MONTE CLARK GALLERY
This catalogue was published in conjunction with the exhibition and screening series: Traces That Resemble Us
Monte Clark Gallery, November 21, 2015 – January 30, 2016 The Cinematheque, November 12, 19, 26; December 3, 10, 17, 2015 Installation photography: Chris Rollett Design: Monte Clark Gallery Cover designs: Information Office
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The Cinematheque, in collaboration with Monte Clark Gallery, presents Traces That Resemble Us, a screening series and art exhibition that explores the intersections
between visual art in Vancouver and cinema. Motivated by Jeff Wall’s history as a former film programmer at The Cinematheque, Traces That Resemble Us invites twelve
prominent Vancouver-based artists to each program a film that has been influential to
his or her practice, and to exhibit artwork for a corresponding group exhibition at Monte Clark Gallery.
Participating artists include Vikky Alexander, Roy Arden, Robert Arndt, Karin Bubas, Dana Claxton, Stan Douglas, Greg Girard, Rodney Graham, Owen Kydd, Myfanwy MacLeod, Ian Wallace, and Jeff Wall.
Traces That Resemble Us Aaron Peck
“The concept of pure art — pure poetry, pure painting, and so on — is not entirely without meaning; but it refers to an aesthetic reality as difficult to define as it is to combat.” – André Bazin
Of the origin myths regarding contemporary art in Vancouver, one concerns a failed
collaboration between Rodney Graham, Ian Wallace, and Jeff Wall. In 1973, the three
decided to abandon The Summer Script, a feature-length film that they were working on together, because it was, according to Wallace, at the time “well beyond our
resources and technical experience.” Both Wall and Graham would return to film-studio methods but neither attempted a feature-length again, while Wallace did something
more direct with their incomplete project. He transformed stills from it into one of his early large-scale photographic tableaux, The Summer Script, 1974.
Traces That Resemble Us, a series of screenings at The Cinematheque and its
attendant exhibition at Monte Clark Gallery, spotlights something that is often unsung in contemporary art in Vancouver, either because it is deemed too obvious or too
formalist: the relationship between this city’s art and cinema. While other programs in the city, such as The Cinematheque’s own DIM Cinema, focus on how film intersects with
contemporary art, little critical or art historical attention lingers on how both the culture of cinema and the movie industry have influenced art production here.
The failure of that 1973 film, so the story goes, articulated new approaches in
photography. In an email to critic Shep Steiner, Wallace claimed that reading Roland
Barthes’s “The Third Meaning: Notes on Some of Eisenstein’s Stills” in the January 1973 issue of Artforum led him to reimagine Summer Script as stills. So the accent is often placed on the role of photography, but film ought to have equal stress.
Since the 1960s, contemporary artists in Vancouver have been involved with cinema in a variety of ways. Many have engaged directly with the industry or with local cineaste
culture: Wall himself programmed films at The Cinematheque from 1975-76; Roy Arden worked as a projectionist at Vancouver East Cinema in the early 1990s; Brian Jungen
volunteered at The Cinematheque while a student at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design; and Owen Kydd graduated from Simon Fraser University with a degree
specialization in film, making a documentary for his graduating project. The list could go on.
More so, contemporary artists often glean content from movies, either in references or in direct appropriation of film stills. For Wallace, as already mentioned, film stills
became a recurring mode of picture making, most notably in the ongoing series Masculin/Féminin, 1997-, which takes stills from Jean-Luc Godard’s films,
Michelangelo Antonioni’s, and others. Arden’s recent painting, Malevich, 2012, with its series of panels, functions like a storyboard or a set of animated stills,
juxtaposing early cartoons with modernist painting. Other artists also have taken content from films through citation or reference. In 10, 2003, an earlier work by
Dana Claxton, the artist questioned how movies — in that case, adaptations of Agatha Christie’s detective novel Ten Little Indians — can perpetuate racist
stereotypes and further forms of colonial violence, while Robert Arndt’s Pursuit, Plunder & Fleece, 2011-2015, reworks shots from Robert Bresson’s
Pickpocket. Likewise, Karin Bubaš’s new work for this exhibition, Little Lad, 2015, cites Charles Laughton’s 1955 film, The Night of the Hunter, whereas Myfanwy MacLeod’s 2012 origami pieces appropriate centerfold images of Dorothy
Stratten, the Vancouver-born-and-raised Playboy Playmate who, at the time of her brutal murder by her estranged husband and manager Paul Snider, was
attempting a crossover into the mainstream film industry, acting in the 1981 film They All Laughed by Peter Bogdanovich, with whom she had begun to have an affair.
The culture of contemporary art in Vancouver continues to be uniquely tied to cinema, not only because of the way that multiple generations of artists draw
content from it (that is the case all over the world), but more significantly because many artists imitate production methods of the industry. With the kind of
large-scale video, film, and photographic work that Vancouver became known for, the early cinematic “failure” of The Summer Script must have been particularly informative for the later work of Graham and Wall, with others following. For Vancouver artists in the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, the proximity to a robust film
industry provided new methods of making art (even if, at first, Wall was making
pictures without a studio, for example). It’s surprising that a rather minor film city
like Vancouver would end up producing the art that it did, not a major one like Los Angeles; perhaps artists in LA were too close to the movie business to see what possible models for art making it provided.
Whatever the case, artists here, such as Stan Douglas, Graham, and Wall, have,
in varying ways, utilized that industry to create complex forms of art that either
rely on studio production methods to execute films or video works — in the case
of Douglas and Graham — or use film production methods to produce large-scale photography — in the case of all three. Other artists, such as Judy Radul, have followed suit in her video installations, making use of, or questioning, the conventions of cinematic production.
This attention to film, both for method and content, signals a shift in artworks
made during the postwar period. In 1940, in the essay “Towards a New Laocoon,”
Clement Greenberg argued that painting had become the “dominant” form of art in the early twentieth century and, as such, no longer needed to borrow content from other arts, like literature. When an art form is independent, he argued, it is free
from needing content taken from other sources to make meaning. In the essay,
he limits himself to painting, but the implication is that it holds for all of the plastic and visual arts. The rise of international cinema in the postwar period, however,
saw movies overtake visual art as the dominant form of the mid-to-late twentieth century, both in terms of popular and high art (by the rise of the nouvelle vague
in the 1960s, this is incontestable: even John Baldessari has claimed that Jean-
Luc Godard is the most important “artist” of the twentieth century). No longer the
dominant art in North American and European culture, visual art, which by the late 1960s gave way to what we now call “contemporary art,” turned to other forms to
find content: to dance, to music, and to cinema. It is because of the rise of cinema as a popular and serious art form that visual art, finding itself again subordinate,
enters its “expanded field,” to pilfer a phrase from Rosalind Krauss. Art production in Vancouver offered specific witness to that “turn” — in this case, to cinema.
Traces That Resemble Us takes its title from a phrase of Jean-Luc Godard. In one of a series of lectures given at Concordia University in 1978, the auteur claimed
that, in cinema, the traces of former images are found in each that follow it. Every image is a history of all other cinematic images. He furthers that we — its view-
ers and makers — are also traces in those images, as our human history is also threaded into that most significant cultural and social phenomenon of the last
century: cinema. And the artists in Traces, with their selected films and artworks, evince how these practices also are projected onto it.
Aaron Peck is the author of The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis. He is a regular contributor to Artforum. He has written essays for a number of exhibition
catalogues, most recently for Jeff Wall’s North & West published by the Audain Art Museum. He is a lecturer at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.
Vikky Alexander
Playtime
France, 1967. Dir: Jacques Tati 124 min. 35mm
Screened at The Cinematheque, introduced by the artist My interest in Playtime comes from its satirical perspective on architecture. I like to think that it is a film about architecture’s “revenge.” In the first part, the uniformity and perceived inhumanity of International Style architecture is
identified in the complete confusion it causes for the protagonist, who cannot
find or connect with the bureaucrat he is looking for because of the building’s
unkind intervention. At an International Trade Fair, a group of American tourists are only allowed to peep at the historic city of Paris through reflections in
portions of glass-curtain walls, which the monuments seem to literally slip off. When Hulot goes to meet a friend for an evening, he is confounded by the
entrance to the apartment. He can see his friend and family from the street
through the floor-to-ceiling window, but cannot figure out how to access them,
and when he leaves, he cannot exit the main door. Finally, on the opening night
of a chic restaurant, the room, furniture, food, and costumes literally self-destruct in front of us. The more ruinous the interior, the more fun for all. –Vikky Alexander
Vikky Alexander
White and Gold Greyhounds (Istanbul Showroom Series), 2013
Lightbox
28 x 40 x 5 inches
Exhibited at Monte Clark Gallery
Courtesy of the artist, TrĂŠpanier Baer Gallery, Calgary, and Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles
Roy Arden
Speedy
USA, 1928. Dir: Ted Wilde 85 min. DCP
Screened at The Cinematheque, introduced by Aaron Peck Speedy was made towards the end of the silent film era. Its lack of dialogue
serves its true subject: the traumatic experience of modernity. A hokey plot about a young man trying to save his future father-in-law’s horse-powered streetcar business sets in motion a dizzying tour of Manhattan and Coney Island.
Watching early silent films and animation, I noticed that many of them centre
on aspects of modern technology, especially new conveyances like cars, trains,
streetcars, motorized ships, and airplanes. In Speedy, the rides at Coney Island use modern mechanics to simulate real world conveyances. It got me thinking about the jalopy as a comical critique of the automobile. It didn’t take people
long to see that as amazing as the automobile was, it was ultimately a pile of
nuts and bolts, destined for ruin — as ignoble as a horse is noble. This led to
my work Jalopy, which features a wind-up tin toy car going through its gimmicky paces. For the first two minutes, the video feels comical. The second two
minutes is simply the first part repeated in reverse, but now it feels decidedly demonic.
—Roy Arden
Roy Arden
Jalopy, 2011
2 min. endless loop
Video for projection with stereo sound Exhibited at The Cinematheque
Courtesy of the artist and Monte Clark Gallery
Roy Arden
Malevich (octaptych), 2012 Oil on canvas
Each 28.75 x 35 inches
Exhibited at Monte Clark Gallery
Courtesy of the artist and Monte Clark Gallery
Robert Arndt
Pickpocket
France, 1958. Dir: Robert Bresson 75min. 35mm
Screened at The Cinematheque, introduced by the artist Robert Bresson’s Dostoevskian Pickpocket is a film that resists conventional filmic language. The editing, cinematography, use of non-actors and their
expressionless/non-acting performances, duplications, choreography of shot
sequences, music — in a way, it is Bresson who is pulling a sleight of hand on the audience and the medium of film. Through his provocation, he offers an uncomfortable close-up of the exchanges of capitalism and transcendence.
There is much discussed about Pickpocket and what has become known as the Bressonian form or technique. His approach enabled filmmakers to reconsider
the way narrative is conceived and conveyed. His influence can be identified in films such as Taxi Driver, American Gigolo, and Eastern European new wave cinemas.
—Robert Arndt
Robert Arndt
Pursuit, Plunder & Fleece (deleted scene), 2014 12:30 min.
Single channel video projection
Exhibited at The Cinematheque
Courtesy of the artist and Macaulay & Co. Fine Art, Vancouver
Robert Arndt
Scenes Unseen (outtakes, deleted scenes footnotes, character studies, props, stills, cancelled treatments, unpublished work, production stills, props, referenced images, failed attempts) 2011 – ongoing
Exhibited at Monte Clark Gallery
Courtesy of the artist and Macaulay & Co. Fine Art, Vancouver
Karin Bubas
The Night of the Hunter
USA, 1955. Dir: Charles Laughton 92 min. DCP
Screened at The Cinematheque, introduced by Monte Clark The Night of the Hunter has some of the most haunting, chilling, and beautifully poetic scenes I’ve seen depicted in cinema. Set during the Depression in Ohio, the black and white film is like a child’s nightmare come to life, with the
surrealistic sets and expressionistic style adding to the horrific storyline. The heart of the story is one of predator and prey — children John and Pearl
attempt to escape their murderous preacher stepfather. The river scene is one of the most affecting; the entire sequence perfectly captures the sorts of
nightmares where you are trying to run but can’t quite move. The young children rush through the woods at night, managing to evade their stalker in a small boat that takes them down river. These two babes have seen more and experienced more than any child should, and their weary bodies collapse into the comfort of the little boat taking them to momentary safety. Animals of the night watch over them from the side of the river, Mother Nature keeping them safe from the madman, as young Pearl launches into haunting song. —Karin Bubas
Karin Bubas
Silversword Seascape, 2013 Archival pigment print 60 x 60 inches
Exhibited at Monte Clark Gallery
Courtesy of the artist and Monte Clark Gallery
Karin Bubas
Little Lad, 2015
Archival pigment print 13 x 27 inches
The Cinematheque Artist Edition of 25
Exhibited at Monte Clark Gallery and The Cinematheque Courtesy of the artist and Monte Clark Gallery
Dana Claxton
Dog Day Afternoon
USA, 1975. Dir: Sidney Lumet 125 min. DCP
Screened at The Cinematheque, introduced by the artist The independent production value and 1970s Kodak texture of Lumet’s
classic speak to a current feature film I am working on: a real life coming-of-age story set in Vancouver in 1973 about aboriginal youth, Indian drag princesses, Andy Warhol, and union politics. Everything I love — Indians, art, politics, and
sexuality! When “Attica! Attica!” is shouted out to the hoards of people gathered in support of Sonny, this indicated a political consciousness of the times. They
were collectively articulating their disapproval of state violence. My photo work
Love Liberation Front considers the same time frame and places the indigenous
female body in defiance of authority and exploitation. The declaration “make love not war” becomes relational to Redbone’s 1970s hit, “Come and Get Your Love,” visible on the protester’s sign. Love Liberation Front creates a complex
negotiation of reading the desirability of the indigenous female body within colonial and now lateral violence. —Dana Claxton
Dana Claxton
Love Liberation Front #1, 2015
Love Liberation Front #2, 2015
Images of polyester (windboxes) Each 51 x 102 inches
Exhibited at Monte Clark Gallery Courtesy of the artist
Stan Douglas
Film by Samuel Beckett
USA, 1965. Dir: Alan Schneider 22 min. DCP
Screened at The Cinematheque, introduced by the artist Vidéo is an adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s 1965 Film by way of Orson Welles’s The Trial (1962), which itself was based on Franz Kafka’s 1925 novel.
Beckett’s protagonist, O, spends the bulk of Film avoiding the gaze of others and especially that of the camera, which stands in for self-perception. Conversely,
Kafka’s hero, K, desperately seeks to find out why the eye of the law is upon him and the nature of the crime of which he has been accused. Neither succeeds. Welles shot the bulk of his film in Paris in studios and in the then-abandoned
Gare d’Orsay. Vidéo was also shot in Paris and in its troubled Northern suburbs.
K in this version is a black woman who lives in La Courneuve — epicenter of the 2005 riots — in the same public housing complex where Jean-Luc Godard shot
2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle in 1967. Vidéo borrows two basic conceits from
Film: (1) it is silent except for a single sonic event, and (2) the protagonist’s face is withheld from view. O’s face is revealed in Film’s denouement; however, in Vidéo, K’s face remains unseen. —Stan Douglas
Stan Douglas VidĂŠo, 2007 18:14 min. DCP
Exhibited at The Cinematheque
Courtesy of the artist, David Zwirner New York/London, and Victoria Miro, London
Greg Girard
The Yakuza
USA/Japan, 1974. Dir: Sydney Pollack 112 min. 35mm
Screened at The Cinematheque, introduced by the artist There is an early scene in The Yakuza in which Robert Mitchum’s character,
Kilmer, and his young sidekick, Dusty, ride into town from the airport. It’s Tokyo,
1974. Kilmer, stationed in Japan after the war, looks out at the modern cityscape
and says, “I hardly recognize the place.” Dusty, unimpressed, replies, “Looks like just another big city.” (You won’t see this scene. I’m remembering it from my first viewing in Tokyo in 1976, and it appears to have been cut from all
subsequent versions of the film). Dusty’s throwaway comment was, for me, a
kind of landmark moment: the first acknowledgment of Tokyo as a modern city in a Hollywood film, a refreshing corrective to outdated readings of the time. It also demonstrates that particularly American indifference to “the foreign,” a hallmark of post-war American hubris and entitlement. Later, Kilmer’s old army buddy
tells them: “It’s still there. Farmers in the countryside may watch TV from their
tatami mats and you can’t see Fuji through the smog, but don’t let it fool you. It’s still Japan and the Japanese are still Japanese.” A good enough introduction to
modernity in Japan. And a good enough departure point for exploring the forms it would take in the years ahead. —Greg Girard
Greg Girard
Foreign Spoils, (House of Bamboo, 1955/Tokyo Mix, 1976), 2015
Archival pigment print 30 x 80 inches
Exhibited at Monte Clark Gallery
Courtesy of the artist and Monte Clark Gallery
Rodney Graham
Dillinger is Dead
Italy, 1969. Dir: Marco Ferreri 90 min. 35mm
Screened at The Cinematheque, introduced by Helga Pakasaar Songs featured in Dillinger Is Dead: “Cielo rosso” by Jimmy Fontana “Qui e là” by Patty Pravo
“Travelin’ Man” by The Four Kents
“The Moving Finger Writes” by The Four Kents “Searchin’ For My Baby” by The Four Kents “Hold My Hand” by The Rokes “Ripe Apples” by The Rokes —Rodney Graham
Rodney Graham
Paradoxical Western Scene, 2006
Painted aluminum light box with transmounted chromogenic transparency 58 x 48 x 7 inches
Exhibited at Monte Clark Gallery
Courtesy of the artist and 303 Gallery, New York
Owen Kydd
Gummo
USA, 1997. Dir: Harmony Korine 89 min. 35mm
Screened at The Cinematheque, introduced by Nigel Prince Unequal parts document, narrative, and micro-cinema, Gummo essentially
functions as a self-portrait of Harmony Korine’s youth in Nashville, Tennessee. Although fictionally set in a tornado-ravaged Ohio town, Korine casts his
misbehaving friends beside actors in a succession of anarchic scenes that are at times both horrifying and beautiful, forging his singular style of polyphonic
realism. Mistakenly criticized as white trash nihilism, Gummo instead carried the torch of structuralist cinema into the late 1990s, while also producing a complex
portrait of a generation of Midwest kids that still had the ability get lost and weird, whether they wanted to or not. Filmed by French cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier, Gummo adeptly filters the tones of American pop through a Dogme-adjacent genre portrait of suburban anomie. —Owen Kydd
Owen Kydd
Knife, Sole, Feather, Scrubbers, 2015
Video on digital display with media player 16.25 x 16.25 x 7 inches
Exhibited at Monte Clark Gallery
Courtesy of the artist and Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver
Myfanwy MacLeod
Star 80
USA, 1983. Dir: Bob Fosse 103 min. 35mm
Screened at The Cinematheque, introduced by Dr. Aoife Mac Namara I have vivid memories from when Star 80 was made, particularly the media
controversy surrounding the actress cast to play Stratten, Mariel Hemingway,
when it was revealed she had breast implants in order to portray her character. I was, and have been, a fan of Hemingway’s since her film debut at the age of 14 in Lamont Johnson’s Lipstick, and then three years later, when she played Woody Allen’s underage girlfriend in Manhattan. Star 80 was released three
years after Stratten’s murder in 1980. The movie was shot in Vancouver and,
in ways still oddly unique, the city plays itself. Though Stratten was the impetus for a major work of mine, I will join some of the audience in viewing Star 80 for the first time. I’m fascinated by her story — how the movie appears to weave
subject and location together. In many ways, Star 80 is not just a representation of the life and death of Dorothy Stratten — one of the city’s great tragic victims
— but also a portrait of the context that informed the photographic practices that emerged in the city at that time. —Myfanwy MacLeod
Myfanwy MacLeod Shipwreck, 2012 Inkjet print
30 x 40 inches
Exhibited at Monte Clark Gallery
Courtesy of the artist and Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver
Myfanwy MacLeod Kabuto, 2012 Inkjet print
30 x 40 inches
Exhibited at Monte Clark Gallery
Courtesy of the artist and Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver
Myfanwy MacLeod Artifact, 2012
Star City pin up poster of Dorothy Stratten 6 x 6 x 6 inches
Exhibited at Monte Clark Gallery
Courtesy of the artist and Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver
Ian Wallace
Contempt
France/Italy, 1963. Dir: Jean-Luc Godard 103 min. DCP
Screened at The Cinematheque, introduced by the artist Since 1996, I have been making a series of works, titled Masculin/Féminin, that comment on the tragic divisions that exists in male/female relationships. These works are compositions of painting and photography that use citations of still photographic images from specific films from the 1960s, including Jean-Luc
Godard’s Le Mépris of 1963, which I consider to be one of the great films of the recent past. In this film, Godard’s first major production shot in colour and
Panavision, he has created a montage of scenes that brilliantly reveal his ironic humour and philosophical insights into the conflicts between male and female
through a deep meditation on the art of cinema. In the citation of Le Mépris in my own work, I pay homage to a major work of modern art by one of the greatest artists in the history of cinema. —Ian Wallace
Ian Wallace
Enlarged Inkjet Study for Le MĂŠpris IV, 2010
Inkjet print
47 x 35 inches
Exhibited at Monte Clark Gallery
Courtesy of the artist and Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver Photo: SITE Photography
Ian Wallace
Enlarged Inkjet Study for Le MĂŠpris V, 2010
Inkjet print
47 x 35 inches
Exhibited at Monte Clark Gallery
Courtesy of the artist and Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver Photo: SITE Photography
Jeff Wall
Straight Time
USA, 1978. Dir: Ulu Grosbard 114 min. 35mm
Screened at The Cinematheque, introduced by the artist Straight Time, photographed by Owen Roizman, is an outstanding example of
the new colour cinematography that seemed to emerge from everywhere in the later 1960s. The film is an interesting, though conventional, version of the
romance of criminality, laced with sour emotional realism, that has been a staple of the movies since the early days. It was adapted from a novel called No Beast So Fierce, by Edward Bunker, quite notable and notorious in his own right as delinquent, criminal, author, and actor, who also wrote the screenplay for
another of my favourite films, Runaway Train, in the mid-1980s. In that film,
Jon Voight, playing a criminal very much like Dustin Hoffman’s in Straight Time, quotes this line from Shakespeare’s Richard III: “No beast so fierce but knows
some touch of pity. But I know none, and therefore am no beast.” Straight Time is directed by Israel (Ulu) Grosbard, Hoffman’s close friend and mentor, a distinguished director better known for his work in the theatre. —Jeff Wall
Jeff Wall
Man in Street, 1995 Inkjet print
21.25 x 52 inches
Exhibited at Monte Clark Gallery Courtesy of the artist