calendario eventi  :: 

X

18/9/2003

Liam Gillick/Rodney Graham/Joao Penalva

The Power Plant, Toronto

Liam Gillick
Rodney Graham
João Penalva




Liam Gillick: Communes, Bars and Greenrooms
Curated by Philip Monk

The name of this exhibition, communes, bars and greenrooms, is also the subtitle of one of Liam Gillick's recent books, Literally No Place. This coincidence points to a couple of important issues to consider in approaching Gillick's work at The Power Plant: firstly, Gillick's practice is divided between a number of different pursuits and, secondly, each exhibition is only an installment in an ongoing investigation.

Sometime Gillick's artworks are only the slightest of interventions or modifications of spaces. Sometimes they overwhelm the space, combining the look of corporate architectural design and office supergraphics with the colouristic formalism of minimal art. In the case of these larger installations, we might think that Gillick's work has the look of another space out of place in an art gallery, that it seems more design than art. At this point, we might recall the title of his book: "literally no place" means the nowhere of utopia. The temporary architecture Gillick installs at The Power Plant then is an occasion to speculate on what Gillick calls "functional utopias" as well as on how "shifting concepts of ethics and conscience find form in the built world . . . when speculation becomes the dominant tool in defining our urban environment."(1) As Gillick writes about the exhibition, the spaces of "the commune, bar and greenroom are specific locations for planning, speculation, reflection and constantly renewed forms of social interaction."(2) While Gillick does not intend to make the individual spaces represent these environments, "the exhibition makes use of the social dynamic that is unique to each type of space, taking it as a base model for new forms of quasi-architecture and decoration."(3)

Operating between a number of practices might make Gillick's work somewhat unplaceable. Known particularly as an artist, Gillick has worked widely within the fields of design and architecture. Gillick does not want to create autonomous works of art that answer a restricted set of problems, preferring instead "a non-linear or non-progressive working technique that involves the development of parallel strategies." Our role as spectators is somewhat analogous. Sometimes the work, rather than an object of pure contemplation, is backdrop or décor for discussions to take place. It is this sense that we understand Gillick when he says, "My idealism is rooted in discussion, negotiation, and the examination of compromised states."(4)

Architecture and graphics frequently have been components of Gillick's exhibitions; similarly, diagrams and texts have become integral to his work. At The Power Plant, the textual and the decorative are dominant within the architectural setting. Within the shell of the gallery proper, Gillick has constructed a second architecture. In plan, it looks like a cross between a maze and a decorative meander. With no external walls, centred in the gallery, it is open to the space around it, giving the appearance somewhat of booths at a trade fair. Each of the walls, as a sequence of inter-relating planes, however, have been particularized through all-over painted patterns or through the application of vinyl texts. Moving around this structure-its walls only two metres high-viewers will experience a variety of spaces opening up before them. Much like the sets of television or film, these spaces offer themselves temporarily for activation through performance.

The vinyl texts are developed from the position reached in Gillick's book Literally No Place whose publication coincided with his 2002 exhibition The Wood Way at London's Whitechapel Art Gallery. Here is what the artist said in an interview about their relationship:

The phrase "literally no place" is one way of understanding the word utopia. Once I had stolen the title I became more interested in something more concrete and functional than making general points about utopia, which is why the subtitle to the book is Communes, Bars and Greenrooms. To a certain extent, I'm interested in the idea of "functional utopia." . . . What you end up with is not so much a meditation on utopia but an attempt to play with or expose certain kinds of functional utopias. It's an echo of utopia, where glimpses are heightened. The bar, the commune and the greenroom are places where the pragmatising pressure to hold back ideas is suspended for as long as possible. You could argue that the exhibition is a demonstration of a compromised diagram of a functional utopia. You could suggest that the combination of factors involved, like the adjustments to the café and lecture theatre which leave the original elements all in place, acknowledge the potential of existing spaces and tries to heighten them without resorting to the corrupted language of renovation and short term control. While this will inevitably lead to collapses of understanding and realisation, it might also demonstrate the contradictions inherent in any contemporary attempts to resolve the paradoxes of our neo-liberal condition.(5)



________


Rodney Graham: Phonokinetoscope

The presentation of The Phonokinetoscope marks the first exhibition of this pre-eminent artist and musician at The Power Plant as well as the first "special project presentation" at The Power Plant, an initiative to liaise with other art institutions to promote contemporary Canadian art. Rodney Graham's The Phonokinetoscope is presented as part of soundtracks, a larger exhibition produced by The Edmonton Art Gallery in partnership with the Blackwood Gallery (UTM), the MacKenzie Art Gallery and the McMichael Canadian Collection with the support of the Department of Canadian Heritage: Museums Assistance Program. soundtracks is a large, multimedia exhibition that examines the creative interplay of visual art and music throughout the 20th century. Components of the exhibition will run concurrently throughout the fall at The Power Plant, The McMichael Canadian Art Collection, the Blackwood Gallery (UTM), The University Art Centre, University of Toronto, and The Gallery (UTS).

Over the past few years there has been an explosion of interest among visual artists in the popular culture of music. They are attracted by its themes and sentiments, its versatile styles of communication and its powerful, generative effects. Some seek a more immediate contact with popular culture, immersing themselves within the circles of actual performers, collectors and fans. Yet, they all share a more reflective approach to the culture of music, offering observant replays, emotional inhabitations, ironic appropriations and a skewed perspective on glamour, hero-worship and stardom. Rodney Graham's The Phonokinetoscope comprises a five-minute 16mm film loop and a twelve-inch vinyl record with fifteen minutes of music on it. The projector is activated when the needle engages with the record - technically making it a phonokinetoscope, after Edison's early cinematic invention. The film is set in Berlin's spring-blooming Tiergarten; its only props are a playing card, a clothespin, a vintage German bicycle, a thermos, and last but not least, a blotter of LSD, which Graham casually drops on his tongue while reposing on a rock. The phonographic component of The Phonokinetoscope is written, performed and recorded by Graham who is a talented musician in his own right.

The Power Plant is also pleased to promote the upcoming retrospective of Rodney Graham's work, including The Phonokinetoscope, at the Art Gallery of Ontario, opening March 24 through June 20, 2004. The exhibition, Rodney Graham: A Little Thought, features more than 25 works, following the evolution of Graham's film, video and sound pieces from 1976 to the present. Props, scripts and notes related to the films, as well as selected multiples and audio works, complete the survey. This exhibition is co-organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

_________


João Penalva
Curated by Philip Monk

…it became a text where stories are told in several versions, where someone's misunderstanding becomes the definitive version of the account of an event and the notions of what is true, imagined, misinterpreted and reconstructed are blurred.
- João Penalva

About half-way into João Penalva's 1998 film 336 PEK (336 Rivers), the narrator interjects into his tale saying, "On the other hand, this is not my voice. It is the voice of Yuri Stepanov, an actor who doesn't have a Siberian accent. But neither do I. I lost mine long ago." Or rather, the narrator says this in Russian and we read it in English through subtitles. This distinction of translation is important to note, because the narrator's self-reflexive intervention points to formalist strategies operating all through the film that we are oblivious to. Starting from the first: Penalva wrote the subtitles in English and then had them translated into Russian.

Many commentators have written of the function of memory in this film. It seems a film for imagining. The first person narration is spoken over an image captured by an unmoving camera, in a single hour real time take with no edits. The high contrast image is tinted yellow and the only movement is that of the shadows of trees or walkers who stroll at a distance through a park. For the last fifteen minutes, a recitation of the names of the many rivers that flow into Russia's Lake Baikal is all we hear. Read with the slow musical cadence of the Russian language, the text lulls us like the ebb and flow of water it mimics. Indeed, Penalva's evocation of time has been compared to the great Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky. Evocation seems the tone of the film with the narrator reminiscing, taking Lake Baikal, the largest fresh water lake in the world, as the touchstone for his meandering tale.

Yet, enough clues within the narration, such as the narrator's admittance above, cue us to a construction rather than an organic reminiscence taking place in the film. The narrator often talks of his occupation as a filmmaker and the articulation of a memory as a script that may be fictional and not real at all. Here we note again the prominence that the subtitles play; given that we are not Russian speakers, they are the means by which we understand this story. Inverting expectation-subtitles are automatically thought to be a diminished shorthand expression of the true sense of the dialogue-the subtitles here actually tell us all there is to know. But they are only one of the formal components of the film; simultaneously but separately, we see an image, hear a voice, read a text, and imagine our own version.

Penalva's films are subtly constructed narratives. With the subtitles dominantly demanding our attention, the simplicity of the unmoving camera and unedited image conspire not to distract or divide our attention. Nonetheless, the mood and tempo of the image and the drift of the voices almost unconsciously absorb us in the story. Within Penalva's narratives or dialogues, however, there are markers-not only of the insecurity of interpretation, but if we are still attentive and not completely seduced by the film apparatus-of the divisions of the senses or of the compensations when one sense is lost or another made dominant. For instance, in Kitsune, a film from 2001, two old Japanese men, strangers, surprise each other in the fog of a pine-forested mountain. We do not see them, only hear their voices, as the fog blows over the mountain, sometimes obscuring it, sometimes revealing it. Perhaps we can take this atmospheric effect of this subtly changing image as a metaphor for the content of what is about to be related. For in the small talk prefacing the ghost stories related by the two men, there is talk of blindness and deafness. Ourselves, we hear but we do not see the narrators who tell three stories. The first two tell of the dire or beneficent consequences of encounters with the fox spirit of Japanese ghost stories. The third returns to the present to tell of what can be seen and heard in our daily lives, but only to some-children and the elderly.

Penalva's third work, Violette Avéry (200x), differs in that it is an installation of projections. Penalva wanted to create a situation where text dominated and though not deriving directly from film was still related to it. Text and image are now separated with the story of Violette Avéry being told through three rolling texts, like the ones that appear in film credits, in conjunction with two projections of The Life of O-Haru, a 1952 Kenji Mizoguchi film. The images and texts, however, cannot be seen and read at the same time. Moreover, the Mizoguchi films, one reversed as well, are out of focus. Thrown back upon the text, we have to discover their uncertain relations.

The rolling text is a transcription of an interview between two women, the niece and a writer friend of the pseudonymous Violette Avéry. Avéry, a translator by profession, secretly wrote pornographic novels and led a life of sexual excess unknown to the others, only to be revealed posthumously in her diary. At different times in the interview, it is suggested first, that the diary might be fiction and secondly, that the niece might have written it. The interview touches upon questions of ethics of translation but more importantly upon issues of censorship. Violette Avéry's liberitinage was similar to that of one of the characters of a book left in her library, the seventeenth century classic Ichidai Onna by Saikaku Ihara. Although based on this book, Mizoguchi's film suffers from 1950s morality and the sexually independent life of the book's protagonist is turned into one of abusive domination by men. In the early twentieth century, Ihara's book was censored. Penalva shows two versions of the book in slide projections, an unexpurgated reprint and the censored 1924 edition. Once again, the artist frustrates our reading: the reversed slides pass too quickly for us to comprehend. This device is one more element of the construction of Penalva's work that lends authenticity to the reality of Avéry at the same time that it casts doubt.
Philip Monk

Image: Liam Gillick and Anthony Spira, "Speculation and Planning," Liam Gillick: The Wood Way, 21.


The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery
231 Queens Quay West
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5J 2G8
Phone: (416) 973-4949

stampa

permanent link