The boxes –les boîtes, las cajas-… the house… the home, a mise en abyme, a mise en boîte of Monique Sarfati’s cultural recycling
Monique Sarfati’s installation boxes represent in some sense a synthesis of life experience for this woman, who as a little girl in Morocco used to sit on the corner of a sidewalk and entertain herself by filling match boxes with all sort of things: dead insects, apricot kernels, silkworm cocoons, etc. (something that Derrida also used to do as a child in Algeria). Who would ever imagine that such an interest in collecting odd objects would prefigure a form of art later in life? Who would have said that her work would place her in the tradition of Joseph Cornell and Alan Glass, masters in the art of assembling boxes?
The boxes, a mise en abyme of the house, and the house a mise en abyme of the boxes mirroring each other through the assembling of Latin American and American crafts and art: an old armoire Québécoise houses an enormous collection of little boxes; a set of ex-votos fills a corner of a wall; the house foregrounds what the boxes encapsulate and the boxes are a much more radical way of displaying the miscellaneous where the high and the low, the sacred and the profane, the kitsch and the sublime, the folk, the craft, nature/plastic, in sum, all binarisms instituted by Art are destabilized. In the ordering of the miscellaneous resides Monique Sarfati’s interest and transgressive gesture in the transfer of the history of culture to a wealth of assets. Her art of collecting, in a Benjaminean sense of collecting what lies outside the sphere of Art, her supply, her stock are useless parts, leftovers, remains, waste, that are appropriated and recycled to become something else. Her rummaging here and there through la grande aventure of garage sales is the way to discover the bits and pieces, a cacophony that gets transformed into stories, whose playful character threads narratives, stories of sorts that inevitably refer to culture, identity, migration, uprooting, re-rooting.
The box large and small is the frame –le cadre-, the form, the structure of a narrative that gets told through the multiplicity of objects whose coherence resides in the particular ordering of elements, in their juxtaposition, in their mixture, in their dissonance that finds a new resonance and consonance.
Vancouver, June 2010
Rita De Grandis
Professor and Graduate Advisor
University of British Columbia