MOMENTA has opened. While I have only seen about two-thirds of it so far, it does seem to be better than past instances. I have already written an introductory preamble examining the self-contextualization and curatorial claims that have accrued around this iteration. In this, and a few future articles, I will examine some of the actualized exhibitions.
There are, from the outset, a series of interesting clashes amid a number of the exhibitions. I will only deal with a couple of them here, but they seem neatly in line with the general theme of masquerades. The two discussed here were directly funded by MOMENTA so this should not be surprising.
One of the three exhibitions on at Galerie de l’UQAM is The Roman de Remort, or the inhumane, villainous fabliaux of the Ultimate Carnaval by the collective Marion Lessard (Marie Cherbat-Schiller, Alice Roussel, Jean-Nicolas Léonard, Claude Romain, and Élisabeth M. Larouine).
According to its official gloss:
Marion Lessard appropriates the medieval literary model to present the human character of Remort, who feels deeply remorseful for the centuries of harm that has been inflicted upon so-called Nature. Here, the blending of humans and animals is taken to extravagant and absurd new heights through disguises, split personalities, and theatrical reversals and turnarounds. Combining medieval satire with musical comedy, Marion Lessard’s exhibition at the Galerie de l’UQAM will take the form of an immersive work in which gallant language masks and unmasks the exhilarating horror of the possible end of the human world.
While “immersive” does not accurately describe it, the installation of this video is more tactile than they tend to be. In a dark room, there is a mask suspended on one wall. At the other end is a giant mouth, gaping open, its long serpentine tonguing spread out like a welcome mat. It is a variant on the Hell Mouth, but inside of it is just a video screen and a couple of backless chairs. Walking towards them is complicated by distinct changes in the density of the carpeting on the floor which provides slight disorientation. The set-up for the video, however, is only disorienting because it is smaller than such set-ups tend to be, almost intimate. There was barely room in the mouth for more than myself and whoever was sitting beside me for the 40 minutes of the video’s duration.
The video has a series of starts, stops, and repetitions, often bridged by a visual effect that has the image swallowed by a mouth which then opens on another scene. In content, it is theatrical, consisting primarily of songs, monologued commentary by a mediatrice speaking in trite Lacanianisms, tableaux, and choreographed processions.
In terms of its narrative, it follows the various deaths of its titular character, pitched both as an aggressor against “Nature” -- figured by people in animal costumes or puppets -- or as someone attempting to save the same “Nature.” As a pseudo-Darwinian the character is damned and the same is true as a pseudo-Rousseauist or pseudo-environmentalist.
Stylistically, the video has minimal to do with “medieval satire” and is better described as a satire of the contemporary (mocking cultural theory, environmentalism) using some (extremely loose) borrowings from the medieval. Most of it falls closer to children’s television aesthetics, relying on pantomime, animal masks and costumes, sing-song repetition, and puppetry.
The overriding sense of the work is comedy and it is less “exhilarating horror” than some shrugging irony that verges on smugness. It is substantially more entertaining and thoughtful than the other show I will review, and significantly more misanthropic.
It is also organized around two symbolic sacrifices. The prologue re-imagines the Nativity story in “bad taste.” Following a few jabs at the Virgin and some lactation humour, the baby Jesus is ripped from the manger and devoured by an animal. (I assume there are more serious theological implications to this than the obvious one of figuring “Nature” as the destroyer of God’s love and salvation.) The second sacrifice involves an animal killing the mediatrice and dumping the body in a stream. Evidently, mediators are not worth actually consuming. The cultural fantasy of the world, symbolized by the mediatrice and her appeals to the division between the Imaginary and the Real, etc. is clearly figured as an even more poisonous delusion about the world than religion.
Remort, who is frequently described as the “artful,” the “master of images” and a “perverse” creator of “artifice” is less convincing as an avatar of humanity than of art. The video simultaneously suggests that he is being punished for his transgressions and that his intentions and acts do not matter. Art is identical to the re-deathing of the world but the world is barely distinguishable from art which operates according to its own rules of artificial production, blurring the lines between animal and vegetable.
The absurdity of this conflict is explicitly figured by its conclusion. At its finale, the video becomes a puppet show within a puppet show, human in animal skin, animal in human skin, all stable identity formations collapsing into one puppeteer (which could stand for Art, Nature, the Divine, the Human, Death, etc. It is not clear).
It is all a matter of aesthetic valuation. As one subtitle on the blubbering wails of the suffering spells out, “Human screaming. Frogs singing.” The “suffering” is clearly performative to the point of parody, just as all the voices sound detached and dubbed in to add to their flattening of “thick” or anthropologized experience.
At Centre Vox, is Marianne Nicolson’s Tawi’stalisala (To Walk Around the World): Reclaiming the Intangible. One of three shows at the locale, it occupies the largest area. It features the redeployment of various archival materials, primarily through the reproduction of various photographs that are curatorially re-mediated and reterritorialized with commentary, as well as some sculptural and mixed media pieces.
The Biennale brochure’s rationale for Nicolson’s VOX exhibition:
Artist, researcher, and activist of the Musgamakw Dzawada'enuxw Nation Marianne Nicolson uses her art to advocate for Indigenous ancestral land rights and to preserve the sacred rituals of her community in Gwa’yi (Kingcome Inlet, British Columbia). The work Nicolson presents in a contemporary art context stems from her engagement with the medium of photography, which she submits to what she calls “reverse appropriation” in response to the continuous acts of expropriation and appropriation inflicted upon Indigenous peoples. At VOX, Nicolson installation works with dynamics of exposure and concealment, of dispossession and reappropriation, beginning with a striking face-to-face. Nicolson thus establishes a space of recognition and negotiation, and ultimately, a space where violence can be dismantled. In this way, she re-actualises the principle of the potlatch, that is, the reciprocity of gift and counter-gift.
Leaving aside the various debates about what “the principle of the potlatch” might signify [There are ways that its varied interpretations could undermine her presentation of it, beyond which, it is completely unclear that the exhibition is structured as a gift and counter-gift. It is, in its material and structural actuality, an object of governmental patronage constructed for touristic propaganda, which makes it a more extreme version of the artifactualization that it denounces.], the issue that is stressed far more within the exhibition itself is the premise of the “colonial gaze” which is vaguely tied to anthropological practices and photography. These, she claims, “possess” and transform their ostensible objects, hunting them down like “prey” in the collection and taxonomization of artifacts. This gaze is then an extractive one, analogized with capitalism, that violates a supposedly holistic and self-defining culture. It is a variation of The Fall, dramatized through a groundless ontologization and essentialization of photography.
While the “colonial gaze” is susceptible to the same critiques as that of the general theory of the “gaze” (its basis in the half-witted appropriation of pseudo-scientific speculations through a series of specious analogies between irreconcilable forms and media), the more curious issue is the entire set-up’s total blindness to the fact that it naturalizes (and sacralizes) the basic premises of anthropology in order to critique them (or “correct” them), and seemingly has to in order to “perform” its content (the construction of a mostly elliptical narrative of violation that requires the discrete existence of “identities” but which the formal reality of the work evacuates). In the end, this only exasperates what is the most untenable to start with and completely undermines both the anthropological fantasy of the existence of culture and its parasitic “reappropriation.” [Nicolson, unsurprisingly, is a doctor of Linguistics and Anthropology.]
There is nothing in the visual logic of the work that restores, or even meaningfully suggests, some alternative. Captioning photos is made to do more work than it can possibly accomplish and seems to give text, in this case amounting to little more than a string of hackneyed clichés, a superhuman amount of power. The most substantive thing that occurs is a sarcastic use of gun shells in one of the ancillary works, but this suggests as much the re-killing of the thing it ostensibly attempts to resurrect as anything else.
A note from curator Ji-Yoon Han highlights what is at stake here: “By mixing Indigenous symbols together with colonial forms, Marianne creates a space for understanding and reconciliation. She wants to break down violence and honor [sic] the things in life that are invisible.”
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While the social mediatization of the exhibition markets it as: “Nicolson refuses to abide [sic] the logic of compensation through visibility as practised by political and cultural institutions,” this compensatory logic is precisely what it practices both in its visual language and its pedagogical framing. If anything it only extends this in an even more obfuscatory way.
In the context of the first work discussed, we can see that both the function of the various textual mediations performed by the artist and the Biennale curator are equivalent to the work of the “mediator” in Marion Lessard’s Remort.