The other night, I went to a much-hyped
performance by Vancouver-based artist Gareth
Moore at the Power Plant. Moore's part of that priveleged cabal of
next-generation Vancouver conceptualists represented almost exclusively, it
seems, by Catriona Jeffries, whose stable includes international art stars like
Brian Jungen and Geoffrey Farmer, among others.
So Moore's reputation -- by
association, at least -- preceded him. But that's not why I went. I was
intrigued by Moore's contribution to the current Power Plant show of Canadian
sculpture, Nothing to Declare. All the other artists -- somewhat naturally, it
being a sculpture show -- offered actual objects, rough-hewn and workaday
though they may have been. Moore, by contrast, offered an opportunity: He
installed an unassuming suggestion box in the gallery, complete with paper and
pencil, entreating viewers to offer ideas he would later try to execute.
That happens next week. This week's
performance was the warm-up, and it was a little worrying. Moore casts himself,
according to the gallery description, as "(W)orking in the tradition of
the journeyman apprentice and the itinerant artist/storyteller." It's an
intriguing notion, to be sure, and one with obvious roots in a early conceptual
practice of the late 60s and early 70s, where a bleak, worldwide recession
coupled with the sudden deflation of an art market gone mad (sound familiar?)
helped spur a generation of young rogues to shift art-making away from objects
and into ephemeral manifestation:
Stanley Brouwn counted his footsteps on long meanders through cities; Bas Jan
Ader rode his bike into an Amsterdam canal (writing in the New
Yorker on a MoMA show of such work last year, critic Peter Schjeldahl summed up the ethos of the period nicely: “it
scarcely mattered what you did,” he wrote, “so long as it wasn’t much, and you
documented it.”)
In his recent performance, Moore seemed
to take this to heart. He spent nearly half of the hour-long experience
unpacking his bags (he had just arrived from India; they were brightly-coloured
woven synthetic, items spilling out the top). Slowly, he arranged them on the
table and the floor – a ragged blanket, a multi-coloured plunger, a candle, a
package of drinking straws, a bundle of grass, the dessicated corpse of a rat.
“There are some things I’ve found on my
travels,” he mumbled. The crowd grew restless, pained expressions creasing
foreheads around the room. A couple of yawns escaped as Moore fiddled with a
tape recorder, and a small film projector throwing indistinct images low on the
wall in the corner. Moore, silent for much of the event, would occasionally
murmur something about where he found some of his objects; when he knelt to
alter their arrangement on the floor, the audience would stand and lean forward
in anticipation, hanging on his tiniest gestures, hoping that something,
anything, would happen.
But there was no build, no climax –
just Moore, mumbling, fidgeting, seeming to be trying as hard to make sense of
his grab-bag of objects and experiences as the rest of us. Which surely says
something about the general dislocation of being cast adrift in a world of
post-modern otherness; but as a viewing experience, it’s excruciating.
Afterwards, speaking with some of the
artists that had made the trip through the snow, we wondered if in fact the
point of the performance was at least partially a forced surrender to the
artist’s authority for its own sake, just to
give it its own presence -- that the piece’s content void was a deliberate test of
what an audience would endure when being told they were coming to something
significant, important. This is art only in context, not form or intent; the point, it seemed, was confounding
expectations, and then completely deflating them.
That’s
a bleak view of an artist whose object-making can compel, in its scavenger-like
simulations of a post-apocolyptic hunter-gatherer, so I’ll give him the benefit
of the doubt. After all, Moore is surrendering authority in taking suggestions
from the public; whether the performance was meant as a corrective balance, or something
else entirely, I can’t say. I hope to meet with Moore next week, so I’ll ask
him.
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