Art Reviews: Montreal, New York, Your Town.

Dominique Blain is the art star in Montreal these days as her retrospective is ongoing at the Montreal Museum Of Contemporary Art.

This was a great opportunity to invite her to present some new (or not so new) works elsewhere, and the Uqam gallery, the best of any Montreal University galleries, jumped on the occasion.

This review is unfortunately late (the exhibition is over), because I had forgotten all my notes at the gallery, and it took me a week to figure that out.



The first thing that stroke me while entering "Monuments" (1997-1998), that "new" work by Dominique Blain, is that it looked "very Dominique Blain". Whatever topic she chooses and materials she select, she always end up creating a piece that is authentically hers. You could have guessed her easily if no names had been written on walls.

The work is simply (well, not so simply) 12 reframed and enlarged negatives of period photographs documenting the rescue of important italian masterpieces of art during the first world war (1914-18), surrounding a replica of the huge wooden case that saved the "Assomption" (1516-18) by Titien during that war (and which is the topic of actually five the photographs, to be honest). These photos are all "painted", through a serigraphical method similar as the one used by Andy Warhol in landmark works such as Race Riot , and each are casted in luxurious wooden frames, sporting their titles on metallic tags, similar to the way old master paintings are presented in your average museum. Not far from there is presented an extra selection, called "I Monumenti Italiani" (1995), of 12 tiny photo-lithographs of other italian masterpieces that were "prepared for battle" on site, surrounded by quantities of bags of sands that hide them from our view. They each hold the title of the work (in talian) as if everything was normal, as if they were copied from a standard catalogue.


Each visitors of the retrospective at the Mac should have been forced to visit the Uqam exhibit afterward. After years of using art to treat about every political subjects possible, Dominique Blain now defies those who critiqued her activist pertinency by developing a corpus irreproachably related to art history and its link with war. Finally is she able to demonstrate how her critique of "evil humanity" can be directly linked to her will and right to do art: because art, is also and always a witness and victim of war.

The tableaux are absurds, with all the people joining together, walking alongside the precious art they are transporting toward safer places. They make us wonder if we would be doing the same nowaday. They seem to invoke the sacred and the sublime, because they depict for a great part the transportation of religious works. If Dominique had opted for the specific, she could have only used shots about the Assomption and turn this whole installation into a sacred calvary (but that could have reduced the broadness of the topic). Normally I would have critiqued the charged use of negatives, but here it`s justified by the extreme surreality of the situation they demonstrate. They enhance our disbelief that these events ever occured. And the central "monument" of the replica of the wooden case does the opposite by hitting our heads up its wall. I wonder if the show shouldn`t have been simply called "Monument" (with no s), to let the word enfolds this unique sculpture. "Is there something inside ?" asks that gallery`s school educational guide. The quasi-religious austerity of this monolith encases on its own the whole memory of these events, the surrounding photographs merely picturing the context, as though argumenting that the central piece be considered for what it is called. The "other" monuments are on the tiny photos: those absurd installations of sandbags. Protecting from war, the museum changed themselves into the most radically minimalist and conceptuals environments. For a moment they looked even more daring than Dia Beacon. The link between the contemporary art world and the ancient couldn`t have been more successfully established. Because of its market, works of art have been more and more understood as objects incorporating strong materialistic values. Somehow Blain provokes us by asking why we aren`t properly protecting ourselves instead of all this art. Blain really made a big hit with this piece and this is probably why it`s been travelling.

The other issue that needs to be brought up is that no one ever will witness one "real" work of art through all these documents. The "hiding devices" are providing "the art". I thought there was an interesting link to make with contemporary copyrights issues and photographic rules in present institutions. How no one is ever able to take pictures in any contemporary museums. In certain ways we protect the art of nowaday by keeping it off the view of people, what I interprete as another way to inflige pain into our lives and against the emancipation of art. In a sense, these monuments could also represent a call to save and let breathe the dying art we have been burrying into archives that no one (but a few) is ever able to see.


-----------------


As a complement, another show at Uqam proposed works about the dying of culture.

Guy Laramée presents three sculptures influenced by the topic of his book "Biblios: Le Dernier Livre" ("Biblios: The Last Book", whose text is also exhibited).

I took the time to read the 35 pages of this quite humoristic essay, which describes in various segments the life of an imaginary ancient people (the "Biblios"), as though it was an anthropological research text (the field inwhich the artist actually studied). Influenced by a story from Jorge Borges ("Library Of Babel" ), each paragraph defines a different facet of the life of these people who "existed" under the dependance of words, writting books, and preserving knowledge, until they dissappeared under the crumble of the quantity of books they had created and amassed. For example there is a paragraph named "What?" that describes their difficulty with defining the term and pointing exactly what it was about. Or another that demonstrate how they conceived of their history through the creation and use of bibliographies One of the best moment in the depiction of these problematic with amassing knowledge, was this sentance resolving that, if you wanted to pass all your life describing your own history, you would end up writting "I write, I write, I write" all the time.

Obviously, Laramée aims to attack our present obsession with archiving information, and the surabondance of cultural artefacts we create. But he doesn`t go soft by directly attacking the nearby construction of the gigantic Montreal National Library ,
which has been subject to severe financial difficulties recently, to a point where it makes you wonder how the people in charge will be able to buy books after the building is finished. One of the sculpture, and perhaps the finest, that Laramée had skillfully produced in the matter of illustrating the thoughts conveyed by his book
is called "La Grande Bibliothèque" (2003), and it`s literally a small pathway of canyons sculpted directly into the middle of two rows of piles of a couple versions of Britannica Encyclopedia. From that standpoint, and looking at the two other sculptures installed in the blue-lighted room, you get a sense that the scape of Babylon is used as a metaphor. Here the "canyon valley" bluntly refers to the erosion of culture. It is not the first time I`ve seen an artist sculpt through piles of books, as I`m recalling a piece by Long-Bin Chen presenting four large buddha heads sculpted with yellow pages phonebooks at an exhibition called "The Invisible Thread" at Snug Harbour, New York (which was themed on buddhism). But different categories of books mean different focus, and here the artist embrace chaos and decay in order to better criticize our deification of knowledge (the press communiquee does make a referece to Shiva, god of destriction). I think Laramée assured himsef his place in the pantheon of new promissing Quebec artists with this piece, and I`m certain we will be hearing about him again very soon. The sculpture speaks for anything else he`s done and on my account is worth exhibiting in any contemporary museums, under any circumstances.


The two other pieces look both like buildings from the babylonian era. The first is "La Tour (Le Trou)" (2003), which is an inversed wooden version of an imaginary Babel Tower. In the book "Biblios", there was a mention about the "people" being divised in two clans or classes: the providers of "horizontal knowledge" were very spread and knew everything but little under the surface while the providers of "vertical knowledge" knew little information but were expert in analysing it. I like to think that this tower refers to the latter, a building built large at the top but going down the bottom through a hole, or rather a darkhole. Sort of like going down the memory lane until it vanishes. The final sculpture, "Autel D`Ordination" (2004) would be about the first group. It`s simply a sophisticated and compartimented sculpture of a computer desk, that is designed with quantities of spaces and holes for every and any types of computer documents, but also looked like a religious altar or, from further and with a little imagination, an imaginary babylonian temple constructed in pyramidal layers. The piece provoke our contemporary devotion and admiration for computer technology, which recently drastically enhanced our capacity for archiving information. With this piece Laramée is pointing that the "Biblios" people he is depicting is actually us, and the artist attempts to warn us about the inevitable dooms of knowledge, that can only logically exist to be lost again some day.

Laramée reminds you and me that this little blog you are reading right now and that I`m writting madfully for no real apparent pertinence, will disappear some day
and return to dust, that our culture will also be facing its own death. And why do we feel so concerned about preserving it ? Blain and Laramée both pose the same problematic in this magnificent exhibit, that I`ll be remembering as one of the best in 2004.


Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan