Reviews: Patrick Beaulieu at Art Mûr; Comme un bruit de métal at Projet Casa; Émilie Allard at Centre Clark

Last week’s reviews touched on the “poetic” attempt to do what amounts to pseudo-investigative journalism, avoiding the tabloid route by exploiting an arguably brassy form of performative religiosity to market its slim content. This was given an unsurprising phenomenological inflection (the links between phenomenology and the return to a vaguer and more “embodied” religiosity are well-known) through an appeal to attunement. Attunement, as Heidegger once pointed out, tends to go along with boredom, even when it is about looking at shoes.

The conflict between boredom and attunement was avoided in the discussion last week and it will not get much play this time either. But there are a handful more incidents of poetic tuning in and out on display. 

Something like this was at play in Patrick Beaulieu’s Transvasements at Art Mûr. The work was created through his interaction with the various landscapes he passed through while aboard a tiny vessel as it “sailed from the Gironde estuary to Sète on a canal that links the Atlantic to the Mediterranean for 35 days.” With bits of a boat at its centre, the walls of the exhibition were lined with photos on metal. Some were found images, but many were photos of vessels that stressed their “names” or the slogans that were written across their sides, spelling out things like Liberty, Nuance, Patience, Muddy Waters, etc.

Together, the lines of photos suggested both a kind of found poetry and a web of data that had been gathered from casting his eye around these locations. It was investigative of the current but presented in the language of a sort of antiquarianism, these two temporal registers jarring as an odd joke, the brassiness of the framing and their implied historical distancing through art, giddied up by focus to register their daffy declaritiveness. This humorous twist was also present in the video works that were shown. Dominated by a brooding and churning ambient soundscape, the videos featured the passing through and under bridges and locks in various waterways, the image twisting around to create a kind of paradoxical going-nowhere quality.

Going nowhere also seems to be what is at play in the show at Projet Casa. Comme un bruit de métal was curated by Nicolas Ranellucci and features his work alongside that of Frédéric Chabot, Mathilde Varanese, and Sophie Perry. It is marketed in end-of-the-world science fiction terms:

Departure is imminent. Earth is uninhabitable, and Projet Casa is the only shuttle available. On board are four artists, whose delicate mission is to survive the unknown, the lack of resources and the unpredictable. Bordering on art, technology and the living, Comme un bruit de métal invites you inside our spaceship, a house-laboratory suspended between the present and the future. [p] In the darkness of night, a curvaceous craft rises into the sky. Thick smoke hits the ground. Minutes before, humans boarded a strange vessel. Where do we go from here when our world ends? Are other dimensions hiding from the human eye? How can we reconcile the before and the after, the known and the unknown, the explored and the unexplored?

Spread over several rooms, the exhibition is dominated by Chabot’s sculptures and Perry’s assemblages, both of which seem to most blatantly dramatize the narrative framing. The rest comes off as secondary and decorative. Perry’s works explicitly engage with the sci-fi theme, suggestive of a campground for post-apocalyptic survivalists or low-rent space travellers without much of a direction. She concocts these out of bits and pieces: tinfoil sheets, dysfunctional tools, and old media tech. If these are theatrical, Chabot’s work carries on the low-budget aesthetics. His hybridized furnishings which seem alien by dint of their odd and suggestive carving combine with cardboard blocks that simultaneously suggest non-objectivism and computer graphics, cobbled together in a distinctly proppish way that is entertaining.

The show at Projet Casa is ostensibly about remembering, or more accurately, imagining what it might be like to remember something. Its space-age thematic and B-movie set-up go along with so much of the work feeling like a rehash of what was commonly found in the city by the late 1960s. The only things that do not register in this retro-kitsch mode are the videos, which seem dated to far more recent times, their combination of arbitrary slideshow aesthetics and free library ambient music registering as the most cooly robotic aspect of the whole thing.

Altogether, the works create a much more sedate sensation than other recent apocalyptic fantasy shows (1, 2). Curatorially, whatever the initial intentions of any of the artworks on their own might have been, it is all oriented around this potentiality of remembrance. Why any of these objects or images would be selected for this purpose I cannot say.

Émilie Allard’s Point d’ironie point d’orgue at Centre Clark follows a very similar framing.

Artist Émilie Allard is mindful of the unknowable; that which is beyond the limits of common textual and formal languages. By transforming what surrounds her, she emphasizes the unexpected associations between words and things through a prism of connections, excess, derision, reference, and the inconceivable. This attention to the unknown incites her to compose poetic prose on sibylline subjects and create assemblages of found objects that she subverts and shapes into incomparably unique sculptural-writings. Some of these are the result of anticipatory reflexes; others, in majority, are clearly improvised based on what she discovers through research. For Allard, making art means creating the possible and even the impossible. She perpetuates what exists and conceives what doesn’t. Like “sense beings,” her works are combined with percepts and affects that transpose new possibilities of existence in different materials. Each piece supports the production process.

The works themselves are hybridized sculptures using wood, metal, etc. They are suggestive as images - a bagpipe/beast, a question mark filled with musical instruments and what resemble antique enema tools - but this is all done in a distinctly familiar way. The references to objects (feet, etc.) do not really matter so much because they are so clearly references to other art. Rather than being incomparable, it is all comparable, both in its broad references and very clearly to a visual logic inherited from the traditions of surrealism. There is nothing here that you could not find traces of in Magritte or Benoît. As with Beaulieu’s poetic assemblage of snapped boat names, there is a familiar, almost folksy traditionalism to them, even if it is filtered by a fake antiquarianism. Fake antiquarianism was effectively the guiding logic of the Casa show.

The more pertinent issue than the “unknowable” would be, how do we look at the all-too-familiar? It has been nearly a century since there was much of anything defamiliarizing about hybridized objects (which already had pictorial roots in the Renaissance, Middle Ages, and far more ancient art, to say nothing of advertising and children’s TV), nor the incursion of the banal as the strange. The gesture of defamiliarizing itself is already over-familiar. This is not intended to be cruel. The works are quite charming and amusing. There is something basically pleasant to them, like some random, slightly archaic thing that looks like something else you bump into at a flea market. But maybe that is the issue. It is too familiar, too easy. That is when boredom does not lead to attunement but just banality. The Casa show can be symbolically read as taking the banal to the point of apocalyptic transcendence.

The bigger problem of Contemporary Art is that it is largely incapable of plausibly imagining the present let alone the future. If the apocalypse results in the world being reduced to a hodgepodge of recognizable art styles, the unrecognizable space that potentially opens up only seems to continue this trajectory.

* Photos of Allard show (1st and last) are mine.