 |
| Belmore - Fountain 2005 |
So,
I’ll begin with a question. How can we visualize complicity and connectedness
in a postcolonial world? As I think my example of Teresa Margolles made clear,
water and liquidy forces can provide an apt method of rendering obvious the
ways both power and disadvantage flow, simmer, and cycle between nations,
communities, and people – the ways in which we are all interconnected through a
global postcolonial system that privileges the rights of some nations/bodies
over others. I’d like to turn to another example that also speaks to the same
themes: Rebecca Belmore’s video/installation piece Fountain, which was displayed in the Canadian Pavilion at the
Venice Biennale in 2005. Belmore is an extremely prolific Anishinaabe-Canadian
artist (one of my personal favourites!) based in Vancouver. Her work frequently
deals with the legacies of colonialism in Canada and the – extremely fraught –
relationships that have existed between settler and First Nations communities
since the country was supposedly “discovered.” In 2005 Belmore became the first
Aboriginal woman to represent Canada at the biennale (I think the first
Aboriginal male was Edward Poitras in 1995, thanks Wikipedia) and her piece was
wonderfully appropriate for Venice, the globalized ‘art fair’ context, and for
my own purposes here.
So
first – I’ll describe the video (and full disclosure here, I’ve only seen
what’s available on Belmore’s website, I wish I could have seen this in
person!). The video opens to a fairly bleak, grey beach, and we can hear a
plane flying overheard. As the camera rolls towards the water, a giant fire
erupts upon a pile of driftwood to the right, the bright orange flames seeming
all the more intense and hazardous against their dull gray surroundings. The
image then cuts to Belmore submerged in the water, fully clothed, grunting and
coughing as she struggles to shore, dragging a beat-up bucket with her. Her
labour here is emphasized: she pushes herself forward but keeps falling back,
sputtering and gasping for air. Finally she grows calm and manages to pull
herself from the water, carrying her full bucket across the beach until she
reaches the camera, throwing its contents into the faces of us viewers. The
water from the bucket has magically transfigured into blood, and it coats the
screen. Belmore remains visible behind this red liquidy curtain, and she slowly
regains her breath as she stares coldly out at us. In Venice, this video was
projected on a wall of cascading water.
 |
| image of the video being projected on the wall of cascading water at the Canadian Pavilion |
Well,
what I find fascinating about this video work is how Belmore makes use of water
as a signifier for the breadth of colonialism. In the context of Venice
specifically, a city referred to by Lee-Ann Martin in her essay on Belmore’s Fountain as “part of the colonial story
[…] a conduit for European world views,” it is water that connects this
European port – its ideologies, its economies, its exchanges of power – with
the rest of the world. It’s all too easy to argue that the issues of First
Nations identity and representation that Belmore frequently tackles in her work
are too specific, too rooted in a Canadian context to create much of a
resonance in a worldwide, globalized art market. Yet as Martin’s essay argues,
water (and its counterpart, blood) signifies the deeply rooted connectedness
and mutual complicities and responsibilities shared across continents, across
histories, in the legacies of colonialism:
The blood in Fountain is a powerful metaphor for the
burden of First Nations history. Here, as throughout Belmore’s art, she flings
responsibility for the cycles of bloodshed found within the history of
colonialism in the Americas back to their European source. Through her actions,
an Anishnabe woman from northwestern Ontario recognizes the blood of all people
who suffer because of others’ greed for power.
Water becomes blood, and the
visitors to the Venice Biennale – who are undoubtedly taking advantage of the
uneven distributions of privilege and wealth that have provided them with the
opportunity to travel to such an affluent, touristic, globalized art fair – are
met with the remnants of these repeated violences as they are thrown back in
our faces. Additionally, fountains are often symbols of wealth, prosperity, or
the display of power. In this way, Belmore’s unorthodox “fountain” works to
subvert many of the ideals this monumentalist form of architecture/sculpture
often attempt to uphold: replacing the values of coherency and stability
favoured by public manifestations of colonial power for a liquidy, messy vision
of mutual responsibility in the face of a shared history of violence that
literally disrupts our clear vision of the present.
Martin’s
essay elaborates on these ideas very well (I’ve linked it below here so you can
have a read if you’re so inclined) but the one thing I found interesting that
she didn’t elaborate on was Belmore’s obvious labour. Belmore is clearly struggling in her attempts to collect
the water in her bucket – she gasps, wheezes, and grunts as she wrestles it to
shore, in danger of being overtaken by the current herself. It’s impossible to
watch this video without being engaged on a bodily
level with the work she is undertaking. I find this significant. For me,
this level of visible labour speaks to the intense amount of work required to
render these cycles of complicity obvious. It’s all to easy to just lie back
and let the current overtake you, as uneven relations of power across gender,
ethnicity, sexuality, race, class, etc. continue on as normalized and
unquestioned. They are woven into the fabric of everyday social relations and
are either so ubiquitous that they go unnoticed, or their consequences are too
far away that we are unable to see their effects. It takes work to render these processes visible, it requires a violent,
disruptive action to wake us up to their problematic influences – for Belmore,
they literally need to be thrown in our
faces. In this way, I find Fountain an
amazingly interesting video work. Not only does it coerce a sense of self-reflexivity
in the visitors to the Canadian pavilion at the Venice Biennale, but it uses
water and other liquidy forces to build an alternative cartography of
colonialism that favours the messy and the complex over the overdetermined and
simplistic narratives supplied by traditional forms of history-making.
Fountain as displayed on Belmore's website -
http://www.rebeccabelmore.com/exhibit/Fountain.html
Lee-Ann Martin's essay, The Waters of Venice -
http://www.rebeccabelmore.com/the-waters-of-venice.html
Youtube clip of the Canadian Pavilion display (not great quality but you get the picture) -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAz8QT2kYQc
No comments:
Post a Comment