KNOWING HURT AND SEEKING SALVE by Sky Goodden (2019)

The interior is not only the universe but also the étui of the private person. To live means to leave traces. The detective story that follows these traces comes into being. 

- Walter Benjamin 

Introducing The Art of Cruelty, Maggie Nelson clarifies that she’s “less interested in art’s capacity to purge or master.” She wants to know its forms. Not a catharsis, more a bemused study, her beloved and bruising text suggests the possibility for trauma’s traces to be read as secret, as neutral, as fictive, as furtive, as owned, renamed, as recharged. Brutality can be used “as a bluff, as a bludgeon,” she admits. But in considering its formation through art, we meet its capacity for compassion, its effectiveness at working-through, and the various inroads and impasses abutted or gained through abstraction, figuration, narrative, or reenactment.

In the work of Carrie Perreault, a material and psychological affect are both achieved and demanded, none obvious but each one more pressing. Formally, they arrive as figurative or diffuse, provocative or muted. But functionally, Perreault solicits our memorial and sensorial vulnerability, expecting a certain amount of “giving over” in order to complete the work. 

Displaced from our “here and now” and yet found in our histories – the leafy interior of what Benjamin called our “forest reserve of remembering” – Perreault pivots on the head of trauma and spins its effects through a present-day accounting of illness, grief, and reparations. Agency muscles through, though, asking “What can we exhume and what can we exhaust on the page, on the pavement? What can we own through our retelling, or by refusing our confessing?” Mapping dubious narratives, obscuring sightlines, and demanding our trust, Perreault’s practice requires a romantic supplication. But also our skepticism. “What has been trespassed, here? What is left to save? What is now at stake?”

Perreault implicates us in a breathless, fruitless search for the origin of our hurt, and its final, unlikely salve. In Untitled (Eggs)(2018), she has eggs cracked overher head in a morbid reenactment of childhood trauma. Whether seeking its triggering or forcing its resolution, Perreault admitted to feeling weirdly fine, afterwards. Meanwhile her hired performer – her normally steady friend, now violator – evinced unusual agitation.

“The making of the work is incredibly onerous,” reflects Perreault, “but it isn’t about labour.” Privileging process allows the artist to pace through systems of abuse, and allows for thinking. “The work is onerous, but in the way of balancing in equal measure resistance and restraint.” She pauses. “It does so in quiet ways.”

Insisting on a largescale work that is “physically real” (“this is big, this is okay, it’s something of substance – also, this is the most I can handle,” she admits), Perreault’s Over My Dead Body(2019) demands every inch of its form. Across a broad swath of concrete panels, Perreault spray-paints, chalks, waxes, attaches rubber and lays cement, before sanding down and beginning the task of removal. “Some of the underneath part comes through,” she says. But inevitably it’s “a revealing moment, taken away.” Her process communes its subject’s secreting, silencing, shaming: still, these warped utterances demand the space they take. Like the controlled but fatefully shaking lines of a grid from Agnes Martin, or the muted yet urgent vessels from an unknowable Eva Hesse, much is uttered through the indefinable, indefatigable gestures of a willing, hurting artist. Perreault avows her pain like the breaking of a wave that was both sudden and, before that, eventual and disclosed. You saw it coming but couldn’t know it before it came, nor name it once it left. 

 

Sky Goodden is the founding publisher and editor of Momus (momus.ca), an international online art publication and podcast that stresses “a return to art criticism.” Momus has been shortlisted for two International Awards for Art Criticism since its inauguration in 2014, and has attracted over 850,000 readers. Goodden is currently the Artist-in-Residence at Montreal’s Concordia University (2018-19). She holds an MFA in Criticism & Curatorial Practice from OCAD University, which awarded her with an Alumni of Influence Award. She has published in Frieze, Modern Painters, Canadian Art, C Magazine, the National Post, and Art21.