the woods in a room

The Woods in a Room

Any one of the peasants from the village without apparent reason, enters the building. He stays for a few seconds or for several minutes. Standing. Quiet. Motionless. After this time, he goes out.

— Juan Munoz,Segment. Centre D’Art Contemporain Genève / Renaissance Society at University of Chicago.

The surrounding mountains shield the observatory from the electrical noise generated by cities and towns and their associated industries.

— recording by Yvette Poorter of a pre-recorded explanation to visitors of the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Laboratory

Yvette asked me to come over the other day to check out another one of her projects, this room in her apartment that she’s set up as a kind of ‘artistic retreat’. She calls her project A Week in the Woods, which doesn’t immediately make sense, since we’re talking about a room in an apartment on a very urban block in Montreal. There’s a window in the room but there’s no woods out there, just the roof of the building next door and the wall of another building next to that. The ‘woods’ are actually inside the room. And a sorry-looking ‘wood’ it is, too; ten or twenty leafless little twigs sticking up out of pots of earth.

Since October 2001 there’s been eighteen residencies here. ‘Here’ is a cubical room. One enters a door from the hallway of Yvette’s apartment, and in the centre of the opposite wall is a fairly large window. To the left of the door is a bed with a grey duvet and a hard flat mattress (if you can call it a mattress, it’s really just a kind of pad). Halfway across the room from the door is the kind of square cushion you’d find in any given sofa from the sixties. You could sit on that cushion, if you wished, and stare at the low table-structure that takes up most of the middle of the room, where the Woods in question are. The walls are bare, art gallery white, but not art gallery smooth. The floors are old polished hardwood. There is a naked bulb in the ceiling fixture, and a clip-on light by the bed — clipped onto a little-kiddie type table with worn ivy-and-flower designs in green and red, a red heart in the middle. Eighteen residencies, sixteen people, the evidence of their residencies is in a nice cardboard box under the bed. I open the box, and sift through all the detritus of these people.

There’s all kinds of cassettes, a couple of CDs and Diane Borsato’s video, “or just experiments, really.…” I put these aside, thinking vaguely that maybe I won’t even bother with them. There are sounds and smells coming from outside the room as I sift. Yvette’s making soup, Lance has put some avant-garde klezmer music on the stereo and guitar chords are pealing like sheets of metal tearing. I look out the window and remember last summer. There was a housewarming party. It was hot and humid, so the guests were happy to slip through this window — or was it the one in the room next door? — and onto the flat roof outside. Now the window is covered in plastic and I can only look. There’s a crazy pipe that springs from the roof next to a tubular aluminum chimney. The pipe angles and angles and angles, following the logic of a ricocheting bullet up and over another part of the series of edges and planes out there. Brick and tar and pebble and stucco and sky. There’s the steel ladder where we all climbed with our drinks to cross another huge stretch of roof and sit on a parapet over the street and sweat in the night. There’s the steeple of the church that was Saint Jean de la Croix and is now destined to be condos.

Back to the room, which I now think of as a monk’s cell looking out onto an abstract view. As I sift through the contents of the box, the first thing I look at is a book by Juan Munoz. Whether by accident or design, the book’s cover is on backwards. I think about the peasants spending time in the funny skeletal house structure in Zurite, and then I think of the various artists spending time in this room. Then there’s a kind of bookwork, a transparent box which contains a nest made of lines of text cut from a page, a little bit of fake green grass, and orange rinds. There are some tiny ornamental birds in the nest1.

As I go through the box, I find that many of the visitors have left work that directly responds to a) the room, and b) the ‘woods’. Anthony Burnham drew a sketch of the room as if viewed from above; and there in the centre, of course, are the woods. In one corner floats a blimp. There’s a whole other cartoon sequence about the room and the ‘forest’2. Someone’s cut out little maple leaves and coloured them and left them in the box3. Christine Brault’s contact sheet contains a lot of pictures of the bare little twigs in soil, and a few shots of the steeple out the window.

The saddest thing about the conversion of church to condos is the disappearance of the “Notre Dame des Lourdes protegez nous” statue that used to be out front, with Mary’s delicate foot crushing the head of a writhing serpent. I wonder where the statue went? Is there a depot somewhere, like those sad fenced enclosures in Russia, final resting place of dozens of busts and statues of Lenin? Some basement full of superannuated Marys? This is the church that actually kicked out a group of El Salvadorans who were facing deportation and sought sanctuary there, a few years ago. Notre Dame des Lourdes protegez nous, indeed!

I look at a photocopied sheet featuring a grainy picture of a moustached man leaning against a huge tree. “It is there that he begins to write his memoirs, on the first pages of which he speaks of the trees he has planted and tended with his own hands.”4 I get up long enough to see if the twigs are at all tended; there’s evidence that someone has recently watered them. “Now it’s the third of December and the trees have lost their leaves …”5 Maybe the twigs are trees after all — but as it is winter, they’ve lost their leaves. “Aileen has locked herself in the room.”6 Drawings of ‘woods’ and door with hasp lock by Meg Sircom. I leave the door unlocked. “I went in one day, but I don’t really understand the jist of it all; what makes it art?”7 Is it the white walls? The ‘woods’? The box of things? “When she comes home, she lies on her bed.”8 I spread photos of helicopter seeds on the duvet, and a photo of a video projection on the big translucent window across the roof outside. The steeple looms. Another forest sketch on yellow notebook paper — “I never planted the orchard but now the whole room or where I am sitting smells like oranges, and there are thirty brave small trees, like thirty whispered statements which one know to be true.”9

Trees and bed and room and window and trees and bed and room and window. A kind of paper doll cut-out of these words: “Host — Ghost — Guest”10. There’s a kind of ghostliness to the room, or to the act of going through the box and all these traces of its previous inhabitants. It’s beginning to have a feedback effect — you read about trees and room and window and bed and start thinking about the trees and the room and the window and the bed. There’s a flicker as shapes in the translucent window across the way hurry to and fro. “The silence of our grey bed.”11 Someone had a typewriter in here.

I am only a syllable
In January’s dark mouth
It’s crazy here and cold
Each breath’s a Waiting room
and Everything is losing its shape
at the water table 12

Andy Brown worked on an article about tree-planting while he was here. I try to imagine him staring at the ‘woods’ as he casts memory back to bare mountain slopes and scratched knees. “Back in the room Bucky Jr. was inconsolable. How could no one know who Pete Gray was?”13 Pete Gray on a grey bed. Yet another sketch of the trees by Todd Munro, this one with a touch of earthy brown watercolour paint.

The guests comment frequently on the noise from the bar downstairs, and on the chilliness of the room. I don’t find it cold, and after drifting happily through these things in the box, I’ve had some soup and now I’m listening to cassettes. Panasonic tape player, Panasonic CD player. Cat’s voice describes a dream of a shaven-headed red-robed monk who follows her along a street and offers a stick reminiscent of the twig trees in this monkish room. Each cassette yields the electronic ghost impression of the room itself, its ‘room tone’. Listening to the sound of the room while in the room creates a kind of aural Russian doll effect. The thrum of Samuel Roy-Bois’s bass in the room. Christine Brault’s sleepy thoughts as she snuggles under the duvet (all cats are grey). She recites the entire Munoz book. Stephan Kurr fills a sixty minute tape with ruminations in broken English and in German. “I am in a strange white cube …”14 Nancy Ring and JoAnne Balcaen sing in the room as it grows grey with waning light, JoAnne over there, Nancy right here on the bed.

Once more the waxy leaves of the elephant plants are cleansed. I tug at one twig and confirm the presence of a root system below. I pat the earth back down. And through the window, across the roof, beyond the opaque panel is what looks like a doorway, an orangey glow of electric lamp light, living room light, and ghostly figures flickering by. Silence is a quality here. I’m listening to radio noise bursts from the planet Jupiter in this white-painted room on the edge of twilight. I’m putting the box, and the Panasonics back under the bed where I found them.

One last thing — interrupting the Olympics just long enough to watch a blob of dough overflow in rapid flicker time down Diane Borsato’s lap. She sits in the electronic ghost of the room. She crushes cakes in a ghostly room.

— 17 - 20 Feb, 4 Mar 02 —

1Catherine Kidd, “The day no one phoned”, or “I like a bike”.
2Meg Sircom.
3Todd Munro.
4W. G. Sebald, “The Rings of Saturn”. Contributed by Todd Munro.
5Taien Ng-Chan. “The Intricacies of Plaster”.
6Dana Bath. “Celadon — Some Thoughts”.
7Ibid.
8Op cit.
9Catherine Kidd.
10Stephan Kurr.
11Lance Blomgren. “Woods”.
12Ibid.
13Andy Brown. “Something Blue”.
14Stephan Kurr, from a cassette recording.

(return to A Week in the Woods intro)