This is the sort of rhetoric that gives the adjective \u201cuniversal\u201d a bad name, well intentioned everything-and-nothing blather that can suck the air out of any room in which it is read or uttered. The oddly dated phrase \u201cinformation age,\u201d meanwhile, could not fail to arouse suspicion that it was being used ironically\u2009\u2014\u2009for how could it be used seriously? At the very least, The Power Plant director Gregory Burke, who curated the show, was \ufb01xed in the unenviable position of having to generalize about works so diverse they almost defy classi\ufb01cation. (Full disclosure: I am a member of the Board of Directors of The Power Plant but have had no hand in the curation of this or any other show there.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Consider the depth of the problem. In one of the short essays in Mythologies (1957), Roland Barthes delivered a sharp version of his general critique of ahistorical cultural ideology. Re\ufb02ecting on the Edward Steichen photo exhibition called The Great Family of Man<\/em>\u2009\u2014\u2009\u201cthe greatest exhibition of all time,\u201d according to its Museum of Modern Art catalogue\u2009\u2014\u2009Barthes penetrated the surface appeal of this collection of more than 500 images of people all over the world at work, play and rest, and revealed a troubling irresponsibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe are at the outset directed to this ambiguous myth of the human \u2018community\u2019, which serves as an alibi to a large part of our humanism,\u201d he noted. The myth works in two distinct stages: \ufb01rst, \u201cexoticism is insistently stressed, the in\ufb01nite variation of the species\u201d; then, \u201cfrom this pluralism, a type of unity is magically produced,\u201d an identical human nature beneath \u201cthe diversity in skins, skulls and customs.\u201d2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Roland Barthes, \u201cThe Great Family of Man,\u201d Mythologies<\/em>, tr. Annette Lavers (London: Paladin, 1973), 100.<\/span> It is a \u00adfamiliar double man\u0153uvre, one that the Steichen exhibition by no means invented. The very same man\u0153uvre haunts the smarmy funeral orations acknowledging that death comes even to the wealthy and powerful. This assertion, in death, of their essential sameness with the rest of mortal humanity is offered precisely to prove something about their \u00addifference. Covering over while apparently uncovering is precisely the sort of \u00adlegerdemain that masks the naturalizing function of all ideology. The \u00adcultural myths Barthes analyzes in Mythologies<\/em>, apparently \u00adinnocuous bits and pieces of cultural ef\ufb02uvium, are in fact narrative strands in a larger movement of placing \u201cnature\u201d at the bottom of history, the lived narrative of real cruelty and exploitation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The family-of-man conceit, the myth of a shared human condition, is one of the most comprehensive and powerful of these ideological gestures, perhaps, ironically, because of its bland expansiveness. \u201cThis is the reign of gnomic truths,\u201d Barthes argued, \u201cthe meeting of all the ages of humanity at the most neutral point of their nature, the point where the obviousness of the truism has no longer any value except in the realm of a purely \u2018poetic\u2019 language.\u201d The inverted commas around \u2018poetic\u2019\u2009\u2014\u2009\u2018scare quotes\u2019 as they are known\u2009\u2014\u2009are essential. The \u2018poetic\u2019 effect is itself gestural and without determination. \u201cEverything here, the content and appeal of the pictures, the discourse which justi\ufb01ed them, aims to suppress the determining weight of History,\u201d Barthes continues. \u201c[W]e are held back at the surface of an identity, prevented precisely by sentimentality from penetrating into this ulterior zone of human behaviour where historical alienation introduces some \u2018differences\u2019 which we shall here quite simply call \u2018injustices\u2019.\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Ibid., 101.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Sentimentality emerges as the basest sort of intellectual failure, one in which we invest a narcissistic self-regard with derivative stocks of self-pity and soft-headed emotion skimmed from our own sense of imminent demise. And such is the appeal of this stew of feelings that a marginal self-awareness even serves its ends by rarefying the conclusion into an assertion of shared guilt, common sinfulness, or generalized falls away from presumptive grace. We congratulate ourselves both coming and going, just as we doubled diversity with unity in order to keep thought, and hence responsibility, at bay. Celebrate life!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Universal Code<\/em> could easily have fallen into these abysses of \u00admeretricious sentiment and phony poetry; luckily, it did not. Indeed, some of the included work makes possible, even demands, new turns of thought in the otherwise inescapable insight of Barthes\u2019s analysis from a half-century ago. Maybe there is such a thing as universal code after all: not as a smooth erasure of history or even as a regulative ideal, but as a useful moving target, focus of suspicion and belief, celebration and cynicism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As we move past the dubious claims of the rhetorical frame into actual aesthetic experience, the title phrase mutates into an unstable mixture of irony, dystopian aggression, and genuine wonder, hinting at both the implicit menace and the open awe contained in any conjunction of universality with codedness. That is to say, it is not paranoid to parse the titular sentiment as a plan of generalized translation of the world into digital disposal; but neither is it naive to accept its echo of optimism, that we might all be linked after all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some works confront the dark side of globalization. Tania Mouraud\u2019s video installation of clacking Indian weavers, La Fabrique<\/em> (2006), with its twelve monitors huddled in a small room, forces viewers into intimate contact with the eyes and faces of the routinely oppressed\u2009\u2014\u2009and yet, with no possible political or economic reaction to their mordant, accusing gaze. Other works are celebratory: Henrik Hakansson\u2019s Monarch\u2009\u2014\u2009The Eternal<\/em> (2008), a large-screen projection of thousands of the Monarch butter\ufb02ies returning to Michoacan, Mexico, in winter migration; Katie Paterson\u2019s Earth-Moon-Earth (Moonlight Sonata Re\ufb02ected from the Surface of the Moon)<\/em> (2008), which bounces a Morse transcription of the Beethoven work off the moon and performs the resulting cracked terra-lunar version of the piece on a player grand piano, making an incidental soundtrack to one whole gallery of the show.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are witty plays on global awareness that turn into \u00adarresting visual and physical immersions. Trevor Paglen\u2019s Active Military and Reconnaissance Satellites of the United States of America (2008), a large transparent globe suspended in the centre of a dark room, revolves in its own light even as small white dots, matching the trajectory of actual satellites, move around the glowing surface. Angela Bullock\u2019s Night Sky: Mars from Venus<\/em> (2008), an effectively simple expanse of neoprene and light-emitting diodes, offers the viewer a matte black surface on which scattered star points rise and fall in programmed patterns of varied intensity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some small pleasures stay with you long after viewing, deft examples of the haptic conceptual in contemporary art; that is, work of big ideas and profound engagements, delivered not as disdain for beauty but with a cheerful belief in its power. String Theory<\/em> (2003), by Antonia Hirsch, is a tiny masterpiece, a hand-sized digital video monitor set into a gallery wall where its base meets the \ufb02oor, allowing the distracted visitor to walk right by it. On the blueish screen a slow-motion human \ufb01gure is skipping rope in an elaborate repeated criss-cross pattern; each time the coiled strands of the rope hit the \ufb02oor of the screen\u2009\u2014\u2009and hence of the gallery\u2009\u2014\u2009a dull thump sounds from behind the wall. This constant heartbeat, coupled with the glowing screen, is mesmerizing and, \ufb01nally, vertiginous. Watching it, you feel as though you might lose your balance, pitch into the wall, and be swallowed up by the screen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Taken together, and despite occasional weak entries, Universal Code<\/em> succeeds at something a cynic might have thought impossible. \u201cA really big show about feeling small,\u201d as one daily newspaper had it, the exhibition is a deliberately constructed cabinet of wonders that opens new avenues of thought and movement. Using the odd spatial distribution of The Power Plant\u2009\u2014\u2009a recovered industrial building on Toronto\u2019s lake front\u2009\u2014\u2009the show opens doors into small enclosed screening rooms, sends visitors up and down stairs, and pushes them along narrow corridors and into corners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Perhaps this is the right moment to rethink, or expand, Barthes\u2019s well-founded critique of \u201cthe reign of gnomic truths.\u201d Neutralizing history to a bland point of commonality remains a cherished tactic in the evil of banality, the unctuous obliteration of real history. But Universal Code<\/em>\u2019s collective re\ufb02ection on the physics of consciousness recalls the fact that a point, having location but no dimension, is as expansive as we want it to be. Collapsing to a point initiates an expansion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is worth noting that \u201cgnomic\u201d did not always carry the negative connotation of sententious, didactic, or truistic. The word comes from the Greek gignosko<\/em>, to know; and the original gnomic verses were mnemonic devices, poems composed to render useful aphorisms or maxims in, as it were, portable form. They were timeless truths carried in individual \u00admemory. And so gnomic becomes the term for the grammatical tense of general claims made without speci\ufb01c temporal extension. (Oxford\u2019s poignant example of this, from Much Ado About Nothing: \u201cSigh no more, ladies, sigh no more; men were deceivers ever.\u201d) But the very same root, now in its sense as knowing or indicating a fact, gives us gnomon, that part of a sundial that stands upright and, catching the shadow of the sun, indicates what time it is. Time and timelessness compressed, and \u00adcompressing, ever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We are forever coding and decoding, constantly recording and \u00adplaying back. There is no universal code if we mean a master-pattern or a \u00adsecret-unlocking meta-language. There is only the universality of a \u00admundane miracle, a prosaic paradox: consciousness\u2019 awareness of itself as particular. Nature and history meet in the wonder of you and me as we try, now and always, to say things\u2009\u2014\u2009to ourselves and to each other.<\/p>\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/68_AC06_Kingwell_Orozco_Black-Kites-perspective-scaled.jpg\")
Black Kites Perspective (front horizontal)<\/em>, 1997.
Photo: courtesy of the artist & kurimanzutto, Mexico City<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/68_AC06_Kingwell_Bulloch_Night-sky-Mars-from-Venus-scaled.jpg\")
Night Sky: Mars from Venus<\/em>, 2008.
Photo: courtesy of Esther Schipper, Berlin<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/68_AC06_Kingwell_Hirsch_string_theory-ex.jpg\")
String Theory<\/em>, 2003.
Photo: courtesy of The Power Plant, Toronto<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n