MakeBelieve
"MakeBelieve" by Dick Averns, Spring 2007, pp. 96-98
In their exhibition “MakeBelieve,” the curators Catherine Crowston and Barbara Fischer presented 10 artists “for whom representation is like a magic trick.” Operating on the premise that reality in art is a fictive construct—an imagining of the mind—the exhibition recalibrated the concept of the suspension of disbelief.
For instance, works by the Vancouver artist Tim Lee traded on art-historical references related to the sight gag. His diptych Untitled (James Osterberg, 1970), in which the upper and lower parts of the artist’s body appear to hover above the floor, is an ironic take on Bruce Nauman’s already ironic Failing to Levitate in the Studio (1966). With Lee’s deadpan works now in the collections of the MOMA in New York and Tate Modern, we are reminded that art on art has a seemingly perpetual currency.
Louise Noguchi’s glossy transmounted prints of theme-park stuntmen re-enacting the shootout at the O.K. Corral bear out the belief that perceptions of the (Wild) West owe much to cinematic constructs. Indeed, cinema was a recurring medium and prop in “MakeBelieve.” The movies featured either overtly or covertly in works by Adad Hannah, Althea Thauberger, Judy Radul, M. N. Hutchinson, Milutin Gubash and, most particularly, in a clever installation by Geoffrey Farmer called Use of Self. With many of the artists either coming from Vancouver or working with the lens-based practices associated with its psychogeography, the show could be said to pose an absence/presence dichotomy—the deconstructed, theory-heavy theme of “making belief ” certainly succeeded in highlighting the presence of technical and critical effects in the art, but it also risked conjuring an absence of affect.
The artist who most successfully navigated these shoals was Milutin Gubash. His melancholy yet lush videos A Lot and The Last Spring Run—shown in conjunction with a book of newspaper clippings headlining death and departure—made for a compelling riddle and an elaborate restorative. In the end, “MakeBelieve” proved itself not just an important academic exhibit, but a benchmark in the insinuation of new art and artists into the debate around Canadian conceptualism.
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