There should be a banner across the courtyard entrance to Toronto’s Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art these days reading “Welcome to Frenkeland.” Perhaps, in smaller letters, there could be “Bienvenue à Frenkeland,” or even “Wilkommen in Frenkeland.”
Frenkel, of course, is Vera Frenkel, the now-76-year-old Torontonian who in the last 40-plus years has earned a substantial following here and abroad for using a myriad of artistic practices to create liminal worlds as involving in their cerebral, modestly budgeted way as anything conceived by Walt Disney, Hugh Hefner or Universal Studios. MoCCA is currently devoting pretty much its entire Queen Street West space, including the lobby and the common area of its public washrooms, to a survey of her protean productivity. Called Ways of Telling, the exhibition, expertly curated by Jonathan Shaughnessy, the National Gallery of Canada’s associate curator of contemporary art, is the first such survey of Frenkel in Toronto in more than 10 years.
I say “survey” because, as Shaughnessy remarked the other day, a full-blooded Frenkel retrospective would need “at least 10,000 square feet” to do justice to the completeness implied by that term. As it stands, the 13 pieces/works/presentations/interdisciplinary excursions that make up Ways of Telling are an introduction to and distillation of the Frenkel oeuvre and a refresher course of sorts for those familiar with the artist’s serious mischief.
Be forewarned: This is a dense exhibition. The veteran conceptualist is a Bratislava-born Jew, the only child of a furrier father and corset-making mother who lit out from what’s now Slovakia in 1939 just as the Nazis completed their annexation of the nation.
Frenkel has never lacked for ideas – on dislocation, discontinuity and discrimination, language, bureaucracy, censorship, translation, on how fact can shade into fiction, and vice-versa. And she’s never been afraid, as Shaughnessy puts it, to “deal with five ideas at any one time.”
That Frenkel embraces not one medium but many – including video, print-making, audio, performance, photography, text and installation – is entirely in keeping with the catholicity of her concerns, thematic and aesthetic. Having made two trips to MoCCA totalling some five hours, I can tell you this iteration of Frenkeland is best experienced and appreciated at a purposeful meander rather than a brisk ramble. Yet even with prolonged exposure, there’s probably no shaking the fundamental strangeness of what Frenkel has wrought. If anything, both the constrained circumstances of the show – the proximity of every thing to everything else means you’re rarely, if ever, out of earshot of sounds carrying over from one work to the next – and the concentration the show demands only intensify the spaciness of her colonization of MoCCA space.
As the title of the show indicates, stories and storytelling have been a key part of the Frenkel modus operandi for a long time. The visitor gets two heady hits of this right at the start of Ways. The first is a 30-minute or so presentation in the lobby of two videos, one from 1979, the other from a year later, both on the Canadian-born, Paris-based writer Cornelia Lumsden. Described here as “a little-known but brilliant novelist” who in 1934 wrote a masterpiece, The Alleged Grace of Fat People, before largely disappearing from view, Lumsden was conceived by Frenkel as a fictional historic character for an equally fictitious historical series, Our Lost Canadians, that Frenkel was pretending to produce for CBC-TV. Fact – or “fact” – overtook fiction when, during a speech in Montreal on art and artifice, person and persona, Frenkel found herself challenged (or so she said) by an audience member who claimed she was a Canadian writer in Paris named Susan Cornelia Lumsden. “By what right,” this Lumsden asked, “are you using my name in your art?”
The second hit, called Once Near Water, is encountered in MoCCA’s main space. It comprises three looped versions of the same 2008 video, namely “a report” prepared by someone named Vera Frenkel for a faintly sinister bureaucracy called The Building Committee, based on the research of a recently deceased archivist named “Ruth.” The archivist, residing in a city that clearly is Toronto but not named as such, was “passionate about destructive change,” documenting “anything with scaffolding” or, as she puts it, “mapping the greed” of high-rise towers walling off the city from its lakeshore. One version of the video is pretty much straight narrative, with Frenkel intoning the story over imagery of construction sites, roads, barriers and water. Another is more “gussied up,” with an abstract soundtrack, voices and subtitles in Dutch and English. The third is a documentary of sorts, from 2009, featuring Toronto new music ensemble Continuum performing a live soundtrack, co-composed by Frenkel, to a screening of Once Near Water.
Five more works follow – including 1977’s The Storyteller’s Device, a shadowy floor piece (Frenkel calls it “a drawing”) composed of strewn cinder blocks, a cassette player, wooden skids, surgical gloves, knitting needles, chair parts, two Japanese masks and a black-and-white photograph of the words “The Truth” – before the viewer/pilgrim reaches the exhibition’s halfway point.
This would be the artist’s most famous and, well, relaxed creation, “… from the Transit Bar.” Built for Germany’s prestigious dOCUMENTA art fair in 1992 (the first dOCUMENTA held, not coincidentally, after the reunification of Germany), Transit Bar is part of the NGC’s permanent collection, but until its exhibition in Ottawa earlier this year, it hadn’t been publicly mounted for almost two decades. A simultaneity of fact and fiction, it’s a reel bar, like Rick’s Café Américain in Casablanca, and real bar in that, at certain times, patrons can purchase actual drinks (Scotch, vodka, mineral water, orange juice) as a real keyboardist (Tom Szczesniak) provides the soundtrack otherwise reeled non-stop by a piano roll. “Here, dear tourist,” Shaughnessy seems to say, “is respite from your travels/travails in Frenkeland – and fortification for the journey still ahead.”
Of course, it’s not all that relaxing. True, the bar has six functioning video monitors – but none is tuned to TSN, CP24 or the pretty faces of eTalk. Rather you get a collection of stressed-looking monologuists of various ethnicities and races chattering about immigration, cultural identity and other topics, their voices “helpfully” dubbed into Yiddish and Polish while subtitles in French, English and German crawl along the screen bottom. If Franz Kafka had had a video camera in 1912, this is what he would have come up with.
Ways of Telling’s penultimate installation, The Blue Train, is also the show’s most recent – its original iteration had its debut two years ago at Toronto’s Ryerson Image Centre – as well as its most elegant and moving.
It consists of two large screens, cornered at a right angle to each other, with two long parallel tracks, one containing 20 image panels, the other 21, extending from one of the screens along a wall. One screen recounts, in text and images, the return of real-life Black Star agency photojournalist Werner Wolff to the ruins of his native Germany after the Second World War. The other plays a video shot from the back of a train as it slowly moves down a hypnotic infinity of receding track. Accompanying the footage is the reminiscence, calmly voiced by Frenkel, of a Jewish woman telling of her flight from her native Czechoslovakia in 1939, infant daughter cradled in her arms, en route to her husband in England. (The real-life Frenkels lived there for 11 years before coming to Canada.)
We learn, too, that young German soldiers were on that train and, taking a shine to the baby, kindly took turns spelling off her mother. Most of the wall panels are static, shots of tracks, engines and countryside, but nine or 10 are, in fact, animated, featuring short, subtitled narratives of some 30 individuals – identified simply as the Agent, the Priest, the Apprentice etc. – who also were on the train. As this train moves steadily westward, it’s hard not to think of other trains of the Second World War, the ones heading east to the terminus of Auschwitz.
Frenkel has called her works “fields of energy.” Yes, like the good Western artist she is, she has a fondness for binaries, for the spaces between fact/fiction, art/non-art, image/thing, virtual/real, past/present, Vera/“Vera.” But it’s rare for her to stay put with them and in them. Hers is an art of piling on, layering up and messing around, of bringing all of her food “at one time on the same plate,” to paraphrase jazz musician/poet Oliver Lake.
All of which is to say you’re going to leave MoCCA’s Frenkeland disoriented, skeptical, perturbed and bemused, just as Frenkel intends. “One cannot trust words other than to betray experience,” you remember being told during your visit there.
“The truth is attributed to one falsehood after another.”
“I tell stories to mask the truth or simulate it.”
“Stories tell us what we already know or what we want to find out.”
Vera Frenkel: Ways of Telling is at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto through Dec. 28. Admission is free. Bartending hours at the Transit Bar are 4-6 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday, 4-9 p.m. Thursday through Saturday and 4-6 p.m. Sunday. Live music Thursday through Saturday, 5:30-8:30 p.m.