Parachute, 1 juillet 2002, Para-para

[" Ce 333 C&Y7 sRi ten iri tn 007 VII VIII IX Hwl *.gratuit free #£r ».Av , JocheN Gerz .Iochen Gerz, Cr/erjusqu'à l\u2019épuisement, performance (sans public),1972, © Jochen Gerz De Jochen Gerz, aujourd\u2019hui - que ce soit d\u2019ailleurs pour les louer ou pour les blâmer -, on ne connaît généralement que les interventions des quinze dernières années, où il a réalisé, dans l\u2019espace public, de véritables «anti-monuments» aux victimes du fascisme, qui abordent les thèmes de présence et d\u2019absence (Monument contre le fascisme, Hambourg, 1986), de la visibilité et de l\u2019invisibilité du passé dans le présent (Monument contre le racisme, dit «Le Monument invisible», Saarbruck, 1993), de la mémoire au singulier et au pluriel (Monument vivant de Biron, 1996), ou de la lutte pour la reconnaissance (Les Mots de Paris, 2000, installation performative réalisée en collaboration avec des gens de la rue sur le parvis de Notre-Dame).Dans chaque cas, Gerz a réussi à soulever une controverse véhémente, avec des répercussions allant bien au delà du seul milieu de l\u2019art.Et cela en dépit - ou peut-être à cause - du fait que, dans chaque cas, quoique de manière très différente, il n\u2019y avait à proprement parler rien à voir, nous épargnant efficacement un débat purement esthétique.Pour Gerz, il s\u2019agit défaire voir, ce qui est tout autre chose que de donner à voir.Car l\u2019artiste reste convaincu de la nécessité d\u2019utiliser les moyens artistiques pour dépasser l\u2019art - dépassement qui consisterait, comme il l\u2019a dit, à ne plus avoir à y penser.Lors de ces différentes interventions, Gerz travaille à rendre palpable ce qui n\u2019est pas, à conférer une présence incommensurable à l\u2019invisible - qui ne se réduit pas au contraire du visible -, en initiant des processus collectifs qui, au lieu d\u2019incarner l\u2019art dans un objet, le logent, pour ainsi dire, dans la tête des gens, lui assurant ainsi une résonance à la fois plus intensive et plus extensive.Gérard Wajcman dans L'Objet du siècle, identifiant l\u2019œuvre de Gerz comme l\u2019une des rares à même de nous aider à penser l\u2019irreprésentable, par le mimétisme rigoureux de son objet, écrit que: «ce qu\u2019on ne peut voir, l\u2019art peut seul le montrer.Et si l\u2019ceu-vre-de-l\u2019art consiste à accomplir la puissance de l\u2019art, alors, ce qu\u2019on ne peut voir, l\u2019art doit le montrer».Telle serait sa valeur d\u2019usage.Ce que nous révèle cette exposition de son œuvre vidéo est peut-être moins l\u2019unité des recherches qu\u2019il mène depuis plus de trente ans, mais plutôt la confirmation d\u2019une expérience profonde qui informe son œuvre entière : l\u2019expérience d\u2019une déception, non pas contingente ou circonstancielle, mais fondamentale, incommensurable, liée au fond à l\u2019impuissance de l\u2019art à se dépasser, à répondre aux attentes qu\u2019il sème; une déception face à l\u2019abîme apparemment infranchissable séparant l art de la vie, l'artiste du public, le mot de l\u2019image; une déception enfin, et surtout, face à l\u2019art en tant que forme de domination sociale, pratique à laquelle Gerz refuse de participer.L\u2019exposition s\u2019ouvre sur la projection de l\u2019extraordinaire Crier jusqu\u2019à l\u2019épuisement, une performance réalisée pour et devant la seule caméra en 1972.Sur une colline dans un terrain vague, à quelque soixante mètres de la caméra, l\u2019artiste crie à tue-tête «Allô», aussi longtemps que possible.Or, cette adresse élémentaire à autrui ne rencontre nulle réponse.Petit à petit, la voix défaille, jusqu\u2019à l\u2019extinction totale.Tel est l\u2019accueil plutôt désolant proféré au visiteur de l\u2019exposition.S\u2019il s\u2019agit bien entendu d\u2019une allégorie de l\u2019incommunication entre l\u2019artiste et son destinataire, il s\u2019agit peut-être moins d\u2019un duel entre l\u2019être humain et la machine reproductive (qui continue à tourner alors que l\u2019homme flanche) que d\u2019une première tentative d\u2019aborder la question de la disparition comme moyen de faire voir.Une logique comparable informe la performance vidéo Das Autoportrait (1975) : l\u2019artiste est situé derrière une plaque de verre, qu\u2019il remplit d\u2019écriture à l\u2019envers (donc lisible du côté de la caméra), le texte faisant progressivement disparaître celui qui écrit.Dans la première salle, Gerz réactive une installation initialement réalisée en 1974: Vivre.Le visiteur pénètre dans la salle apparemment vide, pour se diriger vers un texte encadré, accroché sur le mur au fond, et dont la lecture se révèle peu éclairante.Plutôt rares sont les visiteurs qui, se retournant pour en sortir, remarquent l\u2019élément clé de la pièce.Et pour cause: le mot «vivre», écrit à la craie des milliers de fois à même le sol, le couvrant d\u2019un bout à l\u2019autre, à la manière d\u2019une fragile et pathétique litanie, n\u2019est presque plus visible.Car, pour pouvoir lire le panneau, le visiteur doit marcher sur les mots, participant ainsi à leur effacement, ainsi qu\u2019à la détérioration de cette œuvre éphémère qui, de par son titre, cherche à relier l\u2019art à la vie.À la fin de la première semaine de l\u2019exposition, des traces ne subsistaient qu\u2019aux bords de la salle.L\u2019essentiel de l\u2019exposition consiste en quatre postes informatisés permettant de suivre les quelque vingt-neuf bandes vidéo restaurées pour l\u2019occasion.La moitié environ n\u2019est que des traces filmées de performances réalisées dans les années soixante-dix : moins des œuvres en soi, que la mémoire d\u2019actions diverses.Les performances corporelles, presque actionnistes, où l\u2019on voit l\u2019artiste nu ( Welcome Home, 1980) ou vêtu uniquement d\u2019une jambe de pantalon (Chinook, 1985), ne s\u2019inscrivaient nullement dans un processus de mémoire; contrairement aux performances sans public, comme Parler (1972), elles n\u2019ont pas été réalisées dans le but d\u2019être enregistrées et conservées.Dans cette dernière vidéo, réalisée en collaboration avec l\u2019artiste Sarkis, on voit les deux hommes mener un dialogue, chacun parlant dans sa langue maternelle : ils s\u2019écoutentret se répondent sans se comprendre (Gerz ne comprendra qu\u2019après coup que Sarkis parle du génocide des Arméniens, alors que Gerz, à l\u2019insu de Sarkis, parle d\u2019une crèche sauvage à Paris), cherchant les bases de la communication au sein de l\u2019incommunication même.Le premier mérite de cette exposition est de permettre au public (non pas au grand public, auquel ces œuvres expérimentales n\u2019ont jamais été destinées, mais à un public d\u2019artistes et de théoriciens qui se doit d\u2019être averti) de prendre acte des affinités entre les expériences tentées il y a trente ans et celles d\u2019aujourd\u2019hui.Épreuve quelque peu pénible pour l\u2019amour-propre contemporain, dans la mesure où bien des initiatives font triste figure à côté des pratiques expérimentales de la génération précédente.En effet, si l\u2019on connaît assez bien maintenant les tenants et les aboutissants des provocations des avant-gardes historiques du début du xxe siècle, les recherches innovatrices des années soixante et surtout soixante-dix demeurent encore, sur le plan de l\u2019histoire de l\u2019art, un angle mort.Dans la transmission intergénérationnelle des savoirs, ce phénomène de refoulement, qui consiste à ignorer tout ou presque de la génération immédiatement précédente, est bien connu; et dans une certaine mesure, du moins dans une perspective nietzschéenne, seul un certain oubli rend possible l\u2019action au présent.Mais on ne peut que déplorer l\u2019appauvrissement de l'œuvre chez bien des artistes s\u2019inscrivant dans la mouvance « relationnelle» qui ignorent - ou feignent d\u2019ignorer - les gestes pourtant irréversibles accomplis par des artistes de la génération de Gerz.Gestes souvent liés à une ambition politique assumée, allant chez Gerz jusqu\u2019à la volonté d\u2019abolir l\u2019art en tant qu\u2019élément d\u2019une «législature visuelle», destinée à administrer les subjectivités.« Est beau ce qui sert» affirme Gerz, définissant un terme par ailleurs peu usité dans son vocabulaire artistique.Mais qui sert à quoi ?Sans doute à arracher l\u2019art à lui-même et à imaginer ce qu\u2019il pourrait être, comme dans la plus récente proposition présentée dans l\u2019exposition, la plateforme de dialogue que l\u2019artiste a lancée sur Internet à partir de la question suivante : « Dans le contexte actuel de l\u2019art, quelle serait votre vision d\u2019un art encore inconnu ?» L\u2019état actuel de cette œuvre plurielle, imprévisible et encore ouverte se trouve au www.anthology-of-art.net.> SxepheN Wright L\u2019auteur est critique d\u2019art et commissaire iNdépeNdaNt.Il est rédacteur correspoNdaNt eN FraNce pour la revue parachute.Il vit à Paris.< swright@ext.jussieu.fr > FraNCiNe Savard Galerie ReNé BIouin | MoNtréal 2 février - 9 mars Ces œuvres récentes de Francine Savard nous sont présentées accompagnées d\u2019un livre d\u2019artiste intitulé Un plein un vide, avec pour point commun et pour point de départ : des mots, plus précisément un lexique de trente et un termes ayant tous partie liée à la désignation dans le langage commun de l\u2019espace planaire et des formes qu\u2019il peut prendre, notamment en peinture : un fond, une étendue, des étalements, une traînée, un motif, etc.Tous ces mots déclencheurs ont été extraits d\u2019une monographie (J.-P.Duquette, 1980) et d\u2019un catalogue d\u2019exposition (Musée des Beaux-Arts de Chartres, 1985) traitant du travail de Fernand Leduc, et ils composent le Lexique du vocabulaire de l\u2019abstraction.1 : les citations présenté sous forme de liste verticale dans le livre.Des trente et un termes, onze sont repris et littéralement «mis en œuvre», et quoiqu\u2019ils aient été sélectionnés parmi tous, ils ne se distinguent pas d\u2019une manière particulière, par une complexité ou une fortune critique plus grande, par exemple.Par ce souci de n\u2019instaurer aucune hiérarchie de quelque nature que ce soit, l\u2019artiste se trouve à garder ouvert l\u2019ensemble des possibilités offertes par le corpus de termes (ceux-là sont retenus, d\u2019autres auraient pu l\u2019être tout aussi adéquatement).Elle étend cet aspect de dé-hiérarchisation jusqu\u2019au mode d\u2019interaction des toiles entre elles, faisant en sorte qu\u2019aucune ne se présente comme punctum, pivot ou aboutissement par rapport aux autres : le caractère rhizomatique de la liste des termes dans le livre se transpose ici en all over, dans un respect très poussé des deux médiums, des deux langages écriture et peinture.Il en va également ainsi de l\u2019accrochage, où aucune ligne force - de nature formelle ou coloristique -, ne s\u2019en dégage d'office.Chacune de ces onze œuvres exposées mesure aux alentours d\u2019un mètre par un mètre cinquante et se présente comme une toile montée très minutieusement sur un cadre épais de trois centimètres, de forme non géométrique et non régulière.Chacune est peinte d\u2019une couleur monochrome en aplat, sans aucun effet de texture, et en plein rt coNtemporaiN _ contemporary art\t007 .paee 1 \"WflHflMj , - ' BÜ1B* .daprèsledépeupleur/afcerthelosiONes centre de cette surface colorée est tracé un des termes retenus du Lexique, en ton sur ton, dans un contraste minimal qui oblige à s\u2019approcher pour lire le mot.Un très intéressant dialogue est ainsi institué entre la forme non orthodoxe, la couleur toujours très unie et franche, et enfin le mot et son article inscrits sur la surface : c\u2019est cette dynamique qui s\u2019installe entre les caractères dénotatif et connotatif attachés au mot tracé et le caractère évocatif de la forme du tableau que le spectateur n\u2019a de cesse d\u2019explorer et d\u2019en vérifier la pertinence.Car, on l\u2019aura compris, le rapport entre les trois éléments forme-couleur-mot ne vise pas à être unilatéralement convergent ou divergent, ni à se donner spontanément.Ainsi, dans la première toile de la série (Une étendue jaune), le spectateur cherche spontanément à mettre en relation la forme vaguement rectangulaire et cassée en «V», le contour bosselé par endroits, le pigment jaune vif, avec le mot étendue qui y est inscrit: il évalue spontanément en quoi ceci - et notamment le jaune - s\u2019accorde avec ce que le mot dénote et comment est particulièrement bien rendu le concept ou l\u2019expérience d\u2019étendue.C\u2019est une même introduction à la problématique globale de ces œuvres qu\u2019on retrouve dans Une aire bleue qui, parce quelle est accrochée à la suite de Une étendue jaune, incite à se demander en quoi une étendue se distingue d\u2019une aire, et en quoi le bleu a une plus grande capacité à rendre le concept proprement géométrique d\u2019aire que le jaune, comme l\u2019artiste en fait la proposition; ou encore en vertu de quel a priori perceptuel la forme «molle» (comme une flaque de pigment bleu) exploitée ici entre en contradiction avec la régularité et la rigidité qu\u2019on associe habituellement -mais indûment, nous est-il révélé ici - aux concepts géométriques.Dans Un pan orange, la forme presque carrée et régulière est animée d\u2019un mouvement, presque d\u2019un « swing », qui fait se retrousser légèrement les angles : ici la couleur orange, la forme nettement plus géométrique que dans les deux toiles qui précèdent, et le mot pan lui-même, ne sont pas sans évoquer la tradition du monochrome.Ce que reprend un peu plus loin Un aplat violet à la forme trapézoïdale et d\u2019un violet opaque sombre qui capte la lumière et produit un effet de dématérialisation du support; l\u2019absence d\u2019accidents dans le contour, sa réduction à une pure fonction de délimitation, donne par ailleurs un aspect minimaliste à la forme que n\u2019avait pas Un pan orange.Une semblable évocation de la pratique du monochrome - où forme et fond, forme et support, ne font qu\u2019un - est également présente dans Un plan rouge mais elle y prend une autre voie : par son format plutôt rectangulaire, l\u2019intensité et la vibrance du pigment rouge ainsi que le mot plan, on ne peut manquer d\u2019associer cette œuvre à celles de Bamett Newman.Précédant cette évocation libre de Vir Heroicus Sublimis et préparant en quelque sorte le terrain à la référence au discours serré et rigoureux des formalistes américains, Une forme rouge orangée offre un contraste fort: elle arbore un contour vagué qui s\u2019accorde pleinement avec le flou, le vague inhérent au mot-valise qu\u2019est forme.Pour créer cette résonance oppositionnelle entre les deux œuvres, l\u2019artiste n\u2019a pas hésité à faire converger dans chacune les trois termes de l\u2019équation forme-couleur-mot et à les unir clairement.Elle rentabilise une même «reposante» et rassurante analogie dans d\u2019autres toiles mais à des fins qui ne tiennent pas systématiquement à l\u2019évocation de l\u2019histoire de l\u2019abstraction picturale : dans Une tache rose qui se présente sous forme de pétale de couleur fuchsia, c\u2019est le dispositif même du procédé de l\u2019analogie qui est mis en évidence à travers la «simplicité» de l\u2019adéquation des éléments, dans le but de souligner - par contraste là aussi - la complexité du dialogue mot-image qu\u2019exploitent les autres toiles.Un même accord aisé des trois éléments se retrouve dans Un littoral vert où la forme triangulaire étirée et courbée à sa base évoque la ligne des bords de mer ou de lac vus de très haut, ce que vient renforcer la couleur verte qui a la faculté, bien plus que ne le pourrait le jaune sable ici, de connoter et d\u2019évoquer directement la nature «naturante».Mais Un littoral vert se distingue dans sa mise en œuvre d\u2019un accord interne convergent et il occupe une place particulière dans l\u2019exposition : il est le seul en effet à porter un vocable précis dans sa dénotation (littoral est plus circonscrit que ne le sont surface, figure, plan, etc.) en même temps que le plus puissamment évocateur (la mer, un lac, l\u2019été, une prairie, la nature.); ce qui s\u2019avère très intéressant ici, c\u2019est cette dynamique forte entre une plus grande précision et une ouverture instantanée sur l\u2019imaginaire et ses multiples connexions mnémoniques, et que vient nourrir tant la forme d\u2019arc qui renvoie à un geste large et libre dans le tracé, que la couleur naturalisante (d\u2019un vert prairie).Un propos opposé anime Une figure ocre, où le rapport entre la forme très découpée à la façon d\u2019une pointe de flèche et le mot figure rappelle ce mode plus complexe d\u2019analogie entre l\u2019image et le mot qu\u2019est le motif signalétique et qui fait appel à une médiation, une convention sociale en l\u2019occurrence.À l\u2019extrême, l\u2019artiste nous rappelle que le dialogue interne entre les trois éléments forme-couleur-mot peut aussi se montrer sibyllin, comme dans Des étalements gris bleu et dans Des trouées noires où deux formes vaguement jumelles sont accolées de part et d\u2019autre d\u2019un axe de symétrie sans offrir de possibilité d\u2019emboîtement harmonieux : le hiatus spatial mis en place « fait image », il renvoie au pluriel imprimé aux mots étalements et trouées, mais sans plus, nous laissant sans véritable réponse.Ces onze œuvres intriguent et fascinent par le fait qu\u2019elles font penser à des formes (de la nature ou appartenant à l\u2019histoire de la peinture) mais le léger pas de côté qui est imprimé dans le rapport forme-couleur-mot change toute la perspective et rend éminemment relative la sorte de reconnaissance spontanée qu\u2019elles induisent.D\u2019où une sorte de mouvement en boucle de la réflexion chez le spectateur, celui-ci tentant en effet de saisir en quoi et 1 L * I* Galerie de l\u2019UQAM g David Tomas, Not Here, Not There, 2001, installation view, \u201cdaprèsledépeupleur/afterthelostones\u201d; photo: Richard-Max Tremblay, courtesy Galerie de l\u2019uqàm.mb Francine Savard, Un littoral vert, 2001 ; photo: (Richard-Max Tremblay) Galerie René Blouin.comment ce qu\u2019il a devant les yeux n'est pas un rapport d\u2019identité et / ou d\u2019illustration entre image et mot, ou encore à évaluer en quoi la forme construite par le contour ne correspond jamais indubitablement aux connotations formelles de la notion écrite dessus, en quoi la proposition formelle de l\u2019artiste n\u2019est jamais tout à fait «arbitraire» et ne peut être vue comme une pure forme issue de son imaginaire; et aussi, à un autre niveau, en quoi l\u2019œuvre présentée n\u2019est jamais tout à fait de la peinture formaliste comme telle, ni jamais tout à fait un « shaped canvas », ni jamais tout à fait de l\u2019art conceptuel.La fascination qu\u2019exercent ces œuvres provient ainsi de ce qu\u2019on pourrait appeler leur «familière étrangeté», et qui résulte d\u2019analogies sapées systématiquement, de pistes de lecture tronquées, d\u2019associations présentées comme «libres» mais en fait savamment dirigées.C\u2019est la capacité de Francine Savard à exploiter plastiquement les ressorts du langage que sont la dénotation, la connotation et l\u2019évocation, et d\u2019en disposer en toute liberté qui rend les œuvres captivantes.À partir d\u2019un intérêt pour les différentes démarches de l\u2019abstraction en peinture, et à partir d\u2019un matériau de départ que sont les mots et leurs diverses modalités d\u2019extension discursive et imagée, l\u2019artiste a réussi à faire se croiser et se nourrir mutuellement la problématique interne du langage avec la problématique foncière et paradoxale de l\u2019abstraction qu\u2019est le rapport au réel : c\u2019est en prenant en compte le fait que le caractère dénotatif du langage ne peut être disjoint totalement de son caractère connotatif et en produisant un parallèle entre cette nature double du langage et la démarche de l\u2019abstraction, qu\u2019elle redéfinit ici l\u2019abstraction comme processus indépassablement intriqué à la figuration, à une denotation picturale du réel.Comme nous le révèlent les œuvres présentées ici, le travail d\u2019abstraction chez Francine Savard montre qu\u2019il sait toujours qu\u2019il se constitue en porte-à-faux avec son origine (la figuration en peinture) et expose sans ambages ce qui le nourrit (la pratique du monochrome, la réactivation critique des théories picturales de la dernière moitié du xxe siècle), ce qu\u2019il prend pour matériau (la nature double du langage, la complexité du lien entre abstraction et figuration), et finalement ses exigences - soit la nécessité qui s\u2019ensuit d\u2019une absolue rigueur de la démarche.C\u2019est en ce sens que l\u2019on peut comprendre la référence au travail de Fernand Leduc: non seulement ce travail a-t-il constitué le point de départ des œuvres mais il se révèle également comme l\u2019horizon qualitatif qui a guidé leur conception.> C h r l STI N e Dubois L\u2019auieure est critique d'art et vit à MoNiréal.For her most recent exhibition, curator Michèle Thériault invited three artists and one artist team to produce work based on Samuel Beckett\u2019s Le Dépeupleux (The Lost Ones), a narrative text that describes in exacting detail the extreme conditions of existence of some 200 human beings living inside a delimited cylindrical space.The title of the exhibition offers a preliminary staging of Thériault\u2019s interest in questions of translation and temporality inasmuch as it registers the polyvocal aspect of Beckett\u2019s text - published in French in 1970 and then in English in 1972 - as well as the problematic of translation and interpretation as belated activities.As a translational and cultural matter, the meanings engendered by the exhibition unfold in a temporality that struggles with itself and dissolves itself against the historical, phenomenological and literary aspects of Le Dépeupleur.The artists involved are placed in an affective and active relation with the form, factuality and sense of Beckett\u2019s descriptions.While we receive and understand Le Dépeupleur as a text that withdraws from and refuses visibility, we do so through the materiality of Beckett\u2019s language, the text\u2019s rhythm and cadence, and its detached description of the suffering of both the body and the psyche inside the cylinder.Through the structure of the text and through the structure of the exhibition, two modalities are brought into play: one which negates and dissolves visu-ality as an epistemological trope but which retrieves it in the dimension of embodiment, and a second mode which relates to the former; that is, temporality as a physical and material dimension that conditions human life and human contact.The tragic action that unfolds between old and new fluctuates between two poles of political time: that of dehistoricized timeserving and that of serving time in a world of total illusion against which the work refuses to become worldly - the conditions of Beckett\u2019s endgame.Among the artists involved in the exhibition, the artist couple Smith/Stewart have produced a large-scale double video projection superimposed onto the ambient sound of a 16-mm film projector.In A is B (2001-2), a flash sequence of images of a grasping hand disturbs one\u2019s visual field and physical coordinates.The sound of an outmoded technology is appropriated for the purposes of the looped projection which brings to mind early cinematic montage.While the images of the hand seem to have once moved in real time, we eventually begin to understand their construction from a sequence of numerous video stills.The double projection allows the viewer to move around the screen, inviting a more highly developed sense of phenomenal space.As the light of the screen reflects off of the walls of the room, the screen image becomes increasingly easier to view.The viewer soon begins to seek a level of comfort between the image and the surrounding gallery space, between perception and the apperception caused by the fluctuations of light and darkness.This bodily sensation is doubled by the image of the hand which seems to grasp, grip and scratch, then clutch helplessly and blindly, thereby figuring the destabilization of sight that we experience.Through gestures of release and tension, vision itself is dimly associated with mastery and aggression, survival, dispossession and eventual fatigue.Works by Jana Sterbak and Guy Pellerin are also concerned with embodied perception and movement.Sterbak\u2019s Monumental (2001) is comprised of oversized wooden crutches that lean into each other against the wall.Their massive indifference to potential usage provokes an untranslatability into either necessity or play.While we acknowledge the work\u2019s semiotic code almost without effort, we encounter a difference in its semantic register that makes the work recede from comprehension.Between experience and discourse, we are diminished by our incapacity to decipher this difference and are confronted by our hesitation to enter a space of unknowing sympathy.Our hesitation is maintained perhaps because the work elicits the memory of liberal sentimentality.While an æsthetic of special pleading would be highly comforting in Beckett\u2019s world of postwar breakdown, Sterbak, like Beckett, closes off this avenue; mobility is frustrated.Movement also characterizes the reception of Pellerin\u2019s No 345 - Ce qui frappe d\u2019abord dans cette pénombre est la sensation de jaune qu\u2019elle donne pour ne pas dire de souffre à cause des associations (2001).Eight roundels of painted plywood are placed at eye level along a wall painted the same unnameable yellowish, taupe-ish brown colour.We wander from one roundel to the next, as though the enigma of its existence might be answered by a different circle.The figures, painted according to a calculated schema similar to The Lost Ones\u2019 concern with measurement, reason and embodiment, soon seem anonymous and banal.The frame of the minimalist painting that was once so crucial in the work of artists like Stella and Tousignant is now dispersed into multiple parts and the painted installation\u2019s ambivalent structure opens onto the space of the gallery as environment.In the process, we become aware that the social world that once talked about the abstract painting\u2019s metaphysical existence has also threatened to disappear.David Tomas presents us with two works that are concerned with vision, sound and technology.L\u2019Œil de Beckett (2001), a small glass-blown object, seems to function as a key or solution manual to the more complex construction that is Not Here, Not There (2001).The former consists of a glass tube and two enveloping glass spheres that engagé vision in a ruse that separates vision from the sense of hearing and in the process reintroduces one to the other.As we cognitively and visually follow the length of the tube from its hidden orifice inside one sphere to its visible exit in the next, we experience the impossibility of a purely logical and formal collapse of inside and outside.L\u2019Œil de Beckett addresses the possibility and impossibility of Beckett\u2019s hermeneutic world inside the cylinder by maintaining the fact of the text\u2019s ri coNiemporaiN _ contemporary art 007 .page 2 transmission (Beckett being the primary conductor of his text).This understanding helps us make sense of Not Here, Not There, a multi-part construction which uses cylinders of glass and aluminum, circular panels of mirrored glass and a video projection, in an elaborate mediation of a ten-second video sequence taken from one of the closing scenes of Andrei Konchalovsk\u2019s Runaway Train.The two cylinders mediate sound and image through a series of historically and epistemologically laden technologies - blown glass, mirror, camera lucida, speaker and microphone, digital monitor and camera.Not Here, Not There articulates the technological present through a secondary designation akin to the procedures of natural history; it proposes an anxious and dizzying non-discursive discourse on technology, on its classifications and condi- tions of emergence.The work maps the space of a virtual text that we come to inhabit, if only marginally.As we decipher the chain of mediating links, we come closer to sensing and apprehending the significance of the audio-visual artifact of the train locomotive that is captured in the eye of a circular screen.Through the chronotopic image of the character Oscar Manheim riding the escape locomotive, we are blocked off from the sentimental literature of private tragedy.Oscar\u2019s singularity is no more real than is our collectivity.Like Oscar, our humanity is serving time as it tries to catch up with the past, going nowhere fast.> Marc James Léger The author is aN arnst, writer aNd scholar liviNg in Ottawa.Sylvia Safdie PeaK Gallery | Toronto | November 15 - December 15 Serenity diffuses the exhibition space as one first experiences the recent work of Montréal artist Sylvia Safdie.The open structure of the show, curated by Zack Pospieszynski, inevitably invites a second tour.Dynamic tensions and conflicts in the works are gently layered into a whole.Each piece, whether it is sculpture, drawing or video, circumscribes a space-time territory, a zone of reflection by drawing the viewer in and then letting go.For Safdie, video is a new medium of production and this is her first showing of video installations.A contemplative vision and a free-flowing yet sober approach that is characteristic of the artist is evident.Moreover, the sense of fluidity is even more powerfully pronounced in this liquid medium.The videos are silent, engaged in an invisible loop, their meditative rhythm preserved.Ben (2001) is projected on a large wall.It shows the shaved head of a man, engaged in a conversation and seen in slow motion.The camera remains still, scrutinizing his expressions as they transform the features of his face.The movement is entirely internal, the head levitating and changing its position within the frame.The artist creates the impression of disembodiment and the head appears as if it is viewed under water.Indeed, another video track is layered over this one: the waters of a river (actually, Montreal's Lachine Canal).At times, waves penetrate the frame, submerge the head and blur the image; at other times, they are dispersed and Ben is seen clearly.Wind and birds interfere at irregular intervals and create subtle disturbances.They ripple and texture the image.In one unforgettable moment, a bird flies in an out of the frame, crossing Ben\u2019s head like a passing thought, a touch of inspiration, a sudden enlightenment or a new thrust for life.The profound reverie of Ben is in contrast with Sam\u2019s striving for awakening.Sam (2001) is portrayed on a tiny, lcd screen, mounted into the opposite wall.The image of the head of a newborn child is superimposed with an image of water, interspersed with raindrops creating many small ripples, fust as in Ben, in Sam two video tracks run through the whole duration of the piece.Rain showers over the baby\u2019s head.This new being struggles to keep his head above water, striving to emerge and confront life.Ben and Sam are a unique personal inquiry into the metaphysical dimensions of video portraiture.The layers of water in both videos create painterly density and depth.An effect of a double screen is created.Face to face, yet unaware of each other\u2019s presence, Ben and Sam are linked through multiple strings of meanings.The communication between these two pieces conceives the content which defines the perimeter of a reflective zone.It exemplifies the dialogical mode in Safdie\u2019s work that is accurately rendered throughout the whole exhibition.Walking further into the gallery space, the viewer encounters Keren No.4 (1999).A book with empty pages is placed at the bottom of a copper barrel.The gaze of the visitor, who is walking around it, illuminates the pages reflected onto the walls of the barrel and fills them with his/her own imaginary world.In the large drawing Earthnotes, Series II No.1 (2000), many small human figures climb, fly, fall or crawl.In their passage through the visual territory of the work, they move upwards, leaving the lower part of the frame empty and aspiring toward the unknown, beyond the borders of the frame.The figures are drawn with earth mixed with oil and are spread sporadically onto the white mylar surface.Lost in space, their earthy substance counteracts with their disobedience to the laws of gravity.In Threshold No.2 (2001) a pile of black soil and a pile of sand are separated by a transparent glass screen.As the viewer observes the work from different angles, the relationship between the elements changes along with their appearance.First, soil and sand fuse together.Then, one is present and the other disappears until we could see them both again, distanced from each other.It is important to point out that the earth and the sand in this work are part of Safdie\u2019s collection of over 400 earth samples gathered from around the world.The sand originates from Haifa at the Mediterranean Sea and the black soil from the Eastern Townships in Québec.A series of drawings of trees, Notations (1999), is placed in a separate room.These drawings are suspended in the middle of the frame creating an illusion that the uprooted trees float in space.In the centre of the same room is a sculpture, Tahala No.1 (1999), a black, rectangular metal box, left ajar and overflowing with stones.The drawings and the sculpture function as a composition.They are reminiscent of an abandoned graveyard.The trees come to life and play the role of witnesses to a ceremony of unearthing the forgotten past.In fact, in Doina Harap\u2019s documentary on Safdie\u2019s work, Earthmarks, the artist recounts the stoiy of finding an abandoned Jewish cemetery in Tahala (a small village in Morocco) which served as an inspiration.The cave-like quality of the gallery space lends itself to Safdie\u2019s artistic discourse.It elicits elements from the inscrutable pool of meanings within the artist\u2019s voyage into the depths of the past, the vestiges of memory and the contemplative present moment.There are no patterns in this work but a flow and an awareness of the cycles in nature, in culture and in human life.The works communicate between each other in many ways, establishing diverse paths of experience.The different media constitute a variety of thought forms which become inhabited by Safdie\u2019s sensibility, its diverse manifestations and its metamorphoses.> Rossuza DaSKalova Sylvia Safdie, installation view of Ben, 2001, dvd continuous loop projection, and Keren #4, 1999, copper, book; photo: Zack Pospieszynski, courtesy Peak Gallery.;-lV- The author is a critic liviNg in MoNtréal pursuiNg a Master's Degree at CoNCordia UNiversity.< daskal@sympatico.ca > Ami HaraldssoN/Aivigela Grauerholz\t\t Contemporary Arts Gallery\ti/ancc\t December 7 - February 10 The rise of photoconceptualism during the 1960s and 1970s contributed to art discourses that questioned photography\u2019s use as a tool of representation.Photography was no longer considered a transparent medium through which the world could be documented distortion-free.The legitimacy of the documentary photography tradition was questioned by works such as Martha Rosler\u2019s The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (1972), which pointed to the inability of either photographic or written language to tell a story objectively and truthfully, free from preconceived notions attached to positions of dass, gender, race and power.Photoconceptualist works have subsequently explored the complex spaces between reality and its representation, thereby increasing the perceived distance between the two, where once none existed.The strategies and aesthetics favoured by early photoconceptualists -including a distanced, clinical/scientific approach, the self-directed analysis of pictorial conventions, and the adoption of modemist/mininialist visual forms - remain prevalent today.By contrast, barring a few notable exceptions (such as Nan Goldin and Richard Billingham), tra- ditional documentary photography practices are seldom seen in contemporary art.This tendency towards photoconceptual rather than documentary strategies is apparent in two recent shows.While Canadian photographers Arni Haraldsson and Angela Grauerholz have different relationships to photoconceptualism, its aesthetic legacy surfaces in their latest bodies of work.Both Haraldsson\u2019s Firminy (1999) and Grauerholz\u2019s Privation (2001) reflect an awareness of critical discourses in their use of photoconceptual methodologies to mine what could be considered humanist documentary territory: the reportage of human struggle and loss.Each project turns an analytical eye to its subjects in cool-toned colour photographs documenting objects and places devoid of the human figure.Human presence is implied through its absence, suggesting disappearance and alienation, and leaves the viewer to complete each narrative through the details and traces that remain.With Firminy, Ami Haraldsson continues his investigation of building sites designed by Le Corbusier, a French Modernist architect well-known for a utopie vision that often disregarded actual human use of spaces and cities.Haraldsson\u2019s photographs document two buildings located in the town of Firminy, France: the Unité d\u2019habitation, an apartment complex and nursery school, and the empty, unfinished Church of St.Pierre.The dilapidated concrete constructions - one a boxy monolithic ghetto and the other graffiti-covered - sit in stark contrast to the nearby verdant French countryside and picturesque old town of Firminy.The Unité d\u2019habitation in particular is a site of conflict: its residents oppose the French government\u2019s efforts to gradually close down the building, as it is said to be too expensive to maintain.Images of protest posters made by the Unité\u2019s tenants and an architectural model of the uncompleted church supplement the photographs of building exteriors and interiors.Haraldsson\u2019s continuing investigation of Le Corbusier building sites may suggest an interest in capturing these crumbling edifices for posterity: the anthropological salvage paradigm applied to Modernist architecture rather than \u201cprimitive\u201d cultures.However, his photographs are most resonant when they aspire beyond the obvious in their project of documentation.While the images of the building exteriors resemble innocuous landscapes or architectural studies, the images of the nursery school interiors reveal much about the negotiations between these humans and the modernist artefacts in which they live.In \u2018Ceiling Project\u2019, Nursery School, Unité d\u2019habitation, a construction paper assemblage hangs from the ceiling of a classroom, deliberately mimicking a nearby patch of disintegrating, peeling paint.It\u2019s an ironic gesture, disgruntled yet affectionate, that speaks of the conflicting thoughts and emotional attachments the Unité\u2019s inhabitants possess for the decaying eyesore they call home.In contrast with Haraldsson\u2019s social/historical project, Angela Grauerholz\u2019s Privation expresses more of an individual narrative.Privation represents the remains of Grauerholz\u2019s book collection, amassed over a period of twenty-five years, which was destroyed in a house fire.The images were produced digitally, without a camera, the books\u2019 fronts and backs laid directly onto a flatbed scanner.The lush prints, outputted onto watercolour paper, portray charred, water-stained, mouldering objects.Although historical references to book burning do briefly spring to mind, Privation is primarily a testament to Grauerholz\u2019s personal loss.Floating timelessly against a neutral background and blown up to a monumental larger-than-life size, the book exteriors reveal little about their contents (only two can be positively identified: Derrida and Writing and William Blake\u2019s Theory of Art)] instead, the viewer is seduced by the formal qualities of the books\u2019 damaged surfaces, as if they were abstract paintings.Privation's detached approach works against the em-pathetic association that it seems to ask of its viewer.The indisputably beautiful images serve as memorials to the lost collection, and although the enormity of Grauerholz\u2019s loss is hinted at - the sixteen images shown are only a 007 .page 3 ri coNtemporaiN _ contemporary art small sampling of the hundreds of books destroyed - it is not made visceral.The overall generic character of the images, reinforced by the paucity of specific information about the books and the impersonal, specimen-like titles (e.g., Book #136 back), fails to convey Grauerholz\u2019s sentimental or intellectual relationship with these objects, and thus they remain just that - mute material objects.Firminy and Privation attest to the vexed status of traditional documentary photography within contemporary art.They both attempt to negotiate the fine line between taking a detached, critical look at their subjects and allowing the emotional affectivity of their subjects\u2019 stories to make its impact.The mixed results that ensue elicit a number of questions: Is traditional documentary photography still relevant?Does it have a future within contemporary art institutions?Is criticality more important than compassion?Is a critical contemporary documentary practice - one that avoids reverting to universalist and humanist tendencies, but that also resists the plague of postmodern cynicism -even possible?If the crisis of representation has presented contemporary photography with a kind of loss (of certainty, of belief in the possibility of Truth) then perhaps works such as Firminy and Privation represent a step in the process of grieving: an attempt to take loss and transform it into something else - something that still remains to be seen.> AdrieNNe Lai The author is a writer aNd photographer whose most receNt wores (both scholarly aNd visual) explore issues arouNd xechNoloey, perceptiON aNd cultural represeNtatiON.Angela Grauerholz, Privation, 2001 (Book #10 Front, Book #10 Back), each 44.5 x 36.5\"; photos: courtesy Art 45, Montréal and Olga Korper Gallery, Toronto.u-5£ ** \u2014-1»\u2014 fT 1 ¦ ÉLM : m sm ' mm m; -y*W' ssstrn; iiaüÜH laEBil //' * .j .- rr- -¦\t, r.\tj wk \u2022«% _ Arni Haraldsson, Firming (North-East Facade, Incomplete Church of Saint-Pierre [1960-74] Firminy-Vert, France; Le Corbusier, architect), 1999, transmounted C-print 50 x 60\u201d; photo: courtesy Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver.Atul Dodiya, Babu at René Block Gallery, New York 1974, 1998, watercolour, \u201cMoving Ideas\"; photo: courtesy Gallery Chemould, Mumbai and Peter White.JËLËfliElËil Moving: Ideas:\t\t\t\t A CoNtemporary Cultural Dialogue with iNdia\t\t\t\t VaNCOuver\tVarious Sites\t\tJaNuary 19 - March 31\t \u201cMoving Ideas: A Contemporary Cultural Dialogue with India\u201d arrived early this spring in Vancouver and represented the western Canadian version of the curatorial initiative which began last year as \u201cDust on the Road: Canadian Artists in Dialogue with S AH MAT\u201d (in Vancouver it was presented at Roundhouse Community Centre).Organized by the Canadian curatorial collective Hoopoe Curatorial, the Vancouver show was curated by Montréal-based independent curator Peter White and was expanded to include two other major exhibitions: \u201cSecular Practice: Recent Art From India\u201d and \u201cFrom Goddess to Pin-Up: Icons of Femininity in Indian Calendar Art.\u201d This ambitious, multi-venue exhibition included the work of nine Indian artists whose visual practice has a shared concern for the intersection of the personal with the political and social terrain in contemporary India.In the last ten years the introduction of new communication technology to South Asia has facilitated the rise of installation, performance art and video-based work.The shifts in artistic practice coincide with the liberalization of India\u2019s economy and the ascendancy of Hindutva, a right-wing political movement that advocates Hinduism as a prerequisite for national identity.The diversity of expression and media represented by the work included in this show delivers a visual challenge to the hegemonic assertions of the Hindu right wing in India and positions contemporary art as a generative space of resistance and a site of productive engagement with past and present.The work of Nalini Malani, Bhupen Khakhar and Jayashree Chakravarty shown at the Charles H.Scott Gallery represented the varied means by which contemporary artists negotiate a cultural terrain vexed by competing notions of the traditional and the modern.Khakhar\u2019s gestural watercolours with their homoerotic motifs challenged viewers to cast off any preconceptions that contemporary art in India is mired in traditionalism.Khakhar\u2019s valorization of a gay sensibility offered an oppositional voice to the patriarchy entrenched in Indian culture and the overdetermined masculinity of the Hindu right wing.Malani\u2019s Hamletmachine (2000) exemplified the deployment of new visual media to create a critical space that encouraged dialogue between past and present.By drawing upon the Hindu conception of the caste system as a body, Malani\u2019s video installation articulated the formation of a new social body under the influence of the right wing\u2019s problematic reclamation of traditional Hindu values in the laje twentieth century.Calcutta-based Chakravarty\u2019s installation of vertical paper banners suspended from the ceiling called to mind the architectural congestion of the metropolitan spaces of India.Her loose and seemingly hurried drawing style captured the cadence and chaos of the modern urban environment and her vertical placement of the paper recalled the narrative tradition of indigenous storytellers in Eastern India.The works of Vivan Sundaram, Atul Dodiya and Sheela Gowda, grouped together at The Contemporary Art Gallery, shared a concern for history and the intervention of the personal and the quotidian into artistic practice.Dodiya\u2019s large watercolour drawings took up the life of Mahatma Gandhi as their central thematic.Dodiya's sustained studies recaptured and reconfigured key moments in the Mahatma\u2019s life to offered a Subjective re-visioning of history and served to highlight the implicit performativity of Gandhi\u2019s political endeavours.Similarly, Sundaram\u2019s Re-Take of Amrita (2001) used photomontages to reconstruct tire history of his great-iunt, Amrita Sher-Gil, one of 2002 rt coNtemporaiN _ coiMtemporary art 007 .page 4 Bruce NaumaN kü^ii^Xi .10 ; i ! T Bruce Nauman, Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage), 2001, installation view; photo: Stuart Tyson, courtesy Dia Center for the Arts.Bruce Nauman\u2019s haunting, seductive large-scale video installation, Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage) (2001) places the audience in the centre of two spatial superimpositions.Recorded at night over the summer of 2000, using infrared tape, seven surveillance cameras and microphones, the ghostly nocturnal video footage of Nauman\u2019s New Mexico studio is mapped onto the present-tense space of the museum in New York City.The result produces a translucent superimposition of two distinct temporalities, rather than a series of seven large-scale pictures projected onto the four walls.Video projection technology, as Samuel R.Delany observed, can liberate the \u201cwindow\u201d of the picture frame from its architectural support: when the video image vanishes, the screen disperses in the air, reconfiguring both frame and site.This fluidity of the image and sound, plus the mobility or absence of the frame \u201csuggests shifting and mystical fata morgana,\u201d or a mirage architecture, \u201cthrough whose flexing and flickering corridors, closets and gardens the video experience moves us, as the video window changes and its images shift\u201d ( Video Spaces, New York: MoMA, 1995, p.10).In this way, Mapping the Studio temporarily channels currents that we usually cannot see.As Delany so eloquently writes, \u201cinvisible cities that can only be manifested, to whatever ghostly extent, by technology\u201d (p.11).Like John Cage\u2019s \u201csilent\u201d composition, 4'jj\" the first Indian artists to bridge the divide between East and West.In keeping with his previous work, The Sher-Gil Archive (1995), Sundaram's complex montages spoke of memory, identity and cultural displacement to stress the importance of personal narrative as a counterpoint to a homogeneous national vision.Gowda\u2019s installation, And Tell Him of My Pain (2000) used simple everyday materials, thread, needles and red kumkum to create a writhing three-dimensional drawing that accentuated the role of the artwork as a residual document.Gowda\u2019s work functioned as a testament to the personal tactile experience of its creator and also called attention to the labour and process of both the artist and the women in India who use these materials on a daily basis.The intersection of personal narrative with public document carried through to the work of Rummana Hussain at the Vancouver Art Gallery.Hussain\u2019s installation, Home/Nation (1996), was reminiscent of a shrine or reliquary with its sealed momentos, documents and photographs.The eclectic collection wove a powerful narrative which commented on the status of women in India.The intimate nature of Hussain\u2019s work was paired off against the documentary films of activist filmmaker Anand Patwardhan, also at the vag.Patwardhan\u2019s films openly critiqued the political situation in India and endeavoured to raise consciousness about the hazards of a government which positions religion as a prerequisite for national identity.Patwardhan\u2019s We Are Not Your Monkeys (1996) addressed the mythological origins of the untouchable caste found in the Hindu epic the Ramayana, a text which figures prominently in the rhetoric of the right wing, and his most recent Ribbons For Peace dealt with the nuclear testing undertaken by India in May 1998.Presentation House, in North Vancouver, was host to the photographic work of Pushpamala N and an exhibition of popular Indian calendar art, \u201cFrom Goddess to Pin-Up: Icons of Femininity in Indian Calendar Art\u201d culled from the collection of Sociologist Patricia Uberoi.Pushpamala N\u2019s Phantom Lady or Kismet, A Photoromance (1998) recuperated the 1935 Bollywood film persona of the fearless femme fatale cum swashbuckling superheroine of the Hunterwalli films.In their heyday these films gained popidar appeal by virtue of the heroine\u2019s ability to set right the evils of the world.To cast herself as the Hunterwalli in modern Mumbai, Pushpamala N\u2019s twenty-two black-and-white photographs delivered a sardonic critique of urban life in the thriving metropolis.Her photographs positioned the feminine as an active agent and called attention to the gender stereotypes exemplified by tire \u201cFrom Goddess to Pin-Up\u201d segment of the exhibition.The ephemeral brightly coloured images that made up the corpus of the calendar exhibit served to capitalize on the purchase power of the feminine as an empty sign ready for enlistment in the sale of both commodity' and ideology.\u201cSecular Practice\u201d encapsulated the need to develop international awareness of India\u2019s present political situation.The social relevance of the work included in this segment of the exhibition was sadly underscored this February when sectarian violence broke out in India\u2019s northern state of Gujarat, leaving over 500 people dead.The diversity of artistic engagement represented by this show not only challenged the myopic conception of India promoted by the Hindu right but it also highlighted the productive artistic tensions between the sacred and the secular, the urban and the rural, as well as the national and the international.\u201cMoving Ideas\u201d was the first major exhibition of contemporary Indian art to be held in North America.This unparalleled event represented a vast array of current artistic practice in India and successfully unmoored the lingering perception that Indian art is located in an enduring and pristine past.> KathleeN Wyma The author is a graduate studeiNt studyiNg coNtemporary iNdiaN art at the UNiversity of British Columbia.< kwyma@hotmail.com > (1952), Nauman\u2019s Mapping the Studio additionally depends on a field of unintentional movement and sound, chance and indeterminacy as well as the interpenetration of audience and work.Located in the gallery across the street from Dia\u2019s main building, a square room is built inside the former industrial space.Seven high-backed office chairs on casters sit in its centre, providing seating for the audience.Inside, seven greenish-grey infrared videos of Nauman\u2019s studio space are projected onto the four walls, The glowing projections reflect onto the smooth, highly polished concrete floor, further merging space and work.The individual pixels quiver on the walls like the surface tension of a heat mirage, barely visible on the low horizon of a highway, or like so many sequins on the wall, shimmering under the influence of a slight air current.Evenly spaced around the room, the projections display the leftover detritus of Nauman\u2019s studio - a stepladder, multiple casts of heads, leftover lumber, a rubber bucket with gloves dangling over its edge, pliers, C-clamps, partially opened shipping crates, a plaster-mixing tub, a drawing tube, three mismatched chairs forming a semi-circle, an unstretched, unfinished painting dangling from the wall as well as other unidentifiable bits of rubbish strewn across floor and walls.Multiple soundtracks of incidental noises in and outside of the studio record a coyote\u2019s bark, the restless movement of horses in the corral outside, thunder cracks - sounds that are punctuated by other less-identifiable bumps, crashes and bangs from inside the studio.Objects flip-flop from wall to floor, change place or disappear, signaling that the videotape which is initially presented as seamless is anything but.Rather it is a series of segments shot over successive nights and then edited into a five-hour-and-forty-five minute loop.Another cue that what is being watching is not a series of still images, but a field of constant, otherwise imperceptible activity, emerges when twin, glowing pinpoints dance across the field, and resolve into the nervous, stop-and-go motion of mice and lizards.The flicker and twitch of their movements across the floor, under studio litter and up the screen door heightens the already-present pulse and quiver of the video pixels.\u201cA cat and mouse game\u201d was a phrase that came to mind the second time I sat inside Nauman\u2019s work.Mapping the Space activates one\u2019s peripheral vision, leaving viewers at full attention, inside a series of perspectives onto apparently empty rooms, waiting for the jolt of pleasure that comes when something moves.Beetles and cockroaches slowly and methodically crawl across the door jambs and floor.Moths scud across the camera lens, drawn to the light, and are caught and suspended on its beams, leaving vaporous streams behind them like jets.The appearance of a black, tailless cat is an event.Its eyes, twin points reflected in the spotlight, create phosphorescent trails as it looks this way and that, hunting for mice.From one comer of the Dia space, the cat\u2019s hoarse meow is heard, while on the other it lopes across a corner of the studio, and disappears through a doorway into another room.I find myself waiting for its return.The illusion that the seven screens provide seven contiguous windows onto a roughly coterminous space, existing on an alternate plane that we have been afforded a temporary glimpse into, is ruptured when the same cat appears simultaneously in two projections.However this illusion is repaired when Nauman walks across three frames of his studio, flashlight on.Combined with an absence of an art object - that no one can bang into or knock over - the mobile chairs and the dark room create an atmosphere of motility, autonomy and uncertainty that differs sharply from both the conventional museum and cinematic experience.Audience members form and disperse, or engage in impromptu bumper car games.Two girls became like two sentries, perched at taut attention in the middle of the space, facing opposite directions so as to miss nothing: \u201cI saw a dog - look!\u201d.\u201cWhere?\u201d .\u201cOver there!\u201d .\u201cDo you think it\u2019s a live [real time] video?\u201d An intertwined couple vigorously make out, small groups of three or more friends meet, sit down, chat and then disperse, a group of women gleefully straddle the chairs and propel themselves across the smooth floor, laughing with delight, and an unhappy young man wandered up to me and said, \"What\u2019s supposed to happen?\u201d Mapping the Studio sits between the type of attention required by a still image, a prolonged, attentive look, and a film, where the action comes hurtling at you and you absorb the rush of information.Over the duration of the video, Nauman brings a cat-and-mouse game into the museum.Suspended between a moving and a still image, Mapping the Studio draws on both, setting up a temporal suspense that reconfigures the quality of attention it derives from the audience.> Margot BoumaN The author lives in New Yorn City aNd is a Ph.D.caNdidate in the Graduate Program in Visual aNd Cultural Studies at the UNiversity of Rochester.Deiourism Renaissance Society Chicago November 11 - December 23 \u201cDetourism\u201d is a combination of \u201cdetour,\u201d going someplace you don\u2019t want to go because of circumstances beyond your control, and \u201ctourism,\" visiting a place to satisfy a desire to experience someplace exotic and new.Curator and education director Hamza Walker coined this neologism for an exhibit which elaborates on what an idea of \u201cplace\u201d can possibly mean to an individual in a post-multi-culti, globalized, very-late-capitalist world.Invoking Gertrude Stein\u2019s conflagrations of linguistic meaning as a diasporic umbrella of context - \u201cCan you tell can you really tell it from here .From here to there and from there to there\u201d (Detourism, p.11) - Walker collected work by fourteen artists from around the globe to ruminate on the complexities of owning up to being a tourist in specific geographic locales.The show includes all the trappings of a holiday trip that one would expect: There are picture postcards, tchotchke souvenirs, and the ubiquitous phrase books that help us translate from a familiar language into a \u201cforeign\u201d one.The postcards are provided by beautiful large-scale colour photographs that describe the thrill of travel: Michelle Keim\u2019s gorgeous \u201cAir Traffic\u201d series capture the flight patterns of planes leaving Chicago\u2019s O\u2019Hare airport rt coNtemporaiN _ contemporary art 007 .page 5 m Suchan Kinoshita, Lautsprecher (Loudspeaker), 1997, still from video, \u201cDetourism' photo: courtesy The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago.David Servos, Axes, 2001, installation detail, \"Detourism\u201d; photo: courtesy The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago.ANNelies Strba Galerie Anîon Mc | eNève | 21 février - 1er mai 2002 Annelies Strba, Linda dans la cuisine, 2001 ; photo: Galerie Anton Meier, Genève.Chez certains artistes, la maturité apporte une sérénité bienvenue ou au contraire navrante selon les tempéraments.Avec sa vidéo Nyima (2002) et les photographies extraites de son autre vidéo Daiva (2001) - en tibétain, «Nyima» signifie lune et «Dawa» soleil -, Annelies Strba démontre une quiétude heureuse en harmonie avec une créativité réfléchie.Dans ces œuvres, elle décuple une propension pour les visions éphémères, les cadrages respectueux de la réalité, les attendrissements de l\u2019œil pour les paysages bucoliques et les floraisons exotiques, les femmes aux cheveux longs et aux jupes de mousseline.Le spectateur pourrait presque s\u2019y méprendre.Cette image de la femme féminine et douce, embrassant des bébés potelés ou roulant de joie avec ses enfants dans ime prairie pourrait aisément le tromper.Est-il devant des visions les plus rétrogrades, des clichés les plus défraîchis ou une version aussi obsolète que dépréciée du bonheur ?Posées sur un cuir épais et ses fermetures éclair, les fesses roses de bébé qui tortille un piercing de maman, tout en buvant son biberon sur une berceuse de Nirvana, semble une image plus véridique de la réalité.Or, tout l\u2019intérêt de ce travail réside dans ce constat: l\u2019erreur est de le prendre au premier degré.Comme toutes les œuvres, elle n\u2019est pas à consommer en passant vite, comme une «restauration rapide» pour satisfaire soudain un besoin symbolique de culture.Cette œuvre requiert l\u2019épreuve du temps et de la patience pour agir en profondeur.Une assiduité anachronique avec l\u2019empressement des visiteurs qui rechignent à passer plus de quelques minutes dans la «boîte noire» de la galerie, alors que Nyima nécessite vingt-neuf minutes d\u2019attention au son de chants bouddhistes enregistrés au Népal; un «hum» impérissable suffisamment compensé par l\u2019explosion du plaisir visuel pour les spectateurs insensibles aux bienfaits du bouddhisme tantrique.Cependant, seules les vidéos offrent une approche correcte de son travail puisque les « résidus » photographiques qui en sont extraits induisent une erreur de jugement et, surtout, occultent la dimension créative essentielle.En passant vite devant les photographies le spectateur manque le principal, l\u2019effet poétique qui émerge de la combinaison de trois ingrédients : un déploiement ralenti de la composition entièrement soumise aux coloris; le travail de la caméra, parfois lisse comme une caresse ou au contraire rythmé par de légers soubresauts et bégaiements subtils; la musique propice aux rêves diurnes.La créativité de ce regard patient de l\u2019artiste sur les détails intemporels réside dans un écart de la temporalité et de la saisie du réel par rapport ¦EliWEira rt coNtemporaiN _ coNiemporary art\t007 .paee 6 size vertical vitrine, the miniature imagery in the stamps, from proud Afrikaaner white leadership to a proud Nelson Mandela, accumulate to trace the history of nation-image-making in this country which continues to struggle with an identity crisis tied to real economic and racial problems.Inability to speak the language is always a problem when travelling, don\u2019t you know.Rainer Ganahl has made a collection of t-shirts, some included in \u201cDetourism,\u201d that say \u201cTeach me Albanian\u201d or \u201cTeach Me Chinese\u201d translated into the language requested.This Austrian-born, New York transplant\u2019s brand of do-it-yourself diplomacy was furthered in his attempt to learn Chinese.Stacks and stacks of vhs tapes, which document his language studies, could be cynically interpreted, as Walker does, as a commodification of the ability to translate for economic gain.I prefer to hope that GanahTs ever-inadequate attempt to learn new languages are a pathetic but genuine urge to meet actual people on each other\u2019s own terms.Suchan Kinoshta's Loudspeaker (1997) is similarly frustrated in attempting language translation.Walking into a shanty-like cubicle, the viewer looks into a telescope to watch a video of a woman listening to two people - one at each ear - and trying to translate what she hears for the viewer.None of the languages are English, and therefore lost on this viewer, but the hope that translation can lead to true understanding is palpable.Tourism can no longer be understood as West on East or First on Third.Johanna Bresnick\u2019s Panama Canal Conduit (2000) is her handmade souvenir - a lumpy pathetic sculpture of the grand canal - of a geographic divide that separates her from her Ecuadorian husband\u2019s culture.Siegren Appelt\u2019s blurred video view from a train into Milan presents only personal visual confusion without any overarching cultural obfuscation.If anything, David Servos\u2019s video sling - a projection of footage of the artist flinging around a camera focussed on himself with a background continually in blur, then slung into oblivion - is perhaps the most poignant delectation of Walker\u2019s \u201cDetourism.\u201d Along with the Afghani carpets woven during the Soviet invasion, replete with helicopter and machine gun images, which were borrowed from local collectors and graced the entrance to this provocative show, are sad but compelling evidence that as much as we want to understand other cultures, our imperialist tourism still wants to own.> KaihryN Hixson The author is aN art critic, editor of New Art ExamiNer, aNd adjUNct assistais professor at the School of the Art iNstitute of Chicago.\u201cmass\u201d transportation, and overdetermined atmospheres - not exotic at all.Burtynsky\u2019s sweeping views are exotic enough for a West starved for new unmediated experience - shot in the Bay of Bengal ravaged by monsoons.But his subject matter, beautifully photographed, is of giant rusted cargo ships marooned on beaches after the rains stop.Against the vessels\u2019 vast scale, tiny human workers can be seen dismantling them for scrap metal.The contrast between the economy of global trade represented by the ships -Walker describes them as almost geologic - and the tenacious scavengers highlights the interdependency of modernity and ancient trade practices: The death of the ships creates a new economy for a native population, though not one as easily consumed by a visiting Other as a quaint village life of picturesque rituals.Carter and Giles\u2019 video of marching bare feet similarly problematizes touristic consumption.Titled Footage (2000), their video was shot during a visit to Bali as they were trying out their new camera.Set on a curb, it recorded a formal procession, but without the full cultural trappings of costume, music and atmosphere.By then transferring this brief video mishap into a shiny, high-tech, spinning low-slung monitor-machine, the artists made this dramatic immersion into another culture into a friendly merry-go-round, exposing their own ambivalent feelings about yearning to get away while wanting to feel at home.Tourists bring home souvenirs to prove that they were there, objects from other cultures that point to difference, while remaining safe and understandable.Giles and Carter made seven miniature models of such objects, culled from their travel photos, but denuded them of the mementos\u2019 exotic and colourful cheapness: the sandals, pagodas and bananas are each sixteen inches high, handmade of unpainted chipboard.Corey McCorkle makes a more arcane high-art gesture at souvenir collecting: He gathered wood from around the world in thin veneers, wrapping them around fluorescent tube lighting.Nestled into the fixtures of the Renaissance Society\u2019s high ceiling, the covered tubes glowed in various brown hues in a combo that conflates Dan Flavin with third-world deforestation issues.Simeon Allen collected postage stamps during the period of South Africa\u2019s move from colonialism to post-apartheid times.Displayed in a wall- in super-long exposures, allowing her film to capture the elegant rising of air traffic.Miranda Lichtenstein and Edward Burtynsky present vast panoramic views of faraway places in crisp photographic detail, and Jeff Carter and Susan Giles, a collaborative team, show us the up-close bustle of foreign feet in a video that spins around on a merry-go-round contraption hugging the floor of the gallery.But these various views do not sit easily within the wish-you-were-here-postcard genre to which Walker refers them, and his curatorial premise begins to get fleshed out.The dignified arcs in Keim\u2019s photographs look ominous, especially post-September 11.The tracings of the planes\u2019 headlights through space could signify scarily precise threats of bombing raids as easily as a harbinger of grandma\u2019s homecoming.Similarly, Lichtenstein\u2019s pretty pictures from a 2001 series titled \u201cCyberjaya\u201d draw the viewer in with their inexhaustible detail, but what she describes is eerily unsettling: the pictures document the building of model communities for Internet workers outside of Kuala Lumpur.More frightening than even Disneyland\u2019s ideal community in the States, these newly fashioned suburbs sport acres of fake neighbourhoods, H î monte Shahryar Nashai Shahryar Nashat, Unreasonably Resonant, 2002, extrait vidéo.Alongside such works, some of the more oblique pieces in the exhibition struggle to make an impact and risk appearing trite, Martin Boyce\u2019s Noiv I\u2019ve Got Worry (1997) is a beat-up Eames shelving unit, where some of the bright, pristine formica panels have been replaced by graffitied boards.The writing issues challenges to the invasion of private space and, more specifically, refers to the slogans scrawled on walls by neighbours of Nicole Brown Simpson, who were fed up with the tourist attraction status their neighbourhood had acquired in the furor surrounding the O.J.Simpson trial.Immediacy is replaced by a complex layering of references.The linguistic explorations of Christopher Wool and Felix Gonzalez Torres seem somehow rather dry; they are earnest and yet hollow.This impression is enhanced by the evident satisfaction of the majority of the exhibition visitors who wander around clutching rolled up papers taken from Torres\u2019 stacks.While Lucia Nogueira\u2019s Slip (1992), a bell jar which on closer inspection appears chipped and stained with blood, provokes a flinch, its impact is no greater.Tracey Moffat\u2019s series of lithographs Scarred for Life II (1999) come as a welcome relief in their recognition of humour as a valid response.Her kitsch and retro images focus on the domestic and examine the location of trauma in childhood experience: twins cut the grass with scissors as a punishment, a schoolboy is mocked by his fellow teammates for his hand-knitted rugby kit, the authorities intervene on behalf of a child kept on a leash of tights by his mother as he plays in the garden, and two boys are forced to urinate into bags as they remain locked in a camper van while their mothers embrace on the beach in the background.There is an honesty in these images which are at once straightforwardly entertaining and thought-provoking.Individual works in the show offered powerful and fascinating interpretations of the meaning and experience of trauma and yet, as a whole the exhibition failed to deliver the punch promised by its title.That the framework should not be overly prescriptive seems to be somehow \u201cright,\u201d and yet one then begins to wonder, why have one at all?Within such a modest context, the breadth of response results in a grouping of works which lack coherence, and while this coherence is perhaps not necessary it is something for which we have been encouraged to look.The variety of responses to a term as loose and a notion as vast as trauma is not surprising, it is inevitable and in this inevitability it fails to stimulate.In another work by Kendell Geers, Double Take (2000), an exhausted Steve McQueen does push-ups and mutters incessantly \u201cI\u2019m going to be ok.\u201d Watching McQueen it is hard either to empathize or sympathize and his lack of conviction seems to serve as a fitting metaphor for the overall \u201cTrauma\u201d experience.But while this feeling of anticlimax may betray all too clearly the voyeuristic tendencies alluded to in Boyce\u2019s work, it should be added that it was however a sense of disappointment coupled with one of relief.> Sara HarnsoN The author is aN editor on ARTbibliosraphies Modem aNd a free-laNce journalist.Ceisiire pour 1\u2019image coisitemporaiNe SaiNt-Gervais GeNève 23 jaNvier - 24 mars Un homme se débat dans l\u2019eau, le bruit du ressac auquel se mêlent des voix envahit l\u2019espace.Une sourde oppression submerge le spectateur rivé à cette noyade.Seule l\u2019image en gros plan de l\u2019homme luttant pour sa survie - projetée sur un grand écran double face - éclaire faiblement la salle plongée dans l\u2019obscurité.Cet instant de saisissement passé, le spectateur discerne, parmi les sons, une voix masculine qui résonne au delà de l\u2019écran.Se déplaçant, il s\u2019enfonce dans le noir et fait face à une autre scène sur un moniteur suspendu à quelque distance derrière l'écran.Le son prend ici toute son ampleur: issu de trois sources distinctes, il emplit l\u2019espace de résonances qui tissent des liens étranges et instables entre l\u2019image de l\u2019écran et celle du moniteur.La voix a comme un écho, un deuxième souffle.Elle semble raconter une histoire, que l\u2019on est tenté de rattacher à la scène qui défile sur le moniteur.Un homme couché par terre dans une chambre vide est transporté par un autre homme ganté de blanc qui lui ligote les mains et les pieds.Action indéchiffrable, qui n\u2019attribue ni à l\u2019un ni à l\u2019autre les rôles de bourreau ou de victime, la voix jetant le doute sur la distribution.« Because I didn\u2019t make the rules, I just suggested.» L\u2019histoire reprend au début chaque fois que la voix off s\u2019avoue insatisfaite de sa reconstruction.« I will have to start all over again.He will have to start all over again.» Dans cet effort de reconstitution mentale, le narrateur fait appel à sa mémoire, en perpétuelle réorganisation, et à son imagination qui infléchit les relations entre l\u2019événement et sa restitution.« I live from imagination and recollection.» Les mots, à l\u2019instar du noyé, lâchent prise, comme si la raison submergée par les émotions rassemblait des souvenirs qu\u2019une voix intérieure inventerait et qui pourtant auraient eu une incidence réelle sur le comportement du narrateur.Ainsi la mémoire, tissu fictiona-lisé, rejoue à l\u2019envi l\u2019événement et, à force, pose les conditions même de son existence; elle s\u2019assimile à une mise en scène.Celle d\u2019Unreasonably Resonant, qui force le spectateur à se déplacer presque à tâtons dans le noir à l\u2019écoute d\u2019une voix, calque en quelque sorte le cheminement intérieur du narrateur.Et la noyade relance la quête du sens, qui fait surface, puis disparaît dans un mouvement que l\u2019émergence reconfigure à chaque fois.«Because anything is possible and likely to happen.» à la norme : ce qui est le lieu même du travail poétique pour éveiller la sensibilité, faire émerger des sensations imprévues et surprendre nos habitudes.Les couleurs pastel et acidulées, souvent réduites à un jeu d\u2019opposition binaire contrasté, alimentent le rendu flou issu de cet excès.Obtenues par saturation, substitution ou traitement de l\u2019image, elles rappellent un penchant désuet pour l\u2019attrait des techniques propres à rendre un effet visuel, comme un écho aux vibrations impressionnistes ou aux substitutions fauvistes d\u2019un autre temps.Le sujet filmé, paysages ou fleurs, ciels orageux ou cascades, (Nyima) n\u2019est plus que le support d\u2019une composition essentiellement coloriste.Ce travail glisse sur les franges de l\u2019identifiable, à la frontière de l\u2019abstraction.Comme l\u2019avait très bien souligné Jacqueline Lichtenstein, dans La Couleur âoquente, (Flammarion, Paris, 1989), le coloris est ce qui ne se laisse pas soustraire par le concept.Les vidéos d\u2019Annelies Strba forcent toute conceptualisation à plier sous le joug de la sensibilité, interdisent tout jugement rationnel autre que technique et échappent à une quelconque emprise théorique.Or, c\u2019est ici que le public retrouve le dilemme de la réception et du jugement des œuvres d\u2019art : soit elles procurent un authentique plaisir, soit elles sont une mise en question radicale et novatrice des formes de l\u2019art, comme le souhaiterait une certaine élite satisfaite de sa seule intelligence au détriment de pulsions sensuelles parfois anémiées.Oui, ces œuvres sont contemporaines et oui elles sont poétiques et sensuelles.N\u2019en déplaise aux derniers consensus à la mode, la création aujourd\u2019hui peut aussi ne pas être cérébrale et nécessiter la logique des propositions ou l\u2019analytique des concepts.Ce qui poserait donc im problème avec ces œuvres radieuses, c\u2019est justement qu\u2019elles sont trop belles.Or, la beauté relève encore d\u2019une dimension «bourgeoise» de l\u2019art: superbe justification pour décorer un bureau ou un hall de banque; critère avilissant pour une œuvre d\u2019art «contemporaine» qui risque, par ce traître penchant pour la satisfaction d\u2019un plaisir, de tomber dans l\u2019opprobre et le purgatoire de la création d\u2019aujourd\u2019hui.Finalement, c\u2019est un problème de réception: c\u2019est le public qui est fautif, et les déficiences cruelles d\u2019un regard véritablement critique.> VéroNique d\u2019Auzac de Lamartmie L\u2019auteure est critique d\u2019art iNdépeNdaNte; elle prépare actuellement un essai d\u2019esthétique sur l\u2019art coNtemporaiN.Elle vit à GeNève. As a title for an exhibition, it is at once attention-grabbing and hard-hitting.We brace ourselves as we enter the space, prepared to vicariously relive the traumas presented by twelve international artists.A photograph of Kendell Geers\u2019 Cry Wolf (1999), an entangled heap of flashing emergency lights, is used on the poster for the show and strikes a brash, challenging note, far removed in fact from the sense of disquiet and pathetic desperation engendered by the actual work in the gallery.The introductory text on the wall draws attention to the multitudinous meanings of the term and highlights the consequent breadth of response of these artists which ranges from the highly personal to the universal, with subjects encompassing both domestic and public concerns.At the monumental end of the scale lies Johan Grimonprez\u2019s by now familiar Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997)- The montage of images, music and literary texts documenting the history of plane hijackings has of course, as in so many cases, acquired a whole new poignancy, currency and indeed significance since September 11th.The images are compelling in both their brutality and in their garbled presentation.Our struggle to make sense of what we see mimics the victims\u2019 inability to comprehend, while their grief remains immediately accessible.Continuing in the documentary vein Anri Sala\u2019s moving video Nocturnes (1999) trades monumen-tality for intimacy.Two initially separate narratives telling the stories of two men in northern France gradually merge, a path mirrored by the steady conflation of images.While one man, Jacques, talks obsessively about tropical fish, the other, Denis, a un soldier who fought in the Balkans, recounts his military experiences.His disturbed state Johan Grimonprez, Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, 1997, detail, \u201cTrauma\u201d; photo: courtesy Museum of Modern Art, Oxford.and the distress apparent from his testimony is heightened by the camera\u2019s focus on his nail-bitten fidgeting hands.Through their respective uses of newsreel footage and the documentary genre, Grimonprez and Sala present us with common material and more significantly present it to us in the form in which we are most accustomed to witnessing trauma, and indeed experiencing it at one remove.While their subject matter renders their work in one sense unpalatable, it is at the same time strangely familiar to our constitutions and as such peculiarly digestible.La mise en espace des sons, des images et des textes est une préoccupation centrale aux travaux vidéo de Shahryar Nashat.Elle sert une thématique complexe où se côtoient mémoire et imagination, rêve et conscience, souvenirs et mise en scène.Le narrateur revient compul-sivement à la source de la rupture, c\u2019est-à-dire au moment où quelque chose s\u2019est passé, qui a modifié son comportement et ainsi ses relations au monde.Ces événements d\u2019ordre traumatique refont alors surface par lambeaux qu\u2019une imagination fantasmatique arrache au passé et que la conscience désormais altérée reconsidère.La voix navigue entre différents états de conscience et voile les inconsistances entre ses différents points d\u2019origine.La voix est lancée comme un moteur de recherche.Elle parle en termes comparables à des indications scéniques, faisant naître ainsi un sentiment étrange de distance et de froideur clinique.Effet paradoxal, car sous le discours dépourvu d\u2019affect et en apparence rationnel percent des dérèglements, affleurent des états de conscience différents.Les personnages sont en fait scindés, en proie à l\u2019hésitation, proches à certains moments de l\u2019univers psychiatrique et livrés au monde onirique, comme possédés, dédoublés.«Someone should just free me from the nasty person that\u2019s inside me.» La connaissance qu\u2019ils ont d\u2019eux-mêmes est mouvante et paradoxale.Cette thématique du dérèglement est explorée dans Off Screen (2000).Cet ensemble (six tirages argentiques montés sur aluminium) reproduit des indications scéniques s\u2019adressant au rôle de Blanche dans Un Tramway Nommé Désir (Tennessee Williams).Shahryar Nashat sélectionne parmi elles celles qui font apparaître le déséquilibre du caractère de Blanche et dont le style s\u2019apparente à une notice clinique.Superpositions mentales, décalages et glissements construisent l\u2019ambiance particulière de All the Way Back, the Reconstruction (2001) qui illustre bien ce thème du dédoublement et, comme son nom l\u2019indique, met sur le devant de la scène l\u2019acte de reconstruction.À nouveau, le narrateur tente de reconstituer le déroulement d\u2019un événement et de lui insuffler un sens.Une voix lui souffle son texte qu\u2019il répète en boucle; lui-même à la recherche d\u2019une voix, il glisse du «il» au «je», mêlant plusieurs points de vue, se demandant s\u2019il est témoin de ce qu\u2019il a vu ou s\u2019il en est l\u2019auteur, s\u2019il n\u2019est pas victime d\u2019une mise en scène.Qui a fait quoi?Il y a des faits certes «There are the facts, a man running.», mais «ces faits», plus qu\u2019ils n\u2019offrent de clé de compréhension, soulignent la disparition de l\u2019événement.« What just happened has no importance.» She Can\u2019t Keep Hold of Herself it Keeps on Moving (2001) donne une tournure plus dramatique au thème du dédoublement.Cette installation met en scène le monologue d\u2019une jeune femme.L\u2019image est dédoublée et projetée sur deux écrans se faisant face, la jeune femme s\u2019adresse à elle-même, à son double, et le spectateur muni d\u2019un casque infrarouge entend sa voix comme une résonance se confondant avec sa propre voix intérieure; l\u2019effet s\u2019en trouve encore redoublé.Le recours à de légers décalages dans les angles de prise de vue des deux images, ainsi qu\u2019entre la bande-son et l\u2019image, souligne la difficulté du récit à rendre un événement et rejoue sur le plan formel le thème du dédoublement.L\u2019écran, surface de projection, de réflexion aussi, sert ces rêves éveillés, ces cauchemars diurnes.La multiplicité des positions et des déplacements possibles entre les écrans rend compte de l\u2019irréductibilité de l\u2019expérience et surtout met en scène le spectateur en l\u2019incluant dans le processus de reconstruction.Le spectateur agence les éléments visuels, sonores et textuels dans une succession de combinaisons personnelles et précaires.Cette spatialisation de l\u2019expérience, à laquelle les dispositifs sonores contribuent, est un des traits dominants et des plus prometteurs des travaux récents de Shahryar Nashat.Les installations de Shahryar Nashat proposent une réflexion originale sur la voix.La voix est un fil conducteur dans ce labyrinthe qu\u2019est la conscience : elle véhicule les mots, articulant à haute voix des cristallisations provisoires et incertaines.Les personnages semblent emprunter une voix - quand ce n\u2019est pas elle-même qui les habite - qui ne dit qu\u2019une partie de ce qu\u2019ils sont, ne révélant qu\u2019une facette, qui plus est temporaire, de leur relation à eux-mêmes et à l\u2019extérieur.Ces va-et-vient entre des voix diverses créent une indétermination fondamentale entre les mondes intérieur et extérieur, deux entités communément envisagées comme distinctes.Et c\u2019est bien le trouble que Shahryar Nashat sème avec cette voix unique, canal de voix multiples, palimpseste vocal.> Isabelle Papaloïzos hauteur est historieNNe de l\u2019art et rédactrice à I'EncvcIo-pédie des Nouveaux médias. Museum of Modem Art | Oxford | JaNuary 26 - April 7 ri coNiemporaiN _ coNiemporary art 007 .page 7 Broadcasts Project, dedicated to NiKola Tesla (MR Technical Museum | Zagreb | Croatia JaNuary 26 - March 3 para-para- esi publié par PARACHUTE _ para-para- is published by PARACHUTE directrice de la publicaiiON _ editor: CHANTAL PONTBRIAND coordoNNaieur à I\u2019admiNisirauoN ei à la productiON _ coordiNaior (admmisirauoN aNd producuoN): MARTIN ROBITAILLE adjoiws à la rédaciiON _ assisiaw editors: JIM DROBNICK, THÉRÈSE ST-GELAIS rédacteur correspondaNt _ cowribuunR editor: STEPHEN WRIGHT collaborateurs _ cowtributors: MARGOT BOUMAN, ROSSITZA DASKALOVA, CHRISTINE DUBOIS, SARA HARRISON, KATHRYN HIXSON, ADRIENNE LAI, VÉRONIQUE D\u2019AUZAC DE LAMARTINE, MARC JAMES LÉGER, IVANA MANCE, ISABELLE PAPAL0ÏZ0S, KATHLEEN WYMA, STEPHEN WRIGHT traductiON _ traNslatiON: NATASA ILIC réviseurs de la maquette _ copy editors: Timothy Barnard, Marie-Nicole Ciidon promotion publicité _ promotioN, adveriiswe: MONICA GYÔRKÔS comptabilité _ accouwme: ISABELLE DUPLESSIS stagiaires _ imems: KÉLINA GOTMAN, ANDREA WILSON graphisme _ design: DOMINIQUE MOUSSEAU rédaction, admiNistratiON, aboNNemeNts _ editorial aNd administrative offices, subscriptions: PARACHUTE, 4060, boul.Samt-LaureNt, bureau 501, Montréal (Québec) Canada H2W 1Y9 téléphone: (514) 842-9805 télécopieur _ fax: (514) 842-9319 courriel _ e-mail: mfo@parachute.ca Prière de Ne pas envoyer de communiqués par courriel _ Please do Not seNd press releases by e-mail.PARACHUTE remercie de leur appui fmaNcier _ thaNKs for their fmaNCial support: le Conseil des Arts du Canada _ The Canada CounciI for the Arts, le Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, le Conseil des Arts de la Communauté urbame de Montréal, le Fonds de stabilisation et de consolidation des arts et de la culture du Québec, la Ville de Montréal et le mmistère de la Culture et des Communications du Québec.Nos aNNONceurs _ Our advertisers AgNes EtheriNgtoN Art Cemre > Art 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107 07_08_09 2002 élecirosoNS_ elecirosouNds CaroliNe Hayeur > Essai visueLVisual Essay, Achim SzepaNSKi > Digital Music aNd Media Theory, RaymoNd Gervais > Eleciric Readymade, Brady CraNfield > Oval, Kim CascoNe > Laptopia, Tim HecKer > \u201cThe Victorious Realm of Electricity,\u201d Philip Sherburne > SouNd Art / SouNd Bodies, MartiN Pesch > CarsieN Nicolai, Vinconi Epplay > Vinconi Epplay, Marc Battier > iNformauque musicale, Bernard Schiitze > MoNtréal Mushroom GatheriNg + Échos et mouvaNces_Echoes aNd Shifts + Réxrospective_FlashbacK + Livres et revues_BooKS aNd MagaziNes En Kiosque dès maiNteNaNi _ On sale now [ www.p a r a c h u t e.c a ] the elliptic exchange of letters is displayed in the geological department of the museum, in the form of a rounded conglomerate produced by a process of copper electrolysis which supposedly transcribed the letters.In the work of Croatian artist Ivana Keser, the possibility of exerting omnipresent control over guileless consumers appears surreal next to telescopic photographs of space, presented as a recording of fictional polemics on cosmic conspiracy emanating from the nearby radio set.At the same time, the romantic hacker idea of wireless Internet access by Slovenian artist Marko Peljhan acquires cynical overtones placed next to a lightbox of the logo of a major Croatian telecommunications company, the main sponsor of the project.The same cynical turn is inevitable in Peljhan\u2019s other work, Trust System 22 (1998).The complicated and totally incomprehensible schema of an electronic military system that mystically glows in the dark, next to a model of a lethal missile, at least partially loses its sublime ominousness when the visitor learns that the author created the same missile as a private acquisition, buying its parts on the Internet black market.Despite the diversity of the works, the exhibition context offers a possibility to see most of them against the background of broadly understood relations between high and low technology.As sophisticated as it may be, every form of \u201cBroadcasting Project\u201d will seem naive and utopian when applied in a way that diverges from the currently dominant model that imposes itself as normal, normative, logical or original reality.In that sense, awareness about the constructed character of artworks and of the project as a whole presents a dimension of risk that inevitably precedes every subversive expectation.Since at any given moment, the strongholds of hegemonic interest might be adapted in order to calculate in advance the alternative models as nominal counterpoints, every initiative that automatically takes for granted \u201cBroadcasting Project\u2019s\u201d subversive and contra-cultural qualities is as mistaken as it is irresponsible.At the moment when (self-)ironic consciousness is being turned off, there arises a risk to comprehend its own critical position as a discursive construct that may quite easily fall victim to those social forces that stand to gain when things are taken to be self-evident.This is why \u201cBroadcasting Project\u201d is successful both as a platform located in a local context, bringing together people who for many years have used the media of mass communication at different levels, and in terms of how its very realization bypasses authoritarian media practices, and whose ideological contingency could not be sanctioned by any potentially \u201cpolitically correct\u201d programs.As a media spectacle which, given the opportunism of a certain part of the audience, tries to impose itself as a meta-linguistic optimum, \u201cBroadcasting Project\u201d runs the risk of becoming the privileged discourse of elite cultural forces that nurture a highly cultivated consciousness of the democratic potential of mass communication, but forget Brecht\u2019s basic principle: if the theatrical illusion is not broken at its most pleasant point, there is a risk of replacing reality with fiction, denying a chance to those for whom the struggle for media freedom is still imminent.> IV a N a MaNCe The author is aN art historiaN aNd free-laNce art critic liviNg in Zagreb.Translated from the Croatian by Natasa Ilic The exhibition itself, inevitably positioned at the border between media fascination and the possibilities for its utilization, was actually an occasion to try, hypothetically, to point out differences between the deliberate and intended media spectacle of the project and its real weight - that is, between the project and its realization, between sign and performance.Because if we take \u201cBroadcasting Project\u2019s\u201d systematic and protracted media blitz too seriously, there is danger of turning the exhibition events, the artworks shown and the very participation of the audience itself into a form of politically correct cultural conformity.And at that point, everything that presents recognizable formal signs of rebellion against the ever-vigilant guards of media globalization, or the syndrome of hysteric enthusiasm about new possibilities of hyper-communication, automatically becomes legitimate.In which case, the whole exhibition would merely float at the surface of simulated interaction between theory and praxis.It would be just a user-friendly system of guiding the audience to predetermined spots in a discourse, where, before the lulled visitor\u2019s eyes, a harmonious permeation of theory and praxis would lead to a critical and logically empty conclusion.But if we suppose that the whole media spectacle functions as a part of the project\u2019s realization, which in practice surpasses general suppositions of its theoretical articulation, the situation is dramatically different.The exhibition at the Technical Museum, like the events linked to it, as well as the whole narrative formed around Nikola Tesla, produces a necessarily playful and ironic alternative for that segment of the audience inclined to take the bait not only of a trendy concept but also of works offered by major names from the Croatian and international art scene, including Marina Abramovic', Braco Dimitrijevic, Scanner and Marko Peljhan.The exhibition was worthwhile not merely in terms of the locally and internationally established authors, but also to see those works in the company of works by less known authors, unobtrusively integrated into the museum context, which managed to poke fun even at the works of artists who are inclined to take themselves far too seriously.In the context - full of the wreckage of iron machinery, unwieldy models and various rare species of outdated technology - every aspect of fascination with high technology was radically de-sublimed.Emptied of the powerful charge of their potential efficiency, technological toys generate a utopian surplus that creates an imaginary projection of an era when electric energy allegedly had a more palpable, more human form than it has now in its present abstract incarnation in the form of digital information.The whole story is further fictionalized by the personality of Nikola .Tesla: for as much as one tries to produce an historically exact and scientifically legitimate image of Tesla and his inventions, the semantic mixture provided by \u201cBroadcasting Project\u201d primarily brings out his showman-like charm and strongly developed, ethically motivated utopian consciousness - which makes him seem more similar to Gandalf than to the archetype of a serious scientist.In this context, even the works that might easily enforce diabolic and catastrophic intonations take on ironic dimensions.For example, in the work of Dalibor Martinis, pioneer of video art in Croatia, the paranoia of binary-coded hyper-reality weakens at the moment when an undecipherable message takes the form of Morse-coded credits at the beginning of the early version of the film King Kong.Failed attempts at establishing communication with artist celebrities become less frustrating - both for the author, Russian artist Yuri Leiderman, and a visitor - when The cultural event that doubtless marked the small cultural scene of Zagreb this season was the broadly conceived, several-month-long and multidisciplinary \"Broadcasting Project, dedicated to Nikola Tesla,\u201d organized by the curatorial collective What, How & for Whom (Ana Devic, Natasa Ilic, Sabina Sabolovic), in collaboration with the Arkzin publishing house, the mi2 multimedia institute, and the Technical Museum in Zagreb.As the size of a local scene does not depend solely on its number of participants, but rather on the demands it sets for itself, \u201cBroadcasting Project\u201d was educationally conceived and strategically developed from the outset.From its conception phase in June 2001 to the moment when the exhibition finally opened at Zagreb\u2019s Technical Museum, local audience awareness was systematically tuned-in through a series of monthly lectures given by internationally renowned curators and cultural theorists (Brian Holmes, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Viktor Misiano, Diedrich Diederichsen, Keiko Sei, David Toop, Igor Zabel, Branko Dimitrijevic, and others), radio shows, presentations in a local cultural magazine and a number of co-ordinated actions and art interventions, as well as through promotional material with a recognizable visual identity, distinguishing all these spatially and temporally dislocated segments as part of a single initiative.In this way, the project created the conditions to unambiguously locate its interests (\u201cto question the artistic and social implications of mass media,\u201d as the catalogue puts it) and position (conceptually in opposition to all forms of hegemonic discourse, its realization conceived as a form of research in progress) and to advance its cultural scope to the level of a social and political experiment \u201cseeking to redefine the social, political and public role of media,\u201d and to redirect mediated forms of communication.Marina Abramovic, In Between, 1996, installation view, \u201cBroadcasting Project, dedicated to Nikola Tesla\u201d; photo: Ivana Vucic, courtesy WHW.¦\" ' Vfctu tUJ Dalibor Martinis, To America I Say (Binary Series), 2001, \u201cBroadcasting Project, DEDICATED TO NI KOLA TESLA\u201d; PHOTO: IVANA VUCIC, COURTESY WHW.2002 rt coNtemporam _ contemporary art loo7 .page 8 "]