Monika Szewczyk
Departures From Death
- Judy Radul: Downes Point and So Departed (Again)
- Presentation House Gallery, 17 September to 30 October 2005
It could be said that contemporary art lives off death—the death of painting, the avant-garde, irony, and (doubtlessly soon) relational aesthetics—to name a few of the current preoccupations. Or I should specify that it is the ghosts of paintings’ past, the unfinished avant-gardes, and their furtive, regicidal ironies that continue to haunt current art production. Judy Radul’s two multiple-projection video works, on view at Presentation House Gallery in North Vancouver, could be seen as paradigmatic in this respect as they deal so clearly with death and the departed. But to stop there, with the fact of Radul’s dealing with death and afterlife, could miss the unique aspect of her practice; namely, a notion of experimenting with the world that seems in short supply today.1 This notion of experiment, an open encounter with the world I detect in Radul’s practice, is often foreclosed by the all too melancholy death drives of contemporary art (not to mention the lively but lame forms of participation that many relational works politely enforce). Radul’s route to experiment is virtually free of the prevailing nostalgia for too hastily consumed artistic vanguards or some coming notions of community because it primarily interrogates presence. Even when she stages her experiments in the most romantic of settings, her work is not grounded in the fond, disarming recognition that so often links subjectivities. Infused with an undecided quality, the work foregrounds our confrontation with common concepts that remain abstract (such as nature, death and the base materiality of objects). And by introducing a kind of obscurity, a slightly cryptic quality to the identity of subjects through the processes of rehearsal and audition (as provisional activities that embody a changing mind), what she may be said to advance is an abstraction without the memory of Malevich (or at least without the mere/misguided worship of his monochrome as an icon).
If abstraction was once deployed by the Suprematists and Constructivists to pave the way for change in their world, these particular geometries may no longer hold the revolutionary sway, having long ago become part of the nostalgic canon. But what if the abstractions of yesteryears are (in sly samizdat style) masked in representation Although I suspect that Judy Radul’s work is not bound for social revolution—true experiments being by definition without bounds—her art continues to foreground the bare geometries that in turn animate, expose and open up already improvisational behavior.
In her latest work, Downes Point (2005), the viewer is implicated in a precise geometry of viewing. Three projectors on the one side and two on the other cast two corresponding panoramic views onto two facing walls. On one of these panoramic images, a motley company of characters assembles in a sublime arbutus grove on Hornby Island, situated within a two hour, three ferry drive and ferry trip from Vancouver. This group of individuals wait, listen, and then respond to the existential musing and elemental instructions of a man with the gait of a stage director (played by the only professional actor on the set). He is seen on the opposite wall amidst more arbutus trees, recorded by another two cameras that were pointed in the opposite direction. The forest space is thereby almost entirely “covered,” as they would say in cinema or the newsroom. Five cameras produce two composite panoramic views recast on two facing walls by five similarly distributed projectors inside the gallery (see diagram). By entering the space where Downes Point is projected, viewers inhabit a rectilinear field completed by two benches placed perpendicular to the two parallel screens. We’re back to the square then, although the scene is not recognizably constructivist.
Attention! What you see here is only an excerpt of a longer article. The full text appears in printed copies of the magazine. To purchase the issue of Fillip in which this article appears, please visit one of our many retailers worldwide, or contact us directly. You can also purchase a PDF of the full text of this article for $2cdn via Paypal. The PDF will be emailed within 24 hours of your received payment.
About this Article
Departures From Death was first published in Fillip 2 in Winter 2006. For more articles from this issue, see the Table of Contents.
Monika Szewczyk writes on contemporary art and is Assistant Curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery, where she recently co-curated Classified Materials: Accumulations, Archives, Artists.
Notes
The views expressed in Fillip are not necessarily those of the editorial board or the Projectile Publishing Society.
All content appearing on this website is copyright to the authors, artists, editors, and the Projectile Publishing Society, or is published with permission of the copyright holders. No part of this site may be reproduced, copied, or transmitted in any form or by any means without express written permission.