Mircea Cantor

LIVE ABOUT LIVE CINEMA

Live Cinema is a series of programs in the Film and Video Gallery of the Philadelphia Museum of Art that will explore the vast production of single-channel video and filmwork by a diverse group of local, national, and international artists. In the last decade an ever-increasing number of contemporary artists have appropriated these mediums as an artistic outlet, in a dialogue with the early video and Super 8 practices of the sixties and the tradition of experimental filmmaking. Each program of the Live Cinema series will focus on a specific aspect of this work, in order to both map and analyze this important facet of contemporary art production. Certain Live Cinema programs will be accompanied by a brochure where guest writers will discuss the works exhibited, and also by public lectures given by the participating artists.

The reproductions in this brochure were provided courtesy Mircea Cantor and Yvon Lambert Gallery.

Philadelphia Museum of Art Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street (215) 763-8100, TTY (215) 684-7600 www.philamuseum.org Š 2006 Philadelphia Museum of Art

1106-2498

N OV E M B E R 2 0 0 6 T H RO U G H F E B RU A RY 2 0 07

Please check the Philadelphia Museum of Art website www.philamuseum.org for up-to-date running times.

Mircea Cantor The Title Is the Last Thing

Philadelphia Museum of Art

amid the foliage in Mexico’s jungle peninsula, creating a visually reverberating environment that shatters the apparent solidity of the world and replaces it with dispersed refractions of light. Smithson’s work suggests a resonance between the mirror’s—and by extension photography’s—infinite reflectivity and nature’s entropic tendencies.

A paradox confronts us in Mircea Cantor’s T H E L A N D S C A P E I S C H A N G I N G , a perplexing but visually mesmerizing twenty-two

The Landscape Is Changing provokes a similar visual confusion during those moments when viewpoint is lost within a labyrinth of mirror

minute video made by the Romanian artist in 2003. The camera tracks

images, eroding the distinction between reality and representation.

a group of placard-bearing protesters moving through the streets of

Zooming in on the placards, the camera portrays the city’s reflected

Tirana, Albania. The dozen or so young men and women are shown

images clearly; but backing off, it provokes the twisted forms and optical

marching down sidewalks, through thoroughfares, and across squares in

distortions that betray the effects of undulating silver surfaces. Cantor’s

the center of the city, sometimes with police escort. Otherwise an orderly

video consequently moves beyond the so-called “site/non-site dialectic”

demonstration—vaguely recalling the staged rallies before the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, as during Enver Hoxha’s leadership in Albania—the participants hold mirrored posters overhead, inexplicably.

Their surfaces appear abstract, merely reflecting back the urban environment, curiously articulating no apparent demands. The signs in fact undermine the language of protest—meant to be pointed and crystal clear, reduced efficiently to a catchy slogan—and replace it with ambiguity, even meaninglessness, which frustrates all sectarian allegiances. The

that defines an earlier period of artistic practice, wherein geographical

landscape is changing, indeed.

location and its representation (a map, photograph, or gallery-bound material) are each understood to possess a distinct identity that then

The video becomes particularly suggestive at those moments when the

might be transgressed, for instance, by mirrors. For Cantor, reality and

camera’s focus appears to lose itself in the mirror reflections, and espe-

its disjointed reflections are inseparable.

cially when it catches the echoes between protestors’ mirrors and the reflective windows of passing buildings. The effect is reminiscent of

Instead of staging a protest with a clearly formulated message, as if

Robert Smithson’s Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan of 1969, for

originating from a position exterior to power, Cantor’s enigmatic marchers

which the artist photographed several square mirrors placed disjunctively

Left and above: The Landscape Is Changing, 2003. Mini DV transferred to DVD; 22 minutes

to the “official” sidewalk plan, forming new lines of flight. Like The Landscape Is Changing, these pieces join documentation to indeterminacy: while the photographs appear neutral and objective, embodying a form of straight documentary representation, their meaning couldn’t be less secure. What is the meaning of, and motivation behind, these entangle Tirana in an oscillating circuit of reality and its distortion,

alterations in space and discourse? Like his mirrored signs, Cantor’s

such that difference and creativity emerge within what already exists.

photographs reveal intervention but explain nothing, as if to avoid the

The Landscape Is Changing emphasizes movement and becoming over

authoritarian associations of directing subject matter, producing clear

timeless constants, thereby contesting the supposed solidity of political

messages, or controlling interpretation.

power, and indeed of any ostensibly stable system, and it does so in a

Based on a similar uncertainty principle, which is now unleashed to

place—Albania—that has been dominated until recently by Stalinist

interrupt natural “law,” the short video D E E PA R T U R E , 2005, records

communism (like much of Eastern Europe, including Romania, where

the behavior of a deer and a wolf interacting precariously in a gallery’s

Cantor grew up). Cantor’s project thus generates an aesthetic of travel

empty space (Yvon Lambert’s gallery in Paris, where Cantor is currently

that mirrors the artist’s own nomadic sites of artistic practice (he’s done

based). The piece is prefigured by Joseph Beuys’s famous 1974 perform-

projects in Romania, Albania, and Paris, among other places) wherein

ance, when, without setting foot on American ground, the German

displacement does not so much abandon given systems but finds sources

conceptual artist was wrapped in felt and delivered to René Block’s New

of creative multiplicity within them.

York gallery, where he shared the space with a coyote for a week. Yet, unlike

Cantor’s subtle photographs similarly record the signs of reality’s diver-

Beuys’s exploitation of nature to help fashion his own neo-primitivist

sification. His 2006 photograph of the cover of the newspaper Le Monde

persona, Cantor’s scenario absents the artist and directs the viewer to

is exemplary: it documents a simple transformation, finding the title of

focus on the relationship between animals that is tentative and incon-

the French daily altered by hand so that it reads “Les Mondes,” a simple

clusive. Rather than presupposing an opposition between nature and

act that pluralizes “the world,” rejecting the notion that there could be only one. The photographic triptych S H O R T C U T S , 2004, shows with a similar modesty the formation of beaten paths left in the ground where pedestrians have cut a corner. These new walkways create alternatives Above: Tribute, 2004. Mini DV transferred to DVD; 2 minutes, 45 seconds. Right: Shortcuts, 2004. Black-and-white photographs; triptych

culture (or site and non-site), the transcendence of which was key to Beuys’s self-mythologized artistic identity (and Smithson’s prescient critique of site specificity), Deeparture exposes the mutually affective force of each on the other. Whereas the white-cube architecture is shown to disrupt the natural rhythms and predatory relationships between animals, viewers come to identify with the protagonists of the video. Against all expectations, the wolf—clearly caught off guard— never attacks the deer, entailing a departure that projects us into the deep of uncertainty. While Cantor, like Beuys, appropriates wildlife for artistic purpose, his video represents a vivid example of the disruptive effects of the human environment on nature—suggesting its potentially catastrophic denaturalizing consequences on ecology. As well, it implies, through this simple staging of wildlife within an art gallery, that such environmental manipulation might be redirected toward other, creative ends. Short in length but looped into an insistent repetition, the video proposes a cycle from which escape is impossible; but, unlike the cycles of nature, the video frustrates calculation, revealing unforeseen potential.

In a world that seems to be increasingly devoid of such creativity, we face today a situation in which nature has been transformed into one giant enterprise zone on a global scale, where the totally manufactured environment has spread across the entire planet. Its envelopment of social life is captured painfully in Cantor’s video Nulle part ailleurs (Nowhere, Elsewhere) of 2000, which plays an endless stream of panoramic images of commercial resort hotels—the perfect example of the totally controlled environment, where life itself slips into the oblivion of all-encompassing consumption. As the video cycles through Right: Deeparture, 2005. 16 mm film transferred to DVD; 2 minutes, 43 seconds

innumerable advertisement images, which the artist downloaded from

and Negri’s book Empire: “While it [biopower] unifies and envelops

miscellaneous websites, it provokes a nauseating dizziness caused by the

within itself every element of social life . . . at that very moment [it]

exposure to repeated sameness, which is further emphasized through

reveals a new context, a new milieu of maximum plurality and uncon-

the video’s continually spinning views. Its critical counterpart is

tainable singularization—a milieu of the event.”1 Likewise, by elevating

Cantor’s video D E A D T I M E , 2003, which documents a group of taxi

the improvised ball game to the privileged status of an artistic event—

drivers standing in a circle and kicking a ball around during a break

making it the subject of video art—Dead Time asserts an implicit criticism

from their job of ferrying tourists around Thailand. The drivers take

of the culture depicted in Nulle part ailleurs, which minimizes spontaneity

respite in the spontaneous game, the improvised creativity of which

in favor of controlled environments and reduces the diversity of life to

counters the deadening homogeneity and commercially mediated rela-

commercialized routines. Reversing those priorities is the remarkable

tionships of global tourism shown in Nulle part ailleurs.

achievement of Cantor’s art, which places the stress back on ephemeral

Nulle part ailleurs shows one aspect of our current system of socio-political reality, according to which the whole social body—down to every

invention and nonscripted behaviors—revealing “a new milieu of maximum plurality and uncontainable singularization” in everyday life.

individual and its biological and corporeal existence—is comprised of

The video D O U B L E H E A D S M AT C H E S , 2002, achieves a similar

power’s machine; that is, of the diffusion of diverse and subtle technologies

end, where artistic creativity interfaces with and diversifies industrial

of social control, such as architectural design and the patterns of

production. For this project, the artist approached the Gherla match

commercialized leisure, that regulate and discipline life. If we accept

factory in Romania, commissioning it to produce an edition of twenty

this analysis of what is termed “biopower”—forwarded by philosophers

thousand boxes of double-headed matches. The unusual request

such as Michel Foucault and more recently Michael Hardt and

entailed the factory’s return to hand-based production from its normal

Antonio Negri—then Cantor’s Dead Time must be seen to disrupt such

automated procedures, the process of which the video records over

regimentation, unleashing the radical potential of biopower as it is

some seventeen minutes. It begins by documenting the factory’s process

channeled against constituted order, paralleling the argument of Hardt

of cutting down the trunks of poplar trees to match-sized splinters, which are dipped in red phosphorus by hand and then packed into small boxes for which the artist designed the logo.

Double Heads Matches recalls two strategies of past artistic practice: first, by assigning a factory the job of producing an art object, Cantor’s project 1. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 25.

Left: Dead Time, 2003. Mini DV transferred to DVD; 2 minutes, 23 seconds

tion, evokes the recent artistic trend of institutional critique, whereby the functions and spaces of institutions—often museums and galleries— became the objects of analysis during the eighties and nineties. But unlike such mimicries, which aimed to reveal, not so much to alter, the effects of given systems—think of Andrea Fraser’s unconventional docent inevitably evokes the Readymade, by which Marcel Duchamp, early in

tour of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Museum Highlights: A Gallery

the twentieth century, purchased industrially produced commodities,

Talk, 1989), which delivered to audiences the historical facts relating to

such as a urinal and a snow shovel, and designated them art objects by

the institution’s founding—Double Heads Matches creates paths of

virtue of his own artistic act of choosing them as such. By collapsing the

creativity within the conditions of its institutional site. That the video is

distinction between art and commodity, the Readymade represented a

not accompanied by any voice-over means that the viewers themselves

wry maneuver that showed art to be fully immersed within industrialized

are left to consider the meaning and ultimate significance of the project.

modernity, even while Duchamp extracted something unique—the

Each interpretation becomes a further singularization of difference

Readymade as nuanced conceptual proposition—from the system.

generated within the system, like so many mirror reflections.

Cantor’s Double Heads Matches reverses the process, creating an idiosyn-

T. J. Demos

cratic handmade product from an otherwise automated environment, as well as producing a doubly functional object instead of a defunctionalized Readymade (some of the boxes of matches were put into circulation, given out freely to passersby on the street). Making a play on the Readymade, Cantor elicits a creative differentiation within an industrialized system geared toward regularity and sameness, requiring the reactivation of the physical involvement of laborers in production and reorganizing the factory’s social coordinates, which is documented in the video.

T. J. Demos is an art critic and a lecturer in the Department of History

Multiplicity erupts within the established uniformity of automation.

of Art, University College London. He writes widely on modern and contemporary art, and his essays have appeared in journals such as

The second strategy, insofar as Cantor’s project documents the inner workings of the factory and reveals the process of the work’s own fabrica-

Artforum, Grey Room, and October. His book, The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp, is forthcoming from MIT Press in early 2007. He recently penned the introduction to Vitamin Ph: New Perspectives in Photography (New York: Phaidon Press, 2006) and is currently working on a new book-

Above: Double Heads Matches, 2002. One of twenty thousand matchboxes produced manually at Gherla match factory, Romania

length study of contemporary art and globalization.