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The stained screen: on tony scherman's "About 1789"

Catalogue essay by Geoff Pevere

"It's all in the framing", insists the narrator of The Falls, a sinuously intelligent 1992 documentary about Canada's most famous tourist trap. Made by a Canadian journalist turned filmmaker named Kevin McMahon, the movie–a visual essay, really–is a remarkably self-assured exercise in the study of relative perception. Both formally and intellectually, the movie stresses the role of point-of-view in interpretation. The cascading torrent of Niagara Falls meant different things to different cultures at different moments, depending on the interest of the eyes which gazed upon the brink. Moreover, the Falls comes to mean different things to different viewers at different points in the film itself. Like the lady says, all in the framing.

In McMahon's movie, framing is really just another word for perception, the idea that what you see depends entirely on where you stand. And, when you look at the paintings of Tony Scherman–who works and lives less than 100 kilometers from Niagara, and in the same city as McMahon–you're likely to find yourself standing in a number of places. Indeed, one needs a lot of room to really look at Scherman's beguiling exercises in portraiture, for they compel different interpretations based on where you are when you're looking. Indeed, they're different paintings.

Take "Study for the last Framboisier", one of the new series of French Revolutionary-themed portraits called "About 1789"–itself a title which, in its deliberate ambivalence, evokes the relative nature of meaning. From an appropriate distance, it seems a luridly tumescent study of an aristocratic fruit delicacy on the verge of rot. Even the dripping streams of dried, coloured wax trickling downward on the canvas can, at this distance, be incorporated into an almost purely representational interpretation: fulsome, almost bursting, the plate seems dripping with decadence and neglect. You can almost hear the flies.

Move closer, however, and the certainty of representation begins to shimmer like heat ripples on the surface of an Ontario highway. The lurid fruit transmogrifies into rotting meat, the other layers of pastry evoking the colour and texture of crushed flesh and bone. Perhaps because of the historical framing, the guillotine comes to mind, but so, somehow, does sex. It's like the mouth of "Study for Liberty", a vivid, voluptuous orifice which is at once erotic, repulsive and mesmerising, and which threatens to drool from the canvas as–cautiously, hesitantly–you close in on it. Give me liberty? Or give me death? Move even closer to "Framboisier", and the image's transformation into pure tactility is complete: here it is all wax, colour, texture and object. It compels you to touch it–as Scherman himself does when showing it–like a sculpture which has fooled you into thinking it's a painting. Depends on how you look at it. All in the framing.

So how then to frame Scherman, and particularly this arresting series of revolutionary inspirations called "About 1789"? Certainly it depends where you stand, but it also depends what you bring into the room with you–where you've come from, how long you've travelled, what means of transport delivered you thus. Some have placed his work in the history of portraiture, a history he is clearly engaged in an unsurprisingly ambivalent, but indubitably productive, relationship with. Some, including the artist himself, tend to frame the work in its relation to film, particularly in its deliberate meshing of cinematic visual codes–and particularly the close-up–with forms of sequential narrative.

Or one could address it within the historical frame–the French Revolution–suggested by the titles of both the series and its individual constituents: Marat, Napoleon, Liberty, Varennes. At first glance, this is probably the frame most would impose, and naturally so. After all, we are a culture of signposts, symbols, labels and categories, and we tend to respond according to the generic labels applied. In the end, however, this is also the least generous approach to work like Scherman's, for it locks both the work and your response to it into a purely literal form of rhetorical call and response. All one is left to do is either agree or disagree with, say, Scherman's interpretation of Napoleon, or the deranged King George. Or to wonder what that dissembling bouquet has to do with "Varennes: a.m.", or why we're looking at "Marie Antoinette's dog". In Scherman's work, it's the wondering that matters. If meaning can be said to reside anywhere, it does so only in the act of interpretation. In the end, the work has far less to do with the French Revolution than the idea of the French Revolution, or specifically, the way that that idea now comes to us only through two centuries of cultural and historical hindsight. Possibly this is what's meant by the mists of time. Certainly it alerts us to the primacy of the frame.

As I walk away from Scherman's east-end Toronto studio, my head a Niagara-esque whirlpool of associations, my frame eventually tends to cohere into, of all things, a distinctly vegetative shape. Specifically, a maple leaf. The aptly fragile, easily windswept and entirely tentative symbol of the country both Scherman and I live in. I find myself thinking about Canada, and about the relativity of perception which has become something of a defining cultural characteristic. There may be no other country in the world better capable of understanding the hopeless dependence of interpretation on point-of-view, for there is certainly no country which has enjoyed the same destiny of growing up geographically fused to the most powerful image-generating force on the planet. Canada, and particularly English Canada, is a place in a constant state of cognitive dissonance: while most of what we see, hear and consume may not come from here, no amount of it can completely obliterate that feeling that something isn't quite right. The illusion isn't complete, the fusion isn't seamless, the seams are always showing. There's a stain on the screen.

Backing away from the awesome "Marat", in which the murdered republicanist–and author of L'Ami du peuple–is imagined as a screaming, dagger-eyed falcon against a technicolour baby-blue sky–which in turn evokes Xanadu's shrieking cockatoo in Citizen Kane–I tell the artist I'm reminded of a movie screen in downtown Toronto. I once went there to see something (something American, of course) called The Stepfather, a horror movie about a killer who pretends to be a suburban family man, but who really murders suburban families. Already a movie about the deadly deceptiveness of appearances, The Stepfather was lent an added layer of disorienting ambivalence by a large soft-drink stain smack in the middle of the screen. Every once in a while, no matter how tense or terrifying the dramatic proceedings, the stain would become hopelessly visible and intrusive, thus creating an inescapable, and in this case almost poetically apt, tension between the dramatic illusion and the material of its conveyance. "Marat", and Scherman's work in general, reminds me of that stained screen.

And, since he seems more interested than offended by the comparison, I tell him of another screen his work has brought to mind. In the small Ontario city, very near Niagara Falls, where I spent my adolescence, there was a drive-in movie theatre built in truly curious proximity to one of the Great Lakes. Curious because inevitably, during the stifling humidity of summer evenings, the fog, like dry ice at a rock concert, would begin to roll across the parking lot and up the screen. Once it started, you knew there was only so long before the screen was completely obliterated, and all you were left with were disembodied voices crackling from the cast-iron speaker suspended from the driver's window. Once again, just as was watching that stained version of The Stepfather, immersion in illusion was rendered impossible by that clockwork fog. Tony Scherman's work, with its deliberate attempt to simultaneously evoke and thwart the codes of dramatic representation, reminded me of that screen.

With no small degree of presumption, I take it as a sign of Scherman's deep-seated anglo-Canadian-ness (he was born in Toronto, and has lived and worked there, after residing extensively in Paris and London, since 1976) that he not only appreciates the screen comparisons, but endorses them. How could he not? After all, Canada would seem to be a country where the terrain between medium and meaning is all too familiar, and where there is an apparent hypersensitivity to the material nature of illusion. Having lived at the receiving end of American culture's high beams for as long as we have, we're perfectly positioned to identify the contradiction between expression and its form, and to recognize, as perhaps only a Canadian could, that the medium and the message may well be the same thing. (Besides, the climate being what it is in Canada most of the time, it's not surprising that we tend to watch TV more than most other countries on the globe. Moreover, TV from somewhere else.)

Marshall McLuhan, who spent most of his life in Toronto, might have been the first internationally-known Canadian to fixate on the glass pool of the TV screen as paradigm for contemporary experience, but he was hardly the last. Canadian comedy, which currently enjoys a conspicuous amount of influence over mainstream American cinema and TV, has been rooted in ironic pop-culture parody since a Toronto comedy team called Wayne and Shuster appeared 67 times on the legendary American program The Ed Sullivan Show during the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, one of the most sublimely brilliant TV shows ever, a made-in-Toronto comedy sketch program called SCTV, was the TV comedy equivalent of McLuhan's equation of medium with message, which is to say that it was as much about the act of watching TV as what was on it. Indeed, watching–as a physical, cultural and occasionally even political act–would seem not only to be something Canadians know about, but something they may be doomed to know about better than most. In fact, it might well be a screen which novelist Margaret Atwood was really talking about when she likened living next to the United States to staring through the world's largest two-way mirror. After all, what's a TV screen but a looking glass which only reflects one side of the story? And what's a Canadian but a terminal viewer?

It's fascinating to consider how much Canadian televisual and cinematic activity is, like Tony Scherman's portraiture, about looking. In David Cronenberg's lurid 1982 masterpiece Videodrome–the only movie so far to put McLuhan's theory into vivid dramatic practice–the television becomes an agent of almost viral malevolence, something which literally penetrates and possesses those who watch it. It makes its own meaning, and it is an inextricable part of the contemporary physiology: "The television", says the movie's TV-transmitted McLuhanesque guru, "is the retina of the mind's eye".

Similarly, in the work of Atom Egoyan–like Cronenberg, yet another Torontonian–the television becomes the repository of physical as well as emotional desire, the inevitable mediator of all human thought and feeling. A mourning woman visits a video mausoleum in 1989's Speaking Parts, and another character in the same movie obsesses over the extra she sees on the periphery of a videotape movie. The Oedipal conflict of 1987's Family Viewing is played out over the issue of videotape, and the operative cinematographic point-of-view in the same movie is the TV screen: watching that movie is like sitting inside a television looking out at the action.

Then there is Guy Maddin's work, which may be more like Scherman's fog and static-shrouded visions of history than any of the above. Born in Winnipeg, where Marshall McLuhan grew up before moving to Toronto, Maddin makes movies–Archangel, Careful Twilight of the Ice-Nymphs–which are as hopelessly fascinated with the material of the screen as they are with what happens on it. More so, in fact. Rife with deliberate damage to both image and soundtrack, redolent with the hothouse post-Romantic atmosphere of the cinema's infancy, Maddin's films are an act of aesthetic archeology. They compel us to experience the present through the deteriorated filter of the past, and they offer the screen–hopelessly dilapidated though it is–as the only window through which to do so.

As an artist living and working in Canada, it might be Tony Scherman's destiny to make portraits which–like McLuhan, Maddin, Egoyan, Cronenberg and SCTV–take the act of looking as their real subject. His paintings are the stained screens through which history is squeezed and distorted and ultimately experienced by contemporary eyes; his portraits the frames through which we can learn to see how little is actually apparent.

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