Aude Moreau

Sugar Carpet 3, installation, 2008
From March 20 to June 1, 2008

 

Sugar Carpet, a perishable installation in refined, white sugar, uses food as the raw material of the art object, transferring it to an architectural space through a game of role-reversal. This installation creates a confrontation between an industrial space and the modern comfort traditionally associated with carpets, “edible” material, and the pollution produced by metallurgy.

Originally from France, Aude Moreau lives and work in Quebec. She holds a B.A. in visual arts from Université de Paris 8 and has trained in stage design. Her works and performances have been seen in Canada, France, Switzerland, Italy and the United States.

crédit photos : Guy L'heureux.


The Weight of Aude Moreau’s Tapis de sucre #3
-Scott Toguri McFarlane

Spreading two-and-a-half tons of refined white sugar uniformly across an uneven floor is an extremely difficult task. Aude Moreau and the gallery staff designed a special device for the job but it was nonetheless a struggle to get it right. Next, Moreau had to carefully apply the stenciled perimeter onto millions of granules prone to shifting and rolling. So resist the temptation to touch or taste the carpet—and watch your step. That’s my first point: the sugar carpet is not for you to walk on. Don’t confuse its crystalline beauty with a welcome mat.

Instead, your visit to the gallery is confined to a passage between the carpet’s pristine perimeter and the fortified walls of the Darling Foundry. To guide you along your path, the artist has applied shadow-like murals based on photos of industrial buildings in Montreal. The relation between sugar, the architecture of the building, and the history of the neighbourhood is intriguing, and ultimately startling.

Let’s begin with the gallery itself. Before this turn-of-the-century iron works building was transformed by Quartier Éphémère into a space of art and culture, the Darling Foundry was dedicated to the production of heating systems, steam pumps, elevators and tramway stairs—as well as parts for the ships gliding through the newly built Lachine Canal. You are thus passing through an architecture that recalls Montréal’s central role in the industrialization of a youthful Canada.

But what does the industrialization of Canada have to do with the history of sugar? A founding narrative of the Canadian nation as a place rich in natural resources—it is even a Heritage Minute!—is John Cabot’s fifteenth century discovery of abundant cod off the Atlantic coast. During the nineteenth century, salted Canadian cod from the Maritimes and the Gaspé was shipped to the Caribbean where it provided cheap nutrition for slaves working on sugar plantations. By 1854 The Canada Sugar Refining Company (Redpath) opened the doors of Montreal’s first refinery, and began receiving shipments of raw sugar cane from the Caribbean.

In a sense then, Moreau’s Tapis de sucre #3 asks us to rethink the birth of the Canadian nation in relation to a history of slavery and the cultures of the black diaspora. Not an easy task. It would require us to rethink the meaning of nationhood and the ways we perform national belonging. To what extent can we reasonably accommodate the always global production of our national identities? That is, to what extent are we capable of understanding that immigrants from, in this case, the Caribbean, are already a part of Canada’s and Quebec’s cultural heritage—as opposed to arriving from other cultures?

The need to rethink the places in which we live in relation to our alienation from global histories and the contemporary expanse of capitalism presses upon—and even into—us more and more these days. Take, for example, the issue of ballooning obesity. Research has shown that the cheapest area of a supermarket to buy calories are in the middle aisles, away from the refrigerated fresh meat and vegetable areas that need access to electricity, water, ventilation, etc. So if you are shopping on a budget you are most likely to head to the “junk” food aisles where you can purchase considerably more calories than you could if buying lettuce. These often high-tech processed foods are cheap primarily due to government subsidies for corn and soy crops—which show up in processed foods as sweeteners and preservatives. Think soda pop compared to fresh orange juice. The enormous subsidization and subsequent over-production of corn not only promotes a “junk food” culture and turns a blind eye on obesity; legislation such as the U.S. Farm Bill affects prices of corn globally—which can change the composition of a country’s population. Michael Pollan has argued that “The flow of immigrants north from Mexico since NAFTA is inextricably linked to the flow of American corn in the opposite direction, a flood of subsidized grain that the Mexican government estimates has thrown two million Mexican farmers and other agricultural workers off the land since the mid-90s.” Our culture and the shape of our bodies are related to the lives of others.

Sugar and sweeteners permeate our lives—even if we as individuals avoid them. Sweetness is a social issue. Perhaps the incredible suffusion of sweeteners is why this third incarnation of Moreau’s sugar carpet series is a grand gesture. Previous carpets were installed in rooms and were smaller, evoking the sensibility of a parlour. Here, the magnitude of the work resonates with the architecture in at least two ways. On one hand, the rhetorical effect of the sheer quantity of sugar draws attention to its pervasion in our lives but also to its materiality and non-food usage. Sugar, for example, is used to help the settling of cement. In other words, sugar may very well be in the renovated walls that surround you.

On the other hand, the size of the carpet transforms the Foundry into something of a grand hall, hallway, or passage. It is as if someone or something is going to arrive, and with a flourish. Someone or something is coming—other than you who are left off to the side and in the shadows of the nineteenth century. I’m reminded of that arch, high-brow Victorian, Matthew Arnold, who a year after the first sugar refinery opened in Montreal described English culture as “Wandering between two worlds, one dead,/ The other powerless to be born.” Later, in Culture and Anarchy (1869), Arnold argued that what England needed most was a renewed vision of culture. To describe his vision, Arnold popularized a sugary phrase borrowed from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726; 1735). The phrase has come to encapsulate a secular, disinterested and humanist conception of culture that “seeks to do away with classes; to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light…This is the social idea; and the men of culture are the true apostles of equality” (70).

Unfortunately, Arnold’s seemingly universal sense of “the best that has been thought and known in the world” was decidedly narrow and Eurocentric; and he was not immune to negative assessments of women, and especially Indians and Jamaicans. It would be difficult for someone of Arnold’s temperament to engage with the challenges of radical cultural difference; with the fact that the enforcement of European humanism could be culturally destructive and a tool used by colonizers to facilitate the control of cultures organized in different ways. And Arnold would almost surely struggle with the possibility that the meaning and taste for “sweetness” could be different in different places; that the sweet taste of refined sugar in English tea could stir revolt in the West Indies. How are we to negotiate the sublime pleasures of sugar that twinkle from Tapis de sucre #3 and the weighty social responsibility of being sweet?

Here’s the rub: Arnold’s fears of rampant materialism, the pedantic worship of utility and efficiency, as well as of latent violence or “terrorism” still abound, though in different forms. It is as if his dream of humanist glue has failed to stick. International law and governing bodies based on humanist ideals and principles of democracy seem to lack authority, authenticity and resonate emotionally less and less. In a strange paradox, industrial buildings around the world are being renovated and occupied by cultural institutions—an Arnoldian dream come true. In Montreal, the Parisian Laundry-cum-gallery in St. Henri parallels the Darling Foundry’s transformation. London’s national gallery, the Tate Modern, and Toronto’s Power Plant gallery both occupy disused power stations. Galleries abound in Toronto’s refurbished Distillery District and New York’s former meatpacking district (Chelsea). Aside from nodding to waves of market forces, what are we to make of this moment of so-called cultural production? Amidst the debilitating incapacities of humanism, what vision of sweetness and light is emerging from these converted edifices? Is a coherent vision even desirable? Who or even what is coming to address us—to provide us with a visionary sense of place and a blueprint for our accommodations? Or my sweet visitor is such an arrival powerless to be born? The carpet has been laid, and it has been an awful struggle. As you traipse in the shadows you can feel it in your bones, and in the very walls enclosing you.