<http:\/\/bit.ly\/2EVHQfn>.<\/span>More recently, Terry Smith has described contemporary art as \u201cmultiple, internally differentiating, category-shifting, shape-changing, unpredictable (that is, diverse)\u200a\u2014\u200alike contemporaneity itself.\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Terry Smith, Contemporary Art: World Currents<\/em> (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2011), 9.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Contemporary art discourse often seeks salvation in this idea of unfinishedness, which it positions, much as it positions itself, as open, inclusive, subversive, and liberatory. This is part of the legacy of the historical avant-gardes and their assault on the autonomy of the work of art, in which the unfinished, discarded, shocking, and ephemeral defied a stultifying, bourgeois institution divorced from what Marxists sometimes call the praxis of everyday life. Unfinishedness thus played an important part in catapulting Western art into a stage of self-critique. But the politics of the unfinished shifted irrevocably after 1968, and then again with the cementing of the neoliberal economy, and this change has been further galvanized in a global political climate in which precarity and an open, flexible, more dynamic, and, consequently, more volatile species of capitalism prevails. As a social ideal, it would seem that unfinishedness has become increasingly sketchy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While unfinishedness is generally understood to be opposed to boundaries, it is important to remember that criticism requires the distance afforded by autonomy, just as a limit at once excludes and relies upon the outside. An odd, but nonetheless compelling way into a better understanding of this dialectic\u200a\u2014\u200awhich, in contemporary art discourse, has generally become lopsided and unwieldy\u200a\u2014\u200amay be found in one of the most basic components of the sketch: the line. This is not any kind of line, however, but one that turns rather tightly on the hesitation between its role as a limit and an egress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Although the following selection of works may, in some ways, seem slightly peculiar, together they provide a rather compelling illustration of this particular dialectical rhythm. Take, for example, a series of untitled works that Garry Neill Kennedy made in the mid-1970s by meticulously running a pencil along the threads of a stretched canvas. This work is generally understood as a critique of formalist aesthetic theories espoused by American critics such as Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried. It is often defined as post-minimal or conceptual art and thereby reduced to a rather narrow argument with a certain kind of modernism. And yet, this simple, prescribed gesture is paradoxically the source of a remarkably open work of art. In addition to engaging with the problematic of modernism, it subverts classist hierarchies of training and knowledge and questions the nature of labour under capitalist temporal regimes. And this is to say nothing of the metaphysical aspect of the work, whose repetitive nature allows, as Kennedy once remarked, \u201cthe maker to do something else or to be something else.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Garry Neill Kennedy, quoted by Eric Cameron in \u201cGarry Kennedy: Painting Painting Itself,\u201d Artforum<\/em> 15 (May 1977): 50\u200a\u2014\u200a51.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Contemporary artists working in a similar vein are often subject to comparable reductions. Tammi Campbell\u2019s impressive work Dear Agnes<\/em> (ongoing since 2010), a series of grid drawings produced almost daily as wordless letters to the abstract painter Agnes Martin, is usually understood as an engagement with the history of American modernism, in which the names Frank Stella and Sol LeWitt eclipse Martin\u2019s. Indeed, one commentator even described Campbell\u2019s project as \u201ca love letter to modernism.\u201d5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - John Shelling, \u201cDedication to the Grid: Tammi Campbell\u2019s Love Letter to Modernism,\u201d Saskatoon StarPhoenix<\/em>, August 29, 2016, <http:\/\/bit.ly\/2FlsoHm>.<\/span> It would be foolish to deny that these lines exist\u200a\u2014\u200athat they connect Kennedy to Campbell, and both of them back to the legacy of North American formalism. At the same time, it seems equally nonsensical to ignore Campbell\u2019s work as a highly personal endeavour undertaken\u200a\u2014\u200aironically enough, given her methods\u200a\u2014\u200ain opposition to these patrimonial links. Such \u201cmodels of arborescent descent,\u201d to borrow a phrase from Deleuze and Guattari, create patriarchal lineages that choke freethinking, and obscure or eliminate women and anyone outside the dominant cis-gendered, white, male subject position. Instead of simply plugging these works of art into a sanctioned genealogy, we might try to see them as weaving a web with the world. This is not the same as deciding which side of the line they are on\u200a\u2014\u200ain other words, whether they limit or liberate. The point is, rather, to draw out the tension between a practice that fixes you and one that lets you go\u200a\u2014\u200ato understand how the unfinished can be limiting and, conversely, how limits may set you free.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Nadia Myre\u2019s Landscape of Sorrow <\/em>(2008), a line is cut into a piece of raw, stretched canvas and then sewn shut with thread. The gesture is repeated six times, as though it were at once a prescribed ritual and a potentially endless process. Although technically separate from her series of scar paintings and Scarscapes<\/em>, there can be little doubt that these lines are abstracted from real, if unnamed, injuries. And while some wounds are the results of accidents, these do not feel random. However haphazard the gashes, however improvised their sutures, it is difficult to see these marks as anything but intentional. As such, they materialize a particular power dynamic\u200a\u2014\u200aone in which violence is both inflicted and overcome. Myre, who is of mixed Algonquin and French Canadian heritage, refers to these marks as a \u201clanguage wound,\u201d6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Nadia Myre, quoted by Cynthia Fowler in \u201cMateriality and Collective Experience: Sewing as Artistic Practice in Works by Marie Watt, Nadia Myre, and Bonnie Devine,\u201d American Indian Quarterly<\/em> 34, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 344\u200a\u2014\u200a64.<\/span> and indeed, as political gestures go, they couldn\u2019t be less didactic. Although they speak of a variety of ills\u200a\u2014\u200aphysical, psychological, intergenerational, colonial, environmental, spiritual\u200a\u2014\u200athey remain paradoxically mute. In this way, they presume equality between the speaking and the silent. This is in keeping with traditional Anishnaabeg worldviews as expressed in such sacred teachings as the philosophy of the Medicine Wheel, in which connections are made, not by lines, but by directions that collapse Western distinctions between consciousness and insentience, nature and culture, mind and body. In this sense, Myre\u2019s works are at odds with much Western critical art, which, as Jacques Ranci\u00e8re has convincingly argued, relies on a hierarchical distinction between the knowing and the ignorant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Similar to a scar, the line as a tattoo is also particularly evocative of the dialectic of freedom and oppression at the heart of the question of the unfinished in contemporary art. Once considered a marginal means of signifying membership in a particular community, in contemporary North American society tattoos have evolved into a mass expression of individuality. While on the surface they may continue to embody an ideal of social rebellion and nonconformity associated with \u201cthe underworld\u201d of artists and criminals, under neoliberalism they have also become a market-sanctioned expression of diversity. This irony is captured rather eloquently in John Murchie\u2019s Black and Blue<\/em> (ongoing since 1996). To create this work, Murchie instructed a tattoo artist to draw two lines down each of his inner forearms\u200a\u2014\u200aone blue, the other black\u200a\u2014\u200awith the proviso that they be made as straight as possible without using a ruler. In their wavering frankness\u200a\u2014\u200aa rigid simplicity deformed by undertones of chance\u200a\u2014\u200athe resultant lines mark a moment in which it is possible to both exceed and fail a program. Though drawn with the greatest precision a free hand can afford, the lines naturally tremor subtly off course. A simple, closed procedure is thus opened to the complex uncertainty of another\u2019s agency. Describing the work as \u201can ongoing performance, until my last breath,\u201d Murchie plans to bequeath these lines to the National Gallery of Canada upon his death. Curators will then be forced to decide if they want to exhibit the work as a drawing, which would entail skinning him, or as a sculpture, which would require him to be taxidermied.7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - John Murchie, interviewed by Keeley Haftner, \u201cThinks: John Murchie,\u201d Bad at Sports<\/em>, December 19, 2017, <http:\/\/badatsports.com\/2017\/thinks-john-murchie>.<\/span> Alternatively, they could refuse the gift. Here, again, the question of individuality is presented as a paradox: this is a work by the artist John Murchie, but it also turns out that Murchie is nothing more than one object among many, waiting to be displayed or rejected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mi\u2019kmaq artist Jordan Bennett has a very different set of lines on his forearm. A member of the Earthline Tattoo Collective,8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - Other members of the collective include Dion Kaszas (Nlaka\u2019pamux) and Amy Malbeuf (M\u00e9tis). See \u201cAbout,\u201d Earthline Tattoo Collective<\/em>, <https:\/\/www.earthlinetattoo.com\/about>.<\/span> an Indigenous organization devoted to the support and preservation of traditional Indigenous tattoo practices, Bennett received his tattoo while struggling to create a series of sculptures inspired by the drawings of Shanawdithit, a Beothuk woman widely considered to be the last of her people.9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - The Beothuk were a nation of Indigenous people based on the island of Newfoundland. Although history records them as extinct, Mi\u2019kmaq oral histories say they fled to the Atlantic mainland and intermarried with neighbouring nations.<\/span> In the final months of her life, Shanawdithit drew maps and other images that Bennett believes were intended to \u201cpreserve some visual knowledge and memory\u201d of her culture.10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 10 <\/a> - Jordan Bennett, interviewed by Mireille Bourgeois, \u201cSix Questions with Jordan Bennett,\u201d IOTA: Gallery, <https:\/\/www.iotainstitute.com\/jordan-bennett>.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Unable to reconcile his conscience with the idea of exhibiting her drawings, or the works he created from them, in the colonized, Eurocentric space of a gallery, he decided instead to have two of them tattooed on his forearm. Serving as constant reminders of previous Indigenous generations, but also of the ties between the Mi\u2019kmaq and Beothuk peoples, these lines bear witness to a particular kind of freedom: the freedom of the collective rather than the individual. The lines of these drawings do not belong to Jordan Bennett, even though he will carry them to the end of his life. They belong to what he calls \u201cthe entirety of [Indigenous] ways of being.\u201d Such lines continue, despite being repeatedly broken, in the face of cultural genocide.11<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 11 <\/a> - Jordan Bennett, quoted by Michelle LaVallee in \u201cRemembering the Remembered: In Conversation with Jordan Bennett,\u201d BackFlash<\/em> 34, no. 2 (October 13, 2017), <http:\/\/blackflash.ca\/rememberingremembered>.<\/span> In this gesture, the ideal of unfinishedness ruling over contemporary art receives one of its sternest rebukes, for how can we celebrate the freedom of individual lines if they serve only to destroy communities? Do the \u201clines of flight\u201d we still cherish, despite being nominally on the other side of the postmodern, lead to new unities or merely to a series of disconnected points flailing in the darkness? These are questions that we must continue to ask ourselves, particularly as we search for ways out of this darkness. If contemporary art is to play a meaningful role in this project, we need to be aware of its limitations, but perhaps most especially of the limits of its obsession with the unfinished. <\/p>\n![\"Kennedy_Untitled\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/93_DO01_Falvey_Kennedy_Untitled-scaled.jpg\")
Untitled<\/em>, 1974-1975.
Photo : courtesy of the artist & Diaz Contemporary, Toronto<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Campbell_dearagnes_july29_2016\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/93_DO01_Falvey_Campbell_dearagnes_july29_2016-scaled.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Campbell_dearagnes_july27_2016\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/93_DO01_Falvey_Campbell_dearagnes_july27_2016-scaled.jpg\")
Tammi Campbell<\/strong>
[left to right] Dear Agnes series, July 29, 2016\u2009<\/em>, 2016
Dear Agnes series, July 27, 2016<\/em>, 2016
Dear Agnes series, July 5, 2016<\/em>, 2016.
Photos : Courtesy of the artist & Galerie Division, Montr\u00e9al<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Campbell_dearagnes_july5_2016\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/93_DO01_Falvey_Campbell_dearagnes_july5_2016-scaled.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Nadia](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/93_DO01_Falvey_Nadia-Myre_Scar-Project_.jpg\")
Scar project<\/em>, detail, 2005-2013.
Photo : courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"bennett_Tatouage\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/93_DO01_Falvey_bennett_Tatouage.jpg\")
Tatouage inspir\u00e9 des dessins de Shanawdithit, tatoueur : Ryan Coombs.
Photo : permission de l\u2019artiste<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"Murchie_Black](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/93_DO01_Falvey_Murchie_Black-and-Blue.jpg\")
Black and Blue<\/em>, depuis 1996.
Photo : Gemey Kelly, permission de l\u2019artiste<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n