Body and Chaos in Christine Major’s Recent Work

Shedding the animal imagery for which she was generally known,1 1  - Recall, for instance, her exhibition “Vivarium,” at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (October 21, 2004, to March 13, 2005), which brought together a collection of paintings that staged — or caged — an entire population of animals — tiger, elephant, wild dog — seemingly drawn from Indian wildlife.  Montreal artist Christine Major has been working on a series of paintings since 2011 under the title Crash Theory. The iconography in this project draws from images of calamity — car crashes, Amelia Earhart’s disappearance, the collapse of the Twin Towers in New York, among others — culled from libraries, archives, the Web, and other artworks. The title of the project had first been given to a much earlier painting, a large triptych presented in an exhibition titled Terreurs intimes (2000).2 2  - “Terreurs intimes,” a solo exhibition presented in 2000 at contemporary gallery Axeneo 7 in Hull, Quebec, and at La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse, in Montreal, Quebec. In nascent or variously explicit form, sensually imbued desublimation and disorder were already in evidence in the artist’s work of the last ten years. The tension between body and chaos had also been more frankly explored in the recent exhibition Ninfa morderna (2010),3 3  - “Ninfa moderna,” solo exhibition presented in 2010, at Galerie Donald Browne, in Montreal, Quebec. which staged the slumped, debased bodies of young women in ramshackle settings inspired by the violence surrounding the Jaycee-Lee Dugard case. Here, the disorder conjured a perverse eroticism.

Crash Theory pursues the exploration on the same emotional register. From a thematic point of view, one can thus situate the series in an exploratory continuum from the relative eroticization of anxiety (Terreurs intimes, 2000) to the sense of alienation and isolation in Vivarium (2004), and carrying on with the dialectic between degradation and survival in Ninfa moderna (2010).⁴ 4 - This title is taken from Georges Didi-Huberman’s Ninfa moderna: Essai sur le drapé tombé (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), from which the artist’s debasement-survival theme likely derives. Crash Theory incorporates reminiscences of the broken, disengaged bodies, fetishized and obscenely suspended in their resistance, that populate “Ninfa moderna.” Except that here the collisions, the clutter, the scrapyards are juxtaposed with the kinds of recreational sports activities that habitually sexualize women’s bodies: pom-pom girls and cow girls accompany tragic scenes of traffic accidents. In popular cinematic culture, the cheerleader and cow girl are generally associated with clichés of superficial, hypersexualized women. As such, the juxtaposition of car crashes and clichéd images of women may certainly be interpreted as an attempt to call attention to the bankruptcy of such images on a human level. It seems to me, however, that a feminist reading focused on the subversion of male car/woman fantasies cannot fully exhaust the significance of these paintings.