Nelson Henricks - Prix Robert-Forget 2024

Since its emergence in the 1960s, video art has proven to be a particularly apt medium for experimenting with perspectives, norms and expectations. Straddling the realms of popular culture and the visual arts, video can not only reflect society, but also help to shape it. In a way, it renders the world and its temporalities more malleable. When it first emerged, video art was influenced by experiments in music and performance, and it continues to bring different disciplines together, enabling stories to build through an assemblage of literature, visual culture, music, cinema, dance, performance, and theatre, for example. In this respect, it is not unlike another discipline: curating. Curatorial practice, which fundamentally involves the organization of exhibitions and the assemblage of objects, has asserted itself as a discursive, conceptual and formal practice in recent decades. The exhibition, a crucible of negotiations between objects, information, people, spaces, temporalities and contexts, is now seen as a transdisciplinary, or even ‘undisciplined,’ space. In this sense, the curator is also able to ‘think through reality’.  

In this essay, I would like to look at the curatorial approach that Nelson Henricks takes in his video practice. While remaining critical of forms of categorization (such as the artist-curator), I will examine the methodologies he has used in creating and presenting his multidisciplinary projects. I will consider the motives, gestures and strategies that activate associations, connections or interactions, and that generate discourse and contexts for assemblage. Henricks is a major figure in contemporary video who, since 1985, has developed an experimental practice through which he explores rhythm and composition. In a 2007 interview with Mike Hoolboom, Henricks talks about the political and social potential of interconnection with reference to the philosophical concept of the rhizome², a continually evolving, non-linear and non-hierarchical network, with no apparent order or coherence. He asserts, however, that ‘It’s not enough to simply make a bunch of rhizomes. The key is to connect them. When linked, rhizomatic structures can have political [and social] potential.’³

This vision of interconnecting rhizomes is applicable to the representational system Henricks develops in his work, and it is a particularly interesting angle from which to consider the crossover between the curatorial methods and artistic experiments at the centre of his practice. Henricks’ rhizomatic philosophy allows him to extend his field of reference and transfer elements between works in which he deconstructs and reassembles reality. The artist detaches ideas, images, sounds, and texts from their original contexts and manipulates them, rendering his videos ‘material’ so to speak. As curator France Choinière explains in his exhibition text about the four-channel video installation A Lecture on Art (Dazibao, 25 April – 20 June 2015), Henricks weaves ‘a system of associations that can open new parameters of perceptions and reflections.’⁴ With A Lecture on Art, Henricks presented a fragmented interpretation of Helen Potter’s phonetic transcription of an extract from a conference given in 1882 by Oscar Wilde. Each of the four screens was dedicated to a single component (actor, text, sound, set) but they were unified by sound. The assemblage was primarily rhythmic, while the sequences and temporalities were united through the modulations of sound. The staccato effects of attraction and repulsion deconstruct linguistic meaning in favour of sensation.

In a similar way, the project DOCUMENT XXL (Artexte, 13 April – 17 June 2017), explored speech and ways of making sound visible. In a video programme on two screens, it brought together artists’ presentations in various formats (video, audio and printed) from the collection at Artexte. Created during a research residency, this project was both curatorial and artistic, both an exhibition and an original work. This hybrid form allowed Henricks to explore one of the themes that runs through his practice: the inability of words to articulate the inexpressible, to signify or evoke ‘[the] extralinguistic thought that the artist puts into the work during the act of physical creation.’⁵ Using a curatorial model borrowed from ‘platinism’ – the manipulation and mixing of different sources of sound to produce original music – Henricks organized documents in pairs, creating associations through editing that attached new meaning to their individual content. In doing so, he lends the same importance to the device as to the content that it produces or contains. This strategy feeds the artist’s analytical exploration of visual and audio synchronicity. The resulting shift in meaning invites us to reflect on the capacity of the curator and the expographic model (which extends beyond the physical exhibition into, for example, book or audio form) to express the depth of an idea, a question or a concept through the assemblage of works, texts, and speech, etc.

For several years, Henricks has used synesthesia, a perceptual condition that he himself experiences involving a crossover of the senses, ‘as a generative strategy for artmaking, but also as a tool for thinking.’⁶ As a methodology, it allows the artist to go further with his conceptual and formal exploration of the processes of juxtaposition, and of the representation of feelings and sensations. The installation Don’t You Like the Green of A? (Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 17 November 2022 – 10 April 2023), explored the theme of synesthesia and was inspired by the experience of the American painter Joan Mitchell (1925-1992), herself a synesthete. The artist explored the effects of an atypical perceptual mechanism on ways of conceiving and understanding the world. The videographic space was exploded: elements of the video at the center of the exhibition were transposed throughout the gallery – monochrome canvases, wallpaper, costumes, lighting. These sensorial extracts or fragments seemed to be the result of a (de)composition that destabilized the temporalities and surfaces of the video medium. In this case, the shifts were not only semantic – they were embodied. Translation, which is central to Henricks’ practice, took a material form. Don’t You Like the Green of A? experimented with the use of the exhibition space in a way that somehow renewed the methods the artist had used since the end of the 1980s, which Jon Davies qualifies as ‘the aesthetic of the self-reflexive collage’.⁷

Henricks’ early videos, influenced by conceptual art, theatre and performance, and cinema, explore our inclination to communicate and to dissect the relationship between language and visual experience. The rapid succession of sequences, extreme close-ups, and a fragmented self portrait (including the artist’s voice over) creates a hypnotizing rhythmic effect. Legend (1988) tells a non-linear story with nine segments that address the formation of identity. The story’s kaleidoscope structure rests on a network of multiple references – including some that can also be found in recent works. Shimmer (1995) demonstrates a more assured engagement with collage, which the artist produces by ‘shimmering’ between the image, the voice over, and the sound. On this subject, curator Nicole Gingras speaks of a ‘doubling up’ inherent in the act of recounting or watching ‘a false coupling that engenders the simultaneity [of] two streams.⁸ In Crush (1997), Henricks extends the shimmering to the image itself with bright sunlight, glistening water, and reflective metal. The unfurling of images and voices, united in their gleaming, creates productive distortions from which new meanings emerge – perceptible shifts. Planétarium (2001) and Satellite (2004) interrogate our relationship with the future, and combine images and texts like an experimental atlas. With a chaotic edit and a pulsating techno soundtrack, both videos bring together eclectic and a priori opposed perspectives that refer to the immensity of the cosmos and the universe that exists in our heads. Map of the City (2006) is inspired by the Hugolian concept of ‘the building as book’, or of constructed speech, to evoke memories, geographies, and urban meanings. Through a process of accumulation, Henricks links hundreds of photographs and video clips to extracts of text, implementing a ‘cinematographic metaphor of the book,⁹ according to curator Donna Wawzonek, with ‘each projection reading like a “page”.¹⁰

Over the past 40 years, (or nearly, at the time of writing in 2024), Henricks has (re)used the videographic medium by exploring its structure, format, codes and potentialities. He has made an ‘undisciplined’ tool that encourages contamination and separates all content from its context, recontextualizing it according to the assemblage. His various formal and discursive processes take a curatorial approach, in the sense that they bring about a transposition of information and generate spaces to foster discourse. Henricks tests the mechanisms of representation with innumerable experiments intended to organize the world. In the text that accompanies the project DOCUMENT XXL, the artist describes feeling and sensation as ‘a place in which linguistic meaning falls apart, giving way to something more intuitive, more embodied, more colored.¹¹ This idea eloquently sums up and unifies the multifarious methods used by Henricks in creating transdisciplinary works, rendering video a device with which to think through reality.