Introduction to “Ruling Fictions” by Vera Frenkel.
A slideshow of 34 images. Transcripts of audio recordings voiced by the artist appear over 18 of the images in small black text, letter by letter in time with the audio. The text appears near the top to the left, centre or right, or sometimes on a wall in a building.
The first image is in grainy black and white. There is a large textured gray square over the centre of what appears to be a photo captured in an art gallery or a museum. Black text on the square reads: “Ruling Fictions (The Small & Large Betrayals that Haunt Us Once Again)”
Thirty colour images are captured from inside a vacant, modern commercial building, possibly an art gallery as one image shows what appears to be a makeshift storage room with many tall, white platforms or plinths. Despite natural light that shines through large windows and artificial light from tube shaped wall lights, many parts of the building are dark and shadowy. Most show public areas with white walls, polished concrete floors, light wood doors, exposed ceiling pipes and ventilation ducts. Some show non-public areas with concrete walls and control panels. A few of the images show a hand holding a camera, or a sliver of a person standing behind a corner. Seven look down hallways. Another shows a public washroom. Another looks out through a grid window onto an urban area with low rise buildings, greenery and a courtyard. Signs that appear in some images say “32 Lisgar”, “Meeting Room” and “Mezzanine”. Eight feature lit “Exit” signs.
After these images the text appears in white on a black background, followed up by a colour image of a large dark red velvet curtain.
The last image is in grainy black and white. In it, a person views an exhibit in what appears to be a gallery or museum. Behind them is a doorway. A sign above it says “Ruling Fictions”. It appears to be the same as the photo that appears in the first image, but without the textured gray square in the centre as there is very similar content. It seems to be from a book as there is a centre crease and fingers along it’s left edge.
Black text on a textured gray square: “Ruling Fictions, (The Small & Large Betrayals that Haunt Us Once Again)." The next two images appear as follows: 1. A shovel and a “32 Lisgar” sign rest against a large window to an area with a concrete floor, garbage bin and broom. 2. A white wall with a fire alarm pull down switch and an automatic door activation button.
the following text fragments were selected by Shani Parsons from the narrative portion of
ruling fictions (the small & large betrayals that haunt us once again)
an installation with video and tableaux i first showed in the exhibition “vestiges of empire” at the camden art centre, london, england, 1984
In writing there is the power to put anything anywhere: the door you’ve placed in the text may be open; the door may be closed. Behind the door there is a garden; or behind the door is a slum, or a battle, or a chalk pit, or a king, dying; or nothing, or another wall with another door.
A ventilation duct frames the top and right side of a wall that cuts to the foyer of a modern commercial building. A tiny hand reaches up in the lower left corner. The next two images appear as follows: 1. Two aqua- coloured wood tables sit in an open white room with a concrete beam the left. One table has a matching bench. 2. A white wall with a small sign that reads “Mezzanine”. Beyond is a wide hallway with a concrete floor.
So. The Door. Open or closed. And whatever lies behind it. And then those who move in either direction through the door, closing it behind them or leaving it ajar, and why. It’s in the writing.
I would tell you more if I knew. I always tell you everything I know. You doubt this I see. You do well to question me. But it is not I who lie — you must know that by now — it is the culture through me, deceiving me and turning me into the instrument of your deception. In this way we are both possessed, and tell each other things. And wonder.
An urban area through a large grid window or metal gate. The area has low rise buildings, greenery and a courtyard. The next image shows an open room with white walls, a large round concrete beam to the right, and a fire extinguisher box on the wall to the left.
If the wall in the story is pierced with windows and the writing makes room for us to see through these — to raise a blind or sweep aside a curtain, and to stand quietly nearby at the right time looking out — we might then observe things both self-evident and baffling, amazing things.
The place in which we are standing and from which we are looking out and which shapes our senses as we do this is not floor or window or door, nor whatever may be said to lie beyond, but simply the writing and its power to invent the truth as well as to persuade us to believe it.
Two photos of an empty stair well with gray concrete brick walls and wood railings.
Two photos. A lit and a dark area of a commercial building with concrete brick walls, utility panels and ventilation pipes. The next two images appear as follows: 1. A narrow, dark hallway. An exit sign shines bright at the end and a wooden pole leans against the left wall. 2. A black tile wall lines the right side of a hallway to the right of a blank white wall.
The question remains:
Whose stories are these, after all?
Whose are the fictions we live out, and why? Who are these people?
In life, as in text, I find especially interesting those objects which are so familiar in function and iconography, and therefore in their power to shape experience, that we take them for granted, hardly seeing them at all. I choose such ordinary made-by-human things and join them in a work as if I were writing, naming some internal state and describing some external reality with the same breath: this next to that, the teapot near the hammock; the two vases beside the mask; the fake gin-and-tonic comfortably within reach next to the bowl of real fruit. (The Door is open; the Door is closed. And then there is still the task of suggesting what is really behind the door.)
Two photos of double doors, one is propped open, the hall beyond is dim. One photo is closer to the doors than the other. The next image shows a textured concrete wall and a white wall. A person's shadow is cast on the white wall. A sliver of the person is shown.
But I dissimulate. All that I have said so far suffers a serious error of omission. I have neglected half the story; the part that describes the connection between us if I make something that you recognize, however ruefully, before making it your own. My reinventing the world, then, is not so arbitrary as I have chosen to insist. My writing, my joining of disparate events, take both you and the world into account.
A thick wall divides two areas. To the right is a fluorescently lit white hallway. To the left is a dim, gray-blue wall. The next two images appear as follows: 1. At left: a dimly lit, gray wall with a mirror that reflects concrete bricks. At the end of the grey wall is a white wall. 2. A shadowy white wall. A fluorescent tube light at left and two on the ceiling partially light it. At the top, an exit sign.
You and the world are vigilant, clear in your requirements: you allow me to seduce, but not to abandon. I cannot be one-sided. I boast in vain. Art is unremarkable after all.
But is it possible to reinvent or even refresh any part of the world we know when our governing hypnoses, those received ideas to which we remain in thrall, invite our continuing abandonment to some rather odd ruling fictions and their unhappy consequences? To make any art at all requires a steady look at these proverbial truths that betray us again and again, ingratiating themselves into every corner of our lives...
A very dark hallway. The far end is lit. There is a wall mounted drinking fountain and a lit “exit” sign. The next three images appear as follows: 1. Two photos of a storage room with several tall white platforms. A wood panel leans against a wall. 2. Toilet stall doors reflect in mirrors of a washroom with white sinks and a black tile wall. 3. Two photos of a hallway. It has bright blue accents, open wood doors, an armchair, and exposed ceiling ventilation ducts.
The questions remain:
Whose stories are these after all?
Whose are the fictions we live out, and why?
That gesture:
Is it yours?
That practiced smile?
That rage?
One cannot be interested, as I am, in questions of the attribution of meaning and in how we come to believe as we do, without paying attention to discontinuities between statement and feeling, fiction and reality. I am a student then, of mistaken attribution, of the incongruent.
Two images that look down shadowy, partially lit hallways with exposed ceiling pipes. Exit signs are attached to the ceiling.
A dark room with a large glass window marked with an X. It looks out to a brightly lit area with a pink wall. The next image shows a pale blue wall with safety lights and a closed door on the right. A door on the left is open. Beyond it is a dark room.
Empire, whether exploratory and seemingly benign, or conquering and cruel, is a wilful carrier of mistaken attribution. (“You are like me. You must be like me. You will be like me. You will want to be like me. I represent you and your wish to be unlike yourself. Your smile and your obedience reassure me of that, and your handing over of your weapons. Now tell me, is that your sister over there? She is lovely.”)...
A long, white hallway that leads to a dim area. To the right is an open door that leads to a shadowy room with a blue hue. The next image shows a white wall with a red rectangle. On the white wall, a small sign reads “meeting room” with an arrow pointing left.
The question remains:
Whose fictions are these?
To whose facts do they correspond?...
Two wood doors, a red rectangle and a large concrete beam. Beyond, to the right is a glass door. The next image shows a white wall with a small red utility box next to a gray door. The far wall is gray concrete brick.
Actually, I prevaricate. What I have brought is rather a mixture of all these lies and truths (The Door is open. The Door is closed. There is a garden. But no, there is something else there entirely. We must investigate.), the times being confusing and there being some urgency about the matter. I mean, you, we, do want to know after all: Am I like you? Do we resemble each other at all, still, ever? And if we do, can we bear the reflection?...
A corridor with a doorway with a large window to an empty room. To the right, two more corridors. The next image shows a long corridor leads to a dark grey door with a push bar. There are two doors at right.
(The Door is open. The Door is closed. There may or may not be a garden or a pit behind the door, or a king, dying, or people passing through in either direction. It is all determined in the writing, which is where we stand and from which position we look out believing what we’re told to see).
A hallway leads to a door with an exit sign above it. One end of the hallway is bright. The other end is dark, almost black. The next image is a completely black screen.
The question remains:
Whose stories are we living after all?
A large dark red velvet curtain.
A two-page grainy photo in a book. It is of a gallery or museum. A sign above a doorway reads “Ruling Fictions.”
In writing there is the power to put anything anywhere: the door you’ve placed in the text may be open; the door may be closed. Behind the door there is a garden; or behind the door is a slum, or a battle, or a chalk pit, or a king, dying; or nothing, or another wall with another door.
Vera Frenkel is an artist for whom language — particularly in terms of its malleability and unruliness — has served as an essential impetus, catalyst, and consequence for her storied career across nearly fifty extraordinary years of art-making. Moving between analogue and digital, documentary and fiction, departure and arrival, site and screen, Frenkel’s transdisciplinary approach is as much a process of migrating between her artworks’ evolving forms, contexts, and meanings as a reflection on migration itself. Since the 1970s, she has critically engaged with urgent socio-political issues of our time — including migration and exile, but also other conflicts inherent to communication, commodification, increasing bureaucratization, ongoing dispossession, and unrequited desire, to name but a few. Throughout, Frenkel has remained attentive to the linguistic underpinnings of her work, maintaining a keen sense of irony and wit in all that she writes, speaks, and represents. Referring to a work from 1974, the astonishingly prescient String Games: Improvisation for Inter-City Video, Dot Tuer observed in 1997 that “from her earliest experimentation with telepresence,” Frenkel has engaged the viewer in “an active process of piecing together meaning from fractured points of view.” Situating her works within indeterminate zones where the borders between oppositions begin to dissolve, Frenkel thus sustains a level of productive ambiguity that always holds a door open for others to enter and join in.
Ruling Fictions (The Small & Large Betrayals that Haunt Us Once Again) is a work that exemplifies many of these tensions and potentials. Originally created for a 1984 exhibition titled Vestiges of Empire at the Camden Arts Centre in London, Ruling Fictions took the form of an installation with video and tableaux, accompanied by a pamphlet with interlinked texts. The writing weaves together parallel narrative threads that encompass the artist’s inquiries and strategies for engaging, and often challenging, the institutions of Empire, art, archaeology, government, bureaucracy, and power interrelations thereof. As such, it is writing that catalyzes what Sigrid Schade has described as Frenkel’s interest in the “interplay between the construction of institutional archives and individual story-telling … illuminat[ing] blurred transitions between truth and fiction.”
Jonathan Shaughnessy concurs: “An essential premise for the artist’s use of works and words [is] that there is nothing necessarily foundational to language at all, or at the very least, nothing essential to words which can ensure that their propensity for Truth and Fiction cannot be undermined along every contextual step.” In an almost uncanny instance of reality mirroring fiction, 1984 was also the year that the Ontario Board of Censors was renamed the Ontario Film Review Board. In effect turning many artists into outlaws, this act affected Frenkel personally when she chose to move ahead with exhibiting The Business of Frightened Desires (Or the Making of a Pornographer) at an artist-run centre that had been shut down in the wake of a government raid.
Fast forward to 2019, the year in which I was researching artists for the site-responsive version of this exhibition at the Toronto Media Arts Centre (TMAC), an artist-run consortium that had itself become stuck in a legal battle with the city (albeit for reasons other than indecency). I had become interested in the possibility of installing a series of artist’s writings on walls within TMAC’s interstitial spaces, with the idea that this might also function as a kind of narrative thread for visitors exploring a show that was intended to manifest as a kind of fugitive presence within the troubled building. Frenkel and I had already been conversing on the increasing scarcity of space for art in downtown Toronto, and we discovered a shared interest in the Centre, as she had been working closely with one of the consortium members, Charles Street Video, on a new project. Encountering her writing within Ruling Fictions, I was struck by how it poignantly yet humorously captures the slippery nature of language in its power to cajole, caress, conceal, and coerce, often at the same time. In its direct address to the reader, its storybook quality, and spatially-oriented play, Frenkel’s text is equal parts exposition, proposition, and interrogation. Shifting in subjectivity and tonality, it manifests speech in a way that mirrors the strangeness and suddenness which with any conversation can turn in an unexpected direction.
The parallel and polyvocal form of the texts in the pamphlet made for a conceptual match with the idea of installing passages at key spatial turns in the building. In this way they would become a running counterpoint or commentary on the vicissitudes of mis/communication in parallel to the other more media-based or object-oriented installations within the exhibition. Focusing on 13 key passages, the texts broadly relate to, yet remain autonomous from, the other installations as both artwork and framing device. Unfolding as a fragmentary, nonlinear, and asynchronous echo from 1984, Ruling Fictions becomes all the more resonant in how it presages the accelerating crises of culture and communication we face today. Schade: “The present is permeated by history, and Frenkel’s works make these kinds of permeations visible.”
In 2000, Frenkel spoke on the role of art as testimony: “We’re here to talk about what happens when an event is experienced, remembered, and recorded in some way that allows it to enter history, accepting that this is a fragmented process, fraught with vested interests, contradictions, and denials.” Against such things as vested interests, contradictions, and denials — which condition all communications — how do our messages ever get through? Ultimately the physical form of this exhibition was never realized, cancelled in the wake of the pandemic and eventual eviction of the media arts consortium from the downtown building. Yet through an extended and complex process of communication, conditioned as much by chance and care as by conviction and crisis, the show is now realized in digital form, having undergone many more kinds of translation in the process. For example, while the artwork’s presentation may have lost a dimension in space, it has gained a dimension in time. Through setting the type in motion, Frenkel’s words now materialize letter by letter as a spectral form of writing on photos capturing the otherwise empty walls, mirrors, plinths, and halls of TMAC’s unfinished spaces before their eviction. The fragmentary passages thus map a place that no longer exists, except in these 17 images, teeming with absence and exits. In her 2013 essay, Work/Life Fragments, Frenkel observed, “Walls real and allegorical continue to rise and fall in constant redefinition of us-them, in-out, here-there….” Such dualities are key among the ruling fictions she interrogates, asking again and again: “Whose stories are these, after all? Whose are the fictions we live out, and why? Who are these people?” The question remains.
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Vera Frenkel is an internationally acclaimed multidisciplinary artist and Governor General's laureate based in Toronto. Her installations, videos, performance works and new media projects addressing forces at work in human migration, the learning and unlearning of cultural memory, and the ever- increasing bureaucratization of experience, have been seen at documenta IX, the Venice Biennale, and at major museums and galleries throughout the world.