PART II
Kathleen Ritter Guillermo Trejo
January 24–March 7, 2015 Access Gallery Curated by Kimberly Phillips
PART II
Kathleen Ritter Guillermo Trejo
January 24–March 7, 2015 Access Gallery Curated by Kimberly Phillips
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Acknowledgements
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Revenants Kimberly Phillips
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Dear Common: Abridged, A Bridge Stephen Collis
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Repeat, Revolt, Remember Andrea Torreblanca
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Images
64
List of Works
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Biographies
Acknowledgements I am grateful to both Kathleen Ritter and Guillermo Trejo for their commitment to this exhibition, for the shared space of dialogue they helped to create together, and for their work which has been an inspiration to present to our audiences. This project has also been wonderfully “thickened” by the textured writings of Stephen Collis and Andrea Torreblanca, and I thank them for their generous engagement. Additionally I thank Ian Wallace, whose spirited contribution to our public artist talk offered a rigorous frame through which to unpack issues of political revolt, repetition, and distance. Access gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Province of BC through the BC Arts Council and BC Gaming, the City of Vancouver, the Audain Foundation, and that of our committed donors, members, and volunteers. My gratitude also goes to Fine Art Framing for their support of this exhibition. Finally I wish to thank Access Gallery’s committed staff for their assistance in the realization of this project, particularly curatorial assistant Emma Metcalfe Hurst, preparator Alex Pichler, photographer Alina Senchenko, special projects intern Angela Yan, and book designer Chelsey Doyle, whose layout has brought a quiet intelligence to this lasting record of the Far Away So Close series.
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Kathleen Ritter gratefully acknowledges the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for their support of this project, and wishes to thank Tanya Battel for her generous assistance in the shorthand transcriptions. Guillermo Trejo also acknowledges the Canada Council for the Arts for its ongoing support of his practice, Justine Bell for her support, and Chris Simonite for being the artist’s third and fourth hand during this project.
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Far Away So Close is a series of exhibitions, publications, and events that explores the idea of distance, considers the bridging of distance as an ultimately quixotic gesture, and investigates the particular relationship of this gesture to art making. Presented over the course of 2014–15 at Access Gallery, each installment features emergent artists who draw upon a variety of modes, materials, and methodologies, and whose practices are scattered across the globe. Part II is focused on the revolutionary utterance and the idea of revolt. Here, Paris-based Kathleen Ritter and Ottawa-based Guillermo Trejo explore different moments of this utterance—the call to arms, the “day after tomorrow”— as well as the idea of “revolutionary becoming,” and their resonance long after the events themselves have passed. Their works consider the roles of opacity, subterfuge and repetition in moments of revolt, and query ways in which the creative act itself may above all be akin to the desire for political upheaval and change: resigned to the possibility of failure and yet driven by an insuppressible hope.
* Consider the etymology of the term “revolution.” We may take for granted its current political meaning, but early usage of the word, which entered the English language in the fourteenth century from French and Latin antecedents meaning “to revolve,” suggested a rotating movement in space and time, a cyclical turn.1 Studies of the word’s shift in meaning track its complex path from the sense of a circular movement to that of a political rising. They suggest
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that its evolution, over the course of the seventeenth century, was linked to the popular image of life’s Wheel of Fortune, where the normal distribution of power as that of the high over the low and which was, “as a matter of course, certain to change places.”2 As political and literary historian Christopher Hill notes, “one characteristic of the [term’s] earlier sense is that a revolution is circular, returning to its starting point: the historical process is circular.”3 We might hypothesize, therefore, that lodged deeply within the word’s very architecture—and despite our current understanding of it as a decisive rupture or break with the past, or an overthrow of the established political order—is this notion of coming back round, of a cycle of returns. From the perspective of the political left, this sense of a circular return, a revolving, is a familiar one. We remember, of course, the opening lines of Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto, which announce with portent the inevitability of the proletarian revolution (“Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa—das Gespenst des Kommunismus [A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism]”) and Derrida’s forewarning, uttered soon after communism’s pronounced death in 1989, that this ghost may be with us yet. “A question of repetition: a specter is always a revenant,” he cautions. “One cannot control its comings and goings because it begins by coming back.”4 Are we bound, then, to revisit the revolutions of the past? If so, in what ways is their residue visible? In a talk given in Vancouver in 2008, the artist and feminist Mary Kelly spoke of what she called 10
the “political primal scene”: the idea that our identity is
shaped by the imagined failure of our parents to enact the revolution, which, consequently, creates a sense of lack. “The questions of origins, of where we come from, includes not only the family saga, but the grand narrative of social change, and for both, the answer revolves around something missing—a lack in the past that makes a claim on the present and the future.”5 Kelly’s theory is compelling from the point of view of this exhibition, whose central purpose is to consider the visual and material utterance produced within the revolutionary moment, and to query its efficacy (and repeated reenactments) in moments long distant from events themselves. How is a moment of revolt
Kathleen Ritter Revolt (The struggle continues), 2014 Detail
taken over by its subsequent representations? What lives on (or returns) after the moment after? In the face of this lack of, or distance from, what can be uttered? And to what end? Kathleen Ritter and Guillermo Trejo consider some of these questions in response to that space. Kathleen Ritter’s Revolt is a series of large format, two-colour seriographic prints with revolutionary messages written entirely in shorthand. Shorthand, or stenography, is the general term for abbreviated writing that can transcribe speech at the same speed at which it is spoken, using a sequence of marks and symbols to represent words phonetically. It was a language widely used by secretaries,
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a vocation that had been entirely feminized by the 1880s. In the first half of the twentieth century, when women began to enter the workforce en masse, shorthand became a staple of their training. This was a moment of considerable change for women in society, coinciding with suffrage movements and emancipation. It is thus surprising, Ritter suggests, that shorthand was not the written language of this revolution, given that it was almost exclusively shared by women. 6 As the practice of shorthand Kathleen Ritter Revolt (The Pitman Dictionary of English and Shorthand), 2014 pigment inkjet print, 21.5 x 25.5 cm
has gradually been phased out of secretarial training and replaced by electronic technology, it has become obsolete and is perhaps now, Ritter posits, a secret language.7 The texts for Revolt were assembled from a number of different sources linked to revolutionary movements— political speeches and writings, avant-garde film, feminist and artist manifestos, song lyrics and protest slogans— which were then encoded in shorthand. One text, for example, takes lines from Michel de Certeau’s “The Capture of Speech” (1968), Claude Channes’ song “Mao-Mao” (1967), Gilles Deleuze’s “Difference and Repetition” (1968), Mina Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto” (1914), Mierle Laderman Ukeles “Manifesto for Maintenance Art” (1969), and graffiti in the streets of Egypt written during the Arab Spring (2012). 8
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Each of the assembled paragraphs begins and ends with
the same statement, to create texts that literally make a revolution in the original sense of the term. The prints also incorporate phrases that have been repeated in several different moments of unrest over time. The line: “the revolution is not a party,” for example, is a quotation originally from Chairman Mao Tse-tung’s Little Red Book (1964), which reappears in a song in Jean-Luc Godard’s film La Chinoise (1967), and was more recently scrawled on the walls of Egyptian cities during the Arab Spring (2012). Thus Ritter’s project investigates how revolution repeats itself, by literally utilizing lines that recur in protests in very different contexts.
Kathleen Ritter Revolt (At work), 2014 pigment inkjet print, 26 x 40 cm
Print work has long been an aspect of Ritter’s practice, developing in part, she suggests, out of her experience as an artist living in Vancouver, a city preoccupied with the photographic image. 9 However, her work has tended to gravitate toward the “lower” forms of reproducible media: to the rough immediacy of the screenprint and the political poster. The body’s physical engagement in its production, the often urgent context in which and for which it is produced, are often revealed through the form and limits of the print itself (this Ritter understood particularly after studying the prints produced by the Atelier Populaire in Paris during the turmoil of May, 1968).10 Of particular
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interest for the artist is the way in which printmaking functions to create or galvanize community—often surreptitiously—during moments of unrest, and the ways gender roles are organized around such production at these critical moments.11 Ritter imagined Revolt to address those that community still fluent in shorthand, and invites them “to consider the potential of these two ‘obsolete’ languages—the gendered language of shorthand and the declarative language of revolt—perhaps inspiring Unattributed poster from May, 1968 serigraph on paper, 47 x 33 cm reprinted in Vasco Gasquet, 500 affiches de Mai 68 (Bruxelles: Les éditions Aden, 2007) 54.
a revolution.”12 For Ritter, the physical print, as well as one’s encounter with it’s message, might serve an example of as what Bulgarian-born, French philosopher Julia Kristeva has termed “revolutionary becoming.” In a series of interviews published under the title Revolt, She Said, Kristeva draws out a number of distinctions between the terms “revolution” and “revolt,” with “revolt” representing the freedom to call everything into question. This contestation is separate from the act of political revolution. As Kristeva states: Today the word ‘revolt’ has become assimilated to Revolution, to political action. The events of the Twentieth Century, however, have shown us that political ‘revolts’—Revolutions—ultimately betray revolt, especially in the psychic sense of the
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term. Why? Because revolt—psychic revolt, analytic
revolt, artistic revolt—refers to a state of permanent questioning, of transformation, change, an endless probing of appearances.13 The state of permanent questioning, and the print itself (as both object and technique), offer necessary points of entry into the work of Guillermo Trejo. Trained as a printmaker in his native Mexico, it was the artist’s experience of immigration to Canada in 2007 that crystallized the concerns of his practice. The physical and emotional distance between himself and his home country offered a necessary space to consider and question the political situation (and its
Guillermo Trejo Dissertation about Actions, 2014 Installation detail
beleaguered histories, afterlives, and repetitions) both in that place and elsewhere. For Trejo, the print medium is synonymous with revolt: cheaply and almost endlessly reproducible, designed for the urgent and widespread dissemination of ideas. But it is the support material itself, as much as the printed ideas it carries, that makes an utterance for the artist. Trejo very frequently works with newsprint, which is thin, light, and easily pasted up in city streets. When exposed to weather and other stress, newsprint is quickly battered, sometimes disintegrating after only a few hours. Trejo likens the brevity of the newsprint poster’s existence to the idealism of revolt itself: insuppressible and yet doomed to disintegration.14 Like Ritter, Trejo’s interests in printmaking
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extend to the social conditions of its production, and to the importance of collaborative action in its process: the greater the collective of printmakers, the larger the print run possible. For Trejo too, the span of time it takes to produce a print allows for a crucial pause for consideration, to determine the ethical worth of the printed message for the communities it is destined to reach.15 The trio of letterpress prints that together form Trejo’s Dissertation about Actions—which are situated on the floor at the gallery’s entrance, and which read “a political action,” “apolitical action,” and “a poetical action” respectively—suggest the slippages and mistranslations possible in assembling and printing of text, particularly the colossal importance of that short distance between those letters a and p. In many ways, Trejo’s An Example of a Forgotten Ideology could be seen as the inverse of his work in print. Monumental and static, a life-sized figural statue cast in plaster and mounted on a plinth, it is a form that cannot have been created in the fervour of revolt but orchestrated by an ossified, entrenched set of beliefs. This statue, however, has been draped in black plastic sheeting, its upper half obscured from view. The work originated with an occurrence the artist witnessed some years ago in Mexico City’s Paseo de la Reforma, on October 12, known as Día de la Raza (Day of the Races), the day officially commemorating the anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the Americas.16 In a statement of outrage over the government’s identification with symbols of the colonial past, protesters had thrown a 16
black garbage bag over the head of the statue of
Christopher Columbus. This action was then echoed in numerous other Latin American cities. By obliterating the figure’s face from view, the simple act performed a gesture of negation, of silencing and of suffocation. The incongruity of the black bag upon the grand sculptural work also called a new attention to the monument, refuting and refusing its previous invisibility amongst the other furniture of the grand boulevard. Both the original act of revolt and Trejo’s reference to it suggest an instance of Kristeva’s “probing of appearances.” However, the moment the artwork captures is not that of provocation and defiance,
Guillermo Trejo An Example of a Forgotten Ideology, 2014 Detail
but its quiet aftermath. This stillness suggests a time held in suspension between the theatre of revolution itself and the moments after. It calls up, in Trejo’s view—echoing Slavoj Žižek’s articulations in the wake of the world’s most recent political revolutions—a troubling unknown: “the day after tomorrow.”17 The works in Far Away So Close are referential. Meticulously printed and framed, Ritter’s Revolt series is too fine for the street. Trejo’s Forgotten Ideology—a rough plaster maquette—is not fine enough, and while his Dissertation about Actions might well be circulated in a moment of revolt, its message is anything but clear. These works are
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at odds, perhaps, in the gallery space: one an effervescent rallying call (though offered as a cipher) and the other a profoundly ambivalent, even melancholic meditation. But as revenants they suggest the vast expanse of possibility that opens up when revolt momentarily transforms or disrupts everyday life, 18 and the tension that floods the space both preceding and following it.
Notes
1
See Raymond Williams’s entry for “Revolution” in Keywords (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976.) Reprinted in Lisa Robertson and Matthew Stadler, eds., Revolution: A Reader (Paraguay Press & Publication Studio, 2012), 53-60. Williams reminds that the word’s early definition survives today in the sense of the physical movement of engines or revolutions per minute (“revs”).
2
Ibid., 54-55.
Christopher Hill, “The Word Revolution,” from A Nation of Change and Novelty: Radical Politics, Religion and Literature in Seventeenth-century England (London: Routledge, 1990), reprinted in Robertson and Stadtler, eds, Revolution: A Reader, 25.
3
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 11. Emphasis in original.
4
18
Mary Kelly, “On Fidelity—Art, Politics, Passion and Event,” Artist talk as part of the Distinguished Visiting Artist Program, Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, October 6, 2008.
5
6
Kathleen Ritter, unpublished document on Revolt, 2014.
7
Ibid.
8
Ibid. Kathleen Ritter, in conversation with the author.
9
Ibid.
10
11
Ibid. Ritter, unpublished document on Revolt, 2014.
12
Julia Kristeva, Revolt, She Said, trans. Brian O’Keeffe, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, (Los Angeles: Semiotexte, Los Angeles, 2002), 12. 13
Guillermo Trejo, in conversation with the author.
14
Ibid.
15 16
Ibid.
Slavoj Zizek, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9Ok0JzUL_c. Žižek asks: how will the moment of revolutionary enthusiasm be translated into everyday institutions? This, he presses, is where the real struggle begins.
17
18 See Kristin Ross, May 68 and its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
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1 The Call The moment you step into shadow / your particles start to drift apart 1 / at the antipodes / whatever antipodes are / along meridians / and circumferences / a call goes out / from the Lacondon jungle / or internet / from Tarnac / or the France of revolutionary repetition / really / not from anywhere at all / not directed to anyone at all / testimony to a capacity / in the course of actualizing itself / committees remain noticeably invisible / somos todos marcos / an apoetical action is performed / an apolitical one / some of us will hear the call / some of us will not / some of us will read the ledger / some of us will allege readers / this is part of the call’s structure / its habitus / covering as iconoclasm / covering as preservation / dear blank / dear common / we register / transmission / we become nodes / an assembly / whoever we are / radio broadcast on archaic air / where the voice remains distant / detached / echoing after many years / of stenographic riots / calling all and any subjects / into their all and anyness / posting on a website you could / but what are the chances / find / and then pass on the call to / resist / resist / resist / resist / resist / resist / resist /
1
Sachiko Murakami, Get Me Out Of Here. Vancouver: Talon Books, 2015.
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2 The Transcript with us right now is stephen coliseum is with occupied vancouver at the rally right now welcome to resume an active and what’s happening right now where you are or order start gathering crowd before arriving in hartford the drive there is so much stress during the organ writing tradition and mobilize to to wear what would be plenty to do but will share their personal blog for your purists are where we are going to march or and you hope to stop traffic when you get there what’s the plan for think i go to word you used an interesting registration of god disrupts traffic is the right word that you’ve noted earlier about briefly describe the parking entrance and what you see here vancouver is a rolling temporary disruptions what are you charging ports just like three regarding on the refer them for service in organizing solidarity with our american brothers and sisters called for action and down the coast on the lumen of the global movement is only a global movement if people in other countries work in solidarity and support with their compositions in other countries so the solitary effort secondly the english kindergarten attempt to get job the discussion of any talking in economic and colony going cold out here at yellow dildo ports are where canadian resources leave the country and consumer goods in the country countries seek to look at it as a place where all the profits of one percent are really made this is where the covenant and we have to make ourselves and the government is asking everyone to get a good look at our system is the serving us all property on or in a small part of operation benefiting 24
from this and finally ending with his immortality like the
component will be on ecological and that the framework outlined a series of failed toxicity in durban south africa to come up with new climate change agreements and countries in atlantic canada is one of the strongest opponents are bearing out globally i working against efforts to root contain a constraint on global climate change always her husband were saying arising one of aquatic criminals and unflattering out and are part parts in their expansion is a big contribution to global climate change and i will try to bring that issue the documentation as you’re well aware to the that many of the ninety nine percent work at the ports and more detailed people who made lose a chef store or lose wages through this network i do not believe anyone is going to lose shifts or loose regulators because of our doing today but the right side you i think the common response to reoccupy move over several months out of the oven all your list up to the sky section is that jesus is inconvenient well our world is a little inconvenience being downsized your job outsources inconvenient climate changes in convenient laws are stranded anywhere surround the brain commences the kind of inconvenience we may introduce while trying to work toward social and political account change not being convicted of the arab perspective we live in a world full linking the support of labor though than doing them an issue that are said to be confederation family support document nominated artist interaction and the dockworkers should also go to statement but formal we can tell from rank-andfile members of a lot more support others on the fringes of the action of gloria clark street as workers injured on foot
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there was nothing but vocal support from union workers to us to costly standby invisible quarter fbi arresting for listeners opinion on this action by occupy vancouver today at the ports we had some activity earlier in delta as well what you think of the six oh four six six nine three seven three three one eight hundred eight two five fifty nine fifty one keep the phones over the next two minutes also hear some other voices in this story and if stephen can hold on we have jim sinclair with this right now to he is president of the bc federation of labour and jim what will you make of this protest today well and that the protest that and the art by robert dalton allowed that going forward as a protest a regulated fashion with the set up or down for twelve hours to put three thousand people at work for at that time and that many of us felt that that wasn’t attacking that would be successful or would unite people because related into the david about getting a ninety nine percent on-site understand the significant issues were facing and that would occupy it may do it mitigate the advocate for this event that the gap would never support the oecd study the evidence is getting worse and worse and worse and that the real problem for all that on this blog in our province around in the country i i think that the that we have the group said that the group that a lot we talk functional there is another about this in the unit but decided that that the blockading the port and shutting down twelve hours with not to be an effective tactic that would guide that would dad highlight the issues you i would boast what the okay to stop the flow of commerce and send 26
it a message to big business at the same time about how you
thought the book commerce is that the discussion with the blockade the report that bucket report i will doubt that that was an incorrect tactic we still believe that bought the right tactic that we don’t want to punish the people would try to help those truck drivers were often living on the margins of the difficult decision to make to do that but they felt that that this was not portable and the edit shutting down worksite we do that at a labeled with doing that front of years and is a procedure that we have in place to protect workers the lead does happened they know about it the part of the discussion and is sanctioned by the federation of labor that was in place long before occupation came along and hopefully we have placed a long time in the future because it’ll be the difficult decisions to make and we think you have to other people involved in making those decisions and their leaders were democratic not sexy since this is more of a disruption then then a full long blockade and that it’s an inconvenience when what you make of that descriptions of how you feel about the first time i’ve heard that and so on the paper out of the conversations we’ve have had an impact on the situation for the happened on that i don’t know what happening to me that talking about that that that’s the first time i’ve heard it described in that way with the savvy forward the blockade the last twelve twelve hours that at the port’s close even call us this is online and i believe rightness even the can you clarify what this has become sure our god is able to disruption and inconvenience where there were a greater market underserved because " you remember what i was meanwhile talking about the jungle right here initial call was
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for a twelve hour talking to shut down and what is happening as far as i understand everything out country through negotiation regular action committee and in parts with labor leaders to first nations people and talk about what this might mean i’m old could you support that she did support this what can we do so it is a fluid thing all along and not myself an part of the negotiations like every the belief that as is " of evolving into something other than straight out twelve hour blockade shut down and then you’ll do a lot of reading on the ground is inevitably negotiation gym and a final thought for the silly because the move onto some listeners to what they think of this and also from the spokesperson from the federal conservative party any final message to to the occupiers today when i admit here that this is that the ninety nine and one percent problem in the gap nourishment or is really a phenomenal problem over time and occupy in north america and put that on the agenda and they deserve credit for that and now we have to search for tactics that put that and continue to keep that on the grandma on the agenda and put the pressure on the one percent and mobilize the ninety nine percent unite them and i think that the john of faith and that it can effectively take on where we simply won’t survive to do that and not affect workers met with the client with a way to do that oddly we affect workers a lot but we take action but the way to do that is what not to do that to their secular much tim sinclair president the bc federation of labour and we are going to go to her listeners now in the number to reach us for your comments on what’s going on 28
today and when you can support this at the port of
vancouver six oh four six six nine three seven three three one eight hundred eight two five fifty nine fifty student causes with us he is of one of the members who is part of the rally today and brenda is phoning us from up in the middle of the province of france wally brenda i go ahead please are thank you wanted to me that form part of the ninety nine percent and i got carded one percent canadian i really do purport to continue hi i also hope that those people who are inconvenient will get patient is just down we all need to be read minded that we are in it together and calling because of the pipeline that intended to go to the pretty enough and as much as i appreciate the economic boost i really do not appreciate the fact that the government seems to have completed an bridge to continue to move forward as if this is a done deal on thursday when there is such a large group of people who are really against it and though occupied kitimat printer i was mentioned to us the costume only if your colleagues are active there right now him by moving from and are all over the province and we’ve got i can’t comment specifically on one cannot but it would sure support the recorder said the pipeline that is vital in more detail but one of the environmental reasons why we " action today will be front and center expansion was particularly baikonur morgan’s own job i can company is working with alberta children’s oil and is exponentially increasing how much oil goes through garden i know bankers are people not realizing massive oil tankers during alberta tar sands crude oil eight london bridge around in the dark all the time in the company is expected to increase two hundred eighty eight larger than
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exxon valdez i anchor the year by twenty sixteen and thank you called it’s one of the owner on cbc radio one and forget that some listeners were that if you’re briefly from my marked strong he is a conservative member of parliament for chilliwack fraser canyon walk of iraq yesterday mark to be with you what you think of what’s happening at the ports of it was only good not something it’s not something that the positive the other development from from our perspective and certainly for mars or perspective to weave a in ottawa we seen the ndp have been pumping the tires of the occupied movement of bulletin of the common than in the and their leadership race and we seen them continue to to align themselves with the more radical elements on the left we seen them do that now with occupy we thought was keystone xl pipeline it seems that they put their allegiance to do those activists ahead of the ahead of the workers of at the ports of those that were carried in the in the oil sands and that we think that’s troubling so you’re focusing up on the ndp but what you think what the occupy movement is doing today at the port well certainly i think that it is not a productive move to the target of workers to who and who have who are just trying to put food on their table in on a truck driver trying to do his job and of the of longshoremen trying to offload cargo of those are not the target supposedly of the occupied movement to if they have a coherent message to certainly it’s the it’s not something that we support we support letting workers to do their job and we believe that that this target of those people that are 30
supposed to be allied with these are several public ports and
what it is the message that the government is sending to the ports police francis as to how they should deal with this well i don’t think we will like to let the police make their own decisions as to what enforcement measures they should take but certainly we support the freedom of movement of the of goods and in the ability of workers to do their job preserve these are hard-working of folks who play by the rules in error and are just trying to put food on the table and have have that disrupted and to have the those that disrupt the disrupt the port of have thereof have them pumped up by the online dp is certainly something were concerned about is your call mark strahl conservative mp for chilliwack fraser canyon and let’s hear from listeners a been waiting to comment on this england victoria next hello richard will when thinking about this i think that the that the problem was they occupy movements in bc is set up basically the copycatting the americans and to a certain extent i get your opinion but earnhardt we didn’t have banks bailed out using public funds in the us and europe we’ve got our system is more egalitarian old got a medical system that failed to all of our high-income earners pay more taxes in the us for example the republicans just will not raise taxes on high-income earners i ignored and i know it’s tough being left out of our that’s going on in california but i just don’t think that we have and are not perfect but we are far better off than we argued that in the us and europe and i think the art by vancouver should be a little more specific and not really the protesting against the goes round circle still cost less than some from occupied vancouver in the music of richard’s comparisons and his
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request to be more specific click on the argument and statement we been hearing for months now about writing out her father’s anger and frustration and faith in my response to that in considering being your right warlock the court valley but all the statistics show you exactly where were going that disparity between the longest course is growing faster in canada and the state and faster in bc they were canada bc is the highest rate of child poverty in old canada we right now can save you we’ve got these great program and we got this economy is not quite about the date but all the statistics showed that would look at american people will be there maybe much later the year to but that’s exactly where had i not also say that our government from politics utterly are also contribute to the evolution of our system toward moderate american jewish health jobs yes even in the run up and actually wanted to educate graduate of almost the range and that i would entirely regret i’m so glad that you see our support of the movement are generally on-the-job gelation who we we support working people one hundred percent but in supporting working people i think we need to pressure the system to create a better situation for working people involved in part what they do i think we need everyone and it can in the organization the concerns of working people’s situations to work on this issue can it affect their livelihood shouldn’t you have then there are approval first. 2
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2
CBC Radio One “raw machine transcript” December 12, 2011.
3 The Assembly Dear common / how can we / assemble we / out of our / divergence / our moving edges / which drift and blur / against the wild intransigence / of our wanting to be whole? I cup my hands / in the pool of voices / crisp meridians bisect / our coming together / out of nothing / but threads and streams / so that when we sing / we sing for what is / to be done and undone / this fractured morning / with the single foundering / on the shores / of the common land As fictitious individuals / we repealed we / mined sense from our / thick impenetrable selves / chopped off at / the edge of / our beings we / clung to these / accidents of / commodity form / the cut we / adhere to / apprehensive / of our stops / and our starts Dear isolate faces / in the storm / casual statues under / causal darkness / we are posted / liked and shared / into being we / compass naught together / incoherent light / impales us in digital realms / what happens in the gallery / stays in the galley / under semiotic capture / though it is dangerous / to speak this way / raced and gendered / to invisible lack / I call out nonetheless / for impossible assembly / enquentro, communitas / the civic of speech / how to do the polis / in different voices / a problematic / plurality spoken again / and again into / the fractious night / to drive out alone / and welcome polity / into its intricacies / once again
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Late yet coeval / we cried over / bottomless drinks that / became bottoms we / natured near / filled with thirsts / only our co-council / could relieve our / Aeolian string selves / in wind of our / difference—we’ve only / ever found our own / in others’ deep explore / so post it for / advertisements / and the cooption of all our methods / of congress and / congregation—the helm / we have surrendered / to other drivers / and masters only sons I know it in my / small contusion alone / palaces nap behind / corporate edifices / assembling system one / contrapuntal turn / at a time / they too have their / enslaving demos their / petty methods for / seeming to include / so we sing again / for this we to be / done and undone / once and again Then distant migrants / fail to come / fully into focus / we is fragment / totality a temporality / remote and unassimilable / to a larger figure / where I go on / perambulating the bounds / in and around / a space that once / was common—even / if only in our / communist dreams—something / still rumbles up / from the absence we are / yet the circumference of
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Sometimes language is out there in the world, waiting to be used, uttered or broken. While speeches and languages are collective revelations, writing and reading are personal constructions. In an untitled text (c.1921), the artist Liubov Popova stated, “Not a single historical moment will be repeated…Revolution in art has always predicted the breaking of the old public consciousness and the appearance of a new world order in life.”1 In the spirit of the avant-garde, artists pursued a profound transformation of social life through the fracture of semiotics and ideology. Political manifestos, speeches and propaganda were continuously being subverted, transcribed, or stolen to be adapted as free speech, and the words of a few were meant to become the voices of others. When Kathleen Ritter decided to delve into the relationship between syntax and political declarations, she coalesced both: an account of collective resistance as well as of social behaviour. Contrary to Popova’s statement, Ritter knows that words in speech are ubiquitous and that language unfolds the continuous repetition of the past. However, the artist goes farther into unravelling the connotation of revolutionary statements. For her series Revolt, the artist compiled “a variety of sources linked to revolutionary moments, including political speeches and avant-garde films, feminist writings and artists’ manifestos, song lyrics and protest slogans.”2 These writings were subsequently transcribed into shorthand, a resourceful method to encrypt what could be self-explanatory. 38
On the one hand, the use of stenography brings out into the open what once was a powerful and valuable tool that eventually led to steganography: a mechanism used for espionage and undercover operations during times of war. On the other hand, it is also a trope that bears the signs of cultural difference and privilege, considering that shorthand was a task designed for listening, copying and typing and mainly relegated to women. After all, stenography did not only transform the way in which spoken language was read and transmitted, but it epitomizes the women’s labour force during the twentieth century; it represents a modern ambition and aspiration to belong to society itself. What is more, it is a mechanism that coincides with the increasing exploration of language in art, from Dada to the lettrists. Today, shorthand writing is widely unknown, consigned to oblivion and mainly obsolete. For the ordinary reader, it is closer to the style of asemic writing practiced by artists such as Brion Gysin, Isidore Isou, or Henri Michaux. However, Ritter is consciously aware that stenography is still a decipherable alphabet for those able to read it, and thus she implies a rhetorical question beyond visuality: How much do we understand about historicity without the notion of the “other�? Whether it is the other language or the other person. This is the reason why the artist meticulously adapts, selects, quotes, and paraphrases revolutionary statements: to offer an account of what has been repeated and obliterated 39
through textuality. In short, a history of domination and fixed ideologies. Gregory L. Ulmer describes how modernist (linguistic) examples have been copied, repeated, and modelled throughout postmodernism through techniques such as collage, montage, mimesis, and allegory. In his description of Derrida’s Grammatology (a significant reference for Ritter), Ulmer speaks about the “text as “texture,” as “touching” language—in which the deconstructive writing traces the surface of the object of study (writing as “tracing”) looking for “flaws” or “faults”—the opening of joints, articulations, where the text might be dismembered.” In the same way, Ritter wistfully uses montage and the texture of writing to dissect in layers the signs and symptoms of language. She selects the essential words that have pervaded collective consciousness and that have motivated social unrest. The theoretician Homi K. Bhabha suggests that “the historical moment of political action must be thought of as part of the history of the form of its writing.” So when Ritter interweaves the history of female labour, semiotics, and revolution, she is also cross-examining notions of concealment, coding, and misrepresentation. The role of theory mentioned by Bhabha has always played an essential role in social transformation, whether it evolved from society itself or was propagated by the ruling class. The language of revolution has been smuggled not only in its obvious form: camouflage, but also by means of political and theoretical influence. In consequence, Ritter’s 40
oeuvre consistently implies the resistance of language to be deciphered, transmitted, and translated. It anticipates that the flaws and faults found in repetition also bring to memory that which was left elsewhere in history.
Notes
Liubov Popova, “On Organizing Anew (c. 1921),” 100 Artistsʼ Manifestos (London: Penguin, 2011), 195.
1
2
Kathleen Ritter, unpublished document on Revolt, 2014.
Gregory L. Ulmer, “The Object of Post-Criticism,” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (New York: New Press, 2002), 93-125.
3
Homi K. Bhabha, “The Commitment to Theory,” The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 22-23.
4
41
Guillermo Trejo An Example of a Forgotten Ideology, 2014
46
47
49
Kathleen Ritter Revolt, 2014
53
Kathleen Ritter Revolt (We must confront vague ideas with clear images), 2014
Kathleen Ritter Revolt (The revolution is not a party), 2014
Kathleen Ritter Revolt (Live dangerously until the end), 2014
Kathleen Ritter Revolt (The struggle continues), 2014
Kathleen Ritter Revolt (We want everything), 2014
Kathleen Ritter Revolt (We are all undesirables), 2014
Guillermo Trejo Dissertation about Actions, 2015
— Kathleen Ritter Revolt (We must confront vague ideas with clear images), 2014 serigraph on Arches 88 paper 57.5 x 76.5 cm
Revolt (The revolution is not a party), 2014 serigraph on Arches 88 paper 57.5 x 76.5 cm
Revolt (Live dangerously until the end), 2014 serigraph on Arches 88 paper 57.5 x 76.5 cm
Revolt (The struggle continues), 2014 serigraph on Arches 88 paper 57.5 x 76.5 cm
Revolt (We want everything), 2014 serigraph on Arches 88 paper 57.5 x 76.5 cm
Revolt (We are all undesirables), 2014 serigraph on Arches 88 paper 57.5 x 76.5 cm 64
— Guillermo Trejo An Example of a Forgotten Ideology, 2014 plaster, paint, epoxy foam, wood and plastic sheeting dimensions variable
Dissertation about Actions, 2014 three digital reproductions on cartridge paper from original letterpress posters each 55.8 x 86 cm
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Kathleen Ritter Kathleen Ritter is an artist based in Vancouver and Paris. She was an artist in residence at La CitĂŠ Internationale des Arts, Paris, in 2013. Her art practice broadly explores questions of visibility, especially in relation to systems of power, language and technology. Recent solo exhibitions include G Gallery, Toronto, and Battat Contemporary, MontrĂŠal, both in 2014. In addition Ritter has organized exhibitions in Canada and abroad. From 2007 to 2012, she was the Associate Curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Her writing on contemporary art has appeared in ESSE, Prefix Photo, and Fillip as well as in numerous catalogues.
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Guillermo Trejo Guillermo Trejo is a Mexican artist based in Ottawa. He completed his BFA at the National School of Painting, Sculpture and Etching in Mexico City with a specialization in printmaking, and moved to Canada in 2007. The experience of immigration has shaped Trejo’s work. He holds an MFA from University of Ottawa and presented his Master’s thesis at the Ottawa Art Gallery. His first solo exhibition was at Saw Gallery (Ottawa), and he has been Artist-in-Residence at Creative Fusion (Cleveland, 2012). In addition, Trejo has worked as research consultant at the National Gallery of Canada, and he teaches printmaking at the Ottawa School of Art. He was the recipient of a Canada Council for the Arts Grant and the Becas para Jóvenes Creadores (Emerging Artist Award) from the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (Mexico) in 2014.
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Stephen Collis Stephen Collis is a poet, activist, editor and professor. His many books of poetry include The Commons (Talon Books 2008; second edition 2014), On the Material (Talon Books 2010—awarded the BC Book Prize for Poetry), To the Barricades (Talon Books 2013), and (with Jordan Scott) DECOMP (Coach House 2013). He has also written two books of literary criticism, a book of essays on the Occupy Movement, Dispatches from the Occupation (Talon Books 2012), and a novel, The Red Album (BookThug 2013). In 2014, while involved in anti-pipeline activism, he was sued for $5.6 million by US energy giant Kinder Morgan, whose lawyers read his poetry in court as “evidence.” He lives near Vancouver and teaches at Simon Fraser University.
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Andrea Torreblanca Andrea Torreblanca is a curator at the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo. She holds an MA in Curating from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in New York. She was coordinator of the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros-The Tallera, Deputy Director at the Centro Cultural Muros, Head of Registry at the Colección de Arte Moderno y Contemporáneo Mexicano de Jacques and Natasha Gelman and Registry Coordinator of the Museo de las Californias en el Centro Cultural Tijuana. She has been a fellow of the Jumex Foundation, CONACYT and FONCA, and currently teaches critical theory and contemporary art.
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222 East Georgia Street Vancouver, British Columbia v6a 1z7 accessgallery.ca Access Gallery is a platform for emergent and experimental art practices. We enable critical conversations and risk taking through new configurations of audience, artists, and community. Access gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Province of BC through the BC Arts Council and BC Gaming, the City of Vancouver, our donors, members and volunteers. Access is a member of the Pacific Association of Artist Run Centres.
Published by Access Gallery
isbn 978-0-9866688-6-9
Kimberly Phillips, Director/Curator Edition of 75 to accompany the exhibition
Series editor: Kimberly Phillips Layout: Chelsey Doyle
Far Away So Close: Part II
Photography: Alina Senchenko
Kathleen Ritter
Printed in Canada by Bond Reproductions
Guillermo Trejo Copyright Š Access Gallery and the January 24–March 7, 2015
contributing authors and artists, 2015.
Curated by Kimberly Phillips
Content from this book cannot be reproduced without express written permission from the publisher.