Angie Keefer and Fred Sandback

Plug In ICA has mounted two separate and seemingly unconnected exhibitions concurrently. There are contemporary artist, teacher, writer and publisher Angie Keefer’s three new works: First Class, Second Thought and Interminable Swell. These works make use of the resources of contemporary media art, including video, electronic voice synthesis, neon tubing and blue screen projection. The second exhibition on display is a unique collection of works of American minimalist artist Fred Sandback (1943–2003), including six pieces from the late 1960s/early 1970s to the early 2000s.

The pieces from Sandback’s vast body of work demonstrate his capacity for the delineation of empty space through an impressive economy of means. Primarily using coloured acrylic wool (red, grey, ochre, white, blue and black), Sandback groups together straight lines to “draw,” as with a pencil, forms that take advantage of the negative spaces of the gallery white box. Looking closely at the work, viewers are able to appreciate the shaggy, rough materiality of the fibre lines. Looked at from a distance, though, viewers are able to appreciate the way in which spaces are delineated in relation to the ceiling, walls and floor of the gallery. This effect is particularly strong in the pieces that spring away from the wall: Variation of 4 Rooms, 4 Horizontal Lines, 1969/1997, Four-Part Vertical Construction, 1992, and Untitled, 1972, the latter being notable for using yellow elastic cord rather than the acrylic wool typically associated with Sandback. In these pieces, lines appear and disappear as viewers move towards and, in the case of the Four-Part Vertical Construction, around the pieces, thereby altering the negative spaces that speak so audibly in these works. Certainly, this is an exhibition that invites silent contemplation as we allow Sandback’s works to communicate their quiet messages.

Sandback’s works are not, for the most part, objects that are transported from one gallery to another; rather, they exist as meticulous instructions made by the artist for authorized installers to interpret and follow. In the present exhibition, artist Amavong Payne, who has worked extensively with the Sandback archive, installed the works. So, to take Untitled (Four-part Vertical Construction) as an example, two parallel lines must be arranged such that they are parallel to the gallery wall, with the position and colour of each of the other two strings meticulously stipulated, whereas their height, naturally, depends on the distance between the gallery roof and floor. Thus, these works exist not as objects, but as the material application of a set of rules in a specific context.

This question of rules and their application that is brought forward by the Sandback exhibition is notably one under taken by Wittgenstein, who, in his Philosophical Investigations (1953), explored what it meant to follow (and not to follow) a rule. While his focus is on the meaning of language in the context of its everyday use, what we can take from this is the indistinction between a rule and its application. For Wittgenstein, a rule can be articulated in itself only as a methodological convenience, and this articulation is not, independent of its application, able to adjudicate if the rule has been followed correctly or incorrectly. French sociologist Luc Boltanski, in his book On Critique (Polity, 2011), gives this indistinction an explicitly political interpretation, noting that it is the power of the socio-politically dominant to justify to themselves when and how they (mis)apply social rules (which in this context include laws, procedures, standards, regulations and norms), whereas the margin for manoeuvre is much smaller for the dominated class. To be a member of the dominant class is to be in a position to adjudicate how the rule can be applied in advance; to be a member of the dominated is to be subject to this adjudication.

Angie Keefer’s three works in the concurrently running exhibition directly explore this socio-political question of who adjudicates and who is subject to adjudication. First Class is a video surrounded by an ostentatiously ornate gold frame, which shows women on chaises longues from various periods of art history reading selections from On Critique that deal with the dominated’s relation to social rules. Several metonyms of class authority are here: the ornate frame, the citations from Western art history and the video’s voice-over, which makes use of the synthetic speech software of telephone call services that ask you to choose between a set of predetermined options. We are informed, authoritatively, “To get round the rules or break them, without feeling that you have betrayed them, you have to believe, at least implicitly, that you embody, in your very person, the spirit of the rule.” What Keefer is doing in this admittedly didactic video work is showing how the dominating/ dominated dyad is dependent on two incommensurable positions of enunciation: embodying the rule in one’s own person or “spirit,” and being a subject of the rule’s application without access to criteria of justification.

Keefer’s two other works in this exhibition make the gap between the two positions of enunciation palpable. The neon wall-mounted sculpture Second Thought flashes the red word SECOND over the blue base of THOUGHT, such that both signifiers are separate and combined. Thought—self-assured and unambiguous—becomes a second thought, self-conflicted and ambiguous. This work takes the position of the dominated by demonstrating the conflicts and ambiguities of the split position in which the position that would make articulating the rule (THOUGHT) possible is internally divided (SECOND). This split position is spectacularly literalized in the last work, Interminable Swell. This work takes place in two physical locations. Four synchronized monitors, which capture an endlessly rolling ocean wave, are displayed in the Plug In breezeway outside the gallery proper. It is only when viewers see other viewers apparently walking around in front of the rolling wave that we understand that we are watching a live video feed taking place within the gallery. When the viewer enters the gallery itself, the illusion broadcast into the breezeway is demystified; a carefully lit blue screen is being filmed by a video camera, and it becomes clear that the spectacular wave was nothing more than a chromakeyed addition. In the present context, we can understand this demystification of the video illusion as an ideological mystification. This split in authoritative application of the rule is not simply a feature of being part of the dominated class, but is, in fact, a general condition that is masked by the dominant class. The assumption of justificatory plenitude is a motivated illusion of the dominant class, and the exposure of this deliberate mystification must thus be regarded as the first step towards any emancipatory politics whose necessity becomes apparent all the more each day. ❚

“First Class, Second Thought and Interminable Swell” and “A Sampling of Works” were exhibited at Plug In ICA, Winnipeg, from January 20 to March 26, 2017.

Tom Kohut is the co-editor of Marshall McLuhan and Vilém Flusser’s Communication and Aesthetic Theories Revisited (2015).