Home, Critical Archive


Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts


Simon S. Belleau
Canadian; 21st-century

Chicago, IL: Letters to Nora (Exhibition: Simon S. Belleau: Thousand Telephones)
65%

Speech Assistance Machine (Leonard Cohen’s Democracy — 1992). 2025. Fruit shipping box, 3.2-inch Raspberry Pi LCD screen, birch plywood frame

So, it's a very slightly modified found object with an added screen, on which the lyrics to a Leonard Cohen song that's obliquely about America's role in geopolitics at the beginning of the end of history are flitting by one letter at a time. The slightness of the modifications are important: the way the screws through, and tiny incisions in, the cardboard box rhyme with some of the box's preexisting features causes the whole ensemble to seem by turns delicately worked and factory-made. (It's almost like the box is a skeuomorph of a cardboard box and, at the same time, an actual cardboard box.) The modest little properties of the video are important as well: each letter — white on a black background — sort of spasms onto and off of the screen, and occasionally there's an interlude of some kind of image, all of which conveys old poststructural ideas about the materiality and fundamental ambiguity of signs. It's very sleek and convincing from a design perspective, nor does anything about how the object looks seem superfluous w/r/t to the jokes about legibility it's trying to make. (The bottom of the box, which is the front surface of the artwork, is displayed upside down, such that the text on it is abstracted from meaning.) The artwork's problem, such as it is, has to do with how the lower-order elements of one's immediate experience with it (the physiognomy of the box/screen-construction; the slow, anticipatory, futile fight with meaning of trying to make out the words) relate to its the higher-order conceptual moves and propositions (the full commensurability and fungibility of all information that AI signals, and the smallness of human creation in the face of that; new world orders at the dawn of Trump2 [the artist is Canadian, and so is Leonard Cohen, and the piece is called Democracy]). This is a handsome artwork that is perhaps a bit out of its depth. (Frankly a less momentous title might have been all it needed.) (TFS, 2025)