Description
Cette nuit, défaire is an audio visual performance and installation. For three weeks Karen performed sitting on a stool during the gallery’s open hours.
To her left was an approximately six-foot by two-foot pile of unspooled, continuous ¼ inch magnetic tape. The ribbon of tape ran up from the pile to a reel that acted as a guide and was held in place at the top of a 3-foot high, custom-made metal stand. From there the tape was suspended horizontally in front of Karen and went to another vertical metal stand. This one was equipped with a wheel connected to a modified sewing machine motor and foot pedal. When the artist stepped on the pedal, the tape was advanced by the motorized wheel, and then was dropped to the floor, creating another pile to her right.
Karen cradled a playback head of a reel-to-reel tape player in her hands, positioning it so that it could read the sound recorded on the tape as it moved past her. A sound system allowed the recording to be heard in the gallery space. The pressure Karen put on the foot pedal determined the playback speed.
The recording on the tape is of Karen and her friend Nancy Ring reading the entire 1000 page novel Ulysses by James Joyce. The performance began with the playback of the first page of the book and continued in a linear way for the duration of the exhibition. The recording was so long, some 15 hours, that Karen never got past the first chapter during the exhibition.
The piece also included a large temporary loom at the front of the gallery, visible through the window to passers-by. It was approximately seven feet high and leaned diagonally out from the wall to the floor. The warp threads of the loom were nailed to two boards at each end; they were made of spun 1⁄8 inch magnetic cassette tapes – recordings of Nancy Ring reading fairy tales to her daughter.
At the end of each day in the gallery, Karen would bring the length of tape that had been played that day and hand-weave it into the loom to create the word “yes” – the last word in Joyce’s novel. At night, a television in the gallery’s window broadcast to the street a video loop of the recorded tape being dumped on the floor played in reverse.
Statement
Cette nuit, défaire originated as Karen and Nancy Ring looked for ways to pass time together. Nancy, a friend and colleague, had been diagnosed with stage-four ovarian cancer. Bedridden for days at a time following chemotherapy, they looked for ways to divert their thoughts. Both of them had always wanted to read Joyce’s elusive and difficult Ulysses. They discovered that the rhythm and sound at the heart of Joyce’s writing needed to be spoken or heard for it to be fully appreciated. So they decided to read it to each other out loud. Karen proposed recording the reading, as an afterthought, on a hunch that it might be good to have later.
“Chapter by chapter, day after day, Nancy read out loud; I listened and wrote. Time was extended by a mingling of the flow of Joyce’s amazing text and the sound of a voice stumbling with the awkwardness of speaking words never before read, our laughter, and the numerous interruptions by cat, phone, daughter and doorbell. All of this conspired to ward off our fears and to prolong and enrich the experience of that moment together.” (Karen Trask, press release, La Centrale, 2008)
Joyce’s novel Ulysses is considered a rewriting of Homer’s Odyssey. In both literary sources, Karen’s interest is not in Joyce’s main character, Bloom nor the mythical warrior king Ulysses, but rather their wives, Molly and Penelope. Penelope waits 20 years for Ulysses to return from fighting in a war. One of the ways she devises to ward off her 108 suitors is to say that she will only give up hope for her husband’s return and marry another, when she finishes weaving a burial shroud for Ulysses’ elderly father. Then, every night for years, she undid part of the shroud, so that it was never completed.
Karen takes up the role of Penelope in Cette nuit, défaire. The artist’s weaving on the temporary loom and her video of the “read” magnetic tape falling up are literal allusions to Penelope’s actions in the Greek myth. There are many other aspects of the work that point to, what Karen admires as, “Penelope’s small but significant acts of keeping oneself alive and hopeful.”
Think of the importance for Karen of bringing her working hands into the performance, “While we were doing that [reading with Nancy], I just kept feeling the sound going through my hands.” (Karen Trask, 2024, AOPA) Karen found a way to realize this poetic coupling of story and hands in collaboration with Avatar, audio and electronic arts research artist-run centre in Québec city. There is also the cyclic transformation that weaves the elements of the work together—Nancy’s reading voice transferred to magnetic tape and brought into the gallery is placed on the floor in a physical pile that then becomes sound before falling back into a pile that in turn is reorganized into a flat weaving that over time asserts just one word, “Yes” – the last word in Joyce’s novel. The next day it all starts again.
In the work Cette nuit, défaire, as in Au rythme de Pénélope / Penelope Speaks, which was exhibited along side it at La Central, the artist looks to women who, out of a sense of honour and through their daily work (rather than for glory and going to conquer the world), are the glue in society, holding relationships together. Penelope represents a female character of quiet strength and resolve. All these elements were perhaps what the artist needed to be able to understand what it means to accompany a friend through suffering, and to be left to mourn her death. Nancy passed away in 2010.
Yoko Ono’s 1966 work Ceiling Painting/Yes Painting was another of Karen’s references for this work. Ono described it as being about the discovery of hope, even when it’s hard to find. The “yes” that closes Ulysses and the “yes” Karen wove in the last stage of her process work, do the same. “Yes, is the affirmation of life.”
Don Goodes & Karen Trask, 2024
