Not long ago we reviewed a show at UQAM that took as its broad concern issues of “fake news” and the schisms between different types of knowledge. While it emphasized the dubious role of the university’s mediation in the evaluation of these different regimes of knowledge, none of these things were formulated in a way that made much sense, either within the works themselves or their collective curation. As a result, the exhibition testified more to the irrelevance of knowledge than anything else and demonstrated the absurdity of its conceptual categories and strategies.
At Circa is another show that dances around a topic peripheral to fake news and alternative epistemologies, conspiracy theory. Jacinthe Loranger’s Conspiritualité, pastel Q et autres cabales is something of an aesthetic departure from her earlier work. According to the accompanying essay by Galadriel Avon, the installation
…examin[es] codes that stem from conspiracy theories. Although popular for centuries, recent societal events, such as the pandemic and the massive influx of demagogic discourse in the political arena, have propelled them to the forefront: conspiracy theories evolve alongside the specific imaginaries they give rise to. These trains of thought fascinate Loranger, and she has been working for over a year on the particular iconographies that these theories call forth, inserting them into her multidisciplinary installations.
Using the two exhibition spaces of the gallery, she relies on a variety of media to illustrate these borrowed iconographic elements, which largely come down to pizza (for Pizzagate) and Q (for Q Anon). They are combined with generically medieval iconography (presumably for plague-era imagery to take the place of the remarkably image-impoverished era of the pandemic) and accents from folk or naive art. It is presented in a sprawling but spacious way, using colour accent walls of vibrant blue and humming pastel purple. In general, the pieces have a soft, jelly quality, presented on the wall, as silhouettes, or in tabletop mode.
The more curious thing is the abstraction of these types of visual rhetoric from what is largely an online phenomenon, expressed in social media diatribes and memes. It is the aesthetic and narrative logic of conspiracy theories that are absent from Loranger’s work. Memes trade on familiar images that are given highly local and explicit significance while treating their appropriated images in a fluid manner. They point to the extreme contextual specificity of meaning as not being inherent in an image but located in a meta-narrative context that has to be imprinted on it. In appropriating these different icons, Loranger has likewise placed them in a new context, only without any explicit meaning. Without a narrative, what is a conspiracy? It simply becomes another form of kitsch content, another kind of decoration, like gewgaws that have lost their actual religious function while retaining a vague “spiritual” connotation, or at least a festive one, such as the partial collections of mass-produced nativity figurines on a shelf at a Renaissance.
The iconography is less important in Loranger’s show than the context of display that she has created. Meaning is less relevant than mood. If conspiracy is a theoretical image, Loranger is offering a vibe instead. The pastel world that surrounds the icons overshadows whatever their vague and, in terms of scale, cute qualities are. This cuteness factor is the other major feature of the exhibition. The softened tones and muffled quality of the content aids in their decorative function. What is being decorated is, the accompanying essay informs us, a “new-genre spa, drawing inspiration from yoga salons and the symbols of today’s fashionable wellness rituals.” It is this aspect of it that helps the exhibition succeed as a fairly gentle satire of the artworld rather than as a probing of the marginal sphere of conspiracy theory. Delirious intensity played out through a decentred and anonymous series of reprocessed memes is sacrificed to the relaxing ASMR fantasy of imagining that structures of power are real and communities can be centrally located.
More ambitious and covering a wider swath of time, the show within the darkened walls of MAC relies on a different series of kitsch forms. Alanis Obomsawin: The Children Have to Hear Another Story was curated by Richard Hill and Hila Peleg and financed by a partnership between the Government of Canada, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Art Museum at the University of Toronto, and Vancouver Art Gallery in collaboration with the National Film Board of Canada, CBC/Radio-Canada, and the Canada Council for the Arts. It is organized by decade in fragmentary anecdotes and filtered through largely ahistorical categories superimposed to reflect the ideological tendencies of the funding institutions.
It is advertised as a
groundbreaking exhibition … dedicated to the work of Abenaki documentary filmmaker, activist, and singer Alanis Obomsawin, one of the world’s most renowned Indigenous directors. […] The exhibition seeks to explain how Obomsawin achieved what she did and what it has meant for her to do so. To begin, the exhibition explores the motivations of this artist, who, from a very early age, showed tremendous will and courage.
The mostly dim rooms are painted in different colours, the light varying in each space to allow for the ease of access to videos and texts. There are large table areas with artifacts in them. There are newspaper articles, records, videos (complete and partial, projected on the wall or at small viewing stations), there are bureaucratic documents in frames and vitrines, bits of wall text, optional audio accompaniments to guide the viewer through the borough of segments, and at the end of this path, a little reading room for rumination (it is advertised as “Thontenonhkwa’tsherano’onhnha” or The Medicine Room), either to recover from the trauma of images, or get reading recommendations to further your education. Or, as the accompanying text suggests, “This versatile space exists to encourage all visitors to process the content of the exhibition in a way that centres on healing and the creation of a better future. It invites you to take the time and space to reflect.”
The duration of the various videos stationed across the rooms far exceeds anything anyone is likely to get through during business hours. Besides which, they all run on their own schedule, meaning in practice that only bits and pieces are likely to be consumed, basically non-linearly and within a contextualization that is wholly fragmentary. Although the decadal structure is stark, it is very easy to navigate the space non-linearly, crossing between and back across decades and undermining the narrative continuity. When I attended, it was busy enough, and viewing stations filled up in excess so that it would be nearly impossible to view it in a chronological fashion unless you spent long periods standing still and staring at the wall before manoeuvring into position. (Maybe that was sadistically intentional. If so, that’s hilarious). Some of the audio is amplified and overlaps with other streams in the space. Some can only be heard in isolation.
One room is dominated by her most famous work, Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993). Perhaps, like me, you were shown this film numerous times by professors as a canonical example of the “Canadian documentary” or of a “counter-discourse” or something (I got both). The use of a work for the curatorial construction of the director as an iconic figure is probably most coherently essayed here as the viewer is prodded to walk from the “folkloric” to its mediatization to the media compounds that documentary is made from.
In most of the exhibition, things are fragmented in ways that make the point less evident. This also makes clear that the documentary is no longer an autonomous work but just a function within the heterogeneous medium of the exhibition space. The documentaries are transformed into just another set of documents whose significance is radically altered and blurred by the curation. This seems unintentional.
The key elements of the exhibition make good use of the artist’s origins as a model and her ability to take on a variety of tangential roles to suit. Primarily, she is cast by the curators as a folkloric icon and this takes on a variety of connotations. She is there in kitsch form in complete Indian Princess garb with accompanying records and performances for children. This is buttressed by a slew of drawings from children combined with her amateurish drawings and sketches to plan out documentaries. Simultaneously, she is presented as a navigator of bureaucracy.
The accompanying curatorial statements and the general selection of visual materials stress her as princess/performer, as a pop-folk figure, and as a glamour model as much as a documentarian or bureaucrat. Ultimately, she is depicted as a decolonial saint, a Santa Claus figure handing out gifts during a time of plague. Like the show at Circa, cute trauma fantasies circulate as the standard atmosphere.
What the exhibition illustrates is the continuity between these different forms of kitsch and their use in the infantilization of the viewer, treating them as a child to be “educated” (narrated to). Accentuating this element is the implied identification of the figure of the artist as teacher and as child, a symbolic gesture that simultaneously exploits the references to residential schools that the accompanying text calls on, and one of the most basic clichés of Primitivism (which could either be read as “racist” or “empathetic” depending on your whim).