Archive for 2000
This is in relation to this year’s Turner Prize:
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From: timothy comeau
To: arts_online@scotsman.com
Subject: Plagiarism or Appropriation?
Date: Thursday 30 November 2000 6:02 PM
Plagiarism or Appropriation? I smirk at this case, because I see it from both sides of the argument. One the one hand, it appears to be flagrant plagiarism. One could not reproduce a text changing a few words here, and the punctuation, and make a claim to be original.
But Duchamp brought in the readymade. In *choosing* an object, he exercised artistic decision making – the process being defined as such: 1. I’m an artist, that is, I have been trained to see the world in a special way, I have “heightened aesthetic sensibility”. 2.I see a shovel, I think, wow, that looks pretty cool, we don’t have anything like over in France 3. I think the art world is too stuffy, all those boring glossy paintings, I’ll exhibit this in a gallery 4.I’ll give it an ironic, humorous title, “In advance of the broken arm”.
When I was in art school, I wanted to produce cinematic picture books, but because I was in a small town at the edge of the ocean, and because I was only a poor art student, the only way I could get access to certain pictures was to borrow them. I took photographs from the TV, from movies etc, in order to get photographs that would have been impossible for me to get otherwise. For example, I could never schedule a photo shoot with Albert Einstein, since he’s been dead for forty-five years.
I would present these books to my studio group, and I asked my studio advisor about this act of appropriation. He pointed out that there are thousands of images in a film, and to choose one or two is an artistic act in line with the history of the readymade. (One should ask, why did I the creator of this piece choose these images when I had thousands of frames to choose from)?
I also argued, that we live in a landscape dominated by created images. There was a time in the past when an image was expensive to produce, and this kept the presence of media down, but in this day and age, the cost of producing media is inconsequential. I argued that representing images from the media is similar to painting a landscape. Does God own the copyright to that view? Do all the Sunday painters of the past who have also painted that area have a say? We think nothing of looking at paintings of landscape, we think it’s interesting for example, to compare the photographs of Atget from 100 years ago to photographs taken from the same vantage point today, in order to see the changes that a century brings.
Since there seems to be an image wherever you look today, whether it be golden arches or blank faced models or sci-fi book covers, it seems almost impossible to represent contemporary reality without including what some would consider a copyright violation.
In the case of Glen Brown, its unfortunate that he wasn’t more upfront about the source, that it wasn’t clear from the beginning that this painting was his remix of that 70s song.
TIMOTHY COMEAU
Toronto, Canada
An email to Janna, Fri. 22 September 2000 at 11.24 pm
Now I’m back from my little trip.
I need a new notebook…and for notebooks I only buy Clairefontaine notebooks. I have been getting them at a place on Queen St west, but I am not happy with the selection they offer, despite my attempts to get them to order me what I want. Now the first store that I ever found a Clairfontaine notebook at was the University of Toronto bookstore and this was in 1993. So I decided that this time I would try the U of T.
Walking along College St, there are all of these students, with backpacks and youth, and I thought O I miss Academia! Rumpled old white bearded professors and leaves blowing on sidewalks…and I realized that is what I miss so much about Halifax, its the fact that Hali is a university town, and you are surrounded by this atmosphere. So, needless to say, that walk along College St was big time refreshing. The U of T did not have what I was looking for, their selection is even more disappointing then the place on Queen. So it was down to Queen after all, to get the book that has to do….
And then the opening. Tonight they were not serving Keiths. I had to settle with some Belgian import called Selma or something like that. At these events I always expect to see someone I know, because there is supposed to be all of these Nascaders up here, but I have never seen them yet. But there are familiar faces in the crowd, people who go to all of these events that I go to, there’s this one guy, he’s really tall and skinny and wears a jean jacket. He has thick sideburns and glasses…and the other regular is this girl that I find alluring because she’s so anti bourgeois. This evening, like the last time I saw her in June, she was wearing gray. I tried to memorize her features so that I could draw her picture later and write odes to her and stuff, because I probably wont see her again until the next opening in December. And this all stems from the fact that she asked me if I was sitting alone at this movie – Cremaster 2– that I went to see in March, my first Toronto art event, and I said yes and she asked if I could move over because her group was 3, and I said sure…but she had all these interesting things about her so now she’s a character in my mental world and pops up in my writings.
But she only showed up about ten minutes before I left. I had made a phone call to my friend Nick in Ottawa. Yes I too have a friend named Nick who is central to my travel plans. Perhaps we all have nicks in our lives, but I hear that girls have allot on their legs, wink wink, and so I am going to buy a ticket tomorrow to go up to Ottawa on the third of October, and I’ll be there until the seventh, which is a Friday. I hope that it’ll rule.
The art itself was much too resonant…it hums with its grandiosity, and because of this, the presence of middle aged wankers dressed in black only makes it seem cheap. But the middle aged wankers, that’s our future, and they always seem to be well off financially, and you know they must be more than tolerable to listen to considering they’re there, so I don’t hate them for being beautiful even though I think they’re losers for not having enough originality to wear something other than fucking black….
A large room, a large screen. A conductor, close up. We see his hands moving through space. We catch occasional glimpses of his face. The orchestration…cinematic music. In the corner, Hitchcock’s Vertigo is playing. It is right on the floor, projected into the corner. The image must be about 2.5 feet by 1 foot….but that’s a really rough estimate. Anyway, its small, compared to the screen hanging in the middle of the room where the conductor is. There is this synchronization see, the conductor is conducting the background music that corresponds to Vertigo playing in the corner, in silence. I think the artist DG said last night that it isn’t THE score for the film, but nevertheless, they interact with each other.
24 Hour Psycho. A smaller screen this time. Silence….large still photographs, immaculate black and white. The type of black and white cinematography that makes colour obsolete. Hovering above the ground, on the hanging screen, shuddering through their stunted animation. It is great to see a two hour movie slowed down to this extant, so that each frame is visible, so that it becomes a progression of still photographs rather than a movie house sequence. And there is no sound…which I love, I hate sound in film, I mean its obviously necessary but sometimes it’s just redundant and annoying and unnecessary. Did you see the video I made for my video class? Did you ever see the video Ed and I made? Both are silent.
Needless to say, I’m a sucker for this artist already, when I learn that his films are silent.
The beauty is the installation entitled, Through the Looking Glass. You turn a corner. Large black bare room. Concrete floor, no light, a mirror. You see a light in the corner, you glimpse a larger video projection. You walk toward it, seeing your self in the mirror that covers the entire wall.
The other room then. Deniro in Taxi Driver. “You talking to me? You talking to me? I dont see anyone else standing here….fucker….faster than you.”
But the thing is, on the wall to the left, the sequence is playing, on the wall to the right the same thing, only the image is reversed so that one is the mirror image of the other, and the sound is off by a fraction of a second, so the dialogue echoes around the room. The luscious beauty of half a wall covered by a video projection….you talking to me…the two Deniros squaring off. The army jacket, the shelf behind his shoulder displaying 1970s plastic food clutter. Over and over again, this sequence, which the wall card says is 71 minutes long.
I wandered through each room three times, well no four times. I wandered had a beer wandered had another beer. Half looking for someone I might know. But no…
And on the way home I was listening to the radio, Ideas, and this time its dialogue from a conference on the current internationalization of culture and art. One voice says how art is trivialized in the contemporary, it is commodified and become another something we consume and then forget. And I cant help but think of the stuff I have just seen, and the fact that it is wow but it isn’t sticking, and I have to write it all out like this in order to see for myself if I remember anything of it, if it meant anything to me….and you see the crowds there drinking and chatting and you know no one really cares about the art, I mean its all just novelty, that it, its just an excuse to get together and talk and get drunk and get interviewed. I cant help but think that our mental habit for consuming and forgetting, satiating ourselves briefly and then tossing it over the shoulder like the medieval dinner party caricatures, that it defines our art and that it is an historicism, and that in the future this will all seem incomprehensible, because future people will not be defined by consumption. And with me, art that last centuries rather than decades is where its at, I really like feeling that I’m part of an historical moment, and I like art that has that staying power around it. So I don’t know, overall, I mean the whole thing is so au courant that I don’t know if it was awesome….but it was definitely a decent Friday night out, a lot better than watching the latest Hollywood disaster. (You see consumption entering into my thinking…) They have re-released the Exorcist you know. With 11 more minutes of footage that was “too scary to see the first time around”. Perhaps I will go see that one day in the next few weeks. Maybe when I’m in Ottawa.
Later
Timothy
Why did you paint the timeline?
I had found this website, artandculture.com, and there amongst the
other flashy graphics was a timeline. Under each artist’s name, there
was this timeline and two lines: lived and worked. I thought it was one
of the best graphics describing that information that I had ever seen.
Everything, its coloring and the font, made it very elegant.
I was also at the time reading a book called A Short History of the
Future, by W. Warren Wagar. This was a book that in a way I had
wanted to read for ten years. It had originally been published in 1989,
but I only fond it in the winter of 2000. I have always been interested
in the future as it has been depicted in the media. While growing up I
regularly became a fan of whatever TV show had some basis in the
future, which usually revolved around the year 2000.
Anyway, here was this book, presenting possible future scenarios for
the next two hundred years. I wanted to make a graphic displaying this
information, and that line on the artandculture site “showed me how” as
it were. So I drew it up one night on the computer. Aliens was on TV.
Here I was, one future scenario on TV to my left, the ones in the book
in my head, and then the Timeline on the screen in front of me. So
simple, the centuries that we are dealing with, that some of us will live
through. It’s quite possible that many of us born in the late 20th Century
will die in the 22nd Century. That’s what they keep telling us anyway.
So here was the field in which our being would play out.
And I also liked the fact that the Timeline, as a painting, had a lifespan
in terms of centuries. That it would exist for all of these years that it
depicts. That at the time of its creation, we can only fill in the details up
to the year 2000. But each block represents a decade, in which major
news stories occur. In the 90s there was the Oklahoma city bombing,
which I always think about, since it sort of came out of nowhere and
splashed itself across the mindscape of the time. And then there were
all the high school massacres. These weren’t predictable occurrences
based on trends at the time – no one could have forecast that in 1989.
But now, we say, they could happen again. Wager’s book is about
following contemporary trends to their logical conclusions. But time is
fluid, that ‘s one thing that keeps getting taught in time travel stories:
hat nothing is set in stone except the past, and even that can become
malleable through deconstruction. What fascinates me is what will we
fill those blocks with, those things that we can’t imagine happening
today.
And during that time, while we are busy creating crazy and memorable
history, that painting will be there, witnessing them, its oil paint
continually solidifying and gelling. Perhaps cracks will appear on its
surface. Its not immune to the effects of time, even though its place
within it is as a witness.
Why did you paint the postcard?
Initially it was because it looked so luscious that I wanted to put it into
paint. It cried out for the buttery texture of oil paint. But the thin is that
it too has been a witness. When I first found these postcards in the
store, I began to look for everyday images of the past. It was interesting
to see ones that had been sent by soldiers during the world wars. As
such, they were historical documents that were being ignored because
they were so common. But I grew up anticipating the future. I grew up
surrounded by old things, and knew that as I got older, their status as
historical objects rose.
The postcards are rich little semiotic fragments. The handwriting, the
imagery, they are documents of a time that was once common, but is
now gone. Yet these things survive. I have one that is really sweet…a
young girl wrote to her father and asked him to send her toothbrush.
But you know, this is a hog bristle toothbrush, and what they called
toothpaste none of us would recognize. Perhaps this girl is still alive,
she’d be in her 90s now. I’, more inclined to think that she’s dead, one
of the reasons her old postcards would end up in a used bookstore. But
the thought is that she lived out her life, gotten married and had
children – all the things that we are familiar with from award winning
novels. And here is a fragment from one of that story’s earliest chapters,
when the book was new and crisp.
To: Blake Gopnik
From: “Timothy Comeau” at Internet
Subject: please consider the following
Date: 3/22/2000 8:32 PM
Dear Mr. Gopnik,
I hope that you are not to busy so that you can take time to read my letter. I wrote the following excerpt as part of a letter to a friend of mine in BC, last night. After reading your article this morning, I thought this is something I’d like to submit for your consideration. (I am a recent NSCAD graduate and attended the presentation you gave there last spring).
I remember an article you wrote in December 1998 after you visited Art Metropole, and the theme of consumerism entering the realm of art appeared again in this morning’s article. It is for this reason that I would like your thoughts regarding this excerpt.
In the letter I basically expressed how buying certain art supplies, for computer based art, seems like an extravagance, because graphics software is so expensive:
*** “….I’ve never been competitive because basically I’m a sore loser and I decided early to avoid competition to avoid disappointment and frustration.
Unfortunately I did not realize how competitive life is in general. I’ve also been reflecting how I’ve patted myself on the back and called myself noble for certain qualities – which were no more than coping strategies. Now that I have employment and a descent wage, I feel greed and the consumerist impulse to define myself through acquisitions blossoming. Because now I have the means. To desire things when you are art-student poor is self-torture, but now…
and I don’t like this, but I wonder why should I deny myself things? How come everybody else gets to waste money on junk, and what I want is stuff that I actually feel I need, tools for my art practice.
Perhaps this questioning about buying art supplies is due to my uncertain commitment to being an artist. The art world system seems so wasteful and set for a toppling, so set for a fundamental paradigm shift, that I don’t want to begin swimming only to have to pool drained when I’m in the middle.
This feeling perhaps is a reflection of our changing times. There is an ad that I pass on my way to work that says basically, “just when i was ready to make the next move in my career, the industry has changed”.
And art seems so faddish and cultish and so much about identifying cliches and either associating yourself with them or moving away from them (either way the cliche is the center and source of your action, and we should link the word cliche with the word style) that it seems like certain death to get serious about art. I see so many of our colleagues out there and to me they’re like the Salon painters of 100 years ago. Which makes me think who is going to be the 21st Century’s Duchamp and exhibit a pisser? Does the 21st Century even have room for another art movement? Does art have a future?
I really would like to do webdesign. I’m thinking of taking a course. But the web seems faddish too. Sure, its here to stay, but right now its hot hot hot. How boring will it become? Like network television? But the remedy for boring network TV is the art video. So where are the art websites? I ask this rhetorically because such things are supposed to exist. How about this for an advant-garde site: you go to the url and your system crashes. Is that the equivalent of a pisser? Which to me raises two questions: are computer viruses the most eloquent form of computer art? And, to put a wall between you and your tool, is that what art does? Any thoughts?”
***
I would appreciate any feedback you might have.
Sincerely, Timothy Comeau
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From: bgopnik@globeandmail.ca
To: tcomeau45@hotmail.com
Subject: Re: please consider the following
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2000 11:14:19 -0500
Thanks for your note.
Just one thought: DO we have to buy in to the basically Romantic, avant-gardist view of the artist-as-rebel. I’m afraid that artists are inevitably closer to shoemakers or other craftspeople than to revolutionaries, and that we all might want to accept that, and go back to an older, Medieval view of the artist as purveyor of sensory and intellectual pleasures — since I think that probably is the inevitable reality.
Yrs, Blake Gopnik
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Subject: No subject given
Author: “Timothy Comeau”
Date: 3/23/2000 11:30 PM
Thank you for taking the time to respond. Regarding your comments: I entirely agree. Yet it seems simple to say in the forum of internet correspondence, yet when I am interacting with my artist peers and gallery going, it doesn’t seem that I am browsing shoes. To stretch that metaphor, I inevitably end up examining the stitching. If everybody is employing a standard stitch, isn’t the craftsman who uses a new design going against the flow, and thus acting revolutionary?
I find your response intriguing in many ways. I am especially intrigued by the notion of the return to a medievalist view. I mean, there’s the talk of the collapse of the nation state and the rise of the neo-city state to replace it, and what seems to be a decline in standards of education, leaving a large, tasteless populace (do you agree, or is this a crutched form of snobish thinking which seems to be the refuge of all the Bach lovers that have to listen to Nsync being piped in from somewhere?) contrasted by a minority of educated and “cultured” elites, and the rise of footnotes (by this I mean that the act of sourcing everything reminds me of the mediaeval scholastics who always assumed that some ancient source was a reliable authority).
This is partially why I am approaching you with these thoughts, given that as art critic for a national newspaper, I respect your “authority” on these matters. Art for me isn’t a matter of a weekend’s entertainment, but is an important social indicator, a status report on the state of society. Which is why I am so frustrated that art in the public sphere, and within the community, seems dominated by the cliches of the artist founded in the 19thCentury, like you pointed out. No we don’t have to buy into the view, but in my experience many people are wearing that uniform (which Katy Seigel described as “worker drag” in an article on Mathew Barney’s work, in last summer’s Artforum) (there you go, footnotes).
What do you think of that Mike Kelly and MacCarthy show? Doesn’t that show rely on artist as rebel a little? I mean the whole shock art thing as being the presentation of an enlightened view brought forth by artists who are critics of a culture dominated by sugarcoated elements, and thus acting revolutionary? To me it seems a little infantile, in an educated sort of way. I imagine your review will be appearing soon, so I’ll wait and see.
One question that I’d love to have you answer is: Given that I imagine the typical art experience in 2000 to be spending a few hours in a gallery, or browsing through monographs of artist’s work, what would the typical art experience be in 2100, considering that you believe that artist will be by then, “purveying sensory and intellectual pleasures,” as craftsmen?
I suppose you’ll tell me that my job as an artist is to figure that out.
Anyway, I hope this hasn’t been a bother for you, I’d like to know what you think.
Sincerly Timothy Comeau.
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From: bgopnik@globeandmail.ca
To: Subject: Re: No subject given
Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2000 11:38:10 -0500
Thanks for yours, Timothy. Afraid I don’t have time to digest its length and depth right now — deadlines call — but hope to take a closer read soon.
Blake Gopnik