Thursday, August 30, 2007

How To Get Away From Bruce: "Elusive Signs", Nauman's Retro at the Montreal MAC


Bruce Nauman, "Helman Gallery Parallelogram", 1971





Hey, wow...Haha....I LUV the gigantic pic effect for this article !
Totally fits the idea. Let's leave it like this.


Hello,


Summer is nearly off and though the weather wasn't always nice it has been
quite a passive-contemplative sitdown for me.


I am totally off the arts, and in fact, the biggest question since I ever had
health problems was not going to be wrether I would survive them or not, but if the visual arts including this blog remained anywhere pertinent to my new life anymore. I feel almost like I just entered a big psycho-destabilizing religious sect, and I don't know if I can describe this as developing a sentiment of absolute vacuity (maybe they did lobotomize me during my last operation?), or if I've just recently been feeling some sort of self-conscious, anti-or-above-intellectual plenitude the way a buddhist would. Have I become suddenly wise, or numb? I just know that something's changed. It's as if art had been this evil obsession all this time and getting a little away from it made me breathe for the first time in years. Or maybe I felt like my own ghost crossing across 1000 of exhibits with everything seeming so irrelevant to some post-living immaterial and imageless state of reality. Having faced death. Having met the edge of one somptuous dark cliff. Then stepping back, turning, and decide "ok, now, where it is that I haven't yet been in this picture?", and embrace this opportunity of living everything anew, but from a different angle (at least different as possible when tainted with back experience). I call it my zombie phase. Sometimes I get the overwhelming sense that I simply turned into a zombie. Or maybe Cedric's not really there anymore, maybe somebody aka me-with-no-name just took this body when Cedric left it, and I'm receiving all this confused info from the past that I'm struggling to comprehend. Who am I, now?


So I've been lurking towards the technology world recently, trying to understand how basic things work. I feel like a child about to return to school after a very long obscure summer, or not even yet: like touching electricity for the first time. I just crave at understanding machines. And so because so much of visual art has become dead-obvious to me, maybe because I've experienced a little too much, it's been less titillating lately.


For example, I felt the exhibit of Bruce Nauman in Montreal to be for the most part (80 per cent), utterly boring. The way I perceive things, Nauman will remain an artist that will have influenced many others, but that will become less important for future generations when other artists will have outdone or outplay his way too blunt and simplistic approach to artmaking. I mean, "The True Artist..Revealing..Mystic Truths" (1967) was a fantastic pop art pun (wisdom questioned by beer-bar aesthetic) that resumed a good portion of his art for many years to come (the Mac justifyingly hanged this show-stopper right at the entrance wall), but re-establishing the ying and yang in all spheres of langage and non-langage possible for me sounds like a futile exercise. Why not just grasp Ying and Yang in the first place and keep it to Ying and Yang?? Or why not address 1 + 1 = 3 for that matter? The neons are just flashy and fashionable to me, sometimes looking like a shop had invested in the Keith Haring aesthetic. I was more intrigued by the amount of power boxes surrounding the works themselves, and this idea of enclosed, directional energy filling the glasses, but this technology involves a whole other kind of ying and yang
that goes beyond anything attributable to human values.

The performance videos are desparatly autistic, and would make sense as an art project if a dictionary or some kind of registering of these videos enveloped the project, but as sparsed pieces they just bubble up in fragmented perception of space
that are just frustrating to me so much etheir space or body remain constrained and unsoluted by their stubborn limits (them, very resolute). I bet all the Nauman videos could have fulfilled one nice, form-explorative, dance choreography, and I'm sure somewhere someone already thought of that, so why beg my patience through 3 or 4 pieces presenting one gesture each, over 60 minutes? Is idea best expressed when underlined 60 times or repeated in eternal redundancy? Is the human condition the condition of stupid not being able to grasp a simple artistic (formal) fact?


Nauman's sordid clowns are neat, but again they are deconstructions of things I've met elsewhere. Stephen King's "IT" clown for that matter, was way more scary on paper. I mean, effective enough to grasp an antagony of clowning and pain, or evilness, if that's what you fancy. So Nauman, like so many other artist, is merely extracting the narrative juice of everything to the core, to present us the conceptional bones of reality like dead insects in a laboratory. I've been growing wary of this approach, especially when it concerns art made past 1980. But the art snobs... I guess they just like to take their bath dry. I don't know. Can't you guys see how facile it all is? Coming up with your life's achievment by playing a violent clown stabbing at an old joke for 2 minutes in an afternoon?? Why does the artworld always seem soooooo unaware? I am shocked by the whole unawarenes of it. I bet 500 pounds that Nauman never saw an early 80's concert of french punk band Bérurier Noir when he made that Clown Torture piece in 1987, that so many consider his best piece ever. And way before, Leigh Bowery, and then, etc... Violent clowns will be violent clowns, which means they remain cool, but don't come and argue how someone invented the wheel because you've never been interested in anything else than reading art books, which must represent the most culturally filtered artefacts ever. The other video installation, Anthro/Socio, was interesting as a lyrical piece, as if it had been a micro-opera by Ligeti or Penderecki, some sort of tense drone made out of human screams, and as an interesting metaphor about human's primal scream, I find less to speak against it except that it's again a blunt punchline almost entirely bereft of sensibility so much the atmosphere is animally agressive. Is this really about human condition? Probably more about the pre-psyche "Need" and how it fosters agression to the more elemental beings. But in life, a true horrendous whine can't last that long without a relief, I believe, and that's what this art doesn't offer. Here, the only thing less subtle would have been a loop of a newborn being slapped by the doctor forever.


At any rates, the one thing that Nauman did that really makes him (in my opinion) interesting and "landmark", if you will (trying to reason here how someone can become the most important artist alive, after reading the polls), is the architectural structure. All these 70's self-enclosed variations on minimal spaces and lighting presented as early forms of installation art, which represent exactly the path someone should have taken right post the 60's minimalist movement. Nauman took it in almost uniqueness. Of course, these "built galleries" look over-simple by today standards, but for their times they remain spectacular, and again the idea that a "register" of those spaces could exist, sort of a language of basic architecture, would sound to me as a dramatically important event in art history, as most architects would have not ventured in exploring their theories through human-size, "livable", experiential settings in non-commercial avenues, and that is where art can proof its pertinence in that it's not only about the ideas, but about the "theoretical" things made with these ideas, and Nauman, throughout the dole redundancy of his neons, found the time to realize these large slabs.. of pure space, what I find absolutely amazing. Indeed, the only redeeming retro of Nauman would consist of at minimum a dozen of those spaces, but it's hard to imagine the museum with the available rent to present them (they are about 4 in the Dia Beacon basement, next to "Mapping The Studio", with all its zen gone awry dead-cold ambition).

Finally, the Hundred Fish Fountain (2005) in the retrospective looked neat, just totally out of place with the rest so much it is baroque. Looked like fishes decrying an agonizing ecology, like if lead forced them out of the water. Expectably about the only work my mother enjoyed. Comes as an irony in the corpus of an artist who had been striving towards taking the "Fountain" out of the urinal all his life, concentrating so much on the idea of language as a pure object.


So toodles for now, I will probably finish my Biennial review before Christmas 2007, but I'm just going very slow as I've been caught by other interests.


Right now I am attending the World Film Festival, with its array of moodish and over-sensitive films, where the avant-garde would seem to linger.


So these brief suggestions goes to anyone with more heart than reasoning:


Travelling With Pets by Vera Storozhevais is the most beautiful film yet seen, a touching portrait of an orphan woman who's given a chance by destiny to live her life anew again, starting from scratch. For the image of a bride travelling in her own wagonette in the empty russian scape, totally worth seeing.


I Served The King Of England (Obsluhoval Jsem Anglického Krale) by Jiry Menzel, is an intelligent film standing on a fragile line between humor and drama as it recounts the events leading to the czech bourgeoisy loosing everything after WWII.
Events that have affected my family personally, so I might be biaised, but the crowd really seemed to have enjoyed themselves judging from the warmth applause at the end.


Ben X by Nic Balthazar is another fine, crowd-pleaser film, about a man suffering Asperger Syndrome (which by the way, also afflicts the person writting here, aka me, but that deficiency never seemed to have restrained Gary Numan from becoming a pop star, did it?). Poor Ben either was stroke really hard or didn't receive the good help that I had, but in this film he is having a real harsh life apart from reaching 80 in online video-gaming (demonstrated by magnificent computer sequences). His story will certainly move a few hearts, and if you pay attention there are surprises to fulfill you until the very end.


I also suggest The Orchard, Eduart, Beaufort, and strictly if you enjoy watching old torture intruments being used, Opium (Diary Of A Madwoman), in the same festival, but I'm far from being done yet.


I wrote an opinion, in french, about the situation of canadian film festivals here. Basically I sort of give in to the idea that TIFF (n Toronto) had about the same amount of time than other festivals and they used it to become THE most important film festival in the Americas, and I doubt we can only inflict that on sponsoring choices from the government. So my idea is let Montreal keep the art Biennial and make TO where the films happen. I might even attend the TIFF in the future if action in that sphere dry out in Montreal. Most of it is entertainment anyway. "Have a ball - Let me piss"
kinda drill.


Allrite, then, see you in a month, or less. It's September after all, might be wandering on computers a little more.


Cedric Caspeyan
centiment@hotmail.com