\nTo anyone preoccupied with the aftermath of Minimalism in \u00adcontemporary art, Erika Kierulf\u2019s recent exhibition Retiens mon souffle<\/em> (La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse, 10\u201312 October 2007) will be a breath of fresh air. I contend that by means of two video installation works, Kierulf reconsiders the now historical critical debate surrounding Minimalist art by framing its two antagonistic positions\u2014namely, Michael Fried\u2019s brand of modernism versus what he calls postmodern \u201ctheatre\u201d\u2014in a highly sophisticated and enlightening manner. In fact, Kierulf\u2019s work is a prism through which one can make sense of a widespread retro trend in recent contemporary art (which casts a backward glance particularly at the 1960s and 1970s); ultimately, it affords one a critical re-assessment of the stakes of Minimalism in our contemporary context, especially as these stakes are now being played out in the hands of a new generation of artists.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
As one enters La Centrale, the first work on display, Breathe<\/em> (2007), is experienced almost like a wall that impedes further entry, be it visual or bodily, into the space at hand. Breathe<\/em> is a video installation comprised of three equidistant rectangular video screens built into a large white polyhedron (a rectangular parallelepiped or cuboid to be precise). This fact alone suffices to understand the work as an explicit reference to the geometrical universe of Minimalism\u2019s \u201cspecific objects.\u201d However, as opposed to the aesthetic parameters of Minimalism (in which the sheer presence of objects is in the service of an anti-illusionistic agenda), a representational element is included in Kierulf\u2019s sculptural entity: from the screens emanate the images of three \u201cspaces\u201d delimited solely by a frontally framed wall. These unevenly lit walls each bear\u2014given their video translations\u2014slightly different tints (one is bluish, another tends towards the violet, whereas the last one appears to be grey). Thus, these images of placelessness evoke both the Trinity (and the Christian motifs in this exhibition abound) as well as the serial repetitions associated with the art of Donald Judd, Robert Morris and Dan Flavin. The images \u00adappearing on these three screens are coordinated in such a way as to relay the actions that are shown on the outermost left and right screens to the central monitor, thereby underscoring the fact that these three, separate images really comprise a single, albeit dismembered, entity. Much like a Minimalist \u201csculpture,\u201d whose totality can never be experienced if only because a finite spectator is in time and must apprehend each face of the sculpture independently and then synthesize them in one\u2019s imagination, the projected image in Kierulf\u2019s work displays three independent \u201cfaces\u201d of a given scene in three formally distinct manners (if only slightly so).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The action, a minimal narrative, is as follows: very slowly, either from the left or right screen (depending on the point in the sequence at which one encounters this work), emerges a standing figure dressed in \u00adcontemporary attire framed from the waist up. The figure walks in profile, solemnly, towards the central monitor. Once at the centre, he or she turns, faces the camera, and then falls out of the frame, away from the camera, in a sometimes poignant, sometimes comic act of abandonment of the body\u2019s motor capacities as well as its normal state of verticality. Each model in fact willingly lets himself or herself fall back onto the floor (which one only imagines, for it lies outside of the field of representation). Entropy here becomes anthropic. The slow-motion playback of these sequential \u201cfalls\u201d conveys the normally imperceptible moment of vertigo that characterizes a state of in-betweenness, between standing and falling, self-control and self-loss, consciousness and non-consciousness. In other words, this work explicitly frames, by displaying, a state of absorption<\/em> equal in evocative power to sleep, unconsciousness, or the pathos of affective intentionality\u2014all modes privileged by art critic Michael Fried\u2019s historical accounts of this mode. One could almost<\/em> say, as Fried does in a lecture held at the National Gallery of Canada on 10 September 2006 entitled \u201cJeff Wall, Wittgenstein and the Everyday,\u201d that the absorbed spirituality in Kierulf\u2019s Breathe<\/em> emblematizes, much like Chardin\u2019s art in the eighteenth century, a \u201cstructural duality\u201d:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201c. . . at once facing the beholder as artefact, and close to the beholder as representation. . . I suggest that such paintings [or \u00advideos].\u202f.\u202f. in which young people are engaged in what seem to be trivial \u00ad\u00adpass\u2011times [or \u00adrepetitive bodily actions], represent quite a momentous \u00addiscovery.\u202f.\u202f. \u00adnamely, that absorption as such is perfectly indifferent to the \u00adextra\u2011absorptive status of its objects or occasions, so that particular actions (playing with cards, or blowing bubbles [or willingly letting oneself go onto the floor]), emerg[e] [in Chardin, and now in Kierulf] as vehicles of a new, essentially positive, mental or say spiritual state, the ultimate \u00adimplications of which. . . we have yet to fathom.\u201d1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - 
Taken from the author\u2019s audio transcript of Michael Fried\u2019s lecture, National Gallery of Canada, 10 September 2006.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
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