Year End Art Exhibit Rush (Montreal) 6: Mona Hatoum: "Mona Hatoum (René Blouin)".

"If a new layer was revealed, it had to do, perhaps, with the spirit of the times: This group of objects seemed to be more about design than politics."

Frances Richard, ArtForum, Jan 2000










There used to be a time when Mona Hatoum produced important works for montreal galleries.


I've seen excellent shows of her at Oboro ("The Light At The End", 1989), Musée D'Art Contemporain, various times at René Blouin, and a couple other spots. I'm talking of the type of shows which you build an art carreer with.



These days, Hatoum sends to Montreal a collection of extra multiples that didn't sell from her previous shows. Not that these are all bad, but, really it's a missed rendez-vous as the René Blouin's space is indeed, "spatious", and full of potential. And let's face it: it's one of the obligatory stops in a gallery-filled building that attracts a large amount of art fanatics weekly. Montreal is a cool town filled with so many cool people, and they deserve so much more than half-baked art.


So yes, for what you can make of Hatoum being "an art star", the show at René Blouin consisted mostly of recent multiples, smaller works of the category people can afford around here (but if art can't be afforded in Montreal, where can it be, I ask? In less than 10 cities across the whole world? Something is wrong here). These works didn't provoke much in me. They're mostly cute appliances preserving meanings that sometimes are obvious, sometimes hard to decipher (it doesn't help that René never writes press releases: for a good part this attitude can be interesting, but some works here absolutely begged for an explanation).


Well, let me see what I'm able to receive...

Generally: images of microscosms, cytoplasms, cells, etc, created with the shapes of everyday objects like cut bottles, tea cups, and human hairs (a note that she doesn't use found objects, her work is technically sculptural).


The best work is the sculpture of the siamese cup ("T 4 2" (2002)), two cup that blends one into another like a cell caught in the process of duplication. Obviously, this work deals with notion of clonage. I'm sure the fact the artists lives in England adds a special political resonance to the use of a teacup. I'll grant that the piece was worth my visit (I even tought of buying a copy, but at 2500 grands a piece, when they are 100 copies, I thought it was a tad expensive).


The other central piece in this exhibit was the image of a cell fabricated with reproductions of halves of bottles (of what I presume is alcohol, but it could be medicinal bottles), of which ends were "rounded" in a manner that gives the impression that the bottles are emerging from invisible water (or actually sand, to be honest). Before you realized the fragments are pieces of bottles, it looks like an old floor sculpture by Richard Long. Hatoum seems to appropriate the popular "sos in a bottle" idiom. I'm stipulating a sense here from its title, "Drowning Sorrows" (2002), which suggests a psychological interpretation. Though these aren't baudelairian jars, these are liquor bottles. Alcoholism seems to serve a rather blunt objectification of despair. But the shape of a cell also lean me to infer issues of artificial biology, or the sickening of the human dna. Or was it simply some drunk cell ?


Next, the two drawings made with human hairs again formulate micro-biological aesthetics. How many dna researches in the world are executed through the use of hairs? How much do hair can tell about the identity of an individual ? With the title "Hair And There", I can imagine "where" this is going, but aesthetically it's not as flabbergasting as Kiki Smith's own hair drawings.


In "Hearing Voices (Moi?, Toi?, Lui?, Elle?)" (1993-02), the wall urges to talk: 4 rectangle glass cells are engraved with the interrogation marks Me?, You?, him? and Her?. This piece seems again to engulf the popular idea that in the cloning of representation we lost an aura of the original. Just like coming back to good old Walter Benjamin, as if redundance didn't exist (it's an old work, mind you), except that now of course we are dealing with real life and identities, or rather, Hatoum lets these quasi-identical, quasi-invisible tablets speak for us. Is this what the work is really about? I have nooooo clue, darling. I'm only guessing, here. Maybe that work would be a good reply to the minimalists, but in the end my guess is that not so many people are ready to read deep into the meaning of a work when it shows so little on the surface. Right?


On the opposite wall, there are two drawings made of wax paper: they look like residues of a performance, or linked to a process that is unknown to me, involving kitchen appliances engraved into cooking paper. I have noooo idea. Let's call them "Failure 1 and 2".


The two textural pink frames in the other rooms are handmade papers. One is representing a brain ("Untitled (Brain)", (2001)) and it really shares the fleshy organic texture with what it represents. The other use deadpan humor by juxtaposing its title, "Hand Made Paper" (2003), with the representation of an arm and hand. Ohhh, the preciosity of connecting with the artist's body and craft. Been-there-done-that sort of gallery fillers. Where's the beef?


Finally, the two marble gobelets ("Set In Stone" (2002)) linked by a tiny rope imitates the form of an ancient toy phone, that sort that kids often bricolage at school. They are adorned with arabic descriptions. This is as uncommunicative a work can get, but I guess that is the point. Communicating with yourself to see if you hear any better ? I did some research. The words spells "East" and "West" in arabic. Ok, now I see. Does the work shift meaning depending on where it is shown? Intriguing.

Not bad, but a lot of these objects seem to be made to decorate the walls of those who can buy them. I'm not certain where exactly does Mona Hatoum senses that she can have an impact. Not that the work is oblique but more that it is toned down by an aesthetic of bibelot.


Finally, some of these works are obtused by their clinical aspect. Is there a sense of humor somewhere ? Am I allowed to find it funny ? The tone is uncertain.

Why is surrealism dead when so many art seems to derive from it? At least with surrealism we could laugh.



Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com