Rewind: Ann Course
Mercer Union, Toronto
Viewing Ann Course's videos at Mercer Union was like sitting in front of a collage of ideas, images, flashes and tremors of thought. One is exposed to an array of events and images, free of either sequence or order. Everything happens simultaneously; no one event has priority over another. The Artist presents a moving spiral, a scarecrow and an artist urinating, but there is no continuity among the scenes. It is a cauldron of images in which everything feels flattened, equal, the same. However, everything is not the same. It shares the same amount of being, but not the same being.
The real and the non-real share the same space in Course's videos. Every event of fantasy is an event of reality. One encounters bizarre, fantastic beings, chicken-persons, horny vegetables, sausage-babies, boned penises. They appear and disappear, caught between the traumatic and the banal, between death, sex and vegetables. They are deep, scarring, even redemptive.
In short, the videos are full of symbolic imagery. Consider the solemn bust of Käthe Kollwitz in Mother, or the hangman game in Recruitment Video. One may be tempted to diagnose the videos, but there are no subterranean psychic layers to decode. There are only aggregates, additions of experience and additions of meaning.
Course constructs a dimensionless stage, a stage of movement, of coming in and going out. In Black Magic, the mouth and the anus are almost indistinguishable. Similarly, it is difficult to distinguish shit from food, or in which direction the links of shit/sausage are going. Morsels of organic matter, like the cars of a runaway freight train, pass through the bowels of the body. And what is a body but a machine, a processor of organic matter?
One can feel here the resonance of Antonin Artaud's pen, of the body without organs. If Artaud wanted to do away with the organs, organization, representation and the judgment of God, then Course presents an intuitive, loose organization based upon a constant expansion of meaning and discourse. She relies on the particular histories and contents of her invented beings, but never designates a function for them. They manoeuvre freely in reference to the giant aggregate of meaning.
Fall 2005
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