Vera Frenkel
by Dot Tuer
I don’t know of any story that is not true.
For over thirty years, Vera Frenkel has been making multi-media artworks — by turns poignant and wry, humorous and wise — that cut to the heart of issues of identity and belonging, exile and longing. Encompassing printmaking, photographic collage, video, performance, drawing, web-art, computer interactivity, and large-scale installations, her artistic practice opens up spaces of imagination and critical contemplation through her play with multiple sites of meaning. Intertwining the visual vocabularies of the avant-garde with the narrative traditions of storytelling, her artworks are remarkable for the ways in which they challenge the boundaries of simulation, truth and fiction. At once muse and soothsayer, Frenkel uses her art to explore the cultural myths and social projections that sustain and mislead our individual and collective psyches. In the process, she has herself become a cultural mythmaker, deploying the framing devices of the video monitor and the web page to embrace the intersections of art and life, artifact and archetype.
In one of her early pioneering works, String Games: Improvisations for Inter-City Video (1974), Frenkel harnessed Bell Canada’s fledgling teleconferencing technology to connect a group of artists in Toronto with a group in Montreal, each of whom acted out patterns of communication based on the string game of cat's cradle to virtually bridge the distance between them. A year later, Frenkel produced a series of performance pieces at St. Lawrence Hall in Toronto, in which she fashioned poetry, staged tableaux and music into a spatial montage of gestures, objects and sounds. In turn, all of these works were referenced in The Big Book (1975), an installation of thirty panels of drawings, prints and texts.(1) By the late 1970s and early 1980s, Frenkel had created a series of video works about the little known Canadian author Cornelia Lumsden, who wrote a novel in Paris between the two wars and then disappeared. Lumsden emerged as Frenkel’s alter-ego, emblematic of the struggles of women artists and the condition of exile. Through the Cornelia Lumsden tapes, Frenkel’s relational aesthetics converged with an exploration of the narrative possibilities of video to blur the boundaries between documentation and fiction. Cornelia Lumsden became Canada’s most endearing and mysterious writer-in-exile, a subject of speculation and controversy that engaged experts, lovers, friends, and an audience member in Montreal who claimed Frenkel had usurped her family’s name and identity.
In another instance of the serendipitous intertwining of truth and fabrication that characterizes Frenkel’s artmaking and her life, the premiere of her videotape The Last Screening Room: A Valentine (1984) — a haunting, beautifully wrought tale of a future time in Canada when storytelling is banned along with the rain — took place at A-Space gallery in the aftermath of an illegal raid by the Ontario Board of Censors. Although the censors were in the audience the night of the premiere and poised to seize Frenkel’s videotape, she proceeded with the screening despite their intimidation. On this occasion, as on many others, her ethical stance served as an affirmation of artistic autonomy and an inspiration to the cultural community. Three years later, Frenkel made Censored: Or the Making of a Pornographer (1987), a videotape and installation whose hilarious recounting of the making of a film on the sexual habits of fleas is destined to become a Canadian classic of political satire.
In the 1990s, Frenkel produced two video installations to international acclaim: …from the Transit Bar and Body Missing, which extended her reflections on historical absence, personified by Cornelia Lumsden, to the dispersal of peoples and cultures.(2) ... from the Transit Bar, commissioned for the 1992 documenta IX in Germany, is a functioning piano bar that features the videotaped testimonies of fourteen Canadians who recount their experiences of migration and displacement. On six video monitors placed in the bar, the testimonies are orchestrated in montage fragments, with the original voices supplanted by Yiddish and Polish voice-overs and alternating sub-titles in German, French and English. Language and image, as much as the bar itself, become literal and metaphorical way-stations for chance encounters and cultural dislocation.
In Body Missing, first exhibited at the Offenes Kulturhaus in Linz, Austria in 1994, the lost artworks that Hitler stored in a salt mine near Linz towards the end of World War II are the subject of an extensive investigation and an allegory for the bureaucratization of genocide and the systematic disappearance of bodies and cultures. By piecing together archival lists and photographs, conversations overheard in cafés, rumours and eye-witness accounts into photographic montages and a six-part videotape, Frenkel conjoins the making of art with the unearthing of evidence to create a conceptually unique memorial to the ravages and losses of war. In turn, her Body Missing web site (www.yorku.ca/BodyMissing) uses the multi-faceted potential of the Internet to house her reflections on history and memory, linking her investigation of the Third Reich art thefts to stories told to the bartender in ... from the Transit Bar and to web pages of artists invited by Frenkel to mount their own inquiries and homages to lost artworks.
Frenkel’s most recent work, The Institute™: Or, What We Do for Love, returns her critique of bureaucracy to a Canadian location, and expands her use of computer-integrated text and image to create a richly-layered narrative about the plight of artists — at times hapless, at times humorous — living in a state-run retirement home. Functioning as a web site (www.the-national-institute.org) and an installation, The Institute™ weaves a tale of senior artists confined to a converted hospital building and subjected to a Kafkaesque management structure devised by down-sized apparatchiks from defunct Canadian art galleries and granting agencies. A thinly-veiled critique of ageism and the increasing corporatization of the arts in Canada, The Institute™ deploys the multiple perspectives of the residents, board and staff to question what is art and what is life and why we should have a stake in supporting artists, and not technocrats, as our cultural visionaries.
Given Frenkel’s pioneering embrace of new mediums, it seems fitting that the essential nature of her artmaking has recently been distilled on a DVD set small enough to slip into a purse. Of Memory and Displacement opens a window onto the formal innovations and intellectual depth of Frenkel’s commitment to art as a social and life-affirming practice.(3) Featuring a selection of her videotapes, documentation of her installations, stand-alone versions of her two major web pieces, interviews with the artist and critical writings on her work, the DVD set reveals the multidisciplinary reach and thematic concerns that have placed Frenkel at the forefront of artists addressing the local crossroads of a global culture. Both creator and guardian of Canada’s social imagination, Frenkel weaves hybrid fictions through a playful entanglement of storytelling and images in which art is central to how we perceive and act upon the world around us.
Dot Tuer is a writer, cultural theorist and professor of art history and humanities at the Ontario College of Art and Design. Her book, Mining the Media Archive: Essays on Art, Technology and Cultural Resistance (YYZ Books, 2005), includes writing on Vera Frenkel.
Notes
1. The Big Book is held in the Canada Council Art Bank. For an overview of Frenkel’s early performance works see: Dot Tuer, “Vera Frenkel: The Secret Life of a Performance Artist,” in Caught in the Act, eds. Tanya Mars & Johanna Householder. Toronto: YYZ Books, 2004.
2. Major catalogues produced on these works include Vera Frenkel: …from the Transit Bar Body Missing (Riksutställningar, Stockhom, 1997) and Vera Frenkel … from the Transit Bar (National Gallery of Canada and the Power Plant, 1994)
3. Distributed by V-Tape in Toronto, Of Memory and Displacement is based in part on a retrospective of Frenkel's time-based and new media works programmed by the Canadian Images Festival of Film, Video and New Media in Toronto, 1997.