Acting Between | Body Time

Acting Between | Body Space Time / À l'oeuvre entre corps, espace et temps , is an exhibition of Concordia University Faculty of Fine Arts alumni from the past five years. The Concordia University Faculty of Fine Arts is recognized as one of the finest art training institutes in Canada, with many of its alumni counted amongst the country's best contemporary artists. Selecting six artists to include in this exhibition was a stimulating process, as there were so many dynamic artists to consider. The organizing principle of "Body Space Time" eventually yielded the grouping of Diane Borsato (MFA 2001), Sarah Febbraro (BFA 2006), Thomas Kneubühler (MFA 2003), The Parasite Collective, Ana Rewakowicz (MFA 2001) and Andrea Vander Kooij (MFA 2005). All of the artists in this exhibition recognize that the body is the centre of all agency in the physical world, whether dealing with its corporeal placement, interrelations, its absence, limitations or its actions.

The body has been repositioned in art since the mid-1960s. Under the influence of Modernism it was pushed to the perimeter as a subject of art, particularly with Formalism, which came to an end-point with Minimalism's complete rejection of any content. In an attempt to get out of this impasse artists recuperated the experience of the body as a subject. Stimulated by performance art and feminist-based art practices artists began to synthesize the conceptual and the perceptual. Many contemporary artists have inherited this legacy, particularly as transmitted through the identity- and issue-based art that dominated the 1990s. At the same time the theory of Phenomenology acknowledges the role of the body's many sense perceptors in the formation of consciousness. In art then, body knowledge is coupled with intellect and becomes a valid means of understanding.

In contemporary art bodily referents engage the artwork and viewer in an experience that moves through time and space. The Parasite is a collective of nine artists (including Tagny Duff, Concordia MFA 2005; fellow Concordia alumni Joshua Schwebel and Ruby Kato Attwood; and Cam Matamoros, Suzanne Caines, Rajee Pana Jejishergill and Christopher Watt) who use the tactic of intervention to alter expectations, movement, and linearity of time and space. The installation created for the FOFA Gallery takes its departure point from a performance enacted in Halifax in March 2007. The artists have created an audio tour (downloadable to an mp3 player) of the current installation, with multiple tracks containing different directions that navigate the viewer through, around and even outside the gallery. They instruct the viewer to undertake various activities such as finding hidden objects, moving from the gallery to the adjacent sculpture court, taking items out of a coat pocket and looking into a freezer installed in the centre of the gallery. The inclusion of documents from the Halifax performance adds a temporal layer to the work, as they recall an event. But the viewer, experiencing the current installation has access only to the artist's recollection, so builds a new memory of the event based on the current physical experience. Time and recollection are bent and redoubled by the open-endedness and repeatability of the experience, by the impossibility of an exact duplication of the event, and through physical interaction with the objects, the creation of a body memory that reaches into both the past and the future.

At another level the Parasite Collective also implicitly plays with the idea of limitations. As seen, they weave the strata of time in what they term "para-temps," which facilitate a sense of past-present and present-future. By working collaboratively they also diffuse authorial control, which they further relinquish by allowing viewers to direct their own experiences. By making choices, participants are then able to create personal meanings through their interactions. The hidden authority of the gallery space is also breached, by the non-linearity and unpredictability of the event on one hand, and on the other, through negotiation with the curator who must surrender a certain amount of jurisdiction over the exhibition site.

Limits, borders, location (and dislocation) and boundaries are explored in all of the work featured in the current exhibition. Thomas Kneubühler's photographic projects often look at those spaces we tend to take for granted, those of only passing interest to most people, unpopulated sites of exchange such as office blocks or airports. The current series Private Property/Propriété Privée (2006) presents images viewers are familiar with: deserted parking lots, brightly illuminated facades and vacated spaces.

An image in the front window of the FOFA Gallery shows the exterior of a building, blinds drawn, lit from both inside and out. The space in the photo is limited to the extreme foreground, much like the shallow space in which the photo itself is situated. The only human presence appears in another work; a security guard, half-swallowed by the night in his dark uniform, confronts the viewer and enforces order. Close-by a photograph shows an empty parking lot, while another displays a surveillance room, filled with monitors focused on empty spaces . At the base of all these images is the unseen presence of those who watch - the security personnel whose job it is to monitor this emptiness, the artist who transgresses the codes of private property, and the gallery visitor who acts as witness. Foucault's theories of surveillance have a resonance here; order, visuality and power fall into a natural equation. What becomes apparent in looking at these photos is that the lights, fences, cameras and guards are there to maintain emptiness. However, Kneubühler's presence behind the lens troubles this vigilance. In seeking these images the photographer performs an intervention, testing the penetrable nature of boundaries, and calling into question the authority that inscribes the line between public and private. Kneubühler, coming from Europe, sees this "preoccupation with security [and] the idea of private property...as a distinctive part of North America's society." As he states it, our history is to an extent based on land grabbing and the act of enclosing spaces to designate ownership, a condition that necessitates security to enforce and maintain it.

Whereas Kneubühler examines the lines between public and private/access and exclusion, Ana Rewakowicz's art explores transience and belonging and the identity issues arising from this divide. This concern is understandable when one considers that Rewakowicz is a Polish-born Ukrainian who came to Montréal via Italy and Toronto. Reflecting on displacement and survival is at the base of Rewakowicz's installation in the FOFA Gallery. One of three "You never know WEAR" designs, the SleepingBagDress (2003 - 2005) transforms from kimono to shelter with the aid of an air pump. As with the other designs, ParachuteDress and LifesaverDress , this work comments on the tenuousness of existence in an increasingly unpredictable environment and the basic needs of survival.

Rewakowicz's "inflatable dressware" takes its departure from the visionary projects of the 1960s that proposed socially responsible housing, alternative forms and portable environments. Rewakowicz especially notes the influence of the British architectural group Archigram, who used play, fun and pleasure as guiding principles and whose futurist designs revolted against Bauhaus functionalism. Inspired by Pop Art, Archigram exploited new technologies and materials in their conception of modular, mobile, single-space architectural units.

Gallery visitors are invited to occupy the shelter of the SleepingBagDress , a space large enough to accommodate two. Inside, there is a cocoon-like sense of protection and a feeling of vulnerability arising from the insubstantiality of the material. Reclining on air mattresses visitors can select between videos of the artist deploying the piece, taken during four public interventions - in Brussels, Toulouse, Tallinn (Estonia) and Mexico City. The videos document the reactions of people passing by, who are mystified, amused or intrigued by the event. The performance element of the work is as important as the object to Rewakowicz, as it is the social engagement between the viewer and the artwork that fascinates her. This work represents a search for affiliation and belonging in a global culture where the nomadic lifestyle is commonplace and the idea of "home" is continually being redefined.

Overcoming barriers between individuals also figures in the work of Andrea Vander Kooij. The social and psychic boundaries that separate self from other are deeply inscribed, and their transgression by any but our closest, tend to be viewed as aggressive and alarming. Designed to be worn by two people, Vander Kooij's Garments for Forced Intimacy (2006), are hand-knit items that, as the name states, compel the wearers into uncharacteristic proximity. The least disconcerting garment is the Glove for Holding Hands , while the balaclavas - for Looking in the Same Direction , - for Gazing , and - for Kissing , trample the boundaries of personal space. Norms for intimacy and distance vary by culture, and shift according the level of relationship people have attained. As a rule people of North European-descent maintain a greater personal space and are more touch avoidant, and North American standards generally conform to these rules.

The Garments for Forced Intimacy expose the vigilance we maintain around our bodies and draws the psychic prohibitions out into the open. According to Vander Kooij, the garments essentially create "one artificial skin that brings together two separate, other skins." In psychoanalytic thought, skin is both that which divides us from one another, but equally importantly, it is that which contains the self. Any discomfort found in the Garments for Forced Intimacy is rooted in this fact. The artificial unity forced by these clothes then, signals a potential psychic conflict, as the key to maintaining subjectivity is a stable awareness of the division between self from other.

Although issues of repression and subjectivity are raised, these garments also have a less threatening side. The material nature of these pieces, situated in the craft tradition, connects the work directly to the experience of the body. In this way the physical comprehension of the objects (through memory of time, space, touch, movement and emotion) creates an engagement that is more difficult to attain with more stringently conceptual works. Playful and flirtatious, they tease at the barriers that reinforce social alienation and "encourage us to cross the great divide ... and touch someone who might touch back."

Personal relationships, particularly the subtle power dynamics at play in the parent-child relationship, are an undercurrent in Diane Borsato's lighthearted video, Wondering How Long He Can Keep Up the World (2004). This 10-minute edit of the original 45-minute event shows the artist's father attempting to keep a soccer ball in the air using his feet, knees and head. Throughout the video Borsato cajoles, pushes and negotiates with her father to keep juggling the ball. In turn, we see her father struggle to comply, stall, bargain and finally call it quits. The humorous banter between Diane and Mario Borsato is indicative of a loving filial relationship and the video can stand as a snapshot of a moment in family life. However, like all of Diane Borsato's work, the small gesture reveals a great deal more about complex social conditions and boundaries.

As Borsato impels her father to continue, a discourse can be detected on the power relationship between father and daughter. Though we are raised with a healthy respect for paternal authority in the nuclear family, daughters can often play on their fathers' affections, subtly and harmlessly pushing back the boundaries of that authority. In persuading him to keep up the performance she plays on his willingness to please, and drives him to the limit, where they negotiate an end.

The title, Wondering How Long He Can Keep Up the World , also suggests the presence of the hero in this "durational performance." The hero archetype represents that which is fine and noble, a figure willing to sacrifice himself for the greater good, but who is often somehow flawed. The grandness of this idea stands in sly contrast to the video image of her father, who she described as "an aging, falling figure." Borsato's work tends toward mischievousness and this pairing could be read as a gentle poke at both images. But the father as hero is a construct similar to the ego ideal in psychoanalysis - an image we conceive as the ideal model of masculinity. Part of becoming an adult is the need to negotiate the failure of this ideal as our filial relationships change and recognize our own mortality in our parents' aging.

Sarah Febbraro's video Singing Portraits (2005; re-edited 2007), addresses a different type of image ideal. Febbraro solicited participation in this project through an ad in the newspaper and through word of mouth and her 19-minute video features a series of non-professional singers performing to the camera in an outdoor location of their choice. Some performers are more talented than others, but all exhibit a remarkable enthusiasm for the exercise. Off-key, out of tempo, lyrics are garbled and forgotten. Each person unintentionally presents a portrait of him or herself in their song choice, the way they perform to the camera, the location they choose and in their skill of execution.

In this work Febbraro is exposing the constructed nature of celebrity and the star-image. Her practice typically intersects art and life by involving non-artists in "fun, popular-culture based activities [that take them beyond] passively observing them on television or Youtube." She mines reality TV's ability to democratize fame and plays on the cultural desire to perform to the camera. Yet Febbraro offers the participant an opportunity to live out the fantasy on a much smaller scale, without the element of competition, judgment or audience. The singers perform to a fantasy audience, playing out an imaginative image of themselves as pop stars. In the process they display a certain vulnerability (and courage) and awaken in the viewer a sense of familiarity. She affords real bodies opportunities to insert themselves into the highly mediated image of "The Star," and thereby call into question its credibility and cultural value.

For at least the past half century the star image has been bound up with the technology that promotes and perpetuates it. Mediated through technology the body becomes, de facto, un-natural and un-fixable, and thus it can never represent the "authentic" subject. Febbraro's Singing Portraits draw attention to the chimeric quality of celebrity that can only be achieved through mimicry (of the real) and the construction of the imaginary.

In one sense or another each of the artists in Acting Between is concerned with the recuperation of the body or its experiences. Work centred on the body awakens a knowledge within the viewer, a sense of their corporeal existence and location in the world of social relations. Although small, the gestures performed in these artworks underscore Merleau-Ponty's assertion "the world is not what I think, but what I live," a notion that positions us bodily in the centre of existence.