“Age of Catastrophe”

The disaster, unexperienced. It is what escapes the very possibility of experience—it is the limit of writing. This must be repeated: the disaster de-scribes.
–Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster

“Age of Catastrophe,” curated by Video Pool’s Melentie Pandilovski, is so packed with interactive work that it’s best viewed alone, though the opening, with its explosion of noise and frenetically convulsing machines, did fruitfully parallel the theme of the show. Inspired by mathematician René Thom’s catastrophe theory, Pandilovski brings together a diverse set of artists and thinkers to attempt a glimpse into futures for which we currently have no words—futures that can only be accounted for in retrospect. The included works represent today’s panoply of interactive and cybernetic contraptions, from twitching metal nervous systems to organic “micro-architectures,” many of which were activated to near exhaustion in the overfilled gallery. Upon returning alone, I found the show hobbled by technical glitches, a by-product of electronic art that is so common it barely merits mention. “Age of Catastrophe” feels like the outcome of a fevered desire, though knowingly futile, to mark the incomprehensible breadth of change that prods us ominously, precipitously, sending us into a vertigo of unknowability.

It’s a sad confluence of events that the opening night coincided with the Paris bombings, yet another in a series of catastrophes that sent rippling chain reactions felt painfully by the most vulnerable, such as the Syrian refugees, some of whose camps were later set alight in France, or the already besieged Muslim diaspora, whose mosque was burned in Peterborough, Canada. This recent spate of events has brought me back to Maurice Blanchot’s assertion that “the disaster de-scribes,” which is one statement amongst many bulleted utterances in The Writing of the Disaster that attempt to feel their way through that which we cannot name. The welling of knee-jerk reactions has shown how quickly the lessons of history give way to well-worn habit, putting us “face to face with ignorance of the unknown so that we forget, endlessly.” The projects that face the unknown and unknowable remain with me as the most urgent in the show, leaving the spectacle of futuristic imagining to blink, buzz and vibrate in the background.

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Level of Confidence, 2015, was perhaps the most subdued piece in the exhibition, nestled in a narrow hallway just before the entrance to David Rokeby’s immersive Dark Matter, 2010. The work consisted, simply enough, of an LCD monitor hung portrait-style with a scrolling grid of photographs picturing the faces of young Mexican men. These were students who, on September 26, 2014, were leaving their campus in Iguala, Guerrero to participate in demonstrations in Mexico City. That night they were ambushed by police and armed men; some were killed, others wounded and 43 of them, those pictured on the monitor, remain missing. Lozano-Hemmer uses facial recognition software to scan each viewer and attempt to match his or her likeness, with the closest “level of confidence,” to that of one of the students. Looking at the monitor, you confront your own face, overlaid with measurements, paired to its closest match. The work is both eulogy and despair; it highlights the tragic futility of looking for those most certainly dead, as well as the indifferent limits of the technology employed.

The contrast of Rokeby’s installation was jarring. Behind a curtain one enters a black space lit by ultraviolet light. A rectangle is taped off on the floor signifying the space of activation. During the opening, people staggering through darkness with arms outstretched triggered the sensors into a cacophony of sound. The entire room banged, crackled and popped to such an extent that it was difficult to grasp who was setting off what. The work resembles the artist’s early, and now iconic, piece Very Nervous System, 1982–1991, which translated physical gestures into a real-time sound environment. Using a similar strategy, Dark Matter maps out an unseen object in space, the limits of which the user can “touch” by moving through it. Upon returning at a quieter time, half the room remained silent, even as I spun around in hopes of eliciting the slightest reverberation. I was struck by how often the viewer is left to engage with the idea of the work, leaving its reception to be a truly collaborative act.

The number of projects and their diverging sensibilities make them exceptionally difficult to describe, let alone experience—I’ve never seen the gallery quite so full as during “Age of Catastrophe.” Kelly Richardson’s Orion Tide, 2013–2014, which I first saw on its own as a double projection at the Art Gallery of Guelph, then the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, loses its cinematic force as a single channel video opposite Andrew Milne’s self-styled “psychic viewers,” whose theatrical system of DIY laser-cut cogs and pulleys evokes a steampunk aesthetic. Between them an accumulation of glowing plinths feature Kelly Jaclynn Andres’s vitrine-encased fungal growths, which the artist calls “micro-architectures,” and a range of 3D-printed figures. The small sculptures are shown in various stages of completion, some of them still tangled in the melted plastic the machine uses to “draw,” while others look like miniatures of Brâncus¸i’s 1918 Endless Column. As a whole, the exhibition seems engaged in an attempt to describe what Blanchot wrote disaster specifically “de-scribes,” or unravels into an elemental, mute unknown.

It is perhaps here that one should take heed of Tom Kohut’s warning, found in one of the accompanying exhibition essays, that “it is always dangerous to overvalue art’s cognitive capacities,” though one might wonder what it means to “inhabit imaginatively the temporality of catastrophe” if not through repeating previously imagined visions of the end. I’ve been using disaster and catastrophe interchangeably but I think the parallels are real, even if semantics are slippery. Catastrophe theory, Kohut explains, states that catastrophic alterations can only be formalized retrospectively and so when we are caught in their midst, we lack the tools with which to adequately make sense of them. “To think the disaster,” writes Blanchot, “is to have no longer any future in which to think it.” Exhibitions like this are important not only in their ability to bring together an impressive range of international artists and thinkers, but in showing just how difficult it is to move past the limits of our experience before we are irreversibly thrust through them. Catastrophe, it seems, will affect us all, and there will be no way of making sense of it when it does.❚

“Age of Catastrophe” was co-presented by Video Pool and Actual Contemporary and was exhibited at Actual Contemporary, Winnipeg, from November 13 to December 13, 2015.

Dagmara Genda is an artist and freelance writer living in Winnipeg.