Patrick Bernatchez

I once inherited a rather good watch. It was elegant, ergonomic and dependable. However, it was not long before I brought it to my watch guy and asked him to remove and discard the second hand and the interior mechanism that facilitated that hand. He seemed surprised, suggesting that such a trepanning operation would severely limit the future resale value of the instrument. He grimaced painfully as he removed the centre sweep second hand. The excision went against the grain of his nobler instincts. But it suited my own temporal inquietude and distemper. I mention all this at the outset because it informs my thinking about Patrick Bernatchez’s work and, more importantly, segues with his own.

This exhibition included two overlapping and profoundly dialogical bodies of work within the artist’s oeuvre: Chrysalides, 2006–2013, and Lost in Time, 2009–2015. The chiasmic dialogue was arresting and interrogative. The former works focus knowingly on life, death, decay and the inexorable passage of time. The latter seeks to dismantle temporality itself and put it through its paces in sundry aspects and contexts. These parallel bodies of work are porous, cross-pollinating and perennially self-refining. They mark points of departure, not points of arrival. Yet both are all about the journey of the self in and through time.

The revelation the exhibition held in store, even for those who knew his work well, was its high level of formal invention outside film, the medium for which he is perhaps best known. The objects, installations and sundry sound works gave us a whole new understanding of the sheer breadth of his work—and his subversive philosophy of time. Starting in 2010, he began to visit the legendary Swiss watchmaker Roman Winiger.

Working in close collaboration, they created the BW (Black Watch, also the initials of their surnames), a watch with an automatic movement remarkable for the fact that it only measures time in millennia. For Bernatchez, the fact that the watch is composed of a single needle that takes a thousand years to make one complete revolution has a celestial significance. Here is the pinnacle of the instrument’s ‘use’ function and the baseline of his own mythopoesis. The housing and darkness of the room in which it rests suggest the watch is being kept safe from the ravages of time until one thousand years have passed.

There are many extant reports from the survivors of serious accidents how everything appeared to them to happen in slow motion. This warped phenomenology that many people experience during an accident is reprised here in the context of a wristwatch undreamt of by Steve Jobs. Bernatchez changes our perception of time’s passage, as in a crisis situation wherein thought processes are reportedly enhanced. The interaction of internal states and external circumstances is rendered askew so that the latter, not the former, are perceived to slow time, making it viscuous rather than lightning-quick. The second hand of one’s experience of time is, as it were, frozen and does not advance. In slowing time down, Bernatchez decolonizes it and the watch becomes talismanic of his whole project. Its beauty resides less in its exquisite housing and sleek futuristic lines than in what its movement makes possible: effectively slowing it down to a millipede’s pace that no eye could ever follow. The watch is a palpable moral struggle against transience, the brevity of life and mortality felt viscerally as affront.

The related film Lost in Time, 2014, has a powerfully apocalyptic resonance. Chronologically inchoate but conceptually pristine, it acknowledges a profound debt to Alain Resnais’s Mon oncle d’Amerique, 1980, winner of the Grand Prize at Cannes and probably that new wave savant’s most enduring film. It is the voice and presence of Henri Laborit in the film, a famous French surgeon and neuropharmacologist, writer and philosopher, who haunts this artist’s dreams. “Man is undoubtedly the only animal who knows he is going to die,” states Laborit, and it is this awareness of finitude that is central to Bernatchez’s own strategies to decolonize time, to slow it down, make it stop. In the film, the BW watch is discovered entombed in a wintry landscape. It opens with a man on horseback, whose outfit suggests the knight from Bergman’s The Seventh Seal who challenges death to a chess match so that he can postpone the moment of his own demise, a biker from some future tense and an astronaut who has landed in some nameless arctic dystopia.

The temporal bracketing has twin interwoven tracks: a huge block of ice is slowly melting in one and disinterring its contents, and that of the knight on horseback in the other, who follows a strange and fateful itinerary. Both horse and rider are gradually frozen—metaphorically frozen in time. But once the ice has melted, the horse, symbol of the resilient Id, is reborn, whereas the human figure, emblematic of higher consciousness, sinks into oblivion. Beyond Resnais, there is also a slo-mo sci-fi cinematic riff here on Godard’s Alphaville, with intrepid intergalactic secret agent Lemmy Caution seeking to terminate with extreme prejudice both Alpha 60, the sentient supercomputer and its inventor, Professor von Braun.

As for the drawings here, we appreciate quickly just what a savant of a draughtsman Bernatchez is, with vanitas as his endlessly embraced subject from work to work, betraying an obsession with mortality of almost mythic proportions and a technical virtuosity to match. The drawings have a coruscating aureole of darkness and an occult morphology and transformation. Bernatchez focuses thematically on the verse Vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas from the biblical book of Ecclesiastes in the Latin translation “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.” The drawings were executed at a rate of one a day for months in 2006, and became a proverbial seedbed for ideas that would blossom in different media over the course of the following decade. Skulls proliferate in hectic anamorphic multiplicity.

The “Chrysalides” group includes a mesmerizing film of a man sitting alone in his car at night in the basement parking space of a high-rise, munching on a hamburger and smoking a cigarette as the camera performs slow pirouettes around his vehicle. He is apparently oblivious to the fact that the car is rapidly filling up with water and that he will soon drown. Or is this a sort of ritual suicide? Time seems to have slowed down for him as the water rises. The camera orbits the car until it is repletely inundated.

Experiencing this exhibition reminded me of the last and most poignant fiction, “The Million-Year Picnic,” in Ray Bradbury’s celebrated collection The Martian Chronicles, 1950. In the linked stories humans have deserted the earth to begin new lives on Mars and in the final one, a last family emigrates in the face of nuclear fire. The young children plead to see the indigenous Martians who have, of course, long since departed. The father acquiesces at last and leads them to the canal. He tells his sons to lean out over the water and look down, for that’s where the Martians are hiding. But his sons can see only their own reflections. The father says, “There they are,” pointing down to the surface of the water. Similarly, looking closely into the eerie mirror of Bernatchez’s work, we slowly grow aware that it is we who have become the Martians. ❚

“Les Temps inachevés” was exhibited at Musée d’art contemporain, Montreal, from October 17, 2015 to January 10, 2016.

James D Campbell is a writer and curator in Montreal, who is a frequent contributor to Border Crossings.