At Occurrence, Angela Grauerholz’s The Empty S(h)elf, deuxième itération, follows on from the first’s “exploration into concepts of subjective experience and the role of language in self-definition.”
This time, The Empty S(h)elf engages the archive in a more direct reflection on the role of language and subjectivity: here concerned with how the acquisition of language defines one’s sense of self and simultaneously separates self and other—the primordial being that exists outside of language. In this instance, the “other” is represented by the main character in a story by Franz Kafka entitled “A Report to an Academy”: an ape recounts how he survived and escaped life in a zoo by mimicking human actions, eventually adopting speech to become a circus performer. An analogy to the construction of the self and even the “escape” into becoming an artist might be suggested.
Created in collaboration with graphic designer Réjean Myette and with sound elements by Melissa Grey and David Morneau, it is made of video projections and word clouds.
It follows the vein of the work she’s been doing for the past few decades, although it seems softer than usual.
As an aesthetic experience, it feels like watching an aging professor update the lecture they give every year by including some memes supplied to them by a friend on Facebook or a grad student.
It has an overall dissipated quality, a sense of the underwhelming. The vastness of the archive succumbs to the ease of the reference.
The dour “Europeanness” that haunts a lot of her work is still there in her selections of ostensible content (primarily texts), but it feels far more off-balance than typical in one of her shows.
There is a quality of over-explanation in its selection that robs it of its density; it is only in the kitsch quality of some of its display that it attains a limited aesthetic shock.
The reliance on word clouds, for instance, comes off like it’s halfway between an affirmation poster and an old blog entry. In terms of its input and output, it suggests far less about subjectivity than algorithms.
There is an interesting archaic quality to the whole thing, a datedness to its internet aesthetics that makes it already feel a dozen years old. However, it comes off less like digging up something buried in the archive (the internet of a dozen years ago has already largely vanished), than an effect.
Even the projections have what appear to be old film filters applied that give them an amateur video style variant of archival age.
This is also why, at its best, it seems more like an ancient Tumblr abandoned after a few weeks of posting by a Walter Benjamin obsessive or a flashback sequence from a cheap TV show.
None of this is to besmirch the work. It simply seems to make it more obvious that her concerns have always been far more superficial and superficially formalized than tends to be suggested.
It does, of course, raise questions that barely seem interrogated about what “exploration into concepts of subjective experience and the role of language in self-definition” has to do with the visual language adopted for the exhibition itself since it seems to use this language in a naive and utilitarian way rather than recognizing it is the only real content at play.