Gallery 44 - Centre for Contemporary Phtography

The measurement of epochs and historical periods is an arbitrary human construct, yet there is a powerful sense of an era lived as we look back on the twentieth century now. A vivid and often disturbing portrait of the century emerges in a series of five installations begun by Freda Guttman in the mid-1990s. In the first part of this continuum, personal and historical memory are interwoven as if inseparable, reflecting Guttman’s life that has mostly been lived in the century just past. As the series progresses, the twentieth century appears more clearly as the stage for events that were for the first time felt worldwide, but also as a backdrop for humanity’s age-old struggles with power and violence. Notes from the 20th incorporates the second and third installations from the series, plus a video from the first.

The first installation in the series is entitled Cassandra: An Opera in Four Acts (1995), invoking the character in Greek mythology who is endowed with the gift of prophecy but is fated by the gods never to be believed. It presents two defining moments that together offer a key to the conceptual grid underpinning the entire series. One is a Hitler speech emanating from an old upright radio, as remembered by Guttman from her childhood in Montreal and presented in Act 3, The Little Radio. The other is a short piece of home movie footage from Guttman’s family life in the 1940s that was a chance (or more likely predestined) discovery by the artist, reworked on video and shown as Act 1, Cassandra (shown in the Gallery 44 Project Room). These cues from Guttman’s memory and life as lived speak to the viewer in a one-to-one mode—they solicit empathy, awareness and understanding in an intersubjective approach. But Hitler’s 1930s radio speeches are also a pivotal moment in the inauguration of media as the begetter of what ultimately became a depoliticized mass culture. The personal address of Cassandra and The Little Radio is thrust up starkly against the societal effects of ideology and of group reaction—visible in the patriarchal authority of the father played out on the little girl in the film and, in the radio work, the crowds enthralled by their leader’s imagined and real authority.

It is hard to fathom in retrospect the distorted beliefs shared across huge populations that are revealed in Guttman’s scenarisations, yet we have all experienced the phenomenon. The legacy of unresolved complicities embedded in the twentieth century rise of mass media leaves each of us today with the increasingly confounding question, where am I in the crowd? The weight of this question and the struggle we have with it are evoked in Guttman’s work with much lucidity, and with more than a touch of melancholy.

The fifth installation in the series (in progress) will be an explicit homage to the influence of Walter Benjamin, continuing a theme begun in the preceding ones. In his texts, Benjamin identified the global media phenomenon that would mushroom through the course of the twentieth century, cognizant even then of its profound consciousness-shaping effects and how it sucks the lessons of history into its vortex. This prescience is exquisitely encapsulated in the third installation Monotony is Nourished by the New (2001), in its backwards spinning turntables and in the porcelain replicas of phonograph arms that appear at first to be human ruins. Images on the turntables of Monotony were made using anamorphosis, a Renaissance viewing technique that relies on deliberate distortion corrected by cylindrical mirrors. It is also a key element in the second installation, To Archive the Shape of Memory (1999). Although the technique much predates the twentieth century, the stretching of the image in anamorphosis provokes in the viewer an oblique viewing, a looking askance to see something elusive that might or might not be there. This mode of viewing suggests Benjamin’s "unconscious optics" that were to be revealed to the public through film just as Freudian psychoanalysis was to disclose the secrets of the human unconscious. The devices and tactics Guttman uses in Notes from the 20th do reveal something, namely, the denial that Benjamin warned about. The events of the past hundred years are forgotten and swept away, yet they are still being played out in the new century, largely through the impact of the immense technological changes which took place in the twentieth century.

Underlying Guttman’s project of asking us to look again at the century past is the spirit of conflicted hope and despair in the face of overpowering forces that pervades Benjamin’s writing. Following his lead, Guttman focuses her technological and media strategies on how we see and understand reality, rather than on representations of what we build to better destroy each other. The latter is present, but only in effects and artifacts of war filtered through viewing devices that deliberately link the old to the new. Images in the work are largely presented in contemporary photo and video media, while the material framework of antique radios, old record players and anamorphic display place the viewer in the past—specifically, a technological past. Benjamin could not help but revel in the promise of his era’s technologies and promote a belief in the revolutionary potential of photographic and film art to mobilize the proletariat. But within this utopic outlook he warned against the lure of the converse, of what he called aestheticized politics—technologies in the service of the cult of fascism and inevitably of war. If the utopian project of twentieth century art has largely failed, Guttman’s strategy is to use current technologies that have evolved from it so as to pull us out of a thrall to the authority of technology itself. Her belief in the power of representation shifts us away from enormous contradictions regarding herd mentality and the tides of mediated group think, and toward a possibility for individual consciousness and responsibility. Appealing to the uniqueness of individual memory, she wants her audience to recall what is so quickly forgotten, and uses elements of surprise, pleasure and play embedded in old technologies brought into the new, to draw us into that desire.

Within the rich intellectual and emotional texture Guttman has established in Cassandra, To Archive and Monotony, the homage to Benjamin completes a circle: his life and work are shown as a portrait of an isolated individual confronted with catastrophic collective events, reiterating the emotional tone in the first works. Guttman’s achievement is to acknowledge our collective dilemmas, but by breaking them down into examples of lives lived she urges each of us to transform them into a unique political will.

Freda Guttman, a native of Montreal, has worked as a printmaker, photographer and laterally, as an installation artist. In more than forty years of active research and practice, her work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Canada, the United States and internationally. The works presently shown at Gallery 44 are part of a continuum of installations
that are influenced by the life and writings of Walter Benjamin, in particular, his notion of the need for us to awaken from the myth of history as progress in order to free ourselves from endless cycles of violence and despair. The fourth and fifth installations in the series will be shown at A Space Gallery, Toronto in 2004-2005.

Nell Tenhaaf is an electronic media artist and writer. She has exhibited across Canada, in the U.S., and in Europe. A survey exhibition of fifteen years of her work entitled Fit/Unfit opened at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Ontario in April 2003 and will travel to several other venues. Tenhaaf has published numerous reviews and articles that address the cultural implications of new technologies. She is an Associate Professor in the Visual Arts department of York University, and is represented in Toronto by Paul Petro Contemporary Art.