Public (E-Journal, York University)

Allan, Kenneth R.

Grounds of Forgetting and Intermediaries for Memory: Some Photographs by David C. Miller

Lau, Charlene

Pieter Hugo at Yossi Mil Gallery

Simon, Roger I.

Artwork, Aesthetics and Public Memorization

Balfour, Ian

Quaking

Lessard, Bruno

English

Site-Specific Screening and the Projection of Archives: Robert LePage's Le Moulin à images

Chew, May

152 PlJBLIC 40
representation, Sarkar contends that several factors in
the 1980s broke film's Partition-silence, such as the
rise of dalit (untouchable) politics and religious
militancy. Chapter Six of the book focuses on the
television mini-series Tamas (Darkness), originally
aired on the state-owned netv"ork Doordarshan. The
series depicts the violent effects of Partition through
the experiences of Nathu, a lower-caste worker, and
his family. In his analysis of the series, Sarkar suggests
that the narrative of Tamas not only absolves the
average Indian citizen of the violence and trauma
brought by Partition, it places the blame on India's
national leaders and colonial forces and policies.
Whilst examining the period immediately following
Partition, Sarkar asks the question, "if contemporary
films did not represent what was clearly the most
momentous event in modern South Asian history, what
were they doing instead?" (49). Sarkar's question points
to his unique methodology-his analysis considers both
what stories are being told and which stories remain
untold. In doing so, he argues that cinematic discourse
is constituted by both its "expressions and silences."
For example, in the Bengali films of the 1940s and
1950s, Sarkar argues that narrative preoccupation
with poverty and homelessness is the trace of
Partition mourning. Later, the author makes a
convincing case of these traces of mourning, looking
at refugees both as spectator and film subject. Sarkar
contends that India's mourning is as much about
what has happened in the decades since Partition as
fantasies of what could have happened. In his words,
he is interested in "a kind ofmourning work that helps
us dream about futures and communities" (page 43).
Like most of the books published on Indian cinema
in the past few years Sarkar cannot escape situating
his analysis within globalization discourse. Yet, even
while engaging with the effects of globalization on
Indian cinema, he never loses sight of Partition.
Rather, when he engages with globalization and
its effects on Indian cinema and television, it is to
further an understanding of the changing and multiple
effects of, and reactions to, Partition.
Also, similar to many of the books now being
published on Indian cinema, the book's greatest strength
may be its specificity.This is a comment not just on the
book itself, but also on the landscape of Indian film
studies. The field has grown beyond its earlier, often
pejorative, writing, and now beyond the taxonomies
and surveys that were published in the 1990s. Instead,
books such as Bhaskar Sarkar's have a narrow focus, in
this case Partition, and an important one at that.
H ubert Davis's Invisible City, screened at Toronto's
Regent Park Film Festival (RPFF) this fall, opens
with a crucial image; it is a bird's eye view, which
situates in its foreground a handful of ramshackle,
tired apartment buildings that comprise the heart of
Regent Park, Canada's largest and oldest housing
community. Somewhere towards the back, the hazy
line ofToronto looms silently. As this image and the
rest of Davis's documentary goes on to suggest, there
is a hard, yet unspoken line drawn between these two
planes, a line that characterizes Toronto's resolute
blindness towards its West end neighbourhood. It is
precisely this "invisibility" that the film then attempts
to uncloak, by actively foregrounding Regent Park
residents and giving them a platform-albeit never a
wholly unencumbered one-from which to speak.
The film follows intermittently two Regent Park
residents, Mikey and Kendell, through three years of
their lives, as they stumble-sometimes blindly,
sometimes brazenly-from adolescence towards
adulthood. Though attention is given to the hardships
of life within the confines of their inner-city
neighbourhood, the film suggests that the real struggle
comes in Mikey and Kendell's fraught navigations of
the larger city "outside," and its forms of juridical,
political, emotional, and even physical alienation. This
transitional period of the protagonists' lives is
deliberately juxtaposed against the changes faced by
the community itself, which is presently undergoing the
contentious fifteen-year "Regent Park Revitalization"
plan that will see most of its existing structures gutted
and replaced. As the film returns to the opening bird's
eye shot, it becomes apparent that, from this aerial
vantage point, the Regent Park buildings resemble
Xs-marked eerily for demolition. The grievous
point emphasized here is that perhaps the only instance
Regent Park registers on the city's socio-political
cartography is when it is on the brink of dissolution.
Invisible City, however, is neither a mournful
elegy nor a rash and clumsy call to arms. Instead, the
film is Davis's deft attempt to crack open up a space
for dialogue, by firstly inserting subjects and perspectives
often egregiously misrepresented or else wholly left
out of official urban discourses. While the film is at
times successful at returning the gaze and using
strategic evasions and silences to interrogate the
imposed "invisibility" of its subjects, it is really the
embedding of the film within a firm community
context-such as the RPFF-that really provides the
amplest grounds for reciprocal exchange.
Davis's documentary, which will make its broadcast
debut on TVO next February, has been making the
festival rounds since this spring. In November 2009,
it closed the 7th annual RPFF, where it was received
in a fitting homecoming of sorts. Unlike the city's
usual festival fare, RPFF remains staunchly driven for
and by its community. Organizers put in every effort
to ensure that RRFF remains as accessible to the
community-within and even beyond Regent
Park-as possible: there are screenings, panels, and
May Chew 153
media arts workshops geared towards residents;
screenings are free; childcare is provided; and each
festival also highlights films produced by local residents.
RPFF's sole venue-a modest, makeshift theatre in
the auditorium of the nearby Nelson Mandela Public
School, decorated with children's artwork, and filled
to the brim with foldout chairs and eager mixed
crowds of residents and nonlocals-is both a marker
of the festival's budgetary constraints, as well as its
political effort to remain a central, relevant, and
accessible presence within Regent Park.
The powerful dialogic tension arising from the
situation of this particular film within this particular
festival is startlingly demonstrated in a sequence
where Davis's camera, on revisiting Mikey and
Kendell's old stomping grounds, takes the viewer
inside this same auditorium in the Nelson Mandela
PS.. This moment serves primarily two significant
functions. For any viewer, the filmic space here
becomes ripely expanded beyond the hermetic
parameters of the screen into a larger site of
encounter and collusion. For the Regent Park residents
in particular, this moment signals at least a temporary
break in the often impenetrable spectral selvage of
filmic representation. This moment is in fact reflective
of the many ways in which the film, particularly situated
within this festival, demonstrates the effectiveness of
community screens-mediating planes which provide
the means by which community residents can represent
themselves both to themselves as well as to larger
audiences. Of course, there will always be tensions and
moments of near failure; for instance, the film notably
falls short ofprobing beneath the deleterious veneer of
the "Revitalization" project in order to really address
the effects of the redevelopment on the residents'
lives. In more general terms, while realising the
importance of beginning from the local, one at the
same time waits impatiently for such community
screens to rupture their own enclosures and go on to
infiltrate wider terrains.This said, RPFF at least provides
an abundant starting ground for such fraught and
necessary negotiations.


Invisible City

Eamon, Christopher

148 PlJBLIC 40
marble tomb with the words "I Love You" carved in
Armenian, words she was reported to have spoken.
There are many ways to engage with political
issues, For instance, Osvaldo Romberg's maze-like
installation at Sabanci University's Kasa Gallery
addresses what he calls the macro-political. In
Building Footprints (2009) Romberg mixed transparent
elements from classical and modern architecture to
express layers of time, and to ask us what is remembered
and what is being forgotten.
I came away from Istanbul feeling that it was the
work outside the biennial that was "political," yet
very subtle and effective.
The 53rdVenice Biennale,like many ofits predecessors,
seems doomed to displease, the result perhaps of a
syndrome of aiming to please everyone. It is revealing
that after continuous expansion born fi'om its aspirations
for inclusion, more could be learned about the state
of global contemporary art at Art Basel than at the
grueling and difficult-to-maneuver Venice Biennale.
What most visitors tend to expect from biennials is
the ability to grasp an overview of contemporary art
presented by a specialist in the field. Anything else
like conceptualizing the works selected in a way
that enlightens or, better, changes, one's view or
understanding of the works, is an added bonus. In
recent history at the Biennale, neither has been the case.
If Documenta is the Olympics of contemporary
art, then the Venice Biennale is its Academy Awards.
It was the first of its kind in 1895. It maintains the
status of "mother of all biennials" even now that it
has been followed by greater numbers and ever-
more-specialized biennials and triennials taking place
all over the globe. But the birthplace of the modern
biennial may be in the long run also the place of
its end, if this has not already happened at least
symbolically. Born in the golden era of World
Expositions so famous for leaving behind their
landmarks-London's Crystal Palace, the Eiffel
Tower, Louis Sullivan's Transportation Building at the
1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago,
among others-the Venice Biennale first exhibited
decorative and applied arts at its inception. The
landmarks of its history can be found in the Giardini,
where the pavilions are trenchant reminders of the
colonialist context of the fair's birth and subsequent
growth as a mainly Eurocentric yet international
venue for contemporary art. Over the decades it has
worked to rectify the situation of not adequately
representing non-Western nations by adding new
national representations in off-site pavilions and
expanding the main exhibition greatly with the
addition of the enormous Arsenale exhibition space
in 1980.
This year, the broader Biennale boasted seventy-
seven national pavilions, including representative
artists from the Republic of Gabon and the Union of
Comoros, and forty-four collateral exhibitions,
exhibitions not organized by the Biennale organization,
but which are welcomed under its umbrella. Even the
Arsenale had been greatly expanded. The main
exhibition pavilion formerly called the Italian
Pavilion has also been enlarged and renamed the
Palazzo delle Esposizioni della Biennale. Collateral
events included interesting digital works by John
Gerrard at the Island of Cortoza, as well as a context-
sensitive exhibition of recent works by Mona
-
Hatoum at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia. The
biggest collateral event of all is not included in the
Biennale: the massive renovation of the Baroque-era
Customs Hall, the Punta della Dogana (itself a symbol
of globalization from a former time), by luxury goods
magnate Francois Pinault, and the reinstallation of his
museum at the Palazzo Grassi, both of which drew
many thousands of visitors.
Apart from repeatedly seeing the massive yachts
of Pinault, Roman Abramavich and Larry Ellis
moored outside the Dogana (because all mega yacht
moorings in the Canal Grande were already taken),
the pleasures of traveling around Venice to visit over
ninety or so offsite pavilions wears painfully thin,
especially since the rewards for doing so are mostly
not forthcoming. Individual national representations
were simply not worth the trek. But this is, in a sense,
the legacy of a post-colonial aspiration that in
expecting to represent the world, the map for that
world has become almost as large. A painfully evident
problem is the inconsistency with respect to the
mechanisms through which individual nations select
representative projects for their pavilions, most evident
at the United Arab Emirates pavilion and newly created
Italian section at the Arsenale. Both are probably the
result ofState requirements and, in the case of the latter,
internal bureaucracy.
The continuous expansion of sites and venues
exasperates viewers at the Arsenale, which is really a
endless line of mega installations from one end to the
next. It culminates with the weak Instituto Italo-Latino
Americano pavilion, consisting of works by twenty
artists crammed into one room with no real curatorial
vision, the Chinese pavilion and aforementioned
U.A.E. and Italian Pavilions. This is before you even
get to the newly opened Giardino delleVergini, ifyou
aren't already too blitzed to notice, a site that this year's
Director Daniel Birnbaum calls "a uniquely poetic
backdrop for artistic interventions." Indeed, eleven
artists installed work in the park, one artfully creating
an artificial swamp, another, famed choreographer
William Forsythe, stringing stirrups in a tree so that
Christopher Eamon 149
you could "interact with" or become part of the
movement of the work. That the press release and
Directors' statement makes so much out of a few
works placed outside speaks to perhaps the complete
outmodedness of large-scale biennials, especially this
one. Large-scale exhibitions like this are simply not
able to react to truly innovative or multidisciplinary
work with any real depth or seriousness.
Biennials have always been about art tourism,
and in effect about garnering tourist dollars and
demonstrating national power. Indeed that's why
World's Fairs and Venice Biennale were created. That
one can already indulge in art tourism from the
Tirana to Dakar and Havana, and have been able to
do so for many years, is perhaps the main reason
Venice is failing. It is intent on competing with these
much more focused and at times more enlightening
exhibitions. While art tourism can be a way to learn
about others, it also never really quite gets the touring
subject into any position of knowledge vis a vis the
other, a fact that has hardly been ameliorated in
today's much-lauded "global" art world.
All of this is not to say that the main exhibition,
save for certain inclusions and barring one's own
predilections, is a relatively handsome exhibition with
combinations of newer works brought into contact
with historical antecedents such as Oyvind
Fahlstrom, the Gutai artists, Lygia Pape, Gordon
Matta-Clark, Andre Cadere and Blinky Palermo.
Much of this work, especially of Gutai, is rarely seen
and enlightening especially in relation to the current
resurgence of audience participation and performance
practices in art. Many artists in the vein of the latter
seem happy to embrace their roles as technicians of
the conceptual, where rules and activities can be
dreamed up in perpetuity as a kind infinitely generative
grammar with no need to infer from history, look at
current conditions, or make something other that
basically does not self-generate.
Still Birnbaum falls into the classic curatorial trap
of explaining the inclusion of historical antecedents
as due to their "influence" on the younger artists with
150 PUBLIC 40
which they are coupled. This is usually apocryphal.
Indeed, the reason it is so important to see works likes
these included in a contemporary context is that these
works and these artists for one reason or another did not
have the influence they should have had. In the case
of FaWstrom and Gutai, they suffered respectively from
Anglo-American and Western Eurocentrism, which
is not to say that their contemporaries were not
interested in, and aware of them, rather that their legacy
has been so diminished that they need to be included,
remembered and reinserted into the contemporary
art dialogue today.
Still the timeliness of the inclusion of some of the
other historical works, such as Pape and Cadere
seems belated in this context. And of course Yoko
Ono's Fluxus works jotted down during two years in
sixties seem to have been repeated in exhibitions
everywhere for the past decade. You can't get away
from them, but whether she or Fluxus has influenced
a younger generation is another question.
In any case, Birnbaum's main exhibition at the
former Italian pavilion is fine, in fact, refreshing, in an
era of the Euro-curator-as-brand. By that model, the
brand oftentimes writes of major paradigm shifts
in Western epistemology every time it makes an
exhibition. Think of Nicholas Bourriaud's Tate
Triennial, which is somehow meant to support his
thesis that a major rupture in Western consciousness
is about to occur on the occasion of his exhibition. 1
If we return to the curatorial goal of changing
our understanding of works on display, Birnbaum
seems to find it a valuable concern. In Birnbaum's
conceptualization for the Biennale, he is not guilty of
intellectual overreaching. Indeed, his almost banal
concept of"MakingWorlds" is either a tease about his
philosophical underpinnings, or a complete accident.
Given his background as art historian and philosopher
his conception is most likely based on an unmentioned
intertext kept a secret so as not to alienate. The title
"Making Worlds" is a contraction of a key idea in the
philosophy of aesthetics developed in the late fifties
and sixties by Anglo-American philosopher Nelson
Goodman.The key tenets ofwhat can be considered his
constructivist philosophy is that human consciousness
constructs the world through interpretation and the
creation of symbols.
Art in creating a relatively dense situation creates
a world rich in symbols just as the real world is
constructed through symbolization, and as such can
be considered at no less a level. Goodman's ideas, which
are conceived basically within the relatively obscure
and already bankrupt discipline of the philosophy of
aesthetics, parallels an attempt in the same time period
to view everything in human experience as knowable
only through the structure of language. In
Goodman's case, symbols and symbolization, rather
than language proper, create worlds, which therefore
can be considered made. The context is significant
because within the fields of analytical and Anglo-
American philosophy this sort of constructivism was
rather a leap. Only Richard Rorty made more of the
idea of the knowability of the world outside oflanguage
from within the Anglo-American tradition. However,
as is common in the field, Goodman could not keep
from engaging in the creation of shopping list of
more or less dense types of symbolization, better or
less good attempts at world making, and which of the
arts fits which bill of goods, all as a way to compensate
for the fact that the idea that art builds worlds-literally
different worlds-was already grossly out of touch
'with what contemporary art had become by the early
sixties. For better or worse, these attempts from within
the philosophy ofaesthetics, no matter how progressive
or maverick they may seem in hindsight, were late in
describing how art was contemporaneously being
made and conceived by artists.
In evoking, at least in his title, the philosophy of
art as world making, Birnbaum's subliminal choice
for an exhibition on the current state of contemporary
art worldwide seems out of step, and yet as a title, and
title alone, it is as sufficiently inoffensive to at least let
much of the work and the curatorial choice for
display, combination, and pacing speak for itself. For
this, Birnbaum should be applauded.
If the end of the Venice Biennale comes about
from an exhaustion of its own aspirations, it is also
because the impetus for its existence, art tourism and
a predilection to "discover," like Columbus, new
worlds and new artists has outrun its usefulness. World
art tourism is more available and more adequately
attempted elsewhere. Contemporary art as we know
it, colonizes more and more of the globe. It's no
wonder that the term "global" in art began to be used
around the same time as the term globalization in
finance and the birth of many of the new biennials in
the early-to-mid nineties. Colonizing the contemporary
as "the Same" has been expanding for twenty years
and now the showcasing of sameness and difference
is done better at the regional level, for reasons of
self-discovery or otherwise. This is the nature of the
exhibition form known as the biennial. For all the
texts criticizing Venice, few have taken a look at the
biennial and its replication as useful at times and in
certain contexts, and vastly inadequate at others.
NOTE
1 As the press release states, Bourriaud's Triennial "argues
that the historical period defined by post-modernism is
coming to an end, and a new art form for the twenty-first
century is emerging...." He explains that "while the [1970s]
economy was severing its ties with concrete geography,
culture was becoming divorced from history as a coherent
scenario. Postmodernism was the story of this disconnection,
leading to a reified conception of 'origins.' What I call
'altermodern' is the narrative of our reconnection with
both, through a new set of parameters linked to globalization:
instantaneity, availability, displacements ... " (Bourriaud 2009).
That historicism is part and parcel of Modernity and what
we call Post-modernism is meant to be outside historical
periodization in the first place is lost in this type of brand-
consolidating statement.
REFERENCES
Nicholas Bourriaud, "Tate Triennial 2009," interview with
Tom Morton, Freize, #120 Ganuary/February 2009),
http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/tate_triennial_2009/.
Tate Modern, press release for" Altermodern: Tate Triennial
2009" Ganuary 2,2009), http://www.tate.org.uk/about/pres-
soffice/pressreleases!2009/17523 .htm.
On August 14th, 1947 a sovereign Pakistan was
created, and the following day saw the creation of a
sovereign India, and event known as Parition. Bhaskar
Sarkar's lVIourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the
Wake of Partition adds a much-needed addition to the
quickly expanding catalogue of scholarly work on
Indian cinema. In his book, Sarkar considers the
effects of Partition on the world's largest film industry
through an examination of Bollywood, Bengali, and
other regional cinemas, as well as Indian television.
Sarkar's analysis both addresses and moves past an
understanding of Indian film merely as part of India's
nation-building project. Rather, Sarkar suggests that
the relationship between Indian cinema and nation
has, since Indian sovereignty, been fluid and complex.
In his introduction, he cautions that rather than view
Partition as India's originary trauma, one which has
caused all of India's present "woes," Partition should
be understood within a matrix of discourse that
continues to change. For instance, in the book's last
chapter, Sarkar asserts that in recent years Partition
has been consciously mobilized by contemporary
cultural and political trends. This mobilization
demonstrates the self-awareness that, according to
Sarkar, the media has of its own role in memory and
archiving history.
The book's seven chapters and coda are divided
into two sections. The first section of the book focuses
on the relative silence of representation of Partition
in the thirty years immediately following the event.
The second section examines how and why this
silence was broken through textual analysis of specific
cases of the representation of Partition within Indian
film and television-what the author calls "the return
of repressed." As far as the increased rise in Partition


53rd Venice Biennale

Marchessault, Janine

Of Bicycles and FIlms: The Case of the CineCycle

Lord, Susan

Naaman, Dorit

VanderBurgh, Jennifer

Introduction
Susan Lord, Don't Naaman,jennifer T/cmderBurgh
Introduction 11
PUBLIC: Screens is dedicated to the ways screens are used, viewed, imagined, placed, and made worldwide. In
the plural form, Screens takes into account the dynamism of objects, ontologies, and communities that are
reciprocally represented and constructed by smfaces that are, in this sense, anything but stable. In developed
countries, the exclusive consumption and use of contemporary moving images has shifted off the Cineplex
screen, the living room, and out of the traditional museum space, onto billboards, buildings, outdoor screenings,
and more privately (though used in public) to iPods, cellphones, computers and commuters. In many developing
countries where movie theatres have always been sparse, and TV service sporadic and unreliable, informal DVD
circulation and generations of mobile screens technologies continue to pass through cities and rural areas. The
internet and communication networks enable screens to become sites of a multiplicity of localities, cultures
and citizenship practices. While the increased presence of screens in a variety of art forms and public places
complicates and enriches patterns of consumption, cameras and screens are also used for surveillance of nearly
every aspect of civilian life. Although screens have always consolidated publics (national TV, early film actualities,
etc.), they are increasingly becoming the platform by which we are indexing our lives in various ways. Our
intetface with "public" events is largely through screens, as is our expression of private experience (from
YouTube, to Augmented Reality and "social" media networks which screens individual perception for all to
see). Collectively, the articles in this issue suggest that screen technology embodies a tension between the
mobilitylimmobility of citizens.While mobile screens make new forms of citizenship possible for mobile citizens,
the issue concludes with a reminder that mobility does not extend to everyone. The screen can reaffirm how
the politics of actual locations (nations and sites) are relevant to our lived experiences in this world.
PUBLIC: Screens features twenty artists, curators and researchers who investigate and respond to these new
spaces of viewing and changing patterns of consumption with a variety of aesthetic, technological and
distribution tactics.
This issue is dedicated to Anne Friedberg (August 29, 1952-0ctober 9, 2009), pioneer cif screen theory and history.


Introduction

Ferrera-Balanquet, Raul Moarquech

Mérida T'Ho_MX: Exploring Locative Media in a Latino Territory

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