Susan Hiller at Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art Until Nov. 26, Suite 124, 401 Richmond St. W., Toronto
All around us, according to popular wisdom, is more of us – and we love a parade.
We are, increasingly, one roiling, relentlessly nattering mass of linked, cloud-sourced and socially mediated little communicators – a welcoming global chat room, the point-and-click defeaters of geography and cultural distinction. But capital-driven pluralism has a cost, and it is one paid by those least able to afford it: cultural minorities.
A haunting new multimedia exhibition at Prefix Institute explores this benefit/cost dynamic by looking at one of its harshest casualties – the death, by extinction, of entire languages.
Susan Hiller's The Last Silent Movie assembles 25 samples of recordings of dead or nearly dead languages (recordings dating from the early 20th-century to today) and presents them to the viewer/listener in a simple but stark two-part format, a format designed to make the visitor consider the cost of invisibility (or, rather, inaudibility).
The first half of the exhibition is a series of plainly made etchings mounted in a crisp, plain grid on the gallery wall. Each etching carries the peaks and valleys made by the reading marker of an oscilloscope (a device that marks sound waves) – if you've ever seen a lie detector scroll or a heart monitor, you've got the visual idea – and, underneath the wave lines, a translation, in English, of the phrases spoken in the various languages.
Putting the threatened languages literally under glass in the framed etchings, after feeding them through a robotic wave reader (a device that can only read sound as lifeless matter, not as something that carries meaning), turns each language into something less than human, something less a part of a culture, and thus a people, and more akin to a chemical formula or a bacterial growth. It's a chilling effect.
The second part of Hiller's project is even more spectral. Every half hour, a 20-minute video plays in the gallery, or, perhaps it is more precise to say, under-plays. The video is one long blackout with a soundtrack. Only the subtitled English translations of the voices are heard, voices recorded in an attempt to preserve an expiring language. After each linguistic sample, its name and level of misfortune can be seen at the bottom of the screen: Extinct, Endangered, Nearly Extinct, and, the creepiest, Seriously Endangered (can't it be saved?, you want to holler).
A simple metaphor, perhaps, this shrouding of the speakers, of even the devices used to record them – but that's exactly what is happening. Languages are being erased, not by growth and morphing, by new variants of the root language, but by nothing at all, a vacuum. As the speakers tell stories, sing, or lament their displacement, the screen can show us nothing, because technology has failed where it could easily have been most successful (but, of course, not very profitable).
The languages themselves, one untranslatable because all the speakers are dead, make for a gorgeous, cacophonous sound collage – a dissonant choir that includes languages that purr, a language based entirely on whistling, and languages that sound remotely familiar, such as Cajun, but remain just out of comprehension's reach.
The Last Silent Movie is an eerily prophetic work.
Chaim Pinchas Podeszwa, Yidel Podeswa, Howard Podeswa at Wynick/Tuck Gallery Until Oct. 15, Suite 128, 401 Richmond St. W., Toronto; wynicktuckgallery.ca
Themes of invisibility and abrupt erasure (indeed, murder) also permeate a multigenerational painting exhibition on offer at Wynick/Tuck Gallery. Entitled Sole of a Shoe, the exhibition presents works by three generations, grandfather to grandson, of "the painting Podeswas" – Chaim Pinchas Podeszwa, Yidel Podeswa (the Anglicized version of the family name – see above!) and Howard Podeswa.
Spearheaded by curator E.C. Woodley, Sole of a Shoe is a family story on canvas. Chaim Pinchas was killed in the Holocaust. His son Yidel survived, but spent many years constantly travelling, finally landing in Toronto. Grandson Howard, now in midlife, has been making and showing work in Canada and abroad for years. Thus, we see a kind of grim progress model in action, and the works reflect the life patterns of each artist.
There are only two of Chaim Pinchas's works known to have survived their maker: a painting of a small girl holding a chicken and a painting of a Jewish cemetery. They are both made in a "story picture" style, intentionally flat and naive, vernacular, in the manner of Post-Impressionist Henri Rousseau. They are blunt and direct, relaxed and confident. Yidel's works are far more fraught, often depicting occluded landscapes, indistinguishable terrains, and, much later in his life, fruit and food that appears to be just out of reach, as if the artist is still, decades later, uncertain of his safety. Yidel's works are also very small, occasionally wallet-sized – a byproduct of living an early adulthood in constant transit.
Howard's paintings are a whole other slippery ball of wax – pulsing with frantic strokes, liquid patches and a composition strategy that conflates spans of barren space against crammed, itching depictions of people, they are, in Howard's own words, attempts to "wrestle with the paint" (not to mention his always present family history). There is a freedom and expansiveness in Howard's paintings that would be unimaginable in his father's or grandfather's works, and yet Howard's paintings seem the least certain of the worlds they depict. Howard's works share Yidel's distrust of the tangible, the idea of anything lasting, as well as Chaim Pinchas's narrative drive.
It is said that trauma skips a generation. Bunk. Trauma mutates and regroups, finds new veins. Talent, however, is eternal.