UNDERTONES
Jon Davies
In Nelson Henricks's 1994 tape Comédie, a man describes his obsession
with cracking the code behind the apparently random arrangement of white and
brown tiles in his local Metro station. After extensive analysis, he concludes
that the pattern in fact represents a musical score. Almost fifteen years later,
this theme of struggling (often in vain) to create order from the chaos of
the world – and particularly of music as one system for potentially doing so
– has returned as a major focus of Henricks's work.
While Henricks's tapes of this period and earlier are very much products of
their times, there is a self-reflexive collage aesthetic apparent at least
as far back as 1988's Legend that suggests that the mechanism of representation
itself was as much his ostensible focus as the performance of personal history,
memory and the vicissitudes of identity (regional, sexual and, perversely,
of species). Over the years, his aesthetic lexicon developed and personal self-expression
became directed outwards, diffused into broader themes like television (Emission,
1994) and voyeurism (Handy Man, 1999). (I can't help but evoke video artist
and writer Gregg Bordowitz's wish for his own ultimate fate: dispersion into
the atmosphere.)
Now in 2008 in the context of Henricks being selected as the Images Festival's
Canadian Artist Spotlight, we can see that he has evolved a wide-ranging oeuvre
united by a fascination with the ever-malleable video medium's capacity to
manipulate meaning, achieved through its ability to effortlessly juxtapose
any image with any sound with any text. His conceptual preoccupation with video's
essential signifying building blocks has manifested in works that pit image
against sound against text to signal a crisis in the progress promised by technology.
For many, technological innovation represents liberation: from our messy, fragile
bodies and everything they are forced to endure, from a life without meaning
or certainty. In Henricks's hands, the technology of video promises an intensification
of contingency and entropy: possibilities, change, the risk of failure rather
than frozen, dead knowledge, all the ruptures and breakdowns that arise in
conveying meaning.
Henricks's key work in this regard is Satellite (2004). It burlesques the
unwavering faith in reason and progress evident in musty, once-educational
science films for children through the use of idiosyncratic, absurd texts that
delight in nonsense and in the inappropriately intimate (precisely the outbursts
and expressions that would be held in disdain by the upstanding citizens desperately
trying to make sense whom we see in these old films). The soiled, unstable
subjective contaminates the pristine rational objective, the data-quantifying
image track ends up with its pants pulled down by the wacky text. Some of the
most prominent sequences are demonstrations of the functioning of the human
ear, intimations of the Henricks's growing interest in the aural.
Satellite refines some of the ideas about technology and its sillier manifestations
apparent in his Planetarium (2001), an examination of, among other things,
electronic music. In its mockery of our faith and hope in the glorious "future" -
its laser light shows, synthesizers and outer space kitsch - and in the driving
rhythm and numerical structure of his Untitled [Score] (2007) with composer
Jackie Gallant – also about music – we find connections to his new work, Countdown,
on display at Gallery 44. In Countdown, Henricks shot different numbers from
30 all the way down to 1 that he found printed on objects in his apartment
(dice, money, product packaging, etc.). He approximated a length of one second
for each shot and filmed them in order, thus editing the film in camera. In
only 30 seconds it produces rich connotations: First off, this countdown isn't
trustworthy or useful because it is susceptible to human error. Second, we
are used to countdown as a device to build suspense as it reaches towards a
major narrative goal. Something big is supposed to happen: the rocket will
lift off, the ball will drop, the system will self-destruct. Instead, Henricks's
countdown mirrors (and gently satirizes) the inescapable temporal structure
of its own medium of video installation: the endless loop. (Henricks's oeuvre
has evolved into the gallery space in the past several years, going multi-channel
in the process.)
All of these recent works suggest that attempts at organizing the world are
futile. In Untitled (Score), Henricks spells out different 3- and 4 letter
words that only use letters representing notes of the musical scale (A-G),
and Gallant scored the piece based on these. The images that accompany the
words are largely illustrative, as if in a children's primer, and the tape
serves as an experiment in bridging two different languages with overlapping
forms of notation together. But of course neither system really thrives in
these circumstances: this union merely leaves you with two puny, arrested vocabularies
rather than any utopian new form of communication. This falling short is also
inherent in the artist's expansive, philosophical Map of the City (created
during a 2006 residency in Rome). In that two-channel tape, Henricks constantly
editorializes on the sheer quantity of things: "So many rooms in this
world, but you will live in just a few of them," it begins. Approximating
the form of an encyclopedia, it attempts to catalogue a world of objects so
vast as to be impenetrable - those that have crumbled and gone, those that
are still with us, and even those to come. For Henricks here, material culture
is paradoxically the apogee of ephemerality and meaninglessness.
In the exhibition with Countdown is Henricks's most ambitious gambit, the
multimedia installation The Sirens. It is a sort of laboratory for contemplating
the emotional and physical force of the singing human voice, but through its
very absence. We hear other noises, music even, but no voice. We are presented
with two monitors and a screen showing a text narration and sequences of oblique
images evoking the complex tangle of body, sound, sensation and technology.
Partly because its multiple components are arranged throughout the space (giving
it a sculptural form), and partly because the screen directly addresses us
with words – "make the loudest sound you can make" – and blank cue
cards, The Sirens immerses the spectator's body and seems to leave an opening
for one's own song, almost as if it were a too-shy karaoke machine. (We are
potentially the sirens, after all.) The images illustrate the power play between
bodies and instruments: they play guitar and sing (though we only see throats
tense, wordlessly), operate projectors and record players, receive acupuncture
and tattoos – even cutlery becomes sensuous here (a dinner fork is played like
a tuning fork, for example). The video images on the monitors are crisp and
detached, while the film clips and slides on the screen are more tactile and
analog.
There is a poignancy to The Sirens as it is almost inevitably doomed to failure:
can one really represent the gut impact of a thing – essentially, the beauty
of opening one's throat up to sing – without including the thing itself? With
the microphone trained on everything except a mouth? (He literally caresses
a speaker with a mic at one point, and then a hand). Can the intensity of embodied,
sensual experience usurp the authority of literal representation and rational
systems and technologies? Can a hand ventriloquize a voice? Yes, says Henricks,
the hand can sing, just trace the rim of a wine glass with your fingertip.
His oeuvre is full of such metaphoric slippages – this is that and that is
this – suggesting that if video has taught us anything it is that that can't
simply be that anymore.