Sympathy, Empathy, Museopathy
Driving on the kingston waterfront along Lake Ontario, past the stout Martello towers, Georgian houses and green parks, can be a pleasurable experience when the breeze is up, the sailboats are out and the light on the water is dazzling. With an exhibition passport ticket in hand to 11 sites along a route stretching from the Correctional Services of Canada Museum, past Kingston General Hospital and Queens University, to the Royal Military College Museum on Point Frederick in Kingston Harbour, it seemed adventurous, even exciting. Here was encouragement to explore one of Canadas most historic cities and, not so paradoxically, to go indoors.
The exhibition, "Museopathy: Contemporary Art in Kingston Heritage Sites," was also an adventure for its organizer, the Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queens. To produce this complex, multi-layered project, the gallery brought together the twain that rarely meet: a university art gallery and the heritage sector. Kingston began life in 1673 as a French fort and trading post at the strategic junction of the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes. Today the citys major employers are the university, the penitentiaries, the military and the hospitals. One result of Kingstons location, history and distinctive institutional base is the unusual abundance of historic sites and small specialist museums for a centre of its size.
The Agnes sought partners from among the citys 20 heritage sites and invited artists from Canada and the United States to make works and interventions at 10 of them. Much of the project depended upon the artists responses to the sites, and the pairings for the exhibition were brilliantly made by Montreal-based guest curators Jennifer Fisher and Jim Drobnick. Together, they also organized "Empathology: Performance Interventions at Kingston Museums," an opening weekend program of four simultaneous performances by artists Diane Borsato, Peter Hobbs, Linda Montano and Clive Robertson (who, in the role of interviewer, spent every Sunday afternoon during "Museopathy" collecting peoples opinions of the site-specific installations).
Vancouver sculptor Brian Jungen imagined what prison life must be like in his work at the Correctional Services of Canada Museum, located in a Victorian mansion built in 1873 as the residence for the warden of Kingston Penitentiary, directly across the street. The Texas-based conceptualist Mel Ziegler literally hung his hat in Bellevue House National Historic Site, a rare, mid-19th-century Italianate villa, once home for 13 months to Sir John A. Macdonald. Jamelie Hassan, based in London, Ontario, recalled her experience as a young nurses aide in Beirut and in Rome for her installation at the Museum of Health Care at Kingston, housed in the neoclassical Ann Baillie Building, a national historic site built as a nurses residence in 1904. Montreal artist Anne Ramsden gave a womans touch to the Murney Tower National Historic Site, located in a Martello tower originally erected on Murney Point in 1846 to defend Upper Canada against invasion by the Americans. Fastwürms instilled the Miller Museum of Geology and Mineralogy, located in Miller Hall, a 1930s Gothic building on the Queens campus, with the enthusiasm of amateur rockhounds. Mitch Robertson took over the International Ice Hockey Federation Museum, and John Dickson set his miniature ship-in-a-bottle maritime disasters and an interactive bottled cyclone in the Marine Museum of the Great Lakes at Kingston, a shipbuilding site since 1790. Outside the museum, the ecologically-minded Dickson installed a new water work that sent up an SOS signal in bubbles every few minutes. And on board the Museum Ship Alexander Henry, a decommissioned 1959 icebreaker, Joyce Wielands Sailboat (1967) endlessly traversed the screen of a television set in the ships galley.
In another of Kingstons six Martello towers, which houses the Royal Military College of Canada Museum on the RMC campus, Kingston artist Barbara Hunt filled a vitrine in the munitions magazine with knitted land mines in varying shades of pink wool. Russian expatriate artists Komar & Melamid, in collaboration with American composer William McClelland, made a choral call to "Art!" which comprised four sequences, each lasting five to 10 seconds, and was broadcast on the half hour from Queens Universitys Grant Hall Tower. Audible all over the campus, the ringing, celestial summons had people stopping in their tracks and looking up at the sky. With intellectually agile artists working in fertile terrain, "Museopathy" was positioned to initiate new works of art, to expand the discourse on museum display that began in the 1970s with artists making site-specific works in public institutions and to foster dialogue within the Kingston museum community. Certainly these were the goals of Jan Allen, the Agness curator of contemporary art, who conceived of the project and oversaw it. Her primary inspiration was "Manifesta 1," a pan-European biennial inaugurated in 1996 in Rotterdam. Artists showed around the city in traditional locations like public art galleries and art museums, and in unexpected places such as a police station, a cafeteria and a marine museum. The intersection of "Manifesta" audiences with tourists at destinations all over town intrigued Allen. So did the network of venues, which led the art audience, on the trail from one site to another, to experience the city itself as a "historical, social and economic entity."
The character of European cities makes them well suited to this kind of project. But Kingston, whose downtown plan is still concentrated, as it was in 1783, in a few blocks adjacent to the waterfront and whose fabric retains much of its 19th-century form, had the prerequisites. Allen recognized what was in her midst and set the project in motion with the Kingston Museums Association. The result involved eight institutions and 11 sites in what could be one of the most innovative and ambitious site-specific projects undertaken in Canada.
The guest curators worked with the curators of participating sites and coined the title "Museopathy." They framed the project, Drobnick says, by "looking at the museum as the jumping-off place for reverie, play and the empathetic." Their neologism suggests a feeling for museums, as in sympathy or empathy. However, some read the suffix as an indication of a disorder. Aware of this shade of meaning, Drobnick and Fisher saw it in terms of homeopathy, treating like with like. "Museopathy" also contains the word "path," a connection between points, a line of communication, travelled in this project between disciplines, taxonomies, display methods and sites.
"The network itself becomes as important as any one site," says Fisher. And so it did: this was one of the projects greatest strengths. That each site possessed such a distinctive identity and individual character of its own was just as important. Each was a crossroads or a node in the network at which a heritage site, an artists intervention, a "Museopathy" visitor, the phenomenon of cultural tourism and a broader, incrementally built idea of Kingston and its layered history all intersected to generate an unusual amount of energy. If some site-specific works seemed stronger or more pertinent than others, it hardly mattered.
The artists met the project in diverse and equally individual ways, the common factor being that the museum or heritage site and, in some cases, the parent institution provided both muse and context for the intervention. Jungen worked much as he always does: he began with research into a social system. His focus was the Correctional Services of Canada Museumwith its collection of prisoner art, strapping bench, whips, restraints, shivs, homemade knives, escape devices and decoy heads made from papier-mâché. It was also the penitentiary itself, where the smallness of the cells surprised him and the TVs were always on, although no one was watching them. Jungens powerful Isolated Depiction of the Passage of Time (2001), a handmade cedar pallet stacked with 2,230 cafeteria trays that surround and all but conceal a barely audible television set, spoke to the loneliness, claustrophobia and boredom of prison life and the procession of days marked by mealtimes.
He found his inspiration for the "tray pod" in one of the museums most inventive escape devices: two stacks of green plastic trays that a prisoner had glued together, then laboriously hollowed out on one side in the hope of concealing his coiled body. Interestingly, the hideaway recalls Liz Magors recent sculptures of stacks of towels concealing stashes of beer and booze. Lying hidden in Jungens work is the meaning of the trays, whose quantity and colours, respectively, refer to the number of aboriginal men in the prison population of Canada and to the lengths of their sentences.
"When compared to their percentage in the Canadian population, Aboriginal men are by far over-represented in prisons," Jungen noted in an artists statement, adding that he deliberately did not include a key to these hidden statistics to create a "contrast with the educational explanations provided for other objects in the Museum." Moreover, he placed his work apart, in a darkened upstairs room, where viewers encountered it after seeing the collection. Although the collections idiosyncratic objects were real and intense enough, Jungens work effectively narrowed the gap between the museums distancing exoticism and the penitentiarys bleak realities.
Anne Ramsdens work was equally critical of a social institution, yet entirely different in tone. Murney Tower, where she installed Garden (2001), was used as living quarters for married soldiers and their families from the time it was completed in 1846. Ramsden quickly seized upon this history to create a fictional soldiers wife and insert a subjective, female voice and feminine culture into what was still a military site despite its domestic function. Treating the sites entirety as a museological object, Ramsden planted a garden of artificial flowers in the encircling dry ditch. In a vitrine, on the main floor, she surrounded a text, written like a diary in the first person, with porcelain saucers, each of which had a different floral pattern and held the seeds of a different flower. The matching cups she placed upstairs atop a vitrine holding the iron cannonballs used by the huge, swivelling carronade that commands the floor.
Ramsdens fiction was layered as delicately as the porcelain pictured on the souvenir postcard she made for the site. Violet is the name that the fictional wife, Alice Ritchie, fancies for herself. She makes extra money as a kitchen maid at "Mrs. Moffats tea parties" for "the notable ladies of Kingston," and dreams of the garden she will plant when she has her own house: "splashes of pink and yellow and white and orange and even blue, flowers with bright colours and fine shapes..." Visitors to Murney Tower saw them, too, when they looked across the dry ditch through the gun slits in the lowest level of the tower, the artificial flowers rhyming with Alices fantasy and Ramsdens fiction. Seen from inside the thick-walled fortification, the flowers were a surprise, a truth planted that war and culture are always at odds, that history is a fiction with a point of view.
Like Ramsden, Mel Ziegler and Mitch Robertson completely took over their sites. With Mail Order Authenticity (2001), Zieglers installation at Bellevue House, the artist usurped the role of curator by adding contemporary objects obtained from mail-order catalogues or online shopping to the furnishings and household goods in the roped-off period rooms. Visitors were alerted to the deception by a flyer, but of course the newly added 50-odd objects were not identified. Spot-the-imposter grew into a challenging game that pointed to the vagaries of the booming heritage industry and questioned the idea of authenticity in any historical reconstruction. In effect, Zieglers additions insinuated another occupant into the house, a cowboy hatwearing, guitar-playing persona with a fondness for likenesses of rabbits, found in several rooms. Robertsons additions to the International Ice Hockey Federation Museum collection struck a humorous analogy between the world of sports and the art world with, among other things, artists trading cards and banners and the ultimate Canadian fetish object, the worlds biggest ever ball of hockey tape.
"Museopathy"s weakest link was Drobnick and Fishers foray into working with objects which were drawn from the participating sites and exhibited at the Agnes. Entitled "Collectioneering," their installation was about the rhetoric of display. Using disparate and like objects, the curators arranged them in pairs or in clusters that toyed with taxonomic criteria. They hung the big key that operated the locks on the main gate of Kingston Penitentiary in the 19th century above a 17th-century painting of the apostle Peter holding his attribute, a key. They placed shivs, surgical tools and an Ashanti knife together in a table case. Under the category of armour, they included 19th-century lead nipple shields from the health-care museum, hockey knee and leg pads, a Zulu shield, a suit of Italian armour and a prisoners makeshift body armour made from three taped-together ring binders. Many of the objects were intriguing.
With all due respect to them, however, these playful academics, who are also performance artists and critics, didnt quite make things resonate. In a project like "Museopathy," context is everything. It is, after all, the museum context that offers the possibility of illumination to the artists intervention. The objects brought to the clean, white, well-lit space of the art gallery seemed adrift, their contrived relationships a superfluous intellectual game. At the other venues of "Museopathy," sites, things and old narratives acquired new meanings.
Spring 2002
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