“Plaisance”
MIDWAY CONTEMPORARY ART
527 2nd Ave SE
April 19–June 22
View of “Plaisance,” 2013. Foreground: Willem De Rooij, Bouquet VI, 2010. Background: Sven Augustijnen, Les Demoiselles de Bruxelles, 2008.
Contrary to its pleasant title, this exhibition presents an array of troubling histories. For example, the legacies of Belgium’s colonial past feature prominently in Sven Augustijnen’s series of photographs “Les Demoiselles de Bruxelles,” 2008, while Henrik Olesen’s A.T., 2012, engages with the life and suicide of Alan Turing, whose homosexuality, once discovered by authorities in 1952, precipitated a fall from war-hero fame to government-controlled “treatment.” Riddled with demonized desires and illicit pleasures, these histories revolve around power: the power to control resources and bodies, representations and collective memory.
Curated by Fionn Meade, the show also compellingly questions how visual modes of representation have served as means to construct difference and to legitimate abuses of authority. From the roots of phrenology, poignantly pictured in eighty 35-mm slides of Charles Le Brun’s seventeenth-century drawings of human faces resembling those of animals, to appropriations of August Sander’s 1929 photographs of German people in Florian Zeyfang’s single-channel video Introduction of a Small History of Photography—Formalist Heady Pattern Version, 2008, “Plaisance” looks at the problematic nexus of authority, power, and visual representations. Natascha Sadr Haghighian’s The Microscope, 2006, locates this line of inquiry in biology, ostensibly the most objective of sciences. The modified microscope emits an oddly ominous vocoder version of “Every Breath You Take” and is paired with a brochure featuring an interview with science historian Evelyn Fox Keller, who explains the danger of “dead metaphors”: words that no longer register as figurative language but effectively masquerade as factual.
“Plaisance” suggests that when we mistake mere representations for facts we not only deceive ourselves but court disaster. Looking is never innocent, representation always an intervention. Gareth James’s untitled prints from 2011 underscore this point: Here, geometric patterns interrupt black-and-white portraits of Edward Curtis and Claude Levi-Strauss, arguing against any conflation of figurative and factual. Yet “Plaisance” does not get lost in purely intellectual pursuits; the show has a heart. Willem De Rooij’s Bouquet VI, 2010, a black vase on a white pedestal holding one hundred white and one hundred black tulips, installed adjacent to Olesen’s A.T., suggests a tribute to Turing. Such gestures imbue “Plaisance” with an affective charge that situates the very act of looking at art in the history of representation the show investigates.