Félipe Goulet Letarte's Le Poème politique 3 at Galerie Popop is the third part of a series of paintings/performances. According to the artist, "Political Poem 3 is a conceptual painting series following the score: paint the phrase ‘I am ashamed to be white’ in a different language on each painting’’
It would be easy to dismiss it as crude agit-prop or trolling but there’s a little more to it, either deliberately or not, than something that asinine. And as easy as it would be to dismiss the gesture as exploitative and narcissistic, it’s interesting as a particularly naked instance of some of the tendencies in the city’s Contemporary Art.
Letarte claimed that the idea for the works occurred to him in 2014, which means these have been gestating for nearly a decade. This may be true or defensive. It seems eerily too much an appropriation of the meme moral panic associated with the “It’s Okay to be White” posters from a few years ago to be coincidental.
The accompanying text provides absolutely no rationale for the forms that the paintings take, or why they are even paintings. The stated purpose, to make “relevant” art as though this is some “subversive” desires rather than conformity with the most basic functionalist tendency of the state dominated art market, and its combination with a list of the most trite anti-racist clichés imaginable should give one some pause (unless one treats the work as wholly naive).
He runs through a set of equally clichéd forms of painting with the text superimposed upon them in different languages. The multiplication of languages also suggests an exchangeability, a translatability of common point of reference that denies the otherness his supplementary text alludes to (with references to Levinas no less), because they are all presented as presumably interchangeable. Would the text in any of the given languages function differently if superimposed on any of the other clichés?
As a performance, the paintings are the erasure of any kind of otherness not a threshold of openness to it as the text claims.
The use of the non-objective seems to be designed as a kind of elliptical spiritual implication, but actually works only as kitsch, the historicising function of which renders the implied moral-historical allusion an absurdity.
One might ask, given that it is hardly self-evident, why these texts appear over pastiches of non-objective painting. This rhetorically renders the “paintings” as objects of possession, as a strange other to the text that sets itself in distinction to the allusive other that forms the dramatic background to the work. But it is this objectification of the non-objective, a basically aggressive and ridiculous performance of aesthetic rape and appropriation that is the heart of the exhibition.
More generously, one could read the intellectual failure of the works in performative terms as the enacting of the fantasy of self-erasure that they are justified as. In this respect, it adds another ball-gag to the inventory of masochistic fantasies that crop up in local galleries.
Perhaps the more convincing interpretation is a satirical one about art actually making “relevant” statements.
The artist statement on his website (written in the third person) suggests this possibility with perhaps more ambiguity and contradiction than is intended:"The work is aloof and systematic and a cool and neutral imagery is used. With a subtle minimalistic approach, he tries to grasp language. Transformed into art, language becomes an ornament. At that moment, lots of ambiguities and indistinctnesses, which are inherent to the phenomenon, come to the surface. His work urge us to renegotiate performance as being part of a reactive or – at times – autistic medium, commenting on oppressing themes in our contemporary society."