Production/ReProduction (1984)

“Production/ReProduction,” Vanguard, 13:1 (February 1984), pp. 53-54.

For Lebredt’s letter to the editor, click here.

Production/ReProduction
A Space Toronto November 19 to December 17

The title Production/ReProduction implies a working on something already worked upon, or already mediated. This reworking might be called “appropriation”, except by the letter of the title the emphasis is not on issues of representation, but production and re-production. What can this cluster allow into its concept? Can we be sure with a title like this that it does not concern representation and reproduction, without a hypen, both a mechanical and an ideological process? The too easy coincidence must be questioned at its word. In fact, all these terms or concepts—“production”, “reproduction”, “appropriation”—should be put in suspension. Are they merely ideological flashpoints, or do they have a constructive or descriptive relation to the work?

Without the title to this exhibition, one might think that the criteria of inclusion was something to do with war: three of the four artists make some reference to it. We can look to the work by the curator and also that of the designer of the catalogue for what this title might mean. But in the work by curator Jayce Salloum we have a fetishizing of the title—a proliferation of titles that attempts to buoy up the empty signifiers of the work, except that the titles are neither redundant to the images nor referential except to some vague intent that the work does not make clear. For instance, the title of the series presented here, which seem part of a larger series, is called . . . In the absence of heroes . . . ‘Part IV: Warfare/ A case for context. (Relentless verity), to which is added titles of the individual works ranging from 8 to 212, for example, number 15, Up from under (figure placement). St. John’s Nfld., May 30, 1943. These war archive photographs do not sustain enlargement to 45”x65”, let alone the clumsy handicraft addition, the reworking of black, white or gold paint that block out figures: a too simple device for marking absence.

Gordon Lebredt institutes that absence through a text that maintains itself as a critique of presence. But he sets a misleading context to the exhibition and his own pre-text by also designing the catalogue. He plays on the ideological aspects of reproduction through placing an illustration of a father teaching a son on the cover (and poster) and one of a mother feeding a child on the back. While he refers to the cover image in his own work, it is only a pretext because he is not at all concerned with ideological reproduction or the social construction of the subject, but with idealist representations. Neither Lebredt nor any of the other artists here are so concerned. That image on the cover is only the name of the Father. What signature, event and context is being played upon here? In a name, Derrida. Or to double that name Blanchot through Derrida. Here we encounter the same problems as in phenomenological work made from Merleau-Ponty’s writings. Imitating rather than appropriating Derrida’s strategies, actual tactics, language and anti-phenomenological attitude ends in work of the same academic, illustrative idealism as phenomenological, temporalizing, sculpture, i.e., a sculpture of presence. No attempt is made at translation, only application in the “same” language in another “context”. If he could escape the name of this father and follow through from the images of the cover, Lebredt might find productive use of other analyses of copyright and naming, Marxist for instance.

Like Lebredt’s work, Janice Gurney’s is a remarking. But it is a re-marking of what is proper to her in history and artistic practice. Appropriation takes place here in what is first made by the artist and what makes her. Gurney has an interesting intention and practice as an artist, which in this instance she calls “reparation”. This entails treating the fabric and construction of painting as an “attack and a reparative gesture”. This double gesture is carried by the white marks of paint which are taken from a photograph or painting, which pre-exists the work, and then is overlaid on another which comes out of it. Painting practice is brought into alliance with historical and biological inheritance: in Cloud Study, a bandage from a postcard of the artist’s grandfather in World War I serves as a template. While this practice makes the work and the intention—it marks, obscures and retains what was there before it — is this gesture for the artist or us? The intention is not clarified in the work itself which has to be supplemented by the catalogue. Cloud Study is the title of the construction as a whole, but also refers to the painted sky of the photograph, one of the panels. We only find the significance of the gesture in the catalogue and then associate it somehow with the painting of swirling figures next to it. If this cloud study is painted on a photograph and achieves significance through the text, does painting as a whole become a signifier in the artist’s concept and practice? If so, it explains but does not excuse discrepancies of technique in the painting of the yearning basketball players.

The confusing rhetorical devices of Jayce Salloum’s work can be contrasted to Michael Mitchell’s Picture Stories: Three Tales from the Vernacular, where everything has a reason and place. All the works in this exhibition use photography, but Salloum and Mitchell are the only practising photographers. And in reworking something already worked upon, Mitchell is the only one who remains within a single medium, here photography, exploiting its resources, reworking it within its limitations. He uses a technique on a technique (which is a mechanical process and reproduction to start with), not merely to purify it in repetition, nor to play it against itself in deconstruction, but in order to create a narrative from within a single image. He does this three times, isolating details and stringing them together into a simple story. Rather than formally restricting itself by this reflection on itself, the print opens up to become a “picture story” of something historically and culturally detached from us but revealed in the print. These are simple, subtle and evocative works, which perhaps have something to say about our place here: the three images have their sources in Britain, America and Canada, respectively subtitled Making War, Making Movies, Making Light.

Lebredt wrote an interesting letter to the editor in response to this review and a review of his work Outers appearing elsewhere in the same issue (“Locations [Toronto],” Vanguard, 13:1 (February 1984), pp. 22-23; click here).

Dear editor:

I must confess: I concede to Philip Monk’s quite appropriate critique of my attempt to mimic certain Derridian gestures (Vanguard, February 1984), but only to the degree that—and he has my fullest apologies here—in setting myself up for a fall, I had anticipated it, had, to some extent, already written it. Therefore, with all apologies aside, I would like to pass along these rather brief remarks. As designer of the catalog for Production/ReProduction, I was not directly responsible for illustrating the covers. I had, in fact, proposed alternative solutions. Both images were submitted by the curator and were eventually employed with the consent of all those involved. Only then did I choose to incorporate a reading of the cover image (as the leading face of the exhibition) into my work, not so much to set a false pretext to the exhibition, but to introduce a prop upon which, somewhere down the line, I might stage a bit of theatrics: a follow-up, if you like.

Being always “on the mark” so to speak, Monk saw through my Derrida, my Blanchot, perhaps even my Kafka (since they announced themselves—to anyone with an ear for them—rather conspicuously.) And this was enough to chastise me—and rightly so—for predicating the work on the dicatates of a name or two. I take it, then, that my stylistic renditions were, in a word, Oedipal, i.e., I had been taken and possessed by the voice of that name, by the “truth” of the name “Derrida”. If indeed I was, from the beginning, so obsessed with delivering that name (to you?)—in order perhaps to cash in on a trend—why would I run the risk of stringing up my entire production to that name, to its signature? What could possibly come of it for me? What could I have hoped to receive in return?

Perhaps only the opportunity to stage one more silly little scene. (Having invested in a staging of the master’s discourse, I have apparently failed to master it, to extend or exceed it; I have only artfully mimed it, reproduced it. My “quotation”, instead of displacing the authority of his words, merely re-stated them, re-reflected them. It would appear that I’m now, here, left with only one option, one scene):

But the curtain is up, and (to stay with the cover image) I have yet to learn my lesson. Having come into my own I’m now out on my own. I’m on stage: a stand-in for the master, a protégé who, in a stolen moment, attempts to give his master’s lines... but my timing is off, or perhaps the tone is wrong... I’m about to fumble my delivery... There’s only one thing to do (lest I lose it all)... As if on a que from the wings, I throw the show... as if just for laughs, I fall flat on my face...

Regarding Monk’s criticism of Outers, I again must concur with his analysis. From the very beginning, I felt it unlikely that any of the works to be presented would exceed the ideality of the gallery context: that due to concept and structure of the exhibition, notions regarding location would, in the end, coincide with and thus restore the most traditional notion of the gallery. My work was positioned as an index of this condition, i.e., an index of what had to be forgotten in order to stage such an exhibition.

Hence, its belatedness on at least two counts:

1. It was my intention to construct a tape similar in appearance to certain documentary tapes of the late 60’s and early 70’s whose production values often included a roving hand-held camera, and “endless” self-conscious voice-over, rough sound/ picture edits, etc.

2. Since Monk located this work in relation to earth art, it would not be inappropriate to mention that the father, this time, was Robert Smithson. (Or to double much as its success—and to Aldo Rossi—to his “house of the dead”: the Sanctuary of the Modena Cemetary. I owe the structural alterity of the narration (the displaced figure of death as a suspended limit-point, an “arête de mort”), of course, to the couplet Blanchot/Derrida.

As for “cancelling” the site, i.e., the “Bayview Ghost”: yes, it was cancelled, but not by a valuation of the document—which was meant to effect only a displacement of the “primary” site. Cancellation of this site had already occurred at the hands of a demolition team. I felt that, given the circumstances, any restitution to this act on my part, could come only in the form of a document, but one, as I have stated elsewhere, that would be “from the very outset, a failed document”: a failure, not only in terms of the performance of an account or investigation, but as the site of a responsibility which had called for an engagement with what is exterior to the gallery.

Gordon Lebredt, Toronto

I found a reply to this letter in my archives but I don’t think it was ever sent:

To reply, to continue to play the game, to fold my response into what has already been determined, to accept as a wager what are only the rules of the game: I will not play Searle to Lebredt’s Derrida. In this repetition, the stakes are not worth playing. I sign off here.