Daniel Barrow

Last November, Winnipeg artist Daniel Barrow (now based in Montreal) was named winner of the 2010 Sobey Art Award. The website of the Musée d’art contemporain posted the comments of the curatorial committee for the award that praised Barrow’s virtuoso performances. They felt his work addressed the problem of “how we are all obliged, in order to proceed with our lives, to continually strive to better ourselves and the world around us, in ways misguided or not, transforming the abject into the sublime, heartbreak into redemption.” While this is a perfectly apt (although slightly rambling) description of Barrow’s work and its exploration of forms of social isolation, desperation, sexual uncertainty and self-loathing, his most recent exhibition, “Good Gets Better,” provides a timely opportunity to consider his practice a little more closely.

A modest but concise exhibition, “Good Gets Better” offers a respectable cross-section of Barrow’s practice, including drawing, video, installation and performance. It thus functions as an engaging aperçu of his unique aesthetic approach, which combines illustration, collage, video, storytelling and obsolete technologies such as overhead projectors and Commodore computers. Thanks to exquisite craftsmanship, the viewer is quickly caught up in Barrow’s fascinating and peculiar universe of beauty and ugliness, virtue and transgression, optimism and desperation. Ballet, 2011, for example, uses an overhead projector to blow up a sinuous drawing of a ballet dancer’s leg bound romantically with ribbons. As is often the case with Barrow’s work, the viewer is invited to alter the image by sliding sheets of acetate back and forth across the projector bed. Doing so creates an alternation in which the foot seems to both writhe and dance, thus emphasizing the paradoxical grace and deformity that results from a lifetime of ballet practice. Along with the image, this action also changes an idiom written across the dancer’s ankle: “It’s never too late for a happy childhood” becomes “It’s far too late for a happy childhood,” thus producing a more obvious hesitation between hope and despair.

Contrary to prevailing statements about Barrow’s practice, his work does not transform ugliness into beauty, or abjection into pathos, but holds these opposing forces together in the same moment. Similar strategies of contradiction often motivate works of art that question aesthetic categories and modes of social conduct, and especially those associated with the grotesque and its subgenres, including the baroque, Gothic, absurd and carnivalesque. While critics often describe Barrow’s work as grotesque, it is important to remember that this word is more than just an adjective. Historically, the grotesque is an aesthetic category that undermines the very notion of categories, “a species of confusion”—to borrow a phrase from American Literary critic Geoffrey Galt Harpham (On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature)—that calls into question “the adequacy of our ways of organizing the world.”

Where Barrow’s work diverges from the grotesque is in its relationship to the sincere. Lionel Trilling once observed that the ideal of a sincere and honest soul has, since the 19th century, slowly lost its status as a virtue, becoming instead a hollow and almost self-negating image. Historically, sincerity is the opposite of the grotesque, which revels in hybrid forms, impossible complexity, and absurd or elaborate fantasies. What is so fascinating about Barrow’s work is the way it knits together these traditionally opposing forces, producing what he refers to in his video Artist Statement, 2006, as “gratuitous honesty.” This earlier work, which is projected in its own space at sbc Gallery, is among Barrow’s most successful. A brilliant critique of the inane and bureaucratic importance placed upon written artist statements, it is also a funny, poignant and moving meditation on the struggle to make art. And while Barrow may now be considered by most “a winner,” as the inclusion of this video in the exhibition reminds us, he remains devoted to “risking public humiliation” in an effort “to say those things that people in their daily lives find so difficult to express.” ❚

“Good Gets Better” was exhibited at sbc Gallery in Montreal from February 12 to March 19, 2011.

Emily Falvey is a Montreal-based, independent art critic and curator.