Project description • Codicologie(s) • with Patrick Altman

The title is derived from the name of an aspect of historical research that entails the study of manuscripts (texts) as cultural artifacts. The “text” being examined in our work is the highly-coded space of the public museum, specifically that of the Musée du Québec in Quebec City.

Colour as organizational device is central to our exploration. When one thinks of colour and museums, it is usually the colour of the works of art and other artifacts in a museum's collection that come to mind. Patrick and I noted that colour is also used extensively by museums to categorize and differentiate their own institutional functions. This observation led us to eventually concentrate on two aspects of the many colour codes operative in the museum - the institutional filing system for photographic documentation of artworks (much of this documentation was shot by Patrick in his role as staff museum photographer) and the paint colour schemes that subtly theme gallery spaces and exhibitions. Our approach was meant to turn the colour coding systems “inside-out” – and so render them visible - by transforming the systems for coding both art and institution into artworks (aesthetic objects) themselves.

 

Our transformations are not gratuitous but are meant to reference genres of art actually held in the museum’s collections.  Patrick has photographed the drop sheets used by the preparators  after they have finished painting the walls of a set of galleries. The resulting works, enlarged significantly, take on the appearance of abstract expressionist canvases making reference to the  museum’s extensive collection of Quebec modernist painting by artists such as J.-P. Riopelle. Whereas Patrick plays with the idea of Greenbergian flatness in his pieces, in my photographs I have attempted to render the shelving system and file folders of the institutional photo archive as sculptural figures. This is done through playing with scale, perspective, an ambiguous placement neither fully on the wall nor on the floor, and through a trompe l’oeil effect enhanced by the colour coding system itself. Our pieces are not individually titled or credited. It was our intention to allow them to function as emptied signifiers whose strangely familiar appearance might encourage viewers to reflect on the paradoxical nature of the structures that construct the category of “art” and allow us to recognize that we are in its presence.