Reviews: Jinyoung Kim at Dazibao; Eddy Firmin at Art Mûr; Rick, le 6e Backstreet boi at Optica; Raúl Aguilar Canela at Diagonale; Marie-France Brière at Centre Clark

The fall season is here and galleries are opening their doors again. The art spaces at the Gaspé relaunched last week with the halls including a poster declaring the ongoing panic about the decline of culture and its potential ruination. The point comes across with a certain degree of ambiguity in the wording and this provides a useful backdrop to what will be discussed in this article.

This selection of reviews is organized in a more or less thematic manner. The theme is primarily monumentality and secondarily some other, maybe more interesting things.

Monumentality is a pretty standard theme in art discourse, localized in discussions of its earliest iterations in religious art and territorial markings. Monuments are one clear way to leave a trace or mark-up a landscape. The term tends to conjure the sculptural but certainly is not limited to it. A monument often indicates and memorializes the passage of some historical event, standing in for it as a kind of presence that may cast an ironic shadow on the present or at least remind one of the fleeting nature of material presence. In the case of the works discussed below, it tends to come in the form of a reliquary, explicitly borrowing from the language of religious art, and inflated by its interrelated objects and supplementary texts.

Monuments, by their nature, tend to have a public function. They loom over their viewers and they throw how a viewer interacts with their space into relief. In the show Here at Dazibao, Jinyoung Kim’s works on display deal with numerous things but the one most relevant to us is a wall of photos that she took documenting a set of unintentional sculptural monuments. Objects on the Sidewalk (Montréal) are inkjet photographs operating as a sort of memento mori of the ephemeral and transitory nature of the objects that people collect. They document the various heaps of stuff people leave on the edge of the street when they move out of an apartment, testifying to a stage of life now gone.

Transformed into photographs, they are flattened, compartmentalized, categorized, and reduplicated like the postcards of religious icons sold at tourist kiosks, here blown-up with an accompanying text to provide them with the appropriate amount of pathos that their blunt descriptive title does not provide. Humourless, sentimentalizing, and fetishistic, as a practice the photos project a kind of redemption fantasy onto these things, rescuing them in effigy from the trash for the sake of memorialization and even reverie. The wall of photos is monumental like the flowers and trinkets left at the spot of a fatal highway accident. 

If that sort of memorialization relies on the appeal to a vague and anonymous humanity, this is not so much the case in Eddy Firmin’s Lawond at Art Mûr. With this show (already exhibited at Oboro last year as part of this UQAM thesis [1]), Firmin is doing pretty much the same thing he has for some time. Unlike his last show at Art Mûr a couple of years ago, here, he has to truncated his generic concerns in terms of space and that makes the exhibition at least slightly more focused. It still runs through the same hodgepodge of stylistic approaches. There are the heavy-handed photos of stereotypical “identity” and there’s the showroom of colonialism, which this time includes the usual gewgaws, a library of books on blacks in art, etc. with his face looking down over the proceedings. On the way to this corner, you pass by a sculpture of the Chanel logo dripping from a face, highlighting the function of “decolonization” as the production of luxury commodities that we have seen lately. On one of the walls, there are maps of a re-imagined (or “decolonized”) world that updates the face of the flattened globe as it introduces “new knowledge” of the postcolonial age, which seems to be entirely wellness clichés. More or less at the centre of the exhibition is a confessional booth, cobbled together in a rather roughshod way and looking every inch a theatrical prop. As part of the “community” outreach of the work, you can listen in to the slightly distorted and rather robotic-sounding recordings implied to be occurring in its empty and obscured interior. 

If Firmin’s work is Art Pompier monument-as-décor in the least subtle, nouveau riche kitsch sense, then one of the exhibitions at Optica is slightly more complicated as it crosses some similar territory. Under the assumed identity of Rick, le 6e Backstreet boi, arkadi lavoie lachapelle’s I didn’t want it that way fills the space with videos, posters, colouring pages, living room props, and jewellery store display style bling. If Firmin is luxury decolonial bling, this is Jean Coutu-manufactured merchandise that uses a lot of the same tropes (“folk art,” heroic mythology, elite vs. popular art, various racial and class clichés) in its performative resistance to resentment, bid at healing, celebration of “marginality,” and promotion of art as the production of knowledge (the primary claim of Firmin’s work). 

The central character in the Optica show is described this way:

The only group member really marginalized from the perfect existence of the sentimental quintet is Rick, the 6th Backstreetboi. A ‘tender-hearted little guy’ hailing from Centre-du-Québec, a free-thinker the BSB recruited from off a beach in Florida in 1993 and then promptly dropped in 1995. A missed opportunity for the Backstreet Boys to add some depth to their art and to address, as Rick had wanted, such topics as rape culture and the toxicity of the industry. Rick always identified as a researcher—a charcheur (‘chercheur’) as Rick puts it. [p] One might think the divorce a painful one. Yet by turning toward fine arts institutions, and encouraged by their agent arkadi lavoie lachapelle, Rick’s quest for healing gave rise to a series of varied artistic interventions on the crossroads of elitist art and pop culture.

The “merch” that makes up most of the show consists of throw pillows, shower curtains, puzzles, colouring books, and so on. Its “participatory” aspect consists of bidding the viewer to sit and watch videos or colour in the line pictures during appointed hours. The most impressive thing about the show is the extent to which it commits to the bit, something that includes the accompanying essay by local music journalist Marc-André Mongrain. 

The less blatant but still obvious reference in this is to General Idea rather than the pop group. They appear in blown-up colouring book form here and clearly cast a rather different shadow on the proceedings. Their inclusion establishes a more ambivalent claim of relation. Aspects of the rhetoric of the work, like its exhibition space, have a historical relation to the strategies of the group and their function within artist-run centres and the attempts to foment a kind of glamourized and tabloid culture for art in Canada that mimed that of elsewhere. General Idea’s work was also more hyperbolic and, even with its various games and attached personas included, surprisingly direct in the brutality of their satire, especially of forms of artistic activism and their essentially parasitic nature. The difference in the Optica show is that the parasitism is thematized in a non-satirical form that is something far closer to cosplay than derisive parody, both in terms of the invention of this “marginal” character to pre-established icons, and the moralizing attempt to rectify that historical marginalization and cast it in generic activist terms (rape culture, toxicity, reparation, etc.). Or, at least, this is the impression I get from having seen other work by the artist even if the formal logic of the work certainly can be seen as potentially mocking these sorts of moral concerns and the figure of the artist-as-activist.

All of this is filtered through what amounts to new “folk” forms: the YouTube video essay and Jean Coutu printed products. Like the show at Dazibao discussed above, it involves a pseudo-religious treatment of banality and its redemption, up to its appeal to communal experience and treatment of bling and an arm cast as relics. 

 Due in part to its Prince referencing title and less explicitly in terms of its general aesthetics, a show down the hall also combines references to pop music and DIY style. At Diagonale, Purple Rain by Raúl Aguilar Canela claims to question “the existence of equilibrium in a world dictated by the unbridled circulation and accumulation of goods, where social relations have been debased by technology and hyperconnectivity.” This is done, the text goes on to explain, through the use of printing on used clothing to reinvent them with painting and collage, the absorption of the dyes by the textiles and the torching of wood supports for effect, both intended to illustrate “flux” and “permeability.”

In practice, this means the space involves two basic set-ups and a supplementary pamphlet. One is a set of large horizontal mirrors, at the bottom centre of which are small videos of a flower in the rain with the coloured lights of the city reflecting in puddles on the street that conjures retro music videos. The other is a series of scorched wooden monuments reminiscent of old telephone polls from which hang the various paintings. The works themselves suggest crucified sports jerseys. The entire thing wreaks of nostalgia, although this is marketed as “melancholic” and evocative of “the alienation to which we are subjected by the neoliberal capitalist system, and its repercussions on mental health.” As such, the exhibition is another monument to wellness clichés. Like the show at Optica, there is a performative trashiness to it that is decontaminated by its political apologia, something which seems to give both shows a moral aura that the works presented would entirely lack otherwise. If this was ambiguous (intentionally or not) at Optica, it is not here.

One of the show’s currently on at Centre Clark provides a useful spin to all the things just discussed. The framing text for Marie-France Brière’s Champ de contraintes stresses her function as a master of technique with a profound knowledge of the nuances of Carrara marble

…her goal: to reshape the space-time of stone through its strata and interstices. To this day, by chiseling layers of meaning into this irreversibly formed material, she still finds potential for transformation it holds—its simultaneous revelation and disappearance. Marble is an amalgamation of (un)predictable pressure, which, to say the least, is hard to interpret. [p] In Champ de contraintes, we read and translate the marble’s veining. Marie-France Brière’s body of work converges at this propensity for vernacular language; one that is both immemorial and immutable.

However, the encounter with the work itself within this maze of references is rather different. The footprint of the display suggests a series of simple intersecting lines that come together like the hieroglyphs of an alien language left behind. The marbles are vertical or flat, the lighting of the gallery creating some subtlety glittering effects like a wall of salt. All of this is offset by a bronze sculpture that dislodges the works from the tradition that such marbles would presumably be directly related to. 

The works, propped up as they are on stark metal beams, suggest the most basic building blocks of modernist architectural design. This also accentuates the prop quality of the works themselves. Without knowing their material make-up, there is an overall impression that these are the props from some cheap sci-fi series. Such fake cheapness is impressive. The treatment of the materials, their display in a performatively simplified and naked form, tends to speak against their luxury quality. As a result, they come off looking more like styrofoam and suggest a remarkable lightness and lack of any gravity. As hyper-monumental as they are, both in terms of their art history pedigree and their suggestion of the ancient or futuristic, they seem like stuff put together from a craft shop for a community theatre production of Julius Caesar.

 

[1] Firmin’s doctoral thesis stresses decolonization as what amounts to a dialectical frontier. [20] One of the more peculiar things about his dissertation is that it highlights the idea that trans/interdisciplinarity (one of the most standard methodologies of Contemporary Art) is a form of colonial violence that erases the subaltern and yet his entire body of work is essentially done in this format. [23] In general, he stresses a subjectivist form of expressive culturalism which he treats as relativizing while ignoring that it is only a more extreme variation of the thing being critiqued (“Universalism”) through the reification of a series of non-viable and ahistorical categories (the social, the cultural, violence, subjectivity) and ignores the actual political function of his work as part of the state apparatus in which it exists (as part of the “knowledge economy” that duplicates the foundational claims of the Canadian state).

* The shots from Optica are my own, the others are from official social media.