Playing Homage
"Playing Homage" by Leah Turner, Spring 2010, p. 112
In recent years, re-enactment, in various guises, has become rich terrain for artists and exhibition-makers alike. As its title suggests, the exhibition “Playing Homage” does indeed present works that restage and remake specific events and familiar identities. However, the larger thrust of the show deals with an age-old motif: the artist as subject. With a range of works by ten artists, the show surveys direct citations as well as broader, self-reflexive engagements with what it actually means to be an artist. Or, as the exhibition’s curator, Jenifer Papararo, asks, “What does it mean to produce? And how significant is the relation between the identity of the maker and their product?” It is a line of questioning that continues to present us with more ambiguities than answers; the intelligent works included in “Playing Homage” tend to approach the artist persona, and all its narcissistic discontents, with ambivalence and nuanced cynicism.
A little-known General Idea video from 1977, Press Conference, sees the trio staging a mock press conference, answering such questions as “what is an artist?” with complete seriousness. Andrea Fraser steals the show with her performance in the video installation Kunst Muss Hängen (2001): she exactingly and excruciatingly re-enacts, in memorized German, a half-hour speech given by a drunk Martin Kippenberger at an art opening in the 1990s. Presented in contrast to Fraser’s critique of the artist’s macho posturing is a selection of Kippenberger’s exhibition posters that see him making reference to various other art-world figures as he poses, locating the shifting notion of personality itself as a subject for art. Also inhabiting another’s identity is Kerstin Cmelka, in her 2006 triptych of photographs that restage Valie Export’s pioneering 1961 feminist action Action Pants: Genital Panic. In her deliberately demure, depoliticized version, Cmelka explores the iconic character of these performances.
Other works play overtly with art-historical clichés and stereotypical representations of the artist. Rodney Graham’s My Late Early Styles (Part 1, The Middle Period) (2007–09) is a tongue-in-cheek self-portrait showing Graham standing in front of a wall of boilerplate abstract paintings that he himself has painted. Here he plays the part of a modernist painter (another persona in his roster of character types), betraying both a suspicion and an acknowledgement of the role he undeniably inhabits.
Though its participants’ individual positions vary, ultimately the exhibition reads less as sincere homage than as sardonic send-up, and thankfully so. As such, “Playing Homage” offers a compelling contribution to the ongoing discourse surrounding artistic subjectivity and all its playful manifestations.
Subscribe to Canadian Art today and save 30% off the newstand price.
