Terence Gower Was There
In 1997, Terence Gower manufactured the documentation of a fictional event: an exhibition taking place at an unidentified location in 1971, represented only by a series of acrylic wall-labels corresponding to each of the works in the show and gathered in an elegant orange fabric-covered box. Although the artist’s alleged intention was to caricature the canonization of conceptualism and the reductive periodization in art history (“art of the 1970s,” etc.), his work’s demonstrating potential did not finish there. One interesting idea underlying Gower’s 1971 is the presentation of the proverbial and suspicious immateriality of conceptual art as a tangible feature—all the more so if we observe that the work is documentation without the event, the document or material remnant thus appearing as the self-sufficient medium of fiction.
Do documents need events? That is the question that more than one reader may have asked herself when reading any history of conceptual art. The truth is that facts produce documents, and in exchange—in revenge—documents produce other facts. Documents are strange, absent-minded assistants of meaning, constantly dreaming of fooling their master, the text.
Although most accounts of early conceptual art insist in presenting the movement’s approach to art as post-medium and, above all, “dematerialized,” it suffices to take a look at the years following 1970 to observe that conceptualism was, in fact, the most subtle and versatile of artistic substances, and that in a short period of time all techniques, materials, and media, were to fall under its magical and indefinable spell. Even before some of the founding fathers of the movement returned to materiality[1], a powerful rethinking of art media through the perspective of conceptualism took place in different parts of the globe. Photography offered, among these media, an especially interesting tool given its predominant role in the documentation (read also, “illustration”) of early conceptual works. Meanwhile, it continued its technical development as a characteristically modern form of representation. A few artists in Vancouver saw the potential contained in this medium’s duplicity, and started investigating photography not as the documentary margin—or messenger, or journalist—of conceptual art, but as a medium of conceptualism in itself. Ian Wallace, a leading figure amongst this group, coined the term photo-conceptualism to define their approach, claiming photography’s importance as both “witness and medium”[2] and emphasizing the critical folds of documentary (journalistic, historical, diaristic) photography onto itself.
This was happening around 1970. In March that year, the architecture magazine Western Homes & Living featured a short reportage about the Gower home, a modernist house designed by the architect Terry Gower for him and his family in British Columbia, in 1965. The photographs of the living spaces showed the architect’s family carrying out some of their daily activities: the young mother preparing lunch or reading a book to the kids; the group at table in the family room; one of the sons, Terence Gower, playing with toys on a Persian carpet. This child didn’t yet know that, years later, in 2004, he was to produce a diptych, Kitchen I & II, to expose the striking resemblance between the image of his mother in the kitchen, as shown in the Western Homes & Living reportage, and the appearance of Mrs. Ruth Bass in a similar feature in a 1958 issue of Californian monthly Arts and Architecture. Gower could barely know about photo-conceptualism either, but his presence in the reportage is indicative of a future interest in both the myths of modernist architecture and photographic fictions. Even more so: Perhaps the evidence of his existence in the very medium that he was later to investigate led him to imply a continuity between documentation and life; a continuity that could be manipulated in conceptual ways.
The force (one may say, the logic) of that early encounter led Terence Gower to follow Ian Wallace’s tutorship during his years as an art student in Vancouver. The first artwork in Gower’s personal registry, from 1992, documents by means of a photographic series a fictional experiment in perfume-making, the “enfleurage” of an old book (an enfeuillage, as the title indicates) leading to the extraction of the volume’s fragrance. A character—whose face we will never see, although we could recognize his hands—wears the artisan’s apparel not as just another uniform of the arts, but precisely in that non-artistic, secular manner—multiple pens in the chest pocket, clean sleeves; he is surrounded by archival boxes and impeccable tools—the conceptual artist would ironically recognize as his own.
The artist-as-actor reappears in other photographs, other series[3], jumping anachronistically from screen to screen. Far from violating the historical inscription of the images, his gesture exhibits the document’s malleability[4]. In many of these photos, such as Gower’s Sculpture-Portraits (2011), this figure assumes the attitude of the modernist sculptor in the intimacy of his atelier, or the solitude of a gallery closed to the public: elegant, exclusive, magazine-friendly. The works surrounding him are no less inauthentic than the figure itself, or the atmosphere surrounding them all—that art-photography halo. However, the continuity between dimensions (documentation - “reality” - fiction) is again demonstrated in series such as Display Modern I (2007-ongoing). Carefully placed on pedestals, the generically modern sculptures offer their qualities, and their lack of them, in the same exhibition space where we, the viewers, find ourselves. The weight of these quasi-photographic objects is, also in the historical sense, undecidable. They are just a little thicker, a little harder than mirages.
Manuel Cirauqui
[1] The names of Joseph Kosuth and Robert Barry are the first coming to mind here, although many others could be invoked.
[2] Ian Wallace, A Literature of Images (Rotterdam, Düsseldorf, and Zurich: Kunsthalle Zürich; Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen; Witte de With Publishers, 2008), p. 139.
[3] See, for example, Terence Gower, New Utopias, 2010; Display Modern II (Hepworth), 2007.
[4] “Anachronism seems to emerge exactly at the fold between image and history; images sure have a history; but what they are, the movement that is intrinsic to them, their specific power—all those things appear but as a symptom—a discomfort, a more or less violent denial, a suspension—in history.” Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant le temps (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 2000), p. 25. My translation.