Eddy Firmin's Orgueil et préjugés spans two substantial rooms at Art Mûr, employing installations of appropriated items, sculptures, video, and photography. Stylistically, these suggest regional museum aesthetics, installation art, advertising, jewellery display cases, video essays and so on.
The eclecticism of strategies does not suggest museographic critique so much as artistic egoism, consistently returning to images of the artist. The performative heterogeneity of its material resources ironically only points to the homogeneity of its polemical references and techniques. Together they blur the viability of any kind of point.
As an exhibition, it brings together a series of works made over the past several years and lumps them together, giving them the sense of a retrospective on strategies dwelling on the same theme and generic imagery.
The obvious reading for the exhibition is to treat it as dealing with “identity”, “race” etc. — and indeed it (and more specifically its textual framing) taunts one to do so – but its means of display place all these things in quotation marks, and this makes their ostensible reference unclear. Given that the wall of mechanized heads/punching bags that functions as the exhibition's centre was barely functional when I viewed it, one wonders if this was the point.
As a work concerned with multiple identities and displays of purported cultural coding, assumed (though never explicitly stated or analysed) moralizing historical meta-narratives, and dashes of forced humour, it perfectly captures some of the most basic tenets of the religion of the Canadian state.
Insofar as there is a “cultural identity” that is actually implicated in the work, it is that of the elitist culture of Contemporary Art through which the artist appropriates the various “identities” and stratagems his work references and exploits.
There is a clear recognition of this in the work itself and its generally defensive or passive-aggressive framing, right down to the artist’s appropriation of an exceedingly vague, transhistorical, and transcultural “blackness” and the related supplementary appeals in his texts to his daughter as a kind of shield.
One does not get the sense that this is a more or less earnest (and naive), masochistic fantasy like that in Diyar Miyal's show at Centre Clark a few months ago. In that case, the relation between these two points and the tactility of the work at least provided an intriguing tension and sense of perversity. There is something far more neurotic going on here.
Instead of playing with the multiple implications of “fetishism” as Miyal did, there is a mixture of extremely lazy and broad humour (“French” portraits with a beret etc.), juxtaposed with hyperbolic video essay (setting race riots alongside minstrelsy that, sitting beside his self-portraits, suggests a very cynical take on racial politics which I doubt was intended) and a combine of historical materials (“racist” gewgaws in colonial furnishings) that say nothing about whatever significance he thinks they hold. They may be detourned from being knickknacks but only to the extent that they are made to function as kitsch post-colonial tropes.
It is the last of these aspects that seems key since it transforms all the themes into decoration. Indeed, the whole theme of socially or politically involved art seems to be sent up in a rather heavy-handed way in the second room that features everything from a “therapeutic” bit of iconoclasm rendered in dumb literalness with a video of smashing a sculpture and the various displays of tools (presumably to signify labour, and in their presentation, its transformation into ornament) and his own head as though they were designer items, complete with performative protest markings by inscribing one of these elements with profanity.
The strength of the exhibition largely hinges on whether you construe it as referring to some external (more or less political) world or deriding such an interpretation as a ludicrous prejudice. (Insofar as this exhibition deals with “prejudice,” it is in dealing it here). If you take the former position, little works and if you take the latter, it doesn’t seem to go far enough.
By the exhibition’s logic, however unintentional or not, the former interpretation is the kind of “confectionery” that it mocks. The clearest statement of this is in the second room which displays photos of the lawn jockey gewgaw as a form of candy. Almost directly across from this, is his own self-image.