How can artists face the social, institutional and economic pressures which have come to bear on the arts and the multiple communities in which they reside and are experienced? How can art be relevant without being ridiculous, pedantic or didactic? Should it have to hide in white boxes to avoid the difficult questions? Artists must be able to provide the intellectual and creative tools for dealing in a critical and rigorous manner with the world in which we live and provide a real sense of viability for alternative ways of being and thinking.

Based on a meditation on the unfinished work (or 'un-work') of David Miller, tentatively entitled The Museum, photos of and around Holocaust sites in eastern Europe, this text makes reference to Seamus Heaney, and through him, Ossip Mandelstam, Anna Akmatova and Paul Celan in asking how and through what kind of poetics can art speak of the violence of the twentieth century. To some extent photography is asked to play the role both of scientific document and poetic voice responding to a history in which it is somehow complicit (our understanding of the violence of the modern era is significantly determined by photography). Is it photography rather than the word which forms both the (comprimised) poetics of the modern era and the visual texture of media/consumer culture?

Looks at MacGregor's installation and its recreation of personal history through the lens of the theory of history of Hayden White who structures the evolution of 'histories' through various stages from 'unprocessed record' though 'chronical', 'story' and finally 'narrative' in which events are gradually disciplined into a 'meta-history' using various literary tropes whose result is what we call 'history'. This notion is used to put stess on roles of institution, curator and practitioner in the context of contemporary art and how in the creation of this work each layer of memory, discourse, interpretation, professional exegesis and so on are folded in upon each other.

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Contemporaneities (2004)

One image I have of the contemporary artist, for better or worse, is that of the international traveller, a modern-day troubadour, arriving (usually invited) in town from afar with his or her bag of tricks. Call it a Couture of Contemporaneity perhaps, where the artist either skims over the local or engages it with a fresh eye and an awareness of its relationship to the contemporary elsewhere. There is a significant difference between the artist being 'here' in this place and an audience simply seeing an action or a work on TV or in a magazine. The artist's presence (or the presence of their work) is the event, framed as it may be in press releases and on web sites in terms of one-liners and outrageous acts, the artist has the choice to become either an entertainment in a machiavellian festival or a privileged correspondent in a dialogue in which grounds for identification are set up between an audience and the artistÕs gestures because they occur in the local space, in this place. On the international level artists skip from here to there formulating a body of work not in a specific location but as a kind of compendium of gestures, to be noted (or ignored) in a meta-world of the art press and journals. In every place that this armature of international culture touches ground, it does so in different ways and the artist has the choice to be a dilettante or an engaged player.

In Canada we have a particular version of this traveller system. Fostered through the Canada Council and the artist-run spaces, an attenuated institution is spread out across the country allowing artists to present their work in its various nodes, simultaneously bringing the centre to the periphery and vice versa. As with other national institutions, such as GriersonÕs film board, there is embodied in the artist-run system a project of building identity through which the regional, the less urban and the rural become, at least symbolically, part of the consciousness of the rest who, for the most part, live in urban agglomerations. At best these institutions are able to develop and embody changing realities and models of who we are, opening spaces for practitioners to develop deeper thought, functioning as think tanks for new ways of engagement. At worst (which happens when artists donÕt question, on all levels, the frameworks in which they are asked to operate) we descend into an abyss of facile symbolism exemplified by ministers of culture distributing free flags as a constitutional strategy or the manic socialist-realism of Canada's five-dollar bill.

What has this got to do with the Couture of Contemporaneity? This is the second event in which artists from Canada and abroad have been invited to present artwork, performances and interventions in a venue described by the organisers as 'public space'. The work is experienced in urban spaces; in storefronts, on sidewalks, at a car dealership, in the bus station, in city parks and vacant lots. There is a gesture here, on the part of the curators (or coordinators as they prefer to be named), to put the artistic activity outside of the hermetic confines of the gallery space. This alone is significant. The glory of the artist-run system is also its major flaw. In consciously nurturing a network of physical spaces the Canada Council and other arts councils created a place of serious experimentation for several generations of artists. Unfortunately this focus on spaces, on white interior volumes of various shapes, has over the decades moulded limited types of practice. For example, many artists have worked primarily in installation and performance using what increasingly became a cliche notion of site-specificity where improvising using the immediate physical, architectural and social conditions became more and more absurd as spaces came to be clones of one another, both administratively and physically. Also there is no audience, that is to say no public (leaving aside for the moment the important question of what 'public' could mean). Visitors to spaces are predominantly other artists and students. This makes perfect sense if one regards the artist-run system as a research institution, much like a university or think-tank. In this sense the gallery is a safe-house. But this mind-set and the notion of artist it engenders precludes other kinds of critical engagement be they across disciplines or with different publics. This is a very localised phenomenon related to how these spaces came into existence and the cultural geography of Canada. For example, my experience recently in former communist states is that all kinds of people will come in to gallery spaces and enter into dialogue with artists. The space is seen a place of very lively interaction, not exclusion. So it has nothing to do with the box itself. But that different places require different propositions in order to shift paradigms.

SPASM can make such a proposition. What is vital in how invited practitioners situate themselves (or are situated) in relation to problem enucleated by this slight gesture of reframing. SPASM comes out of but is not operating within the artist-run space. Significantly the festival does not consist only of performance in public space, which can be easily passed over, but also includes static artwork seen in both public and private commercial spaces for the duration of the festival. That is not to say that simply shifting venues really changes where we are operating. The public for SPASM is still predominantly SaskatoonÕs cultural community and a well-schooled professional artist can choose to wall off their slice of the public space, pretend it is a gallery and focus primarily on how well the work documents. It is interesting to me that, on occasion, it was the organisers of 'Couture of Contemporaneity' who were more interested in how the works manifested themselves as public interventions than the artists. However the shift out of the gallery is a significant gesture in reframing possibilities. Simply put, there are other people walking around where this work is happening--it is a shared place. The work may dialogue, now and through its documentation, within the specialised world of the visual arts but it also extends into other spaces where other forms of dialogue are possible. How can artists face the social, institutional and economic pressures which have come to bear on the arts and the multiple communities in which they reside and are experienced?

How can art be relevant without being ridiculous, pedantic or didactic? Should it have to hide in white boxes to avoid the difficult questions? Artists must be able to provide the intellectual and creative tools for dealing in a critical and rigorous manner with the world in which we live and provide a real sense of viability for alternative ways of being and thinking. For me this challenge invokes a notion of interdisciplinarity which is not simply a mixing of disciplines and technologies, following models proposed by the entertainment industry, but rather a recognition that the codes, ethics and disciplines through which we have built practices can be the basis for future practices only if they draw on a wider range of epistemologies, forms of action and reflection in feeling out a viable approach to present conditions. The future viability of the arts does not lie in acquiescing to a prevailing economic morality which dictates an over-professionalized "living within oneÕs means" (which most art schools seem to have internalised). Cultural practice must always seek to exceed its means and extend critical inquiry and reflection beyond its self-imposed range. I mentioned above that current models of cultural production engender a certain image or role for the artist. To what extent does contemporary 'branding' of the artist (the self as trade mark) represent a conflation of a romantic notion of the creative hero with a contemporary hyper-consumer ethos? How can experimentation with alternative models (through gestures raising questions around authorship, ethics, intimacy, implication and permission which violate the normal authorship and copyright structures, for example), shed light on these questions?

For me it has been necessary to explore various types of collaborative activity which provide an alternative to solo or object-oriented making. This has involved collaborations with architects, dancers, media-artists and others, in both non-commercial and commercial projects destined for dissemination in the art milieu and elsewhere. These experiments, not always successful, perhaps rarely so, have provided insights into strategies of working and functioning as an artist but outside of expected frames. I would simply call this "mobility". The more widely this kind of mobility is practiced (or if the ways it is already practiced are more discussed), the better. Why not integrate artistic practice and inquiry with other disciplines, be they what we would normally call commercial or 'applied' (architecture, communication design) or other artistic fields (dance, writing, curatorial/critical activity)? In each case the desire is to find out how these other fields or practices can be useful in extending the inquiry begun with solo practice, to push those other fields beyond their self-imposed frames to a point where they are rich, critical and dynamic as contemporary cultural activity -- pushed to a point where what is at stake in the world around us is brought to the surface. How can the curatorial gestures and structural questioning proposed by practitioners from within the Canadian arts milieu facilitate this inquiry?

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IYet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want a poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself. We want the surprise to be transitive like the impatient thump which unexpectedly restores the picture to the television set, or the electric shock which sets the fibrillating heart back to its proper rhythm. We want what the woman wanted in the prison queue in Leningrad, standing there blue with cold and whispering for fear, enduring the terror of StalinÕs regime and asking the poet Anna Akmatova if she could describe it all, if her art could be equal to it. [Seamus Heaney--Nobel Prize Lecture: "Crediting Poetry", 1995]

In his 1995 Nobel Lecture, Irish poet Seamus Heaney invokes Ossip Mandelstam, Anna Akmatova and Paul Celan in delineating how poetry can respond to the extremes of brutality and "the decisive operations of merciless power" characterising the modern era and more specifically, his own experience of "the troubles" in Ireland. He outlines a journey from alienation to a modern relevance for a poetry both of witness and of reflection. He also elaborates a yearning for lyric poetry where truthfulness becomes recognisable as a 'ring of truth' within "the buoyancy generated by cadence and tone and rhyme and stanza", a note "tuned to its most extreme" by Celan. In short, truth is conjured through beauty. Here I propose to hijack HeaneyÕs notion of poetry and apply it, rather roughly, to photography. Photography is undeniably beautiful, seductive and magical. It is a condensation of precious light, of things in the world and a myriad of ingrained references. This mapping of light onto the emulsion surface is a corollary of lyricism in poetry. So perhaps photography can be seen as the poetry of the late twentieth century. But photography is also the documentary tool of evidence, the instrument of scientific record and the suspect implement of the political or commercial propagandist. What do we do with the corrupted poetics of photography, never completely believable, never completely untrue? Unlike poetry it can never stand fully away from the current, protected by the scrim of language. Photography is essentially complicit in the violence of the modern era. Perhaps in the right hands it can unravel itself just a little bit and recuperate, precisely because of its complicity, a relevant poetics.

When invited to write about the photography of David Miller, I asked his permission to write about a work not yet fully formed, tentatively titled "The Museum". It is a suite of more than a hundred photographs taken over a period of five years principally in and in the environs of Holocaust sites in eastern Europe, though not predominantly 'of' these sites in a documentary sense. This work, according to the artist, may ultimately be configured into a publication, with or without text, or parts of it fractured off to be components in other works, installations, exhibitions, etc. These aspects have not yet been finalised, and we cannot assume at this point how, or if, they will be. My interest in unfolding my own thoughts around David MillerÕs practice through this "not-yet-work" or "un-work" follows two main streams. Firstly, in my labeling this body of images with an invented notion of the "un-work", there is a desire to engage a point where the work is still vulnerable enough to open into a conversation whose own process is analogous to (and possibly interdependent with) the process which the work embodies Ð rather than the work being the subject of an exegesis with this writing appearing to be an authoritative unpacking of what is contained within a 'work' defined by the formal bounds of contemporary art-making; of authenticity, objecthood, sole-authorship, genius, commodity, etc. In short to privilege process over end-product. Secondly, the specific geography in which Miller wanders, necessitates a consideration of how art, specifically photography, engages the profound violence of the modern era. What is its capacity to do so? What is the necessity to do so? And to what extent does such an engagement inhabit a work whether explicitly intended or not? To a certain extent the first stream gains permission for the unfolding of this second more vital set of questions. To claim to move with Miller through this geography is a little trick to avoid the requirement for conclusion or valuation and a slight polemic about how I would prefer to think through and with the work of others about the world we confront everyday.

This little box of a hundred or so prints which David has lent record a pilgrimage of sorts. The path in question is a subjective wandering through of sites of the Holocaust in eastern Europe; Auschwitz, Majdanek, Warsaw and others. There are images of museum displays, rooms of stacked archives, fragments of Hebrew script on walls, kitsch representation of Jewish culture and samples of contemporary racist graffiti superimposed upon historical sites as they themselves are framed by the processes of remembrance, monumenting, museifying and rendering sacred. There are many images of people caught in relationship to static historical displays. Still others, of people bundled against the cold of the moderately bleak everyday of eastern-European winter or of a saturated rust-colour winter path through the forest. Every photograph is the framing and perpetuating of the stare. In Miller's case the stare is often oblique, the point of concentration slightly away from where you would expect it to be, distancing these photographs from the thousands that have already been taken. The image of the horrific photo in the display includes a contemporary observer looking in a completely different direction. An image of the familiar architectural profile of an Auschwitz block includes local workers delivering flats of soft drinks.

A feature of any pilgrimage is that the path is conditioned by those who have passed before. A passage through Holocaust sites is a ritual in which a Theodicy, a confrontation with evil in our world, meets a whole range of proposed conclusions, agendas, significances and interpretations. With Miller that Theodicy encounters an intuitive post-modern scepticism, a kind of apophatic feeling out of truth though negation, simultaneously a stare and a veering away from proposed truths, questioning the stability of what it is we see. There is also another pilgrimage of sorts, through the history and uses of the discipline of photography. How does one use this material? Are the tools of the contemporary artist adequate to this enquiry. Or can approaching this field ultimately only prove the poverty of the discipline through failure? Are the artistÕs intuitive bag of tricks and gleaned knowledge up to the task. As with the question posed to Anna Akmatova in Leningrad the answer can only be "No, of course not. I am full of doubt." and simultaneously, "Of course".

What is it to make a pilgrimage to a place where something devastating has happened. What are the motivations for this activity? Going to 'the place' is a very specific type of activity. It is different from going to a Holocaust museum in Washington or in Israel. How is going to a library different? How is the process different from a remembrance not located in place, such as the Passover Seder where simple objects, texture, tastes, having no direct connection to the events have such power as part of ritual. Here the meaning does not reside in the things, but in the shared ritual in which meaning is conferred. Holocaust pilgrimage has elements of this kind of ritual (including a narrative of persecution and exile), but is very different in its relation to modern signifiers of truth and evidence where material reality is a container of truth rather than metaphor. What is the 'truth' of a place? How does a place 'mean' something? Perhaps we go to a place in order to think about something or perhaps to put ourselves in a position where we cannot think of anything else, an isolation for the purposes of meditation. But as time goes by one is forced to deal more and more with the re-presentation of the site (as monument, museum, ruin, or erased reality). It is impossible to isolate the 'essence' of historical events from the flood or rearrangement. At least in the material world.

In looking at other work by David Miller we can see some of the sensibilities which are at play in the "un-work" of "The Museum" and the fascination about the function of photography which collides with the complexities of representing and dealing with representations of the most documented and studied genocide of all. Living things are rarely central in MillerÕs photography but life is. Desiccated remains, husks, empty settings: evidence of fleeting passage is everywhere. As reaffirmation of life, as affirmation of death, as meanderings in the existential unfairness of passage. Photography is ideally suited to this. The photographic image itself, as trace of the passage of light, evidence of animation, of illumination, is like the dried husk that is evidence of decay and the rekindling to come. For years Miller has collected the fallen chaff of the natural world, seeds, pods, shafts of grass, flowers, insect parts, leaves, feathers, etc. and from them has built a set of photograms which are the basis for two works; "Legend", a vast grid of images, each a tiny white object centred on a black field and "Natural Causes", where the shapes of natural objects overlap and build up in complex layers of colour. "Night" is set of black and white photograms. They are made from earth or cremation ash, titled with a proper name (Kathy, Dion, Adam, Aldis) which references the source of the material from which the image is made, in some cases actual cremation remains, in others earth from a specific location. These grains of earth or ash are laid out meticulously and exposed to make a photogram which looks like a photograph of the night sky. Only the title give a clue to look deeper into these images to find that a one to one imprint of material gives rise to a representation that is utterly specific as the shadow of a being recently passed and at the same instant imbued with the universal wonder of gazing at the open night sky. The photograms, avoid the specific use of the camera as apparatus but at the same time are deeply preoccupied with photography as conversion of light into matter, of representing light / life and its absence on the surface of the paperÕs emulsion both in its literal and metaphorical dimensions.

"Execution I" and "Execution II" [published in Pataphysics "Psychomilitary" Melbourne, 2002] consists of two images published as facing pages in a magazine). Their source is an image from Yad Vashem, a reproduction with the aesthetics of a copy many generations removed of a photo of a group of prisoners standing against a wall before a firing squad. The photographer and camera shares the space of the perpetrators, the camera shoots to capture the moment on the edge of the abyss, freezes the temporal flow of the other inevitable shots to come so that it cam be played and replayed ad infinitum, as glory, as gloating, as indictment or perhaps in the end as disconnected visual toy. This is a phenomenally complex image, never a document of true facts but a document of its own representations, forced over and over to reproduce the same moment. As with the famous images contained in the Stroop Report, the victim's role is to never escape a sealed temporality no matter what use the image is put to. That is the left-hand image. On the right is an identical image, except the prisoners have been released. The photo has been retouched so that the stone wall is continuous. The people have gone. The artist has let them out of the representational loop. Or rolled the imaginary film a few frames forward. They have been rescued by being allowed to escape into the abyss of death, which was always their fate. In doing so Miller has restored their specificity, released them from emblemhood into the abyss. The revelation of the fictive 'before' and 'after' is a reflection on the fallibility of the image as evidence, as science, as truth and an opening up of the image as a site for a poetic leap.

In Miller's work the camera is the tool of the collector. The box of the camera is a morgue. A fascination imbues these photographs which is akin to the fascination of a child staring at the microcosmic world of insects, or pools. Why does anything move? The leg of the spider, the tiniest protozoa. Through the magnifying glass, the stare of fascination. The child grows up. The stare of fascination meets the historical complicity of photography. There is no escape.

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*

I conjectured that photography is essentially complicit in the violence of the modern era. What is interesting or useful about this statement? Photography is certainly intrinsically related to modernity, to post war global visual culture. It formulates the world we perceive as real. In writing on Paul Steinberg's Hollocaust memoire Speak You Also Adam Philips asserts that "...memory is complicit with what it remembers. The museum and the litany celebrate out losses even as they mourn them." So is photography complicit with what it records and its relationship to memory and death, as so richly described by Barthes, is one of multi-layered intimacy. In the use of photography as evidence there is the desire for a verifiability exemplary of the modern world. A picture is proof. Scientific. Undoubtable. The camera is a scientific instrument. A lie detector. Photography, then, has a dual attribute; that of science, evidence, etc. and that of poetry. So every photograph carries with it the baggage of its potential as scientific evidence (proof of a cartesian "this is this") and its intimate potential as lament, as poetry. Every photograph is burdened by the history of photography as poetry, as scientific proof, and as the visual hyperbole which is the background texture of modern life.

Much documentation of the Holocaust is photography and film whose source is National Socialist documentation of its own actions. As WW2 brought an acceleration in the development of the technology of war, in the application and perfection of industrial processes and managerial techniques to the annihilation of human beings, it also brought an acceleration in the methods of documenting and an unheard of sophistication in the use of the image for propaganda and satisfying the revisionist vanity of those in power. Because of this leap of technology of which photography was an intimate part, the vast documentary remains of WW2 have had a defining impact on the highly commercial image-based culture we live in. In post-war photography the visual cues of what signifies horror has been indelibly affected by the inadvertent aesthetic of holocaust documentation (for example that horror belongs in a bleak northern landscape photographed in black and white) and as it permeates commercial culture, these signs break free of their historical source and float in the market place of images as commercial texture. This overdetermination is one further layer that must be peeled back by any photographer approaching the Holocaust. The photos collected for the Nuremberg Tribunals entered post-war visual culture as the basic body of images of the Holocaust, repeated, recaptioned, reorganised in thousands of contexts. Nazi documents such as the Stroop Report, detailing the destruction of the Warsaw Jews, were immaculately illustrated with photographs whose technique, composition and sophisticated construction of meaning are one with the techniques of any photographer.

Every photograph is, within itself, a 'museum', a complex collection of evidence, signification, explicit and inadvertent inclusion, narrative strategy, prejudice, and historical reference that can never fully be controlled. Every museum is a reduction of these parameters and factors to the point where an intended narrative becomes apparent, but every museum always has its unintended, or un-tended, narratives; telltales of a vast undertow.

So what is at stake when an individual turns a creative 'eye' towards the violence that marks our century, and specifically towards the very western, very modern convulsion that is the Holocaust? The work must flow through many layers and undertows, both personal and cultural, including accounting for the desire to investigate individual and collective identity, record and reflect on the issues of truth, beauty and representation, of technology and of the place of the invocation of meaning. In short what is at stake is of our implication in this world, our interdependence, our conversation with those others with whom we share a brief consciousness. David's process intuitively shies away from completion, from implication. It does not want to be caught in one of the possible narrative closures, perhaps not caught up in the uses others would put it to. One does not want to be guilty of hijacking the aura of Holocaust in some sensational way for artistic success, all too common in photography and installation practice. Once again, are the tools of the contemporary artist adequate to deconstructing and synthesising this field of enquiry? Can approaching this field ultimately only prove the poverty of the discipline through failure? This is an appropriate and necessary doubt. We have to return to the queue in Leningrad with Akmatova and her nameless interlocutor. David Miller's work does much to open up the ground for a journey through this territory. I would say that this "un-work", far from being a work not yet completed, is a work not yet begun. It is a work simultaneously accomplished in the most rigorous terms of its discipline and a gesture on the cusp of abandoning a conventional meaning of 'art work' in favour of an integration of the artistÕs process with the world through which he moves, in all its complexity and reciprocality. It is a participation in a conversation that permeates modern being.

In "Crediting Poetry" Heaney asserts both a place for the individual voice to approach the most vital of territories "... true to the impact of external reality and... sensitive to the inner laws of the poets being" and a responsibility for the complexity of how the work of art must approach a world which shares turf with the zealot, politician, or propagandist. We cannot be thieves of aura retreating crab-like to the safe confines of carefully bounded discipline where nothing really is at stake. I would assert that opening up of this place implicitly demands transcending the mercantile conceptions of 'artist' and 'work of art' which define the relationship of artistic practice to culture. This is part of the necessity for the 'un-work' as a place of focus. I end with the poem that Heaney uses in his Nobel lecture and which to me shares some of the song evident in David Miller's work...

If I could come on meteorite!
Instead, I walk through damp leaves,
Husks, the spent flukes of autumn,

Imagining a hero
On some muddy compound,
His gift like a slingstone
Whirled for the desperate.

The diamond absolutes.
I am neither internee nor informer;
An inner ŽmigrŽ, a grown long-haired
And thoughtful; a wood-kerne

Escaped from the massacre,
Taking protective colouring
From bole and bark, feeling
Every wind that blows;

Who, blowing up these sparks
For their meagre heat, have missed
The once in a lifetime portent,
The comet's pulsing rose.

(excerpt from "Exposure" in Seamus Heaney, North: Faber & Faber, 1975)

 

"Reality is more fabulous, more maddening, more strangely manipulative than fiction. To understand this is to recognize the naiveté of a development of cinematic technology that promotes increasingly unmediated access to reality. It is to see through the poverty of what Benjamin deplored as ‘truth expressed as it was thought’ and to understand why progressive fiction films are attracted by and constantly pay tribute to documentary techniques. These films put the ‘documentary effect’ to advantage, playing on the viewer’s expectations in order to ‘concoct fables’. The documentary can easily thus become a ‘style’: it no longer constitutes a mode of production or an attitude towards life, but proves to be only an element of aesthetics (or anti-aesthetics), which, at best, and without acknowledging it, it tends to be in any case when, within its own factual limits, it reduces itself to a mere category, or a set of persuasive techniques."

(Trinh T. Minh-Ha from "Documentary Is/Not a Name"* )

 

"Let me tell you something. See this. [holds up a bullet] This is this. It ain’t something else. This is this."

(Robert De Niro as Mike in The Deer Hunter)

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Contemporary theory of history (from Hayden White to Michel Foucault) acknowledges, almost as a matter of passing, that history is a form of narrative the content of which is as much invented as found and that historical narratives on the whole serve to suppress discontinuity in constructing a specious continuity between past and present for the purposes of the domestication (disciplining) of the chaos of events whether, for example, for revolutionary purposes(crystallizing the events of the past into a narrative which dictates the unfolding of the future) or conservative ones (justifying the status quo). Hayden White lays out a simple model where the 'unprocessed historical record' (the 'data' that we have available to us, which is certainly incomplete) is turned into a 'chronicle' (a listing of the events and characters in chronological order, without beginning or end) then a 'story' (an establishment of the temporal parameters in which the narrative will take place, adding the rudiments of plot; a focus with beginning, middle and end) and finally a 'narrative' (with the story cast in the form of tragedy, comedy or satire, formed by a [political] ideology and crafted using various literary tropes; metaphor, metonymy, synechdoche or irony). The resulting metahistory is what we call history. For White all history is metahistory (though it may not acknowledge it), an attempt through narrative closure to approach (or disguise) a truth which is unattainable. In short, all history is contained within a fiction.

To some degree regarding history as such a fiction is a luxury of the uninvolved but its permeability can also permit a retelling from the margins. Those with a more instrumental relationship to power have a vested interest in seeing history as a fixed set of 'facts' and those challenging the status quo from the margins are to some extent obliged to acquiesce to, or infiltrate the scientific constructions of history, truth and power upon which our legal systems are based. The history of indigenous claims in the post-colonial era is one of the conflict of radically different modes of telling history in which the pseudo-neutrality of western historical/legal method collides with a form of telling where personal identity and social history are part of the same story, where memory and history are of the same fabric.

In this exhibition, Gwen MacGregor's subjective approach to history reveals the inventions, tropes, etc. which transform chronicle into a narrative. Using Haydon White's terms, one could say that Fold it up and put it away: Fernie’s Curse seeks to reside in the area between 'chronicle' and 'story' where the creation of significance and hierarchy remains permeable and transparent. Discontinuities reside on the surface and alongside the 'telling' of a story there is a curiosity about the nature of that 'telling'. Ultimately, though, the narrative cannot remain there. The unfolding of the story will not remain static and absorbs this latest layer of authorship. While on one level the work hesitates to impart narrative closure to the history it investigates, it does create another narrative layer with the subjective presence of the artist, her process and her investigation of the 'telling'. This new narrative, framing the story within the continuity of an artistic practice, relies on both the installation and this publication (including this text). In turn these elements are folded back into the history in a self-revealing way. MacGreggor does not exclude herself from the picture as a historian or curator would, remaining objectively ‘out of the fray’. She is present and part of this 'narrative of doubt' which allows the story itself to remain open and in flux and provides us with a fragment of a continuous telling of history.

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© 1998 Andrew Forster & Southern Alberta Art Gallery (all rights reserved)

© 1998- 2004 Andrew Forster (all rights reserved)