Reviews: Manuel Poitras at Circa | Jannick Deslauriers at 1700 La Poste

It would be possible to review a show about the end of the world every week and still leave some out. Apocalyptic fantasies seem to be one of the more significant neuroses exploited by Contemporary Art in the city. Once and a while they are humorous (deliberately or not), but they are almost always pretty to the point of flirting with tweeness. This week, two that get a bit more complicated.

If nothing else, Inondation maison by Manuel Poitras at Circa is actually entertaining and not especially pretty. Made of a set of distinct stations, each of which contains a convoluted water-circulating mechanism. Cartoonish in form, each of the contraptions consists of very different appropriated materials (books, chairs, shoes, etc.). Rigged up like the elaborate technological gimmicks of the Swiss Family Robinson, their results function like gags from a silent film.

It is part of an ongoing series of installations that fall under the header, DIY Flood. Poitras claims that these installations are “challenges [to] the modernist conception of the control of nature by humans and its corollary, neoliberal individualism. Composed of a series of installations that flood domestic objects, DIY Flood ‘brings home’ the existential crisis brought about by the environmental mess that our political and industry leaders have brought upon us.” The off-loading of responsibility on the individual rather than the collective means that people construct a set of (probably) self-satisfying but not actually effective gestures that end up going nowhere. 

The various mechanism that Poitras constructs are essentially “water features” like fountains or the trickling water over flagstone falling down a wall that some people with questionable taste put in their condos. It’s performative environmentalism as décor but in a rather different way than the “botanical turn” that is still circulating.

Poitras uses the DIY aesthetic that is the counterpart to the DIY philosophy he is polemicizing against. As satire, they’re basically anti-punk, that other great expression of DIY anarchism. It is entirely unclear based on the works themselves what non-negative point he is making. The comical machinery, which, notably is not the necessarily self-destructive machinery that was common to neo-dada, is a basically functionalist kind. It has a lot less pathos that way. Aside from the sadistic fantasy of water torturing Ayn Rand in perpetuity, it’s unclear what the governing fantasy of his work really amounts to.

On his website, he appeals to the kind of naive bifurcation of nature and culture that is generic to some Contemporary Art discourse and suffuses it with existential anxiety. His framing in terms of oppositions between nature and industry and the supposed historical existence of modernity and neoliberalism also falls into this trap. In “political” terms, environmental panic is something that is state-sanctioned (the exhibition is funded by the Art’s Council) rather than the far more convincing case one could make against something like birth control if one wished to challenge the “control of nature” or “neoliberalism.”

What you get is just this circulating machine, rather absurd but entertaining, that doesn’t do all that much aside from creating a continually fluctuating audio texture and a very specific aroma. In itself, this is interesting, but it does make the polemical framing around it simply absurd. Or perhaps this is the point, and the parody of environmentalist discourse is just costuming for the borderline slapstick of the rest of the show. 

Jannick Deslauriers Être imaginaire at 1700 La Poste is substantially less humorous. It combines two distinct bodies of work. The oldest, dating from 2006 when she was a Concordia student, involves works in translucent materials while the most recent, made while studying recently at Yale, shifts to welding steel combined with other materials.

In the former, she tends to make gauzy sculptures of apparently hard objects, tanks for instance, transforming them into delicate forms held up by a spiderweb of strings. She also makes a great show of their seaminess, their various strings hanging loose and fraying. In the latter, she inverts the balance of light to dark in her earlier work but is still creating frayed, delicate pieces that seem on the verge of collapse.

A press release for Tourism Montreal advertises it as “a contemporaneous reading of the destiny of a world tending towards collapse and points to the complex issues at stake. [p] Resulting from a process of ongoing deterioration and repair, her works register the presence of beings and bear witness to the object’s obsolescence over time.”

In the catalogue, she discusses Foucault’s notion of heterotopias, claims Sally Mann’s Body Farm photos as an influence, and alludes to Victorian spirit photography and theatricality. An accompanying essay asserts that she is “concerned with the problem of violence in the world and by the capacity of humanity to lead its universe to destruction.”  It is concern expressed in crinoline, which, in addition to suggesting lingerie, is intended to be a neutralizing factor for her various hybrid objects.

If Poitras imagines the upcoming apocalypse as a gag, Deslauriers imagines the post-apocalypse as a negligee in the double sense of the neglected and the stripped (déshabillé).

Although her older work is displayed in the basement and the mezzanine, the central and dominant exhibition of new work involves a series of stations where heaps of dirt and ash are amassed with the skeletal remainders of playground equipment and children’s things, strings of gummy and blackened chains of various lengths hanging down.

It is difficult to move in the space. Each heap she’s constructed is separated by what visual contrast suggests is an excessive cleanliness, occasionally broken up by an accidental shoe print. Organized as such gives the heaps a spotlit quality, a unique feat given the flat, even lighting of the space. All wires are clearly exposed, the variance between those of the installation and those of its installing providing the works with the sense of assembled artifacts from a ruined civilization held in a museum.

The transparent curtain at the entrance is dramatic, stressing a kind of theatricality, but also providing an initial, muffled view of the primary installation. This gauzy quality adds to its general glamour. This also suggests that what’s at stake artistically is the glamour of violence. Whatever the work may be “concerned” with, it certainly is an extension and cultivation of formalizations of violence. If the soft sculptural rendering of the tank could be taken as the “neutralization” of the form by a foreign material, this is no less a performative show of violence than the destruction of forms in ash.

The solid as negligee is not merely a transformation of its content but of its tactile and sensual aspects. As a form of lingerie - that exoskeletal formation that parodies the body and hybridizes it with furniture - neutralization corresponds to a general eroticization. Both the new and old works partake of this with a stress on the implied sensuality of the silhouette. The results are fragile, perhaps (and certainly if you want a sentimental interpretation), but also basically trashy: post-apocalyptic detritus with a glaze of softcore pornography.

There are things that do not work. There are smears on the walls and pillars that give a flat echoing of objects suggestive of the photographs of bodies caused by atomic explosions. But they just appear clumsy and distract from the potency of the heaps themselves. Likewise, the inclusion of the artist’s miniature studio, preserved in the vault at the back of the gallery, adds little but an unnecessary distraction that just seems to be a forced index to a series of objects that effectively hollow out such sentimental realism.

The implications of Poitras’ work are far more conservative and priggish while Deslauriers is actually perverse.