“Empty Orchestra” runs to Nov 13. Mon-Wed 11am-5pm; Thu-Fri 11am-7pm; Sat-Sun 1-5pm. Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Hart House, 7 Hart House Circle. 416-978-8398.
www.jmbgallery.ca.
Karaoke is undoubtedly one of the most postmodern of pastimes, with its simulation of past and present pop ditties, its electronic and digital dependencies, its inherent deconstructionism (drawing attention to lyrics through drunken caterwauling, say) and its easy portability and replication — from bar to home, from Korea to Canada, etc. It is no surprise, then, that “Empty Orchestra,” Justina M. Barnicke Gallery’s current show about karaoke in contemporary art curated by Maiko Tanaka and Heather Keung, features distinctly postmodern practices. Mimicking their subject, these artists adopt a distanced, often wry, approach to the relationship between art and ideas or, rather, between aesthetics and ideology.
And so like every karaoke performance, there is a strong sense of anticlimax and unfulfillment to “Empty Orchestra.” Candace Breitz’s Karaoke, in which ten monitors, arranged in a circle, show ten different people singing Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly” out of time with each other, seems more about cacophonous meaninglessness than cultural or emotional interplay. Wang Gongxin’s video Kara Oke irritates similarly: different karaoke singers appear on the artist’s teeth, all buzzing like mosquitoes on the same note until his tongue or lips mute them by covering them up. Christian Jankowski’s The Day We Met has a killer premise — he makes a karaoke video starring himself, which viewers can sing over (I chose from the Ps: “Proud Mary” and “Piggy”) — though it, too, falls a bit flat. I imagined a more elaborate, epic project in which there was a separate video for every song in his karaoke book and which told a more perplexing, nuanced version of his (as it stands) quite obvious postcolonial melodrama about a European man breaking a Korean woman’s heart. Karaoke may indeed be a tool of (to paraphrase Tanaka in her brochure essay) complex cultural negotiation, but in this exhibit it is its caricaturizing, delimiting nature that shines through.