It may be objected, however, that this perspective now belongs to the past, to an avant-garde movement now completed. This is the art historical view of avant-garde but an alternative exists in the conception of avant-garde formulated in historian Matei Calinescu\u2019s argument that \u201cavant-garde\u201d is not primarily the name of a stylistic movement but refers to a mode of temporality that is open to the unforeseeable, to what is fundamentally incomplete.2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism<\/em>. Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1987, p. 95-148. [Trad. libre]<\/span> His proposal leads to a construction of art viewing on a performative model.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sarat Maharaj, a Duchamp scholar equally conversant with the craft and artisanal traditions, defended the \u201cnon-knowledge\u201d of artistic activities in the face of dominant perceptions that \u201cnothing counts unless it has the systematic rigour of \u2018science.\u2019\u201d His argument against modelling art practice on scientific rigour rests on what he perceives as a need for activities that \u201cresist being wholly taken under the wing of systematic methodological explication.\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Sarat Maharaj, \u00ab\u2009Know-how and No-How : stop gap notes on \u2018method\u2019 in visual art as knowledge production\u2009\u00bb, Art\u2009& Research<\/em>, vol. 2 (printemps 2009), p. 1-11.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n This topic of tradition and technics could be considered on the basis of almost any contemporary exhibition, however, a few seen in recent years in Montr\u00e9al would be adequate. We could take a look at the simple yet sensuously resonant paintings of Chris Kline, bringing them to contrast with the computer-generated video animations of Yam Lau, who coincidentally began his art practice as a painter. These two artists make works of great refinement and are therefore susceptible to being described as \u201cskillful.\u201d Recent exhibitions by Montr\u00e9al photographer Lynne Cohen equally emphasize enquiry into the status of building\/making in the era of technical abstraction. A retrospective of video work by Nelson Henricks represented this artist\u2019s preoccupation with issues of narrative construction and the existential conflicts between the temporality of the video medium and that of one\u2019s own life. Finally, a glimpse at the installation by Lani Maestro at the Darling Foundry suggests further evidence of any \u201creturn to tradition\u201d as paradoxical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To describe a work of art as \u201cwell made\u201d or \u201cskilled\u201d is usually to fall short of saying anything pertinent. Works of art \u201cin themselves\u201d propose not the hierarchical vocabulary of the \u201cwell made\u201d but the anarchical \u201cwell-enough-made.\u201d Nelson Henricks\u2019s video retrospective held last year at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery at Concordia University presented a number of video works narrating, as subject matter, Henricks\u2019s own struggle to write for video. The arbitrariness that results from immersing oneself in contingency as a source leaves the artist with the task of sorting through memory and its attachments and disconnections in the social or historical milieu. Writing as a performative task as Henricks formulates it is a kind of Proustian quicksand with which one engages in the search for artistic form. From this perspective the notion of well-made art looks absurd or at least, anomalous. As an everyday art critical concept, \u201cwell made\u201d at least requires further and very precise contextual elaboration if it is to be meaningful. I might think of a shirt as \u201cwell made\u201d if the stitching is tight, the fabric durable and the design to my liking but would I ever spontaneously describe an artwork as \u201cwell made\u201d unless I were speaking ironically, or in a context in which the phrase would be understood as a casual generalization?<\/p>\n\n\n\n These perceptions arise the moment we encounter Lynne Cohen\u2019s photographs where \u201cmaking\u201d consists of documenting a play between virtual and actual space, a play revealing their reciprocal and complementary status. French critic Marie de Brugerolle has called Cohen\u2019s path a \u201cmetaphysical investigation.\u2009.\u2009.<\/em> guided by clues,\u201d asking also, \u201cwhat are we to make of the strangeness that is the subject of these images?\u201d4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Marie de Brugerolle, Lynne Cohen<\/em>, (ed.) France Choini\u00e8re (Montr\u00e9al: Dazibao, 2011): 6.<\/span> Descriptions of Cohen\u2019s photographs often stress terminologies both spatial and temporal, with the favoured terms being \u201ctransitional,\u201d \u201ctemporary,\u201d \u201cartificial,\u201d and \u201calienating.\u201d \u201cVeneer\u201d is a word that comes up frequently and the manufacturing process by which veneers are made is particularly relevant to our consideration. Veneer is often produced using a photographic process to replicate wood grain, substituting a superficial image for a tactile material. It also comes into play as a metaphor attached to attitudes and behaviours or even to describe contemporary practices of dwelling. Veneer implies \u201ccovering over,\u201d and art such as Cohen\u2019s often serves to point out that what has been covered over is the uncanny thing, the strange returning in the guise of something familiar. In relation to the topic of \u201cmaking\u201d Cohen\u2019s photographs present insights into how our current building practices present a fullness that is virtual and that is as empty as it is full. The interior rooms that are always the subject of her photographs present not a damning sociology of current design, but rather, consist of observations toward our contemporary design practices which no longer oppose the virtual to the actual, where full may also mean empty and vice versa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yam Lau\u2019s computer-animated video installation Rehearsal<\/em> at Galerie B-312 last spring would seem to be a good example of a skilled use of digital visual production technology. In this video Lau begins with a schematic rendering of a view from \u201coutside\u201d into the \u201cinterior\u201d of a built space. Two modes of viewing are initially proposed: we see the schematic animation, but also the integration of images of an \u201cactual\u201d room with a real occupant. This interior \u201ctakes place\u201d in the ongoing imaging process which inhabits a stage-like space that rotates, and while rotating, shifts views through transparent veils of animated architectural rendering. I used the adjective \u201cskilled\u201d just now to refer to this work but where is the skill and what is this artist\u2019s relationship with it? Could we not locate this skill within technics itself rather than in the artist\u2019s use of it? What I suggest is that Lau\u2019s process actually deconstructs \u201cthe skill dimension\u201d of the computer video animation that is embedded in the technology. By layering multiple viewpoints and visual modes he takes apart whatever we might think of as technical sophistication, substituting for it a gentle and meditative proposal regarding our inhabitation of place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Genuine works of art often act by incorporating non-art entities and materials into their own workings. Even if this became explicit with early Modernist works such as Degas\u2019s Little Dancer of 14 Years<\/em> or Picasso\u2019s Still Life with Chair Caning<\/em>, or the fragmentation of various traditional procedures such as bronze casting (fragmentations such as Medardo Rosso\u2019s refusal to take his wax models to their final step toward permanence); the history of this notion could be pushed back beyond the days of Modernism\u2019s inception. The artworks I am discussing embrace this tendency toward an incorporation of non-art materials and practices along with aspects and fragments of artistic and artisanal traditions in order to reflect on contemporary modes of \u201cmaking.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n For example, Chris Kline\u2019s paintings shown at Galerie Ren\u00e9 Blouin in 2008 make fragile woven cotton fabric an explicit concern, an apparently simple material pushed to an extreme, and the same may be said of the work\u2019s facture. In this particular series Kline\u2019s paintings have no paint on their surfaces at all, simply a single line drawn (sewn) horizontally, forming a seam that joins two subtly different fabrics. The simplicity of these elegant works reinforces the attention given to the seam, the drawing (pulling inward) that the stitching makes, and the joining together it accomplishes. In such a reduced work like this, tension is everything, and tension is not an object but an encounter with the rhythm of perception itself. Tension is now: tension is the gap about which Duchamp wrote, \u201cit\u2019s not what you see that is art, art is the gap.\u201d5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Marcel Duchamp as quoted by Arturo Schwarz. The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp<\/em>, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Abrams, 1970), 197.<\/span> In Kline\u2019s \u201cpaintings\u201d this tension is the felt sense of the joining, the being held together in the breathing of inside and outside, above and below. Kline\u2019s seams look merely \u201cwell-enough\u201d made without attempting to demonstrate virtuosity of crafting or technique. Skill is largely bound up with issues of control<\/em> whereas what we see in works of art such as Kline\u2019s, is care<\/em>. Control is rigid behaviour directed by the dictates of means and ends efficiency, but care is ultimately a concern for time, not only in terms of mortality but for the dimension of futurity. From a Duchampian perspective (the relationship of art and life modelled on breathing), works of art would consist of \u201cletting go\u201d rather than an exercise in control.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2010 Lani Maestro, in collaboration with composer\/violinist Malcolm Goldstein created the site work l\u2019oubli de l\u2019air<\/em>, at the Darling Foundry in Montr\u00e9al. This apparently simple installation covered the Foundry floor with a black sand surface punctuated at random intervals by reflective pools of water registering the passing of sky and clouds from the overhead clerestory windows. Obviously a different sort of work from that of Yam Lau or Chris Kline yet there is a similar interest in discerning building\/making in terms of a play that redefines the opposition of inside and outside, or the empty\/full. Such a play is remarked on by Anja Bock who wrote, \u201cdidacticism would be an imposition and a constraint on the work\u2019s poetic logic, which opens a far more expansive, if less easy to define, territory.\u201d She goes on to say, \u201cits materiality and music wraps itself around us to the point of rendering us immobile, caught in the spell of its most modest monumentality. It is as if the vast hollow space of the foundry is full, so full that it does not allow time to enter.\u201d6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Anja Bock, \u201cLani Maestro: l\u2019oubli de l\u2019air,\u201d BorderCrossings<\/em> (March, April, May 2011): 80\u201381.<\/span> However, in this installation the tradition and the practice of sculpture have not defined the work stylistically but simply exist as threads among others from which the work weaves, ultimately leaving us, as Bock has written, \u201cwith our intellectual handles and habitual ways of being (now) unanchored.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Artworks such as those discussed here engage with our building and dwelling practices, with issues of making, of materials, and their virtuality such that the interpenetration of each with its other is reciprocal, reversible: materiality becoming virtual and the pictorial\/virtual revealed as a bodily materiality. These artists and exhibitions present diverse investigations of spatial and temporal construction in which non-knowing, emptiness, and the unforeseeable are privileged modes of being and doing destined to perpetually undermine the realm of skill, know-how, technique\u2009\u2014\u2009all the behaviours that belong to the realm of pre-determined goals and the criterion of \u201cefficiency.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/74_DO02_Horne_Maestro_Loubli-de-lair-scaled.jpg\")
Fonderie Darling, Montr\u00e9al, 2010.
photo : Guy L\u2019Heureux, permission de | courtesy of Fonderie Darling, Montr\u00e9al<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/74_DO02_Horne_HENRICKS_Unwriting-scaled.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/74_DO02_Horne_Hendricks_Unwriting-3-scaled.jpg\")
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photos : \u00a9 Paul Litherland & Nelson Henricks, \u00a9 Paul Smith & Nelson Henricks; permission de | courtesy of Galerie Leonard & Bina Ellen, Universit\u00e9 Concordia, Montr\u00e9al<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/74_DO02_Horne__Cohen_Untitled-NudeColumns-scaled.jpg\")
Lynne Cohen, Untitled (Windows)<\/em>, 2010.
photos : permission de \u00adl’artiste | courtesy of
the artist & Art45, Montr\u00e9al<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/74_DO02_Horne_Cohen_Utitled-Windows-scaled.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/74_DO02_Horne_Kline_By-The-Time-it-Gets-Dark-scaled.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/74_DO02_Horne_Kline_Raft-II-scaled.jpg\")
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Chris Kline, Rim,<\/em> 2008. (bas\u2009|\u2009bottom)
photos : \u00a9 Richard-Max Tremblay \/ SODRAC (2011), permission
de l’\u00adartiste | courtesy of the artist & Galerie Ren\u00e9 Blouin, Montr\u00e9al<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/74_DO02_Horne_Kline_Rise-scaled.jpg\")
Chris Kline, Rise<\/em>, 2008. (bas\u2009|\u2009bottom)
photos : \u00a9 Richard-Max Tremblay \/ SODRAC (2011), permission
de l’artiste | courtesy of the artist & Galerie Ren\u00e9 Blouin, Montr\u00e9al<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n