Parachute, 1 octobre 1989, Octobre - Décembre

[" SfeiP «Sur ma manière de travailler» i(0n My Manner of Working\u201d octobre, novembre, décembre, m 1989 October, November, December 700$ «awn»* UN CHEF-D\u2019OEUVRE EN LIBERTÉ.LA QUALITÉ PASSE AVANT TOUT Sommaire / Contents «Sur ma manière de travailler» / \u201cOn My Manner of Working\u201d octobre, novembre, décembre, 1989 October, November, December ÉDITORIAL / EDITORIAL par/by Jean Papineau ARTICLES / INTERVIEWS / ESSAYS DIDEROT CHARNEY KOUNELLIS HAACKE CADIEUX GRAUERHOLZ GOODWIN GROUP MATERIAL BUREN MASSEY MAGOR SNOW FORTUYN SOUTIF CROW 7 ARTS VISUELS / VISUAL ARTS Tenir l'image à distance par Alain Laframboise\t52 5e Festival international de films et vidéos de femmes de Montréal par Christine Ross 53 Laurent Pilon par Guy Bellavance 54 Festival de Cannes par Francine Laurendeau 55 Guy Pellerin par Lisanne Nadeau 57 Alain Laframboise par Christine Bemier 50 Children's Pavilion : Dan Graham & Jeff Wall par René Viau 80 Françoise Schein par Jacques Doyon\t61 Grace Hopper: An Independent Group Exhibition by Carol Laing 62 Andy Fabo by Janice Andreae 63 Geneviève Cadieux by Kitty Scott 65 Richard Purdy by Alison Tett\t66 Liliana Berezowsky by Donald McGrath 67 Interior Presence : Projecting Situations by Robert Milthorp 69 Gardens by Elizabeth Ritchie\t70 I H É Â T R E / THEATRE Festivals: la part du risque par Gilbert David 71 DÉBATS / ISSUES Condemned to History (But Not Invited to Lunch) by Philip Monk 78 Bilderstreit by Sabine Vogel\t79 LIVRES El REVUES / BOOKS AID MAGAZINES par/by Charles Acland, Sylvain Campeau, Kevin Dowler, Christine Dubois, Chris Martin i tL Wi'Aà'm v COUVERTURE/COVER Melvin Charney, The Other City.No.2, 1986, pastel sur bois, 152,6 x 102 cm., collection Paul Lowinstein, Canadian Corporate Funding Collection.PARACHUTE 56 f PARACHUTE 56 La direction de ce numéro spécial a été confiée à Jean Papineau./Jean Papineau is guest editor for this special issue.directrice de la publication/editor CHANTAL PONTBRIAND directrice adiointe/managing editor COLETTE TOUGAS rédacteurs correspondants/ contributing editors SERGE BÉRARD, CAROL LAING adjointes à la rédaction / assistant editors JENNIFER FISHER, THÉRÈSE ST-GELAIS collaborateurs / contributors CHARLES AC LAND, JANICE ANDREAE, GUY BELLAVANCE, CHRISTINE BERNIER, DANIEL BUREN, SYLVAIN CAMPEAU, THOMAS CROW, GILBERT DAVID, DENIS DIDEROT, KEVIN DOWLER, JACQUES DOYON, JIM DROBNICK, CHRISTINE DUBOIS, JENNIFER FISHER, PEGGY GALE, ALAIN LAFRAMBOISE, CAROL LAING, FRANCINE LAURENDEAU, CHRIS MARTIN, LOUIS MARTIN, DONALD MCGRATH, MARTINE MEILLEUR, ROBERT MILTHORP, PHILIP MONK, LISANNE NADEAU, JEAN PAPINEAU, CHANTAL PONTBRIAND, ELIZABETH RITCHIE, CHRISTINE ROSS, KITTY SCOTT, BETH SEATON, DANIEL SOUTIF, NELL TENHAAF, ALISON TETT, PIERRE THÉBÈRGE, RENÉ VIAU, SABINE VOGEL graphisme/design ROMAN-FLEUVE traductions/translations GIOVANNI CALABRESE, JEFFREY MOORE, JEAN PAPINEAU promotion /promotion GUYLAINE GAGNON documentation / documentation CHRISTINE DUBOIS 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responsable des documents qui lui sont adressés.Les manuscrits ne sont pas retournés.La direction se réserve quatre mois suite à la réception d'un texte pour informer l'auteur(e) de sa décision quant à sa publication.Les articles publiés n'engagent que la responsabilité de leurs auteur(e)s.Tous droits de reproduction et de traduction réservés © PARACHUTE, revue d'art contemporain inc./PARACHUTE assumes no responsibility for submitted documents.Manuscripts are not returned.Authors will be informed of the editor's decision concerning publication within four months of receipt of text.The content of the published articles is the sole responsibility of the author.All rights of reproduction and translation reserved © PARACHUTE, revue d'art contemporain, inc.PARACHUTE est indexé dans/is indexed in: Art Bibliography Modern, Canadian Periodical Index, International Directory of Arts, Points de repère, RI LA.PARACHUTE est membre de/is a member of: L'Association des éditeurs de périodiques culturels québécois, The Canadian Periodical Publishers' Association, La Conférence canadienne des arts.Dépôts légaux/legal deposits: Bibliothèque nationale du Québec, Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, ISSN: 0318-7020.Parachute est une revue trimestrielle publiée en janvier, avril, juin et octobre.Parachute is a quarterly published in January, April, June and October, \u2014courrier 2e classe/second class mail registration n° 4213 impression: Boulanger inc., Montréal typographie: Zibra inc., Montréal.Imprimé au Canada/Printed in Canada.3e trimestre 1989/3'd trimester 1989.PARACHUTE reçoit l'aide du/receives support from : Conseil des Arts du Canada/The Canada Council, Ministère des Affaires culturelles du Québec, Ministère de l'Emploi et de l'Immigration du Canada/Department of Employment and Immigration of Canada, Ministère des Affaires extérieures du Canada/Department of External Affairs of Canada, Conseil des Arts de la Communauté urbaine de Montréal.PARACHUTE remercie ses généreux donateurs/wishes to thank its generous benefactors: Air Canada, Lavalin, Power Corporation, Corival inc., Marché Public 44 Itée. éditorial VITE, EN RÉSUMÉ, À LA QUESTION QUI LUI EST UN JOUR SOUMISE PAR CATHERINE II, DIDEROT RÉPOND QUE SON TRAVAIL EST SIMPLEMENT UNE ACTIVITÉ; QUE LES ŒUVRES SONT LES PRODUITS D\u2019UN ENSEMBLE D\u2019ACTES; ET QUE CE QUI DISTINGUE LES ŒUVRES ENTRE ELLES, CE QUI FAIT LEUR QUALITÉ , C EST MOINS UNE APTITUDE AU TRAVAIL (LE MÉTIER) QU\u2019UNE ATTITUDE À L\u2019ÉGARD DU TRAVAIL.DIDEROT EST DONC À SAINT-PÉTERSBOURG, OÙ IL A ÉTÉ APPELÉ À PARAÎTRE DEVANT CATHERINE IL ENSEMBLE, ENTRE LE 8 OCTOBRE 1773 ET LE 5 MARS 1774, À RAISON DE DEUX OU TROIS SÉANCES LA SEMAINE, ILS S\u2019ENTRETIENNENT DE PRESQUE TOUS LES SUJETS.JAMAIS RIEN N\u2019A TRANSPIRÉ DE CES ENTRETIENS, SINON LES COURTS TEXTES ÉCRITS PAR DIDEROT EN PRÉPARATION DE CHACUNE DES SÉANCES.ON DEVINE FACILEMENT LES INCONVÉNIENTS DU GENRE.JE PARLE D\u2019UNE CERTAINE RETENUE DANS LE TON, D\u2019UNE ESPÈCE D\u2019IMPATIENCE AUSSI, ET SURTOUT DE L\u2019ÉTAT DE GÊNE OÙ SE RETROUVE CELUI QU\u2019ON OBLIGE À TENIR LE RÔLE PARADOXAL DE QUI DEVRAIT NORMALEMENT SAVOIR.ÉCRIT PAR DIDEROT PENDANT SON SÉJOUR À SAINT-PÉTERSBOURG, SUR MA MANIÈRE DE TRAVAILLER EST UN TEXTE DE CIRCONSTANCE, UN TEXTE ADRESSÉ AUSSI, PUISQUE LA DESTINATAIRE ÉTAIT EN QUELQUE SORTE L\u2019INTERVIEWER.J\u2019AJOUTE SEULEMENT QUE LES MÊMES REMARQUES S\u2019APPLIQUENT AUSSI AUX TEXTES QUI ONT ÉTÉ RÉUNIS POUR CE NUMÉRO.editorial IN BRIEF, TO A QUESTION ASKED ONE DAY BY CATHERINE II, DIDEROT REPLIES THAT HIS WORK IS SIMPLY AN ACTIVITY, THAT A WORK IS THE PRODUCT OF A SET OF ACTS; WHAT SETS ONE APART FROM THE OTHERS, WHAT LENDS IT ITS PARTICULAR QUALITY, IS LESS AN APTITUDE FOR WORK (CRAFT) THAN AN ATTITUDE WITH REGARD TO WORK.DIDEROT, THEN, IS IN SAINT PETERSBURG WHERE HE WAS ASKED TO APPEAR BEFORE CATHERINE II.BETWEEN OCTOBER 8, 1773 AND MARCH 5, 1774, IN TWO OR THREE SESSIONS A WEEK, THE TWO OF THEM CONVERSE ON ALMOST EVERY SUBJECT.NOTHING CAME OF THESE MEETINGS, EXCEPT FOR THE SHORT TEXTS DIDEROT WROTE IN PREPARATION FOR EACH SESSION.AS ONE MIGHT GUESS, CERTAIN PROBLEMS ARISE WITH THIS TYPE OF AFFAIR.I AM REFERRING TO A CERTAIN RESTRAINT IN THE TONE, A KIND OF IMPATIENCE AS WELL, AND ESPECIALLY THE STATE OF EMBARRASSMENT IN ONE WHO IS OBLIGED TO PLAY THE PARADOXICAL ROLE OF HE WHO SHOULD, BY RIGHTS, KNOW.WRITTEN BY DIDEROT DURING HIS STAY IN SAINT PETERSBURG, SUR MA MANIÈRE DE TRAVAILLER IS A TEXT OF CIRCUMSTANCE, CONSIGNED TO SOMEONE AS WELL, FOR THE ADDRESSEE WAS IN SOME WAYS THE INTERVIEWER.I WILL ADD ONLY THAT THE SAME REMARKS APPLY EQUALLY TO THE ARTICLES THAT MAKE UP THIS ISSUE.Translated from the French by Jeffrey Moore.JEAN PAPINEAU Louis-Michel Van Loo, Diderot, 1767, oil on canvas, 0,81 x 0,65 cm; photo : Musée du Louvre/Réunion des Musées Nationaux.'/.«S ùùfii UT J.5 PARACHUTE 56 Articles / Interviews / Essays 7 D enis Diderot Sur ma manière de travailler On My Manner of Working Melvin Charney L\u2019Architecture comme roman une interview de Louis Martin 12 Ja nnis Kounellis Le Poids et la mesure une interview de Chantal Pontbriand 16 H ans Haacke «La Trahison des images» a written interview by Jean Papineau 20 Geneviève Cadieux Écrans de réflexion une interview de Jean Papineau 23 Angela Grauerholz Mundane Re-membrances an interview by Beth Seaton 26 B etty Goodwin Fragments d\u2019expérience une interview de Martine Meilleur 29 Group M aterial Dialectical Group Materialism an interview by Jim Drobnick 32 Daniel B uren Règle du jeu 34 John Mas sey Art as Embodied Conditions an interview by Peggy Gale 37 Liz Magor Identification: An Insider\u2019s View an interview by Jennifer Fisher 40 M ichael Snow Laocoôn of the People an interview by Pierre Théberge 43 Irene Fortuyn The Materialization of Intimacy an interview by Christine Dubois 43 Daniel Soutif Matière et manière 47 Th ornas Crow Une Manière de Travailler in the Studio of David Denis Diderot SUR MA MANIERE DE TR AVAU 1ER Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Diderot, 1769, oil on canvas, 0,815 x 0,650 cm; photo: Musée du Louvre/ Réunion des Musées Nationaux.Votre Majesté Impériale m\u2019a demandé quelle était ma manière de travailler.J\u2019examine premièrement si la chose peut être mieux faite par moi que par un autre; et je la fais.Sans le moindre soupçon quelle peut être mieux faite par un autre que par moi, quelque avantage que je puisse y trouver je la lui renvoie, car le point important n\u2019est pas que je fasse la chose, mais quelle soit bien faite.Lorsque j\u2019ai pris mon parti, je pense chez moi le jour, la nuit, en société, dans les rues, à la promenade; ma besogne me poursuit.J\u2019ai sur mon bureau un grand papier sur lequel je jette un mot de réclame de mes pensées, sans ordre, en tumulte, comme elles me viennent.Lorsque ma tête est épuisée, je me repose; je donne le temps aux idées de repousser; c\u2019est ce que j\u2019ai appelé quelquefois ma recoupe, métaphore empruntée d\u2019un des travaux de la campagne.Cela fait, je reprends ces réclames d\u2019idées tumultueuses et décousues et je les ordonne, quelquefois en les chiffrant.Quand j\u2019en suis venu là, je dis que mon ouvrage est achevé.J\u2019écris tout de suite, mon âme s\u2019échauffe de reste en écrivant.S\u2019il se présente quelque idée nouvelle dont la place soit éloignée, je la mets sur un papier séparé.Il est rare que je récrive, et les différents petits papiers que Votre Majesté a entre ses mains n\u2019ont été écrits qu\u2019une fois; aussi y reste-t-il des négligences, toutes les incorrections légères de la célérité.Je ne lis ce que les autres ont pensé sur l\u2019objet dont je m\u2019occupe que quand mon ouvrage est fait.Si la lecture me détrompe, je déchire mon ouvrage.Si je trouve dans les auteurs quelque chose qui me convienne, je m\u2019en sers.S\u2019ils m\u2019inspirent quelque nouvelle idée, je l\u2019ajoute en marge, car, paresseux de copier, je réserve toujours de grandes marges.Voilà le moment de consulter les amis, les indifférents et même les ennemis.Les ennemis! oui, madame, les ennemis, ceux que je méprise.Je fais comme le médecin qui guérit son malade avec du bouillon de vipère.Je n\u2019ai jamais refusé un bon conseil à celui que je méprisais, ni rejeté celui que j\u2019en pouvais recevoir, ni rougi de l\u2019obligation que je lui en avais.Il s\u2019en manque bien encore que l\u2019ouvrage puisse être publié; il y a le travail de la lime, le plus épineux, le plus difficile, celui qui épuise, fatigue, ennuie et ne finit point, surtout chez une nation où quatre expres- sions de mauvais goût tuent un très bon ouvrage, où l\u2019on ne permet pas la rencontre dure de deux voyelles, où l\u2019on est blessé de la répétition d\u2019un même mot quelquefois dans une page; où l\u2019on exige que vous soyez doux, clair, facile, élégant, élevé, harmonieux; où les femmes écrivent purement et jugent en dernier ressort.Ah! quelle tâche que celle d\u2019un auteur chez un peuple qui se soucie fort peu qu\u2019on l\u2019instruise, mais qui veut sur toute chose être amusé, même dans les matières les plus sérieuses, les plus importantes ! Nous faisons bien plus de cas de la couleur que du dessin.Point de salut pour celui qui ne sait pas écrire.Cet auteur travaille pour le premier écrivain qui saura se parer de ses dépouilles et joindre l\u2019agréable à l\u2019utile.Tout le monde crie au plagiat, mais tout le monde laisse le premier dans la poussière et lit le dernier.Les plumes du paon s\u2019attachent si bien, à la longue, sur les ailes de la corneille, quelles lui restent en propre.Voltaire en est un excellent exemple; il est vrai que celui-ci était très riche de son fonds.Le désespoir, c\u2019est qu\u2019on croit avoir vu toutes les incorrections, et que l\u2019ouvrage imprimé vous en montre qui crevaient les yeux.Alors le public se partage; malheur à l\u2019ouvrage qui n\u2019excite point de schisme ! Au milieu de ce tumulte, l\u2019auteur qui a un peu de fermeté d\u2019âme sourit; l\u2019auteur pusillanime souffre.Cependant tout s\u2019apprécie à la rigueur et les censeurs stupides louent aussi impudemment que s\u2019ils n\u2019avaient jamais blâmé.Pour moi, je ne crains ni le jugement de mes actions, ni la censure de mes écrits.Je permets au plus déterminé scélérat de publier le libelle le plus atroce contre mes moeurs; il ne m\u2019empêchera pas de dormir; il n\u2019attaque qu\u2019un point de ma durée; et ce point, justifié par le passé et par l\u2019avenir, reprendra bientôt la couleur du fil entier.J\u2019abandonne mes ouvrages à la censure la plus amère, parce qu\u2019il est une trinité contre laquelle les portes de l\u2019enfer ne prévaudront jamais: le vrai qui engendre le bon, et le beau qui procède de l\u2019un et de l\u2019autre.On a publié contre l\u2019homme et contre l\u2019auteur dix mille papiers.Que sont-ils devenus ?On l\u2019ignore, et l\u2019homme et l\u2019auteur sont restés tout juste à la place qui leur était due, excepté dans ce moment, où il plaît à Votre Majesté de leur accorder mille fois plus qu\u2019ils ne méritent.«Sur ma manière de travailler» est extrait des Mémoires pour Catherine II (1773-1774).Le texte que nous reproduisons intégralement est celui des Oeuvres complètes (Éd.Lewinter, Paris, Le Club français du livre, 1971, v.X, p.772-775).7 PARACHUTE 56 Denis Diderot ON MY MANNER OF WORKING Your Imperial Majesty has inquired of my manner of working.First, I ascertain whether the object can be better made by me than by someone else; if it can, I begin to work.Should I entertain the slightest doubt as to whether it can be better made by someone else, regardless of the advantages I may derive therefrom, I refer the work to that person, for the important thing is not that I make the object, but that it be made well.When I have decided to undertake the work, I reflect day and night, at home, in society, on the streets, during my outings; my work stalks me.On my writing desk is a large piece of paper on which I jot down a few key words to represent my thoughts as they come to me, in tumult and confusion.When my mind is exhausted, I rest; I give the ideas time to germinate; I have sometimes called this my \u201caftercrop,\u201d a metaphor borrowed from one of the activities of the fields.When this is done, I take these desultory and formless ideas and order them, sometimes numbering them.Upon reaching this point, I can say my work is completed.I immediately start writing; my soul is stirred in the process.If some new idea appears whose place is far off, I write it on separate paper.Rare, are the times that I will rewrite, and the various little papers that your Majesty is now holding were written but once; as a consequence, there remain the oversights, the infelicities that are the product of haste.I read what others have thought about my subject only after I have finished my work.If, in these authors, I discover something aidful, I make use of it.If they inspire new ideas, I add these in the margin; since I am too lazy to re-copy, I invariably leave wide margins.The time has now come to consult my friends, my indifferent acquaintances, and my enemies.Enemies! Yes Madame, my enemies, those whom I despise.I am like the physician who cures his patient with a draught of snake venom.I have never declined to offer advice to someone I detest, not declined advice that I was able to receive, nor been ashamed to acknowledge an obligation.Much remains to be done before the work can be published; the work of the final editing is the most delicate and most difficult; it is exhausting, ardous, tedious and neverending, particularly in a country in which four expressions of bad taste can kill a very good work, where a harsh encounter between two vowels is forbidden, where one is offended by the repetition of the same word on the same page; where one has to be sweet, clear, fluid, elegant, lofty, harmonious; where the women write purely and hold the final judgement.Oh! What a task for a writer who lives among a people who care little for instruction, who in all matters wish to be entertained, even in the most serious of matters, the most important! We thus show much more interest in colour than in drawing.Unfortunate is he who does not know how to write correctly.For he is working for the first author who comes along who can plunder his ideas and marry the agreeable with the useful.Everyone cries plagiarism, but everyone reads this work and leaves the other in dust.The borrowed feathers of the peacock end up fitting so well on the crow that they remain as if they had always belonged.Voltaire is an excellent example; it is true that he had his own rich store of ideas from which to draw.It is distressing to discover, after think- ing all inaccuracies had been removed, painfully obvious errors in the published work.Now come the time for the public to divide itself; woe betide the author who provokes no factions! Admidst this tumult, the author possessing a bit of firmness of spirit will smile; the pusillanimous author will suffer.Everything is measured against the strictest rules and yet the dull willed critics will have the impudence to praise what they earlier reproved.Personally, I fear neither the judgement of my actions, nor the censure of my writings.I allow the boldest of scoundrels to publish the most atrocious slander on my morals; he will not upset my sleep; he is attacking but one stitch of my existence; and this one stitch, justified as it is by the past and by the future, will soon regain the colour of the complete thread.I yield up my works to the severest censor, because there is a trinity against which the doors of hell will never prevail: truth which engenders good, and beauty which proceeds from both.Against the man and against the author ten thousand articles have been published.What have become of them?No one knows, and the position of the man and the author has remained exactly that which is their due, except at this moment, where Your Majesty is humbly asked to accord them a position a thousand times higher than they merit.«Sur ma manière de travailler» (On My Manner of Working) is taken from Mémoires pour Catherine II ( 1773-1774).The text reproduced here in its entirety is in Œuvres completes [Paris: Ed.Lewinter, Le Club français du livre (1971), v.X, pp.772-775].Translated from the French by Jeffrey Moore PARACHUTE 56 8 Melvin C h a r n e y L\u2019ARCHITECTURE COMME ROMAN Mpait ished wort.e public ro Mhor wli àorposi-U smile; tk ist the strie-.critics will lat they ear- judgement ip writings, rels to pub-in my mor-îe is attack-:e; and this îepast and ie colour of verest cen-inst which rail: truth utv which [he author published.me to®' the author h is their here Tour : ¦d them î than thef .fanner of rltlfhri ¦\u2019 jtw'to ;iubfr^alS I# ' \u2022r-***¦»*\u2022' - ¦¦ t .¦mim ¦> ; ¦ Melvin Charney, La Colonne sacrée \u2014 Colonne n° 8, en construction pour le Jardin du Centre canadien d\u2019architecture, 1989-Photo : (Michel Boulet) Centre canadien d\u2019architecture.Melvin Charney, La Colonne sacrée: Colonne n° 8; Jardin du Centre canadien d\u2019architecture, 1987, crayon sur papier, 20,5 x 12,5 cm.une interview de Louis Martin Y a-t-il une différence dans votre façon de travailler entre les œuvres où vous choisissez le sujet et celles où vous répondez à une commande?Aucune, car je n\u2019ai jamais cru en l\u2019importance du sujet.D\u2019ailleurs, il me semble que depuis le début du XXe siècle, il n\u2019y a plus de répertoire de sujets appropriés.L\u2019art est devenu un système de gestes dont découlent quelquefois des objets.Il faut vraiment inventer à travers le quotidien et identifier des gestes propices.Les sujets ne sont pas à inventer; ils découlent d\u2019une problématique spécifique, ou encore de l\u2019existence qu\u2019on mène.Pendant des années, le phénomène de la ville m\u2019a intéressé.J\u2019y voyais une sorte d\u2019encyclopédie de l\u2019existence, et les meilleures choses que j\u2019ai faites, c\u2019est quand les sites urbains m\u2019ont été assignés.Le sujet n\u2019est qu\u2019un point de départ.Ce qui compte, ce 9 PARACHUTE 56 r **/*».oCe.UjcUA\t-*~r Melvin Charney, A Piece off the Wall, 1981, étude pour une installation à la galerie John Weber, New York, série de deux dessins, encre sur papier, 17 x 9,5 cm chacun.OcA d fMC' Va » \u2019 *¦) l*5*-y CvLe CvW$)ptr*ith ftftifw «a ^atahic tHra 7% H %e PARACHUTE 56 18 eSij ^iderti, -Ctr P*Uii Lay oftheday \u2019Politica and read.oa # oi ie tin surrealist Paris are kept from toppling into adjacent empty lots.The slab was vaguely reminiscent of the mysterious protagonist in the film 2001.Engraved in the granite block (imported from South Africa) by stone carvers of the Montparnasse cemetery was the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, which had been proclaimed two hundred years ago during the first sessions of the new French National Assembly.Behind the construction site, so-to-speak as a back-drop, I mounted an enormous French flag across the full height and length of the wall.Blown by fans, it billowed dramatically like the tricolore of the Arc de Triomphe, its pompousness heightened by raking theatre lights below.Standard issue police barriers barred access to the national(ist) symbol, with which the French identify unquestioningly (like the nationals of other countries do with their flag).The opposite wall, the one facing the propped up Declaration of the Rights of Man and the flag histrionics, was entirely covered with the white ceramic tiles typical of the Parisian subway.A billboard poster I had discovered in the Métro in 1987 occupied its center, flanked by the blue signs of the Barbes-Rochechouart station (without changing trains, in this case without leaving the set, one can travel underground from the chic sixteen arrondissement in the shade of the Arc de Triomphe to the immigrant ghetto of the contemporary third estate at Barbès-Rochechouart in the North).The poster, designed by Roux, Séguéla, Cayssac & Goudard (a well-known French advertising agency) for the Paris department store Au Bon Marché, peddles home improvement materials for the domestic construction site.A young couple, cradling rolls of wall-paper and a power-drill in their arms, like the héros on Soviet posters holding their rifles and pitchforks, full of yuppie pep, looks resolutely up to a bright future and announces solemnly: \u201cLet\u2019s Redecorate our World.\u201d The sponsor promises a 20% discount for this revolutionary endeavor.iei]ïjron- Inscribed on the two adjacent walls, ,n(jc0[i' white on a Moslem green background, I jjjojfjt inscribed the three words that fired the ,;0ll jo i French revolution and since grace the façades çjooJ of every French city hall, school, and court 0f building with what now amounts to mocking cynicism: Liberté, Fraternité, Egalité.But only the workers of the Centre Pompidou, who clean it after hours, can read the magic words unaided \u2014 they are inscribed on the wall in arabic calligraphy.An integral part of the material for my \u201cconstruction\u201d was the political situation in the year of the French revolution\u2019s anniversary.Surprisingly, this historical event is still controversial in France.In fact, the Ihisaudi-:i)ts, pre-livable ot ccepta work, to id simple enjoyable; tre\" I care îshed'f1 [signs °» [TERDIT ^epootl m at c°n' igfiï v *\t: ¦tSSÊÊÉ \t Hans Haacke, Décor, 1989, Musée national d\u2019art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou.church, the aristocracy, and much of the political right stayed aloof or quietly even sabotaged the celebrations (The political designations right and left are still used with ideological partisanship by everybody in France.).The revisionist historian François Furet, whose books on the subject dominated the displays of bookstores and the general readership press, was succesfully championed by the conservatives \u2014 and by James M.Markham, the correspondent of The New York Times, who focused on the bloodshed of the revolution.The gauchiste left grumbled as well, accusing the socialist government of having betrayed the revolution of which it considers itself the rightful heir.The old French struggle between the Girondists and the Jacobins flared up with new ferocity, while the general public became increasingly bored and disgusted by the revolutionary hoopla and the commercialization of the event the closer the fourteenth of July approached.Nevertheless, it is commonly believed in France, as in other countries, that the revolution\u2019s goals have been accomplished and that the Rights of Man are firmly implanted in Western democratic societies.What better sign for this assumption than the adoption by Jacques Chirac\u2019s neo-gaullist RPR (Rassemblement pour la République) of the Phrygian bonnet as the logo for his rightist party.An important subtext to contemporary French politics are the tense relations between the indigenous French and a large, poor, predominantly Moslem immigrant population.Civil rights organizations like SOS-Racisme and the Ligue des droits de l\u2019homme are on critical but more friendly terms with the socialist government than with its rightist predecessor, which was notorious for its disciminatory laws and police practices.Right wing parties have formed occasional voting alliances with Le Pen\u2019s racist Front National, a party which has also drawn support from traditionally communist voters.A raucus demonstration in the center of Paris against Salman Rushdie, with calls for his death, by a large crowd of fervent Moslems shocked French TV-viewers early this year and gave race relations still another spin \u2014 and focused anew on the French revolution\u2019s link between civil rights and secularization.Searching for a title for my environment, I first thought of calling it LEF au Bon Marché.L(iberté) E(galité) F(raternité) means \u201cleft\u201d in Russian and served as title of a Moscow periodical which counted Maja-kowsky and Rodtchenko among its regular contributors.The Parisian department store\u2019s name can be colloquially translated as \u201con the cheap.\u201d I discarded the idea eventually, because it required a lot of arcane knowledge to be understood.Instead I let myself be inspired by the \u201crevolutionary\u201d subway poster\u2019s caption and called the piece simply Décor.The summary of the ingredients of my environment may demonstrate that its subject is not the Declaration of the Rights of Man, that, in fact, looking for an easily definable subject misses the point.Like my Oilpainting \u2014 Homage to Marcel Broodthaers of 1982, Décor does not offer new information.It does not even have a readily identifiable \u201cbad guy.\u201d Like Brecht\u2019s theatre it is impervious to empathy.It is probably a melancholic Décor.* Hans Haacke agreed to a written interview.The exchange took place during July and August.I sent a first question, followed by Hans Haacke\u2019s answer, followed by a second question, again followed by Hans Haacke\u2019s answer.Neither texts were edited in any way.Hans Haacke\u2019s title is taken from René Magritte\u2019s 1929 La Trahison des images (Ceci n\u2019est pas une pipe).Jean Papineau 19 PARACHUTE 56 ÉCRANS DE L\u2019une des caractéristiques de votre travail, la plus évidente, sinon la plus significative, c\u2019est le changement d\u2019échelle.Dans La Blessure d\u2019une cicatrice ou Les Anges, par exemple, le changement d\u2019échelle est presque brutal, au point où les portraits en pied du Petit Prince et de la prostituée de Bellocq deviennent littéralement des objets, des objets dont le statut est renforcé par un choix correspondant de moulures autant que par l\u2019espace qu\u2019ils occupent et qui les sépare.La différence d\u2019échelle devait normalement produire un déséquilibre chez le spectateur et, possiblement, donner à voir des choses qui passent inaperçues à plus petite échelle, un peu comme les gros plans, les ralentis ou les accélérés dont on a dit, au cinéma, qu\u2019ils pouvaient avoir un effet révélateur, et donc faire découvrir des choses qui seraient normalement restées cachées.En décontextualisant, je fournis un nouvel instrument de compréhension du récit.Nous connaissons tous la provenance de ces images.Ce que nous connaissons moins, et ce qui est à proprement parler étonnant, c\u2019est le choix lui-même, au point où l\u2019on peut s\u2019interroger sur ce qui a pu vous amener à les associer.J\u2019indique d\u2019abord que les deux images sont, pour ainsi dire, des objets trouvés.Je ne les ai pas trafiquées, seulement recadrées.A toutes les deux aussi il manquait le visage, qui avait été comme gratté dans un cas et effacé dans l\u2019autre.Geneviève Cad eux RÉFLEXION une interview de Jean Papineau La relation que j\u2019avais, moi, au départ, avec ces images était de nature assez émotive.Il a donc été nécessaire de les conserver longtemps, comme je conserve toujours toutes sortes d\u2019images sur une planche contact; parce que c\u2019est seulement de cette manière, à la manière d\u2019une archiviste, que j\u2019arrive à voir comment elles pourront ensuite fonctionner.En fait, toujours, et avant même que je puisse me mettre au travail, les images doivent se détacher de mes sens et, disons, perdre leur caractère émotif.A la fin, il reste quand même quelque chose d\u2019intime.Qui est différent de la nature émotive.Pour parler de Bellocq, par exemple, j\u2019ai longtemps été frappée par l\u2019intimité qui devait exister entre le photographe et son modèle.Parce que le sujet est photographié de dos, et que consentir à être photographié de dos exige une forme relative d\u2019intimité.Toujours, ces photos m\u2019ont fait penser à celles qu\u2019on pourrait faire dans un cercle intime, très fermé, invisible presque.La remarque, je crois, vaut pour toute l\u2019oeuvre de Bellocq, qui, autrement, faisait de la photographie dite commerciale.Le travail de Bellocq est d\u2019ailleurs demeuré tout à fait inconnu, jusqu\u2019à ce que Friedlander reproduise les S tory ville Portraits.En ce qui concerne l\u2019effacement, j\u2019ai tout de suite été intriguée.Parce qu\u2019on s\u2019interroge inévitablement sur le motif de l\u2019effacement et sur l\u2019identité de la personne responsable du geste : qui, de Bellocq ou du modè- Geneviève Cadieux, La Blessure d'une cicatrice ou Les Anges, présentée à «Emotope», projet Büro Berlin avec la participation de Künstlerhaus Bethanien, à la Staatsbibliothek, septembre 1987.PARACHUTE 56 20 atlr - vats ¦0M mm?i - ' ' s# \u2022 '«'->¥ -\t.- .\u2022 -\u2022 ' - im*® iiis ^ SffifS&feipSSr'-™'-' üyi .\u2022 ; ɧ - Geneviève Cacheux \u2014 ,\t't .>V sstjBgg*i V.: : : - \u2022 «BÉ - -\u2022 *v '\"-'.-p ;i, v - :V:'7 -\t\";\t- ~\t\u2018 : » - VG:\t¦- - : : -V \u2019 '\t¦ -\t- ¦ \u2022\t- -'\t~ \u2022 \u2022'\u2022\"\u2022'.7/'*'i -: .:'53S£35P ¦ ii - .-¦*' '* .ov- s-:«r\t\u2022\u2022-=v£-¦\u2022 -¦ ._¦¦¦¦- - ¦ : ¦ E.J BnUocq - - ' 9VS3B4!B(B3S& .- Story ville Portraits -;.vr-v:>;f\t-T} ._________~£sm ; - 'i\tV-; .r v:-:V'-\t^v;^.mm - - ¦ ; : v .- - de Saint-Exupêry :ÿm : ¦ ¦ ^>r.v - : v'^4»5i£?î^v^ÆO-aï .gg Antoine U IV t- ft Cr et- e- ¦*» - x Xe Pi&i Pfci/ncA \u2022 \u2022 feMSsSS sBsWae* M(B .> ::: y:tj:;itt: ¦ II^ElËSSSIlSSiiiW ' \u2022 - > .yy :-.yyyy\u2018i WÊÊÊB& \u2022\u2022\t: -\t.y ¦ - .; ¦.mmkmmMmwSgmfamm -v; Ef-Pts Geneviève Cadieux, Storyville Portraits \u2014 Le Petit Prince, 1988 (page couverture du livre); papier Dulcet, 24,77 x 27,56 cm; Éd.Oboro/Galerie René Blouin.21 PARACHUTE le, a effacé la figure ?Mais on ne sait presque rien, sinon que ça pourrait tout aussi bien être une tierce personne, celle qui était en possession des plaques par exemple.De la même manière, j\u2019imagine qu\u2019on devrait aussi s\u2019interroger sur l\u2019effacement dans le cas du Petit Prince.Mais c\u2019est peut-être là une toute autre histoire.L\u2019important, c\u2019était une certaine idée de la correspondance'.«L\u2019image [.} ne peut naître d\u2019une comparaison, mais du rapprochement de deux réalités plus ou moins éloignées.[.] Plus les rapports des deux réalités rapprochées seront lointains et justes, plus l\u2019image sera forte, plus elle aura de puissance et de réalité poétique.» [Pierre une relation d\u2019intimité entre les lecteurs et les livres.Lire, prendre des notes ou écrire sont pour moi des activités intimes.Et puisque je voulais avant tout privilégier un lieu porteur d\u2019archives, parce que les archives me renvoient à mes propres activités, à la formation d\u2019archives personnelles, la bibliothèque semblait être un lieu approprié.Ce que vous dites de l\u2019oeuvre d\u2019exposition ne convient plus exactement au livre.Bien que l\u2019échelle semble toujours avoir été une caractéristique de mon travail, la présentation d\u2019une oeuvre peut évidemment varier selon les circonstances.Je ne dis pas que la régularité est secondaire, seulement V-K^-vi :s ¦: m ¦ ¦ Geneviève Cadieux, A fleur de peau (diptyque), 1987, plomb, miroir, bois, feuille d\u2019argent, 218 x 147 cm chaque élément; photo : Louis Lussier.I ! 4M: |\t,* j aiii, 23 PARACHUTE 56 kggage, ™ la memory.itotly.and ye Jmost the sac I a [ lêare just te to is an ek | moue it's d lust as cen i of : Nogpmc l%,anysor vidually; what it means in relation to photographie imagery?The painterly quality of these photos may be attributed to a notion of conceptual and visual continuity.And in much the same way, their mundane contents refer to a particular continuity as well.Yet, there are distinct differences in the blurry subject matter of these photographs, and in these differences, a type of tension arises.You see, I definitely want to create a universal space.By this I mean a universal imagery which is k]tlon , so recognizable that it becomes totally 1 p devoid of any affect, and yet in its application it starts to become reinvested with something.And I\u2019m not really sure how that happens.It\u2019s sort of like a negation of ) any kind of interest in imagery, and at the same time trying to reinvest imagery with some sort of intrigue, even though it is obvious that it\u2019s a more or less common image.And so I work with contradictions constantly, and two poles of ideas.If we think ' of one being indifferent or docile, and the j other distinct, I try to fluctuate between the 1 two to try to construct a new sort of meaning.I don\u2019t want to be prescriptive in this construction, and yet ironically I find that keeping these photographs open to different interpretations can be a controlled process.And this accounts for another sort of tension as well.For instance, those two pieces shown at Optica CThe Zone of Conventional Practice and : Other Real Stories) are not a set, not a diptych; :tN Perhaps the most salient aspect of your work is its ephemeral quality; a blurred mark of indistinction which suggests a pictorialist style.Yet it\u2019s not laid over as simply a gesture, and neither do I want to render it to simple metaphor.For this ephemeral quality, coupled with the photographs\u2019 contents of everyday, banal occurrences, strongly evoke the \u201cblurriness,\u201d or the fleeting, mundane moments which make up our everyday lives.Simultaneously, the work underscores the contingent and conjunctural nature of meaning.As viewers of these photographs, we are forever looking to concretely grasp something absolute, something know-able, but we are continuously deferred in this task; forever moving on.Our eyes cannot rest long upon one identification, or one truth in the image.While these photographs do tell stories, they are not discrete, self-contained creations.Rather, like the stories which we construct for ourselves, they are stories without resolution; timely stories tenuously built upon conjunctural relationships with people and things.Do you see such an interaction taking place?I want these photographs to be as open as I can possibly make them, so that the viewer can reinvest what he or she feels into a particular scene, into a particular image.But I\u2019m never quite sure how to deal with meaning.How do you begin to think about what something means to a particular person; what it means universally, collectively, indi- Angela Grauerholz, Clouds, 1988, cibachrome, 48\u201d x 64\u201d.Angela Grauerholz, Châteaux d\u2019eau, 1989, cibachrome, 48\u201d x 64\u201d. lonto photo tphotosmay iceptual and :h the same let to a par-t, there are irry subject ind in these versai space, erv which is mes totally its applies-nested with [y sure how negation of1 ; and at the nagery with jhitisoh'i', mon i®^\u2018 étions con- If « think le, and the between'1] art of ative^ ¦ I find thJt ltod.^ [led pt°cess' lttoftenslOD : they are individual works.They are all individual pieces that can be made into particular combinations that will make specific or unspecific statements.So I guess this can be termed the conjunctural or contingent aspect of my work.All of these pieces can be put together or pulled apart, just as the meanings within any individual photograph can be strung together in many different ways.It all depends upon the moment and the given criteria for it.Still, the question remains, whose construction is this?And is this something happening right now, or is it something that has always been that way?I deal a lot with archetype, or invest the work with a lot of symbolism, because that comes closest to the idea of a sudden recognition.I'm always concerned about that one moment where you suddenly recognize something.But this recognition is always different.Or rather, were looking at something we\u2019ve seen a hundred million times, but suddenly were starting to look at it one more time.And every viewer looks at it with his or her own baggage, with everything that is in his or her memory.Everyone will look at it differently, and yet I have a suspicion that it is almost the same.Somewhere in that, I think we can refer back to what you were saying about the construction of our selves.We always see it as separate from the other.But maybe it\u2019s not.We are just telling stories which are banal.There is an element of sameness, and yet for everyone it\u2019s different.Just as certain statements which constituted photography as an integral entity (of truth, of authority, of originality), no longer hold true, neither does any stable definition of identity (of ourselves or others).Do you see your photographs working precisely against any sort of certainty, any sort of universal truths, in order to work \u201cpolitically\u201d?In other words, a politics that only emerges accidentally, momentarily, by default, at the margins of statements of certainty.I have suspicion \u2014 that even while I\u2019m doing the work I'm going along with the idea that there is no truth, authority, and so on \u2014 I don\u2019t believe it.I want to express some of the loss of those belief structures through the images.There is a strong sense of loss in them, which can be related to nostalgic sentimentality.But I don\u2019t like terming it nostalgia.I'm treading a fine line as to what this loss is all about.One of the things that it could be about is that the belief structures are not there.But I want them to be there.And I re-create them, I reconstruct them.And that\u2019s why these things are so familiar.They are the images that we have from our memory of what the future used to look like.And yet it\u2019s also about doubt, and a kind of ironic stance about that doubt at the same time.You can never be totally behind this, behind these truths; you have to constantly fluctuate with them, and so you go back into that flux.Again, the loss of truth is not the truth.Do you see your work as pertaining to a gendered critical practice?In many aspects it seems to voice a particular feminist refusal of the fixed signs of subjectivity, and a recognition of the relations between representation and sexed subjectivity as always in process; unstable, unfixed, produced in contingent and momentary relations of signification.I find myself being very close to this notion of construction; that I respond to it, and that it responds to something in me that is \u201cwoman.\u201d I think it has something to do with the voice of authority that we don\u2019t have, and we\u2019re trying to have.In order to get it, we have found ways of circumventing and constructing realities; situations that we can manipulate with our facilities of intuition, and so we make ourselves heard and known in that way.It\u2019s never a direct way, and so if you want to bring it back to the images \u2014 because they are not direct images, they don\u2019t assert anything in particular \u2014 they respond perfectly to that idea.They invite and yet simultaneously deny access.It\u2019s a resistance of some sort, which can be taken as a feminist stance \u2014 confounding interpretation.This idea also strongly pertains to photography itself.If we think about it in terms of how most of us accumulate photographs \u2014 as memorabilia, keep-sakes \u2014 then perhaps we can talk about this dual and confounding activity.For while a photograph records a particularly meaningful moment, it simultaneously speaks of its own action; a mechanical activity which may annul meaning.A camera is a totally deadly instrument as far as I\u2019m concerned.Still, it creates, or has the possibility of creating something which is very meaningful and lively.But we find it difficult to tenaciously cling to these meanings.For while the photograph offers up moments of recognition, it compells us to.always move on.In this way, the instance it records is always turned in upon itself.It\u2019s a moment of magic that is out of control.We have referred to subjectivity as the effect of the interaction of experience; an experience wrought from our own personal engagement with the discourses and institutions that lend meaning to the events of the world.Your own practices \u2014 as photographer, designer, teacher, and founding member of Artexte \u2014 allude to such a dynamic engagement.How does this diversity affect your own construction of self, particularly as it relates to your photographic practice?I\u2019ve always felt that there is a particular difficulty involved in defining yourself as an artist.Perhaps this stems from a need to be validated as such by other people; unless this validation is forthcoming, it\u2019s difficult to believe that it\u2019s true.Still, our sense of self doesn\u2019t simply come from other\u2019s definitions.While it\u2019s always important to define ourselves in some way, we may feel uncomfortable with one stable explanation.We may need to do many different things to define ourselves.Or maybe leave it open-ended; to decide at a later date what it is we want to be.It\u2019s being different people.For me, the photographic work is very much a kind of self definition.Since beginning this work in 1978, I\u2019ve come to realize more and more what it is I\u2019m doing.I started out doing much the same thing, but I didn\u2019t know why and how.As you learn over time what it is you\u2019re doing, it also becomes more important.And as your start constructing it, you start understanding how you\u2019re doing it and why you\u2019re doing it.Just before I came here to meet you, I was thinking about this, and asked; \u201cHow do you begin talking about yourself other than just as a reflection of your inferiority?\u201d It is that, and yet I can talk about it in other ways.Basically, I do this work because it gives me pleasure, and that pleasure is also a part of dealing with certain things which are inside me.But it can also be talked about in terms of my cultural upbringing.I was a grown-up coming to Canada, and so I had a big, heavy bag.Much of my thinking is very much rooted in a kind of German romanticism.I studied German literature, specifically, Schiller and Goethe, because coming from Northern Germany, it already resided within me.It confirmed my cultural behavior.Two years ago I worked upon a series of photographs where I recreated a type of Northern German romantic landscape.Still, I don\u2019t know if art making is essentially a recreation of some earlier feelings.I\u2019m not sure.I may not now be doing Northern German romantic landscapes, but I\u2019m dealing with German romantic ideas.I don\u2019t know how far I\u2019ve taken them out of what they were, or how far I\u2019ve changed them but I do know that they are still there.I draw from memory.And I\u2019m now very comfortable with this sense of displacement: of the necessity of being in constant flux in order to create the work; of drawing from fleeting images and fleeting ideas; I don\u2019t think I could do the work if I wasn\u2019t comfortable with it.Displacement used to be a very scary word, but it is no longer.25 PARACHUTE 56 Betty Goodwin MW: ¦ Wʧ0 FRAGMENTS D\u2019EXPÉRIENCE une interview de Martine Meilleur Betty Goodwin, Figure with Chair, 1988, huile en bâton, graphite sur papier, 106,7 x 226,1 cm.Considérez-vous votre atelier comme un lieu privilégié de travail ?Je ne crois pas que l\u2019essentiel du travail se fasse dans l\u2019atelier.L\u2019origine d\u2019une œuvre n\u2019est jamais localisable dans l\u2019atelier.Je dirais plutôt que tout commence vraiment le jour de notre naissance.Une œuvre est toujours le résultat d\u2019une accumulation de choses qui appartiennent en propre à notre existence.En fait, c\u2019est la rencontre plus ou moins curieuse de ces divers éléments avec les événements extérieurs.Accordez-vous une importance particulière aux différentes étapes de production ou, pour le dire autrement, suivez-vous un ordre déterminé, qui serait rigoureusement le même pour chaque œuvre ?S\u2019il s\u2019agit d\u2019un ordre, il ne suit pas une logique déterminée, du moins au sens tradi- tionnel du mot.En fait, il est plutôt chaotique en ce sens qu\u2019il accumule les fragments d\u2019expériences diverses, visuelles entre autres.Rien n\u2019est exclu: une chose que j\u2019ai vu un jour, ou une phrase que j\u2019ai lue dans un livre.Le temps altère ma perception des choses; elles ne se présentent pas par séquences distinctes et selon un ordre déterminé.Il n\u2019y a pas non plus de ligne droite, un chemin tout tracé à l\u2019avance ou une trajectoire ininterrompue.Par exemple, ce dessin, qui a été fait en 1976, a servi de point de départ à la pièce présentée à Berlin [In Berlin.A Triptych: The Beginning of the Fourth Part, 1982-1983].Il est très abstrait, mais il peut aussi rappeler une chaise.Aujourd\u2019hui, treize ans plus tard, si je pense réutiliser ce dessin, le retravailler, c\u2019est que j\u2019y vois à nouveau une chaise, et non plus quelque chose d\u2019abstrait.Pour PARACHUTE 56 26 vous, il est probablement abstrait, et je ne m\u2019y objecte pas, mais la figure représente pour moi une chaise.Dans le cas d\u2019un autre dessin, il n\u2019y avait au départ qu\u2019une figure, une seule, dont je n\u2019étais pas satisfaite.Alors j\u2019en ai dessiné une deuxième au-dessus de la première, une sorte de char.Mais puisque je n\u2019avais pas effacée celle de dessous, je me suis retrouvée avec deux figures.Ce qui a d\u2019abord été pour moi un étang s\u2019est transformé en rocher, un rocher avec quelqu\u2019un en dessous.Il y a là Betty Goodwin, Two Figures with Megaphone, 1988, matériaux mixtes sur papier, 179,7 x 116,84 cm.Betty Goodwin, Without Cease the Earth Faintly Trembles (11), 1988, graphite, huile en bâton, fusain et tige de métal, 223,5 x 132,1 cm.mttmm .l\u2019image d\u2019un poids, d\u2019un fardeau qu\u2019on porte.Mais on pourrait tout aussi bien dire qu\u2019il s\u2019agit d\u2019un nuage noir.Le processus de travail, c\u2019est précisément ce qui m\u2019a permis de produire cette double figure.Je travaille et, en retour, cette production et le fait même de travailler alimentent mon travail.C\u2019est ça qui est à proprement parler extraordinaire.Reste qu\u2019il y a quelque part l\u2019idée d\u2019un centre, d\u2019un point où convergeraient toutes sortes d\u2019informations, des informations sur des événements passés, des informations sur le présent, ou encore d\u2019autres sur le travail qui a déjà été fait, qui est derrière moi, mais auquel je reviens continuellement.Quand j\u2019y reviens, que je regarde à nouveau, je trouve un point d\u2019appui, qui génère de nouvelles possibilités.Vous parlez de votre travail en termes de figuration.Or, ce travail reste toujours assez près de l\u2019abstraction.C\u2019est très difficile de distinguer ce qui est complètement abstrait de ce qui ne l\u2019est pas.Je peux seulement dire qu\u2019on arrive parfois à l\u2019essence.On épure, et on épure jusqu\u2019à ce que ça devienne la réalité d\u2019une chose.Prenez le premier dessin que je vous ai montré.Je ne le vois pas comme une abstraction, et je ne l\u2019ai jamais compris comme une non-représentation.Quand je le regarde maintenant, il y a certaines choses que je n\u2019aime pas, il y en a d\u2019autres que je voudrais pousser plus loin, de manière à développer la figure de char.Je prends des notes, où j\u2019indique par exemple qu\u2019il faudrait mettre bout à bout trois ou quatre feuilles horizontales afin d\u2019agrandir le dessin.En travaillant un dessin, j\u2019ajoute, j\u2019efface, et je rajoute par dessus.C\u2019est un mouvement perpétuel, un mouvement qui tend à éliminer les éléments qui ne sont pas absolument essentiels au dessin.En un sens, ce mouvement est l\u2019essence même du processus, l\u2019essence de la forme.Je peux parler de formes, de formes géométriques en particulier, et désigner comme triangle la forme qui pénètre le corps dans la série Rooted Like a Wedge (1984).Encore aujourd\u2019hui, je dirais que cette forme demeure pour moi une cale, et que j\u2019ai seulement choisi de la désigner comme triangle parce que le triangle est la forme qui ressemble le plus à une cale.Je n\u2019ai pas pensé en termes de forme géométrique.Tout ça s\u2019est d\u2019abord présenté à moi dans les termes d\u2019une cale, mais j\u2019ai conservé cette sorte de triangle rigide parce que j\u2019aimais l\u2019idée, un peu de la même manière que j\u2019utiliserais une tige métallique dans un dessin.Si j\u2019avais à faire des phrases pour le définir, je dirais que mon travail s\u2019oriente vers un centre, mais que ce centre n\u2019est pas facilement identifiable.J\u2019imagine que c\u2019est une sorte de pulsion souterraine.Vous procédez généralement selon des cycles thématiques ou des séries qu\u2019on pourrait dire propositionnelles.Comment se produit la mutation d\u2019un projet, ou le passage d\u2019un thème ou d\u2019une série à un autre thème ou une autre série ?Ça dépend.Comme je vous l\u2019ai déjà dit, je reviens presque toujours sur tout, je reprends presque tout.Par exemple, le motif des Seated Figures est une reprise de l\u2019idée du mégaphone.Et c\u2019est seulement après avoir vu l\u2019accrochage de l\u2019exposition rétrospective du Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, où la position de Triptych (1986) par rapport aux Swimmers (1982-1983) était tout à fait étonnante, que je suis revenue au mégaphone, au motif que je voulais développer il y a plusieurs années avec le mégaphone.Je suis donc revenue au mégaphone, à ces œuvres où il est beaucoup question de communication, évidemment, parfois de communication interrompue ou interceptée, de ratages dans la communication, un peu comme quand quelqu\u2019un lance un appel à l\u2019aide ou une mise en garde, et que personne n\u2019écoute.Tout ça m\u2019a amenée à utiliser le mégaphone de différentes manières : comme un poids qu\u2019on porte sur son dos, comme quelque chose qui est projeté hors du corps, ou encore comme une gerbe sortant de la bouche.Le travail sur le mégaphone s\u2019est ensuite transformé, et cette transformation m\u2019a amenée aux Seated Figures (1988), qui sont liées au motif de la chaise, qui lui venait des séries Passage (1981-1982) et Half Passage (1981).Mais le point de départ des Seated Figures, c\u2019est l\u2019idée d\u2019interrogatoire.27 PARACHUTE 56 Vous dites interrogatoire et non pas interrogation.Je parle de l\u2019interrogatoire comme pratique politique.L\u2019interrogatoire est encore une pratique courante dans plusieurs pays, notamment dans certains pays d\u2019Amérique du Sud, où on réprime la liberté d\u2019expression des individus, les opinions qui ne sont pas conformes aux politiques gouvernementales.L\u2019idée n\u2019est pas utilisée de manière anecdotique; par exemple, je n\u2019ai pas utilisé les lampes braquées ni rien de la sorte.Je pense d\u2019ailleurs que c\u2019est la raison pour laquelle le résultat exige plusieurs niveaux d\u2019interprétation.Vous semblez préoccupée par certaines questions sociales ou, plutôt, par des situations sociales.Je suis préoccupée, oui.C\u2019est un sentiment toujours présent, qui ne me laisse Et , \u2022 Betty Goodwin, Two Chairs and Figure, 1988-1989, graphite sur geofilm, 52,5 x 42 cm (encadré).Betty Goodwin, Half-Passage Double (Pmjection), 1981, pastel et fusain, 66,04 x 101,6 cm; photo : Brian Merrett.Collection particulière.jamais.Et ce sentiment correspond aussi à mes lectures et aux citations que je choisis de noter.Je sens la nécessité de raconter ces choses, de travailler sur des questions sociales, sur la condition humaine, sur les relations entre les être humains et sur la manière qu\u2019ont parfois ces relations de devenir tordues au point de dégénérer en horreur et en non-sens.Mais je n\u2019ai pas l\u2019illusion de pouvoir beaucoup changer les choses, ou encore que mon travail puisse arriver à changer la façon de penser des gens.Je le fais, et je le fais seulement parce que je suis confrontée à cette espèce d\u2019événements, comme je suis confrontée à la désinformation dont ces événements font l\u2019objet.Et si je suis plus profondément touchée par les événements qui semblent être plus sombres, ce n\u2019est pas qu\u2019il n\u2019y ait rien de positif.Ils sont seulement plus présents à mon esprit, même si, en même temps, je n\u2019y suis pas directement -1 engagée.Je ne fais qu\u2019observer ces situations .Il y a beaucoup d\u2019art dit politique, mais je crois qu\u2019il y a peu d\u2019œuvres qui, en mêlant la politique et l\u2019art, arrivent à produire quel que chose qui se tienne.Si nous parlons de > la mise en scène des divers éléments, c\u2019est : plutôt simple: je pense toujours en termes ; de mégaphone, d\u2019interrogatoire, ou en termes d\u2019un nageur qui refait surface, ou encore d\u2019une personne qui se trouve en situation de danger quelconque.Et si c\u2019est ça la signification dont vous parlez, alors, oui, ce sont bien les éléments avec lesquels je joue.Sans parler, bien sûr, des éléments formels du travail.Les éléments formels sont soumis au contenu, au besoin de dire ce que je dois dire, à l\u2019expression d\u2019un contenu spécifique.C\u2019est-à-dire que je ne commence jamais avec des éléments formels, auxquels j'ajouterais ensuite les idées.Au contraire, la partie formelle, quelles que soient la forme ou les qualités formelles, est déterminée par l\u2019expression.Quelle importance accordez-vous au fait que votre travail arrive à rejoindre les intérêts ou les préoccupations des spectateurs ?J\u2019ai besoin de travailler, un point c\u2019est tout.Avec un peu de chance, si ce que je montre au public touche l\u2019un ou l\u2019autre spectateur, alors c\u2019est pour moi une sorte d\u2019aboutissement, la fin d\u2019un cycle de travail.J\u2019imagine que c\u2019est la raison qui, d\u2019abord, puisse justifier le fait qu\u2019un artiste souhaite exposer son travail.Vous reliez la série des Seated Figures à celle des mégaphones.Est-il possible de l\u2019associer à une autre série, à Carbon (1986), dans la mesure où l\u2019on pourrait voir dans l\u2019une comme dans l\u2019autre des corps < torturés, des corps dont on a abusé ?J\u2019imagine que toutes les possibilités sont là, qu\u2019il y a plusieurs interprétations possibles .De fait, dans les deux séries, je voulais dire quelque chose sur la question de la torture, et j\u2019ai donc essayé diverses manié- > res.Je suis une sorte de trajectoire en zigzag : d\u2019abord Passage (1981-1982), puis Half Passage (1981), et enfin Chair (1988-1989).Puis, les dessins à partir du motif de la chaise ont transformé le motif en figure assise.La chaise est ensuite partiellement disparue et la figure est apparue à l\u2019avant-plan.Je tente présentement de le cerner pour vous, mais le processus dont je parle est davantage une sorte de processus psychique.Je dis ça avec des mots, mais il s\u2019agit plutôt d\u2019une sorte de long silence élaboré.Traduit de l\u2019anglais par Jean Papineau PARACHUTE 56 28 Group Material, Subculture, 1982, 100 artists\u2019 work installed in advertising spaces on New York City subway trains.Group Material, Americana, 1985, installation; photo: Geoffrey Clements.PARACHUTE 56 J.A.: What we do is like editing society \u2014 selecting artworks, music, texts, artifacts, documentation, and then combining them to make an editorial.F.G.-T.: Our shows are not simply visual.They are very complex and inclusive \u2014 everyone\u2019s there, in terms of approach, style, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation.If every show was like that, in every museum, culture would be different.J.A.: There isn\u2019t any one label we would accept.We are often branded \u201cpolitical artists.\u201d This doesn\u2019t accurately describe our work.But curating, in an expanded sense, is a good word to use in relation to our 1985 project at the Whitney Biennial, Americana.The project was site-specific and institution-specific \u2014 our version of what a Biennial should be.We presented fifty-three artists in our installation, an eclectic display of culture and issues unusual for the Whitney.We a primarily Hispanic block, and some of our shows directly involved that community.In People\u2019s Choice, for example, we invited residents to contribute an object of cultural value from their homes.Now, however, the relationship we have with any community is defined by issues and ideas.D.A.: I think that often the dichotomy distinguishing between a community and an artworld as not having a community is an artificial one.Representations of the art-world are often fictional, endowing it with a particular class interest, a particular unity.This is not quite the case.What you see as the artworld depends upon what you see as culture.J.A.: After one year at 13th Street, we realized our practice was limited by being tied to a space and decided to take our questioning of culture into a more public realm r , fGd lb ile* Subculture put 3 000 artworks by 100 artists iA\u2018 0»etW 1 iiioosis®* I\"1 ¦ acti?an *1* *iiMAoawAM TW\t________.\"\"¦\u201c*** »eu»tmjoajL >* .ki.irne fer \", '&'¦ Is.War ¦ i sTkador .P .w *¦» ¦ ¦ ¦ - ¦ u- 3sur ¦.g|SM Group Material, Da Zi Baos, 1982, opinion posters installed in Union Square, New York.ftù» iQStallânoc feel,fe Germany.198 For ten years, the members of Group Material {Doug Ashford, Julie Ault, Felix Gonzalez-Torres] have collaborated to present exhibitions challenging the presumed neutrality of the white cube.Are you curators redefining the category of art, or artists redefining the role of curator?J.A.: We see ourselves as artists redefining the role of curating.We shy away from the word \u201ccurating\u201d because it has connotations of connoisseurship and exclusiveness\u2014 we\u2019ve always called it \u201corganizing.\u201d We organize a show.D.A.: Traditionally, the curator is a keeper of the treasures.Our project has always questioned what is treasured, what is culturally important \u2014 and how ideas are finalized about what art is supposed to be.We don\u2019t deny the label of curator, but we want to expand what that label implies socially.showed more artists of color than they have probably ever shown.It was a model of inclusion rather than exclusion.Group Material has also worked in many alternative venues: street corners, buses, subways, newspapers.what role does this diversity play in your practice?D.A.: Over the years we have had a certain kind of method within the traditional art institutional framework, and another strategy outside which critically utilizes advertising and other \u201cpublic\u201d space.We are always on the lookout for other distributional forms.J.A.: This reflects our interest in diverse audiences and communities not necessarily confined to the \u201cartworld.\u201d When Group Material began in 1979, we knew that art was our orientation and that we wanted to represent certain political and social values.We opened a gallery space on 13th Street, on into ad spaces in New York City subway j trains.Da Zi Baos was a public poster project inspired by the student democracy walls I in China and centered on divisive sociali issues of one neighborhood, Union Square.Jl6®^ We interviewed individuals on the street Dy [.about drug abuse, unwanted pregnancy, and J * o*n pre U.S.military aid to El Salvador and jux- mm taposed their statements with texts froml: organizations working to solve those issues.! The result was a panorama of diverse social responses.For us the ideal audience is one that : Ma includes people initiated in art as well asi people who aren\u2019t.We try to address both.: Even in an institution like the Whitney, thei audience is diverse and includes tourists, school children, office workers.D.A.: We\u2019ve tried to anticipate how different levels of contestation and resistance) can get appropriated.It\u2019s very important foi|.PARACHUTE 56 30 otsi as to establish points of questioning in all hese different areas and as elaborately as possible.F.G.-T.: The power structure is so much nore complex than in the past.In terms of ;trategy, you can look at ACT UP {AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power] as being effec-:ive because of its use of advertisement.They use sophisticated visuals geared specif-ïjlcally towards the media.That\u2019s where the battlefield is.One thing that bothers me, it came to nind when you mentioned the word alternate, is that people think you\u2019re alternative only when you have no power.As soon as you aave some power you\u2019re no longer alternate, but part of the system.That\u2019s problematic because the goal of grassroots orga-iurqus||nizations is to empower.They are in existence Screak It o remedy something, to provide some-i Mlartii thing.ACT UP started as a nitty-gritty organization to protest government inaction :tlCulaiJ lat !!ou sell people think of power in black or white terms \u2014 no matter what you do in a museum is negated by the fact that it\u2019s in a museum, you\u2019ve sold out.We obviously disagree.In many exhibitions we have included \u201coutsider\u201d art, work by people with no formal art training, and also practitioners whose work may not even be called art.Randall Morris, co-director of the Cavin Morris Gallery which represents outsider artists, commented once that if you look at artmaking from a global perspective the word \u201cmainstream\u201d is meaningless.Take that word away and \u201cothers\u201d would be outside of nothing .there is no outside or inside.Ultimately, that\u2019s what we\u2019re working toward : a redefinition and reclaiming of culture.F.G.-T.: That\u2019s what happens in our shows.Plierarchy is broken down.You can see a piece by Flaim Steinbach next to a piece by Bessie Harvey, an untrained artist from South Carolina.But when people write n.uihtiB*' Rcstriclicnei- uneiidlicii Aus7.uk a us K sclinn an sich Kafka, \u201cDas SchloB' \u201cDas ScjiloBjst : Material,\t :h 11; ;\tThe Castle, on posters\tinstallation, led::.\tDocumenta 8, n Square,\tKassel, West York.\tGermany.1987.and the holding back of medical treatments itysul and drugs, and now has some influence in xracywali isive sod gnancy,aj or and j®' iverse tlif is I*\"1' i as Idlest fliinfl rctt# aceE (jres\u2018sl politics and in determining methods for testing and releasing medications.To have this power was the purpose from the very beginning.D.A.: It\u2019s not like we don\u2019t understand our own predicament.Power itself is a paradox.To shy away from having an effect on a discourse level, or on a practical or political level, means that your fear of this paradox predetermines your effectiveness.J.A.: That was the meaning of our installation for Documenta, The Castle.Art, as practiced now, is defined by the market whether you know it or accept it or believe it or agree with it.Our installation juxtaposed artwork with store-bought products that appealed to or affected the look of fjjf.power, set in the context of the international .,;;r mega-show that encourages competitiveness and \u201cbigger is better\u201d responses.Some 0 about the exhibitions, they mention only the familiar names, and for the most part overlook people who might not be in prominent galleries.D.A.: Our exhibitions are a kind of analysis where artworks decipher, comment, enlighten, legitimize each other.Often the social purpose of a particular artwork has been clouded by the way it gets seen within the market and the museum.The concept of a show and the juxtaposition with other practices, some not even by artists, shows that art has other possible functions and readings.J.A.: Artists like to participate in our shows because they reveal a content of their work that perhaps isn\u2019t so obvious.Then again, we don\u2019t exactly do justice to the art in the sense of giving it space, and the neutral environment art is supposed to have.Do you consider your work a critique or an antidote to the cynicism of post modern- 31 ism and to the overuse of irony?F.G.-T.: I think irony is almost a disease of language.Before, you thought culture could be understood by using the language of culture.Then you realized that you are investigating culture with the wrong tools, because language is already so coded that you start with an answer when you ask the question.Then you say, well there is no opposition, and the battle is lost before you even started.But within this definition there are fissures in which resistance can take place.J.A.: There are elements of cynicism and irony in our work, very much so.We don\u2019t want to paint a prettier picture than is realistic.But there is also a consistent idealism.We have a positive outlook towards actually being able to effect some kind of change.D.A.: I don\u2019t think that we\u2019re alone in seeing this modernist /post-modernist dichotomy as being partially absurd.When we discard the universalisms of modernism, we can also lose certain levels of communication \u2014 how opposition can be realized and shared.If we\u2019re deciphering the codes that define or express who we are, we also have to keep in mind who is really benefiting from our activity, who can read it, who can use it.What role do you envision for the artist \u2014 either inside or outside the art world?D.A.: One is the utopian tradition of \u201ceveryone being an artist,\u201d the second is \u201cartist as everybody.\u201d Both of these are idealistic influences in our practice, in terms of selecting artworks and how we use them to imply a different role for culture.I don\u2019t mean to diminish the real power of the economic hierarchy or political order, but artworks can at least propose the possibilities of other ways of living.J.A.: If individuals could just define their creativity unrestricted by the marketplace or by categories of specialization, that would be a big, first step.Can Group Materials effect on artworld practices be measured?J.A.: Effect is very elusive.The only way we can measure our success is that we\u2019re still working.Different people, different projects, but Group Material still exists.I think there would be a void for this kind of work if we stopped.D.A.: Were also part of the audience.I love going to Group Material shows.These are the presentations I like to see \u2014 objects with a history, a context, a relationship to experience.J.A.: I remember going to a commercial gallery at a time we were thinking of breaking up and I thought if I had to see every show in a white room, hung on fifty inches, with no music, no seating.F.G.-T.: How can you relate to it if there is no TV in the room?PARACHUTE 56 Daniel Bure h Daniel Buren, photo/souvenir: Watch the Doors P lease, 1980-1982, une oeuvre in situ et en mouvement; photo : (Luis Medina) Art Institute of Chicago.IBP : \u2019 '\t*33 r.¦ üppf Ip d& : S ; I ISÉ i Byy.;ilA:y=: t»l> MM wiânBMpâSÿHonV' \"¦/ 1 : i - ¦.\t.tt îgiÿiÿSÿ: »W! ?£*NS fc;;: : ¦ ART AS EMBODIED CONDITIONS John Massey, Death Mask', 1985-1986 wood folding frame (open 50\u201d x 30\u201d, closed 25\u201d x 30\u201d), black and white mounted photograph, silkscreened image on plexiglass; photo: Peter MacCallum.' an interview by Peggy Gale John Massey, Untitled, 1986, photo lithograph, 24\u201d x 24\u201d; photo : Peter MacCallum.: ;>¦ \t Generally, I find myself caught up in a condition that I want to understand, an impairment to my vision.* The actual identification of what it is I want to work with is absolutely not intellectualized beforehand.In fact, I more or less have no comprehension of it.I find some form that is a device to get me into the area that I want to be in.For example, when I made the models (A Directed View, The Third Room, Room 202, A Model for Johnny and Fee, Fie, Foe, Fumm), I compressed space, and the initial impulse to do that had absolutely nothing to do with planning an object as a finished piece.I simply wanted to look into the studio I lived in in a wholly ideal way.In a way that would be impossible from inside that space.But after I made the model it suddenly became clear to me that these were extremely emotional interiors.They somehow embodied, or transcribed, or represented the theatre of the inside, analogous to the interior of one\u2019s being.I saw that I could create the theatre of perception, the theatre of reception, the theatre of projection.Everything that I\u2019ve done in my work is, in some way, trying to deal with an investigation of perceptual faculties.When I look at how I\u2019ve come to perceive or apprehend, or know things, it\u2019s always with a view to understanding why I don\u2019t know things.In other words, an exploration of my ignorance.I become more and more interested in looking at works of art from that point of view.If you understand the focus of attention to be essentially on the body, on the faculties of perception and orientation in space as being the primary concern in my work, then even in the photographic pieces, the folding frame pieces, there is a picture of the body, and a picture of an image.There is an attempt to illustrate a relationship between the body and the reception.I have to be honest, I guess.I think that the presumption that I\u2019ve always made in relation to my work, is that I\u2019m investigating my own body.In a sense the model works ask the viewer to cohabit my body.And in the works that are, as you put it, looking at the body, there\u2019s more of a desire to objectify; the focus is not so much \u201ccome and cohabit,\u201d but more \u201clookat this.\u201d That\u2019s probably where I began a retreat from the notion of attempting to incarnate space.It\u2019s not a major preoccupation for me now, and in fact I shrink from it.There\u2019s a sense in my earlier work that if one activates the perceptual, imaginative faculties and gets them keyed up to a certain point, the sky\u2019s the limit in terms of what you can see.There\u2019s been a pulling back from this potentially megalomaniacal agenda.I\u2019ve gone through a lengthy period \u2014 four or five years \u2014 of looking at that psychology.It\u2019s not finished by any means, but it\u2019s brought me to an acknowledgement that the preoccupation with space that makes me a sculptor has become much less important to me.To want to occupy space in that way is a very aggressive act.So I\u2019m pulling back from actualizing space, from being completely preoccupied with bringing everything in a space into play as much as I possibly can, by using whatever means available.The photoworks seem to use the body as a ground, with reference to art history or decorative techniques, jewelry, gold incising.In reference to the prints, and particularly the one that establishes that ornamental construction, Versailles 1983, where I made an identification with the baroque and rococo ornament on the interior of the Palais de Versailles as being very akin to how I experienced my own capacity for neurosis as an artist.In the print, one senses a moment of recognition; it\u2019s incredibly grand but horrific at the same time, there\u2019s no room for anything else.I have to talk about what I do in relation- 35 PARACHUTE 56 SifeS v ' John Massey, Twilight\u2019s Last Gleaming, 1987-1988, 10 sepia-toned photographs, each 13\u201d x 18\u201d.Each framed photograph is a partial view of scale model.ship to a moral evolution, or its lack.The bottom line is that I think art must be motivated by, and preoccupied with, a radical spirit of consciousness; a radical desire for consciousness.In the earlier works I felt that creating the environmental pieces was an attempt to create a consciousness around one\u2019s faculties of perception, drawing the anima out of all the inanimate things, all that latency out there, continually building up, to get it all moving so that everything was unbalanced and brought into question.Coming out of that period, having pursued things fairly extremely, I began to understand art as being able to isolate the poison and the panacea in syringe form and on a daily basis, sort of innoculating yourself to determine the nature of the illness and its cure.Coming out of the period of making the models, I understood that something was out of whack in my own consciousness.The basis of my moral philosophy was crumbling.In judging the excesses that were necessary to mine the resources of those physical spaces, some psychological stock- taking was necessary.And I\u2019ve been doing that.I still am very concerned with what I refer to as embodied conditions.My knowledge is pretty much subjective, though I try to get as much distance as I can these days.It\u2019s a process of recognition followed by the slow rendering of an image that actually incarnates that condition.It must have a bodily presence, even as an image.The \u201cTwilight\u201d Images {Twilight\u2019s Last Gleaming (Antwerp), From the Dawn\u2019s Early Mom Until Twilight\u2019s Last Gleaming (Pittsburg), and High Noon (Toronto)} invoke the absence of a body.That\u2019s the breakthrough for me.I\u2019m not sure where it\u2019s going, but it does present a way that I can think about how to work with space again, that is concerned with the absence of the body as opposed to the presence of the body.Does your work relate to what you are reading?I had stopped reading for awhile, but have started again.Specifically, right now I\u2019m reading a series of transcriptions of radio programmes on the seven deadly sins.Absolutely wonderful.To give these a contemporary context is a tricky business.There are conventional attitudes towards Anger, Envy, Pride, Laziness, Lust, Gluttony, Avarice.You see caricatures of sin everywhere.I\u2019ve only begun to consider these constructions but, I\u2019m drawn to illustrating sin.Yet it\u2019s almost inconceivable for me to think of illustrating virtue.What would be the context?It would inevitably end up looking kitsch in some way.And yet it seems so vital that we actually do think of virtues at this point, as opposed to continuing on with this nihilism, of preoccupation with sin and evil.There must be a way of dealing with Hope, Charity, Prudence, Chastity, and so on.But, while I would like to be talking about the potentiality of my freedom, it\u2019s more pressing to deal with my bondage at this moment.I\u2019m also reading Roman history and trying to understand the meaning of this empire devoted to inurement to death.I think it\u2019s necessary to get lost again.But now when I go into the woods, I have a few more tools.As much as I\u2019m being articulate in terms of what I think has gone on, I\u2019m more or less in a miasma all the time, just like anybody else.I am less and less concerned with the grandiose and the heroic, and more and more concerned with the capacity of art and people to come to terms with the domestic: the context that everybody shares, something as maligned as one\u2019s understanding of one\u2019s humanity, or lack of it.I\u2019m concerned with making an image that you can read very quickly.But if you choose to meditate on it, much more is there; that\u2019s why I devote so much energy to production values.In the prints, it\u2019s not an i ad hoc ornamental structure.It\u2019s very minutely determined.For all of the prints, the emphasis on high-quality printing gives the image a kind of resilience.I never make anything in a two-week period.It\u2019s more like two years.The images might take three years.There was a time when a number of the model works happened sequentially.They built on one another, and happened quite quickly.More recently I tend to work very laboriously.I\u2019m so obsessive about the conditions I want to create that things tend to be belaboured; I want to rework and rework.I find that in this period of extreme inflation in the world of art or writing, if one can find a document or image that appears to have real quality, you want to take it to the bank.I\u2019d like to be a little freer in relation to what I do.But short of intoxicants it\u2019s awfully hard, because it\u2019s my nature to be absolutely as comprehensive as possible.I generally work on one thing at a timeg and can project two or maybe three worksj! into one future.At the present moment I have ideas for seven or eight prints, though they\u2019ve been cooking for ages, to the point that I\u2019m almost sick of them before I\u2019ve put them together.The initial impulse is often very invigorating.The initial trigger that presents the raw composition of an image is so far down the road from the final realization, but you know that in that first germ there\u2019s something very important.When aj thing finally starts to happen, for me there\u2019s: one moment of recognition that\u2019s very brieln where there\u2019s almost delirious excitement,: and then there\u2019s almost nothing.You think,li right, that\u2019s it.It\u2019s a wonderful ecstatic experience that lasts a couple of seconds.I don\u2019t have any class analysis or a desirai to democratize my work.The printmakingr.process is the only way that I can build these?images.It can\u2019t be done photographically, sc: it\u2019s with printmaking that I will probably, stay.Computer technology is beginning tel be where I want it to be, though at this; point it\u2019s very costly.When you give your work over to othew people to supervise the printing, there aret necessarily elements that are out of youm control.There is never an element of sur: prise, but there is always an element ol extreme trepidation; fear and anxiety all the! time.Making art is a high-wire act, to me The more taut the wire, the higher off the ground it is, the more I tend to like it.Li! [it b lii cit b phi ¦< * This text was exerpted from a three hour interviewi between Peggy Gale and John Massey loosely concernecr with working methods and motivations.PARACHUTE 56 36 Liz Magor of the 5 veil Prim \"N, \u2019*«>4, \u2019Ht Hill, °°n0Usly.fi oosI want ^laboured; f find that 1 tlie li| tfadocuinet absolutely a ng at a time three wort it moment tints, thong to the poii dote I've pi raise is ofte trigger tha i an imagei final realiz at first gera ant, When t for me there1 it\u2019s very brie excitement j.You thint rful ecstatic Liz Magor, Chicoltin Belt, circa 1970, photograph, beaded belt, paper bird; photo : Alex Neumann.Liz Magor, Chicoltin Beadwork, circa 1970, photograph, beaded necklace, paper bird; photo : Alex Neumann.t ' IDENTIFICATION: AN INSIDER\u2019S VIEW isolate an interview by Jennifer Fisher You have said that art for you is an attempt to consume the world by remaking it.Do you still see this process as characterizing your practice?\u201cConsumes,\u201d when you say it back to me, seems very aggressive.I think, if I can remember, I was feeling more threatened than I do now.At that time I had done Regal Decor which is about being caught in the social contradiction between production and consumption.The verb, maybe, has changed a little bit.Rather than wanting to consume the world by remaking it, I want to \u201creregard\u201d it by remaking it.\u201cRegarding\u201d is a little bit more distanced.In the recent body of work, generally titled Chilcotin BeadWork, I have used photographs of myself and my friends during the sixties.While the pictures are relatively unaltered, how I regard them has shifted, and this becomes the subject of the work.In Chilcotin Bead Work your concerns have moved from formal interrogations of such discourses as medicine and linguistics into a more personal investigation of a generational identity.Chilcotin Bead Work refers to the belts and beadwork that I made when I was an art student to sell as a craft.Even at that time, I was already becoming an artist and I knew that they weren\u2019t legitimate art; that they were something else.I wasn\u2019t so naive that I thought I was a craftsperson, yet I still was able to do them without feeling bad.I included the beaded belts with the photographs because they were a portrait of my production and my value system of twenty years ago.37 PARACHUTE 56 Was this process an appropriation of Native craft technique?No, it was just the aesthetic, or style, of the time: people were wearing those things.I liked them, so I made them to sell and to give to my friends.I don\u2019t think that it was \u201cappropriation\u201d in the sense that we know it now.Social values were being questioned and inverted during that time all across North America.We studied the values of Native people, emulating them in the hope that this mimicking would establish a new value system for us.Using a different interpretation of the sixties now, specifically the back-to-the-land movement, I see the alienated identities of these white, urban kids as they adopted Indian or pioneer ways, or became farmers.Yet I don\u2019t want to condemn them in this work because it really was an attempt at resistance and I still think that the idea of resistance is important.The fact that I did make beaded belts is slightly ridiculous, but I don\u2019t feel better off, freer or happier because I\u2019m too sophisticated to do that now.You have included photographs of yourself as a hippy.How do you feel about presenting your personal history in this way?I don\u2019t think of it as personal, strangely enough.Rather, I think of it as an insider\u2019s view.\u201cPersonal\u201d to me means \u201cabout me\u201d and I don\u2019t want to focus on that.I\u2019m interested in dealing with things that I know are generally felt by people like me.My work is about the world that I know and comes from a position that I maintain.I can\u2019t do it from the outside, so I have to include my involvement.Your decision to use repetitive sequences of movement over an extended time has been an important aspect in the production of your past work.Is this operative in the recent work?Yes.The beaded belt was a very early version of that sort of (could you say) boredom.There is a line from Walter Benjamin that says that a story repeated creates boredom, that boredom is a place of mental relaxation; and relaxation is rare in a person\u2019s conscious life.I wanted to deal with a certain repetitive process in regard to material.The birds were made, very laboriously, out of cardboard.It\u2019s intentional that, if you look closely, you see these little bits of tape holding them together.In this sense the word \u201ccraft\u201d comes to my mind as something that I see as intersecting my art practice.The birds function as artifacts, like in a natural history museum: on a shelf presented to the viewer, and behind, a tableau contextualizes the artifacts of this particular tribe or culture.On one level, the birds refer to the association of Native people with animal heraldry and powerful shamanistic creatures.I placed them with the photographs to mimic contemporary museum displays which are oriented more toward show business \u2014 in the enhancing of the context of the objects that you are looking at \u2014 than a strictly scholarly presentation.I think that kind of museological display is melodramatic; that\u2019s why I put the beads in the bird\u2019s mouth.The birds started as a wild card, something that I didn\u2019t have a rational use for.When I know something will take me a long time to make, I have a lot of time to figure out how it functions.(Not all parts of my work are like that: with the photographs I have to decide their role well in advance because they must go through a lab process.) Very specific things come to bear on this aspect of the work.For one thing, it\u2019s easier to throw away what I\u2019ve made in the studio because it doesn\u2019t cost me anything, so it\u2019s a risk that I can take.I always like to have an aspect of uncertainty and risk when I\u2019m developing an idea and usually it\u2019s found in the part that I\u2019m involved in making physically.I had placed the birds in many different configurations before they ended up the way they did.The final arrangement was the result of rational thinking about an irrational or unexplained desire to have them.I finally recognized them as an equivalent of the beadwork, a repetitive activity that isn\u2019t necessarily useful, a place where I can be busy in a dumb project.They satisfy my desire to have something that I don\u2019t understand in a work so that I can\u2019t finish explaining it.Your work is timely in terms of the current problem of defining \u201ccontemporary Native art.\u201d I do think a lot about Native issues in terms of our need to identity who is the native and who is the outsider.On a political level, I think many problems are unresolved because we tend to think of ourselves as native to this land.I read a lot about it.I\u2019m particularly interested in the period of early contact between Native and European people.What I understand now is in complete contradiction to what I was taught as a child \u2014 that their history ended when ours began.Theirs was a culture relegated to natural history museums, not art galleries or places of living culture.They were put into dioramas as \u201cstuffed\u201d people.Native history absolutely didn\u2019t stop when we came; it has just not been recorded and if it has, it has been completely from our point-of-view.There are a variety of viewer positionings in this work ranging from the spectator\u2019s mirror-like relationship with life sized tableaus to the contracting of space in a minia- ' x\"\u2019 à'&'Xî turized diorama.How deliberately do yo work with reception?I think it\u2019s a natural aspect of the realm of sculpture that the body is part of th work.Considering the body in the s with the work has always been important.In| many pieces I have wanted to take the body\u2019s?, experience and fold it into the subject of the work.With Cabin at Tetlayoko, I wanted thet viewer to feel omnipotent in surveying thef PARACHUTE 56 38 «felpfetei I 'Nï.¦ gaa&Mfigg aa^ai-Ài* : -.w~ r^ââws^jèy .urej&j uild no real consensus; instead, :hey seem to consent to dissent, Delonging to a heterological tradi-ii, Virtual :ion \u2014 like the one described by es exhibits Vtichel de Certeau \u2014 that under-tands that every figure masks a *rid; that what is pictured, or Dosed, is always Other by the sim-odc-surdjple fact of its being picture (or Dose).So the inventions of art are ronstrained by the conventions of |irt, often giving them the character of obsessive relics when they are merely models.And such modelmaking is consistent with the pseudo-realisms of mass culture chat, as obsessively, goes on blurring the scale and nature of things.So Massey\u2019s rephotograph-;d small rooms, Fernandes\u2019 oversized texts, and Fastwiirms\u2019 monstrous beehive are all models first linked to certainties \u2014 a certain simplicity, a certain hardness, a :ertain finish, and a certain emptiness\u2014 that become, in the end, uncertain and ironic when tied to manipulated strategies of discontinuity, repetition, and a studied awkardness.Models are evidence that art, like theory, moves by analogy; in irt\u2019s case, visibly materializing and objectifying ideas that have no equivalents in language.As this counti :t not on ition spaa rusts to sii ids, and tli ite that 4 stallarion Vief ¦aceHopp such, artworks are \u201cprimary\u201d \u2014 and social \u2014 documents in a culture, even when they are understood to be surplus, fictitious and aestheticizing.Work in Grace Hopper shows no withdrawal from the image or the object, and most reflects the degree to which everyday life has been destabilized by mass culture.But if everyday life is not stable, why would art be?Or how could its symbols be?And given the distancing \u2014 spatial, temporal, and psychic \u2014 that already separates art from experience, how could such symbols not be fragile when we live in a time where it has become impossible to believe in the symbol\u2019s traditional task of fusing an image to a collective experience?This means that contemporary symbol-making differs significantly from earlier modes.In Grace Hopper, symbols function more like emblems, and Meigs\u2019 stereotypes, Hurlbut\u2019s ceiling maquette, and Magor\u2019s hollow birds and lead fish mix the arbitrary with the dramatic, the sacred, the sentimental, and the banal.As cultural objects, such symbols become as much objects of mystification as objects for signification.And this is consistent with the uses of symbols generally.But we cannot, I think, delude ourselves that contemporary cultural meanings could \u2014 or should \u2014 be common.Or certain.For where one viewer finds meaning, another will find oppression, suppression, or repression.We need to be able to tolerate these differences, as much as we need to critically interpret them; less to test their truth, than to examine their fit.It is not my intention to homogenize the works in Grace Hopper; still there is a strain in many of the pieces that I\u2019ll call the concept of the minor that is linked to what is considered to be the less privileged.It is first visible in uses made of the miniature, the ordinary, the cartoon, and in craft procedures.Then it blends itself with content that references the working class, visible minorities, aboriginal cultures, and immigration.Remembering that everything here is being staged in a cavernous ex-production space whose paint-peeling clerestory windows mimic a sacred space (complete with side-chapels, some of which were former washrooms), it is necessary to ask \u2014with works like Fastwiirms\u2019 Six Fainted Panels and Magor\u2019s Chilcotin Beadwork, particularly \u2014 if we are not seeing yet another attempt to internalize the Exotic (as the Other)?Are these works more nostalgic alibis that attempt to construct cultural identities by poaching on Other cultures?Or are they, instead, pictures of ourselves divided, those \u201cfree\u201d subjects who have become Other precisely because our references \u2014 and our gaze \u2014 grasp everything and hold nothing?Certainly, the uncertainties abound.And the impenetrable surfaces of many of the works in Grace Hopper are nothing if not ironic and self-conscious, doubling the world and doubling the spiritual by grossly parodying it.The lifelessness that comes from such doublings verges on the hallucinatory, cluttered up with what, at first glance, seem to be inessential objects.But such pseudo-realisms line up with the pseudo-realisms of mass culture and wait in ambush \u2014 at one with the interpretive violence that has been characteristic of the West \u2014 for viewers whose culture begs to be cartooned.But it is their sense of being surplus that ultimately validates this exhibition.For if, as Adorno believed, technology increasingly demands gestures that are precise, art is one of the few surviving forms of work where interactions with things are imprecise.And works, here, share a kind of precise imprecision, even as they replicate forms of anonymity familiar from the culture industry.But what they do not share with that industry \u2014 and this is certain \u2014 is that pressured and exploitative repetition of closed signs whose use consumes them.Instead, their forms maintain an openness, and an incompleteness, that lends them the character of Bakhtin\u2019s \u201cideological objects\u201d whose specificity \u2014 and, I would say, whose usefulness \u2014 lies in their differing material realities, and in their potential to construct \u201csocial meaning.\u201d Seen as such, these are not things that we can afford to lose.- CAROL LAING ANDY FABO Garnet Press Gallery, Toronto, April 8 - May 6 He tumbles into death, the blood flows down his handsome limbs; his neck, collapsing, leans against his shoulder: even as a purple flower, severed by the plow, falls slack in death; or poppies as, with weary necks, they bow their heads when weighted down by sudden rain.Virgil, The Aeneid, IX, 576-581 If death is the real, and if the real is impossible, then we are approaching the thought of the impossibility of death.Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 121 Technologies of the Self is an exhibit composed of bookworks, drawings, and paintings which address the construction and representation of \u201ccontrol\u201d and \u201crestraint\u201d in contemporary society in relation to issues of sexuality and the body.For some time, Andy Fabo has explored issues of subjectivity in landscape paint- ing.Now, he intervenes with the social and moral codes through which individual identity either emerges and blossoms, or is repressed.Fabo\u2019s imagery is appropriated from the authorative and moral institutions he challenges.In this way, he focuses attention upon the nature and structure of social and moral codes of behaviour which impose authority over and shape the expression of every individual who is a part of that society.Technologies of the Self, then, is about the controls and restraints society uses to develop a behavioural code which designates a proper orientation of action for all of its individual members.This exhibit identifies the role representation plays in maintaining this code, particularly in relation to sexual activity and representations which objectify the body, specifically, the gay male body.It is also 63 PARACHUTE Si an exhibition about disaster, about being human in the face of an insistent and pervasive form of death mediated through Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, AIDS.And Fabo\u2019s work is about betrayal: the betrayal of a young healthy male body, the betrayal of physical pleasure and intimacy, the betrayal of a long life ensured by modern medical technology, the betrayal of a future.More importantly, this disaster exposes fallacies surrounding notions of individual rights and liberty: privacy, community pride, and the illusion of promise implicit in all societal belief structures which impose order and attribute meaning to individual lives caught in the midst of existence, a state of fluctuation and chaos.Like gay people and gay sexuality, the reality of an individual gay person\u2019s life experience is something which most viewers might more comfortably keep \u201cother\u201d: something to be intrigued by, something to dabble in when no one is looking.But Fabo places this reality in the foreground.In Communicating the Pleasure, 1989, Fabor appropriates the sensuous \u201cdying slave\u201d figure from Michelangelo which he conflates with the \u201coutcast\u201d figure from Les Demoiselles d\u2019Avignon\\ the one in the midst of sexual ecstasy overwhelmed by jouissance, her arms stretching with beguilement into the heavens, the one Philip Monk describes in his essay \u201cBreach of Promise,\u201d in Struggles with the Image, as a member of \u201cPicasso\u2019s brothel women, Lesbian warriors, Marys become prostitutes.\u201d While Monk identifies the distance between the male viewer and these women, the object of his gaze, Fabo deliberately eliminates this gap by constructing a dialogue between the viewer and what is observed.In this way, he effectively closes this distance and the sublime male figure becomes our subject.The surface of this drawing is animated by energy and emotion.Fabo\u2019s presence is felt in the gesture of line, in the physical contours of the body.Fabo portrays this figure of jouissance with immediacy.The viewer apprehends this figure in an erotically charged moment, overwhelmed by plea- sure and surrendering to passion, an image which recalls a host of art historical representations of the male nude: from classical heroes such as the young warrior of the Aeneid, Euryalus who, together with his companion Nisus, is struck down by death in the blossom of youth with no warning or reason, to Christian martyrs whose collapsing figures and sensuous limbs recall Michelangelo\u2019s depiction of Christ\u2019s languid body in the Entombment of Christ (c.1511).However, these representations of heroes and martyrs show \u201chonourable\u201d deaths; whereas, Fabo\u2019s subject is denied these rights; his position in society is marginalized, for these configurations of the male body are also found in gay pornography.In Communicating the Pleasure, Fabo makes direct reference to gay male sexual activity with the image of an ejaculating male in the lower right hand section of this drawing.By juxtaposing these two images, one of jouissance with one which exposes the transgressive nature of gay sexual activity, Fabo bravely ruptures the code of silence which keeps gay culture in exile.He communicates the pleasure and the sexual act which consummates it.Throughout this exhibit, Fabo\u2019s portrayal of the gay male experience falls within the parameters outlined by Foucault.Images of surveillance, and control, constantly remind viewers that the daily experience of gay people constitutes something which needs to be policed and censored in order to keep it separate from \u201cnormal\u201d heterosexual culture.Fabo brings the vitality and joy of his subject to the foreground, closer to viewers.He also shows pain and despair, a life not unlike the viewer\u2019s own.Viewing this exhibit, it becomes clear to me that, for Fabo, every objectification of a homosexual person and his/her sexual practices underlines a social and cultural need to control and confine difference: to hide it, not recognize it.In fact, Fabo reminds me that carrying out rituals of surveillance and developing technology which brings this unknown other into close focus, whether this process occurs through the magnifying lens of a microscope or the amplification of a satellite dish, directs attention to the projection of fear which lies at the core of this obsessive activity.In Examining the Subject, 1989, we perceive much about ourselves as we confront what is most fearful and what is most beautiful, for Fabo draws bodies which are immediate and full of sensuality.They engage.But they also disturb the relation of subject to other, the basis of objectifying practices.In these drawings, fluid surfaces and sensuous limbs beckon.Each image triggers sensations, associations and familiar responses stored in the viewer\u2019s unconscious.This step, in turn, affects spontaneous recognition of the self in the subject, an awareness that cannot be uttered, yet its presence unites.This bond is reinforced by another presence, desire.With the process of identification, \u201ccontrol\u201d is lost as the viewer transcends the space which separates the \u201cother.\u201d Fabo\u2019s subject confronts me with force.For Fabo, the body is a site for dialogue.It is a common place for A id ied35 nie l* ho! r* r sharing the sadness of loss and pleasure.The body is a site for play, sexual abandon, \u201cjouissance.\u201d It is a vulnerable territory where pain and waste excruciatingly mark their impact.The body is a site of disease and death.This subject is not an object which can be exchanged or bartered through religious devotions and sacrifice In the body Fabo posits the reality of death.This reality is common to every individual who lives with disarray, confusion and despair in the midst of disaster.For Fabo, the dilemma is to write of that disaster when words cannot change it, to write about disaster standing beside it, without walking away.Fabo writes of the disaster of AIDS in the most immediate way he can: through multi-media, drawings using collage to jux-! tapose images, signs and symbolsi in new ways to suggest conflicting moral codes and behaviours which surround the place where trans gressive activity occurs: the body Viewers can relate to this subjec ;s a»1 Th ft' ^ 11 it#1 -partit pre to male o *0 ¦ MlS Lie h- Li portrait m Thei in an intimate, private manneij where identification occurs tins hum While the body is a site for suent -\t: conflict, Fabo makes me awad|pWei itthrea L W ] 'A* '\u2022«tiwifi,- miL Andy Fabo, Communicating the Pleasure, 1989, mixed media Echoes :i ek;:;:Y 3 for Separate rt A::s :e-A 'The.: erne:.V:;:: | Mnessof! I ^ He place; pttatjf Ktton* ¦h- Rafter) :3tl°meat I :,|Jl^lf,( Sdo on paper, 182 cm x 152 cm; photo: (Isaac Applebaum) The Garnet Press Gallery.PARACHUTE 56 64 viourswhit \"'here train is: the bod this sub|6 /ate rnanni >ijEilhat it also provides a place for ; ilteh ynthesis, for transcending deological oppositions.In the .r''^ilody, transgression begins and uNjnds.By challenging traditions of lis-, epresentation which objectify the ody and position the homosexual ta ubject as \u201cother,\u201d Fabo seeks to estore dignity and freedom to >oth.The body Fabo draws is a ite of feeling and subjectivity, of îappiness and loss, of tears and motion.They can neither be ommodified nor idealized; a rep-esentation which violently inter-upts the art historical (and nedia) tradition of gazing on the xxly as object.Thus, Fabo effec-¦^\u2018ngaway ;ively transgresses the moral and t: iocial codes which govern the ®dy is complex and confusing.It îeeds to be examined closely and cared for, not kept at a distance, n a separate room.Fabo employs Foucault\u2019s re-discovery of the classical notion of self-knowledge, which comes about through caring for the self instead of through stoic deprivation, and recognizing this as a means to comprehending the fullness of life as it draws to an ;nd.He places value in the concrete realm of experience as it is iived, not on what was produced, not on what may have been promised by an afterlife.For gay people this perspective proposes that each lived moment is valuable, that I subjective experience is enhanced through self-reflection and self-affirmation.Foucault inspires in Fabo a vision of possible relations between people where individuals care for each other in community; not separated, but enhanced by difference.-JANICE ANDREAE Geneviève Cadieux, Hear Me with Your Eyes (triptych), 1989, photographic print on wood screen, 249 x 310 cm each; GENEVIÈVE CADIEUX Galerie René Blouin, Montréal, April 29 - May 27 Geneviève Cadieux\u2019s recent installation, Hear Me with Your Eyes, consists of three huge photographs which immediately envelop the spectator.These larger-than-life framed images read around three adjacent sides of the rectangular gallery from left to right, with each image on a separate wall.The first black and white photograph is of a woman\u2019s head, in three quarter profile, eyes closed, mouth open as if moaning, her right ear poised forward to hear.She appears to be in the throes of extreme emotion.The central photo represents the same woman with the same passionate expression but in colour and in motion.Cadieux uses a double exposure to capture a trace of the head\u2019s movement when shifting left, coupling profile and three quarter view.The series ends with a black and white photo of a grossly magnified mouth which appears to be a detail of that in the central photo.The hairs and pores around the lips are clearly visible.A seam divides or meets at the mouth of each depiction and threads the tryptich together.The installation\u2019s appeal to the senses is deceptively simple.It displaces the \u201ceye\u201d through its insistence on silence as a sensual experience and functions voyeuris-tically as portraiture, engaging the spectator\u2019s desire to scrutinize.Yet this simplicity is complicated by the installation\u2019s intellectual facets \u2014 a focus on the social implications of silence; a denial of photography\u2019s mythic objectivity; an archival document of both the artist\u2019s oeuvre and personal life; a reference to other representations concerned with emotion.Hear.The mouth utters what is not heard, perhaps even what is not said.Cadieux has worked with anti-ocular devices before to displace the primacy of sight.In Voices of Reason/Voices of Madness (1983) loud noise accompanies projections.In À fleur de peau (1987), a braille text can be read only through a tactile experience.The title Hear Me with Your Eyes, suggests a need for lip reading.The loss of sight and now the loss of hearing are meant to sensitize the field of communication to alternatives: to be deaf, to hear with the eyes, to lip read.Cadieux\u2019s insight promotes the established spaces of silence.The installation relates and recalls the political silencing of two powerful women by the church.Sor Juana (1648\u20141695), nun, scholar and author of the poem from which the title is borrowed, was subject to ideological persecution by church officials in New Spain during the last years of her life because she not only defended women\u2019s rights to educa- photo : Louis Lussier.tion, but also their rights to comment on and interpret the Scriptures.Eventually she was silenced: sacrificing the word in order to devote her life to prayer and charity.The stark framing, emotional figure and the reliance on close up in the first photo recall Joan of Arc as she appears in Carl Drevyer\u2019s film The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928).Joan was martyred for speaking her mind.The lives of Sor Juana and Joan are not central to the installation; they invite further speculation involving silence, the church and women.Me.A covert narcissism embodies Hear Me with Your Eyes.The source image for the installation is a still from a filmic portrait the artist shot of her sister, eight years ago, and used before in the earlier installation Voices of Reason/Voices of Madness.But whether or not the viewer has seen the earlier installation, the face in Hear Me with Your Eyes presents the viewer with the experience of déjà vu\\ the face seems familiar.The size of these images and the family resemblance shared by the sisters assures the artist a love of looking at the self once removed.Cadieux\u2019s repeated imaging of her sister over time affects an autobiographical and diaristic character reminiscent of family albums.In this way Cadieux can scrutinize a face similar to hers for signs of aging, change and similarity with a distance not permitted when examining her own body.65 PARACHUTE 56 Besides functioning as a personal document, Cadieux\u2019s installation can be seen as an archive of her recent practice.Cadieux used figures with obliterated faces and heads in La Blessure d\u2019une cicatrice ou Les Anges (1987): the grandiose scale of the faces in Hear Me with Your Eyes compensates for the faces\u2019 erasure and censure.The mouth in Hear Me with Your Eyes functions similarly to the wound the artist photographed for her installation Trou de mémoire, la beauté inattendue (1988).Both the mouth and the wound are enlarged to a scale that invests the familiar with a sense of horror.While the mouth is instantly recognizable, the wound is not.Is it wound?Incision?Genitalia?Whose?Male?Female?The earlier installation, Voices of Reason/ Voices of Madness, with its exaggerated scale and large size and dependence on similar imagery, is obviously referenced by Hear Me with Your Eyes.This self reflexive focus frustrates and forecloses interpretation.Your Eyes.Cadieux\u2019s oeuvre contests photography\u2019s longstanding claim of \u201ctruth to vision\u201d and refutes mastery by the gaze.The use of colour appears to invest the image with characteristics typical of advertising yet the colour is off, the image is not appealing, the expression on the face is wrong.This not-so-perfect image is further disturbed by the obvious seam which runs horizontally through the middle joining the two halves of the image.This, combined with the parodie melodramatic quality of the work, the head shot is all cinematic spectacle, the figure is performing, putting on an act, assuming a role.This masquerade further confuses any notion of the \u201creal.\u201d Acted and re-acted.The gesture in the photographs is re-enacted three times in three different ways.The spectator cannot view the entire series in one glance but must turn to read each invididual photo, searching for clues, symptoms and traces to gain entry into the work, moving forward, turning back and moving forward again rhythmically (the eyes always scanning) to learn the intricacies of the installation.Each photo adds information to the recorded events yet the spectator learns little.The ambiguous gestures \u2014 throwing the head; the closed eyes; the open mouth \u2014 signify resistance, pain, and pleasure.That is all.Hear Me with Your Eyes remains hermetically sealed.The spectator experiences mind blindness: the loss of interpretive skill.A meaning is deferred and the body is forced to shift reliance on each sense, the spectator may remember other depictions of similar physical states.The sexual tension of Cadieux\u2019s imagery connotes advertising for porn films where a frontal shot of a woman from the waist or shoulders is in supposed ecstasy.But the expression used in Cadieux\u2019s tryptich is ambiguous, reminiscent of Bernini\u2019s seventeenth century The Ecstasy of St.Theresa, where the artist sculpts the Spanish mystic\u2019s totality of sensation, agony and ecstasy, as she experiences her passionate love for God.The figure\u2019s display of emotion in Hear Me with Your Eyes reflects contemporary western attitudes where such displays are relegated to the private.Hear me with your eyes, now that distant ears cannot attend, and, in absent sighs, hear reproaches sobbing from this pen.And as you cannot hear a voice so faint, then hear me deaf, for mute is my complaint.Sor Juana Inès de la Cruz With.LÉcho (1989), an installation in the small gallery, mirrors the installation in the main gallery.Rectangular yellow parchment is attached to the wall at the height of a large male torso and bears a trace resembling a graphite rubbing of a male torso.Hanging directly in front of the skin, suspended from the ceiling by fine threads, is a shield-like thin bronze cast of a male torso.These two objects are then reflected in a shiny black cibachrome sheet on the far wall of the small gallery.The three layers resound internally and mimic the three photographs comprising the main installation, but where L\u2019Echo is attentive to the masculine, Hear Me with Your Eyes is preoccupied with the feminine.\u2014 KITTY SCOTT RICHARD PURDY Galerie Christiane Chassay, Montréal, May 27 - June 24 Memory and the millenium connect Richard Purdy\u2019s most recent works, Progeria Longaevus and The Inversion of the World, to each other and to the expanding universe of Purdy\u2019s historical fictions.Each of the installations explores a different aspect of \u201cmillenium\u201d: Progeria Longaevus deals with the millenium in terms of a thousand years, while The Inversion of the World presents a millenium understood in its eschatological sense as a doctrine concerned with the final state of the world.The conceptions of history which underly the two works correspondingly differ: whereas Progeria Longaevus presents history as a complex process of change \u2014 a network of lives and events which interconnect without a predetermined course \u2014 The Inversion of the World presents a neat teleological universe governed by spatial and temporal symmetries.But both works are cartographies which ultimately allow viewers to situate themselves in relation to time and the instantiation of their own histories.Progeria Longaevus is the framing piece for The Inversion of the World as well as for Purdy\u2019s 1984 piece, Corpus Cristi.The name of the work derives from a hypothetical disease which causes abnormal longevity.The disease is the pretense on which Purdy creates a character: an infant born in Venice in 992 and who dies in a Vancouver nursing home in the year 1992 after a life of multiple identities in which he ages one year for every ten.Purdy chronicles this life in an extended text (extracts of which are included in the catalogue), and a 365 foot scroll of handmade paper which has been painted and hung, labyrinthine-like, from threads descending from the ceiling.The scroll is polysemous, being at once historical artifact, scriptural record, modern time-line, and \u201cinterim document\u201d connecting the certificates of birth and death which bracket it.It is the scroll that allows Purdy to confront time by spatializing it; it materializes footsteps, and in the process of tracing the lifetime of one indi- vidual, retraces an entire mil- I#*1 10, dr I i«f lenium.The word is therefore a \u201clife-path,\u201d to use Torsten Hâgar strand\u2019s term, which is simultaneously a longue durée, to switch to the terminology of Fernand Braudel.It plays with the Western conception of history by combin- ing the forward-looking, plan- view perspective of traditional history, with the backward-looking history of personal memory which always remains referenced on the present.The intersection of history with memory occurs in the movements of the viewer, who walking chronologically through the installation is confronted with changes of scale and the occasional non-sequential segment of biog- raphy\u2014 a remnant of Purdy\u2019s character remembering \u201cbackwards.\u201d The written text of Progeria Longaevus is full of the wonder of anachronism and magnified time I*®®' frames.The story of the man who fif® lives a thousand years (whom I Uimilst will call Carlo Corlett in accor-failli Wo to a topi dance with his final identity) takes jit work of I its shape across a network of refer- «tiouilly ences to history, fiction, and historical fictions.The historical references which punctuate the J work connect Carlo Corlett\u2019s life n Pure with known historical events and Beaiespi.personages.Purdy also lets Carlo\u2019s- ppai& n diaries shed light on historical piVw enigmas, such as why the sixteenth; 05;^ century Venetian school of paint-ing portrayed such charged, \u201celec-kaW, tric\u201d atmospheres, and who the k^.original source for the AIDS virus.:|y.was.Elsewhere Purdy clearly intersects the presumed historicity ; of his text with known fictional h events, such as when CarlcBife .marches with Tambourlaine, the! IK Scythian ruler of Christopher Mar-:I_ lowe\u2019s play.By intermixing his own pseudo-history with knowr ï .fiction, Purdy equalizes all events .\t.\u2022\t\u2022\tU\t^ within memory, subjecting them t -to the same temporal veil.Ever where he overtly draws on \u201crea 3 :: .% :% ttesacklit photographs, inhabit the deathless and virtually timeless if til noment between self-knowledge ind dissolution.Eyes gaze from a If the oil >aroque theatrical frame (signifier G«}:Con >f the exteriorization of self), tical serialiicross the room (and through the : couldeasij mdience) at two hieratical images: )onaldJuM>ne of the body as heat sensitive : vulcaflizJK-ray, and the second of the body ig from tt :t, so Iturally si as from tits, Its pi modules, y intend» lotionoftt itritte tt: is ephemeral shadow on the wall, rozen in its relationship to reality Dy the pair of shoes at its feet.In :he high key chroma of computerese, the X-rayed skeleton, stripped ftistatidd 3f identity, is the simulacra.The >hadow image, head bent to gaze mpotently at the shoes, is absence longing to be materialized.The irony is that in the medium of the photograph both images are mptied of presence.There is , 0[nipjts hopelessness here mirrored by the eseIltjii{tl pol impersonal technology of the jjldescij presentation which does not en-jjjuesk gage so much as invade the viewer, jjterpi Cadieux breaks into this paralysis by inserting an undulating apiece shadow which plays across the hesculpfl larêe image of the eyes.A fragile awareness is implied which con-templates the possibilities of escape from, or imminent surren-f: der to, disembodiment.Nostalgia for the body is complete in Wyn Geleynses miniaturized film projections onto glass Grant Poier, Border/Framing the State of., 1989 installation; photo : (Douglas Curran) The Nickle Arts Museum.plates.The looped images, intense in colour and presence, appear more real (significant) than the stage sets Geleynse has created for them, more real than the darkened surroundings in which they and their audience exist.In What a Strange Thing to Happen to a Little Boy, a film image of a mother, knitting in her rocking chair, meets the gaze of a framed black and white still photograph of her family.Side by side and of equal size, these images are almost cloy-ingly intimate.At the same time the relationship between the apparent time of the film image and the nostalgic time of the still photograph, framed by the clatter of the projector, is clearly artificial.Above, positioned amongst the cross bars of the gallery ceiling, the film image of a man, presumably the grown son materialized from the still photograph, balances dramatically on a metaphoric tightrope, in obvious terror of losing his tenuous grip on existence.Geleynses innovative use of media is compelling.The audience is torn in its response between the poignancy of the images, and the black humour of the viewer\u2019s push of a button, competes for \u201creality\u201d with the artist\u2019s narrative.If Cadieux\u2019s work operates in an imploded present and Geleynses rebounds between past and present, Jan Peacock\u2019s The Road Rises to Meet You examines the future and how it is constructed from values and experience of both the past and present.COMING UP TO A RISE IN THE ROAD YOU THINK This is familiar I know where I am now I know what\u2019s on the other side of that hill.AND YOU IMAGINE IT CLEARLY (IT IS JUST AS YOU IMAGINED) (IT IS UNRECOGNIZABLE) Peacock opposes Bliss (familiar desire) and Dread (nameless fear) in two separately viewed videotapes.Bliss shows images of bed-sheets and plates, of domestic intimacy.Dread shows the open road, the unknown.The projection of slide images of a male and female figure entwined, moves across the gallery floor from sheeted bed to a taped outline suggestive of a police fatality investigation.A sub-narrative of the two individuals which reveals their need to affirm the present and circumscribed world of their experience, while recognizing that their inability to extend that knowledge into the future, except to say that it is unknowable, undermines the security of their present as well.In this work, perhaps the most personally evocative in the exhibition, Peacock grapples with the process of cognition itself, the mechanisms of doubt and belief.The viewer is implicated in the process of investigating and deciphering the clues and is part of the projected situation.Like Peacock, Marella Bienvenue examines the relationship of present and future.She invites the viewer into a small room in which a button activates film loops which project from outside onto the walls.In a six minute sequence, images of trains\u2014sometimes moving across the screens, sometimes approaching and threatening to overwhelm the viewer \u2014are accompanied by sounds reminiscent of the grinding and percussion of moving railcars, but permeated by reference to sounds of radio transmission, music, 69 PARACHUTE 56 technology.Bienvenue inserts a monologue .\u201cmuch of time is spent preparing for the next event in your life,\u201d \u201clife is what happens to you when you\u2019re making other plans.\u201d Bienvenue speaks for, rather than to, the viewer who is transfixed, surrounded, isolated, but also complicit by the push of a button.Cadieux\u2019s crisis of the moment is transformed into a crisis of indefinite duration while a sense of resignation (determination?) replaces Peacock\u2019s dread.Grant Poier\u2019s Border!Framing the State of.which also employs the metaphor of train, has an aggressiveness absent from the other works.Banks of slide projectors barrage opposing walls with images, while on a raised platform which spans the room, a mechanized cart rumbles back and forth on a set of railroad tracks.Images are projected from this moving platform punctuating and penetrating the already constantly changing collage of photographs.The rumble of the \u201ctrain\u201d is amplified in space, following the progress of the vehicle.The incessant barrage of images of city, of rural prairies is redolent of personal narrative, fragmented and discontinuous.The occasional image of a figure, always isolated in a hostile environment of snow and ice, is inevitably and rapidly replaced as the train continues its journey.Poier subjects the viewer to a media bath as he deconstructs the images which frame his own life.In varying degrees, all the works discussed so far involve the viewer bodily in their space or operation.This is not so in Tom Sherman\u2019s Equidistant Relationships in which he presents two continually playing videotapes to a traditionally seated audience.Sherman uses the inherent authority of the television medium to seduce the viewer into watching, only to turn the audience back upon itself as the content becomes clear.On one screen the viewer sees images of the family, and landscapes viewed from a car, both obviously personal experiences.Camera angles and technique including handheld, upside down images reinforce this \u201cnon-media\u201d individuality.On the second screen, the viewer sees an office interior in which a robot arm manipulates the camera through repetitious sequences.Sherman himself appears, at once in control of, and subject to, the course of the camera.Sherman relates anecdotes which deal with personal history, memories and perceptions of events, and speculates upon the effects of shared histories filtered through technological media.He presents the dilemma of resolving first hand experience with knowledge derived from mediated information.In the dialectic between Sherman\u2019s World \u201cA\u201d and World \u201cB,\u201d neither epistomological base can be ignored.In a technological world, individuals share the experience of information-as-event while desiring direct knowledge of self and others, a condition which inevitably leads to uncertainty, isolation from others and alienation from oneself.The site of experience becomes a secondary reality, submerged in a complex of undifferentiated levels and patterns of recognition.As Sherman\u2019s video images and monologue, each of which is independent of the other, unfold, the viewer is forced to listen or view selectively, and is encouraged to reflect upon the singularity of their experience of Sherman\u2019s \u201cmessage,\u201d the problematic relationship between information, experience and knowledge.The response of the works in this exhibition to the crisis of identity loss in the face of technology has been to focus upon and deconstruct the elements of that relationship.We are led to the brink of the void, but where then?These works share an acknowledgment of Sherman\u2019s worlds, and do not condemn so much as seek a reconstitution in which the hierarchies of knowledge are within the power of those whose lives are framed by those systems of knowledge.In their use of media these artists introduce means of questioning and reconstructing personal and social meaning on the shifting grounds of technological signification.Nor are their works without degrees of humour, hope and compassion.\u2014 ROBERT MILTHORP GARDENS Arts Court, Ottawa, June 1-5 Mayo Graham, first Director-Curator of the new Arts Court Gallery in Ottawa, had the idea of calling upon artists to transform the neglected urban site of the late nineteenth century building, formerly a courthouse.Artists involved were Max Dean, Philip Fry and Susan Guy (working together), Jerry Grey, Don McVeigh and Susan Geraldine Taylor.Each had complete autonomy, but they met fairly frequently during the project to exchange ideas.The strategies adopted vary, but in general two things are at stake: the role of artistic practice in relation to the natural environment; and a reinterpretation of the role of sculpture as a means of considering the cultural and natural specificities of a site.Red Columbine!Auge Bleue by Philip Fry and Susan Guy was certainly the most complex piece, representing the most serious attempt to come to grips with a renewal of landscape art, in particular, the reinterpretation of the Baroque \u201cgarden of meaning.\u201d The area chosen was the most neglected part of the site, a partly shady patch reaching into the corner created by the high entrance steps and the wall of the Courthouse building.Here, with scarcely any traces of grass, were pigeon droppings, a bicycle rack, a large aluminum flagpole and a muddy pathway created by generations of courthouse clerks.While formal structure is very important in Red Columbine!Auge bleue, the design is far from arbitrary, depending on the givens of place, history and human involvement in the space.Rather than removing the well-worn path, the artists made it a central articulating element, cutting the space in half along a line parallel to the boundary fence.They then bordered it with limestone blocks similar to those used in the Courthouse building and paved it with gravel.A rectangular dry trench, also edged with limestone blocks, cutting diagonally across the path was added, joining up the space again and creating a dynamic sculptural element.The sides and floor are metal painted red.One of the artists\u2019 technical problems had been the lack of water: this dry trench or dry well expresses by metonymy the absence of water in the ground.A second rectangular element makes water paradoxically present, referring to the material of the flagpole present on the site: a 24 foot long aluminum trough is placed paralllel to, and just inside, the boundary fence, foilo«4 gscone^0 artist1 inters » thei® mm d 0! ¦eDiporaf}1 jit;::' ;gd it ofactually Jerry Gre; painted blue on the inside and 0 lit» » filled with water.Finally, a third | object, a metal single-rail fence, !il painted yellow, fits into the angle of the building and the steps, following the line of the first course of masonry on the building.The pure primary metallic colours\u2014red, blue, yellow \u2014 of the three objects function independently as bright notes in the subtly muted colour composition of wildflower plantings.Fry, in conversation, stresses the polyvalence of the \u201cobject things\u201d: the two artists had wanted each to be a kind of a thing, and at the same time not really be it.They serve practical, formal and ornamental purposes; at the same time, owing to their status as objects which only resemble real things (the well, being without any source of water is not a real well, the trough is too small for a horse to drink out of, the fence does not really fence anything in or out), they unleash a series of significations by metonymy.The dry well, for example, is also a sort of cave (echoing the basement of the courthouse); the context of a well, even a dry one, makes one think of water; hence the redness of the interior evokes the idea of some-; thing red that flows \u2014 blood.It is important to stress the crucial \u201ccompositional\u201d role of the sculptures.Conceived in terms of the cultural and natural givens, they articulate the site, being the only forms imposed upon it.The plantings reflect, as well, the species indigenous to the Ottawa region.Attention to sun anc shade, the effect of one plant upon another, the way they woulc c :he sioevo {0 out of p as a ¦ pilasters at th tat and the makes this r i their ret plantings, in »art space, it issue of mi »as Histone huildingi This y the fa tlso quote Gun lptnre,fo nearby Cot tyj columns led by mi »ithweep Pétant sour ^¦Areth meets\u2019I it result 1,1 Ma, H».«re ci !eroli \u201cto the \u2018\u201cdivide tine PARACHUTE 56 70 loot Of l; Hem, ^ntontj to, laryfs the [evelop in the long term \u2014 these onsiderations were far more mportant here than ornamental r formal ones.Following the path (by the side f which there is an irregular \u201csiting stone\u201d found and left there by he artists), the spectator indeed nters a \u201cgarden of meaning\u201d 'ateh inhere the imagination is led not way from the specific place but leeper into it; for the common ontemporary urban experience of >eing \u201cnowhere in particular\u201d is ubstituted the unaccustomed one >f actually being here.Jerry Grey\u2019s Historic Columns msideaoj Hysterical Elements) stands on high thiilpground at the outer corner of the 'raU[|(t| ite, dominating the city intersec-ion below.Grey, too, was con-stepi cious of cultural and architectural pvens in evolving her strategy, the bail Three soaring square columns metal hold begonias, lobelia and mari-ellow- Isolds (red, blue and yellow) that honindo ;row out of peat moss contained )tes in à I vithin a metal grid.The columns impositidl unction as a direct quote of the ;; ft; ¦: blasters at the entrance to Arts lourt and the title of the work nakes this reference explicit.Vith their red, blue and yellow fiantings, in the context of the Theyseiflifiew art space, the columns raise irnamendj he issue of modernist art \u2014 is it low as Historic as this neo-classical milding?This question is undercored by the fact that the columns Iso quote Guido Molinari\u2019s 1967 culpture, Hommage to Samuel Beckett, n nearby Confederation Park.jyfeiK firey\u2019s columns are a considerable ev ujjgj! echnical tour de force, consisting of .îollow wooden structures sur-ffej| I 'ounded by metallic frames and .yrji died with weeping tiles to provide t constant source of moisture for jeU ,;i :he plants embedded in the sides; ;f[ md raising another issue: that of >ur traditional domination over mure.Are the \u201chysterical ele-nents\u201d of the title perhaps hyster-.cal as a result of being manipu- \u2019roleoft1 ated?Both Max Dean and Don ff!; VIcVeigh were concerned with the ssue of the role of the artist in \u2019elation to the natural environ- lOO!t'1 jj,! jnent.Max Dean\u2019s Caring for An , Other \u2014 R planting our Planet, where mf.owiw :C!i will! :hetrou;l i (H of theO^ .md / iiey :he artist (that traditional champion of individualism) hands out o individual members of the pub- THÉÂTRE / THEATRE Corps scéniques FESTIVALS : LA PART DU RISQUE lie free pine and black spruce seedlings on condition that they undertake to plant them, proposes the notion of the artist as intermediary, as motivator in getting the public to act individually.Don McVeigh\u2019s Bean Garden, a wattle fence with bean plants growing on it, suggests that contemporary art should no longer be concerned with pure creative invention, but rather with a meditation on the unique structures of things as they are; with a minimum of intervention.The Bean Garden makes its point well.The intricate twisting pattern of the fence and the runners, the contrasts of colours between the bright green of the bean plants, the russet of the fence panels and the bright red specks of bloom are a visual experience similar in quality to that of pure painting.Susan Geraldine Taylor\u2019s Bouquet for Art\u2019s Court, on the other hand, together with the Garden Tea Party performance event she organized on the last Sunday of the show, fail to address current issues, reiterating the dogma of art for art\u2019s sake and, even more questionably, of life for art\u2019s sake.It was regrettable that the display of works in the indoor gallery was not planned to relate more significantly to the \u201cGardens\u201d themselves.Why not documentation of work in progress?- ELIZABETH RITCHIE DU MAURIER WORLD STAGE AT HARBOURFRONT, 2e édition, Toronto, du 3 au 18 juin 1988; sous la direction artistique de Lilie Zendel : Fool\u2019s Edge, écrit et mise en scène par Ronnie Burkett; production de Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionnettes (Alberta).Stars in the Morning Sky d\u2019Alexandre Galin; mise en scène de Leo Dodin; production du Théâtre Maly de Leningrad (URSS).Tattoo Theatre, écrit et mise en scène par Mladen Meteric; production de The Open Stage (Yougoslavie).Tears of a Dinosaur, texte et mise en scène de Blake Brooker; production de One Yellow Rabbit Performance Theatre (Alberta).Tectonic Plates/Plaques tectoniques #1 du Théâtre Repère (Québec); mise en scène de Robert Lepage; scénographie de Michael Levine.FESTIVAL DE THÉÂTRE DES AMÉRIQUES, 3e édition, Montréal, du 23 mai au 4 juin 1989; sous la direction artistique de Marie-Hélène Falcon : UAnnonce faite à Marie de Paul Claudel; mise en scène d\u2019Alice Ronfard; coproduction d\u2019Espace GO (Montréal) et du FTA. quelle heure on meurt?d\u2019après l\u2019œuvre de Réjean Duchar-me; adaptation et mise en scène de Martin Faucher; réalisation des Productions Branle-bas (Montréal).Border Brujo, écriture, mise en scène et interprétation par Guillermo Gomez-Pena; produc-tion autogérée (Etats-Unis).Le Chien de Jean-Marc Dalpé; mise en scène de Brigitte Haentjens; coproduction du Théâtre du Nouvel Ontario et du Théâtre français du Centre national des Arts d\u2019Ottawa (Canada).El Concilio de Amor d\u2019Oscar Panizza; mise en scène de Jesusa Rodriguez; production du El Grupo Divas (Mexique).Hamlet d\u2019après Shakespeare; conception et mise en scène de Hillar Liitoja; production du DNA Theatre de Toronto (Canada).Je me souviens de Georges Perec; mise en scène et interprétation de Sami Frey; une coproduction du Festival d\u2019Au-tomne à Paris, Spectacles Lumbro-so, Spectacles ALAP (France).Merz Opéra, montages de textes de Kurt Schwitters, et Oulipo show, textes de Raymond Queneau, Italo Calvino, Harré Mathews et de l\u2019Ouvroir de littérature potentielle; ÂC, uii ÉV-'À-;.N - z.- ; *\t\u2022 \u2022V-Æf ^\tJ.3KS '.' U.* U myf ¦ Philip Fry & Susan Guy, Red Columbine/ Auge Bleue, 1989, installation view; photo : Philippe Pellerin.71 PARACHUTE 56 mises en scène de Denis Marleau; productions du Théâtre Ubu (Montréal).La Negra Ester, texte et musique de Roberto Parra; mise en scène d\u2019Andrés Pérez; production du El Gran Circo Teatro (Chili).Opium, conception et mise en scène de Lome Brass; production de Carbone 14 (Montréal).Pablo d\u2019Eduardo Pavlovsky; mise en scène de Laura Yusem; production autogérée (Argentine).Pass the Blutwurst, Bitte, conception, mise en scène et chorégraphie de John Kelly; production autogérée (Etats-Unis).The Road to Immortality : Part Three, Frank Dell\u2019s the Temptation of St.Antony, création collective; mise en scène d\u2019Elizabeth Le Compte; production de The Wooster Group / (Etats-Unis).La Sécréta Obscenidad de Cada Di'a de Marco Antonio de la Parra; mise en scène de Maria Elena Duvauchelle; production du El Nuevo Grupo (Chili).Six personnages en quête d\u2019auteur de Luigi Pirandello; mise en scène d Anatoli Vassiliev; production de l\u2019Ecole d\u2019art dramatique de Moscou (U.R.S.S.).Suz o Suz, création collective de La Fura dels Baus (Espagne).Terre promise/Terra pro-messa, conception et mise en scène de Nino D\u2019Introno, Daniel Meilleur, Graziano Melano, Giacomo Ravicchio et Monique Rioux; coproduction du Théâtre de la Marmaille (Montréal) et du Teatro Dell\u2019Angolo (Turin, Italie).When Girls Collide, texte et mise en scène de Stewart Lemoine; production du Teatro La Quindicina (Edmonton, Canada).TORONTO : LE POIDS DU «MAINSTREAM THEATRE» Toronto est, à n\u2019en pas douter, le principal centre théâtral du Canada anglais.Si on en juge, toutefois, par les commentateurs spécialisés de la scène torontoise1, le théâtre expérimental y occuperait une place précaire et la vie théâtrale y serait dominée par ce que l\u2019on nomme en anglais le «mainstream theatre» dont les motivations artistiques et les choix de programmation sont tournés vers le savoir-faire et les succès de Broadway ou, au mieux, vers le répertoire de pièces bien faites du West End londonien.Dans un tel contexte, il ne faut sans doute pas s\u2019étonner qu\u2019un festival à vocation internationale comme le du Maurier World Stage ait eu du mal à trouver à Toronto même des spectacles qui puissent proposer une théâtralité non conventionnelle dotée d\u2019une certaine rigueur.Le théâtre canadien-anglais, sauf de rarissimes exceptions, manque d\u2019audace et d\u2019invention.Pour l\u2019heure, Toronto n\u2019aurait à offrir que des recherches inégales qui n\u2019ont pas encore réussi à créer un véritable mouvement rénovateur, et à rassembler un public significatif comme cêla a été le cas dans les années quatre-vingt à Montréal.Par conséquent, un festival de théâtre a la tâche malaisée à Toronto : il lui faut être à la fois un événement provocant, sinon stimulant, et pas trop, pour ne pas s\u2019aliéner l\u2019appui de spectateurs habitués plus souvent qu\u2019autrement à consommer des produits théâtraux standardisés.Le du Maurier World Stage a ses quartiers au cœur du Harbour-front, le vieux port de Toronto récemment aménagé en espaces publics récréatifs: on y trouve notamment quatre lieux théâtraux, flambant neufs, de différentes dimensions, où étaient distribués les quinze spectacles programmés qui couvraient cinq continents \u2014 toutefois, on aura pu regretter que la majorité des spectacles aient été d\u2019origine canadienne, soit six compagnies cana-diennes-anglaises et deux troupes québécoises, ce qui, pour un festival qui prétend avoir une vocation internationale, rend perplexe.Quoi qu\u2019il en soit, ce festival biennal est encore jeune: il n\u2019en était en 1988 qu\u2019à sa deuxième édition; or les sources de subventions pour de tels événements étant ce quelles sont \u2014 la même remarque s\u2019appliquerait à la 3e édition du Festival de théâtre des Amériques dont je parle plus loin \u2014, les organisateurs et la directrice artistique, Lilie Zendel, ont certainement eu à composer avec de multiples contraintes : bien des spectacles étrangers d\u2019envergure ne sont tout simplement pas accessibles au public canadien (ou québécois) parce que nos différents festivals n\u2019ont finalement accès qu\u2019à un soutien public et privé de deuxième ordre, comparé aux fes- tivals internationaux qui se tiennent en Europe.Quand pourra-t-on inviter les grands créateurs scéniques de notre époque que sont les Tadeus Kantor, Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson (pour ne nommer ici que les plus connus) et les metteurs en scène d\u2019envergure tels Peter Brook, Peter Stein, Patrice Chéreau, Ariane Mnouch-kine, Giorgio Strehler?Nul doute qu\u2019il faudra attendre que le Conseil des Arts et le ministère des Affaires exérieures du Canada obtiennent du gouvernement fédéral les sommes nécessaires à un soutien adéquat pour que de tels événements jouent mieux qu\u2019ac-tuellement leur rôle de colimateur d\u2019un esprit théâtral tourné vers le risque artistique et l\u2019invention.Parmi les cinq spectacles que j\u2019ai pu voir au du Maurier World Stage, Stars in the Morning Sky d\u2019Alexandre Galin par le Théâtre Maly de Leningrad était, quoique d\u2019une facture dramaturgique somme toute assez traditionnelle, le plus achevé, tant sur le plan du jeu qu\u2019à celui de la mise en scène (Léo Dodin).La direction du festival avait eu la bonne idée d\u2019utiliser le surtitrage en anglais, ce qui permettait de suivre les abondants dialogues sans pour autant être, privés de l\u2019écoute de la langue russe et des intonations des acteurs, tous excellents.Cette pièce, écrite en 1984 et autorisée, glasnost oblige, à être représentée en 1987, dépeignait un milieu de prostituées que les autorités, à la veille des Jeux Olympiques de 1980 à Moscou, avaient retiré des rues de la capitale pour les parquer dans un baraquement délabré de la banlieue.Cette opération de ratissage (et d\u2019hypocrisie sociale, car au pays des Soviets les «vices» occidentaux ont été soi-disant éliminés depuis la Révolution d\u2019Octobre.) est le levier qui permet au dramaturge de révéler la face cachée d\u2019une société qui s\u2019est longtemps mentie à elle-même (pas seulement concernant ses mœurs) et qui aurait soudainement à prendre en compte la part d\u2019irrationalité qui, même à travers la déchéance de certains êtres, contribue à l\u2019humaniser.Un autre spectacle venu de l\u2019Est, Tattoe Theatre, par l\u2019Open Stage de Yougoslavie, abordait également la problé- matique de la délinquance et la question de l\u2019individualité blessée par le récit de la vie amoureuse d\u2019un jeune couple que la pauvreté (autre tabou communiste) met à rude épreuve.L\u2019auteur et metteur en scène, Mladen Materic, a construit là une pantomime dont le principal mérite était de prendre le contrepied de l\u2019idéalisme officiel et du réalisme socialiste.Mais sur le plan de la maîtrise formelle et U liau1' ivaiU périr lier cdW ®fl ¦l\u201e0 p#le3t irteceli:: lire, fiecteran jicet» le |ue» ou par lîtlV tusse ave jü aérien ei pi nappait lisant la &agl ¦très, sans insi natalité.Ma topos traire Bise împrovi ue$\u2019 ni, an contrai de l\u2019invention, le spectacle est resté fragile et bon enfant.Du côté canadien-anglais, deux spectacles aux antipodes l\u2019un de l\u2019autre exprimaient bien l\u2019ambivalence à l\u2019égard de la théâtralité que à je signalais plus haut.D\u2019un côté, Fool\u2019s Edge, écrit, mis en scène et joué par Ronnie Burkett, était un produit-type de Y entertainment à l\u2019américaine; Burkett jouait en virtuose un nombre impression- itnrség°ur'; nant de personnages, et ses marion- Bolide.' nettes qui empruntaient leurs identités aux types de la comme-dia dell\u2019arte, avaient du bagout et tout juste assez d\u2019impertinence pour titiller l\u2019esprit; avec son langage à double sens, ses allusions à des réalités actuelles, ses décors jolis, sa gueule de rock star, Burkett a tout pour triompher.dans le circuit des variétés.De l\u2019autre côté, Tears of a Dinosaur, écrit et mis en scène par Blake Brooker, proposait une parabole excentrique, non pyschologique, sur trois individus, candidats idéals à l\u2019extinction, d\u2019où la métaphore du dinosaure dont des répliques de diverses dimensions étaient utilisées tout au long de la représentation, créant tour à tour des situations cocasses ou insolites, oniriques et ironiques.Mais ce travail paraissait inachevé, sans colonne vertébrale, faute d\u2019une direction d\u2019acteurs rigoureuse et d\u2019une mise en scène qui aurait su tirer parti des pistes offertes par iap .une écriture dramatique originale, j iti^ ]f \" L\u2019un des événements attendus ;-de ce festival était sans contredit la) if, création de Tectonic Plates, une créa- % tion collective du Théâtre Repère de Québec, dirigée par Robert ^ Lepage.La scénographie de Michael Levine imposait d\u2019emblée un espace ouvert, très dépouillé un peu surréel, exploitant à fonc la verticalité du déjà merveilleux du Maurier Theatre Center : tout kl métrant ton \u2019un psychiatre lier sur un cas tpersonoaiit les destinées.; Europe et de t sur le l\u201ct) avaient réi alaises, de sot \"Wur ltre®ei \u201c\u2019\u2022UJ ®%raj %: r, n ' V,.PARACHUTE 56 72 etnettf ;nc,ar\u201e, q haut, en plein cœur de la salle ide, avait été suspendu un piano queue étincelant, surplombant ne piscine, figurant l\u2019océan (ou renise), flanquée sur l\u2019un de ses ôtés d\u2019un arbre dénudé qui renoyait aussitôt au premier acte ! 'En attendant Godot.L\u2019écriture du pectacle aurait voulu coller à image centrale, suggérée par le itre, d\u2019une dérive des continents, létaphore de l\u2019éloignement qui ffecterait les relations humaines n cette fin de siècle.Chaque «pla-ue» ou partie avait une durée pproximative de trente minutes; ette première mouture en présen-ait cinq.L\u2019ensemble m\u2019est apparu our le moins inégal.Parfois les Cl1 sc®i Images \u2014 celle, par exemple, du ûaniste qui, depuis la piscine, tait hissé avec son banc jusqu\u2019au liano aérien et qui laissait longue-nent s\u2019égoutter l\u2019eau retenue dans ses man# non habit de soirée, tout en jouant lient W la cou «saisi, J 8 Jes l\u2019t J nc#j était» \u2019ftrnm w son 11 ; allusions ses déca rock sti riompher.candu u Chopin \u2014 avaient cette poésie [ui n\u2019appartient qu\u2019à Lepage, .isant la fragilité des choses et des ipertineo! ctres, sans insistance et sans senti-nentalité.Mais trop souvent, le iropos était dilué, sentait la mau-aise improvisation, butait sur es dialogues verbeux et triviaux u, au contraire, laborieusement composés».L\u2019épisode le plus 'énétrant concernait le voyage .\u2019un psychiatre qui avait à se pen-her sur un cas de dédoublement ,e personnalité.Les thèmes de errance, du croisement aveugle clan® ies destinées, de la séparation de nr des repli i \u2019Europe et des Amériques (no-amment sur le plan gastronomi-}ue) avaient réussi à indiquer un jouràtoj ertain nombre de fractures, de .-,u jnsol malaises, de sourdes inquiétudes, ;.i!g>Hl nais on aura attendu en vain que .lissai les dizaines de touches et de (bons ;t moins bons) trucs établissent tne problématique convaincante.1 a manqué au magicien scénique [u est Lepage un auteur \u2014 peut-tre un dramaturg aurait fait l\u2019af-aire \u2014 qui l\u2019aurait aidé à élaborer [f.|:|j me vision articulée, car plus soumirent qu\u2019autrement, le concepteur oguait lui-même à la dérive, en .[uête d\u2019un ancrage solide.pat ailé* jsJfP 0» #11 ¦toi Suz o Suz, création collective de La Fura els Baus (Espagne); photo : Louise Oligny.MONTRÉAL : UN FESTIVAL À LA VOCATION ÉLARGIE La 3e édition du Festival de théâtre des Amériques (FTA) a, pour la première fois, ouvert sa programmation à l\u2019Europe.Cet élargissement de l\u2019aire géographique de l\u2019événement biennal est une heureuse initiative, même si, cette fois-ci, il a eu lieu, peut-on penser, au détriment de la participation latino-américaine2.La vocation internationale du FTA en est donc sortie indéniablement renforcée sur le plan de la géographie théâtrale, mais il serait nécessaire qu\u2019on s\u2019interroge maintenant sur le poids relatif que devraient y avoir les compagnies canadiennes (dont les québécoises); celles-ci comptaient pour la moitié de la programmation de cette année qui regroupait vingt spectacles.A mon avis, il serait souhaitable qu\u2019on ne consacre pas plus du tiers des futures programmations aux productions nationales, ce qui aurait pour effet de libérer des places pour d\u2019autres spectacles européens, latino-américains ou, pourquoi pas, asiatiques.Je viens de dire que le festival présentait vingt spectacles, mais l\u2019un d\u2019eux, Plaques tectoniques, le deuxième temps d\u2019une création collective du Théâtre Repère de Québec, a été annulé en catastrophe le jour même prévu pour la première : le metteur en scène et concepteur du projet, Robert Lepage, visiblement abattu, est venu annoncer en conférence de presse que le spectacle n\u2019était pas à la hauteur de ses attentes et qu\u2019il avait pris la décision d\u2019en reporter la présentation à l\u2019automne.S\u2019il faut louer ici le courage de Lepage, l\u2019un des créateurs les plus doués de sa génération, on ne peut s\u2019empêcher de penser qu\u2019il a peut-être aussi péché par excès de confiance en assumant, ces derniers mois, trop de projets et, surtout, en n\u2019accordant pas à son ambitieux cycle des Plaques tectoniques tout le temps nécessaire à sa pleine maturation.Mis à part ce triste (et coûteux) incident de parcours, le FTA 89 aura offert un éventail stimulant de la créativité théâtrale actuelle qui aura attiré une moyenne d\u2019as- sistance de 85% \u2014 ce qui laisse bien présager de l\u2019avenir.Cette manifestation, animée par la fougue et la détermination de Marie-Hélène Falcon, la directrice artistique, est devenue irremplaçable dans le contexte culturel et théâtral montréalais.Cette année encore, un jury de sept membres'\u2019 avait pour mandat de distinguer les productions estimées les plus méritantes.La géographie de théâtre vivant est une chose, mais ce qui compte vraiment dans un festival, c\u2019est la possibilité, dans le plaisir de la découverte, de s\u2019interroger sur l\u2019art théâtral lui-même et ce sont les occasions d\u2019examiner, en les confrontant, différentes approches de la dramaturgie, du jeu, de la scénographie et de la mise en scè- V ne.A cet égard, on verra que le FTA a permis de mettre en perspective plusieurs aspects de la modernité, sinon de la postmodernité, nous poussant à des considérations critiques\u20194.CLAUDEL, PIRANDELLO, SHAKESPEARE : L\u2019EXIGENCE DE LA RELATIVITÉ La relativité du point de vue (par et dans la subjectivité) a été la grande conquête de la dramaturgie et de la mise en scène modernes, comme l\u2019autoréférentialité celle du modernisme et l\u2019hétérogénéité formelle (métissage des codes et des genres) celle du postmodernisme.En tant que parabole au service de sa foi chrétienne, LAnnonce faite à Marie ( 1912) de Claudel échappe en ce sens à l\u2019aire d\u2019influence de la modernité: cette pièce est para-moderne, en posant un discours univoque qui sacralise le destin d\u2019une croyante, Violaine, en regard de l\u2019incrédulité malveillante, pétrie de désir charnel, de Mara.Alice Ronfard, la metteure en scène, a voulu pointer par là, dit-on, la question de la transcendance, de Dieu, ce que la pièce encourage certainement, mais cette œuvre ne fait-elle pas aussi et surtout l\u2019apologie de la virginité, de la chasteté et de l\u2019oubli de soi \u2014 vertus cardinales des moniales dont Violaine se fait l\u2019interprète extrême en contractant la lèpre?73 PARACHUTE 56 Claudel a écrit ici une œuvre édifiante, un «miracle» \u2014 ce qui ne la prive pas de toutes qualités.L\u2019interprétation qu\u2019en a tirée A.Ronfard m\u2019est apparue plutôt orthodoxe, abandonnant presque toute la place au texte que la force, la netteté et la cohésion du jeu de tous les comédiens5 ont transmis de façon remarquable, quoique une acoutisque déficiente ait nui à la clarté d\u2019audition de plusieurs scènes.Mais face à l\u2019éloge clau-délien de l\u2019idéologie patriarcale, la metteure en scène s\u2019est montrée très timide; par ailleurs, venant d\u2019une compagnie qui s\u2019est distinguée par ses prises de position féministes6, cette production m\u2019est apparue incroyablement réactionnaire.Dans la perspective de l\u2019oppression objective des femmes et de la vieille dichotomie Vierge/Putain que la pièce de Claudel exploite à des fins délibérément moralisatrices, n\u2019aurait-il pas fallu déstabiliser la certitude de Violaine (et d\u2019Anne Vercors) ?Pour cela, on aurait mieux fait de jouer ce drame liturgique ailleurs que dans une chapelle \u2014 qui est, on ne peut plus, un lieu de renforcement du sacré pris comme absolu.Quant à la vidéo, son apport aura été très décevant, au point de paraître superflu, comme si on n\u2019avait pas osé s\u2019en servir pour casser le lyrisme textuel et lui opposer le prosaïsme de l\u2019image vidéographique qui aurait pu alors faire place au commentaire.L\u2019entreprise, dès lors, a viré à la célébration : dans son fondement idéologique, le spectacle n\u2019a fait que reconduire l\u2019hymne textuel à la sanctification où la femme renonce à «l\u2019œuvre de chair» pour se faire «servante du Seigneur» \u2014 comme quoi la qualité sensible d\u2019une interprétation ne peut seule être garante de la pertinence d\u2019un discours artistique.En revanche, la mise en scène d\u2019Anatoli Vassiliev de Six personnages en quête d\u2019auteur ( 1921) de Pirandello proposait un cheminement plus risqué et portait la marque d\u2019une réflexion incisive sur la théâtralité7.En fait, Vassiliev a soumis le chef-d\u2019œuvre moderniste à un intense traitement polyphonique qu\u2019il a présenté d\u2019ailleurs comme un «essai sur le théâtre» : chacun des trois actes se manifestait avec sa propre tonalité, sa rythmique et sa plasticité spécifiques.Après un premier acte très éclaté où les personnages étaient démultipliés, accusant la dimension angoissante et ludique, liée à la fameuse irruption de six personnages dans un théâtre un jour de répétition, le deuxième acte s\u2019ouvrait sur la salle, mêlant les comédiens aux spectateurs, et accentuait l\u2019humour du matériau dramatique, tout en réactivant, par des jeux improvisés, la question centrale de l\u2019œuvre concernant la frontière entre la vie et le théâtre.À l\u2019acte III, on retrouvait un arrangement plus traditionnel, quoique la présence d\u2019un rideau de scène sur tringle, à hauteur d\u2019homme, lequel coupait obliquement l\u2019avant du parterre, rappelait depuis le début de la représentation, l\u2019instabilité des rapports entre la fiction et la réalité, à la manière, pourrait-on dire, d\u2019une «coupure tremblante» dont ce théâtre autoréférentiel se nourrit.Ce jeu contrasté des styles où avaient été mis en tension un jeu psychologique d\u2019inspiration réaliste et les artifices du jeu dans le jeu, contribuait à l\u2019élaboration d\u2019une esthétique de l\u2019incertitude qui, par ses poussées erratiques, inattendues, toujours étonnantes, soutenait l\u2019attention du spectateur \u2014 ce qui n\u2019était pas sans rappeler la dynamique de l\u2019ici-maintenant propre au performance art, car les comédiens de la troupe russe étaient aussi importants dans cette représentation que les personnages «réels/fictifs» dans la fable analytique de l\u2019auteur italien : la combinaison d\u2019une gravité ironique et d\u2019une inquiétante légèreté dont ces comédiens étaient capables, a constitué l\u2019un des moments forts de ce festival et l\u2019on ne peut que saluer le talent exceptionnel de Vassiliev dont les recherches, pour une fois, ne nous auront pas été offertes dix ans après tout le monde ! L\u2019expérimentation de Hillar Liitoja et du DNA Theatre de Toronto nous est connue depuis le FTA 1987 alors que la compagnie avait présenté This Is What Happens in Orangeville*.Cette fois, le metteur en scène a choisi Hamlet, moins pour en proposer une nouvelle «lecture» que pour s\u2019y dépla- cer librement et littéralement «en jouer» \u2014 comme on le dit d\u2019un instrument de musique.La conception de Liitoja est globale, profondément postmoderne, charriant une montagne de contradictions (qui, bien sûr, sont aussi les nôtres), oscillant entre le respect et l\u2019irrespect, puisant aux sources (musicales, notamment) du romantisme jusqu\u2019à l\u2019exacerbation et n\u2019hésitant pas à laisser des trous, des séquences évidées où il ne se passe presque rien \u2014 sinon notre propre attente de spectateur saisi en plein anti-climax.Aussi, les principaux protagonistes de cette réalisation étaient le public (chaque spectateur invité à se déplacer dans l\u2019espace de jeu où plusieurs actions simultanées ont cours, pouvant modifier à sa guise son angle de perception) et le temps.Certes, la durée en elle-même de la représensation en imposait \u2014 environ huit heures \u2014, mais c\u2019était par sa musicalité, laquelle usait de reprises, de la réitération en boucle, d\u2019échos et de leitmoti-ve, que la temporalité, travaillée comme matériau formel quasi autonome, manipulait la perception, poussait le spectateur à éprouver le vertige devant ces répétitions qui ouvraient comme un abîme dans lequel s\u2019engouffrait momentanément le sens, renvoyant métaphoriquement au délire feint/réel d\u2019Hamlet et de son double, le metteur en scène en personne qui orchestrait à vue une véritable symphonie théâtrale.Jouant des intensités \u2014 le fameux monologue «To he or not to he.» presque inaudible, les entrées ostentatoires de Claudius et Gertrude, par exemple \u2014, déjouant la logique événementielle \u2014 en étirant ou en accélérant l\u2019action présupposée connue \u2014, Liitoja se plaisait à dissoudre les points de repère familiers de la célèbre tragédie, à faire en sorte qu\u2019une autre écoute, un usage autre du texte shakespearien puisse être possible.Le spectateur pouvait ainsi accompagner, au sens strict, l\u2019un ou l\u2019autre des personnages dans leur errance, dans leur aveuglement singulier, dans leur passion dévastatrice \u2014 ce qui ne laissait plus bientôt que des cadavres qui, un à un, s\u2019étaient réfugiés dans un grotesque Royaume des morts \u2014 sorte de maison close gardée pa une Madame entreprenante \u2014 qu était placé en surplomb par rap port à l\u2019ensemble des lieux scéni- ques et qui était le seul endroit absolument interdit d\u2019accès aux spectateurs.Avec cette production, Liitoja déplaçait vers le spectateur lui-même la subjectivité dont s\u2019était déjà emparé, au tour- nant du siècle, l\u2019artiste moderne; il ne s\u2019agissait pas, Dieu merci, de \\f*1' «h- participation, mais de liberté: le spectateur se découvrait libre et il lui appartenait de composer sa trajectoire dans la «représentation» et de vivre à sa guise, même avec des absences, son expérience d\u2019Hamlet, à travers la vision originale et ouverte, qu\u2019en proposait le DNA COLLAGES ET MONTAGES ti0l t plKllO; lou® pies®* Json arbitra poMiscoDtn JtBItfc® l\u2019idéil wagne: \\ IîPP; meneur en scé eu On connaît l\u2019importance des pratiques du collage et du mon tage dans les arts visuels (à partir des années 1911-1912, Braque et Picasso ont recours au collage); on connaît moins bien l\u2019impact que ces techniques ont eu sur les putequony démarches créatrices de praticiens de la scène, d\u2019abord dans les années vingt, et dans le théâtre de création depuis les années cinquante.Le maître-mot est sans doute celui d\u2019hétérogénéité, le collage rompant avec l\u2019unicité me te \u2022 ke modérai matérielle de l\u2019objet artistique et explorant les contradictions nées de la juxtaposition, de la superpo sition et de la simultanéité, princi pes directeurs que l\u2019on retrouve at cœur des préoccupations postmo dernistes.Denis Bablet a pu voii dans l\u2019utilisation du collage et dt montage «une machine de guern contre les séquelles d\u2019un roman tisme qui, à travers diverses péri péties, aboutit à l\u2019expression nisme, et plus généralement con tre le Gesamtkunstwerk, le rêv d\u2019une harmonieuse et envoûtant! fusion des arts dans un univer réconcilié»9.C\u2019est ici qu\u2019il fau faire intervenir les essais de théâ tre-collage (ou théâtre-merz) d< Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) don le Théâtre Ubu de Montréal ; présenté un ensemble de textes (oi d\u2019anti-textes, si l\u2019on veut) sous 1 titre de Merz Opéra.Schwitters s réclamait, tout comme Wagne avant lui, de l\u2019œuvre d\u2019art tots le10 mais c était avant tout pou b quatre inre les «part ms avec une W excep Miis, le projet ® i}' trouvai: Essentiel d \u201cK material nous ®Htl at i sis ce %ii] Htâti te rai voca.SSiftStui er s Un, IDC, S fer 1 %JV %i Nr % Ni PARACHUTE 56 74 \u2018'S 'HJ \"«N, \"«kj SüW H JI1 too I' \\\\ quelle heure on meurt ?e ®odel I\tj j des productions leu merci ¦ Branle-bas (Montréal) Je liberté' * adaptation :âlt libre et J\t.\t.1\tet mise en scene de Martin Faucher; photo : Louise Oligny.flâne JT ! ous les matériaux» dont la combinaison arbitraire produirait des \u20180\\TAGEj( dations contradictoires et engen-Irerait des associations libres \u2014 out le contraire, en somme, de Hl\u2019idéal wagnérien de fusion des irts11.L\u2019approche de Denis Rrar]uei Tarleau, responsable du collage et netteur en scène, était à la fois éduisante et limitée.Séduisante )arce qu\u2019on y entendait les pre-nières tentatives de poésie sonore omme ce «RIBBLE BOBBLE :t( eu sut ri dans années tu tre| HMLICO», soulignant la ten-lance moderniste vers l\u2019abstrac-est ion par un «processus de purifica-ion visant à l\u2019essentiel»12; sédui-ante également par la virtuosité les quatre interprètes qui exécu-aient les «partitions» de Schwit-:ers avec une vivacité et un rec artistique dictions â le lasuperp n retrouvi diverses F' [\u2019express^ itre-i veut)5005 Sdiu'lltcrs J* tôt) toutP0\" proclamer «l\u2019égalité de base de tion commémorative qui présidait à cet «opéra»13.Mieux inspiré, encore que très «littéraire», l\u2019autre spectacle du Théâtre Ubu, OUL1PO show, exposait les jeux de langage du Queneau d\u2019Exercices de style ( 1947) et de représentants de l\u2019OULIPO (pour OUvroir de Littérature Potentielle).Illustration amusante de la relativité de la trame narrative \u2014 remodelée par des jeux de permutation paradigmatique \u2014, ce spectacle tenait plus du récital, avec ses «morceaux choisis», que de la représentation théâtrale.Cette célébration du jeu «pur» \u2014 proche en cela de la musique \u2014 avait son charme, mais je n\u2019ai pu m\u2019empêcher d\u2019y voir une un théâtre culinaire pour «branchés», une approche narcissique ou l\u2019on s\u2019amuse (brillamment !) avec des colifichets textuels.Des auteurs comme Beckett et Handke sont, à mon sens, allés beaucoup plus loin dans leur examen de la langue comme fabrique de fausses évidences (pour ne rien dire du rapport au monde).Georges Perec, un autre célèbre Oulipien, a signé les 480 «Je me souviens» 14 qui accompagnaient la trajectoire en vélo d\u2019un narrateur (Sami Frey) sur une route de montagne, astucieusement évoquée par un voile dont les pointes hérissées pouvaient figurer monts et vaux au gré de filins tendus ou relâchés.L\u2019interprète, ici, ne jouait pas : il proférait simplement cette impressionnante série de «petits morceaux de quotidien», sans chercher à les parasiter par des accents émotionnels; la scène devenait un lieu du monde où les sou- iplomb exceptionnels.Néants noins, le projet global de Schwit- ; :ers n\u2019y trouvait pas vraiment son rompte.Le Théâtre Ubu a concentré l\u2019essentiel de sa reconstitution |»ur les matériaux verbaux, négli-jujfJ ?eant beaucoup trop l\u2019ambition originelle de l\u2019artiste allemand i\u2019englober tous les arts \u2014 ce qui % testera à l\u2019état de souhait de son ; .^vivant mais ce qui se réalisera quarante ans plus tard dans les 0,ït aappenings.D\u2019où une impression ^'jlfu ie théâtre radiophonique où la dimension vocale est privilégiée, nais aussi et surtout un sentiment d\u2019assister à une démonstration , Technicienne, vaguement passéiste, qui n\u2019a guère plus d\u2019intérêt, sinon muséologique, qu\u2019il n\u2019y en s turait à assister à une pièce de Tchékhov dans la mise en scène d\u2019origine de Stanislavski.On peut donc rester perplexe sur la motiva- venirs, malgré leur caractère inessentiel \u2014 et qui étaient parfois indéchiffrables du fait de leur ancrage dans une aire culturelle «étrangère» \u2014 avaient pourtant la faculté de toucher notre fibre intime, car leur apparente banalité n\u2019altérait en rien le gestus de remémoration qui dit tout simplement l\u2019humain en marge de l\u2019Histoire, irréductible aux mécanismes d\u2019une rationalité instrumentale, aujourd\u2019hui omniprésente, qui fait que toute parole soit-disant futile \u2014 c\u2019est-à-dire non utilitaire \u2014 est frappée du stigmate de la non-valeur (ce par quoi, en revanche, ces actes de souvenance déposaient un à un des grains de sable dans les rouages d\u2019une société de rendement).Sami Frey, par son parti pris minimaliste et par sa performance sportive \u2014 il ne cesse de pédaler tout au long de la représentation \u2014, était un magnifique rêveur qui nous entraînait dans une fête de la fragilité, d\u2019une inestimable fraîcheur.À quelle heure on meurt?, le remarquable montage de textes de Réjean Ducharme, réalisé par Martin Faucher qui en signait également la mise en scène, conviait le spectateur à une espèce de rituel profane, intensifié par une scénographie (Danièle Lévesque), des éclairages (Sylvie Galarneau) et une bande sonore (Christian Thomas) d\u2019une grande force expressive.On se retrouvait ici dans un univers mi-réaliste, mi-onirique où l\u2019invention ludique n\u2019évacuait nullement les dimensions angoissantes.La chambre de Chateaugué (Suzie Lemoine) et de Mille Milles (Benoît Vermeulen), deux adoles- cents de quatorze ans en rupture de ban, nous a été montrée comme prise d\u2019assaut par une horde automobile (figurée par cent cinquante petites voitures qui occupaient, en rangs serrés, toute l\u2019avant-scène).Ces jeunes gens avaient la souveraine gravité des enfants qu\u2019ils entendaient continuer d\u2019être et ils se tenaient sur la corde raide de leurs passions sauvages, se refusant d\u2019avance aux compromis de l\u2019âge adulte et lui préférant l\u2019incandescence tragique d\u2019une mort librement choisie.Leur désespoir radical \u2014 d\u2019où l\u2019humour (noir!) n\u2019était pas absent \u2014 est à l\u2019image d\u2019une espérance qui a quitté le monde administré, ne laissant d\u2019autre choix que celui d\u2019un repli obstiné.Devant une vie qui s\u2019annonçait mortellement plate, la mort n\u2019est-elle pas devenue leur unique antidote?Ce romantisme cruel, ce pessimisme sans pathos, parfois même loufoque, radiographiaient, dans une langue brûlante, aux accents cyniques, la tranquille barbarie qui entourait ce couple pas toujours bien accordé.La sombre poésie duchar-mienne, entre dérision et folie, a pour objet l\u2019absence de beauté : ce spectacle, intime et bouleversant, a réussi, de manière exemplaire, à en signifier la violence fondamentale.Border Brujo de Guillermo Gômez-Pena15, un Mexicain vivant en Californie, relève d\u2019une approche transculturelle où diverses strates anthropologiques étaient l\u2019objet d\u2019un brassage et d\u2019un métissage aux implications critiques impitoyables.Le performer-brujo (sorcier), en complet trois-pièces, 75 PARACHUTE 5 6 officiait à une bien étrange cérémonie des masques, assis derrière une petite table où avaient été placés pêle-mêle divers objets dont des lampions, des jouets, une bouteille de shampoing, etc.Procès ironique de la culture de masse américaine, des stéréotypes qui y ont cours sur la réalité mexicaine et les Chicanos, la performance de Gomez-Pena était aussi un cinglant brûlot théâtral qui, pour mieux les faire sauter, matérialisait, à travers l\u2019hybridation d\u2019idiolectes, les multiples frontières (géographiques, ethniques, linguistiques), lesquelles imposent des séparations, des préjugés, du mépris \u2014 le brujo ne portait-il pas au cou, comme un emblème, un collier où étaient enfilées des bananes et des grenades de plastique ?Les Québécois auront pu être sensibles à cette problématique de la dualité intérieure : le dominé vit toujours une division qui se manifeste par sa fascination pour l\u2019Autre qui, pourtant, l\u2019asservit.Le performer s\u2019attaquait ici au monolithisme anglo-saxon et déconstruisait les discours par lesquels des cloisons racistes sont érigées, y compris par ceux qui en sont les premières victimes.Mais le spectacle ne devenait pas pour autant didactique, un peu beaucoup parce que Gomez-Pena se refusait à se tenir sur une position \u2014 «I am not your tourist guide into the undetermined otherness» .En fait, le performer assurait à ses interventions une dialectique des ruptures et des connivences, qui s\u2019ouvrait sur un destin mythique, à la fois méta-nationaliste et multiethnique où l\u2019artiste est «celui qui part et n\u2019arrive jamais».Gomez-Pena accomplissait un geste essentiel de déterritorialisation et répondait ainsi avec acuité à la finalité souhaitable d\u2019un festival des Amériques.Un dernier spectacle, et non des moindres, relevait de l\u2019esthétique du montage \u2014 je devrais dire de l\u2019hypercollage tant l\u2019hétérogénéité y était savamment cultivée : il s\u2019agissait du troisième volet de The Road to Immortality16, par le Wooster Group de New York, intitulé Frank Dell\u2019s The Temptation of St.Antony11, créé en 1987.Dirigé par Elizabeth Le Compte, ce spectacle a calqué sa vision réflexive \u2014 le mot «vision» est à prendre aussi dans son sens hallucinatoire \u2014 sur un texte de Flaubert, mais il s\u2019est agi avant tout d\u2019un emprunt formel, d\u2019une intertextualité structurante sans être explicite18.A travers un processus d\u2019équivalences, d\u2019échos et d\u2019analogies, ce théâtre multimédia (théâtre, danse, vidéo) établissait un réseau complexe de référents : en plus de la nouvelle de Flaubert, une biographie de Lenny Bruce, le film le qu\u2019un plan de la stratégie scénique qui superposait à une telle textua-lité hybride des interventions vidéographiques (pré-enregis-trées, mais qui donnaient toujours l\u2019impression d\u2019être «en temps réel») et une sonorisation (amplification des voix, citations musicales, sonnerie stridente) à plusieurs canaux qui permettaient des distorsions, des reprises, des manipulations de la perception, des mises en abyme, etc.L\u2019ensem- -JT «r-* r *i %* The Road to Immortality: Part Three, Frank Dell\u2019s the Temptation of St.Antony, production de The Wooster Group (États-Unis), mise en scène d\u2019Élizabeth Le Compte; photo : Louise Oligny.Magicien (1958) de Bergman, un livre de Geraldine Cummins sur la communication post-mortem, sans oublier les éléments apportés par le groupe lui-même, dont la réutilisation du personnage de Frank Dell que l\u2019on connaît par des spectacles antérieurs du groupe.Tous ces éléments textuels disparates s\u2019interpénétraient, se contaminant les uns les autres, et s\u2019amalgamaient; mais ce n\u2019était là ble avait tout du patchwork génial, ou plutôt du labyrinthe : le spectateur s\u2019y engageait à ses risques et périls, sans être assuré en tout cas de trouver une issue, car la multiplicité des codes culturels (et théâtraux) et des systèmes signifiants, dans leur inextricable et incessante interaction, faisait que la signification n\u2019était jamais évidente \u2014 ce qui ne veut pas dire que l\u2019œuvre était insensée.On i «itrnirdct était ainsi devant une constella tion à donner le vertige, une écri ture scénique non linéaire, sans finalité univoque, aléatoire, qui n\u2019en manifestait pas moins, à même une expressivité vigoureusement chaotique, une critique féroce de l\u2019idéologie de la rédemption (par la religion/par l\u2019art) en même temps qu\u2019une véritable descente aux enfers d\u2019une troupe de magiciens.L\u2019exploration privilégiée par le Wooster Group concerne, sans l\u2019ombre d\u2019un doute, le blocage de l\u2019artiste dans un contexte social dominé par la Kul- \u2022 \u2022: turindustrie \u2014 à titre d\u2019exemple, la1 dernière image du spectacle montrait le visage du Christ sous les traits de Wilhem Dafœ (qui fait j -.partie de la distribution et est membre de la troupe new-yorkaise) dans le film The Last Temptations of Christ, laissant croire que c\u2019est l\u2019acteur lui-même qui se trouvait ainsi tenté par la machine hollywoodienne.Rien n\u2019était affirmé! toutefois qui ne fût aussitôt passé; au crible du doute: cette entre-1 prise de sape (cryptodadaïste) s\u2019ec : .apprenait à la passivité complaisante II PP l des spectateurs, bien quelle affecfii:.::- ; tait de les ignorer.Le théâtre du) su*: Wooster Group n\u2019a aucune conso : lation \u2014 aucune catharsis \u2014\tme:;:; nous fournir; leur plongée dans klfeife mythologie la plus actuelle \u2014 c< c c: aca: qui n\u2019exclut pas le sordide et h :iemporain;: déchéance\u2014 est traversée par unt irstesqu::-interrogation spirituelle qui passa j .par une fission des images, de ; \\reasons, des situations, des «genres» \u2022 ce théâtre du Deuil, dans uni u;;a5(.société qui condamne ses mem I: bres, y compris les artistes, à l\u2019im j llDlèlfi puissance, a pourtant une fonctioi I FI (P flfoiiCiri («(lit éminemment tonique: le déses : poir, couplé à la dislocation de ff,.formes, se montre productif.JÉHÜ («te, DU COTE DU THÉÂTRE-THÉÂTRE \u201cKietai Voyait, W MtlLir Comparés à l\u2019entreprise dévas ; tatrice du Wooster Group, plu j .sieurs spectacles du festival parais «te saient bien anodins.J\u2019ai déj parlé du Chien (The Dog) de Jear Marc Dalpé19 : c\u2019est là une écritur réaliste superficiellement critiqu d\u2019un malaise social et individue sous-tendue par l\u2019exploitation d pathétique.When Girls Collide (Ec monton) se voulait une parodie de % Ptt Iki, I 4, 0101 PARACHUTE 56 76 -S* :*\u2022' A, JS&ëfa \u2022jïtï ^gs&ss Terre promise I Terra promessa, coproduction de Théâtre de la Marmaille (Montréal) et duTeatro Dell\u2019Angolo (Turin), conception et mise en scène de Nino d\u2019Introno, Daniel Meilleur, Graziano Melano, Giacomo Ravicchio et Monique Rioux; photo: Paul Emile Rioux.% ilms policiers de série B, mais ça ü se trouvai dime ho! mssitôt pas cette entti dadaïste) s\u2019 estait très mince et sans surprise.Les quatre spectacles en prove-îance d\u2019Amérique latine étaient plutôt décevants, si on veut bien e souvenir de ceux qui étaient au c\u2019a programme des deux précédentes \u201cditions du FTA.La Negra Ester l\u2019El Gran Circo Teatro (Chili), infime comédie musicale, tournait autour des amours d\u2019une prosti-uée et d\u2019un jeune homme sans le ou: l\u2019ensemble baignait dans le pittoresque, les gags éculés, et ne dépassait pas le niveau d\u2019une production honnête.El Concilio de ucunecorlmor du El Grupo Divas (Mexi-itharsisque), une pièce de l\u2019Allemand mgéedansi Dscar Panizza, écrite en 1895, cruelle - ¦ tvait été adaptée au contexte sordide et 11 contemporain; tout en misant sur orsée par ut in grotesque dont la charge satiri-GC;js* lue pouvait paraître aujourd\u2019hui images,dffiie peu de conséquence, la repré-genre; ;entation souffrait de rachitisme I ja0Siij|pt d\u2019effets faciles que le jeu burles-ne sts ffll^flue incisif de Jesusa Rodriguez20 cistes, à Fin -Le Diable) ne réussissait pas à nnefoncdoc faire oublier.La Sécréta Obscenidad Jf.|cdé| ie Cada Di'a de Marco Antonio de ¦location^ Parra par El Nuevo Grupo (Chi-li) et Pablo d\u2019Eduardo Pavlovsky Argentine) étaient deux pièces à :aractère verbal dont la thématique renvoyait, de manière oblique, à la situation socio-histori- que de pays qui ont déjà connu ¦ : .;\tn|| une dictature militaire, ce qui na pas ete sans provoquer des trauma-pj J cismes dans leur conscience collec-d)eîtMve; rine telle dramaturgie criti-que peut dès lors, après coup, .réexaminer l\u2019héritage de penseurs ^révolutionnaires comme Marx et .uFreud ou se confronter aux séquelles d\u2019 une mémoire mutilée.Malheureusement pour les spectateurs qui, comme moi, ne comprennent pas l\u2019espagnol, les résumés même les plus détaillés, publiés dans les programmes, constituaient un guide forcément lacunaire.Ces deux spectacles présentaient, selon toute apparence, une écriture dense et percutante, un jeu bien senti, mais leur impact aura été douteux sur les non-hispano-phones.THÉÂTRE D\u2019IMAGES : DE L\u2019USAGE DES CORPS ET DES OBJETS Quatre spectacles du FTA 89 peuvent facilement être regroupés sous l\u2019appellation de théâtre d\u2019images, en ce sens que la narrativité, sous la forme de tableaux vivants, y joue encore un rôle bien que tout dialogue, voire tout texte, en soit absent.Cette théâtralité qui renonce à la textualité a souvent une rhétorique emphatique qui est, sur le plan de l\u2019expressivité (comme dans la danse), une extension hyperbolique des possibles du corps même.Ce corps, pris comme support du narré, est aussi traversé d\u2019affects contradictoires qui peuvent être assimilés à une stratégie énergétique plus ou moins contrôlée par le moi.De là vient le risque \u2014 et, bien sûr, le plaisir \u2014 de ce théâtre volontiers pulsionnel, aux visées, sinon aux implications, métaphysiques.Dans cette perspective, il n\u2019y a pas grand-chose à penser de Pass the Blutwurst, Bitte de John Kelly (Etats-Unis) qui a réduit la vie tragique du peintre autrichien Egon Schiele, mort en 1918, à une juxtaposition de vignettes simplistes; Kelly n\u2019a pas réussi à trans- cender l\u2019anecdote biographique et il s\u2019est contenté d\u2019illustrer des historiettes sans parvenir à créer un langage original qui puisse ouvrir son sujet à des dimensions universelles.Opium de Carbone 14 (Montréal), conçu et mis en scène par Lome Brass, avait quelque chose du genre «son et lumières» et faisait dans le théâtre-clip\\ la trouvaille de faire jouer des bureaucrates dans un bassin de six pouces d\u2019eau n\u2019arrivait pas à déboucher sur autre chose qu\u2019un cliché idéologique «dénonçant» l\u2019inanité et l\u2019hystérie de la technocratie.Tout cela baignait \u2014 c\u2019est le cas de le dire \u2014 dans une mélasse romantique, était ponctué d\u2019effets spéciaux, s\u2019évertuait à masquer sa vacuité par un esthétisme racoleur.À l\u2019opposé de ce pompiérisme qui se donne des airs d\u2019avant-garde, Terre promise/Terra promessa21, une coproduction du Théâtre de la Marmaille (Montréal) et du Teatro Dell\u2019Angolo (Turin, Italie), proposait en une série de courts épisodes une méditation, forcément elliptique, sur la vie humaine depuis son origine préhistorique jusqu\u2019à nos jours, avec pour témoin une simple et lourde pierre.Théâtre de l\u2019image-objet plus que du corps \u2014 un rideau descendu très bas ne permettait de voir le plus souvent que les pieds des acteurs, et leurs mains occupées à manipuler des objets au sol \u2014, mais aussi art de la découpe, du concentré qui va à l\u2019essentiel, souvent avec humour, toujours en un saisissant momentum métaphorique, ce spectacle mérite bien des éloges, à commencer par la trame sonore de Michel Robidoux qui contribuait on ne peut mieux à centrer émotivement et à faire glisser l\u2019un dans l\u2019autre une vingtaine de vivants bas-reliefs.Enfin, il faut faire une place à part à Suz o Suz, le très controversé spectacle de bruit et de fureur de la troupe espagnole La Fura dels Baus.Véritable «théâtre de la cruauté» selon Artaud \u2014 lequel, on s\u2019en souvient, réclamait un langage physique «qui s\u2019adresse d\u2019abord aux sens au lieu de s\u2019adresser d\u2019abord à l\u2019esprit comme le langage de la parole»22 \u2014, le spectacle entraînait le public, resté debout entre les quatre murs de béton d\u2019un espace industriel qui évoquait un lendemain d\u2019apocalypse, dans un maelstrom où se télescopaient les images exacerbées d\u2019un rite initiatique: musique tribale (percussions et guitares électriques) et combats de héros, corps convulsifs et précipités oniriques.La dimension athlétique, sinon acrobatique, du jeu de cette troupe exclusivement masculine, le climat survolté et la sensation de danger \u2014 au sein desquels un tendre et violent duo entre un être fœtal, submergé dans l\u2019eau d\u2019un caisson transparent, et un guerrier intrigué et insistant qui entendait l\u2019apprivoiser, donnait un peu de répit aux spectateurs secoués \u2014, toute cette énergie brute, puisant à un fonds mythique, installait une fantasmagorie inquiétante.Mais rien ne dit que cette vision d\u2019un univers ramené à des contradictions primaires, gouvernées par la loi du plus fort, ne soit pas, sous couvert de libération des pulsions sauvages soi-disant réprimées dans la civilisation moderne, hantée par la nostalgie de XUnwesen \u2014 une barbarie qui a, pour ses officiants, la fascination de la force brute, dans le refus, hautement problématique, de toute rationalité.C\u2019est là l\u2019ambiguïté qui guette toute théâtralité «organique» qui prend ses désirs pour la réalité.- GILBERT DAVID 1.\tSignalons ici les deux principaux périodiques sur le théâtre publiés à Toronto : Canadian Theatre Review et Theatrum.2.\tEn 1987, il y avait sept spectacles latino-américains, contre quatre en PARACHUTE 56 1989, alors que trois spectacles européens (France, Espagne, URSS) se trouvaient aussi sélectionnés.3.\tCe jury était présidé par la comédienne québécoise Patricia Nolin et était composé de : Carmelinda Gui-maræs (Brésil), critique, théoricienne et historienne du théâtre brésilien; Lorraine Pintal (Québec), comédienne, metteure en scène et codirectrice du Théâtre de la Rallonge; Joe Dekmine (Belgique), directeur artistique du 140, théâtre de recherche de Bruxelles; Nigel Hunt (Canada), rédacteur en chef de la revue Theatrum de Toronto; Jean-Pierre Léonardini (France), directeur des pages culturelles et critique dramatique au journal UHumanité de Paris; Paul Lefebvre (Québec), professeur et critique de théâtre.J\u2019indiquerai en note, dans le cours de l\u2019article, les prix décernés par le jury.4.\tSignalons au lecteur que je n\u2019ai pas revu les spectacles québécois auxquels j\u2019avais déjà assisté en cours de saison; de même, je n\u2019ai pu revoir le Hamlet du DNA Theatre que j\u2019avais vu à Toronto le 4 février 1989.5.\tLe jury a accordé le Prix de la meilleure interprétation à Linda Roy qui jouait Violaine.6.\tJ\u2019apprends que le Théâtre Expérimental des Femmes, fondé en 1979, a été récemment dissous pour devenir exclusivement Espace GO.7.\tCe spectacle s\u2019est d\u2019ailleurs mérité deux prix du jury: le Grand Prix et le Prix de la mise en scène.8.\tVoir mes commentaires sur ce spectacle, dans Parachute n° 48, Montréal, 1987, p.59.9- «Exposé introductif» par D.Bablet, dans Collage et montage au théâtre et dans les autres arts durant les années vingt, Lausanne, La Cité \u2014 L\u2019Âge d\u2019Hom-me, 1978, p.14.10.\tDans son premier manifeste, Schwitters écrit : «Je réclame la convergence complète de toutes les forces artistiques pour parvenir à l\u2019œuvre d\u2019art totale.Je réclame l\u2019égalité de base de tous les matériaux (.)», cité par Helga Vormus dans «Collage et montage dans le théâtre dadaïste de langue allemande», ibid., p.221.11.\tHelga Vormus précise que «Pour Schwitters, juxtaposition, superposition, agrandissement, déformation, donc simultanéité chaotique, sont les seuls moyens de rendre la multiplicité de la réalité moderne et, bien sûr, de détruire toute illusion au théâtre, but beaucoup plus esthétique que politique.», ibid., p.222.12.\tCité par Friedhelm Lach, dans «Le principe MERZ», Merz Opéra, Montréal, VLB éditeur, 1988, p.142.13.\tD\u2019un point de vue esthétique et idéologique, le théâtre de Schwitters est un avatar de la vision totalisante qui hante tout un courant de la modernité, dans le sillage du romantisme philosophique de Nietzche : l\u2019artiste s\u2019y rêve démiurge et visionnaire, prophète du surhomme.Mais la fragmentation n\u2019a eu de cesse de déstabiliser cette utopie, repoussant toujours plus loin la possibilité d\u2019une retotalisation des matériaux hétérogènes, voire de leurs éléments constitutifs, qu\u2019une intense activité autoréflexive de différenciation n\u2019a eu de cesse de disséminer.Aujourd\u2019hui, le théâtre-merz ne gagnerait rien à être repris tel quel \u2014 à quoi bon : il peut certes servir de déclencheur, d\u2019amorce à une démarche de création, mais ne devrait dispenser personne d\u2019avoir, justement, à inventer sa théâtralité.14.\tPerec, Georges, Je me souviens, Paris, Hachette, 1978.15.\tLe jury a décerné à cet artiste le Prix de la parole pour sa performance.16.\tLe deuxième volet avait été présenté lors du 2e FTA, en 1987.Voir l\u2019article déjà mentionné à la note 5.17.\tCe spectacle s\u2019est mérité le Prix spécial du jury.18.On trouvait dans le programme un résumé des principaux épisodes de la Tentation de saint Antoine de Flaubert en regard des séquences du spectacle qui a sa propre «narrativité».19.\tVoir mon article intitulé «Une dramaturgie à deux vitesses», dans Parachute, n° 52, Montréal, 1988, p.66-69.20.\tCette comédienne a remporté, ex-æquo avec Linda Roy (Violaine dans l\u2019Annonce faite à Marié), le Prix de la meilleure interprétation.21.\tCe spectacle s\u2019est mérité le Prix de la meilleure conception visuelle et sonore, décerné par le jury du FTA.22.\tAntonin Artaud, Le Théâtre et son double, Paris, Gallimard, coll.«Idées», 1964, p.54.$ D E S S U E S CONDEMNED TO HISTORY (BUT NOT INVITED TO LUNCH) I; VU K*.of M0u ¦ I#ai Had Greg Curnoe actually read my introduction and not merely listed it(!) among the section headings of my essay, he would have discovered what I was and what I was not writing.Compositionally, an introduction serves that purpose and for that reason I repeat it here: This exhibition charts Paterson Ewen\u2019s movement through landscape imagery, from the early \u201cabstractions\u201d with their rudimentary signs of and material resemblances to landscape, through the semiotic schemata of weather phenomena, to the more painterly evocations of the phenomena of light and space.The focus in the exhibition is on the plywood landscape paintings.If the landscape works constitute a break in both the image and practice of Ewen\u2019s art, it is logical to limit the exhibition to what most fully exemplifies that break, rather than try to lead up to it with earlier works as if to keep the career within the narrative model of the retrospective.Needless to say, the notion of the retrospective is implicitly questioned in this presentation.In accordance with this conviction, the catalogue text avoids the narrative pull of a history and instead concentrates on the materials and methods of Ewen\u2019s practice.Insofar as the images of Ewen\u2019s work are discussed, they are treated in their sign function, where image and appearance are brought together in the materials of presentation.If phenomena can be recognized as a type of sign, their transcription in art is a further semiotic interpretation.It is perfectly clear that I was writing neither a history nor a biography, and that these very terms, as traditionally thought, were under question in the essay.Moreover, the presentation of the work in the exhibition implicitly called into question (which I explicitly repeat here) the model of the retrospective, allied as it is to an academic, narrative art history (you know: the first works anticipate the last and, in turn, are interpreted by what comes s> iii )T« ider !!E till after all lintei is iiton's sQtcTi lost obvious after but none are treated in their own right, which is also the result biography and \u201cinfluences\u201d bring into play).Perhaps, it is not so much a particular idea of history I am avoiding as the tampering with the retrospective format \u2014 with which Greg Curnoe has been honoured\u2014that Curnoe finds so objectionable.I am more willing to listen to Andy Patton, however long his and Curnoe\u2019s lunch must have been as they came to agreement on my abuses of history and Paterson Ewen.How is one, after all, to interpret the uncanny resemblance of their arguments?At least Patton knew what I was attempting in the catalogue and the exhibition, and he actually starts from the introduction Curnoe overlooks.But for Patton not only have I not produced a history, even if I wanted to I would not be able.I don\u2019t quite known] how to respond to a lengthy argument that deals with a subject I did not engage nor really feel that I should have to justify not pursu-|di ing: for instance, \u201cif Monk had been committed to writing a history.\u201d This was not my task; and I can\u2019t help but think that the seriousness of Patton\u2019s critique is marred by the misdirection of his analysis.(In quoting my \u201cthe measure of competency of a curator should be: how many histories is one capable of,\u201d Patton presumes d ijves permissif ® about Ewe These other ines were the le claims t menais and t «nice were m iis art whose e ugs with the p nofoundlv mar sp oaterial objet: îj'formofiier.Mlous pifrinp thin; its as if they Soryorindj MUeck that the presentation of a history can only be written, whereas I was implying that a curator has tc present multiple histories through a collection.I find it revealing that Patton wants to hold me tc the altogether different criteri expressed in my past practice as £ critic and does not refer to a more .programmatic text I produced as a curator, \u201cIn Retrospect: Present ing Events.\u201d) Nevertheless, let\u2019: take one of the criticisms, fo instance, the notion of th' \u201cbreak.\u201d Andy Patton writes 34G lines and more, approximately treated\u201d aDi meth «perso Mdi « it it at 18 that c, \u2019nsiveoj 7 «lilt Waites % k.¦ % \"X Ht PARACHUTE 56 78 i H Brésil] \u2022s y nistorj reementi ter ail, 750 words \u2014 a good sized article itself \u2014 on my mention of this ord.I\u2019m a bit embarrassed to say did not use this word as a \u201ccon-pt\u201d or \u201cmodel\u201d as Patton reads .Not for me the coupure épis-mologique of French post-struc-Lralism; I was using the word in s ordinary English sense.(The ust tense \u201cbroke\u201d gives hint of iis usage in the first line of the ;say.) That gets away from any 3n-existent claims I might have lade for a model of avant-garde or todernist rupture as opposed to ime consideration of historical mtinuity or any suggestions Pat-on reads into my \u2014 once again on-existent \u2014 claims for Ewen\u2019s ; an avant-garde practice.Yes, ndy, after all he is a landscape ainter as you and I point out.jatton\u2019s statement \u201cFor one of the lost obvious things about the its,' ew what : catalog! id he act troductlt lgthyatgi a subjeal lly feel til ¦ not puts c resejl orks is that they are landscapes\u201d 'ives permission to think other-ise about Ewen\u2019s work.These other and not obvious lings were the aim of my essay, he claims that I made for the îaterials and methods of Ewen\u2019s ractice were my way of celebrating is art whose essential character id achievement I saw as \u201cpaint-igs with the power to signify by rofoundly material means.\u201d Patin seems to think that I have thus :duced Ewen\u2019s paintings to merely Monkhij îaterial objects detached from king ahï I iy form of significance; but their task;anil îarvellous quality is that they are gnifying things.Patton instead ould have me write about Ewen\u2019s orks as if they were emblems of \"t| istory or indices of biography, iter all, he claims I should read wen\u2019s paintings in terms of \u201cthe îounting ecological disasters we ave created\u201d and look at the mat-rials and methods of his art in ght of his personal upheavals and îarriage breakdown.What is it in my close atten-on to what an artist actually roduces that Curnoe and Patton nd so abusive of the artist\u2019s intenons?What is it about Ewen espe-ally that makes the biographical etail and environmental milieu ) essential?Why has History been iken as the offended party with urnoe and Patton so willing to + e its advocates?What makes : îese respondents so uneasy that t reveal*1 ent practice35 ertoa®1 J.ifPfl f ;belfSi BILDERSTREIT Museum Ludwig, Cologne, April 8 - June 28 they either have to insult me and produce their own (and let\u2019s keep the emphasis on proprietary) history (Curnoe) or invest energy in a wilful misreading (Patton)?And they are not alone, judging by other published responses to the exhibition.I can understand why traditional academics and journalists have their orthodoxies unsettled, but why these painters?Could it be that Greg Curnoe, for instance, worries what would be left of his works if we concerned ourselves with the materials and methods and avoid their (auto) biographical content?Having reread my essay, somehow I feel that this demand for history and context, rather than letting the work stand in its own right, is an unconsciously envious attempt by Curnoe and Patton to diminish the achievements of Ewen\u2019s art.Why are both so offended by my mention \u2014 and their misreading \u2014 of Snow, Smithson, Morris, Pollock and Serra as if these were considered as influences or measures?They were merely means of directing expectation from traditional landscape image and iconography to the materials and methods of Ewen\u2019s work.By the way, I don\u2019t need Greg Curnoe to tell me how to be nationalistic.And please tell me, Mr.Curnoe, what is this 11 real chronology\u201d you demand?Is it something like a real man and not just an American gigolo?Does it go something like this: \u201c1968, moves to London, meets Greg Curnoe\u201d?\u2014 PHILIP MONK Over one hundred artists, with at least a thousand objects, are represented within an area of 10,000 square meters in the mamoth exhibit Bilderstreit in Cologne.Siegfried Gohr, director of the city\u2019s Museum Ludwig, and Johannes Gachnang, a Swiss publisher, presented Cologne with an ambitious concept, the basis of which was an intuitive, associative and subjective selection process that would present art from I960 on, in an \u201cextraordinary and fascinating panorama.\u201d Bilderstreit [literally: Quarrel of Images] is both title and concept : around I960 a new attempt at understanding the image in its relation to public space and audience was developed.The generally acknowledged view of the world, Bildder Weit, had been shattered with World War II, opening the way for Arte Povera, Pop Art, Concept Art, Minimal Art, Action Painting.Through these developments, the contributions of older artists like Munch, Fautrier, Bal-thus or Giacometti gained a new status.This exhibition attempts to make clear the relationship between both generations.Bilderstreit, as a phenomenon, has accompanied the history of art and religion through the centuries.In the first millenium, Bilderstreit meant a ban on pictures most radically expressed by the Book Exodus: \u201cThou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.\u201d The Christians adopted the Old Testament\u2019s ban on images.Only symbols or interpretations of certain events from Christ\u2019s life, such as miracles, were permitted.In the fourth century, people\u2019s desire for images gained influence, and using the argument of education, the church allowed images to be made.Pope Gregor the Great (c.600) stated: \u201cWhat the written word is to the learned, the picture is to the unlearned.\u201d In the eighth century, the controversy flared up again, resulting in iconoclasm, the planned destruction of holy images.The Byzantine kings supported iconoclasm; the people and monks, the making of holy images.In 72 6, all imagery was ruthlessly removed from the churches.There appeared a number of theological texts defending image making; the most famous are by Damascenus and Theodor Studites, who differentiate between image and original and make clear the difference between worship (belonging to God alone) and admiration (of the images).In 737, the Council of Nicâa\u2019s decision in favour of images resulted in the blossoming of icon-painting, which stretched through the century.At the beginning of the sixteenth century, during the Reformation, systematic iconoclasm passed through Europe for the last time: in 1566, in Britain and the Netherlands in particular, all the icons were destroyed.The history of ideas has brought fundamental change.The Nazi dictators of our century knew how to use art for their own purposes and issued it into the service of propaganda.The newest societal development places art in the service of helping the Corporate Identity of great companies, as decoration or justification of certain corporate doings (as well as tax breaks) \u2014 famous examples include Saatchi & Saatchi, Mobil Oil, and Philip Morris.Bilderstreit Widerspruch - 11 S tvw *¦ * Einheit Fragment 79 PARACHUTE 56 In 1977-78, Anselm Kiefer reopened the discussion of the term Bilderstreit.The exhibition in Cologne has been very much influenced by this problem that Kiefer formulated for his generation as to \u201cwhat right, what function, and what position art has in the world today, in our current society\u201d \u2014 questions that were very important during the centuries of iconoclasms.Questions that every artist and every curator have to answer for him or herself.Whatever answers Gohr and Gachnang offered, those that the viewer finds in the exhibition are completely different.In this case, the answers cannot be found in the art shown, but in certain aspects that are artificially set above art.What rights does art have in today\u2019s society ?If one replaces the word \u201cart\u201d with \u201cartist,\u201d the question becomes relevant in relation to the many court cases that have sprung up around this exhibit.As far as the artist is concernred, he or she has none.There were many artists who, under no circumstances, wanted to be part of this exhibit.For example, Anselm Kiefer, in an open letter, clearly stated his opposition to being involved in it: \u201cI want to take a stand against the exploitation of artists, against the misuse of our names in connection with pointless exhibits, and against the \u201crape\u201d of artists, who clearly state that they wish to have no part in such an exhibit, whose paintings are then secretly lent to exhibitors behind their backs\u201d (Kiefer, in a statement dated 4.4.89).Or Daniel Buren, who found himself so falsely represented that his works shown could be defined as \u201cfakes.\u201d Donald Judd agreed to be shown only under the condition that a text of his, criticizing the exhibit\u2019s concept, be published.This proposition was refused by the exhibition organizers and explained away by weak arguments.But at the opening, several works by Kiefer and Judd were present; as well as objects by Richter and by Kounellis, artists who had refused to participate.So what rights has the artist?Not until artists begin to oppose the political strategies of the market and thereby take the responsibil- ity for their production will they gain their rights.In the possession of a collector, a work of art is his or her legal property, and is accordingly at the disposal of that person.(Some collectors withdrew their loans to the exhibition, a gesture which has resulted in lawsuits.) Yet the possibility exists \u2014 in Germany at least \u2014 to protect oneself from selecting committees with a so-called \u201cright of exhibition.\u201d When selling works to a gallery dealer, the artist has only to reserve this right (in the presence of a witness) for himself.The right of exhibition, then, remains with the artist whether or not a respective buyer is informed about it by the dealer.What function, task and position can art hold in our time ?That question gets a definite answer in Cologne\u2019s exhibition: art is at the mercy of politics.In group exhibitions of this dimension, neither the individual artist nor the particular work are the focus; the artist\u2019s position and the single work are both subordinate to, and part of, the intent and concept of the exhibition \u2014 to the curator\u2019s ultimate profit, not the artist\u2019s.They\u2019re placed as illustrative examples of a highly personal interpretation, where each individual work loses its importance.Here one thousand artworks are displayed in contrasting combinations, for Gohr and Gachnang decided that the pictures should fight among themselves.Fame is easily equated with influence.And Bilderstreit tells its own story about how much power a dealer must have to be able to present numerous examples of the works of his artists.Said simply: the artists from the Michael Werner Gallery in Cologne are over-proportionally represented, not simply in quantity but in the quality of works chosen as well.The importance of the German painter Georg Baselitz should not be put in question, but is it necessary to represent him with twenty of his paintings while, in comparison, Joseph Beuys is represented with a mere three works; William Copley with eight pictures, Jorg Immendorff with eleven objects, yet only three examples of Jasper Johns and Barnett Newman with a few drawings and a single painting ?Exactly two works by Dan Flavin made their way into the exhibition, while works by Mark Rothko and Richard Serra were nowhere to be seen.And why forget Dan Graham and Joseph Kosuth, whose artistic influence since the sixties is without doubt ?What about Franz Erhard Wal-ther\u2019s Werksatz (Work-set) from the sixties ?Their refusal to participate which was disregarded in the case of other artists, will not do as an explanation.According to Gachnang, the explanation is quite simple : \u201cCertain objects are missing, not because we wanted to suppress them \u2014 it\u2019s just that we probably never encountered them.\u201d The Byzantine controversy about images originated from a religious dispute and was, to a great extent, carried on by the people.Visitors to the exhibition in Cologne today can hardly be expected to side with art.If it is hard for the learned observer to identify with the contexts construed by Gohr and Gachnang, it is downright impossible for the uninitiated to understand the connections.Let\u2019s take, for example, the story of American painter and gallery dealer William Copley whose work in the exhibition is surrounded by works by Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Max Ernst and René Magritte.In 1947, Copley put the works of these artists on sale but, with no buyer in prospect, acquired them for himself.Another example is the Hommage à Giacometti which brings together the artist\u2019s studio neighbours André Derain, Francis Gruber, Balthus and Pierre Klossowski.According to Gohr: \u201cThat\u2019s what we wanted the exhibition to demonstrate: the possibility of avoiding the superficial in dealing with art by suggesting, in such a way, a closer look.\u201d But what does Giacometti\u2019s work gain by the establishment of such a context ?And who is able to see these fine threads ?How is it to be understood when Gohr and Gachnang repeatedly stress an American challenge to European artists as the reason for a Bilderstreit l It might be hard to find an artist who began to produce or develop nw his or her art as a reaction to an American challenge.Besides, what is this specifically American element in American art ?What one actually gets to see are a number of rather good works of art \u2014 some of which could be called masterpieces.This comes as no surprise considering the many public and private collections of the first order that serve as resources to the exhibition.But German artists are dominant, especially Georg Baselitz, Markus Liipertz and Jorg Immendorff.One gets the impression that all the other artists serve as a kind of del éd .D* Deux livr back-drop for a chosen few who, in p iseencrisf ! the process, are assigned a place in the history of art.And the history of art is written \u2014 or will at least be affected \u2014 by exhibitions of this kind.The confrontations, as well as the threads spun, are accessible only to the very well informed.The antithetic hypothesis (the rational vs.the sensual), the exhibition\u2019s title, the connections, are construed for art historians, and consider neither the sense of the art nor the artist, let alone the uninitiated visitor.The Bilderstreit, at one time staged by the people, has become an exhibition competition, a game of power politics, entirely excluding the public.The exhibition in Cologne was controversial.Not only lawsuits, but also an alliance of different galleries in Cologne against the Museum\u2019s director Gohr.All those involved should nevertheless avoid small-minded combat and remember their responsibilities as agents between spectator and artn ist.Donald Judd commented on Bilderstreit'.\u201cThe majority of those who live at the cost of art and many of those who purchase art, museum directors and collectors, seem to have something against AG1 IF \u201e l-etit tiicirrf Liffipi:: iDuvetairc' r Kate in a Mi iJt-inonde).q isd expoi [art, Sun tine, appuyé ! aé, de Du' lie Hé', du I us kaultj I dc Lvoiarc lim cost: it la crise del P permis d ft», mil ms le art.The collectors have to prove jh frep te aj0 that they are superior to artists, in that they misuse their work since tdc they own it.And it reaches the point that they see to it that history is falsified and rewritten Their imaginary power over artists materializes into real power ovei museum directors and the world of the collectors.\u201d SABINE VOGEI 'D a ftp PS: l k ltion ! rien PARACHUTE 56 80 irt?LIVRES El REVUES / BOOKS AND MAGAZINES OUVRAGES THÉORIQUES / ESSAYS 3ls % étions! ( s«ve, 3ition.Bj Thierry de Duve, Au nom de l'art Paris, éd.De Minuit, 1989, 145 p.et Résonances du readymade, Nîmes, éd.Jacqueline Chambon, 1989, 301p., ill.n.& b.Deux livres publiées à quelques mois d\u2019intervalle, un même 'tti propos: la Modernité telle que I mise en crise par Duchamp.Dans de l\u2019art, «qu\u2019est-ce ^Udotï le premier, Au nom abordant la question as well thesis (il suai) 11! tie sense a et v lawsuit que l\u2019art?» à travers une sorte de il petit théâtre de l\u2019absurde et du caustique où trône un urinoir, de Duve fait défiler divers personnages (un ethnologue, un historien de l\u2019art, un philosophe, un socio-ilils dogue, un Monsieur-Madame Tout-informei de-monde), qui sont autant d\u2019occasions d\u2019exposer les divers discours sur l\u2019art.Suite à cette archéologie de la Modernité (tel est le sous-titre, appuyé d\u2019une dédicace à Foucault, de Duve repose la question de FArche, du moment d\u2019origine, de la périodisation de la Modernité (contradiction assumée (?) vis-à-compe vis Foucault) à partir du paradoxe erpolü ! de Lyotard («une œuvre ne peut devenir moderne que si elle est d\u2019abord postmoderne») pour ensuite mieux établir les paramètres de la crise de la fin et de la finalité de l\u2019art plantée là par Duchamp.De Duve conclut son livre avec les Duchamp dont il interprète le «il est permis de faire n\u2019importe jgjtjesi quoi», non pas comme une formule d\u2019autorisation, mais comme ,ntedo une formule de profanation: «elle libère le profane, elle l\u2019autorise à juger».Résonances du Readymade reprend les axes théoriques développés dans le livre précédent.De Duve confronte ainsi les rapports de l\u2019objet et de son auteur, de l\u2019objet et de son public, de l\u2019objet et de l\u2019institution artistique réduits à l\u2019infra-mince par Duchamp, à des problématiques particulières de concordance: le cas R.Mutt et Duchamp, celui de Le Passage de la vierge à la mariée et le passage de l\u2019abstraction autour de 1912, et finalement la problématique du presque rien que pose l\u2019art if differeo igainst and art jnei itjoft of art jidiasc* oartistS: worksi\" reaches tl it chat M rewrite :0ver^ phe\"'01 -a minimal, les bandes de Stella les pulvérisations d\u2019Olitski.C.D.Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989, 496 p., illus.b.& w.and col.Rock critic for The Village Voice and Rolling Stone, Greil Marcus has compiled his secret history of the twentieth century.The product is not exactly cultural studies art history, or sociology.The focus is spread widely across art, music and subculture resulting in a personal fantasy of a time that passed.Marcus\u2019 secret history is a fantasy, a personal construction of a history.Much of cultural studies has been devoted to remembering the promise of punk.(The democratic affiance that everyone can be a star regardless of money or skill, as well as the radical negation which it spoke.) Marcus devotes a large portion of his book to this same project.Version one (of the secret history) consists of \u201cThe Last Sex Pistols Concert.\u201d We are treated to a narrativization (fantasization?) of the relationship between Johnny Rotten and Guy Debord, Johnny Rotten and Theodore Adorno, Johnny Rotten and George Groz, Johnny Rotten and Hugo Ball, Johnny Rotten and Nietzsche, Johnny Rotten and Hegel, Johnny Rotten and Johnny Rotten.Accounts of alternative culture have been widely criticized for romanticizing and indulging nostalgically in male youth cultures.Regardless of Marcus\u2019 insights into youth and microcultures as a source of social change, he seems painfully unaware of the gender gap in his work.Women are largely kept as the real secret of this history except for, far too brief references to punks Poly Styrene, Lora Logic, and the Slits; Dadaist Emmy Hennings; and Situationist Michele Bernstein.There is no doubt that changes in gender rela- tions and the women\u2019s liberation movement are central to any history of the twentieth century, especially Marcus\u2019 which is otherwise perceptive to the revolutions of individual everyday life.This book covers interesting ground including the vast territory of everyday life and popular culture, entertainment, leisure and boredom.We are also lead through an account of various moral panics and mass culture theory, as well as the ground which Debord covers in his La Société du spectacle.We are made to understand the patently clear roots of punk in the Situationist\u2019s refusal to separate author and reader, to site sources, or claim copyright.We see the evident similarity to punk\u2019s demystification of the barrier between performer and spectator.This book provides a good study of situationist and lettrist strategies of détournement and negation.Negation is revealed as the practice that can make it evident that \u201cthe world is not as it seems.\u201d Lipstick Traces (although containing precious little lipstick) will prove to be a useful resource in its extensive list of Dada, Lettrist, and Situationist documents; including descriptions of forgotten or unknown events, films, books, comics, grafitti, newsletters and maps.Marcus makes us contemplate these art movements both in their formal concerns but more importantly for their political traces.Throughout the book public pranks of the Situationist International and Lettrist International are an important object of inquiry.One of the most important contributions can be found in this image of public life.Finally, Marcus narrates the events which precede the student lead strike of May 1968.At times the leaps from French intellectual history to America are too quick, perhaps following the tradition of his 1975 book, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock \u2019n Roll Music, Marcus is continuing to look for his own image.In the epilogue Marcus states, \u201cI have tried to make the ethos the Lettrist International claimed into narrative .to make it fit for rational consumption.\u201d One wonders who is the rational consumer Marcus has GREIL MARCUS LIPSTICK TRACES A SECRET HISTORY OF THE/îO\u2019» CENTURY i| in mind?The fantasy (of a rational narrative) which Marcus creates is also the fantasy of a rational reader, which seems in conflict with the goals of a profoundly irrational movement.C.M.Esthetics Contemporary, Revised Edition, Richard Kostelanetz, ed., Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1989, 469 pp.Perry Anderson, in his essay \u201cModernity and Revolution,\u201d warns against the indiscriminate deployment of the \u201cportmanteau\u201d concept of modernism, since it artificially unites and condenses a wide variety of distinct and incompatible aesthetic practices.Esthetics Contemporary, by bringing together over fifty short essays on the topic of modern (and \u201cpost\u201d modern) aesthetics, underscores this diversity, and in its own way indirectly testifies to Anderson\u2019s claim.What is immediately evident is the range of dispositions that characterize the approaches to aesthetic modernism: the definitions of the modernist aesthetic and their appropriate modes of artistic practice are at least as numerous as the authors represented in this book.Thus, to the extent one volume is able, Esthetics Contemporary manages to be sensitive to Anderson\u2019s call for caution by acknowledging the diversity of practices captured under the catchall of modernism.Nevertheless, some common threads can be detected in the assortment of essays chosen for this book.Firstly, almost all of the authors are American (the spelling of \u201cesthetics\u201d pointedly reflects this), and thus reflect to an extent a one-sided approach rooted in the historical (and intellectual) conditions of the postwar avant-garde in the United States.In a rather per- 81 PARACHUTE 5 6 verse justification for this choice, Kostelanetz dismisses modernist European aesthetics in his introduction as \u201cso similarly abstract and amorphous,\u201d lumping Adorno and Sartre together as followers of the Crocean school of \u201cexpressionist\u201d aesthetics considered to be \u201ctoo divorced from the real problems of artistic choice and construction\u201d (p.19).This evident distaste for the philosophical side of aesthetics is not reserved for the Europeans; Kostelanetz similarly dismisses the work of Americans such as Dewey and Kenneth Burke as too far removed from the gritty problems of contemporary art (seemingly on the grounds that what is old is no longer relevant).This is the second common thread: the rejection of philosophical inquiry in favour of critical texts along with \u201ctheoretical\u201d and heuristic writings of various contemporary artists (and in the process collapsing the distinction between criticism and aesthetics without a second thought).Within the perspective of modernism that takes the relation between artistic practice and aesthetic theory as a struggle in which practice must fight its way from under the millstone of outmoded thought, Kostelanetz turns to artists and critics on the grounds that they are closer to the \u201cradical\u201d artwork of today and therefore more sensitive to the naturally radical aesthetics which accompany it.In this context, Kostelanetz attempts to set up a tension between critical approaches and an elusive avant-garde playing a cart and horse game, with the artists in the privileged position of breaking all the rules and thereby outrunning critical attempts to characterize their practice.The problem that arises is the extent to which it is still possible to model either current practices or critical writing on this basis.Kostelanetz clearly privileges the idea of art as radical break, and thus the choice of essays for the collection reflect that progressivist stance, despite the \u201crevised\u201d status of the book.With the exception of the inclusion of Robert Morgan and Charles Jencks who are particularly sensitive to the problematic status of both current artistic practices and critical evaluations, the essays represent an exclusively (high) modernist view that seems rather inappropriately labelled as \u201ccontemporary.\u201d Indeed, the book entirely misses the ironic possibilities that lie within the process of revision, as it is understood in relation to aesthetics and art today.Nonetheless, the book manages through its diversity to capture some of the debates and directions that made (American) modernism what it was, and a number of these essays continue to be sources of debate and reflection today.Although calling it \u201ccontemporary\u201d is perhaps a bit of a misnomer, it would be impertinent to merely adopt the same progressivist stance and reject these essays as out of date and irrelevant for our time.K.D.Panic Encyclopedia: The Definitive Guide to the Postmodern Scene, Arthur Kroker, Marilouise Kroker, David Cook, with various \"panic\" contributors, Montreal: New World Perspectives, 1989, 262p., illus.b.& w.The perfect companion to Jean Baudrillard\u2019s coffee-table edition of America.While the increasing demand for the commodity of postmodern theory (Nietzsche gone Las Vegas) leads some to respond with cynicism, or disgust, at least Panic Encyclopedia imparts a sense of play with respect to its concerns.In this collection of epigrams, the gravitational pull of commodity culture has produced a suggestive and occasionally amusing handbook for our age, one that poses interesting questions about the process of cultural investigation.What sense is to be made of a period characterized by instability and change, where everything, from donuts to seagulls, is potential evidence, though only in precise locations?How is a chronicle of an historically specific situation to be amassed when what we know is not guaranteed in the same manner from one moment to the next?These issues of the nature of cultural investigation and the complexity of referentiality are omnipresent in this text.In this way, the \u201cencyclopedia\u201d is the per- feet trope for the KrokerKroker-Cook crew.Theirs is the paradoxical task of compiling a comprehensive body of knowledge \u2014 that is, the project of the encyclopedia \u2014 in an age characterized by an absence of such coherence.In fact, the very form of the encyclopedia is subverted in that while the book initially appears to be alphabetically ordered, upon closer examination, one discovers that it is not.This is the encyclopedia of the impossibility of the encyclopedia.Hence, the \u201cpanic\u201d: panicking epistemes and a record offin-de-millmium ambivalence.Rather than a litany of cultural knowledge, Panic Encyclopedia wants to capture a sensibility while suggesting the diverseness of cultural struggle.One finds many contradictions, if only because so many of the entries are more intuitively suggestive than elaborately constructed arguments.The occasional moment of rhetorical confusion may be exactly the point; if the observation is evocative (the depletion of the ozone precipitating participatory democracy), then its broader implications are of secondary importance.If there is a unifying thread, it is a sense of loss.Something (perhaps everything) is escaping, changing, vanishing, transforming, mutating, disappearing, imploding.The astronomical phenomena known as black holes is employed as a key metaphor for the implosion of culture.And the conclusion of The Day of the Locust is evoked several times as the new image of \u201cmob rule\u201d in the face of this disappearance.The responses oscillate between the \u201cecstasy of catastrophe and the terror of the simulacrum,\u201d but the attitude of \u201cpanic\u201d is constant.In many ways, the authors succumb to the seduc-j tion of the vanishing, admittedly resonant description ~\t* a resonant description of the peculiarities of contemporary culture.Yet, at moments the book reveals a certain tedious predictability of the consequences of the disappearing.In reading the text cover to cover (which is not the best way to use the book), the density of its despair, though tinged with cynical humour, leaves one wondering if there can ever be, or if there ever was, more than absence.(Not surprisingly, the one thing that remains as steadfast as ever is authorship, which is noted both with authorial signatures following their respective entries and exceedingly clever biographical information at the end of the book.The Kroker-KrokerCook contributions are left unsigned, marking them as the \u201cgeneral\u201d next to the \u201cparticular\u201d of the other writers.) Most of all, Panic Encyclopedia is an example of \u201cpanic social theory.\u201d This is what happens when our strategies of explaining the world are revealed to be archaic and ineffectual.Equally, it is a product of the fracturing of the \u201cdisciplinization\u201d of theory, where, for instance, the difference between political science and art criticism is blurred.Though some of the more powerful entries refer to the ambivalent position we find ourselves in when what terrifies us most is so much fun, and gives us such pleasure, the possibilities of \u201cpanic\u201d are left largely unexplored.When Maurice Charland writes of computer \u201cworms,\u201d \u201c(c)an this parasite be stopped?(Should it be?),\u201d the second question should have been brought to the fore, freed of its paranthetical enclo sure, and posed to every contributor, every note and observa tion.As \u201cthe definitive guide to the postmodern scene,\u201d where is it leading us to?Or are we not moving at all, but merely pointing at something that is disappearing over the horizon?The authors may respond that this is precisely tb question.C.A.l£S reC cacbenf f fois, P tiff Ufflx£0DCel jllllS PItll'£ itfûtF ([fSUSCitt ÛÉ itleaeur se su nuque dink die réalité dé Quoi qu\u2019il nouée l\u2019impos ïeœepnse.:: iiqueraeni : brêtreimput net taira tr ¦ère à redit té des pi PARACHUTE 56 82 >»»\tCATALOGUES / CATALOGUES ToUi %(fl t0 'lie si * \"title!, Hon 0f Cent ans de théâtre à Montréal, conception, réalisation, recherche et rédaction: Lorraine Camerlain et Diane Pavlovic, Montréal, Cahiers On; 1 A - gaps isApf®\u2019 eMmm.TIhE SAblE-CASTElli CaIIeRY LiMiTEcj the installation of De Stijl Dancing.Column No.5 in the Canadian Centre for Architecture Garden, Montréal, 1989.33 Hazelton Avenue, Toronto, Ontario M5R 2E3 Telephone: (416) 961-0011 photo: (Michel Boulet) Canadian Centre for Architecture IN BETWEEN AND BEYOND: An exhibition of contemporary art from Germany Curator: Louise Dompierre Gallery Hours: Tuesday to Saturday, noon to 8 p.m.Sunday, noon to 6 p.m.Public Opening: September 22 from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m.Exhibition continues through November 12 CHRISTIAN BOLTANSKI: Lessons of Darkness Organized by the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, and M.O.C.A., Los Angeles The Design Series: Packaging Garbage An analysis of the garbage crisis through products, photographs and packages Curator: Tom Folland Public Opening: November 24 from 5:30 to 10 p.m.Exhibitions continue through January 8, 1990 to