Post on 22-Jan-2021
transcript
Bogdan Achimescu, Matilda Aslizadeh, Rebecca Belmore,
Jake & Dinos Chapman, Dana Claxton, Douglas Coupland,
Mario Doucette, David Garneau, William Kentridge, Wanda
Koop, Fawad Khan, Emanuel Licha, Shirin Neshat, Michael
Patterson-Carver, Dan Perjovschi, Raymond Pettibon,
Nancy Spero, Althea Thauberger, Jason Thiry, Scott Waters,
Balint Zsako
Diabolique
18 September to 14 November 2010
Oakville Galleries in Gairloch Gardens
and at Centennial Square
Curated by Amanda Cachia
Organized by the Dunlop Art Gallery
Og2 Oakville Galleries 2
It is no pigment powder
Nor myrrh
Pensive odor nor delectation
But flower of blood flush with the skin
Map of blood map of the blood
Bled raw sweated raw skinned raw
Nor tree cut to a white thrust
But blood which rises in the tree of flesh
By catches by crimes
No remittance
straight up along the stones
straight up along the bones-for
copper weight shackle weight heart weight
venoms caravaners of the bite
at the tepid edge of fangs
“Fangs” by Aime Cesaire1
Diabolique cuts a map of blood across white walls.
The terrain opens with a disturbing image of Neil
Stonechild. His brutalized face hits a raw nerve, shaves
close to the bone, particularly in Saskatchewan, where
Diabolique originated. David Garneau’s autopsy portrait
of this 17-year-old First Nations target of racist violence in
1990, face indented, apparently by handcuff blows, reflects
the inherent social and political violence that charac-
terizes the devil’s underbelly of Saskatchewan, whether
those responsible for dominant lore care to admit it or not.
Like everywhere else, Regina is not immune to cruelty
and conflict. The oft-cited, shame-producing Maclean’s
Magazine survey that gives Regina the number one or two
spot (depending on the year) as the most dangerous city
in Canada is an undeniable sign that there is war tak-
ing place close to home.2 War, covert or otherwise, is
being waged against Aboriginal peoples,3 against other
disenfranchised and minority groups, and those who live
below the poverty lines in all of our communities.
Garneau’s portrait bears uncanny resemblance to that
of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African-American Chicago
boy who was visiting relatives in August 1955. Shot in
the head and thrown in the river with a mammoth cotton
gin fan tied around his neck for allegedly whistling at
a white woman, Till’s death mask photograph reveals
his head mottled and swollen to many times its nor-
mal size. The stark image ran in Jet, and largely through
that medium, both the picture and Till’s story became
legendary. Emmett Till’s mother wanted “all the world”
to witness the atrocity that had been enacted upon her
son.4 Garneau’s painting, entitled Evidence (2006), recalls
the photograph of Till’s and similarly requires an act of
witnessing by viewers. The image is derived from an
autopsy photograph taken of Stonechild published in
the public domain: an official 2004 report compiled by
the Saskatchewan Commission of Inquiry into Matters
Relating to the Death of Neil Stonechild.5 (As a point of
interest, another artist in Diabolique, Rebecca Belmore,
has also reflected upon Stonechild as a subject in her
previous work. Clearly, Saskatchewan is haunted by this
brutal martyrdom.)
In my foreword to the Diabolique catalogue, I pose
the question: “Is our attitude to war, our participation
in and immunity to violence and our ability to act polit-
ically and protest, stronger now, or worse?”6 As Dan
Perjovschi’s evocative drawing on the cover of the cat-
alogue (Progress, 2008) captures, it appears that in the
space between 2000 and 2009, we have grown more ideo-
logical dicks and udders on our virtual military tanks,
an unnatural development akin to Douglas Coupland’s
bio-genetically deformed The Gorgon (2003). The artists
Previous page: Matilda Aslizadeh, Hero of our Time (detail from still), 2008, DVD (19 mins.), courtesy of the artist.
Map of Blood
by Amanda Cachia
and commentators whose work is featured in this show
raise the implicit question: as viewers to such wide rang-
ing approaches to the diabolique, are we swallowing the
chunks of blood and semen of terrorists and their tar-
gets, or of ourselves?
Diabolique invites viewers to walk an existential
line between conflict and conscience7 throughout the
exhibition: the “heart weight” of vomiting blood, blood-
red backgrounds and bloodless car explosions charts
the map of blood. There are painted blood rose dents
on concrete pavements marked by fallen grenades in
Sarajevo, Bush dragging a blown-up, blood-gushing torso
of a soldier in Iraq (blood for oil) and plastic video-game
blood that drips off the face of a child soldier. Like the
ephemeral quality of Perjovschi’s cartoon guerilla draw-
ings, this map of blood—Stonechild’s blood—haunts the
spirit, but what is left in the snow? What is the memorial
trace? In the presence of such atrocity, what space can
there be for any meaningful apology or forgiveness?
Jacques Derrida argues that “true forgiveness con-
sists in forgiving the unforgivable: a contradiction all
the more acute in this century of war crimes” (from the
Holocaust to Algeria to Kosovo to Saskatchewan) and
government-sponsored healing tribunals. He also confirms
Og2 Oakville Galleries 3
Jake & Dinos Chapman, War, 2004, painted bronze, 14.5 x 19.0 x 22.5 cm, courtesy of White Cube, London.
that none but the bereaved may forgive and that there
is absolutely no obligation to do so.
In Shake Hands with the Devil, Lieutenant General
Romeo Dallaire’s extraordinary account of his time serv-
ed as force commander of the UN Assistance Mission
during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, Dallaire recounts
“watch[ing] as the devil took control of paradise on earth
and fed on the blood of the people who we were supposed
to protect.”8 Who is protecting the widely diverse commu-
nities who live in Saskatchewan? Is it the military bases
in Moose Jaw or Dundurn, sending young men and women
off to Afghanistan? Is it the RCMP or the Regina Police
Service? Or is it ultimately ourselves, fighting for safer
lives, for human rights, for social justice for everyone?
In the end, both military and police operate under “two
contradictory directives, to protect and destroy … they
are representatives of the mechanisms of social con-
trol.”9 How do we subject ourselves and each other to
similar mixed messages and controls?
In Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Nietzsche gives the
“highest priority for achieving personal freedom—the ulti-
mate goal of the individual — to emphasizing knowledge
and above all not looking away from difficult knowledge,
although it may be ugly and even deadly.”10 What can
viewers learn from facing evil in the eye? Is war perma-
nent and peace illusory? Repelled by horror, ironically,
many are equally compelled by the ravages of darkness.
“Against our expectation, we find a covert attraction
to disaster as well as a violent reaction to an image of
beauty.”11The beauty of ugliness is an old theme and the
“iconography of suffering has a long pedigree.”12 Cultural
critic Reesa Greenberg has stated that “playing it safe”
Og2 Oakville Galleries 4
William Kentridge, What will come, 2007, anamorphic projection: 35 mm film transferred to DVD; (8:40 mins.),
courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.
is no longer a viable option for museums, curators, critics
or viewers when the questions at hand are, necessarily,
so dangerous.13 Viewers are all implicated in the trans-
gressions of these violent and shameful acts when con-
temporary art enacts such excruciating demands. This
is the provocative challenge that Diabolique brings to
its viewers.
Elaine Scarry argues that “when one hears about
another person’s physical pain, the events happening
within the interior of that person’s body may seem to have
the remote character of some deep subterranean fact,
belonging to an invisible geography that, however por-
tentous, has no reality because it has not yet manifested
itself on the visible surface of the earth.”14 Diabolique
strives to provide audiences with a large geographic
arena in which two temporarily separated but spatially
congruous “chapters” provide opportunities to contem-
plate social and political crises that have indeed mani-
fested and become visible, stemming from Saskatchewan,
Canada, Italy, Romania, Ethiopia, and the rest of the world.
Twenty-one international and Canadian artists share
what is at stake in human violence and challenge view-
ers to look beyond the surface sensationalism of conflict
to confront how invested any one can become in win-
ning at all costs. This work invites consideration of the
palimpsested history of human violence, the ways it
breaks boundaries and always intrudes.
The artists in Diabolique are presenting art for our
time, occasionally providing a glimmer of hope amidst
opportunities for questioning and reevaluation. As the
history of war art — or the horror represented in art —
demonstrates, art can rarely claim to thwart war; it can,
however, trace its too-often ignored effects. While not all
images of war become famous, like Picasso’s Guernica
(1937), each has the ability to imprint. As Norman Rosen-
thal comments in his essay for Apocalypse: Beauty and
Horror in Contemporary Art: “One major task of the artist
is to say that, as human beings ourselves, we are all impli-
cated. It is important that we do not look away and merely
take refuge in superficial beauty … We need to confront
evil visually.”15 Tangible and intangible elements of anxi-
ety, hope and struggle, power and authority, projections
of good, evil, banalities and birthrights, processes of
minoritization, sublime truths within harsh realities,
contemporary and modern renderings of historical events
are all juxtaposed in this exhibit. The images are threat-
ening, and remind us that we live in an age where fear
is both a political tool and a commodity.
In this exhibition, the word war is used in the broad-
est possible sense. While war happens all over the world,
every day, in traditional contexts, war is also waged
in many ways and places. Many wars occur within the
four walls of our own homes and on our televisions, as
artist Martha Rosler famously demonstrated in her body
of photo-collage work, Bringing the war home: House
beautiful (1967–1972). “Assembled from the pages of Life
magazine — where the documentary accounts of blown
bodies, dead babies, and anguished faces flow seam-
lessly into mattress ads and photo features of sophisti-
cated kitchens, fastidiously fertilized lawns and art-hung
living rooms — Rosler’s montages re-connect two sides
of human experience, the war in Vietnam, and the living
rooms in America, which have been falsely separated.”16
Photography and war journalism are represented in
Diabolique by the artist Althea Thauberger, alongside
video documentary in the work of Emanuel Licha. While
all the other mediums in the exhibit offer streams from
the imagination, a photograph and video seem to offer
realistic depictions — but do they? Digital art and photo
manipulation have played great tricks on the human eye.
Historically, within the context of modern warfare, pho-
tography has had relationships with notions of atrocity
and war crimes as evidence, manufactured or not.
Consider also the role of photography in Michael
Patterson-Carver’s drawing of the covering of a large
tapestry reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica in the United
Nations headquarters in New York on February 5, 2003,
when the U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell went there
to make his case for invading Iraq. Maureen Dowd wrote
in The New York Times that, according to diplomats, the
picture would have sent “too much of a mixed message…
Mr.Powell can’t very well seduce the world into bombing
Iraq surrounded on camera by shrieking and mutilated
women, men, children, bulls and horses.”17The suppres-
sion of art to facilitate war underscores the power of the
image in today’s global media culture, even if the image
Og2 Oakville Galleries 5
is a drawing, and not a photograph. To further reinforce
this point, on June 23, 2009, an Associated Press story on
the Yahoo! News website reports that “Iran clamped down
on independent media in an attempt to control images
of election protests, but pictures and videos leaked out
anyway — showing how difficult it is to shut off the flow
of information in the Internet age.”18 Social-networking
sites such as Twitter and Flickr became more prominent
because of the government interventions. The U.S. State
Department, for example, called on Twitter to put off a
scheduled maintenance shut-down following a massive
opposition rally in Iran on June 22, 2009 when authorities
restricted journalists from reporting on the streets. “The
Iranian government also tried to stop its citizens from
spreading information. Internet service and cell phone
service was intermittent, with long delays. Reporters were
also restricted during the 1979 Iranian revolution, which
saw the installation of the Islamic regime in power today.
Government censors and the Internet have often clashed.”19
One of the most iconic media images from the war
in Iraq was a globally broadcast photograph of a hooded
Iraqi prisoner at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, forced
to stand on a box, naked except for a blanket, his hands
outstretched, apparently wired, in front of his American
Og2 Oakville Galleries 6
Althea Thauberger, Untitled (Ma’ Sum Ghar 1), 2009, colour photograph, 28.3 x 35.5 cm, courtesy of the artist.
captors. This image revolted the world, and marked a turn-
ing point in public opinion about the war. Artist Richard
Serra created a poster (Stop Bush, 2004) that re-works this
iconic image; it subsequently became a symbol for anti-
war demonstrations and activities by artists in the U.S. in
2004. The level of political protest by artists that year —
including posters, artworks, marches, actions, an Artforum
issue dedicated to political protest and various fund-
raising events, exceeded that during the American con-
flict with Vietnam. The Iraq war continues to draw artist
protests.20 In Diabolique, this is demonstrated pointedly
in the work of Raymond Pettibon and Patterson-Carver.
By bringing several artists into the exhibit who reflect
on the genre of left-wing art activism and protest, propa-
ganda or sloganeer art, rather than art “horror,” I am chal-
lenging viewers to think in different directions about the
relationship between art, activism, protest, propaganda,
and dread. Gregory Sholette, in his essay, Snip, Snip …
Bang, Bang: Political Art, Reloaded, discusses the label
“political art” and how many galleries and museums were
adverse to consider hosting such work in the 1980s. “Even-
tually, museums bagged and tagged a limited number
of socially critical artworks. It was, however, a selective
assimilation that favored politically ambiguous work
over the directly interventionist. Meanwhile, those col-
lectives that had been instrumental in forcing-open the
question of art and politics — PAD/D, Group Material,
the Art Workers Coalition, Artists Meeting for Cultural
Change, The Guerilla Art Action Group, Paper Tiger,
SPARC, Carnival Knowledge — were unceremoniously
submerged, partially or wholly, beneath the waves of
normative art history.”21 In bringing Perjovschi and out-
sider artist Patterson-Carver to the group, audiences
can engage with these dissenting artists’ voices. Pre-
viously on the outskirts or margins of society owing to
socio-economic and/or political circumstance, they are,
today, validated within a contemporary gallery con-
text. As political activists, their work contains witty ele-
ments: indeed, the cartoon nature of their work frames
their satiric observations within a traditionally comical
discourse. All “political” subject matter — whether it is
the former Bush administration or other world affairs —
is fair game for these artists.
The title of the exhibition is partially inspired by
Les Diaboliques (1954), a classic French terror film direct-
ed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, the title of which trans-
lates in English as “The Devils.” The women protagonists
are dubbed devils because they plot to murder a man
who has betrayed them. A revenge-fear classic, this
film recalls the ways white supremacists, including
the KKK and Aryan Nation, have projected their own
histories of sexual aggression onto members of sub-
ordinated groups as justification for further dominance
and violence. While combat is commonly seen as mas-
culine, is it really a male domain? Are men heroes in
war and women devils in the battle of the sexes? In
her essay, Reflections on feminism, war, and the politics
of dissent, Leslie Cagan describes war and feminism as
being opposites of each other. “The horror and evil of
war can partly be understood in seeing just how much
it stands in opposition to feminism and feminist princi-
ples. All of the values of feminism are contradicted —
if not rendered impossible to achieve—by the realities of
war and the machinery of war-making.”22 Cynthia Enloe
discusses how definitions of masculinities and feminini-
ties are carved out and integral to the waging of war, and
how power will be wielded based on these definitions.
The use of violence in war to impose control and domi-
nation reinforces the traditional power men have had
over women. Yet, while feminists have long opposed
war’s destructive and futile fatalisms,23 who among us
is exempt from the will to power?
In Nancy Spero’s series of drawings, Vietnam War
from the ‘60s, men are bombs. In Althea Thauberger’s
photograph, female Canadian military personnel climb
Ma’Sum mountain with smiles on their faces, seem-
ingly victorious and almost relaxed despite their roles
in Afghanistan. In Diabolique, the art works show that
gender is not necessarily a basis for explosive definitions
of those who impose, invoke or are victims of violence
and diabolical action. On the other hand, several artists
summon the visual emblem of the phallus as weapon
and tool for destruction, including the drawing by Balint
Zsako that blends man, machine, gun for penis and penis
for gun; the romance novel interventions by Scott Waters
in which erect weapons overlay couples entwined in
Og2 Oakville Galleries 7
Harlequin bliss; and Rebecca Belmore’s totem pole,
wrapped in torn camouflage material. Taking it a step
further, emerging Regina artist Jason Thiry uses imagery
from pornographic magazines interlaced within cam-
ouflage pattern. Thiry’s blend of porn and war demon-
strates how both industries use extreme male and female
body images as weapons of consumer-seduction. In 2007,
an exhibition entitled Love/War/Sex was held at Exit
Art in New York. The paradoxical title demonstrates how
war is central to human coupling, pulling together a
powerful cocktail of emotions, passions and idealistic
convictions. There is a connection between “longing and
violence and love with war, imagining the business of
war in all its sensual manifestations.”24
Weapons used as toys by boys and girls is a cul-
tural practice explored by several artists in the exhibi-
tion including Douglas Coupland, who has reproduced
a giant-size genetically-modified toy solider; Dana
Claxton, who repetitively pulls on the trigger of a plas-
tic toy gun; and Mario Doucette, who explores video
game violence æsthetics in his paintings. Fawad Khan’s
flameless explosions also hint towards video game enter-
tainment — violence that is harmless, even attractive
or sublime, yet disarmingly so. Matilda Aslizadeh’s Hero
of Our Time (2008) also draws on video game æsthetics,
and relies on the classic fall and redemption narrative.
Symbols of war and violence — the visual language of
war — appear in many of the images in Diabolique. Such
symbols and metaphors include the skull, the cross,
helicopters and tanks, the swastika, the phallus/gun,
and much more.
Stepping into immersive fictional narrative and filmic
videos and animations based on historical events by
high-profile artists Shirin Neshat and William Kentridge,
audiences will be delivered into new worlds of nostalgia,
memory, sounds, places, pockets of terror, class, power
and authority, heirarchy and surrealism, and lessons learnt
and lost. These stories, while perhaps not as confronta-
tional as the Jake & Dinos Chapman’s War skull (2004),
or Cross on bomb (1968) by Nancy Spero, nevertheless
Og2 Oakville Galleries 8
Mario Doucette, Monckton, 2008, pastel, ink, pencil and acrylic on wood, 66.0 x 122.0 cm, courtesy of Andrew and Lyndal Walker, Toronto.
illustrate how the power of violence can seep into the
sub-consciousness in other, long-lasting and psycho-
logically damaging ways. Diabolique offers a wide scan
of how violence has been carried out over the ages —
whether it be traditional, romantic or even biblical: bow
and arrow or stoning, as seen in Balint Zsako’s collage
figures cut from Renaissance painting reproductions in
books; through stark black and white images of dictator-
ship and execution; ethnic cleansing through colonial
pillaging and burning of Acadian villages; gas masks,
tanks and airplanes during the Italian-Abyssinian war
of 1935; suicide and protest in the 1953 coup d’état in
which the CIA reinstalled the Shah of Iran; grenades
used in the Vietnam War in the 1970s; car bombs used
today in Karachi, Istanbul, Baghdad, Kabul, New Delhi,
or Bali; or prisoners being left to freeze in the snow or
drown in a river, completing the full cycle of violence
through which history — and ignorance — repeats itself.
Historical icons and perpetrators of violence, ranging
from Hitler to the Ku Klux Klan, Napoleon, Mussolini and
Bush Junior and Senior are invoked and impaled. We see
others who populate the world of violence, war and terror:
Kosovo refugees from the 1990s by Bogdan Achimescu,
front-line soldiers and various manifestations of their
“family” unit, innocent victims, women and children,
parents, concerned citizens.
Diabolique was inspired by a post-September-11
world, whatever that might mean given that the events
took place on the anniversary of the terrorist coup in
Chile, orchestrated in 1973 by the government of the
United States. I was in New York on the most recent 9/11
spectacle and witnessed the events and their aftermath
Og2 Oakville Galleries 9
Nancy Spero, Helicopter, Eagle, (Magnet), Victim, 1968, gouache and ink on paper, 62.0 x 100.3 cm,
courtesy of Galerie LeLong, New York, GL 6302.
(“it felt like a movie,” rather than “it felt like a dream”25).
The city became a macabre gallery, like Diabolique, filled
with an eclectic mix of devilish dioramas, and narratives
influenced by human conflict, torture, the grotesque,
masks, hybrids, and surreal scenes that might recall
Goya’s Disasters of War (1810–1820) or Dante’s Inferno
(1308–1321). Does my proximity to the visibility of the
September 11 event mean that this event was more tragic
and diabolical for me? How close or distant does one
have to be to violent events in order to feel a sense of
horror, shock or loss? Ironically, when I was in New York,
surrounded by the chaos of September 11, everyone ran
to television screens and turned on radios in order to
find out what was happening. I recall sitting in my hotel
room in midtown Manhattan, staring frozen at the TV
screen news reports, and thinking how strange and hor-
rible it was, that while this event was happening in my
own backyard, I still felt quite removed from it, helpless.
Was the power of this event for me partly manifested
through the channels of the media? After all, my reality
of the event, despite close proximity, was still charged
by the media — somewhat disillusioning. Baudrillard
remarked several decades ago that “we live in a world
where there is more and more information, and less
and less meaning.”26 Sontag calls this a “pornographic
appetite for suffering.”27 Why was this event, in this back-
yard, rendered more powerful for some of us than other
violent events in other backyards? The power of the
media to render certain violent events more “diabolical”
than others is at play here. Winnipeg artist Wanda Koop
explores similar ideas in her Green Zone series of paint-
ings in Diabolique, inspired by watching TV distortions of
the Iraq war this decade, similar to Martha Rosler’s inspi-
ration from Vietnam War footage on television in the ‘70s.
Og2 Oakville Galleries 10
Scott Waters, Badland, 2009, acrylic on book cover, 16.9 x 10.0 x 2.5 cm, courtesy of the artist.
More and more people are traveling to trauma zones,
it seems, in efforts to understand the dynamics that
produce them. As Emanuel Licha attempts to show in
his video documentary, War Tourist (2004–2008) in which
he travels from the Auschwitz concentration camp to
New Orleans post-Katrina to the nuclear-bomb site of
Chernobyl, and as an article in the Globe and Mail dated
November 5, 2008, reports, tourists are now flocking to
sites of suffering and even into war zones. Laszlo Buhasz
explores this desire to pay tribute to and look death in
the face. He says “tour buses keep rolling into sites asso-
ciated with death and suffering: the Killing Fields of Cam-
bodia, New York’s ground zero, the genocide memorials
in Rwanda and Nazi death camps in Central Europe.”28
The article also quotes Philip Stone, a senior lecturer
with the University of Central Lancashire in England, who
is studying the phenomenon of “trauma” tourism. Stone
says that visitors have mixed motives for visiting such
sites: some come to remember and pay tribute (or to see
what they have seen in the movies), but for many, visiting
such memorials is a socially acceptable way to confront
the most destructive aspects of human nature. Death has
been abstracted in our culture and moved out of (com-
fortable) everyday discussion—death hides in hospitals
and funeral parlours. Perhaps visiting sites like this can
make death and mortality feel more tangible. In reality,
Og2 Oakville Galleries 11
Balint Zsako, Untitled, 2007, watercolour and ink on paper, 45.0 x 60.0, courtesy of the artist.
however, we never have to travel very far to experience
death and suffering, if we seek to be aware of the oper-
ations of violence in our midst.
Diabolique draws inspiration from the exhibition
Apocalypse: Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art,
co-curated by Norman Rosenthal and Max Wigram for
the Royal Academy of Arts, London, on display from
September 23 – December 15, 2000.29Two of the artists in
Diabolique, Jake and Dinos Chapman, were in this same
exhibition. The intriguing aspect of the London exhibition—
apart from the drama, and the way that the theatrical and
the heightened sense of suspense were crafted by the
curators—was the manner in which the artists confronted
horror, both present and past. The artists were fearless,
risk-taking and bold in their statements. The curators
thoughtfully situated their project in relation to such varied
sources such as Titian, Caravaggio, Goya, Bruegel, Beuys,
and Charlotte Saloman. Their essay carefully juxtaposed
these great masters with the work of contemporary artists
in the exhibition, from Wolfgang Tillmans to Tim Noble &
Sue Webster, Richard Prince, Gregor Schneidor and many
more. Another exhibition, Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery /
Recent Art, curated by Norman L. Kleeblatt in 2002 for
the Jewish Museum in New York, has also provided rich
ground for inspiration and contemplation.
In the foreword to the exhibition catalogue Mirror-
ing Evil: Nazi Imagery / Recent Art, James E. Young asks
some provocative questions about how viewers’ atten-
tion might be directed: “Where are the limits of taste
and irony in art that portrays terror? Must a depraved
crime lead to depraved artistic response? Can art mirror
evil, and remain free of evil’s stench? By including some
powerful and violent images in their work, are artists
somehow affirming and extending them, even as they
Og2 Oakville Galleries 12
Matilda Aslizadeh, Hero of our Time (still), 2008, DVD (19 mins.), courtesy of the artist.
intend mainly to critique them and our connection to
them? Perhaps this ambiguity between affirmation and
criticism is part of the artists’ goal.”30
The artists in Diabolique appeal to our hearts, minds
and senses. Some are political activists. Others are cap-
tivated by nightmarish experiences, terror and horror,
the links between weapons and toys. Still others wish
to illuminate the mistakes of the past, admitting guilt,
without guaranteeing or even requesting forgiveness.
Perhaps the contemporary art in Diabolique gathers
together symbolic wars that partake of struggle and car-
nival—battles that bring people together before divisive
yet collective weaknesses for atrocity. These artists are
“best positioned to affect our knowledge by confronting
us with a synthesis of new and often shocking realities.”31
Like the poetry of Aime Cesaire, these visual works of art
embody and illuminate blood, pain, fury, rage, destruction,
protest, and outcry.32They are also talismans, memorials,
(anti-)monuments, and shrines. Lest we forget.
Amanda Cachia was employed at the Dunlop Art Gallery from
2007–2010, where she most recently held the position of Director/
Curator. She is currently pursuing a Masters in Visual and Critical
Studies from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
This essay originally appeared in the exhibition catalogue for
Diabolique. It appears here in edited form to reflect the exhibi-
tion’s presentation at Oakville Galleries.
1 Clayton Eshleman & Annette Smith, Translated with an Introduc-
tion and Notes by, The Collected Poetry: Aime Cesaire, University
of California Press: Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1983, p. 2912 According to a CBC report from November, 2006, Saskatchewan
had more homicides per capita than any other province in 2005,
according to figures released by Statistics Canada. The federal
agency examined police reports for the year and tallied up 43 cases
of murder, manslaughter or infanticide in the province. That
gave it a rate of 4.33 homicides per 100,00 people — double the
national average of 2.04 homicides per 100,000 people. 3 www.dick
shovel.com/covertwar.html (Accessed June 20, 2009) 4 Fred
Moten, “Black Mo’nin” in Loss, edited by David L. Eng and David
Kazanjian, 2003, Regents of the University of California, p. 595 www.stonechildinquiry.ca (Accessed June 20, 2009) 6 Amanda
Cachia, Foreword, Diabolique, 2009, Regina, SK: Dunlop Art Gallery,
p. X 7 Gertrude Kearns in “The Art of War: Steeped in modern
conflict, artist portrays historic warriors”, by Anthony Reinhart,
The Globe and Mail, October 29, 2008, p. A7 8 L Gen. Romeo
Dallaire, Shake Hands With The Devil: The Failure of Humanity in
Rwanda, 2003, Canada: Random House, p. 7 9 Sylvie Blocher,
“Working With Them …” in Living Pictures: Wo/Men in Uniform
by Sylvie Blocher, 2008, Regina, SK: Dunlop Art Gallery, p. 1910 Norman Rosenthal, Apocalypse: Beauty and Horror in Contem-
porary Art, Royal Academy of Arts: London, 2000, p. 22 11 Philip
Monk, “Violence and Representation” in Struggles with the Image,
1988, Toronto: YYZ Books, p. 29 12 Susan Sontag, Regarding the
Pain of Others, 2003, New York: Picador Press, p. 40 13 James E.
Young, “Foreword: Looking Into the Mirrors of Evil” in Mirroring
Evil: Nazi Imagery / Recent Art, 2002, New York: Jewish Museum,
p. xvi 14 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Un-
making of the World, New York: Oxford University Press, 1985,
p. 3 15 Norman Rosenthal, Apocalypse: Beauty and Horror in
Contemporary Art, London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2000, p. 1916 Laura Cottingham, The War is Always Home: Martha Rosler,
1991 (catalogue essay) http://home.earthlink.net/~navva/reviews/
cottingham.html (Accessed July 10, 2009) 17 Miriam Hansen,
“Why Media Æsthetics?” Critical Inquiry, 30 (Winter 2004): 39318 http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090617/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_iran
_election_media_2 (Accessed June 26, 2009) 19 ibid. 20 Toni
Burlap, “The Euclidean Triangle” in Whitney Biennial 2006: Day
For Night, New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2006,
p. 42 21 Gregory Sholette, Snip, Snip … Bang, Bang: Political Art,
Reloaded, www.gregorysholette.com/writings/writing_index.html
(Accessed June 20, 2009) 22 Leslie Cagan, “Reflections on
feminism, war, and the politics of dissent” in Feminism and War:
Confronting U.S. Imperialism, edited by Robin L. Riley, Chandra
Talpade Mohanty, and Minnie Bruce Pratt, London and New York:
Zed Books, 2008, p.252 23 Ibid., 252. 24 ebounce@mailer.e-flux.com
and www.exitart.org (Dated December 2007/January 2008) 25 Our
world is a media-saturated one — we no longer have to ‘imagine’
what it would be like to be in a warzone, because our lives revolve
around the imaginary world of cinema and film instead. Susan
Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 2003, p. 22 26 Baudrillard,
Simulacra and Simulation, 1994, Ann Arbor: The University of
Michigan Press, p. 79 27 Sontag, Susan, Regarding the Pain of
Others, 2003, New York: Picador, p. 41 28 Laszlo Buhasz, “Travel-
ling to the dark side” in The Globe and Mail, November 2, 200829 Many other exhibitions around the world have addressed the
theme of war as crucible for exploration. That Was Then … This is
Now at P.S.1, New York, 2008, curated by Director Alanna Heiss
was divided into three core themes of Flags,Weapons and Dreams;
Signals in the Dark: Art in the Shadow of War, 2008, was curated
by Seamus Kealy for Blackwood Gallery, Mississauga, Toronto;
Robert Storr’s Venice Biennale, Think with the Senses—Feel with
the Mind: Art in the Present Tense, 2007; Brave New Worlds, was
co-curated by Doryun Chong and Yasmil Raymond for the Walker
Art Center, Minneapolis, 2007–2008; War Zones, was co-curated
by Karen Henry and Karen Love, 1999 at Presentation House,
Vancouver; numerous Whitney Biennials in New York, and At War,
Og2 Oakville Galleries 13
for the Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona, Spain,
was curated by a team composed of Antonio Monegal, Francesc
Torres and Jose Maria Ridao in 2004. Reaching back further
historically, the exhibition A Different War was produced by the
Whatcom Museum of History and Art in 1990 and circulated by
ICI across the U.S. It was accompanied by a catalogue with text
by Lucy R. Lippard. This exhibition was the first critical exami-
nation of the impact of the Vietnam War on American art of the
past twenty-five years since 1990. 30 “While this work may
seem offensive on the surface, the artist may also ask, is the
imagery itself that offends, or is it the artists’ æsthetic manip-
ulations of such imagery? Does such art become a victim of
the imagery it depicts? Or does it tap into and thereby exploit
the repugnant power of diabolic imagery as a way to merely
shock and move its viewers? Or is it both? Perhaps we need
to become aware of our motives for gazing on such art, or our
own need to look evil in the face even as we are repelled by what
we see …” James E. Young, “Foreword: Looking into the Mir-
rors of Evil”, in Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery / Recent Art, curat-
ed by Norman L. Kleeblatt, 2002, New York: Jewish Museum,
p. xvii 31 Norman Rosenthal, Apocalypse: Beauty and Horror in
Contemporary Art, London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2000, p. 2232 Sunera Thobani, War Frenzy, Centre for Research on Global-
ization, 28 October 2001.
The presentation of this exhibition has been made possible in
part through a contribution from the Department of Canadian
Heritage.
Og2 Oakville Galleries 14