In the first article, I looked at how the entire event was framed. This meant both its broader framing in the press through a rhetoric of crisis that exploited various medical metaphors, and the way that MOMENTA was more specifically conceptualized this year by its curator Ji-Yoon Han.
In her concluding essay in the MOMENTA catalogue, the curator substantially extends the kind of panic discourse that was already employed as a plea for funding and publicity. She uses this to frame the event with an extraordinary amount of hyperbole. We are told that we live in a “frantic age” in which artists have lost their prerogative as image makers. The image is being made with or without human intent or consciousness just as we are all becoming images in an automated and increasingly surveilled world. An image no longer seems to be determinable as a representation created by a perceiving subject. What an image is directed to or depicts is also unclear since images are neither part of a universal language nor are they necessarily moored to human intention.
According to the curator, the status of images then becomes an accelerating ethical crisis. Complicit with “barbarity,” the production of images is not innocent and they do things other than depict. As they proliferate, human attention can hardly keep track of them and seems to be losing itself. Amid this “vortex” the “‘subject’ is making a huge comeback.” There is an ethical demand to rescue it from the “narcotic excess” of the image to allow for common references and meaning. Does the stress on diversity, inclusion, equity, etc. just produce more images rather than action? Does it just file these “subjects” back into the “neoliberal game of the attention economy and identity capitalization?”
One of the primary points of reference that the curator relies upon is Roger Caillois’ essay Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia. Written while he was marginalized from the Breton circle of Surrealism and shifting closer that of Bataille, the essay relies primarily on a kind of speculative biology, a move that allows him to dislodge his arguments from the more commonplace claims of psychoanalysis and sociology. Caillois suggested that, “Morphological mimicry could then be genuine photography, in the manner of chromatic mimicry, but photography of shape and relief, on the order of objects and not of images; a three-dimensional reproduction with volume and depth: sculpture-photography, or better yet teleplasty, if the word is shorn of all psychic content.”
The notion that mimicry was a defense mechanism does not stand. Predators see through mimicry without much difficulty so it is not really a protective strategy and mimesis is also found among the inedible. Instead, it is a “dangerous luxury” that often results in accidental destruction rather than survival. Rather than the retention of the self, what occurs its its diminishment or loss. Attracted by the lure of space, the collapse of personality into space seems the end “once we have established that mimicry cannot be a defense mechanism, then a disorder of spatial perception is the only thing it can be.”
Under these conditions, the subject begins to stand outside of themselves. They feel themselves become space, or at least similar to it, which is to say not particular to anything specific. “These expressions all bring to light one single process: depersonalization through assimilation into space.” From this, he concludes, “It simply suggests that alongside the instinct of self-preservation that somehow attracts beings toward life, there proves to be a very widespread instinct d'abandon attracting them toward a kind of diminished existence; in its most extreme state, this would lack any degree of consciousness or feeling at all. I am referring, so to speak, to the inertia of the élan vital.”
After running through a selective recapitulation of Caillois’ argument, the catalogue more or less ends on the question, “Will learning how to slip into the skin of images not be the very thing to help us compensate for the excess of the visible that rules our lives and presence in the world today?” Much of the work seems to be a policing of this excess, a turn to a puritanism of the subject (individual or collective), however befuddled, awkward and implausible, and more importantly, a failure to really address the implications of the blurring of photography and sculpture and the radical exteriorization this plasticity implies, regressing instead to a rather dull kind of intersubjective functionalism.
The curator’s argument makes all sorts of assumptions, none of which are really in evidence in any of the work in the Biennale, even if they are insisted on by textual supplements. If they were ever really there, did the subject ever go away and what has prompted it to come back beyond the promptings of an extremely artificial art market? As Caillois put it, “Beware: Whoever pretends to be a ghost will eventually turn into one.” Whatever demands these “subjects” purport to make or claims of “experience” they pretend to represent is unclear, just as the causal or structural mechanism of their appearance and referentiality is.
Unsurprisingly, the moral logic of “compensation” continues the war against art carried out by cultural institutions for most of the past century. This is in keeping both with Canadian state policy and with Catherine Millet and Donald Kuspit’s observations that Contemporary Art has been to a large degree defined by a socio-political hostility to art, or what the latter referred to as its function as institutional rape.
I would not have expected any of the discourses around any of the exhibitions, either in the catalogue or in its “accessible language” handouts, to have relayed anything like this. As intriguing as these forms of writing sometimes are, they are ultimately institutional PR statements more than anything else.
Rather than going through every remaining show, I have only selected a handful of the main Biennale exhibitions to discuss, but which thematically and strategically provide a reasonable representation of the remainder. Even here, there is a certain amount of redundancy, but there are also a few interesting clashes.
The exhibition Play Mas explores the complex issues of masquerade within a colonial context. In this regard, Ehlers draws attention to the exemplary figure of Moko Jumbie. A god of fate in many West African cultures, Moko is said to have crossed the Atlantic to protect his people from calamity and malediction. The exhibition is centered around the video Moko is Future (2022) portraying the arrival of Moko in the city of Copenhagen. The larger-than-life silhouette wanders through the empty streets of the Danish capital, and as the antithesis of an urban environment frozen in stone, whose architecture and monuments form the archives of a colonial past, Moko shines bright.
This explanation sits rather curiously with the work itself, the overall impression of which could not be more at odds with it. Consisting of a video projection on a vertical monolith at the centre of the Fondation’s largest exhibition space, it shows the colourfully costumed character on stilts, eyes behind its mask frequently stressed in close-up, as it moves from the water around the city streets. Much of the time is spent gesticulating at silent statues until it gets tired and has to rest, like a meth head in Dorchester Square (I saw one arguing with a bench about Justin Trudeau being the son of God after I left the gallery).
The narrative also implies that the god has abandoned his people and that the fight was taken back to the colonizers long past that point that it was of any actual importance, that there is actually nothing to fight, not even ghosts. Regardless of how one feels about the extremely vague historiographic referent that is being exploited here, it is all empty action, presenting the decolonization fantasy as a masquerade for tourists who do not bother to appear. What does this suggest about the artist and consumers of a tourist event like the Biennale?
For jung’s first solo exhibition in North America, the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery presents her 15 years of research, dedicated to the Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project (2008–ongoing). From an openly political perspective, the artist explores how deviation from the norm has been lived and felt within the context of Korean culture. jung’s videos and filmed performances show the aging bodies of Yeoseong Gukgeuk’s original female actors, some of whom have since passed away, applying their makeup, telling their stories, sifting through old photographs of themselves, acting out long-dormant scenes for the camera, playfully re-perform their “man-making” techniques based on the established typology of the hero, the joker, and the villain.
The artist relies on a generic bifurcation borrowed from lazy sociology (normal-deviant) to sketch out this narrative. However crude that is as a historiographic model, in presentation it complicates all of this, staging it with a mixture of library display techniques and generic Camp accents. This includes various types of video installation (beyond diaphanous curtains, to be watched on thick carpeting, to be watched sitting, to be encountered amid archival materials, etc.) which employ assorted types of narrativization (ethnographic, ironic commentary, didactic correction, autobiography, etc.). The use of Camp and sociological realism makes sense because the latter is Camp anyway, in Sontag’s sense of being earnest in its ridiculousness.
While “deferral” tends to be the operative guiding term in the wall texts intended to dictate interaction with the works, the “Deferral Archives” section is also explicit about the work’s construction of history and the exhibition is more about the way that the aesthetics of display construct a historiographic fantasy than it is about its ostensible narrative content. What is displayed has little to do with the performance of gender and a lot to do with the performance (mimicry) of historiography.
Gender easily assimilates to genre and the installation is a way of rendering exhibitionist the performativeness of “gender as a construct” rather than a more naive neo-liberal presentation of it as an actual social fact. While the artist clearly seems to have intended a utilitarian representational function for the imagery they have narratively codified, they simultaneously undermine its status as credible evidence. It all becomes the pageant of “making” history.
Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s four-channel video installation titled The Specter of Ancestors Becoming explores a little-known aspect of colonial history: the stories of love and separation experienced by hundreds of Vietnamese women and Senegalese soldiers, or tirailleurs, enlisted in the French army in Indochina during the first half of the twentieth century. The maternal figure is at the heart of this polyphonic and intergenerational co-creation conceived by Tuan Andrew Nguyen that seeks not to reconstitute history, but to work together toward creating a counter-history. One by one, members of the Vietnamese-Senegalese community of Dakar read a series of fictional conversations with or between their parents and grandparents, while others play the role of ancestors. In counterpoint to this narration appear contextual archival images that are progressively replaced by family portraits.
Make-believing history takes on a rather different form here. Effectively, the various figures in the videos mime and mythologize a maternal figure. It is a kind of anti-archivism that enacts a violation of the past for the image of the present, actively erasing history for the construction of what amounts to a romantic short film for colonialism.
It relies on the use of stereotypically “spiritual” music, floating cameras that likewise “spiritualize” the environments that they claim, and emotionally manipulative close-ups. The overwhelming sensation is like a high concept commercial where you are not entirely sure what the product is (VRBO, Ancestry, a low-emissions car?) but it tries very hard to sell it while attempting to lull the viewer into a trance.
Quantum Choir (2022) is a four-channel video installation that puts the accent on the procedural dimension involved in any process of imitation, and the therapeutic—even jubilant—nature of repetition. Clarke’s strong apprehension about singing in public is the starting point for a choral piece based on the recognition, vulnerability, and solidarity of other queer masculine women with whom she identifies. In response to Clarke’s invitation to join her in collectively overcoming their fear of singing, Naisargi N. Dave, Kerry Manders, and Kimiko Tobimatsu learned to sing John Grant’s “Queen of Denmark,” a pop song about the challenges of self-acceptance.
Even before you enter the gallery, the cacophony of the singing voices can be heard. On entrance, the exhibition spreads over two rooms, one providing screens that encircle the viewer in a manner akin to the previous exhibition, and the other a mock set-up of the studio set that the performers were photographed in. The viewer, hedged in or placed into a re-fabrication of the set for the exhibition’s photos and videos, is forcefully addressed and presumably interpolated, prompted to some kind of strained recognition.
If, in superficial content, the work seems to be mostly concerned with a kind of failed mimicry and matching amid generic types that are sentimentalized into imaginary unity through an infantilizing show of incompetence, the viewer is treated to assume a comparable role or remain just outside as a spectator of unclear purpose. As such, it makes them part of an enforced performance of the failure of mimicry, a severe act of subjectification that is spelled out by the explicit separation of the figure from their environment at every stage.
Blass’s exhibition at the Fonderie Darling explores the erotic tension that drives our desire to see, in which our recognition of a familiar object is therefore constantly vexed—excited—by an eruption of the unusual, a visual anomaly, an ambivalence between resemblance and dissemblance. Blass has deepened her interest in the sculptural potential of the photographic image, therefore her exhibition suggests a journey through the metamorphosis of the image as a sculptural skin.
While “metamorphosis” may seem like a metaphor for simply making things, it is the made rather than the passage between forms that seems dominant. Blass’ work is a rather literal production and exhibition of a “skin,” which is perhaps why what makes it interesting is less this direct thematic translation than the more accidental suggestiveness that is introduced.
Upon entering, the visitor sees what appears to be a production photo of the casting of some of the sculptures in the show. Ce qui a déjà été vu ne peut pas être dévu shows two semi-nude women crouching, one licking Doritos dust from her fingers, which is presumably where the “erotic” excitement of desire is supposed to come from.
This scene of frozen poses is also presented with the ghostly bodies of Le mime,le modèle et le dupe, a sort of skinsuit set beside a pair of pants in semi-acrobatic suspension, made of acrylic, oil, gouache, plaster, copper, chip bag, juice box, jumpsuit, resin, epoxy, and fibreglass.
Despite the clear stress on the erect nipples that have been carefully cast, the liveliness of this painted husk is secondary to the vitality of the bag of Doritos that it holds. However, the empty chip bag echoes the basic form that dominates most of the show. Although there is some implied narrative about the tension between mimes and mimicry with the human figure, the idea of the body as bag that holds mostly air with some artificial flavour and toxic corn overshadows it.
I do not see any “ambivalence” in any of this. It is curated in a fashion that makes it all seem demonstrative and self-evident. There is nothing vexing or anomalous. The objects do not resemble things, they are clearly just things that have been produced by no mysterious process and are presented in a way there could be no ambiguity about this. Many of them even look extremely familiar, recalling the type of assemblage sculptures that were common to Funk 60 years ago. One exception is the inkjet print on polyester mixed with metal, acrylic, oil, gouache into a suspended blob that resembles nothing so much as a compacted and tossed chip bag, although the distortion that this formation provides is extreme enough that it hardly registers as a photographic image and sits comfortably as a sculpture.
Logic Paralyzes the Heart (2022) is a video piece that introduces us to Cyborg #1, a sentient being who adopts the guise of a human through actress Joan Chen, to engage in an exercise of self-reflection on her role in history. Cyborg #1 tells a story: a life, her own, conditioned by the militarized, warmongering context that motivates technological innovation, from encrypted and decrypted underwater communications systems during World War II to the genesis of cyborgs during the Vietnam War.
The work itself just feels like a student short film, mixing bad History Channel style montage with acting that would be suitable to an industrial training video. (You could argue this is primarily where its substantive relationship with mimicry is but it does not seem intentional). It rehashes a lot of stuff that was already rote in 80s cyberpunk, only deprived of everything that made that interesting.
While it opens with the statement that the cyborg is given a human face because people seem incapable of looking at the non-human, it relies on an extreme anthropomorphization of history, naively narrating it through a hyper-moralized lens as though this was not just another “cultural value,” rather than using the cyborg to dehumanize history. Sacrificing the possibility of any radical alterity ironically to be encountered in the spectre of mimicry, it seems to reduce the cyborg to the saccharine. However, the initial appeal to AI in the opening moments, and the subsequent appeal to the blurring of the human and cyborg, could be cited to as a means of interpreting the historical fantasy it constructs as no more than a deep fake.
While some of the work can be productively viewed as entering into the space of a sculpture-photography, much of it does not do this and to whatever degree it relies on forms of mimicry, it is considerably different from that outlined by Caillois. Indeed, much of the work discussed in this article (opposed to the previous) falls far closer in line with the kind of defensive position that he argued against and seems entirely horrified by the “dangerous luxury” and “depersonalization” that he alluded to.
While there may be some “disorder in spatial perception,” this is what the mimicry here seems orchestrated to fend off. It is all about overcompensation and panic. If anything, most of this work comes closer to something like René Girard’s notions of mimetic desire and scapegoating fantasies than it does to Caillois.
While Blass’ work is certainly an instance of relief photography, it is not mimicry because it retains a distinct set of entirely separate and institutionally codified identities. The collapse into mimicry is denied by the framing of the work itself.
Some of the exhibitions in the satellite programme seemed to deal with the mimicry programme pretty literally. Karine Payette’s Adaptation at Art Mûr, for example, consisted largely of cast of hands and forearms that were melding with butterflies and other types of insect and animal life. It was a fairly obvious melding of forms using aesthetics common to horror or magic realism, even if what implication can be drawn from this is not obvious at all, although it was framed by almost obligatory references to the Anthropocene, extinction, the domination of nature, etc.
