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This week we deal with three shows that play with different types of fetish imagery. Unlike the more commonplace fetish imagery about “culture,” these are more overt in tackling eroticism. This is not to suggest that the culture fetish is not present, in fact, in two of the shows it is explicitly foregrounded.
At Art Mûr is Diana Thorneycroft’s exhibition of coloured drawings, Sing Into my Mouth. Thorneycroft has consistently changed strategies across her career. Her work divides easily into distinct directions and models that she has pursued for several years at a time. There have been thematic and stylistic consistencies within this. Her current drawings share something with her earlier ones depicting murdering one’s lovers and continue her interest in the perverse, whether that is taken as content or strategy.
Throughout her career, there has also been a concern with either esoteric mythologies or more global ones subjected to various sorts of subversion. The more obvious example of this would be her examinations of Canadian “cultural” myths employing dolls and toys, something that started with the playful morbidity of juxtaposing Group of Seven paintings and implied tragicomic narratives starring advertising figures. This tendency likely reached its most subversive and generally misunderstood stage when she was relying on much the same visual logic to tackle historical atrocities in some of the most impressively misanthropic art produced in the country in the past half-century. Subsequently, this was mostly jettisoned for the far safer realm of fantasies that didn’t risk pointing to how fantastical historical narratives are.
The works currently on display at Art Mûr are mostly drawings and a few hybrid pieces that work in her familiar doll form. If they lack the strengths of her earlier work, they share its ambiguity. Spread around the walls of the smaller exhibition space upstairs, they are primarily two or three figure pieces operating within the genre of family or couple’s portraits. Interspersed among them are a few more overtly erotic couplings. It is the family images that tend to hybridize this genre with the erotic in a more provocative manner.
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As an exercise in the strange and fantastical, however, it feels overly familiar (maybe that is the joke implicit in the “family portraits”). It is pretty run-of-the-mill neo-surrealist stuff. If her other work relied on a series of borrowings from familiar genres and icons to make something strange, the work here lacks the same level of perverse estrangement. There is no indication about what any of this is intended to imply. Whether it is simply softcore fetish fantasy, satire, or something else is unclear and this ambivalence is one of the strengths that she’s retained.
If Thorneycroft’s show is a mediocre echo of what she once accomplished, the paired shows at Centre Clark are something else. While Thorneycroft’s show involved illustrations with no referents, the shows at Centre Clark seem to be devoted to the illustration of clichés. Cindy Hill’s A bell I never hear installs works in different media arbitrating the “pony girl” theme while Amanda Boulos’ The Legend of the Palestinian Sasquatch offers a set of paintings thematizing more commonplace topics like “otherness,” etc.
As a side note, the “Palestinian” fantasy has been playing out in the graffiti passing between Rosemont and the Plateau for months. The “anti-Zionist” fantasy was almost exclusively expressed in English for a long time and countered in French. Then this reversed and reversed again as the painters erased each other’s statements over and over again, adding parenthetical remarks and jokes, inverting the implications of bland polemical statements. This was all visually boring but mildly funny. The point is not that this was a political argument about “Gaza,” that spectre that has already been brainlessly exploited by “arts workers” in the “cultural sector,” but, as with almost all street art, it was basically about territorial marking with different artists pissing on each other’s turf. “Gaza” stands in as the most moronic reduction of the battle over territory and functions effectively as a bit of dress-up for intensifying the piss play.
What is displayed at Centre Clark is a less complicated, more kitsch variation of one aspect of this. Boulos’ The Legend of the Palestinian Sasquatch purports to involve the artist exploring
family’s oral narratives from Palestine, Lebanon and Canada, as well as her own life. The show includes four large drawings of Sasquatches, which her male family members modeled for her. They are accompanied by a series of landscape paintings from different places she has visited and lived in: Prince Edward Island, Alberta—where she first started thinking about this body of work in 2019—Lebanon and Palestine. Boulos complements these landscapes with depictions of long-distance migratory species; the Painted Lady butterfly and the Arctic Tern bird. She traces places that she and her family moved to and from, in an attempt to discover who they were before the move, before the state’s mythologisation.
This anecdotal account offered by Sarah Sarofim is then assimilated into a series of standardized clichés about “othering,” “marginality,” the “indigenous” and so on. This is ostensibly about the “relativization” of a vague and largely bullshit historical hypothesis (“the settler”) set in opposition to a rival epistemological/mythical claim that the artist is accorded privileged knowledge of and righteously imbued with “pride.” In doing so, far from setting out a positive differentiation, it sanctimoniously reduces the work to the normative ideology of the culture industry and a state institution.
The bigger problem is that they are bad paintings. Technically bad and rhetorically worse, from the schlock butterflies to the mediocre and lifeless landscapes to the various portraits of the mythical creature. We are told that the artist used family members as models, presumably to suggest some deeper emotional relationship to the figure. But the poses are either blunt, moronic stares at the viewer at dead center of the space, or awkwardly off-centre like a paparazzi capture. The results fall somewhere between the illustrations for a children’s book and an old kitsch postcard. The combined result is a patronizing quality. Along with the general framing, it has a clunky tweeness that goes along with the luxury decolonial fantasies that pop up frequently.
Less reliant on this type of saccharine manipulative sentimentality, the larger room contains Hill’s A bell I never hear. The negative space is the primary feature of the installation. At one end a woven line resembling hair with ceramic charms (Keepsake) runs toward the ceiling. A few feet diagonally from this is Permissions, which consists of a pair of doors hinged together and set at an angle, one side upholstered. Diagonally from this is a brown saddle astride the upholstered headboard for a single bed (Briddle fantasy). Dotting the walls at intervals are the remnants of rhinestone designs, left, the patterns of the absent twinkling gems left like scars. Finally, there is an old television playing a video that includes the washing and caressing of a saddle in mimicry of a YouTube video. This, and the cropped-out aesthetic of this bit of the history of mediation, are intended to double-up the fetish aspect of the works on display.
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This also makes it more striking how unused and sealed all of the pieces seem, how stressed the divorce from any tactile or visceral experience is. The entire show has that upholstery covered in thick plastic aesthetic common to shows at the gallery. There is a distinct lack of any other sensual value to it, even the fragments on the wall seem like little more than chalky residues. Everything seems just like a prop with no material history, which lends it all an idealized quality. It is a kind of perversity devoid of sensuality where the desire is entirely divorced from the items into the discursive clichés that surround them. The accompanying text plays this out pretty succinctly and in a way that is a little more nuanced than that for the Boulos show. Anaïs Castro seems to specialize in turning out this sort of shtick. Her text informs us that the work
taps into this fetishistic charge, while also commenting to the often-hidden ways in which girls discover intimate pleasure, and how the subdued, secretive experiences of female desire contrast to the open discussion of male sexuality. The piece also reflects the cultural trope of the ‘Horse Girl,’ the mostly derogative archetype of an introverted and socially awkward horse-obsessed girl. Reflecting on personal references associated with her sister’s experience, Hill critiques how female passion and self-confidence are often shamed or ridiculed.
In the case of each show, most of the conceptual (and affective) work is offloaded to institutional mediation because the artworks themselves do not do much. In a sense, the artistic inertia is the primary theme that runs through both. None of this is really about “Palestinians” or “gender” but about the libidinal desire for the artist to be disciplined by institutional power and its normative claims. It is about the mystification of this through institutional discourse, which is where the real “perversity” is (and I mean that in a neutral sense).
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The wall text for the Hall show unsurprisingly only relies on one limited use of the horse girl image, redeeming it as an avatar for moral critique. The other implied sense, that of the pony girl common to BDSM as a sort of becoming-animal/slave figure is largely displaced. Even the BDSM allusion is dealt with in a highly mediated way by alluding to Helmut Newton’s imagery while not really engaging with what this implies, shifting the libidinal investment onto a level of meta-artistic reference and insisting on the politically sanctified nature of the desires purportedly being expressed. The sort of hybridization of animals/living spaces/objects that Hall relies on also casts its shadow on the Boulos show and contextually colours its sublimated bestiality/dominance theme, which both suggests and refuses to engage with its incest thematic while overcoding it with maternalistic “care.”
If Thorneycroft’s earlier work had a perverse relationship to its “socio-historical content” and her new work is basically sealed in fantasy that scarcely pollutes any external discourse it could intersect with, the two shows at Clark are overtly framed in ways that operate as apologetics for its content and attempt to index it to the redemption of the fantasy of the artworld as a mirror of the social.