Rewind: Istvan Kantor
Since 1993, Istvan Kantor has been fascinated with filing cabinets, incorporating them into installations and utilizing them as sound-making instruments in his performances. He views the cabinet as a monolithic and ubiquitous piece of information-storage furniture, a fixture in every office, a sculptural system. Intercourse, the most recent work in The File Cabinet Project, shown recently at InterAccess Electronic Media in Toronto, is a gripping and powerful piece, administering a kind of shock treatment.
The installation consists of four heavy, old-fashioned desks, each supporting one upright filing cabinet, weirdly appended with ladder-like constructs. Projected on the wall behind are two video screens showing a masked male figure strapped down and wired to a system we cannot see.
In the middle of the room, lit by a single lamp, is a lone filing cabinet. When a viewer opens any or all of the drawers, it sets off a reaction in the main installation. The drawers of those cabinets jerk and smash open in a violent series of crashes and the figure on the screen begins to writhe. Each drawer activates a different cabinet, and all drawers can be worked simultaneously to create an orchestra of noise. First, however, we must learn to brace ourselves against the sound of slamming metal and the violent contractions of the body.
The piece raises issues of control: we control the trigger, but are helpless as well, for we have started a noise so resounding that no one can overlook the fact that we have tampered with the object. Furthermore, we cannot immediately turn it off, for even when the drawer is closed, the figure on the screen continues to jerk to a low reverberating sound.
On a television monitor the words "terror," "noise," "technology," "insanity," "sex," "communication," flash by in a steady stream. It is simple to apply these concepts to the installation. The weirdly wired body on the screen hints at technological invasion or experimentation. Technology invades the body and the machine is rigged so that we are both implicated as well as impacted. By experimenting with the drawers, viewers make themselves both accomplices and components of the piece.
The question that arises is whether the technologically extended body is enhanced or entrapped. The spasmodic figure seems to indicate pain, yet as Kantor points out, the impact of technology on the body is not necessarily painful. It could be a simple physical reaction to a stimulus. Even the excruciating noise could be experienced as a release.
Intercourse compels us to ask whether we really have control over the technology that we use dailythe technology that has taken over infinite functions and promises to ease and add pleasure to our lives. By placing the body centrally in this work, the artist calls for caution. The body is not obsolete. We need the hard copy: the physicality in which experience is rooted.
Summer 2000
Image credit: Istvan Kantor Intercourse 2000 Photo: Jowita Kepa Interactive video sculpture Courtesy InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre
Subscribe to Canadian Art today and save 30% off the newstand price.
