In Call and Response Dave Dyment puts his music on ‘mute’
Dan Adler’s exhibition text on Call and Response says that Dave Dyment makes clichéd sources strange again and makes them “worthwhile once again as objects of study and contemplation.” It’s a tall order for the Toronto artist’s current Truck exhibition. This call for study and contemplation operates on an advanced level where Dyment assumes a familiarity with certain cultural reference points in the exhibition.
Take Don’t Count My Scars like Tree Rings as an example. The audio-effects record “Ultimate Heartbeat” is simply painted with four lines of liquid paper correction fluid radiating from the centre of the disc. The lines are intended to produce a sound like a heart beating when the record needle skips over them but the record is tightly secured within a pristine white frame. There’s no opportunity to listen to the sound or to hear if this experiment convincingly imitates a second heartbeat or not. The point of entry for this idea is visual: you have to know that a disturbance in the record needle’s track will produce a skip and then patiently imagine the sound that is created. Perhaps the idea of two hearts beating on one record was too overly poetic for the staid conceptual tone of the show.
The pleasures of installations that include audio and visual components are the multi-sensory access points into the work. Here in an exhibition all about sound and music the gallery is completely silent. Unless that is the gallery staff turn up the horribly annoying feedback loop that is generated from His Master’s Voice (for Nam June Paik) . The shrill tone is so antagonistic to the ears that even the most dedicated conceptual art fans would have a tough time taking in the exhibition let alone sitting out the 26-minute running time of Dyment’s longest video work Pop Quiz .
His interpretation of a seminal piece of video art by Nam June Paik TV Buddha makes the double suggestion that Dyment is invested in questioning the “feedback loop” of artworks that are referential to the history of art but he also seeks roots in this lineage — inclusion in the loop so to speak. Adding to the loop are the similarities between Dyment’s works and those of Christian Marclay an American artist and musician who creates rich visual metaphors using altered musical instruments records album artwork and recording equipment.
Pop Quiz becomes a game of recognition as song lyrics from Dyment’s music collection flash across a dark screen without intonation backup vocals or musical accompaniments. “What else should I be?” is clearly quoted from Nirvana’s “All Apologies” or perhaps Sinéad O’Connor’s 1994 rendition of the same tune. The video offers hundreds of quotations from a cross-section of genres and lyrics with meanings alternately philosophical completely trite apathetic political romantic or narrative. When separated from their original sources and projected in the silent contemplative gallery each question can be interpreted many ways starting with: how does that song go?
Questions like Madonna’s classic “are you wasting my time?” and the more ubiquitous “so what?” seem to test the audience’s response to contemporary art in the face of more immediate forms of culture like the convenient format of a four-minute pop song. When applied to Call and Response or even to contemporary art in general they seem to mock the audience’s potential disinterest in finishing the quiz or spending enough time with an artwork to reveal its conceptual meaning. There’s no particular reward for watching the video for its entire duration though elite music nerds might feel self-congratulatory as they recall these pieces of trivia one by one.
Call and Response includes wall labels that carefully indicate titles medium and date of each piece. The titles are integral to the work’s meaning but the choice of labels is heavy-handed in Truck’s small artist-run space. In addition to Adler’s invitation text produced by the gallery a photocopied sheet of didactic descriptions also accompanies the show. The text is not identified as an artist statement but instead the tone reads like a curator’s text or the kind of material that the gallery would produce in order to explain the artist’s work to audiences. The use of these various curatorial devices make this exhibition of artworks from a 10-year span of the artist’s practice seem as if someone else has curated it. This is an important point to raise in an artist-run gallery where a programming committee or a curatorial panel typically makes programming decisions from an open submission call.
Dyment is active in the artist-run network as director of programming at Toronto’s Mercer Union and the show raises interesting questions about how curatorial working methods transfer into individual artistic practices. It’s a working reality for many artists to be engaged in studio practice while also staffing galleries writing and curating.
While Dyment’s interest with Call and Response may have been akin to putting together a concept album or a collection of his greatest hits the separation between studio and self-curation should have been made more clear.
