The Rest of Our Lives: David MacWilliam
May 12 - June 3, 1995
Stride Gallery, Calgary
Catalogue Essay, Robert Linsley
Dissonance and Stylistic Montage
The internal historical movement of modern art has always been driven by the conscious exploration of dissonance- brighter, more clashing colours, strange harmonic intervals, and disturbing new metaphors. Inevitably, all dissonances eventually become a new kind of consonance- beauty is reinvented and the senses educated to expect new experiences in art. What aggravated the nerves yesterday has today become refreshing novelty, and tomorrow will be so familiar that we will only be able to recapture its originality through historical research supplemented by a sympathetic imagination.
Around the turn of the century a new kind of dissonance appeared. The juxtaposition of works from all periods and cultures in the modern museum created a new consciousness of style, and at the same time, modern analytical thinking reduced artworks to their component elements- colour, line and form. For the artist, modernism became the key to all styles, which we all now more or less arbitrary. The simultaneous presentation of different styles in the same work became a discursive, referential form of dissonance, one which played on the enormous richness od association that had collected around historical art, while at the same time accelerating the breakdown of the collective sensibility that enabled the older dissonance to function. The new context offered by the montage work released buried expressive potentials in obsolete, discredited artistic languages.
But since anything can find a new home in montage, the tension between dissonance and consonance diminishes and perhaps disappears. Since in principle there are no wrong gestures, innovation itself begins to seem impossible. This is the problem faced by the contemporary artist who wants to work at the highest level of historical consciousness- dissonant montage is a device,a nd once it is recognized as such it no longer works. Today, an artist with a diverse, uncentred practice has to reformulate the relationship between parts and whole outside of the aesthetic- with maximum freedom for the parts and an unforced organic necessity for the whole as the likely result.