Parachute, 1 avril 1999, Avril - Juin

[" EIJ A-LI I SA AHTILA SOPHIE CALLE JANET CARDIFF TOM DEAN ANDREA FRASER ISA GENZKEN L »\t' \u2022 *\tJ k 4\t** > * / , M ih ?Vi 77176600308594 PARACHUTE, REVUE D'ART CONTEMPORAIN INC.ÉDITIONS PARACHUTE PUBLICATIONS directrice de la publication /editor CHANTAL PONTBRIAND directrice adjointe / managing editor COLETTE TOUGAS adjoints à la rédaction / assistant editors JIM DROBNICK, THÉRÈSE ST-GELAIS rédacteur correspondant /contributing editor VINCENT LAVOIE collaborateurs /contributors MARIE-ÈVE CHARRON, FRANCINE DAGENAIS, ROSSITZA DASKALOVA, JIM DROBNICK, ANDY FABO, JENNIFER FISHER, SYLVIE FORTIN, CORINNA GHAZNAVI, ELIOT HANDELMAN, ALAIN LAFRAMBOISE, VALÉRIE LAMONTAGNE, PIERRE LEGUILLON, MARCELLA LISTA, JEAN-CHARLES MASSÉRA, JOSEPHINE MILLS, JOHANNA MIZGALA, DAVID O'BRIEN, ANDRÉ-LOUIS PARÉ, BIRGIT PELZER, SHEILA PETTY, BÉNÉDICTE RAMADE, THÉRÈSE ST-GELAIS, JEAN-PHILIPPE UZEL, CHRISTINE VIDAL, PETRA RIGBY WATSON, ELISABETH WETTERWALD, JERRY WHITE, STEPHEN WRIGHT, GER ZIELINSKI abonnements, gestion / subscriptions, administration KATHLEEN GOGGIN conseil d'administration / board of directors: JEAN-PIERRE GRÉMY président du conseil /chairman CHANTAL PONTBRIAND présidente directrice générale/president COLETTE TOUGAS secrétaire-trésorière /secretary treasurer CHARLES LAPOINTE président sortant/outgoing chairman ROBERT HACKETT membre/member rédaction, administration, abonnements / editorial and administrative offices, subscriptions: PARACHUTE, 4060, boul.Saint-Laurent, bureau 501, Montréal (Québec) Canada H2W1Y9 téléphone: (514) 842-9805 télécopieur / fax : (514) 842-9319 courriel/e-mail: parachut@citenet.net Pière de ne pas envoyer de communiqués par courriel/Please do not send press releases by e-mail.publicité / advertising: (514) 842-9805 tarifs des abonnements / subscription rates: UN AN / ONE YEAR - 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Envoi de Poste-publications-Enregistrement n°08995.Impression/Printer: Bowne de Montréal inc., Montréal.Imprimé au Canada / Printed in Canada.2e trimestre 1999/ 2\"d trimester 1999.PARACHUTE remercie de leur appui financier/thanks for their financial support: le Conseil des Arts du Canada / The Canada Council for the Arts, le Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québeç le Conseil des Arts de la Communauté urbaine de Montréal.depuis >957 since 1957\tDU QUÉBEC CONSEIL graphisme/design DOMINIQUE MOUSSEAU SOMMAIRE / CONTENTS avril, mai, juin 1999 April, May, June 8,25$ ESSAIS/ESSAYS THE MEANING OF FLUX IN THE ART OF TOM DEAN by Andy Fabo 4 LE POINT DE GRAVITÉ Les sculptures d'Isa Genzken par Birgit Pelzer 14 SPEECHES OF DISPLAY The Museum Audioguides of Sophie Calle, Andrea Fraser and Janet Cardiff by Jennifer Fisher 24 INTIMITÉ, VERDURE ET BLANCHEUR ÉCLATANTE Représentations du vivre en famille dans les travaux vidéo d'Eija-Liisa Ahtila par Jean-Charles Masséra 32 COMMENTAIRES/ REVIEWS CHRISTIAN BOLTANSKI par Alain Laframboise 40 DONAI YANEN! ET MAINTENANT! par Elisabeth Wetterwald 41 PROPOS MOBILES par Christine Vidal 42 L'ENVERS DU DÉCOR.DIMENSIONS DÉCORATIVES DANS L'ART DU XXe SIÈCLE par Marcella Lista 43 LA BIENNALE DE MONTRÉAL par Rossitza Daskalova 44 JEAN-PIERRE AUBÉ par André-L.Paré 46 LOUIS CUMMINS ET ALAIN LAFRAMBOISE par Jean Philippe Uzel 47 CLARA GUTSCHE par Francine Dagenais 48 UNFINISHED HISTORY par Pierre Leguillon 49 THE AMERICAN LAWN: SURFACE OF EVERYDAY LIFE by Johanna Mizgala 50 FESTIVAL INTERNATIONAL: NOUVEAU CINÉMA/NOUVEAUX MÉDIAS by Jerry White 51 MAID IN CYBERSPACE by Valérie Lamontagne 52 CHAR DAVIES by Jennifer Fisher 53 ELDON GARNET by Corinna Ghaznavi 54 LITTLE WORLDS by Sheila Petty 55 EDGE CITY by Josephine Mills 56 LOVE FOREVER: YAYOI KUSAMA, 1958-1968 by Eliot Handelman 57 ERNESTO NETO by Sylvie Fortin 58 ROXY PAINE by David O'Brien 59 SPSS' COUVERTURE/COVER TOM DEAN, THE WHOLE CATASTROPHE, 1999, DÉTAIL D\u2019UNE ŒUVRE EN PRÉPARATION, VUE DE L\u2019ATELIER, MODÈLES EN ARGILE POUR FUTUR COULAGE EN BRONZE | DETAIL OF WORK IN PROGRESS, STUDIO VIEW, CLAY MODELS TO BE CAST IN BRONZE; PHOTO: (ISAAC APPLEBAUM) COURTESY TOM DEAN.DÉBAT / ISSUE FORUM DE L'ESSAI SUR L'ART par Thérèse St-Gelais 60 LIVRES ET REVUES/BOOKS AND MAGAZINES par/by Marie-Eve Charron, Jim Drobnick, André L.Paré, Bénédicte Ramade, Petra Rigby Watson, Stephen Wright, Ger Zielinski 61 BRUTAL 4 gidnis NORMAL he MEANING Andy Fabo 1 LUX IN THE ART of TOM DEAN UNTITLED (BABIES), 1992, DETAIL, PLASTER, BLACK PIGMENT AND SULPHURIC ACID; PHOTO: ISAAC APPLEBAUM.TOM DEAN, NORMAL STUPID PURE BRUTAL, 1985-91, ELAT SHEET EOR PAMPHLET; PHOTO: ALL PHOTOS COURTESY THE ARTIST.I.APOLOGIA & APHASIA The thought behind I strove to join Unto the thought before.But Sequence raveled out of reach Like balls upon the floor.\u2014 Emily Dickinson1 Emily Dickinson\u2019s description of nonlinear thinking in this poetic fragment is reflective of the critic\u2019s dilemma in trying to reduce over thirty years of Tom Dean\u2019s art to a manageable unity that can be itemized, described and analyzed.His œuvre is so diverse and multifaceted that \u201cballs upon the floor\u201d keep escaping as one tries to gather them up and organize them by typology.There\u2019s always a few balls rolling out of reach that have a different size or colour or texture that seem impossible to ignore in the inventory.And when you think that there\u2019s only one of a particular ilk you notice that there\u2019s more mixed into the myriad spheres, so they really should be included in the commentary too.The critic is left stammering fragmentary statements about a seemingly unwieldy body of work.5 PARACHUTE 94 II.\tCATASTROPHE & CONTINGENCY Shining solitude, the void of the sky, a deferred death: disaster.\u2014 Maurice Blanchot2 The catastrophe has already happened; we survey the aftermath of the disaster.Charred babies, petrified with a porous igneous coating, are cloven and strewn.Severed phalluses erupt in clusters on the ground.This is a bloodless emasculation, no crimson vital liquid seeps from the amputations.Each swollen cock is cast in bronze, they\u2019re giant immobile leeches and some are mutating: a scrotum forms on both ends of their truncated shafts, turning them into stumpy bones, perhaps dwarfed ulnæ and humeri.Severed hands affectionately clutching other hands and orphaned heads litter the stage, adding to the carnage.One fragment that is identifiably female consists of an entire leg up to the vagina and attached to an exposed coccyx and vertebrae.The vertebrae transforms into a woven cord that links the leg and crotch to a brain.Spared a grim mangling, a bevy of miniature resin nymphs happily strike demonstrative poses like kitsch porcelain figures from slightly risqué 1950s gift shops.Patrolling this chaotic scene are six bronze canines with tails of exaggerated length, their mammaries swollen for nursing.But the milk is encased in bronze and cannot flow.The walls of the enclosure are blank except for a series of large silkscreened texts, The Ten Commandments excerpted from the revised, standard version of The Old Testament.This is a description of a work-in-progress by Tom Dean.Initially dubbed The Whole Catastrophe, it is being created for the last Venice Biennale of the century.The installation, curated by Jessica Bradley, will be installed in the Canadian Pavilion, which is arguably the most eccentric building on the Biennale site.The wood and glass pavilion\u2019s architecture alludes to North American Native teepees and it is constructed around a living tree which is encased in glass within the interior.Modernist utopianism was pushed to an absurd degree in the pavilion\u2019s conception and now the caged tree seems distinctly dystopian.Dean\u2019s strange array will emphasize the antinomic characteristics of the site.The Whole Catastrophe also inventories various past bodies of work by Dean: The Ten Commandments echo textual works that he has sporadically created since the inception of his career; the penises point to body art from the mid-seventies; the beauty queens refer to a series of paintings on Penthouse pages from the late seventies and early eighties; the hounds recall a large group of cast works made in the foundry at York University in the early nineties; and the complete tableau could be imagined miniaturized and placed in one of his table works from the mid-eighties, Excerpts from a Description of the Universe.III.\tINFERNOS & PARADISES Ambivalence is the capacity of an object to be both attractive and repellent at the same time.The queen would be glamorous: polarization is a prerequisite of glamourization, perfecting the image, correcting the lighting.The antithetical position is the only one that delivers, provides the hardening of surface, that arc-lamp high-lighting and masking of image: counteracting the sins of secularism, liberalism, existentialism, metaphysics.- Tom Dean3 A superficial survey of Dean\u2019s work could lead to the conclusion that his work proposes a universe of emphatic binaries: heaven and hell, male and female, work and rest, symmetry and asymmetry, birth and death, stasis and motion, enduring materiality and ephemerality, unity and fragmentation.Perversely, the artist is somewhat complicit in this simplistic reading by constantly teasing the viewer with easily digested dichotomies.In truth, however, while Dean may be captivated by such polarities, he is actually more intrigued by the complexity of metamorphosis and interstitial spaces; he is fascinated by transmogrification and her abandoned children \u2014 sometimes grotesque mutants with the curious charisma of the freakish, sometimes sublime hybrids with the peculiar beauty of angels.So accomplished has Dean become in his exploration of this flow of change that some of his artworks seem to shape-shift right before your eyes.Flux is the crux of his art.Dean\u2019s obsession with transformation and mutation is manifested on both a mi-crocosmic and macrocosmic level.Even the smallest possible element is multivocal: a motif of triple Xs that crops up frequently in his recent computer images fluctuates as a code for poison, kisses, pornographic material, deletion and negation.With change so imperative in the details, it is not surprising that flux is a constant in Dean\u2019s greater body of work.IV.\tBETWIXT & BETWEEN Between the form of Life and Life The difference is as big As Liquor at the Lip between and Liquor in the Jug.\u2014 Emily Dickinson4 Lately in the artworld the concept of liminality has come to be applied most often to postcolonial discourses of identity by describing the in-between, or transcultural, space where social change may be possible.With Dean\u2019s œuvre it is useful to consider liminality\u2019s application in psychology where it indicates the threshold between the sensate and the subliminal, the interstitial space where a sensation is not quite perceptible.It doesn\u2019t take much of a cerebral leap to stretch this concept to define the threshold between the cognitive and the subliminal, a conducive habitat for Dean\u2019s enigmatic objects.There is a consistent representational mechanism in most of Dean\u2019s work.The image he begins with is imminently recognizable, well within the realm of the cognizant: the house, the pin-up, the staircase, the wagon, the snake, the dot, etc.His subsequent manipulation of the familiar is reflective of the master illusionist saying to us: \u201cYes, it seems so familiar but it is not really what you think.\u2019\u2019 We are transported to a phantasmagorical realm of the imagination not unlike Alice\u2019s Wonderland where everything is altered in scale, doubled, reversed, hybridized or turned completely topsy-turvy.This hallucinatory terrain is too distinct to be subliminal; we simply cannot repress such pronounced visions from cognition.Stairwells have often been cited as metaphors for liminal space as the transitional pathway for moving between levels, so it is not surprising that the essential work of Dean\u2019s œuvre is an infamous monumentally-scaled floating staircase, absurdly decorated with dots.An upright vision of ascent, the staircase is a corridor between the heavens and hell on earth while floating on unpredictable waters.V.\tVERTICAL & HORIZONTAL I had been interested in beds as a form for years because I found myself drawn to that prone position.All that was passive or without willfulness, that didn\u2019t attempt to defy gravity, but acquiesced to it, seemed more like wisdom to me than all that striving after wind.The bed seemed to me the essential horizontal cultural artifact, the cultural distillate of our horizontal components, storing in its forms all those associations with the prone position, both our love and fear of it.A horizontal monument, a kind of anti-Babel, a monument to our deaths or peace rather than to our strident willfulness.- Tom Dean5 In 1976 Dean moved from Montréal to Toronto to take a job as an instructor at the Ontario College of Art.In Montréal, where he had schooled, he quickly established himself as a dynamic young artist, co-founding Véhicule Art and also founding and managing the gallery\u2019s press.He started his career in an era when the brightest lights were more inclined to multi-media experimentation but he created works in a wide spectrum of THE WHOLE CATASTROPHE, 1999, STUDIO VIEW OF WORK IN PROGRESS; PHOTO: ISAAC APPLEBAUM.PARACHUTE 94 6 ^ ?é&kti v.ÂV >5 v;-' f.; \\ * - XvX ii:ar\" :%*ij UNTITLED (BABIES), 1992, INSTALLATION VIEW, PLASTER, BLACK PIGMENT AND SULPHURIC ACID; PHOTO: ISAAC APPLEBAUM media that was remarkable even for that period: photography, printmaking, painting, sculpture, video and performance.In Toronto, he had a paradoxically subtle but immeasurable impact on a city whose art scene was undergoing a major upheaval.Word of a number of his art pieces preceded him, arriving as juicy art-talk for the insatiable art community that was forming on Queen Street West.Rumors of the Cock Pkotos (1973), a body art series of Dean manipulating his lengthy penis by kneading and knotting it had caused quite a sensation, especially among the various phallophilic art subcultures, but there was also an equivalent excitement about his more formal projects like the appropriated and manipulated chair sculptures, variously charred or layered with petroleum jelly or painted with an illusory contour in order to appear flat in photographs.The most persistent buzz, however, was about a wild event, Performance (1974) in which Dean fought a professional boxer and his co-conspirator Margaret Dragu led a troop of pubescent tap dancers through the ropes.Bristling with the anticipation of a completely transgressive installation, viewers of Beds (1976), his first Toronto work, were confounded by the orderly row of old hospital beds, dressed with clean white linens and pillows and placed in the glassed-in corridor that connects the two wings of the Ontario College of Art.This static display inside an austere architectural vitrine seemed to contradict the audience\u2019s preconceived image of the artist as a wild-man.A couple of gently eccentric, thoughtful texts by Dean appeared on the wall, conflating the two diverging meanings of the word, \u201clabour\u201d: childbirth and work.Preparations for the constmction of Dean\u2019s most notorious work, The Floating Staircase (1978-81), immediately followed the dismantling of Beds.\u201cThe stair,\u201d he wrote, \u201cis an abstraction of the body\u201d: Like many cultural artifacts it embodies us, is a metaphor.It articulates the vector between the ascending mind and the proceeding body, the vector compromise between our forward directness and our upward direct-edness.The slow and plodding ascent: stairs articulate the difficulty of ascent after the Fall.6 By 1978 the plywood-sheathed, thirty-foot-tall stairwell to the expanse of the heavens was floating in an industrial part of Toronto Harbour close to Cherry Beach.As though the construction of such a mammoth folly was not enough, the labourious task of painting thousands of dashed dots on its surface was also undertaken there.If the intention of Beds was to embrace lassitude laced with melancholy, the objective of The Floating Staircase was to lay bare the notion of unrestrained aspiration and inane willfulness.¦¦¦11 Ü §§V>A'< ¦ H T-C- £ > C- l ' THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, 1998, EXCERPT, DONE IN COLLABORATION WITH MARK BELL.f / 4 * C ,b\\ \u2018n jr' ,4 In 1982, after much expense for storage and legal fees and aggravation in bureaucratic and practical terms, he burned the sculpture in a private ritual, but not before giving it a Dionysian send-off at the Palais Royal, a decaying big band era dance hall on the Sun-nyside waterfront.VI.IDEOLOGY & LUNACY Liberals forget that we are by nature dialectic, split, that we have an outside and an inside, and that the one is always doing violence to the other.We gain our strength by confronting our antithesis, our nemesis.The bourgeoisie in a liberal society attempts to eliminate dialectics from its life.It is committed to death, the lobotomizing of the schizophrenic fact.Liberals would enervate all enemies, giving quaaludes to half and grants to the rest, short circuiting every significant schism.\u2014 Tom Dean7 The charred remains of The Floating Staircase were shown at Mercer Union in 1983, laid out in geometric patterns on the floor and accompanied by Dean\u2019s contemplative videotape documenting the project from conception to destruction with a spoken text about his meditations on work and indolence.Much of the content is a generalized treatise on the burdens of living using specific anecdotes of the ordeal of building, painting and maintaining The Floating Staircase to illuminate how labour and career objectives dominate our lives, out of enforced necessity.While politics are not foregrounded in the videotape, the dialectics of Marxism are inherent in the piece.Also, thoughts on the more insidious ideology of fascism bubble up between the crevices when Dean explores the troubling aspects of willful aspiration.Dean made these connections more explicit in a 1979 File interview as well as other texts that were published concurrently with the ongoing The Floating Staircase project.Lor an illustrated text in an OCAD catalogue \u201cAlbrecht Speer Meets the Buddha,\u2019\u2019 he discusses the penchant of Hitler\u2019s personal architect for neo-classicism and quotes Speer\u2019s explanation of the genesis of his Nuremberg monument to the glorious Third Reich: \u201c[l]n an inspired moment, the idea came to me: a mighty flight of stairs topped and enclosed by a long colonnade flanked on both ends by stone abutments.Undoubtedly it was influenced by the Pergamum altar.\u201d8 A schematic for a project page by Dean in an issue of Impulse demonstrates how multiple series of intersecting stairs would create a field of swastikas.9 In an 1980 interview, Dean facetiously replies to the question \u201cAre you a liberal or a fascist?\u201d: \u201cWho\u2019s to say.Only a liberal could abuse the term fascism the way I do.Only a fascist imposes his imagery on the public.\u2019\u201910 Obviously, Dean is not a fascist; he aims to show that fascism is a possible consequence of our society\u2019s most pious assumptions about working and living.Maurice Blanchot has speculated on labour as a punitive measure in societies with strong work ethics: \u201cWork, in societies where, indeed, it is highly valued as the materialistic process whereby the worker takes power becomes the ultimate punishment: [.] Lor work has ceased to be his way of living and has become his way of dying.[.] When oppression is absolute, there is no more leisure, no more \u2018free time.\u2019 Sleep is supervised.\u201d11 In a similar vein, Adorno notes: \u2018\u201cModern man wishes to sleep close to the ground like an animal,\u2019 a German magazine decreed with prophetic masochism before Hitler, abolishing with the bed the threshold between waking and dreaming.The sleepless are on call at any hour, unresistingly ready for anything, alert and unconscious at once.\u201d12 Both Beds and The Floating Staircase were equivocal in their exploration of will/aspiration and rest/indolence creating a dialectic and simultaneously negating it.Similarly, Adorno has advocated \u201cthe obligation to think at the same time dialectically and un-dialectically,\u201d realizing that we are tethered to such thinking, but fully aware of the traps.\u201cDialectical thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means, but since it must use these means it is at every moment in danger of itself acquiring a coercive character: the ruse of reason would like to hold sway over the dialectic too.\u201d13 VII.PAINTING & PORNOGRAPHY Betrothed to Righteousness might be An ecstasy discreet But Nature relishes the Pinks Which she was taught to eat.\u2014 Emily Dickinson14 Concurrent with his staircase project, Dean embarked on a series of figurative works, that neither fit into neo-expressionism or the cool, mediated image painting that countered that movement.While his works 9 PARACHUTE 94 were intensely hued, scruffy, painterly and filled with unabashed eroticism, they were directly painted on photographic pages of Penthouse and Hustler magazines, allowing varying amounts of the image source to show.The earliest works from 1978 are almost a defacement with dots and swatches of colour painted over the faces and genitals.By 1981 the photographic armature is often totally covered and the works luxuriate in painterly sensuality; in a 1982 review of an exhibition of these works for the now-defunct Vanguard, I stated that everything about the works were \u201ctangential to the idea of metamorphosis.\u201d15 While I mentioned the difficult nature of Penthouse images for many feminists, I never articulated that part of Dean\u2019s intention was to examine the problematics of the erotic heterosexual male gaze within the context of the era and parallel those with a similar set of problematics around figurative painting.Out of all the various excursions of exploration that Dean has made, this seems like the rare motif that was dropped and never picked up again.He has since worked in painting collaboratively with Richard Banks and Gordon Anderson, but figurative painting has yet to reoccur in his practice.However, he has continued to explore the representational mechanics of pornography in unexhibited and unpublished computer works, and the resin nymphs from The Whole Catastrophe are the progeny of this interest.One published image stands in for his extensive digital work in this area.The collective Nether Mind published a photograph of a squatting Amazon wearing sunglasses and sporting a tight t-shirt to cover her ample breasts.A hefty flaccid cock has been imported from gay pornography and digitally sutured between her legs.The text in the piece gushes: \u201cFeeling good about myself.\u201d VIII.\tBLAU & ANGST As the hand is at the end of the arm so blue is above us.We are structured from the earliest moments of evolution in relation to a blue dome above us; it is part of our structure and it has meaning.\u2014 Tom Dean16 In retrospect, the two ambitious performances featuring Margaret Dragu that were mounted in the early eighties seem more significant than this interlude of painting.Her Majesty was performed at the Art Gallery of Ontario and Palais des Beaux-Arts, in Brussels; Fear of Blue was performed at Art-space in Peterborough, The London Regional Art Gallery in 1982 and the Akademie der Kunste, in Berlin, 1983.In spite of chronology, the later work, Fear of Blue, seems to be the last of a trilogy of works that includes Beds and The Floating Staircase.It is a strange meditation on the sky above us, how we em- brace it as a symbol of numinous transcendence but simultaneously fear it as the beautiful mask of the void.He couples the blue of sky and the blue of the dead, clarifying that both are frightening because they\u2019re thresholds to the unknowable void: \u201cDeath and blue: the magic and perfection of each is in its untouchability, its virginity.\u201d17 In the subsequent videotape, Dean forgoes Margaret Dragu\u2019s performance and instead fills the screen with a tale of two firmaments: British Columbian skies and older, verdant Vancouver suburbs filled with quaint bungalows that emanate an essential domesticity.Neither are the skies untouched by the banal details of everyday life.Electrical wires often bisect the azure screen and jets serenely arc through the picture.All these visuals are strained through a soundtrack of Hank Williams\u2019 country blues songs, giving an oddly meditative effect.Pointing out that the words \u201cspire\u201d and \u201caspiration\u201d have the same root, Dean asserts that the sky is a commonly understood metaphor for goals and ambitions thus linking The Fear of Blue to the uppermost step of The Floating Staircase.For Dean, the aesthetic sky masks the fearful void: It is to blue that we attach all our hopes: most luminous blue, you-who-lives-closest-to-space, who so perfectly occupies it.Masking space, blue is the idol to which we attach our longing for space.A luminous cloud of blue that we occupy, this thin glass caught in light, and its hardened core, on which we rest.18 While the text of Her Majesty elaborates on Dean\u2019s thoughts on the abuse of political power, the work is more significant as the portal to a rich vein of Dean\u2019s œuvre.Making the props for the performance (a steel house on wheels, a wagon with swastika wheels, etc.) rekindled Dean\u2019s interest in sculpture and led him to miniaturize previous works, even the grand staircase.The props presage sculptural works to come.IX.\tCOSMOS & EARTHENWARE True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.Artists do not sublimate.That they neither satisfy nor repress their desires, but transform them into socially desirable achievements, their works, is a psychoanalytical illusion; incidentally, legitimate works of art today are without exception socially undesired.\u2014 Theodor Adorno19 Another play of opposites in Dean\u2019s work is his vacillation between the indolent \u201cslacker\u201d and the heady overachiever.A slacker may have a solid reasoning for his refusal to participate in a system he discredits, an overachiever may have foolish, unexamined goals.The defeatist sphere of the slacker, the flaneur at the end of the millennium, is reflected in works like The Upright i £23 Dot, a serial sitework of right-angles spray-painted with a stencil on hoardings around the city in the winter of 1979, or the ongoing woodcut series printed on a debased paper, newsprint, which deteriorates rapidly because of the high acid content.Dean\u2019s major opus, Excerpts from a Description of the Universe, on the other hand, is a body of work that epitomizes overachievement.Theoretically, it is an expansive sculptural project without end, and from 1984 to 1988 Dean performed the sweeping task of laying out his entire imaginary macrocosmology in diminutive scale on forty-two roughly hewn steel tables.Objects proliferate on these hard surfaces, with snakes, horns, puddles or balls seeming to multiply like amœbas splitting right before one\u2019s eyes.Liminality becomes tangible on these tables because most of the artifacts seem to be morphing, caught in a corridor of semblance as they transform from one familiar object to quite another.There is a gentle parody of the Enlightenment implied in these works, especially Diderot\u2019s encyclopedic urge to gather and classify all the natural forms in the world.Dean\u2019s tables of contents are filled with the most unnatural forms, enigmatic fragments and indescribable mutants, most beyond categorization.Having materialized this inventory, he emphasized the material and the works on the tables were made from an array of hair, clay, steel, bronze, fabric and latex rubber.This metamorphic world is fused with sexuality, and many of the objects, like the polka-dot dress and the hair sculptures, have the allure of fetish; genitalia are alluded to curious forms, and orifices are pronounced and lurid, accentuating their role as the threshold between outside and inside.X.\tSYMMETRY & ANXIETY This still place, this patterned turbulence, a cycle of light and dark, and a cycle of seasons, constructed around its stillness a dependent form, fit an off-spring to the form PARACHUTE 94 10 THE FLOATING STAIRCASE, 1978-81, MIXED MEDIA, 20 X 22 X 24\u2019 BURNING OF THE FLOATING STAIRCASE, 1982.-ffn *1 } **¦ i .: turn.*r.Sfte'y: 44- \u2019 * I i \u2019t-t BEDS, 1976, INSTALLATION VIEW.5^- ¦ - - _ - - .«,« ¦.',\\w- f^Hg & Hi ¥' T\\'-! if.\u2022V isj v; ll-j itkJI.: of its womb.The life form occurs as an eddy in decay, a backwash, a hoarding and inertia.That inert place is active, and muscular, resisting the flow of decay.That inertia is Sisyphean.The inertia by which we fell became the inertia by which we resisted falling, a stillness that both requires labour and ends the fall.We are an inertial form, a chauvinistic form that is able to fortify its own inertia by consuming energy and matter, monopolizing and draining resources from its environment.We take the radiance of decaying matter and store it in ourselves.We create a localized decrease in entropy by accelerating decay through our bodies.\u2014 Tom Dean20 In 1992 Dean produced an untitled exhibition with five untitled works, all created while he was in residency in the sculpture department of York University taking advantage of the new foundry facilities for casting in bronze and concrete.The single work that was not a multiple was an oversized vase.Dean plays on the cliché of women as vessels by molding a form that, in silhouette, has a vagina-like appearance, with two thin, bowed arms making a stylized heart as well as alluding to the lips of the labia.The allusion is made specific by a thick fall of dark brown women\u2019s locks skirting the base of the vase.Two women\u2019s right legs, one stretching out the other bowed at the knee, are coupled in the centre of the gallery.Catherine Crowston points out that it is \u201cnot coincidental that this work shares a formal relationship with the pose of the woman\u2019s legs in Marcel Duchamp\u2019s Étant donnés, a classic example of the staged gaze, a voyeuristic fantasy par excellence.Dean\u2019s Untitled (Legs) (1992) plays in the space between an intimate represen- 11 PARACHUTE 94 V Wmm ¦ LH.\t À \u2022 *\t¦ HYPERBOLOIDES-ELLIPSOIDES : HYPERBOLOIDES, 1981, RESINE D'EPOXIDE, 10 M; ELLIPSOÏDES, 1978, BOIS LAQUE, 570 X 6 X 14 CM; VUE D'ENSEMBLE DE L\u2019EXPOSITION DE ROTTERDAM, 1989; PHOTOS : JENS WILLEBARND '?\u2022 - gages?» mmm \u2022tiX-W/*.*-J /.a\u2014v '\t' A^V.A '\t-\t; , ¦ -\u2018s K>fb-: \u2022 ? * (^ 1 *( *1 , » \u201e Pfw \u2022%¦ ' s S jp ' »«sr -\"'¦ «Mr ÉtiS.I s'V«53v.v\u2018 »-'¦\u2022*\twV ^ -»*V - .\u2022*.»¦>\u2022 AP-T ; :: \u2022: : ssMisv-.ÿ ¦.VUE D'ENSEMBLE DE L\u2019EXPOSITION DE ROTTERDAM, 1989; PHOTO: JENS WILLEBARND.sculptures en béton des points d\u2019appui.Ces structures stratifiées en béton, lourdes, brutes, éraflées, sont donc posées sur des socles en acier, conçus pour chaque sculpture.Selon les termes de l\u2019artiste, ce ne sont pas des socles, les supports font partie intégrante de l\u2019unité sculpturale.La conjonction de l\u2019acier et du béton réfère aux deux matériaux de l\u2019architecture moderne, un système de structure-ossature caractéristique, permettant l\u2019affranchissement des verticales.Le support en acier, dont le dessin varie, est nécessaire, il permet de voir la sculpture à la hauteur de l\u2019œil et il amplifie l\u2019illusion de sculpture monumentale tout en allégeant le béton.A propos de ces bétons, Isa Genzken a dit: «Je voulais créer des sculptures qui ne sont pas des modèles, mais de véritables sculptures.Elles sont relativement petites et en même temps monumentales5.» Ces fragments organisés, en même temps, ne sont nullement conformes à l\u2019architecture qu\u2019elles convoquent.Elles seraient plutôt proches du plan dans l'acception de Vitruve, qui signifie à la fois le vestige, la trace, l\u2019empreinte d\u2019une chose laissée sur le sol.Le plan serait la première étape d\u2019une construction et l\u2019ultime reste de l\u2019édifice lorsqu\u2019il est détruit.FENETRE, 1990, BÉTON SUR SOCLE D'ACIER, DIMENSIONS VARIABLES; PHOTO: PHILIPPE DEGOBERT.S ' 17 Ainsi, ces sculptures sont suspendues entre un acte fondateur et un acte destructeur, entre le projet et la trace d\u2019une chose.A l\u2019inverse des sculptures publiques, les sculptures en béton compactes de petit format, mais surélevées à hauteur d\u2019yeux, dressent une masse pesante et opaque.Conçues pour l\u2019intérieur, elles opèrent une inversion topographique.Elles importent et insèrent dans un espace interne clos un matériau brutal, abîmé, érodé, à l\u2019abandon dans l\u2019espace urbain des banlieues, des terrains vagues, un extérieur séparé, un espace indéfini dont on ne veut rien savoir ni voir.De plus, ce qui, en principe, constitue l\u2019armature d\u2019un édifice s\u2019expose, se détache dans l\u2019abri soigné, protégé, élégant d\u2019une collection ou d\u2019un musée, à l\u2019état de fragment, de ruine, d\u2019usure.Coulées autour d\u2019une armature métallique, empilées, concassées, parfois peintes ou incrustées de tuiles en céramique colorée, les sculptures en béton compriment le mortier, les gravats, des amas de pierres, les débris, un dégât.Elles se voulaient à contre-courant du post-modernisme, de son système effréné de citation historisant et de dérive, surtout en référence à l\u2019architecture.Loin de ce mode de citation convenu, avantageux et éclectique, elles confrontent crûment à ce que l\u2019architecture urbaine, infiltrée par la spéculation immobilière, est devenue.Exposant, dans un point de dévastation et de ravage, la paupérisation avérée, qui constitue une composante incontournable de l\u2019expérience collective, ces sculptures déclinent un ordre du dénuement, de la banalité, de la barbarie ordinaires, tout en y introduisant parcimonieusement un interstice, une trouée, un écart.Les sculptures en béton posent aussi la question du caractère achevé ou pas, déjeté d\u2019une œuvre.A partir de 1988, Isa Genzken concevra des toiles.Ce sont en fait des sculptures produites selon le procédé de l\u2019empreinte \u2014 matrice des traces en creux et en relief laissées par les surfaces rugueuses de ses propres sculptures en béton.Elle nomme ces tableaux-empreintes «Basic Research».En 1990, Isa Genzken commence dans l\u2019ensemble des sculptures de béton une série qu\u2019elle appelle «Fenêtres» qui exposent le cadre.Elle explore par ailleurs un matériau nouveau, translucide, qui constituait entre autres l\u2019armature des sculptures en béton: la résine artificielle d\u2019époxide (Epoxidharz).Le cadre est ici expérimenté sous une forme légère, transparente.«Je voulais quelque chose de transparent par opposition au béton solide, opaque6.» Ces fenêtres-sculptures bordent un trou.Elles sont installées soit en contraste avec la nature, soit mises en tension avec l\u2019architecture existante.Ainsi la «Fenêtre» de la Documenta IX (1992) est un dispositif en hauteur translu- cide et ajouré.Il est constitué de l\u2019addition de six fenêtres échafaudées sur trois étages, de matériaux transparents et opaques ici ouvertement conjoints de la résine d\u2019époxide et du béton (pour la partie supérieure), l\u2019ensemble étant attaché par deux charnières dépliant ce dispositif tripartite en l\u2019orientant selon trois axes.L\u2019exploration de différents mouvements rectilignes, circulaires, rotatifs, potentiels ou réels, se remodule dans ces sculptures articulées par charnières.Elles incluent en effet un mouvement virtuel puisqu\u2019elles sont réunies par une attache autour de laquelle un élément au moins peut tourner librement.Par ailleurs, en 1994, la série des six «Sâu-len» («colonnes») et des deux «Hauben» («casques») est fabriquée en résine colorée.Les «colonnes» présentent des formes cylindriques, rayées de deux couleurs teintées dans la masse transparente de la résine.Elles effectuent une rotation silencieuse.Le pied étoilé de la tige renvoie étrangement à une photographie d\u2019Isa Genzken dans le catalogue Jeder braucht mindestens ein Fenster1.La photographie montre plusieurs de ces tiges sur roulettes qui dans les cliniques servent à suspendre les baxters.Ces dispositifs mobiles faits pour porter les sachets transparents remplis de liquides plus ou moins colorés pour injections intraveineuses sont des appendices du corps \u2014 que les infirmières appellent les potences.Mais ces cylindres colorés ont ici à la base du pied ventousé un moteur faisant tourner la sculpture sur une tige.Les deux «casques», intitulés Mann (homme) et F tau (femme), sont faits de morceaux de tissus trempés dans la résine colorée, puis emmêlés dans un amas échevelé et suspendus au bout de la tige tournante.Les différentes couches de couleur fusionnent de façon irrégulière.Le mouvement mécanique, rotatif, lent, constant, au principe du mouvement perpétuel et d\u2019un effet scénique, semble parodier une question ancestrale restée aiguë et présente dès le départ de la pratique d\u2019Isa Genzken: comment offrir de tous côtés des vues diverses également satisfaisantes8?L\u2019ENREGISTREMENT D\u2019UN CORPS Dans le catalogue raisonné Jeder braucht min-destens ein Fenster9, Isa Genzken décline les différents registres de la photographie quelle utilise dans ses recherches : en tant que repère biographique pris dans un montage séquentiel; comme document-index de classement chronologique de son travail; enfin et surtout comme objet/support/médium de V l\u2019œuvre comme telle.A la série «Hi-Fi» (1979) remaniée quant aux valeurs de contrastes, la série des «Oreilles» surdimension- nées (1980), les radiographies légèrement agrandies de son crâne «X-Rays» (1992), s\u2019ajoute dans ce contexte le paravent à charnière fait de quatre photographies transparentes sur plexiglas (1983).Ces images explorent diversement la question du prélèvement, de la narration, de l\u2019enregistrement et l\u2019action de la lumière sur une surface sensible ou pas, l\u2019empreinte positive ou négative \u2014 la transcription.Dans ces travaux ainsi que dans la série des tableaux/empreintes de «Basic Research», nous retrouvons un parcours.Ils inventorient, intensifient une mise à l\u2019épreuve du corps.Ainsi, les sculptures en plâtre, en béton ou translucides exacerbent autant que les photographies, les radiographies, les empreintes, les collages, la question du dedans mis au dehors.Comment isoler, décanter, imprimer une texture interne, la charpente, l\u2019ossature, l\u2019appareillage, la mécanique d\u2019un corps.La question des différentes parties d\u2019un corps avait déjà été appréhendée, en 1980, dans les photographies de pavillons d\u2019oreilles féminines isolées et agrandies, toute oreille présentant un cartilage insaisissable justement par la radiographie.Ce sont des photographies prises dans les rues de New York.Isa Genzken raconte qu\u2019à sa question adressée à telle ou telle passante, si elle pouvait la photographier, celles-ci opposaient en général un refus embarrassé, croyant que le but était leur portrait.Mais à la précision «Non, il ne s\u2019agit que de votre oreille», elles acquiesçaient enchantées.Nous retrouvons la question de l\u2019anonymat d\u2019une partie du corps qui pourtant signe une individualité, mais dans la non-capture apparemment.L\u2019œuvre organise une série de renvois entre appareil et organe, entre différents modes de calcul, de précision, de construction.La pratique d\u2019Isa Genzken cherche à se rapporter au fait que toute découverte scientifique a sur les sujets une opérativité particulière, et peut porter des effets inattendus.Le readymade Weltempfanger (1982), les transistors en béton du même nom (1987), les bétons percés intitulés FLaut-parleur (1986), TV (1986), et la série des photographies de chaînes «Hi-Fi» (1979) \u2014 à travers le motif du calcul d\u2019une perfection acoustique et visuelle \u2014 statuent et interpellent les relations d\u2019un sujet à la technologie, à la science, à leurs objets.Au pôle du corps se conjoint un objet hors-corps, détachable qui touche à la voix, aux ondes, et aux organes, appareils y attenant.Les toiles de «Basic Research» mobilisent aussi un ordre de l\u2019enregistrement.Elles présentent, en un retour du volume au plan, le décalque de la structure rugueuse d\u2019un corps par pression, contact.En l\u2019occurrence, c\u2019est la 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