Irene Loughlin, “Downes Point And So Departed (Again); A work by Judy Radul.” Simon Fraser University

This review explores the video art work “Downes Point And So Departed (Again)” by Vancouver artist Judy Radul. (Presentation House Gallery, Sept 17 – Oct 30/05) This multi-projection installation places the viewer in the middle of two panoramic screens facing one another on opposite walls. The director is placed on one side of the projection, and addresses the actors on the other wall. A staged construction unfolds within an arbutus forest on Hornby Island. The actors slip in an out of camera range, creating an uncanny effect emphasizing the seamed nature of the video that incorporates several camera views. Five video projectors relay each of the separate camera views, which are pieced together to represent one panoramic view. As a result of the precise angles in which the cameras are set up, limbs appear at intersections encompassed by gaps between the differing sight lines of the camera, until the entire body is present on the screen. The work is synched so that actors leaving one frame are immediately picked up by the next. Radul states that the actors “enter, exit and wait in the wings of a non-architecture” (Radul, artist talk, Sept 24)

The director voices humourous, non-sensical, and non-linear verbal clues to the actors using theatrical methodologies of the audition and the casting call. His addressment crosses over the empty landscape of the viewing area to the opposite wall, to which the actors enthusiastically respond. Depending on their response, the actors are divided up into two camps, where they wait for further instructions. The method of the director’s assessment is also nonsensical. He first addresses the actors with the words “Who’s there?” – words lifted from the opening scene of Hamlet.

The work addresses several themes within a global local context, such as the cultural staging of the BC landscape within the context of local global economics, the artist’s position within the landscape as a cultural producer/consumer and their role in the production of local global economies such as eco/artisan tourism, the history and currency of class in relation to art practice on a local level, the translocal tensions and anxieties inherent in the BC landscape resulting from inscribed cultural, historical and global socio-economic pressures of uneven development in conflict with ideas of nature, the liminal gap that represent a fold between “place and space” of the local global scale jump, heightened anxieties resulting from fissures in ideas of public/private space, and ownership related to the BC natural landscape and colonial history, the art disciplines of craft, theatre and performance art and the body as metaphor and signifier of the pressures and inconsistencies of globalization, and the contrasting cultural, historical and economic constructs of pristine landscape within the changing context of national identity and the nation state, ideas of the individual, and locality as a site of individual and local resistance to global local pressures,

Her method of filming emphasizes the staged nature of the actions/movements, and reveals similarly the cultural staging of nature. In this case, enactment is particularly embodied within a “quintessentially westcoast landscape”, and one that refers “to the traditions of pictoral art.” (curator’s notes, p. 3) Zukin speaks of the relation of art/artists to landscape when she states, “portrayals of the countryside reflected a way of seeing that was part of the larger social system. Artists generally shared in the upper classes’ shift from seeing rural areas as place of leisure and indolence to viewing them as sites of entrepreneurial agriculturalism. More picturesque landscapes, however, either ignored recent rural improvements or persisted in depicting older practices as if they were unchanged.” (Zukin, p. 16) She further states, “…landscape is a series of unbound spaces where mass production and mass consumption reproduce a standardized, quasi global culture….it takes an effort of imagination to distinguish among the “non place places” in such a landscape.” (Zukin, p. 20)…”the inner landscape (of the actor) both represents and resists the abstraction, internationalization, and consumption bias of the new market economy.” (p. 22-23) It may be argued that “culture takes primacy over economy…indeed, the rules of a market economy are both represented and challenged by a market culture.” (Zukin, p. 23)

The emphasis on the pristine aspect of nature has been culturally inscribed by artists and writers. This enactment has traditionally denied that “even in the most desolate ecological contexts, the relationship between the production of local subjects to act socially…is a historical and dialectical relationship…long term reproduction…of values (such as pristine landscape) depends on the seamless interaction of localized spaces and times with local subjects possessed of the knowledge to reproduced locality. Such problems do not arrive only with modernity, colonialism, or ethnography…but involve national regimes (such as reinscribing the nation state aspect of Canadian identity as constructed through commodification of the Canadian pristine landscape)… and particularly at a time when a framework for the global, the national (embodied by the nation state) and the local, has not yet emerged. (Appadurai, p. 181)

The “who’s there?” cry of the actor perhaps refers to the anxiety of the inherent liminality involved in creative/destruction of the pristine landscape through global economic pressures. In the production of locality, Appadurai asserts that “locality is an inherently fragile social achievement. Even in the most intimate, spatially confined, geographically isolated situations, locality must be maintained carefully against various kinds of odds…ecology and technology dictated that … inhabited spaces are forever shifting, thus contributing an endemic sense of anxiety and instability to social life.” (Appadurai, p. 179) Image production of the westcoast Canadian landscape serves to define translocalities of consumption through eco and artisan tourism, of which Hornby Island is particularly susceptible.

The actors assume traditional roles of theatre, they slip “on and off stage” as they enter and re-enter the purvey of the camera lens - they recite parts of soliloquies, line up in preparation for entering the stage, etc. These actions mimic and expose metaphors for the production of locality “where space and time are themselves socialized and localized through complex and deliberate practices of performance, representation, and action. We have tended to cause these practices cosmological or ritual (often also described as a particular aspect of performance art) terms that by distracting us from their active, intentional and productive character create the dubious impression of mechanical reproduction ” (Appadurai, pg 180) Radul pulls back the curtain, so to speak, and reveals the mechanics of art production, which is commonly hidden due to factors such as art’s double function as a class signifier, and historically as a vehicle of aristocratic consumption. Wayman describes this overlay of privileged consumption in contemporary life. He states, “there is an almost pathological aversion to representing an accurate portrayal of daily work” (p. 117) He also attends to the dilemma of the actors, who are revealed to be directed and positioned to perform through hierarchical decision-making. Wayman states, “the real moment we are all in (ironically, the time compression that performance art adheres to) then, is for me a historical time when everywhere on the planet, the majority of people – those who are employed for a living – have not yet attained democracy at work.” (Wayman, p. 120) It is interesting that the artists and actors work environment is staged in nature, which is often positioned as a balm for the “sociomatic illnesses – of how daily life in hierarchically-organized enterprises and institutions negatively affects the human organism.” (Wayman, p. 125)

The montage effect of the various camera angles “demarcates the scene into a spatial architecture.” (curator’s notes, p. 3) The fact that nature could be transformed physically into a staged area upon which dramas are enacted and re-enacted seems odd – lending emphasis to our general belief that there exists natural areas outside of the influence of socio-cultural meaning that remain “pristine”. Radul contests this belief, and contributes observations of staged areas in our lives that we do not recognize as such. She states, “It seems our social – commercial spaces are similarly designed around back stage, stage and audience areas which suggest rules of interaction…for instance the ubiquitous west coast franchise coffee bar (which functions as a semi-public space). Customers find this space reassuringly clear; there is a hidden backroom for storage and preparation, the employees may enter and exit the stage through a back door which leads to a back stage, there is a staging area behind a fourth wall/serving counter which often even incorporates a raised floor, and here the employees prepare the coffee and banter with each other and the customers…the audience area is for the customer, who plays their role on the other side of the counter.” (Radul, p. 96, Video Dreams).

In the artist talk related to the exhibition Radul also related to audience discomfort. “Visiting galleries can become a crisis oriented visitation, how long do you look, stand in front of a painting, when does the video end …” (Radul, artist talk Sept 24) Similarly we feel discomfort in constructed nature, I think, asking ourselves questions such as when do we leave the seawall and head for the hills, how quickly do we walk, are we taking in the landscape or trying not to trip while looking down at our feet, are we relaxing the way we should when we spend time in nature…” All of these questions are socially inscribed, and affect how we see and navigate the landscape.

In the article, landscapes of power, Sharon Zukin suggests that in urban environments, hybrid sites such as the waterfront shopping centre create liminality by opening public space to private consumption. (Zukin, p. 52). Paradoxically, the liminal interiority of the west coast forest, a pristine space of private contemplation, is publicly enacted upon in this work, and thus gains fixity and is constructed according to its use as a theatrical stage, a site that has mixed social (cultural space delineated by actor/audience) and commercial functions (cultural production that functions as work and is consumed). Radul speaks of the “theatrical tendency,* which has gained ascendancy, that of artist’s reemerging interest in built environments, architecture and social space.” (Radul, p. 98) Concurrent to this theatrical tendency is the west coast tradition of performance art, which hovers like a spectral presence in the Downes Point Video, breaking up the theatrical narrative, and the illusionary tropes of dramatic entrances/exits. Theorist Peggy Phelan describes the ephemerality of performance as antithetical to consumption, a methodology that “becomes itself through its own disappearance.” Zukin also speaks about spaces that “used to stand alone – representing ‘pure’ nature or culture in people’s minds – now mix social and commercial functions, sponsors and symbols…an especially open question is how the visual economy of landscape mediates market culture.” (Zukin, p 41)

Similarly the video work raises questions of how nature is and has been staged as a pristine social landscape. Is it possible to reveal what is going on back stage and in the wings as individuals enter and exit within the context of local global influence? In the case of this video presentation, it is fascinating to consider the west coast landscape as a performed site located within a continuous and non-linear time frame. What seems endless and outside of cultural influence - the landscape - is in fact temporal; that which is altered, inscribed and acted upon continuously.

The enacted landscape of this work was made available to the artist as property that belonged to a curator. Hornby Island has a long history of being inhabited by artists, and historically has been reputed as a communal and supportive haven for artists. As a site of eco-tourism, culture is highlighted and pamphlets emphasize that artist’s studios are open to the public – perhaps another market driven change of a historically private site made public. When the actors call “Who’s there?” in the video, there seemed to be a slightly ironic overtone within the video, as Zukin delineates the actor’s confusion, “instead of social groups experiencing moments of liminality, the liminal experience of the market is broadened so that new urban spaces are formed, permeated, and defined by liminality. All such places stand betwixt and between” institutions, especially the sacred sphere of culture and the secular world of commerce.” Zukin’s ideas are also related to the spectral presence of development within landscapes of uneven development, places where the creation/destruction aspect of late capitalism has not yet completely broadened. Cultural production on Hornby Island also relates to a national history of establishing work/retreat areas for artists in remote areas, such as the historic Banff Centre for the Arts. The Banff Centre itself, primarily an artist’s production and residency site, has in the last ten years moved towards a conference/business centre site that supports (financially) the tertiary programming of art production.

Cultural work highlighting the difference between town and country as class inscribed, the town theatre troupe visiting the country, the urban artist on retreat, Engels saw “abolishing the contrast between town and country as one of the keys to resolving the problems of capitalist society. Marx saw agrarian participation and strategies of revolution as a key to success, (Dirlik, p. 24) “ironically, local society (of devalued areas or remote areas) would also emerge as a source of national identity, against the cosmopolitanism of urban centres, drawn increasingly into the global culture of capitalism.” A set of tensions occur, as in Canada we depend upon local eco activism to sustain some degree of ecology.

Bibliography

Appadurai, Arjun Globalization , ed. Arjun Appadurai. Duke University Press, 2001.

Dirlik, Arif. The Postcolonial Aura. 1998

Pakasaar, Helga. Presentation House Gallery. 2005

Radul, Judy. Artist Talk Presentation House Gallery Sept 24, 2005.

Wayman, Tom. Anthem Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, Duke University Press, 2006

Zukin, Sharon. Landscapes of Power, From Detroit to Disney World University of California Press 1993