One of the little joys of being an art critic -- other than having the best job on the planet -- is that you sometimes get to visit shows outside of business hours. You get extra peace and quiet, sure, and an unobstructed line of sight. But you also get to respond to work just as you please, without fellow viewers there to react to your reactions.
The other morning at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, viewing the new show by Montrealer Geneviève Cadieux that had just arrived from the Belkin Gallery in Vancouver, I was glad I got in early. That way, no one was there to see my smile, to note my chuckles, to flinch, even, at an occasional guffaw.
Important art is supposed to be serious stuff; since Cadieux's impressive CV sets her up as an officially important artist -- Venice Biennale show and all -- laughter is the last thing that seems in order. But I'm sorry. I think visual art might try to copy literature and music, where an As You Like It, a Pickwick Papers, a Figaro is allowed to compete with more sober offerings, and often beat them out. I'd like to put Cadieux forward for the Canadian art world's best suit of motley -- a nomination made in earnest, and which means I take her art very seriously indeed.
When you begin with the banal, even the grotesque, and blow it up to monumental scale, you inevitably get humour. Remember Gulliver's Travels? That's why I had to laugh when I entered the special white-cube gallery that the AGH has built to show off -- and tuck away -- the exhibition's most ambitious piece, called Loin de moi, et près du lointain ( Far From Me, and Near the Far Away).
A pair of giant colour close-ups, each almost two metres by three, shows the aftermath of sex in Rabelaisian detail.
In one, a flaccid, spunky penis lies dark and shrivelled on the belly of its owner. The job is done, and there's nothing left but to bask in the glory of heroic labour well accomplished. After all, if John Thomas fills the wall in his current detumescent state, imagine how majestic he must have been a moment or two before this photograph was snapped.
And he would have had to have been majestic given the size of his female counterpart in the other photograph.
An edge of dark pubic hair, glistening wet, is all we get to see of Her. She Who Must Be Obeyed is too big, too important, to be caught in a single photo. She overflows the bounds of apprehension, and demands obeisance to Her dark, unshowable presence. All of which reflects the ridiculously inflated role sex can take on in our lives.
Some twist of evolutionary wiring has got humans to take a basic bodily function and elevate it to mythic, sacramental status. It fills our psyche just as Cadieux's crotches fill this wall. And just as little Gulliver could see the pimples and pores on Brobdingnag's great beauties, so these overblown photos had me laughing at the self-important airs our nethers can put on.
If the wit I see in Loin de moi is coarse and cutting, verging on burlesque, the series of elegant colour photos called Elle et lui ( He and She) seems a comedy of manners. Revelling in grotesque animality has given way to smiling at the vagaries of culture.
From that series a diptych called Elle et Lui (avec main de femme) ( He and She -- With Female Hand) shows a well-dressed couple who just can't seem to reach across the gulf between the sexes, or the gap between their portraits.
In the left-hand panel stands She, dressed in fashionable acid-green velour and looking blankly off into the distance. In the bottom corner, His right hand pokes into the frame in a mute gesture of supplication, but to no effect. Over on the other side of the equation, in the second panel, a slim He, head shaved and dressed in modish black, seems equally anomique. The begging female hand that intrudes upon his solitude gets no more reaction than his did.
These posed figures present a theatre of estrangement, not a candid view of actual relations, and that's what makes them have more wit than pathos. Served up to us in such a formal, artificial fashion, human drama becomes a human comedy -- a mirror held up to our foibles rather than a picture of real dysfunction -- and therefore worth a smile.
All the work I've seen by Cadieux, including the other five pieces in this show, have this same cool, calculating poise -- a quality I can't help but associate with the distanced stance of irony or satire.
But then, I know a joke is not a universal thing. I am not sure how many others will laugh just where I do, and I don't know where Cadieux herself sees the punch lines falling in her show. Which is why I'm glad I got to see it solo. Now she'll never get to know about my smiles. Unless, I guess, she reads The Globe and Mail. Geneviève Cadieux's work is at the Art Gallery of Hamilton until Feb. 27. Call 905-527-6610 or go to http://www.artgalleryofhamilton.on.ca. The show opens at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts on May 6.