Canadian Art

• Home
• Online
• Reviews

Contour Biennial of Moving Image: Rock of Ages

O poor contemporary art! Poorer still media art, or new media, or moving image, or whatever you choose to call it; it's so often outshone by the blinding light of silver screens in cineplexes everywhere and, in Europe anyway, by the centuries-old brilliance of religious art. There, cathedrals stand as cinemas of yore, remnants of a time when art's job was to project the greatness of God directly into the hearts and minds of the people.

Contour Biennial of Moving Image in Mechelen, Belgium, was conceived to provide relief from this impoverishment. Mechelen was the sole seat of the Catholic Church in Belgium until 1961. Saint Rumbold's Cathedral, with its truncated but still lofty bell tower, dominates the city's skyline; located on the other side of a yawning pit beside this massive cathedral, Contour’s offices are literally in the shadow of religion and of what remains the city's biggest tourist attraction.

For the fifth Contour Biennial, Canadian curator Anthony Kiendl has made a somewhat surprising connection between moving-image art and the opulent trappings of religion via rock music. Situated in the city's churches, train stations, schools, dance halls and theatres, “Sound & Vision: Beyond Reason” places 16 works that, unlike most movies or sit-down church services, are created, received and interpreted through the body. “The transformation of experience, and the expansion of consciousness, has historically been a preoccupation in rock music, one that combines both physical and conceptual realms,” Kiendl states in his introductory essay.

I was keenly aware of my body (weary and cramped) when I arrived on opening day, so I refreshed with a shower at the Contour office and a coffee with Kiendl. At the café we encountered conceptual artist Dan Graham, who excitedly began to discuss the curatorial concept for the exhibition: “Anthony likes rock music because it allows him to be non-rational.” Graham might as well have been paraphrasing the titular essay of his book Rock My Religion. The essay traces rock music back to an unlikely source—the spasm-based exorcisms of the Shakers. This essay undoubtedly influenced Kiendl's thinking on the ecstatic power of rock music through its physical affect.

Adam Pendleton Band 2009 Installation view at Contour 2011 / photo Faryda Moumouh

Although rock music may seem like a frivolous theme, the exhibition explores the revolutionary (not merely rebellious) spirit of rock music through the ages. Thus any music that has animated the body and called forth prohibited desires falls under the rubric of “Sound & Vision: Beyond Reason”—from the work-shirking guise of curing a spider bite through dancing (Joachim Koester asked a group of dancers to enact the delirious spasms resulting from a spider bite for his 16mm film Tarantism) to psychedelia's mind expansion; from punk's embodied rejection of conformity and normality to hippie folk's earnest utopianism; and from metal's obscenity to avant-garde composition's pissy withholding. Each is presented in turn, and on turntables.

While music may raise the spirit, it also (as Graham notes) raises spirits—dead dreams are reanimated, Elvis' ghost is still hanging around and Adam Pendleton's Band is haunted by Jean-Luc Godard's Sympathy for the Devil. There were even reports of an actual ghost moving boxes around and interfering with the installation of Edith Dekyndt's Myodesopsies, [Before Life], songs based on the lyrics of Myodesopsies, a work which is, really, eerie enough on its own. In it, songs issue faintly from antiquated boom boxes in peeling and empty rooms throughout Bleekstraat 7 while a light box allows one to see spectres populating our bodies—the shadows of micro-organisms as they float across the retina.

From ghosts to the Holy Ghost: “Sound & Vision: Beyond Reason” deftly sites works in conversation with the architecture of the city—the Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul is the perfect place for a collision between church and cinema through Brion Gysin and Ian Somerville's not altogether contemporary artwork Dreamachine. Elegantly repurposing the record player (rotating at 78 rpm) to visual rather than auditory affect, the flicker produced by this combination of turntable, lightbulb and cut-aluminum tube is meant to be viewed with eyes shut, as if in prayer. What appeared on the screen of my closed eyelids was cinematically transcendent, redolent of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (the end sequence of which, Kiendl says, was itself inspired by Dreamachine).

Brion Gysin & Ian Somerville Dreamachine 1961/1979 Installation view at Contour 2011 / photo Faryda Moumouh

Dan Graham, it seems, could not resist empathizing with the city's churchy architecture with his own building, Performance Pavilion for a Catholic City, its mesh steel walls hinting at the screens of the confession booth. The shifting moiré of apertures as one moves around the pavilion correlates to another Ben-Day-dot-speckled wall—Rodney Graham's typically wry Rotary Psycho-Opticon. Based on an actual stage prop for a Belgian television appearance by Black Sabbath, Rotary Psycho-Opticon is hilarious in its total unsuitability for the band and, when powered by a sleek stationary bicycle, in the total failure of the rotating discs of swirls and stripes to generate a hallucinogenic affect.

If television imagined that it could contain the satanic intimation of Black Sabbath with a goofy stage design, movies sought to absent Elvis' shockingly present sexuality, bridling him with the emasculating form of the musical. Pierre Bismuth (or more likely his assistant), a pen in each hand, traces each swing and gyration of the King's hands, engaging in a dance with Elvis in the (to some viewers) homoerotic film Jailhouse Rock.

In contrast to the teeming ghosts and dreams, the opening-night performances brought some embodied unreason to the event. Belgian legends De Bossen enacted the hair-tossing, tooth-gnashing of rocking out for structural filmmaker Jennifer West's Drummed Rock Film, a conversely subdued Morse code of scratches and dings pounded into film footage of a sailboat.

Rodney Graham Rotary Psycho-Opticon 2008 Installation view at Contour 2011 / photo Faryda Moumouh

Breaking from the traditional “elbow performance” mode of sound art, Chicks on Speed suggestively twiddled mixer knobs on their outstretched legs as they ranted and shrieked. A loop of the last few moments of the performance can be modified by viewers who want to play with assorted toys, including the Chicks' guitar-strung pumps, over the remaining months of the biennial.

“Music for the neck downwards” is how Keith Richards defines rock ’n’ roll. Though many of Kiendl's selections for this biennial are brainy rather than heady, a few engage with what is below the neck, and, indeed, below the belt. Quebecois folk accompanies the honey-coloured frolicking of a threesome of beautiful boys projected onto the walls of a geodesic dome. Created in collaboration between filmmaker Noam Gonick and artist Luis Jacob, Wildflowers of Manitoba connects sexual euphoria (also known as gaiety) to music. “Wildflowers is about listening to music as a teenager in your bedroom and using the harmonies and tones to fantasize possible worlds, daydreams, erotic visions, astral projections,” Gonick explains via email.

The visual and the aural may be a bit of an irrational combination to begin with, although the biennial got my mind, more than my hips, moving. Perhaps it is because of the need for either a collective experience or solitary listening that Contour has produced a limited-edition LP for the exhibition, hearkening back to some rather unsexy vinyl records of lectures and college curricula from Canadian art history. The bedroom, more than the exhibition, seems like a place to go all the way with reason—and then, a little further.

Subscribe to Canadian Art today and save 30% off the newstand price.