What People Are Saying:
Exhibition Essay Down the Memory Hole
Essay by Robin McDonald
Voir Dire Exhibition: Modern Fuel Gallery, London ON, 2012
“Dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen.”
(“Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.”)
–Heinrich Heine, Almansor: A Tragedy (1823)
Calgary-born multimedia artist Tammy McGrath is a bibliophile’s worst nightmare. Like lambs to the slaughter, nearly 1400 books were taken from their cozy shelves, lifted from coffee- and end-tables and other places of prestige, unpacked from cardboard yard-sale boxes that had been tucked away in garages for decades, and sacrificed to McGrath’s recent instillation, ‘Voir Dire’. Roughly translated from Old French into “to say what is true”, “Voir Dire” is used in contemporary Canadian and U.K. laws to mean “a trial within a trial”, the process of questioning a juror or witness in order to establish her as an expert of the evidence she presents to the court. With this title, McGrath probes contentious issues surrounding censorship and rights to the control of information. The books’ decaying corpses litter the perimeter of the gallery space, emitting the distinctive barbecued smell that one can conjure into the nostrils just by thinking about it. Two large, winged creatures patrol this literary cemetery, surveying the space and all who enter it like vultures eagerly awaiting their next meals. While a certain mythological creature has been rumored to arise from ashes, the menacing ebony birds, bats, reptiles, or some combination thereof, that hover low to the gallery floor bear no resemblances to the magnificent phoenix, with its gold plumage and its representation of new life in death. Instead, these creatures, ominously suspended from the gallery ceiling like gothic chandeliers, potentially exist as the only witnesses to this cataclysmic event aside from the artist herself, provoking the viewer to question, “who could have done such a thing?” and the ever-more-haunting, “why?” As explained in McGrath’s artist statement, “The viewer is never clear if the taloned beasts simply arrived too late – or if their sole purpose is to guard the truth of the destruction below them.” McGrath’s viewers feels compelled to place, displace, and re-place blame unto the creatures for the literary massacre.
Though the space holds some clues to its intended purpose as a place for the exhibition of art (didactic panels, vinyl text, white-painted walls), the viewer enters the instillation and is immediately transported into a post-apocalyptic future. The obscured, destroyed, or otherwise rendered-unreadable texts do more than frustrate their potential readers; they assure these readers that the “future” they find themselves in is not one which can be easily reversed or escaped, for this is a time and place in which the right to speech, information, and other freedoms have become obsolete. Heinrich Heine’s aforementioned proverbial quotation, in which the German poet draws the parallel between book-burning and the burning of human beings, succinctly explains the symbolic element of book-burning as representative of the eradication of an idea. Furthermore, Heine illuminates the dark and oppressive history of biblioclasm and its use by Fascist regimes as a tool for the censorship and command of thought and communication. Notable examples of this political history include the book-burning of China’s Qin Dynasty, led by Emperor Shih Huang Ti in 213 B.C., in which books were destroyed in an effort to re-construct history so that it began with the emperor’s reign. In this case, the desire to not only edit but to eradicate history was so intense that it led Emperor Shih Huang Ti to bury-alive scholars who voiced thoughts and theories oppositional to the falsified history. Another, more contemporary example is the Nazi regime’s burning of Jewish, leftist literature as a method of denouncing and exterminating the “degenerate” ideas articulated within. ‘Voir Dire’ symbolizes and conveys this larger dictatorial history, coercing its viewers out of their complacent positions and implicating them in active roles of resistance against future acts of censorship.
The invention of the printing press in 1440 and the shift toward an industrial society increased the quantitative production of individual texts and thus removed most of the burden held by books in previous eras as the sole sources of the knowledge they kept. This period marked a serious cutting of ties with the tradition of oral story telling and the loss of the “aura” associated with quill-and-ink-written texts, as proposed by Walter Benjamin and defined by one’s proximity to an original work (of art, etc.). The twenty-first century introduction of entire digitized libraries challenged the relevance and necessity of a physical knowledge-keeping vessel and foreshadows the extinction of the material book object as demonstrated in ‘Voir Dire’. McGrath both laments this disappearance of the traditional medium, referring to her installation as reflective of the “violent cutting of ties to story, history, heritage and place”, and simultaneously urges her viewers to take stands against the censorship and control of artistic and intellectual creations before the post-apocalyptic future she has constructed for our viewing becomes a reality.
Robin McDonald is a first year graduate student in the department of Art History at Queen's University. Her research investigates the art museum's role in the construction of discourses surrounding sexuality and queerness in art, and the queering of art historical canons.
Voir Dire
The text below was written by Lissa Robinson and appeared in the invitation that accompanied the Voir Dire exhibition at Truck Gallery in Calgary, AB.
I love books. They are the only objects in my house that I have willingly and lovingly (okay, sometimes begrudgingly) packed, hauled and unpacked repeatedly since my early twenties. Throwing them out feels like sacrilege, and thoughts of giving them away creates feelings of anxiety over future regrets. But what about burning them, or modifying them? On what basis may these choices be made, and by whom?
In Tammy McGrath’s recent installation, Voir Dire, viewers are faced with similar questions. The artist collected over a thousand books from people whom she knows well or is acquainted with, and they all donated these cherished items with the full knowledge of their fate: to be sacrificed to the fires. No longer readable, these objects of adoration have been utterly and permanently transformed into piles of ash and delicately charred sculptures for our objections and contemplation. Oh, the shame!
Books are considered purveyors of knowledge; the sacred keepers of free thought, creative genius and most especially, delicious rainy days curled up on the sofa indulging in the dangerous and sinful thoughts of others. Book burning has a sordid past. As early as 212 BC, volumes of ink-stained paper were burned in order to control the flow of information and enforce the values and beliefs of a corrupted or delusional leader. The book-burning scene from the infamous poem, Don Quixote, is a delightfully daring epitaph carefully constructed to mock the indulgences of those damned book-burning Spanish Inquisitors while also revealing the author’s own literary likes and dislikes. Even on the imaginary plane Cervantes had limits on what he could bear to burn, even though he was unabashedly able and willing to condemn the books he disdained to an eternal, imaginary hell.
In a similar fashion, Voir Dire is an exhibition that unfolds in a conundrum of paradoxical metaphors. Is the message one that rails against those who destroy books in ignorant and malicious ire, or does it give rise to the ideal that humanity can and will rise anew from the cruel and irrational flames of destruction?
Hovering above the artist’s vast piles of ashes and burned books are three ominious creatures with vast leathery wings, dangerous talons and vertebrae-like tails that protrude four-feet out from their thickly tarred and feathered bodies. Not bird, nor reptile, it is difficult to discern whether these mythological beasts have descended from the skies as the protectors of the persecuted books, or as the provocateurs of their evil demise.
There is an elegiac quality to this exhibition that both laments and pays homage to the book, either as it stands as a trashy piece of pulp fiction or as a work of great literary genius. Despite the discomfort a viewer might experience from smelling and gazing over this mass of burnt books, it is impossible not to be enraptured by their aesthetic transformations into gorgeous and delicately charred paper sculptures. The artist’s role in society is often a daring one, even deviant, and if the underlying message is one of lament and celebration, then in this context, the act of burning books can be appreciated and understood. In alchemy, all the processes – especially the regressive ones – are governed by the idea that it is a necessary provocation to improve or refine matter. Like the mythical Phoenix, the seed must rot and the body must burn to ashes before new growth and glorious resurrection.
LR
FFWD
Volume 15 No. 48
November 4, 2010
Book-burning bastards
Truck’s latest toys with viewer’s emotions
Published November 26, 2009 by Drew Anderson
Tammy McGrath's Voire Dire at Truck Contemporary Art in Calgary.
Friday, November 13 - Thursday, December 10
The first thing that hits you as you enter Truck Contemporary Art in Calgary is the smell. Smoky, charred air pierces the nose, reminiscent of a campfire or, more ominously, a smouldering house fire. There is an edge to the smell.
The second thing to hit you is the fact that they’ve burnt books. Those bastards burnt books. Lots of them.
It’s strange, the emotions raised from the sight of charred remains of piles of books. It is a political statement, a religious statement, a celebration of ignorance and an affront to word nerds. I am shocked.
I bend over to read the few visible titles. Cheap paperbacks of poorly written bestsellers litter the floor. Relief. But then; is that Nathaniel Hawthorne?
The books aren’t just burnt, they sit in as guano for the large winged creatures hovering above. A scatological smattering of lost words.
Of course shock is the kind of reaction that artist Tammy McGrath wants. She is a book geek and, like me, has unfailingly trudged her collection of books from one apartment to the next. Heavy boxes of literary treasures. She wants questions to rise quickly, rather than slowly percolate.
So what does it all mean? Are the creatures winged representatives of ignorance, guarding their destruction from curious minds? Is this a challenge to rise above those who would destroy millennia of human learning (or mindless entertainment)?
Of course, these questions are left unanswered. But even without raising them, this exhibition is an esthetic pleasure. The charred piles of word guano form richly textured sculptures and the strange, feathered beasts visually entice, with leather wings and sharp claws.
If anything, it’s a creative way to decrease the burden of moving for the artist and her friends who donated the books.
Essay by Robin McDonald
Voir Dire Exhibition: Modern Fuel Gallery, London ON, 2012
“Dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen.”
(“Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.”)
–Heinrich Heine, Almansor: A Tragedy (1823)
Calgary-born multimedia artist Tammy McGrath is a bibliophile’s worst nightmare. Like lambs to the slaughter, nearly 1400 books were taken from their cozy shelves, lifted from coffee- and end-tables and other places of prestige, unpacked from cardboard yard-sale boxes that had been tucked away in garages for decades, and sacrificed to McGrath’s recent instillation, ‘Voir Dire’. Roughly translated from Old French into “to say what is true”, “Voir Dire” is used in contemporary Canadian and U.K. laws to mean “a trial within a trial”, the process of questioning a juror or witness in order to establish her as an expert of the evidence she presents to the court. With this title, McGrath probes contentious issues surrounding censorship and rights to the control of information. The books’ decaying corpses litter the perimeter of the gallery space, emitting the distinctive barbecued smell that one can conjure into the nostrils just by thinking about it. Two large, winged creatures patrol this literary cemetery, surveying the space and all who enter it like vultures eagerly awaiting their next meals. While a certain mythological creature has been rumored to arise from ashes, the menacing ebony birds, bats, reptiles, or some combination thereof, that hover low to the gallery floor bear no resemblances to the magnificent phoenix, with its gold plumage and its representation of new life in death. Instead, these creatures, ominously suspended from the gallery ceiling like gothic chandeliers, potentially exist as the only witnesses to this cataclysmic event aside from the artist herself, provoking the viewer to question, “who could have done such a thing?” and the ever-more-haunting, “why?” As explained in McGrath’s artist statement, “The viewer is never clear if the taloned beasts simply arrived too late – or if their sole purpose is to guard the truth of the destruction below them.” McGrath’s viewers feels compelled to place, displace, and re-place blame unto the creatures for the literary massacre.
Though the space holds some clues to its intended purpose as a place for the exhibition of art (didactic panels, vinyl text, white-painted walls), the viewer enters the instillation and is immediately transported into a post-apocalyptic future. The obscured, destroyed, or otherwise rendered-unreadable texts do more than frustrate their potential readers; they assure these readers that the “future” they find themselves in is not one which can be easily reversed or escaped, for this is a time and place in which the right to speech, information, and other freedoms have become obsolete. Heinrich Heine’s aforementioned proverbial quotation, in which the German poet draws the parallel between book-burning and the burning of human beings, succinctly explains the symbolic element of book-burning as representative of the eradication of an idea. Furthermore, Heine illuminates the dark and oppressive history of biblioclasm and its use by Fascist regimes as a tool for the censorship and command of thought and communication. Notable examples of this political history include the book-burning of China’s Qin Dynasty, led by Emperor Shih Huang Ti in 213 B.C., in which books were destroyed in an effort to re-construct history so that it began with the emperor’s reign. In this case, the desire to not only edit but to eradicate history was so intense that it led Emperor Shih Huang Ti to bury-alive scholars who voiced thoughts and theories oppositional to the falsified history. Another, more contemporary example is the Nazi regime’s burning of Jewish, leftist literature as a method of denouncing and exterminating the “degenerate” ideas articulated within. ‘Voir Dire’ symbolizes and conveys this larger dictatorial history, coercing its viewers out of their complacent positions and implicating them in active roles of resistance against future acts of censorship.
The invention of the printing press in 1440 and the shift toward an industrial society increased the quantitative production of individual texts and thus removed most of the burden held by books in previous eras as the sole sources of the knowledge they kept. This period marked a serious cutting of ties with the tradition of oral story telling and the loss of the “aura” associated with quill-and-ink-written texts, as proposed by Walter Benjamin and defined by one’s proximity to an original work (of art, etc.). The twenty-first century introduction of entire digitized libraries challenged the relevance and necessity of a physical knowledge-keeping vessel and foreshadows the extinction of the material book object as demonstrated in ‘Voir Dire’. McGrath both laments this disappearance of the traditional medium, referring to her installation as reflective of the “violent cutting of ties to story, history, heritage and place”, and simultaneously urges her viewers to take stands against the censorship and control of artistic and intellectual creations before the post-apocalyptic future she has constructed for our viewing becomes a reality.
Robin McDonald is a first year graduate student in the department of Art History at Queen's University. Her research investigates the art museum's role in the construction of discourses surrounding sexuality and queerness in art, and the queering of art historical canons.
Voir Dire
The text below was written by Lissa Robinson and appeared in the invitation that accompanied the Voir Dire exhibition at Truck Gallery in Calgary, AB.
I love books. They are the only objects in my house that I have willingly and lovingly (okay, sometimes begrudgingly) packed, hauled and unpacked repeatedly since my early twenties. Throwing them out feels like sacrilege, and thoughts of giving them away creates feelings of anxiety over future regrets. But what about burning them, or modifying them? On what basis may these choices be made, and by whom?
In Tammy McGrath’s recent installation, Voir Dire, viewers are faced with similar questions. The artist collected over a thousand books from people whom she knows well or is acquainted with, and they all donated these cherished items with the full knowledge of their fate: to be sacrificed to the fires. No longer readable, these objects of adoration have been utterly and permanently transformed into piles of ash and delicately charred sculptures for our objections and contemplation. Oh, the shame!
Books are considered purveyors of knowledge; the sacred keepers of free thought, creative genius and most especially, delicious rainy days curled up on the sofa indulging in the dangerous and sinful thoughts of others. Book burning has a sordid past. As early as 212 BC, volumes of ink-stained paper were burned in order to control the flow of information and enforce the values and beliefs of a corrupted or delusional leader. The book-burning scene from the infamous poem, Don Quixote, is a delightfully daring epitaph carefully constructed to mock the indulgences of those damned book-burning Spanish Inquisitors while also revealing the author’s own literary likes and dislikes. Even on the imaginary plane Cervantes had limits on what he could bear to burn, even though he was unabashedly able and willing to condemn the books he disdained to an eternal, imaginary hell.
In a similar fashion, Voir Dire is an exhibition that unfolds in a conundrum of paradoxical metaphors. Is the message one that rails against those who destroy books in ignorant and malicious ire, or does it give rise to the ideal that humanity can and will rise anew from the cruel and irrational flames of destruction?
Hovering above the artist’s vast piles of ashes and burned books are three ominious creatures with vast leathery wings, dangerous talons and vertebrae-like tails that protrude four-feet out from their thickly tarred and feathered bodies. Not bird, nor reptile, it is difficult to discern whether these mythological beasts have descended from the skies as the protectors of the persecuted books, or as the provocateurs of their evil demise.
There is an elegiac quality to this exhibition that both laments and pays homage to the book, either as it stands as a trashy piece of pulp fiction or as a work of great literary genius. Despite the discomfort a viewer might experience from smelling and gazing over this mass of burnt books, it is impossible not to be enraptured by their aesthetic transformations into gorgeous and delicately charred paper sculptures. The artist’s role in society is often a daring one, even deviant, and if the underlying message is one of lament and celebration, then in this context, the act of burning books can be appreciated and understood. In alchemy, all the processes – especially the regressive ones – are governed by the idea that it is a necessary provocation to improve or refine matter. Like the mythical Phoenix, the seed must rot and the body must burn to ashes before new growth and glorious resurrection.
LR
FFWD
Volume 15 No. 48
November 4, 2010
Book-burning bastards
Truck’s latest toys with viewer’s emotions
Published November 26, 2009 by Drew Anderson
Tammy McGrath's Voire Dire at Truck Contemporary Art in Calgary.
Friday, November 13 - Thursday, December 10
The first thing that hits you as you enter Truck Contemporary Art in Calgary is the smell. Smoky, charred air pierces the nose, reminiscent of a campfire or, more ominously, a smouldering house fire. There is an edge to the smell.
The second thing to hit you is the fact that they’ve burnt books. Those bastards burnt books. Lots of them.
It’s strange, the emotions raised from the sight of charred remains of piles of books. It is a political statement, a religious statement, a celebration of ignorance and an affront to word nerds. I am shocked.
I bend over to read the few visible titles. Cheap paperbacks of poorly written bestsellers litter the floor. Relief. But then; is that Nathaniel Hawthorne?
The books aren’t just burnt, they sit in as guano for the large winged creatures hovering above. A scatological smattering of lost words.
Of course shock is the kind of reaction that artist Tammy McGrath wants. She is a book geek and, like me, has unfailingly trudged her collection of books from one apartment to the next. Heavy boxes of literary treasures. She wants questions to rise quickly, rather than slowly percolate.
So what does it all mean? Are the creatures winged representatives of ignorance, guarding their destruction from curious minds? Is this a challenge to rise above those who would destroy millennia of human learning (or mindless entertainment)?
Of course, these questions are left unanswered. But even without raising them, this exhibition is an esthetic pleasure. The charred piles of word guano form richly textured sculptures and the strange, feathered beasts visually entice, with leather wings and sharp claws.
If anything, it’s a creative way to decrease the burden of moving for the artist and her friends who donated the books.