Josh Thorpe: Sites Unseen
Signage at Toronto’s Campbell House Museum this month / photo Josh Thorpe
Josh Thorpe's installation in the windows of Toronto's Campbell House Museum has the great merit of not using archival sources or historical research. The piece is not about the people who used to live in the house or any aspect of Toronto’s past. Its main feature is a set of quotes from Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy? applied to one window in each of four rooms, and three other groups applied to hallway windows.
The use of text in public places is a common strategy, but it is canonical for a kind of art that attempts to reawaken a sense of the past, to remember the history of a particular place. As soon as one enters the house, however, it is clear how unnecessary any historical evocation would be; the house itself is history. That said, Thorpe’s work is emphatically not site specific, and one could be forgiven for asking exactly what it is doing there, in that building. The Campbell House is the oldest surviving building of York Township, built in 1822 at Frederick and Adelaide Streets, moved to its current location in 1972, and restored and turned into a museum thereafter. But this disjunction between the site and the installation is one of the work’s strong features, enabling one to focus on bigger questions, in particular questions concerning art that are usually lacking in public art or other worthy projects that use text.
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Josh Thorpe The House-sensation (Deleuze and Guattari) 1994/2011 Detail Courtesy the artist |
A memory of a place—this is one of the central topics of modern poetry, certainly since Wordsworth, and the poem that grows out of such memories is a time-space unit, or may contain several such units. Wordsworth called them “spots of time.” But in great poetry, whether that of Wordsworth or of Wallace Stevens, a time and a place become a philosophical experience. Of course, the time and place of art is always here and now, but this here and now is strangely inhabited by words, songs and stories of the past. To discover where is here and when is now is the effort of both contemporary art and poetry. Stevens named the object of his search “the poems of our climate,” and I have a vivid image of how he found his poetic vocation on a camping trip in British Columbia, watching the moonlit clouds storm and roll over his campfire while classical Greek literature rose up in his memory. An intense experience of the present and an intense response to art—the conflict between these is one of the motors of the art of our time.
The relevance of Thorpe’s piece to all this is that in the city it is very hard to actually be anywhere. There is simply too much going on: too much to respond to, too much to recognize, too much to do in the immediate future, too much attention required to cross the street. The lack of a here and now that is really here and now is the poverty that demands to be compensated by art. So no place could ever be particular enough; our responses to any site have the same generic quality, and this is the reason for the general failure of historically oriented public art. On the other hand, Thorpe’s piece succeeds as a kind of poetry that can signify in any corner of the city.
Writers quote, but artists have a unique way of treating texts as readymades. The way that Thorpe has extracted and combined fragments of his source has made them poetry. One can easily imagine any artist, as they read, getting stuck on a phrase, looking at it from a funny angle, seeing it as a thing apart. Artworks are things, and talent in art, among other things, is the ability to break the flow, to hold a moment still. Found poetry is a form of violence to the text, but in this case the content of the words—the aspect of the text that matters to Thorpe—redeems the cut. All the quotes tell us that our human structures, allegorized as “the house,” the material and conceptual dwellings we have made for ourselves on this earth, are permeable. The energies of the universe flow though us, but since that is hard to see directly, we can learn something about reality by noticing that they flow through what we have built. It’s a beautiful insight, and a corrective to the view that the horizon of all our experience is human history. One might say that it is “critical” in the best sense because it is a liberating perspective.
The selected text fragments touch very lightly on the interior of the house and on the view through its windows, but not consistently, and not obviously. The whole ensemble has a reticence typical of abstract art—it responds to the world through its autonomy. But these fragments do have an order, and that ordering is very sensitive and thoughtful—progression is suggested, not drawn with heavy strokes. Again, the technique of writing a narrative into a building is not unique, but I like the way Thorpe does it, without avant-gardist rhetoric.
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Josh Thorpe Blown Out Mountain (Ron Thorpe) 1962/2011 Courtesy the artist |
Yet the other part of Thorpe’s show at Campbell House—three photographs displayed in a kind of gallery on the top floor—breaks the spell. Here, Thorpe has included two found photos of the establishment of the house in its new location, and one photo from the archives of his photographer father, Ron Thorpe. The latter image is a perfect touch; retrieved by the artist from an old contact sheet, it is an overexposed landscape view, apparently a forest seen in fog. The other two photos seem more conventional in their direct reference to the site.
When I was there, Thorpe was occupying himself with photographing patches of light and shadow, which filtered through the trees outside and fell over the photos leaning against a wall. Clearly, his own impulses are not restricted to teaching lessons about place. And yet the evocation of the rebuilding of the house (and the images chosen are hardly obvious ones) does bring memory back into the work. Presumably, some viewers will remember the location before the house was put up there, or remember seeing its reconstruction. The rebuilding of the house on that spot is the making of the place, but Thorpe’s installation reminds us that places are also made by the thoughts we have had there.
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