Telling Details: Liz Magor (2020)

I wrote this text for a book of Liz Magor’s writings that was published fall 2022 in Concordia University Press’s TEXT/CONTEXT: Writings by Canadian Artists series. I deemed it insufficient to the needs of an introduction and wrote a completely different text.

[Illustrations are after the notes.]

Telling Details

No doubt you are aware of the proverb by the ancient Greek poet Archilochus, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Well, Liz Magor is a hedgehog and I am a fox. I’m not sure, then, why the artist chose me to write this introduction. Was she supremely secure in her belief, as Isaiah Berlin writes, that the proverb “may mean no more than that the fox, for all his cunning, is defeated by the hedgehog’s one defence”? [1] She would still worry, though. Surely, she would know that we would worry two different things. Like the animal in Kafka’s story, “The Burrow,” she would worry about the integrity of her overall system, fixating on the security of her enclosure, whereas I would worry its entrance, snuffling with my muzzle through the debris that hid it and, once exposed, left the whole enterprise vulnerable. A devouring interpretative attack would follow. For a system there must be one interpretative way in. Maybe she would welcome this entry, though no sign would be given. No sign of welcome, “enter here.” Rather, “look over there.” This ploy would be the function of the false entrance, the decoy or lure away from the real one. I would fall for it. But counter-intuitively, I would worry this false entrance, not the “real” one. I would worry its falsehoods because, after all, deception would be the right way in. In the end, deception was her system.

Maybe Liz Magor was a fox, after all. Cunning. What was it Flaubert said about Madame Bovary? “Where could she have learned this depravity, so deep and so dissembled that it was almost incorporeal?” [2]

It all started out so promising. So frank, so corporeal, so to speak. What went wrong? Or, rather, it all seemed so straightforward from the beginning. A program seemed set from the start. There were four boys and a girl. There was production and then there was reproduction. There was agreement between the two. Whether a case of genetics or society, this agreement naturally could be demonstrated. Liz Magor constructed machines to prove, or to convince herself of, this agreement. Four Boys and a Girl, for instance. Four Boys and a Girl (1979) pressed out somewhat similar forms from its constraining apparatus. Both cause and effect were evident. Yet, while the machine constrained the material, the title opened it to a story.

This was typical of feminist art of the time, even more evident in the sculptural processes Magor employed. Repetition (or classification) was not just a formal device systematically effecting the outcome of an abstract system. Process was personal. Think Liz’s own family position in a series of four boys and a girl. Her material manipulation suited some subjective need: “to objectify some history of a life, or at least the life of a body and the process of change that affects that body.” [3] Right at the beginning of her career she admits, “I’m always looking for comfort in a world disturbingly subject to change…. While I can only parallel the events of a natural history, there is modest consolation in effecting a real change in the material of the work; forcing it to form, to repeat, to reorder its appearance.” Her modest consolation, though, ended in insecurity, her stories mere accessories: “For while I use this work to make manifest some aspects of a personal story, I find that I have simultaneously manufactured my own competition as the pieces themselves take the opportunity to manifest their history, their own generation and transformation.” [4] If works’ formation followed rules, their ensuing history was unruly.

Maybe given time, one could trace this unruliness to some propensity that a story itself would reveal in its telling. Take, for example, Dorothy’s story, Dorothy who always weighed 98 pounds, except when she didn’t.

Magor takes Dorothy’s story at full measure and creates a portrait of her in Dorothy – A Resemblance (1980-81), literally weighing her in the parsing of her story set out on the four metal tables that constitute the piece. (The tables are sprung like measuring scales and weighted in lead casts that comprise Dorothy’s weight at the moment.) With the story locked in lead, the work itself no longer suffers deterioration. Perhaps it is now no longer the work that gets away from Magor, but the story itself—something not immediately evident but aberrant that shadows or haunts what is given there: “the Dorothys of aberrant weights.” Those were the Dorothys who oddly were “close but not-quite me,” Magor related Dorothy admitting in “Like a Tune.” [5] What transpired in a story might now be out of tune—familiar but not quite right. Identity might no longer be configured and confirmed in Magor’s sculptural objectifications of the history of a body but prefigured in stories, where resemblances were hard to recognize, being faint emanations that slowly emerged like details from photographic emulsion. Signals were faint, signs feint.

There was an added caveat to Dorothy’s story, another resemblance between her condition and Magor’s practice: that these signs might not be recognized. Such was Dorothy’s case, where an agreed-upon distress signal was misconstrued and she was barely rescued from a wasting illness.

If a story was no longer accessory but preponderant, so, too, might Magor’s own writing signal themes, whether details there are telling or not. Telling of herself or not.

“Auto Portrait” (1990) may be such a text because, after all, “auto portrait” is the French translation of “self portrait.” What was Magor telling us about herself in this text that is given the added weight that it was written for the sixteenth anniversary publication of the Montreal feminist gallery La Centrale (Galerie Powerhouse)? It seems, however, that, she is not the subject but rather a series of women who had devoted their lives as accessories to men, modernist literary masters (Eliot, Joyce, Beckett), to whom they had served as secretaries and wives. Magor interrogates photographs of these pairs (sometimes there were barely enough to examine) to find some agency in the women, but she is reduced to a parody of the “codes of fashion” describing their outfits—with emphasis on details, accessories. No dismissal of fashion is implied here; rather, fashion may be a quiet rebellion, a “critical alternative.” “Fashion’s qualities are best enumerated in a kind of inverted list of what modern art is: fashion is not private, it is substantial and representational, and its trajectory is always described in full public view.” [6]

The telling detail for me in this text, contrarily however, is, right at the top, Magor’s description of Samuel Beckett’s overcoat, a “felty swaddling” that saved Beckett from a knife wound, that the arrival on the scene of his future secretary/wife Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil only seconded in driving the killer off. [7] Only a couple years later, in “Home and Native Land” (1992), Magor’s defense in the chill of the appropriation wars, she figuratively described her “winter coat” as the ironic mask of the captions to a “private and personal project clothed for public exposure,” namely Field Work (1989), the work that got her in so much trouble. [8] If she chose, Beckett’s overcoat could only be loosely inhabited: “What’s more dangerous, however, is being too right—conforming so closely to the host’s shape and movement that something symbiotic develops: the perfect fit, a shared dependency. This becomes your niche, and you dwell, forever invisible, forever aggrieved, deep in the heart of your oppressor.” [9]

It would be easy to turn irony on those who live in another and inhabit their host’s costumes as acts of sincerity, even having fictionalized them. This would be the case for the practitioners of living history, hobbyist re-enactors of the American Civil War or North American fur trade and Indian wars. Magor dedicated nearly a decade re-enacting their photographic equivalent in silver-gelatin prints. This was too much effort to be merely ironic. Thus, her writing of this period could be treated as extended captions whose tone is more quizzical than dismissive. It attempts to answer the question of the emotional, not recreational, investment of “players in a game of hide and seek. They hide by living imaginatively in another era. I seek, looking for what drives them to escape their time.” [10]

Her photographs themselves inadvertently play along, the medium’s own technological advances revealing the contrary inadequacy of mimicry measured against timeworn images. “A kind of ungluing of the parts of the image takes place showing a gap between authenticity and artifice,” she later says of her Field Work photographs. [11] It is always a question of what a detail tells. “Great pains are taken with detail. But for all the attention, it is detail that ultimately undoes the illusion.” [12]

Yet, re-enactors aren’t at all duplicitous. “Most of them don’t assume that a costume is the same as a persona. In fact, their efforts lead more toward expression than concealment.” [13] But for Magor, there is “something else that makes me uncomfortable.” It is the worry what other, personal, histories might be disclosed—the way she sometime sees her gestures as uncanny mimicry of her parents. “The feelings that accompany this experience are disturbing, a mixture of awe and disgust.” Eventually she dismisses the whole social enterprise of living history as a “folly,” but here she wonders whether “the costumes, the buildings, the gear and all the retold tales are really part of an elaborate ruse.” Does innocent escapism mask an unconscious delusion? “I get a little closer to the source of my discomfort, but I’m still left wondering what anxious psyche this stratagem is meant to conceal.” [14]

Concealment itself, perhaps.

The escape route from the banalities of re-enactment’s repetitions might only be its inversion. Turn the costume inside out in order to “render it domestic” and sound the retreat. Solitary retreat might possess the same articles of faith as a forward march. “Whatever the cause, the instinct to pull into the shell is strong. Introversion seeks its form.” [15]

When once a uniform’s “bits of braids and baize that allow the player to toy with his vulnerability” provided the “protective exoskeleton for a tender organism,” [16] Magor sought more secure shelter in the form of a series of works produced in parallel to her re-enactor photographs: Cabin in the Snow (1989), Messenger (1996), and One Bedroom Apartment (1996). “With the threat of invasion seeping through our walls, we dream of solid enclosures. Turning inward for comfort, we form a carapace to shield our soft center.” [17] Cabin in the Snow is as cute as a button, diminutive in its bed of fluffy fake snow, with no tracks to it but its owners cozy inside, its pristine inaccessibility reinforced by a pane of glass, which leaves the scene forever untouched and ideal. “The pioneer cabin [was] the rudimentary unit of a growing settlement, a bulwark against the wilderness… Today’s cabin is different. It is solitary, positioning other people as the threat and the wilderness as solace.” [18] If Cabin in the Snow is mythic, Messenger’s real log cabin is menacing, realistic as a rogue re-enactor turned Unabomber hoarding weapons and supplies in his wilderness redoubt, a fort of sorts. We are the unwelcome neighbours, peering from outside, rattling the locked door.

Yet the appearance of a similarly featureless white dog, emblematic of our core vulnerability, faintly huddled and sleeping in Messenger and One Bedroom Apartment shows what we share with the recluse: we are both ciphers in search of signifiers to lend identity to our everyday lives. “Adept at mixing semiotics with subjectivity and dependent on the virtual worlds thus created for a defining notion of self,” Ralph Lauren might provide the “rustic” accents while we lay in the provisions. [19] “Language has changed places with experience, promising lives that seem limitless,” but it could all just pile up like the heaved-out stored furniture in One Bedroom Apartment. [20] Maybe we won’t go so far as the recluse, but “we want a world inside of a world where we feel welcome and safe.” [21] Yet as far as vulnerability goes, it is only a small step from shelter via storage to street.

Later in 2002, Magor wrote about a “heaved out” inversion that befalls an ordered and unquestioned storage system, where what upholds collapses: “when there is a shift, an emptying out, a move or a collapse, the layers [be it bookshelves or cabinet drawers or the house itself] move away from each other, revealing their insubstantiality, their provisional and pathetic identity.” [22] There was a moment, it seems, when Magor welcomed this inversion, even provoked it perhaps. There had been too much accumulation. Too many details, too many provisions had piled up during the re-enactor period. It was time to strip down to the basics, to the bare essentials, with nothing but Beckett’s overcoat, so to speak, for protection.

Exposed, the bare life, nonetheless, needs concealment. With no wilderness cabin to withdraw to, a fugitive must hide in plain sight, such as we find evidence of in Hollow (1998-99), a rotted out cedar stump with a sleeping bag stashed inside, except, other than the actual sleeping bag, the log has been cast in polymerized gypsum. Here detail conceals, rather than reveals.

In turn, flight’s lesson in deception could be domesticated, brought home, such as in the 2001 sculpture Double Cabinet (blue). This sculpture and others like it hide habits one might want to conceal but need their resources cached close at hand to surrender to at will: liquor, cigarettes, junk food. Deceptively mimicking piles of cotton towels, here the blue polymerized gypsum shell secretes real cases of beer.

These sculptures were a revelation for Magor, or, at least, their casting technique, which began with Hollow, was. The technique is uncannily like the photographic process of pulling a print from a negative. The inside-out world of the mould invites the world back in, not as an image as in photography, but as a “real” thing. [23] Happy Liz! No more deceit. Or, at least, the deceit was palatable, palpable. A return to the real, not the ersatz. Not the costumed camaraderie of re-enactors, the outer envelop of costuming pretending association, but a mere mute thing clinging, cleaving to the world. It answered her need, too, to cleave to the world.

Magor makes objects but, of course, she thinks about them, too. Maybe “object” is the wrong word here since it implies an orienting subject and a relation between the two that is always disposed in a hierarchy of use. Objects serve our needs. Objects exist variously on a continuum of our desiring and having (and then discarding) that lends them their value depending on our possession of them. Some objects, as we have already seen in Double Cabinet (blue), mainline desire and are the epitome of its expression. The essence of desire for Magor, a non-smoker by the way, is the cigarette. The elegant cigarette exhausts itself in its service though its butt leaves a distasteful residue.

Within the clutter of what surrounds us, Magor has tidied up a bit, intellectually that is, in undertaking a classification of things. Objects, for her, belong to a class system stratified along the lines of privilege and servitude. She writes, “I look at objects in the world, noting that some enjoy privilege while others are made to serve.” [24] For example, in spite of being filigreed in silver, serving dishes are condemned by their very name. They belong to the servant class. Signifying the entropy of the end of a party, Stack of Trays (2008) is an emblem of excess seen from the bottom, in its waste no different from the opulence of a seventeenth-century Dutch still life, a memento mori where in last matters everything is equal: piled trays of cigarette buts, candy wrappers, bottles of spirits, a dead rat, etc. Magor notes, “Casting things from different categories, in the same material, and often in the same casting event, renders them equal and I guess that was the interest; leveling disparate things (cigarette butts = dead mouse) by making them one object.” [25]

Magor asks us to reverse point of view by focusing, not on the object, but the thing, that is, on the thingness of the thing, as separate from us as possible, as wordless as it can be. The thing, though, still comes freighted with our subjectivity. So for the last near couple decades, Magor has been stripping things of their stories and draining them of their affect. But, of course, this stripping and draining is also part of the work since we always resist any independence of the thing, seeking instead its flattery of our needs. This is why Magor is interested in things that are “full and empty at the same time. Full, thanks to the relentless production of ‘meaning’ within a culture, and empty due to the persistent failure of things to hold on to those intentions.” [26] Articles at the end of their lifespan serve her purpose best, those whose affect is depleted and influence negated since we now treat them as garbage, as mere disposable things. The lack of empathy on our part is significant still: what we give, we can take away. Yet what remains as residue uncannily restores the thing to itself, as damaged as it might be. This mute uncanniness drew Magor’s attention.

“In theory, humans charge things with significance, inflecting them with cultural code. But in reality the value of objects preexists us and is mutable, based on how we find them.” [27] It’s not just that Magor wants to give back some love “to restore a range of emotion to these sad things, in order to ameliorate the passionless desire that created them in the first place.” As an artist, she wants to address the gap, “the unmeasurable space between the thing as it is and the thing that appears.” In the potentiality of this space that we command as consumers, strangely “all laws of physics are suspended. The weight, the mass, the volume, are nothing. The body is nothing.” [28]

Weight, mass, and volume are the sculptor’s stock-in-trade, but they are not necessarily only abstract concerns, as figurative sculpture demonstrates. Magor’s sculptural things are firstly found objects that live in the forms they happened to be born into, with their long legs and floppy ears. Magor doesn’t restore them to an underlying essence or pristine condition in order to turn them into sculpture. In fact, Magor doesn’t make them into sculpture so much as lend their damaged forms a sculptural life. She offers them a role within sculpture, not as mere props but as agents. Like the hardworking, “cliffhanging” bunny in V (2017) securing a sweater from a precarious fall, they have a job to do. Given a new life, these rescued objects reciprocate. They join. They join in sculptures of reciprocal care. Liz Magor ended her 2018 Stonecroft lecture by affirming, “If I ignore the typical ‘subject uses object’ relationship I can make sculpture with one part caring for another part, and arrange for material to know material. I can give objects agency or allow them to be disinterested in us; turn their faces to the wall, house them in sealed boxes and obscure pouches. I can take the human out of the story to mount a theatre of things.” [29]

NOTES

1. Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox, second edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 1-2.

2. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Penguin Books, 2010), 246.

3. Liz Magor, “Production, Reproduction,” (1980).

4. Ibid.

5. Liz Magor, “Like a Tune,” (1981).

6. Liz Magor, “Auto Portrait,” (1990)

7. Ibid.

8. Liz Magor, “Home and Native Land,” (1992).

9. Ibid.

10. Liz Magor, “The Forces of Wolfe and Montcalm,” (2000).

11. Liz Magor, “House Plant,” (1996).

12. Liz Magor, “Military Through the Ages,” (1994).

13. Liz Magor, “Pour la suite du monde,” (1992)

14. Ibid.

15. Liz Magor, “White House Paint,” (1996).

16. Liz Magor, “Military through the Ages.”

17. Liz Magor, “Messenger,” (1996).

18. Magor, “White House Paint.”

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid.

22. Liz Magor, “Faint,” (2002) The ultimate heaving out, of course is death, “and in that file I would place the bulk of my work.” See Liz Magor, “To Liz Mulholland,” (2015).

23. The technique is Magor’s invention. Since a silicone rubber mould carries static electricity, when Magor selectively brushes the interior of a mould with dry pigment the colour holds in position and bonds to the casting medium, and thus a realistically coloured “object” appears as the ensuing cast.

24. Liz Magor, “Statement for Capilano Review,” (2012). “If I invent a class system for textile products, I would probably put dresses at the top and towels at the bottom. Towels are like trays and dishes. Does that make dresses like cigarettes and candies? Dresses are princesses. Anyhow, I’m pretty sure that towels, sheets and blankets are like cutlery, dishes and trays; a kind of servant class.” Liz Magor, “About Blankets: Kings and Queens,” (2011).

25. Magor, “About Blankets: Kings and Queens.”

26. Liz Magor, “Stonecroft Lecture,” (2018)

27. Magor, “Statement for Capilano Review.”

28. Magor, “Stonecroft Lecture.”

29. Ibid.