadi lavoie lachapelle, Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Bahar Noorizadeh, RYBN.ORG, Slinko, AM Trépanier, Tania Willard, and ZK/U – Center for Art and Urbanistics & KUNSTrePUBLIK), the more than a dozen works that make up the exhibition each offer their own vantage on the very loosely articulated issue at hand.
Curatorially, the space is used in an almost church-like way with clearly delineated stations for each artist at hygienic distances from one another or alcoved away so as not to pollute one another too much. This may be why there is so much disparate impact from the works.
The first room features a series of print-outs by RYBN.ORG, which their website explains as:
ADM XI is an independent research platform for experimental algorithmic trading engineering. The novelty and the singularity of its approach lays on the exploitation of the artist legendary vision and know-how, to create innovative and counter-intuitive strategies of investment and speculation. These uncanny strategies challenge the neoclassical economics dogma. The platform gave birth to a collection of heretic, irrational and experimental operating trading algorithms. These algorithms are released to compete with each other on a marketplace hosted and organized by RYBN.ORG.
These sit beside some performatively abject soft sculptures by Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill that look like post-apocalyptic children’s toys on a discontinued display table from The Gap.
Both are aesthetically underwhelming, which is presumably their purpose, setting up a grey-brown-black dullness reminiscent of a decaying leather couch left on a street corner in the summer. Neither of these elements is curated in a sense that makes them amount to more than props in a model condo.
Such dullness is off-set by entering into the narrow video room where a work by Slinko plays. A series of figures in blue with bread variations appended to them. This cyborg bakery farcically plays out a shift from dance to dancerly violence. It does effectively work as a kind of commercial break between the stations.
The next element of note is arkadi lavoie lachapelle’s little funeral home installation, Le travail que l’on rêve gratuit, consisting of some chairs, end tables, a wall of images/texts in twee frames and shelves filled with what look like bookmarks filled with tidbits of information on the funeral home industry’s changes over the past several decades.
It has that public library sense of installation infotainment, but the sarcasm (deliberate or not) of its presentation sits oddly with its content. The inclusion of a plastic pouch of kleenex branded under the term “dignity” and protected by a glass bell jar sits directly across a little picture frame that offers a trigger warning for the tales of death, suicide, and depression that you can listen to in one of the cushy chairs invites a sense of skepticism and ambivalence at the least.
This sort of ambiguity carries over to Amy Balkin’s install, Public Smog, a diffuse project consisting primarily of various actions and polemics, but here materialized as something much more specific, namely, a (primarily) paper record of the “ongoing attempt to submit Earth’s Atmosphere for inscription on UNESCO's World Heritage List” by shipping mass quantities of letters and postcards to officials.
These letters are in dozens of languages and cover the wall, stretching well beyond the point of legibility. If the point of the work is not the Bablesque absurdity of international organizations or to ridicule the merit of petitioning for environmentalism as no more than a model form of paper wastage, it’s unclear what it is.
This is driven even further by the fact that the premise of environmental protection ends up being rendered as an absurdist museification project and, like much eco art, amounts to accidentally implying that pollution is a more significant work of art in itself, and market industries greater artists, than what rival institutional artists make in appropriating their work.
(The last of these points is also, in a more convoluted way, the accidental implication of ZK/U – Center for Art and Urbanistics & KUNSTrePUBLIK’s bee-themed installation.)
Perhaps the most successful work in the exhibition as far as coinciding with the stated curatorial aims is Bahar Noorizadeh’s video work, After Scarcity, isolated in a dark room.
Noorizadeh describes the work as:
...a sci-fi video-essay that tracks these Soviet cyberneticians in their attempt to build a fully-automated planned economy. If history at its best is a blueprint for science-fiction, revisiting contingent histories of economic technology might enable an access to the future. [p] How might we use computation to get us out of our current state of digital feudalism and towards new possible utopias? …After Scarcity flashes through decades of history to propose the ways contingent pasts can make fictive futures realer, showing us that digital socialism was inbred into the communist revolution and that computation doesn’t mean we’re condemned to today’s tyranny of total financialization.
The irony of this, and of the artist’s brandishing of the cliché about the difficulty of imagining a post-capitalist future within the video, is that the activity that constructs the work actually demonstrates how hard it is to imagine the past and the present, that history is far from settled, that the description of “our current state” that defines the point of opposition in her statement is as weak and unreal as imaginings of the future.
In a more concrete irony, the lionization of cybernetics that the video celebrates accidentally coincides with the fact that, explicitly since the reign of the first Trudeau, this, and not the “market,” has been the organizing principle of Liberal rule in the country.
To make the obvious point, whatever initial intentions may exist behind a work, it is transformed by being re-contextualized through curation to the point that it can not be reduced to these. Given the thematics of the exhibition, this appropriation and re-evaluation is effectively the artistic gesture. And the structural facts and thematic logic that it is deployed within make it about as reactionary as a work of art can be.
One could also point out that the issue at play in the works in general is less the nebulous question of "capital" or the "market" than the sociological and value which the curators take uncritically as their underlying premises, although it is entirely unclear, either epistemically or historiographically, that either of those categories are more than an illusion of capitalist modes of representation. This isn’t unique to this exhibition, its curators and artists; it’s a naive position that’s basic to Contemporary Art practice. However, one doesn’t usually see such premises as misanthropically degraded by visual rhetoric as they are here. I am assuming, perhaps wrongly, that this is unintended.
Like the funereal LARPing of lachapelle’s installation and relevant performance supplement, there is something almost morbidly off about the entire exhibition and this is its most admirable quality.
The event ends in an extraordinarily lopsided way with AM Trépanier’s installation, dans le souffle, a lengthy video (which if you bother to sit through it, takes about as long as viewing the rest of the exhibition) dealing with sex workers combined haphazardly with some neo-glamour photos and a few images of the redlight district sitting at a table. In the window, the term “sex work” is in neon, with sex flashing off and on as though work were eternal and sex a contingency.
Situated beside the gallery reception area, the install has the aesthetics of bureaucracy saturating it. This extends to its kitsch presentation of sex as a pose, its journalistic representation of the district, and interview mode of investigation. The interview format for prostitutes also mirrors the formatting for curatorial intentionality.
Walking out, this image is immediately juxtaposed with ZK/U – Center for Art and Urbanistics & KUNSTrePUBLIK’s bee installation and one cannot escape the suggestion of the sex worker as something less than a drone.
The title is misleading. It would be difficult to imagine things less radically than what’s on offer here. In fact, it’s only in the potential inversion of the ostensible points the curators (and artists by and large) suggest are being made that the exhibition really works (this is a common fate for exhibitions at Centre VOX).