Rewind: Aernout Mik
The Power Plant, Toronto
Aernout Miks Reversal Room is an array of rear-projection videos in which a hallway leads observers into a conjunction of five screens and two mirror panels. Periodically illuminated from within, the mirrors reveal room interiors that seem like holding cells; each has blank walls and a number of lights, and one has an end table. Flickering as images of incarceration, the video screens simultaneously function as windows and barriers. The architectural weightiness of Miks installation makes an impact on a phenomenological level, countering the ethereal nature of the projected images. Surrounded, a viewer must navigate the psychical and physical nature of spaces we would otherwise consider ordinary.
The construct is panoramic; it is impossible to view all of the screens at once. At the centre of the installation, inside a heptagonally shaped area, we grasp the scenes before us, catching echoed glimpses of the others on the mirrored walls. Unfolding without sound, the videos place the viewer within a voyeuristic, empirical point of view.
The scenes oscillate between two different panoramasa Chinese restaurant and the unrelated interior of a restaurant kitchen. In the restaurant scene the camera roves above eye-level and disorients our perspective as waiters race around serving food. After a while, two men storm from their table to attack a waiter. He wards them off as if it is only a minor accident. The patrons are oblivious to the commotion. As the image seamlessly loops, the focus is on the disjunctive social interactions. Intuition tells us that what these attackers are doing is nonsensical; yet the normalcy of the setting in which they carry out their roles defies dismissal. Mik presents a space in which our will to create interconnected systems of social roles and purposes is reflectedas if we are in a fishbowl looking out upon our own anxieties.
In the alternate scene, the kitchen interior, chefs labour as the camera slowly tracks meddlesome interlopers. Dressed in casual clothes, these intruders disrupt the staff by bumping into chefs, obstructing pathways and aimlessly repeating mindless obsessive-compulsive motions. A connection can be drawn between the passive- aggressive nature of these interlopers and the scheming violence of the attackers in the restaurant. Both scenes include obstructive individuals who seem to exist out of time, on independent temporal levels, and who seem to make no clear impact on the people whose actions they disturb.
Reversal Room subtly alludes to how we construct our perception of social conventions. Relevant to its approach is Michel Foucaults thinking in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, which illustrates the ways that society orders indivi- duals. Foucault presents punishment as a lineage that has moved historically from torture to imprisonment. A key example of his argument is the circular prison, imagined in the 19th century by British philosopher Jeremy Bentham, called the panopticon. At the centre of Benthams prison was a tower, where unseen guards could omnisciently watch the exposed prisoners.
Foucault observed that we internalize discipline as a cultureregulating our actions by limiting the movements of our own bodies. Although the intended effect of the panopticon was to encourage self-regulation through non-torturous discipline, Miks Reversal Room compares with it at the theoretical level of interiorization and the gaze. What is astute about Miks construct is that it shows how bizarre and unwarranted behaviours also captivate. It also tells us that in our social attempts to avoid difference, we sink into oblivion.
Spring 2002
Subscribe to Canadian Art today and save 30% off the newstand price.
