A famous character who often dispenses with presentations, Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) continues to attract the attention of academics and artists alike, thus reconciling popular culture and scholarly culture. The author of To understand the media (1964), his most famous work, is the inspiration for the exhibition which opens the season at the Darling Foundry, Feedback #6. Marshall McLuhan and the arts.
The man who predicted the “global village” and who left his mark on communication theories by asserting that the “medium is the message” has developed other key concepts that have remained more discreet, such as that of feedback (feedback). Several works by the 13 artists and collectives brought together in the exhibition variously revive its content, both theoretical and physical, sometimes bordering on comfort. Flashing light and sound interference are part of the lot, anchoring the visit in an undeniable corporeality.
In its pastiche of exhibition audioguides, the tool par excellence of cultural mediation, the sound work of Julia E. Dyck introduces the visit. A monotonous voice tells us to breathe and close our eyes, to abandon ourselves in the artistic experience which, with its very Mcluhian feedback loop, activating observation, memory and imagination, provides a change of vision.
The theoretician-artist
Guest curator Baruch Gottlieb highlights this other strong idea for McLuhan of the unique power of art to understand media and its effects. Artists, he believed, are essential to humanity for its survival in this age of electronics which, through technology, overloads sensory life, creates a “maelstrom”. Art acts as a radar, penetrates the indistinguishable.
From there, Gottlieb mainly showcases the artist in McLuhan, in this sixth iteration of a series of exhibitions around the character and his legacy.
Himself a thinker and artist, the curator is a Montrealer of origin established for 20 years in Europe, where he practices as a digital specialist at the Dutch Institute of Contemporary Art West Den Haag and at the University of the Arts in Berlin. .
He presents here archival materials under display to testify to the exploratory activities of the media theorist in the field of extra-university publishing, where he was very creative. This rich section, of course, struggles to find its place among the works with which it must supposedly enter into dialogue.
Excerpts from McLuhan’s appearances on television are more popular, especially since they are subtitled in French; the translation aims, a premiere to underline, a wider audience. Sometimes funny, sometimes serious, McLuhan has participated in several programs, given a number of conferences.
The curator compares these public outings to performances through which the theoretician tested the media studied, tested ideas with shocking formulas: Marx had not foreseen that the prized merchandise of the XXand century would be information; the media coverage of the war becomes more important than the war itself…
Feminist reviews
Many works could echo McLuhan’s thought, which is confirmed in the exhibition. At Iain Baxter&, Landscape (2003) embodies the genre of the landscape by means of old cathode ray televisions animated with “snow”, to persistent cosmic radiation. The past also resurfaces in the collection of counterfeit telephones put together by the activist collective Disnovation.org; the “Prisoner Flip Phone”, “Razor Phone” and “Retro Phone” evoke the attachment to obsolete technologies.
If electric light was pure information for McLuhan, it has other resonances for Ludovic Boney and Caroline Monnet. Their majestic installation Hydro (2020) concern, recalling the links of hydroelectricity with ancestral indigenous lands.
While the !Mediengruppe Bitnik duo digs into the clandestine Web and its interactions with the legal world, Stephanie Syjuco fulfills the promise of freedom not kept by the Internet. On the wall, like the bulletin boards of yesteryear, are displayed URL addresses to tear to take away giving free access to texts whose content only emerges by reading the names: Judith Butler, Rebecca Solnit, TiqqunFrançoise Vergès…
These writings, among other feminist, anti-capitalist, and decolonialist writings, draw attention to the patriarchal biases in McLuhan’s thought. Its universalizing vision of the power of the media did not take into account inequalities based on gender, sex, ethnicity and social class. This is what the work co-edited by the former director, in Toronto, of the McLuhan Center for Culture and Technology, Sarah Sharma, proposes to expose and go beyond. Re-Understanding Media: Feminist Extensions of Marshall McLuhan (Duke University Press, 2022). The necessary publication will be launched during a symposium in August, at the end of a series of public activities linked to the exhibition.
The Darling Foundry is 20 years old