Utilizing what the accompanying literature references as the domestic “bourgeois” space better than most of the installations that tend to be laid out in it, Delphine Huguet’s Les corps complexes, curated by Mylène Lachance-Paquin, is part of the international Post-Invisibles: regard sur la place des femme biennial series of shows. Huguet is based in Montréal and France and Lachance-Paquin largely works developing corporate art “democratization” programming. The exhibition notes thank “the Canada Council for the arts for believing in me.”
According to the curatorial statement:
The exhibition Les corps complexes looks at the internalized frameworks surrounding the place of bodies in both social and intimate interactions. Through an examination of deeply encoded experiences and feelings, the exhibition is rooted in societal, behavioral and feminist research and invites us to reflect on gendered relationships. The copresence of imposing fabric sculptures, installations and works on paper reveals the discomfort conveyed by relations of domination based on gender identities in contemporary and past space-time.
Spanning two floors and split between wall and floor works, the overall exhibition feels spare. The rooms are broken up by what amount to themes like at an antiquated novelty motel.
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To one side is what you could call the Narcissus room, with curved mirror “puddles” spread around a pole on which is the blown-up image of a “romantic” sky, leaving the rest of the space empty, and the adjoining doors shut, showing off their mirrored grid. It is an airy room and the mirrored surfaces never create any kind of baroque density. We are told this all has something to do with the “selfie” but nothing about the use of the space or its forms does much to back up this analogy.
Across the hall, the room is primarily dominated by the largest work in the exhibition with some wall art in the alcove area. At centre, plopped on a plinth by a bay window, is “Étude de Nu.e.s 3, composed of five organic, knotted forms, whose hybrid physiognomy plunges us into an ambivalence” which we are instructed to see as “shapeless masses [that] remind us of the physical and psychic weight imposed by societal dogmas that weigh us down, albeit imperceptibly.” They have the appearance of elongated breasts, with clear nipples and varying tones to suggest flesh. It is unclear what they are “hybrid[ized]” with. Worms? Penises? An Octopus?
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Picking up on the romantic theme, another room extends this to botanicals with a few prints on the wall, potted plants on the floor, and a minimal wooden sculpture resembling a garden ornament. (Several of the pieces of wood are cracked which presumably is intended to imbue it with pathos or index trauma but maybe was just the result of bad planning.) There is a photo of a garden on the floor and we are told that all of this is about the artist’s romantic fantasies, all of which are related to a romanticized (and tightly controlled) nature which is filtered through sentimentalizing mementos.
In the final ground floor room, a set of breast sculptures (“arranged here and there”) resembling footrests are spread out over the floor like a series of rocks of lily pads (if you want to keep with the garden theme).
As you go up the stairs, on the landing you will encounter a trio of embossed prints that are denied any tactile relation with the viewer and held under glass. Once you reach the top, there are some more prints and a make-shift confessional. In the most participatory aspect of the exhibition, we are prompted to write our confessions and then redact most of their content from public view. Such redacted confessions dot the space like post-it notes. Even the exit sign is redacted. This, we are told, alludes to Church censorship, which is cast here as a form of liberation whereby the unspeakable can be uttered and erased but retained as an indecipherable art object. “Self-discovery” is identified with self-censorship which, perhaps says something about the curatorial notes' obsession with “gender identity” since “selected” identity, the logic of the show indicates, is an erasure or obfuscation. As an artistic strategy, all of this seems like a naive deployment of the Foucauldian model of sexuality.
An essential strategic and functional element of an exhibition like this is the production of ignorance and obfuscation. This is not hidden, it is overt and structural, and it extends to the overall framing of the show. The Post-Invisibles biennial this year involves four cities (Montréal, Las Vegas, Lyon, Paris [although it is vastly disproportionately the first]), each with completely distinct art histories in disparate contexts, which are effectively mystified by its curatorial thematization:
Throughout art history, women artists have faced countless inequities vis-à-vis their male counterparts. Notably, women had no access to art schools and were kept outside the art circuit. Their practices were associated with the so-called minor arts, and their talent and the originality of their proposals were, to say the least, downplayed. Forced to the sidelines, they remained invisible.
It is not just that this kind of framing misrepresents history, it also does a significant disservice to what the city’s female artists actually did. Feminist historiography (such as some of the work of Sheena Gourlay, Patricia Smart, Kristina Huneault, Rose Marie Arbour, Francine Couture, etc.) in Montréal has, sometimes far more than it likes to admit, shown that this kind of historiographic framing is more fantasy than reality. Most of the evidence that they have accumulated on art practice, production, and dissemination in the city since the 1920s suggests something very different. This historical framing is an extension of the redacting to produce and sacralize a “self” as a state-funded commodity that is the central practice of the exhibition.
But, to return to the curatorial framing cited above, I am not sure what “contemporary and past space-time” means exactly. If it is supposed to suggest broader historical context and recurrence, that is precisely what the exhibition lacks and which its framing and practical logic undermine. And it is certain from my own experience and what I could observe from those who walked through the show, that “discomfort” and defamiliarization are not things that were really at play.
As I have tended to point out before, whatever Contemporary Art does for its audience, it is rarely anything like defamiliarization. Everything in this exhibition, from its use of materials, rhetoric, and basic points of reference, is completely familiar. There were already dozens of artists doing almost indistinguishable work from this in the 1970s, including numerous in Montréal. It is completely traditional to the point of being rote. That is where most of its charm derives from given that its craft and conceptual value is indistinct.
The exhibition is explicitly about avoiding “discomfort,” about the eroticization of repression and censorship. It is possible then to situate it within a trend that we discussed last year both toward several distinct types of erotic art [1,2,3] and to a kind of zombie feminist art. With its level of rhetorical, iconological, and plastic cliché, it falls closer to the latter. What this might point to is something I will discuss with what I think is a complementary exhibition next week.
* Aside from the 1st, photos are my own