IT’S ALL A MATTER OF TIME
Concepts of time connect the work of artists Patrick Bernatchez and Dana Schutz, who open exhibitions at the Musée d’art contemporain on Oct. 17.
Time is almost everything for Bernatchez, a Montreal- based multimedia artist. His wristwatch that will require 1,000 years for its single hand to make one revolution is just the beginning — there is a film about time travel and a music composition based on the lights going out on Montreal’s textile industry.
Patrick Bernatchez: Les temps inachevés is a meditative space, with drawings, photographs, sculptures, films and installations set to discordant, yet oddly engrossing music.
Schutz, a New York- based painter, has addressed time in a series of paintings based on reconstructing the art of an extinct humanity. That hints of the wit and deep knowledge she brings to her art, but she also compresses sequential actions into single images.
“Duration as a subject has always been interesting for me,” Schutz said in an interview.
Getting Dressed All at Once depicts a woman putting on all her clothes and shoes at the same time. “How do you do that?” she asked. “It’s an interesting problem.”
The painting, like many in Schutz’s oeuvre, is broken into planes of colour and forms. Robert Enright describes it in a catalogue essay as a cubism of temporal rather than spatial simultaneity.
Schutz interprets all types of paintings — cubist, surrealist, abstract and expressionist — and creates absurd scenarios that somehow reflect the anxieties of contemporary life.
Swimming, Smoking, Crying depicts a woman smoking a cigarette and crying big tears even though her head is under the water.
It’s an impossible combination of actions, but it reflects our multi- tasking way of life. Emotional turmoil in one’s personal life must be kept in its compartment.
It can be expressed only during a lunchtime swim or a cigarette break, and then it’s back to work with a smile on your face.
Smoking and crying are signifiers of distress, Schutz said, while swimming in a lane by oneself implies an interiority, a mental state.
“That informs how I painted the woman’s head, full of things, where action is happening,” she said. “I am interested in verbs that can cancel themselves out or make a poetic sense.”
Schutz was a student in the late 1990s, when painting was self- conscious and post- modern. Traditional painterly language, which included the idea of beauty, was seen as retrograde.
“For me, the question was how to make a painting that is a painting,” she said. “I didn’t feel everything had to be a quote, or a pastiche or appropriation. I felt painting could have a history, but that ultimately it could be my own thing.”
Any painting must be open to possibilities and individual inter-
pretations. Also, “is it too embarrassing or not enough?” she said, possibly thinking of Shaving, in which a woman shaves her pubic hair on a beach.
Or of How We Would Give Birth, in which a baby is emerging from a woman who relaxes with her arms behind her head as she gazes at a 19th- century landscape painting.
Schutz is a highly accomplished painter whose subject matter can obscure her mastery of form and of a colour palette that is as complex as her compositions.
Bernatchez is also an artist of impeccable craft. The drawings he made, one per day for three months in 2006, sparked enough ideas to occupy him for a decade in which he developed two “cycles” in several media in collaboration with musicians and filmmakers. These are Chrysalides ( 2006- 2013) and Lost in Time ( 2009- 2015), the two bodies of work that comprise Les temp inachevés ( Unfinished Time).
“It all came from the drawings,” Bernatchez said in an interview. “Not the subject, but the spirit. Oh yes, now I understand why I want to have a guy in the car ( with water), a snowstorm in a building.”
The Chrysalides ensemble includes films of a man engulfed by water as he sits in his car in the basement garage, smoking a cigarette, and of a winter storm in an office.
The scenes suggest an implosion in which nature reclaims its space, Bernatchez said. They also reflect the fate of the textile industry in two buildings known as Fashion Plaza on de Gaspé St., where garment trade tenants were moving operations overseas. Bernatchez, who had a studio there, saw an opportunity to document a displacement.
One day every month for a year, Bernatchez photographed the facades of the buildings, tracing the employees as they left work and turned off the lights. The windows with lights became musical notes.
“Each building became a piano,” he said. “It became an homage to the workers.”
In an installation, spools of thread slowly make a cocoon around the speakers and muffle the sound.
Lost in Time is also an ensemble of film, music, photographs and installations — and the wristwatch that can time a millennium but has no numbers on its dial, and must be wound or worn to keep the gears moving.
“That suggests that if anybody is still alive in 1,000 years, the watch will still work,” Bernatchez said.
In the film Lost in Time, the watch is discovered buried in an Arctic landscape. The film opens with a man on horseback, whose costume suggests both a knight and an astronaut, a scene borrowed from Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould. Lost in Time includes Bach’s Goldberg variations, which Gould interpreted.
Bernatchez sees the film as a confrontation between subconscious urges and the conscious mind that tries to inhibit them. The horse, which represents instinct, leaves on its own when it disagrees with the rational man.
Both freeze, but it’s the horse that is reborn when a block of ice is found and thawed out.
Bernatchez uses the words in voice- over of French philosopher Henri Laborit, whose experiments with rats showed that when they couldn’t fight or flee from electric shocks, they developed cancers, Bernatchez said.
“If you can’t fight, and can’t escape ( a situation), you freeze,” Bernatchez said.