Reviews: Catalogue des ruines at Skol and Sébastien Cliche’s La température de l’information at Circa
Last week we looked at two exhibitions that more or less dealt with the notion of “home.” In both instances, this was also inflected with the spectre of ruination. One did so in an overtly theatrical manner involving a lot of “meta-modernist” pastiche and “archaeological” stylization while the other concocted a self-destructive narrative of “displacement” that testified to the distance between art and the subjective fantasy of home.
The notion of housing has also been cropping up a bit lately at Skol. They have had two group shows in the past few months dealing directly with it in a variety of guises lately. The currently on view Catalogue des ruines in certain respects was a logical follow-up to Mode d’emploi pour habitation invisible (User’s Manual for an Invisible Home). If the latter relied on the idea of human structures as a basic model, the former relies on the notion of the world remade around the human in a far more extreme way.
The exhibition’s text describes it this way:
With a key emphasis on territorial retrieval, ecological awareness and the aesthetics of accumulation, the exhibition presents various encounters with elements and material residue that encompasses our environmental relations. […] As the Anthropocene can be defined as a geological time frame that marks the long standing effects of human activity on a planetary scale, confronting the realities of environmental pollution and climate crisis is often met with an overwhelming feeling of apathy or abjection. By alluding to ecosystems of material abundance and exploitation that we’ve created, the exhibition transforms the gallery space into a melancholic environment where things, and objects, become less certain. Every item in Catalog of Ruins presents its own temporality that begins to address the terrifying reality of deep time as we find ourselves faced in an era of ecological crisis.
The exhibition offers the typical “apocalyptic” framing and references to the Anthropocene that we encounter almost weekly. In this respect, it is part of that loose “eco-horror” sub-genre that vaguely incorporates perfunctory references to broad historical processes as part of its general glamourization (a “melancholic environment” that distracts from “abjection” by creating uncertainty). It is a great deal more even in tone and coherent in theme than a lot of the curatorial projects that flow through the space.
The space is neatly divided in two. The larger of them contains wall and sculptural works and the smaller space a video by Elise Rasmussen. On the dividing wall is the work of Lauren Chipeur. Dotting the rest of the space are sculptures by Kuh Del Rosario, prints by Samuel Bernier Cormier, and pieces by Xavier Orssaud (shown last year at Atelier circulaire).
Chipeur’s work, which I saw a broader iteration of in London last year, comes off like fairly muted paper art. The wallworks are decorative and prop-like, but the few bits stranded on the floor have a little more sculptural presence and retain a certain “abjection” that borders on the comic, especially when viewed only a few feet from Del Rosario’s far more ornate conjuring of material processes in action.
A bigger question is why is this a “catalogue?” Umberto Eco has spoken of catalogues as one of the great formalizations of the sense of the infinite, as something that far exceeds the more subjective limits of the sublime, and creates a concrete and unique kind of indefiniteness. Catalogues are a kind of non-narrative version of history, the world as things and events but without any protagonists or antagonists, any clear causes or relationships even if they may share a common type of furniture.
So the general set-up of the exhibition seems to sit with a certain unease in the attempt to introduce an overriding narrative into it. This occurs both in the curatorial framing (the historical/geological fantasy of the Anthropocene) and, more specifically, in the video’s attempt to carve out some historical narrative. It is notable in this respect, how much of the video’s form consistently undermines this programme.
Rasmussen’s video In the Valley of the Moon is a kind of investigative documentary that keeps getting sidetracked from its ostensible central focus, following tangents which are often poetically evocative, but throw off balance the central attempt to articulate a coherent point. The video also sets up some analogies between visual layering (vertically in image and horizontally in time) that stress the blurring of stratification in a way that complements Orssaud’s work.
Like the rest of the work, it does not really inspire a melancholy affect or a sense of crisis, but an overall “residual” prettiness, like the dusty interiors of a historical house open to the public. This is the overriding sense that is left from the exhibition.
At Circa is Sébastien Cliche’s La température de l’information. Split starkly into the space’s two rooms. The second room displays one large work. On entrance, it appears to be a palette of orderly stacked archival boxes. As you tour around to the other side, there is a gaping hole like a wound or quarry pit, the torn-through stacks of documents appearing like the strata of rocks. As an image, this directly parallels the depictions of strata that were central to Orssaud’s work in the Skol show.
The larger room at Circa contains multiple works spread out for the visitor to circulate through. Stark and simple wooden frames, some on casters, some standing sold, gold various trays. These are filled with different types of media (photos, books, CDs, etc.) which are also densely stacked. The trays these sit in generally contain fluid and the various media are moulding. As the cauliflower-like moulds spread, cluster and decay to crumble into the surrounding fluids, many of the media are decomposing, bleeding out soft pastel hues that seep through the mould.
Both shows, whatever their textual framing suggests otherwise, stress the wealth of all this ruination as well as the poetry of “pollution.” As the text for Circa notes:
Throughout the exhibition, the work evolves like a poetic fiction. The result is a certain aesthetic of accumulation confronted with oblivion, in which the processes of crystallisation, precipitation and sedimentation bring about metamorphoses. Like an alchemist, the artist sets in motion a series of reactive properties that lead to the sculptural development of archives. The same is true of our living memories, just as it is of our sleeping ones.
It goes on to suggest, more curiously, that the artist “explores the notion of memories and data beyond the cloud paradigm or dedicated structure, towards their perpetual future. …the research underway frees itself from a specific theme in favour of a mnemonic approach to materials.”
.jpg)
I find this framing oddly skewed. While the work employs objectified “memory,” it is not as memory. But the stress on memory itself here is more metaphorical or a matter of presumed content rather than of what the artwork actually does and for which it has little significance other than as an abstract implication of the distance between memory and its memorial. If anything, as a semi-autonomous performance being undertaken by an inhuman production, Cliche’s work has more to do with a kind of de-memorization that is not the same as forgetting.
What is occurring is a sculptural metamorphosis of the archive, separated from its artificial temporal suspension and immersed in an accelerating historicisation process where history-as-such becomes the annihilation of memory. In this sense, it is real history’s destruction of the narrative of a peculiarly human history.
This can be read in poetic terms and it seems redolent with the kind of bio-mechanical poetics that were common to the strains of surrealism that were best exemplified (theoretically) by someone like Caillois. As with Del Rosario’s work, what seems to be appearing in semi-autonomous form is a visual poetry that makes a show not only of the irrelevance of memory but of the paradoxically dehumanizing process of display.
* Header photo from artist’s website, others my own.