Exponential Future

“Exponential Future,” the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery’s new survey of emerging Vancouver art, appears to me a failure of artistic and institutional nerve. “Curators Juan Gaitan and Scott Watson chose artists working in different media whose work involved a wide range of issues to give an overview of the new artistic thinking of our time and place,” claimed a gallery press release. It went on: “The curators were interested in works that engaged the complex reality of urban life at the beginning of the 21st century.”

What’s remarkable about “Exponential Future” is how reluctant its participants are to engage directly “the complex reality of urban life,” without the props of theory or subjects and themes around which critical consensus has already formed. Realism—the ostensibly transparent representation of the now—has a long history on the west coast. A mid-career retrospective of Roy Arden, on display this past fall at the Vancouver Art Gallery, cogently summarized realism’s ongoing relevance to a region being razed and rebuilt just in time for the spectacle of the 2010 Olympic Winter Games.

Realism has also been important to a younger generation of Vancouver artists, including Evan Lee, Mike Grill, Adam Harrison, Alison Yip, Scott McFarland, Jamie Tolagson, Sara Mameni, Chris Gergley, Owen Kydd, Brad Phillips, Sylvia Borda and others. “Exponential Future” muscles realism offstage. In its place it deploys works that are canny, learned, self-reflexive and deeply ironized. Most of these pieces pair quotation from avant-gardist practices (Modernism in all its guises: Pop, minimal, conceptual art and “photoconceptualism”) with subject matter either lifted from popular culture, or rehearsing the by-now well-trodden tropes of “the failed utopia” or “alternative culture.” The ‘anything goes’ spirit of the works on display recalls the free-ranging across forms of another local artist, Rodney Graham. But “Exponential Future’s” works largely lack Graham’s idiosyncratic wit and playfulness. The art is learned, in the worst sense of the word. This isn’t to say that the artists in “Exponential Future” haven’t previously made good work. Most of them have. But these pieces aren’t in the show. Take Tim Lee, whose videos and photographs are exemplary in their hybridization of art historical and Pop cultural sources. Lee’s output was recently surveyed in a Presentation House Gallery retrospective that included some middling photographs and one good new piece: Goldberg Variations: Aria, BWV 988, Johann Sebastian Bach, 1741 (Glenn Gould, 1981), a two-channel video projection in which Lee, a non-musician, slowly and clumsily rehearsed the fingerings the virtuoso pianist Gould played. The inadequacy of Lee’s amateur performance in the face of Gould’s genius is, I think, its point: its deliberately flaunted belatedness and inadequacy are the candid response of an ambitious, historically savvy young artist who suspects, perhaps accurately, that larger talents have sucked most of the oxygen out of the arena.

Lee’s contributions to “Exponential Future” include two photographs, Untitled (The Pink Panther, 2092), which refer to Dan Graham’s photographs of himself reflected in his architectural pavilions and Peter Sellers’s deadpan performances as the bumbling Inspector Clouseau. These highly detailed pictures, which linger almost fetishistically over the weave of Lee’s clothes, the huge, gleaming barrel lens of the camera he squints into and his chin stubble and hair on the backs of his hands, feel brittle and contrived.

The air of contrivance that hovers over the Pink Panther photographs also clings to works by Elizabeth Zvonar and Mark Soo. Zvonar’s Sign of the Times is a large, serpentine stone sculpture of a huge black hand flashing a “peace” sign: a Rodin remade in Berkeley or Oakland some time in the late 1960s. Zvonar has created some major works, including a shapedglass window for Artspeak Gallery that effortlessly withstood comparison with Dan Graham’s mirrored pavilions. Sign of the Times, in contrast, seems peculiarly inert and unsatisfying.

Mark Soo’s That’s That’s Alright Alright Mama Mama, a huge, two-part, 3-D photograph of Memphis’s Sun Recording Studios, is similarly unmoving. The two-part image and the layers of colour might concern sound reproduction and multitrack recording. Or not. Soo’s decisions governing his piece’s form are disappointingly unavailable from the physical facts of the work.

What is most disappointing about these works is their air of calculation, their reduction of the complexity of lived experience to an ironized half-nod at modernist or utopian failures. Lee, Zvonar and Soo have all made stronger works than these.

Althea Thauberger’s projects, like Alex Morrison’s, are less overtly “learned” and more conscious of a larger social world. Thauberger’s Zivildienst ≠ Kunstprojekt is a 20- minute-long, black and white video projection developed in collaboration with a group of young German men. Her performers find themselves trapped on a scaffold in a Berlin gallery and improvise short actions as a distraction from their confinement. Thauberger is attentive to the performers’ micro-gestures, and her work is enriched and sharpened by the endless complexity of human bodies moving through space.

Another Thauberger piece, The Art of Seeing Without Being Seen, is a huge, staged, colour photograph of a group of young Canadian Forces troops conducting a surveillance exercise on a CF base in British Columbia’s Chilliwack Valley. The picture is installed in the foyer of UBC’s Koerner Library, a reminder, as local critic Clint Burnham suggested to me, that not everyone in their 20s is studying at university. The Art of Seeing is a window opening onto a larger, harsher and more ambiguous world, one that, given the evidence of a comment book alongside the piece in the library, many UBC students, staff and faculty would prefer not to confront.

Alex Morrison’s Giving the Story a Treatment (Battle in Seattle) consists of three black and white photographic panels depicting riot police lounging about on the streets of downtown Vancouver, surrounded by cameras, reflectors and other filmmaking apparatus. A movie about the Seattle WTO protests is being shot in Vancouver. Vancouver’s specificity is elided; it stands in for Seattle, or, by extension, for any place at all. Morrison’s photographs are not “good pictures” by any stretch of the imagination. They are documents that call attention to the film’s mechanisms of production, which are typically hidden from viewers. This isn’t a particularly novel insight, but it demonstrates Morrison’s awareness of art’s usefulness as a critical tool, a scalpel that can cut through ideological boundaries.

Corin Sworn contributes a suite of drawings of Summerhill, AS Neill’s visionary “free school.” Sworn draws well, blending high-focus representation with passages of biomorphic abstraction that recall the 1930s experiments of English draughtsmen like Graham Sutherland and Paul Nash.

Isabelle Pauwels’s The Embellishers is a video shot in two slightly different takes of approximately 15 minutes each. Like all Pauwels’s work, it resists easy summation. The artist and her twin sister, an aspiring actress, argue and make up in the actress’s apartment. Sometimes they wear plastic monkey masks. Other times they appear as themselves. Long self-revelatory monologues are intercut with winking digressions on urban development, desire, Vancouver’s booming film industry and the sisters’ poor employment prospects. The Embellishers is dry-witted, politically engaged and eminently watchable. It resembles a Lenny Bruce take on the history of Western art video. Pauwels’s is a realism totally unlike most other realist practices, and her simple, low-budget work towers over everything else in the show.

Finally, Kevin Schmidt contributes two works, made during a recent residency in the Yukon. Aurora With Roman Candle is a time-lapse photograph of a firework’s plume and sparkle in the midst of a frozen northern landscape. Schmidt’s other contribution, Wild Signals, is a video loop depicting gear that could easily belong to a local hair-metal band—smoke machine, speakers, coloured lights—parked in the middle of a frozen winter lake at twilight. As the lights blink wildly and fake fog rolls across the snow, the speakers pump out a low-tech version of Close Encounters of the Third Kind’s famous five-note theme. In the Steven Spielberg film, a group of scientists uses a sequence of notes and lights to lure an alien mother ship down to earth. Sound and light build a bridge between two vastly different worlds. In Schmidt’s video the mother ship does not appear, and the lights and music eventually die down into darkness. It’s a strangely moving experience, whose palpable sense of loss is mirrored by the many expectations “Exponential Future” raises, then fails to deliver. ■

“Exponential Future,” curated by Juan Gaitan and Scott Watson, was exhibited at the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery in Vancouver from January 18 to April 27, 2008.

Christopher Brayshaw is a Vancouver-based critic, curator, bookseller and photographer. He is co-director and co-curator of CSA Space, an independent Vancouver project space.