Rewind: Lecture Notes
MSVU Art Gallery, Halifax
Appropriately located in Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery, "Lecture Notes" simultaneously critiqued and affirmed the closely aligned student/teacher and viewer/artist relationships, as well as the physical and social infrastructures that reinforce them. "Instructors" ranged from professors emeriti (Joseph Beuys) to new recruits (Mike Hein) and, like all teachers, they not only had something to say—they also had the privilege to say it.
Michael Fernandes made the nature of this privilege clear in Comments Book (2004). The work consisted of an overhead projector and transparencies drawn from several years of the gallery's comments book. Viewers were invited to project them onto the gallery wall. By rescaling viewers' remarks to the size of an artwork and leaving execution of the work completely to the will of the viewer, Comments Book pointed to power imbalances at the core of art experience. It suggested that public exhibition, like public education, functions to empower exhibitors, not viewers; lecturers, not listeners; teachers, not students.
Of course, the interaction is predicated on the belief that between showing and viewing exist engagement and learning, but Fernandes's piece suggested that the process is usually far from transcendent or transformative. Viewers can arrive and leave with their own entrenched beliefs. How else could the exhibition "General Idea Editions" have generated a sincere "If you do not yet know the love of Jesus and the wrath of God, please email me at..."?
Similar tensions between expansion and limitation, humour and seriousness were manifested in Mike Hein's sculpture Untitled from 2002 of an old school desk methodically mushroomed upward and outward. No matter how big the structure, it was still locked to a small chair and a single, unmoving spot in space. So although the desktop reached far overhead, it still evoked knees crammed under particleboard and belly pushed against plywood—an effective illustration of the institutionalized truth that cerebral development requires bodily repression.
Works by Suzy Lake and Rainer Ganahl examined the intellectual as celebrity. And over it all, one of art's biggest loomed; a video of Joseph Beuys's 1976 Nova Scotia College of Art and Design lecture unfurled silently on another wall. Beuys emphasized inspiration over knowledge and experience over explanation. But as NSCAD's subsequent (and lucrative) sale of the chalkboard used in his lecture demonstrated, it is more Beuys's reputation than his philosophy that continues to be fetishized.
Summer 2004
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