There I was, lying on my back, the sharp bang of shots coming closer and louder. I stood up and I could feel air pressure from the vibrations of the ceiling as it dropped nearer to my head, as close as a mere foot away.  If this thing fell, I’d be dead on the spot. I wasn’t in a bunker–I was experiencing Cinétose, Projet EVA’s latest installation, which debuted at Montréal’s electronic arts festival, Elektra, this month at UsineC.

"Cinétose." Photo credit: Gridspace. Courtesy: Projet EVA.

Projet EVA describe Cinétose as a

“large scale installation comprised of steel sheets that are used both as sound instrument and scenic apparatus. Attached to a mobile grid over the audience, the large steel plates perform a series of movements while descending towards the public.”

It’s also, I suppose, performance art: a piece performed by a giant robot and dramatically scored to what I can’t quite refer to as music. In my video below, you’ll hear a resounding and reverberating banging. That is the sound of the steel sheets each time they are struck by the pneumatic pistons hidden behind their shiny façade. The robotic choreography is also a sound composition, because every one of its movements makes a sound. The movement of the structure and its independent components results in a kind of mechanical score (which, it should be noted, is backed by atmospheric sounds played live on analog synthesizers by Projet EVA). However, despite there being rhythmic elements to the resultant percussive sounds, the timing between the bangs is never maintained at any point, which means the rhythmic structure never becomes musical. Basically, the bangs are not beats, and in this case I’m glad. The worry that comes when a mechanical sound installation begins a foray into “music” is that it will veer away from making a case for sound – the eternal underdog of visual art.

Simon Laroche,  a member of and guiding force behind Cinétose, tells me that the original idea came to him years ago when he had built a mechanical drumming robot doll. Inspired by the mechanical element that allowed the doll to automatically move its arms to make a “clack clack clack” sound with drumsticks on a drum, he decided to make a piece that used the mechanism itself as the visual apparatus. The non-personified, unmasqued robot, combined with surreptitious lighting and sound design, makes the work feel theatrical, even performative. In this case, it is the robotic structure that performs, and because the installation appears to be in many ways a part of the building–a set of scaffolding, a large grid, multiple cables–the room itself becomes an important aspect of the work as it fills with reverberating sounds through the performance’s duration.

As the large-scale grid is lowered toward the public, it displaces visitors and skews spatial representation. Our sense of personal space changes–expanding and contracting–while the immersive sounds become louder and that much more physical. In fact, it becomes loud enough that you can feel that sound is movement, and that sound is vibrations, as the grid seems to hover perilously above visitors’ heads. Cinétose operates on, and plays with, the idea of common sense which is based on a model of recognition, and an expression of performing society’s good will: as a visitor you hope and trust that the booming structure won’t fall and crush you. (I overheard that the venue, UsineC, had to obtain insurance coverage for millions of dollars of damage for Cinétose just in case that did happen!). Nonetheless, there is a fun “cringe factor” in experiencing this sensorially astounding work.

Interestingly, Laroche told me that before Projet EVA debuted Cinétose this month, the group had experimented with making the work interactive, i.e. with allowing the public to make contact with the steel sheets. However, they decided against it for fear that the artistic experience would devolve into mindless entertainment. It is a point that dominates that strand of installation art involving “immersive environments,” and is an important enough reason to continue looking at Projet EVA’s work closely in the future.

Hundreds of giant, silver, cloud-like, helium-filled Mylar balloons reading “Magic Bullet” float in a white room in the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in Toronto. Magic is right. The shiny, crinkling objects of air dance like parts of a mobile rotating above a child’s crib. And “bullet” is also right: the shape of each balloon–a pill–is meant to evoke the anti-viral drugs that artists Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal – two thirds of the famous Canadian art collective General Idea – would have taken for AIDS-related illness. AIDS is one major theme explored in the AGO’s Haute Culture: General Idea retrospective, alongside “the artist, glamour and the creative process;” “mass culture;” “architects/archaeologists,” and “sex and reality.” The 300 works on display take you from bizarre and comical objets d’arts like faux fossils, to hilarious video spoofs on beauty and glamor pageantry, painted macaroni, and a series depicting a trio of neon poodles copulating on black-painted canvasses. Life, including death, it appears, is as dark as it is humorous.

Untitled (detail), 1986. Acrylic and pasta on canvas. Image courtesy VoCA. Collection of Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (Mudam), Luxembourg.

General Idea. Canvas from the series "Mondo Cane Kama Sutra,"1984. Image courtesy the Estate of General Idea; ©Pierre Antoine, Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris / ARC, 2011.

"Mondo Cane Kama Sutra," 1984. Installation view. Image courtesy the Estate of General Idea; ©Pierre Antoine, Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris / ARC, 2011.

General Idea delighted in their sense of humor; case in point: poodle symbolism is everywhere in the exhibit. Operating as a stand-in for “the artist,” the poodle is General Idea’s alter ego, chosen for the banality of the animal and the arbitrariness of sophistication ascribed to it. For General Idea, poodles can have an air of importance about them the way that artists do: not much has to necessarily be there before people are buying into it and once they do, others come to attribute the same sense of value to them, et voila! Suddenly everyone’s a believer. Thus the image of the display dog, preened to make its grand and glamorous appearance, shows itself throughout the exhibit: on flags ironically hailing the artist, on shields and crests, in illustrations, and rigidly presiding on straw in hilarious installations.

"XXX (bleu)," 1984. Image courtesy the Estate of General Idea; © Pierre Antoine, Musee d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris / ARC, 2011.

Another room reveals three poodles used to paint blue “X”‘s onto large canvasses, suggesting that the General Idea alter ego had to put its whole self into making art work. General Idea were aware that in irony lies mockery and truth, once saying, “We knew in order to be artists and to be glamorous artists we had to be artificial and we were.” Their appropriationist method also extended to playful recreations of recognizable symbols of consumerism; for example, macaroni paintings of well-recognized logos, and renditions of iconic Mondrians. They were not created with homage in mind, but rather they were poking at the establishment of value and status in the art world, and the fame and notoriety that go along with it–an idea they explored most thoroughly with their Miss General Idea Pageant and Pavilion.

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It’s late summer in Montreal, and many of the major museums and even smaller art galleries are doing what they often do during the summer months: exhibit works from their permanent collections. Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MACM) is no different. However, their “black box” room (denigrated to the institution’s basement no less), has something different and excitingly relevant going on, thanks to their Head of Multimedia Events, Louise Simard. For about four weeks and for the first time in a Canadian venue, the box is exhibiting RealTime UnReal, the latest project by the new media collective Workspace Unlimited, whose members include Kora Van Den Bulcke and Thomas Soetens.  Built site-specifically for the MACM, this slick and elegantly-presented installation presents visitors with a large rectangular screen on which the projected image of another screen is displayed. Once the network of motion and location sensors detect the user’s presence, the onscreen image “comes alive” as the user’s speed and movement transform what appears on the screen: a metamorphosis of the room and parts of the larger museum outside the black box, triggered by the user. The transformation evokes a constant negotiation between our perceptions and expectations of how space is represented. While the technology in this architecture-meets-video art installation is certainly impressive, it is also integral to the conceptual ideas about lived and imagined spaces the installation presents.

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Berlinde de Bruyckere, (partial installation view). DHC Gallery. Photo: Raji Sohal.

Before the analysis comes rushing in like an insuppressible wave, I am struck with the straight-up “thingness” of Flemish artist, Berlinde De Bruyckere’s corporeal sculptures at gallery DHC in Montreal. For inanimate objects, the amorphous shapes, translucent white/gray/bluish depths and waxy textures on the one hand, and the immense brown-haired animals displayed on the other, these sculptures are a loud and demanding imposition when presented in a pristine, white cube. The materiality and scale are compelling enough on their own. The sculptures’ meticulously-crafted content and masterful aesthetic qualities are a visual mystery while their possible meanings stretch the interest of De Bruyckere’s work far beyond the physicality of the sculptures.

Berlinde de Bruyckere, "Les Deux," 2001 (partial installation view). DHC Gallery. Photo: Raji Sohal.

Berlinde de Bruyckere, "Les Deux," 2001 (partial installation view). DHC Gallery. Photo: Raji Sohal.

One of two rooms in De Bruyckere’s exhibition consists of casts of real humans created site-specifically for DHC – Invisible Beauty and Invisible Love (2011).  In these works, boneless and headless bodies hang vulnerably from pole-like structures fixed off the ground, to the walls. They are as arrestingly beautiful in their carefully-rendered technique and form as they are disturbingly deformed and mutilated in their meaning. There is also a trestle holding two actual-size brown-haired horse figures in a piece entitled Les Deux, (2001), in which the creatures are stacked horizontally atop one another inside a precarious scaffolding structure. Their cultural symbolism suggest extreme weight and heaviness, but of course they are actually comprised of lightweight materials. Despite their stiff and vulnerable positioning, the horses appear vibrant and life-like, still powerful with the potential of wild horses in wait. To see a horse – a symbol of strength and war – in a position of defeat, loss, and compromise, points also to the fiction of the steadfast, heroic narrative. Soldiers fall, horses too. And war is very much about death and suffering of actual bodies. The two horses’ majesty is interrupted by the disturbing trestles in which they lie on exhibit, but also by their lack of facial features and the absence of their eyes – a gateway into identifying with the animals which we commonly associate with humans. The human body sculptures on the other hand, cling inwardly, the centre of their sinewy bodies are wrapped in a way around pole-like structures, seemingly resisting the world outside them. The physical agency is introverted, like someone who has failed or fallen, and its body center – its heart – hides from spectators; this is shame personifed. The bodies are without heads and without eyes, and so spectators can look, gawk, and gaze without being seen. The scrutiny extends beyond the material instantaneously, lending itself to parallel the political realm.

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As part of the exhibition Dwellings at the Surrey Art Gallery, Sitely Premises is a group show of works by artists who have examined the exterior of Lower Mainland residential spaces (facades, backyards etc.) over the last five decades. Sitely Premises is inspired by “unsightly premises” by-laws which enforce codes of cleanliness and orderliness on domestic properties across municipalities in Canada. Walking through this exhibition is like watching a brief biographical-documentary; new and interesting things are learned about a previously run-of-the-mill (or so you thought) character in a way that writes history forward. You appreciate the subject – in this case, Vancouver via “residential art” – more than you did at the start. The works featured in Dwellings breathe new perspective into Metro Vancouver – a city where public art often makes people think of landscapey or decorative sculpture on condo or highrise grounds rather than critical work done on residential space and which is meant to incite discourse.

Deborah Koenker and Roberto Pacheco, “Cherry Tree Project,” 1987. Courtesy Surrey Art Gallery.

Sitely Premises includes documentation of artists Deborah Koenker and Roberto Pacheco’s 1987, site-specific “Cherry Tree Project” – an elevated structure that connected three neighboring Vancouver gardens surrounding the trunk of a cherry tree – allowed visitors to walk a kind of viewing deck across and through private yards. “Cherry Tree” reveals the exterior of one’s home as dwelling also, and by inhabiting outdoor space as place for production and exhibition of art, the artists transgress notions of trespassing. Similarly, for Kara Uzelman’s “Backyard Dig,” the artist invited people to partake in an archeological dig of her backyard; the findings are presented as a cabinet of objets trouvés.

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Exhibition view, Red Bird Gallery, Montréal. Photo by Raji Sohal.

The first really noticeable thing about new media artist Tyson Parks’s digital paintings is their fostering of tension between organic and synthetic elements. Images of readymades provide the tip of the paintbrush, and its stroke is the paint that traces across the canvas. He purposefully maintains the tension, too, by restraining from trying to make the digital trace appear like real, physical paint. But at the same time, Parks’s paintings are a new conceptualization across mediums. Parks makes his paintings using a combination of computer hardware and software that he’s designed, a setup he has appropriated from his practice as an electronic music producer, computer programmer, and video artist. He re-imagines the brush, the paint, the canvas. Parks overturns tradition with his technological approach to painting—embracing VDMX over oils, appropriated photo images of readymades over still-lifes, and computer screens over canvasses. There is no easy congruence of form and content in art, and I doubt that the Montréal-based artist’s paintings are an attempt to achieve that congruence completely. In one sense, these paintings embody a nod to formal conditions, and in another sense, there is an obvious aversion to traditional material conditions, while still referring to the history of painting.

Tyson Parks, "Composition #3," 2011. Gesture-modulated video-feedback painting, archival inkjet print. Courtesy the artist.

Parks’s practice, he says, continues from Wassily Kandinsky’s formal theories relating abstract painting to music. For Kandinsky, “the point is temporally the briefest form,” a complex and sharply-defined unit. The point takes on the character of a single sound, and quantitatively, this creates a composition pictorially and audibly. For Kandinsky, visual elements are likened to musical elements of orchestration. This approach is different from “visual music,” an artistic tradition practiced by Norman McLaren, Oscar Fischinger, and Len Lye, whereby music is visually interpreted and (often quite literally) represented in film and video works. With visual music, lines, colors and shapes correspond with music, appearing to move and react to sound like perfectly choreographed dancers. Kandinsky’s interest on the other hand, lay in developing visual abstractions analogous to, and in conversation with, the structure, form, and style of music composition.

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I recently made the trip from Montréal to Toronto – clocking in over six hours of driving on the dismal 401 Highway in my packed rental car. In the backseat were artist friends participating in the Toronto version of BYOB, or Bring Your Own Beamer. I was making the great sojourn in part to also attend BYOB, but primarily to attend the hyped reopening of Toronto’s snazzy Power Plant art gallery and its unveiling of Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn’s Das Auge (The Eye). Two shows on the opposite sides of town, on the opposite sides of the spectrum.

Thomas Hirschhorn, “Das Auge (The Eye),” detail from installation view. Photo by Raji Sohal.

Thomas Hirschhorn, “Das Auge (The Eye),” detail from installation view. Photo by Raji Sohal.

Imagine a giant room in one of Toronto’s most important galleries overtaken by the colors red and white; squirted, splurged, and oozed fake blood is dried all over objects in the room. From stuffed animal baby seals and real fur coats covered in red paint, to groups of Coke bottles and hanging red and white country flags, to white lawn chairs affixed with celebrity face cutouts, to newspaper clippings of war atrocities, walking through the room feels like making your way through a physical collage: a child’s giant school project, a dioramic meditation on war and consumerism, pulled together with packing tape. Small mountains of objects pulled from their usual context – mannequins that belong in store windows, studio wigs from salons etc., are mixed with the decidedly cheap materials you may see on the curb on garbage day – their golden homes are broken plasterboard, chunks of Styrofoam, excessive amounts of duct tape.

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Ever watch a three month old baby stare into a mirror for the first time? Its face is an expression of pure awe and confusion. What is the thing in the mirror? Why isn’t it like me (three dimensional)? Over time, of course, that curiosity turns into fascination at the stage when the child learns that the image he sees is himself… or, at least, the image of himself. That recognition may seem trite but it is a critical site in the individual’s subjectivity-formation. At this level there is still much play and experimentation as he learns how to be and how to identify himself in relation to others.

How we self-identify relative to others is a key issue of exploration for Vancouver-based artist Ken Lum. Lum’s retrospective at the Vancouver Art Gallery involves several installations using mirrors as well as riffs on public signage that create what he refers to as “triangulation”: a visitor is always projecting his or her own identity onto characters on a sign or poster. A kind of looped communication occurs between expectations, projection/reflections, and identification. These works by Lum are focused on issues of identity, evoking empathy at the same time as alienation.

Installation view from Ken Lum's "Photo-Mirror" series. Photo: Raji Sohal

Installation view from Ken Lum's "Photo-Mirror" series. Courtesy Vancouver Art Gallery.

In the Photo-Mirror series Lum began in 1997, the viewer walks into a room where personal-use mirrors hang. Wedged on the inside edge of each mirror’s frame, photos of random people and scenes stick out — strangers smiling in seventies school studio portraits, eighties birthday shots, and scenes of backyards and beautiful sunsets that belong on postcards. As the viewer amusingly looks at his own reflection in the mirror, his face is quite literally framed by the small photos of other people looking back at him. A series of reflections in a room of mirrors could go on forever. We get the metaphor. But here, also, art gets to perform its occasional magic by debunking common sense, replacing it instead with what Gilles Deleuze prefers to call “good sense.” Good sense, as opposed to common sense, is where “difference exists at the origin of individuation,” and the subject’s sense of what is is defined by the process of prediction, rather than recognition. I don’t actually recognize the smiling faces in the portraits but they are ubiquitous nonetheless. Unrecognizable but familiar. I’ve got the same (but different) photos in my roster of old photo albums at home.

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When I interview an artist for radio format, I go in hoping for interesting and honest statements about his/her work and ideas, because I know that in the editing suite, I’m going to have to be economical. If an artist can succinctly (so little air time, people!) express something original, and thought-provoking about his or her work, I find a way for the clip to make the cut. And yet, although I hate to admit it, with the occasional artist, this requires me having to wade through rehearsed grant-speak that they’ve plucked verbatim from their artist statements. So when I sat down recently with Canadian artist, Scott Yoell, after his exhibition as part of The Contemporary Museum Biennial of Hawai’i Artists, I was delighted that he spoke candidly, from the heart, about his work. Already, Yoell’s Biennial-presented conceptual work entitled Tsunami elicits a lingering cerebral response that continues to cause you to think about it long after you’ve seen it. And an hour-long conversation with him about the work revealed even more layers of philosophical connections to the work and the artist who made it.

Scott Yoell, "Tsunami," installation view, 2010. Courtesy the artist and The Contemporary Museum Honolulu.

Scott Yoell, "Tsunami," installation view, 2010. Courtesy the artist and The Contemporary Museum Honolulu.

Tsunami is an installation work that consists of three thousand, four-inch tall businessman figures cast in flesh-toned plastic. Each man wears a hat and carries a briefcase. The mass of the figures together forms what appears to be a surge of water, a tsunami — the whole of the formation is more overwhelming than the small parts that devise it, no one figure able to resist the swell of what is naturally unstoppable. The scale of the work – too many replicas to count – is a brash statement in itself. In our capitalism-critiquing era post-Naomi Klein’s No Logo, a glib comment discrediting obtuse representations of mass production might be expected here, but Yoell’s work is more complex. With a background of training in sculpture, Yoell’s own handiwork went into the fabrication of each figurine; the mold that he employed to create each figure deteriorated with every use in the art-making process, and so despite the result of general uniformity among the men, each one is slightly individualized and imperfect, different though undetectably so. The work is metaphorically-rich to say the least, but its origins are perhaps the most interesting aspect to me.

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“Maybe the Internet is for me what Paris in the 20s was for Joyce, Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein or New York in 50s was for Jasper Johns and Rauschenberg.” — Jon Rafman

Canadian new media artist Jon Rafman may be best known for his Google Street View project and his clever and poignant web art series Brand New Paint Job, in which recognizable 3D objects (and entire rooms and scenes more recently) appear to be wrapped in famous paintings as though the paintings themselves were wrapping paper. Because of the easy, crude techniques used to produce some web art, along with its reproducibility and disregard for the original copy (but we’ll leave that Pandora’s box for another post!), web or net art is still finding its sea legs in the fine art world. However, as a conversation with Rafman maintains, and as his live virtual tour project Kool-Aid Man in Second Life (see promo video here) in particular reveals, these conceptual works are as relevant as art gets today: they arise from our decentralized Internet age and draw attention to how contemporary subject formation is increasingly co-constitutive of the virtual, the actual, and the real.

Jon Rafman, "Kool-Aid Man in Second Life," installation view, 2010. Courtesy the author.

I caught Rafman’s presentation of a live virtual tour of Second Life as it was delivered to an audience at Montreal performance venue, Il Motore. The presentation, which has happened in numerous cities now (and received much press), entails Rafman’s live navigation of Second Life with his avatar, Kool-Aid Man, as in The Kool-Aid Man — that exaggeratedly large jug of toxic-colored “drink” whose weird deep-voiced proclamations of oh yeah! and penchant for jumping through brick walls you may remember from marking commercial breaks on Saturday morning cartoons in the eighties. According to Rafman, Kool-Aid Man is identified with a specific demographic, one which grew up before the Internet age. Kool-Aid Man also represents an empty signifier from the decade that defined excess: “you can inscribe whatever you want onto Kool-Aid Man.” Much like Second Life itself, the reappropriation of Kool-Aid Man here, is both a source of ironic humor and a place for self-conscious critique: what is he and what does he represent, if anything?

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