Yet what makes this project stand out is its openly ambiguous\u200a\u2014\u200aor, rather, clearly double\u200a\u2014\u200astatus and function, which show how the re-enactment process seeks less to recapture a past reality than to respond to it and revive it through the time-lag in this very response\u200a\u2014\u200aa response that generates knowledge and adds to the event\u2019s history much more than actually taking us back in time to give us access to its original truth. Scher\u00fcbel refers to the project as a \u201ccuratorial and art intervention,\u201d clearly stating his intention to serve as both artist and curator. VOX also highlights this duality through the project\u2019s presentation: the installations were presented as art productions in the event Period <\/em>Rooms<\/em>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Besides Scher\u00fcbel\u2019s installations, the event featured work by seven artists in the period interiors of various institutions in Montr\u00e9al (see www.periodrooms.ca\/en).<\/span> and as \u201cdocuments\u201d in Cr\u00e9er \u00e0 rebours vers l\u2019exposition<\/em>, a series of documentary exhibitions, the last of which was entrusted to Scher\u00fcbel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cr\u00e9er \u00e0 rebours vers l\u2019exposition<\/em> presents a substantial number of documentary traces of significant contemporary art exhibitions in Qu\u00e9bec in order to reactivate their memory and broaden our sometimes-incomplete knowledge of them. Several of them are known only through rare photographs, a shortcoming that VOX has tried to address by offering multiple and varied forms of documentation to provide a fuller picture of every exhibition reactivated. This \u201cfar-reaching research project\u2026 on the history and the future of exhibitions in Qu\u00e9bec\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Marie-Jos\u00e9e Jean and Claudine Roger, \u201c\u2018Cr\u00e9er \u00e0 rebours vers l\u2019exposition\u2019: The case of Aurora Borealis\u201d (Montr\u00e9al: VOX, 2016), .<\/span> focuses particularly on exhibition views such as Perron\u2019s photographs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By being included in both this cycle and Period Rooms<\/em>, Scher\u00fcbel\u2019s installations fall within the framework of very distinct activities (the presentation of an art offering, on the one hand, and the development of original documentary materials on historical exhibitions, on the other hand) whose functions and validation criteria differ significantly. Both the artist and the institution blur the boundaries between document and monument, knowledge and aesthetics, the creative freedom of art and the subservience of the didactic tool to its subject. Such blurring (with its consequent, expanded interdisciplinarity) is not new, of course: inherent, as it were, to all contemporary art understood as paradigm, it\u2019s been happening for a good fifty years. Nevertheless, the language games made possible by the advent of this paradigm have not been fully explored yet, something that Scher\u00fcbel\u2019s initiative clearly reveals by exposing the establishment presenting it and the public receiving it to the illocutionary effects of some of these games (for example: should we appreciate the installations as part of a free and subjective aesthetic experience or \u201cconsult\u201d them in order to acquire knowledge?). He used this dual framework to encourage critical thought, through his works, on the role of the image and reconstitution in the writing of art history, by transgressing certain conventions of the period room, blurring the realism inherent to the reconstitution process, and including paratextual elements in his project that are more typically used in dissemination materials.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Scher\u00fcbel\u2019s intervention differs from the period room in evident ways. The re-created interiors have none of the splendour of the bourgeois or aristocratic residences often perpetuated by this museographic genre. Nor is it the artist\u2019s intention to preserve some historical memory or celebrate a heritage building or public figure.4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - A good example of this is the period room dedicated to Brother Andr\u00e9 at Saint Joseph\u2019s Oratory, in which Steve Bates, another artist participating in the exhibition, created an intervention.<\/span> Perron\u2019s photographs and the interiors that he captured are studied and reworked, rather, as part of an independent art practice. Scher\u00fcbel\u2019s reconstitution demonstrates an authorial, editorial, and scientific rationale: a recovery process derived from his neo-conceptual approach; the period room theme imposed by VOX\u2019s event; research conducted in response to the mandate of Cr\u00e9er \u00e0 rebours vers l\u2019exposition<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While the reconstitution may seem faithful in places, it is definitely partial and selective. The presence of the two photographs used as models allows us to compare them with their reconstitutions; the absence of the large desk in the foreground of the photograph is particularly striking. The reconstruction of the second interior seems even freer: it presents more panels than paintings are shown in the snapshot, and the perspective seems to be reversed, as though we are seeing the room from the other side of the sofa on which several group members are sitting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The realism of the two works therefore turns out to be relative. True, the level of fidelity of some of the details may evoke the almost obsessive concern for accuracy of When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969\/Venice 2013<\/em>, an exhibition curated and restaged by Germano Celant at Fondazione Prada (Venice, 2013). Yet Scher\u00fcbel\u2019s intervention is more in keeping with a practice like that of Sophie B\u00e9lair Cl\u00e9ment, who, in her replicas of historical exhibitions (from Seth Siegelaub\u2019s January Show to El Lissitzky\u2019s Proun room) examines the photographic documentation and exhibition motivations much more than just producing clever facsimiles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is as though Scher\u00fcbel sought to reproduce not the exhibitions immortalized by Perron but their photographic representation. Attesting to this is the omission of colour in the paintings of the second Automatist exhibition in favour of black and white, their scrupulously conserved soft-focus effect, and the removal of the natural tone of the burlap (a material used as a backdrop for the paintings) so as to match as closely as possible the black and white in which Perron\u2019s photograph renders the composition. Lastly, although the relatively precise shapes in the works in the front room allow us to recognize the Automatist style, they are reduced in the back room to pure clusters of vague blotches. By enlarging the original photographs to the scale of the domestic spaces that they depict, Scher\u00fcbel reveals all the more sharply the blurriness into which a photographic reproduction plunges once it exceeds its resolution limits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Therefore, Scher\u00fcbel seeks to reproduce not the space in which the exhibition was held but the manner in which Perron\u2019s photograph depicts it, with the necessary limitations that make the paintings\u200a\u2014\u200aalbeit the stars of the event\u200a\u2014\u200aevade our searching gaze. The project also underscores important blind spots that remain to be uncovered, even in a document that has forged an iconic image of the group\u2019s activities.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n A similar ambivalence is expressed in the paratextual materials of the works and photographs. As for the glass wall, although it functions as a diorama window, it also reverts to its own material reality, to the detriment of the expected realistic effect, through the distancing effect created by the vinyl lettering inscribed on its surface. Some of the inscriptions serving as a caption for the reconstructed room could also indicate the title of Scher\u00fcbel\u2019s work (\u201cSeconde exposition des automatistes\u201d\u200a5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - The exact title of Scher\u00fcbel\u2019s work is Sans titre (Seconde exposition des automatistes, au 75 rue Sherbrooke Ouest, chez les Gauvreau, 1947).<\/span>), while others, such as \u201cVOL. 26\u201d at the very bottom of the glass wall, clearly associate the work with its production. \u201cVolume\u201d corresponds to the artist\u2019s numbering system for his projects; the green colour of the lettering comes from the cover of a monograph of his work;\u200a6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Klaus Scher\u00fcbel (ed.), Klaus Scher\u00fcbel: Vol. 13 (Montr\u00e9al: Fonderie Darling and Gent: S.M.A.K. Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, 2012).<\/span> and the layout evokes the cover of a book\u200a\u2014\u200ahis preferred medium. The allusion to the book, also present in the second installation, suggests the vital importance of books and printed matter in the life of exhibition images like Perron\u2019s, since we most often encounter them and form an indirect memory of the exhibitions that they depict by scanning the pages of a book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These various motivations illustrate how convincingly Scher\u00fcbel integrates his installations into the distinct streams in which they are presented at VOX. The information provided on the didactic panel for Sans titre (Seconde exposition des automatistes\u2026) allows the artist-curator to fulfill VOX\u2019s mandate for Cr\u00e9er \u00e0 rebours vers l\u2019exposition<\/em>. The same concern with accuracy is conveyed by his reconstitution, yet combined with his own artistic motivations: the aesthetics of re-enactment with discrepancies that reveal the blind spots of visual documentation and historical memory; the cleverly maintained ambiguity between the subject of the reconstitution (photograph, exhibition?) and its realism; and the distancing process\u200a\u2014\u200aall of which feed the critical thinking that he wants to encourage on photographic documentation, exhibition apparatuses, and the construction of history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By examining Perron\u2019s photographs through the magnifying glass of a reconstituting installation, Scher\u00fcbel helps us to (re)discover them through the prism of their history and their complex identity as work and trace. Although the ambitious labour dedicated to them clearly attests to their historical importance, the photographs are ultimately not monumentalized but, rather, analyzed and put back into circulation for the purposes of speculating on the image and examining the function of the memory trace.8 In so doing, Scher\u00fcbel invites visitors to experience the photographs in novel ways\u200a\u2014\u200awhich are simultaneously immersive and distanced, perceptive and cognitive, haptic and reflexive\u200a\u2014\u200awhile also revealing their omissions and blind spots, their silence and incompleteness. Perron\u2019s photographs, just like Scher\u00fcbel\u2019s reconstitutions, have something decidedly undecidable about them. They are suspended between the demanding testimonial function that history has endowed them with and the freer agency that their status as artworks provides, and that Scher\u00fcbel fully revives through his own work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Translated from the French by Oana Avasilichioaei<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n![\"Klaus](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/98-DO6-IMG2-IM_Loubier_scherubel_vol27_9811_final_e_CMYK_resultat.jpg\")
<\/strong>Untitled<\/em> (Exposition
Mousseau-Riopelle chez Muriel Guilbault, 1947), installation view, VOX, Centre de l\u2019image contemporaine, Montr\u00e9al, 2019.
Photos : Michel Brunelle, courtesy of VOX, Centre de l\u2019image contemporaine, Montr\u00e9al<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/98-DO6-IMG3-IM_Loubier_scherubel_vol27_9828_final_e_CMYK_resultat.jpg\")
Sans titre <\/em> (Exposition Mousseau-Riopelle chez Muriel Guilbault, 1947), installation view, VOX, Centre de l\u2019image contemporaine, Montr\u00e9al, 2019.
Photos : Michel Brunelle, permission de VOX, Centre de l\u2019image contemporaine, Montr\u00e9al<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nPeriod Rooms that Are Not Exactly Period Rooms<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"Klaus](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/98-DO6-IMG4-IM_Loubier_Scherubel_IMG_9808-new_CMYK_resultat.jpg\")
<\/strong>Untitled<\/em> (Seconde exposition des automatistes, au 75 rueSherbrooke Ouest, chez les Gauvreau, 1947), installation view, VOX, Centre de l\u2019image contemporaine, Montr\u00e9al, 2019.
Photo : Michel Brunelle, courtesy of VOX, Centre de l\u2019image
contemporaine, Montr\u00e9al<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nAn Unstable Realism<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Who Speaks Through the Paratext?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The didactic panel for the first installation refers almost exclusively to Perron\u2019s photograph reconstituted by Scher\u00fcbel rather than to the latter\u2019s project, in contrast to the other panels at the various Period Rooms sites, which provide information about the artists\u2019 approaches. The panel describes Perron\u2019s photograph and lists the paintings visible in it, as though the artist appropriated a paratextual tool generally used for the exhibition site and appended it to his own intervention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n