Gordon Lebredt: Nonworks 1975-2008

Gordon Lebredt died in February after a lengthy illness at the age of 62. The release of Gordon Lebredt: Nonworks 1975-1980 marks the passing of one of this country’s most distinct, difficult and hitherto underappreciated conceptual artists. Fittingly, Nonworks, which, as its title suggests, consists entirely of the artist’s unrealized proposals, elegantly affirms one of the central adages of conceptual art that: “The piece,” as Lawrence Weiner laconically put it, “need not be built.” Something can remain unrealized and still be a work of art—and a good one at that.

Nonworks was conceived by artists David Court and Josh Thorpe, designed by Lebredt himself and represents the largest single published collection of his work to date. It is an interesting cross between a catalogue and an artist’s book, surveying over 30 years of tangible material, while also picturing “a history that has not yet taken place.” It is a retrospective of counterfactuals, of works that Lebredt envisioned mounting after settling in Toronto in the early 1980s, as well as proposals that date to the mid-1970s when he was actively involved with early Winnipeg art sites like the Grand Western Canadian Screen Shop and Arthur Street Gallery, which later became Plug In. For the most part, the material is crisply and elegantly reproduced, although unfortunately some works are printed too small for the artist’s handwritten notations to be legible.

According to its official press release, Nonworks contains approximately 125 sketches, letters, textual layouts and technical drawings (mostly floor plans and three-point axonometric views). Whether intended or not, this committed vagueness reveals a basic truth about Lebredt’s practice, namely the way subtle moments of intersection and exchange occur between his works in order to resist their individuation and enumeration. As many of the Nonwork drawings illustrate, Lebredt made use of a recurring set of props and materials throughout his career—frames, partitions, corridors and mirrors—in different configurations and under different titles. It is not always clear if the installation or proposal one is looking at represents something completely new or is a reworked earlier idea. Nonworks is successful in showing that Lebredt’s true oeuvre is a continuous project or program rather than an assemblage of discrete objects. Wisely, the chronology is occasionally broken so that proposals committed to paper years apart using similar elements and configurations may be juxtaposed.

The publication includes commentary by artists Yam Lau, Ian Carr Harris, Yvonne Lammerich and Andy Patton and by the writer and art critic Gary Michael Dault. Lin Gibson, writer, editor and Lebredt’s partner of 35 years, provides the afterword. All the authors are universally drawn to the way the artist’s work places the viewer, as Lammerich puts it, in “a state of waiting.” Lau writes of being struck by how “Gordon’s work is set up in order to short-circuit its coming-into-presence.” Dault likewise pays tribute to the quicksilver quality of his practice. Foreseeing folly in attempting to hit Lebredt on the head with prose—“With what reticence do I write of him and his works…!”—Dault advances on him indirectly through the diaphanous cloud of a Wallace Stevens poem. Carr Harris discusses Lebredt’s interest in 137 Tecumseth, a 1995 installation in which the former replicated the passage of sunlight through a projector into a windowless gallery space. Carr Harris’s meditation, at once clever and wistful, suggests that the movement of artificial sunlight across a room enjoys the equally murky ontological status of Lebredt’s unrealized proposals: neither corresponds to anything beyond itself, although both pretend to and are thus fleeting phenomena but also somehow endless and eternal possibilities. Patton’s contribution is important for drawing attention to the theme of institutionality, which (somewhat perversely) is central to Nonworks: “Gordon’s work…has always relied on being given a specific institutional situation from which to form itself, the raw materials being the institutions themselves, the exhibition occasion itself.” Galleries, museums and artist-run centres were not primarily important to Lebredt as neutral placeholders of his work but as complicit contributors to the experience of it. At the same time, Patton, no less than the others, revels in the cryptic, mind-bending inscrutability of Lebredt’s art and the doubts that result from trying to individuate it: “…his work is all of his work—everything proposed, whether realized or not.”

The contributions are all, unfortunately, very brief, and none are able to offer, as Patton admits, an “extensive” and “careful study” of the nonworks, let alone Lebredt’s practice as a whole. It is also regrettable that the publication, an otherwise valuable trove for future research, does not include the artist’s cv. At the risk of assessing the publication against criteria that it denies itself beholden to, Nonworks is something of a disappointment for not attempting to accomplish what is admittedly overdue and sorely needed. However, it remains both an important catalogue of Lebredt’s methodology and a tautly defined conceptual project in its own right. ❚

Gordon Lebredt: Nonworks 1975-2008, published by the Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art and Plug In Editions, Winnipeg, 2011. Edited by Lin Gibson, texts by David Court and Josh Thorpe, Ian Carr-Harris, Yvonne Lammerich, Gary Michael Dault, Andy Patton, Yam Lau and Lin Gibson. 179 pp. $50.00.

Andrew Kear is a curator in Winnipeg.