Crossed wires

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/10/2016 (3260 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There are lots of things in Connexion, the 40-year survey of solo and collaborative material by Vancouver artist and influential arts administrator Hank Bull. Organized by the Confederation Centre Art Gallery in Charlottetown, P.E.I., the iteration at University of Manitoba’s School of Art Gallery collects performance documents and video works, props, costumes, backdrops and set-pieces, collages, publications and poster layouts, paintings on canvas and cardboard, functional ceramics and handmade textiles, a garage’s worth of outmoded electronics, a postcard collection, a coterie of Indonesian-style shadow puppets and one presumably working Tesla coil.

Connecting these disparate fragments is both the challenge of the show and its reward. Improvisational and underground, little of Bull’s work survives in tangible form. Instead, curators Joni Low and Pan Wendt work with the idea of an archive in mind, reproducing some of its forms.

There are banker’s boxes stuffed with papers, documents in tabletop vitrines, a study area and homey cubicles for watching videos, but this isn’t a functioning archive in any meaningful sense. One leaves the show not much better informed about Bull’s work, but with a real sense of the sensibilities and circumstances that fuelled it. That isn’t not nonsense, but it’s not nothing, either.

Continuing a legacy of absurdist, ad-hoc actions pioneered by Dada and Fluxus artists, Bull and his collaborators broadcast on multiple frequencies, in different languages, literally and all at once.

In the cluttered gallery, separating signal from noise (or even one artwork or author from another) isn’t just frustrating, it’s beside the point. Bull’s “medium” is less “performance” or “video” than the impulse to communicate itself, and his works adopt and adapt to the technologies, networks and relationships that connect us.

Connexion deals in mixed messages, pregnant displacements and mistranslations. Something like order and moments of poetry, humour, or transcendence do emerge, but unpredictably and unbidden. You just have to be OK with that. Navigating the show is like tracking a weak radio signal on a mountain road, and the static matters as much as the song itself.

Arriving in Vancouver in 1973, Bull was an early member of the influential art space Western Front, going on to co-found Centre A, a Chinatown gallery dedicated to contemporary Asian art. Much of the material on display was collected on an extended world tour Bull took with partner and frequent collaborator Kate Craig. (Craig died in 2002, but her presence is seen, heard and felt in many spots throughout the show.) Lighter works send up bureaucracy, religion, technology and media, but a committed, madcap multiculturalism suffuses the entire affair.

Headphones playing back a burbling tide of world languages trail from a photo of the ocean in a work called Last Words of Gertrude Stein. (“What is the answer?” the poet is said to have asked. Met with silence, she went on, “In that case, what is the question?”) A band of purple in one hard-edged abstract canvas paints another horizon, the “wine-dark sea” Homer had his Odysseus survey, first for glory and then for home and bed. The moon arcs across a TV set atop two bamboo ladders. Everyone sees the same thing but each from different angles.

In the space of the gallery, Bull’s scanning, searching, collecting and conversing don’t feel like means to an end, which will frustrate some.

Loudly and clearly, though, they broadcast ambiguities central to being an artist and person. It all connects in the end, or it doesn’t. You have to be OK with that.

 

Steven Leyden Cochrane is a Winnipeg-based artist, writer and educator.