A solitary walker treads into the undergrowth of the forest, pulling a spool of blue half-inch plastic tape along with him. The ribbon unwinds into a perspectival line, shooting toward a moving and obscured vanishing point. The figure, dressed in overalls and crowned with a bandana, pushes foliage out of his way. The camera tracks left and right to capture the traces of the man, who is crouching, dropping down into shallow stream beds, leaping over logs, navigating between fallen and decaying trees. Sometimes there are faint signs of what appears to have been logging, and there’s one momentary glimpse of a small wooden cabin. For a time the walker moves along the gravel path formed by a power line right-of-way. The man walks into a gently sloping field of low cut grass. There is a bench with a sign placed on it. As the figure makes his way down a gravel road, a couple of errant hikers appear, fitted with aluminum-framed backpacks. The camera peers down the length of blue tape; the tape arcs and bows in the breeze before reconnecting with the solitary walker.
The viewer too is walking. It is 1970. The film, Forest Industry, is projected onto the white screen-like walls of a gallery interior. The image of the figure in the forest slowly scans along the horizon of the Gallery’s pale perimeter; the effect is to create a double moving image. The two-fold movement is created by the projector being slowly rotated by hand on a turntable positioned in the centre of the white-walled room. The figure of the man in the film is also moving, evading the gaze of the walking viewer. As the projected image scans around the full circumference of the square walls, a seated musician plays variations on a C-chord on harmonium while another player accompanies with flute.1The composer Martin Bartlett played harmonium while Don Druick performed on flute. Bartlett’s composition was called “Pulse Studies. Forest Industry was originally presented at the Vancouver Art Gallery and would later be presented at Millennium, New York in 1971 and at NASCAD Halifax in 1972 as part of “Halifax Vancouver Exchange”. The film was billed as a “movie event” on the accompanying NSCAD flyer. As the image nears the room’s full circumference, the overalls, with which the image of the walking man began his journey, disappear. In a final scene the outstretched tape is unceremoniously tied off. With that the performance that is also a film ends.
In what follows, Glenn Lewis’ early films Forest Industry, Blue Tape Around a City Block, and Four Intersections will be considered together as the Blue Square performance-films. The works in this group addresses the cross-points of labour and leisure, and the relationships between centre and periphery, mainland and island, urban and rural. The performance-films of the Blue Square series are concerned with the places in which they were made, but also with techniques of land demarcation and subdivision that subtended modernization in North America, and with a broader critique of positivism. Following the perimeter of a city block, an intersection, or a quarter square-mile of forest, the walker with tape held aloft does not so much make maps as he enacts performances of the actions that maps are based on.
The Blue Square works were not the only projects created by Lewis that incorporated the walking figure extending flagging tape through landscapes. Taping the Critics, enacted on the front steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1970, is a performance with an accompanying photograph and print where Lewis, along with the artist Michael Morris, wound two rolls of blue flagging tape around a gathering of bemused art critics. In the performance-film Alfred Taping (1970) a group of twenty-five to thirty individuals—primarily Lewis’ students from a short teaching stint in Alfred, New York—walk through the street of this small Upstate town with unwinding rolls of multi-coloured flagging tape in hand. As the performance progresses, dozens of bands of tape droop and flutter between parked cars, sign posts, roadside trees, parking meters, across streets, parking lots, and around standing human figures. Over the course of the film’s almost seven minutes, various dramas play out: approaching pedestrians duck and weave between strands of tape—inevitably, as with one mother and child, snapping the tape to make their way along the sidewalk. Confronted with this carnivalesque scene, several cars that initially come to an idling halt eventually proceed through the web of tape, slicing the impromptu bunting into masses of billowing ribbons.
Similarly, in Contingent Blue Tape Irrational Construction (1972) a series of photographs of the Georgia Viaduct construction site with blue flagging tape running between seemingly random objects such as building debris stacks and dirt piles unifies an unruly space through the presence of discretely ordered lines. Kingsway Taping (c.1972) involves multiple participants who unspool their multicoloured tape while they walk in improvised and haphazard ways around telephone poles and sign posts along a section of Vancouver’s Kingsway. This performance—a collaboration with Michael Morris and Vincent Trasov of Image Bank—shares with the latter’s Colour Bar Research an interest in situating physical manifestations of the colour spectrum in varied natural and manmade environments. While not usually called a “public artist,” Lewis considers both Alfred Taping and Kingsway Taping to be “very much public art.2Author interview with the artist, summer 2010.” These later tape pieces are participatory artworks—a couple of the earliest examples of civic space based participatory practice within Canada.
It is, then, not only in the choice of material but in the particularity of their actions that the Blue Square works address the embodied labour of early land surveying history. Like N.E. Thing Co.’s (NETCO) Circular Walk, Inside Arctic Circle Around Inuvik, N.W.T. (1969), in which a “three-and-a-half mile walk was measured by a pedometer in a modern mimicry of the surveying techniques of the historic exploratory expeditions,” Lewis’ survey is in real time.3Charity Mewburn, Sixteen Hundred Miles North of Denver, Vancouver: Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, 1999, p. 10. NETCO’s Circular Walk deployed flagging tape—a material device normally used to mark spatial boundaries in a variety of instances not necessarily limited to property demarcation—as if it were surveyor’s tape—a material device that is always ‘walked out’ in a line along a property boundary. More absurdist and multivalent, Lewis’ property defining behaviour is doubly antiquated, as new technologies of surveying were increasingly overtaking the standard techniques of ‘running line’ at the time of his Blue Square performances. Surveyed lines had been created through much of the late nineteenth century and early to mid twentieth century by carrying Gunter’s chain (and eventually lighter steel tape) along fixed compass coordinates. By the 1960s, aerial photography, electronic distance measuring devices (EDMs) were increasingly replacing the steel tape that had been used during the middle part of that century.4By 1965 the use of tellurometers and geodimeters was increasingly common Electronic distance measuring devices (EDMs) came into common use in the late 1960s. As with art practice at the time, portable video (in this case the Hewlet Packard HP 3800A) had increasingly been used in surveying. See Katherine Gordon, Made to Measure, p.301. It is this fragile—if not feeble—outmodedness of the flagging tape and its antiquated encodings onto the landscape, that gives these works an elegiac tone.
Governed by the grid, these works are fixed to, and fixated on, the axes of the perpendicular and the ground line. The shape and format of the grid would figure strongly in several of his artworks from this time such as the ceramic mural Artifact (1970), Wall Graphs (1969) which consisted of many sheets of graph paper multiplied along the walls of the Ace Gallery, and 400 Yards of Burned Paper in a Square (1970) in which a group of people carry a length of twisted paper into a square before setting it alight. The notion of ordering and measuring in basic geometric shapes undergirds many of Lewis early performances and films. Flour Piece, presented at the Vancouver Art Gallery in April 1968, as part of the Deborah Hay workshop, is a performance that proceeds to transform a circle into a square: “Walk slowly for 7 minutes, from the centre to the outside edge, changing the circle into more of a square, stopping at each complete turn. Put hand in pocket, turn radio on for 10 seconds, turn radio off… Pick up yardstick and measure circumference of the square… Stand up straight, read the dimensions aloud when measuring is completed.5The text is taken from Lewis’ copy of the script “Other Related Routes”.” Lewis links his late 1960s practice of “performing circles and squares” to his interest in the practice of raking in the Japanese garden tradition.6The source of this text is from a typed rendition of the first performance Lewis performed at the VAG for the Deborah Hay workshop. Artist’s personal collection. In the Blue Square works this Zen-like expression of primary shapes and resonant space merges with the ideas coming out of experimental dance from the period.7Indeed, the Blue Square film-performances were inspired by the ideas around dance and performance coming out of the work of the New York Judson Dance Theatre, and specifically the work of Yvonne Rainer, Deborah Hay and Steve Paxton—each of whom had traveled to Vancouver in the late sixties to perform and give workshops to would-be performance artists and would-be dancers. The performance/dance workshops were conducted at Intermedia in 1968 and 1969, with additional presentations at the Vancouver Art Gallery and University of British Columbia.” In 1969, Lewis would travel with Rainer down the west coast (after Vancouver there were performances in Oakland and Los Angeles) performing Lewis’ Canadian Pacific and Rainer’s Rose Fractions. The Blue Square works adapt many of the techniques and approaches that the Judson Theatre had become known for—including an emphasis on repetition, pattern-making, pedestrian and task-oriented movement.
Lewis’ Blue Square works address the instrumentality of space, and specifically the strategic functions of enclosure, or the cordoning off of space crucial to a capitalist system of private property, within a broader critique of positivism. The process of “scientific management” and capital accumulation becomes, in some sense, a decorative act. Lewis has described the blue of the blue tape used in his early works as variously related to Yves Klein Blue, the blue of the sky, the “unique and omnipresent blue of Cézanne” And the blue of the ocean.8Author interview with artist, July, 2010. If we are to take Lewis’ description that the blue tape related to these natural and unnatural conditions, then the running of this line around an otherwise generic block of the city and its surrounding intersections and an apparently random piece of property seems to link space to the ineffable more than to the particularities of place.
N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., Page from National Gallery Exhibition Catalog, 1969, Yellow Rope Space, 1966-68
From this perspective, the Blue Square works can be considered in the context of the influence of international practices related not only to experimental dance but also to earth art, post-minimalist practices, and performance art on artists on Canada’s west coast.9Prior to pursuing the creation of Spiral Jetty, Robert Smithson had traveled to Vancouver to work on what was to become the uncompleted Island of Broken Glass project. During one of his visits to Vancouver, Lewis drove the New York-based artist out to the impressive Iona Jetty, a narrow sliver of land that runs 2.5 miles into the Straight of Georgia. This type of industrial landscape inspired Lewis as well. Artists were increasingly working through the creation of basic geometries and linear investigations in both natural and urban settings. For example, N.E. Thing Co. had produced a number of minimalist linear outdoor artworks: Yellow Rope Space, (1966-68), which consisted of 200 feet of quarter inch polyethelyne rope stretched through a canopy of Mt. Seymour forest and Rubber Strewn over Bush in Diagonal Direction, (1966-68), in which twenty pounds of cured rubber thread, of varying lengths and thicknesses, was spread throughout a thicket of shrubs. But, if NETCO’s outdoor installations, as Marie Fleming described them, “define space as place, making the general specific,” Lewis’ works tend to move in the opposite direction.10Marie L. Fleming, Baxter2: Any Choice Works 1965-1970, Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1982, p.48. The tape pieces explicitly foreground the artist’s body and make the specific into the general. More than random actions in the landscape, Lewis’ geometries were firmly in his control and often made reference to man-made environments and ‘found’ landscapes. He was interested in the grid formations associated with recreation and industry.
At times in Forest Industry, Lewis breaks into jogging, sprinting his way through the landscape, and eventually, towards the end of the film’s circumnavigation, sheds his garments. In her 1970 review of Lewis’ film, Joan Lowndes writes that Lewis “is bare, natural man in nature, slender as the cupbearer of the gods, advancing towards the accomplishment of his mystic task, the joining of the tape to the starting point to complete the square.11Joan Lowndes, “Lewis’ Forest Industry film a hypnotic experience,” The Vancouver Sun, July 3, 1970, p.23, 10A. ” Yet, this heroic-mystic aspect of Lewis’ nudity in the film must be tempered by the fact that in Storm Bay at the time “nearly everyone wandered around naked which attracted loggers in low flying floatplanes… ”.12Brown, All Possible Worlds…, p. 83-84.
Lewis’ train engineer overalls—both a counter cultural sign at the time and signature uniform for Lewis during his performances— also point to an earlier industrial history in the district of Vancouver. The outfit serves as a guise of a blue collar street labourer, convenient while taping off the street, while at the same time it is a sign of late sixties hippie culture, suggesting the importance of leisure and non-work. The Blue Square works exists within a social context in which, following Lewis’ generation, many Baby Boomers were choosing to live more directly off the land and have alternative lifestyles. According to Karen A. Henry Forest Industry’s “surveying of property was a marking out the geometry of paradise amid the quiet forest at Robert’s Creek.13Karen A. Henry, “At Home in the Wilderness,” Glenn Lewis Utopiary, Metaphorest, Bewilderness: Works from 1967-1993, Burnaby: Burnaby Art Gallery, 1993, p.19.” The idea of paradise would figure strongly in both Lewis’ work at the time and in the cosmologies of the communal communities—Storm Bay and neighbouring Babyland—that he participated in on British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast. “The other possible description of paradise,” as Lewis writes several years later, “is an enclosed garden.14Glenn Lewis, Bewilderness: The Origins of Paradise. Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1978, p.53.” These places, like the exotic gardens he photographed years later, were clearly sites of leisure as much as they were sites of self-sustaining labour; it is pertinent to note that while it may not have been the intent of the artist to frame this particular patch of forest in Forest Industry as paradisiacal, the geographic proximity to the utopian communities of the Sunshine Coast speaks to a tension between labour and leisure that is sustained throughout this particular work and the Blue Tape works more generally.
The notion of the forest and nature itself was undergoing significant changes in the postwar period, not least through shifting notions of provincial land management. Forest Industry can be considered as a parody of the “sustained yield” policies that had been heavily promoted in the province by the Social Credit government. The concept of sustained yield, which included the systemization of tree farms and other forms of scientific management of the forest, was an attempt to assuage public concerns about ‘forest devastation’ that had become politically salient from the late 1930s through to the post war period.15Jeremy Wilson, Talk and Log: Wilderness Politics in British Columbia 1965-96, Vancouver: UBC Press, 1998, p. xv. According to Jeremy Wilson, the powerful positive symbolism associated with sustained yield in the 1960s contributed to a “drift into complacency” by environmental activists.16Ibid. , p.89. It was not until the beginning of the 1970s, that the modern environmental movement was beginning to become a serious political force. The BC Wildlife Federation (BCWF) began to publicize instances of bad forest management. Greenpeace formed in 1971. The Sierra Club and the BC Federation of Naturalists were beginning to raise awareness of the devastation caused by forestry practices. Informed by this political context, Glenn Lewis’ Blue Square works orient the problem of the city, with its increasing erosion of the possibilities of utopian living, back to the notion of land management, connecting the rationalization of the city with that of the hinterland, while signaling a new paradigm that was already under way by the late 60s.
It is clear from the opening moments of Forest Industry that it was never intended to be a film of formalist experimentation in its own right. It has none of the hazed-out bathos and existential preoccupations of, say, Stan Brakhage’s much emulated Dog Star Man (1959-1964)—another film that features a male figure clambering through densely thicketed underbrush. Quite deliberately lacking superimpositions and compound images—the “synaesthetic/kineastetic flow of color, shape and motion” as film theorist Gene Youngblood described Brakhage’s structuralist aesthetic, there is instead a matter-of-factness to Lewis’ unedited footage.17Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, New York: E.P. Dutton, p.90. Rimmer, who himself had been strongly influenced by Brakhage, and especially Dog Star Man, describes in a conversation with the author, how he recalled wanting to simply document Lewis’ performance as opposed to making any formal interventions into the final material. His outstretched arm holding the tape aloft is a gesture of purposeful though understated labour. Lewis’ at times Chaplinesque extension of the body—like some human tape dispenser—into the space of the frontier, recalls the deadpan apparent nonchalance of his earlier gallery-based performances such as Rice Krispie Piece (performed at the Festival for Contemporary Arts in 1969) and increasingly absurdist 1970s performances, such as the New York Corres Sponge Dance School of Vancouver swimming events.
Lewis’ camera perspectives create new landscapes that come into view only as the figure moves through a given space. Avoiding associations with the picturesque, the square mile of forest in Forest Industry, is made visible only through the libidinal investment of the artist “running” ribbon. Yet Lewis continually moves away from fixed perspectives as he repeatedly slips from the camera’s gaze. The camera locks in on the turned-away figure in the swift zooms and pans that trace his trajectories behind hanging boughs and thick stands of wood. The unraveling line in Forest Industry flutters and bows in the breeze, all the while playing with the viewer’s sense of perspective, and the zooming and panning conventions of the camera. Even in the loosely shot sequences of Forest Industry, cameraman David Rimmer zooms in on Lewis’ receding form, mimicking the linear extension and gathering in of the line so central to the act of land surveying.
Similarly, in Blue Tape Around a City Block, the film opens up a space of visibility—like the individual shop windows that open up micro-landscapes behind reflective glazed surfaces. The central action of Blue Tape is captured at the pedestrian level—though from the perspective of a passing automobile driver—through an improvised “dolly shot” in which Lewis’ frequent collaborator, the Vancouver writer/artist Gerry Gilbert, locks the camera’s gaze onto Lewis’ body, while being pushed in a wheelchair along the parking lanes of the city block. The walking performances of both Blue Tape and Four Intersections reveal cross-sections of culture like geological core samples. City Block and Forest Industry draw the inherent filmic tendency to make indexes or lists into the artist’s awareness that the cataloguing of territory is at the root of property making. Yet the street itself is rarely visible in Lewis’ Blue Tape performances—it is revealed instead in an accompanying set of photographs of the spaces bordering the sidewalks he traversed. These colour images depict an abject array of what Lopate describes as “the street’s biota”: crushed and soil-caked ‘to go’ containers along gutter edges, withered clumps of twigs bordering storm drains, scuffed concrete of recessed doorways, and weathered sidewalks depict a microphotography of Lewis’ boundary line.18Lopate, “The Pen on Foot…,’ p. 212
In Blue Tape Around a City Block and Four Intersections, the even rhythm of the walker against the ordered machine of the city is mirrored by the unraveling, constantly exposing film inside the camera apparatus. The tracking shot of Blue Tape literally pries open and gives a glimpse into the social frame of the street. Shop windows glide along like cells of 16mm film. In this way, the flagging/surveying tape acts as the celluloid’s surrogate, demonstrating in effect what Carsten Strauthausen has called the “structural homology” between film and city.19Carsten Strauthausen, “Uncanny Space: The City in Ruttman and Vertov.” Screening the City (eds.) Mark Shields, Tony Fitzmaurice, London: Verso, 2003. A structural parallel between film and surveying also exists, identified symbolically in the transit, a measuring device mounted on a tripod that functions like a camera–as with film cameras, transits are often referred to as though a gun, “used to shoot angles and bearings.20Katherine Gordon, Made to Measure: A History of Land Surveying in British Columbia, Winlaw: Sono Nis Press, 2006. p. 57.”
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If Lewis was part of a local milieu that included the Colour Bar Research works of Michael Morris, Vincent Trasov and Gary Lee-Nova, he also shares an affinity with the work of another Vancouver artist who was concerned than the others with the abstract conditions of the modern city.21Scott Watson has related Lewis’ Forest Industry with the collaborative works ofthese Morris, Trasov and Lee-Nova; Lewis’ filmartists’ shared with their Colour Bar Research project and interest in practices to multimedia sensorial the sensorium experiences within the gallery space and to the ephemeral geometries performed for fil. Seem: , “Urban Renewal: Ghost Traps, Collage, Condos and Squats—Vancouver Art in the Sixties.” Intertidal: Vancouver Art and Artists. Vancouver/Antwerp: Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery/ Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, 2005, p.37. Ian Wallace’s notion of the “asphalt monochrome,” evident in his photographic works of the period such as Untitled (Intersection) (1970), treats the “white line motifs” of street corners and intersections as abstract spaces. In Lewis’ Four Intersections, the corners of Dunsmuir and Homer, Dunsmuir and Hamilton, Hamilton and Pender, Pender and Homer are reproduced in the four corners of the gallery, in effect overlaying the grid of the city onto the abstract space of the gallery. As with Blue Tape and Forest Industry, Four Intersections shares a generative spatial grid derived from extending a line through space with Wallace’s Magazine Piece (1970): for Wallace, a line of adhesive tape through the pages of a mass-market magazine; for Lewis, a line of flagging tape along pre-ordained spatial geometries of a city block and rural property.
Both Lewis and Wallace are concerned with the notion of picturing temporality vis-à-vis the body in the cinema-dominated world of the late twentieth century. While Lewis does not directly engage with cinematic history as Wallace does, Lewis’ Blue Square works are aware of their own survival and re-presentation as films. Like Wallace’s foregrounding of the body within the fundamental geometries of the city, the Blue Square works posit the temporality of the act of walking (or of hiking, as industrial demarcation) in the highly regulated pedestrian non-places of the intersection (or apparently unoccupied forest). Similar to Wallace’s photographic collages like Pan Am Scan (1970) that engage with the “interface between land surface and soft screen reality” of the storefront window.22This quote is taken from Wallace’s study for Pan Am Scan (1970) reproduced in Ian Wallace: A Literature of Images (Kunstalle Zürich, Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Witte de Witte, Center for contemporary art, and Sternberg Press, 2008, p.12. Blue Tape Around a City Block and Four Intersections draw the viewer’s attention to the vertical nomenclature of street intersection space and the conceptual blocks of the city.23The phrase asphalt monochrome is taken from Wallace’s “Street Photos 1970,” Unfinished Business: Photographing Vancouver Street 1955 to 1985, Presentation House Gallery/ West Coast Line, 2005. p.216. Burnham’s refers to this thread of Wallace’s practice as “intersection as abstraction” in “Fourteen Reasons for Photoconceptualism,” Unfinished Business: Photographing Vancouver Streets 1955 to 1985. P.101. The “landscape of intersections, dead zones and suburban housing” as a definition of the “defeat(ur)ed landscape” tradition is described in “Appendix: Catalogues, Films, Posters, Videos & Other Ephemera,” Intertidal: Vancouver Art and Artists. p.45.
The Blue Square tape works and related urban photography are in the spirit of the so-called “defeat(ur)ed landscape” trajectory of 1970s and early 1980s Vancouver art that pictured the non-places and abstracted architectonics of the city. Yet Lewis, more than the artists associated with this counter-tradition, was interested in process: “I don’t believe that gesture or process is less valid than hard copy” he once proclaimed.24Here Lewis is quoted in Vancouver Art and Artists, p.263. While Lewis was likely one of the artists of the “counter-cultural tradition” (vanguardist) that Jeff Wall counterposed against the “counter-tradition,” of artists such as himself, Ian Wallace, Ken Lum, and Rodney Graham, it would be wrong to dismiss Lewis’ early art practice as wholly about a “romanticism of nature and the native” or some strictly bohemian experiment. The Blue Tape works demonstrated a deeper complexity that seems to have been obscured by his later landscape work such as photography presented in the Bewilderness: The Origins of Paradise exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1978. On the notion of counter-tradition see Jeff Wall’s “Traditions and Counter-Traditions in Vancouver Art: A Deeper Background for Ken Lum’s Work,” Witte de With: The lectures, Rotterdam: Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art, 1991, p.75. Lewis unabashedly performs his own body for viewers. For example, the camera in Four Intersections, is situated inside the primary unit (the square intersection) of the city, directed outwards, much like the viewer’s gaze in the gallery is directed out at the typical gallery’s four-sided walls which is amplified by the four projector environment of the installation. Lewis questions the act of viewership within the gallery in a way that draws spatial and structural parallels with the experience of urban space.
Such gallery-based film installations were beginning to occur with greater frequency in the late 1960s. There were a number of Vancouver visual artists experimenting with film beyond merely projecting the films cinematically onto the gallery walls as though feature films in a cinema house.25The late sixties saw increased instances of film projection within gallery spaces. Under the stewardship of then Director Tony Emery, the Vancouver Art Gallery opened up and encouraged increased contributions from across the arts, including film. In January of 1969 the Intermedia Film Marathon at the Vancouver Art Gallery invited members of the art and film communities to present their own films within the gallery’s confines. David Rimmer’s Landscape (1969) was “designed originally to be rear-projected by a continuous loop projector onto a plexiglas screen which is framed in a false wall by the traditional wooden picture frame.26Anne Pollock, David Rimmer Film, Vancouver: The Vancouver Art Gallery, 1980.” Rimmer’s Canadian Pacific I and Canadian Pacific II had been presented together—one above the other—rear projected into a specially made false wall at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria as part of an Intermedia exhibition in 1969. These were two of many new multimedia exhibitions and happenings that were beginning to appear in museums and galleries in western Canada. Yet the performative projection of Lewis’ Forest Industry was exceptional, even within the self-conscious awareness of the medium at the time. It resembles in some respects Robert Morris’ Finch College Project (also from 1969). In Morris’ film, a scene in a gallery is recorded on a camera positioned on a slowly revolving turntable and then re-projected into the gallery on that same turntable with the original scene replaced by its projection.27See Chrissie Iles detailed description of this project in Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977, New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, p.98. Yet, Lewis’ Forest Industry surpasses Morris’ piece by not only addressing notions of viewership and temporality, but doing so while addressing the museum’s larger role and implicatedness in the city.
The continuum of land clearing (the demarcation of the rural lot) and the focus on the germinal city form (the city block) found in Lewis’ Blue Square works recall Boris Groys’ critique of projected media art in the museum at the turn of the twenty-first century. Groys describes how projected media in the gallery entails the simultaneous movement of the pictures and the movement of viewers in the gallery space. This simultaneity of movement creates their aesthetic value.28Boris Groys, “Media Art in the Museum,” Last Call 1:2 (Fall 2001), p.3. Groys goes on to compare the contemporary art experience dominated by projected image as one linked to Heidegger’s philosophy of art, which draws a relationship between being, the notion of the forest clearing and the opening up of light (lichtung). When the viewer walks into the projection-filled gallery, Groys argues “the viewer walks into the clearing.29Ibid., p.5.” Yet, Groys expresses his concern for temporarily and movement endemic to projected image in the gallery: while “the pictures keep on running… so do the spectators.30Ibid., p.2.” A central strength of Lewis’ gallery-based projections Forest Industry and Four Intersections is their drawing of attention to the geometries of this continuum: the originary clearing through to the city block to the logic of the white cube of the gallery, the parallel between the moving viewer and the artist’s own tracing of the gallery context.
According to Karen Henry it was a “proprietary relationship to the landscape” that had “infiltrated” Lewis’ artwork during the late 1960s. What unites these works, she suggests, is their impulse to “mark territory—inside/outside, conscious intent superimposed on nature, on cultural institutions (the territory of the art gallery), on relationships of power (tying the critics with Michael Morris), on urban planning (taping a city block).31Henry, “At Home in the Wilderness,” p.19.” By marking these territories, Lewis’ Blue Square works and related tape pieces delineate a strikingly interconnected portrait of the general ordering of space at the heart of the North American city with its colonial origins and ongoing colonial present. Lewis’ performed lines recall what the geographer Cole Harris called “the primal line on the land of British Columbia, the one that facilitated or constrained all others. This was “the line separating the Indian reserve from the rest… the Province’s internal boundary between the desert and the sown.32Cole Harris, Making Native Space: Colonialism Resistance and Reserves in British Columbia, Vancouver: UBC Press 2002, p.xviii” In this way the Blue Square works are what W.J.T. Mitchell calls “dreamworks of imperialism” – fantasies of incorporation and accumulation.33W.J.T. Mitchell, “Landscape and Power,” Landscape and Power: Space, Place, and Landscape, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002, p. 10.
In his 1969 essay “A Literature of Images,” Ian Wallace describes what he feels to be the determinant of the new landscape of the time: “the urban, suburban and industrial environment.34Ian Wallace, “The Literature of Images,”Free Media Bulletin, Eds. Duane Lunden, Jeff Wall, Ian Wallace. Vancouver: Intermedia, 1969, no. 1.” And Wallace finishes his essay by speculating that “perhaps one day we will recognize the wilderness of the metropolitan grid.” In fact in the works Forest Industry, Blue Tape Around a City Block, and Four Intersections Glenn Lewis was after just such a recognition, and it might be well worth our while to take his embodied lines of thought out for another stroll.
Jordan Strom is a founding and associate editor of Fillip magazine. In 2008 he was a guest curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery and between 2008 and 2009 he was the Interim Curator at the Kamloops Art Gallery. In early 2009, he was appointed as Curator of Exhibitions and Collections of the Surrey Art Gallery in Surrey, Canada. He has curated recent exhibitions such as Ornamentalism: Clint Neufeld and Dirk Staschke at the Surrey Art Gallery, Surrey (2013) and Showroom at Centre A, Vancouver (2009), among others. Strom lives and works in Vancouver, Canada.