Review: Goose Village at Occurence | Where Were You in '92? at Optica | Desire Lines. Displaced Narratives of Place at Artexte
Before making a series of generalizing statements about these three exhibitions, it is incumbent on me to provide you with their statements of rationalization, each of which avoids any justification for their mode of display, at best vaguely waving it off as “experimentation”:
Desire Lines. Displaced Narratives of Place, curated by Felicity Tayler at Artexte
Desire lines are paths that are created as people move through open urban areas. Well-worn tracks in the dirt show us an everyday that is determined by overlapping drive and intent, spaces carved out in collectivity and in defiance of the structural forces invested in infrastructure and landscaping greenery. Similarly, arts magazine publishing in Toronto, from the 1970s onward, has been a space criss-crossed by lines of desire for access to print as a communication medium with political effect; for organizing labour through mentorship and kinship structures; and for new forms of representation through an analysis of gender, class, and race. […] These relationships, however, are an incomplete representation of the multiplicity of communities from which these writers emerged; and to wish for comprehensiveness is an expression of desire that looks toward a utopian horizon.
Goose Village by Marisa Portolese at Occurrence
The village has since disappeared from Montreal maps, effectively obliterating certain ethnic groups from the cultural and social fabric of this undervalued site. Goose Village is currently a parking lot and a dismal terrain vague. Via memory mapping, oral history interviews, portraiture, the urban landscape, and a forensic gaze into more than 1,600 historical images of the neighbourhood housed at Les Archives de la Ville de Montréal, the Goose Village project signals how poor urban planning decisions play a role in the physical and psychical erasure of working-class communities, as my family and friends experienced the expropriations. The purpose is two-fold: to highlight the destructive consequences of short-term political agendas and capitalist ills of hallmark events that cause community displacement, and to commemorate the villagers’ memories by investigating a sense of place and cultural identity through an autobiographical and empathetic lens.
Where Were You in '92? curated by Pamila Matharu at Optica
Through experimentation with sound, image, found texts and acts of counter-archiving of personal and political experiences, Where Were You in ‘92? brings forth the embodied archives of the ground-breaking legacy of Fresh Arts, a Black artist-led program that was born out of the fury of impassioned youth. Pamila Matharu, one of the mentees of Fresh Arts, returns not only to this pivotal moment but also to her mentor, Winsom Winsom, who’s more than decade-long activist history in Kingston ON is under-recognized. Matharu looks back to Toronto’s 1992 youth-led uprising on Yonge Street that gave rise to Fresh Arts. Where Were You in ‘92? traces new lines of connection across history and geography, drawing in those who inherit its legacy and holding up those who mobilized its centrifugal forces.
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Portolese's exhibition dramatizes this “disappearance” with its off-kilter combination of disparate visual rhetorics to try and map out a series of shifts in the urban landscape. If there is an attempt to subordinate landscape to narrative, particularly by the awkward, halting voiceover that wafts through the space, there is still enough in its digressions to the formal norms of landscape (or site) photos of the past half century to distract from it. They tend to function more as ellipses than threads. For the most part, it functions as a series of semi-articulate fragments that, while spectacular in their assemblage, is filled with enough gaps to be curious and tangential.
The other two exhibitions are much less creatively ambitious. In their reliance on ephemera turned into museological icons, they are essentially conservative. In terms of context, they have several, either amid their limited localized image economies on display or by supplementary text/audio narratives designed to curb their otherwise entirely ambiguous possibilities. And these should be interpreted less as “tracing lines” than as acts of erasure that paranoiacally abstract and triangulate ephemera into meta-narratives.
Aesthetically, they tend to the crassly utilitarian in attitude, obscuring this with stark, even austere, and sober models of presentation.
Not wholly given over to this, there are flashes of little bits of over-played display that simply sit in the space like dysfunctional chairs in a theatre or the astroturfed displays of barbecues at hardware stores in the summer. And then of course there are faces, usually positioned at the height of the average head, to elicit easy pathos.
Each is a weirdly sterile invitation to fantasy (albeit one whose limited deliria have a strangely flat affectivity mixed with a certain corniness) that is peculiarly divorced from the “thickly descriptive” or phenomenological prejudices of ethnographic work that wouldn’t go unexpected given their curatorial statements. Instead, they have a sense of being curated (purified) to the point of death.
Things may be sterile and flat, but they aren’t cold. They have the warmth of fluorescence. Coldness in art has often been associated with a kind of nihilistic facticity (by Jessica Burstein and Gilbert Lascaut for example) that is more threatening than “righteousness” because it destroys both the claims of the righteous and those they oppose.
There is a lot of righteousness in the paraphernalia around these exhibitions (and the paraphernalia often collected as their central objects like hunting trophies), in their forced attempt at the archive as part of a wellness centre where the public records of government programming are redeployed as “counter-archives” by the same state apparatus and following the same categories (the social, the cultural, persons etc.) and cliche forms (the map, the portrait, the newspaper, the interview etc.).
Images are not language; they don’t speak but do other things, both indexical and not. The narratives constructed for them are only language; they have no referents. The former tends to disarticulate the latter. The more time you spend in these spaces, the more ludicrous “reading” these objects/images into narratives, maps of cultural moments etc. becomes.
This is not simply to concur with Michael Renov’s uncomfortable recognition that the documentary form is inevitably, and quite despite the intentions or stated desires of its practitioners, filled with enough material detail that jouissance is ready to burst through and collapse its suppression into narratives and models of interrelationality. But most of this potential is thoroughly repressed here.
The exhibitions of Tayler and Matharu in particular operate quite comfortably as what might be termed, to slightly bastardize Pamela M. Lee, neoliberal or think tank aesthetics. As questionable as the existence of “neoliberalism” is as a hypothetical political-historical phenomenon, as an aesthetic model (as systems of systems: network aesthetics, interdisciplinarity, pseudo-sociological instrumentalism, ethnography) it well approximates both their modes of presentation and the underlying logics that give their work its purported significance, organizing logic, and the funding models that allow them to exist institutionally.
The bigger question is why do these exhibitions tend to have this sleek, wellness clinic with Scandinavian modular furniture or library vitrine aesthetic as their driving formal logic? These are, after all, the most basic modes of kitsch (which the neoliberal position would deny as a definition, preferring fuzzier, warmer words).
This is not like in the 1970s when artists would exploit the stark bureaucratic aesthetics of government as a form of satire, however limited that may have been. This is deadly earnest utilitarian bureaucratic fantasy art. So it is only slightly ironic, but mostly appropriate, that the antiquarian neolib institution Optica is involved.
This mode of exhibitionism, which is almost everywhere (to varying degrees both in retail and galleries) but is made the most keenly felt in these sorts of shows, is a curiosity because it makes you work to avoid seeing how domineering it is precisely because it seeks to communicate in such insipid ways.
This is not inevitably the case. I assume it was at least partially intentional that Eli Kerr’s curation Alternative Convention: Top Value Television’s Four More Years, which was housed at Optica for several weeks last Fall, was intended to be funny. As an exercise, it was as much an almost mocking interrogation of “archival” display techniques as it was an archival display. If it did not push this nearly as far as it might have, the intimation of the archive as a burlesque of materials was at least present.
