Guy Laramée

As first and foremost a composer (of contemporary, microtonal, and gestural music), I have been led through my work with invented instruments to collaborate with dancers and theatre professionals, and now to explore the field of visual arts.

Using a neo-primitivist approach (in TUYO, a microtonal and gestural music ensemble, 1987-1991; and "Les Éléphants sont venus mourir ici," gestural music for six dancers, 1986), I have tried to distance myself from ideologies of progress and from the Western concept of civilization (i.e. as a sedimentary evolution of stages). In "Théorie du désert" (1991, an opera describing the death of words), I sought to express the music of silence. This withdrawal, which led me to abandon the role of composer and music as my principal medium, is documented in the 1997 film "CrystalKey Bee" (using the metaphor of a bee who becomes disgusted with the honey of words and tries to flee the flowers of thought). In "Marche de nuit" (a show without lighting at the Musée d?art contemporain de Montréal, 1994-96), I wanted darkness and divination to envelop the id, and imagination to feed the how of perception. In "Quelle belle journée pour mourir!" (1997), and "Jardins de moisissure" (2000), I tried to explore the shifting boundaries between life and death: specifically, the point where death reverts to life. This exploration of the ultimate obsolescence of all things led me to abandon stage representation as an art form. Today my principal project is "Biblios: Le dernier livre" (2001-6). It serves as a crucible in which all my inspirations are fired, whether tranquil or disturbed: duration, immobility, impatience. In the present I feel a need to examine the continuity-change paradox from the opposite end of the spyglass. Instead of hunting for continuity in change (art forms in movement), I seek changes in continuity (art forms in stillness), trying to see the living nature of inanimate things. In this way I intend to bring myself closer to the goal of "erasing the ego myself" - a beautiful paradox! Is this not the quintessence of withdrawal?

The dominant theme in my artistic endeavours is certainly that of Presence. When I started as a composer, I explored this theme by dividing attention among several simultaneous discourses, chiefly by constructing multiple layers of polyrhythm. Very soon however I came to favour two strategies: withdrawal and planned obsolescence. For me withdrawal is a way of acknowledging the creative power of the void. Withdrawal was achieved in my case through intercultural and interdisciplinary methods - which represent for me the voyage "between" artistic cultures. Travelling between cultures will always involve some kind of damage, since "culture," by definition, implies "territory," and territory implies a protective boundary that will be broken. Also, in exposing the mechanisms of planned obsolescence (modernist and otherwise), I suggest that the principal of novelty is one such mechanism which acts as a guardian over the territories of different disciplines; and I transfer "the new" into experience. By digging up the roots of the continuity-change paradox, I try to explore different forms of Presence and the various space-time continuums that accompany them. If consciousness can be defined as an "out-standing" of the mind (Sartre), my approach seeks to travel in the opposite direction, from the outstanding to the innate.