Symposium: Rethinking Exhibitions

The Mendel Gallery in Saskatoon hosted an international symposium May 1 and 2, 2004, as the final event in a series organized by independent curator and academic Joan Borsa. Each of the events, including a seminar for professionals, explored the opportunities and challenges of curating contemporary art, “negotiating” the needs of exhibition midst the persistence of manifest and latent inhibition. The series succeeded because of high levels of engagement in the local community and the quality of visiting lecturers such as Mary Jane Jacob, Carol Duncan, Matthew Higgs and Louise Dompierre. There will surely be interesting outcomes of these exchanges for audiences and participants alike.

The first presenter at the symposium was John Bewley of Locus+, a project based in Newcastle, England, which establishes a “creative relationship with artists” interested in doing socially engaged, site-specific projects. Artists range from the well-established to students. Locus+ has no gallery, hence refusing the community/institution distinction. But it does have an impressive record of ceding control of production to those whose projects it takes on. Many of the sites chosen by artists are improbable or hostile at first glance, but they are made to yield a “plus” of perception and reflection that unsettles public space, including mass-media space, otherwise regulated, sanitized, made sedative in the name of decency and public safety. Many of the projects are transgressive, but saved from ideological rigidity by wit and imagination, in most cases supplied by audiences as much as by the artists themselves. There is a constant appeal to ordinary people (including children and seniors) as knowledgeable critics and defenders of their locales and communities. Location may not be everything, nor is it only what local authorities or developers say it is. So the placement, in the middle of TV commercials, of footage from public surveillance cameras following two women ‘simply’ walking; or the placement of a Scottish bothie (a humble hut), as an ironic “Show Home” bearing a double history of exploited agricultural labour and the bourgeois picturesque, on an English housing estate to provoke reflection on the realness of real estate; or the placement of a huge monolith of chalk in the River Humber (“which flows faster than the Orinoco”) in a time-based performance of the processes of formation and erosion native to that place; or an hilarious take on the sport of kings with a living horse as “A Real Work of Art”; or Calgary’s Laura Vickery’s moving installation in a former textile mill where women’s labour dominated: all were funded, filmed and then archived at the University of Sunderland by Locus+. In an area too often written off as an industrial wasteland whose culture is embarrassingly working class, Locus+ has succeeded to a remarkable degree in demystifying art while also commending itself to institutions via its impressive publications, videos and roster of participants (including Anya Gallacio, Stefan Gec, Andre Stitt, John Newling and Wendy Kirkup). The boonies are not back; in fact, they never went away.

Bewley left the audience energized and excited about public art. Jennifer Fisher and Jim Drobnich of DisplayCult had a cooler, more academic approach (they teach at McGill and Concordia University, respectively), but they also had important things to contribute to the rethinking of traditional curatorial practices. They showed how cultural studies and performance art can enrich each other outside of, or in creative relation to, usual exhibition spaces and apparently outdated forms like the tableau vivant. They do not deny the category of the aesthetic but are continuously trying to stretch it in pursuit of one or another affect, and the psychic and somatic underpinnings (if that’s what they are) of the human senses. They talked about four different projects, all of them transgressive but less overtly political than the work of Locus+. Their work seemed more of a playful, at times unduly self-absorbed, supplement to curatorial conventions, the insertion of smart and sometimes gutsy bourgeois bodies into pathways and pathologies they hoped would create “empathologies.” Their three-month deconstruction of curatorial convention in Kingston, Ontario, made intelligent use of the institutional richness and conflicted histories of that city, but their “museopathy” seemed more like an extension of elite practices than their thorough, shameless, Geordie makeover.

The final presentation was by Mark Dion. Since the 1980s he has established an international reputation for savvy versatility and an ability to elicit from natural and built environments responses that both evoke and constantly interrupt grand narratives of nation, knowledge, status, city, self. Imagine what would have happened had Charles Darwin met, and got on famously with, Michel Foucault! Out of the meticulous taxonomical and display traditions of natural history, and the exposure of the pretensions of power/knowledge in Foucault’s revisionist genealogy and archaeology, Dion establishes intriguing interfaces between art and science. His practice is generous but also difficult, respectful but also invasive. He knows how interesting people find museums where consoling stories of discovery and control are purveyed, but he also knows there is much more to our species than that, and that the ‘tainting’ of knowledge by imagination makes people, though not always or only scientists, uncomfortable. He does not try to supplant one version of genius by another, the scientist by the artist, but insists on the inescapable collectivism and multiple dependencies of both. His works interweave information and beauty, solemnity and playful contingency, in institutions and their immediate vicinities, and in natural settings where the scientific or otherwise authoritative gaze is connected to inevitably mixed histories and presences of accomplishment and hurt. Some might see in this work too much political coyness—a refusal, for instance, in the project on the banks of the Thames beside the Tate, where the detritus of centuries was recovered and displayed by a motley crew of helpers, to castigate British imperialism. But Dion is more elusive than escapist, making the viewer responsible for her or his own reactions to his installations, and insisting that interpretation that avoids complexity and relationality is a form of violence only too familiar to us all.

In their differing employment of directness, irony, reflexivity and obliqueness, the presenters gave the audience much to revisit in the concluding panel and discussion. There was enthusiasm and anxiety aplenty in the auditorium. Some were very concerned about public tolerance for the “wastefulness” or futility of time-based projects. Others wondered about the implications for cash-strapped galleries if they have to mount substantial numbers of site-specific initiatives as well as in-house programming. ls the artist ingesting the curator? There was no final consensus sought or achieved, but only an enhanced sense of possible reconfigurations of artists, institutions and audiences. Just as it must, the rethinking of exhibitions continues. ■

Rethinking Exhibitions was a weekend-long symposium held at the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon on May 1st and 2nd, 2004.

Len Findlay teaches at the University of Saskatchewan where he directs the Humanities Research Unit.