In many ways, The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture, at the Vancouver Art Gallery, is an exhibition at the right place and the right time.
First, its theme links it to the life of the city -- birthplace of The X-Files and home of science-fiction guru William Gibson, who coined the term "cyberspace" in his 1984 novel Neuromancer.
Then, there is the fact that so much of the high and low culture being generated around the idea of the cyborg -- and we get both in this show -- is coming out of Japan, a culture very much on the radar of Asia-focused British Columbia.
The whole final third or so of this exhibition is dominated by contemporary art from Japan and Korea. The show includes, as well, a healthy dollop of Japanese animation and comic strips, providing a terrific opportunity for the VAG to build bridges to communities -- to the Asian community and to youth -- that the gallery desperately needs to engage if it is to remain relevant.
Finally, there is the topicality of the cyborg, which the exhibition's curator Bruce Grenville presents as an exemplar of our global Zeitgeist, the object of both our idolatry and our dread.
The cyborg, he writes, is the human body that has been "doubled by the machine, that thing that is so common, so familiar, so ubiquitous and so essential that it threatens to consume us, to destroy our links to nature and to history, and quite literally, especially in time of war, to destroy the human body itself and to replace it with its uncanny double."
Our culture has produced the figure of the cyborg, he argues, in what Freud would describe as an act of repression and displacement whereby the familiar thing -- in this case the machine -- is returned to us in a bizarre or "uncanny" new form.
Methodically, Grenville's exhibition traces the variations of this phenomenon from its earliest roots, starting with an 1810 automaton made by Henri Maillardet, now in the collection of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia -- a small, beret-clad harlequin, driven by an elaborate system of gears, who writes verse and draws pictures at his little desk.
Grenville then walks us through Eadweard Muybridge photos of human locomotion (images that investigate the mechanical systems of the body), heroic Lewis Hine photographs of brawny men tending their giant factory machines, and past the National Gallery of Canada's famous Fernand Léger painting The Mechanic (1920). We see, as well, Léger's film Ballet Mécanique (1924), scenes from Fritz Lang's Metropolis of 1926, Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936), geometric Picasso etchings of women, and Picabia works on paper in which people are figured as machine parts.
In this same historical section of the show, we find Jacob Epstein's nightmarish bust of a warrior-like man-thing, Torso in Metal from the "Rock Drill" (1913-16). Its head is a faceted wedge of brutal metal, striking a dark note of menace. Where other allusions to the human-machine hybrid had suggested the promise of technology, and a sense of wonder at modernity, a tone of dread increasingly sets in after the First World War -- we see it in this Epstein sculpture -- as civilization experiences at first hand the horror that machines can visit on mankind.
"It is here," Grenville writes, "in this untenable gap between a utopian and dystopian vision of the machine that the cyborg was born."
The term "cyborg" is a hybrid of "cybernetics" and "organism."
This exhibition also includes: Video demonstrations of the Hara/Kobayashi robotic labs at the Science University in Tokyo, which specializes in developing lifelike machines programmed to respond interactively to our facial expressions; a vitrine filled with action figure models; electronic prosthetic appendages created by Stelarc; creepy clips from The Terminator (1984), Robocop (1987) and Videodrome (1983), and other bits and pieces we could find lying around the rec-room floor.
Last, but not least, we see contemporary art: A video installation of six monitors by Gary Hill (a man is seen squirming from one screen into the next and back again); a forlorn little talking head by Los Angeles artist Tony Oursler; a photo-mural by Mariko Mori (showing the artist dressed like a pumped-up Japanese cartoon heroine in her baby-doll space suit, posed in the technology district of Tokyo); a sculptural woman warrior (or at least her brutally armoured torso and thigh) by Lee Bul, suspended from the ceiling.
And, there is the show's highpoint, a room full of Takashi Murakami's female-gendered transformers (now she's a woman, now she's a high-speed stealth aircraft) in various stages of mutation from woman to machine. With her Technicolor wings, lithe waist and stupendous breasts, Murakami's ninja nymphet is the quintessential hypersexualized Japanese girl heroine, complete with operating instructions stamped onto her segmented body parts.
So, with all this going for it, how come the show didn't feel more exciting? Walking from room to room, I sensed that there was something subtly off about the installation. A thematic exhibition, at its best, presents a group of objects that engage, by virtue of their configuration, in a kind of dialogue, provoking non-linear leaps of thought in the viewer. In a great installation, the objects feel bound to each other by a kind of forcefield. This was not the case here.
Instead, we found the Léger languishing on a wide wall, in lonely company with the film projection of Ballet Mécanique. We find Oursler's little man drowned out by the noisier video installation of Survival Research Laboratories, as if no one had bothered to love it. We also have real works of art installed in the same exhibition beside reproductions on the wall, which has the peculiar effect of corroding the presence of the art on display.
As well, we sometimes have what feels like the wrong works by the right artists -- for example, an unpreposessing work by Duchamp (a black plastic Underwood typewriter cover on a stand) that struggles to bear up in the context. The contemporary works by Nina Levitt and Ronald Jones likewise felt like a stretch.
Looking at the show as a whole, I had the nagging sense that, instead of the art leading the thesis, the thesis leads the art, with the result that the exhibition at times feels like a three-dimensional graduate course, more convincing on paper than in the flesh.
The academic analogy is apt, as the exhibition is built upon a weighty foundation of critical theory. The VAG/Arsenal Pulp Press book marking this exhibition brings together the required reading for this subject that will no doubt prove handy in the future. The lineup includes Sigmund Freud's landmark essay The Uncanny (1917-19), and more recent essays, such as Joey: A Mechanical Boy,by Bruno Bettelheim (1959); A Manifesto for Cyborgs,by Donna Hathaway; and a couple of newer essays by Toronto's Jeanne Randolph and Japan's Toshiya Ueno, Makiko Hara (now living in Canada) and Masanori Oda, among others.
While some of this felt like a bit of a slog, the essays by Toshiya Ueno and Makiko Hara, in particular, seem fresh as daisies, providing tart critiques of the West's perennial impulse to project onto Asia all its own cultural anxieties (in this instance, our Western phobias about technology and the rising global stature of the East). Hara offered, as well, close readings of some of the contemporary art in the show from an enlightening Asian-Canadian perspective.
I found myself reading these essays and fantasizing about an exhibition centred simply on the cyborg in Asian culture. What might it have been like to see three or four works by Mori, Bul, Murakami and Kanji Yanobe (who is exhibiting a comically ungainly yellow survival suit for a man and his dog in the gallery's rotunda), instead of just one or two?
This show's ambitions, however, lay elsewhere, and to a large extent it met its objectives. A didactic exhibition such as this provides a great opportunity for the wider public to catch up on the art world's continuing discussions in a user-friendly and informative way; you would be hard-pressed, in fact, to find any visitor who would not learn a great deal from visiting the show. But the curator's approach carries with it a price tag; by overdirecting the way we see, the exhibition seems to exert too tight a grip on the art, ultimately restricting its meanings.
The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture continues at the Vancouver Art Gallery until May 26.