Volupté, the new group show at Blouin|Division, features the work of 8 artists: Amanda Ba, Geneviève Cadieux, Shona McAndrew, GaHee Park, Elena Redmond, Hiba Schahbaz, Corri-Lynn Tetz, and Chloe Wise. It joins a set of erotic art shows that have been seen in the city over the past year (such as Mia Sandhu, Hannaleah Ledwell, Kara Eckler and Caroline Schub), although it is notable for being the least ambitious or thoughtful of them, as well as the most uneven in quality.
According to its press materials, in
[b]ringing together a group of female-identifying artists from various backgrounds, Volupté aims to draw an alternative portrait of pleasure, one that dispels masked fears about the emancipation of female pleasure outside of patriarchal control. [p] The artists brought together in this project are exploring desire in its various expressions, whether it is psychological, physical, sensory, or erotic. Pleasure is represented as complex and multifarious and often posited at a wide range of other intersections.
Apparently, this slot in the calendar was originally intended to be a two-person show for Tetz and Redmond called, Reclaiming Rapture, which the gallery’s website advertised until this exhibition debuted. This may explain why it seems so carelessly tossed together.
Judging by the work that the Tetz/Redmond show was supposed to contain, it may have actually been an interesting two-hander with a coherent focus. What Volupté offers instead, is a broad, sloppy, plunked-down quality. Scarcely justified in its press release, it was, Dominique Toutant was quick to assure me when I entered the space, a “very political show.” In a particularly innocuous Dove commercial way, it might be, although Dove commercials tend to have a little more creativity in their marketing aesthetic. What’s on display is more attitude than anything else.
While calling the exhibition Tits and Ass would have let it live up to the performative swearing aesthetic common to clickbait article titles or ironic coffee mugs and likely would have been more suited to the quality of the assemblage, branding it “Volupté” softens the blow while suggesting a level of sensual luxury the curation entirely lacks. Although Blouin|Division can’t be accused of tending to use its exhibition space in a particularly thoughtful way that does anything for the experience of art, in this case, its sterility serves to exaggerate the flatness of the work on display.
Returning to the PR statement, it is, as PR statements tend to be, an exercise in obfuscation in the form of broad market-targeting (inclusivity):
Bringing together a group of female-identifying artists [taking for granted the “neoliberal” identity fantasy] from various backgrounds [exploitation of sociological stereotyping], Volupté aims to draw an alternative portrait [to what and why a portrait if not because it reinforces the neurotic conceptualization of sexuality as subjective?] of pleasure [why pleasure given its extremely varied theoretical valences, which are further obscured below?], one that dispels masked fears [whose?] about the emancipation of female pleasure [if female pleasure can be singularized like this, doesn’t it complicate it as a selection?] outside of patriarchal control [even hardline feminist historians have tended to have a difficult time persuading themselves that this has really empirically existed in Canada]. The artists brought together in this project are exploring desire [are desire and pleasure identical?] in its various expressions, whether it is psychological, physical, sensory, or erotic [how are these things distinct? None of this is articulated in the works.]. Pleasure is represented [is pleasure actually what’s represented in this show at all? This isn’t even remotely evident.] as complex and multifarious and often posited at a wide range of other intersections [this sentence seems wilfully vague to paper over the fact that there is almost no actual content and it provides a buzzword saturated means to avoid committing to a meaningful statement].
The works seem to be arranged by size, and this slotting in of shapes without much thought given to what the relations created are is about where the voluptuousness tends to halt. One exception is Geneviève Cadieux’s work, which appears at the beginning (or end) and operates as a kind of historical anchoring, set like a map beside the exhibition's legend, and which can be read (likely unintentionally) as placing the work in a genealogy of Canada Council kitsch.
Her fragmenting and juxtaposition of body parts (the only time a piece of a man appears) across a rigid grid, is followed by a sculpture (Shona McAndrew) and painting echoing one another in the gesture of one arm. Here, we are also introduced, primarily by title, to the interpolation of art historical referencing (Araki, Matisse, photos, etc.). All of the work that follows is parasitic on this relation to pre-established images, something that is also strongly formalized in the frequent reliance on propping up the figure against strong patterning. But the effect of this relation, curiously enough, is a kind of hollowing out.
The figures themselves tend to the iconic and illustrative, the occasional blue dotting an overwhelming amount of yellow. They are presented very traditionally, either in “nature” like a primavera image or posed in a “studio” as in fashion or softcore porn (explicitly “archival” or “internet-based” to give it a sheen of conceptual consideration). The poses are very generically poses, which gives them a stiff, static quality that further subjugates the almost non-existent context to the figure’s domination of the image. Reading as images more than paintings, and in doing so they tend to severely limit their voluptuousness. It’s all pretty and pretty flat.
This flatness extends to the facial rendering as well. One curious thing that can be generalized about the work is how “dead” or “masked” the figures are to the point that they do not register as portraits (which increases their iconic, or perhaps, “political” significance as stereotypes). They have the same dulled expressivity as the smiling face icon that appears on the mug one of them holds.
Whatever one can call all this, and whether it is intentional or not (judging by what I’ve read from the artists elsewhere I will guess it isn’t), it isn’t voluptuous unless this merely designates the presence of a curve. It’s more like the sensuality of an SSRI addict. Chloe Wise’s work, which overshadows the rest in scale and presence, is like if you drained everything of painterly or figurative interest out of John Currin and hung up the desiccated shell (or, to keep it in kitsch terms, if you contrasted Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman to the reboot of That 70s Show).
Judging by the half dozen aging tourists I observed taking in the show and the handful of heavily tatted younger people (there may be a reason why “zoomer” in Canada connotes both the terminally online and the geriatric), they seemed to register, in behaviour and word, the pleasure of seeing depictions of breasts on a large scale. This is not to suggest that their pausing to ogle Wise’s rendering of nipples and glinting teeth halts it from being a “very political show,” but it begs the question of what those politics are and what it means for them to be a show.
In this respect, Tetz deserves highlighting since she seems to have been obsessing over this for more than a decade in interviews and artist’s statements since she lost the RBC Painting Competition. In a statement that seems generalizable to most of the work in this show, Tetz claimed that
My paintings are personal re-takes of the figure in landscape. Using found photos as references, I work without sketches, allowing forms and content to emerge, gradually, as I paint. In this, I am interested in charged point of interactions between figures and/or the landscape, as well, in the ways meaning shifts, opens or reconfigures, as a found photo becomes a painting. Subsequently, in collecting, and transforming representations of women’s bodies, my intention is to speak to a history that was not meant for me – to personalize figures and re-work images so that they speak more to experience than a mastering gaze.
In a profile for Arsenal, this was given another relevant glaze (the topic fleshed out more in an interview with the Calgary Herald):
Corri-Lynn Tetz’s work as a painter, focuses on the female figure as a way to explore identity, sensation and desire. Working from personal archives, fashion photography, film and pornography from 80’s/90’s, the artist explores the sexualized representation of women and the male gaze that she attempts to subvert. In this, she often uses disparate color, and inventive figuration, to create the impression of transformation, affect and sensation. Her intention is that each painting occupies a space between representation and abstraction - that form provides enough information to convey bodies and space, without losing the immediacy of that first layer of paint.
The hypothetical of a Male Gaze, once promulgated by John Berger and then repackaged in more sophisticated language by Laura Mulvey (one should add, to apply very specifically to a particular type of American film), was rooted in Lacanian theory, itself a pseudo-scientific abuse of bad linguistic theories applied to mental structures and fused to an attempt to reinvigorate idealism with a sheen of materialism. Lacan was then (Mulvey would later claim deliberately or carelessly) misread and applied, relying on an even more dubious application of an already grating language model applied to the visual through a series of structurally untenable and false equivalences, ahistoricism, and interpolations of stereotypical viewers. Film scholars, in particular, have extensively demonstrated, whether theoretically or in empirical fact, that none of this can hold, that there are no plausible grounds for contending that anything like a “gaze” exists or that an image has, or even involves, much of any subjectivity at all. If this appeal to the gaze is all more ridiculous than Lombrosian phrenology (and it is), it also serves a substantial function.
Since the epistemic purchase of the framing is null (it is an instance of Focualtian knowledge-power, namely the convoluted strategy to avoid the truth in front of you by concocting a socio-historical fantasy to obscure it, a point he made implicitly in regards to Lacanian neo-feminist theory), the strategy suggests something else. It could be earnest, laziness, or just marketing. Or, to keep it in the psychoanalytic register it is flirting with, it is narcissistic. At any rate, it plays the most generic Contemporary Art game, the fuelling of hermeneutic speculation, which implies potential thoughtfulness, even if in practice, it tends to work out as idiocy.
In relying on these clichés in her performative role as a Female Artist, Tetz is as much a generic figure as a centerfold, in fact, far more so. In pitching things in this fashion, she also falls into the basic trap of Lacanian desire, namely that the whole operation is one of misrecognition. A fantasy about the desire to be desired, it is also a fantasy about the desire to be subversive when it is anything but. You could call this Zombie Feminism (as an homage to Zombie Formalism) and it bears that taint of examples like Janet Werner, an example of visually illiterate banker’s art if there ever was one.