Emotional Rescue: Glynis Humphrey "Breathing Underwater" at La Centrale.

"Every day the fat woman dies a series of small deaths."

Shelley Bovey



"Thin people are beautiful, but fat people are adorable."

Jackie Gleason





Montreal has been a lucky week with good exhibitions,
and the one I just saw today is categorically excellent.
And I almost missed it to attend an Abramovic performance !


Luckily, you readers have still one week to catch it.



I'm talking about Glynis Humphrey's installation
at La Centrale, an artist from Halifax whom I
had never heard from.


At first, the video that she presents
in the window of the gallery, visible from the
outside at night, looks like a bad rendition of
a Bill Viola installation (simply
because Viola's use of slow motion
turns his people underwater into
sublime creatures, when Humphrey's
editing is much more abrupt and runs
at a much more urgent pace).


Things start to get really interesting
once inside the gallery, as a series
of giant balloons adorned with speakers
vibrates through the contact of manipulated sounds
of heartbeat and other body noises.

These sounds are played at low volume
so that you-the-visitor is forced to come close
and touch the balloons, pull your head
close to them in order to fully
experience the work.

The rumblings are very intriguing,
and soon you start speculating
notions of inner body worlds,
and maternity, while you watch
the woman in front of you
moving around in her
own aquarium.



"This woman is hardly surviving", I thought,
as I was recalling works of Heike Mutter
from a few years ago, that used a similar
visual approach to similar effect (what a bizarre
coincidence: the curator for that show
at Optica was in the gallery at the same time
I was there !!).

The three big balloons, being objects
transformed by the performative act
of blow, now appeared like the perfect
reply to a tryptich in glass called
"Souffle" made by Geneviève Cadieux
from some years back, but instead of
conceptualizing a monument to
the precarity of life, Humphrey opted
for tangibility and experience. The installation
is alive, and gasping for space as you
move around it. These are fragile bubbles
that could explode any second, and destroy
everything that they're trying to hold on.
I think I can use the term visceral to describe
how this mere thought affects the viewer emotionally.

Moving near the wall, passing by a smaller
monitor video that shows the artist suspended
in water from a distance, like she is being surveilled,
I read an inscription on the wall: "dedicated to my daughter Carrie Johnson
and to the memory of Emily Givner (1966 - 2004)."
At this moment I interprete this as a confirmation
that the work is really, as I perceived it, about
the difficulties of living, standing at the constant threshold
of life and death, and the metaphorical trap of amniotic water,
both a prison and the condition of existence.



But I was totally wrong.


And this is one thing I love to do
with art, and that is to read the press
release or title after my exploration
of the work to see how much I got from
the work itself.

The artist had another agenda,
and to her credit that probably
renders her project less facile
than my interpretation would have let
you guessed.


Get this: the work revolves
around "grotesque".
It's about the difficulties
of living as a fat and (ugly?)
individual, unfitting to any
wanton of sexual gaze ! The artist says:
"my work articulates my experiences as a large
middle-aged woman who does not conform to
North-American society's restricted vision for
femininity and sexual desirability."


Wow... Splendid.

Seriously, let's step back a little:
I remarked that the lady in water was
a little chubby, but I thought that was fitting
with the idea of being a grown up baby back into
her mother's womb. The idea of "ugly"
never crossed my mind, but that is probably
because, having to deal with similar problems
that the artist summons (I got a little chubby
in the last 3 years, growing from 168 to 190
at 5.10), I've come to naturally suppress any
endeavour related with human desire (which is not to
say that I've abandoned sensual pleasure
in any way, que no: I just lived it through food
instead of human contact. I feel entirely
responsible.)


And so, the interesting part occurs when,
actually sharing a vital sentiment with the artist,
it didn't help me envision the work in
the right way, simply because the artist
addresses herself to another crowd,
the average people, or rather, above average,
since the video is playing in the windows
at night in a district where a lot of the
fashion people pass by.


And if you think I'm stretching, here is an example:
while I was at the gallery, a gang of cute arab guys
entered the space. They saw the video
from the street and wondered what all
this was about. They were obviously
there to goof around, but I was scrutinizing their
reactions as I thought it was interesting
to meet people unknowing of contemporary art
entering a gallery for their first time (I'm projecting
a fantasy, bare with me). They looked at the large
video and I'm pretty sure they found it comical
(they were laughing, goofing together),
and left (only one of them took the time
to come to the bubbles).


Now this image, considering
the topic at hand, becomes
extremely powerful. These men
coming in, goofing, not expressing
any emotion at the image of a fat
woman nearly drowning in front of
them, and leaving just like they came.
What would have been their reactions
if a young porn model was featured
in the video instead? (well...I would
have laughed anyway...)


So, as I was on my way to leave,
I thought about how this work shifted
strongly depending of who is watching.
And how much the artist succeeded at mirroring
these inequities of sexual gaze, as an art
expectful of the spectrum of reactions, and
that keep meaning something regardless
of the type or quality of these reactions.



But just right upon reaching the door,
I decided to lend a quick look
at the book of commentaries left
from visitors. That was revealing.
First, I had never seen such an amount
of comments in a gallery book since
a while, and than, at least everyone I read,
had positive things to say about it.


I was surprised to read many people
say that they found the work comfortable,
relaxing, and calm. I think I underestimated
the power of the sound installation as itself,
too concentrating on its relation with the images.
It was indeed very hypnotic and soothing, and
wouldn't have been misplaced in the chill room
of a rave party (if they still do that kind of stuff these days).
Other people mentioned images of cocoons,
of a desire to get back to this enthralling feeling
of the womb, which made me realized that the artist, as large
as she claims to be, had a power to trigger another
kind of desire: a fond for motherhood. She
was embodificating the goddess of nature!

The response to the work was not only
emotional, it was sensual. This sort of
sensuality that makes a child want to rub themselves
to their parents or grandparents. The artist
had become a symbol of that psychological affect:
wanting to pause from the general worries of life,
the responsabilities of adulthood, and reach back
to this primal state of abandon to a life once careful
and tender. I think that it is not for nothing that
water symbolizes emotions in most mythologies. People rapidly
make abstraction of its dangers: for them water
is an expression of comfort, a reminiscence
that every living creatures was once conceived by the sea.


So, as I was walking on my way home,
I thought to myself: is it all that important,
that people interprete this work as
either tragic or soothing? That I saw
in it an expression on the harsh conditions
of living, that another grinned at it while facing his own
repulsion, or that someone else found it as pleasurable
as being in a spa environment ?


This work functions on every
of these levels, because unlike
programmatic intellectual art, but
much more like the experience of music, it reaches
to deeper levels of the emotional, which comprehend a
vast, spreaded and abstract realm of perspectives.


And so all I'm left to say as a critique
is that I think the piece is worth finding
out the emotions that it will trigger in you,



Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com



Glynis Humphrey: "Breathing Underwater"
October 20 - November 20 2005
La Centrale Powerhouse
4296 Boulevard Saint-Laurent
Wed 12h - 18h
Thu, Fri 12h - 21h
Sat, Sun 12h - 17h