Lifeworks : Elusive inspiration

The last time I took my 10-year-old daughter to the art gallery, she armed herself against boredom by taking along a book. It was a workbook on drawing; complete with watercolour pencils and a pen, it leads the reader through entertaining exercises intended to unlock a free, gestural style.1 The exhibition we were going to see was Elusive Paradise, which showcases until May 13 the ten invited contestants for the National Gallery of Canada's newly minted Millennium Prize. Curated by Diana Nemiroff, this international competition proposed the theme of Arcadian visions on the edge of the 21st century. What is the contemporary artist's view of landscape, of nature, of our lost earthly paradise? The first work we examined was a set of four sculptures by Liz Magor. These include Hollow, a replicated log that houses a sleeping bag, and Burrow, an intensely claustrophobic variant of the same. Nature is presented uneasily as refuge and hiding place. Stores consists of bags of carrots and potatoes stashed behind sheets of building material. The carrots were sprouting; we considered whether the artist intended this. I attempted a commentary on the forces of nature: renewal and growth. “But won't it go mouldy?” my daughter pointed out. Oh. She pulled me over to Chee-to, a pile of stones imperfectly concealing a cache of cheese snacks. “Are these rocks real?” We tapped one while the guard wasn't looking. No. “But are the Cheezies real?” It seemed so, yes. We were getting the point, or one of them: a loss of distinction between the natural and the artificial. It's an aspect of life we've noted many times, frequently in the grocery store. Feeling blase, we moved on to Jana Sterbak's ironic Oasis, a Faraday cage constructed from woven stainless steel, an unlivable refuge from one of the deeper forces of nature, electromagnetic fields. No comfort there. We looked at Diana Thater's Red Sun, a scary array of video screens projecting the sun's plasma, formlessly. And at an equally formless set of pieces by Genevieve Cadieux, in which nature is replicated and amplified, invoking infinity, the unarticulable. My mind was slipping into reviewer mode, churning out phrases to capture the conceptual spin. But my daughter was looking for a place to sit down with her sketchbook. There was nothing, in her view, worth looking at for very long, not even Shahzia Sikander's ceiling-high veils of decorated tissue paper, which soothingly invoke the garden of the imagination. Yoshihiro Suda's exquisite trompe l'oeil, Tulip and Weeds, a carved wooden flower dropping its petals on a glass table, with tiny wooden weeds sprouting from the floor below, provoked our admiration as well as a disagreement about whether the clipboard on the table and the navy blue jacket slung over an adjacent chair were really part of the installation or a mistake by an insufficiently briefed guard. What is nature, what is artifice? What is art, what is accident? We moved on, weary of riddles. And I found myself disinclined to intrude further into my daughter's day off school with discourse on the Death of Nature. It is too sad. Worse, she knows about it already. So we sought out Janet Cardiff's prize-winning Forty-Part Motet, a “reworking” of a complex polyphonic composition from the 16th century using 40 loudspeakers and the voices of the Salisbury Cathedral Choir. This music is, indeed, paradisical. But somehow I pictured Cardiff coming to terms with Thomas Tallis's motet as a contemporary scientist standing before Creation: a sense of wholeness giving way to a complexity too great to comprehend. This technologically enabled performance dismantles the music: each individual voice, assigned to one of the 40 speakers, resists assimilation to the whole at the same time as harmony is required. A metaphor for modern society? I felt divided about what to do: whether to seek the exact centre of the sound, or to travel from speaker to speaker, isolating each voice. (We settled on the middle; my daughter opened her sketchbook on the floor.) Acoustically, Forty-Part Motet is not always pleasing; at times I felt as if the vaulted exhibition space were replicated inside my skull, a chamber where competing frequencies sometimes painfully collided. But this is, after all, an auditory sculpturing of space. And it is not only a musical performance but a representation of one, generating meanings and questions that belong to conceptual art. The speakers have a humanoid appearance: large heads on spindly trunks with comical feet. The real singers, meanwhile, are bodiless. Other conundrums arise from the setting: the Rideau Chapel, a former place of worship rescued from demolition, now reconstructed in the secular temple of art. High-tech sound equipment and wooden angels make for a strange juxtaposition. Visitors move attentively from speaker to speaker, reminding me of worshippers progressing through the Stations of the Cross. What does it mean, that in the judges' opinion a modern Arcadia was best expressed by nonvisual means? Is this a bold escape from old boundaries? Or a defeat for contemporary visual art? As we left the gallery my daughter offered a comment on the whole experience: “Well that certainly wasn't worth $12.” Under her arm was the book in which she had drawn, with Quentin Blake's guidance, a pig, a hot-air balloon, a big umbrella over a thin person, a small umbrella over wide people, smoke issuing from cars, chimneys, and people's ears, and various other artifacts of an unselfconscious, animated world. A day or so later I realized that she had, unknowingly, mirrored Janet Cardiff's own advice: “follow what you're interested in, don't look at too much art.”2 Anne Marie Todkill CMAJ

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