A couple of pieces in a current group show at Montreal's DHC/ART gallery consist of multiple copies of a single item, laid out for the taking. Yes, you can take one, "if you dare," as artist Dora Garcia says in her art multiple Steal This Book, knowing that pocketing a gallery object runs against the well-guarded sanctity of things displayed in museums.
The show is called L'OFFRE – The Gift, and it's a veiled pat on the back for the non-commercial, free-admission DHC/ART itself, and especially for its founder, Phoebe Greenberg, who has been bankrolling the gallery with her own funds for the past 10 years. The unexpected bitter irony of this show at this time is that Greenberg has recently stumbled into a drama in which, as in Garcia's piece, the line between something offered and something pilfered has become hard to trace.
Greenberg is also the founder and moving spirit behind the Phi Centre, a place for art and media creation and exhibition a few blocks from DHC/ART. Through Phi, Greenberg has produced such diverse offerings as a short film by Denis Villeneuve, performances by the likes of Tanya Tagaq and Arcade Fire, and a rolling carnival of virtual-reality displays. Her in-house partner in all of these ventures till recently was former Phi president Penny Mancuso, who Greenberg counted as a close personal friend.
Barbara Messim’s John Lennon Remembered, 1988. Watercolor on Paper.
According to court documents secured by La Presse, Greenberg is now pursuing her old friend, who left Phi last spring, for $5.2-million. That's the sum Mancuso is alleged to have funnelled from Phi into her own accounts, or to those of her husband Bayard Whittall and his company, Two Monsters Exotics, which breeds and sells large snakes. Greenberg's suit at the Quebec Superior Court also seeks the return of the first $407,000 instalment of Mancuso's three-year severance package.
Greenberg refused all comment about the court action, or about the dispute that must be a galling personal disappointment to her. The free-admission Phi Centre was initially set up as a for-profit enterprise, but its lavish offerings and hard-to-perceive revenue stream make it hard to imagine that money is being made there. Like DHC/ART, it's mainly a gift to the people of Montreal.
The gift keeps on giving, of course, every day that Phi and DHC/ART remain open. Each has a crackerjack show on display, of work by artists whose methods and concerns, at first glance, could not be more different.
Red Head with Yellow, 1983. Computer Heads series. Cibachrome Print.
DHC/ART has a small but powerful show of video works by Bill Viola. Three of the pieces are large-scale instalments in the American artist's long-running obsession with inundation of the human form. We are born out of liquid, some of us are baptized or drowned in it, and many of us are washed in it after we die. On its face, Viola's Ascension is nothing but the slow-motion video record of a man plunging feet first into a pool of water. Its metaphoric narratives, however, are very close to the surface, and they're all about travail and transfiguration, birth and death, violence and the sacred. The video is also a beautiful spectacle, and a testimony to Viola's subtle mastery of observation and lighting.
Inverted Birth, shown in Canada for the first time, shows a standing man stained and streaked all over with black liquid. Gradually the black puddle at his feet begins to rain upwards, becoming a reverse deluge that eventually turns red, white and then clear. It's an inundation video in reverse, yet this simple trick becomes a magical and profound reflection on life and our passage through it.
Phi is showing work by the American illustrator and artist Barbara Nessim, whose sparse line drawings have appeared in galleries and on the cover of Time magazine. Nessim's drawings of women are playful but serious, and their apparent simplicity disappears as you examine them closely. Her WomanGirl series from the early 1970s packs every kind of stock sexualized characterization of the female into figures that have lost their hands (and therefore their agency), or who can casually move mountains while posing (in ironic superagency). They are both symbols of women constrained and of women whose power is not containable.
Bill Viola’s Ascension, 2000, shows a man plunging feet first into a pool of water.
Bill Viola Studio
Nessim was a pioneer of computer-assisted drawing as an art practice, thanks to a series of nocturnal experiments in the early 1980s with a Norpak computer at Time headquarters. Her virtuoso use of what was then a severely limited apparatus is exhilarating to see, in a 1983 video compilation she made of her Norpak work. It's also inspiring to see facsimiles of her notebooks, which she uses as unfiltered compendia of her daily visual thoughts.
The way Nessim has passed freely between freelance illustration and gallery art, and from drawings on paper to precocious computer imagery, make her a good fit for Phi, which has always emphasized the flow between popular culture and high art. That's a boundary worth crossing often. Whatever happens in court, here's hoping that Greenberg will remain as generous with Montrealers in the future as she has been these past 10 years.
Bill Viola: Naissance à Rebours, and L'OFFRE continue at DHC/ART Fondation pour l'art contemporain through March 11. Barbara Nessim: Conditions de fluidité, continues at the Phi Centre through Dec. 1.