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Jean
Gagnon
Source: Vera
Frenkel …from the Transit Bar (Toronto: The Power Plant; Ottawa:
National Gallery of Canada, 1994) 11-17.
Reproduced with
permission from the National Gallery of Canada.
Images accompanying
this text are from the Kassel and Toronto versions of the Transit
Bar, courtesy of the artist.
We are all,
in the end, stories in search
of a storyteller, someone who remembers.
-- Lisa Steele , "Committing Memory,"
Vera Frenkel: Les Bandes Vidéo/The
Videotapes
We tell stories
because in the last analysis human lives need
and merit being narrated… The whole history of suffering
Cries out for vengeance and calls for narrative.
-- Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative
In the many
video projects she has created over the years, Vera
Frenkel has been intensely curious about the role of the narrative
in exploring the ambiguous relationship between fiction and reality.
Installations having videos as one component display her interest
in language-related questions and "the shaping of experience into
narrative."1 A rather amazing story is told about a work
by Frenkel that contains a character named Cornelia Lumsden. During
a lecture on the piece by the artist in Montréal, a woman in the
audience called out, "By what right are you using my name in your
art? I and my family wish to know!" A strange case of art coinciding
with life.
If this relationship
between art and life, between imagination and reality, between artifice
and authenticity is a recurrent theme in Vera Frenkel's work and
that of many other video artists, … from the Transit Bar
implies transitions from one opposite to another. This work restates,
subtly but with remarkable clarity, the long debate carried on by
the artistic avant-garde of the twentieth century concerning aspects
of daily life and politics. Without reanalyzing all the strategies
at work in this confrontation, we nonetheless can sum up the debate
with the observation that it is based either on violence against
artistic, social, or political institutions and conventions, or
on heightened autonomy of artistic practice. In … from the Transit
Bar, the signposts of art's association with daily life are
re-examined by fully exploiting the narrative entanglement. This
term designates the relationship between life experience and the
stories we invent and tell. Such entanglement involves a reciprocal
contamination of real life and fiction, of recollection and invention,
and of memory and anticipation. The concept of entanglement is borrowed
from the narrative hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur, who illustrates
it with the example of the judge who analyzes the course of a criminal
action by untangling the web of intrigue in which the suspect is
involved. This notion, though not at the heart of Ricoeur's theories
on the dynamics of narrated time, nonetheless remains useful in
understanding … from the Transit Bar since it forms the link
between reality (the life of the bar patrons chatting over a drink),
and what the artist brings into the space with accounts and stories
conveyed by video.
Over an extended
period, Frenkel has expressed in her work what Ricoeur has formalized
on a philosophical level. Ricoeur speaks of a "prenarrative quality
of experience" and "inchoate narrativity"2 relating to
our propensity to weave stories, to tell one another stories with
all the duplicity that this expression contains, and generally to
bring about situations conducive to narrative within the fabric
of daily life, as well as in the context of social anonymity, where
we invent stories about strangers. In a work like … from the
Transit Bar, entanglement is the pivotal means by which exchanges
and movements take place between the two orders, that of reality
and imagination.
Anther important
dimension of Frenkel's video work, magnified in … from the Transit
Bar and central to the installation, is orality, the use of
oral speech. An electronic medium like video has led many artists
into the sphere of mediatized orality discussed by Paul Zumthor.3
Orality is valid as part of artistic and video practice relating
to the articulation of reality and fiction, because it forms a structure
in which the visitor/viewer is called upon as addressee, by the
face and voice of someone on the screen who talks to the visitor/viewer,
bringing that person into the dialogue.
The visitor/viewer
is immersed in a cultural environment (that of a bar) with its implications
of meeting, of shared solitude, of a transitory and temporary situation,
and becomes involved in an intentional discourse addressed to him
or her by the artists, and embodied in the portraits - the people
appearing and disappearing on one monitor and reappearing on another.
The bar represents a place of passage and meetings, a place structured
by "transient intimacy," as Frenkel aptly puts it. This intimacy,
established by the entanglement of personal lengths of time with
their private "depths," constitutes reality by covering the present
over with stories related by each person.
The visitor/viewer
is immersed in a cultural environment (that of a bar) with its implications
of meeting, of shared solitude, of a transitory and temporary situation,
and becomes involved in an intentional discourse addressed to him
or her by the artists, and embodied in the portraits - the people
appearing and disappearing on one monitor and reappearing on another.
The bar represents a place of passage and meetings, a place structured
by "transient intimacy," as Frenkel aptly puts it. This intimacy,
established by the entanglement of personal lengths of time with
their private "depths," constitutes reality by covering the present
over with stories related by each person.
In another exhibition
dealing with orality,4 it was established that video's
retroactive nature (instantaneity and the mirror relationship) prompted
the artists to present themselves or play themselves, adopting personae.
But in … from the Transit Bar, Frenkel gives the floor to
other faces and other voices, bringing into play an equivocal aspect,
a discrepancy between what the person is and what the person says
he or she is and lets us see, and a discrepancy between the person
and the persona (an eminently social construction). We witness a
persistent ambiguity concerning the truthfulness of the conversation
and the sincerity of the people talking to us; we also observe a
constant interplay involving the adoption of signs that may identified
with the roles and borrowed voices.
In this bare,
there are things to hear and read ( a newspaper restating Frenkel's
ideas and transcripts of the discourses in the videos along with
other community newspapers), confirming that mediatized orality
is literate; it is produced by a literate imagination that values
the written word. We hear the accounts, confidences and stories
of the mediatized people, as well as those of the real people with
us or beside us; each contaminates the other. There are known and
unknown voices and languages. Yiddish and Polish, minority and marginal
languages, are spoken, while French, English and German, the three
imperialist and dominant languages, are conveyed by subtitles and
provide only partial comprehension of the discourse. This device
highlights the foreignness and inadequacy that may be felt by the
visitor, who is marked by the element of real or imaginary transit.
The bar is a
space of orality. The initial form of meeting and the initial form
of touching5 among denizens is via the voice, which gives
resonance to the body. Orality usually corroborates the body's presence
but here can only signify the present, representing the speaker
and producing immediacy all in the same breath. In this bar, stories
are exchanged and conversations are initiated, and these structure
and occupy the present. These verbal exchanges are surely significant,
as is the choice of the five languages that relate stories of exile
and forced or voluntary moves, stories of belonging to communities,
or of community difficulties, anecdotes recounting the person's
inadequate adjustment to his or her environment. This oral communication
constructs the space of a shared personal memory in the present,
the historical present, forming a collective space of experience.
Orality, and
the structure of intimacy that engages the visitor through the video
portraits, places … from the Transit Bar in the present,
which, unlike presence, does not fall into the spatial and visual
category, but rather the temporal category of acting and suffering,
expressed in the accounts, stories and anecdotes of the bar conversations.
The bar is the space of the present, the space of initiative and
stories expressing this, the space where the past, present and future
are entangled, because the fleeting present in Vera Frenkel's bar,
the manifest present of the oral statement, is itself invested with
three temporal dimensions: the past (through memory), the present
(through initiative), and the future (through anticipation and waiting).
Orality, according
to Zumthor, presupposed a performance, consequently entailing an
encounter where speech occurs. It depends as much on the expression
in the tone of voice as on the face of the speaker. The oral performative
and the type of language used to serve to approach and call the
Other, to provoke and to ask. The staging of mediatized orality,
of the dimension of speak, and of the human face, is one of the
important strategies of video artists.6 This formal strategy
produces several results. First, the viewer's reception of the work
is established by means of close-ups and medium shots that directly
address the viewer, thus encoding a structure of intimacy. Orality
also confirms individual identity via stories of community in origin,
personal transformative experience and unique imaginative life as
these are situated in relation to the metamorphoses of history.
Finally, orality entails an articulation of a person's private identity
and public presentation, and of the possible interplay of the two,
so that authenticity and deceit become intertwined.
Through these
stories, conversations and dialogues, through this sense of the
present, orality implies the presence of both a speaker and an addressee
who engage in the discourse. But since this discourse is imaginary,
Frenkel's work maintains a separation between life (the bar) and
art (the video elements, the portraits, the set of "themes"), while
at the same time the narrative entanglement resists this separation.
As an artistic discourse, this is a work of fiction, one step removed
from daily life. The structure by which it addresses the viewer
is based on a transitory and mediatized intimacy, on narratives
comprising stories, anecdotes and accounts that come into being
and disappear. The oral statements, and what they affirm, lead to
a synthesis of the stories and discourse in an imaginary situation
involving communication.7
The work established
a space of collective experience, bonding the visitors to the mediatized
people speaking on the screens. The discourse is neither restricted
nor univocal; the space of experience may be bridged in many different
ways, and involves the mixing of voices and an expansion of intentions
shared by the work and the visitor, the visitors among themselves,
and the visitors in relation to the people on the monitors. The
Transit Bar aptly incarnates the complex relationship between the
space of experience - a place where the past is integrated and the
present reassembled - and the horizon of expectation based on present
initiatives aimed at spreading diverse perspectives. Hence the relevance
of the bar-car metaphor, since it suggests the exchange of works
in a mobile present and, at the same time, a move towards a chosen
and sometimes uncertain future - like migration.
Ricoeur has
observed that "only someone who can be projected toward the future
by care - which includes desire, fear, expectation, and flight -
can also be turned toward the past, through the past, through memory,
regret, remorse, commemoration, or loathing, and thus come back
to the present as that aspect of time in which expectation and memory
enter into an exchange with one another. In line with the first
relation, the present is an origin; in line with the second, a transit."8
Orality theory
highlights the contrast between traditional societies whose cultures
are not based on the written word, where orthodoxy and communal
authority are sustained by myths and fables communicated orally,
and our technological world, where the written word has fostered
individual freedom, originality and self-awareness. It has also
been frequently noted that the electronic media generate a new environment
where a new form of orality based on time-space shifts - for instance,
the telephone - can manifest itself. This is one of the well-know
theses propounded by Marshall McLuhan, whose "global village" we
begin to see in action. Today we realize the extent to which this
idea is utopian, but the practice of artists like Vera Frenkel inventively
makes use of electronic media to reinvigorate the oral nature of
society.
Personal memory
is connected to collective memory. Artists, in works like … from
the Transit Bar, display an attempt to maintain this connection,
in a desire to affirm the living traditions, which we transport
unknowingly from our individual origins and from our moves both
in space and in consciousness, aspects of living tradition from
a personal or historical past that still affect us and that we continue
to reformulate in action and speech. Frenkel's … from the Transit
Bar causes us to realize that the process of identity is shared,
and must be articulated and rearticulated as people migrate, as
memories are transformed.
Jean Gagnon
has been the Director of Programs at the Daniel Langlois Foundation
for Art, Science, and Technology since February 1998. Prior to that,
he was Associate Curator of Media Arts at the National Gallery of
Canada between 1991 and 1998, where he was responsible for the programming
and acquiring works for the collection in cinema, video art, and
new media. Exhibitions curated by him include: The Body of the
Line: Eisenstein's Drawings, Daniel Dion: Path, Vera Frenkel ...From
the Transit Bar, Video and Orality, Video Sonority: Video Born of
Noise, Lynn Hershman: Virtually Yours and Luc Courchesne:
Interactive Portraits. His critical essays have been published
in Canada and abroad in exhibition catalogues and major publications
such as Artintact 2 (Cantz Verlag and ZKM, Germany) and Clicking
In: Hot Links to a Digital Culture (Seattle: Bay Press),
among others.
Notes
1. Quoted in
Vera Frenkel: Les Bandes Vidéo / The Videotapes (Ottawa:
National Gallery of Canada, 1985), 33.
2. Paul
Ricoeur, Time and Narrative [Temps et récit] (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1984) Vol. I, 74.
3. Paul
Zumthor, Oral Poetry: An Introduction [Introduction à la
poésie orale] (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1990).
4.
Video and Orality / Vidéo et oralité, at the National Gallery
of Canada, 1992-93. See exhibition catalogue, text by Jean Gagnon.
5. Note
the double meaning of touching, which can be both physical
and emotional.
6. This
brings to mind such works as Patternity (1990) by Sara Diamond
(see Sara Diamond: Memories Revisited, History Retold
/ Memories ravivées, histoire narrée [Ottawa: National Gallery
of Canada, 1992]), The Board Room (1987) by Muntadas, and
Luc Courchesne's interactive videos, including Portrait No. I
/ Portrait no I (1990) and Family Portrait / Portrait de
famille (1993). Each of these works, in its own way, is based
on orality and video's mediatized dialogism. Muntadas's installation
is a direct and critical reference to television.
7. See
Claude Filteau, "Fiction et oralité," Oralités - Polyphonix 16.
(Québec: Inter éditeur and the Centre de recherche en littérature
québécoise, 1992), 73-86.
8. Paul
Ricoeur, From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II [Du
texte à l'action: Essais d'herméneutique II] (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern
University, 1991), 209
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