ABOVE: Found image from the collection of Dr. Jeanne Randolph.

Das Cabinet des Dr. Jeanne Randolph: The Gothic Unconscious

The public was invited to a four-day performance by Dr. Jeanne Randolph:

GIZMO SURREALISMO: Thursday, 5 February 2004 at 3 PM

CARNIVAL OF DESPAIR: Friday, 6 February at 3 PM

PHENOMENOLOGY OF DOO-DADS: Monday, 9 February at 3PM

PRECONSCIOUS SLIME: Tuesday, 10 February at NOON

Das Cabinet des Dr. Jeanne Randolph was the third exhibition in a multi-component project, The Gothic Unconscious, curated by Sigrid Dahle, Gallery One One One's curator-in-residence until April 2004.

Das Cabinet Des Dr. Jeanne Randolph refers to the 1919 German expressionist film, director Robert Wiene's Das Cabinet Des Dr. Caligari which features a "mad psychiatrist" and a plot and imagery that speaks to issues of authority and control. (Interestingly, the Winnipeg General Strike, a watershed event that set the course for class warfare in Winnipeg, erupted the same year and Sigmund Freud's essay, "The Uncanny" was published in 1919 even while the coterie of European artists who would come to be called "surrealists" were developing their ideas and performative strategies.) Jeanne's performances are highly entertaining as well as rigorously intellectual; they could best be described as improvisational stand-up comedy for intellectuals, or, as Dada for post-modern egg-heads. In the same way that Jeanne's art writing is a hybrid between fiction and criticism, her performances slide between performance art and an academic lecture.

The Gothic Unconscious exhibition series, which includes work by over 50 artists spanning 500 years of image-making, (wildly) speculates that Winnipeg is a city haunted by the ghosts of its traumatic social history. This history includes (but certainly is not limited to) the genocide of First Nations peoples, the dispossession of the Métis, the hardships endured by Icelandic immigrants founding a new republic at Gimli, the arrivals of Russian Mennonites fleeing persecution and Jewish holocaust survivors in search of a safe haven, the exploitation of impoverished European immigrants (culminating in the spectacular 1919 Winnipeg General Strike) and the monumental struggles of women to attain full citizenship.

The Gothic Unconscious proposes that this aura of tragedy and impoverishment manifests itself in the abject, uncanny and surreal quality of much contemporary Winnipeg art, even when this work doesn’t explicitly address the city’s troubled histories. While Winnipeg’s civic leaders are beginning to recognize that artists are key to the city’s economic well being, The Gothic Unconscious serves as a reminder that art has other equally important contributions to make. Contemporary art offers us a unique and potent means to process collective (historic) trauma. It weaves the present into the past and the future even as it invites us to consider our subjective experiences within the context of larger historical forces.

Special thanks: Dr. Jeanne Randolph, The Canada Council for the Arts, The Manitoba Arts Council, Susan Chafe, Richard Dyck, Harlene Weijs, and student volunteers.