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Luis Jacob: Questions of Framing

Luis Jacob is contemplating his roots. It’s a brisk mid-November evening and the artist, after years of travel and growing international acclaim, is at his west Toronto studio, selecting and arranging works for his upcoming exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA). Jacob made the works in the early 1990s, when he was majoring in semiotics and philosophy at the University of Toronto and just beginning to find his calling.

“I’m trying to decide how poor I want these objects to feel,” he says, wondering aloud whether they should be framed. Arranged in the hallway outside his studio door, the works are uniformly small and grouped modestly together by type. Many have been pulled from his mother’s crawlspace and bear traces of time and neglect—notably, watermarks. Some works consist of dots on graph paper; others are photocopies of cloud-and-sunray images; a few are text works; most are paintings in the minimalist colour-field tradition. Strangers walk by, unfazed by the minor obstructions. Jacob’s eyes are twinkling with distinctive, puckish glee. For him, this is momentous—“an episode in self-archaeology,” he says. And also, in effect, an act of aesthetic divination.

Two and a half months later, the works are installed—in frames—at MOCCA. Part of a touring survey that shifts shape according to its venue (the first installment was last year’s “Tableaux Vivants” at Montreal’s Fonderie Darling), this show is entitled “Pictures at an Exhibition” and, it turns out, centres crucially on frames: as meaning-markers and as meaning-makers. A new chapter of Jacob’s Hannah Höch–ish Album series (2000–ongoing)—a collection of found images arranged to form elusive narratives—lines the north end of the gallery; illuminated by exposed lightbulbs, it abounds with depictions of people looking at art. Works from a more recent series, They Sleep With One Eye Open (2008), stand like stanchions amid the juvenilia in the rest of MOCCA’s opened-up main space. These large-format, airbrush-painted canvases, made in response to Mark Rothko and nicknamed the “tie-dye paintings” are, to quote Emily Carr, filled with stare. Related versions will grace Toronto’s new Dufferin Street underpass in a public art work to be installed this year.

Here, then, are the bookends of a career in confident mid-step, one that began with a young-outsider exuberance for the art world’s grand conceptualist gestures, and is now characterized by a highly professional immersion in them. What happened in between, however, is not directly articulated by “Pictures at an Exhibition.” How did Jacob progress from the “poor objects” of his student days to become a participant in 2007’s documenta, the prestigious contemporary-art exhibition held every five years in Kassel, Germany? How indeed did a queer, Scarborough-raised Peruvian immigrant—largely self-taught and without an MFA—manage such a poised ascendancy as purveyor of exceedingly philosophical, and often challengingly spare, artworks?

There is no ambition-fuelled trajectory, insists Jacob in the first of our many comfy interviews at the Roncesvalles Avenue apartment he shares with his partner and fellow artist, Chris Curreri. A true conceptualist, Jacob has always built his practice from many aspects of his life—a fact made manifest by his home, which is filled with art, music, tchotchkes and, unforgettably, a wall of books and magazines. His desire to become an artist was, he relates, not terribly evident in childhood. Like other kids, he drew and painted. His family wasn’t particularly involved in the arts: he didn’t take art classes in high school, and at one point his father told him a career as an artist was “not going to cut it.” At the time, this made sense to him.

Jacob’s awakening came in university, with a project he did for Janine Langan’s Christian literature class at the University of Toronto. His was an unorthodox approach, of which Langan approved: a book work on Dantean notions of heaven, which included photocopied sections of Gustave Doré etchings and evangelical pamphlets. These are some of the earliest works in “Pictures at an Exhibition.” “I devoted everything to it,” he says of the book work. “I realized then that if I had decided to, say, become a dentist, I’d do dentistry in the way that an artist would. It’s not a choice; it’s an acknowledgment that what you’re doing is done ‘as an artist.’ It’s a question of framing.”

Alongside this evolution—which was accompanied by autodidactic stints at U of T’s Robarts Library wherein he randomly grabbed titles from the art stacks and devoured them one by one—Jacob began his involvement with Toronto’s dance-music scene. Among artists, a passion for music and clubbing is hardly rare; with Jacob, however, it is exceptional, growing alongside his art in vital complement. In “Pictures,” this stimulating time of discovery is represented by two colour-field works from 1992 (part of his ongoing Monochromes series): Sun (for John Russon), dedicated to a U of T professor, to whom he presented the work as a gift, and Moon (for Derrick May), dedicated to the famous techno DJ.

Jacob has lived through the principles of these two works, which proclaim philosophy and dance-music’s diverse affinities for both the cerebral and the experiential. “I’d volunteer for the parties,” says Jacob of the massive, 12-hour-long raves that cropped up in warehouses and other unsanctioned spaces in Toronto and elsewhere in the 1990s. “And during the day a crew of 20 or 30 kids would set everything up. The organizers would give us this giant roll of material and say, ‘Okay, this is the Black Room,’ or ‘the Silver Room,’ or whatever, and you’d have to figure out how to make it happen.” It was Jacob’s first crash course in large-scale installation art. Later, as a DJ at various club nights in the city—most of them queer-oriented—he became attuned to the politics of dancing and to the alchemy of the dance floor. In its classic, tiled form, the dance floor is essentially a modernist grid; when inhabited by bodies, it becomes a site of sociological, sexual and ethnographic transfiguration. Jacob mentions the canonical house track by Larry Heard, a.k.a. Mr. Fingers, entitled “Can You Feel It,” which asks the question that provides the basis for dance music’s defiant contextuality and performativity. Played at a particular time and place, a song creates a moment; the precise energy of this moment, like that of a religious ceremony, can be evoked and ritualized, but never relived.

“Questions of Framing” by David Balzer, Canadian Art, Summer 2011, pp 78–83

Such interest in participatory, or relational, aesthetics persists in “Pictures at an Exhibition,” but it is by no means apparent. In contrast, the pre-documenta works Jacob produced in the late 1990s and early 2000s were often radically engaged with audiences both inside and outside the art world. Recalling the anarchist sensibilities he developed in the late 1990s, he discusses with enthusiasm the 1997 collective work project Mattress Plaza. A collaboration with Adrian Blackwell, Kika Thorne, Cecilia Chen and Christie Pearson, the project involved culling discarded mattresses into a patchwork playground in front of Toronto’s City Hall (again, the grid, exploded by people) on the eve of the city’s amalgamation under the aegis of then-premier Mike Harris. Similar endeavours in probing and extolling theories of civic publics include the 2003 Anarchist Sandwich Party, a performance on a Toronto subway that involved the collective creation and provision of food, and his 2005 Flashlight, an outdoor installation at the Toronto Sculpture Garden that celebrated his love of funk music and featured a geodesic play structure and Muskoka chairs attached to pedals that, when turned, illuminated a lyric from the eponymous Parliament song.

More central to “Pictures” and its modified relationalism might be his 1999 Anarchist Free School Minutes, recently acquired by the Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queen’s University. It is a treasured project for Jacob, its main component a wall display of minutes taken in the meetings that led to the opening of Anarchist Free School, a Toronto DIY educational resource that the artist co-founded. The piece resonates with Jacob’s own experience of learning, and emblematizes the art/life correlations that permeate the touring survey. The piece is complemented by the important fact that Jacob’s grassroots schooling was completed in the art world: he paid the bills for six years by working as an attendant at Christopher Cutts Gallery, and, in 1998, moved on to Art Metropole, where he organized and curated. Jacob loved working with Cutts—the Monochromes in “Pictures” and “Tableaux Vivants” seem influenced by the post–Painters Eleven abstractionists the gallerist heralded at the time (Jacob cites Ron Martin)— but it was the idea of the artist-run centre that really appealed to him. “General Idea is the shining example,” he says of the Art Metropole founders. “They saw from the very beginning that an artist is someone who makes art, but who also shows art and runs a gallery and writes and publishes about art and has a magazine and stores art and keeps an archive and everything else. Anything that you need to practice as an artist within a field. That became very clear to me—almost second-nature. In Toronto and Canada there aren’t the institutions that generally exist elsewhere, so artists have to create them.”

It was this phenomenon that Jacob broached with Ruth Noack and Roger Buergel in 2005, when they came to Toronto’s Power Plant to talk about their plans for documenta 12. Jacob was among a handful of artists invited to meet the curators at a local bar. “I knew everyone was going to be jockeying for a position,” he says, “and I’m not inclined to do that—I’m not an alpha male. When they came around to me, I thought, It doesn’t make sense for me to talk about my art. We’re not at my studio. So I told them things I thought they needed to know about Canadian art.” They listened; Jacob followed up by sending them the catalogue for “Golden Streams: Artists’ Collaboration and Exchange in the 1970’s,” the 2002 show on artist collectives he curated for the University of Toronto’s Blackwood Gallery. At first, he heard nothing; and then, the fateful email. “At the time, I couldn’t believe it,” he says, but notes an auspicious coincidence: his work Habitat (2005–6), a concatenation of various cellular living spaces, was on view at the Art Gallery of Ontario. “In retrospect, I can see that Habitat was very much aligned with their notion of ‘the exhibition as a medium’— and their plans for documenta 12’s Aue-Pavilion, a greenhouse they had built that, like my installation, had an open-ended architectural feel to it. The way the artworks related to each other—everything in their exhibition appeared layered by something else.”

He ended up giving Noack and Buergel a new work, A Dance for Those of Us Whose Hearts Have Turned to Ice, Based on the Choreography of Françoise Sullivan and the Sculpture of Barbara Hepworth (With Sign-Language Supplement) (2007), an installation that references the British modernist sculptor Barbara Hepworth and the Quebec dancer, painter and sculptor Françoise Sullivan, who was a member of the Automatistes, a group that led the way for Canadian artist-run culture. A Dance’s centrepiece was a video of the Toronto-based queer activist and performance artist Keith Cole performing a bizarre, sloppy interpretation of Sullivan’s iconic expressionist piece Danse dans la neige (1948). All this subtext is, of course, eminently regional, and was likely unrecognizable to the majority of documenta’s audience—which is just what Jacob wanted. “Unintelligibility needs to have its place, too,” he says. “To put things beside each other that have a kind of intuitive connection for me and for the viewer, but that one would be hard-pressed to articulate.”

After documenta, a whirlwind of prestigious engagements arose, perhaps most conspicuously the 2008 purchase of his Album IV (2005) by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and its inclusion, last year, in the museum’s “Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance” group show. “My life has definitely changed,” Jacob reflects. “I’m a completely different person.” He claims to have become a hermit, and says he has had to scale back his involvement with entities like C Magazine, Toronto Free Gallery and even Art Metropole. Inevitably, some have suggested that Jacob has abandoned the activist-oriented engagement that so characterized the portion of his career that came between the minimalist experiments of his early days and his post-documenta meta-art. Yet, as “Pictures at an Exhibition” evinces, contemporary art is by nature reorienting. The history of the avant-garde is defined, after all, by notions of metamorphosis. (Jacob is enraptured with what he calls the “flat transcendence” of Donald Judd and Dan Flavin.) And so Jacob’s civic public of yore has synthesized into an art audience, their variable, quizzical presence completing the Album portion of “Pictures”—people looking at art of people looking at art—and the installation portion of “Tableaux Vivants,” a gallery-within-the-gallery with one zoo-like glass wall.

Jacob is not shy about exploring his own metamorphosis, which “Pictures at an Exhibition” lays bare by focusing on the simultaneous strangeness and familiarity of his humble beginnings. Discussing his love-hate relationship with the contemporary art world, he recalls two pieces he made for group shows at the Power Plant in the last decade. For one, he displayed a flock of taxidermied pigeons; two years later, after escalating accomplishments, he displayed a swan. For him, there is no better illustration of the strengths—and dangers—of the individualist and collective forces at play in an artist’s career.

“I know some people said, ‘Oh, wow, look at Luis—he thinks he’s a swan now,’” he says. “But I see no reason why the swan would be thought of as a self-portrait, and not any of the pigeons. It’s an arbitrary choice, but part of the equation. It’s a serious question, actually, and fundamental. Why is the art world based on making swans out of pigeons? And how do you get from a pigeon to a swan?” ■

To see more Luis Jacob works, go to canadianart.ca/jacob

“Questions of Framing” by David Balzer, Canadian Art, Summer 2011, pp 78–83

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