How do we reiterate the past in the present, over time and place? How do we disseminate cultural and personal experience - commemorating. How do individual and collective stories and references become embodied, imagined, and reinterpreted, as artistic confabulatory chronologies, and/or archival performance? These epistemological queries unfold as we traverse Lili Reynaud-Dewar’s three performative self-referential installations, displayed at MAC, Musee d’art contemporain de Montreal, May 18, 2023- September 17, 2023.
In the gallery foyer, we encounter a sculptural series Metallic Bodies, 2019, (Figure 1) in which the artist’s clothed life-sized body, caste in silvery aluminium, reclines in quotidian, casual self-absorption, on a stage-like dance grid. Each sculpture denotes a passing season in her life, an ever-changing chronology. Similarly, in the film series Dance Alone in the Museum, 2011 - (Figure 2) the artist chronicles her various artistic residencies in global art institutions over time. In these on-site self-filmed dance performances, the artist/dancer’s body becomes discursive, engaged in an artworld institutional critique that queries hierarchies. The series references other artists’ works, art historical tropes and genres, and mimics dancers, like Josephine Baker.
Another film series is displayed as an installation scenography, Rome, November 1st and 2nd, 2019-21 (Figure 3). Four films are projected, either simultaneously or alternating, on four walls of a squarish room, in the gallery. In the centre is a 1960s bar-like lounge area, replete with the era’s colours and cushion stools, a time capsule, into which the visitors enter. Therein, we are addressed by a series of characters, recounting and lamenting, cumulatively confabulating the happenings of one night.
The films prismatically reconstruct Pier Paolo Pasolini’s murder by his lover Giuseppe Pelosi, his last evening, and his last interview with Furio Colombo. These contain allusions to Pasolini’s last novel Petrolio and Abel Ferrera’s film, Pasolini. The walls carousel multiple speculative, overlapping versions recounted by characters, played by Reynaud-Dewar herself, friends and family. The films read like an archival round-robin, as reconstructive performance of the night. The reiterative quality of unknowing, the multiplicity and duplicity of perception, unfolds.
Actors voice their political points of view, like Pasolini and Colombo in an interview. Pasolini’s associates are cited, to re-present their interpretive perspectives on events surrounding Pasolini’s murder. Slippages occur between testimonials and the characters’ identities, initially assumed to be documentary characters. Reynaud-Dewar, friends and family exchange characters and roles, with other actors, in a cacophony of confabulatory fact and fiction, to be deciphered by the viewer.
In Rome, November 1st and 2nd, 1975, visitors witness a dance between the tinted screens, which create a spatialization of rectangular colour fields, an abstract tableau, a tinted window onto an interspliced dialogue between rotating actors. The films’ coloured tints project, not only a symbolic mood shift superimposed on actors and dialogue, but also a dance-like visual beat, a club-like affect that accompanies the bean-bag-like stools. Thus, the films become an aura, invading the viewers’ space. Thus, the gallery space once becomes a stage inhabited by duplicitous actors and visitors, in archival performance, performing multi-cast collective research, where truth, fact and fiction intertwine, indecipherably. Overall, it is a commentary on contemporary society’s sensationalism, the ghoulish desire to know what is nonetheless distorted and disguised in the recounting. The only truth that remains is that events are often partially concealed, in unknowable fragments.
What actually demands scrutiny we ask, in our dual worlds, which are both public and private? The exhibition and accompanying catalogue as a book of sources, queries what constitutes our sources for both our individual and collective histories, particularly in our information age of tabloids, internet chats, non-verifiable instant news reports, and digitalized archives. Do we look to our individual lived experience or gather external data, or compare both for verification?
In the first two afore mentioned installations – Metallic Bodies and Dance Alone in the Museum – the commemorative lens is turned on Reynaud-Dewar. Colour tints Reynaud-Dewar’s skin, to confer a formal materiality yet Brechtian reflective distancing, between the visitors and artist/performer’s body. If skin is analogous to film, as well as the picture’s canvas, then these performances bear a window onto the institutionalized art world, in relation to the individual, portrayals and the body as a site, throughout art history. Above all they discourse the tableau, as theatrical conveyance and performance within the context of art history, sculpture and filmic media.
In Metallic Bodies, 2019, visitors walk onto the gallery stage, like performers. As public spectators, visitors meander around gallery’s institutional stage set, like dispassionate actors, intruding on the artist’s sculptures –cast self-portraits of stayed, intimate moments of everyday solitary repose and contemplation, on her cell phone, curled up casually on the floor. The silvery, polished painted aluminium imitates stage makeup, a second skin, that preserves her body in time. Silver painted bodies are reminiscent of Gilbert and George’s Living Sculptures performances, 1969, or street performers, alluding to Otherness in the visitors’ experience, human aliveness vs the material objects of another’s gaze. Moreover, the sculptures convey the sequestered oblivion of contemporary communicative devices, a preoccupation, both private yet public worldwide.
The sculptures demarcate the passing of time, for they are taken on a yearly basis, denoting life’s passing. As a cumulative installation, they become a static spatial-temporal, episodic rendering, a still life scenography. As witnesses, we imagine her circumstances, an individual static yet aging. Conversely, Reynaud-Dewar’s still life sculptures are autobiographical, yet generic, as we become actors, consciously projecting an imaginary, on her private persona.
Dancing Alone in a Museum, 2011 is also an episodic series of films, in which Reynaud-Dewar paints her body, to dance around her residency spaces at art institutions. In these films, she adopts a living sculpture quality and spectatorial distance, through the film camera’s eye as an authorial distancing devise, as narrator-performer. The film and screen, as skin, conjoin with her nude skin, which is both camouflaged and highlighted by body painting, highlighting performance, as gesture. Screens are placed to allow quasi simultaneous viewing, between works, emphasizing sequencing, choreographic beat, and the room’s screens’ formal choreography. These filmic works allude to theatrical tableau painting and photographic traditions, recalling art historical leitmotifs.
Lady to the Fox, 2018 and Teeth, Gums, Machine, Future, Society (One Body Two Souls), 2017 are likewise commemorative. The dancer creates a loose narrative amidst an idyllic pastorale landscape in Lady the Fox. A foxily red-tinted Shepherdess mythically dances, to exploit and expose the institution’s interior and exterior, public and hidden spaces. In Teeth, Gums, Machine, Future, Society (One Body Two Souls), a surrealist machine-plant-human sculpture is somewhat reminiscent of the Fritz Lang’s German expressionist film Metropolis,1927. The grey-tinted dancer mirrors the gallery’s sculptures’ curvaceous metallic forms, to become a live element, spatializing the sculptures’ stasis. Do we privilege bodily experience, human sensation over technological mechanization?
This film series started at the Generali Foundation, Vienna, which typically exhibits institutional critique. So, Reynaud-Dewar conceived a video journal an ‘archive of my circulation as an artist’, which speaks to female freedom inside and outside institutional power structures and canons. Her artist’s female gaze chooses what to film - exhibitions, offices, storage, the institution’s public and private spaces, as she choreographs and films herself dancing a solitary frolic after-hours. Thus, she intersplices her repertoire of gestures with appropriations, paying tribute to performers like dancer-musician Cosey Fanny Tutti, and citing yet defying the female nude’s art historical idealized portrayal and objectification of women. Once again, her installation is structured around references – to institutions, art historical traditions, and theory.
Reynaud-Dewar notes Bruce Nauman’s Art Make-Up, 1967- 68, as a key reference, because Nauman systematically layers colours on his body, until they blur to shadowy black. As well, he sequences simple studio- shot actions. His vulnerability blurs public and private. In art history, both canvas and film are viewed as analogous to skin. Likewise, in theatre, make-up becomes a second skin that denotes the actor’s identity slippage, as the actor adopts a stage
character’s role, shifting from private individual to public persona, framed by an institutionalized public narrative that is reinterpreted, thus individualized, by an actor.
Lili Reynaud-Dewar’s interdisciplinary art is reiterative, intersplicing past and present, commemorating her own and others’ experience, choosing referential sources. Thus, archival performances and chronologies, appropriate cultural and personal happenings, signifiers and histories. So, multiple boundaries dissolve - public and private, quotidian and institutionalized societal-cultural class, racial and gender exclusionary categorizations. In so doing, she conveys epistemological queries, engaging in socio-political commentary, for she asserts personal experience’s agency, in contrast to privileging institutionalized, sanctioned perspectives. In so doing, her artworks mediate societal hierarchies.
— Beverley Harrison, July 17, 2023, Burlington Contemporary Writing Prize Submission
Illustrations
Figure 1
Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Untitled (Winter 2022) (detail), 2022.
Aluminium, 134 x 49 x 78 cm.
©Lili Reynaud-Dewar. Photo: Courtesy the artist and Layr, Vienna.
Figure 2
Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Teeth, Gums, Machine, Future, Society (One Body, Two Souls) Version 2, 2017
HD Video 4’34”, looped
Clearing Brussels
Figure 3
Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Rome, November 1st and 2nd 1975 (video still), 2019-2021
four-channel video installation, colour, sound, 35 min 1 s.