[Fall 2021]
Speech and silence
by Vincent Bonin
Invited by Ciel variable to follow up on the reassessment of works by the artist and anthropologist David Tomas (1950–2019) started in the recent exhibition Moving Through Time and Space,1 Vincent Bonin offers a broader survey of Tomas’s intellectual trajectory and reflects on the presence of silence in some of his installations.
David Tomas was a member of the first small cohort of artists who decided to pursue their academic studies to the doctoral level in the 1970s and 1980s, at a time when there were few points of intersection between disciplines remote from one another. In 1979, dur- ing a solo exhibition at Galerie Optica, in Montreal,2 Tomas read a communication titled The SX70 (1972): A Machine for the Critical Examination of Context, dealing mainly with the attributes of the Polaroid instant camera.3 In his lecture, Tomas described the invention of the internal mechanism that reduced the moment of latency between image capture and automatic appearance of the print. Tomas associated this technical advance with the reorientation of a rite of passage. The exhibition also included works based on various representations of physical phenomena invisible to the human eye. The transfer of this type of theoretical research into the field of art was still an unusual event. Tomas illustrated his spoken discourse with diagrams that were superimposed on each other, adding, layer by layer, a semiotic complexity to the liminal observations.
Extending the premises of his 1979 presentation with the series of installations Experimental Photographic Structure (1980–82), Tomas condensed the cultural space-time of the production of images to a continuous period of time in a single place. He programmed stroboscopes, chronometers, and automatic shutters that were connected to cameras so that Polaroid shots emptied of content (“raw, ideologically complex photographs”) were captured in a determined sequence. Between these components, he placed a closed-circuit video and a miniature train set. In one of the installations, he ob- served a part of the environment around him via a camera lucida (a nineteenth-century drawing tool, involving a prism and a lens, that projects a faint image of an object onto a sheet of paper). As a loco- motive crossed a bridge, triggering a flash, Tomas made a mark on a substrate. The black square resulting from this action, the tactile indication of a perception of blinding light, constituted the positive inverse of the white negative shots from the Polaroid cameras, generated without human intervention.4
Tomas then reused almost all the elements of the Experimental Photographic Structures cycle – miniature train set, closed-circuit video, camera lucida – in different configurations. However, he grafted onto this system text fragments in vinyl letters – his own writings and those of other authors. Inspired by the Russian avant-gardes’ graphic design techniques of arranging sentences in all directions, he also reordered his diagrams. In many respects, Tomas’s artworks and writings the 1980s were contemporary with a critical re-evaluation of the history of photography conducted by artists who were also theoreticians (Victor Burgin, Jeff Wall, Martha Rosler, Alan Sekula). Yet, it is important to emphasize that until the 1990s, Tomas avoided explaining the tenets and results of his practice in the form of statements of intent, preferring to disseminate his anthropological research in a fragmentary or performative manner in the art field. He often required that only one visitor at a time be in the gallery space that was provided to him. When he was present, he remained silent. This withdrawal was at the opposite end of the spectrum from academic presentations before peers.
In 1988, Tomas completed a dissertation on ethnographic observation during the contacts by the British with the indigenous populations of the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal between 1858 and 1922. At the same time as he was pursuing his doctoral studies, he became interested in the construction of heterotopic space within popular science-fiction narratives. The result of this research, Utopias (1988), rearticulated sections of previous installations – miniature train set, mirrors – to which were added images (engravings, photographs) portraying Indigenous people and photograms from Ridley Scott’s movie Blade Runner (1982). The notion of “offworld,” which describes the insular territory of the Andaman Islands, is also found in Blade Runner, designating inhabitable planets far from Earth. To summon and juxtapose these seemingly unrelated references, Tomas used the form of the slideshow. Several projectors were placed on an island-shaped bearing structure, which also served as the vector of movement of the locomotive, leading to a mirrored funnel. By breaking the continuity of the film, this unfolding of the stills, intercut with ellipses, created gaps in perception of the quoted materials.
During the 1990s, Tomas began to look at the flaws in the reclaiming of the historical avant-garde by members of his own discipline, who saw surrealism as a model of reflexivity, at a time when artists like him were turning instead to social sciences (anthropology) methodologies to grant themselves greater agency. In the video Rum and Coca-Cola (1992), Tomas continued his study of intercultural spaces, this time juxtaposing contemporary political content – images of the 1990 Oka crisis captured on television – with ethnographic materials that he had previously employed. The soundtrack superimposed Rupert Grant and Lionel Belasco’s song Rum and Coca-Cola (1945) over dialogue from cold war–era sciencefiction movies evoking extraterrestrial invasions. Tomas intermittently inserted into the montage an animation of the head of a “scare devil” (hentakoi) representing a white man, sculpted in 1900 by the Indigenous inhabitants of the Nicobar Islands in the Indian Ocean. Hentakoi were fashioned to ward off evil spirits; they also put a face to the colonizer.
Elements of Rum and Coca-Cola had previously appeared in a 1990 drawing from Tomas’s cycle Time Transfixed (1976–94) based on an allegorical reading of René Magritte’s Time Transfixed (1938). Magritte’s painting situates a floating locomotive in front of a fireplace, on the mantelpiece of which are a clock and a mirror that doesn’t reflect anything. Tomas replaced the train with a flying saucer and had the Nicobarese scare devil emerge like a ghost in the mirror. This cycle was partly inspired by Tomas’s discovery of a collection of family snapshots in one of which he can be seen posing in front of a fireplace in his parents’ house beside a miniature train set. In another, he appears on a camel with a camera slung around its neck. During a performance (titled Time Transfixed IV in 1994, then The Incubator in 1998), Tomas appeared in a structure formed of a circular mirror that concealed his body, leaving only his head and one hand sticking out. A monitor attached to the reflective surface scrolled through the family pictures, zooming in quickly from the full frame of the photograph to one of the eyes of its subjects (him, his mother, his father, his sister). During the time when this detail occupied the entire field of his vision, Tomas, using a camera lucida, made a mark on a substrate. His perception, thus obstructed, was limited to the contours of this video. After the Time Transfixed IV/The Incubator performance, the drawing was displayed and holograms were substituted for the flesh-and-blood artist. These elements acted as more than simple documents, as his head was shown in profile, his mouth open, imitating the expression of the Nicobarese scare devil of the white man. For the catalogue for an exhibition of works from this cycle in 1994, at Oakville Galleries, he wrote an essay commenting on the chain of references by adding ethnographic signifiers to autobiographical fragments. Yet, in the exhibition space, this discourse was set aside in favour of a mute, impersonal encounter. Visitors discovered this “severed” head staring at the video loop in silence, as their own bodies were reflected upside down in the mirror.
In 2008, Tomas began a process of anamnesis on the first years of his art career, influenced by “post-studio” practices. Artworks (or their residues), first conceived to resist the status of luxury goods, resurfaced much later in the secondary market. With the advent of Internet auction platforms, Tomas assembled a modest collection, composed mostly of photographs and works on paper. Surveying the sales organized by agencies such as Sotheby’s and Christie’s, he set up a system for recording fleeting traces reminiscent of the automated camera shutter trigger from his installations of the early 1980s. His parents had been antique dealers in the United Kingdom. As a child, he saw their travelling shop repeatedly fill up and empty. Like the items that appeared and disappeared in that store, the objects transiting through auctions gain an ephemeral visibility and then are eclipsed. Between 2010 and 2015, Tomas sent a list of correspondents anonymous emails with an “invitation” announcing the short interval of “public” availability of the works being auctioned. A series of videos and complex exhibitions were distilled from his examination of this market. In Lot 94, he highlighted information from the sale by Sotheby’s, on November 15, 2013, of documentary by-products of American artist Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates (1973). Matta-Clark had purchased, for extremely low prices, small lots situated in forgotten portions of the urban fabric of Manhattan. Tomas created several installations around this single transaction, giving it an afterlife within locations that were equally interstitial, such as a storage space in the Gaspé Building in Montreal. In a video from the series Lots (2013–18), he animated the online announcement of the sale of lot 94, published on the Sotheby’s website. Tomas privileged blank spaces, making the information unintelligible by breaking up the text and compressing Matta-Clark’s images in the montage. The soundtrack was composed of snippets of the auctioneer’s patter, keeping only the beginnings and ends of his sentences. Visitors were witness to a slow absorption of the content of the transaction in the form of truncated signifiers, floating topsy-turvy in a void.
One might say that these works prefigured the saturation of the algorithm culture that we have been living with for the last while, in which each object has a double existence: a concrete history related to its material use and an abstract trajectory of exponential value. Closing this cycle in 2018, Tomas made small paintings bearing the seemingly ambiguous declaration “No Lot,” which in fact designates the end of a sale. The statement was also published on his website, ordering us, it seems, not to seize the body through monument. This “no” now resonates in the posthumous space, as a last form of the resistance of silence after the interruption of speech. Translated by Käthe Roth
1 Curated by France Choinière, Dazibao, Montreal, February 28 to April 24, 2021.
2 Œuvres sur l’histoire de la physique en peinture/Works on the History of Physics in Painting, Galerie Optica, Montreal, September 17 to October 5, 1979.
3 David Tomas, “The Ritual of Photography,” Semiotica 40, no. 1–2 (1982): 1–25; A Blinding Flash of Light: Photography Between Disciplines and Media (Montreal: Dazibao, 2004), 95–116.
4 On this series of installations, see “David Tomas: Pour une pratique négative de la photographie,” Parachute, no. 37 (Winter 1984–85): 4–8. The article was translated and edited: “For a Negative Practice of Photography: An Interview with Aberto Cambrosio,” trans. Timothy Barnard, in David Tomas, A Blinding Flash of Light: Photography between Disciplines and Media (Montreal: Dazibao, 2004), 31–42
5 David Tomas, “From Gesture to Activity: Dislocating the Anthropological Scriptorium,” Cultural Studies 6, no. 1 (1992): 1–26; reprinted, edited, in A Blinding Flash of Light: Photography between Disciplines and Media (Montreal: Dazibao, 2004), 43–65.
6 David Tomas, “Thresholds of Identity,” in David Tomas and Lesley Johnstone, David Tomas: Chemical Skins (Oakville: Oakville Galleries, 1994), 26–45.
7 Email correspondence between Tomas and the author, June 2017. On the exhibition cycle around the sale of Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates, see David Tomas, An Economy of Discursive Fields, Lot 94, E6-03 (Montreal: self-published, 2019).
Vincent Bonin lives and works in Montreal. In 2016, he organized an exhibition around the work of the French philosopher Catherine Malabou titled Réponse, which was presented at the Musée d’art contemporain des Laurentides, in Saint-Jérôme. His essays have been published, among others, by Canadian Art (Toronto), Fillip (Vancouver), Centre André Chastel (Paris), the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Vancouver Art Gallery, and Sternberg Press (Berlin).
[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 118 – Exhibiting Photography ]