|
|
Entre nous deux [Between You and Me], a site-specific installation/performance by Vancouver Artist Kirsten Forkert, took place in a cinema at the Goethe Centre in Montréal, sponsored by Galerie Dare-Dare. The show was comprised of a simply edited video projected on a screen, and slides projected on a second portable screen placed in the middle of the seats facing the main screen. There was also a performance component to this exhibition.
The video projection was of a series of people seated at a kitchen table, giving cold readings of a bizarre, extremely introspective text (Rousseau as it turns out). They spoke phrases such as "a tepid languor enervates all my faculties" and "the decrepit wrapping of my soul." The readers were presumably in the artist’s kitchen, face to face with the camera/camera person. We watch as one by one they trip over the long sentences, rare words and peculiar wording, and inevitably wonder how we’d do if we were in their place. The readings last approximately 1-2 minutes and are broken up by 15 seconds of black. When the reader finishes with the reading the shot continues until the she or he looks up at the camera as if to say "now what?" or "what the hell is this stuff?" This look—unscripted but culturally encoded—seems to be one of the focal points of the exhibition. It doesn’t function as a punctum so much as it engages our expectation for one, or at least, for a startling burst of intensity which clinches a contact or identification. It’s hard to be in a movie theatre and not want to identify with the characters, it’s one of the main reason we go. In some ways this non-scripted, candid moment has been deliberately set up to be our "in," to feed our desire to merge with these images.
Even if you didn’t know the text was written by Rousseau, its authority was almost immediately discernable—complex and sensual language, drawing on various classical philosophical and religious terms. We sense its authority, but also sense that this is high culture Euro-baggage: fancy, anachronistic but the kind of stuff "cultured people" are obliged to acquaint themselves with. Yet, beyond the cultural trophy/atrophy we somehow know contemporary reality is deeply implicated. The text is a curious collection of obsolete introspections yet one has the sense it has "everything to do" with how we’ve come to conceive of the self and the world, and of what is deemed as culturally significant. So the text alternates between being a cultural powertext (the cannon, the ancient western code, the last laugh), and, in the face of global capitalism and a proliferation of ironic perspectives, a quaint little reading. It implicates the liberal tradition in contemporary North America.
"Who are these readers?" we inevitably ask. Mostly in their 20s and 30s, arty types—perhaps the people that might comprise this cinema’s audience? This group of readers is similar to other incidental groups: passengers on an airplane, people in an elevator, or people in the audience of a cinema or gallery. Of course they aren’t family or a band of friends, more like a demographic. And there is also my involvement with these other people. How does my face relate to these strangers, "others," what’s my place in this group?
Is all the readers have in common this ill-fitting text imposed on them? Is all they have in common this similar look; exasperated, dumbfounded, relieved when the reading is over? Is this cynical, or, does this cross a line and count as an actual commonality that I, the viewer, share in? Is there a presque rein in this look that secures, or allows something to continue? The exhibition could be understood as addressing the condition that, in lieu of a grand fraternity (the fraternité that belongs to egalité and liberté), contemporary urban reality relies on a more evasive sense of identification—the possibility of an empathy that is deeply extricated in our experience of images, in particular the images of faces.
Turning around from the normal cinema screen to the temporary screen in the middle of the seats, we see a succession of slide projections of various crowd shots. These heavily cropped images appear as small rectangular openings on the otherwise dark screen, similar to the odd openings in the projection booth visible at the back of the cinema. A second slide projection, on the same screen, projects a dotted rectangle around the entire screen. Again the question—who are these people? Are they generic "people in the street"? In fact (of course?) there is something that keeps these images from being merely "filler people." We begin to recognize faces of the readers in these crowd shots. They arenot so much familiar as familiarized faces—a modified anonymity, like going to a city you don’t know and seeing the same stranger twice. This recognition has the effect of establishing protagonists amid a sea of inadvertent extras.
As people leave the cinema/art installation, they are handed a handwritten note from the artist, seated by the entrance/exit to the cinema. The note is her projections of what she thinks she has in common with him or her, and what she thinks she doesn’t. It’s startling—it’s normal to engage in the every day theatre of first impressions and "checking each other out," but we’re not supposed to actually reveal our thoughts. Here Forkert breaks this rule in order to make the continual strands of identification (or lack of identification) discernable. This act reiterates various dynamics in the installation, but here we are confronted not with an image but another person. The effect is both disconcerting and refreshing, as we make our way out of the cinema/art experience and back into our normal lives.
|
|
|
