Gallery Skol, Montreal, January 16 - February 14, 1999

Maria Zimmermann Brendel

The following review first appeared in Espace 48, Summer 1999.

When Hélène Sarrazin initially proposed Mater/Materia for installation at Gallery Skol, she used literary excerpts to communicate and situate her work -- to successful ends. After all, how is one to describe an installation in a small room composed of recorded sounds of water, traces of plaster on the walls with dust on the floor to evoke waves receded - a space the spectator is to occupy for viewing and listening? The literary work used by Sarrazin is an introductory excerpt from the ancient classic, Homer's Odyssey, which references the Acheans who, ignorant while traveling to new places, found themselves surrounded by waves of water whose sounds they could neither hear nor understand.

As one walks into Skol's petite salle through a low doorway, made particularly small by the artist so that the spectators would have to bend down to enter, the audiovisual components are what immediately affect the beholder.¹Sounds can be heard of the waves of the sea approaching the shore, breaking and receding, their noise increasing with the ocean's performance. Played continuously via four small loudspeakers suspended from the ceiling and couched in decorative halogen lights - the familiar, soothing beautifully sonoric atmosphere envelopes the listener. Memories are instantaneously recalled by the sounds, secured by the enclosure of the small room. One is made wanting. However, after being swayed by the familiar sounds thus "traveling" in space and in time to the mater (mother) and to materia (materials, objects and subjects), the spectator's eyes adjust to the dimly lit room only to find surface traces. Vertical and horizontal striae on the walls and rubble on the floor become a stark remainder of the traces of an absence.

The real

The real has left, momentarily, or is made overly present in memory, as the spectator is being touched (touché) by the sounds of familiarity. For, the touché is what initiates a productive engagement, confronting the spectator with the real. The real, I suggest, is the traumatic absence, the memories of plenitude, of fullness, of in utero² evoked in this artwork . The real is that "which is non-narrativizable, having no sure identity," as Judith Butler phrased it. And, having no direct language either with which the real could be articulated, being the effect and remainder of trauma (trauma can be defined as loss, pain, emptiness, fragmentation) the question Butler poses is: "How to write in it and of it?" No wonder Hélène Sarrazin turned to the past to reconnect to a literary classic, in order to establish a level of communication, and in order to express that which is difficult to articulate. But in reconnecting with a literary giant, she also disconnected with it, in part, by extracting not directly from Homer, but from an already processed source of the ancient bard's novel, from the introduction to the Odyssey by Meredic Dufour and Jeanne Raison (Paris: Bordas, 1988), who situate the novel's content anew, isolating issues of contemporary currency, which are taken up by the artist in Mater/Materia and transformed. In appropriating and transforming her initial source, turning it into a new production of surface and sound to strongly affect the beholder, the artist situates her installation as an allegorical paradigm, her activity being neo-allegorical. The neo-allegorist, or neo-avant-garde artist, recedes into the past while returning from the future repositioned by innovative art in the present.³

Allegory / melancholy

We can view Mater/Materia as a new trajectory in Sarrazin's art practice. Her use of allegory allows the layering of discourses and temporality which attracts and intensifies the experience of the beholder. Her previous work focused often on the tangible material object, made of wicker and wood, where the object's presence and exterior surfaces were given emphasis demanding much space when showcased, and where the beholder was in a viewing-observing role. The installation at Gallery Skol, by contrast, is visually minimal, focusing on the interior spaces of memory via sound-waves and faintly "sketched" surface-traces, touching the psychic space of the beholder, thus positioning the spectator centre-stage. By removing the object and replacing it with space and sound (and ultimately with the beholder) there is initially a sense of loss, foregrounded by the presence of (an) absence - a melancholia of sorts. But the melancholic is characteristic of the allegorical paradigm, linked with absences in order to effect fullness in the viewing/listening subject. A melancholic tension can be located in the artwork's shift between past and future with which the work redefines its own trajectory and that of the beholder, who is repositioned and displaced in this viewing/listening dynamic.

This Janus-like aspect of looking backward and forward is intrinsic to allegory, it establishes historical connectedness while disputing historical fixedness of inherent meaning, making the novel work unstable for discursive, personal, and emotive engagements. In stepping into the installation of Mater/Materia, one is confronted with loss while filled with imaginary plenitude; that is the dialectic of allegory. There is the sonoric lavishness of approaching and receding waves, that attempts to rescue what is no longer there to fill the gap of a loss with fullness and coherence, which the spectator experiences when s/he is touched by the real. This installation lends itself to that original fullness before the split occurs between mother/child, providing the viewing/listening subject with an image of sonoric and specular coherence. The allegorical paradigm with its opacity and transparency, revealing while concealing with its focus on detail, on space and temporality, demystifies the real while inscribing it onto the beholder.

Skin-traces

But the faint, almost decorative surface traces left on the wall can also become very tangible, and point to touch and to human skin, to the embrace and to the touch of the other. Skin, flesh, is what spectators strongly respond to, notes philosopher Elizabeth Grosz. It is that "elementary, pre-communicative domain out of which both the subject and object in their mutual interaction develop." Allegory in its duplicity isolates the real, as in the surface details in Sarrazin's installation, evoking the loss of, or the longing for, the other's skin, while covering loss with the joyful sounds of the seashore, the ocean's voice-over. This dialectic is the strength of Mater/Materia, resting not on fullness of meaning, nor on an intelligible narrative even in its historical reconnection, but on the power of an absence, a blank space that is to be filled by the beholder.

Crucial to this work is the inter activity demanded from the viewer/listener who must fill that space - with its surface-traces and sound-waves (which are not fully contained; they are heard as one approaches) -- so that the (a) voyage can begin.

Maria Zimmermann Brendel is a professor and art critic. Her writings have been published in exhibition catalogues and Canadian and international art journals.