Once Upon a Time... there were two writers

In near total darkness, the Walter Phillips Gallery seems huge and impenetrable like never before. The space is painted black, carpeted and seemingly empty - save the projection work by British artist Steve McQueen, Once Upon a Time. Images are glimmering in the distance and a soundtrack of indistinct speaking echoes through the space. The projections become fully visible on the gallery's furthest wall after our eyes forget the light of the afternoon outside and adjust to the dark expanse.

McQueen introduces his work using the familiar first line of many a fairytale, "Once upon a time," as the title. The story itself goes back to 1977, when NASA worked with Carl Sagan and a committee of 6 others to select images, diagrams, sounds, music and greetings to be included on a phonograph record aboard the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecrafts. The compilation, called the Golden Record, and the messages it carries to our neighbours out in the universe, are still hurtling through space today.

This slideshow features the entire index of images from the Golden Record, including a wide pan of our planet Earth and the Milky Way, an inventory of modes of transportation, various mathematical equations, diagrams of the human life cycle, and picture-perfect landscapes. For 70 minutes, the images cycle at the same maddeningly metered pace with a soundtrack of glossolalia superimposed by McQueen - by now, readers of Shotgun-Review.ca and Prairie Artsters will be familiar with where we are, and what we're doing there - and walking out is not an option. For me to abandon this work would mean loosing the challenge, but in a broader sense, leaving the installation before the cycle completes would be like turning one's back on human civilization.

McQueen's renaming suggests that the original is a fiction or a fairytale, something that starts innocently enough, but comes with a moral message embedded in the telling, and gains even greater poignancy in the re-telling. By showing the Golden Record under this new guise of storytelling, he invites our speculation about the original work.

As a record of human activity on the planet, the original selection of images is shockingly affirmative - it shows the many areas of human progress, innovation and the miracle of our natural capacities as living, breathing, breeding creatures. Many images of natural spaces are populated only by evidence that humans have been there, peacefully toiling away: lighthouses, simple dwellings and cultivated daffodils. Architectural feats of the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal, the Sydney Opera House and the UN Building are also represented in quick succession. Here, these iconic places are haunted by the specter of way too many Hollywood movies, and they seem to pronounce: Oh alien race, please don't destroy us! We are the fruits of human ingenuity and labour!

In retrospect, we see that the Golden Record shares its year of realization with several other monumental works of science fiction. 1977 is also the year in which Isaac Asimov founded Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, Steven Spielberg made Close Encounters of the Third Kind and George Lucas launched the Star Wars empire that would become one of the highest grossing movies of all time, and arguably the most influential in terms of its impact on popular imagination. It is from this blockbuster era of science fiction that NASA's Golden Record materializes. But even by 1976, the relationship between popular science fiction and the 'serious' stuff happening at NASA was already well established: its important test spaceship was christened "Enterprise" with cast and crew of the Star Trek television series attending.

Where the Golden Record significantly departs from other science fiction of the period, is in the radically different relationship that it proposes with whoever is 'out there.' Many of the other narratives from that time imagine vast destruction at the hands of the spacefairing strangers who the Golden Record seeks to address. If the alien beings that dwell in our imaginations and on our movie screens ever get hold of the Golden Record and figure out how to play the damn thing perhaps they'd be more benevolent.

US President Jimmy Carter certainly hopes so in his contribution to the original disk: "We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe."

Even in Carter's era, the trouble is infinitely deeper than it appears in the heavily edited Golden Record. Perhaps the mood of NASA's compilation will inspire understanding from an alien civilization, rather than the kinds of destruction that we as human beings have ravaged on each other and our planet. The question is: do we really deserve good will?

So let's presume for a moment that the audience isn't 'out there' somewhere, but instead, as McQueen has implied, here: in the gallery. The exhibition context allows us to see how the snapshot of our civilization circa 1977 seems to have been cleansed of all the things we don't like about ourselves. Missing are the images of genocide committed against First Nations peoples, of the charred bodies of Hiroshima, the results of radioactive fallout from Chernobyl. In three decades since, our record hasn't improved much. Now, we have a few more genocides, the tar sands, and gigantic piles of technological waste from the first world leaching toxic waste into the rivers - and bloodstreams - of people halfway across the world. In this act of making our experience of the world legible to others, and our complicity in this rosy view, we're also committing massive self-deception.

Perhaps we must look to McQueen's observations about his gut-wrenching film Hunger, for the complex psychological wrestling with our darker sides that the Golden Record seems to avoid at all costs. Of the film, he says, "certain things that I was interested in were not recorded in history books, that [is] what intrigues me more... I am more interested in things between the words." Or in the case of Once Upon a Time: the things between the pictures. The re-presentation of these specific pictures gives us the opportunity to read between them, to critique ourselves at a precise moment in history, and challenge the original document - not as a universal study, but as a piece of fiction.

Very short cat naps provide some relief from the meditative cycling images and audio track's frantic lullaby, and Once Upon a Time seems all the more like a far-away dream that fades in and out of focus as we try to decipher it.

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Anthea Black is co-editor of Shotgun-Review.ca

Image credits:

Steve McQueen, Once Upon a Time, 2002 Sequence of 116 slide-based colour images through a PC hard drive and rear-projected onto a screen with integrated soundtrack, 70 minutes. Images courtesy: Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

NASA, The Golden Record, 1977

NASA, The Shuttle Enterprise,The Shuttle Enterprise rolls out of the Palmdale manufacturing facilities with Star Trek television cast members. From left to right they are: Dr. James D. Fletcher, NASA Administrator, DeForest Kelley (Dr. "Bones" McCoy), George Takei (Mr. Sulu), Nichelle Nichols (Lt. Uhura), Leonard Nimoy (the indefatigable Mr. Spock), Gene Rodenberry (The Great Bird of the Galaxy), and Walter Koenig (Ensign Pavel Checkov). 1976

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Image credit information updated July 2, 2009.

Steven McQueen, Once Upon A Time. Walter Phillips Gallery. April 25 - July 5, 2009. Reviewed by Amy Fung

Please refer to this article for the set-up.

In Once Upon A Time (2002), UK/Amsterdam-based film/video artist Steve
McQueen revisits a fairy tale narrative of epic proportions. In 1977, a
team spearheaded by NASA and American astronomist Carl Sagan took on the
grand and presumptuous task of assembling an archive of images and
sounds to represent the scope of human civilization. Launched aboard the
Voyager spacecraft, which after thirty years in space, theoretically
remains the farthest human-made object from our planet, Sagan's
selection for this archive could potentially stand as the sole story of
humanity.

The Golden Record, as it remains known, contains 116 images, along with
natural sounds such as whales and thunder, and greetings recorded in 55
languages by men and women, along with official greetings by then-newly
elected American President Jimmy Carter. McQueen, who continues to
subtly devastate our presupposed notions of image as truth,
reappropriates all 116 original images for recontextualization. Rather
than standing as an emblem of humanity's complexities and achievements,
O.U.A.T takes the same set of images, and forces a contemporary
meditation on the evolution of individual ego and collective alienation.

Viewed today, Sagan's record reads as the ultimate token of
self-aggrandizing myth making. Very actively choosing to represent the
story of the world beginning with human beings as the absolute central
focus of the planet, the record's American-centricism simply cannot but
reveal itself through what has been chosen as the most important factors
to communicate and remember. The elements and environment appear under
complete resolve and human control; images of the natural world are
branded with a scale in the metric system, magnifying species to
designate each image back to human relation. Within the representation
of human civilization, issues of race, sex, gender, and class appear to
harmoniously co-exist together. Any historical markers such as
territority, religion, and other traits of culture and ethnographies
become interchangable or simply non issues.

There is a closed system of narrative storytelling, focusing blindly on
the organization of humanity with no self-reflexivity or irony. A
section of images on the evolution of housing and architecture first
shows an image of a dark man building with bricks. The image is in mid
shot, with the half wall of bricks and mortar and his face dominating
the frame. Its relation to its surroundings is unexplained, communicating
very little beyond its relation to the next image of finished houses
built of different materials on the other side of the world.
Transitioning into ever more complex structures jumping time and space
to exterior far shots of the Taj Mahal and Sydney Opera House, McQueen
emphatically points to the problem of non-contextualized image
signification. Each image does not speak to each building's function,
history, or place. Assembled together, it is taken for granted that
through image alone, a viewer will be able to configure human logic
based on sequential image-based narration. Only, what do these images
signify to people, not even alien life form, but people living outside
of the Western culture? Human achievements, in this light, ultimately
require and uphold knowledge of codes and egos that only reinforce the
system that doles its praise and value. Presenting the images as a
lulling slide show, a form that is more conducive to pedantic
storytelling of yesteryears, McQueen attempts to open up the system by
re-engaging us with these highly socialized and standarized images of
normal human beings, who are mostly white, and male, reproduce, harvest,
build houses, play cello, and barbeque.

Situated a top Tunnel Mountain Drive at the Walter Phillips Gallery, the
solo exhibition of O.U.A.T. marks one of the more memorably pilgrimmages
to Banff. The setting plays a far greater influence for this work
especially, as visitors to the WPG make the effort and trek for an
experience of art, which for the lack of a better description, is an
affect that moves and arrests both thought and emotion. Completely
taking over the entire space and transforming the multisectioned room
into a cave, the space itself becomes an integral factor in the
experience of the show. With a single long bench amidst a sea of
carpeting and a luminous floor to ceiling screen, the viewer is forced
into an immersion of image and sound within a relaxed setting. Taking a
moment to first adjust to the slow flickering light of images in
transition, the dull song of imperceptible noises, reminiscent of human
voices speaking one after the other in an indistinguisable language
begin babbling into rhythm with the slow cyclical effect of the rotating
images. While McQueen has retained Sagan's choice of images, he has
converted the audio of greetings spoken in 55 languages into glossalia,
or more commonly known as speaking in tongues. Trance-inducing in pace
and tonation, with the slow transition of sequential imagery, glossalia
invokes mental states of fervor, where the mind supposedly shuts down to
a pre-linguistic state as one is overcome.

Sagan's project was deemed visionary at the time, as a gesture of human
greatness for alien communication, but also fulfilling the role of time
capsule for future generations. Situated in its history, human
civilization, most notably, American civilization, was at an ideological
peak. At the forefront of the space race, the United States's was the
first country to put a man on the moon, which when read from a
postcolonial lens, streamlined inito Sagan's mythologization of the
human race through an Americanized-centric narrative. As a blank slate,
here was the opportunity to communicate and fabricate the story of human
beings. Only, there were no images of famines, wars, or even natural
disasters recorded. The intersectionality and complexities of humanity
were classified rather than abstracted. The inherent problem of Sagan's
record is its hegemonic positioning, especially from a country that
played a pivotal role during one of the bloodiest eras in human history.
McQueen's title plays up the moral-laden narrative that told the story
of earth as it once was. Only as an critical comment less than thirty
years later, it remains clear the repercussions of ideology continually
reverberate.

Cross-posted with Anthea Black on Prairie Artsters.com June 8, 2009

- A.F. Edmonton

It's a small big world

Landscape art as an umbrella category for any art form depicting or concentrating on scenery cuts out a big chunk of the substance of art history whether it involves sculpture, architecture or landscape painting. Why is landscape continually so appealing to artists? Christine Cheung, in answer to the question "how does your subconscious process of laying down painted marks always move toward depictions of landscapes or scenes?" says that she watched her father learn to paint traditional Chinese landscapes as a child. She then says that landscape is a way to paint portraits of people without having to paint faces. Painting the place rather than the person explores more than just a moment of where that person is in their life. It can expand upon the entire process of forming identity: of how individuals are influenced by political and geographical climates; of how their spiritual views affect the surrounding nature; whether they feel at home or alien; of how their desires are projected onto the land, and where we are heading as a society. "Place" is integral to our sense of self, as geographer and writer Yi-Fu Tuan has explored throughout his career. Each artist in the exhibition At Variance, in interviews with Erin Belanger and in keeping with Lucy Lippard's well trusted definition, has defined "place" as a complex network of influences- terrain, routines, artifacts, people, politics-which are continually reshaping each other.1

Marcy Adzich's sculptures offer imaginative land/sky/toy-scapes. It's like gazing in on a multi-level dollhouse or the world of a snail riding on the back of a mossy turtle shell. Adzich is interested in the transition of scale when "space becomes small enough to be an object, and objects become large enough to be considered space."2 Although Adzich's constructed spaces are too small to enter, they are large and replete enough to still be considered a "place." If our eyes can "feel" or distinguish different touches and surfaces through tactile memory as some architects insist, just by looking at the sculptures we can imagine being an inhabitant in them. She uses hobbyists' miniature grass, fences and trees to cover bloated surfaces made of paper mache or mylar balloons. Their forms often resemble round animal bodies and parts such as a moose antler, a duck, an udder, a swan and even a platypus. Once more, these organic forms resemble hills, cliffs, plateaus and other relief covered with mini trees, spray paint textures of land and sky, and tiny wood shingles or bricks.

Dead Swan by Marcy Adzich. Mixed Media. 2008.

Adzich references 17 C still-life paintings which embraced the piling up of ripe "stuff" including food, hunting game, house ware and flora in the foreground, with undulating vistas in the background. These historical still life paintings conflated the ideas of land and objects the way that contemporary roadside bargain tables and flea markets offer a slightly different array of knick-knacks and historical artifacts depending on where you are on the map. For instance, the pieces of wood cut furniture, party balloons, ribbons, tissue paper and fake flowers in Adzich's pieces suggest a setting for celebration, a basement party, or a parade float somewhere in Canadian cottage country. The artist's sculptures are micro landscapes that put the viewer in the position of "outside looking in" on a world separate from them. But the paradoxical element is that the artificial landscape of the piece is made on the surface of what in our real environment, is as small as an object. Together, they question whether we prefer being separate from our environment, looking in on it, or if we immerse ourselves in material culture in order to identify with "place" and feel integrated into the scene.

Christine Cheung also considers metaphorical or fictional places in her acrylic paintings and asks whether place is necessarily different for every individual. Although she developed the works in different locations such as Indonesia, Hong Kong and Calgary, she is aware that places are not definite things in themselves, and chooses to find instances where different histories and cultures blend in one place, requiring new hybrid definitions. In this way, she chose to paint a scene outside her hotel window in Indonesia, of the local Chinatown, which to her, seemed to evoke a Japanese atmosphere or aesthetic. The Circle Game looks at a group of figures in school uniforms, some with hijabs, holding hands in a courtyard. The headscarves are described in quick white circles leaving the paint underneath to convey an invisible face. Despite their various dress codes the children all blend together resembling Matisse's dancing figures. This was another scene Cheung captured in Indonesia where Muslim and non-Muslim school children were learning a game. Painting from various sources or memories, leading a diasporic lifestyle, and finding instances where markers of the local are misplaced and confusing, has allowed Cheung to probe a "type of estrangement or reconciliation with the place we are seeing and what we would like to see."3

Surrey - Waiting for it by Christine Cheung. Acrylic on canvas. 24" by 20"

Most of the paintings in the show convey a sense of fluidity, drifting, disappearance, and becoming in Cheung's layering of washes of blue's, whites, and watery colors. Sometimes she will use a thick stroke or drip of paint for compositional dynamics. These marks obliterate what's underneath, as decisions are made when mapping out the place, whether or not a painted gesture (indicating signs, trees or buildings) belongs. Writer Yi-Fu Tuan, mentioned earlier, distinguishes art alone as a "surrogate place" which offers a subjective grasp, or stable hold on ideas of home which in reality are changing, ever more global centers or "non-places."4 Cheung hopes that her art may be able to occupy a "place" where people feel neither totally united nor separated by culture.

Howe's work Bow River Topograph takes a distant perspective on the process of how space is made into place. From an aerial view, the viewer stands above stacks of white office paper arranged in a grid on the floor. The packages are unopened, unaltered except where Howe has cut the twisting, looping trace of the Bow River. Here, the artist's hand "drawn" or cut lines into each piece of paper form vertical depth into the layers. This activity as the only mark upon the map is also the only place where nature limits the otherwise flat, geometrical surface of the earth, ready for human development. The time Howe has spent finding unique paths on each subsequent layer of paper mimics the slow process of nature defining the form of the planet.

Bow River Topograph by Beth Howe. Office Paper. 2009.

Unlike the other two artists' works in the exhibition, Bow River Topograph is empty of descriptive symbols of place. Howe in her statement talks about emotional or psychological attachments to places, which necessarily develop over time. Her piece asks whether there are traces of these temporal relationships left behind in physical form or if the form of the land itself indicates in a derivative way what kind of psychology the people of the land come to adopt. In her piece, the only trace of human activity appearing on the landscape is a grid division of space into regular quadrants and the whitewashing of all variety. Howe seems to be stripping the land bare of everything except its base structure or topography to see how this might exist in its own right, and how everything we do rests atop a map of predetermined paths. The piece also offers the contemplation of what physical traces we as a city or civilization will leave behind or whether most of our daily activity is rendered invisible from a distant perspective in time.

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1 L. Lippard in "Out of Place" defines place as "a cultural landscape or cityscape, formed when culture and nature, politics and lives, meet in an almost surreal process to form a new entity." Retrieved June 3, 2009, from www.robbinsbecher.com/LippardArticle.pdf

2 Belanger, Erin. Interview with Marcy Adzich. May 2009.

3 Belanger, Erin. Interview with Christine Cheung. May 2009.

4 Beth Howe in her interview for At Variance: "Marc Auge has this idea of 'Non-Places' which bears on that: a non-place is a space that no one has emotional connection to, it's interchangeable with other spaces of its type: airports, chain restaurants off the freeway, the freeway itself. Non-places are familiar because they are all the same, they make us comfortable because we know how they work no matter where they are, but we don't tend to form attachments or histories or feel invested in these spaces."