The
Big Picture Has No Frame
If we assign
meaning to the term art to allow for art now, art urban, art folk and art
aware, we then understand the term as it applies to Michael Fernandes' works:
works whose elements and materials derive from the world immediately around us,
works of the here-and-now. In them we meet ourselves, we share secrets, we smile. These works are alive in the making. For
Fernandes, each piece is fresh, an opportunity, a starting-over rather than a
perfecting of technique. As the artist states, "The training is now-each
work is this work, it is about something specific, it has its flame."1
What is this?
What does it mean?
Where's the Art?
What's involved?
Something's available.
Is it alive?
This
is personal work. It derives from living in this world (when I need
inspiration, space to percolate, I go to the ravine or the ocean; Michael
boards the
Though
the work is very much of the public, socio-political realm, our relation to it
as viewers is personal. The dialogue is not between this work and art history,
nor between the work and the political situation referred to; the work does not
accuse others, blame others, call for change in
others. We are called to look in. The dialogue is between each of us and
the work/world. The work is personal and the pronoun is WE.
In
the 1989 National Gallery of Canada exhibition, The Canadian Biennial of
Contemporary Art, we, the viewers, walked past two drywall partitions, similar
in construction to one of the NGC's own walls. On one of these partitions was
drawn a yellow happy-face logo, and on the second an anarchy symbol. As we
continued, we found ourselves sitting on a park-bench in front of a third
partition, if, that is, we accepted this inviting position from which to view a
series of projected colour slides (of a man's hand changing from an open to a
closed position, of a man's feet advancing and retreating). Affixed to this
third wall was an arching overhead neon sign, in the style of writing that we
might see in the window of a trendy cafe, which read: "Muggers and
Politicians." As we sat on the bench, framed by the sign above, we had
become part of the installation for other viewers, who might have asked
themselves which of the two we were: muggers or politicians-or does the 'and'
of the signage imply that muggers and politicians are one and the same? Being
in
Fernandes
brings the term politicians back to us. He sees that we are they and he asks us
to consider how we do our politicking. The question extends to the gallery
itself, the walls of which have already been invoked. Fernandes asks, is it a
showcase to serve politicians or does it serve the artist/art?
In
other installations, Fernandes' use of (for example) silhouettes and felt
cut-outs simplifies, eliminates particulars, and in so doing asks us to
recognize what it is that is represented. These elements act as containers,
providing a space, calling us to enter or project; "they condition the
image to receivership: that is, to receive, not put out." The viewer is
invited in. The audience is considered. A meeting of public and private is
acknowledged.
* *
*
Michael
Fernandes puts into relief the everyday. We recognize something so right... and
yet something is ‘off’. A strangeness or foreignness in the presentation
catches us, prods or tickles us. Here are not simply representations of the
familiar: something in their presentation, in the gaps or in the
contradictions, gives us pause. We can't assume we know/identify. They are and
aren't what we recognize them as without the assumptions and expectations that
blind us to the moment.
The
elements derive from the world around us; the language is street-level, the
language of everyday conversation, but the syntax is played with, the
transitive verb is left without its object, phrases float removed from context
or have ambiguous relations. There are plays-on-words and neologisms (for
example, Cour Age, Noosphere, and Possibileator are titles of three recent Fernandes works). Movement
is created between the terms stated and what is left unstated; the conjunctions
in force are AND/OR.
Consider
the title of a 1986 installation, No
Other, written on the invitation-card over an image in negative of a woman
and young child kissing. We read "no other" and hear 'no
other/mother', 'no other/not other', 'no other and other.' The one becomes its
opposite. We're not sure. The contradictions don't cancel. We flip back and
forth between the various readings. Ambiguity and surprise are contained in
phrases from another work, Growing Up Strong:
a big car like Mom;
tall like Mom;
engineer like Mom;
think like Mom;
cook like Mom;
happy like Mom;
just like Mom.
Are these
descriptions, wishes, exhortations? What is meant, which is right?
On
the invitation for Fernandes' 1983 Mercer Union exhibition of the same title,
the words "NO ESCAPE" are printed below two photographic images
butted side-by-side: a woman sleeping and a flame. This juxtaposition raises
the question: do the images signify the darkness of sleep versus the light of
the flame, or the notion that, in the darkness of sleep, the pilot-light
continues to burn? Filling in the unstated but included words of the title, I
think: I have no escape, there is no escape; escape what? Why escape? The traps
are set and I am allowed to fall in. The phrase expands to encompass both the
negative and the positive and, I conjecture, in this movement, points to a
world-view held by the artist. A view of the world that understands: that it's
all life and "it comes again"; understands oneness in perceived
difference; distinguishes what is permanent from the transient; understands the
YES contained in the NO and vice versa.
In
these and other titles, such as Make
Nothing, On The
Fault Line,
In White Bread, a 1990 work included in
the present exhibition, we encounter directives in the negative, placed at the
base of a stacked cube of bread:
NO
GATHERING;
NO SOLICITING;
NO STANDING;
NO PETS.
Breaking
bread connotes an invitation, a calling together, but then we read "NO
STANDING", words associated with commercial and government office
buildings that are clean, pristine, presentable—the white in white bread.
Offices are there to enter, to do business in, and yet possibilities are cut
off. We are told simultaneously, "Come but don't come." Fernandes:
"In denial you question, but in the YES you also ask what is being
encouraged. In the one, there's always a construct of some kind."
I
note here discussions of Yvonne Rainer's film, The Man Who Envied Women,
which speak of her creation in the film-text of a "space of
contradiction"2, a strategy whereby she avoids setting up the
director/camera/protagonist as the point of view through which the audience
perceives; nor does she allow the audience to know comfortably which of the
many, often conflicting opinions given in the film the filmmaker herself sides
with. In so denying the position of authority that narrative film usually
affords the director, Rainer forces the audience to situate itself, do its own
thinking.
In
Fernandes' audio-tapes, everyday language is pared down and carefully
constructed in the rhythms of its phrases, in repetitions, in the selection of
the lists, in the intonations. The tapes reflect our attitudes, our mind-sets,
"the explosives we carry around with us." An example from his 1980
solo exhibition, Exist:
Life
is just one problem after another;
You can’t say what you really think and feel;
I am always to blame.
The
suggestions taped for his 1983 Mercer Union installation, No Escape, are whispered conspiratorially; as listeners, we're in
cahoots with the tape:
Let's
play;
Let's goof off;
Let's whitewash it;
Let's make them pay.
The
tendency to get out of control, to be carried along, as implied by the
progression of this list, can be dangerous.
Says Fernandes, "The energy, the flame, the firepower we have is no
longer innocent, but lethal".
The
language used in Fernandes' tapes is everyday language. It is simple, but the
simplicity creates complexity. In our engagement, we complicate. In the
juxtapositions of elements from various sources or situations, our assumptions
are questioned; cliché-type thinking and buzzword simplifications are
challenged. Hannah Arendt identifies the danger of our not questioning these
and other modes of thoughtlessness and non-thinking: "Clichés, stock
phrases, adherence to conventional standardized codes of expression and conduct
have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that
is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make
by virtue of their existence."3
Fernandes'
recent works contain the language and images of today: graffiti, advertising
slogans, colloquial conversation and symbols (we see happy-face, peace and
anarchy symbols, rather than those of classical mythology or Jungian
psychology). In these expressions, "thinking already exists", it's in
the air, has support, is on everyone's minds.
Advertising
lingo permeates our world; we are mediated.
It is a carefully researched, carefully honed language that cannot be dismissed. As Fernandes has observed,
It's an interesting mirror. You may say it's off,
but not that off. It's alert. It's out for its prey. We feed it. It's a study
that constantly seeks to be heard, to be supported. It tells us about how
dependent we’ve become on being told we're okay. It's about looking out. It carries us away
from ourselves and we go along with it. We want it, we want to belong, conform.
It's about surface. It's direct. It's a system of communication that is
sophisticated, that has authority. It is aware of the waters; in the same week
as the [
Marketing
is pervasive: we are carried along. Our
complicity with this and the cycle of need that we keep in motion recalls the
tape/voice of Wheeling, an installation included in the 1985 group
exhibition at the Art Gallery at Harbourfront, "News from Nova
Scotia," which spoke (in part):
More
food more unconsciousness;
More clothes more unconsciousness;
More books more unconsciousness.
"In
the 'more'", Fernandes explains, "we're looking for change, but in
the gathering we haven't moved."
Today
the Cartesian formulation, "I think, therefore I am", might more
aptly be stated, "I shop, therefore I am."4 The consumerist treadmill
of continual, though superficial, change preserves the status quo;
commodification means objectification and homogeneity, and fashion is discussed
in terms of loss of the subject and of death:
"to desire immortality through the perpetuation of an image is, in
the final instance, to be condemned to a living death."5 Today, the trend
in advertising is to cloak itself in and as art, and some artists, staying one
step ahead, make art that is already advertising.
Fernandes
looks at advertising for what it reveals, asking, where is the power? In an earlier installation at Toronto's YYZ
Gallery, entitled Is That You Jane, Is
That You Dick, he placed a tape-recorder on the floor below a wall of
photographs of the cosmetic display-shelves in a Shopper's Drug Mart store. A
segment of the tape said:
Nothing
is made that cannot be made;
Nothing is requested that cannot be requested;
Nothing is heard that cannot be heard;
Nothing is acted that cannot be acted.
Obvious statements? Only on first hearing or first
reading. In the spaces created within them, in the negative inversions,
we might ask ourselves: how does the past inform the present? What keeps us
spinning? How are we present?
In
his article, "Where are we-the Underground?," Jonas Mekas answered
the question, frequently put to makers of experimental films, as to when he was
going to graduate to making 'Hollywood' features, real movies?, with the
comment,
You may be wondering, sometimes, why we keep making
little movies, underground movies, why are we talking about Home Movies, and
you may hope, sometimes, that all this will change soon... No, there is a
misunderstanding here. We are making
real movies... Man has wasted himself outside himself; man has disappeared in
his projections. We want to bring him down into his small room, to bring him
home... where he can be more with himself and his soul—that's the meaning of
the home movie.6
* *
*
Fernandes
is open to all possibilities: anything and everything can enter his work. He takes risks in his works and challenges
himself. All opportunities are welcomed
to make new work ("I say 'yes' and I grow"). This thinking includes
the circumstances of the work itself; his world includes the art-world. For
instance, in the invitations to a show, Fernandes sees another opportunity for
a work with its own distinct form, its own possibilities and constraints
("To work on the flat, to simplify—some people never see the piece, but
they have the card"). Similarly, Fernandes has also used the catalogue as
a separate work, related to but not duplicating the exhibit, partly in order to
work with the catalogue as a form, partly because, so far in advance of the
opening of an exhibition, not all the elements are resolved. Fernandes moves in the present: "Every
time is a new opportunity; it's a new experience."
A
humorous yet pointed reminder to audiences, curators and exhibitors alike of
the importance of works-in-themselves is the following text by Fernandes for
the media/culture/text exhibition
curated in 1990 by Cindy Richmond for presentation as a special insert in C Magazine:
The works are
important in themselves and interpreters or commentators only distort them. It
is advisable to go directly to the source—the prints, paintings, drawings,
sculptures, installations, videos and film—and not through any authority.7
Fernandes'
no-compromise pushing for the work’s own existence was in evidence in his
installation in
The
space utilized for the exhibition had been a factory. The signage was still in
place (e.g., "Wear a hard hat"). Large printed signs in various
typefaces became an element in the installation, but Fernandes took the words
from the streets—statements by new immigrants, perhaps:
I
didn’t take no stereos;
You are in
Why don't you go back to where you come from?
A
shipping skid from the factory, placed in the centre of the space, took on the
appearance of a raft, now motionless, but with the potential for movement.
Similarly, a wall of veneer paneling-a moveable wall, "on the ready"
for the makeshift office this space will next become?—was leaning against the existing
wall. The factory was thus recalled, but also the broader life of the city.
("It was not just a site-specific piece", Fernandes tells us,
"But relevant to the city as a whole-things you encounter as you move
about, or in the news.") Just as the space itself will be altered for the
next occupant, so, Fernandes remarks, installation work is temporal and should
disappear. Now, of this installation, only his signage remains; all other
elements have "gone back."
* *
*
Over
the years, there has been a movement in Fernandes' work more and more towards
less and less 'art', in so far as that term implies the hand of the artist. He
has gone from being a painter to having objects fabricated for him, with
artisanal or tech aspects (tables and chairs, photographs, electronic
triggering devices), to his present use of peace-symbols and stacks of white
bread. Fernandes started to question his involvement with electronics and
machinery, and our dependency on equipment, expertise and gadgets that can
break down. Bread is a basic, not only
as a staple of life, but also in its simplicity and economy as an artistic
element. This is consistent with Fernandes' continued search for ways to work
simply, to pare down. "When I see things out there like this, I embrace
them. I begin to work with these things that are already working", he
explains. In simplicity there is complexity. Elements have several references
and crossovers to their source in the outside world and to their use and
placement within the work and within the gallery's walls, materially and
connotatively.
Bread
and wallpaper might just happen to be the particular choices for these
installations; on the other hand, they might evince the above-mentioned
movement. One can't be certain, for Fernandes works as he lives, hears, sees, responds to his inner and outer worlds. Perhaps these
choices also point to a broader dialogue with or questioning of the relevance,
role, audience for, impact, and accessibility of art today. Certainly they
provoke a consideration of walls (not just in
To
what extent are walls surfaces, to what extent do they sustain? When does protective become secretive?
Virginia Woolf named the oppressive barriers to (women's) personhood and
self-fulfillment "walls of civilization." Today, walls are coming
down... or are they?
Walls
exclude and include. Fernandes' installation art is marked by
inclusivity-"It's like a market." But the 'like', I submit, is
dropped in Fernandes' thinking, and "like a market" becomes 'is a
market.' Just as in a market, just as in the world, just as in the works, so
"in the crowd we brush up against..." There is movement. Elements are recognizable entities and yet
there is a carry-over; there are connections. Odours permeate, sounds spill
over, differences come in contact. There is a
wash-over effect, but still a separateness. As in a
market, people, objects, ideas, oranges and bananas announce themselves as
individuals, yet accept their togetherness.
There
has also been a direction in Fernandes' work toward seeking opportunities
beyond gallery walls, "out there in the world where everything's
happening". And so, for example, he
has made submissions for the Olympic Poster Competition and the Halifax
Waterfront Public Art Competition. He has placed a piece in C Magazine, and the
next venture of the Grace Hopper
collective is also a publication. Recently he submitted this text-piece to Street SmArt, a community-wide art event
to be held in June 1990 in the north end of
My Farts
are OK, Your Farts Are Not
Fart,
art, smart... getting down to the basics-identity, divisions, yet permeating...
I can hear the laugh! The committee actually likes the work; now they just have
to convince the mayor! In any case, accepted or not, these works are already
working: they're out there circulating, even if only among the various
committee-members.8
Fernandes'
works are personal; the works are alive for him in their seeking. He implicates
himself in his works not only in the motivation for their making-he starts by
noting some situation and questioning, "What is interesting here, what is
happening?"-but also by including himself in the
situation. In the 1986 Anna Leonowens Gallery group show, Art against Militarism, arranged to
coincide with the meeting of NATO ministers in Halifax, Fernandes used the
first person singular in a sign that read, "I am a terrorist." There
are always surprises in Fernandes' work. Here, the admission of being a
terrorist shocks. Bringing a different perspective to bear on a situation
forces us into a reconsideration not only of terrorism as we had it pigeonholed
(i.e., as something those bad ones do), but also of our own natures, the
mind-sets we carry around with us, which could explode at any second.
The
work is personal, but it is not autobiographical. It is not about Michael, nor
is the point to know him. If anything, knowing too much is a hindrance. For
instance, knowing that Michael is from Trinidad, you might attribute
significance to ethnicity (explain/label/dismiss-"Oh, he's from
I'm
not sure any more where my experience of Michael Fernandes' work and my
experiences with Michael leave off from each other. I guess I don't distinguish
between them; they are alike. Michael walks lightly. Michael has a light step. He plays games.
Michael likes a good joke.
* *
*
Michael's Dream: "I saw the faces of Nixon, Haig,
Hitler-all the beings who call forth negative responses. Over these faces was
superimposed my own face."
Michael
was pleased with his dream, pleased to experience "that we are not
separate entities-in another, it comes again." Michael's dream/work is a recognition of 'everybodyness'.
Endnotes
1. Michael Fernandes, in
conversation with Barbara Sternberg, February 1990. All further unattributed comments in
quotation marks are also by Fernandes.
2. Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of gender
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 24.
3.
Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York:
Harcourt, Brace, Janovitch, 1971), p. 4.
4. Debbie McGee, Multiple
Choice (film), 1989.
5. Julia Emberly, "The Fashion Apparatus
and the Deconstruction of a Postmodern Subjectivity", Canadian Journal of
Political and Social Theory 11 (1987): 50.
6. Jonas Mekas, "Where are we-the
Underground?", in The New American Cinema, ed.
Gregory Battcock (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1967), p. 17.
7. Michael Fernandes, Untitled text piece, in
Special insert: media/culture/text, organized by Cindy Richmond and the
Mackenzie Gallery, Regina, C Magazine, no. 25 (March 1990): unpaginated.
8. News flash! The artist informs us, as we go
to press, that this outdoor textwork has been accepted for inclusion in Street
SmArt.
Originally
published as a catalogue Essay for 1990 Power Plant exhibition catalogue:
Michael Fernandes: Walls