Judith Barry Projections, Mise en Abyme

Published in connection with the exhibition Judith Barry: Projections Curated by Helga Pakasaar Presentation House GalleryMarch 3 – April 4, 1993

This project was generously supported by the Canada Council Exhibition Assistance Program and the Vancouver Foundation. ISBN: 0-920293-38-7

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Judith Barry and the Space of Fantasy by Brian Wallis

For the 1991 Carnegie International, Judith Barry created a work that was disarmingly simple, yet elegantly summarized many of the complex issues in her art. Titled Ars Memoriae Carneg;ensjs: A Memory Theater, this piece consisted of a packet of eight large cards printed with information about the Carnegie Institute, a combination of a library, natural history museum, and museum of fine art.

With the cards as a guide, the viewer could navigate through the vast collections of the Carnegie, rethinking the meaning of its objects and the reasons for their assembly. The cards turned the museum into a rich storage house of memories that could be retrieved by the viewer by following the simple instructions on the cards. In this way, the viewer became, as Barry's cards noted, "the producer of the museum, bringing to bear her or his particular belief in the notion that the objects displayed constitute a coherent view of the UNIVERSE."

Although the idea derived from Barry's earlier work on the Neoplatonic memory theaters of Renaissance architect Giulio Camillo and other mnemonic devices, in this site it gained particular meaning due to the way it triangulated her interests in the psychological effects of public architecture, as well as the relationship between representation and fiction or myth—an accumulation of ideas and images assembled from various pre-existing discourses.

The subject whose death was being announced was the individual as a universal, autonomous, self-generating being—a figure that formed the centerpiece of modernist culture. Replacing it was a postmodern subject, a sort of switching station for receiving, redacting, and recoding various channels of cultural information.

Theorists from Fredric Jameson to Jean Baudrillard were quick to describe this new, postmodern subject not only as the product (rather than the source) of a variety of signifying practices, but also as being shaped by those cultural formations. In other words, the conception of the logical, fully integrated self was superseded by a postmodern individual that they described as fragmented, schizophrenic, and superficial, trapped in a maze of competing signs.

Jameson, Baudrillard, and other postmodernists disputed the possibility of objective, universally verifiable knowledge even as they denigrated individual expression. For them, the postmodern subject was, in a sense, placeless.