By: Matt Macintosh
“Illuminated Manuscript“, a site-specific installation curated by Bonnie Rubenstein at The Coach House as part of this years CONTACT festival themed, “Figure + Ground” is part of Robert Bean’s ongoing research project on Marshall McLuhan, technology and obsolescence. With access to the back-rooms of the Canadian Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa, Bean has presented 2 videos and 18 mid-scale photographs in the house where McLuhan famously conducted his research and Monday evening seminars.
McLuhan’s typed and handwritten manuscripts are illuminated as moving montages in a single monitor and in two flat-panel screens arranged as book pages using choppy geocities-era animation and all the fade-in techniques of professional amateurism. A network of still images puts photoshoppy catalogue shots of standalone machine-objects beside all-over compositions of wires and keyboards. Cold-War era visual and computing technologies are shown in institutionalized storage spaces beside scaled-up partial scans of McLuhan’s writings. This commentary on the signs symbols and practices of archival documentation is given life in large part by Bean’s heavy use of modernist compositional devices in images of wiring and writing put into relation with isolated machine-objects that seem to predict—as McLuhan did—their own portability as commodities.
The human scale in the largest works invigorate engagement with decommissioned machinery and ab-ex writing, but the smaller works seem non-deliberate in the way they undermine the functionality of their own formal devices without inviting either genuine interest or an encounter with obsolescence. Bean’s choice to use dated animation techniques and to photoshop his still images also provided an extremely fertile territory for comment, but similarly came off as under-acknowledged within a project that addresses relations among communication, documentation and obsolescence.
More successful was Bean’s choice to use photography and video as figures to this specific ground. With a respectful nod to both medium’s association with the disintegration of ‘aura’ in artworks, the relations among designated products and processes of communication are exposed and widened in materially neutral conditions. Text becomes object, object machine, machine as text under new scrutiny enlivened by McLuhan’s ghost. While beautifully drawing out the material and artefactual nature of archived objects and data, Bean has activated a reflexive space that animates and loosens communication ties between devices and spectators as well as figure and ground.