Suggestive enough to be topical, they aren’t topical enough to suggest much. If it isn’t quite as visually crude as Félipe Goulet Letarte, conceptually, it seems even weaker. While the former was so (unintentionally?) ambiguous that it became paradoxical and farcical, Gnass is much more puritanical and dull.
The primary thematic of the exhibition is defined by the artist in this fairly grandiose paragraph:
Throughout time, all over the world, the imposition of statues in a city is not at all democratic. Most statues are not art in the strict sense of the word because they do not give free rein to their interpretation or to the imagination of the viewer. They are not open works. Rather, they are dogmatic and exude the power of the past. They only convey a one-sided, almost frontal and two-dimensional ideology "cast in bronze", weatherproof. They are overtaken by time, by the evolution of thought, the free movements of thought.
Before going on to conclude with some PR hype for his line of work:
Now, we are in the 21st century and there are countless gifted, intuitive, enlightened contemporary artists who stimulate our imagination. Why then clutter our public spaces with these symbols that no one really identifies with, are too ambiguous, and reflect the politics of another era?
There are interesting things to note here, and not only on the level of artistic ressentiment. There’s a horror of an artistic persistence that actually conflicts with whatever Gnass takes to be the comforting self-image of Contemporary Art and its employees. Despite first complaining that this work is not “open”, the real issue is that it is “too ambiguous,” undermining the solidified identity of the present (whatever that is).
Why is his response so sketchy? If anything, the use of sketching lends a sense of archaism and a certain easy sentimentality by way of touch that declares the artist’s presence in a way that the artworks he appropriates do not. Instead, they sit a little too close to anonymity, their impersonality far closer to that of the crowds he claims to stand with, their proximity and placedness posing a question to the “living” by way of direct presence.
The questions that Gnass’ work pose are a lot less intimidating and interesting, a lot less threatening to the sentimental view of art that he clearly holds. While ostensibly dealing with iconoclasm, it suggests far more a nostalgic desire for an activist journalism.
Not quite doodles and not quite editorial cartoons, his work tends to sit in the realm of the kind of homework people do when they are learning to draw from a craft store handbook (a sense that is particularly strong in his rendering of horses). This is frequently cobbled together with looser drawings of angry crowds and soldiers or police shooting, but it’s never raw enough to have much power. The polemical points always seem forced and never articulate enough to be cartoonish or developed enough to be eccentric acts of visual violence.
The use of red to signify blood or violence, either by text or swirly gesture, is both corny in its selectivity (less in the way that Spielberg used red in Schindler’s List in an emotionally pornographic way than in the way the red on his sculpture looks like an adult playing at a child’s painting on a toy) and simultaneously can be read in a more anti-humanist way, in the sense that Godard repudiated people who criticized the bloodiness of his late 60s films by insisting there was no blood, just red (or as Deleuze would have put it, there is no just history, only just history).
One might, in perhaps the least implausible interpretation, see in all this iconoclasm a hatred of art, not a difficult thing for Contemporary Art to muster, given how much of its basic rhetorical justifications tend to rest on an intense resentment of the power of art.
However these works may have functioned in their display at Maison de la Culture Côte-des-Neiges (which, if this review is accurate, suggests something very different), in this case their ordering borders on the arbitrary, the juxtapositions of imagery adding little to each other.