Reviews: Three at Eli Kerr; Cynthia Girard-Renard at Galerie Cache; Cindy Phenix at Hughes Charbonneau; Kuh Del Rosario at Galerie B-312; Steffie Bélanger at Circa; and Marion Schneider at UQAM
Stuck on the metro beside an anglophone with a manicured beard and beanie and a nondescript female companion, I listened as he bemoaned entering the “dark romantic era” of his life just as Gen Z was apparently abandoning their brief commitment to “new sincerity” and “post-irony” only to return to an irony that he pathologized as being a psychological defense mechanism to avoid dark thoughts.
This article is mostly about not understanding what people are referring to.
Why bring this anecdote up? It seems vaguely relevant to the shows I saw before getting on the metro. Not that it strikes me as relevant to much of the work itself, none of which seemed especially ironic, post-ironic, sincere, or romantic, but these were things that some of the PR material around them marketed them as. The cruder and more relevant thing is that it is an example of someone constructing some narrative about their subjectivity (or someone else’s) and recognizing (at least performatively), that this is a convoluted rhetorical game and then doubling down on its obscurantism.
Unfortunately, you can fill libraries with books discussing issues of narrativity and the “construction of the self” by the self, by society, by culture, by [blank]. It has been done to death, almost never well, and the scent of the cadaver still saturates a disproportionate amount of art discourse. This is not a topic I think is interesting, even if I can appreciate how hilariously inane it is. But it brings up a question that arises frequently on this site, usually in the form of questions about theatricality.
There are many ways to think about this, but here is one. Philosopher Galen Strawson has written about narrative and non-narrative selves. He tends to pitch this distinction as one between Diachronics and Episodics. The former are narrativists who believe in a holistic notion of the self and their relations to externality. Usually, there is some claim for a dynamic and perpetual re-writing and synthesizing of the self, projecting into the past and the future. This has its greatest formulation in Hegel, but it is pretty omnipresent and essential to the notion of culture. Narrativists assert that understanding the world narratively is a norm; in fact, it may be the norm that defines one’s humanity. This gives it an ethical import. Being denied this, or having this effaced, is taken as a loss of your humanity. Episodics, by contrast, see things in terms of discrete and ephemeral instances that have no past and no future. It is disjunctive rather than synthetic. To a narrativist, it would appear fragmentary and generally senseless, but is neither of those. In literary terms, it is the difference between something like a bildungsroman and a picaresque. They are both ways of finding or constructing forms but they are different forms.
I understand what “narrative” means in Figuration narrative, Japanese screen painting from the 18th century, medieval Books of Hours, History painting, and even in many genres of video art. In each it is very different (and even in these cases of questionable functionality), determined by genre, context, etc.. However, I am not sure what “narrative” means in the works I am discussing below beyond suggesting that what is presented has some psychological significance that the artists suposedly narrate to themselves (at least, according to what the supplements tell us). “Narrative” is a way of imbuing the artist with a diachronic self and grafting the artwork to some supposedly equally diachronic external world. However, rather than narrative, what seems to be more relevant is a form of command or instruction. If you had not been told by a voice of authority that there was a narrative, you likely would not have noticed one. Even then, it is not remotely clear what it is. Surely, one of the conditions that would make something qualify as a narrative is that it is recognizable as one.
A useful reference at this point would be the exhibition currently on at Eli Kerr. Three spans the three white walls of the gallery (the entrance wall is transparent, which effectively makes the gallery into a kind of diorama or display case). On each wall is work by a single artist: Geneviève Cadieux, Maggy Hamel-Metsos, and Liza Lacroix. No titles, names, or texts are present. There is no clear relation between the works in terms of style, theme, materials, mood, etc.
On the gallery’s website is a textual supplement. To his credit, Eli Kerr’s exhibitions tend to have better textual supplements than other galleries. This one is interesting for the topic at hand because it highlights the problem of narrative in exhibitions but leaves whatever might arise from this problematic completely unresolved. The text is, I assume, deliberately perplexing (the French version seems clearer) and somewhat dysfunctional. Some of it sounds speculative [“When a story is told in the third person, it takes the viewpoint of the people being described.”]; some like instructions for a performance [“A short text accompanying these three works shall not provide narration, recounting what the artists did or what they were thinking about, nor speak for their techniques or objectives.”]; some more like a question about the status or value of curation [“What does the narrator describe, what do they leave out, and what do they even know anyways?”].
There is a loose suggestion that curation and narration somehow overlap. Certainly, a significant amount of what curators, especially in museums do, is to try to envelop artworks within some sort of narrative, whether that is biographical, cultural, formal, etc.. This extends to other varieties of art discourse as well. Artists (and gallerists) tend to be branded with categories that imply biographical and sociocultural meta-narratives. But what is interesting here is the suggestion that narrative is fairly dubious and perhaps not very reliable. The exhibitions below each, in a different way, deal with unreliable narrators and the unreliability of narrative as a model.
Engaging with a work of art is not necessarily narrative. It seems to fall more in line with the model of the event or the encounter, both of which tend to be highly resistant to narrative synthesis.
There is no shortage of non-narrative forms. To borrow a short list from Edward Branigan: “lyric poetry, essay, chronology, inventory, classification, syllogism, declaration, sermon, prayer, letter, dialectic, summary, index, dictionary, diagram, map, recipe, advertisement, charity solicitation, instruction manual, laundry list, telephone directory, birth announcement, credit history, medical statement, job description, application form, wedding invitation, stock market report, administrative rules, and legal contract.” Many more could be added. Most visual art is not narrative either. Most forms of visual art are pretty terrible for narrative.
Cynthia Girard-Renard’s Fureur polyglotte et Joies sauvages is currently on at Galerie Cache and departs in some respect from a lot of her other work. This contrast is important. The Cache show does contain elements that are familiar in her work: butterfly and rainbow motifs, cartoonish figures in jolting superimposition, bits of vague seemingly nonsensical text, and a clash between different styles of paint application and media. As an exhibition, it does not amount to much. That is mostly interesting because her work tends to be very exhibition-specific (conceptually and in the use of space). But this just felt placed together and pleasant but mostly pointless.
If the results seem inane that may be because they lack the thing that generally gives her work whatever animation it possesses: an implied narrative, usually cribbed from some historical event (mostly from Québec and France). In employing such a strategy, she relies on some degree of familiarity, probably a very vague one, with the historical, and a fairly unstable level of symbolic limitation. In the process, narrative sits at the back, more like an odour than a structuring device, and is as (or more) perplexing than explanatory, tending to disarticulate any coherently meaningful relation. As such, it is not really “narrative” any more than dill pickle Doritos are corn silk. This highlights the degree to which history, while often understood narratively (philosophies of history tend to define it this way), does not need to be and, in visual terms, usually makes little sense this way. I assume that is the “point” (if you can put it that way), of much of what she does: using narrative to undo what narratives are typically called on to do. What is absent in the exhibition at Cache is mostly this back note and the energy that it brings. Instead, it all comes off like the psychedelic garbage bags with recycled butterfly motifs that dot its walls. While her work does not really work when not performing the essentially comical “undoing” operation just outlined, the works described below mostly try to pull off something very different.
Over at Hughes Charbonneau is an exhibition by Cindy Phenix called Water Shed Twinkle. It consists of sculptures and paintings. As is customary, there is a text set by the entranceway for the viewer to read.
In the background, a muffled noise. It’s the sound of water, flowing beneath the large oil paintings that surround the fountain made of glass, wood, and ceramic at the heart of the gallery. Like a melodic undercurrent, this wave seems to inspire the figures in canvases … to join in the movement, musical instruments in hand or booms and microphones lying in wait. Cindy Phenix asks herself, “What would be the last sound heard on Earth?”
So, from the outset, we are asked to understand what we are seeing narratively. Even if she may not be a figure in the paintings, the artist has been cast as the figure leading the viewer through them and explaining what they are supposed to be narrating. There are familiar references to ecological narratives of collapse and hybridity and suggestions of more specifically art historical narratives about the play between the senses and the different ways in which sound can be translated visually.
The colourful, medium-sized paintings are elaborately drawn out and dense configurations of figures with hints of locales. These are partially filled in, with some areas remaining only drawn, usually around the corners of the paintings, there are higher concentrations of paint which are built up to the point that they form ridges. These three aspects lend the works the character of relief maps. The sculptures are more jig-saw-like, one cobbled together around a pillar in the room and the other an interactive water clock.
The anomalously helpful gallery attendant spent some time trying to convince me that the exhibition was a narrative, that the paintings directly narratively flowed from one another (although she was unsure which direction or order they went), and that their spanning of the walls and the sculpture’s hugging of the architecture, made the entire thing an immersive environment. One could add that this aspect seems to work in two respects, both on the macro level of the exhibition and in terms of the level of detail and implied narrative within the extremely busy canvases.
You could say that an exhibition like this is straightforwardly narrative, even on multiple levels, but is it? This reminds me more of the fad (I guess it has been a thing for over twelve years so maybe it is more than that) that was common on platforms like Tumblr, of posting anywhere from four to a dozen screen captures from a film. People would complain that this could make any film look extraordinary and that it was rare that films could actually live up to this fragmentary representation of them. What was absent in the screen capture form was most of what makes something a narrative. This screen capture genre — partway between GIFs and conventional trailers, the memeable moment and narrative as advertisement — was primarily striking for its demonstrative capacity to show where narrative was not. Whatever is happening in the Phenix show is closer to this (with a bit of editorial cartooning), than it is to a trailer.
Meanwhile, at Galerie B-312 is Kuh Del Rosario’s Un grain de riz non décortiqué remplit toute la maison. Taking up the two exhibition rooms, it uses found and recycled materials put together into sculptures and fibrous paper works. The sculptures are often moderately figurative, sometimes sporting hands, feet, or genitals. The paper works have been illustrated with marks and figures that suggest cave paintings or some other form of work excavated after being worked over by decades or centuries of sediment. Other areas of the room contain sets of small figures in what amount to little dioramas.
All of this is framed explicitly as the product of a series of narrativizing undertakings:
During a visit to her father's mausoleum, she became fascinated was struck by the oldest commemorative plaque which read: DON. DOMINGO MACATUNAO, Batan's 28th Gobernadorcillo, 1817. Not recognizing the family name, the artist wanted to know more about this mysterious man questioned her relatives. One of her uncles explained that it was actually his recalled own father who had commissioned the this plaque to commemorate a figure from stories he had heard as a child. This ambiguous narrative and the equally cryptic epitaph became the her guides and starting point from which this body of work began. that led to the material exploration and the creation of all the works presented in the exhibition Is Don Domingo Macatunao really one of her ancestors, or did he even exist? The sculptor embraces the uncertainty and views the grave marker situation as a clandestine secret message from her grandfather to his descendants, an expression of hope to validate her lineage's relations connections to the town province of Batan during the Spanish regime. She is not seeking to uncover a definitive truth but rather to provide a material form to something elusive, tracing a new path that connects the present and the future through an imagined past. Like a grain of rice planted decades ago, whose seeds allow it to perpetuate over time, this story transcends the centuries.
Even more than the Phenix show, the supplementary text here rehearses the whole diachronic fantasy of self, projecting it forward and backward in history, indexing it to national histories, etc. Yet, visually, the exhibition does not use the common representational modes of history but something closer to the trend for the “archaeological.” Toys and other figurative objects are laid out, figures appear as if chiselled into stone, dust and dirt are accumulated and spread around because the dust of “memory” is just another prop. The larger pieces sit, apparently suspended in time and without any concrete relation, retaining their cryptic value, something that points as much to the cancellation of meaning as its possibility. While all of this is a means for stressing potential narrativization, it simultaneously points to how severely dubious this is and to the substantial disparity between whatever is alleged to have been an inspiration for the exhibition and its actual result as a work of art.
Steffie Bélanger’s Air d’été, tout léger at Circa is likewise pitted in terms of storytelling practices, although what story is being relayed is far more obscure.
The artist’s approach is rooted in an exploration of the intersection between art and storytelling, material and perception, space and surface, questioning the imprints of a seaside history, the traces of a visual heritage by the water.[p] It is, indeed, the narrative potentials of the installation that Steffie Bélanger seeks to question in order to reveal the ironic side of our beach habits. […]The artist carefully crafts her creations, infused with humor and irony. Slightly provocative. In her own way. Always light-hearted.
Also spanning the two exhibition rooms, the mechanics of illusion play a central role in how “storytelling” is treated. If storytelling ostensibly informs the other exhibitions discussed, it is objectified and dissected here. The smaller space contains a cooler with birds swirling overhead from a fan. The larger space has wooden waves churning at the back, its mechanisms also clearly visible. Taking up the rest of the space is a series of lounge chairs and reeds or long grass. One fan blows on one clump of “vegetation” while another blows on an empty chair. Most of the chairs have torsos on them wrapped in yellow swimsuits. The gallery is populated by headless, jokingly sculpted bodies (more accurately, dummies), cartoonish renderings of breasts and muscle that suggest furniture as much as people, or heaps of wood that contort fabric. Near the entrance is a line of drawings that outline the contents of luggage for a trip to the beach.
Foregrounding the prop aspects of installation, the exhibition seems less about the “ironic side of our beach habits” than the visual irony of projecting narrative onto the objects. What is presented are the aspects that provide a narrative with its setting and its potential sites of relations. The narrative or story is nowhere to be seen. It is unclear if the “characters” are the clothing or the headless torsos. What rules is overt and naked mechanization (the essential model of slapstick): an exhibition of the world without narrative.
The mechanics of narrative play out slightly differently in Marion Schneider’s En frappant le fond de l’eau avec un bâton, on peut faire du feu sur l’eau at Galerie de l’UQAM, which, in its stated intentions, seems to move in the opposite direction, but, in formal logic, only takes what was at play in Bélanger’s show further.
Located in the smaller gallery, it consists of three works, although they overlap. In seeking to be “immersive” in a different way than the Phenix exhibition did, it fills the space with coloured light and the ambient sound with a “melancholy” soundscape composed by the artist. Within this staging are two pieces. Crybot is a suspended computer screen that displays prompts for viewers to enter descriptions of sadness. When the computer “weeps,” these tears are fed into a plant by an IV. On the other side of the room is Stonepoem, featuring a rock and a robot that uses AI to generate a poem about ecological issues after half an hour.
The accompanying text frames the installation this way:
From beginning to end, from end to beginning invites us to pause, take a breath, and inhabit the unease of our shared ecological condition. Emerging from a process of hacktivist and queer research-creation, the installation explores the potential of digital art through an ecological lens. The work envisions a world beyond binaries, where blending, hybridity, and transformation take shape. [p] Marion Schneider weaves narratives in which plants, minerals, and humans intersect, imagining new forms of cohabitation and offering a poetic gesture of repair for the world.
The accompanying text obviously markets a narrative to the viewer, pulling them in through an appeal to a range of familiar clichés and tropes (queer, research, ecology, hybridity, reparation, etc.). These are all staged using some equally familiar aspects: the “Zen” garden aesthetic common to spas (along with the coloured lighting and ambient music), the sci-fi-like bits of suspended computers, and the language of care (“care hacks”) that is one of the primary normative frameworks of Contemporary Art. We can call this something like Command Prompt Art and add it to the other sub-genres of the city’s Contemporary Art.
As supplemental texts tend to be, the one for the Schneider exhibition is also more instructive than anything else. Immersion is about entering into a series of clichés where the viewer’s experience is barely distinguishable from AI-generated material. So, for that matter, is the affect that is theatricalized through the interaction with the machine. The narrative codification of this is secondary to the demonstrative function the artworks perform.
The experience and logic of these shows is much more like doing laundry than experiencing a narrative. That is what immersion means in practice. It is more episodic than diachronic. The point is that simply presenting a series of images, even linearly, is nowhere near enough to establish a narrative. Presenting a series of objects arranged in space does not accomplish this either. It tends to be a means to demonstrating that art is much closer to stock market reports, recipes, and credit histories than to narratives.
But “narrative” is consistently brought up as a way that you are supposed to make sense of these things. You can make an easy socio-economic argument about why “narrative” is being deployed in these cases. If you have written a grant application recently, you may have noticed being prompted to fill in various socio-cultural category boxes and then prosaically construct a meta-narrative that uses them. If you’re redundant enough, you might be rewarded. Most of these artists went through MFA programmes or worked for institutions, so, unsurprisingly, they would employ their normative enframing, even when it makes little sense, and these things rarely do. There is probably more than a little to this argument, but it is boring and makes the artists sound like tools. Then again, that is what employing “narrative” as a framing or instructive device is: it is subordinating the visual to a largely utilitarian (and “ideological”) function that the art has a fundamentally ironic relation to.
* 6th and 7th images are mine. The others are from official accounts.