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Ian Carr-Harris: The Transit of the Grammarian

“He selects for himself new languages to be silent in.”
—Elias Canetti
Notes From Hampstead, 1998

Last February, Ian Carr-Harris was invited to deliver a paper to the art department at the University of British Columbia. The paper, which I did not hear but which I have subsequently read, was titled “Tracing Reading Writing” and, as Carr-Harris points out in his introductory remarks, was an attempt to answer the question, “Why do I do what I do? Why do I make art—what process leads me to it, has led me to it, in determining the narrative of my production?” Daunting queries. And absolute grist for the Carr-Harris mill, which, if I read it aright, delights in grinding out increasingly pure models of his identity as an artist. (“It is only by revealing our identity,” Carr-Harris wrote in the catalogue for an exhibition he curated for the Art Gallery at Harbourfront in Toronto in 1986 called “How We See What We Say,” “that others may understand theirs, and enable us to reconstruct our own.”)

“Tracing Reading Writing” begins with a story—a recollection of the bitter but instructive disappointment felt by the seven-year-old artist-to-be when his mother kindly but firmly pointed out that the eager tracing he had just made from a Donald Duck comic book was nice enough in its own way but, being a copy, was not as worthy as any drawing he might have managed all by himself. “Now, I don’t doubt the wisdom of my mother’s response,” Carr-Harris writes. “And I dedicated the next 25 years or so to that wisdom.”

It was only when he finally went to art school, to what was then the Ontario College of Art (1967–71), he says—and this would be after first earning a degree in history from Queen’s University (1963) and a degree in Library Science from the University of Toronto (1964)—that he came to reconsider—and revisit—“that moment of excitement I had experienced when I was seven.” The moment, that is to say, of the tracing.

The point to which this shard of personal experience would take him was his eventual realization, after a long sojourn in art-making, that “no amount of exercising ‘originality’…had ever touched me so deeply, excited me as much, as that discovery of the ‘trace.’” And that realization excites Carr-Harris still, for it leads him, in his lecture, into a rapid, vertiginous, Derrida-tinctured argument wherein a tracing becomes the locus of “a moment in perpetual transcription.” (“When I rushed to show that tracing to my mother,” Carr-Harris writes, “I had already shifted—at the point of completing the tracing—from tracing to writing, from ‘that which will have been written’ to writing as ‘that which will have been read.’”) The tracing-as-writing, in the Derridian sense of écriture, now serves to reveal the “principal agency through which we establish meaning—that meaning is therefore always both relational and deferred.”

The paper goes on—Carr-Harris will have to excuse my radical and no doubt damaging foreshortening of its subtle progress—to propose that, “To write is to anticipate the completion of comprehension,” and that to be “writing art” (a linkage between tracing and reading) is to address art “as an event-structure, an engagement inevitably caught up in the relation of one [tracing and reading] to another.”

Right in the middle of this hurtling discourse, this rumination upon the relations among modes, methods, practices, Carr-Harris pauses for another of his dialectical intakes of breath and touches down briefly, once again, into autobiography: “…I suspect that my subsequent curiosity, if not actual fascination, with grammar in school was a continuation of my concern with how things are to be placed in the world….”

When you get right down to it, this is what grammar comes to: the placing of things in the world. That is what art comes to as well. A sentence is every bit as much an “event-structure” as a complex, highly articulated artwork. Remember Buckminster Fuller’s galvanizing recognition (it was also the title of one of his books) that I Seem To Be A Verb? The artist-inventor-thinker as grammarian-quickener-artificer.

This is the point, I think, at which it might prove useful to leave Carr-Harris in the throes of his rather brilliant UBC lecture and circle back for a look—albeit a necessarily cursory one—at the trajectory of his art practice over the past 30 years, a speed-reading of “the narrative of his production.”

In a catalogue essay for an exhibition of Carr-Harris’s work called “Indices,” which travelled from Barcelona to Metz and Herblay in France in the fall of 1994, Montreal writer Louis Cummins wisely noted that, “All of Ian Carr-Harris’s work constitutes a reaction against the hegemony of the visual in modernist art.” Carr-Harris does not make art so much as he writes art. To characterize his work, therefore, as “literary”—as a number of my acquaintances recently have, knowing I was cobbling together this Carr-Harris overview—is both to say nothing and to say a great deal about it.

Carr-Harris’s early and frequent employment of the table, for example, is a sustained embodiment of his investigations into the ways an object can be made to both sidestep and extend its own protagonist-status in sculpture. A Carr-Harris table is writing, rather than an object on which writing happens. In Carr-Harris, a table can be said (the phrase is Jean-Paul Sartre’s) essentially to “re-absorb its visibility.” The tables that Carr-Harris first used in the early 1970s, noted curator Jessica Bradley in her catalogue for the Carr-Harris/Liz Magor contribution to the Venice Biennale in 1984, “performed the function of the base in traditional sculpture; yet instead of supporting unique objects, they offered visual and verbal propositions or assertions for contemplation” (it is tempting to imagine that Carr-Harris’s long tenure (1971–88) as OCA’s Director of Library and Audio-Visual Services has had a good deal to do with his employment, in his work, of tables, desks, display cases, card files and the like).

Our specimen table-work from this period is Carr-Harris’s La Plume de ma Tante (1974). Generated from within that particular climate of art that curator Philip Monk once identified as “conceptual art’s opening to the world after the severe reductions of minimalism,” the work offers a relatively mute table—mute in the sense that because Carr-Harris built the table himself (as he does almost all the furniture that furnishes his art), he was therefore able to equip it (or de-equip it) with a faux drawer (with, nevertheless, a real drawer-pull).

The table behaves, therefore, more or less like a table: it presents a useable if oddly compromised upper surface, for example, but offers a drawer that is merely graphic rather than functional. The drawer as trace—and as script.

This non-drawer is no puckish whim. It serves to deny a certain potential extension of the viewer’s understanding, after reading the mirror-like, almost reversible text on its top (“La plume de ma tante/Est dans le bureau de mon oncle,” etc.), that this linguistically mythic pen, so much a part of the mantra of introductory French lessons, might well lie, in actuality, in the table’s hypothetical drawer (it is difficult not to cast this generalized table as the uncle’s fertile “bureau”; and what a Freudian farrago, by the way, this whole pen-of-my-aunt-in-the-desk-of-my-uncle thing is!). The denial, the confounding now inherent in Carr-Harris’s pivotal use of this pedagogical French sentence is not so much intentionally misleading or dissembling as it is a rueful/gleeful acknowledgement that the famous instructional sentence is a trope, not a guide.

The two holes sink into the table’s top flank and amplify a concave, low-relief configuration between them—a sort of gentle slot that, rudimentary insertion that it is into the table’s surface, is nevertheless just sufficiently directed, morphologically, to nudge us (those of us old enough to remember) towards some reminiscence of the stalwart school desk, with its place for pencils and its drilled inkwells. The table is now a displaced, rudimentary memory-theatre, the locus of reverie that nonetheless refuses to come fully into focus as remembrance.

Keeping away from the escapist waftings of memory necessitates the return, again and again, to the tethered ambiguities—which are here bound together—of text and its support. And there is a third, triangulating element in the tableau: the disruptive and thus disturbing placement on the table of the charming china demitasse (it is glued in place) is nothing less than morphological static, a violent breaking of an entire rumination, a defacement of memory. It functions as a generator of a moiré-making counter-memory. Children in school don’t drink from such cups.

So who does? The viewer-dreamer? The departing artist, eliding himself by means of his own admonitions? As Terry Eagleton remarks in his book The Significance Of Theory (1990), “The concept of a thing is not some pale mental replica of it, damagingly bereft of the thing’s sensuous life, but a set of social practices—a way of doing something with the word which denotes the thing.” And vice-versa. That is to say that just as often, in Carr-Harris’s work, the artist finds a way of doing something with the thing which denotes the word. Or, with equal canniness, kills the word. Here, his disruptive, seismic demitasse end-stops the memorial dilemma of the text.

“Everything in the work of art should aim to replace representation,” writes Sartre in his beautiful essay about Tintoretto (“The Prisoner of Venice” in Situations, from 1965), “forcing the spectator into mute participation in the spectacle.” Which gets pretty close to the heart of our next Carr-Harris specimen-work, his Five Explanations, from 1983.

By the time he makes Five Explanations, Carr-Harris’s single, centripetal tables, loci of demonstration, have been dispersed, like the broom of the sorcerer’s apprentice, into centrifugal, gallery-filling proliferations of furniture. Five Explanations,, for example, is made up of five units: two tables, three housings for 8-track tape machines and their switching devices (since changed to two housings and a cassette player), three rather gawky, outmoded speakers, a screen-like “image panel” and strategically placed floodlights and spotlights.

At the heart of the piece is the sculpted image on the “screen”: a greatly enlarged view (as if projected) of a curious, eccentrically shaped, quasi-archaeological artifact, apparently a broken mortar-like fragment of some kind, held up for our inspection by a pair of female hands (a working archaeologist, her sleeves rolled up?). On a table close to the spectator, who is kept at a theatrical distance from the screen, is placed what Carr-Harris has described as a life-size, or scaled-down, copy of the object held by the hands in the “picture,” and a control switch for activating the tape loops.

On the soundtrack are five recorded texts, five more-or-less unrelated explanations for what you see. As you gaze, and your eyes adjust to the lights of the gallery, the illumination of the object on the screen intensifies (causing it to “float”)—“the viewer becomes not only an observer, but also a possessor”—and you settle back into the now rather spongy, granular, womb-with-a-view atmosphere of the gallery-as-theatre—or at least gallery-as-staged event—to await illumination. “Yes, there is daylight,” writes Hélène Cixous in Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing (1993) about a shard of prose she is examining, “but to reach it [the author] traverses the night. This night is not the nocturnal night. This Night is the universe of passage.”

But there is, obviously, no “correct” explanation, among the five, for the proffered image. There is no single, authoritative discourse that will crack the enigma, nothing tantamount to an archaeological dig and the sudden unearthing of an artifactual payload. Rather, each text is entertaining, plausible, more or less satisfying (one is an eloquent, autobiographically-engendered reading from the artist, another is a relevant story from a Sioux medicine man, and so on).

Each of the five explanations in Five Explanations is dutifully, diligently useful and, at the same time, mordantly useless. As Russell Brain, a friend of Walter de la Mare, put it in his book about the great fabulist (Tea with Walter de la Mare), “The same idea held by two different people is not the same idea.” And so the work’s clutch of multi-vectored meanings flies from it, and from us, fleeing the carefully staged ersatz centre of the work. Five Explanations reminds me of one of Elias Canetti’s most exhausting aphorisms: “The urge to say something a hundred times; the wish to keep it secret.”

But of course there is no wish to keep anything really “secret” here. I am positing in the artist, at the very least, however, some kind of benighted desire acted out in the work, some contagiously felt joy in the machinations of the grammar of subjectivity. It lies in a recognition that even when the viewer’s gaze at the illuminated artifact and its double is intensified by the accompaniment of any or all of the recorded texts, the result, for the viewer in the gallery, is probably not more externally acquired knowledge of the work but less.

That is because Five Explanations, is not a system of obdurate, inviolate, neatly inspectable, ingestible sculptural parts. The more you see and hear of the work, the more you engage with it to test your own assumptions, tastes, experiences and memories, the more it leads you back to you. The “damaged” metonymic artifact held up for our inspection is, in fact, bodily (hollowed, rounded, named by numbering). It is a displaced nodal self for the viewer, a body in suspension. And it is, therefore, in the long run, more an emblem of our own subjectivity than it is the artist’s (or the fictive archaeologist’s) trophy. The sample explanations for it may or may not be helpful in bestowing on all the rest of us a “local habitation and a name.” That is beside the point—which is that Five Explanations is not a finished, reverenced work, but rather the still place around which revolves a constantly reconstructed relational situation of reader and reading, text and trace.

These kinds of internal-external, private-public, action-reception dialectics power the absorbing paradoxes inherent in most of Carr-Harris’s work, especially as they are generated from within the pedagogical, the epistemological fragrance with which his work is so often imbued. “How do we see what we say?” Carr-Harris asks of his practice, and, contrariwise (the thorny corollary is always there), “how do we say what we see?”

Carr-Harris’s after Dürer (1989), for example, incarnates a grammar of comparison, making palpable, in the corrective gap between a cabinet-held reproduction of Albrecht Dürer’s famous rhinoceros engraving from 1515 (a cross between a horned tank and a giant armadillo) and a nine-minute film loop of a real, zoo-owned Indian rhino, the fruitless, non-closable closure that swoons deliriously towards a construction of objective and therefore transcendentalized truth. Which rhino is correct? Poor, uninformed Dürer! But then, how do you mean, correct?

Amsterdam-based art critic Martine Neddam begins her essay in the Indices catalogue (“In Praise of Disappointment”) by stating that, “What Ian Carr-Harris does best is promise you the moon, and refuse it to you at the last minute. He disappoints you. Therein lies his art.”

This is an especially disarming introduction to Carr-Harris’s Made in Hong Kong (1993), one of the most majestic of the many muted and marooned furniture pieces Carr-Harris has made during the last decade.

This particular work consists of a massive, grey-painted, wall-like display cabinet with darkly-tinted glass panels. Placed on one of its shelves, side by side, are two small (absurdly small, given the size of the cabinet) figures—a little Buddha holding a tray above its head, harvested from a flea market somewhere, and a generic ’50s-ish cartoon character, naked, with “Made in Hong Kong” stamped on its back. Two subcultural stowaways, in the dim vastness of the empty cabinet, two tiny viruses, two bearers of bathos. Made in Hong Kong, is a Wunder Kammer then, a cabinet of curiosities, but without any curiosities in it. Nothing but, as Neddam puts it, these “two inexplicable statuettes which, because they cannot be compared, allow themselves peacefully to be misunderstood.”

What cannot easily be misunderstood, though, is the way these two nebbish figures scuttle the carpentered hauteur, the sculptural rectitude of the cabinet. How neatly they block and mock our rampant scopophilic hungers! On the other hand, these rude visitants to the dark cabinet (now a sort of inefficient anthropology machine) are still collectibles, prisoners of the artist’s desire, embarrassments of sensibility. As such—unlike classic found objects, whose purpose it is to waggishly scuttle the utopian expectations of modernism—they perform as secret agents whose task it is, as Louis Cummins puts it (in Indices), “to infuse the objects surrounding us and the rules of social interaction with a note of perplexity and suspicion.” Here, Carr-Harris’s cabinet figures act out the role forged by the flagrant demitasse of La Plume de ma Tante.

This note of perplexity and suspicion of which Cummins writes is still profoundly present even in that long series of lambent works which are widely regarded, I think, as among the most guileless and sensuously enjoyable Carr-Harris has made: the illuminated bookworks of the 1990s.

The trust promulgated by these handsome back-lit, wall-mounted works—outdated faux encyclopedias (faux in the sense of reconstructed by the artist) opened for perusal to double-page spreads devoted to a single category of experience (plant life, military costume, mushrooms, human musculature, etc.)—is invariably amplified by the works’ easeful use: each open book conveniently bears its subject above it on the wall in a cursive bent-wire script; each open page draws your attention to something in particular on the page by illuminating that particularized something from behind. To read these pages is to be genuinely illuminated. Here, you can literally bask in the glow of your reading. The assumption is that however outmoded the encyclopedias actually are (some of them are century-old German volumes, now more archive than agency), they innocently offer—in a siren-like, chromatically saturated colour that is absurdly pleasurable to inspect—some kind of superior and therefore beneficial, ameliorative ordering of the real world.

That such is not entirely the case becomes clear enough when the viewer wakes to the fact of his or her own seduction by the work. “The light glowing from beneath the selected picture,” writes critic Walter Klepac in an essay accompanying a touring exhibition of the bookworks organized by the Southern Alberta Art Gallery (1997–99), “turns out, however, to actually subvert the conventional task of the illustration,” divesting the chosen image of its context and transforming it into “an object of fascination.”

But these objects of fascination continue to lie within the context of the encyclopedia—a time-honoured engine for the collection and dissemination and retrieval of information (the encyclopedia is an information byway).

That is to say, notes Klepac, the encyclopedia’s “facts” are “a model for how things are known and for what is known and knowable.” Carr-Harris’s business as an artist has, of course, been an epic examination of our complex relations to the presumed authority of established canons of knowledge and how those relations are coded, acquired or disavowed. Carr-Harris’s softly glowing encyclopedias, the very emblems of the juxtaposition of tracing and reading, are, then, extrapolations of the quest that lies at the very centre of Carr-Harris’s progress as an artist: how do we see what we say? How do we say what we see? What grammar binds us to the world?

His recent Writing (language series) works are supersaturated signs, the spartan outwash from the entire Carr-Harris career trajectory: a letter and a word beginning with that letter, painted in oil on rectangles of masonite prepared with blackboard paint. You can take the boy out of the schoolroom but, obviously, you can’t take the schoolroom out of the boy.

In the Writing series, Carr-Harris, artist-grammarian, anatomizes/atomizes both the letter and the word and their interrelationships. How do they speak to us? By being us. There’s a famous analogy in De rerum natura, in which Lucretius points out that atoms are to bodies as letters are to words. Powered by this analogy, the apparently simple, spare Writing works—semantic homunculi—are Carr-Harris’s retroactive key to the vast body of rhetorical silence that constitutes “the narrative of his production.” The Writing works are like Kepler’s snowflakes—the snowflakes that fell on his coat, which all had “six corners and feathered radii” and which therefore were, he said, the great gift of Nothing: “Nothing, since it comes down from heaven and looks like a star.”

Fall 2002

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