Global Warning: Scenes from a Planet under Pressure

Works from the Montreal Museum’s Collection of Contemporary Art

November 10, 2009 to August 8, 2010

This presentation is the first installation of the Museum's permanent collection from a thematic viewpoint, that of a planet under pressure. The proliferation of nuclear weapons, climatic warming and unprecedented demographic shifts are threatening the future of the planet as no war of the past ever did. "Although the whole history of art is permeated by destruction, damnation and catastrophe, today these realities have taken on a disturbing form and meaning of which art is the anxious witness", explains Stéphane Aquin, Curator of Contemporary Art at the MMFA, who is in charge of the installation of the new galleries. "Give me back the Berlin wall / Give me Stalin and St. Paul / I've seen the future, brother / It is murder," sang Leonard Cohen in The Future (1992). In his novel The Road, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007, American writer Cormac McCarthy offers one of his most extreme images for this murderous future, a world of cinders crossed here and there by gangs of cannibals.

Worst-case Scenarios
The galleries lead visitors on a symbolic tour through worst-case scenarios. From ideological struggles we move on to real conflicts and then to the devastation inflicted on the world; thereafter, we move through the tortuous paths of individual alienation and the wild stammering of a true culture of destruction. A recent gift from the Canadian artist Steven Shearer, Poem IV (2005), a large wall painting stretching from floor to ceiling, makes chilling use of phrases taken from “Death Metal” music as apocalyptic verses: "FLUORESCENT BLEEDING CHAOS… SKULLFUCKING ARMAGEDDON..."

Recent Acquisitions
The installation of the galleries enables us to show the public a number of recently acquired works for the first time. In addition to Shearer's mural, a notable addition is the video installation Supernatural (2005) by Roy Arden, also a gift from the artist. Drawing on the CBC's archives of film, Arden stuck together, end to end like little tableaux, clips from the footage of the Stanley Cup riots that ravaged Vancouver in 1994. Behind these scenes of chaos and destruction lurk memories of images by Goya, Warhol and Manet... There is also Julie Moos's Ken and Anita (2001) from the "Monsanto" series. This image of a father and daughter in front of their field of genetically modified wheat has the power of an allegory on our failure to respect nature and its laws. Another outstanding piece that will soon be added to the Museum's collection is the photographic collage Terminal Velocity by the great Carolee Schneemann. One of the few American artists to confront head-on the events of September 11, 2001, Schneemann tackles History from the viewpoint of the spectacular and tragic fate of those bodies falling from towers of fire, pictures of which were flashed around the world. Of the same generation as Schneemann and like her a committed artist from the start of her career, Nancy Spero gives us a hallucinatory vision of war in Rifle and Male Victim, a rare drawing from 1966 donated to the Museum by Diana Nemiroff and Jean-Pierre Gaboury.

Major Works to Be Rediscovered
The installation of the new galleries has also offered an opportunity to display works that have not been seen for some time, including George Segal's Woman Sitting on a Bed (1993), Leon Golub's Mercenaries II (1979) and Gerhard Richter's Landscape near Koblenz (1987), a falsely bucolic vision hiding the memory of a Germany destroyed by war.

Works from other eras and other cultures that echo the themes of this presentation have been interspersed here and there. Beside Shearer's poem hangs a painting of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorra by Herri met de Bles (mid-16th c.). A print from the series The Miseries and Misfortunes of War by Jacques Callot (1633) is another echo. Additional documentation beneath some of the showcases reminds us that these artists' reactions to the world around them are not excessive, and that, unfortunately, reality outstrips fiction by a very long way.

 

 

Contemporary Art Galleries, The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Photo MMFA, Christine Guest, 2009