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The Autumn season began with the city's second-funniest exhibition this year. It was at MICA and part of the multi-venue exhibition, Une assemblée pour le cosmos, which spreads across Galerie de l’UQAM, the Institut d’art contemporain de Montréal, and Adélard. (I attended the first two and did not make it to the Frelighsburg exhibition, which extends one of the works at UQAM.)
According to one of the official exhibition statements
The project invites viewers to take a renewed look at the cosmos, which has always captivated our imaginaries and shaped our relationship with the world. While the ambitions for space conquest dominate the current context, the participating artists bring forward a diversity of forms of knowledge and sensibilities through works that draw on affectively charged materials such as meteorites, stones, and sealskin, and a variety of media, such as sculpture, beadwork, installation, video, and sound. «Making Assembly» thus becomes a way to foster dialogue between these perspectives, to bring different fields of knowledge into dialogue, and to open a space for reflection, debate, and collective speculation on our relationship with the universe.
The enframing, as these things typically do (especially at institutions like UQAM), does a few things: it insists on a normative form of pluralism that is actually just crude culturalism; it insists on the function of art as part of the knowledge economy; it interpellates a “feeling” subject; and suggests that it is a “dialogue” simply by placing things in a loosely shared set of spaces. To its credit, and more than usual, it has two consistent if unimaginative motifs: rocks appear about half the time, as does some form of “cosmogony/astrology.”
Included in the exhibitions are artists Marcela Armas and Gilberto Esparza, Tabita Rezaire, Skawennati, Suzanne Treister and Patricia Domínguez, Jesse Tungilik, Michèle Boulogne, and the collective Nonhuman Nonsense. Antoine Bertron served as the curator.
The exhibition at UQAM fails in a less interesting way than previous exhibitions at the gallery with comparable themes or framing (anthropocene, art and knowledge, art as dialogue, etc.) did. The same criticism of such framing that I have leveled in the past still applies. But the predictably generic ideological rhetoric is less worth taking seriously than its visual one.
The Skawennati piece, Intergalactic Power Wampum Belt, uses Czech glass, white leather, and artificial sinew, appropriating the traditional wampum form and filling it with various imaginary figures rooted in science fiction. This is advertised as a way of breaking from “tradition” to project a vision of the future, one removed from “racial categories and colonial power dynamics,” as it imagines a “horizon where new alliances and unprecedented forms of intergalactic solidarity can be forged.”
The piece is mediocre in itself (in graphic, symbolic, and craft terms), and this is only amplified by being presented as a hyper-fetishized solitary object on a red runway in a white vitrine in an all-white room to give it the hyperbolic quality of a transcendent object. This spatial frame dwarfs the work while sentimentalizing it. Such a strategy goes along with the general corniness of the exhibition, which is only occasionally used in an interesting manner, but mostly seems unintended.
For Tabita Rezaire’s Mamelles Ancestrales, a series of twelve siliceous sandstones are spaced out in a circle. A video screen sits at their centre, showing “fieldwork” at various megalithic sites that “weaves a polyphonic and ever-evolving narrative” about ancient monuments and the varied meanings (spiritual, cosmological, etc.) associated with them. This is part of advocacy for “a new harmony between living beings and the cosmos” rooted in “folk knowledge” and “cultural heritage.”
The problem is that it is a 61-minute video work lying flat on the floor, surrounded by rocks that further impede its viewability, its sound separated from the image and amplified in a muffled way from the corner that further dissipates its value. Judging by the people I watched milling past it, no one watched more than a few seconds or a minute of it and likely spent more time reading the wall text. Whatever its “intent,” its function as a work of art is not in the mode of documentary or video but that of garden installation. But the work and its curation both seem devoted to either not understanding or caring about how a piece of visual art actually works when exhibited. The display is no more than a kitschy gimmick, but it is the gimmick that provides the content, effectively obscuring everything else about it.
Jesse Tungilik’s Sealskin Spacesuit is what it sounds like. There’s actually charm to it. It comes off as a costume from a B-movie that was never made, and the odd mannequin that it is propped up on gives it an appropriate strangeness.
Perhaps the closest visual relation between the works in the exhibition, really the only one, is that between the Tungilik work and Rezaire’s, where they at least share almost the same place. Tungilik’s standing faceless figure almost appropriates the installation of stones as props for its setting. But even here, they are shoved so far away from one another that it does not really work, and no interesting lighting arrangement is taken advantage of that could have aided this and complicated both works. Even if these works had been placed in the other exhibition areas of the gallery, they would have been more effective in terms of playing on scale. Placing them as the curator does effectively sucks the “charge” out of them.
Marcela Armas and Gilberto Esparza’s Sideral Northwest Africa [NC5] is likely the strongest work in the exhibition. It uses custom-designed instruments “capable of detecting and interpreting the magnetic field found on the surface of meteorites,” which are transformed by synthesizers into “indeterminately generated sound compositions.” If that makes it sound like that John Cage piece (the title escapes me) for amplified pine cones, it does not work that way in practice. Instead, it is a fairly prettified bit of ambience. The artists cast it as a way of revealing “the memory embedded in matter,” which “prompts an ethical reflection on our relationship with non-human entities,” although it is unclear how it does anything like this. It also claims to amplify the “latent spiritual dimensions without veering into mysticism, inviting viewers to instead focus on the physical presence of meteorites and their resonances.” But isn’t this a kind of refusal of knowledge, or a mystification of this refusal by setting a limit for unclear epistemic reasons?
Placed in a darkened space that (yet again) is far too large for it, the work is notable for its prop appearance, the stylization of which seems to have nothing to do with its intended meaning. It is only the materials used to make it that stop it short of seeming like another piece of sci-fi camp. For no good reason, this is pushed to the back of the space beyond one of the increasingly common “reading areas” that tend to encroach on exhibition spaces as another testament to the near-total failure of curators to understand visual thinking and repress it with more language. This also suggests a reduction of Armas and Esparza’s work from an alien encounter to something more like a white noise machine to help you consume academic discourse.
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The next space over, Suzanne Treister and Patricia Domínguez’s work, The Museum of Ethics and Interplanetary Technologies, is sequestered behind a curtain, which gives it an insipidly carnivalesque quality. It includes a poster, a divination chart, and a dowsing board as part of a “fictional museum.” Its supplements claim that its divination presentation is a subversion of digital technology and “a form of creative resistance against astro-capitalism.” On the walls are various tacky psychedelic posters, and the basic aesthetic is regional children’s museum. Aside from being infantilizing and sanctimonious simultaneously, it seems to have been constructed to cut itself short on embracing its blatant theatricality, instead sterilizing it through the dullness of its pastel presentation.
The more interesting question at UQAM is why there is so much concern with horizontal display. This seems obvious. The thematic of the cosmos, rather that being projected on the sky or the outside, is projected at “the earth” or “grounded” and, therefore, humanized (institutionalized) through the spectacle of culture rather than the “cosmos.” Everything about the exhibition testifies to the failure to conceptualize space (in multiple senses of the term) intelligently. It both mimes the museographic cliché of presenting historical artifacts, separating them from a fantasy material context while buttressing them with textual supplements (their moralizing context) hanging on the wall like edicts from God, and furthering their visual value, their ability to be transformed into a symbol by an institution as it pretends to be displaying a form of “culture.” Everything presented in the logic of display and ideological supplements is the fetishism of institutionality. This might be more interesting if there were something of visual value in the work displayed, but it is all quite bland, and the textual accompaniments are worse.
As usual, the UQAM exhibition is partitioned in a way that easily reinforces individual artistic identities standing in as given geographic-cultural makers. This tends to subvert the visual relationship between the works. Instead, it reinforces the artwork as an actor in the manner of the academic cliché of the conference or roundtable. At the same time, it does not involve or encourage a very meaningful “dialogue” between the works. It is, frankly, bizarre that an inordinate amount of the city’s visual art seems to have no idea how things work when displayed visually. This does not help make “knowledge” claims promoted by artists or curators seem serious.
The best work by some margin in the two exhibition spaces is at MICA: collective Nonhuman Nonsense’s Planetary Personhood: A Universal Declaration of Martian Rights. It is presented next to an installation by Michèle Boulogne and dwarfs it to such an extent that this secondary exhibition entirely fails to register.
Painted dark, the walls of the main exhibition space that houses Planetary Personhood are covered in texts. There are glossy brochures and pamphlets, videos, video projections, and a little forest of protest placards (”Martian Matter Matters”). A round shape hangs from the ceiling to suggest the moon, the face of a man projected on it and mouthing a text. This also appears in the video on the wall, which collages together real and fake news footage. It is all cobbled together in the form of an advocacy or charity video. More accurately, it is put together in ways generic to parodies of that video genre which you would find on a sketch comedy show.
The collective is described as using “‘nonsense’ as an antidote to ‘common sense’—embracing paradoxical stories to challenge the human-centric logics that drive the destruction of other ways of being.” Members of the collective claim that they are trying to imagine an ethical relationship that does not privilege the notion of life, although there is not much indication they have thought about what that could imply very hard. The “paradox,” if that’s what it is, does not seem to be in their ideas, which are just the pathological form of utilitarianism, but in the way they are presented.
The content of the video’s text stresses the importance of “geological diversity” and the employment of “strategic anthropomorphism” or “intentionally attributing human traits to nonhumans.” It claims to probe “presences and absences,” reconciliation, ancestrality, and the importance of “reverence” and “mystery,” rather than seeing the alien as “devoid of life” and, therefore, as a “terra nullius” that can be conquered and extracted from. So it privileges the importance of interpretation, rights protection and management, and to end “biocentrism” by giving personhood to rocks and other inanimate objects.
While “decolonial/decolonizing art,” whether as theme or practice, tends to unintentional self-parody, in this instance it seems deliberate, even if it, at least performatively, frames it otherwise. This may be the most surprising thing about the show, which is less intellectually sophisticated than a South Park gag but remains leagues ahead of most of what the space has historically shown. Every line of the script reads as a parody of the standard clichés of decolonial discourse. If it is not a deliberately charming demeaning of these fantasies, is it a shit test for how idiotic a viewer needs to be to pretend otherwise? Even “Mars” is cast as a decapitated black man hybridized as some cross between a basketball and testicle suspended from the ceiling. This figure is alluded to as ALLAN, which could be a joke about Allah or a reference to the Aqua Teen Hunger Force episode where an alien takes over Earth and forces everyone to “just be kind” to one another or face destruction.
The irony is that “decolonization” is shown as an absurd and anthropocentric projection that actually cancels out the proverbial Other in a far more severe and “paranoid” way than “colonialist” thought does. In fact, it seems constituted by a complete inability to think critically while pretending to do so, obscuring this with aesthetic choices that evacuate it of any substantive referent beyond a set of market-tested tropes.
If you wanted to take this seriously, you could ask why privilege rocks for anthropomorphic fantasy? Why not viruses? Why not advocate for the rights of cancers, plagues, HIV, etc. for which you could construct a substantially better argument? Isn’t trying to crackdown on the millions of deaths that occur through diarrhea by creating safe drinking water a brutal act of colonialism? If you want to question (and you should) the merit of the “subject/object binary,” as one supplementary text puts it, it also necessarily results in questioning the distinction between the living and dead, between suffering and its other, and the entire fantasy of the ontological possibility of violence upon which narratives of “colonialism” are predicated.
* UQAM photos are from their official Instagram. The others are my own.