Barroco Nova
Romeo’s famous query, ‘What’s in a name?’, is a rewarding question to ask about ‘Barroco Nova’, the ambitious exhibition of 18 artists from Canada, the US and Europe, which was installed in three locations in London, Ontario. Romeo wanted a name to mean nothing, so that it would provide no impediment to his burgeoning romance with Juliet, but the curators of this exhibition want their naming to carry as much weight of meaning as possible. The title is a hybrid of Portuguese and Spanish, and its mongrel lineage suggests both a sense of possibility and the tawdry quality of a Latino-inspired musical from the 1950s – you can blame it on the Barroco Nova and its own kind of magical spell.
The exhibition’s subtitle was ‘Neo-Baroque Moves in Contemporary Art’, and the word ‘moves’ is critical, since the co-curators, Patrick Mahon and Susan Edelstein, see the neo-baroque as a style-in-progress, capable of reiterating the same kinds and degrees of transformation that were expressed in its origins in the Counter Reformation. The baroque is a term more disparaged than celebrated; it has fought an uphill battle against a range of pejorative associations, mostly because of its excess. The guiding principle of the baroque aesthetic was not less is more, but more is not enough. In their choices, Mahon and Edelstein have settled somewhere in the middle with the result that some is just right.
‘Barroco Nova’ was an exhibition of minimal excess. We could see evidence of this restraint in David Altmejd’s pair of giants, one of which seemed to shield its eyes from the brazen reflective intensity of its partner across the room. It was a telling detail that Kathy Slade’s large orange pom-pom was visible in the mirrored skin of Altmejd’s adjacent giant. The works in Barroco Nova were seen, and see themselves, through a reflected prism.
In this regard, Jeremy Drummond’s 65-Point Plan for Sustainable Living (2007–08), a collection of satellite photographs of gated communities in each of the American states and the Canadian provinces and territories, made an aesthetic connection to Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky’s 12-metre-long charm bracelet of 500 objects – including key rings, spoons, a stapler, a trumpet and a pair of handcuffs. Titled Music of Chance (2008), the bracelet is made from aluminium foil, the precious metal of the down-sized neo-baroque. Drummond’s aerial communities look like clusters of jewels, urban broaches and necklaces that have been made both desirable and defenceless through their digital extractions.
Brendan Tang could be the poster boy for the transculturation that the curators view as one of the characteristics of the neo-baroque. He is Dublin-born of Trinidadian parents, American-educated and a Canadian citizen. (Similarly Brendan Fernandes is Kenyan-born of Indian heritage, while Jin-me Yoon was born in Korea and now lives in Vancouver.) Tang’s ceramic sculptures from his ‘Manga Ormolu’ (2009) series mash together the quiet palette of Delft and Chinese classical porcelain with Japanese cartoons; his vase looks to be in the clutches of a Pop cannon from which it will be propelled and most certainly shattered.
Shary Boyle’s porcelain sculptures are technically dazzling and psychically dizzying. She makes a funeral casket for her own miniature self and fashions it an exquisite filigreed lace dress; in The Bed (2010), she tucks in a cute couple underneath a comforter. Next to the woman, and under the same bedding, is a third figure, who happens to be headless. In Boyleland it only takes a heartbeat to move from the guileless to the Grand Guignol; what makes these pieces so effective is the discrepancy between refined materials and gruesome subject matter.
The one artist in the exhibition who escapes control and who stays true to tradition is Toronto-based Kent Monkman. His Crystal Theatre (2007) honours the over-the-topness we have come to associate with the baroque. The installation was dominated by a tipi structure made from long strings of theatrically lit beads that hung down from a chandelier attached to the ceiling of the gallery. From that light fixture Monkman projected a pair of films onto a faux-animal skin on the floor. One of them was titled Group of Seven Inches (2005) – the members of the Group of Seven are Canada’s best-known landscape painters and they have assumed an iconic status in the national imagination for their depictions of the Canadian wilderness. Monkman inserts his persona, Miss Chief, a fetching queer aboriginal, in the combined role of painter, impresario and seducer. Under the gaze of a portrait of Tom Thomson, the best painter of the group, Miss Chief convinces a trio of white men, who are playing aboriginals, to dress up in the costumes of British gentlemen. She gets them drunk and what ensues is an orgy of paint, sort of Yves Klein meets Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy (1964) in a log cabin. In re-configuring Canadian myth, the irrepressible Monkman always goes for baroque.
