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The first and probably the most accessible way to see
Burning Bridges is as a series of ten wooden doors that are
either rising triumphantly or falling into despair,
depending on your viewpoint (physical and emotional). Taken
with the work's site - a scrubby open field in Winnipeg's
North End - the doorways act as a striking metaphor for a
community in uneasy transition. But it's important not to
stop there, at that intellectually comfy construct. Artist
Jarod Charzewski, blindsides the paradigm of public
sculpture as monumental, untouchable, timeless product,
looking instead at processes - weather, decay, human
interaction, and most of all - time and what they do to
materials. Responses to his work need to do something like
that too, not worrying about neat conclusions but enjoying
uncertainties, unresolved tensions - the practice of
thinking about art and not just the final results.
Doorways. They can be opportunities; "when one door
closes, another opens." They can be strength; they're where
you crouch during an earthquake. They can be ancient; it's
the post-and-lintel system that holds up Greek temples from
the 6th century B.C.E. Usually their scale is human,
measured more or less by the men and women who will walk
through them. When they're outsized, they take on a
horror-movie atmosphere of implacable doom. Charzewski plays
with, and against, the doorway's connotations in language,
architecture and art history. First of all he takes
perfection - the cut-and-dried right angle of the
15th-century Christian God, viewed as the master
geometrician; the stock-in-trade of architects, surveyors
and draughtspersons - and skews it. I'm conditioned to
assume order, regularity and symmetry in built structures,
and Charzewski's - with the large doors at least - are
mischievously close enough to an ideal standard to lead me
in that direction. But when I look down that arcade,
expecting to see space unfolding before me in the
structured, disciplined intervals of Renaissance
perspective, everything's just a little off. the doorways
list and lean gently to one side; they jut too tall or come
up short. And even the glitches aren't systematic; they're
just the everyday, workaday "mistakes" made by the artist
and his friends as they banged the doorways into place - a
few centimeters here and there, the kind of niggling
irregularities that had helpful passer-bys giving Charzewski
and his crew construction advice.
Then there's the site - not a triumphant city square, but
a funny, leftover bit of ground between the Kekinan first
Nations Seniors Centre and some public housing, covered on a
June morning in dandelions and tough, turf-hugging weeds.
the field doesn't neatly frame the work of art; neither does
Burning Bridges impose itself on the land. The relationship
is gentler, quieter, as if the work is growing out of, or
decaying back into the earth.
Charzewski is interested in the organic, not just in his
material but in the processes that affect that material. The
sun moving across the sky and casting shadows; rain staining
and darkening the unvarnished Norway pine and rusting the
bolted black steel plates; the unstinting light of winter
flattening out textures; the mists of a wet spring hazing
them over - these are all part of the piece. Monet liked to
paint the same haystacks or poplar trees again and again to
capture not the things themselves but the the fugitive
atmospheric conditions that surrounded them. Charzewski's
"multiples" are all contained within one work, because that
one work shifts and changes from hour to hour, day to day,
month to moth. And these transformations quicken perceptions
- both of the doorways and of their changing environment.
There is also the possibility of more drastic and sudden
interventions, coming not from the natural but the social
world. For Charzewski the possibilities of graffiti,
scarification, and damage are part of the Burning Bridges
piece. Far from seeing his work as untouchable, he welcomes
physical proofs of community reaction. There are hopeful
reports of kids piling up shopping carts against the
doorways and climbing up, but in June the only
semi-permanent human marking is a small and incongruous city
of Winnipeg Police sticker, about 4 cm in diameter, placed
modestly on one doorframe. Is this tenderness a sign of
respect and affection? Or does it signify an alien distance
between art and audience, an overly respectful silence in
the face of "difficult" contemporary art? For now that
question remains open. Like other issues concerning Burning
Bridges, this might be resolved by next spring, after the
work has spent a hard winter outside. But just like doorways
can lead nowhere, these intellectual searches don't have to
have destinations.
Alison Gilmor is a freelance writer on art and film, based in
Winnipeg.
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