Downer

From the entrance of the exhibition space at Catriona Jeffries Gallery are four of the six works in Liz Magor's Downer -- three on the floor (Shaved, Coiffed and Dressed, 2020), two hanging from the ceiling (Delivery [red] and Delivery [brown], 2018) and a wall work (Migros Shopper, 2020).

The floor works attract me, particularly the first one, Shaved. A "space" machine, as evidenced by its constituent parts: a skirted (curtained?) platform that brings to mind a bed, on which sits a "cast" of packaging materials (wrapping paper), a silicone rubber dog (pet?) on a faux fur blanket and the remains of someone's lunch (a cake box and a cardboard coffee holder). A "space" machine in the way a bed, not a dining table, becomes the surface on which a production (gift wrapping) is staged.

Our world is accelerating, though Covid has us slowing down. Our world is expanding through a de-centralization of symbolic power, yet shrinking because more and more of us are forced into economies where we can afford less and less room in which to live. That Covid has us spending more time at home has us experiencing this shrinking feeling in ways that allow certain of us to identify with a work that has one activity overlaying an object we associate with another -- rest. If there is an art work that best exemplifies Byung-Chul Han's concept of "auto-exhaustion", Shaved might just be it.

"No ideas but in things"

In a November 13, 2015 Momus post editor Sky Goodden asks Liz Magor questions, and Liz responds “simply” and “with uncanny clarity,” according to Sky, but with dollops of mystery and intrigue. Mystery because I am curious to know how Liz arrives at what she says; intrigue because it is more than that -- more than just wanting to know more.

I Googled “Liz Magor” and “William Carlos Williams”, but nothing came up. What was I thinking? I was thinking of Williams’s line from the 1927 version of his multi-volume poem, Paterson, “No ideas but in things” and I wonder if Liz has ever used it.

Liz is disparaging of ideas. Of them she says, “Ideas are a dime a dozen.” But that can't be what she means. Concepts maybe – Conceptual Art -- but I am not buying ideas. Was it not her idea to “flip” her desire for that which she doesn’t have in order to “idolize” that which she does -- like the chair she was sitting on when the idea first came to her? This is what I find so intriguing.

(photo by Glenn Baglo)

9th Column (2014)

Returning home from Chinatown I passed the Onni Group's latest building, which has within its structure nine concrete columns, the ninth of which (9th Column, 2014) belongs to the art of Liz Magor, who has used the tree form in past work to hide things, but in this instance has hidden her concrete tree amongst the Onni Group's forest.

Whether Magor's concrete tree is a support or a decoration is unclear. Whether there were ever living trees like this one (a Douglas fir?) at this site is impossible, given that False Creek, prior to the First World War, stopped not at Main Street but a mile east of it at Clark Drive. (The area between Main and Clark was filled in by the Great Northern Railway.)

As for the title of Magor's work, it brings to mind Spanish Nationalist General Emilio Mola's reference to an insurgent group -- that while his four columns of soldiers marched on Madrid, a sympathetic "fifth column" lay in wait.

So, is Magor's concrete tree subversive? I suppose it could be if you accept the ambiguity of its presence -- if it is there in support of its building's upper floors or if it is strictly decorative. Indeed, it could -- and should -- be both. But the quest to know will only have us knowing more about the construction of our city, and that, as they say, is a good thing.