Front Gallery: Melissa Laing, Back Gallery: Duncan MacDonald, Platform: Johannes Zits

Front Gallery: Melissa Laing, Back Gallery: Duncan MacDonald, Platform: Johannes Zits

Duncan MacDonald.
buzzscapes, in process, 2002.

January 16, 2003 - February 22, 2003
Opening Reception: Thursday, January 16th, 8pm

Front Gallery
Melissa Laing: Shifted Rotating Door

Melissa Laing will install in the front gallery a flow control mechanism, a shifted rotating door. Dividing the gallery, the off-centered door is the only access point from one space into another. The door can be swung back and forth in a limited manner and only allows the passage of one person at a time. By messing with a seemingly effective design, Laing's architectural installation slows things down. Like the original design, her adaptation controls movement, but by shifting the pivot point she stops the now naturalized flow almost reversing it.

Brochure Text, spinning off orbit by Adrian Blackwell

waiting around
Melissa Laing says that her work is about time, specifically those moments when we are forced out of its flow. She constructs waiting rooms, where people wait for nothing. She produces epic films where nothing happens. Her practice focuses in on moments of frustration, arguing that it is in these delays, that the rhythm of the rest of our lives becomes clear. Laing is coming to Toronto from Berlin, from Holland, from New Zealand. She spends time out of time, in precisely the kinds of spaces she struggles with in her practice.

For Mercer she proposes to make a revolving door, its centre of rotation mounted a few inches from the centre of its housing. The door swings off its orbit, rotating but not revolving, moving back and forth. Its banging interrupts the even sound of sweeping brushes. A standard revolving door is a machine that regulates flows of air and people. The door at Mercer allows passage, but only through a double motion of pulling-entering, pushing-exiting. This new binary device works in two ways: as a physical and social mechanism, and as an epistemological time machine.

historical time
Laing’s projects appear, at first, to stand outside our own historical period. They appear slightly anachronistic, referring to the spaces of modernity. Her waiting room in the Czech Republic with its continuous soundtrack of train announcements resounds with the discomfort of socialist bureaucracy. Once social equalizers, generic waiting spaces now emphasize uneven development, signifying something that’s behind the times. They’ve become sorting mechanisms dividing people according to new class formations. We encounter them using slower modes of transportation such as buses and trains, in developing countries and in bureaucratic spaces. Those who can afford to avoid them, hanging out in first-class lounges where they can connect by phone, fax and internet, or sipping coffee at the airport Starbucks. Either way they are not out of time, but tapped into contemporary cycles of either production or consumption.

The revolving door was a modern invention, but it is durable. It is as at home in the contemporary mall as it is in the department store, or as comfortable on a suburban corporate villa as an early sky scraper. The revolving door is a hinge object between modern and post-modern cultural periods.

In 1967 Guy Debord argued that society had entered a "pseudo-cyclical time," during which actions repeat, not with the variable natural rhythms of days and nights, seasonal occupations, and life cycles, but rather according to the serial and always frustrated desire for commodities.* The revolving door is tied to the architectural forms of post-fordism. Two thousand people per hour can pass through one, allowing brainworkers into office buildings on time, and consumers into malls at any time. For Debord, what is needed to shake people out of their endless repetition are their collective steps into a flow of history.

a spanner in the works
The door Laing is proposing has been sabotaged. What normally travels in circles instead swings abjectly in and out, never really opening up and not quite closing. It functions somewhat like a conventional door, but it retains of its centred model an experience of duration and enclosure. The revolving door is itself a waiting room; it takes up time and space. Yet people experience this moment alone, without communication. It operates according to factory logic. The time of passage is a condition of the speed of the line. In a factory, communication between workers is a necessary antagonism to production, allowing their autonomous organization. Laing’s broken door disrupts the atomization that the cells of the revolving door create, and in its place the door produces communication. The leaves are still connected, but the direction of motion is two-way, producing an awkward confrontation between people moving in different directions at the same time. Her project is a social machine, coding conversation between users in a binary language. It is also an intimate mechanism, creating opportunities for bodies to press past one another. No longer is passage structured as a controlled conflict-free process, instead time itself is negotiated between subjects.

* Guy Debord. Society of the Spectacle, New York; Zone Books, 1994

Back Gallery
Duncan MacDonald: buzzscape

For his solo exhibition buzzscape, Duncan MacDonald has created three new audio works. The first two works explore the sonics of mechanisms that create and deliver music: Self-recorded record documents the process of fabricating a blank record; the subtle noises that a cd-player makes as it randomizes through 99 tracks are isolated and recorded onto a cd-r in shuffle 1-99. In the final work, tritone, musical theory is investigated using unlikely means when an insidious tritone chord (a two-note chord with an interval of an augmented fourth comprising three wholetones) is generated by two domestic appliances.

Brochure Text, Vicious Circle by Daniel Olson

Some time ago I read an essay by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke describing an incident from his youth: a physics lesson on phonography. After the theory is outlined, the students build their own phonograph: a horn with a flexible membrane at one end, on which a needle is attached and rests on a wax-covered cylinder, with a hand-crank to rotate and advance the cylinder along a spindle. The horn directs sound waves towards the membrane that transfers them as vibrations to the needle, which inscribes an irregular but continuous, spiraling groove on the wax surface of the moving cylinder. Next, the wax is hardened with shellac, then the cylinder and needle are repositioned at the starting point and the hand-crank is turned to replay the sequence in reverse: the needle, picking up irregularities in the groove on the cylinder, transfers them as vibrations in the membrane, creating air pressure fluctuations that cause a facsimile of the original sounds to emanate from the horn. Rilke describes the first operation of their device: carefully turning the crank as the teacher spoke gravely into the tube; evenly applying the shellac and impatiently waiting for it to dry; anxiously resetting the cylinder and the needle; and excitedly hearing the master's voice speaking out of the recent past.

Rilke then takes a metaphysical turn, shifting into a conjecture about what we might hear if cracks on the surface of a human skull were translated into sounds through phonography. However interesting, his conjecture failed to hold my attention; I was ready to construct my own phonograph. I wanted to create my version of the dictaphone into which Fred MacMurray recites his confessional voice-over in Double Indemnity, Billy Wilder's 1944 film noir classic. Following in the poet's footsteps—not worrying whether I also risked the ultimate demise of Double Indemnity’s doomed protagonist—I began assembling odds and ends in the studio, and after a few trips to the hardware store I had my own contraption, with all the working parts as detailed by Rilke.

I was confident the device, although somewhat makeshift and certainly too fragile to be moved from the desk on which it sat, would function. I set about putting it to the test: turning the crank as I spoke into the horn; applying the shellac and waiting for it to dry; and finally resetting the mechanism. This was the moment of truth, the essential hour of desire and gratification. I began turning the crank, fully expecting my voice to return from the past, but I heard nothing. I leaned in closer to the horn, but still no voice from the past. The poetic words I had uttered were gone forever, destined to survive only in legend as Twenty Minute Life: The Lost Monologue of Leo Danielson. Given the subsequent turn of events, I cannot recall the text although I assure you it was an eloquent rendition of my life story.

Then the most peculiar thing occurred. Deciding to give it one last try, I heard something else: an audible presence that I hadn't noticed before, having been so intent on hearing my own voice. Listening carefully, I realized there was definitely something there, perhaps faint, but clear: a slight rasping sound, as of a sharp object dragging across a surface not quite resistant to its touch; a complex of whirring and grinding sounds, mechanical, but with a human rhythm; and even fainter, an ambient sound just above the threshold of hearing.

Once attuned to its subtleties, each time I played it back the effect was complete. I could clearly hear the sound of the needle moving over the wax, the sound of the crank turning, the sound of the drum rotating and advancing on its spindle, and just below that, if sufficiently attentive, I could make out the room tone. I had unwittingly made a device that recorded and played back, in perfect replica and with no loss of detail, the sound of its own operation and context. What had initially seemed a failure was in fact an astonishing success—I had created a perfectly self-referential machine worthy of Roussel or Duchamp, a mechanical embodiment of the mathematico-philosophical concept of the tautology. My lost, poetic self-explication was worthless by comparison. After all, I’m just a man; what does it matter what you say about a person anyway?

It seems that Duncan MacDonald learned my lesson in advance. He doesn’t need to hear himself speak, or to implicate his life story in the moment of recording; he already knows the apparatus is self-sufficient, so he lets it speak for itself. With bloody-minded simplicity—in a gesture that is almost idiotic, yet strangely profound—he collapses the ends and means of representation, folding them back in on themselves. Trapped in this vicious circle, perhaps we’ll hear the ghost of John Cage in the machine. If we do, I’m sure he’ll be laughing.

(Primal Sound, written in 1919 and first published in "Das Inselschift", 1919/20, re-printed in "Selected Works: Volume I, Prose," translated by G. Craig Houston; London, The Hogarth Press, 1954.)

Platform
Johannes Zits: a poster project

Johannes Zits is no stranger to taking art out into the streets. Utilizing a campaign of billboards, posters and large-scale window images, Zits removes his art from traditional spaces and (dis)places it within the path of the everyday. With this platform project, Zits will plaster the streets of Toronto with a four-part series of posters that will confront pedestrians with issues of space (both private and public), voyeurism, consumerism and desire, exploring all these through a queer lens.

From a combination of collage, paint, assemblage and computer manipulation emerges a series of seductive homoerotic figures set within equally alluring domestic interiors appropriated from interior design magazines. By borrowing images from popular media originally intended to seduce consumers, Zits constructs and collages single and paired males that further suggest a desire to express, consume and possess. Zits’s male subjects occupy their personal space comfortably, but how do they occupy our public space?

By placing these images in urban sites, unsuspecting viewers become voyeurs peering into the private interiors and lives of these men; their private space becoming ours to consume. But is it their private space or our public space that is being invaded? Their queer presence also begs the question to whom does public space belong? Individuals will have their environment disrupted for a short period with the questions put forth by Zits and his boys.

This guerilla campaign was preceded with a similar project in Amsterdam in conjunction with Pink Film Days in December of 2002. Zits’s posters will be plastered throughout Toronto beginning January 6, 2003. Pages Book Store (256 Queen St West) will also feature a window display of the poster series, from January 6th To February 2nd.