Nelson Henricks - Prix Robert-Forget 2024

How can we view Emission today without using the present-time interpretive filters? In an interview with Mike Hoolboom in 2008, Henricks remarked that this work is often revisited: ‘Over the years, I have come to assume that the reason people like Emission is the same reason I dislike it: it is incoherent.¹ He then says that his editing method was refined with the videos that followed (Shimmer, 1995, Crush, 1997). I would suggest, however, that, the inchoative structure of Emission shows a processual, sometimes ambivalent, way of thinking, bordering with nascent discourses of queer theory at the moment of its making.

            To discuss Emission, I have to isolate sequences; as a consequence, the reassembling generates new associations, with many ellipses. In one of the video’s (seven) segments, the screen is split and Henricks moves a chair around on one side and a semaphore flag on the other² A song plays in English, with French subtitles running along the bottom of the screen. Above them, where the two sides of the split screen meet, English words appear in alphabetical order. Certain terms aggregate as markers of gay identity (homo, hole, fist) while others belong to heterogeneous lexical fields (hair, pair). Depending on our affiliation with the group alluded to, we might recognize ourselves in part of the language or we might dis-identify and reject the terms as parataxes. Henricks then brutally interrupts this flux with images of ejaculating penises on the left-hand side of the screen. These are the ‘money shots’ of pornography that provide irrefutable proof of orgasm. While these unambiguous signifiers accumulate, on the right-hand side the artist continues to wave the flags. Connecting the two frames, the word ‘emission’ serves as the lowest common denominator: the emission of a signal, or sperm. The sequence that follows alludes to the AIDS virus without naming it. Pills tumble through the air against a blue background. A ribbon of text brings on the same plane the dissemination of information by the media (radio, television, etc) and the propagation of a 20^th-century pandemic. Then a rupture occurs: the screen turns black. We hear a voice message left by Henrick’s mother: ‘Nelson, this is your mother calling…’ The ensuing silence highlights the artist’s absence on the side of receivership and raises the possibility of his complete disappearance. Midway through, clips of black and white films are interpolated into the fabric of the video. An actor uses sign language. Intertitles seem to stand in for the content transmitted through these codified movements. We think of the semaphore flags seen previously. The narrator’s voice describes the inability to perform a scream. A white liquid jets across the screen from one side to the other. We see a container pouring another liquid outside of the frame. A woman spits out water. In the next sequence, milk (?) is squirted at the artist’s face, with no apparent causal link to the preceding scene. Here Henricks has de-coupled a communication protocol (the signal/noise dyad) and undermined the presupposition that a mode of address could reach any audience, already self-aware and fully formed.

This inventory, which suggests possible juxtapositions and coalitions beyond the listed categories of LGBTIQ+ now, resonates with the appearance and disappearance of split subjects in Emission.

In 1995, Henrick’s earliest works were shown at Oboro, in Montréal. The exhibition was accompanied by an essay by art historian Christine Ross, in which she purports that Henricks has provided a counter-example of the appearance of the most recognizable (homosexual) identity bearers.⁴ Ross cites Peggy Phelan, Teresa de Lauretis and Sedgwick, as well as Raymond Bellour and Laurence Louppe, and links the term “queer” to the instability of the video image and the concept of invisibility in phenomenology. She puts a hinge between the theoretical constellations that were developing in Montréal during this period, at the intersection of French and English translations (from ‘French Theory’). This linguistic hybridity was also manifested through the bilingual enunciations in Henricks’ narrations, often written without one language taking precedence over the other, in the incidental absence of an original text.

Henricks 1990s videos and Ross’s essay anticipated a contemporary critique of visibility as a neoliberal trap. Almost 30 years after the first wave of queer theory, historian Lex Morgan Lancaster has written a series of case studies to comment upon the resurgence of modernist forms in the practices of LGBTQIA2+ artists who seek to circumvent the injunction of self-representation or to provide a figure to difference through an imago of the body.⁵ I hesitate, however, to associate too easily this category of queer abstraction with Henrick’s work – video and painting – and make him a protagonist among others in an art current or movement. My reticence comes from the fact that once the work has been incorporated into a very American critical apparatus, its singularity and the scope of its local reception will be limited. Further, the catachresis that denotes the strategic misuse of a trope, such as the monochrome, according to Lancaster, is mainly at play when artists augment it with performative gestures or texts.

In Henricks’ work, this enactment of ideas through the body and their translation into discourse (fragmentary and non-didactic), takes form with Don’t You Like the Green of A?. Before discussing the video, I would like to address the gradual shift toward abstraction that happened slowly in his practice. Because of the limited word count, I have to put aside part of Henricks’ corpus, mostly the multiscreen installations, in which he examines polysensory aesthetic models dating back to the 19^th century.

A non-pathological neurological condition with which Henricks lives has affected his work for several years: he is a synaesthete. In 2012, Henricks summoned this phenomenon of double perception in Monochrome A to Z (Synaesthesia Paintings), a series of 26 tableaux corresponding to letters of the alphabet and a range of colors established through free association. The cognitive manifestations of synaesthesia and kinaesthesia have been studied since the 19^th century, supporting the theories of an all-encompassing aesthetic realm beyond the limits of disciplines such as literature, painting, and music. Henricks’ works bypass this call for an excess of meaning: they are visually confined to the smallest units of signification – the 26 graphemes – and to colors, without producing any metaphors for translation. The terseness of the artist’s approach regarding his neurodivergence, reduced to an arrangement of letters and readymade signifiers, recalls his early videos, in which he avoids literal disclosure of his sexual orientation. We can say that this enunciation belongs to a language at degree zero, a ‘palette-repertoire’, that nevertheless says more than the sum of its parts.

Another event in Henricks’ life led him to conceive a programme in which he made paintings without foregrounding his autobiography. He gathered unused tubes of color belonging to his late mother, a landscape painter. He filled the margins of his abstract canvases with this residue. The centres of each composition bear a black rectangle that alludes to Laurence Sterne’s novel The Life and Opinions of Tristan Shandy (1759). Sterne’s use of an obstructed page, like a monochrome ahead of its time, suspends his storytelling at the point where one of the characters disappears. Henricks’ project, entitled Lacuna, reached closure once the tubes of paint had been exhausted, perhaps lending an arbitrary end to the grieving process. Henricks’ answer, as silence following his mother’s telephone message in Emission, takes a reversed path here. She is the one who doesn’t respond. However, the items in Lacuna, a body of work which is based on the compulsion to repeat, didn’t articulate or express the emotions felt at the time of this loss or during the making of the paintings.  

Henricks linked himself to another posthumous interlocutor besides his mother: Joan Mitchell. The dialogue between the artists nevertheless circumvented affinities. The relation was based on the simple fact that Mitchell also experienced synaesthesia. She has described her double perception in several interviews and the title of the video Don’t You Like the Green of A?, was taken from one of these conversations. The tape was made for an exhibition at the Musée d’art contemporain in 2022, which brought together all the paintings Henricks had completed about synaesthesia since 2012.⁶

Once again, I will focus only on certain cells from the video. With the use of special effects, Henricks set up a ‘meeting’ of two avatars of himself, to echo the sensory ‘doubling’ that he and Mitchell experience. The jacket, with multicolored rectangles, that one of them wears, is swept with a microphone by his counterpart. The information that is elicited as output warbles with vibrations. Henricks creates the feedback of synaesthesia from scratch, through postsynchronization. In a subsequent sequence, a slide of a work by Mitchell is projected on the wall. We hear Henricks quote extracts from a text about the association that Mitchell made between whiteness and death. He passes the mic over the canvas. The data collected is ‘seized’ and assigned to the sound effects previously perceived. Sequences – which I comment upon here without respecting the order of their occurrence – reprise the coupling of the two representations of Henricks, this time signalling the division of labour as tasks undertaken by the same person. The first subject hangs paintings on the wall while the second plays the role of a photographer. When a monochrome is captured, it occupies the entire field.

In Emission, Henricks appears in two squares dividing the frame, and his movements with the semaphore, accompanied by the parataxis of words, address an Other. The doppelgängers of Don’t You Like the Green of A? parody the auto-affection – wrongly confounded with narcissism – that is prevalent in the genre of the video self-portrait. Henricks is, in principle, alone in front of the camera (at least, that is what he states obliquely). In adding his double, he stages the act of ‘touching oneself touching the Other’, via a system of imaginary auscultation, conveying the wrong information.⁷ At the beginning of the video, the various colored rectangles move top to bottom, then diagonally, towards each edge of the screen. At the end, in coda, the empty clothes float, and the rectangles disperse again in a similar movement. The paintings, like their digital/photographic emanations, become quasi-spectral subjects.

A narrative voice-over, which is integral to Emission and several later videos, is missing here. Henricks appears like a silent lecturer, showing things rather than explaining anything. In choosing the circumstances of his erasures and appearances, he folds, then unfolds a continuous surface. This half-speak could, at a later date, become a full language. We cannot utter words for him. For now, in front of the opacity of the hem, we can only recognize the difficulty of writing about his work, as a good enough response.