Moving Through Time and Space

— a selection of video works by David Tomas

From February 26 to April 24, 2021

Moving Through Time and Space* brings together a selection of David Tomas' (1950-2019) video works, from the earliest to the most recent, and aims to draw a trajectory that opens onto the many ramifications that span throughout the artist's body of work, without forgetting his writings and other often unclassifiable manifestations. Far from a retrospective, the works presented retrace three significant axes of the artist's practice, focusing on the moving image: firstly, his relationship to conceptual art of the 1970s, associated with his research on the history of science, manifesting tangibly in two older works, originally shot in 8 mm. This is followed by his investigations, through dual screen video animations, into the documentary and historical status of the single image — and its lacunae — which allow him to envisage the form that a new experimental cinema could take in the pursuit of a non-narrative history — an avenue of research that Tomas will explore by affirming photography as a figure of history's contradictions and paradoxes, since every detail revealed by a given photograph points to the absence of other details. He will further explore this idea of post-cultural and post-historical mechanisms in his series Lots by using the art economy to make a new — and vast — space for transcultural research.

The present project is thus an incursion into David Tomas' work as much as a recognition of the singularity of his thought process and the particular tendency of his work to put forth paradigms which reflect significant social, economic and technological changes. Change, necessarily, involves a moment of transition that reveals the moving space that the artist has often associated with the rite of passage, and for which moving images prove to offer an eloquent transposition. For Tomas, although the work acquires a fixed form, it is at the confluence of different systems of representation that it attests to its past, its history, its future and even its anticipated form.

Strangely enough, the current pandemic, by nature of the imperatives it presents, invites us to reactivate some of the leitmotifs or conceptual postures so characteristic of Tomas' practice. The exhibition risks at all times being kept at a distance from the spectator, and might only exist through some form of mediation, whether by way of the gaze of others or through its export onto a platform outside its place of exhibition. The object and the human both occupy a liminary zone, outside of their respective systems of reference. An invitation, therefore, to examine the in-between, this place of transition, or even mutation, propitious to the creation of a new object which, as Tomas said, would belong only to itself, free, since not dependent on its initial or final point.

Under this premise, Dazibao has chosen to adopt an angle for this exhibition that brings together the approach and attitude that has permeated Tomas's entire work — his life. A practice that has asserted itself as undisciplined and which, even when constrained by institutional, technological or socio-economic parameters, emerges and proves itself.

Moving Through Time and Space will exist in various forms. The exhibition will be presented within our walls and as much as possible, will offer this unique experience of the coexistence of works in a given time and space. In turn, and each for a limited time, the works in the exhibition will also be presented online. Finally, the exhibition will serve as the raw material for a reflection and video exploration by Catherine Béliveau, Emmanuelle Duret, Rosalie Jean, Manoushka Larouche, Catherine Lescarbeau and Geneviève Massé, members of the last research group led by David Tomas. The exhibition will thus be potentially inhabited at all times by the research group, and will give rise to a performed video tour of the exhibition that will bring the project to a close.

Pushing up against the limits of the exhibition as a device and its networks, between error and wandering, the known and the unknown, structure and arbitrariness, the exhibition will be examined under multiple durations, times and spaces. Moving Through Time and Space.

— F.C.

GAMMA RAYS (1975) — 6 min. 52 sec.

In the first section of Gamma Rays, a hand repetitively triggers a shutter cable release. Presumably, a photograph is being taken. All at once, the rays of a sudden burst of light make their mark and time its trace. Considering the title of the work, a link is introduced between the light of a camera and the gamma rays emitted by radioactive decay and their invisible trace (gamma rays are the shortest wavelength of electromagnetic radiation). The image of the hand is then interrupted by the words "MEMORY TRACE", which hover on-screen as a result of the rolling cinematic frames.  

In the third section of the film, the same table on which the frequency counter was placed in 1000 Seconds is now empty. It is now the depository of a memory. The spatiotemporalities of the separate works are inserted within each other and, in like manner, notions of history, counting and dating are evaluated at a singular junction between the fields of photography, history and technology. 

In addition to bringing together different disciplinary fields of knowledge, this work, as well as 1000 Seconds, is certainly related to the artist's research on the history of science and his interest in stylistic questions concerning the design of scientific instruments. 

1000 SECONDS : Five permutations on the theme of the last 200 seconds before 7:30 am, July 1916, the First Battle of the Somme (1974) — 21 min. 45 sec.

Film originally in Super-8, black and white

This early investigation of operating systems, imaging systems, and technological histories, opens with a close-up of a frequency counter recording signals or more specifically, accumulating events. The counter resets to zero after a preconfigured duration has passed, but without knowing this duration, for the viewer, the system is an indeterminable zone of speculation. 

A message is dispatched letter by letter: the Battle of the Somme, in 1916. Because there is no particular information associated with such a message, it lands as a dissociated image. A notorious fact about this battle, that is interesting considered in relation to the artist's overall approach: the place in history to which it is attributed is subject to uncertainties and fluctuates according to cultural contexts and points of view. 

About this film, Tomas has said that he read somewhere that there would have been a period of silence — about 3 minutes, 20 seconds, or 200 seconds — between the end of the eight days of preliminary bombing leading up to zero hours, 7:30 a.m. on July 1, 1916, and the advance of Allied infantry through "no man's land" towards the German trenches. 1000 Seconds attempts to "document" this silence by respecting the distance between 7:30 a.m. on July 1, 1916, and 1974. In doing so, it presents an "objective" and "exhaustive" recording of the space of silence that these seconds represent as a phenomenon that exists both within and outside of history, both within and outside of the preoccupations of conceptual art of the early 1970s, a decisive period in the artist's practice. 

Subsequently, the words "GAMMA RAYS" appear on the screen, potentially referring back to the frequency counter, possibly in anticipation of the following work of the same name.  

LOTS (2013-2018) — 26 h. 1 min. 32 sec.

An art auction brings together artworks and artifacts from different times and spaces. It is a passageway and a redistribution center. As an item is sold, its capital value explodes while the value it once carried in terms of meaning — its context, origin, or history — implodes. In a sense, it is evacuated. 

What we call a lot is also an empty space. It is a placeholder for an object to be sold and potentially, a site for economic processes. Each artwork is sold at a different price but they are all listed as lots. Such listings are hosted in the catalogue: a document that groups together the auction’s heterogeneous items in a seemingly random yet chronological order according to a visual language or branding that is imposed by the auction house and that thereafter exists as an archive of such redistribution.   

In many of the videos produced in the series Lots, sound bites perpetuate the hyper fragmented sense of history already inscribed in the event of the auction. Graphic items derived from auction catalogues fill and vacate the frame. Sequenced according to a digital algorithm, items such as the Christie’s logo, the lot, the page number, the starting price and thumbnails are stretched and pixelated into practical non-existence, making up a dislocated territory and mapping a not yet legible alternative to the art economy. 

Envisaging auctions as more than a subject matter, that is by addressing their material constitution, these works operate to critique the hegemony of this system. With the series Lots, Tomas turns the question of transcultural space towards the art world itself, asking how, especially for an artist of his generation, to continue creating critical artworks in a neoliberal art environment.

PORTAGE (2004-2007) — 5 min. 59 sec.

A sequence of drawings and photo cutouts float between two empty vertical frames. In transit, between the negative fields constituted by these non-sites, the elements accumulate ambiguity and cast off significance as they are stretched, flipped, expanded and shrunk via diverse technological mechanisms. The specificity of their form or status as anthropological objects is diverted towards a non-historical existence.

Here, the medium of drawing prompts an imagining of the draftsman: an interlocutor who sketches histories in lieu of writing or photographing them. In this way, Portage interrogates anthropological methodologies, while recalling some of Tomas' performative installations, such as The Incubator (1998) or Photography: A Word (1983).

Special attention might be brought to the mask, which in many ways stands in as the prototypical anthropological subject under the western gaze. In a critical gesture of transgression, it is spun into a stroboscope, thereby averting the gaze and by extension, the histories imposed by art, anthropology, and photography, also imitating, through the missing images, history’s shortcomings. 

For Portage, as in many of his dual screen video works, Tomas uses the photographic image as a starting point to witness events whose historical status are collectively recognized, and then to treat this document as part of a collective memory that is more dispersed and necessarily fragmented. By recognizing the image’s double status, the artist develops a cinematographic practice whose technological and documentary foundation differs in that it proposes a legitimate return —free of nostalgia — to the past, in order to define its post-documentary future.

TONY CONRAD, MAKING WORLDS, 53RD VENICE BIENNALE, 2009 (2010-2011) — 7 min. 38 sec.

Here, the camera telescopes along a scenic route, subjecting the eye to a discontinuity characteristic of digital information systems. The missing moments between photographs constitute spatial intervals, generating a spatiotemporal ambiguity that holds meaningful potential for speculative anticipation. 

As the title suggests, and as we see in the later series Lots, Tomas operates a critique both from within and in observation of the field of conceptual art, its economy and processes of circulation. Another collection of photo documents invites the viewer to reinterpret Tony Conrad’s Yellow Movies (1973), as exhibited at the Venice Biennale. This series of frames painted on frail paper that fade over time make up what Conrad saw as films with a duration that would be subject to the context and history they endure. Disintegrating the painted frames into an expression of their potentiality, Tomas eventually replaces these frames with fields of sampled colour.

Because the exhibition photographs are not stamped with the visual codes typical of photographic exhibition documentation, appearing more so to belong to the personal album of an exhibition visitor, they outline how photography is grouped and associated according to allusive and subjective links — therefore, demonstrating that networks of information no longer necessarily encode legitimate or tangible knowledge. 

PROBE (2006-2007) — 10 min. 08 sec.

Probe is a hybrid animation and the third in a series that "deconstructs" speculative virtual reality contact drawings produced by Tomas between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s. In this dual screen video, trace and document implement alternative history systems, which together propose a space for transcultural contact.  

In the channel on the right, the camera zooms up and down along the staircase of an unidentified public institution. The smooth zoom movement is interrupted as the framing abruptly changes, supplanting a cinema-style narrative with the suggestion of security footage and in turn, a more programmatic history. 

Meanwhile, on the left channel a parachutist free falls, occasionally colliding with an amorphous mass that is possibly living, possibly something else altogether. Regardless, in its inevitable vertical descent, the figure operates within a history based on its own time. Parallel to this event, semi-transparent clips of home movies barely appear: playful experiments with a once new image technology point to a history that is no longer knowable.

Probe presents as a uchronic work, which is to say that it proposes a fictitious rewriting of history. It explores a speculative historical narrative based on the relationship between the beginning of amateur cinema (it is interesting to note that the film sequence was produced in 1931 by the artist’s father, then 15 years old) and the contemporary technology of virtual reality. By reproducing the blurred relationship between drawing and photography — the beginnings of photography — Probe suggests a dialogue between disciplines, bearing witness to the changing and complex nature of the twentieth-century media landscape.  

IMPERFECT HISTORY OF CINEMA (2008-2009)
— 13 min. 45 sec.

Though the sources of the images are unspecified, they would have been taken from two photograph archives collected by Tomas. The first, from NASA, documents the training of astronauts, and the second, the construction of a Cinerama in Buenos Aires in 1959. Sequences showing (Western) innovations and public infrastructures — in progress or abandoned — alternate with images of spaces at different stages of construction, not empty, but lacking, or no longer having the desired aesthetic status. Each image appears as an instant extracted from the history it depicts which, in relation to the other images, challenges cinema’s tendency to position itself as an ahistorical discipline, thus situating the image as a field of knowledge that acts as a transdisciplinary and transcultural passageway. 

In Imperfect History of Cinema, each picture is part of a unit composed of four frames wherein the other three parts include two white frames and a grey frame of various darknesses and hues. This grey variant is the calculated zone of contact produced by the whiteness and sediments of the picture, drawing an account (i.e. imperfect history) of their co-presence. Simultaneously, the white frames, which we might see as overexposed images, institute a negation that sidesteps the histories and modes of knowledge implemented by different disciplines. 

Over almost forty years, as an artist, anthropologist, theorist, author and curator, David Tomas developed a singular way of thinking about the nature and functions of knowledge focusing particularly on the construction and presentation of knowledge and the various ways in which image technologies have and are used to transmit, structure and codify this knowledge. Prolific, his reflections developed and materialized in diverse forms but in a fascinating mesh-like continuum. At the crossroads of contemporary art history — particularly conceptual art and its radical language-based materializations —, history, media anthropology and cultures, David Tomas created works — installations, performances, drawings, photographs, sculptures — always of a brilliant formal quality while never overriding meaning. Rooted in the transculturation of image technologies and exploring the ritual and symbolic dimensions of his processes, his entire body of work paints a striking portrait of the transition from the human to the posthuman. A concept he also eloquently wrote about in numerous, substantial works, often drawing on certain striking founding sources in order to come full circle and to enable a better grasp of the subject, it’s many ramifications and it’s potential to open up unto intercultural issues, in every sense of the word..

An extension of his artistic practice and informing his writing, his work as a curator gave rise to projects which embraced fragmentation, that were out of the ordinary and without regard for linearity or chronology. In an approach reminiscent of the "cabinet of curiosities," where rigorously selected fragments meet and sometimes conflict, David Tomas conceived exhibitions which raised many questions about the economic and cultural structures of the art world and about the function of the viewer.

Operating according to complex systems of analysis and reference, interspersed with transversal readings, David Tomas's thinking was undisciplined in the sense that it is more interested in areas of contact between disciplines than in disciplinary discourse. A very free approach leading to the creation of critical models and systems involving much more than the field of art in order to foster socio-political reflection, and perhaps to lend life for the future, to the imaginary ideal he proposed of a future made of intellectual discipline, rigour, power and influence. davidtomas.ca