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La Cour des Miracles Sometimes you hurl disbelief out the window if the payback is big, stupid, visceral pleasure. It worked with Armageddon, asteroids demolishing the planet and Bruce Willis saving mankind. Recognizing the contrivances and manipulations of the film didn't deter one from the trashy enjoyment of it. But if sensational overkill slams you in the gut, it also tends to miss the heart. The only remedy is the kind of smart visceral pleasure provoked by "La Cour des Miracles, " an immersive metaphorical environment created by Montreal artists Louis Philippe Demers and Bill Vorn, at the Musee d'art contemporain de Montreal. On the pale wooden doors leading into the exhibition space it is impossible to miss the endearingly innocuous stencilled message: "Entrez!/ Come in!" It is a subtle gesture that effectively lowers your defenses for the total mind/body assault that greets you inside. In a single, all-encompassing moment, chain-link fencing, scaffolding, sheet metal, oil drums, red theatre lights, strobe lights, smoke and an orchestra of howling, peeling, riotous noises (including moans, sobs and screams) collapse on the viewer. The looking glass has been broached. On the other side is a squalid industrial pit that must be negotiated by way of long, narrow corridors that wind through the space. Interspersed along the route are the inhabitants of "La Cours des Miracles, " thirty robotic entities that reel and stagger like mutant bastard children of the Terminator. Each of them is constructed to demonstrate its dysfunction. One is unstable. Another, in a cage, grabs and shakes the bars. Others crawl. Still another staggers along on misshapen body parts. Not anthropomorphic or zoomorphic, they are familiar to us as things or, more specifically, freakish things, metaphoric representations of pain and suffering. And while we are conscious of the contrivance of the simulated environment, it is, nonetheless, utterly convincing. Demers and Vorn develop their robots so that they are not simply interactive—visitor trips a sensor and robot moves— but rather, reactive. They respond in varying degrees to both the presence of humans and their fellow machines. It is a faked spontaneity, but impossible to spot, and it furthers a sense of the dangerous and unpredictable possibilities within the exhibition environment. In medieval cities, "The Court of Miracles" was where cripples, beggars and criminals would congregate and where, disabilities, miraculously, disappeared. As one winds through this gut-wrenching terrain, a complex emotional response develops as you go. A thick reverberation of pathos cuts a swath through the space. You feel something you never felt in Armageddon, even when Bruce Willis sacrifices himself to save you, me and everyone else. It's called empathy. On the scene like a wreckin' machine. By J O H N M A S S I E R |
