Exhibitions 2001-2002
September 20 - October
27, 2001
Empire Line
Antonia
Hirsch
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Empire Line (detail), 1998
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Text by: Peggy Gale
The image is simplicity itself: a slender young woman with close-cropped
hair seen from behind, wearing a gauzy white dress, quilted, with short
sleeves and a pretty neckline. She steps into sparkling azure water. Continuing
forward her dress is wetted, floating out as she moves deeper into the
pool, then she slips entirely into the water as a swirl of colour spreads
out around her. The camera shifts to an underwater view—feet, legs,
and bared lower torso—as the slowly billowing dress lifts and circles,
a warm sepia tint emanating outwards. A brief three minutes, then the
video, framed within a projection of the dress hovering in the darkened
gallery, begins again.
References and responses to this action—this image—are, however,
less simple. Tranquil movement and limpid colour are subtly arrested by
the mysterious shadow of stain. The purity suggested by white gauziness
and elegant form is now overlaid by something more dangerous; is this
blood we see leaking into the water, or some other bodily fluid?
Water is life’s source but also offers death, on its own or by association.
We see no vicious shark here, no gaping knife wound, but the spreading
reddish-brown has no obvious origin. Entry into water at first suggests
baptism, a rebirth, but the released colour implies a dirtying effect,
uncleanliness. We consider Virginia Woolf’s suicide, stepping into
a river current. Trauma. Water can be a healing bath or a grave, and as
the dress is displayed—both as a projection in the first room and
laid out in its vitrine in the second, as if on altar or bier—it
is a substitute for the body and lived experience.
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Empire Line (detail), 1998, Performance
Still, Photo: Kim Clarke
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The woman’s fluid movement suggests a flow of events or of time itself,
circling around to repeat again, its brief sequence unchanging. Repeated
viewing solves the mystery: this quilted gauze is a fabric of teabags
stitched together, and its spreading colour the simple reaction of water
on dried leaves. The raw has in effect become "cooked," as Hirsch
makes tea of her watery environment. She has been immersed in a
newly altered culture, her body itself coloured by the effects of her
actions and experience. Hirsch’s title, Empire Line, refers
first to the cut and style of the dress, high-waisted and body-skimming.
Immediately afterwards, we are reminded that tea is a product of India
and Ceylon, evidence of colonial enterprise that established the hegemony
of the British Empire (and tea-drinking) world-wide, through exploitation
of resources both geographical and human. The "line" is a route
traced as well, a path of action, a manner of speaking, a means of production
(factory assembly line) or travel (railway and steamship line), lines
of force, a chain of command, lines learned. Indeed, the line of "progress."
With the twentieth century, the Age of Empire receded, though its stains
continue despite repeated attempts at cleansing.
For Antonia Hirsch, time and translation are continuing concerns. Translation
is movement between states or locations, not merely a versioning or equivalence
of words. With both English and German as her primary languages, and having
moved her home base from Europe to Canada, Hirsch is familiar with an
alternation of state and with the clarity afforded by an outside view.
The earlier fluid space (1997) is a two-channel video installation
of watery images on circular porthole-like screens, with a soundtrack
suggesting both acoustic and ocean waves. As she has written, "The
traveler or migrant may set out on a journey in which s/he is changed
irrevocably and unpredictably by entering new and different situations/spaces;
conversely, the point of origin becomes destabilized by this passage."1
Slippage, of two years later, has the dotted white centre-line
of a highway sliding rhythmically across six monitors placed on their
sides in a circle, each monitor nearly the same. In fact, each recording
is at a slightly different speed, and falls further out of synch through
playback over time. Sameness and change are there to be judged, actual
but transitory, slipping away, an (un?)acknowledged, (in?)visible part
of everyday.
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Empire Line (detail), 1998, video stills
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Recovery is Hirsch’s most recent work. A real-time documentation
of Winnipeg railway yards (11:31 am to 12 noon, December 2, 2000), the
29-minute film is planned for projection inside a 40-foot freight container.
Little happens in the wintry scene; engines and boxcars idle, steaming,
then shunt slightly and reposition. A regular day. The duration of the
piece, however, conforms to the 29-minute period "lost" when
Canada committed itself to cooperation with the system of international
time zones established in 1883. Partly the result of work by Canadian
Sir Sandford Fleming, Winnipeg had to "move forward" by exactly
29 minutes to align with the new central standard time so crucial to the
functioning of railways around the world.
We are accustomed to the mutability of time, when in any case we shift
twice yearly for "daylight saving" and back to "standard,"
and when in any ordinary day it is not uncommon to speak to colleagues
in different time zones or in a "virtual" simultaneous time
by Internet. Time is nonetheless a mystery, everywhere at once, yet nowhere
before the Big Bang. Hirsch writes, "As we witness the minutes pass
in real time, we also become aware that any methodology of measuring time
leaves time itself utterly untouched. It becomes apparent that time itself—as
differentiated from time as the necessary substructure of a narrative—is
irreducible." 2
Situated between Recovery and fluid space, Antonia Hirsch’s
Empire Line questions language and marks transition: the meaning
and effect of words and actions, international and personal politics,
the nature and direction of time, the evanescence of everyday realities.
Her works are finely measured, elegant and nuanced, their apparently simple
formal decisions a clear evidence of her precision of thought and economy
of means.
Footnotes
1-
Antonia Hirsch, unpublished artist statement, 2000.
2 - ibid.
Biography
Antonia Hirsch
was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. She graduated
from Central St. Martin’s College of Art and Design in London, UK
in 1994. Since 1997 she has presented solo exhibitions at Access Gallery
and Or Gallery in Vancouver, Open Space in Victoria and La Centrale in
Montréal. She has participated in group exhibitions in Europe and
in Canada including, most recently, These Days, at the Vancouver
Art Gallery (2001). Antonia Hirsch lives and works in Vancouver where
she teaches at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design.
Peggy Gale is
an independent curator and writer based in Toronto, specializing in time-based
contemporary art. Her numerous publications include Video by Artists
(1976); Videotexts, a selection of her writings (1995); and Video
Re/View: The Best Source for Critical Writings on Canadian Artists’
Video, (co-edited with Lisa Steele, 1996), as well as essays in numerous
magazines and museum catalogues. Last year she was curator of Tout
le Temps/Every Time at the Biennale de Montréal 2000 and was
honoured with the Toronto Arts Award for her outstanding contribution
to visual arts.