National Gallery of Canada
Caught in the Act: The Viewer as Performer
About the Exhibition - Overview
This landmark exhibition showcases 17 large-scale sculptural installations and a text project created by 11 Canadian artists and collectives that encourage a new kind of artistic production, where creative authority is shared between the artist & the viewer.
Mowry Baden, Rebecca Belmore, BGL, Max Dean & Raffaello D’Andrea, Geoffrey Farmer, Massimo Guerrera, Glen Johnson, Rodney LaTourelle, Jennifer Marman & Daniel Borins, Kent Monkman, and Jana Sterbak each use diverse approaches and strategies to explore the role of the viewer in the experience of their artworks, proposing a variety of possible encounters for visitors, from immersive environments into which we may enter, to sculptures that engage us through physical movement, to installations that promote interactions with other audience members, as well as a text project that offers a disturbance or interruption in the reading of the catalogue.
Caught in the Act presents new works that have been created specifically for the exhibition, along with pieces from the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Canada, and those that have been loaned from important national and international institutions.
What is so different about this exhibition?
Some of the most noteworthy artists working today address themes of relational aesthetics, interactivity, and the relationship between the self and the other. In so doing, they are redefining the roles of both creator and viewer, the function of the art object, and the boundary between public and private spheres. Caught in the Act focuses uniquely on the development of these new artistic practices within a Canadian context. By presenting influential works from the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, alongside projects by an newly established generation of artists, Caught in the Act forms a framework for these new practices and invites the viewer to investigate the connections between each artist’s work. The exhibition’s aim is not to construct a definitive history, but rather to explore how the role of the viewer has shifted from passive observer to engaged performer.
Where did this type of contemporary art come from?
Developing out of the combined histories of Performance, Installation, Environmental, and Minimal art, the works in Caught in the Act represent the artists’ various reactions to conservatism, to the disconnections felt between people in contemporary society and to the growing influence of technology in the everyday. To counter these potentially alienating social situations, these artists use their work to encourage moments of exchange, where the role of the participant becomes as important as that of the artist in completing the work, and as significant as the very art object itself. This shift challenges traditional ideas of authority, of artistic intention, and of the ‘normal’ ways we act within the gallery.
Close Encounters
Caught in the Act sets up a sequence of engagements into which we, as viewers, may choose to enter; as we move throughout the gallery, it is ultimately our decision how we will interact with the situations set up by the artworks. Each encounter will be unique, driven by our choice to become personally, publicly or politically engaged. In Caught in the Act, art is open to be experienced as a collaborative process, a social experience, and ultimately, an active negotiation, where the viewer always holds the potential to become the performer.
Catalogue
A full-colour catalogue with essays by the exhibition curator Josée Drouin-Brisebois, with contributions from Greg Hill, the Gallery’s Audain Curator of Indigenous Art, Anne-Marie Ninacs, an independent researcher and curator whose work considers the connections that unite human consciousness and visual art, and Montreal-based arts writer Stephen Horne, is also available.
The catalogue also features a text project by performance artist and writer Glen Johnson (a.k.a. Hugh Briss), who has been publishing his work online under the title Persiflage since 2001. Persiflage, which means to tease lightly, is a satirical and often wry commentary on contemporary life. The purpose of his text is to offer a disturbance or interruption in the reading of the catalogue.