Bird

Thorax

Elevator

I listened to my memory. Words sprung up: bird, thorax, elevator, each having a common denominator: cage. One observes a birdcage, feels the movements of one’s ribcage, or the sudden thrust inside an elevator cage. When capitalized, the root-word evokes the thoughts and works of a great sound artist: Cage. John Cage!

In probing this memory, certain audiovisual or acoustic recollections were resurrected: listening to the songs of birds, the breathing sounds of the human body or the hold of a ship, the sounds of rising in an elevator or those suggested by an immaterial sculpture. As far as I can remember, this word-memory is chronologically nomadic—with the twenty years of Avatar as my reference point—and geographic. It then becomes aurally nomadic, taking me to places like Amos, Baie-Saint-Paul, Shawinigan, Havana, Venice and, obviously, Quebec City.

Here then, are the three words: bird, thorax, elevator.

Bird

Eight years before this, in 2005, I was strolling through the Saint-Roch mall, which at the time covered rue Saint-Joseph, trying to track down the exhibitions and other installations presented there by the Manif d’art. While passing by a public cafeteria, I heard the song of birds—without seeing any of the creatures—which infiltrated my thoughts, raising some doubts at the same time. I discovered that these songs were part of Caroline Gagné’s Percer le jour, which discreetly reproduced these cries that we hear at dawn, along with the chirping of birds in cages that brighten up domestic settings. Then, during the appearance of Quebec artists at Habanart in Cuba in 2008, I was able to reflect upon another of Gagné’s installations, L’Occupant, once again through this aerial imagery. It was set up near a large, half-open French door, letting out the sounds of sunny, cheerful birdsong.

In the fall of 2007, I entered one of the immense disused buildings of the Cité de l’énergie in Shawinigan, where the National Gallery of Canada was presenting a large-scale summer exhibition, taking over from the Festival de théâtre de rue (1997-2006). I found myself between two impressive aviaries with wire cages. Each was filled with starlings from different regions: some from Quebec, some from Ontario. Le problème belge, by guest artist Carsten Höller, was based on the story of eighty of these birds being released into New York’s Central Park in 1890 by Eugene Schieffelin, a wealthy manufacturer. This caused a massive and unexpected proliferation of starlings on the continent. Since the species has the ability to reproduce the sounds of its environment, including those of humans, in a song with a wide range, and since the two groups of birds presented in Höller’s work imitated each other, I was confronted with a mixture of fabulous sounds, echoing the realities and linguistic dynamics of Quebec and Ontario (French/English) and Belgium (French/Flemish).

Thorax

Our ribcage follows the rhythms of our inspirations and exhalations, and we can hear this vital, incessant movement. It leads us into an inner listening, to meditation and concentration, as did the confidences of a photographer-performer I had invited to Identités et remplacements at the 24th Symposium international d'art contemporain in
Baie-Saint-Paul in 2006, as well as a performance by a young Polish artist at Le Lieu in Quebec City on April 6, 2013. These two events allowed my ears to grasp the liminal moment that arises in performance art. The liminal moment that is found at the threshold of perception, barely perceptible, a moment characteristic of many of these art-actions that are the body-material, the body-gesture and the body-sound that constitute the act of breathing. The artist “hears” his concentration, however briefly. Before acting, the ribcage breathes in and out. We know that. It is with the Acadian photographer Mathieu Léger that I exchanged these reflections.

Now I am at Le Lieu in Quebec City, attending Fais où tu es, pratiques contextuelles polonaises. Przemyslaw Branas, the youngest of the invited performers, appears with a dead bird in his hand. As a text is read in three languages by audience members, the artist flexes his thorax, absorbs the wind from the pages of the manual he holds in his hands, shakes his arms in vain. In so doing, he is expressing Joseph Beuys’ notion that humans can learn from animals, just as the bird learns how to fly from the wind. It will require patience. In the flipbook held by the performer, however, we seem to hear the beating of the bird’s wings.

Humans, like birds, fly. Do boats breathe like whales? For philosopher Michel Foucault, the boat is a “floating piece of space, a place without a place that exists by itself.” Its deck, cabin and hold conceal creakings, gratings and the humming of engines. With steel instead of bone, its floating skeleton moves, rocks back and forth. I heard this—shook with this—when first experiencing Caroline Gagné’s Cargo at the 12th Mois Multi (Sonoptique) in Quebec City in 2011. Using slightly stylized sounds to poeticize and intimatize the listening experience, the artist’s immersive installation reconstructs her Atlantic crossing from Charlestown to Antwerp aboard the massive MSC ILONA with its heavy cargo of containers.

Elevator

Gliding through the air, rising up against gravity, ascending to the skies—these were fascinating subjects in mimetic theory (bird-man), mythology (Amerindian thunderbird, the Greek figure of Icarus, Christian angels), spiritualism (approaching God, going to heaven), but also in science (balloons, missiles, planes, spacecraft) and mechanical engineering (towers, skyscrapers, elevators). This observation first came to me after experiencing Anish Kapoor’s Ascension, which I pondered at the 54th Venice Biennale’s Illuminazione in 2011. This site-specific installation by a master was striking in its quintessential ability to reveal what “unites the earth and the sky,” to embody the notion of immaterial, spiritual elevation. In total harmony with the “cult” site in which it was presented, it featured an ingenious suction mechanism that thrust a spectacular column of smoke into the dome of the San Giorgio Basilica. “In my work, what is and what seems to be often becomes blurred. In Ascension, for example, what interests me is the idea of immateriality becoming an object, which is exactly what happens here: the smoke becomes a column… Ascension signifies growth, upward movement and spiritual—but also physical and material—evolution.”

In 2008, Renée Gagnon’s Symphonie des carabines was presented as a sound excavation by Avatar in the elevator of the Méduse complex. While recently taking this elevator up to the Avatar premises, other reflections on the forms of listening came to me: I thought of the returning geese that are shot down by the rifles of hunters; I imagined the school—which is occasionally the site of assaults—as being similar to a thorax that breathes through the teaching of the arts, as reflected by an introductory sound art class given by Mériol Lehmann at the Joseph-François-Perrault Secondary School, which totally captured the attention of my son Louis, who was born, like Avatar, in 1993! Finally, I was thinking of the scrollings operated with a touch of the finger, from top to bottom, on a computer screen—like the operation of an elevator—when consulting the Avatar archives and seeing the names of friends, artists: Pierre-André Arcand, Diane Landry, Jocelyn Robert, Alain-Martin Richard, Boris Firquet, James Partaik, Émile Morin, Fabrice Montal, for instance. 

Cage

Borrowing the tagline used by British secret agent 007 for fifty years—when asked his name, he replies with the inversion “Bond, James Bond”—and applying it to the title of this text celebrating the 20th anniversary of Avatar, I have attempted to show the importance of sound in the “indiscipline” of current artistic practices. Art is “in”: interdisciplinary, intergenerational, international, interrelational, interactive and intermedia. It opens itself up to meditation and reflection—and is action. This is what one discovers, moreover, by revisiting the masters, thinkers and artists, such as the one who made silence the condition of all sounds: Cage. John Cage!

Guy Sioui Durand
Tsie8ei
8enho8en
Sociologist and art critic, independent curator