Vera Frenkel

Vera Frenkel’s String Games from 1974, her pioneering exploration of the possibilities of improvisational telecommunication, served recently to launch the “Keywork” series of exhibitions at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre (AEAC) in Kingston, Ontario. The “Keywork” program, as AEAC Chief Curator Jan Allen notes in the gallery’s recent String Games catalogue, is “intended to offer a public platform for research into a single extraordinary work from our collection.”

The decision to inaugurate the “Keywork” series with String Games effected not only a welcome remounting and public (re)presentation of this import- ant early work of Frenkel’s, but seemed also an entirely appropriate one, as Allen explains in the catalogue’s preface, since the work, which includes many hours of video and a great deal of detailed, and therefore invaluable, archival documentation, came to the AEAC at curator Allen’s insistence that it be donated as part of the exchange marking Frenkel’s 2006 residency at Queen’s University’s Department of Art as Koerner Visiting Artist.

String Games—the full title of the work is String Games: Improvisations for Inter-City Video—originated, according to Frenkel’s invaluable “Notes on String Games” (included in the Vancouver Art Gallery’s 1978 “Lies & Truths: An Exhibition of mixed Format Installations by Vera Frenkel”), in the artist’s having learned, in 1974, of “a teleconferencing facility that permitted direct transmission from one city to another. Bell Canada developed such studios as an option for holding face-to-face discussions with out-of-town colleagues without having to travel to do so.” “The facilities,” she writes, “were relatively untested at the time. I was curious to see what could be done with them.”

A considerable amount, as it turned out.

It is always the initial, clarifying, conceptualizing moment, that inexplicable leap of invention that shapes a successful work. As complex as String Games was and is—and it is exceedingly complex—much of the brilliance of the piece, it seems to me, lay in that initializing moment, in Frenkel’s decision to use what, in 1974, was hi-tech equipment to conduct a low-tech, traditional game. And to harvest the implications of having so done.

The game was the venerable, string figure folk-game, Cat’s Cradle. Normally played with a loop of string tautly held between two hands, the game involves the effecting of certain sequences of movements by which a player and a partner manipulate the string into one or another of the eight various patterns or figures traditional to the game (Soldier’s Bed, Fish on a Dish, and so on).

“As a basis for improvisation,” Frenkel wrote, in Notes on String Games, “a non-string version of Cat’s Cradle that could be played between two cities seemed to me interesting. The familiar patterns would become the basis for a choreography that permitted permutations and combinations, not as complex as the forming of sentences, for example, but in similar fashion.”

Easier described, however, than enacted.

One of the participants in the game was a then young, then Toronto-based, artist-to-be named Stephen Schofield who, in the first entry in his deftly contrived Notes from my Second Black Book: September to December 1974, noted (on October 1), “Today, October 1, 1974, is my twenty-first birthday. Vera wants to use the movements and patterns of Cat’s Cradle for a game on closed-circuit TV between Montreal and Toronto. Five people in each city take the position of the fingers of each hand holding the cradle. So far we’ve used numbers, letters, words, names, sentences, gestures, images, sounds and poems” (Schofield’s text is reproduced in Vera Frenkel: Cartographie d’une practique/Mapping a Practice (SBC Gallerie d’art contemporain/Gallery of Contemporary Art, Montreal, 2010).

The numbers, letters, words, etc. to which Schofield refers incarnated the chosen runic structures, the ur-expressive tools that made up the improvisational performance elements of each of the 10 participants. The actual playing of String Games (the word “playing” seems far too casual for such a self-consciously reflexive, demanding activity; here was Homo Ludens pushed to the limit, where play becomes duty and then follow-up labour) was spread over three video transmissions—Rehearsal, Enactment and Review—one a week, each one lasting three hours. Each game participant was invited to play their own game using their own elements (the numbers, letters, poems, etc. that Schofield mentions above). None of these gaming “tools” was assigned to Frenkel herself.

Understandably awkward and hesitant at first, the 10 participants soon appeared to grow easier about the proceedings (Frenkel has assured me that, in fact, it was all great fun). Each player took a turn leading. “It was possible,” writes Frenkel in her String Games notes (a typescript included in Vera Frenkel Fonds Box 10, Queen’s University Archives, 19 April 1978, and cited by Jan Allen) “to begin working in a kind of call-and-response way, somewhere between square dance, sound poetry and prayer. The combination of these was at times surprisingly moving; surprising because of the very straightforwardness of presentation. No attempt was made at theatricality of any kind.” This I believe. No theatricality, certainly, but something more akin to ritual, even to a space-time exorcism of the divisive demon of distance. Last autumn, I sat watching monitors at the Agnes Etherington—experiencing the 2005 DVD of the work, in a format which involved my seeing one hour of String Games (hour five, showing a Toronto team at play) of the original nine hour transmission, plus a concurrently running hour of a documentary camera’s recording of the game’s process. This sojourn resulted in my becoming increasingly intrigued, eager, confused, amused, sometimes irritated, sometimes delighted and occasionally visited by a stab of panic—that I no longer understood what was going on (or maybe never had). It was always clear, however, that the proceedings were venturesome, ambitious, brave, grueling and, in the end, the stuff of which conceptual art history had once been made, in 1974, and was now being made again, right before my weary, wondering eyes.

Of primary importance to any adequate understanding of Frenkel’s subsequent work, this pioneering venture into a simultaneous personalizing and proliferating modification of Bell’s newly developed electronic face- off equipment both broke new ground and revisited the age-old gestures of play that unfailingly return us to our para-primitive selves and our need, as Hamlet’s irksome Polonius would put it, by indirection, to find direction out.

Jan Allen notes, in her String Games catalogue, that “The rudimentary character of the video conferencing facility and process, and the flickering coarseness of the visual record of Frenkel’s experimental work are striking for today’s viewer, awash as we are in high-definition transmissions and wireless social omnipresence.” She observes that “the players in String Games seem to be straining at the limits of their time…” And of course, it is there—located at the limits of what is possible—that the work assumes its grandeur. It is precisely there, after all, that we all live. ❚

Gary Michael Dault is a critic, poet and painter who lives near Toronto.

String Games was exhibited at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, from July 30 to December 11, 2011.