Reviews: Leyla Majer at Optica; Jeanie Riddle and Delphine Hennelly at galerie d'Outremont; Clément de Gaulejac at Maison de la culture de Rosemont-Le Petite-Patrie

The three exhibitions this week may only seem very loosely related. In their own ways, they each imagine utopias, and they each do so with an appeal to the childish, whether in the form of illustration or through their “educational” posing.

At Optica is Leyla Majer’s Anticipating Hypersea. The accompanying text by Esther Bourdages states that

Majeri is proposing an environment that brings together three bodies of work that showcase her research on the deconstruction and decolonization of prevailing ideas, borrowing themes associated with a kind of fictional ethnography and speculative biology. […] Plants and living things are the artist’s raw material. The exhibited hybrid assemblages are composed of gourds and ceramics. While some varieties of gourds, also called calabashes, are edible, most are not. They are generally cultivated not as food, but to serve as a recipient, an ornament, or a sound box. Their dissemination is the outcome of human migratory activity and natural elements, mainly water. Majeri alters their shape as they grow using ceramic structures to enclose the plant. […] Majeri maintains that, “using plants, sculpture, images, and documentary objets, these new installations will continue [to raise] and to re-articulate interrogations related to forms of knowledge: what they arbitrarily make visible or invisible, what they create as the imagination of the living.”

If you do not read the accompanying text outside of the exhibition space, none of this would be conveyed by the work. Instead, what you get amounts to a slightly deranged exercise in absurdity as a plethora of dead gourds spread across the floor in what resemble melting chastity belts from a particularly bad B-movie cluster around a little record player. The air is filled by the sounds of children cultishly reciting a bilingual text and there’s a tarp with a vegetal face that resembles a highway trash sculpture made by a farmer I used to know. The prints (“phytograms, a technique of printing on photosensitive paper” that uses sunlight for exposure) read as non-sequiturs and the spatial relations between the three different elements of the show seem devoid of any substantive consideration.

Besides this, the conceptual claim of providing an alternative reality version of the world where Darwinism does not apply by appealing to feminist pseudo-science is rather surprising when put into practice. This decolonization (“fictional ethnography and speculative biology”) means both a falsification of history and the “extractive” use of materials that denies them their nutritive value, sterilizes them as matter, and reduces them to “ornaments” for anthropological use-value (or what she terms “know-how”). The result is a kind of mangled tourist “folk artiness” that devolves into kitsch thanks to being over-freighted with significations that are clearly absent.

At galerie d’Outremont, Les plus beaux cauchemars, features works by Jeanie Riddle and Delphine Hennelly. It was curated by Anaïs Castro and Alice Ricciardi, as the second of three shows taking place at different times this fall, and which fall under the umbrella of Pictura. Not limited to sculpture and autonomous paintings, the walls in the corner of the library building have been covered in Hennelly’s pastel figures, which snugly fit a kind of kindergarten aesthetic. Hennelly’s work resembles a cuter version of Carol Wainio’s discussed a few weeks ago, although without the barely underlying melancholy.

This pedagogy as style, something extremely different and far more complex than the kind of neo-liberal pedant style that is more common in the city, is twisted by the convoluted curatorial frame-up it gets. Placing them in reference to Fauvism, Anaïs Castro writes:

The contrasting aesthetics of Riddle and Hennelly are resolutely different in their ambitions. However, through this unique experiment at Galerie d’Outremont, together, the artists prompt us to consider painting’s influence beyond the boundaries of the canvas. There lies a political potential for symbolic and intangible representations manifested in pictorial form to compel us to consider how spaces and images have an immaterial impact on our lives. Their palettes, primarily consisting of powdery pastels, are decisively feminine and deceptively sweet, yet the work itself remains undeniably subversive. This second part of Cruel to Be Kind / Les plus beaux cauchemars Trojan-horses feminine codes and iconography to transform the gallery space into an experiment towards transformative care and compassion.

This raises the question of what “political potential” is supposed to imply and whether this allusion is a way of ignoring the actual political function of the work as a quasi-official instance of state ideology. Leaving aside the extremely historically questionable association of the feminine and pastels, the “subversive” or “deceptive” aspect at play here seems to have more in common with what has been termed “cute authoritarianism” than anything else. 

The appeal to the childish that was in vogue a hundred years ago was already a conceptual leftover from the romance of the noble savage from a century and a half before that. That the cult of the child/primitive and their spiritual reincarnation in various forms of marginality, lived experience, alternative epistemology, etc. have been the central clichés of a hundred years of art is hardly controversial. Now that overt “primitiveness” has become unfashionable (because deemed “racist”) as a way of relaying these sorts of notions, they get presented in an even more dubious form, such as this. Likewise, it rehearses the anthropological fantasy basic to all of this, namely the notion of culture itself, here cast in the terms that have been embraced by the bureaucrats of the Canadian state for decades: care.

It is (deliberately or not) hilarious then that the most remarkable thing in this hodgepodge of warmed-over stylistic choices is likely the lack of care that becomes apparent amid the performative softness. The plinths propping up Riddle’s deflated lumps are scratched, bruised, and smudged, with pink-purple apparently bleeding out of them. 

Working in an even more overtly propagandistic vein, Les Maitres du monde sont des gens by Clément de Gaulejac at Maison de la culture de Rosemont-Le Petite-Patrie involves drawings, video, and a duo of murals set up in the manner of tapestries. These works have been showing for several years at various venues and thematically examine civilizational collapse and the possibilities of transformation, one of the primary clichés of the city’s Contemporary Art industry.

Highlighted for satirical purposes in this is the libertarian utopian fantasy of things like seastanding and other ostensibly extraterrestrial possibilities where the rich would silo what wealth they could get away with and flea to drifting micro-worlds that seem on the edge of tipping into the ocean.

This is all depicted in imagery taken from mythology and from iconography associated with Marie Antoinette, notably that exploiting the fashion for outrageous hairstyles and the hats that topped them to relay contemporary events. A propagandist for Extinction Rebellion and Québec solidaire, designer of corny mental heath ads and beer labels, de Gaulejac, in own words, has used his “stupidity as a starting point” and presents the entire thing in the “ingrained kitsch esthetic” that has been fundamental to his career as a cartoonist. Unlike the province’s better cartoonists, his style has been consistently flat and dull, and his imagination too reductive to access the excessiveness necessary for competent satire and comes off like the patronizing instructions you sometimes see on public transit.

Framing all of this is a rehashing of the old Jameson chestnut: why is it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism? Of course, one could point out that the failures of those who have sought to overcome “capitalism” may be mostly a matter of their own failure to plausibly imagine what it is in the first place rather than of its wily domination and extreme power of metamorphoses. It may be that it is not so much that the historical world beats down the human imagination but that the human imagination has almost never plausibly imagined the world at all. It may be easier to imagine capitalism than it is to imagine what history has actually been. 

 One of the things that we have consistently encountered is that artists in the city tend to be weirdly devoid of imagination, something that seems to have a fair amount to do with the professed political fantasies that they market their practices in more than anything else. While this can take the form of a more or less performative senility, it can also take that of this kindergarten mode, which is less a performative infantilism than a pedantic infantilization. This seems to be a force of inhibition and repression rather than a reaction to it. 

* First and third photos are mine. The rest are from official social media.