Works of the pseudo-gothic sculptor Wim Delvoye are currently on display at the DHC/ART gallery in Old Montreal. ‘We want to break down entrenched ideas of what contemporary art is, and who it’s for,’ says curator and managing director Cheryl Sim.
Richard-Max Tremblay
DHC/ART in Old Montreal looks like a posh commercial art gallery, except that no one there wants to sell you art. If you were to decide you needed to own one of the pseudo-gothic Wim Delvoye sculptures currently on view, you would have to contact the Belgian artist's dealer in New York.
With that in mind, you might take DHC/ART for a private museum, although it doesn't have a permanent collection. Nor does it charge admission, unlike the publicly funded Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (MAC), where a visit costs $15 or less – still a bargain.
DHC/ART can function without earned revenue because it is a not-for-profit foundation, sustained entirely by one benefactor. She is Phoebe Greenberg, whose family holdings in real estate – via Minto Group – give the Greenberg clan a collected worth of about $1.58-billion, according to a recent survey by Canadian Business magazine.
Greenberg has been involved in art her whole adult life, first as a performer in avant-garde theatre, and since 2007 as founder and director of DHC/ART. She also originated the PHI Centre, a multimedia facility a few blocks away from her gallery.
Wim Delvoye. DHC/ART doesn’t charge admission. It’s sustained entirely by benefactor Phoebe Greenberg, who founded the gallery and has been its director since 2007.
Richard-Max Tremblay
DHC/ART is similar in structure to the space the Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation ran for 25 years in Toronto, although, unlike Greenberg, Hendeles always foregrounded her role as collector: She showed what she bought. A Montreal comparison could be made with Arsenal Contemporary Art, although that private foundation is also collector-driven, and more market-attentive and revenue-conscious than DHC/ART.
The gallery's focus is on international contemporary work not otherwise seen in Montreal, and on stirring things up. "We want to break down entrenched ideas of what contemporary art is, and who it's for," says curator and managing director Cheryl Sim.
Delvoye showed one piece at Montreal's Galérie de l'UQAM seven years ago: Cloaca No. 5, a mechanical alimentary canal that turned food into poop. Greenberg decided Montrealers needed to see more of his work than had issued from that artificial gut, a version of which was also seen at Toronto's Power Plant in 2004. She worked for four years to convince the artist, and to figure out with Sim which pieces could and should be borrowed. Their efforts produced a must-see exhibition of about 50 works, spread between DHC/ART's five-storey main building and its lofty, one-level annex a few doors away.
Delvoye’s work can seem prankish at first, but a closer looks reveals imagery that is chaotic but not meaningless.
Courtesy of Wim Delvoye and DHC/ART.
Delvoye's work can seem prankish at first sight. It takes a determined provocateur to tattoo live pigs, and to exhibit the skins with and without the animals attached (for the former, the show has videos).
Look at enough of his tattoo drawings on pigskin or paper, however, and you're pulled into a force field of mostly found imagery that is chaotic but not meaningless. Hand grenade, spark plug, winged skull, devil's head, pin-up nudes, eagles and clouds – they're all flash cards for something, as powerful and irreducible as the details in a religious icon.
Much of the show gravitates toward religious imagery. Pliable Christs on rubbery crosses twist and stretch over Moebius strips of endless suffering and redemption. Metal sculptures miniaturize and repurpose the ornate traceries of Gothic cathedrals. There's something at once grand and banal about a cathedralized earth-mover, or an 18-wheel truck that looks like an ecclesiastical nightmare about to flip off the road and onto its side.
The most profound of these Gothic parodies is a stainless-steel nautilus shell that is also an uncoiling cathedral, which also forms the body of the most thought-provoking chalice you'll ever see. The organic and the highly ornamented fuse together into a vision of eternity that is both frozen in place, and endlessly whirling out of itself.
An aluminum Maserati chassis, full-sized and etched all over with Italianate surface decoration and Arabic calligraph, by Wim Delvoye.
Courtesy of Wim Delvoye and Galerie Perrotin.
There's also an aluminum Maserati chassis, full-sized and etched all over with Italianate surface decoration and Arabic calligraphy. It's another kind of tattooing, and a concise statement about the balance of trade and influence between old Europe and the petro-states of the Middle East.
Delvoye makes the kind of eye-catching, mind-messing work that would seem to fit right into MAC's purview – and indeed, at the show's packed opening, I ran into MAC curator Marie-Ève Beaupré, attentively examining the art. Current MAC director John Zeppetelli was previously curator at DHC/ART, so he knows the territory from both sides.
But MAC has other mandates, including an obligation to show work from Quebec and the rest of Canada. A mischievous high flyer from abroad was, perhaps, an easier "get" for Greenberg, who had the time to court the artist and the freedom to go after what she personally wanted to see in her space. DHC/ART is a nimble organization with very little bureaucracy.
"It's really just me and Phoebe talking through the shows we want to do," says Sim, describing the process of planning the gallery's two or three exhibitions per year. Some technical help comes from the PHI Centre, especially for the gallery's minimal publications, which include a free e-book of past exhibitions for iPad.
DHC/ART gives Greenberg a platform for what she thinks is important in contemporary art, but its activities aren't meant to be one-way transmissions.
Just as the PHI Centre engages interactively with several publics and other organizations – including, last fall, the Red Bull Music Academy – DHC/ART is expected to generate feedback and conversation. "Dialogue" is one of Greenberg's favourite words.
Her gallery is an exemplary enterprise, in a town where knowledgeable, activist arts philanthropists are still scarce. As DHC/ART approaches its 10th anniversary, with 165,000 visitors to date, here's hoping that Greenberg has the drive and the curiosity to keep the place thriving for at least another decade.
DHC/ART Contemporary Art Foundation's exhibition of work by Wim Delvoye continues through March 19.