Forest is God, 2023
I have a new job directing Arsenal Contemporary in New York. For years, my ex told me that I had missed my calling as a dealer. Maybe not after all. I wasn’t looking for a job running a gallery in Tribeca but life is full of uncanny twists if you just let it happen. Curiously, thanks to Pierre and Anne-Marie Trahan, I’ve come full circle in my adventure. In the second half of the 80s, my day job was promoting contemporary Canadian art at 49th Parallel; it was a short walk from here in SoHo. Back then, only a handful of Indigenous artists were taken seriously by the Canadian art establishment and they didn’t seem to interest my then boss. Indigenous artists could not be more prominent on the Canadian scene today and the US is finally showing signs that it might be catching the wave.
I can’t imagine a better artist to mark my return to the cause than Caroline Monnet, booked for the current slot by my predecessor Anaïs Castro. I have to admit that, at first, the words “Forest is God” made me skeptical about an otherwise gorgeous work. Then it dawned on me that I actually believe this. A godless materialist, the only time I ever truly feel what I presume other people mean by the word “spirit” is when I’m in the woods. Forests are less ideologically sacred to me than experientially profound. Forest is God turns the ongoing apocalypse in the vast Canadian forests into something Nietzschean and foretold.
You might call this work a post-colonial and post-craft sampler; machine stitched on black air barrier membrane, its geometric patterning has formal Anishinaabe antecedents in porcupine quill work. At least that’s my educated guess about it’s antecedents, having been trained in the long formalist shadow of Aloïs Riegl. The title refers to the old-school sampler slogan “Jesus is God,” or the song “Money is God” by pop singer King Charles. After a summer of researching the state of our habitat for Edward Burtynsky’s current show at Arsenal Montréal, it’s safe to say that no other faith but this one can save us.
Chantier, 2023, neon, air barrier membrane sewn on Tyvek.
Chantier is among my favourite French words. It’s used in a lot of different contexts but it basically means construction site or worksite (the title of this exhibition), or outdoor workshop, or lumber yard. To be en chantier means to be under construction. But, unlike its english equivalents, you often hear the word used metaphorically in French. For example Indigenous/Settler relations in Canada could be called a politico-cultural chantier. We’ve still got a lot to work through and to work out. Art too has been in a permanent state of chantier since the advent of modernism, not only as a mercurial and ever mutating aspect of cultural production, but in its mutable relation to audience.
More immediately in the context of her show, the word describes the artist’s youth as a child of recidivist renovators of whom I had a few in my own family. You buy a house, fix it up, flip it, buy a better house, fix it up, etc. Children who grow up in a series of chantiers develop a different relationship to building materials than those who don’t. For example, you are aware that a home is a house that had to be made. It’s an object of labour, thought, emotion, negotiation, and expense. Monnet is building a beautiful career by sensualising and giving new meanings and new plastic uses to the building materials of a sedentary culture that her Anishinaabe ancestors did not practice.
Along with the word in glaring neon, a nod to New York’s commercial ethos, the piece is made of Tyvek strips sewn to air barrier membrane, the stuff that normally seals off a house from the elements. Monnet punctured it with stitches, cut it into strips that she installed sideways. Unglazed and exposed to the air, the work has a feathery, deconstructed variegation as you approach it. Not only is its function as house-wrap obliterated by the artistic process, so is the oppressively repetitive logo that the neighbours must tolerate until the builder/renovators get around to the cladding, if indeed they ever do. Like Louise Bourgeois before her, Monnet sometimes gives the impression that her work does double duty as a personal exorcism.
Scaffold, wood, 2023.
The oldest forest ever found is about two an a half hours north of New York City, I was surprised to learn. In 2009, British paleo-botanists identified the fossilized roots of 385-million-year-old trees in Cairo, NY, bumping the previous record held since the 1920s by nearby Gilboa. Much older than the long-buried Carboniferous “coal forests” whence we get fossil fuels, these are the trees that spiked the oxygen levels in our atmosphere enabling life forms like ours to emerge. The expression “tree-of-life” refers to an idea prevalent throughout world mythologies, evidence that pre-scientific intuition, like that of Monnet’s Anishinaabe forebears, had already figured out that we owe it all to trees. As the atmosphere heats up from burning their ancient remains, the ongoing destruction of carbon-sequestering forests will likely be our undoing. Trees giveth and trees taketh away.
Manhattan is a forest of towers, many of which are covered in scaffolding like clinging ivy. Frequent stretches of sidewalk are also covered in scaffolding to protect walkers from the debris of renovation or disintegration. Forests, trees, wood, air, towers, construction, shelter, and New York, all conspire to form a numinous and poetical leitmotif for Monnet’s first solo here.
Like chantier, scaffold is a word with plenty of metaphorical potential as an expression of transient support. Here it is more a ‘space girdle’ sequestering Corinthian columns, European tree cyphers that colonisation brought to this place. The geometry of Monnet’s structure is reminiscent of the timeless abstract patterns of her maternal ancestors. Variations in the lumber that she used to make the piece enlists those patterns to schematise branching and forest massing while its diamond shapes give the illusion of cinching. You could see that as the opposite of entasis, the technique of swelling Greek columns to counter the illusion that they taper as they rise above you. Monnet’s riffs on ancient geometries make this structure appear as if holding its breath to constrain the viral expansionism of forest-eating Western civilisation. I’m getting carried away. Anyway, the oldest tree in Manhattan is the “Hangman’s Elm,” a giant English tree in Washington Square Park that was likely planted by the British as New Amsterdam became New York.
Congratulations on your new position at Arsenal. Sounds like a win win move for both you and the gallery. .