REBECCA BELMORE / FOUNTAIN (2005)

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 

TERESA MARGOLLES / PLANCHA (2010)

Plancha at DHC/ART

One post in and I’m already deviating from my intended structure! Oh well. This post is a bit more tangential, actually, but I’m hoping it’ll give a bit more background as to how/why I’ve come to Prof. Hunter’s “Liquid Intelligence” research project and it acts as an avenue for me to reconsider some of my earlier writing. One of my initial attempts to theorize the ‘body as liquid’ came from a paper I wrote last semester on an installation by a Mexican artist named Teresa Margolles entitled Plancha – which was on display at Montreal’s DHC/ART last winter. The installation consisted of a series of heated steel plates which extended across the gallery floor, and Margolles had rigged a tube across the ceiling which sent single drops of clear water down to hit the plank and evaporate into the gallery air. After reading the accompanying wall text, it became apparent that Margolles sourced the water from a morgue in Mexico City where it was used to clean the bodies of the anonymous/unclaimed dead after autopsy. I recently read Judith Butler’s Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence for a course, and it struck me how helpful her writing was for allowing me to reconsider my (conflicted) thoughts on Margolles work. Through Precarious Life, I think I’ve gained a greater appreciation for how ‘liquid bodies’ can create new intersubjective relationships between disparate people. So I’ve written up some of my thoughts here! 

            In Precarious Life, Judith Butler discusses the politics through which legitimized mourning becomes unevenly divided across different lives and different deaths, ultimately asserting that some deaths attain status as publicly grievable over others: “we might critically evaluate and oppose the conditions under which certain human lives are more valuable than others, and thus certain human lives are more grievable than others.” (30) Plancha renders this division of value palpable in the gallery air: the traces of Mexico’s dead – rendered anonymous and unclaimed through uneven systems of power and privilege – linger in the air and are taken into my lungs, into my very body, in the gallery space. In a quite deliberate, jarring manner, her installation calls into question how the deaths of some are simply absorbed back into the status quo – calling the gallery visitors to directly attend to the ephemeral (or even invisible) traces left behind by a necropolitical regime. By taking the traces of the anonymous dead into my body, a twofold form of violence occurs: on the one hand, they infiltrate my boundaries, disrupting my sense of coherence/cleanliness, yet conversely, by breathing them in I assist in their further dispersal/dissolution, perhaps their continued invisibility. In Precarious Life, Butler is arguing for a redistribution of grievability, a reconsideration of intersubjective relations that emphasizes vulnerability and interdependence over hierarchies of value: “In a way, we all live with this particular vulnerability, a vulnerability to the other that is part of bodily life, a vulnerability to a sudden address from elsewhere that we cannot preempt” (29). In a beautifully (or perhaps frighteningly) simple gesture, Plancha encapsulates these complex layers of intersectional vulnerability: by entering the gallery space and participating within its atmosphere (whether or not the water is ‘actually’ sourced from where Margolles claims, which is a whole other issue I’ve considered at length) visitors become aware of their own corporeal vulnerability and fundamental interdependence with others who – due to systematic forms of violence and oppression – are no longer able to speak for themselves. Standing in the gallery space, I take that violence into my body, creating an awareness of complicity and intersecting forms of interdependence that allows me to take responsibility for my own position of privilege. “Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other,” (23) Butler writes: my boundaries are undone by the traces of the dead in the air, just as I participate in their undoing by taking them into my lungs.

Margolles’ ambivalence in relation to this still unnerves me. Her work is amazingly effective in calling forth how this interdependence functions on a personal, bodily level – and causes me to consider how the air I breathe implicates me as a citizen of Montreal, of Canada, as a participant within the systems of power that exist here – yet is this at the expense of enacting more violence upon those who have already experienced enough suffering – the doubled violence of death and subsequent social invisibility? Is Margolles participating in what Butler has named  “the derealization of the ‘Other’” (33)? As they disperse into the air, are the bodies in Plancha rendered invisible twice over, rendered unreal and left anonymous? Perhaps it is the extremely loaded nature of her (presumed) material that prompts me to wish for something more, to ask for a treatment of the traces of the anonymous dead that more directly differs from the cold, medicalized, unsympathetic system that they are already subsumed within. Even as I write that, I wonder how feasible such a demand could be/what such an installation could look like – at the end of the day I don’t think it would be as effective in illustrating these intersecting forms of vulnerability and interdependence that Butler discusses. All in all, Margolles’ work manages to say a lot with a surprisingly sparse visual vocabulary, and Butler’s Precarious Life has assisted me immensely in sorting through many of the ambiguous, conflicting, and disarming implications of her installation. 

Info on the exhibit that Plancha was included in - it was a great show! http://www.dhc-art.org/en/exhibitions/chronicles-of-a-disappearance