Apr. 22, 2009 - Issue #705: Great Outdoors 2009

Some Unabashed Optimism

Successful failure: Sasaki's wit and irony aren't always enough in Some Unabashed Optimism

Jon Sasaki is a funny guy. His conception of art-making as a constant process of failure or not-quite failure—never quite success—seems familiar in famously dreary Edmonton, but his art is at its best when arguing against this, its justification. In a sense, when it manages to succeed despite itself. Sasaki’s show at Latitude 53, titled Some Unabashed Optimism as a preview of the kind of wit that he loves to make art with, is a collection of video and objects, and should be a crowd-pleaser. It's funny and certainly gives us something to talk about, although some of it doesn’t live up to its promise. The narrow selection of the work presented, coupled with its joking nature, makes the show a breeze to see, for better and for worse.

At the core of Sasaki’s work is a somewhat problematic relationship with an idea of futility, hinted at sarcastically in the show’s title. It comes through clearly in all the pieces here, sometimes complicated by other factors, but it's a dangerous topic to be building around. The one work where Sasaki makes futile repetition his absolute centerpiece, a video loop of a vacuum altered to be entirely useless, is undoubtably the worst. Comparison to another similar work makes this clear: “Ladder Stack” is a similar video, but a few factors differentiate the two. “Ladder” is more comfortable in its format, as the video loops are capped in both cases with fades from and to black. In the vacuum video, this unfortunately breaks the continuity of the process, calling into question the endless repetition which the video is based on. But this kind of temporal framing is more suited to the similarly repetitious assembly and climbing of a stack of ladders. Each iteration of the video, separated by black, has its own purpose: the climber moves out of the frame, and a new scene must be established for the next portion of the climb.

At issue here is the way that futility is presented in the work. The framing is a cue to us that the art is done—we have seen the whole thing, no matter that it is on a loop and that each moment is essentially the same as any other. When the screen fades to black, the vacuuming process is no longer repeating, but complete. On the other hand, it's easy to mentally construct a continuing process for the ladder climb as the climber goes higher and higher, each frame being only a stage of a continuing process. But if this is so, suddenly it is no longer futile: he is succeeding.

The centrepiece of the show is a video documenting a large public performance during Toronto’s Nuit Blanche event, and it comes with a description of the same inadvertent success. Sasaki explains it for us on the title card: the performance was intended as a failure, a futile attempt to keep a crowd entertained by exhausted mascots, but his ultimate failure was that it was totally successful. As a result, while I have strong reservations about the video presentation, I think that this performance was in fact great and I wish that I could have seen it in person. Because Sasaki is wrong.

I am sure that Sasaki has some inkling of this: his practice is built on his wit and multilevel irony. Ultimately it doesn’t really matter what he thinks, only what he produces. But his fixation on failure is damaging, as attempts to produce bad work will almost always do just that. When his work (which you can and should see more of at jonsasaki.com) leans slightly towards optimism, even if only hesitantly, it can be quite something, hints of which we see in this show at Latitude 53. His work is not only humorous but also dangerous, exciting, romantic and rewarding when we can experience it properly. V

Until Sat, May 16
Some Unabashed Optimism
Works by Jon Sasaki
Latitude 53 (10248 - 106 St) 

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