Review: Adam Basanta's Common Absurd at Oboro

Common Absurd is an exhibition of work by Adam Basanta at Oboro in the Salle Daniel-Dion et Su Schnee. The supplemental text by Neal Thomas frames it as a re-examination of the optimistic spin on the possibilities once posed by new technologies and networks. For the techno-optimists of the late 1960s, this burgeoning situation seemed to be paving a way to escaping from old dichotomies between users and use. As Neal relays it, “The user emerged as a catch-all referent for this new subjectivity, mixing consumer, creator, technician, actor, and audience member into a composite heroic position that anyone might plausibly occupy.” Yet, after more than half a century of this heroic posturing, the “‘creative user’ feels so much more like a mandated norm than an emancipatory possibility.”

There are (at least) two different thematic directions from which you could approach the exhibition. One: as dealing with general concepts about the function of the user in the post-industrial era, how they are “emancipated” or “liberated” or have found new and more or less enjoyable forms of “enslavement,” etc. The supplemental text covers this angle, stressing the importance of phenomena like the internet, so I won’t really bother. The more interesting aspect, I would argue, is the extent to which the exhibition foregrounds these issues less in a vague “socio-cultural” context than in the concrete one of exhibiting Contemporary Art. In a substantial way, it draws its strength from subjecting the genre's clichés to testing and even ridicule. 

To start with the exhibition title: there is “absurd” in the sense associated with existentialist humanism, particularly that often pinned on Camus, which is taken to designate a kind of heroic perseverance in the face of a universe that does not reinforce human meaning. There is “absurd” in the sense usually given to the Theatre of the Absurd, a very loose genre -- spanning writers as divergent as Ionesco, Beckett, Pinter, and Genet -- that was primarily comic and also sometimes regarded as dramatizing a kind of human heroism or (conversely and even simultaneously) ridiculing humans as cliché-spouting automatons. And there is “absurd” in the logical sense of the term, perhaps best expressed by phenomena like infinite regression. While Neal’s reading is more concerned with the first of these, I find the other two more compelling as interpretations of what Basanta’s works actually do in this instance.

A review/interview in Le Devoir topically positions the exhibition in relation to AI panic and possibility, careful to reassure the reader that there is really no threat to the sacredness of the human. As an aside, AI strikes me as a matter of fascination less for the morbid spectacle of idiotic humanist bromides it elicits than for the parodic ways it is an extreme condensation of what “humanist” education once imagined it could be and spectacularly failed at doing. Within the context of this exhibition, you could cast AI as the spectre whose threat objectivizes the absurdity of humanist perception, a situation central to encountering an artwork.

The large gallery space of Oboro, with its creaking floors, allows the eight works to be sparsely spread. Some pieces are wall art, some are animated sculptures (for lack of a better term). Generally, they are positioned to adapt to the space, using its crevices and supports to their advantage. In the second gallery is Julie Tremble’s video LUCABOT, dealing with cosmology and biochemistry. The two exhibitions can be heard simultaneously. In Basanta’s case, this works because the sonic contrast helps to exaggerate the slightly cartoonish quality he is playing with. (In her case, it tends to have the opposite effect.) I will walk through the Basanta exhibition clockwise from the entrance. 

Clocks Against Time presents a series of Dollar Store wall clocks that have been modified so that they never tell the time accurately. Basanta’s website (I will assume the words are his) glosses this as, “A clock says: Time is running out, Time is money. Each clock whispers a lie, in direct contradiction to the lessons of contemporary physics and subjective experience.” But this does not really address the fact that the intervention on the clocks primarily demeans their socio-cultural significance (it ruins the “common”), mocks the ground of “duration” on which “subjective experience” tends to erect its totems, and highlights that the arrangement of the clocks (the reduction to design elements), trumps significance and meaning-making, nearly evacuating time for the rule of space, retaining it only as a confused stutter.

Discourse II is a sort of mock autofiction consisting of a row of vertical digital photos arranged horizontally, with a video among them. Their patterning is not clearly linear or narrative, but impressionistic, the jagged leap between single images broken with the alternate flow of video. Collectively, they suggest a memorialized collective event, a border of selfies for the white cube that remembers “the real” of ephemeral experience as childish kitsch (the playtime of people and their rubber chickens used in ludicrous craft endeavors). Given the title, you could read it as concerning the “playfulness” of the use of discourses; a sort of Jackass episode with no real risks operating as a metaphor for the practice of Contemporary Art. As with the clocks bit, this one is a reduction to design where the “content” is displayed as an idiotic pseudo-narrative. This might have been more effective if it had been repeated in patterns like wallpaper. 

Discourse presents 300 plastic chickens heaped at the end of a machine. It slowly and loudly shoves them against the wall at regular intervals before letting go. They tumble and exhale, filling the air with a long cluck. This may be one of the more hilarious and surprisingly satisfying pieces I have seen in the city in a few years. 

 

If you are prone to projection (if you believe in the “cultural imaginary” or something), you could compare this spectacle to the images of heaps of bodies bulldozed during atrocities, or interpret the plaintive wail of plastic chickens as the cry of the earth awash with the plastic waste of industry. [I have consistently seen considerably hammier types of metaphors for this sort of thing.] But it actually seems more of a metaphor for the heaps of idiocy bleated out through the mechanisms of the culture industry.

Lonely Abundant consists of a microwave (with a functional clock) containing a chunk of bread and a sardine on a plate. The mirrors installed around them create the optical illusion of infinity. It could be interestingly juxtaposed with the work of Guillaume Lachapelle, whose dioramas often rely on such illusions, usually pushed to slightly more paracinematic and melancholy ends. Here, with Basanta, it is comic, even if it does not really work as a joke. As with so much else in the exhibition, I assume that’s part of the point. If it did work, it would not be absurd: it would just be a metaphor. The chief risk in the exhibition is that it constantly risks simply becoming metaphorical.

Another work in the exhibition complicates this problem because it functions simultaneously as a figurative metaphor and a concrete demonstration. Using two PCs, two Gmail accounts, some custom code, and the internet, Hope Finds Well exploits one of the clichés of COVID-era discourse. This could be tied to the vapidity of general wellness and care talk more generally. However, the artist spins it as “the phrase endures, it[sic] less a reminder of the pandemic, as much as of the way in which repetitive administrative tasks increasingly strip us of our underlying humanity, empathy, and connection, despite claims to the contrary.” The two PCs communicate using codes to send a series of textual variations on the basic well-wishing phrase back and forth. This occurs, over and over, in an automated manner. 

Unlike the comparatively sleek and clean variant of this work displayed on the artist’s website, at Oboro, it is on the floor with the wires and plugs snaked along the wood. You have to stoop or crouch to view it, and the monitors seem more diagonal than straight. As such, it gives up satirically staging the ergonomics of “care” for something else. It loses the kind of bureaucratic and neutralized quality that the website variant possesses, and it seems more game-like and nightmarish. This serves it well, because the sleek version leans a little too heavily into the easy dystopia of the sterilized, whereas this feels messier. On the level of impression, it is a substantial difference and alters how the environment is staged and what is symbolically implicated. Rather than simply the wellness theme, it is the gallery as the grounding of the work that becomes the focus.

The piece relies on a set script (technological rather than simply theatrical) playing out where the gallery-goer is not a participant but a viewer of an exhibition. In one sense, it is an exhibition of their minimal relevance. In another, it is a way of dramatizing the indifference of the work of art to the viewer. It works quite well if understood as a mockery of the participatory turn in art. While this has blossomed into a variety of different forms over the past 60 years, it was probably best exemplified by what were called “happenings.” Happenings were infamously events where not much happened, a joke Warhol, among many others, frequently made. They were semi-scripted (at least at the level of concept, and often in line with the compositional traits that came to be associated with Conceptualism). Like much of the “avant-garde” art of the first half of the twentieth century, it was basically a loose reworking of gags from burlesque theatre.

The “participatory” set-up has become generalized to Contemporary Art display, almost as a rule. It ostensibly allows a viewer/user to interpret art as something communicated and to assume a role in this relation; you are asked to join the community of signification, to become a friend of the making of meaning. This is in line with the utopian fantasy of the community of users/producers, an ideal that has been a commonplace in the praxis of Contemporary Art and was endemic to the rhetorical foundations of institutions like artist-run centres. This is what the work in situ seems to mock in its mechanized performance. If no one had been allowed to see it (as with certain Nouveau réalist exhibitions), the gesture would have become too meaningful.

Tower consists of a twisting series of CD drives piled on one another. The empty disc trays are rigged to open and close at different times, their cords braided behind them and down to the floor. It is a sort of Tower of Babel notable for all languages and utterances being removed, save for a code accessible only to the creator. In other words, it extends the metaphor of the work previously discussed. It is unclear on viewing whether it is simply automated and the presence of a human in the gallery is irrelevant, or if it casts the viewer as a kind of intruder in its space that it seems to be reacting to by demonstrating its emptiness. 

 

The collage pieces on the wall (Born to Burn I and II) are significantly less effective. They lack the power of gesture in the other work. If they don’t detract, they also do not add much. The generalized flat lighting for the space undermines anything other than the gestures. 

To stay with the technical metaphors used in the show, what is being prompted? Are you a citizen, a member, or a tourist during the encounter (if we can even call it this)? One element of an interesting (if not very satisfying) book by Hiroki Azuma called The Philosophy of the Tourist (2023) could be of value here. Through a series of contrasted readings of political philosophers, he tries to carve out a space of contemplation that is not exactly social or political. This is the “gaze” of the tourist, which essentially views the entire world as if it were a mall (another of the city’s primary models of Contemporary Art). They are not part of the logic of politics (the world of friends and enemies), and they definitionally do not belong to a culture or community. They are a guest or even a drifter without becoming part of the “general” or common, or a shared world of welcomes and exclusions.

To what degree can we apply something like this? It’s limited. Is the visitor a user or the used? What is their function? Gallery-goers do have a naked financial function after all. A gallery I once curated for used interns to keep headcounts of visitors and then indexed these for funding proposals. This is not uncommon. Is the gallery-goer really more than another “been served” to add to the tracker like McDonald’s used to do? Isn’t that something Discourse I and II seem to be suggesting? Doesn’t the logic of the artwork render its enframing as just the mechanized groan of an industrially manufactured toy for animals to chew on? Or is even this saying too much?

It is a matter of bare function rather than bare life. The latter leaves the door open to a too-easy sentimental moralizing and pathos. The former is evacuative and demonstrative. It is also basically comic rather than pathetic.