PROOF BREATH CHRISTINE BORLAND Art Gallery of York University v ............. Contents Foreword - Loretta Yarlow ‘Vulnerable’ - Michael Tarantino Exhibited Works Notes Spider Texts Appendix List of Works Foreword In the 1997 Münster Sculpture Project I saw Christine Borland's remarkable work The Loretta Yarlow Dead Teach the Living, consisting of seven Director/Curator luminous plastic heads mounted on plinths, situated like a memorial in an outdoor garden. The haunting presence of these reconstructed portrayals of anonymous beings remained with me. Although I had known Christine’s work through exhibitions at the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York and the Lisson Gallery in London, it was the sight of this impressive work that prompted me to invite her to Toronto for a solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of York University. Christine was happy to consider a future exhibition here, but it was not until she began work on Bullet Proof Breath at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia in 1999 that an exhibition began to take shape. We originally began discussions about a collaborative exhibition with Michael Tarantino, during his tenure at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, England. Now, as an independent curator based in Brussels, Michael helped bring this project to fruition as guest essayist. I am extremely grateful to him for his very personal and insightful text. We agreed to assist the artist in re­ fabricating Spirit Collection: Hippocrates, a major installation first shown at Dundee Contemporary Arts in 1 999. Three York students committed themselves to working with the artist at the university science laboratory during the summer of 2001, bleaching almost one-hundred plane tree leaves that Christine sent to us from Scotland. After the bleaching process all that remained of the leaves was their skeletal structure. Each of these ghostly leaves was sealed in a separate glass vessel filled with an alcohol based preservative solution. We consider ourselves fortunate to be the first public gallery in Canada to premiere Christine Borland’s important work. I am so pleased Christine was able to come to Toronto, first in November 2000, and again a year later, to share her ideas with us. She was extremely generous with her time while in our community and in participating in the many decisions concerning this exhibition and catalogue. It was a complete pleasure to work with her, and I am very grateful for her commitment. I want to thank York students Laurie Nordlund, Mark Campbell, and Janice Leung who worked so diligently in the re-fabrication of Spirit Collection. Their technical skills and patience involved weeks of labour in the university’s science lab. I am grateful to the lenders who kindly enabled us to realize this exhibition: Elayne and Marvin Mordes, Donna and Howard Stone, the Fabric Workshop and Museum, and the Sean Kelly Gallery. I am indebted to Cécile Panzieri, Director of the Sean Kelly Gallery, for sharing her extensive knowledge of Christine Borland’s art and for giving generously of her time and providing organizational assistance throughout the entire project. I also want to thank Janet Samuel and Pam Vander Zwan at the Fabric Workshop and Museum for their crucial assistance with the transport and installation of Bullet Proof Breath. I am indebted to the staff of the Art Gallery of York University who worked very hard, as always, in elevating this project to a level that is rare for a gallery our size: Kathleen McLean, Assistant Curator; Karen Pellegrino, Administrative Assistant; and Julie Yoo, Education Coordinator. To AGYU Advisory Board member, Laura Rapp, and her husband, Jay Smith, I want to acknowledge their hospitality to our visitors and for so generously supporting the production of this catalogue. Robert Johnston in Glasgow deserves special thanks for his role in the design and supervision of this attractive catalogue. I would like to thank my colleagues Marti Mayo, Director, and Lynn Herbert, Curator, at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston for their early commitment to this exhibition and for introducing Christine Borland's work to the Houston audience. This exhibition and catalogue were made possible with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Council, and the Henry Moore Foundation. Vulnerable (i) ‘Casanova likened a lucid mind to a glass, which does not break of its own accord. Yet how easily it is shattered. One wrong move is Michael Tarantino all it takes.' (W G Sebald, Vertigo, p. 56) We had guests over for dinner. It was so incredibly hot outside that we were serving cold salads. The wine, chosen accordingly, was a Chilean chardonnay. It was served in four glass goblets, copies of the kind of seventeenth century glasses which were always turning up in still-lives. Usually, we look at the oysters or the dead geese. But the glasses are truly extraordinary, a series of designs, shapes and imprints that one would not associate with such an unwieldy material. Glass can be wrought as subtly as metal or wood. And yet it retains its sense of transparency, of delicacy, of fragility. Which is why I was so distraught when I broke one of them when washing up the dishes later that night. The water was extremely hot and I had a pair of rubber gloves on to protect my hands. But io _ what I gained in protection I lost in sensitivity. It hardly felt like I was putting any pressure on the glass when my thumb went through it, breaking off a moon-shaped piece along the lip. The anger and violence that erupted from me did not seem to be in any proportion to what I had done. I’d just broken a glass. A valuable one, for sure, one with sentimental value, for sure, but still, just a glass. Of course it rendered the other three useless (in my mind), as one rarely had a dinner for three. And they were too 'special' to use alone or just among the two of us. Still, why was I so angry? Breaking that glass, breaking anything, always depresses me. I suppose it is the sense of loss, of not being able to go back. One could repair wood, fabric, whatever, but glass seemed irredeemable. And so, at the end of the day, it reminded me of death. Of the past. Of memory. The only thing that might have taken me out of my reverie would have been if I had pierced my own hand with the shard of glass, initiating a stream of sobering blood. But it had popped out of place like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle. It was like losing a book. You had read it, felt it, but it was gone now, irreplaceable. Another copy wouldn’t do. There's something about a glass shattering, which signifies utter despair. I was so angry I wanted to pick up the other three glasses and smash them. But I didn’t. I just took the broken one, put a flower and some water in it and placed it on the windowsill. The broken side was facing out. (ii) A glass sheet is covered with dust, tracing a human spine. The bones of a broken arm are Bullet Proof Breath, 2001 attached to two walls at right angles. A pair of shoes rests on the floor, pierced by a bullet. An apple has been shot by a .45 calibre gun. A watermelon drops to the ground, smashing into many pieces. A bullet rips through a sheet of glass, leaving intricate patterns of destruction behind. The ribs and vertebrae of a bison are set out on a table. A cup is shattered into a thousand pieces. A vessel, a body, a species ... disintegrate. What all of these pieces of Christine Borland have in common is the sense of containing an identity and destroying it at the same time. In each case, we can point to the body or the object that existed, at one point, as a totality. But what we are presented with is only the moment of its demise. We reconstruct that body, those objects, by our knowledge of what it was, what it represented. In a number of these works, the bullet of a gun is the means by which something is shattered or pierced. A bullet shatters pieces of porcelain, destroying them forever. The dream of the single vessel, emerging from the potter's wheel, confirmed in the heat of the kiln, shattered in a moment of violence. A hand blown piece of glass, designated by the title Bullet Proof Breath, splits into a series of intricate veins (simulating bronchia, the branches of the lungs). Several of the most prominent bronchia are wrapped with the delicate, golden silk extracted by scientists and without consent, from a golden orb weaver spider-the Nephila of the accompanying video piece Nephila Mania, which records the process. sawiS Destruction and representation in Bullet Proof Breath only seem to be at odds with each other. The starting point is a web constructed in silk by a spider. To enable the 'silking' process whereby its silk is extracted, the spider is knocked unconscious by a blast of carbon dioxide, blown down a straw by the scientist. It is then possible to examine, to reconstruct the spider’s stratagem (sic) in order to attempt the development of a new, at best bullet-proof, material. Yet, the bullet-proof vest is an anomaly, like a star wars missile defense system. It offers a false degree of security, a sense that we are invulnerable, that the forces of the outside world cannot penetrate us. If we examine a surface that has been pierced by a bullet, we see that the term ‘bullet-proof’ is an illusion.