[Fall 2021]

The Personal Narrative and the Art of Fragmented Anti-dogma Narration
by Nicolas Mavrikakis

Is there such a thing as left-wing extremism? In recent few months, various events have highlighted the growing hold on the left of can- cel culture – which should, rather, be called erasure or obliteration culture – a way of doing things associated with dictatorships (on the right and the left) that, in Western democracies, once seemed to be the prerogative of religions and the reactionary right. Democratic societies have censored books, films, and works of art thanks, among other things, to the Index and repressive moral laws. The left seems to be increasingly adopting this attitude, believing that it knows the absolute truth and can decree who is right and who is wrong, and even who is guilty.

In the art world, a certain faction of the left, rather than de- fending freedom of thought and creation, is applying dogmas and setting out to hunt down and denounce oppressive plots in all forms of representation. It also sees fit to reduce art to the life of the artist, without considering the quality of the works. This faction wants art that is moral and bland, with no grey areas.

University professors are accused of being racist when they dare to say out loud in the classroom the title of thinker and activist Pierre Vallières’s book White Niggers of America (which was first published as Nègres blancs d’Amérique in 1968).1 The idea that Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, a white Dutch author, would translate a poem by Amanda Gorman, a Black American author, caused such a backlash that the translation was cancelled. At the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the word “primitive” was excised from an exhibition on Picasso and African art even though the avant-gardes of the time used the word to positively define the pure and authentic energy of non-Western- ers. And I could go on. So, will books by Céline be banned? And Nabokov’s Lolita? Do we have to be reminded that a work is not necessarily the champion of the morals it describes (an accusation made of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary)? Must it be restated that the perversions presented in a work will not convert their reader or viewer? As art historian René Payant says, there is a difference be- tween what a text or a work says and what it does, what reactions and thoughts it stimulates.

As priests once did with their flocks, today we must make artists’ works and private lives speak – make them confess their sins, their scandalous intimate details, their unhealthy obsessions.

The identity of individuals – and of the photograph – reread by Moyra Davey. In this context, Moyra Davey’s exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, and in particular the presentation of her video i confess, were totally liberating. Moyra Davey: The Faithful explored how her work has developed since the 1980s. She probes the question of intimacy, but also the obsession that some people have with an activity, including art-making. Davey shows pictures she has taken of people who write in the subway, completely absorbed in what they’re doing – evincing her own fascination with these individuals and the thrill of photographing them freely, ignoring taboos about doing so. She thus underlines her love of other pho­tographers who have produced portraits of people in the subway, stalking fragments of intimacy. In one gallery of the exhibition, Davey installed Walker Evans’s Subway Portraits (1938–41); Evans waited twenty-five years to publish them in order to avoid issues. Although he knew it was illegal, Evans nevertheless took these shots, hiding his camera under his coat, the lens poking out between two buttons, counting on the noise of the subway to camouflage the sound of his shutter. What exactly was his obsession? The au­then­ticity of people who didn’t know they were being photographed? The idea – mythical and impossible to achieve – of a neutral photographer and camera? Or was he under the spell of this mechanism of soft voyeurism? Aware of the strangeness of the situation, he explained how every photograph is “exploitative and voyeuristic” and that his intervention was a “rude and impudent invasion.”

Davey addresses themes that are even more polarizing, but she finds ways to lead us to reflect beyond the opposition between good and evil, between innocents and criminals. That is what she does in i confess (2019).

How can I summarize this unclassifiable, complex, rich work without betraying its intention? Is it a personal diary? An encounter among photography, video, and writing? A sort of Russian doll layering, among others, James Baldwin, Hubert Aquin, Yvon Rivard, Pierre Vallières, and Dalie Giroux? A look at a subject that is touchy and rather difficult to handle – that of minorities imprisoned in their alienating condition? A reflection on minorities’ desire for freedom – in particular, that of the Québécois people? Or, more simply, the career of Davey, artist and intellectual, which we follow through her readings and research, taking her personal history and its intersections with societally significant events as a point of reference?

Davey uses images within images that complexify and intensify her intention, preventing us from impoverishing it or summarizing it simplistically. Here again, we are caught up in a mise en abyme. Davey strolls through her apartment-studio. To start, we see an interview with Baldwin on a computer screen. But then, the image of her personal space is intercut with shots of a dusty book, a garden, her record player, a photograph of Aquin on a wall, a detail of Benjamin West’s The Death of General Wolfe, pictures of Vallières that she took herself. Is this a film on intertextuality? On the mechanism of reflection through networks of references?

I would say that i confess is, above all, an anti-dogma video. Davey uses a range of processes to obfuscate linear narration and create a narrative distance, an interpretive shift.

i confess reveals the Davey’s personal evolution, but also that of characters in novels. Reading Baldwin’s Another Country, Davey notes how “gentle Vivaldo” had, in his youth, shown “intense cruelty toward homosexuals.” In contrast, Ida, who had been innocent, turns vengeful, abusing even the man who is devoted to her. Davey confesses that “these are contradictions she can identify with.” She explains that at first she wanted to put Baldwin’s book down, as she found some of the characters superficial, but in the end she saw their complexity. This continual interpretive shift is accentuated by Davey’s narrative system.

Davey scans and picks apart her text, pre-recorded on her iPhone, which she repeats after hearing it through speakers – here, again, an effect of narrative gap and shift. As an author, she tells her story. But is it really her that this story is always about? Davey speaks of a woman. “She” did this, “she” did that. “A myopic woman is writing,” she tells us. Later, Davey states her belief that “some things are only imaginable in the third person.” Yet, sometimes the “I” takes over. So, this is a story that Davey wrote as an artist, but it is revealed also to be the story of her life, narrated from a distance – a distance formed of time and reflection.

The video features a train of thought in the process of being developed – a reflection that, like a personal diary or memories that we are obsessed with, turns on itself, functions in loops, does not hesitate to disavow itself or, at least, to correct itself. It’s a way of doing things that features what I would call “the silence of the archive” (whether photographic or of any other nature). I would even call it the “lie of the archive,” which seems to bear truth on its own but which in fact requires other texts, other images, and the interpretation of living people to divulge meaning. i confess is a narrative that does not seem to be settled in advance. It’s a story that allows Davey to tell us about meeting Vallières when he had become lovers with Louis, Davey’s ex-boyfriend. Incidentally, she confides how she learned that her father, who worked for Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, may have helped to fashion the War Measures Act enacted in 1970. She invites us to share her discussion with the theoretician Dalie Giroux, who wrote an essay called “Les langages de la colonisation” (The languages of colonization) (2017). The two discuss Vallières and his book White Niggers of America. Giroux describes the abject poverty, both economic and emotional, in which the Québécois people were still living in the 1960s, evoking the slums in the south part of Montreal. She notes how Vallières climbed out of poverty “by reading bulimically,” obsessed with books. Although Giroux has reservations about comparing the situation of Blacks to that of the Québécois, she brings much nuance to this book, which is now at the heart of a polarizing upheaval. She adds that, in the 1960s, the likening of “the Québécois struggle with Black struggles” was courageous, even if it was “awkward and inappropriate.” And Davey and Giroux might also have explained that for intellectuals, particularly those associated with the magazine Parti pris – published by Vallières – it was important to signify their solidarity with ostracized peoples and to denounce all forms of colonialism.

Vallières seen by Wieland, seen by Davey. In the section of the ex­hi­bition in which a selection of photographs and videos from the National Gallery collection is presented, Davey has included Joyce Wieland’s film Pierre Vallieres (1972). This adds to the richness of the intention; the choice was not anodyne, just as it was not an innocent choice to show this work recently at Centre Dazibao in a program of six of Wieland’s films. Wieland’s portrait of Vallières, also unclassifiable, is located at the intersection of documentary and avant-garde, showing only Vallières’s mouth as he speaks. As the film advances, we advance toward this mouth as if to try to capture what constitutes its oratorical secret. The image finally becomes almost abstract. But what did Vallières want to convey with this provocative title? Wieland, too, allows a more intelligent reading of issues that are too often simplified. In the last third of the film, Vallières explains himself. Strangely, he does so a bit like Davey does in i confess, scanning his wording, also trying to escape a prefabricated, rehearsed discourse:

I’ve often been asked why I titled my book White Niggers of America. I’ve been asked why the word “niggers.” It’s in fact because Québécois are a bit [emphasis added] in the same situation in English Canada, in Canada, as Blacks are in the United States. For the Anglo-Saxons of the English Canadian bourgeoisie, we aren’t human beings like others. We are lazy, backward, uneducated, people who don’t have a sense of economics, people who are poorly brought up. In fact, English Canada, after conquering us as a people, spread the same prejudices about us that white Americans spread about Blacks. They were called Black Americans: they were people with an underdeveloped culture, who didn’t wash much, who didn’t like to study, who didn’t like to work, who preferred to lie around in the sun, who preferred to live off others than to act on their own.

Far from being racist, Vallières underlined how it was not only Québécois, Blacks, and Acadians who were colonized, but also the “Indians” who survived, “in pain and misery, the genocide perpetrated by whites.” He went so far as to point out a blind spot in the Québécois independence movement: “As many white francophones as white anglophones and Spaniards participated in the genocide of the Indians. And many of our own ancestors, we who are white niggers of America, also murdered Indians, massacred Indians.”

Vallières also talked about the fact that the story told to children in Quebec glorified the massacres of the “Indians” and the “heroes who committed these acts.” He concluded, “This history of the French Régime should be demystified.” But how can history be demystified; how can all its weight, contradictions, and aimlessness be returned to it? This is the question to which Davey makes her contribution over time – overlapped times – with multiple voices.   Translated by Käthe Roth

 

¹ Translator’s note: White Niggers of America (trans. Joan Pinkham, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1971) is the translation of Vallière’s Nègres blancs d’Amérique.

² Presented from October 1, 2020, to January 3, 2021, the exhibition, curated by Davey and Andrea Kunard, brought together fifty-four photographs and six of Davey’s films and included a dozen works from the National Gallery’s collection. This overview of Davey’s works offered an exploration of “the artist’s trajectory from early images of family and friends, through portraits of the detritus of everyday life, her mailed photographs, and films examining the works of authors, philosophers and artists.” From the announcement
of the exhibition, National Gallery of Canada, https://www.gallery.ca/whats-on/exhibitions-and-galleries/moyra-davey-the-faithful.

³ Evans quoted in Blake Morrison, “Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera,” The Guardian, May 22, 2010, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2010/may/22/exposed-voyeurism-exhibition-blake-morrison. Morrison describes Evan’s method as “sneakthief.”

⁴ May 14 to July 3, 2021. Translator’s note: All quotations by Vallières are our translation.

 

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Nicolas Mavrikakis is a critic for the newspaper Le Devoir, having filled the same position at Voir for fifteen years. He has written for numerous magazines, for some of which he has been a member of the editorial committee (Spirale, ETC, Espace). He teaches at Collège Brébeuf, is an exhibition curator (retrospective Pierre Ayot in 2016–17), and has published La peur de l’image (2015) and L’illusion postmoderne ? (2021). In his free time, he is an artist.

[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 118 – Exhibiting Photography ]