Archive for September 2000

An Email to Janna Popoff | Review of Douglas Gordon show at the Power Plant

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

Interview

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.