Unnoticed Truths: Zin Taylor’s European Adventure

In Brussels, where revolutionaries have often lived but revolutions hardly ever happen, Canadian artist Zin Taylor is with a group of friends at the Monday market. It is a soft, grey evening and the square in front of the Saint-Gilles town hall has come alive with a community that is not at all what people who don’t know contemporary Brussels expect to find here.

Saint-Gilles has its own town hall—and an impressive one at that. But it’s not a town. It’s a neighbourhood, really. “Kind of the funky part of Brussels,” is the description that settled in with me during my visit. “Funky” and “Brussels” being two words I’m not sure I’d previously used in the same sentence.

Saint-Gilles is where Taylor has lived since 2008. He shares an apartment with his partner, Emilie Lauriola. It’s a walk-up—“five glorious floors,” Taylor says, speaking as someone who has lugged furniture up all of them—and it could be used in a recruitment film designed to encourage young Canadians to run away to Europe and become artists. Its high white ceilings, old wooden floors, vintage-store rattan furniture and modest, Spartan elegance are, well, perfect.

A few vinyl records are stacked neatly against the old fireplace, Sun Araw is on the Philips turntable and posters for Martin Kippenberger’s METRO-Net subway installation in Dawson City and for an exhibition by Belgian artist Sophie Nys are tacked on the white walls.

There are plants, but just a few. There are shells, but not many, and they seem to be placed exactly where you’d like to have a shell. There is lots of light. There are books on Russian actor and director Konstantin Stanislavsky, Antwerp-born architect Henry van de Velde and Belgian dancer, artist and choreographer Akarova on bookshelves that give the impression of being bookshelves in use, as opposed to being bookshelves for decoration. Taylor’s studio (a busily cluttered work area in a former industrial building, now an artists’ co-op) is a 15-minute walk away. Through a park. With wild parrots. As I said: perfect.

Taylor settled in Saint-Gilles in 2008, a year after his first Brussels show and the same year that his book The Crystal Ship was published by Bywater Bros. Editions of Toronto and Belgium-based group Etablissement d’en face projects. If the creation of the charming domestic space that he and Lauriola share was (to use a Taylor-ism) “the skin of his negotiations” with the idea of his belonging in Europe, The Crystal Ship was his investigation into the deeper and more secret dimensions of the places we choose. Or that choose us.

Typically, for Taylor, The Crystal Ship was a hybrid of disciplines and tropes. Taylor rarely thinks about drawing (“propositional, like handwriting”) without thinking of painting (“building up layers”) without thinking of music without thinking of words without thinking of sculptural forms without thinking of performance. He’s the kind of creator who is described as an installation artist more than a sculptor or painter or writer, but it’s not always clear that he sees much of a dividing line between installation and object and text. He’s equally nonplussed by the distinction between a book and a book launch—both are performances, as far as he is concerned. The photographs in The Crystal Ship (shown on slides during the book’s launch while Taylor read in the garden of the site the work is based on) play whimsically with the contrast between Taylor’s elemental sculptural forms and the pristine, slightly sinister aspect of the borrowed museum vitrines that housed them. That housed them, as a matter of fact, in the BELvue Museum in Brussels.

What’s documenting what? It’s often a good question in contemporary art. And it’s the kind of playfully funny question that Taylor’s work invites. In a list of what he really likes, humour is number two. Louise Bourgeois is number one—although his second choice, delivered with a sly twinkle, makes it unclear whether he’s being serious about the first.

“Conceived as an artist’s book, lecture, and sculptural installation,” as the artists describes it, The Crystal Ship was a tracing, of sorts, of the working practices of revolutionary Belgian poet, filmmaker and artist Marcel Broodthaers, and the Antwerp neighbourhood where in 1969 the now-defunct gallery A379089 showed what Taylor’s text describes as “one instalment of his museological displays.”

This is the world Taylor explores—the hidden histories of alignments nobody else notices. He’s someone who takes obvious delight in graceful proportion. On the walk to his studio there are rooflines and windows and trolley tracks that seem to him so beautifully organic to Brussels that he stops and takes them in. He often stops and takes things in. That’s what he did when the idea for The Crystal Ship began to form in Antwerp, and it was a scale of things that he discovered.

He felt that he had broken a code of a secret measurement in his identification of points of local geography that were connected by nothing more or less important than the fact that he was connecting them. In his investigation of an address that is now an Antwerp children’s clothing store and bears no trace of its earlier incarnation as the cryptically named A379089, Taylor created iterations, repetitions and variations of the mysterious crystalline form that he conceived as being beneath a more literal surface.

The Crystal Ship probably mystified more than a few patrons of the BELvue Museum, but it was an important European toehold for Taylor. For someone who presents himself as laconic and easygoing, he is surprisingly strategic in creating a network of aesthetic and curatorial connections. The Crystal Ship solidified his association with Etablissement d’en face projects. The loose collective eventually became part of the community of friends, fellow artists and associates with whom, as he puts it, he “works and hangs out.” In fact, many of them were part of the gathering in the soft, grey evening on the square in front of the Saint-Gilles town hall where this article began—and where, back in the present tense, we left Taylor.

The Monday market happens every week, and as a result of this regularity it is so convivial it’s almost boisterous. In fact, by what I’d previously imagined to be Belgian standards, it is boisterous. It feels like a party well underway.

So let’s call him Zin. Everybody at the Monday market does. In fact, I’m not sure that there’s anyone who doesn’t. During my visits to Jessica Bradley Gallery in Toronto last winter to see “The Story of Stripes and Dots (Chapter 7),” his most recent Canadian show (and fourth solo exhibition with the gallery), and during the five days I recently spent in his company in what proved itself to be the surprising city of Brussels, I never heard anyone use Taylor.

“My parents knew someone else who called their child Zin,” he told me when I asked about his name. There is here a characteristic pause. It is expressionless, but it has the effect of a raised eyebrow.

It’s weird how provisional everything is. That’s part of what the pause says.

Zin likes words like “weird.” And “dude.” And “cool.” Some things “suck.” A lot of things are “fucked up.” There are sometimes occurrences or events or twists of fate or outcomes of work or miracles of creativity that are “totally bananas.” He uses these kinds of words often—often, it seems, to fend off art-speak, although it would be a mistake to think of him as anti-intellectual in his sharp understanding of his own work or the work of artists he admires (late American artist Mike Kelley being a case in point). So it is, therefore, contextually appropriate to say that it’s kind of cool that an artist whose work searches so playfully for new significances has a first name with origins of no personal significance at all. Zin says he likes things that don’t exist until he makes them. That’s also what his expressionless pause says.

He likes to give the impression that he runs his career as casually as he lights his cigarettes, but the pace and output of solo exhibitions, performances, group shows, collaborations, residencies and publications over the past seven years don’t make a very convincing case for an un-driven nature.

So it’s not that he’s stingy when it comes to explanation. He’s usually courteously polite. He likes people who are interested in what he’s doing. In fact, he likes to communicate.

There’s an unfussy friendliness to Zin that is anything but elitist. (When I ask him about the sources of his theoretical heritage, the first book he cites is Greil Marcus’s meditation on the cultural meaning of the Sex Pistols, Lipstick Traces. When I ask about early influences, he tells me about a San Francisco skateboard magazine called Slap that he stumbled on in Calgary when he was 12.) If he appears arrogant, it’s the arrogance of an artist who isn’t going to get too hung up on explaining that when he creates a series called Wood and Dust (2010), it’s going to be a series that is about wood and dust.

In the interstitial gestures that comprise the oddly convincing grammar of his weirdly eloquent narratives, things pretty much are what they are. The soundscape, the Calder-like shapes in air and the unfolding sequence of the evocative drawings in “The Story of Stripes and Dots (Chapter 7)” oblige observers to steer clear of imagined metaphor or juiced-up aesthetic theory and stick to the elements at hand: stripes and dots. That’s kind of the point.

“Nothing is true except our conviction that the world we are asked to accept is false,” Marcus wrote in Lipstick Traces—which is pretty much the point of disbelief from which Zin sets out to create his own strange and (by others) unnoticed truths. “A curve is a more interesting line,” is the kind of thing he likes to say. “I like things that do things,” he said to me in a tone of voice that was freighted with no more meaningfulness than “I like Belgian beer”— which, by the way, he does.

So it’s not that Zin doesn’t speak about what he does or who he is. It’s just that his voice is as unimpressed with my line of inquiry about where Zin comes from as his shrug. “It’s just a name my parents liked,” he says.

But it is a cool name, you have to admit. And coolness is not something to which Zin is indifferent. A lot of his charm has to do with a certain North American lack of pretension that might just be one of the last things Europeans find cool about America. He’s either smart enough, or confident enough, or shy enough (or all-three-at-once enough), to let coolness come to him. And so, of course, it does. The apartment that he and his partner found would be an example.

It’s very cool. And that’s one of the things that’s cool about Saint-Gilles: the view from the apartment is one that is within the rental price range of a young artist from Calgary and a young former music editor who is part Italian, part Belgian, and works for an independent art-book publisher. Affordability is one of the first reasons that artists are moving to Brussels from cities such as Paris and Berlin. But the second is what’s really cool: they come because artists are moving there.

But here’s the thing. The apartment’s principal view is not a bohemian vista of rooftops and chimneys. (That’s the view from the back of the apartment.) The bedroom window overlooks the building in front of which the Monday market happens.

Saint-Gilles town hall was a late outbreak of French Renaissance grandiosity that, undoubtedly, drove the city’s burgeoning modernists mental when it was completed in 1904. It speaks to Belgium’s staid, historic regard for the bureaucracies on which municipal order depends—a middle-class proclivity that makes you realize why Karl Marx had the bourgeoisie on his mind so much when he lived here. Jacques Brel couldn’t get out of town fast enough.

But much as the town hall’s architecture proclaims otherwise, Belgian stereotypes are not in evidence at the Monday market. There are no diplomats in suits. There are no idling Citroëns. There are no complacent-looking burghers, humourlessly precise administrators and overbearing, well-pensioned civil servants. Nobody in the square looks like they spend their days toiling over trade agreements in the bowels of the European Council or comparing debt ratios at the Central Bank. The crowd that gathers for the Monday market is one of those hodgepodges of youth and age, affluence and poverty, student and professional, dreamer and charlatan, artist and truck-driver, shopkeeper and hipster that a big city can produce at whatever street corners and empty parking lots the corporations have somehow missed. It’s the kind of place Zin is not in the least hesitant to say he likes a lot.

The casual urbanity of the crowd combines with the grey dignity of a European city, the flavours and smells of some amazingly good street food, and the existence of perfectly reasonable drinking laws to remind a visitor from North America that, well, he is a visitor from North America.

We are standing in a circle of Zin’s friends, drinking wine as the smoke from the various nearby grills drifts between us. Dusk has fallen. The strings of electric lights make the square feel a little magical, like a fairground after sunset.

Zin was born in Calgary in 1978. His parents split up when he was young and he was raised by a hardworking, independently minded woman who eventually remarried. Money was never in great abundance, and the part-time jobs that were a part of his early life are biographical details of which he is quite proud. No trust fund helped him along the path of becoming an artist, although his mother was always encouraging. He attended art school in Calgary, and he applied the same straightforward motivation in moving from Calgary to Toronto in 2001 as he later would when he moved to Europe seven years later. “What’s the worst thing that can happen?” he says. “You go back.”

But the worst thing hasn’t happened. Berlin, Brussels, Basel, Vienna, New York and Toronto have become spokes on the hub of Zin’s Brussels. And it’s true: what he wanted to be, he is.

He has become what curator Dieter Roelstraete once described as an artist “known internationally for his elaborate installations encompassing elements of performance and sculpture along with drawing, printing, and video. Narration is an essential ingredient of much of Taylor’s multi-faceted work, and his stories are often culled from the undergrowth of popular culture (more specifically underground music scenes) and contemporary art lore…Journalism, research, storytelling: not surprisingly, both the spoken word and the printed word figure prominently in Taylor’s practice (the artist himself belonging to a generation of practitioners for whom a definite facility with language, both on a theoretical and literary level, has become a key aspect of artistic identity), and many of his installations have also been accompanied by publications and/or artist books.”

This is useful and relevant information—and it spreads from the web of social media and multi-platform websites exactly as it is intended to. But what is actually really useful to know about Zin is how methodical and carefully plotted a self-creation he is. For one thing: his facility with language was hard earned. He speaks in public. He enjoys writing. But he taught himself to write by imitating others. And he learned to speak without dreadful, soul-destroying consternation after six years of speech therapy when he was a child. He stutters. The fissures in vocal narrative still open up suddenly before him.

His friends and fellow artists probably don’t know this about him. I don’t realize it myself until he tells me. He’s built a laconic, unhurried pause so successfully into his personality that it is now just part of who he is. But when I play back the recording of our conversation I realize how skilfully he rebounds from and circles around the sounds that give him difficulty. I realize how much he is always thinking ahead.

It is only later, while flying back to Toronto and listening to our interviews that I find myself wondering if the chasms of speech over which he has learned to jump are the same chasms of formlessness for which he seeks to find form. I wonder if the experience of stepping into Jessica Bradley Gallery last winter and seeing the mysterious dangling mobiles of “The Story of Stripes and Dots (Chapter 7)” so confidently claiming the space was something like glimpsing the new language that emerges when the old breaks down.

At the Monday market, the friends he introduces me to are artists and curators from Cairo, New Zealand and France. There is a composer who has just arrived from San Francisco. There is a dancer from New York. The conversations—both ours and those in the crowded square around us—are pitched at good cocktail-hour volumes.

Zin seems happy. He seems perfectly at home.

“I didn’t expect this,” I say.

“Nobody does,” he answers. And there’s something about the way he smiles, the way he refills our glasses with the wine bottle in his other hand, and about the little toast he gives me that makes me realize he is talking about more than Brussels. Not only does he live somewhere nobody expects. Somewhere nobody expects is also where his work is.