REVIEW: When the Guests Are Not Looking
Patrick Blenkarn | February 22, 2018
Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens, When the Guests Are Not Looking, 2016-18 (installation view at Audain Gallery). Photo: Blaine Campbell.
Twice the guest, three times the guest, four...
I was more than one guest attending Richard Ibghy's and Marilou Lemmens' exhibition, since I attended more than once. The gallery I was hosted by the first time around was not the same in configuration and tone as the gallery I was hosted by the second time around, nor the third, nor fourth.
In donning the role of guest again and again, I considered the elements of the installation and performance with new eyes and ears each time. Familiar elements: stage lights, rug, clothes rack, piano, plates, silverware, oranges, books, printed cards, blanket, speakers, cables, lighting, sounds, echoes. But also white walls, doorways, and daises. And of course, bodies - one of which was always me.
But like me, with my multiple roles as guest, in new attire, with new obsessions and reflections, the stage (for the gallery is quite the theatrical space - theatrical in the old-world sense, the way Hollywood still tells us theatre happens, mythic) was continually reformed.
Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens, When the Guests Are Not Looking, 2016-18 (installation view at Audain Gallery). Photo: Blaine Campbell.
Every time I, as guest, came to look, the performance's elements - once scattered - had been reorganized, a new composition had been created. Sometimes it was very slight - a piano shifted askew - and other times it was very dramatic, such as the word "Nephew" written out in dimes and nickels on a dais or an orange stabbed with a fork.
It was when I was not looking, was not a guest, that transformation seemed most active, that the labour was being done, and that only after these intervals was it most visible to me.
(Aside: Wait - was I not only properly a guest when I was looking?)
Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens, When the Guests Are Not Looking, 2016-18 (installation view at Audain Gallery). Photo: Blaine Campbell.
And what of this passive voice? "Had been reorganized," "being done"... by whom? Does it matter? Shouldn't it matter who did the deeds I did not see being done?
The structure of When the Guests Are Not Looking works hard to make ghosts of those who work within its walls. We know of their presence only in the lingering traces of their labour: a new spotlight on the wall, a piano covered with a rug. Seemingly insignificant events, but powerfully present in the stark gallery space.
"Their" - vague, indeterminate - "labour." I know that some of "them" were students. The wall of words upon entering told me so. And all of those students were unpaid - though the wall of words does not say so. Did knowing the labourer change the way I saw or didn't see labour?
Labour has happened. So much is obvious. But less clear is what constitutes this labour.
Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens, When the Guests Are Not Looking, 2016-18 (installation view at Audain Gallery). Photo: Blaine Campbell.
Was the performer's bowling oranges at me labour? Was her playing the piano or reading theory beneath her breath equally labour? Can disparate tasks of labour become equalized when fixed wages aren't involved? And was my attendance labour in the eyes of another guest who I did not know was watching me?
Is guest another name for worker now in this theatre of perception? At times, I feel as though Ighby and Lemmens threaten us with the reality that we're losing the capacity to think of performance independently from labour, whether that is the performance of an artist or the performance of one's self - i.e. just living.
In other words, given the capacity of the concept of performance to apply so broadly across actions, from performing for the self to performing for another, I see in this exhibition the suggestion that even when the performers (pseudo-vagabond nephews of Rameau) performed for themselves, alone in a gallery, they were "at work." Working for the artists who were working through the performers (even if their performing is entirely solipsistic) to create the conditions in which I, should I visit, might think of myself as working.
It makes me wonder if we are losing faith in concepts of the self that do not require work or performance to be coherent. Is every fashioning of the self now labour?
Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens, When the Guests Are Not Looking, 2016-18 (installation view at Audain Gallery). Photo: Blaine Campbell.
Then there's the script. The theatrical heartbeat. The organizing principle. The labour of Ighby and Lemmens as object.
Of all the objects that moved and were rearranged in the gallery across my visits, that script on the northern wall persisted. It never seemed to change. Is it because, to my knowledge, none of the prompts on the script cards instruct the labouring vagabonds to rearrange the prompting cards?
As much as they point us to the theatre, these cards remind us of the traditional gallery's protocol: don't touch the objects on the wall. Performers (named guest or otherwise) can move, eat the oranges, eat the cookies, read the books, play the piano, but gallery protocol lingers. Those sacred words (however vague) which script the actions for the performers are also of course available for purchase, as a book, on your way out.
For more information about Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens, When the Guests Are Not Looking, click here.
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Based in Vancouver, Patrick Blenkarn is an artist working in theatre, film and books who recently completed an MFA at SFU.