THE SYSTEM OF ALLUSIONS
curator : Marie-JosÉe Jean
From May 7 to June 25 2005. Opening on Saturday 7 at 4:00 pm.
exhibition views
Cory Arcangel, Michel de Broin, Stan Douglas, Kevin Schmidt
by Marie-Josée Jean
There are numerous artistic practices that appropriate
or mimic pre-existing images, drawn from the vast bank
of them that makes up visual culture. A considerable
number of artists are thus abandoning the work of representing
reality, in its immediate, direct form, now preferring
to reference this inexhaustible reserve of images. Those
attempting to trace the origins of this aesthetic often
point to the rhetoric of the ready-made—to the famous
appropriation by Marcel Duchamp of a mechanical reproduction
of the Mona Lisa—and to the allegorical nature of collage
and photomontage as practiced by the artists of the
avant-garde. And yet, this “new” imaginative space had
already been observed in the 19th century by Gustave
Flaubert, for whom, as Michel Foucault writes, “A true
image is now a product of learning. It derives from
words spoken in the past, exact recensions, the amassing
of minute facts, monuments reduced to infinitesimal
fragments, and the reproductions of reproductions. In
the modem experience, these elements contain the power
of the impossible.”1 This relationship to
the world of Bouvard and Pécuchet, essentially
a relationship to the authority of books—educational
works, encyclopedias, literary works, philosophical
essays, scientific texts, holy scripture—speaks eloquently
to that shift, from the reference drawn from reality
to that drawn from books. However, that imaginative
space is not erected against reality; on the contrary,
it takes shape in the space of existing books and is
superimposed on the real world to turn it into a domain
of added experiences. Like the library, the image society
is a monument to knowledge and an incubator of experience.
Can we not today consider that the so-called real world
has also become the sum of the images by which it is
shown to us, be they fictional or not?
The many references to pictures in artistic practices
since the 1960s would seem to suggest so. Several artists—all
of them contemporaneous with a society in which reality
is increasingly duplicated by signs—appropriate existing
images or reproduce their codes and conventions, often
with the goal of challenging the experience models to
which they are today submitted by advertising, reproductions
of works in print publications, and the cinema. This
attitude, manifest in the work of several American artists—John
Baldessari, Dara Birnbaum, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine,
Richard Prince, and Cindy Sherman among them—also provided
opportunities, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, to
begin explorations of originality, feminism, identity,
and the effects of colonialism, as well as reinterpret
works from art history. As such, this attitude can be
said to rest on a symbolic process of incorporation
of visual culture. On the one hand it presents the possibility
of appropriating for oneself the aesthetic stakes and
allegiances to which the artists lay claim, or else
to differentiate oneself from them. On the other, it
is symptomatic of a subjectivity now marked by an experience
of the world that is image-mediated: every subject perceives
the world around her through a cultural and historic
screen made up of a repository of images and signifiers
that condition her ways of seeing and thinking. This
vast bank of images eventually ramifies into a referential
system that is irrevocably incorporated into our experience
of the world. In the sphere of the visual arts, this
process of incorporation has, more often than not, critical
designs. Most of the artists who reference existing
images in their work deploy a conceptual apparatus that
affords them the distancing necessary to add meaning
to the incorporated reference. A good number of current
photography and videography practitioners are engaged
in uncovering the rhetorical strategies of producers
of global images; deconstructing the formal codes and
conventions of Hollywood films or TV images; or undermining
advertising imagery by parodying its tactics, mimicking
its slogans or criticizing its stereotypes. This use
of reference, so important in art today, offers artists
an efficient means of observing visual culture and questioning
its role in the production of meaning and ideology.
Artists deploy many means to signal the presence of
a reference in their works. Explicit reference markers
are often visible in titles, either through literal
citation, indication of origin, or the use of italics
or quotation marks. Most often, though, the reference
must be divined based on a network of more or less precise
clues. This is true in the case of each of the four
artists brought together for this exhibition. The works
shown by Cory Arcangel, Michel de Broin, Stan Douglas,
and Kevin Schmidt use the allusive power of the image
to subtly lay bare the social structures, systems of
production, or aesthetic conventions that engendered
them. In that sense, the allusion might be viewed as
a thematic clue based on which these artists’ works
establish a dialogue. Indeed this figure of thought
does seem well suited to defining an aesthetic attitude
that includes all practices that are reliant on a referential
mechanism. Allusion has traditionally been defined as
a combinatorial way of thinking that deploys the resources
of implicit discourse to name something that is related
to something else without stating it explicitly. In
that sense it is a risky statement because its referential
content is likely to be lost on anyone who lacks the
necessary knowledge or mental acuity to decode it. Further,
it is intrinsically linked to the fact that culture
is a social institution, custodian of collective memory
and shared knowledge. As defined by Antoine Compagnon,
however, allusion has taken on a new meaning since its
description by contemporary theorists, according to
the logic of “intertextuality” as referring to any device
that places two or more texts in relation to one another.2
There is a subtle shift in focus from the source of
the allusion to the relationship that it produces. Before,
allusion was a justification of erudite knowledge of
sources; now it encourages intertextual and semiotic
analysis of the relationships between “statements that
allude to” and “statements alluded to.” The consequence,
Compagnon continues, is that “explicit references are
now treated as allusional signals to the same
degree as implicit references.”3 This explains how allusion
has evolved into a global category that borrows a diversity
of means including appropriation, citation, reconstitution,
transposition and remaking to establish a variety of
relationships between the statements.4 In this sense,
allusion is here compared to a dynamic system whose
components have interdependent relationships to one
another whose effects varying according to their type.
Thus allusion is used by all the artists in this exhibition
to posit a relationship between the work and its reference,
so as to have their meaning rest on experience models
that we are likely to recognize: Stan Douglas borrows
from filmmaking techniques to transform a Vancouver
street into a static and strange standing set; Kevin
Schmidt employs a pastiche of adspeak to lay bare its
contrivances; Cory Arcangel appropriates early videogame
imagery to create an unexpected experience of landscape;
Michel de Broin reproduces the minimalist shapes that
he occasionally finds in public spaces. Their works
also afford us the opportunity to examine the gap separating
the work from the referenced work, so as to understand
the critical stance subtending this re-production—which
may be ironic, sarcastic, imitative or admiring, but
which rarely remains indifferent to the model to which
it refers allusively. There are many who criticize these
kinds of allusive practices because of their use of
detours punctuated by references (impenetrable, to the
critics’ eyes) to get to the meaning of the work. On
the contrary: the use of allusion stems most often from
a desire to more actively involve the spectator in its
interpretation. The difficulty, perhaps, lies more in the effort that is demanded.
1. Michel Foucault: “Fantasia of the Library.” Translation
by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. In Michel
Foucault: Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected
Essays and Interviews, Donald F. Bouchard, ed.
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 87109.
2. He references English- and German-speaking theorists,
among others, such as Udo J. Hebel, author of “Towards
a Descriptive Poetics of Allusion.” Antoine Compagnon,
“L’allusion et le fait littéraire,” quoted in L’allusion
dans la littérature (Paris: Presses de l’Université
de Paris-Sorbonne, 2000). The author had previously
conducted an exhaustive of study on citation; see La
seconde main, ou, Le travail de la citation (Paris:
Seuil, 1979).
3. Compagnon, p. 246 [our translation].
4. Here this remark of Compagnon’s is particularly apt:
“[C]ontrary to Genette’s system, allusion encompasses
citation. Therefore it does not merely point back at
the text alluded to, as to a footnote, but
enriches the text containing the allusion through associations
and connotations that are unlimited and unforeseeable,
like thick alluvial deposits.” Compagnon, p. 247 [our
translation].
This text is an excerpt adapted from the essay “The
System of Allusions” to be published in an anthology
by Gallery 44 and YYZ Books.
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credit : VOX
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