Rewind: Are You Talking to Me? Conversation(s)
Galerie de luniversité du Québec à Montréal, Montreal
The question posed by Louise Dérys exhibition is Robert De Niros, in Taxi Driver, as he talks to a mirror. In the exhibition, which carries a printed mirror on its catalogue and an image from the film on the first page, the question is reaimed from the university gallery to the museum, from the art historian to the curatormirrors and soulmates both. As with the film, the drama lies in the schizophrenic estrangement behind the asking.
The psychic separation between the university gallery and the museum, the art historian and the curator, is recent. It has grown from the accelerating process, seen over the last decade, of public art institutions remaking themselves according to culture-industry models and stepping away from their traditionally mandated station as educational institutions above and beyond the fray. The idea of the museum as a business, a system of cultural production run on management principles, looks attractive to governmental and corporate supporters. In theory, for one, the bills and burden of responsibility go down; for the other, philanthropic profile rises alongside niche brand marketing.
For scholars, curators and audiences, however, this cost-effective equation, fashioned out of the current conceptual retreat from public spending, has a way of relegating them to the sidelines. Scholars wonder from the outside about the long-term research function of the museum. Curators wonder from the inside about professional independence. Audiences wonder generally how it is that a public good, held in trust, has been de facto privatized, and whether that development has rendered it (perhaps) a less reliable cultural-protection model than it once was.
Dérys bilingual catalogue, with additional essays by Marie-Pierre Sirois and Didier Prioul, takes on these big questions. Ambitious and thoughtful, the publication deserves a long shelf life, not just inside the country but outside. As for the exhibition, it exemplifies a reimagined kind of exhibition-making. Déry concentrates on the intimate dialogues that an exhibitionunderstood as a careful presentation of artworkscan initiate. These conversationscreated with a selection of fine, sometimes modest works by 15 Canadian artists ranging widely across typequietly take an opposite tack from the loud stress of museum-model exhibitions that struggle to offer historical relevance in the face of newly prioritized in-house issues like accessibility, profitability and tax-credit gifting.
Déry thinks in different terms. She opts to remind us of restraint and transparency. She attaches her curatorial voice to the artworks and their capacities to speak from multiple points of view. The result is a choreographed installation that places works in sympathetic proximitylike speakers in conversationso that content is shared and telegraphed between them. To enter the space past Pierre Dorions abstract Nuages gris (19992000), installed on an angled wall at the foot of the stairs leading into the gallery, is to catch a silvery light from the salon-style hanging. Dorions small canvases become mirrors not only to De Niros question but to the other works in the show. Who would expect that the broken, floating grid arrangement would connect immediately with a small, circa-1930 bronze by Alfred Laliberté called La Corriveau? Yet the folk figure in the sculpture, an imprisoned woman, holds a cross-hatched piece of iron cagean iron cage in which, the story goes, she was left to rot on public display.
The connective text is thick in Dérys show as you move from Lalibertés plinth-top sculpture to the microphones at the image-covered speakers podium in Dominique Blains La république to an Ozias Leduc photographa self-portrait, with the artist peering down the line of his lens towards the mirror that became the image. From work to work around the room, formal and thematic sparks fly, creating a sense of intellectual community that knits different decades and media into a seamless experience that is open-ended and variable, as if the same works could also be repositioned to make an entirely different show. It makes you deeply aware of the arts multidimensionalityits renewability.
That renewability is what we mean when we talk of the art in our museums in terms of heritage. Dérys exhibition, while on the cutting edge of thinking about museums and their work, honours that long time frame. And the answer to her question is yes. The art is talking to us. Please, let it not be a cry in the wilderness for the sake of expediency. What museums need is not corporate streamlining or more marketing money. They need to build a climate for better listening.
Summer 2003
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