[Summer 2024]
by Marie Perrault
Mirement/Towering
The book Mirement/Towering continues a reflection based on Geneviève Chevalier’s homonymous exhibition project, which was presented in three parts between 2021 and 2024 at Dazibao (the installations Towering/The Menagerie and Towering/The Herbarium), the Foreman Art Gallery of Bishop’s University (Mirement/Trissements), and the Galerie de l’Université du Québec en Outaouais (Towering/Instability). The French word “mirement” refers to a navigation term designating an optical refraction effect that makes distant things look taller than they are. Here, it evokes both the obvious “objective” distancing of scientific museology and the illusions impressed by this approach upon human relationships with nature – two positions that Chevalier explores in her project.
The book contains essays by Mélanie Boucher, museology and art history professor at the Université du Québec en Outaouais; Stéphanie Posthumus, professor of European literature at McGill University, and Heather Rogers, a graduate of the Digital Humanities program at McGill University; and Alain Deneault, a professor of philosophy at the Université de Moncton. Gentiane Bélanger, director/curator of the Foreman Gallery, contributes an essay. These authors offer analyses of Chevalier’s approach from different angles and unique pathways – including a critique of the notion of sustainable development, juxtaposed against the excesses of contemporary capitalism – testifying to its polymorphous and polysemic nature.
Like the exhibitions from which it is drawn, the book is the product of a concerted effort by three institutions, related to their desire to save resources and reduce the impact of their activities. In this sense, it is coherent with the scope of Chevalier’s work, as she aims to raise awareness of ecology and the upheavals affecting living beings today, as well as the roles played by human beings in these disruptions.
In the preface, Bélanger, France Choinière and Marie-Hélène Leblanc attend to how Chevalier has deployed a system that links by analogy her subjects of predilection, including the epistemology of the premises and methods at work in the natural sciences and in the museums that disseminate knowledge about them. Their description of the photographic, videographic, and virtual reality components of each exhibition provides a useful context. Indeed, the book is otherwise given over to theoretical texts, in a fairly dense page layout, and its vertical format offers little space for reproductions of works, which are gathered in the middle pages.
In her essay “The Decline of Human Exceptionalism,” Bélanger discusses the Towering project in the light of critiques of rationalism and the objectification of nature – what Bruno Latour called “modern thought.” Like Deneault, whose essay closes the book, Bélanger implicitly returns to characterizations of the current geological era, the Anthropocene (also called Chthulucene by Donna Harraway and Capitalocene by Andreas Malm). She invites us to reverse the point of view that places human life above all other living forms, shifting it to the heart of the “chaotic quagmire” of nature. This position, which corresponds to Chevalier’s – which is based on the scientific gardens and collections that fascinate her – decompartmentalizes life. As Bélanger astutely observes, Chevalier “remains on the shore but is fully aware of the powerful backwash that is eroding the bedrock of sand at her feet.”
Boucher addresses the Towering corpus from a museological perspective around questions involving conservation and creation. Citing Krzysztof Pomian, an expert in the history of collections, she identifies various types of museums. These institutions accumulate artefacts and objects for various reasons, often linked to the choices and interests of the individuals who lead them in turn. The composition and organization of such collections is thus akin to an artistic gesture. And so, it isn’t surprising that more and more artists are intervening in museums and revisiting their collections – a phenomenon that Chevalier has explored as an academic. Her art practice is also inscribed in this tradition, as Boucher demonstrates. In addition to probing how we view nature, Mirement/Towering convincingly proposes that museums have the capacity to create ecological knowledge and the potential reach to resonate with the crises around biodiversity.
In their essay, Posthumus and Rogers state their intention to interpret Chevalier’s work by using an experimental approach, “vibrant materialism,” following Jane Bennett’s notion of “vibrant matter,” even though the works that they discuss consist of images and a virtual reality environment, and are therefore more illusion than material. I expected much from this essay, especially because when I visited the exhibition at Dazibao, I wondered about Chevalier’s integration of virtual reality into Mirement/Towering. Posthumus and Rogers’s analysis places corporeality at the heart of perception of these works and uncovers successive instances of sensitivity to living beings, mourning, and grief before, notably, plants are resurrected in the immersive environment. The video and the intangible world are interpreted here at the level of the affects and specific effects that they produce. But what about challenging the very materiality of nature by representing it fictionally, by building worlds in which its destruction is no longer an issue? Are we faced with the prospect of having only the ghosts of living beings to contemplate, in the form of immersive illusions?
Philosopher of economics Deneault looks into the idea of sustainable development, which seems to reconcile economic growth with protection of the environment. Initially used in the context of management of fishing resources, “sustainable development” conveys the illusion that living beings can be administered with operational models and indicators inherited from a capitalist economy. This aspect of Deneault’s analysis raises the same questions about the human point of view as those that loom over Chevalier’s works. In fact, Deneault suggests, the expression “sustainable development” really means “endurable exploitation,” which raises no challenge to the objective of infinite growth. He also emphasizes that the notion of development, when linked to economic capitalism, legitimizes the opening, or even colonial subjection, of non-Western countries to a market economy weighted in favour of European and North American nations. Beyond museology and ecology, his essay brings the content of the entire book into a critique of contemporary capitalism, broadening the perspective to issues of political power.
Overall, the book positions Mirement/Towering at the intersection of multiple questions arising from various domains, including contemporary art, museology, and political economics. It enriches the interpretation of Chevalier’s practice and expands its consideration to other points of view, attesting to the engaged nature of her project. Translated by Käthe Roth.
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Marie Perrault has followed contemporary issues in the visual and media arts for more than thirty years. She has organized many exhibitions and published pieces (essays, prefaces, and reviews) in books and contemporary-art magazines. She is interested in questions about ecology and territory.
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[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 126 – TRAJECTORIES ]