Archive for December 2004
Sally McKay, who’s run an excellent Toronto arts-related blog over the past year, sent out an email last week asking for 2004 top-tens. Here is my list, which you can see on her blog here, although it’s no different there than here.
1. David Hoffos at TPW in September
2. The Fuck New York video and it’s followup
3. Hive party in June at Studio 99
4. Niagara Falls Artist Program at Mercer Union in December
5. Alyson Mitchell’s show at Paul Petro in March
6. Fastwurms with Michael Barker at Zsa Zsa at the end of August (the canon blew smoke!)
7. French bookstores in Montreal
8. Diane Landry at YYZ
9. Instant Coffee’s make out party in March
10. Realizing that the new OCAD building was great when I wanted to show it off to a visiting friend from out of town.
As the sunlight rises on the rooftops on Queen West on January 1st, few will remember K-Os’ stroll through the hood late last spring when he filmed his Crab Bucket video. Unlike Jan 1 2004, which opened on a scene unchanged from Jan 1 2003, this year will have a few more ‘for rent’ signs in gallery windows. Luft gallery has closed, The Burston Gallery is moving, and Sis Boom Bah moved at the end of the Springtime. For the most part these changes have happened without any concern, since knowing the people involved, I know that tragic stories are not part of the picture. But, what’s new here is the presence of The Drake.
My highly biased year in review – please forgive memory lapses and generalizations…
February
The Drake has gone from crack whores to those of fashion. The year began when the Drake finally opened in February. In the works throughout 2003, the opening was supposed to be in October of that year, and was continually pushed back. There was a robbery of all the computer equipment in the middle of renovations, but given the wealth of Jeff Stober, it was water off a duck’s back, and they were soon back on their behind schedule. It’s all a memory now, and K-Os advertised it’s charming bar throughout the summer with his video. There’s a love/hate thing with the Drake among the artists in the area. It’s attracted the pseudo-posh to bohemia, and artists speak of the hotel with disdain, because it’s phony for them. I myself have a fond memory of being obnoxious to the crowd trying to get in during the film festival.
Personally, I like their coffee. I used to buy coffee at Friendly’s, and while their club sandwich is decadently delicious, their coffee is awful.
The Drake staff are great. I’ve been told that the Drake’s policy is to hire folk with an arts background, which I really appreciate as a chronically underemployed art person.
The TAAFI Festival, held at the beginning of October, was wonderful for the hotel – people got to “see the rooms” and the hotel’s management have lived up to their mandate to support the arts. But I don’t want to hang out with people who have money, so I socialize elsewhere. Although I hear Misha Glouberman’s Room 101 nights are wonderful, but being a sycophantic fan of Glouberman’s I pass that on without ever having attended.
Word on the street now is that Stober has bought surrounding buildings so that they can expand up. An 8 story addition is supposedly in the works, but it’s an unsubstantiated rumour that I’m passing on. Pretty remarkable though, given that they never expected to make much money from renting rooms, everything was supposed to be about the cult-shah.
March
Instant Coffee’s makes it to Second Base – Instant Coffee, the collective I used to be a part of, held a now legendary make-out party at the Gladstone. This isn’t self promotion on my part since it was around this time that we parted ways. Now, the make-out parties began in November of last year in conjunction with the Quadrasonic party at Revival. That night, Emily Hogg built a make-out fort, people dry-humped in the darkness, and spin the bottle challenged our sexual preferences. On this night in March, it was more of the same in a bigger venue. Emily Hogg built another make out fort, Darren O’Donnell MC’d spin-the-bottle, there was a big inflatable thing, and it co-incided with the University of Toronto’s art student’s ‘Room Service’ exhibition in the rooms upstairs, which meant lots of people met for the first time with kisses before names, kind of like this video.
April
Hive Magazine launched an issue with an all-night bash, and with the presence of Instant Coffee’s Urban Disco Trailer, the party turned into another make-out venue. Or, so I hear, since I wasn’t there. I was grumpy and cat-sitting at York University, but that’s another story.
May
The Calgary Flames playing for the cup meant that even sports-phobic artists were getting drunk watching hockey. There were some Canadian themed shows happening in New York, so a bunch of scenesters went down to do what they do here, only because they’re doing in New York, they called it “a vacation” and the implication was that they were cool.
June
In June, Sis Boom Bah left its location on Queen St, and moved to McCaul St. Matt Crookshank, whom everyone knows as the proprietor of S.B.B, even though he inherited the gallery from Jenny San Martin and entrusted it to Claire Greenshaw in November of ’03, made a good go of it on McCaul, but for various reasons the gallery closed it’s doors for good at the end of August. One less venue for artists in this city. I’m not going to say it was because of the Drake, but the reason it and The Burston Gallery removed themselves from the neighborhood is because landlords are raising rents.
The Splice This! 8mm film festival moved from its usual location at the Tranzac club and used the Gladstone Hotel as a venue for its weekend of screenings.
Also in June, Hive Magazine held another all-night bash and again, with the presence of Instant Coffee’s Urban Disco Trailer featuring the Bass Bed, it became another make-out party. I myself have fond memories of slow kisses at 4 in the morning with pretty girls.
July
Jenifer Papararo, who had been co-director at Mercer Union, left town to take a job as curator at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver. Mercer Union replaces her with Dave Dyment, who had worked at Art Metropole.
August
YYZ Artists’ Outlet replaces departing co-director Justin Waddell, who moved to Calgary, with Gregory Elgstrand, who moved from Calgary.
October
The Toronto International Art Fair faces competition from the Toronto Alternative Art Fair International (TAAFI). Chris Hand of Zeke’s Gallery in Montreal suggests a name change, and Andrew Harwood writes a great letter of response, outlining why Toronto needed an alternative art fair. The Queen West Scene’s two party hotels, the Drake and the Gladstone, are used as venues, and people get to see what art looks like in a real room, and not a booth.
Also in October, Atom Egoyan opened his Camera bar/cinemateque. No one I know has gone there yet. Maybe it’s the uninviting curtain, and the fact that I’d rather hobknob with people who I’ve never heard of rather than some celebrity who’s accomplished far more than I. (It is still so much more easier to relate to people who are on their way up).
December
Selena Christo puts the ‘for rent’ sign in Luft gallery, which had moved a couple of blocks up the street so that the space at 13 Ossington could be converted into a bar. Sweaty Beaty’s opened in November. Because she and partner Pol Williams want to concentrate on this new business, and because Selena has fulfilled her ‘five year plan’, it is with little sadness that she is letting it go. However, it is another lost venue for artists in the city. Selena had done a great job promoting artists from within and outside of Toronto, supporting emerging artists , and giving Toronto audiences a chance to see work from Quebec.
Also in 2004, Mind Control continued to host what I hear are the best parties but whenever I drop in it’s too early and they aren’t crazy yet. But check out the photos on the website to see what you’ve been missing.
The Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA) has sort of moved to its new location. There have been some parties (a Halloween bash) and some shows (Royal Bank’s Painting Competition) but I don’t think they’re officially happening yet. However, a check on their website shows they have an opening on January 13, so, yeah, MOCCA are open now.
Spin Gallery opened in their new location (that was this year right?) but they have lots of bad karma.
Clint Roenisch Gallery continued to have lots of great shows, but the thing is there is that you don’t have to go into the gallery to see the art – you can size it up from the windows. If your hooked, than you’ll find Clint friendly when you go in. He opened late in 2003, and he still has the scratched out name misspelled in the window, a down to earth affectation that I find absolutely charming. The Jack Berman show in May that consisted of photos of dead bodies was awesome.
From yesterday’s journal entry:
According to the records, it occurred at 7.58pm our time last night, which was a little after midnight local time. They keep saying it????s the largest earthquake in the world in 40 years – Susan Mernit’s blog quotes somebody saying that it even disrupted the earth????s rotation. I am typing this on Michelle????s laptop in the kitchen, with the tv on Newsworld, which is broadcasting BBC World, which is reporting on the earthquake…scenes of devastation, mud, ruin, ect. More than 11,000 people dead.Earlier this week, I was reading Goethe????s autobiography, and he talked about the Lisbon Quake of 1755, and how it made him question the reality of God. Whenever you read about the development of deism and atheism in the 18th Century Enlightenment, they speak of that earthquake. Here, in 2004 is our version. The difference is though, that without our communications tech, we would only hear about this disaster months from now, and by then with inaccuracy and embellishment.
This Earthquake follows exactly a year after the one that levelled Bam in Iran. From Wikipedia:
In December 26, 2003 at 1:56 AM UTC (5:26 AM local time) Bam Citadel — ‘the biggest adobe structure of the world’ — and most of the city of Bam proper were devastated by an earthquake. The USGS estimated its magnitude as 6.6 on the Richter scale. The BBC reported that ‘70% of the modern city of Bam’ was destroyed. The total death toll was given as 41,000 on January 17 but the latest estimate from Teheran has halved previous estimates to 26,271 deaths. An additional 10,000 – 50,000 were reported injured (this number is very uncertain, the morst appairing number is 30,000, which may have originated from an early Reuters report. The Iranian authorities does not seem to have given any injured quote). According to the Iranian news agency IRNA, the old Bam Citadel was ‘leveled to the ground’.”
For a while I subscribed to the USGS’ earthquake alerts, which taught me that earthquakes occur everyday somewhere in the world. So far today, there have been 139 earthquakes. Many of these are aftershocks from yesterday’s mega.
There was posting this morning on Slashdot, which got picked up by Metafilter proposing a static calendar, one in which every day of the year falls on the same day of the week in perpetuity. Instead of leap days we have leap weeks called ‘Newtons’.
This reminded me of my interest in a universal world chronology, to replace the Christian calendar for academic historical reaserch. For one thing, the Christian calendar is unfairly dominant across global multi-ethnic culture. The other thing, all those negative numbers in BC land. I began thinking about this in 1998, and today I worked out a new system. Details here, where you will find some email I posted on a mailing list in 2001, where I wrote this:
I am fond of [the Christian chronology] myself, and can’t imagine using anything else in my daily life, but when it comes to historical research, to reading history, I hate BC. It cuts us off from a line of events in an unnatural way. I simply would like it if historians, anthropologists, and sociologists could get together and figure out a new system to date historical events with that eliminates BC. […]What I’m proposing is rather simple isn’t it? Just find a day in the past which academics can use as a starting point for an international chronology, that incorporates ancient history in a positive, rather than negative, scale of values. There is a time before civilization, and perhaps this pre-history belongs in a negative scale for simple psychological value, and to keep our date numbers low (no point in adopting a system where we’d have to write 13 Feb 6,987,089,976).
In my new system, Year 0 is 3340 BC, which was the year an eclispe occured that was recorded by neolithic Irishmen, as detailed here. I chose this arbitrarily as a year with a datable event which was sufficiently far back to encompass most of recorded history in positive values. This year also has the advantage that it ends in 0, thus making an effective year 0.
I’m on the board of YYZ Artists’ Outlet, and last night I got an advance copy of our latest publication, Caught in the Act which documents through essays and interviews, the history of Canadian women in performance art from the 70s and 80s. Sally McKay, who used to work at YYZ, writes about the book here. I’ll admit that I’m not that interested in performance art for lots of different reasons, but this book is really welcome.
As Tanya Mars writes in her preface,
“It occurred to me that I was teaching myself right out of art history, which was ironic given that I had been actively engaged in both feminist and artist-run movements of the 70s and 80s, doing my utmost to ensure that women artists were not omitted from that history. As artists women were addressing the lack of representation, but as teachers it was clear that we had been lax.I asked myself, why, despite Canada’s very rich contemporary art activity, were our images absent from the existing literature? We were prolific, our work was strong, we were vocal. Where were we?
I decided that it was time to fill the void. The concept of self-determination that had fueled my resolve as a woman artist to be a woman artist in a male-dominated arena, would now fuel my passion to give Canadian women artists the attention and profile they deserve.
It became clear that others shared my frustration with the lack of resources on Canadian artists. It became clear that writing a book would be an enormous undertaking, and that I did not want to do it alone”.
Hence, a 444 page anthology, which launches tomorrow night at YYZ, in the 401 Richmond building. Here’s the PR:
—————————
Please join us for the launch of this important new title from YYZ Books:
Caught in the Act
An anthology of performance art by Canadian women
Edited by Tanya Mars and Johanna Householder
Thursday, December 16, 7 – 10 p.m.
YYZ Artists’ Outlet
401 Richmond Street, Suite 140, 416.598.4546
Canada’s definitive book on Canadian women in performance art, this indispensible anthology gives readers access to an important and under-recognized subject in recent Canadian art history. Edited by two seminal Canadian peformance artists, Tanya Mars and Johanna Householder, this book focuses on the 70s and 80s; a time when women made a big and noisy impact, and provides readers with insight into the profound effects that feminism and women’s work have had on the current alternative scene. Full of sass and insight, this essential collection is part survey, part critical discourse, and part reference book, containing five critical essays, thirty-four profiles on individual artists, hundreds of images, and an extensive bibliography.
444 pp. , 219 b/w photos, 19 colour plates
ISBN: 0-920397- 84-0 (softcover) $39.95
YYZ Books is online at www.yyzartistsoutlet.org
YYZ Books is distributed by ABC Art Books Canada www.abcartbookscanada.com
The support of the Canada Council for the Arts in making this book possible
is gratefully acknowledged.
— YYZ Books 401 Richmond St. W., Suite 140 Toronto, ON M5V 3A8 tel. 416.598.4546 fax 416.598.2282 www.yyzartistsoutlet.org
image courtesy of YYZ Artists’ Outlet
Earlier this year, I ran into Alissa Firth-Eagland and Gareth Long on Queen St, and I witnessed an handover. She had just given him a video tape, which he in turn was to give to Jeremy Drummond. The ultimate result was seen on Saturday night at the Latvian House (491 College St), the Pleasure Dome screening of a 640480 production called Vs.
The 640480 collective (whose members are Jeremy Bailey, Patrick Borjal, Shanan Kurtz, Phil Lee, Jillian Locke, and Gareth Long) had a great idea, have one video-art-star shoot something, and have another edit it. The screening consisted the pairings between
Benny Nemerofsky-Ramsay vs. Copper Batersby,
Vollrath (Conan Romanyk) vs. Daniel Borins
Steve Reinke vs. Jubal Brown
Emily vey Duke vs. Daniel Cockburn
Tom Sherman vs. Tasman Richardson
Will Munro & Jeremy Laing vs. Aleesa Cohene
Alissa Firth Eagland vs. Jeremy Drummond
Steve Kado vs. Kika Thorne
I think it’s fair to say that the match up between Alissa Firth Eagland and Jeremy Drummond was the night’s worst video because Jeremy inserted text from a torture manual, which seemed to make everyone uncomfortable. From reading some of his previous artist statements, and from seeing other pieces of his work, I understand that Jeremy is interested in the vile aspects of masculinity – the capacity to be brutal and cruel, but all it ends up doing is rehashing the worst of pop-culture, as if we didn’t get how awful it was the first time. The torture manual thing seemed to get under everybody’s skin, and one person beside me actually stopped watching, which seems pretty counter-productive as a video artist. I’m no fan of Drummond’s work – it ends up just being assaulting.
Another artist who’s work lends itself to assault is Jubal Brown – a friend of mind got a little motion sick watching his edit of Steve Reinke’s apparently 45 minute video of him walking around downtown which he improved using fast forward. From Scott Sorli’s essay in the catalogue, I am told that originally Reinke sung along to Patti Smith’s “recent anti-war albulm Trampin’.” With Jubal’s edits in place, we are left with Reinke saying, “I’m pretty much pro-war. Um, not politically, of course, but aesthetically”.
Jubal’s partner in the Famefame collective, Tasman Richardson, edited a Tom Sherman video, which almost didn’t get screened. Apparently Sherman hadn’t been happy with Richardson’s edits and had wanted it pulled, but in the end let it go ahead. In this case, a man in the forest wearing an mosquito-net yells insults into the camera and had some people laughing because the anger was so out of context, its ridiculousness was apparent.
My favorite was Cooper Batersby’s edit of Benny Nemerofsky-Ramsay’s video, a still of which is pictured above. All of these works were really worth seeing, and they were also very much about the editing power of computers. This show was a tribute to Final Cut Pro.
The Q & A afterward brought out some of the ego-clashing that must have been going on behind the scenes, but I was surprised by how many people split the place as soon as they could (because of Drummond’s edit?). All in all though, it’s another score for 640480 who already wowed us earlier this year with their video embroidery project at Zsa Zsa. I for one am totally looking forward to whatever they come up with next.
Cable Project interview conducted by Louis Marrone.
[audio:http://timothycomeau.com.s3.amazonaws.com/audio/20041202_cp_timothy.mp3]
You can go to agriculture school for years, but in the end it all depends on the rain. IE KNOWLEDGE ONLY GETS YOU SO FAR.
There is the authority of tradition, whihch sometimes amounts to the testimony of a complacent history. The sort of thing passes itself off as a type of authority based on experience, which is more legitimate kind of authority.