Home is where the irony is
Toronto Star, April 10, 2008

by Peter Goddard

The sight of an old home, once loved but teetering on ruin, stirs deep feelings and can send an artist n a sentimental bender, as happened to writer Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited. A house “is the shell of a man,” noted the late Irish designer Eileen Gray, a place suggestive of a way of life.
Shell (2008) is the title of a 32-minute video from Paulette Phillips, a new media artist whose second show in two years at Diaz Contemporary opened late last month.
With the camera tracking the cracks fund in many crumbling walls, Phillips turs a ransacked villa at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin on the French Riviera, near Monte Carlo, that Gray, “the first lady of modernism,” built in 1929.
Phillips is not Waugh-like sentimental – at least not in her art, which is minimalist, coolly analytical, subtly sly and generally the source of conflict and uncertainty. Gray’s house, e-1027 – an encryption of her initials with those of her lover, the somewhat unsuccessful Romanian architect Jean Badovici – was home to more than its share of conflict.
Gray quit E-1027 in 1932, leaving it in the care of Badovici, who in turn invited Le Corbusier to stay. The famous architect loved the low-slung seaside retreat and proceeded to draw eight huge murals on its walls. Over the years Le Corbusier would be the least of Gray’s worries as real vandals would come and g leaving her home a wreck.
Gray’s conflict with Le Corbusier, the tension between the glorious promise inherent in E-1027’s modernism and its ruined state, and the lovers’ quarrels are all encapsulated in Phillips’ title for the show, “History appears twice, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce,” a line slightly remixed from Karl Marx’s original phrase.
Cue the tension and uncertainty. Is the farce the ongoing bureaucratic wrangling over saving E-1027 as a historical site? By “tragedy” does Phillips mean the Gray-Badovici breakup?
If s, Phillips’ sense f the tragic is laced with enough irony to lead you think another Marx – Groucho – added something to the show.
Mirrors starting appearing in Phillip’s work in the early 90’s, and in The Egoist/Lover (2008) a small shaving mirror is thrust out from the artist’s version of Gray’s original “satellite mirror” – a small mirror fixed at the end of a mechanical “arm” fastened to the wall – crated originally for Badovici’s room.
Yet this mirror shies fron the viewer’s gaze., its circular surface sensor-activated to twist away at the approach of a viewer. If Phillips means to encapsulate Gray’s rage at her lost love, the Toronto artist could not have come up with a better vehicle to conflate the idea of vanity (Badovici’s, one presumes) and inadequacy (ditto).
Mirror-play doesn’t entirely end here, though.
The Egoist/Lover itself mirrors Home wrecker I (2005), the mechanical sculpture that took centre stage at Phillips’ last Diaz show. With it, a flowing, white hankie or scarf, suspended in the air due to a magnetic field, fluttered sensuously to a viewer’s movement, like right out of a seduction scene in a silent film.
Touché (2008) forces a further confrontation. In container the size of a rat’s cage, the artist ha fixed two magnetized books, one of Gray and Le Corbousier’s The Poetics of Metaphor. Due to all the negative energy in this magnetized force field, one book hovers in space barely above the other, repelled and intimate at the same time.