FREE FALL: THE DEPICTION OF MOTION IN ART FROM BORDUAS TO TOUSIGNANT By Doug Pope This essay examines the treatment of motion in the work of Paul-Émile Borduas (1905-1960) and Claude Tousignant (b. 1932). I have chosen these two artists because their styles represent different poles of abstraction. A rebel against tradition and authority, Borduas was drawn to the revolutionary tendencies of Surrealism, a movement which promoted the subversive character of the unconscious. Tousignant was not an agitator or writer as Borduas was. His work is objective, not personal, and uses geometrical designs in a rational manner to test properties of colour and human perception. Despite their differences, both artists refer to motion in their work. Why is this? What are the ideas behind their different treatments of motion and how do these treatments change over time? I would like to begin with a consideration of two works, Seagull (1956) by Borduas (fig. 1) and Accélérateur Chromatique (1971) by Tousignant (fig. 2). The images were painted fifteen years apart and demonstrate two different sensibilities. To start with the obvious differences, one is painted in black and white; the other is an experiment in vivid colour. One is rectangular; the other is a tondo. The Borduas work is asymmetrical. It is composed of a number of similar, but not identical, fragmented forms. The irregular shapes echo and contrast with one another, evoking an erratic kind of motion that one might see in a bird suddenly changing flight. In the Tousignant work, a series of circles radiate outward in a hypnotic array of colored bands, all the same width. The precision of this work, which could not be achieved without the aid of mathematical instruments and careful planning, is characteristic of the Plasticien movement, prominent in Montreal from 1955 to the mid 60s. The spontaneous methods of Borduas, who worked without preliminary sketches of any kind, are characteristic of the Automatiste movement, which was active from 1942 to 1954. Even the titles of the works indicate a difference. I do not exactly know what an Accélérateur Chromatique is, but I would guess it has something to do with a machine. Borduas’s title, Seagull, is poetic and ambiguous. There may be some correlation in that seagulls are black and white birds equally at home in the air or on the water. The painting suggests forms floating unpredictably through space, but the main point is the reference to nature. Borduas used images of in-between spaces, floating objects, half-hidden surfaces and objects in an uncertain balance with one another. All of which question the idea of permanent borders and fixed relationships. In the 1940s and 50s, Quebec represented a traditional society, resistent to any kind of change. The Catholic church was central to the culture of Québec, controlling education, health care and welfare in the province until 1964.(1) However, the church was only part of a larger infrastructure inherited from another era that was out of step with modern developments. Borduas understood that art in Québec could not move forward without making significant social changes.(2) An early image by Borduas, Parachutes végétaux (1947) shows plant forms hovering over an ambiguous land mass. The motifs of flying and suspended forms are akin to losing one’s body as one starts to dream. The laws of gravity no longer hold. The flying object is a particularly liberating motif often used by the Surrealists. It was at once defiant and absurd. When confronted with a surrealist painting like René Magritte’s A Castle in the Pyrenees (1961), one wonders: how can a giant boulder hover weightlessly in the air? Flying rocks are impossible tricks of an artist’s imagination, yet the planet earth or the moon is a kind of giant rock that hovers in outer space, which we accept without hesitation. Our notion of what is impossible is very much determined by the context of the discussion. In visual works, dark areas can indicate absence as well as presence. However a dark form appears to have more weight, more density than a light form, which draws attention to the way it is suspended on the page. In a work from 1958, known as Composition 38, Borduas places three dark forms at the top of an otherwise empty vertical composition, creating a sense of tension and expectancy. It is as if we expect the forms to fall, and when they do not fall, there is a feeling of buoyancy and release. In an opposite approach, Borduas produced a series of largely white “snow paintings” in New York in the early 1950s. Mirage on the Plain (1953) evokes subterranean forces threatening to break through to the space above. In this work, the artist dispenses with solid forms in favour of an all-over pattern of expressive marks. Marks draw attention to the process of the artist, a process analogous to exploring or child-like scribbling. An artist’s marks may be obscure and unreadable, a set of hieroglyphs that await to be deciphered. They may have no direct meaning, remaining personal to the artist who makes them. However marks can animate and energize pictures. They can help to integrate elements or they can mobilize elements and create instability and agitation. They often provide a sense of direction to a viewer, who is unconsciously guided through the image by them. In his final phase, after moving to Paris in 1955, Borduas introduces irregular forms in stark contrasts of black and white. The forms resemble falling debris or islands seen from the air. I think of them as shrapnel, pieces of an explosion and disintegrating ruins. They are negations as much as positives. Many critics refer to these works as reversible because the black shapes can be read as either foreground or background.(5) They could represent holes as much as substances, as though viewers were looking through a white cloth or net into the blackness beyond. Within this ambiguous space, shapes exist in a precarious balance to one another. Sometimes the space within the picture appears open; other times it is closed. Motifs of flying and of forces breaking through from underground recall the freedom of dreams and the power of the unconscious to subvert conventional laws. While the motion is liberating, the dispersal and disintegration of forms also suggests a tragic side to this charged personal vision. Tousignant’s brightly coloured discs are anything but tragic. His work suggests the sun, the impact with the eye that bright light produces. However the mechanical nature of his image, its perfect regularity and industrial slickness, is at odds with imagery from nature. This is one of the central points of the Plasticien manifesto of 1955, drawn up by a group of Montreal artists who would influence Tousignant’s decision to move into hard-edged abstraction.(6) The Plasticiens stressed objectivity and rationality; the Automatistes stressed spontaneity and emotion.(7) Tousignant became famous in Canadian art circles after being included in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, “The Responsive Eye,” in 1965. This show was a survey of the leading international figures in Op Art. The phrase Op Art was coined by a Time magazine reporter in 1964(10) to describe a type of geometrical abstraction that used moiré patterns and conflicting areas of pattern and colour to cause vibrating optical effects. In Vincent Canaday’s review, he wrote of “art competing with launching pads.”(11) Another reviewer, Thomas Hess, writing in Art News in 1965, speculated that just as Pop Art drew its inspiration from print media, so Op Art was inspired by television’s “quivering glare of light” and its tendency to turn its audience into “peripatetic zombies.”(12) Signifying a new media sensibility, Op Art designs quickly spread into the world of fashion and appeared on record album covers and on the packaging of consumer goods.13 In her book on the Op Art phenomenon of the 1960s, Embodied Visions, critic Frances Follin expressed the trend in these terms: “the future was already happening.”14 People no longer felt that technology was something that happened invisibly in a remote laboratory; instead it had made its way into everyday life. In 1967, Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) argued that just as the printing press altered society by creating what he called “the public,” so too electric circuitry had changed society into “the mass,” which he defined as “an environment of information that involves everybody in everybody.”(15) One could call this an environment of total immersion or hyperactivity. Op Art reflects this hyperactivity and media immersion. Standing before Tousignant’s concentric circles in a museum, one notices that the paintings extend almost to the floor and just above one’s head, giving them a human scale. The artist stated that six feet from the work was an ideal viewing distance.(16) At this distance, the image seems to envelop the viewer as if extending an aura around his or her body. In religious art, a halo or mandorla around a figure signifies a saint or holy person. A figure enclosed in a circle is akin to a being inside a womb or protective space that has associations with physical birth and spiritual rebirth. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) made a famous drawing called Vitruvian Man (1513), in which a circle and square encompass a standing figure. The drawing, illustrating how principles of geometry relate to the human form, shows a unified approach to science, art and nature. The scientific geometrical aura is not so different from the religious holistic aura. Tousignant is heir to both traditions. His circles are expressive of a generation equally fascinated by Apollo 11 and Hermann Hesse (1877-1962), technology and mysticism. Tousignant’s paintings activate the viewers’s eyes to a dizzying degree. The hypnotic quality of Op Art was often associated with the use of psychotropic drugs in pop culture.(17) The hallocinogenic quality of Tousignant’s work is quite different from Borduas’s dream-like surrealist world. Borduas’s world is hypnotic in the way that watching falling snow is hypnotic. Tousignant’s spinning discs are much more blatant in their effect. One critic complained of a “technological artefact hypnotically taking over the mind of the viewer.”(18) If there is an ambiguity in Tousignant’s work, I think it is this: his circles make the viewer conscious of the act of looking, but at the same time they induce a kind of sensory immersion, similar to that of televison and computers, that makes it difficult to step outside the work in order to be critical of the work. The psychology of perception is clearly of interest to Tousignant. When the artist created his series of double discs and targets, he explained that he was creating “a system of relationships with multiple possibilities.”(20) Gestalt psychology maintains that we perceive objects in relationship to environments. We do not see things as isolated parts, but as interrelated to a larger pattern. We see things in a holistic way, not in an atomistic way.(21) Tousignant has set up an ideal system of interdependent parts, activated by the viewer’s response. The viewer is urged to disengage himself from particular impressions and to appreciate the gestalt of the system as a whole. The art of Borduas and Tousignant reflects the different eras in which they lived. Borduas worked to initiate change; Tousignant worked within a climate of change. Borduas used abstraction to announce a shattering of old patterns of thinking. Tousignant used abstraction to conduct experiments in perception, but he was now part of a culture of experiments. Within paintings that refer to nature and to human consciousness, Borduas used motion to suggest the possibility of an enriched life. This also entailed dissolution, fragmentation and dispersal. The freedom to move in and out of alternate spaces is offset by feelings of uncertainty, absence and tragedy. Tousignant’s optical effects make the viewer conscious of the act of seeing, while immersing him in a hypnotic environment. This reflects the intrusion of technology into everyday culture that began to occur in the 1960s. This technology suggested a hopeful new Utopia, but it also inspired a reaction in the counter culture. Tousignant’s work captures this conflicted set of values. While Borduas evokes motion to release the underground forces of the unconscious in an act of rebellion against set attitudes and firm borders, Tousignant uses motion to envelop us in a troubling new totality.
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