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Ken Lum’s new works at the new CAG raise a number of important theoretical questions with regard to class, the signification of art, and the semiotics of multiculturalism. The pieces are composed of a low-grade type of signage, combining a generic-looking commercial signifier (as in Amir, Jim and Susan, Mondo Nudo, etc.) with a type of tracking for loose letters, in which the trackings themselves are combined messages associated with such businesses (respectively, say, "Closing Out Sale Everything Must Go," "Clean & Comfy Rms," "Tues: Wet T Wed: Jello") as well as more personal/political messages(1) ("Moving Back 2 Eritrea", "Sue, I Am Sorry Please Come Back," "Say No to Racism & Homophobia").
But even this cursory accounting of the works—there are seven in all—overlooks Lum’s insistence on foregrounding the multicultural forms of small business, particularly such "low" commerce as restaurants or hair salons, with their oversignifying value of diasporic communities and a concomitant solidarity posited with the sexual (strip bar and motel?). There is a historical reason for such solidarity, I’d argue—from the racist fears associated with African American males or Chinatown as site of "white slavery" to a more mundane mixing of the ethnic & the sexual in my local strip bar, Club Paradise, opposite Kingsgate Mall, which offers eggnog wrestling over Christmas, a Latino disco, and has featured graffitti saying "fuck vietnammers & white trash."
But I’d like to turn, for the remainder of this review, to more theoretical matters: the ontological status of the signs as art—how this is constructed, perhaps, via the system/structure of the gallery—and what we are doing when we look at these signs.
Drawing on the thought of Pierre Bourdieu and Arthur C. Danto, how do we know that these assemblages, these sculptures, these installations, are art? We know for three reasons, I’d argue: first, because of the dialectics of their construction, or how they combine the ethno-sexual-political with the commodified commercial; second, because of their status in an art gallery, and specifically in the (new) CAG; but, most importantly, because of the contradiction between that first dialectic and the second—that is, because while the signs posit a conflict of degraded signage and communicative message, they do this in a way that then conflicts with the sublimated contradictions of the CAG as elegant/high art space in a condo development. There is no question of the various signs in the CAG that thank donors, developer, and community—there is no question of the semiotics of those signs, no ambiguity in their meaning, no desire to use low forms. I’m not positing some literalist Hans Haacke intervention here—but rather pointing out the fruitful contradiction between Lumishness & CAGishness (a contradiction that no doubt artist and gallery are fully cognizant of, although judging by the gee-whiz coverage by the Vancouver Sun, perhaps not their reviewer).
And what of our view, our looking, our gaze? Such art, if it is to work, must make us aware of our bodies, must make us self-conscious in a fully dialectical way as much as the ball bearings on the floor of the Koh exhibit require us—or at least me—to "take our bearings" more carefully. For looking at signs in a gallery entails some different positionality than, say, driving by them on Kingsway (here I acknowledge Michael Turner’s social geography-as-critique). Now, objects of perusal, of the lingering & knowing performance that is the gallery-goer’s prerogative, these signs speak not of their context but of their lack of context, their a-sociality in these brand[ed]-spanking-new surroundings. And for art to speak of whence it comes as well as where it sits—certainly this is almost too much to hope for?
1. Michael Turner, in his illuminating catalogue essay, points out that the messages contain "information some might consider too private (political opinions, domestic problems) for public view" [p. 13]. Here the dialectics of Lum’s/Turner’s texts become apparent; for if opinions on public matters are, in our late capitalist age, considered to be private (as in that old admonition, don’t discuss sex, religion, or politics, and yet what an odd triumvirate that is)—just as, pace Oprah etc., private matters are now public, what does this signify but the failure of our public sphere to be a democratic space (for surely, if we are afraid to publicize our views on Islam or homophobia, we have succumbed to a notion that only the mass commodified signs of Hilfiger or Nike are "safe" enough to publicize, to associate with out bodies)?
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