[Winter 2020]

By Louise Déry

As Dominique Blain’s exhibition Déplacements was being presented in Paris,¹ Venice was suffering a flood so terrible that we were once again anguished about the possibility of seeing this incomparable treasure of world heritage disappear. Not so long ago, it was Notre-Dame de Paris that was severely damaged, this time by fire, before the incredulous eyes of thousands of witnesses gathered on the bridges, piers, and neighbouring streets and those watching on their screens the world over. The mobilization of hearts and minds is particularly pointed when such tragedies occur and the international community rises in solidarity, for good reason, to engage in repairs – often “spectacularized” – as exemplary donations and calls for contributions are made. Yet, in many parts of the world, it is not natural catastrophe or accidents that threaten the patrimony, but deliberate acts of destruction. These acts, of a hallucinatory scope, are part of a spiral of programmed eradication of peoples through war and exile, putting in danger both life and the symbols that, like art, are part of its essence.

This contextualization for talking about work by Dominique Blain, who focuses on the relationship between art and war, highlights that what we call the patrimony is a foundation for individual and collective imagination. Because it designates a shared heritage of assets and rights that we have always considered inalienable and transmissible, “patrimony” imposes the imperative that we protect it, control its theft or loss, and give it precedence as the very basis of our poor humanity, which is powerless, in too many cases, to save life itself. Déplace­ments, shown at the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris, evokes all of this; in particular, the works Monuments II and Dérives embody the main issues around the peril in which works and human lives are put when subjected to the horrors of war.

Monuments II is the second version of an impressive installation that Blain first produced in 1998 for a retrospective exhibition at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec.² That installation included a full-scale replica of the crate that was used to transport a painting by Titian, The Assumption of the Virgin (1516–18), from the museum of the Academy of Venice to the Venetian countryside where it, like many other artworks, was hidden during the First World War to save it from the danger of bombings. The huge sculpture, made of planks and solidly tied with rope, was surrounded by a group of photographs illustrating the protective actions taken by Venetians to safeguard their art treasures.

At the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris, Monuments II (2019) is a new take on the subject, set at the beginning of the Second World War in France, which was about to be occupied. It is composed of a number of archival images, transposed into negative and reproduced on a large scale, illustrating the withdrawal of a number of masterpieces from the Louvre and their transportation to various places in France to protect them from the greed of the German occupier and the risks inherent to war. Among them were the Venus de Milo, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, The Raft of the Medusa (Théodore Géricault, 1819) and the Mona Lisa (Leonardo da Vinci, ca. 1503–19). Blain decided to return to Titian’s The Assumption of the Virgin as the focal point of the new installation, and a replica of its crate was once again reproduced, alongside a large photographic tableau in negative illustrating its removal from Venice.

Blain often combines installation and photography in her work. Here, the placement of Monuments II in the space has a powerful impact because of the size of the crate, the odour of the wood, and the tension felt upon seeing the cables wrapped tightly around it. The Assumption of the Virgin, symbolically hidden in darkness, seems to have been not confined but displayed, brought into view by the extreme materiality of its wooden setting. The photographic images are also as much revelation as dissimulation. They unveil their famous artistic referents as much as they illustrate the hurried actions of men and women who helped to save them from pillage and destruction. And yet, processed as negatives, they seem disconnected, held back, absorbed in the shadows of time.

The photographs in Monuments II are asserted as a reflection of representation due to their status as trace of the real. Their figurability is exaggerated, surprisingly highlighted by their ghostly nature. They produce the keys to reading the immense crate that is paradoxically commanding, as it produces silence – that of a cloistered, mute work – even as it proclaims the survival of an irreplaceable artistic heritage. The narrative is established from a group of photographs found in the archives, which, as we know, have participated in the construction of memory since the invention of photography. They recount the actions and means used to protect the masterpieces from destruction in a tense dialogic relationship not only with the sculpted object, with its essential materiality, but also with the exhibition space as a “repository” for artworks. The narration is subjected to a number of mises en abîme: that of the painting represented but materially absent; that of the photograph taking on the role of the painting and imitating its appearance and presentation; that of the sculpture, which serves as sarcophagus for the painting; that of the exhibition space, which, like the sculpted crate, is a container, or even a reliquary.

Whereas Monuments II was conceived from iconographic sources in books and various archives, the video installation Dérives was produced from a large group of press images gathered from numerous recent journalistic sources. Five screens display what seem to be, at first glance, photographic views of the sea, subtly moved and lifted by a light breeze. As they are lifted, they allow us to glimpse, here and there, makeshift boats overloaded with anonymous, desperate refugees who have been abandoned to their fate, lost in the ocean, frantic to survive. Filmed furtively and displaying both a calm beauty and the human tragedy playing out by the roaming of so many displaced people (not to mention all those who brush up against death on the roads and at the borders of so many countries), the images in Dérives reveal and then, just as quickly, erase thousands of unknown people left on their own, only a few of whom will survive. With the weak respiration that lifts the images and allows us to glimpse the intolerable, this work, like all of those in Déplacements, crystallizes the ambivalence of our relationship with the world. It is a question both of awareness of loss and of what we don’t want to see.
Translated by Käthe Roth

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Louise Déry, who holds a PhD in art history, is director of the Galerie de l’UQAM, a curator, and an author. She has organized some hundred exhibitions by Canadian and international artists in Canada and in other countries. Notably, she was Canada’s curator at the Venice Biennale, with an exhibition by David Altmejd, in 2007. The recipient of a number of awards, including the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Curatorial Excellence and the Governor General’s Award, she was made a Chevalier des arts et des lettres de la France in 2016.

Dominique Blain lives and works in Montreal. Her works have been exhibited in museums and galleries in North America, Europe, and Australia (Sydney Biennale in 1992). She has had three major retrospectives, at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal in 2004, the Musée national des beaux-arts de Québec in 1998, and the Arnolfini Centre for Contemporary Arts in Bristol organized an exhibition of her work that toured five British institutions in 1997–98. Blain has also produced works of public art in Quebec. She received the Prix Paul-Émile-Borduas in 2014 and the Prix Les Elles de l’Art (Pratt & Whitney in association with the Conseil des arts de Montréal) in 2009. www.dominiqueblain.com

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