Review: Feedback #6: Marshall McLuhan and the Arts at Fonderie Darling

Curated by Baruch Gottlieb, Feedback #6: Marshall McLuhan and the Arts at Fonderie Darling features a dozen artists (single and group) from four countries. It involves a dozen installations, mostly relying on sound and video, spread over two rooms at fair distances from one another.

Texts from Marshall McLuhan's experimental publications are spread out in flat vitrines with a stress on his thinking about museums present in those texts that are easily legible, although the implications from this to the exhibition itself are not drawn out. 

The artworks selected span from when he was alive until recent work and they tend to address technology in the most literal of ways. To put you into the appropriate mood, you are invited to plug into the droning monotone of Julia E. Dyck while staring at a hypnotic spinning disc as if you need therapeutic pseudo theory dripped into your ears like the nutrients of an IV. 

One would expect that the choice to curate a show inspired by McLuhan would at least offer a conceptualization of what the medium of the gallery space is doing. After all, the artworks collected, like the bits and pieces displayed from his publishing ventures (primarily, Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication, 1953-1957 and DEW-Line Newsletter, 1968-1970), are simply the content. As he remarks in one of the video on display, that aspect might as well be ignored.

In texture, there is a general focus on unfinished wood, plastic, and lightbulbs (pure information) but it has a thrown together rather than interrogated feel. This serves as the awkward accompaniment for the equally uncomplicated relegation of the auditory to textual conveyance mechanism that tends to dominate. 

If the disjunction between McLuhan's ideas and methods and the art works selected is understressed to the point that most visitors likely do not notice it, the curation of his texts does little to remedy it. McLuhan probes combining his products and those of subsequent artists have been conducted more convincingly by exhibitions like The Brothel Without Walls at UTAC.

The medium itself is the space, and an overtly industrial one at that. While this quality dwarfs everything else, the lingering impression is only this dwarfing. This is exaggerated almost to the point of self-satire in the most successful installation in the show by Colby Richardson, nooked away in a corner on the way out, and barely distinguishable from an unfinished bathroom.

If the exhibition had been left to this alone, it might have been more impressive. 

However, there's a bit of an impressario at work, with strained theatricalization trickling around the space. Presumably, this is intended to convey something about audio space, but this doesn't really work because it's too compartmentalized. 

Compartmentalization is the norm for the show, although it's never literalized to the point that it becomes impressive so the bits remain neither immersive nor isolated but muddled together under awkward sonic divisions. 

The gallery as technology isn't exploited to the point that this makes much sense, unless the sense being conveyed is how antiquarian showing works of art in a gallery actually is. There is a certain charm in its fetishization of museological forms. However, it's difficult to glean much from the curation beyond its root cellar reductivism, which seems a lot more de facto than designed. 

The running theme which the curator highlights in his statement is the artist as the producer of anti-environments, but this is precisely what fails to come across in the show. What you get instead is the artists as environmentalist, something which is expressed in numerous pieces with a certain leadenness. 

The greatest impression one gets from this is precisely that since McLuhan's time, the artist, and what he had in mind applied especially to those of High Modernism, has abandoned this role and power for something else entirely. That all of the aesthetic traps down to the curatorial use of space deployed in the show had already become generic in the 1960s and 70s is clear.  

This has implications beyond formalism. As Le Devoir has pointed out, there is a heavy lean in the exhibition toward activist art, especially of the feminist variety. McLuhan, of course, was quite renowned both for his take on the mechanical brides of technology, but also on the essentially reactionary and delusional function of activist politics as the ultimate symptoms of rearviewism.

What one loses entirely, even in the selection of video interviews and lectures that are presented in a corner, is McLuhan's real power as perhaps the last great Christian master of irony and satire, and as one of the greatest formalist theorists of the twentieth century.