Reviews: Miles Rufelds' “A Hall of Mirrors” at Centre Vox and Guillaume Lachapelle’s "Points de fuite" at Art Mûr

 

Miles Rufelds' Palais des glaces at Centre Vox consists of a 55-minute video isolated in a small viewing room and an installation in the larger room. There’s also an accompanying essay, but as with most supplements at Vox, you are better off ignoring it. The installation is dark, dramatically lit by lightboards featuring small photos, texts, slides, and other accumulated “evidence” with scrawling and lines implying relations.

It’s the sort of generic image of speculative relationships and possible acts that you commonly find in cop shows to illustrate how detectives piece things together. You get similar boards in depictions of schizophrenics, conspiratorialists, and so on. In academic social science research, you get a textual variation of it to make it look more intellectually sober. Perhaps most relevantly, you get something like this in the work of art historian Aby Warburg (who was also possibly a schizophrenic) and whose noble ambition was to create a form of art history that would be images alone, devoid of text; a kind of unwritten history through formal resonances, echoes, and repetitions.

Beside the standing boards, there are also some on the floor, as if dramatically thrown or overturned, images scattered across the floor and barely registering in the dark. At the centre are various books left open and piled on top of one another to dramatize that some kind of research has been done. It is all very theatrical in a scenographic sense, and it illustrates, without explaining, the disjunction between image and text, or between historical fragments and their enframing and abstraction.

Narrated by the artist in a dull, monotonous voice that undercuts the lapses into performative hysteria of the text, the video ostensibly describes his work investigating archives and attempting to figure out where a fragment of a non-representational film (repeatedly shown to represent the uncertainty of its referent) belongs in a web of client-patron relations.

It is advertised this way:

In the parafiction film It’s Not Brakhage, an investigator-researcher in the throes of doubt delves into the archives of a mysterious foundation with links to the DuPont industrial dynasty. His search reveals a network of connections in which cinematic experimentations, image technologies, the arms lobby and family fortunes intertwine. As the narrator is gradually gripped by feverish speculation, the quest for the truth becomes suspect as well.

Aside from the film within the video, the video employs photos, stock footage, and text, layered together as the voice churns on. Numerous, often severely dated (and, therefore, technologically indexed) effects are applied to the images and to the voice itself, even if the subtitles persist either without registering the disturbance or varying in size and location for effects that are not present in the audio. The narration skips through different figures, their theoretical interests, and their patron and familial relations, accumulating multiple levels of possible meaning (formal, metaphysical, etc.) while always folding back to the much duller fantasy of power relations and true crime. In the end, it all amounts to nothing because the analysis of the evidence is the destruction of the evidence, and the evidence is only the mark left on it by the narrator’s fingerprints.

The whole thing comes off more like a joke about cultural history writing than it does about “conspiracy theories,” as topically alluded to in the accompanying text. There is a real difference. Whatever their absurdity, conspiracy theories are fairly concrete and nowhere near as rationally or empirically outlandish as the most basic claims commonly made by cultural historians. And the video does not in any substantive way speak “to the moment” so much as to old post-Kantian epistemological problems. If the enframing text attempts to sideline the serious problems this still poses for the sake of a moralized practicality, it is depressingly ineffectual and aesthetically irrelevant.

The video is part “archival thriller,” but it is mostly a joke. It strongly resembles the sorts of jokes that Norm Macdonald was telling late in his career. For instance, the moth joke, in which he famously took a traditional three-line joke and extended it with five minutes of completely unnecessary but gaudily amusing detail before landing on the underwhelming punchline. In the process, the joke became all about telling the joke, which is basically what this is. 

That this should take a “thriller” form is not that surprising. People used to joke that John Grisham wrote thrillers that were mostly about photocopying and filing paperwork, things that got lost in translation to their cinematic adaptations. To a large degree, the video is about the absurdity of what used to be known as “archival fever,” which infected the minds of people working in institutions, causing them to hallucinate cultural narratives. 

Hallucination of one sort or another is also central to Guillaume Lachapelle’s Points de fuite (rétrospective et nouvelles œuvres) at Art Mûr. Using an array of optical illusions and operating on a miniaturized scale, his pieces tend to fuse various paracinemetic techniques to sculpture. There is a sci-fi quality to some of this, suggesting the de-differentiation of human figures into machines. Rather than providing any narrativization of this (it is completely unclear whether this is a transformation or if human figures have never been more than machines wearing faces), the works clearly undermine extrapolating on their meaning. Instead, as I have written previously, they are fundamentally demonstrative.

The other major aspect of his work, less demonstrative but equally of the perpetual present tense, is effectively a variation on the landscape genre. He creates striking little scenes without scenarios of seemingly endless hallways, book stacks, car parks, and highways, all anonymous, miniaturized, and generally drained of colour. It is the landscape as a dislocation, something that also occurs in his more recent photographic prints of violet cityscapes made from his models.

The retrospective on Lachapelle’s career coincides with the gallery’s 30th anniversary. The exhibition takes up most of the space on two floors. It is organized primarily by the media he uses rather than by periods, themes, etc. The areas are clearly differentiated and often re-stagings of earlier exhibitions he has placed in the gallery, complete with reprints of the accompanying essays. This was a good choice because it makes evident one of the less obvious aspects of his work. There is an overall anti-progressive quality to his body of work, as though his career’s contours were themselves indistinguishable from the basic formal and thematic concerns that have been common in his output. Figures are repeated with slight or no modification in different media. Nothing in his work seems to date; it varies and reproduces, something that is jokingly figured in his repeated depictions of copulating robots.

Although there is a general figuring of “transformation” or “metamorphoses” that runs throughout his career, usually in the form of human figures mouldering with their technological surroundings, this is persistently coupled with what amounts to kinetic stasis. Probably the dominant quality of his work, it seems essential to one of the things that differentiates him from contemporaries in the city who dwell on superficially comparable themes.

One other element that stands out is that the humour in his work feels much stronger here and balances out the superficially dystopian tendencies. The results seem less satirical than ludicrous.

*Images are my own