GIGAJAPON

Pourquoi le Japon? Parce que le Japon est le réglage par défaut de l'imaginaire du futur.(1)

En 1998 j'ai invité Catherine Osborne, écrivaine, critique d'art et co-éditrice du magazine d'art torontois Lola, à organiser une exposition d'art contemporain japonais pour les Cambridge Galleries. Mme Osborne a vécu à Tokyo entre 1989 et 1994, où elle a travaillé comme journaliste en arts visuels pour la revue Tokyo Journal et pour le quotidien national de langue anglaise The Daily Yomiuri. Elle a été témoin de l'escalade rapide de l'intérêt que la société japonaise portait alors à la culture, conséquence d'une expansion économique phénoménale désormais connue comme l'époque de l' « économie à bulles ». Durant cette période, on construisait de nouveaux musées, on faisait d'extravagants achats d'œuvres d'art à titre personnel et les collections privées s'enrichissaient à un rythme frénétique. Les artistes japonais jouissaient d'une attention sans précédent dans le monde occidental.

À leur manière, les Cambridge Galleries ont contribué, elles aussi, à ce japonisme renouvelé. Elles furent à l'origine de l'exposition Waves: Contemporary Japanese Fibrework, présentée dans ses locaux en 1993.(2) Waves a amené au Canada dix artistes textiles japonais dont l'œuvre s'inspirait de l'artisanat japonais traditionnel tout en étant influencée par les développements de l'art contemporain international. Depuis lors, une nouvelle culture populaire japonaise s'est infiltrée en Amérique du Nord. Les anime (animations d'action et de science-fiction) et les manga (bandes dessinées pour adultes) ont développé un statut de culte underground; les dessins animés japonais pour enfants, dont Sailor Moon et Pokemon, et les jeux vidéo tels que Nintendo et Play Station ont fait fureur au Canada et aux États-Unis. Véritable phénomène qui n'a pas tardé à attirer l'attention des journalistes et des regroupements de parents préoccupés par le sens de cette imagerie et par son emprise hypnotique sur les esprits influençables des jeunes.

À travers son expertise industrielle et technologique, le Japon s'implantait progressivement en Occident depuis le début des années 1980. Dans le domaine des biens et produits électroniques, les sociétés japonaises étaient en tête de file et menaçaient la dominance de marché dont jouissaient jusqu'alors les industries de l'automobile nord-américaine et européenne. Le Japon est venu à être identifié non seulement avec la production de technologies de pointe, mais aussi avec la valorisation d'un mode de vie éminemment technologique.(3) Pour plusieurs jeunes Occidentaux new wave des années 1980, pour ces jeunes qui s'opposaient au roots revival des décennies précédentes, le Japon, en tant que concept, était perçu comme étant analogue à un rythme de vie accéléré et à une culture techno-futuriste à la fois séduisante et menaçante.(4)

Les sociologues japonais étaient fascinés, eux aussi, par le sens et les implications de la révolution culturelle de leur pays. À la fin des années 1970, le terme shinjinrui (nouveau type d'êtres humains) a été créé pour décrire une génération hédoniste d'éternels adolescents.(5) Celle-ci finançait son mode de vie matérialiste avec des emplois dans les domaines de la publicité, de l'informatique, de la production vidéo, de la télévision et du jeu. L'importance du pouvoir d'achat des consommateurs fut identifiée comme la cause de cette infantilisation sociale. Les médias et la publicité, affirmait-on, plaisaient à l'enfant en chacun de nous, et la rapidité avec laquelle changeaient les technologies imposait un régime d'adaptation et d'apprentissage continus afin, simplement, d'être au fait. Cela eut pour effet de créer des êtres provisoires et sans racines -- de nouveaux humains ne vivant que dans l'univers de la représentation. Le fétichisme des noms de marque et la consommation de biens de luxe qui prirent d'assaut l'Occident au milieu des années 1980 (tels que pratiqués par les yuppies et ses variantes terminologiques) découlent peut-être de cette façon branchée et de ce mode de vie bien japonais.

Une nouvelle appellation pour ce mode de vie, otaku, s'est imposée à la fin des années 1980. Comparable au nerd ou au geek nord-américains, l'otaku japonais est le terme par excellence pour désigner les collectionneurs obsessionnels d'anime, de manga, de jeux vidéo et autres objets de la culture pop. Le comportement obsessif de l'otaku le rend socialement disgracieux; il évite l'intimité et le contact physique auxquels il préfère la communication médiate par réseaux électroniques interposés. En tant que phénomène social, les otaku ont été définis comme « un produit du surcapitalisme et de la société de surconsommation ».(6) Affranchis des filiations culturelles traditionnelles, « accros » des énergies fantasmatiques de la culture pop, et « atomisés » par les réseaux électroniques et les technologies numériques, les otaku ne seraient pas seulement un modèle problématique de la culture japonaise du XXIe siècle, mais pourraient être aussi, comme le suggère William Gibson, une composante du réglage par défaut de notre futur.(7)

Les artistes retenus par Catherine Osborne pour GIGAJAPON ne sont pas otaku; ils agissent plutôt comme miroir, leurs œuvres étant le reflet de la culture qui a engendré ledit phénomène. Elles traitent de consommation, de vie urbaine, de gratification instantanée, de vitesse, de foule, de shopping, de sexe, de désir, de célébrité, d'anonymat et d'excès -- des conditions associées au monde contemporain en général, tout en étant incarnées dans le Japon urbain. Il se peut, comme l'artiste Takahashi Murakami a confié à son propre sujet, que ces artistes soient des « otaku ratés », incapables de générer suffisamment d'enthousiasme obsessionnel, ou alors inaptes à mémoriser quantité de vétilles. Mais il se peut aussi qu'ils soient tout simplement plus enclins au contact avec les gens qu'à la dissociation, plus enclins à satiriser et à critiquer la culture de masse qu'à s'y soumettre.(8)

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L'imagerie de Risa Sato est « mignonne » (kawaii, comme disent les Japonais). Elle compte des formes gonflables, rondes et à croquer, affectueuses ou endormies; des tricycles à têtes bulbeuses et une tunique de performance en tapis moelleux assortie d'une grosse tête sphérique. Chacune de ses figures affiche une ligne horizontale en guise de bouche et deux lignes ou petits cercles à l'emplacement des yeux. « Miaulant », à la manière des chatons, est l'adjectif qui vient à l'esprit lorsqu'on tente de définir ces personnages quasi humains, sortes d'animaux. Leurs visages rappellent des nourrissons, des créatures qui se blottissent, qui se pelotonnent et qui font vibrer les cordes sensibles. Ils ont pour logique le kitsch, notamment ces objets -- des jouets en peluche, des porte-clefs, des tee-shirts, etc. -- que collectionnent les jeunes filles et les adolescentes comme expressions et symboles du féminin nourricier.

En règle générale, la relation que nous entretenons avec l'imagerie kitsch tient du solipsisme. L'objet est à la fois expression et objet d'affection. En retour, l'image kitsch exprime son amour de façon inconditionnelle. Les personnages à l'œuvre dans les performances et les installations de Risa Sato sont conçus non pas tant à des fins d'autogratification, qu'à des fins de communication entre inconnus. Dans Risa Campaign Vol. 10 (fig. 14), le personnage à grosse tête fait ses courses au marché, discute avec les fermiers et offre des tours de charrette aux personnes âgées.(9) Ainsi costumée, l'artiste devient la scoute parfaite. Circulant sur l'un des tricycles hybrides lors de performances de Risa Campaign Vol. 8 (fig. 12), elle s'attire de l'affection sociale : « Comme c'est mignon! ». Lorsqu'elle emporte un des tricycles à San Francisco pour des retrouvailles avec sa mère qu'elle avait perdue de vue, elle l'assoit à table pour le dîner, tel l'« enfant intérieur » sans nom, l'enfant qui ressent encore la douleur et la confusion d'une séparation. Lorsque, affublée du « personnage à dos » gonflable de Risa Campaign Vol. 6, elle suit une visite commentée de New York à bord d'un bus à impériale pendant laquelle elle exprime l'exubérance d'être en vacances.

Fidèle à sa logique de brouillage des frontières entre l'art et la culture populaire, l'artiste lance une marque de porte-clefs, de presse-papiers et de figures d'action la représentant, elle, ainsi que sa distribution de personnages douillets. Risa Sato n'est pas la seule artiste au Japon à recourir à la vente au détail et à la cession de licences pour promouvoir son œuvre.(10) La commercialisation d'imagerie par des artistes japonais constitue d'une part une référence ironique à la relation entre l'art actuel et la culture pop qui l'a engendré et de l'autre, une stratégie économique.

À travers ses installations, ses performances et son marketing, Risa Sato est parvenue à dépasser les relations d'onanisme et de solipsisme généralement associées aux manga, otaku et kawaii. Ses Campaigns (campagnes) sont des œuvres d'art au service du contact humain élémentaire et constituent l'expression d'un spectre d'émotions humaines. Globalement, son œuvre aborde les problèmes et les possibilités de la communication et du contact humain dans l'univers des représentations de ce siècle.

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Une part importante de l'œuvre de Tsuyoshi Ozawa traite de la présentation institutionnelle de l'art. Dans Museum of Soy Sauce, l'artiste a parodié l'histoire de l'art japonais à travers une série d'installations modelées sur le musée anthropologique. La Nasubi Gallery était une galerie parallèle ou un centre d'artistes autogéré dans une boîte à lait installée dans des arbres, sur des réverbères ou dans des magasins. L'artiste invitait des collègues à y présenter des expositions miniatures. Plus tard, la Nasubi Gallery est devenue la Ai Ai Gallery, une galerie commerciale dans une boîte à lait portée comme sac à dos. Muni d'un télé-avertisseur, le porteur ou galeriste du sac à dos Ai Ai Gallery avait comme tâche de « livrer » la galerie (et son contenu) au client qui le contactait.

Avec la Ai Ai Gallery (fig. 10), Ozawa traite de front le dilemme de l'artiste, nommément, comment produire des œuvres noncommerciales, à contenu critique dans une culture de consommation. À Ginza, le quartier des galeries commerciales de Tokyo, le système de location onéreux reste inaccessible à une majorité d'artistes et ne sert finalement qu'à ceux qui ont les moyens d'exposer leurs œuvres c'est à dire de présenter leur art dans un cadre potentiellement rentable. La galeriste Judy Freya Sibayan conçoit la galerie miniature comme une critique de la cité moderne : une ville monopolisée par le capitalisme à travers les médias, une ville dont les populations sont socialisées exclusivement en tant que consommateurs, une ville qui déniche ici et là des lieux et des véhicules pour l'activité culturelle critique et expérimentale.(11) Qui plus est, Mme Sibayan attribue à la galerie miniature une « économie d'échelle » et une « écologie ». Par opposition à une galerie conventionnelle, précise-t-elle, « les ressources d'une micro-galerie sont conservatrices : on la visite, on prend connaissance de son contenu dans l'intimité sur la base d'une relation d'individu à individu vécue au sein d'une infrastructure limitée au corps humain. La galerie n'est pas enracinée en un seul lieu; elle est mobile, nomade »(12) Les galeries portatives, comme la Scapular Gallery Nomad de Mme Sibayan et les Nasubi Gallery et Ai Ai Gallery d'Ozawa, constituent en soi des actions prises par des individus sans ressources économiques substantielles, par des individus insatisfaits du statut quo de la culture de consommation et qui éprouvent un sentiment de révolte et d'aliénation devant l'appétit insatiable des sociétés affluentes dont le gaspillage et les dégâts écologiques sont connus. Il n'en demeure pas moins que la Ai Ai Gallery traduit également un effort de la part de l'artiste pour générer des revenus, dans l'esprit, par exemple, de Risa Sato qui est parvenue à rentabiliser ses images. Cela, malgré le fait qu'en tant qu'entreprise commerciale, la Ai Ai Gallery, comme le reconnaît ouvertement Ozawa, fut un échec.(13)

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Dans un monde où l'identité est intrinsèquement liée à la représentation, chaque image peut être mesurée suivant son lien potentiel avec le regardeur : « cette personne est comme moi » ou « j'aimerais être comme cette personne » ou encore « je déteste cette personne ». Les images donnent de la crédibilité à notre existence, elles sont nos modèles ou nos boucs émissaires. Le pouvoir de l'image est tel que l'existence en soi pourrait être remise en cause si elle n'était pas représentée. Ainsi s'explique, par exemple, le désir pathologique de célébrité ou de glamour, où l'on n'existe véritablement qu'à travers une représentation publique.

L'artiste Hiroyuki Matsukage est aussi graphiste, journaliste, photographe et musicien. Ensemble avec Muneteru Ujino, il joue dans le groupe glam rock Gorgerous. Les différentes activités de Matsukage se chevauchent et se complètent. Ses expositions sont souvent documentées par des catalogues dont il a lui-même conçu le graphisme et sont régulièrement accompagnées par des spectacles de Gorgerous, dont les CD portent également sa griffe de designer. Par ailleurs, il rédige des comptes rendus de films et de manifestations de culture populaire pour des magazines. Matsukage est le prototype de l'individu postmoderne, se réalisant dans un univers composé exclusivement de représentations -- dans son cas, à travers la production, le design, le packaging, l'interprétation et la critique d'images.

Dans plusieurs de ses photographies, Matsukage s'inclut lui-même en tant qu'acteur et sujet. Pour Man's Back and Woman's Face (1999) il recrée la scène de coït du film Hiroshima mon amour d'Alain Resnais, s'attribuant lui-même le rôle de l'architecte japonais Lui. Avec cet hommage, Matsukage, le cinéphile, l'amoureux des femmes et de la Nouvelle Vague du cinéma français, exprime son enthousiasme pour un genre étranger tout en affirmant son identité japonaise. Bien qu'on puisse trouver des précédents à cette œuvre parmi les productions à base photographique en Occident, il est possible de l'envisager comme une extension de l'album art (design et packaging de disques) ou de la vidéo-clip, où l'artiste est souvent représenté en train d'interpréter les fantaisies ou la passion de la musique.

Star (fig. 8 & 9), une installation interactive de Matsukage, témoigne de l'intérêt constant de l'artiste pour les notions de célébrité et d'identité. Star fait référence à la plus connue des contributions japonaises à la culture populaire, le karaoké, où, sur fond sonore préenregistré, les participants chantent des chansons à la mode à l'aide de textes vidéo et d'incitatifs visuels. Les chanteurs de karaoké peuvent prendre la place de leurs idoles pop, devenir temporairement les stars qu'ils admirent, et exprimer devant un auditoire les sentiments qu'ils leur attribuent. L'installation de Matsukage, cependant, ne fournit aucun incitatif visuel ni textuel, exccepté la photographie panoramique d'un auditoire de femmes acclamant. Chez lui, les prétendues idoles pop ne sont pas tenues de connaître des chansons ou des mélodies populaires. Le simple fait de vocaliser dans le microphone déclenche des applaudissements, et plus la vocalise est forte, plus forts, aussi, sont les applaudissements. Star ne nécessite aucun talent, aucune mémoire, aucune technique; crier dans le microphone suffit pour provoquer une réaction d'adoration. Cette installation est ce qu'il y a de plus proche de la goutte d'amour intraveineuse et du renforcement positif. Elle procure une gratification instantanée : « Vous voulez de l'adoration? En voici, c'est pour vous! ». Star dit «Aimez-moi parce que je suis. Aimez-moi pour rien ».

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Comme les Campaigns de Risa Sato, comme aussi Star de Matsukage, la sculpture en vinyle de Takahiro Fujiwara promet l'amour inconditionnel. L'œuvre de Fujiwara découle d'un intérêt pour les jouets d'adultes, pour les vibrateurs et les poupées gonflables; pour les produits de la célèbre industrie du sexe de Tokyo. Elle a d'ailleurs été comparée « au genre de choses que l'on retrouve suspendues au plafond d'un Love Hotel ».(14) Les jouets sexuels gonflables, semble-t-il, pourraient être l'application la plus réussie de la sculpture figurative de notre époque. Quant à l'intérêt de Fujiwara, il réside plus précisément dans l'interaction réelle et imaginée avec ces objets. À l'image du jouet sexuel, ses sculptures sont pénétrables sur les plans à la fois métaphorique et physique. Dans une optique plus profonde, cependant, l'artiste se demande si l'expérience onaniste ne va pas plus loin que la titillation élémentaire, si elle ne renvoie pas en quelque sorte à la vie intra-utérine :

Il se peut que nos cellules retiennent leur expérience « d'homo aquacole », une existence dans une capsule liquide, la matrice. La sensation agréable que l'on éprouve en se laissant porter par l'eau constitue sans doute le premier et plus grand plaisir de la vie.(15)

La recherche de Fujiwara ne se limite pas à l'expérience du plaisir, mais inclut également la conscience que nous avons de notre envie de plaisir. Une composante importante de plusieurs de ses œuvres est la connexion entre spectateurs : par exemple, lorsque des visiteurs de galerie ayant chevauché sa sculpture vibratoire peuvent se voir dans une glace, ou encore, lorsqu'un visiteur peut contrôler les vibrations de la fève gonflable sur laquelle un autre visiteur est monté. Dans le même esprit, il a aussi fabriqué des judas à travers lesquels les uns peuvent observer les autres en train de se divertir. Le voyeurisme dans ces œuvres, est autoréflexif, réfléchissant de la sorte le véritable visage d'une culture de la gratification instantanée. Les reflets et les judas de Fujiwara donnent à voir des gens se stimulant et se gratifiant eux-mêmes; ils demandent « Vous reconnaissez-vous? Aimez-vous ce que vous voyez? ».

L'installation Beans-BALLOONS (fig. 1 à 3) de Fujiwara réunit deux énormes ballons en forme de jelly beans, l'un rose, l'autre bleu. Ces deux fèves en vinyle sont constituées d'une membrane extérieure et d'une membrane intérieure, plus petite, et percée d'une ouverture permettant aux visiteurs de s'aventurer en son centre. S'inspirant de l'« anatomie » du jouet sexuel gonflable, avec ses orifices simulés, les Beans-BALLOONS sont pourvus de cavités suffisamment larges pour recevoir un adulte de tout son corps. Clairement, l'intention renvoie à l'expérience d'immersion de la vie intra-utérine, un retour à ce « premier et plus grand plaisir de la vie », comme l'indique Fujiwara. Ces jelly beans géants évoquent également des gros comprimés de sucre en provenance d'un futur possible, où le plaisir parmi tous viendrait sous forme de gélule; un autre bien de consommation, mieux encore qu'une télé grand écran à haute résolution, véritable « centre de divertissement domestique » que celui-là.

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De Yuki Kimura, le grand triptyque photographique Tobacco # 3, Enemies Big and Small (fig. 7) ressemble à un panneau publicitaire pour une marque américaine de cigarettes. Deux paquets de cigarettes sont superposés sur l'arrière d'une tête de femme à queues de cheval, ces dernières évoquant la jeune femelle sexuellement désirable. Le rapprochement entre cette œuvre et l'image d'un panneau d'affichage a pour effet de susciter un questionnement quant aux notions d'identité, d'authenticité et de désir dans un contexte de publicité et de consommation : comment, par exemple, peut-on concevoir des représentations contemporaines de femmes et de la sexualité qui soient distinctes de l'iconographie publicitaire actuelle? Sommes-nous capables d'identifier le sexe et le désir en l'absence des produits qu'ils promeuvent, ou en tant qu'expérience distincte du prochain mode de vie tendance?

Manifestement chargées de sexualité, les photographies de Kimura demeurent néanmoins énigmatiques. Dans le diptyque Girl Sitting Left and Right (fig. 4), deux photographies, en apparence identiques, d'une fille aux pieds pansés, assise sur une chaise de bureau les mains posées sur les genoux, laissent voir qu'elles ont été prises en contre-plongée, depuis un point de vue à ras le plancher. Les distorsions causées par cette perspective en « vue d'escargot » nous offrent l'image d'une personne aux grands pieds endommagés, sans bras apparents et avec une petite tête aux traits flous. Par la distorsion de proportions, par la démesure des pieds et de la tête, Kimura propose un corps surtout sensible, qui sent plus qu'il ne pense. La distinction entre les deux photographies réside en un léger écart des genoux. Le changement de position est à ce pointminime qu'on ne s'en aperçoit qu'après un second regard, plus attentif. La cognition, semble suggérer cette œuvre, existe après tout.

Par contraste, la photographie Uniform (fig. 5) montre une jeune femme assise, vêtue d'un habit de marin pour écolière, faisant dos à l'appareil photo et écartant les jambes de manière explicite : sorte de mise en scène du fantasme mâle de la jeune écolière. Le diptyque B&B Nao (fig. 6) oppose l'image d'une jeune femme apparemment enceinte, étendue sur un lit à une autre image de la même jeune femme dans une position identique, tenant cette fois un ballon de basket à l'emplacement du ventre maternel distendu. Provocant et entendu, son regard rappelle la bravade sexuelle de l'Olympia de Manet. D'une manière à la fois subtile, flagrante et humoristique, Yuki Kimura se joue des images conventionnelles de la femme, se joue aussi des attentes culturelles à son endroit; soit de notre perception des femmes en tant que partenaires limités dans l'initiation et l'expression du désir sexuel, en tant qu'objets du fétichisme mâle pédophile, en tant que playmates prêtes et disponibles, portant leur équipement athlétique sous leurs jupes.

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Saki Satom s'enregistre sur support vidéo dans des situations de groupe. Sa présence dans l'œuvre, combinée à des interventions techniques sur le plan de la vitesse, de la direction et de la continuité de l'enregistrement, nous incite à réfléchir sur l'expérience sociale. M. Station Run et M. Station Backward (fig. 15) sont deux vidéogrammes réalisés dans le métro proverbialement achalandé de Tokyo. Dans le premier, portant une pancarte « ne pas dépasser », l'artiste rejoint d'autres voyageurs dans la course frénétique pour assurer la connexion entre deux trains. Elle court dans un sens avec un groupe de voyageurs, puis dans le sens inverse, avec un autre groupe. La vidéo est présentée en boucle, de façon à rendre la course continue et incessante, rythmiquement répétitive et absurde.

M. Station Backward présente l'artiste portant la même pancarte « ne pas dépasser », marchant dans une station de métro parmi d'autres voyageurs qui semblent marcher à reculons. Rapidement, on s'aperçoit que c'est en fait l'artiste qui marche à reculons et que la direction de la bande vidéo a été inversée. Ces images continuent, néanmoins, d'exercer leur fascination, bien après la révélation de l'effet d'illusion. Ici, des voyageurs se précipitent dans des escaliers qu'ils montent à reculons, là, ils tournent des coins regardant en direction opposée et parvenant, par magie, à ne pas se heurter. Nous admirons la démarche concentrée et un peu gauche de l'artiste, et nous imaginons bien à quel point il doit être difficile de créer cette illusion. Nous observons les voyageurs, leur course et les regards rapides qu'ils lancent par-dessus l'épaule à l'artiste. Mais plus encore, nous nous identifions à Saki Satom qui, pour un temps, marche à contre-courant d'une ville entière. Qui n'a pas fait l'expérience de se sentir désynchronisé, à côté de ses pompes, empruntant une direction alors que le reste du monde est engagé dans une autre.

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Les artistes retenus par Catherine Osborne pour cette exposition présentent un portrait du Japon urbain, de la ville moderne et, par extension, de la cité du futur. Celle-ci est une seule métropole, reliée par réseaux numériques à la surface entière du globe, avec des liens progressivement ténus à l'histoire et à la géographie. Elle est la ville virtuelle transnationale avec sa culture visuelle hybride, promouvant des modes de vie prêts à consommer et ses divertissements spectaculaires. Pour chaque enchantement que nous offre ces artistes -- l'éclat graphique des photographies de Yuki Kimura, la légèreté colorée des Beans-BALLOONS de Fujiwara, le charme des Campaigns de Risa Sato, la minuscule et parfaite galerie dans un sac à dos d'Ozawa, la magie hypnotique des vidéos de Saki Satom, le simple plaisir de jouer à la Star de Matsukage -- naît également une conscience troublante de comment l'amour, le désir et le plaisir peuvent être traqués, nivelés et mis en marché. Sommes-nous toujours des citoyens actifs, des participants au débat autour du bien public? ou sommes nous en voie de devenir de simples consommateurs qui ne comparent plus que les prix et la qualité de leurs plaisirs? Notre croyance en l'autonomie personnelle semble quelque peu pathétique face aux vidéos de Saki Satom. Ce qui reste de notre individualité, ce « moi » authentique, pourrait aisément se loger dans la Ai Ai Gallery d'Ozawa. Errerons-nous loin de nos claviers, comme le triste personnage de Risa Sato, à la recherche de contacts humains, ou battrons-nous en retraite dans une bulle amniotique d'autogratification? Notre capacité réelle d'expression personnelle s'affirmera-t-elle au-delà du choix de chansons sur le menu mélodique du karaoké, ou sera-t-elle finalement réduite à l'ouverture et à la fermeture de nos cuisses?

Gordon Hatt, 2002

Traduction d'anglais par Jennifer Couëlle

1. William Gibson, The Observer, Londres, le dimanche 1er avril, 2001, http://www.observer.co.uk/life/story/0,6903,466391,00.html.

2. Waves: Contemporary Japanese Fibrework, organisée par Alan Elder et Kiyoji Tsuji, 2 mai-12 juin 1993, The Library & Gallery, Cambridge.

3. Le Japon est devenu un synonyme pour les technologies du futur, pour les écrans, pour les réseaux, pour la cybernétique, la robotique, l'intelligence artificielle, la simulation. [] Si le futur est technologique et si la technologie s'est japonisée, le syllogisme suggérerait alors que le futur, lui aussi, est maintenant japonais. » D. Moreley et K. Robins, Spaces of Identity, Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries, Londres, Routledge, 1995, p. 168, cité dans Volker Grassmuck, Man, Nation & Machine, The Otaku Answer to Pressing Problems of the Media Society, texte traduit d'une conférence prononcée à la Jan van Eijk Akademie, Maastricht, 2000, http://waste.informatik.hu-berlin.de/Grassmuck/Texts/otaku00_e.html.

4.  Parmi les exemples de japonisme dans la musique pop américaine et britannique des années 1980, l'on retrouve l'album Japanese Whispers de The Cure, les chansons I think I'm turning Japanese des Vapours, Mr. Roboto de Styx et Big In Japan d'Alphaville, de même que les groupes Japan et Big In Japan.

5.  Voir Volker Grassmuck, « 'I'm alone, but not lonely': Japanese Otaku-Kids Colonize the Realm of Information and Media », Mediamatic, Amsterdam,1990, http://waste.informatik.hu-berlin.de/Grassmuck/Texts/otaku.e.htlm et Grassmuck, Man, Nation & Machine.

6.  Yamazaki Koichi cité dans Grassmuck, « I’m alone, but not lonely ». 

7.  William Gibson, ibid.

8.  Journal of Contemporary Art Online, interview avec Takahashi Murakami à Brooklyn, New York, le 24 février 2000, traduction anglaise par Mako Wakasa et Naomi Ginoza, http://www.jca-online.com/murakami.html.

9.  Le personnage à « grosse tête» est peut-être inspiré de Kogepan (pain brûlé), un personnage populaire créé pour un livre d'enfants japonais. L'histoire veut que Kogepan ait été laissé trop longtemps au four et qu'il soit triste parce que personne ne veut le manger.

10.  Takahashi Murakami, par exemple, présente sa marchandise sur Internet, http://www.narakami.com/data/index_shop.html .

11.  Vivant aux Philippines, Judy Freya Sibayan est la directrice et propriétaire de la Scapular Gallery Nomad, une galerie prête-à-porter faite de poches scapulaires contenant les œuvres de différents artistes.

12.  Judy Freya Sibayan, « The Museum of Soy Sauce Art, Scapular Gallery Nomad, and the Nasubi Gallery », A

Guidebook to Tsuyoshi Ozawa’s World, pp. 24-25, Tokyo, Isshi Press, 2001.

13.  Tsuyoshi Ozawa, « Ai Ai Gallery », A Guidebook to Tsuyoshi Ozawa’s World, Ibid., p. 48.

14.  Kengo Nakamura et Tom Vincent, interview avec l'artiste, Network Museum & Magazine Project, 1998, http://www.dnp.co.jp/museum/nmp/nmp_i/interview/fujiwara/fujiintro.html.

15.  Ibid.

Big In Japan

Why Japan? Because Japan is the global imagination’s default setting for the future.1


In 1998 I proposed to Catherine Osborne, free lance writer, art critic and co-publisher of the Toronto based art magazine Lola, that she curate an exhibition of contemporary Japanese art for Cambridge Galleries. Osborne had been living and working in Tokyo, from 1989 to 1994, as a visual arts writer for the magazine Tokyo Journal, and for the English language national newspaper The Daily Yomiuri. She had been a witness to a cultural transformation taking place in Japanese culture and society caused by the enormous wealth and prosperity of what is now referred to as the “bubble” economy. During that time new art museums were being built, individuals were making glamorous art purchases, and the growth in private collections exploded. For the first time, Japanese artists were getting attention from the Western world that no generation before had experienced. Cambridge Galleries played its own small part in a renewed Japonisme. In 1993 Cambridge Galleries organized the exhibition “Waves: Contemporary Japanese Fibrework.”2 Waves brought to Canada ten Japanese fibre artists whose work was based in traditional Japanese craft, as well as being influenced by developments in contemporary international art. In the years since “Waves,” new Japanese popular culture had begun to make an impact in Canada. Japanese anime, (animated action movies and science fiction) and manga (comic books for adults) developed underground cult status. Japanese cartoons for children such as Sailor Moon, and Pokemon, and video games such as Nintendo and Play Station became not only wildly popular in Canada and the United States, they also became the subject of journalists and parent groups who discussed the significance of the imagery, its appropriateness for young impressionable minds and the hypnotic hold that it seems to have over them.

Japan had begun to make its presence felt in North America in the 1980's through its industrial and technological mastery. Its companies were dominant in the field of consumer electronics and were challenging the market dominance of the North American and European automobile industries. Japan became identified not only with the production of advanced technology, but also with the wholehearted embrace of the technological life style.3 For many young westerners of the 1980's “New Wave” who were reacting against the roots revivals of the 1960's and 1970's, Japan, as an idea, was embraced as synonymous with an accelerated rhythm of life and a futuristic technological culture at once seductive and menacing.4

Japanese social theorists were also fascinated by the spectacle of their rapid cultural transformation and what it meant. In the late 1970's and early 1980's the term shinjinrui (new kind of humans) was coined to describe a hedonistic generation of perpetual adolescents.5 This generation funded its materialistic lifestyle with jobs in advertising, software, networks, video production, TV and games. The affluent consumer society was identified as the cause of a social infantilisation. Media and advertising, it was advanced, appealed to the child in everyone and the rate of technological change forced everyone to adapt and to perpetually learn in order to keep up. In the end, provisional, temporary, rootless beings were created – new humans who lived only in a world of representations. The brand name fetishism and chic consumerism that began to be identified in the west in the mid 1980's (yuppies and terminological variants) may have its precedent in this Japanese lifestyle and fashion trend.

A new lifestyle designation, otaku, gained currency in the 1990's. Variously compared to the North American “nerd” or “geek,” the Japanese otaku has become the term to refer to young people who may be obsessive collectors of anime, manga, video games and other pop culture ephemera. The otaku’s obsessional behaviour makes them socially awkward – avoiding intimacy and physical contact and preferring mediated communication through electronic networks. As a social phenomenon, the otaku have been called “a product of hyper-capitalism and the hyper-consumption society.”6 Disengaged from traditional cultural affiliations, addicted to the energies of pop culture fantasy and atomized through electronic networks and digital technologies, the otaku may not only be a problematic model of 21st century Japanese culture, they may also be, as William Gibson suggests, part of the globe’s default setting for the future.7

The artists chosen by Catherine Osborne for “Big In Japan” are not otaku, rather they hold a mirror up to the contemporary urban Japanese culture that has given rise to the phenomenon: consumer culture, urban living, instant gratification, speed, crowds, shopping, sex, desire, fame, anonymity, and excess – conditions that are at once all features of the contemporary world yet are exemplified today by Japan and urban Tokyo. Perhaps these artists are, as the artist Takashi Murakami confessed of himself, failed otaku – unable to muster sufficient obsessional enthusiasm or lacking in the ability to memorize volumes of trivia. Perhaps they are more inclined to seek connections with people than to disassociate, more inclined to satirize and critique mass culture than to submit to it.8

***

Risa Sato employs imagery that is cute – or kawaii as it is called in Japanese – inflatables that are round and hugging (and huggable) or sleeping, kiddie tricycles with bulbous heads, and a performance costume consisting of a plush carpet smock and big round head. All her figures have a single horizontal line for a mouth and two lines or small circles for eyes. “Mewling,” as in “mewling” kittens, is the adjective that comes to mind in trying to describe these quasi-human, almost animal characters. Their faces recall sucklings, creatures that nuzzle and cuddle and tug at the emotional heart. They have their source in the kitsch ephemera – plush toys, key chains, tee-shirts etc. – typically collected by young girls and adolescents as expressions and signifiers of the nurturing feminine. Typically the relationship with the kitsch image is solipsistic. The object is both an expression of affection and affection’s object. In return, the kitsch image expresses its love unconditionally. Risa Sato’s characters are made to work in her performances and interventions, not for her own gratification, rather in the service of making connections between strangers. Her “big head” character in Risa Campaign #10 (fig. 14) goes shopping in the market, talks to farmers and offers rides in her wagon to old people.9 When the artist is dressed in this guise she becomes the perfect Girl Scout. When riding on one of the hybrid trikes in performances of Risa Campaign #8 (fig. 12), the artist draws social affection – “How adorable!” When she brings one of the trikes to San Francisco during a reunion with her estranged mother, it sits at the dinner table as the unnamed “child within,” the child who still suffers the confusion and pain of separation. When she goes on a double-decker tour bus in New York wearing the inflatable piggyback character from Risa Campaign #6, it is an expression of exuberance on vacation.


Consistent with her blurring of the lines of art and popular culture, the artist markets her own line of key chains, paper weights and action figures representing her and her cuddly cast of characters. Risa Sato is not alone in Japan in marketing her work through retail merchandising and licensing.10 Commercial merchandising of imagery by Japanese artists is at once an ironic reference to the relationship of the new art to the pop culture which spawned it, as well as an a strategic economic decision. Through her installations, performances, and merchandising Risa Sato has managed to overcome the onanistic and solipsistic relationships generally associated with manga otaku and kawaii. Her “campaigns” are artworks in the service of elementary human contact and the expression of a range of human emotions. Her work may suggest the problems and the possibilities of communication and human contact in the 21st century world of representations.

***

Much of Tsuyoshi Ozawa’s work deals with the institutional presentation of art. In his Museum of Soy Sauce he parodied the history of Japanese art as a series of installations modelled on the anthropological museum. The Nasubi Gallery was a parallel gallery or artist-run space in a milk box, installed on trees or lampposts or in stores in the city, where the artist invited colleagues to install miniature exhibitions. The Nasubi Gallery, later became the Ai Ai Gallery, a commercial gallery in a milk box, worn as a back-pack. The Ai Ai Gallery backpack wearer or “dealer,” carried a telephone pager and brought the gallery to the customer when paged. With his Ai Ai Gallery (fig. 10), Ozawa confronts the artist’s dilemma, namely, how to make critical, non-commercial work in a consumer culture. The system of rental galleries in Ginza, the Tokyo commercial art district, with their high rental fees, is out of reach for many artists and places the onus on those who can afford to exhibit their work to produce commercially profitable work for sale. Judy Freya Sibayan sees the miniature gallery as a critique of the modern city, which is monopolized by capitalism through the media, with populations socialized exclusively as consumers, and which squeezes out the spaces and vehicles for experimental and critical cultural activities.11 Moreover, Sibayan sees an “economy of scale” and an “ecology” to the miniature gallery in contrast to the conventional gallery, “Its resources are conservative: viewership is intimate; it is on a one-to-one basis; its infrastructure, the human body. The gallery is not rooted to one place. It is mobile, nomadic . . .”12 Miniature, mobile galleries like the Scapular Gallery Nomad, the Nasubi Gallery and the Ai Ai Gallery are actions by those without substantial economic resources, artists dissatisfied the status quo of consumer culture and those appalled and alienated by the insatiable appetite of affluent consumer societies and the attendant waste and ecological damage. Yet, the Ai Ai Gallery is also an acknowledgement on the part of the artist of the need to generate income from the work, much as Risa Sato has managed to licence and merchandise her images, even though, Ozawa freely admits that, as a commercial venture, the Ai Ai Gallery was a failure.13

***

In a world where identity resides within representations, each image can be measured for its proximity to the viewer – “That person is like me,” or “I want to be like that person,” or “I detest that person.” Images variously give credibility to our existence, become models of self-improvement or scapegoats. The power of the image, moreover, is such that existence itself may come into question if there is no representation of it. Such is the pathological desire for “fame” or “glamour,” where one achieves true existence only when existing within a public representation. Hiroyuki Matsukage is, in addition to being an artist, a graphic designer, journalist, photographer and musician. Together with Muneteru Ujino, he plays in the Industrial rock band Gorgerous. Matsukage’s activities overlap and complement one another. His exhibition activity is often documented in catalogues of his own design, which are often complemented by performances by Gorgerous, whose CD recordings he also designs. In magazines he reviews current cinema and popular culture. Matsukage is the model of the post-modern individual – active within a field exclusively composed of representations – producing, packaging, interpreting and critiquing images. In many of Matuskage’s photographs he includes himself as actor and subject. In the work Man’s Back and Woman’s Face (1999), he recreates the coital scene from the Alain Renais movie Hiroshima Mon Amour, casting himself in the character of the Japanese architect Lui. Matuskage, the cinephile, lover of women and of French New Wave cinema, expresses his enthusiasm for the foreign genre and at the same time affirms his Japanese identity in this homage. While we might look for precedents to this in Western photo-based art, it is also possible to see this as an extension of album art or music videos, where the artist is often depicted acting out the fantasies or passion of the music.

Matuskages’s interactive installation Star (figs. 8 & 9) continues the artist’s interest in fame and identity. Star makes reference to that most famous of Japanese popular culture contributions, karaoke, where the participants sing popular songs, with the aid of videotext and image prompts, to the accompaniment of recorded back-up music. Karaoke participants get to stand in the shoes of their pop idols, become for a time the stars that they admire, and express the same sentiments in front of an audience. Matuskage’s installation on the other hand, provides no text or image prompts other than the panoramic photograph of an audience of cheering women. Here would-be pop idols need not know popular songs or melodies and don’t need the help of videotexts. Merely vocalizing into the microphone generates applause, and the louder the vocalizing the louder the applause. Star demands no talent or memory or technique – simply barking into the microphone is sufficient to generate an adoring response. It is the closest thing to an intravenous drip of love and positive reinforcement. Star instantly and freely delivers the gratification of applause proposing, “You want adoration? Here, it is yours.” Star says, “Love me for being. Love me for nothing.”

***

Like Risa Sato’s “campaigns” and Matsukage’s Star, Fujiwara Takahiro’s vinyl sculpture also promises unconditional love. Fujiwara’s work emerged from an interest in adult toys, vibrators and inflatable dolls – products of Tokyo’s famous sex industry – and his work has been compared to “the sort that hangs from the ceiling of a Love Hotel.”14 Inflatable sex toys, however, may be seen as contemporary culture’s most successful application of figurative sculpture. Fujiwara’s interest lies in the real and imagined interaction with the objects – he imagines sculptures that, like sex toys, are really penetrable, and not only metaphorically so. But more profoundly, the artist speculates that the onanistic experience goes deeper than elementary titillation, back to the womb: Our cells may retain their experience of “homo aquarius,” a life in a liquid capsule, the womb. The agreeable feeling you have by releasing your body in the water may probably be the first and best pleasure in your life.15

Fuijiwara is not only interested in the experience of pleasure, he is also interested in our consciousness of our desire for pleasure. An important component of many of his works is a connection between spectators, where for example, gallery visitors riding his vibrating sculpture can watch themselves in mirrors, or where one gallery visitor can control the vibrations on the inflatable bean on which another visitor is mounted. He has also constructed peepholes where visitors can watch other gallery visitors enjoying his interactive work. Voyeurism, in these works is turned on itself – reflecting the true face of a culture of instant gratification. Fujiwara’s reflections and peepholes show people in acts of self-stimulation and self-gratification and ask the question, “Do you recognize yourself? Do you like what you see?” Fuijiwara’s two-piece installation Beans - BALLOONS (figs. 1 - 3), are two enormous pink and blue balloons in the shape of jelly beans. These vinyl balloons have an outer membrane, and a smaller inner membrane with an aperture that allows access to the interior of the balloon while the outer membrane remains inflated. Inspired by the construction of inflatable sex toys, which have simulated orifices, the Beans - BALLOONS have orifices large enough for an adult to enter with their entire body. Clearly the intention and experience recalls the immersive womb experience, or a return to that “first and best pleasure in your life,” as Fujiwara calls it – a sex toy for the whole body. Shaped like giant jelly beans, the Beans - BALLOONS seem like big sugar pills, suggesting a possible future where “the first and best pleasure” may come as a pill – another consumable item, even better than a wide screen, high definition TV – a true “home entertainment centre.”

***

Yuki Kimura’s large triptych Tobacco #3: Enemies Big and Small (fig. 7) resembles a billboard advertisement for an American brand of cigarettes. Two cigarette packages are superimposed over the back of the head of young woman in pigtails – the pigtails signalling perhaps a young, sexually desirable girl. There is little to differentiate this image from what might issue from an advertising agency, and perhaps this is just another blatant example of product placement. The image’s proximity to billboard advertising poses questions about identity, authenticity and desire in the environment of publicity and consumption: What are the possibilities of imagining contemporary representations of women and sexuality apart from the iconography of the modern advertising industry? Will we be able to identify sex and desire apart from the products associated with it, or as an experience separate from the next lifestyle enthusiasm? Kimura’s photographs are both charged with sexuality and at the same time mysteriously enigmatic. In the diptych, Girl Sitting Left and Right (fig. 4), two seemingly identical photographs of a girl with bandaged feet sitting on an office chair, hands folded on her lap, are taken from a position close to the floor, looking up. The distortions caused by the “snail’s eye” perspective give us the strange image of a young woman with big damaged feet, no visible arms and a small head with only vague features. By distorting the proportions, exaggerating the size of the feet and minimizing the size of the head, Kimura suggests a body that is primarily sentient – all feeling and no thinking. Subtly, however, the photographs are distinguished from each other by the slightest parting of the legs at the knees. The change in position is so slight as to be recognizable only after closer examination. Cognition, this photograph seems to suggest, exists after all.

In contrast, the photograph in Uniform (fig. 5) depicts a young woman in a school girl’s sailor suit sitting with her back to the camera with her legs spread indiscreetly wide apart – an enactment of the male school girl fantasy. B&B Nao (fig. 6) is a diptych that contrasts an image of young woman, apparently pregnant, lying on a bed, with another image of the same young woman in the same position, except this time holding a basketball in the place of a distended, pregnant belly. The look on the girl’s face is provocative and knowing, recalling the sexual challenge of Manet’s Olympia. Subtly, blatantly, humourously, Yuki Kimura plays with the conventional images and expectations of women – as limited partners in the initiation and the expression of sexual desire, as objects of a paedophilic male fetish, as playmates ready and available, who carry their athletic equipment under their dresses.

***

Saki Satom records herself in group situations where her participation, plus the adjustment of the tape speed, direction or continuity, causes us to reflect on the social experience. M. Station Run and M. Station Backward (fig. 15) are two videos made in the famously busy Tokyo subway. In M. Station Run, the artist, carrying a “no passing” sign, joins commuters in the frantic run to make connections between trains. She runs one way with a group of commuters, then back the other way with another group. The video is looped to make this run continuous and unending, rhythmically repetitive and absurd. M. Station Backward is a video that depicts the artist, carrying the same “no passing” sign, walking through a subway station where all of the other commuters appear to be walking backwards. It doesn’t take long to discern that it is in fact the artist who is walking backwards, and it is the direction of the videotape that has been reversed. Yet even when this simple illusion has been exposed, the image continues to fascinate. Commuters bound up flights of stairs backwards, people magically turn corners looking in the opposite direction and manage not to crash into each other. We admire the artist’s concentrated and slightly awkward walk and imagine how difficult it must be to create this illusion. We watch the commuters and their brief sideways glances at the artist in the midst of their hurried commute. But more, we all identify with the artist, who for a time, is walking against the traffic of the entire city. Who has not experienced similar feelings of being out of step, of going one way when the rest of the world is going the other way?

***

The artists selected by Catherine Osborne for this exhibition draw us a picture of urban Japan – the modern city, and, the city of the future. The city of the future is a single city, linked across the globe by digital networks, with increasingly tenuous ties to history and geography – an international virtual city with a hybridized, visual culture of commodified lifestyle signifiers and spectacular entertainments. With each delight these artists bring us – the graphic brilliance of Yuki Kimura’s photographs, the colourful buoyancy of Fujiwara’s Beans - BALLOONS, the charm of Risa Sato’s Campaigns, Ozawa’s tiny perfect gallery in a back-pack, the mesmerizing magic of Saki Satom’s videos, or the sheer fun of Matsukage’s Star – there is also the unsettling awareness of how love, desire and pleasure can be tracked, commodified and serviced. Are we still active citizens, participants in the debate about the public good, or we are being turned into consumers, who only compare the prices and quality of our pleasures. Our belief in personal autonomy looks slightly pathetic in Saki Satom’s videos, and after that, what’s left over of our individuality – the authentic “me” – could fit into Ozawa’s Ai Ai Gallery with plenty of room to spare. Will we wander, like Risa Sato’s sad character, away from our keyboards, searching for human contact, or will we retreat back into an amniotic bubble of self-gratification? Will our effective capacity for personal expression go beyond the choice of songs on the karaoke play-list, or will it ultimately be reduced to the opening and closing of our legs?

Gordon Hatt, 2002

Endnotes

1. William Gibson, The Observer, Sunday April 1, 2001. <http://www.observer.co.uk/life/story/0,6903,466391,00.html>
2. “Waves: Contemporary Japanese Fibrework,” curated by Alan Elder and Kiyoji Tsuji, May 2 - June 12, The Library & Gallery: Cambridge, 1993.
3. “Japan has become synonymous with the technologies of the future ш with screens, networks, cybernetics, robotics, artificial intelligence, simulation. (...) If the future is technological, and if technology has become 'Japanised', then the syllogism would suggest that the future is now Japanese too.” D. Moreley, & K. Robins, Spaces of Identity, Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries. Routledge: London, 1995, p. 168, quoted in Volker Grassmuck, Man, Nation & Machine, The Otaku Answer to Pressing Problems of the Media Society, translated text of lecture presented for Jan van Eijk Akademie, Maastricht, 2000.
<http://waste.informatik.hu-berlin.de/Grassmuck/Texts/otaku00_e.html>.
4. Some examples of Japonisme in eighties’ British and American pop music are I think I’m turning Japanese by the Vapours, the album Japanese Whispers by The Cure, the songs Mr. Roboto by Styx and Big In Japan, by Alphaville and the bands Japan and Big In Japan.
5. See Volker Grassmuck, "I'm alone, but not lonely," Japanese Otaku-Kids colonize the Realm of Information and Media, Mediamatic: Amsterdam, 1990,
<http://waste.informatik.hu-berlin.de/Grassmuck/Texts/otaku.e.html> and Grassmuck, Man, Nation & Machine.
6. Grassmuck, "I'm alone, but not lonely," quoting Nakamori Akio, "Manga Burikko," Tokyo Otona kurabu, 1984.
7. William Gibson, ibid.
8. Journal of Contemporary Art, Interview at Takashi Murakami’s studio in Brooklyn, New York, February 24th, 2000, Translated by Mako Wakasa and Naomi Ginoza <http://www.jca-online.com/murakami.html>.
9. The “big head” character may be based on the character “Kogepan” or “burnt bread,” a popular character created for a Japanese children’s picture book. According to the story, Kogepan was left
in the oven too long and is sad because no one wants to eat him.
10. Cf. Takahashi Murakami whose merchandise can be found on the Internet at <http://www.narakami.com/data/index_shop.html>.
11. Judy Freya Sibayan, is the curator and owner of the Scapular Gallery Nomad, a wearable gallery, consisting of scapular-like pouches containing the works of a number of artists.
12. Judy Freya Sibayan, “The Museum of Soy Sauce Art, Scapular Gallery Nomad, and the Nasubi Gallery,”A Guidebook to Tsuyoshi Ozawa’s World, pp. 24-25, Isshi Press, Tokyo: 2001.
13. Tsuyoshi Ozawa, “Ai Ai Gallery,” A Guidebook to Tsuyoshi Ozawa'a World, p. 48.
14. Kengo Nakamura and Tom Vincent, Interview with the artist, Network Museum & Magazine Project, 1998. <http://www.dnp.co.jp/museum/nmp/nmp_i/interview/fujiwara/fujiintro.html>
15. Ibid.

Betsy Coulter and Christy Thompson: Toggle Wand

Once upon a time, sculptors sought above all to achieve “objecthood.”  Minimalist sculptors  rejected the compositional dynamics of geometric and expressionistic abstraction. They created objects – pure objects, without reference – industrially fabricated, of industrial materials.  And they were uncanny, those objects – resembling nothing, except for a kind of non-functional industrial bi-product.  

But somehow, pure objecthood was never achieved.  The fingerprints of the maker, the choice of materials, the nature of the fabrication, were signatures that betrayed a phenomenal relationship – qualities, character, predilection.  The inevitable “thingness” of their objects was their failure, if in their pursuit of the pure, those artist weren’t inclined to give up on objects altogether.  But we are fated to live in world of things – specific things, not general things.  Things address our subjectivity, tell stories out of school, bring with them their own history and make a mess on the carpet.  “These things – here,” surround us, face us, exist in relation to us – this is our world of phenomenal things. 

“Objecthood”may still be the goal, but sculptors now know that they can’t get there from here by stripping an object of its lateral associations.  Instead, they pile it on.  Contemporary sculptors create and assemble objects so loaded with associations and thingness, that they may confound recognition and short-circuit the phenomenal process of perception.  Betsy Coulter’s and Christy Thompson’s objects in “Toggle Wand” enter at this point. What these two artists do is to play with those defining qualities of objects that characterize “thingness.” They play with specificity, presentation, history, purpose and connection.  Things in “Toggle Wand,” may not be what they seem.

A decoy is a thing, that resembles another thing.  It is a Homeric siren for lower life-forms, an animal Lorelei, that signs, “Over Here! (sucker).”  Decoys are functional illusions – primate cousins of art.  A decoy is a thing that isn’t what it appears to be, a seducer conquering  through deceit.  Betsy Coulter’s decoy deer has, in addition to its essential decoyness, two additional cups, in the characteristic shape of cups made from Styrofoam (but which are actually made of rubber).  What is this thing?  Is it part of the exhibition?  The cups, sitting on the decoy, suggest that the decoy is a remnant, reduced to a convenient shelf, not the object of contemplation in the gallery.  A decoy, in an art gallery, poses as art.  Cups, sitting on the decoy, make it non-art. Styrofoam cups, made of rubber, make it art again.

* * *

“Thingness” is defined in its particularity, “a thing which is just this one, ” or, “this thing – here,” and speaks not only of the thing itself, but also of the subject who shares that space with the thing. “It” faces “me.”  “I” address “it.”  “It” emerges from the world of generality into the world of specificity. Like furniture on the street.  My world.  My world of experience.  “It” is some “thing” to me.

When I was a child, the concept of “disposable” didn’t really exist.  You threw out wrapping paper and food scraps, and that was about it.  Everything was used and reused until it was broken beyond repair.  So things then, in retrospect – they seemed like huge containers, invested with enormous feeling.  The desire for the thing, the saving and the waiting and the anticipating and finally the getting and the holding and the using and the safe-keeping and the breaking and the fixing and the losing – this is what I remember about things growing up.

* * *

Christy Thompson’s things remind me of that desire. They’re charged – they glow internally, magnetically, irresistably.  They hang, suspended, comically oversized or slightly out of reach.  These things, these containers of memory and desire, are not Proustian madeleinesmade of butter and sugar, but new stuff, made of resins, plastics, synthetic polymers.  Her cast objects hanging from the ceiling in “Toggle Wands” are made with expanding insulation foam, sprayed it into molds – disposable and unknowable materials, strange and uncanny.  Her giant vinyl oven mitt, though holding the promise of added features, is basically dysfunctional.  Maybe these things are not really things at all, just longing shrink-wrapped, extruded, injection-moulded.  “These things – here,” are Lilliputian or Brobdingnagian – never our size, never within our reach.  

Gordon Hatt

Lisa Neighbour: Illuminations

Then, turning round his great eye, he discerned the strangers, and growled out to them,  demanding who they were, and where from. Ulysses replied most humbly, stating that they  were Greeks, from the great expedition that had lately won so much glory in the conquest of Troy; that they were now on their way home, and finished by imploring his hospitality  in the name of the gods. Polyphemus deigned no answer, but reaching out his hand seized  two of the Greeks, whom he hurled against the side of the cave, and dashed out their  brains. He proceeded to devour them with great relish, and having made a hearty meal,  stretched himself out on the floor to sleep.1

***

In his 1993 year-end review of Toronto visual art, writer and artist Oliver Girling gave pride of place to Lisa Neighbour's exhibition "In the Dark," calling it "dazzling." Girling, however, didn't merely praise the work, but praised it in contrast to what he perceived to be a dominant trend in art at that time - art that was, in his words, "cynical, smarty-pants . . . self-referential."2 And so it was, in those years of the early 1990s: pessimism did at times give way to cynicism. The Canadian art world was experiencing a malaise; indeed all of Canada was in the dumps by the end of 1993. The economy was in terrible shape and struggling to recover from the recession of 1990. The effects of free trade with the United States and the rapid development of a global marketplace were traumatizing and painful. Canadian cultural identity, founded in the postwar period on universal health care, state-owned industries and government support for education and culture, was coming apart at the seams as both provincial and federal governments were facing debt crises. Ontario's social democratic NDP government was in a battle with its traditional supporters, the public service unions, to renegotiate contracts in exchange for job security - the so-called Social Contract. Programme spending in areas of health, education and culture was being frozen or cut back at all levels of government. 

By 1990, it was estimated that nine million people were infected with HIV worldwide. The effects of global warming and ozone depletion threatened an ecological disaster of unimaginable proportions. In 1993, the largest and longest-sustained hole in the ozone layer was recorded - 25 million square kilometres - larger than the European continent.3 The psychic relief from the end of the cold war, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the reduced threat of nuclear war were tempered by the realization that international market values now reigned supreme and that there was no foreseeable alternative to global capitalism. 

Visual art sustained particularly intense attacks in the early '90s. In the United States, controversy over the work of Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe, and in Canada, the National Gallery's acquisition of Barnett Newman's Voice of Fire and Mark Rothko's No. 16, focused debate on government support for the arts. In New York, the 1993 Whitney Biennial, which received scathing reviews in the mainstream press, seemed to define the chasm that had opened up between the art world and an uncomprehending and increasingly recalcitrant public.4 

In Toronto, the confusion came to a head when artist Eli Langer was prosecuted for the alleged crime of producing child pornography, stemming from his exhibition of paintings and drawings at the artist-run gallery Mercer Union. Buffeted by recession and the collapse of the commercial art market and stung by the erosion of public support for the arts, the art community was on the defensive. Faced with the dystopic prospect of a rampant killer disease and a global ecological meltdown, the humanistic belief that underpinned the arts community - that an enlightened society could develop rationally, humanely and free of exploitation - was foundering on a pervasive sense of pessimism and gloom. Los Angeles curator and critic Ralph Rugoff coined the term Pathetic Art for work by emerging artists that reflected feelings of failure, powerlessness and inadequacy.5 In an article in the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik identified the emergence of a new "Morbid Manner," wherein he perceived the building of "memorials-in-advance to an apocalypse whose causes are ill-defined but whose inevitability is grimly certain."6 Death and despair, it seems, had become the metaphors for the life we were living in the early 1990s. 

***

Queen Street West in the 1980s was an artists' community not unlike the Lower East Side community of artists in New York during the same period, where young, middle-class art-school graduates lived in a socially distressed, working-class, ethnic ghetto. Such neighbourhoods were primarily attractive for their cheap flats or rough commercial/industrial spaces - ideal for artists who wanted a situation in which to live and work. 

In 1981, Lisa Neighbour and her partner Carlo Cesta moved into an old, six-story industrial building at 620 Richmond Street West in Toronto. "Six-Twenty Richmond," as it was known, was a short block from the busy corner of Queen and Bathurst Streets. It was a mixed industrial, commercial, residential neighbourhood with eastern European and Portuguese enclaves. But as Toronto recovered from the recession of the early 1980s, Queen Street West started to become trendy. 620 Richmond was renovated, rents were increased, and Lisa Neighbour and Carlo Cesta were forced to move further west into the community of Parkdale. 

After graduating from the Ontario College of Art in 1981, Neighbour and a few school friends had established a print shop in the basement of her mother's house in mid-town Toronto. For the next four years she worked as a waitress in the evenings and travelled uptown to make prints during the day. She started to show her work at the Angel Art Gallery on Avenue Road, owned by Nan Shuttleworth. But by the mid 1980s Neighbour was beginning to experience a crisis of motivation. A period of living in New York exposed her to frontline issues in contemporary art and caused her to lose faith in the body of work she had been developing since graduating from art school. The positive feedback that she had received from her exhibitions at the Angel Gallery no longer seemed sufficient cause to make art. Her frustration and unhappiness at this creative block was reflected in work that was increasingly dark and angry. A couple of years after moving from 620 Richmond to Parkdale, she decided that, "What I needed to do was something just for me and not for anybody else."7 Neighbour returned to an experience that she had in her former neighbourhood for inspiration. 

"I discovered it almost by accident. I was watching a construction crew setting up the lights  on the church at Adelaide and Bathurst Streets for the Portuguese festival. It was beautiful  to see it happening. They would link up each piece together with the wires, up there  swinging from these dangerous looking scaffolds. At some point somebody would throw  the big switch and it would go on."8

St. Mary's Catholic Church at the corner of Adelaide and Bathurst was elaborately decorated every year for the festival of Senhor Santo Cristo dos Milagre, as was St. Patrick's Catholic Church at Dundas and Grace for the festival of Senhor da Pedra. The decorations consisted of images painted on plywood and laced with strings of coloured lights, each connected to the next with flowers and garlands. The festivals at St. Mary's and St. Patrick's were a religious Gesamtkunswerk uniting folk art, religion and community. 

Part of the attraction the church decorations held for Neighbour came from her interest in "outsider" art. In Canada, the critique of social power that began in the 1960s continued to influence the changing cultural landscape. Advocates of feminism, multi-culturalism, aboriginal rights and gay rights continued to question the existing structures of authority and privilege. In the visual arts, the imposing edifice of Clement Greenberg's post-war modernism started to come undone as a result of this critique, and many artists began to investigate domestic, folk and naive art forms as alternative modes of expression and as symbols of cultural resistance.9 

And folk art just seemed fresher, less affected and free of that tiresome academic cant. Neighbour's partner Carlo Cesta had exhibited his work at Claude Arsenault's Home Again Gallery in 1981 and 1983, a gallery that specialized in folk art. Moreover, Neighbour had considerable experience with Mexican folk art, having been to Mexico with her family frequently over the years. Mexican folk religion, its festival decoration and its votive shrines, often made with whatever material was available, became a significant influence not only on the body of work she was now developing, but also as part of a personal, pantheistic religious outlook: 

"My attitude towards religious ideas is definitely influenced by going to Mexico. . . For  each big festival, a different shrine is made. People go from home to home, visiting each  other's shrine, placing objects on them, singing in front of them. There is a web of  connections between the shrines in a neighbourhood."10

Inspired by these painted plywood and electric-light constructions, Neighbour made a couple of early versions of her own. These include Bouquet of Flowers (1987) and Gems andUntitled (both 1988). But it was the crown of thorns image circling the rose window at St. Patrick's Church that was to significantly influence the artist. Neighbour began to make lithographs featuring the crown of thorns. The braided circular image eventually mutated into wreaths, in what she calls a "degraded crown of thorns configuration." Trance Wreath (1988) was a turning point: 

"It wasn't figurative, it didn't have any concrete references, it did have the braided crown of  thorns configuration, but there were no thorns on it - it was just this huge, oval shaped  braid with all these lights on it. And when I finally fired the thing up - it had about a  hundred lights on it - they were each blinking on and off in random sequences. I hung the  thing up on the wall and thought, well now I'm finally getting somewhere."11 

The crown of thorns was the basic form behind a series of images that included various types of crowns, floral wreaths and abstract curvilinear weaves. It is possible to see in the crown of thorns a formal relationship with other circular curving forms like the Mobius strip (Max Bill, M.C. Escher) or the ourabourous, the snake eating its tail as an ancient symbol of all-consuming time. The adaptations of the crown of thorns made by Neighbour followed the anagogical tradition of the icon, turning the symbol of torture into a mystical symbol of victory (the wreath) and imperial authority (the crown) and an object of meditation (mandala). 

While she would work on a crown image in print, Neighbour would create a corresponding light work. During an artist's residency at the Toronto, artist-run print shop Open Studio in 1989 she created the large Black Wreath, a drypoint engraving done with power tools on a large sheet of plastic. Black Wreath was followed by Festival Wreath (1990), a painted plywood and electric-light construction. Similarly, the linoleum-cut Crown of the Kingdom of Bavaria, of 1989, was followed by its painted plywood cognate Crown, of 1991. 

Neighbour was initially reluctant to show the light sculpture. "It was sort of in its formative stages and I was fooling around a bit and I wasn't showing it to anybody. It was a completely personal thing for me that was never intended to see the light of day."12 It was as though she had trapped the genie in a bottle and feared taking the lid off. But she did venture to show Festival Wreath together with Black Wreath at her Open Studio residency exhibition.13 The contrast must have been striking. Exhibiting the two pieces together as much as said, "Here is the dark and angry work that I do in my day job as a printmaker, and here is the bright and colourful work I do at home for fun." 

The artist's split personality was on full display in her exhibition "The Other Mind," 1991, at the Red Head Gallery in Toronto. One side of the gallery featured her print work and on the other side were installed the light works. "The Other Mind" was clearly divided into Lisa Neighbour's day job and her night job, her past and her future. Festival Wreath,Trance Wreath, Crown and Lotus were each exhibited opposite their corresponding prints. Searching for a way to bring it all together, Neighbour distanced herself from the objects and speculated on more esoteric motivations. "Each idea is part of a map or sign post, directing me to a state of mind where I can rest and create. My work is tangible evidence and a record of this search."14 

Nevertheless, the genie had been let out of the bottle. Neighbour was showing a body of work that was personal and not part of any proscribed style or content. She was giving herself permission to deviate from the printmaking discipline in which she had been educated, and setting out on a new and uncharted course. A place had been found where she could "rest and create," and the fact that it didn't much look like anything else being exhibited at the time left her without the signposts of familiar art language. Although she received much support and encouragement to pursue the light-sculpture work, there was no one to contextualize or interpret it. She was on her own, and in that isolation, she was looking to other voices and other ways of thinking to make sense of it all. 

"I was looking for some way to connect them up . . . I was doing some research into how  other people were defining similar experiences . . . using the symbolism of light and  darkness to describe philosophical and religious concepts which are hard to describe. It is  interesting to see that a completely different culture was talking about things in a way that  I could really understand."15

In 1992, Neighbour collaborated with Carlo Cesta and the art collaborators Fastwürms for the Toronto Sculpture Garden installation Artes Moriendi. Three distinct sculptures created an installation that commented on death, ecology and the failures of modernism, by imaginatively recasting the sculpture garden as part of neighbouring St. James Cathedral's missing graveyard. Despite the group effort, Neighbour's work stood apart from the other two installations. While Cesta and Fastwürms played with the ironies of historical mausoleum and sepulchre architecture in the modernist style, Neighbour contributed a three-dimensional abstract swirl of light that continued her interest in the crown motif - a three-dimensional Trance Wreath. In the context of funerary monuments it became a sort of electrified mortal coil. Dai Skuse perceived the developing mystical metaphorical core to Neighbour's work: 

"Christian mysticism meets folk art futurism. Images of rose window cathedrals and spiral  galaxies, crowns of thorns and satellite gyroscopes collide in the simplicity and sincere  presentation of outsider art. . .  At the centre of Neighbour's sphere and the heart of the  memorial's equation, death is a metaphor of spirit and flight, a construction about the  yearning to escape from gravity and the burdens of the body, and to move freely within the  music of the heavenly spheres."16

The light sculpture may have been effective in the Red Head Gallery in 1991, but the work was spectacular outside at night. In the dark, the work became a set piece - an installation. And the parallels of exhibiting art in the dark - the spectacles of the movie theatre, the fun house and the night presentation of commercial signage on city streets - are all aspects of pop-cultural "futurism" and electrification that contexualize the work. The contrast of ambient darkness with the illuminated works brought mysticism into the discussion: the metaphorical opposition of clarity and obscurity, enlightenment and blindness - symbols of knowledge, ignorance, hope and fear. These symbols have long been part of western culture and in some very real way were part of our lives in the early 1990s. 

Neighbour's 1993 exhibition "In the Dark" consisted of thirteen small plywood paintings, each punctuated by a single light bulb or string of lights. The works were named for various methods of divination, a realm of esoteric knowledge in which Neighbour had recently become interested.17 Wired one to the next they formed a daisy chain of points of coloured light in an otherwise darkened space. The centralized, circular form that began with the influence of the rose window crown-of-thorns motif, that continued in the Trance Wreath and Lotus works of her first Red Head show, and that appeared most recently in the Artes Moriendi work, continued here in the form of floral, oval, circular and lozenge shapes. 

"In the Dark" was first and foremost an installation. The individual pieces were simplified in favour of a total ambient presence - most of the works in the show having only a single electrical bulb. In this installation, Neighbour was moving closer to her original experience of Portuguese festival decoration, where the individual iconic objects more than made up for their lack of technical virtuosity by their vast array. The illuminated church standing in dialogue and contrast to the commercial lights of the city streets was an aspect of the festival decoration's charm. Moreover it was about light as a religious metaphor. High above the ground, the festival images were like constellations in the night sky, symbols of a benign and benevolent God. 

"In the Dark," on the other hand, was in an enclosed gallery. The spectator was surrounded by low-level-light-emitting objects. On the two end walls, sequenced strings of light bulbs in the works Astromancy and Oculomancy created a flashing dialogue across the length of the gallery. Connected to them on the two long walls were eleven works that each featured a single bulb on a shaped coloured surface. The single centralized bulbs recalled mythical cyclopes - each icon of divination seemed to contain an omen within its dark contour shadow. "In the Dark" was a painterly exercise in the use of volumes of light and dark for aesthetic effect, similar perhaps to the paintings of New York artist Ross Bleckner, where the existence of points of light makes the spectator more aware of the surrounding darkness. Light in this context was illumination withheld, like existence in a tunnel - a space where light was indeed a long way off. 

"Up to this point, my work has documented a series of visual/emotional obsessions, not  quite understood but deeply felt. In this exhibition, I am aware of the darkness in which I  have been caught, but I am still in it, trying to analyze the experience. Instead of rushing  ahead of myself, I am taking a good look at this obscure and formative place, trying to see  its beauty before I move on."18

The cave of the cyclops, that Homeric symbol of irrational and arbitrary cruelty, was that "obscure and formative place" in which we were living in 1993.

***

By cunning and with luck, Ulysses and his surviving crew escaped from Polyphemus's cave. From the vantage of the year 2000, one can say that 1993's "inevitable and grimly certain apocalypse" was similarly averted, in the short term at least. Lisa Neighbour's art of darkness evolved from a meditation on the absence of light into apotropaic talismans and glowing objects of meditation and desire. "In the Dark" spawned Eye on the Square, Neighbour's 1994 installation of a monumental cyclopean eye on the Cambridge Public Library. And while Eye on the Square was directly derived from the earlier work Oculomancy, its installation outdoors high up on the side of the library building harkened back to the Portuguese festival decoration, the original inspiration for the light sculpture. Where Oculomancy was ominous, Eye on the Square was festive, one might even say celebratory. In the context of the library it became a combination humanistic icon and lucky amulet. The Eye also continued the mandala-like magnetism that all of the light sculpture seemed to possess. The centralized circular, or in this case, oval format, when combined with the electric lights, was transfixing and hypnotic. Neighbour seemed to acknowledge the primary, hypnotic effect of her work in her press release for the exhibition "Luminous" at the Red Head in 1995:

"The exhibition is based on states of mind such as meditation and dreaming, which lead to a  different perception of physical sensation and manifestation. During states of altered  consciousness, the physical body may feel weightless, huge, small, invisible, made of light  or made up of shadow. The environment appears as an intricate pattern, into which the  dreamer fits without a seam. The absence of boundaries between self and environment  may be frightening at times, but also a great relief from the restrictions of gender, age and location."

"Luminous" followed in the hypnotic lineage of Lotus and Trance Wreath, acquiring scale along the way from works like Artes Moriendi and Eye on the Square. All of these pieces begged the question: was it the aesthetic object itself as signifier that commanded such intense response, or was it rather the metaphor and the desire that this work signified? Was it our age old fascination with fire and its ersatz equivalent, the filament bulb, or was it the promise that it symbolized? The 1996 exhibition "Loot" at the Koffler Gallery in Toronto and the "Dalgas Underground" exhibition in Copenhagen of the same year proposed the literal option: the object of aesthetic desire was a kind of pirate's treasure - a dream of vast wealth or happiness or spiritual salvation - something at once available and yet unattainable. The group exhibition "Dalgas Underground" took place in series of second-world-era air-raid shelters.19 In one of these concrete bunkers, Neighbour installed a series of miners' lamps to light a path strewn with coins. At the end of the trail of coins was a small chest that was modelled and painted and adorned with fake gems and gold-painted coins. The pot of gold, the light at the end of the tunnel, was of course, fake. The installation was a literal illustration of Neighbour's effort to take ". . . a good look at this obscure and formative place, trying to see its beauty before I move on."

***

Lisa Neighbour did move on. While she has continued to make sculpture with electric lights, the subject of her work has begun to shift away from the metaphorical opposition of light and dark toward a deeper understanding of the materials with which she is working. Circuitry, conductivity and connectivity - fundamental principles of electricity - have become her new metaphors and working models. Emerging from her work with electrical wiring is an appreciation for the strange and mysterious power of electricity and the web of connections that make it accessible. Super Power, exhibited at the Red Head Gallery in 1997, is the first example of Neighbour's stripped-down work. Sixty varied table-top lamps - minus shades and outfitted with bulbs of various shapes, sizes and colours - were wired to a single source of power. Gone were the hand-painted and hand-shaped surfaces. Gone were the singular, centrally composed objects. Super Power was the skeleton - the wiring, the light fixtures - of all of the previous works.

Neighbour's most recent works, Why Knot? of 1998 and The Breeze, Rope Lights and Hurricane Andrew of 1999, have taken her further into the metaphorical associations of circuitry, connectivity and patterns of energy. While light is still a feature of all of these works, the electrical power is now being dispersed among a collection of small appliances. In Why Knot? and The Breeze she has rediscovered the much-maligned craft of macramé‚ to decoratively braid the wiring for a loose assembly of clock radios, fans and lamps. InRope Lights, Neighbour learned techniques of braiding and boondoggle to combine electrical cords into thick bundles. In Hurricane Andrew, she connected lights, fans and a heat lamp in what she calls an "electro-magnetic spiral," representing the elemental forces of waves of sound, air, light, and heat with familiar domestic machines.

***

Lisa Neighbour's light sculpture emerged from the very specific context of art and culture in Toronto in the second half of the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s. The cultural changes that took place during this time appear massive in retrospect. Quietly, Neighbour synthesized imagery, media, philosophical and religious texts and that intangible quality sometimes called Zeitgeist. Her body of work was the actualization of a personal, quasi-religious mythology that embraced the hopes and fears that she harboured within and that were reflected back by her community of family, friends and colleagues. It may have been a coincidence that in a time of suffering, the crown of thorns - the Christian Ecce Homosymbol - became a motif of ongoing influence in her work. The braided circular icon transformed itself variously over the decade into regal crowns, wreaths, mandalas, gyroscopes and eyes. On a deeper, conceptual level the motif persisted into the circuitry itself and in the braided and macram‚d electrical cords, and finally in the electromagnetic spiral ofHurricane Andrew. The braided spiral is a literal description of interconnection and continuity, metaphors of personal relationships and the life cycle that were important to believe in during a time of darkness. And during that time of darkness, Lisa Neighbour chose to work with light.

Gordon Hatt

Notes

1. From Bullfinch's Mythology, Chapter XXIX.

2. Oliver Girling, "The Coup: No contest. Lisa Neighbour's show at the Red Head Gallery," Eye,  30 Dec. 1993.

3. To get a sense of ecological awareness and alarm in the art community in the early 1990s, see  Jocelyn Laurence, "Water, Earth & Air: Visions of Our Endangered Planet," editorial,  Canadian Art, Winter 1990.

4. See among others L. Lapham, "Sermons in Mixed Media," Harper's, May 1993, pp. 4 - 5.

5. Ralph Rugoff, Just Pathetic, (Los Angeles: Rosamund Felsen Gallery, 1990).

6. Adam Gopnik, "Death in Venice," New Yorker, 2 Aug. 1993, pp. 67 73.

7. Author's interview with Lisa Neighbour, 31 Mar. 2000.

8. Carol Barbour, "Lisa Neighbour: What Do I Believe," Artword, Fall 1993.

9. A parallel might be drawn with the Russian artists Kasimir Malevich, Wasily Kandinsky and  Natalia Goncharova, who at the turn of the century developed an interest in folk art in  reaction to the existing academic models.

10. Barbour.

11. Interview.

12. Ibid.

13. "Recent Work" (Toronto: Open Studio Gallery, 1989).

14. "Lisa Neighbour: The Other Mind," press release, Red Head Gallery, Toronto, 28 June 1991.

15. Interview. Neighbour's statement from "In the Dark" is also relevant: "Darkness and light are  the archetypical symbols of Sufism because they are natural, immediate self-expressions of  a root experience of the Divinity. . . Light and darkness are, for the Sufi, metaphorical  experiences. Existence is light. When the Absolute appears to the consciousness of the  mystic, it appears as uncontaminated unity, as light. All multiplicity disappears into  darkness."   from Laleh Bakhtiar, SUFI, Expressions of the Mystic Quest (London:  Thames and Hudson, 1976), p. 91.

16. Dai Skuse, Artes Moriendi (Toronto: The Toronto Sculpture Garden, 1992).

17. The artist provided the following legend with the press release.

 Crystalomancy: gazing into a crystal ball to divine the future

 Xylomancy: tossing sticks or twigs, observing fallen branches and reading signs

 Psychomancy: intuition and psychic powers

 Arithmancy: the study of numbers and their patterns, to predict the future

 Bibliomancy: reading random passages from books and interpreting their predictions

 Cephalomancy: dissection of animal or human brains for clues to upcoming events

 Cyclomancy: the use of a revolving device to reveal numbers, letters or symbols

 Aeromancy: observation of the atmospheric conditions for portents of the future

 Oculomancy: examination of a person's eyes to determine their future

 Botanomancy: observing the growth of plants and seeds to foresee future events

 Anthropomancy: the dissection and examination of the entrails of human and animal  sacrifices

 Ornithomancy: reading the behaviour and appearance of birds

 Pyromancy: looking for omens in the burning of various materials, sacred fires and candles

 Astromancy: divination by the movements of the moon and planets, an early form of  astrology

   from Lisa Neighbour, "In the Dark," press release, Red Head Gallery, Toronto, May 16,  1993.

18. Lisa Neighbour, "In the Dark," artist's statement, Red Head Gallery, Toronto, 1993.

19. In Toronto, the Nether Mind collective had been exhibiting in the dark, dank basements of old  factory buildings since 1991.

Exhibition Publishing at Cambridge Galleries 

Over the years, the gallery has published booklets and brochures to accompany major exhibitions. These publications generally contain essays on the works in the exhibitions, lists of works exhibited, illustrations, and short biographies or resumes of the participating artists.

Curating is not democratic. Curating is decision-making founded on informed judgement. The primary function of a written text accompanying an exhibition is to serve as a justification for choices made – why certain artists were selected to exhibit ahead of others, why this work and not that, why now and not then. A publication is useful when the exhibited artwork is in any way unconventional, in the hope that the text will shed light on the significant motivations, techniques, and trends influencing the artists. The text should describe what is unique about the art that has been chosen, and how it is representative or how it fits into larger patterns of social and creative activity.

Publications extend the life of exhibitions. An exhibition that is two years in the making, from first contact with the artist to the opening reception, can vanish without a trace without published documentation. Many people walk into the Preston gallery and the Library & Gallery and assume that the exhibition on view is characteristic of what is installed in the gallery at all times. In fact, in the last ten years close to 200 exhibitions have been organized by the Cambridge Galleries, and these exhibitions have reflected a vast array of media and themes, historical art and contemporary art, design, and crafts. Artists have been exhibited who are local and regional, from other parts of the province and other parts of the country, as well as from abroad. Publications are a record of the breadth and scope of this curating activity.

Publications also extend the reach of exhibitions. People who are unable to visit an exhibition at the gallery because of geographical distance or timing are able to view the images and engage the ideas behind the exhibition through a publication. This is a critical factor when applying to funding bodies based in Toronto or Ottawa, adjudicated by people living and working right across the country. Most of these jurors have never visited Cambridge. Moreover, funding agencies expect a commitment to publications as part of the granting criteria.

As well, artists who are in demand will often consider the advantages of exhibiting at one gallery   over another based on the gallery's commitment to publishing. For the artist, the effort and the expense involved in putting together an exhibition are often far in excess of the value of our standard exhibition fee, and the existence of a publication insures that their efforts will not vanish once the exhibition is taken down.

It would be impossible to document all of the exhibitions we do with a publication. Therefore we choose carefully both the exhibitions we document and the appropriate size of the documentation. Generally speaking, brochure type publications are published for the exhibitions of younger artists. Often, the text will be an edited interview with the artist and a resume. Group shows may be published in this format as well, with a text that defines the unifying theme behind the selected work. Catalogue booklets have been published for mid-career artists, artists who have already had a number of brochures published in conjunction with other exhibitions (Kai Chan: In Search of Paradise, 1996, Max Streicher: Sleeping Giants, 1998, John Armstrong: Sanguine, 1998/99), and for significant group exhibitions (Waves: Contemporary Japanese Fibre Art, 1994).

Brochures are produced for the most part "in-house." Layout and design is done by gallery staff, and the publication is paid for from within the program budget. Occasionally, essayists are employed to write for these publications. Since 1997, in order to stretch the publishing budget, all of the text has been produced “in-house” as well. The advantage of the “in-house” brochure is that it can be prepared quickly and cost-effectively to be available for the exhibition opening, as a hand list or guide to the show.

Booklets or “catalogues” have been produced less frequently. They are in fact small books. They involve professional graphic designers, photographers, essayists, and editors and can be complex and time-consuming to produce. Before changes to the Canada Council programmes for assistance to galleries and museums in 1998, grant applications to the Exhibition Assistance programme, made on a project-by-project basis, were the primary means by which the gallery funded such publications. Now that the gallery is receiving annual programming and operating assistance from the Canada Council, it is no longer eligible to apply for Exhibition Assistance funding. Future booklet publications will have to be funded through this on-going assistance.

In the course of interviewing Max Streicher for the exhibition at the Cambridge Galleries, I perceived him to be someone who was very conscious of his own historical development, as he often answered questions about his work by making references to earlier artwork and exhibitions. Writing about his development as an artist seemed to be the most natural path to understanding and talking about his art. Moreover, Streicher had been an important member of the Toronto-based art collective Nether Mind, which over the course of four exhibitions in the early nineties, significantly altered the face of Canadian art. Writing at length about this artist also became a way of documenting some of the important characters and changes that were taking place in the art of the nineties. It soon became apparent that this project would become an important historical document.

Finally, this catalogue was an opportunity to reflect and promote the values which the Cambridge Galleries, under the umbrella of the Cambridge Public Library, have come to represent contemporary culture in the community – accessible, interactive and stimulating to a wide cross-section of the public, discussed in print in a readable and hopefully, entertaining way. Max Streicher: Sleeping Giants, has been scheduled to appear at galleries in Canada and abroad through the year 2001, and the Cambridge Galleries' catalogue will be on sale at each exhibition site. The exhibition publication will become a significant contribution to the awareness of contemporary Canadian art in Canada and abroad, from the unique perspective of the Cambridge Galleries.

Gordon Hatt, Curator, 2000