Re-enactment (the curatorial theme of the year)

I went to Montreal last weekend to visit my sister and my good friend/her boyfriend who was in town, visiting from Vancouver. It was beautiful and warm out and the Raptors were still in the playoffs for a while, so there was lots to do that wasn’t art, but we did manage to make it down to the DHC/Art Foundation for Contemporary Art (note: you need Flash to see their site, and even then it’s very confusing) to see the widely lauded “Re-Enactments” exhibition.

Paul Pfeiffer, Live from Neverland, 2007 [still]

I’ve been joking lately that re-enactment is the curatorial theme of the year as it seems to pop up everywhere I go: my friend doing his MRP on Jeremy Deller, Kristan Horton’s Dr. Strangelove Dr. Strangelove series, and a newly-discovered (for me) artist Robert Lendrum whose work I think is wonderful and often re-stages family photographs using video to record actors awkwardly holding poses taken from snapshots (they’re hilarious). And then there’s the upcoming group exhibition this summer at The Power Plant, “Not Quite How I Remember It,” which focuses on enactments and re-stagings of the recent past, including iconic works in contemporary art.

Kristan Horton, from the Dr. Strangelove, Dr. Strangelove series, 2006
(I can’t not post one of these when the occasion arises. I love them)

I think this all just means that there’s “something in the water,” as a friend recently put it, that could explain this ongoing and widespread interest. I haven’t pinned down what it is just yet, but I know it’s there.

In any case, the DHC show was exceptional. Paul Pfeiffer’s video-installation of a choir of small, immaculately dressed children becoming the chorus that recites a creepy speech made by Michael Jackson (defending himself against accusations of inappropriate behaviour with the boys who came to his Neverland retreat) was mesmerizing. I didn’t think that speech could be any creepier than it was when it came out of his mouth, but the small children shouting it out made it that much more surreal.

Everyone in my group was transfixed by Harun Farocki’s Deep Play installation, which uses 12 screens to project a dizzying amount of information and documentation to recreate the FIFA 2006 World Cup Final between Italy and France.

Installation view of Harun Farocki’s Deep Play, 2007. Photo by Richard-Max Tremblay

Dylan, the big soccer fan in the group, loved it and kept racing from screen, to description, to screen, almost like he was trying to take it all in simultaneously. I loved the astro-turff on the floor and the stadium-style benches they’d provided for viewers. It sort of seemed like something out of Blade Runner, like “this is how we will watch TV in the future” (until I went to a gigantic Montreal sports bar and realized that this is how many people watch TV now, only with beer and wings).

I think my favourite piece, shockingly, was upstairs (as an aside, how weird is the DHC building? It’s like a mall for contemporary art) where Kerry Tribe’s Here and Elsewhere performance/video/installation was. I expected to hate it, based on its description:

“In Here & Elsewhere, two synchronized videos are projected side by side, creating a vertical seam where they meet. What might be called the project’s “narrative” revolves around an interview between an older man who remains off camera (British film critic and theoretician Peter Wollen) and a thoughtful ten year old girl (his daughter Audrey). Periodically the visuals cut away to quotidian interior shots of the girl at home and exterior locations in and around Los Angeles. Although the video is structured as a loop, the questions the girl is asked trace a series of themes, each of which builds on the preceding dialogue. As the interview unfolds, their conversation touches on history, memory, intersubjectivity, temporality, epistemology, photography and desire. Wollen’s questions are loosely adapted from FRANCE / TOUR / DETOUR / DEUX / ENFANTS (1978), an experimental video series made for television by Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville.”

Installation view of Kerry Tribe’s Here and Elsewhere, 2002 (not from DHC).

It sounds awful, cheesy and patronizing, but it’s somehow none of those things. Audrey isn’t smarmy or precocious and earnestly and thoughtfully answers her dad’s questions. Peter Wollen, for his part, manages to ask these insane questions (“Does a photograph exist in the past or the present?”) in a way where the inflection of his voice only shows genuine interest in Audrey’s opinion on what are unanswerable questions for the sharpest of adults. For a video that runs longer than 7 minutes (usually the maximum my attention span will give to most video work), it’s quite successful and engaging as I was compelled to watch for longer than 7 minutes.

Now, if only the Stan Douglas piece hadn’t been broken the day we were there…