Shell Shock and Compassion Fatigue -- "Diabolique: Part 1"

On the front of the Regina Public Library, across the several glass panes of its facade, float numerous line drawings. At first glance, they resemble graffiti and evoke the scrawlings on restroom walls: their forms are childlike and clumsy, but their lines are obviously created by an adult who knows how to manipulate a drawing implement with heavy strokes and constant pressure.

The drawings are by Romanian artist Dan Perjovschi, and that constant pressure is found not merely in their formal characteristics but also in their behaviour as drawings. They provide no break for the viewer, no linear narrative or flow on which to rely, so they behave almost like anonymous dispatches on a large, public bulletin board. They often address the space neutrally, as mass-media and advertising tend to do, occasionally breaking form to confront both the viewer and their situation directly. On the door to the building is one that says "CONGRATULATION YOU ARE ENTERING A LIBRARY"--upon entering, I was surprised to see them again, every bit as legible as before, reflected by the building's second set of glass panes on the other side of the foyer.

Entering the space further, one encounters the Dunlop Art Gallery and the body of the exhibition, a set of works hung largely in accordance with typical museum practice and subsequently in sharp contrast to Perjovschi's markings and Bogdan Achimescu's innumerable sketches elsewhere in the building (titled *stan).

Strolling among the works in the exhibition, I was struck in particular by my desire to quickly categorize each work as either a confession of personal trauma or a fantasy of vicarious trauma. Subsequently, I found myself thinking back to Tim Etchells' faux-manifesto of performance called On Risk and Investment, in which he says: "I ask [of the artist]: 'Are you bound up with this?' 'Or is it the shape of a passion and the noise of a politics?' 'Are you at risk in this?' That's all I want to know."

What I mean is that some of the works are raw, base expressions of resentment, disappointment, or anger such as Balint Zsako's white-on-black works. Comprised of what are perhaps the most obvious of war-related forms from the last 50 years (prisoners awaiting execution, a helicopter, a skeleton, etc.), as drawings they are direct and indelicate--guileless. There is some additional content, though, present in the process of their creation, in that Zsako makes the drawings using ink on a film negative, and then enlarges the image onto photographic paper, inverting its tones. Zsako, therefore, undermines his own presence and proposes his own futility as an artist; where he has made a mark is precisely where the surface remains unchanged.

But consider this attitude in relationship to Fawad Khan's wall-spanning Datsun Sunny Dissonance and the confession/fantasy binary I saw throughout the show comes sharply into focus. Khan's painting of a bursting Datsun taxicab is constructed, and obviously so, with the negative context and consequences of a car bomb nowhere to be seen. The flameless, bloodless, bodiless explosion looks almost fun, and recalls comicbooks in its visual style and vocabulary (complete with trajectory lines for the various fragments flying around). The camo-patterned strands extending out of the top of the car resemble legs less than they do the air-filled vinyl tube-men used to advertise auto dealerships. The work therefore seems to propose, in its fantastically harmless explosivity, a kind of Terrorism Lite--all the excitement of a car bomb with none of the side effects.

Another of what I would term the more vicarious works in the show, Douglas Coupland's Gorgon dominates the exhibition space as an eight-foot assemblage of oversized toy soldiers. The soldiers are frozen in a kind of endless mélange/mêlée, torsos combined and legs protruding in all directions. Within the library, children seem immediately drawn to this particular piece; as I stood in the space, a trio of boys rushed exuberantly towards it, unaware of any menace or controversy proposed by the work. I remain skeptical that any such content is indeed present to begin with, however, as the work seems to rely upon familiarity and affect without actually proposing anything substantive. Within the child-riddled context of the library, though, the work sways towards a dialogue of fragility and the work of art--my first thought at the running boys was not that they might be harmed, but that they could easily damage the fiberglass sculpture.

To the side of Coupland's work is Dana Claxton's Gunplay (Part Two), a video in which the artist repeatedly pulls the trigger of a brightly coloured toy gun. Addressing directly the convolution of fantasy and reality vis-a-vis conflict, the work transforms the threat of violence to one of mere annoyance (try as I might, I was unable to ignore the incessant clicking of the plastic gun while looking at the other works on display). Gone from this work are the rage and demand of her earlier video I Want To Know Why (1994), as Claxton now addresses the camera coldly but with a hint of mischief, or perhaps of mock displeasure.

Where vicarious trauma and visceral loss fused for me, though, were in the three included pieces of Nancy Spero's War Series (1968). Spero's raw treatment of her brushed media and the lack of pretense in her iconography express a shattering disillusionment like no other works in the exhibition, and evoke a Käthe Kollwitz-like grief. Although Spero observed the distant war in Vietnam that inspired this series only through the television and news media, there is an immediacy to the artist's stroke that suggests that she was deeply affected--even personally traumatized--by the conflict of others.

The exhibition as a whole jumps from specific war to general conflict, from the aggressor's guilt to the victim's loss, and from slick, sexy-but-detached art pieces to deep and meaningful engagements with the subject. After spending time in the gallery, I had the sense that I had been turned around and toyed with--that any linear argument or narrative, or even a consistent thesis, that I could have expected from this kind of exhibition hadn't appeared. But then, in an exhibition about conflict and turmoil, what would be the point of peaceful consistency?

"Diabolique: Part 1" runs from July 17th to August 30, 2009 at the Dunlop Art Gallery in Regina, SK -- "Diabolique: Part 2" runs from September 4 to October 18, 2009
Curated by Amanda Cachia

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Images:
1 - Dan Perjovschi's drawings sprawl across the front of the Regina Public Library
2 - Balint Zsako, Untitled, 2008 (detail)
3 - Fawad Khan, Datsun Sunny Dissonance, 2009
4 - Douglas Coupland, The Gorgon, 2003 (detail)
5 - Dana Claxton, Gunplay (Part Two), 2007 (detail/video still)
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Lee Henderson is a contemporary artist and essayist from Saskatchewan.