Archive for 2005
I’m borderline bored today. Read some of Sources of the Self but there’s too much talk of God. Read about how he thinks we may be in a watershed time (written though in the late 1980s) and spoke of how we have a hard time imagining old ideas like the divine right of kings. I’m at the point where I have a hard time imagining God ideas – although I remember faith, I’m working with a memory of an experience, which is different than actually feeling it as real today. It’s like my thoughts last week on myth – as something we’ve overcome, or something which served us and does no longer.I must say I’m particularly animated by the idea that I live in a complicated and technologically sophisticated civilisation. This is something Firefly helped bring to my awareness, through their contextualization of humans spread out across a new solar system, having packed up everything and moved it off world, where they felt free to begin the process of ecological destruction to build complicated early 21st Century cities all over again since there was now many worlds of resources at their disposal. And how Joss Whedon talked of wanting a show that was about ‘us’ – early 21st Century Americans (including Canadians) and revisiting the Western. And so you have a future five hundred years away in which everyone is using things we’re familiar with, like keyboards (no mysterious interfaces like on Star Trek and printed tee-shirts, and everything very familiar to us, as if we have in many ways plateaued, similarly to the way the candle and travel by horse was familiar to people across the centuries before the lightbulb.
So, the idea that I’m living in an emerging global civilization, which is so complex, but which enables me to do almost anything, I find interesting and exciting. To be here when it’s all new and fresh. And what this all means opposed to the Old World, and old world art and culture.
As an artist, I’ve struggled to find my voice and my place within the culture. I’ve also been caught up in the myopia of industry – to participate in the segregation, to go to openings, to party with fellow cultural workers, to read the poorly written and poorly thought documents, all the while not seeing the forest for the trees, and all the while looking in a rear-view mirror as it were: things from the past, and cultural movements better seen through hindsight. Getting lost in what it all means.
We are cut off in the end, from the experience of our lives, what it means to be alive now and to be comfortable with our selves. I sense a great trembling before uncertainty in this regard – the Buddhists who tell us we can be happy now and who want to enlighten us, wake us up to the wonder already here in our lives, but simply getting us to pay attention to our minds and our thinking – this is all seen with a sense of skepticism, but also, I think, there is a deep nostalgia for misery. So used to complaining and to being entertained through moving picture stories, we fear the length of our lives and the prospect of being bored.
Northrop Frye’s article on boredom vs. leisure summarizes the cultural wars I’ve witnessed in my still young life, and in the end lays it all on education … which broadens our perspectives to take in more than what the narrow view offers, the narrow view being by definition limited and quickly exhausted, so we find ourselves bored. The leisured, on the other hand, move through life being productive, pursuing their interests and by default contributing to society and civilization.
But what does any of this mean? What is it to contribute to humanity or civilization or to society? Those ideas were dissected by the post-structuralists which encouraged what Waggar called credicide, draining from our lives the sense of meaning which animated our imaginations and hence our lives – gave us that sense of certainty we seem to desire.
Perhaps our need for certainty is genetic, stemming from the days when uncertainty about yonder hill could get one eaten by a leopard. If that’s the case, we need a technology to deal with it. However, like our obesity problem, we’ve fallen victim to ancient biologies – comfort foods being comforting because of their fat content, which was very useful in scavenging days, but no longer. We now know this through science, and the concept of calories can help us control what we eat, in addition we know that to burn extra calories we need to exercise. But do we have similar knowledge to help us live with uncertainty? Is Buddhism such a technology?
The question is not one of who to make art for – fellow artists and further for collectors. But how to make something so that for the next thousand years, anyone (or at least, some) can see it or read it or whatever, and know that I was a human being just like they are, that I felt as they do sometimes, and in so doing, help bridge the gap of time, help them feel like they are part of the bigger story of civilization. So today, in 2005, I can read St. Augustine’ Confessions and recognize a fellow human being, and learn something of the context of those times. Again, people are still reading Tolstoy’s War & Peace which is set two hundred years ago, and in the process are learning a greater context.
If myth has died out in our age, one sees how that narrative culture we live in has replaced it. The past century was one resembling the wipe of a movie – the fade in or the fade out, how briefly the two images are combined in one still. The Old World of horses and carriages, inkwells and candles; of killing whales for oil, was replaced by a world where we dug oil out of the ground, to fuel our combustible engines for what was at first called a horseless carriage, and inkwells disappeared into speciality shops and art supply stores. Myth died and was replaced by the novel and movie, either projected in two to three hour stories on a large screen (replacing live theatre) or was divided up into half hour to an hour segments for the television machine of living rooms. Poetry, which was exulted for so long in so many cultures, disappeared too into specialty markets, replaced by the lyrics of pop music. Firefly suggests this new world will be with us for another five hundred years.
Picking up on the rear-view-mirror comment: one thinks of the side mirrors, and this past week I was trying to imagine what vision for a rabbit must be like, with it’s eyes on the side of it’s head, forward and backward in their periphery. How would their brains assemble the picture? Our eyes both face forward, overlapping, giving us and animals like us (apes and cats and so forth) binocular vision. I imagine something of what a rabbit experiences could be seen by placing two side view mirrors in front of us, at the angle so that we see the sweep behind, and are blinded near what we experience as front.
If hindsight then, is 20/20, one should further argue that this is the case for animals. The whole point of our lives since the beginning has seemed to be better than the animals. To be human is to see what’s in front of you clearly, and to be blind to what’s behind.
From my journal at the time, where I’d copied and translated it. From my Grade 10 French Class fifteen years ago, dated December 8 1990:
Where is Santa Claus?Where is Santa Claus? To discover the answer to this question, I set about asking children. I asked nearly fifteen children when one told me where he lived really!All the others has said that Santa lived in the North Pole, but after all these answers, one walked into my interview room.
He had big red shoes on his feet and green pants, with a big yellow shirt. He had black hair and big ears.
I asked him his name. ‘Nerwin Tisslefoot,’ he answered. Then he told me…
‘I heard you were asking kids where Santa Claus lived. I’m 7 years old and I know. All the other children think he lives at the North Pole, but it isn’t true. Santa Claus (his real name in Filbert) lives everywhere in the world. In the winter, he lives in Siberia, where he catches his reindeer.
‘There (the name of the place is Northpolliqr) is a huge post office, where Filbert receives the merchandise orders and money from parents all over the world, who buy all the toys from him. On the 20 of December, he puts these great big 767 engines on the feet of his reindeer, Prancer, Dancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner, Blitzen and Rudolph. And on Rudolph, he puts a big red flashlight on his nose. On the 21st of December, he takes off from Northpolliqr, and he flies all over the world, delivering his merchandise to the parents who bought it. He buys all the VCRs, televisions, and toys in Siberia, even if everybody thinks Siberia is poor, but that idea, that is propaganda. It is really rich like the States, or Canada.
‘Anyhow, Filbert is in North America on the 24th – every year straight, never misses – and on the 25th, he flies back to Siberia. He de-hitches the 767 engines, gives his reindeer over to an old lady who looks after them during the year, and he catches the next flight to China.
‘At the beginning of January, Filbert enters his Buddhist monastery, and becomes a Buddhist monk until April, then he goes to Iraq.
You know, in Iraq, it’s the Islam religion, and they celebrate the birthday of Muhammad, like we celebrate the birthday of Jesus Christ. And, like we give presents on Christ’s birthday, they give presents on Muhammad’s birthday. This year, Filbert gave Saddam Hussein Kuwait! That’s why Saddam doesn’t want to get out! He doesn’t want to give up his present!
‘After Filbert’s done in Iraq, he goes to Florida for the fall, to party down with the old timers down there.
‘After that, he’s in Siberia again, and the cycle begins anew. In fact, he’s there at this instant!’
Nerwin Tisslefoot finished his story. I said ‘Thank you Nerwin,’ and he left. I followed, wanting to go home, take about 20,000 aspirin for the migraine he’d given me, and go to bed.
Fini
The cultivation of the mind rather than cultivating the body
Yet there are many who do not cultivate either
So they are the ones who are told that so and so was gay, left handed, autistic, dyslexic – had whatever other condition
To make them ‘special’ so that you and I remain not special, when in reality, we cultivate neither our minds nor our bodies, and wallow in lumpen video game mediocrity, believing we cannot be taught, cannot achieve, and that one must be pathological in order to contribute.
There’s an interview with Slavoj Zizek from the Guardian which pretty much confirms my suspicions as to why I shouldn’t take him seriously – I first heard of him a couple of years ago through a friend who was briefly infatuated with his writing; then looking into it I found it unintelligible, and then further it became Lacan inspired nonsense, and now James Harkins has laid it all out for us, in an interview subtlety designed to impress those with my prejudices, which he perhaps shares.
My highlights:
A one-man heavy industry of cultural criticism, the 58-year-old Zizek has authored more than 50 books, which have been translated into more than 20 languages, on subjects as diverse as Hitchcock, Lenin, and the terrorist attacks of September 11. His brand of social theory – a peculiar amalgam of Karl Marx, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and the trash can of contemporary popular culture – has long afforded him a cult following among fashionable young academics.
Comment: Marx and Lacan are two examples of pseudo-science, and refering to the trash can of pop culture is to say that as trash perhaps it’s not something worth dealing with. Zizek appeals to ‘fashionable young’ academics – which is to say the naive, impressionable, and shallow. Would it not be true that to build arguments out of things not really worth considering is to build an argument itself not worth considering, the equivalent of fantasy?
If I were as fame hungry and vain as Zizek, I might want to start interpreting everything through the lens of Brothers Grimm fairy tales.
No longer tethered to a single institution, Zizek spends his time roving between speaking engagements at institutions all over the world. He is leaving London first thing tomorrow, he tells me, for Paris to be profiled by the newspaper Libèration. Then he is off to headline a Design Congress in Copenhagen (“??7,500,” he shouts to me, still under the photographer’s cosh, “first-class everything, and all that for 40 minutes selling them some old stuff”) and then it is back to Slovenia.
Comment: First class everything, eh? Not bad for a Revolutionary Marxist. The type that overthrows exploitative aristocracy to become aristocracy themselves. Some animals are more equal than others.
On April 1 this year (“a great day to get married”), he married a 27-year-old Argentinian former lingerie model and now spends one third of his time in Slovenia looking after his young son from a former marriage, a third of his time with his new wife in Buenos Aires, and the rest of his time on the road.
Comment: Here we have the degradation of men, especially of older men, who are represented as commitment phobic and chasing after women young enough to be their daughters. Here we have Zizek knocking up a ‘former lingerie model’ which is to say, she had nice tits and an exemplary body, and probably cannot converse at Zizek’s level when it comes to ideas. Zizek has a child from a former marriage, which is also to imply that the lingerie model is a home-wrecker. Zizek, being the ethical fellow we know him to be (“Come on,” he says. “I don’t have any problem violating my own insights in practice.”) could not resist the temptation offered by his new wife. In the end, one is left with thinking: what a fucking bastard.
And not to mention the whole thing about him resembling Jesus.
Geesus.
Northrop Frye, from The Educated Imagination (1962):
So you may ask, what is the use of studying a world of imagination where anything is possible and anything can be assumed, where there are no rights or wrongs and all arguments are equally good? One of the most obvious uses, I think, is its encouragement of tolerance. In the imagination our own beliefs are also only possibilities, but we can also see the possibilities in the beliefs of others. Bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they’re so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can’t see them as also possibilities. It’s possible to go the other extreme, to be a dilettante so bemused by possibilities that one has no convictions or power to act at all. But such people are much less common than bigots, and in our world much less dangerous.
What produces the tolerance is the power of detachment in the imagination, where things are removed just out of reach of belief and action. Experience is nearly always commonplace; the present is not romantic in the way that the past is, and ideals and great visions have a way of becoming shoddy and squalid in practical life. Literature reverses this process. When experience is removed from us a bit, as the experience of the Napoleonic was is in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, there’s a tremendous increase of dignity and exhilaration. I mention Tolstoy because he’d be the last writer to try and glamorize the war itself, or pretend that its horror wasn’t horrible. There is an element of illusion even in War and Peace, but the illusion gives us a reality that isn’t in the actual experience of the war itself: the reality of proportion and perspective, of seeing what it’s all about, that only detachment can give. Literature helps to give us that detachment, and so do history and philosophy and science and everything else worth studying. But literature has something more to give peculiarly its own: something as absurd and impossible as the primitive magic is so closely resembles.
Earlier this year I had the misfortune of attending an abysmal presentation by a visiting academic at one of Toronto’s universities. Afterward, over drinks with my companion, we talked about my dislike for what we had experienced. I wasn’t too fond of the theorizing, having come to see psychoanalysts and their spawn (Lacan and his followers) as practitioners of a pseudo-science, and their theory disconnected from anything I’ve ever considered real. My friend spoke of refinement, that participating and discussing ideas at that level was form of distinction, and sophistication. Her arguments immediately made me think of this by John Ralston Saul, which I’d recently read. I think he convinced me when he threw in the bit about the shoes.
White Bread Post-modern urban individuals, who spend their days in offices , have taken to insisting that she or he is primarily a physical being equipped with the muscles of a work-horse and the clothes of a cowboy. The rejection of white bread in favor of loaves compacted with the sort of coarse, scarcely ground grains once consumed solely by the poor follows quite naturally.
White bread is the sophisticated product of a civilization taken to its ideological conclusion: essential goods originally limited by their use in daily life have been continually refined until all utility has been removed. Utility is vulgar. In this particular case, nutrition and fibre were the principal enemies of progress. With the disappearance of utility what remains is form, the highest quality of high civilizations.
And whenever form presides, it replaces ordinary content with logic and artifice. The North American loaf may be tasteless but remains eternally fresh thanks to the efficient use of chemicals. The French baguette turns into solidified sawdust within two hours of being baked, which creates the social excitement of having to eat it the moment it comes out of the oven. The Italians have introduced an intriguing mixture of tastes – hands towels on the inside and cardboard in the crust. The Spanish managed to give the impression of having replaced natural fibre with baked sand. There are dozens of other variations. The Greek. The Dutch. Even the world of international hotels has developed its own white roll.
In each case, to refine flour beyond utility is to become refined. This phenomenon is by no means limited to bread or even food. Our society is filled with success stories of high culture, from men’s ties to women’s shoes.
(From The Doubter’s Companion, 1994)
In his book on Northrop Frye1, Jonathan Hart describes Roland Barthes as attacking the myths of ‘the bourgeoisie’ and stating that for Barthes, the problem with what is often translated as ‘middle class’ was its inability to imagine the other. Thus, I go through artschool being informed and taught these Marxist ideas, and for a time immediately after graduating am prone to denounce middle-class values as bourgeois.
Then I read Steven Pinker’s account of the middle class (in The Blank Slate, p.416, in his chapter on art), which I had to agree with:
As for sneering at the boureoisie, it is a sophomoric grab at status with no claim to moral or political virtue. The fact is that the values of the middle class – personal responsilbilty, devotion to family and neighborhood, avoidance of macho violence, respect for liberal democracy – are good things, not bad things. Most of the world wants to join the bourgeoisie, and most artists are members of good standing who adopted a few bohemian affectations. Given the history of the 20th Century, the reluctance of the bourgeoisie to join mass utopian uprisings can hardly be held against them. And if they want to hang a painting of a red barn or a weeping clown above their couch, it’s none of our damn business.
The problem of imagining the other is still with us, but like everything has been updated to a new century’s context. ( I’m inclined to say it’s generational in one regard – my parents certainly have this problem, but my parents are also political and social conservatives).
The problem of imagining the other was clear to me in the article I read yesterday by Anthony Harrigan, called ‘History, the Past, and Inner Life’ (PDF) which seemed interesting at first but then became intolerable. He seems to argue that while in the past there has been a connection between a technically advanced society and barbaric behavior (the Nazis) he seems to imply that one cause the other, which is nonsense. He says this of the culture of the United States:
One has only to look at the ‘entertainment’ industry media in the United States. The technology of the electronic media is unparalleled in the world, but much of the comment is hostile to the values of our inherited civilization. The tide of pornography is rising, flooding the internet, exposing the average user to the most vile images.
Which was the first thing to make me suspicious. Then he goes on to write:
Dr. McClay has pointed out that an increasing number of academic historians strive to ‘demonstrate that all our inherited institutions, beliefs, conventions, and normative values are arbitrary ???social construction in the service of power???and therefore without legitimacy or authority.’
An argument to which I’m sympathetic, since I don’t have such a negative view of humanity to see them as all power greedy, preferring the Buddhist view that all beings desire happiness. His point though is raised in order to say the following:
We see this process at work in the effort to de-legitimize the institution of marriage established as a religiously ordained estate between a man and a woman. Judicial validation of ‘civil unions’ between homosexuals undermines the most fundamental institution of our society, monogamous marriage. It opens the door to polygamy and every sort of perverted sexual activity, including bestiality.
Which is of course bullshit, and our first clear example of this fellow being unable to imagine the other. And yet, when reading this yesterday, Marxist terms filtered through French semiology did not pop into my mind; instead I had the realization that I was reading the right-wing point of view.
One reads on, to find this gem of intolerance (the emphasis within is mine):
In this era in which leftist social doctrines prevail, it isn???t surprising that great emphasis is placed on multiculturalism in schools and colleges. The aim in promoting multiculturalism is to downgrade or disavow the culture of our nation and civilization. In many educational institutions, for instance, students are launched into the culture of India before they study the culture of the United States and the Western world. This is a deliberate process designed to underscore the point that our American and Western history and values do not have primacy. Multiculturalism leaves those exposed to it morally disoriented and rootless. Students are supposed to learn that there is nothing special about our traditions; no one is to regard them as having authority in life. A mishmash of culture is ladled out so that young people are without authoritative guidance in adopting values. Those who want to downgrade our traditions and values have what the writer Joan Didion has referred to as ???preferred narratives.??? These narratives have as their central theme that the United States has an oppressive society and has been that way from the start. They regard the Constitution of the United States as a conspiracy against the powerless. They choose to depict minorities as victims regardless of the particular circumstances.
Here I see the power of freedom of speech and thought, to be able to read something I find offensive but which gives me a privileged glismpe into answering the question we express nowadays with ‘WTF?’
What the fuck they are thinking is that multiculturalism is to degrade one’s own culture? How about the idea that we take our congenital cultures for granted – that we don’t need to appreciate them since we are living within it, and see The Other as offering us different perspectives. One thing that Mr. Harrigan does throughout is to talk of ‘our culture, and our civilization’, dividing the world into haves and have nots, closing the door to ‘guests’ in a sense. One detects a distinctive lack of welcome in his use of words.
How does one claim a culture with such certainty? And I think it needs to be asked, why should anyone be so proud of the parochial, patriarchal American culture, so sure of itself, that it doesn’t require the perspectives of other experiences? As Kurt Vonnegut brought up in his recent appearance on The Daily Show in a sarcastic defense of the situation in Iraq, a new democracy takes 100 years to free its slaves, and 150 years to give women the vote, and that at the beginning of democracy, quite a bit of genocide and ethnic cleansing is quite ok.
Why is it about the Right that seems to require this sense of certainty? The argument here seems to be that Mr. Harrigan is so weak-minded that being exposed to the Kama Sutra will cause him to indulge in hedonistic pleasures of which he never dreamed, instead of simply saying, ‘that’s not for me’? You encounter this weak-mindedness with their talk on God and morality – that without God existing, there’d be no reason for moral rules, and than what do you do? How about continue to treat others well because, as it’s been said by many a previous Christian, ‘a good deed is its own reward’?
My ultimate point here though is to say that talk of ‘the bourgeoisie’ is outdated, and that to be able to make the same points being made 50 years ago by the likes of Roland Barthes, one talks of ‘the right wing’ or ‘conservatives’. Which is a little unfortunate – a conservative streak in society that builds museums, ‘to conserve’ is welcome and necessary, but one that fails to imagine other cultures and appreciate their differences and the perspectives those differences offer is simply toxic.
1. Northrop Frye: The Theoretical Imagination ISBN 0415075378
So, according to my sister’s boyfriend, who witnessed it, there was a nude jumper this morning on the DVP. He jumped off one of the overpasses near the BMW facility (either Queen St or Eastern Ave). Of course, they didn’t bother to tell us that on the evening news. Instead, Global gave us a report of increased cycle-cops around schools to intimidate the 16 year old out on bail (whose face was graciously blurred).
Now, I understand that there’s something like at least one suicide a week on the TTC, but they don’t want to make the actual numbers public. It would seem they prefer the accuracy of innuendo and rumour. The same is true for people like this morning’s fellow, who (if successful) chose to leave the earth as buck naked as when he arrived. I’ll credit him with some performance art originality.
But why the silence? Why do news editors everywhere think we should care about the car wrecks and murders? I haven’t been murdered lately, I don’t plan to be anytime soon. But what business is it of yours if I am? The same goes for the car accident. If anything, that’ll be between the insurance companies. I’ll concede it’s everyone’s business inasmuch as it ties up traffic, but beyond that I don’t want or need to know. Isn’t it true that murders are rarely random, but usually are the culmination of some dispute?
We may live in a time when Dr. Phil thinks the whole of the United States and Canada needs to witness the tawdry details of some family’s anguish (today’s episode on incest for christ’s sakes) which completely disregards the reasons for confidentially in the first place.
Let’s be clear here: there are some things of which it is none of our business. I don’t want to know the problems of some abused family, unless I’m in the position of needing to help. But I’m not a priest, a counselor, a psychiatric worker, a bail officer, etc. And if I was, I’d be under strict gag laws. Confidentiality exists as much for the benefit of society as it does for the relevant parties. I for one felt I didn’t need to know the details of Dr. Phil’s incestuous family, and quickly changed the channel in disgust. (For those of you who advertise during his time slot, why not start sending that money to the Red Cross?)
The arrest of the local pedophile, the murder of an abused wife, or the coke habit of the local hoodlum, the grow-op of our neighbors … all this is brought out to be part of the public record. This news is supposed to do what? If anything, it makes us feel less safe, but Toronto remains one of the safest cities in the world, and what crime exists just seems part of life. And given that seems a large portion of this crime is all drug related, it makes me think the only reason we keep our stupid drug laws in place is to ensure the police job security.
Anyway, I for one want to know how many people think Toronto is too awful to live in. I would like to have some understanding of the suicide rate. Because all the regular crime gets reported, I’m able to sit here and think it’s relatively low, compared with other places. I get to formulate what understanding I bring to the issue, and feel rather safe in the metropolis. But I can’t say the same for the depressed, the scared, the anguished, the people who need help but haven’t gotten it, for those for whom society has failed.
I’m reminded of Charles Taylor‘s thoughts now. Taylor, a philosopher originally from McGill (and doing the scholar circuit the last few years – he was at U of T a year ago) argues that while the Modernist philosophical tradition begins with Descartes’ introspection, our reality is really one comprised of dialogue. You might think that you are, but Decartes began the line of telling the rest of us. You cannot exist alone. Our lives are comprised of conversations, and even this writing is part of a conversation frozen into our alphabet’s symbols. The comments section below are there for your side, your contribution.
It is because we are social creatures that the news exists – all these reporters on the street talking to some box on someone’s shoulder would be absurd if they didn’t see themselves are part of a larger stream involving the unanimous and anonymous audience. They talk and therefore they are.
And as social creatures, we want to understand our place in society, so we have a tendency to gossip. So the news thinks we might be interested in the painful stories of people who can’t get along, and instead of being useful and warning us that there’s some psycho out there, instead we only get the news after they’ve been arrested (and hence, this is why I don’t really care about this type of news, it always comes after the crimes have been committed in the first place).
But suicides are a death built around the Cartesian model of introspection. I think I’m depressed and therefore I am. I think I can’t go on and therefore I can’t. They represent failures of our society to reach out the necessary hand, to bring someone into a relationship, to involve someone in a dialogue. Murders are crimes of passion, they involve at least two people, one of which is cruel. A suicide is an act of loneliness, involving only one person, whom people in general don’t care enough about. We extend our hard heartedness to not even mentioning their deaths on the news.
Is it because it’s shameful to kill oneself? Is it a left-over from Christianity, when suicides wouldn’t even be given a funeral? Is the TTC’s reluctance to talk about the people who kill themselves on its tracks because they think it’s morbid? The same must be said for the Go Trains, who regularly have ‘accidents’ involving pedestrians. With such a rate of ‘accidents’ that they show, it’s a wonder they haven’t been shut down has a safety hazard.
Morbidity doesn’t usually stop the news – how much more morbid is it to show us pictures of blown up buses in Israel? I clipped a few over the past couple of years, fascinated in that morbid way by the scenes of bodies frozen in death.
And even over the past week, with the catastrophe in New Orleans, the news is showing us anonymous rotting black bodies, which bring a grunt of awfulness from me, but also help me understand just how bad things are down there.
My point here is that the news has no problem feeding morbid curiosity. So why not go that step further and tell us about suicides?
Regarding the argument of selfishness and shame – when Kurt Cobain killed himself, all the fans were like, ‘what an asshole’ and bitched about his selfishness. That always seemed stupid to me. Are you saying then, that your selfishness is such that you’d prefer he stuck around suffering just so that you can go on buying Nirvana CDs? That was my argument at the time.
It’s not shameful to kill oneself. It’s an act of desperation, or if you’re a terrorist, of idiocy. If you’re so past caring about this world to want to live in it, what do you care about shame? And why should we as a society, continue to take their actions personally?
If you’re of the school that it’s a condemnation of our company, then I suppose I can see where you’re coming from, but I’d like to think we’re bigger than denying them identity out of a petty sense of insult. I mean, our world is pretty screwed up, and those that leave it voluntarily are probably saving themselves a lot of grief. But at the same time, I’d like to understand their motivations, their criticisms, in order to help improve the situation.
The news wants us to believe we live in a cruel world, full of crime and the winners of sports where one person or group defeats another in glorious competition. By denying us the reports of the losers, who validate its cruelty, they aren’t allowing us the chance to think about what’s wrong with the picture, and how it could change.
To the naked jumper: rest in peace wherever you are.
image: from Wikipedia
From this:
“The criticism is all the sharper because the President did nothing to alter his holiday schedule for 48 hours. Vice-President Dick Cheney remains on holiday in Wyoming. Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State, returned to Washington after being seen shopping for $7,000 shoes in Manhattan as New Orleans went under.”
Reminds me of another callous bitch who once suggested they should just eat cake. For fucks sakes, I’m glad these s-o-b’s aren’t my government.
I spent a week in Maine at the end of July, mostly reading fat books but every now and then giving my mind a rest with some channel surfing. The impression I got from my sampling of pure American television was that their reputation for being not to bright seemed well deserved. In that broadcast environment, even PBS looked dopey. I found myself really missing TVO and the CBC.
But, having come to see how great the CBC is, and how important it is to our television recipes, I can’t say I very much care about the current lockout. Because it’s been August, and I see it as part of the vacation – the usual cancon channels on radio and TV are whacked and so what? I can handle it. It’ll be over eventually. In addition, I do have lots of books to read and TV is mostly a waste of time, especially in the summer. I also have a new gig which means I’m not doing my regular home-office hours anymore, with CBC Newsworld on it the kitchen to give me something to listen to – I’m out and about and ignoring daytime TV.
Perhaps I’m just not facing the reality that it could go on and on like that hockey thing. I hear though that it could go on for at least 7 weeks – oh well. I mean, Peter Mansbridge didn’t get to fly to New Orleans to report from the scene, and who really cares? (Wasn’t it kind of disturbing the way all the reporters took the Boxing Day tsunami as an excuse to get out of the frigid continent for a few days … ?) I’ve had CNN on the past couple of days for those hours when I am ‘in the office’ because I have to orient myself to the reality that Louisiana now has more in common with Bangladesh than it does Ontario. Disasters do have a certain fascination and inspire a kind of awe, but it almost seems a good thing that I’m not getting a Canadian perspective on this story.
Anyway, with that nod to current events out of the way, I want to talk about the bigger picture of this CBC dispute. I think I dreamt about it last night, having some conversation about it, where I said that it being a lockout means that the CBC in effect fired their entire staff. In the first week, lots of people joked that the CBC is actually better now than the big egos have been temporarily put out to sidewalk. This sort of division in power – management versus the personalities and support staff, suggests the CBC is a creature with two heads and can function just fine with one. That’s a little disconcerting since it suggests massive and expensive redundancy. But redundancy is a good thing, so that’s not really worth complaining about nor should it be eliminated.
Let’s say this then: we are less than 6 months away from 2006, when we will undoubtedly be living ‘in the future’. The past six years have had a sort of legendary character -first we ‘partied like it was 1999’, than we were living ‘in the year 2000’ and then we re-watched Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001’, enjoyed the palindromic character of 2002, and the past three years, (’03, ’04, ’05) have still seemed like an extension of the 1990s.
But now, everything is beginning to be different. While the belief amongst marketers is that ‘one should never launch a new product in August’ this past month has laid the foundations for the next ten to twenty years of common perception (at least in Canada) – a time frame which makes up the first quarter of the 21st Century.
The American nightly newscasters are all gone (Rather, Brokaw, Jennings), there’ve now been two natural disasters which remind us of our impotence in the face of natural forces, and Hollywood ain’t what it used to be, as the summer receipts show. Michael Ignatieff has gone from being an esoteric academic to being touted as the next Prime Minister (returning from Harvard to take up a post at U of T) – and if pigs fly in the next five years and that comes to pass, he’ll do so under Governor General Michaelle Jean. And the CBC has had a labour disruption, which threatens the broadcast schedule of new season of an updated version of hockey.
Like the guns of August 1914, it seems easy enough to ignore these developments at the moment, not yet conscious of the bigger picture, but let’s consider the following:
René Lévesque used to be a CBC personality in Quebec in the 1950s, until the 1959 68 day (two month) strike. The fact that the French CBC strike was allowed to go for so long embittered Lévesque toward Ottawa. He later said something to the effect that the English CBC would not have been allowed a two-month strike, and would have been forced to and end much sooner. The lengthy disruption in Quebec, in his opinion, showed how little English-dominated Ottawa cared about what happened in la belle province. And so Levesque went into politics ….
(As it is, only Jack Layton is demanding an immediate return of Parliament, and that’s to deal with this softwood-lumber, death of NAFTA thing. All those anti-globalization protests of the late 90s now seem like so much, ‘we told you so’. Ottawa clearly does not yet care about the CBC. Nor do I as I’ve mentioned do I – I mean, does anybody miss George Stroumboulopoulos’s show? … I can’t even remember what it’s called as I type this. So much for their efforts to win over my demographic).
So, point one – this lockout might have significant consequences. And in one way, it already has, since it’s forced podcasting to a new level. I’m not really on the podcasting bandwagon – I find it all rather pretentious. Everyone faking up a radio-like sounding thing and treating it as this new and great thing, and it’s only a trendy way to talk about an mp3 file, which have been around for what, eight years now?
I guess the difference is that mp3s have tipped past bootleg music because almost everyone in an urban core seems to have a fairly sophisticated computer and a high speed connection (and if they have a job they can afford an iPod to listen to their mp3 collection with).
You have radio stations like 102.1 CFNY The Edge offering Allan Cross’s The Ongoing History of New Music podcasts, and no, they aren’t the archived shows (which would be awesome), but some 1 minute clip, effectively acting as teaser advertising for the radio show. That is not worth a trend. Jumping on a downloading bandwagon and offering your readers/listeners irrelevant shit I find tries my patience – especially since one had to wait for the download to complete before being disappointed.
Via Tod Maffin’s site, cbcunplugged.com, we get to listen to phone messages. Oh boy. Nevertheless, this cat is out of the bag. While the content is rather lame, I’m excited by the fact that the employs have embraced the possibilities of this type of broadcasting. The upcoming CBC Unlocked will be something worth checking out.
It shows creative thinking that the management seems to lack, and it also seems like the type of thing which is allowed to happen because it’s unfiltered by office politics and bureaucracy and the like. Whatever happens at the CBC after this is all over, I hope they bring this back the mother corp.
(Which raises another thing: according to iTunes, the CBC3 podcast is number 1 in terms of popularity. It seems to be unaffected by the labour dispute. Why?)
Last week I listened to a couple of mp3 files from Australian radio of my favorite thinker, Mr. John R. Saul. He was on he tour promoting his globalization book, and he brought up his point that the economics of the past 25 years reminds him of 18th Century mercantilism. And so perhaps it follows that the bloging reminds me of the type of pamphleteering that helped spark the American and French Revolution. In those days, you wrote something, you went to a printer, and it was on the street in an hour. In the two centuries since, the middlemen of editors and marketers filled the offices of the publishing houses until reject letters became a writer’s rite of passage.
In his previous books, Saul likened the explosion of instant publishing in the 18th Century with a trend where a public of common people began trying to make themselves heard over the dominant voice of those in power. Post-modernism, inasmuch as it was the academic expression of trying to express what had remained unexpressed (because it had been put down by a dominant voice, in this case, the Modernist aesthetic and philosophical ideology) is nothing more than the first wave of people expressing themselves to those in power. (Ironic then how pomo has become noxious power itself). First radio and then television gave voice to the whole other segment of society which had been discriminated against by those who thought they were better than average. Jerry Springer’s infamous show isn’t so much a parade of ‘trash’ as it is a reminder of human variety, and especially of the need for adequate social and education programs.
Blogs and podcasting are continuations of this trend. As Saul wrote it, when things get too literary and language becomes too controlled by certain experts (whether post-modernist writers who can’t string a proper sentence together, or the rise in corporate ways of speaking so that every idea becomes inarticulate) there is a backlash, a corresponding balancing rise in the speech of everyday.
Humans are creatures of sound – and it is only with training that we become creatures of print. The rhythms of everyday speech will always seem more natural and be more effective at communicating than any purple prose from some show-off snob.
So I think blogs are great for that since their style is one that lends itself to being written as if it were spoken. I certainly think this way when I write – I’m confident enough in my ability to write well that I see no need to show off and am thankful to avoid the embarrassment of academic writing.
And now that a medium has come along which allows both text and voice files to be easily broadcast – we’re witnessing some kind of media utopia, and I remind you that utopia means ‘no place’ and the internet certainly has no place, and like the universe, having no centre, it is everywhere. Naming his perfect place utopia was a way of Thomas More to say that perfection is impossible, but perhaps that is true only when talking about material, human things, and not immaterial shadows of electricity.
For now we have a medium by which a locked-out staff at a national broadcaster can continue writing and speaking, and we now choose to download it and listen to it when we want. We are no longer forced to wait until their re-broadcast time or pay $20 if we want to hear it again. For one thing it’s shameful that the CBC last year stopped providing mp3 files of their shows; let’s hope this populism amongst their worker bees will break their outdated media models once and for all once everything gets back to normal.
And so, the last four months of the mid-decade year will be interesting times, as we watch a new status quo begin to develop. While the CBC lockout seems insignificant, it is part of a bigger picture that includes new hockey, new politics, new ways of speaking and listening to the masses, and new disasters that remind us of bigger pictures and long-term consequences. Whether or not the egos at the CBC return to their soapboxes anytime soon, our lives are way more interesting going into this autumn than they were a year ago. Hollywood may be complaining about a summer slump, and no wonder. It’s far more entertaining and engaging to simply pay attention to events.
Signs of the Times: the CBC lockout, podcasting, and the future
I spent a week in Maine at the end of July, mostly reading fat books but breaking from that with some channel surfing now and then. The impression I got from my sampling of pure American television was that it is no wonder the Americans are seen to be stupid all over the world (even PBS looked dopey) and that I really missed both TVO and the CBC.
But, having come to see how great the CBC is, and how important it is to our television recipes, I can’t say I very much care about the current lockout. Because it’s August, and I see it as part of the vacation – the usual channels on radio and TV are whacked and so what? I can handle it. It’ll be over eventually.
I guess I’m just not facing the reality that it could go on and on like that hockey thing. Something has told me from the start that it has a 3 week timeline. This is week two – there’s another week to go and then I’ll get annoyed.
It’s been a while since I posted … been a busy summer and such. And my art grumpiness has reached the level of ‘why bother?’ and so I’ve avoided a lot of shows in favour of reading biographies of Goethe. But on Friday night, I went out to the opening at Zsa Zsa, since it was the last show there ever.
After seven years, Andrew Harwood is giving up his gallery and moving out of the back. Zsa Zsa has been both a home and a business, but the business side never dominated his commitment to giving people an opportunity to show. In the past, he’s advertised the gallery as showing ‘the best and the worst of Toronto’ which brought a laugh out of me, since my show there in February of 2003 followed what I thought was something abysmal. As a rental gallery, Zsa Zsa was one of those open venues by which people could seek immediate reaction and criticism from an audience – and if anything sold, Andrew didn’t take a cut.
Harwood took over the space from Myfanwy Ashmore, Shannon Cochrane, and Keith Manship who pre-Zsa Zsa called the space the In/Attendant Gallery. Now, with Harwood’s departure, Paul Petro is taking over the space and so-far is planning on using it to exhibit some of his multiple collection.
For the final month, Andrew put together a couple of shows, the first of which opened on August 5th, and was dedicated to the theme of pot. I was away for that one but I heard it was quite a party, with 300+ people showing up. The second show opened last Friday night, dedicated to magic, or as Harwood wrote in his PR: ‘[it] is a simple show that celebrates the sweet magic of being lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time with the right people. This show lauds those folks and that place. Sweetness, magic and light’. Featuring Christina Zeidler, R.M. Vaughan, Will Munro, Maryanne Barkhouse, Fastwürms, Allyson Mitchell, Michael Belmore and Andrew Harwood, Bedknobs & Broomsticks is a nice little show which seemed to open on the right day – with that days thunderstorms reeking havoc across the city, the magic and withcraftery fit right in.
Now, there’s something going on in this city with regard to knitted wool. And in the way that strands of wool can come together to form a blanket or a sweater via a network, there is a network of relationships operating on those two blocks and expressing itself in the material of which sweaters are made of.
Andrew is one of Paul Petro’s artists, as are Will Munro, Allyson Mitchell, and Fastwurms. So it makes since that these artists are in this final show, as much as it does that it is Petro who is taking over the space. In as much as the artist community of Toronto is fractal – that is, divided up into ever smaller communities until only power couples and those with an overdose of self-esteem are left – the community in which Harwood finds himself is one that has been actively working out an ‘afghan aesthetic’ over the past couple of years. Allyson Mitchell and Will Munro have both used appropriated afghan blankets in their recent work, and while Cecilia Berkovic is not one of Petro’s artists, she has brought this to her work with Instant Coffee and especially to the room she designed for the Gladstone Hotel (viewable here).
Allyson Mitchell’s piece in this show is one of her collaged images based on shag carpeting, in this case that of a sasquatch terrorizing something. My conversation with her that night got into my recent trip to my hometown in Nova Scotia. I was telling her about how one of my friends there had a stuffed bear head on his wall, and from there we talked about taxidermy, as her piece uses taxidermy glass eyes and a bear nose.
Will Munro has a wonderful piece which I really liked, consisting of four axes tied together with loops of coloured yarn, using a 70s colour scheme of orange and brown. While axes are supposed to be dangerous objects, their shiny newness and their interaction with the yarn make this piece seem pleasurable and safe. This wool based aesthetic I find really comforting in a way, and given that it’s presence in this show follows the show dedicated to pot, I’m reminded of what someone once told me about what it feels like to be high – ‘you know when you’re a kid and you get up early on a Sunday morning, and it’s chilly, and you come downstairs and wrap yourself in an nice blanket, and how cozy that is? That’s what it feels like to be high’. Yes, comfort and coziness are as associated in my mind with afghan blankets as they were in my stoner friend’s, and thus I welcome this development in the Toronto scene, and it’s reflection in this last show at a gallery which helped foster it’s development through friendships.
But not all the pieces reflect the afghan school. The space is dominated by Maryanne Barkhouse’s piece, which many people thought was a dance floor, and asked if they could step on it. Consisting of a grid of images within a metal frame, and standing up about 6 inches from the floor, the images tell a beaver’s story.
RM Vaughan’s video continues in his theme (present at least in his video works) of self-disappointment. This time, he’s speaking of his belief that 40 year old gay men do not have mid-life crisis’s – rather, they go on tourist vacations, to tourist landmarks like the Eiffel Tower or the Pyramids. Richard is best known as a writer, and as such his monologue, playing through the headphones attached to the monitor, is worth listening to – which I write since so often I at least would rather not put headphones on to watch a video.
The window is dominated by the work of the Fastwürms – mushrooms and fake cakes, it is one of the most ‘magical’ pieces of all. The Wurms (which I’m supposed to write FASTWÜRMS -all caps with an umlaut) work consists of what they have called at various times ‘witch drag’ and so this piece and some of the others in the show fit in with this stream of work. While I don’t share the FASTWÜRMS’ love of witchcraft and magic, I do appreciate there work an awful lot, since they’re an example that something finely made and considered is always more interesting than some kind of crap that tries to get away with the heroics of ‘I can do that with my eyes closed’ sloppiness which artists glorify with the term ‘loose’. While virtuosity has its place, so does craftsmanship, and Fastwürms’ finely made things are force me to pay attention to take what they’re doing seriously.
Anyway, this last ever show closes to walk-ins on the 28th, but can be still seen by appointment until the 30th (which would require a phone call to 416-537-3814).
Bedknobs & Broomsticks
Until August 30th at
Zsa Zsa Gallery
962 Queen Street West
During the summer I’ve been reading up on Johann von Goethe. Somewhere someone noted that when Goethe died the first photographs had been taken, but this having happened in 1832, he never had a chance to sit for a portrait. Nevertheless, I tried to imagine his features (known from drawings and paintings and widely available via the web) in the grayscale of a 19th Century photograph.
Given that with a computer one can do almost anything, last night I sat down to see if I could make something. Imagine then that photography had been invented 20 years earlier, and that the famous Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had sat for a portrait in 1828. Of the two images I worked on last night, this one is the most successful.
Subject:London Terror
From: Timothy Comeau
Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2005 12:24:29 -0400
To: today@cbc.ca
Admittedly, as soon as I heard about this on this morning’s radio I turned on the television to, for lack of a better phrase, ‘witness the spectacle’. Given how two weeks ago you (CBC) suddenly dropped the Karla Homolka story in favor of a full day’s coverage to the events, and how you seem about to be doing the same thing today, it occurs to me that you are complicit in the terrorism by giving these jerks all the attention they want. Would they be so quick to set off bombs and kill and maim if they knew the media would ignore it in favour of Tom Cruise’s love-struck antics? I saw on the ticker that 15 people died in Iraq today, but you’re quite comfortable in burying that story. Breaking News story spectacles are part of the problem, and are never informative. Why not wait until you can actually inform me of something, and give me news I can use, not water cooler gossip?
Timothy Comeau
Craig Francis Power has written me a couple of letters from St. John’s, the latest deals with the latest controversy with The Rooms and Gordon Laurin’s firing.
Now, while the news channels today are creaming themselves about being able to devote another full day to the crumbs fed to them by the London police, we should remember that in the long run, visual culture and literature is where a society’s memory lies, and certainly not at the news desks of CBC and CNN, where, they tell us that today’s bombing occurred two weeks after the first round. No shit. I wasn’t born yesterday.
Goodreads began partially because of what I read by John Taylor Gatto in an autumn issue of Harper’s magazine a couple of years back:
After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.
And that stayed with me. Then, last winter’s readings of John Ralston Saul drove the point home:
“There is no reason to believe that large parts of any population wish to reject learning or those who are learned. People want the best for their society and themselves. The extent to which a populace falls back on superstition or violence can be traced to the ignorance in which their elites have managed to keep them, the ill-treatment they have suffered and the despair into which a combination of ignorance and suffering have driven them. […] It’s not that everyone must understand everything; but those who are not experts must see that they are being dealt with openly and honestly; that they are part of the process of an integrated civilization. They will understand and participate to the best of their ability. If excluded they will treat the elites with an equal contempt”.
London Bombings
Bombers in London are suffering from a lack of imagination, by which they can’t relate to society at large. I’m reminded of something Mark Kingwell wrote ten years ago discussing crime statistics in the U.S. and noting that for some the conditions of poverty were so severe that going to jail was a step up, guaranteeing shelter and three meals a day. (Such motivations have also led many people into the military over the past couple of centuries as well).
One then begins to see that these suicide bombers are trying to escape their lives. And, as the media would like us to think – they all appear normal, aren’t in dire poverty. They always come across as a middle-class, albeit in some cases, lower middle class. Instead, we have a situation analogous to the suicides of Canada’s north, where the Inuit children, after years of sniffing gasoline for cheap and brain-destructive highs, are hanging or shooting themselves. We have a pretty good idea as to why those kids are self-destructive, and that is because ‘they have no culture’, the story being that the misguided intentions of a century ago to assimilate the native populations did terrible damage to their sense of self as a culture, and in effect, destroyed their imaginations. The imagination of themselves and their place in the world, in the grand scheme of things.
And so, I want to say that suicide bombers are suffering from a lack of imagination. That they are choosing to die, and to escape into the paradisiacal world (the only thing, one imagines, that has preoccupied their imagination for years) rather than continuing to live their dreary, industrialized, modernist, post-modernist, (or whatever other name we throw at it) lives.
Those of us who despise reality television and other aspects of pop culture choose do so because we feel that we have better things to occupy our imagination – great books, the art of contemporary galleries – ‘cinema’ as opposed to Hollywood blockbusters…. but if you’re a child of immigrants, and don’t identify either with your parents or fully with your peers, and instead your imagination is stimulated by religion …. it doesn’t seem to be so mysterious now does it, why these kids would do what they do.
We imagine ourselves, develop ambitions, or at least have plans for the future – next vacation and so forth. Imagining ourselves and our place in the world is terribly important in helping give us a sense of context, and in carrying out our daily activities. Our love for stories feeds this sense of imagination – and we feel more alive when our life is echoed in the imagination – it is a resonance chamber by which we build symphonies of meaning.
The Rooms
The tension in St. John’s is one of two imaginative visions: an elite version (which I suppose would be Laurin’s camp) and one down-home version (the CEO’s camp). Now, admittedly, I’m not in St. John’s and am only working with what I’ve read (today’s links) but let’s look at it according to Saul’s take on elitism. I believe, as does Saul, that people want what’s best. That only seems like common sense. Yes, the elites, and especially art-elites, do form a sort of tribe which treats people outside of it with an element of contempt. They think they are engaged in what’s best. They think that the lobster-trap craft folk are uneducated and misguided and have the blinders on towards ‘what’s best’. Hence, tension.
Ok, that being said, it does seem to me that Craig Power has a point where he writes, “Newfoundlanders have a reputation for being stupid, inbred and drunk. With the events of the past week and a half, is there any reason to wonder why?” having set it up by saying, “Wanda Mooney, a career government administrator, has been installed as interim director. … I don’t know what this woman’s knowledge of art history or contemporary art practice is, but I do know that if you Google her name, you find out that she used to be the woman you called if you wanted to rent space or book a reception at the old provincial gallery. How this qualifies her to run the gallery on even an interim basis, I don’t know, but I can hardly wait to see this visionary at work.”
Perhaps that’s unfair. But the point here is that according to the attitude among artists in St. John’s, the Board of Directors and CEO are suffering from a lack of imagination, one that in itself is contemptuous of the public at large. One that assumes tourists want to travel to foggy and cold St. John’s to see a bunch of folk-art crap, when they could be treated to the best of what contemporary culture has to offer.
But, the point I’m trying to make by bringing up London and my thoughts therein are that treating The Rooms with the contempt with which it has been treated, first by the Provincial Government, which kept it closed for a year, and now with Laurin’s dismissal, is stunting the imagination of Newfoundlanders, a place which so far has imagined itself as backward and victimized, and been rewarded by doing so by a Kevin Spacey movie. Laurin’s purported vision to give the citizens of St. John’s the quality of culture they deserve (that is, the best) and to resist mediocre crap, is admirable, and it’s unfortunate that another Maritime art scandal has resulted in the process. But here we also seem to be dealing with the backlash of ‘the excluded’ toward the elites (who have excluded by obscurantist writing and snotty attitudes for a century now) by treating them with ‘an equal contempt’.
Let’s just say that nobody has a monopoly on the imagination, but London also illustrates that it’s important to foster the best imaginations society has to offer.
-Timothy
I still think it’s safe to ride the subway.
I’m tempted to say ‘get a grip’ but it seems that the only people freaking out about the potential for terrorism in Canada, and in Toronto for that matter, are the news editors at the traditional outlets. I mean, remember a week ago, under these sweltering blue skies, when talk was on how crappy the Live 8 was and how the biggest threat to Canada was Karla Homolka, that psychopathic windbag who threatened to blow and blow and blow until our whole civil society came crashing down?
And then, Thursday morning, in London England, some bombs go off. Suddenly, Canada’s provincial sense of inferiority is nowhere to be found. Suddenly, all of our insecurities about not being able to play with the big boys are gone, because ‘oh my god, we’re next!’
Now, all we need is one or more nut-jobs to render what I’m saying here obsolete fast. But let’s not be superstitious about it. Let’s not think that just because I’m saying it ain’t gonna happen here means I’m jinxing it or something else. Granted, we should be vigilant. Granted, we certainly hope it won’t happen here. But I want to say this. I don’t think it’s going to happen here.
I say this with a sense of self-confidence, me, a pipsqueak citizen. The same self-confidence that our Ministers seem to lack in order to reassure the public. The same sense of self-confidence I use whenever I drive onto the 401. Sure, I could get killed, but why today? I know what I’m doing and I have to assume the other driving along do as well.
It would seem that our leadership doesn’t know what it’s doing. Let’s go over some points.
1. Ann McLellan sucks
I think back to October 2001 when suddenly she was the Iron Lady who was going to clamp down on our civil liberties and make sure that Canada wasn’t the so called terrorist haven that CBC documentaries would make it seem to be. Now she’s saying Canadians aren’t psychologically prepared for terrorism, which is a big help. Wonderful leadership. And what, pray tell, would be evidence that we are ready? And, with our history of bloodshed, why the hell should we be?
I’ll tell you about my psychological preparation for terrorism: after Sept 11, ‘life is short’ entered my vocabulary. Further, I developed an impatience described as ‘life is too short to put up with this bullshit’. Who wants to go to work one morning unprepared to become a skydiver and think of all the time we wasted listening to know-nothings and bastards? We all deserve better than the mediocre crap we are asked to put up with, and we deserve better than a Public Safety Minister like Ms. McLellan.
Prior to 9/11, I was dealing with a bout of hypochondria. Worried about this ache and that itch, suddenly the prospect of not seeing the end of a day that began with stupid anxiety was brought to my attention on repeat and with colourful graphics and passionate voiceovers. I learned on that day that one could go at any time, and I, in my practically atheistic way, said, ‘My life is in God’s hands’. We only have so much control over our lives, and let’s focus on what we can manage, and if our fate is to die because some jerk is trying to prove a point then well, what can you do?
2. John Bull’s Eye
London England – 2000 years old, long history of violence. Mobs there used to cart heads around on the end of pikes, but we’ve forgotten that. The news keeps talking about the Blitz, and something about the IRA (remember them)? London, England, home of the British Empire, which has been condemned by every politically correct academic for the past 40 years. London, where, in the months since September 2001, we have regular reports talking of terrorist drills, broken up rings, arrests made, and incidents quashed. Home to 7.5 million people. That’s a full 1/4th of Canada’s population right there. (All of Canada = 4 Londons).
Now, I raise this to say, of all the places in the world, after New York, it makes sense for bombs to go off in London.
History of violence and terrorism on a scale of 1 to 10: 10.
History of violence and terrorism in Toronto:1
(I’ll give it a 1 since there’s at least one shooting every weekend, and I don’t think we’ve had mob violence since the 1830s.)
3. Al Qaeda is a Phantom Menace
The best explanation of what’s happened over the past 4 years I’ve encountered has been Adam Curtis’s, The Power of Nightmares. This was broadcast on CBC Newsworld last spring, and was available on the Internet. The video has been take offline, but here you find a transcript of the episode I’m talking about. Now, The Power of Nightmares is a pretty straightforward account of the rise of both fundamentalist thinking in the States (in terms of the Religious Right, and the Neo-Con hawks) and of the Mid East. And here, we are told that Al Qaeda (essentially) doesn’t really exist. The story goes that in the aftermath of the 1998 Kenyan bombings, when the United States put one of the people they caught on trial in New York, they wanted to try Bin Laden in absentia. To do this, they needed to be able to claim/prove that he was part of an organized crime ring – these laws were developed to fight the Mafia. So, they get this fellow to tell a story about something called Al Qaeda, which is Arabic for ‘the Base’. Here, I might as well quote it:
“JASON BURKE , AUTHOR, AL QAEDA During the investigation of the 1998 bombings, there is a walk-in source, Jamal al-Fadl, who is a Sudanese militant who was with bin Laden in the early 90s, who has been passed around a whole series of Middle East secret services, none of whom want much to do with him, and who ends up in America and is taken on by-uh-the American government, effectively, as a key prosecution witness and is given a huge amount of American taxpayers’ money at the same time. And his account is used as raw material to build up a picture of Al Qaeda. The picture that the FBI want to build up is one that will fit the existing laws that they will have to use to prosecute those responsible for the bombing. Now, those laws were drawn up to counteract organised crime: the Mafia, drugs crime, crimes where people being a member of an organisation is extremely important. You have to have an organisation to get a prosecution. And you have al-Fadl and a number of other witness, a number of other sources, who are happy to feed into this. You’ve got material that, looked at in a certain way, can be seen to show this organisation’s existence. You put the two together and you get what is the first bin Laden myth – the first Al Qaeda myth. And because it’s one of the first, it’s extremely influential.”
The idea of global network of sleeper cells financed by Bin Laden is built up in the days after 9/11 by the NeoCons who want more money for the military-industrial complex. One of the main theses in The Power of Nightmares was that the core of NeoCons – Wolfowitz, Rummy, and the two Dicks (Cheney and Perle) had a long history of over-demonizing America’s enemy – whether it be USSR, or Ayatollah Khomeini (which lead to their support to Saddam Hussein in the 80s), to Saddam himself, and finally, prior to Bin Laden, Bill Clinton.
An arms race of nuclear weapons or a blow job – it was all the same to those jerks cause it got play on CNN and created an anti-Liberal culture unified by a common threat.
Al Qaeda then, would seem to be an elaborate fantasy. And perhaps this knowledge is worth spreading around. Funny though how traditional media haven’t really gotten into it.
The point I want to make here though is that when our city is marred, as it is from time to time, by hate graffiti against whatever ethnic group, CBC isn’t blaming it on an elaborate network of the Aryan Brotherhood. No, we assume it’s a bunch of punks. A bunch of local grown assholes, perhaps inspired by some underground hate-lit or vid. I’m thinking terrorism is working the same way today. Bin Laden might be the hate-pamphleteer, the author of the video Mein Kamp’s that supposedly make the rounds from mosque to mosque, attracting young romantic Islamists to training camps. But we’re dealing with a bunch of independent groups I think, local grown assholes. (And it should be pointed out that we aren’t even sure that Islamists were behind it yet).
London, apparently, had them. Does Toronto? That’s the question. If they do, then…
4. CSIS is incompetent?
John Ralston Saul’s anger toward the word ‘inevitable’ when used by economists and politicians to describe ‘globalizing forces’ over the past 30 years has sharpened me to being angry with the likes of McLellan and all these other so called experts. For them to sit there, on TV, and say, ‘oh, it’s gonna happen here …’ is an admittance of incompetence. It’s like they’re saying, ‘yeah, there are terrorist cells in Canada, we know that, and yeah, they’re probably planning something, but we can’t do anything about it.’ Are they still investigating Jadhi Singh I suppose? Going after the Raging Granies? Or, are they just covering their do-nothing asses by saying it’ll happen here in case something actually does and they were too busy eating donuts?
Basically, scare mongering isn’t going to help anyone. Further, I don’t see why Canada could be seriously considered a target for someone like Bin Laden. For impressionable young bastards from Markham …. who knows? But they’d have to build their bombs first, which would involve the procurement of materials and probably the access of certain websites. CTV and CBC would still rather tell us about the arrests of the local kiddie porn pervert than report such news. What does CSIS know? What aren’t we being told? But is it possible that in effect, there is nothing really to tell?
5. Vigilance
‘Report anything suspicious’. Right. One time I was on the Go Train and there was what I thought a suspicious package there. This was last winter or something. I have to parse this in light of all the paranoia. I think, ‘do I really want to bring the entire Go System to a complete stop just because some careless person forgot something?’ I decided to switch cars. I watched a Go employee walk right past it.
2nd story – CBC reports that VIA rail is investigating a security breach after a CBC employee boarded a train, entered the baggage area, and wasn’t checked for a ticket. I remember in 1995, riding from Moncton to Halifax, and talking with a girl who was careful to not run into the employees cause she was riding without a ticket. She made it sound bohemian and romantic. And I bring that up to say – I bet people ride VIA all the time without tickets. Perhaps this is Canada’s dirty little secret. Do you know someone who freeloaded a VIA ride?
And while we’re on the subject, I’ll bring up that I hate this type of reporter vigilantism. Remember how the Globe and Mail’s Jan Wong, in the months after 9/11, boarded a plane with what was then contraband – box cutter or the like? And then she writes about it as if things are so awful. The same woman who once spent an hour and half looking for kiddie porn in order to prove that it takes that long to find? Why aren’t these people arrested? If I was recruiting terrorists, I’d consider seducing reporters. It would seem a Press Pass is more valuable than a security clearance badge at the airport. You can get away with anything!
Reporter antics do not prove that security is lax. It might prove that these people, whose pictures often accompany their articles, or are seen on tv, are in effect ‘known’ by security. Jan Wong for example – shows up at the airport, has a knife in her purse, and is waived through because it’s known that she’s a just a reporter, and the thought is, ‘why would she do anything?’
The problem with vigilance, when talking about transportation systems, or in whatever other context, is that people are going to be preoccupied with what to them will be significant concerns. ‘I just want to get home,’ ‘I have to make this appointment’. ‘I don’t want to cause a scene…’
Do you remember the fellow in an American airport, who was seen running down an up-escalator? This was in November 2001. Anyway, because he ran down an escalator that was going up, because he was running late, he freaked out security, caused a scene, shut down the airport, and was arrested. He went to jail.
So, you shut down the subway system, inconvenience thousands including yourself, because someone forgot their umbrella, you won’t be called a hero, or congratulated for being vigilant in an era of paranoia. You’ll be vilified.
Now, I’m not saying this to discourage vigilance, or to say it doesn’t matter – I am though, simply trying to articulate what I think most of us would think when considering to hit the alarm strip. The TTC and Go Transit needs to do more to reassure us that we are allowed to do so because otherwise, ‘misuse can lead to fine or imprisonment’.
End the mixed messages and the scarmongering please. And I’ll see you on the subway.
Toronto is NOT next
I’ll make this short for once, because there’s not a lot to say beyond this: if you want to check out a year’s worth of Queen West shows in one weekend, make your way over to City Hall between Friday and Sunday to see all the art-stars and wannabes on display. I always find the stuff the art students are doing (who tend to be relegated to their own marginal section) to be worth checking out. Here’s the PR:
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Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition
July 8, 9, 10, 2005
Nathan Phillips Square, Toronto City Hall
Free Admission * Rain or Shine
Hours: July 8, 10am-8pm; July 9, 10am-7pm; and July 10, 10am-6pm.
Find paintings, drawings, sculptures, fibre works, jewelry, watercolours, metal works, original prints, ceramics, glass, wood works, mixed media works, and photographs by 530 artists and craftspeople!
Preview the artists’ work at www.torontooutdoorart.org
Win a $500 Art Shopping Spree! Tickets are $5 each. Buy them at the TOAE office or at the Main Information Booth at Nathan Phillips Square during the show.
For more information: 416.408.2754 or toae@torontooutdoorart.org
img: Scott Waters, Domestic: Cardinal, 2004, oil on wallpaper
In the future, people will consult machines, which will publish ‘you are’ books. Having analyzed you inside and out, through remarkably in depth ways – you will be presented with a canon of yourself. Thus defined you will either take comfort or squirm.
From the Tuesday’s
Hansard:
Hon. Jack Layton (Toronto-Danforth, NDP):
Mr. Speaker, it is a real privilege for me to stand in the House at this important and significant moment in Canadian history in the ongoing evolution and development of equality rights in our country. This issue is about families and it is about equal families. When we think of families, we immediately think of love.I would like first of all to salute a group which goes by the acronym of PFLAG, Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. It might not seem that remarkable today that there would be an organization called Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, but many years ago when this organization came into being, not only was it difficult for a lesbian or a gay person to come out to his or her family, but it was very difficult for a family member to acknowledge to their broader community that their child was a lesbian, or a gay man. In fact, this is what precipitated the enormous feeling of loneliness which is the singlemost common sentiment that I have heard over the many years that I have been associated with the gay and lesbian community. They have a feeling of being alone with nobody understanding. In a sense they are fearful of what would happen if who they really were became public knowledge, became known to their family, to their friends, to their community.
There was justification for those fears. Far from a loving environment in the early days, certainly of my awareness of the community, the atmosphere within which gays and lesbians had to live in our country was one filled with hate. That hate was illustrated.
I remember that hate as a young person growing up in my little town in the 1950s and the 1960s. I do not know whether any of my friends in the little school I went to were lesbian or gay, but I do know a lot of insults were thrown toward any young person who was judged to have any gay-like attributes. These were hateful comments. I have learned from many of my gay friends over the years what that felt like. It was like a physical assault, and oftentimes it became a physical assault.
Madam Speaker, I should have mentioned at the beginning of my remarks that I will be splitting my time with the member for Windsor–Tecumseh.
Violence and hatred were all too common and still remain when it comes to the gay and lesbian community, the transgender community, and the transsexual community. I recall in a park in my city when a librarian was killed by a group of high school students who had gone out to beat up a gay man. They beat him to death. Sadly, this is an experience that happens all too frequently.
I want to acknowledge the work of our friend, a former member of the House, Svend Robinson, for bringing legislation forward many times in an effort to have hate crimes named for what they really were. That was finally achieved not too long ago in the House.
We are looking at trying to replace hatred with a concept of love, of affection, of the fundamental equality that underlies the whole notion of love. This takes us into new territory. It takes us into the territory of understanding and defining of relationships.
At the 25th anniversary of Pride Day in Toronto a couple of days ago a couple came up to me and asked if I remembered them. I told them that they looked familiar but that they would have to help me out. They said that they had been celebrating their 15th anniversary together and at a fundraising auction had bought a tour of the city and a dinner with Olivia and me. I had very fond memories of that couple. I asked how long ago that was. They said it had been 15 years and that they were now celebrating their 30th year together.
I know from having spent some time with these men that their family has as strong a bond of relationship and love that we would find in any family. I believe they should have the opportunity to have that relationship, that marriage, recognized on an equal par with any other loving relationship in our society.
Now we are putting that into law. I must confess, I never thought I would have the opportunity to stand in this House and actually vote for such a powerful and important proposition.
As I mentioned in my speech at second reading of this legislation, when my wife and I were married in 1988, we asked that one of our gay friends speak on our behalf and dream about the day when perhaps our lesbian and gay friends could celebrate their relationships in front of all of their friends and in front of the whole community. It truly is a privilege for me today to participate in actually helping to make that dream a reality.
This past Sunday morning one of my favourite pastors, Reverend Brent Hawkes spoke to a church service held outdoors at the 25th anniversary of the Pride Day celebrations. He imagined the day 100 years from now when a historian might be writing about the struggle for human rights over the years and talked about a story that was written about the rainbow people who used to be frightened about their identity and had to essentially keep their identity concealed, because if they allowed it to become public, they would be discriminated against and ridiculed. But they fought back, not so much out of anger, but with a spirit of joy, a spirit of respect, a spirit of pride in who they were.
In fact, Pride Day itself, and not everybody knows this, emerged as a response to a huge police raid which resulted in over 300 gay men being arrested. Very few charges were ever laid, but several of those men committed suicide as a result of the exposure of their identity at the time. Pride Day emerged as a statement by the gay community that they want to be public. They want to celebrate who they are. They will not be pushed back into the corners. They will claim their place in society. Believe me, on the streets of Toronto and in communities from one end of the country to the other, gays and lesbians, their friends, their parents and the community will be out on the streets to celebrate a group of people who used to have to hide who they were, but who can now celebrate their love and their affection for one another.
It is a magnificent transition that is under way. It is one that is also very respectful of the religious traditions that compose Canada. In fact, the legislation includes quite a number of provisions to ensure that is the case, because not all of the religious communities or even all parts of every religious community feel that the religious aspect of marriage can be expressed in quite this way. There is a provision to ensure that religious diversity, which is fundamental here in Canada, should be protected. That is, of course, vitally important to the success of this particular initiative.
I am thinking about many individuals, friends and groups who have dreamed about the day that is about to come, literally within a number of hours, when finally, lesbian and gay relationships in our communities across this country will be recognized by the whole community for what they are: equal relationships infused with the kind of love that a society frankly needs more of. It pushes away the hatred. It pushes away the discrimination. It says no to second class citizenship. It invites all of us, in all of our family structures, to share in this wonderful and beautiful country in exactly the same way, with the same rights and with the same obligations and privileges that each and every one of us has as Canadians.
Robert Fulford, reviewing the then recently published diaries of Northrup Frye, wrote:
He told his diary what he didn’t always express in print or in public. He often disliked the moral tone of the Toronto people he knew. ‘Every once in a while I get shocked by the callousness and brutality of members of my class,’ he wrote; sometimes they revealed that they thought the poor sub-human. He wasn’t impressed when Osbert Sitwell, one of the eminent Sitwells of England, came to Canada to lecture: ‘f I didn’t know him to be brilliant I’d say he was a dope.’He decided that obscenity is an ornament to language except when it becomes routine; then it approaches idiocy. He cited a colleague’s story about a First World War soldier who saw a dead mule at the bottom of a shellhole and remarked, ‘Well, that fuckin’ fucker’s fucked.’ Setting that down, Frye added, ‘What sort of person is it, incidentally, whose feelings would be spared by printing the above as ‘that —-in’ —-er’s —-ed,’ or ‘that obscene obscenity’s obscenitied’?” He had no time for prudes.
(National Post, 30 Oct 2001)
Earlier this week I posted an email interview with Matt Crookshank, who is showing with Lisa Pereira at Gallery 61 until July 3. This is the interview with her I mentioned would be upcoming. I first met Lisa two years ago, the same night that Andrew Harwood asked me to be part of the Michael Jackson show that he curated with Lex Vaughan and which got a lot of press. In almost every review – which seemed to be in every paper – Lisa’s video was mentioned, which was a surprising accomplishment for someone who at the time had told me wasn’t sure if she’d flunked out of OCAD or not. (In the end she did have to take a year off due to academic probation, and is due to graduate next year).
Lisa’s video consists of porn culled from various sources and as I describe below, a sampling of different perversions and fetishes. The most amazing thing about it for me was that I learned that it is possible for someone to fuck themselves.
Here’s her PR:
12 Signs of the Apocalypse Lisa Pereira 2005
This video provides 12 Zodialogical pearls of wisdom and is the Kama
Sutra of the 21st century (and not as boring). Like a diver finding
a filthy oyster at the bottom of a sewage treatment plant, this video
will certainly pay off in the long run (whatever that means).
And given that we have Google Ads running on this site, I think I should mention that whatever twisted links come up via the keywords in this post are to be followed at your own risk.
——————
Your video piece, described as a Kama Sutra for the 21st Century, really seems to be a exploration of what most people call perverse. Indeed, many people didn’t want to watch your video twice, although I question what kind of wild stuff they might have on their hardrives. Do you think that the reluctance to watch your video more than once has more to do with not wanting to experience perversion in public, amongst others, or because they were really turned off and disgusted?
With regards to why people may only watch my video once I can only suggest the following two scenarios:
1.) People don’t really watch the same thing twice (particularly video art which is often difficult enough the first time around).
2.) People feel compelled to mimic disgust in front of each other, lest the public assume that they are familiar with, or even enjoy, the particular sex acts described in the video.
I don’t think the material in the video is disgusting nor do I care whether people think I participate in the activities illustrated. They probably think I do, because a lot of people have asked me which sign I am. For the record I’m a Leo, the fisting sign.
And, I’m sure there will be some people who might be turned on by some of the footage and feel the need to have a jerk off about it later on and I think that’s swell.
The found footage in the video is stuff I downloaded off the internet. Anyone with access to a computer has access to the same images. The things I shot myself are so over-the-top and unbelievable that it’s more funny (I hope) then disgusting.
Your cynical approach comes off as an intelligent response rather than just being a wanker, which is a fine balancing act that you pull off well. I find myself amused by your work rather than annoyed. But I wonder, would you ever see yourself making bourgeois-beauty Sarah-McLachlan-like videos featuring flowers and fairies? Or are you committed to exposing the sick underbelly of society forever?
I don’t like Sarah McLachlan or the kind of lame aesthetic her music videos ape, but if I were offered some cash, would I make that kind of work? You bet.
I wouldn’t necessarily be good at it but if the price were right why not? I would take that money and put it into the stuff that I really wanted to make. Better me then some other lame director who’s gonna take that kind of shit seriously and then make some horrible ‘art film’ that I will undoubtedly have to sit through at an equally boring film festival.
And if you knew some of the jobs I’ve had, in the grand scheme of things, making bad music videos would be one of the least evil things I’ve had to do. Who knows, maybe there’s some way I could slip in a few subliminal messages. Like those Coke machines with naked ladies on them.
Anyway, people who work on Canadian music videos get paid in peanuts, probably in Sara McLachlan’s case I’d get paid in free maxis, those horrible pillow-like ones you get at the dollar store so I’d probably say no fucking way you stupid, stupid bitch.
Do you consider it sick at all?
There are sicker things out there. During the making of that video I watched a lot of shit eating. And I’m not talking about a nibble on some cute little poodle poo in Pink Flamingos, I’m talking about squatting over some girl’s mouth and emptying your bowels into her eager craw. And I couldn’t put it in the video. Not because it was revolting (which it was) but because I just couldn’t make it funny. I’m not trying to shock people and gross them out. I’m just interested in people’s sick and disgusting turn-ons.
I can see why a lot of those things might be sexy to someone even though they don’t directly turn me on. I don’t think sex shocks people anymore. Shit eating is sick but it’s kind of funny to think about. It’s unpleasant for me and maybe other people because I don’t find anything sexy about it but obviously someone does because there is no shortage of shit sex sites on the internet and elsewhere so someone’s paying for this stuff and it isn’t just perverts like me (besides, I found a all of it for free). Faking it was way funnier then actually seeing it.
You’ve made other work that seems to explore perversion – notably your vampire video featuring the liver. Why are you interested in the degradations of sex (as opposed to celebrating it or whatever else one might do?)
The vampire film was actually a cannibal film called Lesbian Cannibal (get it? she “eats” her out). There are already a lot of crappy Hollywood movies that celebrate love and sex and romance and all that stuff. Crappier still are the Hollywood movies that are supposed to be titillating and controversial but don’t discuss sex in a way that people do all the time.
Also, if one wants to jerk off, there are a variety of websites and video and magazine stores to provide you with countless hours of beat-off material. That video was about having casual sex in the midst of post-aids tension, where a single encounter could potentially kill you, but then I didn’t want to make some tragic piece about living with aids.
Matching up perversions with the signs of the zodiac was a really good idea. Was it inspired by something real? Like, where you ever involved with a nasty Pisces?
The use of the zodiac is actually based on a record called Blowfly Zodiac. For each Zodialogical sign Blowfly rearranges classic soul tracks so that they are very sexually explicit and funny. It’s a sweet little record. I don’t know anything about astrology but I liked the idea of making arbitrary connections to each sign according to some weird sex thing I was thinking about. For a mix tape of Blowfly email me at lisa@sisboombah.ca
Tim what sign are you?
I’m Aquarius
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Diamonds in the Ruff continues at Gallery 61 (61 Ossington Ave) until July 3. Gallery hours: fri 7-10pm, sat 1-6pm or by appointment.
Image from the invite
Matt Crookshank currently has a show on right now with Lisa Pereira (interview with her to come) at Gallery 61, entitled, Diamonds in the Ruff and which runs until July 3. It is easily some of the most unique work out there at the moment, and so I sent Matt some questions.
Before we begin, here’s the PR Matt sent out last week in preparation for the last Friday’s opening:
“5 Chimera Love Paintings Matt Crookshank 2005
Chimera Love, so addicting. Love Bites! Like Pandora’s Box, the
devil in Miss Jones, these dirty slut paintings are prepared for you,
but are you prepared for them? Drenched in sin, decadence and
debauchery, they are the best kind of poison. Drink and be
imprisoned in the cage with golden bars.”
“Shade 1-3 revisited Matt Crookshank 2005
A shade is the insubstantial remains of the dead, a phantom without a
body or the power of thought. When hung together, these paintings
create a temporary window through which one can view Hades without
having to actually stay there for eternity.”
One of the viewers said that the circles looked like old used condoms. When I asked you about it, you said that to you they were like pockets of energy emerging between the branes of the multiverse of String Theory. Do you think this reflects some kind of fractal of reality, as a dried condom is in a way, a pocket of (captured) energy?
And, was she right-on, considering these were the Chimera love, ‘dirty slut’ paintings? (weren’t they?)
I loved her association to dirty condoms. I’m definitely interested in skins, and membranes, and fluidity in between structures. I find all of that rather sensual, and somehow almost ‘sinful’. There’s something so decadent about tubing out entire tubes of paint onto your canvas. It’s gratuitous. And when the varnish breaks through the tubed dikes, and slides all over the canvas against my will… oh my god…
You’ve told me in the past that this style of yours, with circles and squiggles are inspired by String Theory, are these:
a) concrete representations of something abstract,
b) concrete representations of a concrete reality,
c) abstract representations of a concrete reality,
d) abstract representations of an abstract reality?
e) None of the above. My paintings are not representations of anything. They are something. Certainly there are ideas in them from String Theory, and from other sources. But they are not illustrations of String Theory. They are cohesive and total power magic spells and they are designed to effect people and create changes.
I want you to talk about the ‘failure’ stuff, and this whole thing about being disgusting. I don’t really see the paintings as particularly gross – I see an interplay between materials, but they aren’t what we’d easily call beautiful. One pocket of yellow and red reminded people of a pussy sore, as if that’s the only thing that red and yellow can suggest. What’s going into your colour choices? Are the red and yellow here not related to fire, to being a window into Hades/Hell?
It depends on how you define ‘disgusting’. I think something that is gratuitous is often disgusting. Too much of something becomes gross. Do you ever have a moment when you get too turned on maybe? Or too titillated? Too aroused? And then it all comes crashing down cause it’s too much. When there’s been too much suspense and the illusion breaks. I love that line, that moment when it goes from beauty to horror. I like to make my paintings play that line.
As far as colours being representations of fire, no. My colour choices generally just pop into my head when I look at a canvas. It just says ‘I need some red’ or whatever. My paintings aren’t representations of anything, not in the way that they’re painted anyway. And they’re also not symbolic – I loathe symbolism. So speak and say. Yuck.
My paintings are magic spells. I know that sounds sort of simple, like I’m some kind of village idiot, but it’s true.
I love abstract paintings because you can allow them to become these organic systems, and before you know it they’ve gotten away from you and taken on a life of their own. They each have their own energy, and they are meant to make people change. When I write about my paintings raising hell, or creating world peace, or starting revolution, of course that’s all tongue in cheek. I know that my paintings probably won’t do any of those things. I can’t be totally sure of it, and I certainly am thinking and dreaming rather seriously about those kinds of ideas while I paint, but I’m aware that most of the time they will fail in my more grandiose magic casting intentions.
But this general idea, that a painting can make something tangible happen, that I have seen with my own eyes. I know how paintings can change people, and how they can open minds. There is a very real energy in painting, and it translates to the viewer. You can make someone change, you can affect their mind, and you can create all kinds of effects. Right now, I might not be causing reckless debauchery and dementia through my paintings, but one day! Just you wait.
Obviously chance is playing a part of the process, so I wonder how much you try to control, and if you do any editing after the fact, in case it didn’t turn out like you hoped.
How can you edit poured varnish? It does whatever it wants. The other elements in my paintings are extremely controlled. The painted lines are details of sketches or strokes with my computer mouse. Sometimes I lay out compositions in Photoshop. I build a very strict structure, a foundation, for the varnish to flirt with. Once I lay the varnish, I’m introducing the liquid, the fuel, and the fluid that works inside the structure. It’s the contrast of these two simple things that really lets the paintings take off. I love the varnish because from then on, the paintings pretty much paint themselves. It’s not ‘my free subconscious expression’ and it’s not something I compose and control. It’s actually something entirely random. Of course I mix in whatever colours I want, but this varnish is so unpredictable, even after 5 years using it I can’t know what it will do.
Let’s talk about abstraction. What do you enjoy about it?
Abstract painting is the most difficult thing to do well. It is so easy to make terrible abstract paintings, but it is so very hard to make extremely powerful and overwhelming abstract art.
I love that abstract painting is such a degraded art form. It went from the highest of high art with abstract expressionism, to (what it seems to be now in Toronto) the most reviled and abhorred practice. Especially from the context of a straight white male. How predictable!
Of course, the rest of the world is way ahead of Toronto on this. Abstraction is so exciting right now. There is so much innovation, and it’s really able to capture and translate the complex myriad structures we now live in so effectively. In Toronto though, it seems like people are still stuck in the 90s, still so embarrassed by abstract painting.
Still, people just don’t seem to know how to deal with it. They keep looking for a way to ‘read’ it, to force a narrative. Whether that’s the tired narrative of formalism, or the cliché of pure expression. So many people seem so at a loss. It’s so much easier to look at badly drawn cartoon art, which is a blight upon Toronto right now.
When will that shit die and go away?? If I were to draw or paint cartoons, I’d become a graphic novelist. That’s something you can respect! But how can anyone respect an artist’s stoner sketches, pinned up on a wall? A narrative no deeper than loose nostalgic empathy, maybe with a bit of irony and sarcasm thrown in. Barf.
Abstract painting is fucking HARD. It challenges me. Once you’ve really allowed a painting to come to life, and it starts to tell you what do paint next, that’s when you’ve really gotten somewhere. You’re out of your own head, and you’re into some kind of new territory where you’re forced to respond and be inventive and problem-solve. I had a fantasy once of curating an abstract art show, and forcing all these conceptual artists, and cartoon drawers, and realist painters and photographers to make abstract paintings. Because it is, to my mind, so much more of a challenge than other art practices.
I know I’m sounding totally pretentious right now, but really think about it? There’s nothing else to grab a hold of. No narrative, no figure, no ground, no concept. You have to make the painting speak on its own. And I’m not talking ‘art for art’s sake’ here. I mean you have to make it really talk to people, to make them change. I’ve seen it with so many people, getting excited and turned on in front of my paintings. High is the new low.
Abstract painting is the most difficult of all art forms to perfect. It’s like poetry. Listening to most poetry is like living a nightmare. But every now and then someone is so good, that it makes you forget about every shitty bad piece of poetry you’ve ever read or heard in you life. Abstract painting is the same way. It’s terrible – 99% of it is terrible. Because it’s so HARD. So much art I see my peers in Toronto making right now, it’s so easy to produce. It’s a quick idea. A one off joke. No commitment. It can be very quirky and fun, certainly. But I don’t know how that can be fulfilling. There’s no daring, no chance, no allowing for chaos and then dealing with what comes next.
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Diamonds in the Ruff continues at Gallery 61 (61 Ossington Ave) until July 3. Gallery hours: fri 7-10pm, sat 1-6pm or by appointment
Matt is also currently showing at Solo Exhibition (Barr Gilmore’s storefront window space) at 787 Queen West. That piece is called Chimera Cesspool (of Sin) which consists of oil and varnish on glass. Solo Exhibition runs from one full moon to the next, and so that show ends on July 20 (the day they landed on the moon!)
Images from Matt’s website, www.mattcrookshank.com
Last night I dreamt I was in a gallery looking at particularly bad art, and there were two girls there – one was P-, and they were glowering at me; I was feeling defensive, and when we got to talking the subject came up, they acknowledging visible discomfort, I saying in return, ‘Yes you look like you’re ready to attack me,’ but then the conversation shifted as to how they were discussing my writing, and that while they liked the show, they couldn’t help but agree with my ideas, and were curious as to what I thought. Perhaps —– —– was one of these people (talked to her and P- last night at the openings) but then a curator was giving a tour of the work, saying that some of the work was based on memories of their childhoods, and I interrupted at this point to say, ‘I question whether work based on childhood isn’t in effect childish, and I’d prefer adult work for adults’. This silenced the curator. Later, she told me that she couldn’t think of a rebuttal, and I felt bad, as I’d humiliated her.
So, like I mentioned in my last posting, I was at the MOCCA opening last week. I wasn’t planning to go, really – I planned on going to the latest show at YYZ, but a friend told me about the MOCCA party where she was going so we made plans to meet there. I arrived early, after checking out the show at 401 Richmond, and then my friend showed up, but she got into interesting conversations with other people, and I didn’t want to interrupt, so I wandered around introducing myself to other people for kicks (which I guess is a way to say that the art didn’t hold my attention). But I guess it never really does for very long, especially at openings, and especially at openings in the summer which also consider themselves parties. ‘Seen one, seen ’em all’ I’ve been known to say, and the thing is that’s not really unfair since artists are so invested in the idea of a series. Perhaps I’ve opened myself up to the criticism that I don’t know what I’m doing – writing about art and all – but I tend to think it’s a skill acquired from the channel surfing culture. New technologies introduce new skill sets and exploit unknown talents, n’est-ce-pas?
So, in MOCCA, taking up the main exhibition space, are a bunch of drums. Drums as sculpture, drums in videos, mechanized-robotized drums. I’m sure there’s lost here to appreciate if you like music and drums, but since I’m not passionate about either, I don’t really have anything to say. Some people like Crest, I like Colgate; this is Crest art to me. That’s all.
I suppose I should learn my lesson from my last posting and bitch about it, which would raise some ire and get everyone out to see what all the fuss is about. All I can say is that I’m still figuring out this whole art-criticism thing, which doesn’t even matter anyway since people are quite capable of making up their own minds. I guess when I started this gig I figured I’d try to weigh in with my two cents now and then, encourage people to see this and check out that, give them some ins to the scene. So, with that in mind, I’m saying: there’s a new show at MOCCA. It’s next door to a show at Edward Day which is going to have more visitors now than it would have had otherwise because I said that show was boring. Well, I find the drum show at MOCCA boring too, but for different reasons: cuz it ain’t my cup of tea is all. That’s not to say it shouldn’t have been exhibited in the first place, it’s just to say that I’m a nerd who doesn’t like the whole indie-music convergence with fine art thing, but that’s just me. It’s workin’ for everyone else. So be it.
This drum thing is called Demons stole my soul: rock n’ roll drums in contemporary art. Rock on.
The show I did appreciate at MOCCA is in the backroom, featuring Karma Clarke-Davis, Edith Dakovic, Nicholas Di Genova, Istvan Kantor, Geoffrey Pugen, Floria Sigismondi.
I like Di Genova’s pieces; I curated him into the YYZ zine last January, where he worked with that document’s newsprint to publish nice black and white drawings. Here, he’s showing large images drawn on mylar using animation ink, to give the colours a nice matte effect. I think I’m struck by his pictures because they have this relationship to Japanese animé which I spent my childhood adoring, as did many of us. Animé holds my interest because of the combination of striking rendering, unique stylization, and usually a philosophical underpinning to the story line. By tapping into these associations, Di Genova is able to produce work that holds my interest beyond my usual cursory glance.
In the same room is a video I didn’t watch by Geoffrey Pugen. Or I should say I watched it but didn’t put the headphones on to hear the soundtrack, mostly because the two available were almost always in use. Next to that is one of Istvan Kantor’s machine-sex-action videos … the point of which I always find is lost because I’m distracted by the fact that I know the people writhing around and I’m thinking ‘so-and-so has a nice body’. I think it’s all supposed to be about dehumanization, and machines, and porn, but it comes across as a fetish video of all three, with acting worse than what you usually get in a porn video. But hey, he’s famous now so who cares right? Nowadays, it’s like you’re not a real curator if you don’t take Kantor seriously, so throw him in with the kids.
Sigismondi is another one of these famous people who’s shown with the MOCCA before, when it was up in North York, and she’s got a mannequin with horn legs if I remember correctly. The show is called Hybrids, and so it makes sense under this curatorial theme of what Robert Storr would associate as grotesque. I suppose this is a polite Canadian version, extremely understated, of what he was getting at last year with his SITE Santa Fe show: artists mash things up, come and check it out how weird it all is.
Edith Dakovic has the most repellent pieces, to my Colgate mind, consisting of sphere coated with the type of silicon used to simulate skin in special effects. Little hairs here and there, and moles cover it’s healthy Caucasian surface, the illusion eliciting the reaction of it being some form of life, some deformed animal grown in the lab for organ harvesting and the usual nightmare scenario.
Karma’s video must have been between loops because I didn’t see it and don’t know what it’s about.
Ok, to summarize then: what awaits you when you cross the parking lot, currently marked by that gorgeous installation of blue tree stalks, is Edward Day on your left, who’s showing boring realist work and other stuff that didn’t catch my attention; straight-ahead in MOCCA, you’ll find a floor full of drums cast in bronze or whatever, some of them done up with robotics, along with videos and other things; in the back room at MOCCA, a show called Hybrids which is the only thing that caught my interest. There’s probably something else which I’m forgetting, but hey, I was socializing that evening, not looking for the god of the art religion.
More info: MOCCA website (which is in desperate need of redesign).
I was at the MOCCA opening the other night (more on that later) and while there checked out the Dan Hughes show at Edward Day next door. To be absolutely honest, I was looking at the paintings while in the middle of introducing myself to a girl who turned out to be a painting student at OCAD, so we talked about it from the perspective of both being familiar with the medium. At one point I said, ‘these are too 17th Century for me,’ referring to their dark colour schemes. And I bring that up only to say straight away that the paintings weren’t absorbing 100% of my attention.
I’ve recently begun to paint again after not taking it that seriously over the past few years, and I’ve been going after this New Old Mastercism that Donald Kuspit began talking about 6 years ago. Dan Hughes’s show is just down the street from Mike Bayne’s, which just closed at Katherine Mulherin’s gallery, which I wrote about here and which mentioned Kuspit’s defence of superior craft ‘enhancing sight to produce insight’.
I’m afraid that the only immediate insight I got from Dan Hughes’s show is that varnish makes paintings very shiny. (That and what follows after a couple of days reflection …). My own recent experiences with practicing the craft of painting, in relation to rendering and toward the achievements of the Old Masters is that craft alone clearly isn’t enough.
I’m reminded of one of the more famous excerpted essays I’ve encountered reading art and literary criticism, in which R.G. Collingwood states in his 1938 book, The Principles of Art, (quoting Coleridge): ‘we know a man for a poet because he makes us poets’, as Collingwood explains, ‘the poet is a man who can solve for himself the problem of expressing it, whereas the audience can only express it when the poet has shown them how’.
Our everyday familiarity with language is enough to help us appreciate those who can use words well, and how a well turned phrase can unlock for us understanding not available by being inarticulate (hence my loathing of jargon based literary and art writing).
We don’t seem to share such a facility with images, especially crafted ones, since most of us don’t draw and paint, although most of us do take photographs. So someone like Dan Hughes, just because he can paint like that, means he gets a pass by default into a show. It also seems to mean that those who can’t draw and paint are awestruck at first impression by his ability, so much so that the impression is one of appreciation, and if they can afford it, the seduction of their chequebooks.
Some stuff, by what it represents, will grow in value – like Mike Bayne’s, whose images of today’s everyday will appear quaint in a century and will tie that time to ours, giving them a sense of where they came from. But Hughes’s images are already boring, and I’m uncertain as to how they could grow in value. Nothing represented is worth sharing, none of the images will help the future understand its past. Skulls, self-portraits, business men on stairs … been there done that and gave away the t-shirt. I don’t write this or what follows to be mean, nor to causally disregard it simply for the clichés that they are as much as I mean it as constructive criticism with hopes that Hughes will grow as an artist and that he can put his considerable skill to better use in the future.
And here I’ll acknowledge what these images must be all about: they’re studio exercises he’s trying to offload because he doesn’t want to store them somewhere. He must be thinking, ‘might as well sell them to someone who’d like to have it in their livingroom’ which is all fine and dandy, but let’s be clear about that.
I need to point out that the main thing that makes these images uninteresting is the dark colour scheme – like I said, it’s too 17th Century, when it was fashionable for paintings to be dark. There was a reason for that then, namely, the high cost of coloured pigments against the sort of mass production of images for people’s homes – for a while there, paintings were affordable for the masses. For his own reasons, Hughes has chosen to ignore the past 150 years of paint and pigment development. And part of this criticism also fits into my pet theory of Canadian painters being united via a coincidental (aka cultural) appreciation for bright pallets – something that would seem to have lots to with our being a northern latitude country. So, if he’d used bright colours, filled these paintings with light, taken advantage of the range of affordable pigments available to early 21st Century painters – then I imagine these images transformed, amazing, worth going to see.
As it is, we can do that ourselves with Photoshop. In that sense Hughes is accidentally at the cutting edge of what’s going in our culture at large. Recognizing that the form crafted in the studio (the painting as object) is ultimately only the first version and separable from the content (the image), which can be modified, and re-edited, manipulated, etc. One day, one of these images of one of these paintings will have its levels adjusted in Photoshop before being printed for a bedroom wall. And that is what it comes down to. He, nor the gallery, nor the buyer, have the final say of what these images are supposed to look like. Since they seem to be nothing more than an exercise, you wouldn’t really be re-writing their meaning because they don’t mean anything in the first place.
And hence the image I’m using to illustrate this entry – folded and torn, it’s the reproduced image of a rather large painting, once again reproduced here and modified by my use of it that evening to exchange email address and give out the address as to where we were all going afterward. It perhaps more than anything communicates what this show is all about to me – a decoration to daily life, a nice backdrop to find some common ground with a pretty stranger.
Dan Hughes at Edward Day Gallery until June 12th
(image of Dan Hughes’s invite after a night of email exchanges and note-taking)
Ah the isms, can’t live with ’em, can’t have good arguments without them. And for the past thirty years, we’ve seen a flourishing of isms, one that could almost be said to have sprung from the fertilized soil of the World War’s dead a generation prior. To some they were flowers, to others they have been weeds.
And JRS is one who’s seen them as weeds. I’ve come to find them somewhat noxious myself, which is one of the reasons that I’ve grown fond of his thinking, and over the winter I read most of his books. It is also for that reason that I was particularly excited when I learned in March that he had a new book coming out. There was also a geeky pleasure to know that with the publication of a new text he’d be speaking in Toronto at some point, which turned out to be sooner rather than later.
JRS spoke at U of T’s MacMillan Theatre a week ago now, which I eagerly attended and like the keener I am took a seat dead centre in the third row because lectures for me are more exciting than rock concerts.
Having received a review copy of The Collapse of Globalism a week and half before, I must say that I was only able to get half way through it before seeing JRS in person. The first half of the book traces the history of the globalist ideology, which swept through the governments of the Western world over the past 30 years (which is also equivalent to my lifetime). But, even JRS conceded while presenting an overview of his arguments, ‘what could be more boring than economics’. I tried to cram last week to get ready for the talk, but found myself easily distracted by such mundane activities as mowing the lawn, because it was sunny out and I didn’t want to be stuck inside reading boring economic history, albeit written with Saul’s wonderful style. There is also the element of extreme annoyance at seeing, in the black and white of the text, at how stupid the political leadership has been, those which Saul refers to as ‘elites’ in his indiviudal way (a sort of Saul glossary is available through his 1994 book, The Doubter’s Companion).
Near the end of his talk, Saul referenced the coming democratic crisis, noting that the political energy of a critical mass of people under 40 is going into NGOs and similar enterprises, seeking influence over political decisions, and noting how that’s all they can ever hope to accomplish. (He spoke at length on this in his inaugural Lafontiane-Bladwin speech five years ago, from which I excerpted the relevant portion for my Goodreads list). But, this follows from the globalist ideology, because as he noted, what better way to drive young people away from politics than to keep telling them they don’t have power, that the whole thing is run by corporations?
That’s been the story that I grew up with. It’s also one of the reasons I find someone like Saul so refreshing, because he’s part of that generation seduced by the neo-conservative economists who call themselves neo-liberal (liberal as in ‘free trade’ etc), and yet speaks for the other side; speaks in a way that gives me hope for a better tomorrow, as soon as my generation is given the power to change things. As a traitor to the ideology of his generation, I see Saul as a potential hero to the younger ones.
He’s certainly been my intellectual hero, as he’s attacked those who’ve who constructed another an ism to be a prism: the prism of economics to explain the rainbow variety of the world’s reality. Of course, it should be obvious of how much of this is nonsense. But we’ve lived under this reality because the political leadership essentially through up their hands and said, ‘it’s inevitable, we can’t do anything about it’.
Saul has particular loathing for that word, ‘inevitable’. It’s background was a little mysterious to me when I first heard him speak 7 years ago. He’s continually bitched in his books at how the political leadership was arguing that globalization was inevitable, and there was nothing they could do except jump on the bandwagon. He explained where this came from: the apparent root of this loathing which has spurned him on to write all these books over the past while.
While he was in Paris in the early 70s (during the time I presume in which he was working on his PHD thesis on the modernization of France and basking in his own hero-worship of De Gaulle) the then president of the country, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing came on television to announce (and I paraphrase Saul’s paraphrase here): ‘thank you very much for electing me, you’re all very smart to have done so since I know everything, and I’ve studied the problem, and concluded there’s nothing I can do about it.’ It’s worth quoting the relevant passage from the book:
“Giscard came to power in the midst of those seminal crises of oil, inflation, unemployment, and no growth. He counterattacked as a technocrat could and made no impact … Giscard became bewildered. Discouraged.
“Then one night he appeared on television to address the people. He told them that great global forces were at work. These were new forces. Forces of inevitability. Forces of economic interdependence. There was little a national government could do. He was powerless.
“This historic appearance was probably the original declaration of Globalization as a freestanding force escaping controls of all men. It was also the invention of the new leader: the manager as castrato. This approach created quite a fashion among leaders at all levels. The easy answer to the most difficult problems was increasingly to lament publicly that you were powerless. Impotent. That your large budgets, your public structures, the talents and determination of your population could make little difference. These were not problems to be solved. These were manifestations of the global reality.”
Here seems to be the roots of his argument against technocratic experts and impotent political leadership and throwing one’s hands up in the face of inevitability. The crisis was an economic one, simply a lack of imaginative thinking. Saul argued in the Unconscious Civilisation that since politicians had given up leadership in favour of management, all they could ever do is manage, they didn’t have what it takes to lead society with creative solutions. I guess this is where I got my fire burning toward civic engagement, and the lingering bitterness I have toward the artworld in which I’m immersed: because if artists are the ones society trains to be creative, they’re wasting everyone’s time with these installations.
Not that I’m advocating all artists go into politics (remembering the Hitler example, I don’t think that’s such a good idea for the most part) but he argued last week that we’re in a vacuum now. Since 9/11, the castrated politicians suddenly realise they have balls and are pulling the strings, but they come from a generation who went into politics with the understanding that they would be making concessions to corporations. Now that the situation has reversed itself, and corporations are showing no respect for community infrastructure, the governments don’t really know what to do. Hence, Ottawa for past six months.
I see that whole circus as the chickens coming home to roost: the consequences of what he spoke about in his Massey Lectures ten years ago. At the same time, he’s married to the head of the government, so the chicanerie doesn’t seem so bad, since Mom and Pop have good heads on their shoulders even though they aren’t really supposed to have any influence. (I have faith that everything will turn out fine because Saul has the ear of the GG).
Now I have to bring something up which bothered me about his argument,something he opened himself up to. It’s a case of illogic, for he stated that one can recognize an idealogue by how much they won’t even admit to potentially being wrong; to the idealogue, what they believe is simply ‘true’. This got some laughter from the audience, but from then on, I wanted him to address the ‘truth’ of his arguments. He’s got it pretty good right – married to the Governor General; and he gets to write books destined to be bestsellers, he gets to work out the thoughts via lectures delivered on the ribbon-cutting itinerary, and he draws a sell-out crowd of the city’s thoughtful citizens. He gets to preach to a choir, and those unlike myself who haven’t reached the level of the sychophantic I imagine are at least impressed by His Excellent resumé.
Which is all to say that JRS is enabled in promoting his own ideology. His own ism. This one is older than most, being the one called humanism. As I see myself most influenced by those set of ideas, and operating within that history myself, it follows that Saul’s ism arm me for great arguments, and are breath of fresh air in the sickly academic atmosphere of bullshit that I’ve associated in.
I first saw Saul speak at Kings College in Halifax in 1998, and I found it very influential. It’s perhaps one the reasons I’m writing this now, on a blog I mean, since the way he disparaged the elites then as ‘not doing their job’ (in the earlier books he speaks of Canada’s elites as being the laziest in the world) prompted me to believe in the power of the public intellectual. That ideas and art and all this stuff that I was studying at the time belonged to everybody, and that it was part of a civic duty to criticize bad ideas as much as it was a duty to vote and follow politics because it’s there that decisions are made that affect our lives.
His relentlessly fair approach as well, as mocking what is foolish, and conceding his own defects now and then, is one of the reasons I find his writing extraordinary and highly influential. The belief is that we’re all in this together. We all want what’s best. There are many forces of divisiveness that we need to overcome. Perhaps his basic argument is ‘pay attention’. In that way you become conscious, and can decide for yourself. That’s the essence of a democracy, people deciding their own future, rather than giving up in the face of inevitability. That way, we emerge from being an Unconscious Civilisation.
You have the choice to read this book or not. You have the choice to buy it in a small bookshop or in a Chapters. Of course you can see that I’ll recommend that you do, since I’m a fan an all. But I can say that a knowledge of the history of this ideology from his perspective is quiet valuable, and that Saul’s work as a whole functions in the ways that education is supposed to: it empowers you in your own choice making. It helps you become a better citizen, and by becoming a better citizen, the world becomes a better place. As for the lecture – as I type this, I have TVO’s Big Ideas on in the living room, and I have a feeling this lecture will be broadcast on Big Ideas sometime in the coming months, so you’ll have the chance to see it for yourselves.
You’ll see how he began the talk by telling us of how on May 19th, the City Council of Burlington rejected an application from Wal-Mart to build a centre there, even after all the experts (the evil technocrats of Saul’s cosmology) said it would be a good thing. Here, the ‘common’ men and women of the council said something to the effect that Wal-Mart may know how to lower prices but they know nothing of fostering communities. And here is Saul’s story over the past decade’s happy ending: the collapse of an ideology of markets, when the common citizens take back the power their ancestors won from aristocrats centuries ago, to be able to say no thanks.
A list of Canadians who have contribited substantially to society and are making the world a better, more sane place.
Most links are to articles on wikipedia.org
John Peters Humphrey (1905 – 1955)
wrote the first draft of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948.
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908.10.15 – )
economist who played a key role in the US Kennedy Administration as one of Kennedy’s best advisors
Marshall McLuhan (1911.07.21 – 1980.12.31)
philosopher who initated a new understanding and a philosophy of the electronic media
Jane Jacobs (1916 – )
urban affairs activist
Pierre Trudeau (1919.10.18 – 2000.09.28)
Canada’s greatest Prime Minister who began his political activity advising the abestos miners of their rights during the corrupt Duplesis regime, who went on to be a socratic gadfly toward the stulifying Duplesis status quo, and who became Prime Minister almost by accident. In his last term he insisted the country adopt a constition and bill of rights suitable for the contempoary era, and he travelled to the capitals of the world urging nuclear disarmement.
Jean Vanier (1928.09.10 – )
founded the Arches centres, which provide care for the disabled throughout Europe and North America
Charles Taylor (1931.11.05 – )
philosopher who has contributed to thoughts on authenticity and morality
David Suzuki (1936.03.24 – )
trained as a genetist, he’s used his position as a science broadcaster on the CBC to advocate for environmental responsilbilty
Louise Arbour (1947.02.10 – )
lawyer who served at on the war crimes tribunal at The Hague, the Supreme Court of Canada, and now is the UN Commionsner for Human Rights
Micheal Ignatieff (1947 – )
leading thinker about human rights and of the responsible uses of political power
John Ralston Saul (1947.06.19 – )
philosopher who argues against the downsides of the corporate and managerial mentality
Steven Pinker (1954.09.18 – )
Psychologist and cognitive scientist making contributions to a materialist understanding of the human mind, and able to communicate these achievements to a broad audience
James Gosling (1956.05.19 – )
programmer who developed the Java programming language which has been used on NASA probes
Malcolm Gladwell (1963 – )
writes articles for the New Yorker magazines which documents the history of popular culture.
Mark Kingwell (1963 – )
philosopher who is active in the media and who is able to communicate the complexity behind the gray areas of today’s issues
Rasmus Lerdorf (1968.11.22 – )
programmer who created the PHP scripting engine which is used throughout the internet for dynamic websites and database interfacing
Naomi Klein (1970 – )
reporter and activist for worker’s rights and for limiting corporate power
Cory Doctorow (1971.07.17 – )
novelist and activist for sensible copyright reform
Craig Kielburger (1983 – )
activist against the use of child labour in developing areas
“Perhaps the original flaw of Globalization lies in its overstatement of the success of 19th Century free trade, along with an overstatement of the determinism of technology and the superiority of rational management systems. The certainty of all this inevitable change has distracted us from just how slow civilizations move. The recent genocide in the Congo reminds us that they – and we – are still dealing with King Leopold’s violent, genocidal interference a century ago. Britain is still digesting its loss of world leadership. China still thinks and feels like the Middle Kingdom – the centre of the world. Canada, now the third-oldest continuos democracy in the world and the second-oldest continuos federation, is still emotionally and existentially hampered by its colonial insecurity; just as Australia remains confused by the tension between its European cultural origins, its Aboriginal reality and its Asian geography; just as German youth born forty years after the end of Nazism still struggle with the idea of who they could possibly be. Algerians are still attempting to reconstitute themselves after the loss of their great and appropriate leader, Abd-el-Kader, in 1848; and Americans are still scarred and hampered by the implications of their slave-dependent social and economic origins. The list is endless.”
John Ralston Saul’s, The Collapse of Globalism arrived today. Review to follow, after I’m done reading it.
This isn’t going to be a great review, only because I went out of curiosity. I haven’t read Don Quixote nor am I tempted to anytime soon. But that’s not to say that the event sucked or anything – I think if I was a Don Quixote fan I would have really liked it, but not being one, I feel that I should just be up-front about that, and I write about my experience for what it’s worth. This review is also marred by the fact that having not read it, I’m in danger of not knowing what I’m talking about, so keep that in mind. So, accept these tokens of ignorance caveat lector.
So why review it in the first place? Because I like that word – ‘re-view’. Because you missed it, and I was there, I can try to fill you in, paint a picture enabling you to ‘re-view’ it.
Of course, this reminds me of the presentation by Ellen Anderson who pointed out that the word ‘audience’ come from the same root as ‘auditory’ and how in Cervantes’s 17th Century, people talked about going to ‘hear a play’ while we say, we’re going to ‘see a movie’. The centuries then, divide themselves between listeners and spectators, and it makes me want to read Guy Dabord’s ‘Society of the Spectacle‘ which I haven’t done yet, but at least I’ll be able to tell people I was prompted to read it, and follow that curlicue of ideas after attending the Don Quixote Symposium in May 2005. So, what I’m saying here is – it wasn’t a wasted night, even if I was bored and didn’t stay for the whole thing. I did learn some things, and it caused me to have some thoughts, I feel they’re worth sharing.
Held at the Munk Centre last Wednesday evening, I show up near 6, when it’s advertised to start. I find everyone in the reception eating the usual hore-d’oeuvres. Did I miss it? Usually the grazing crowd follows the speeches. So, already I feel like they’re wasting my time, but whatever. Then the speeches begin with the usual…. I’m sorry, but something needs to be done about these introductions. Every recent lecture I’ve attended at universities in Toronto have been preceded by painfully long sycophantic introductions. It should become vogue for them to be short and humble, and free of the idea that we’ve been blessed by the presence of this important person. In this case, the important person wasn’t even alive – more words were said in the memory of a dead professor than the translator of the book they were selling in the foyer, the real guest of honour.
Mr. Professor’s name was Geoffrey Stag and he died last November. According to the dates give, he would have been 90 so it’s not like his death was tragic or anything. He had is run and shuffled off his mortal coil, but prior to that he’d retired in 1976, and taught Cervantes while he was at U of T. Not to seem callous but I don’t care. I doubt anyone cared, except of course for his daughter, who we were informed, was present. My point is I didn’t give up my evening for a memorial service for someone who’d worked in British Intelligence during World War II and then decided to come to the colonies to live out his life and his career. No disrespect intended, but I came for symposium on Don Quixote, which was published 400 years ago, a time span of which reminds us that our times here are petty, as are the works of those who spend their lives commenting on the achievements of others. I’ll grant the memorial aspect the respect that it deserves – which is small – but it also has a whiff of the celebrity about it, as if the beloved prof’s achievements were somehow on par with that of Cervantes’s (a point none would admit to, including the eulogizer Mr. Rupp, but a point that I feel stands given that actions speak louder than words).
Don Quixote has recently been translated by Edith Grossman who began the talks speaking about what it means to be a translator. Now, having French as a second language has meant that I’ve tried my hand at translation from time to time. At the moment I should be working on something I’m prepping for my reading group, but I’m intimidated by the two last chapters I need to get finished. So, I was surprised to find that what she spoke about resonated with me. She noted that being a translator is, by definition, self-effacing – one is supposed to disappear behind the intentions of the first author. She also noted that translation is not merely matching up words in a 1 to 1 relationship; doing so is a mark of a failed translator, and given the presence on the web of translation engines such as Babeflish, we are very much aware of what she’s talking about. She reminded us that translation is collaboration. She quoted Borges, who told his translator, ‘write what I intended to write, rather than what I wrote’. My own experience shows this to be a very challenging game, since you have to be careful about what you assume they meant: you don’t want to rewrite the book with your improvements, but also a translation is very much a version of an account, which is why her version competes for shelf space with John Rutherford’s.
The presentations, from my perspective at the back, were distracted by the CBC cinematographer, running about trying to get his angles so they can be edited together later for something. At the time I figured it’d be some 30 second clip on the 11 o’clock news, but as I type this maybe it’ll be for some Evan Solomon show on Newsworld.
Edith Grossman spoke first, followed by Ellen Anderson who spoke of Don Quixote’s relationship to 17th Century theatre, which seemed to imply that the novel came out of Cervantes work as a playwright. It’s narration and multitude of mini-stories the type of thing you’d get if you tried to describe a week of seeing plays to a gathering of friends at the pub. Because, and this didn’t come up, but it’s relevant, we should remember that literature in the centuries preceding our own was not only something read aloud to oneself, but also, read to the crowds who hadn’t learned to read.
Anderson was followed by Rachel Schmidt, who had a Power Point slide show, as her topic was on the ‘adventure of the visual image’, talking about how artists have illustrated Quixote over the centuries. There were a couple of things here worth noting: for one, slide shows are what make lectures fun, and I don’t have a problem with people using Power Point, and I understand that some people are still figuring out how to use the program seamlessly.
But, and this is the second thing, what drives me nuts about PP presentations is the shit design of the slides. There are like, how many different fonts on the average system? Please please please do not use Times New Roman. It is the most boring and visually banal font, its status as the default font means that its use shows a complete lack of imagination, a sense that you don’t care about the aesthetics of your presentation, that you think you can just give us the bare minimum and we’re so out of it that we won’t notice. Look, design is easy, just make it look like what you’re used to seeing everyday. That’s pretty much all there is to successful amateur design – make it look like a junkmail flyer. When’s the last time you saw a junkmail flyer that used a serif font? You know what I mean by serifs don’t you?
So besides the fact that I’m grumpy because I’ve been having a rough couple of months, I just feel the need to vent a little because it’s so systemic. You have this considered presentation on artists such as Doré, Dali, Goya, and Picasso who’ve illustrated scenes from Don Quixote, but you have this slide show which is aggravating to look at.
She connected a scene that Goya illustrated with his more famous Sleep of Reason image, but then got into the speculative diagnosis of trying to tell us that Goya encoded all this stuff into the Quixote engraving. She speculated that the fact the he drew the Quixote’s sword resting as if it were resting against the arm of a chair, an arm which isn’t there, had something to do with Quixote’s fevered fantasies, rather than what I would say, is because Goya saw no reason to be that detailed, and that the presence of the chair’s arm would distract from the overall composition. Basically, that the chair’s arm would have been graphically superfluous. Goya’s sketchy style with engravings is one of the reasons they’re so marvelous, because engraving isn’t something you’d think lends itself to sketchiness. And with sketches, you just want to summarize and hint, let the mind of the viewer fill in the missing details, work with illusions rather than meticulous detail.
As someone whose dashed off a couple of drawings now and then, I think I know what I’m talking about here, and I can tell you that back when I was in university, one of my friends referenced one of my drawings in a paper. It happens, right, this stuff is out there, and it provides an interpretive angle, so your work gets referenced in that way. I didn’t read what he actually wrote, but from what he told me it was clear that he’d used my image as a sort of inspiration toward these new ideas, based around the formula, “it’s like…”. And I tell you this because I don’t want anyone out there thinking that Goya actually intended what Ms. Schimdt told us. Sure, you can read the image that way, but I doubt that’s what Goya had in mind. Which doesn’t invalidate either – her argument or his image – but I wish the speculative and metaphorical aspects of interpretation where far more obvious rather than being presented as a great discovery by someone clever, swept up in the current fashion of seeing everything as a riddle. The world of texts and images are not Fermat theorems.
Ok, so that out of the way, I’ll say that she began her talk around the scene in the book where Don Quixote encounters monks carrying some paintings, and she talked about what those paintings meant in the context of the post-Protestant Reformation of Catholic Europe, elucidating the context that would have been familiar to the first readers. But I wasn’t that interested so that’s all I can say.
She was followed by Stephen Rupp, who finally took the podium as more than moderator, to talk on ‘having fun with the classics, Cervantes and Virgil’. He began by reiterating something that Grossman has raised, that Renaissance culture depended on translations, and began to talk about how the epic traditionally had always been written as poems. And then my mind began to wander. I was so dissatisfied with his academic puffery I’d zoned out to think about other things.
My notes from the event include the self-admonition, ‘be nice, be fair,’ because I don’t want Mr. Rupp to read this and feel insulted or humiliated. But at the same time, it’d be dishonest of me to bullshit my way through the part where I stopped paying attention. And that’s how I reacted, I was bored, and that seems worth telling as a critique of the evening’s effectiveness. Somewhere in between our experiences – his ebullient enthusiasm for the subject, combined with his feelings of self-confidence, his enjoyment of the day and of being the dean of his department – somewhere, in the space between the front of the room, and the back, where I shifted uncomfortably with my bum falling asleep, our minds clashed in peep of fireworks invisible and unheard, snowing boredom on the gray heads below.
He could not know of my recent extreme dissatisfaction with the ivory tower, which despite all critiques and attempts at humiliation – that is, to render humble – continues to be an ivory tower, a shelter in which people can nurture a sense of their self-importance, bask in their sense of celebrity and in the rapt attention of the naïve students jumping into crippling debt to sit there doodling, not to mention their comfortable salaries enabling them to indulge in luxury goods, while the rest of us contemplate going on welfare because we can’t find work in our fields.
No, in the face of such bias, there’s nothing he really could have done except maybe be as self-effacing as the whole task of translation demands. Because, in the end, isn’t this all a form of translation? Isn’t every educational enterprise about making something understandable, taking the subject to be learnt and expressing it in a language that can be grasped by the audience? But I’m not saying his (or any of the other’s) language was inaccessible – no, that was fine. I’m just annoyed by the showmanship.
But that’s not what I was thinking about during Rupp’s entertaining presentation, since other people in the audience seemed to enjoy it. I was thinking about how I’d like to have a pint at The Green Room and wondering if my friend would be willing to bike up to Bloor to join me. In the end she wasn’t up to it. Nevertheless I skipped the roundtable discussion that followed the break, since I was so bored I felt I’d just be torturing myself to stay, and I walked down Beverly St enjoying the evening of the early summer. As I walked, I did not have Don Quixote on my mind, because I’d simply been visiting a subject which so far hasn’t been of much interest.
So all in all, the event was cool but I wasn’t the ideal audience, my mind easily distracted by not having a grounding in fascination with the subject and my distaste for academic self-importance at the expense of what I consider to be something real and human. This review suffers from those biases and the fact that I didn’t even stay for the whole thing. I want to summarize by saying: if, like me, you were merely curious, you didn’t miss much. If, on the other hand, you are obsessed by Don Quixote, I’m sorry I haven’t been able to give you a better report.
I posted a couple of things to blogTo this week: an email interview conducted with Mike Bayne, whose show opens tonight at Katherine Mulherin, and a review of the Don Quixote Symposium held last Wednesday evening at the U of T’s Munk Centre.
Now that winter is but a memory for another few months, it’s safe to exhibit its images I suppose, without the groan of ennui that sets in come March. Opening at Katherine Mulherin’s gallery on Friday is a show by Mike Bayne, the PR for which reads:
“Mike Bayne’s paintings are an exercise in photo-realism. His works are painted in the genre associated with the seventeenth century Dutch school of painting. His work is a study in the effects of natural versus artificial light, and an attempt to convey a sense of human absence and isolation. Mostly, though, the paintings address the banal or commonplace objects and spaces of everyday life, and demonstrate how under close examination they are transformed. His most recent work depicts an isolated Canadian winter landscape.”
I first encountered Mike Bayne’s work with the show he had last year at Mulherin’s, consisting of interior scenes mostly of the kitchen from what I remember. A few months later, I saw a piece, a winter scene, which quite literally blew my mind. I gasped thinking I was looking at a Vermeer, which is understandable since Bayne is consciously trying to work that way. At the time, I thought of an article I first read a couple of years ago, written by a British curator (Julian Spalding) who, while coming across as a stodgy old conservative, nevertheless articulated the ‘anti-post-modernism’ backlash that began to appear in online 2003, which I understand to be a way for this decade to define itself against the fashions of yesteryear, yesterdecade, and yestercentury. In the article, he stated:
“Looking at a great work of art makes one feel more fully aware of one’s thoughts yet no longer wearied by them, more exposed to one’s emotions yet no longer drained by them, more integrated, more composed – more, in a word, conscious. It is the light of consciousness that great works ignite in our minds. ”
Or, as Donald Kuspit wrote in 1999, bemoaning the tired old avant-garde (a term, we should remember, that comes from the era of World War I), and the rise of the ‘New Old Materism’:
“The attempt to create beauty as perfectly as possible has led these artists to emphasize craft — not at the expense of vision, but as its instrument. Sol LeWitt once wrote that “When an artist learns his craft too well he makes slick art,” but the New Old Masterism makes it clear that one can never learn one’s craft too well, and the result of doing so is not slick but uncanny. For superior craft intensifies sight so that it becomes insight, which is what occurs in highly crafted Old Master art.”
Seeing Bayne’s little painting that time ignited my mind in a way that made me understand what Spalding was talking about. Further, the intensification of sight toward insight seemed applicable as well. So I’m looking forward to this new show,am fan of Bayne’s work, and as someone who dabbles with paint myself now and then, I emailed him regarding for interview, conducted via email. The questions and answers are below.
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First of all – some background. Where are you from?
I was born and grew up in Ottawa, lived in Kingston for a few years and have lived in Toronto for the past year.
At the time of your last show at Katherine Mulherin’s, you were doing your MFA at Concordia so I’m curious as to whether you are still there and where you did your undergrad. And that leads into – plans for the future? Do you intend to teach? Do you think you can make a living selling your work?
I’m not in Montreal and I never really lived there. I commuted from Kingston, where I did my undergrad at Queen’s, to Montreal for the three years of my MFA. In terms of teaching, I would like to but have not received an offer from anyone. As to whether I can make a living from selling my work I would like to think it is possible though I have been repeatedly told that I have to do bigger paintings and more of them if I want this to be possible.
I’m curious as well as to how you approach painting – have you ever gotten caught up in ideological struggles with people who think painting is lame, or generally have you had a very supportive environment? I ask this in a sense because your work is self-consciously reflective of the Old Masters, so have you spent years dealing with the ‘why bother’ question, and in particular, ‘why not take a photograph?’ Why, in the end, have you chosen painting?
I have met people who say painting is dead and the future is audio or installation or digital or whatever but I disagree. I don’t think painting or any medium for that matter should be dominant over any of the others. I think there is room for a plurality of mediums that can coexist and be weighted equally. Otherwise, though, I have generally been exposed to a pretty supportive environment even if the profs. or other students weren’t working in the same style or medium as myself.
As to why I don’t just take a photograph, I guess I could, it’s just that I enjoy painting, and I enjoy painting from photographs specifically. Whether the end result is better than the original photo or even worthwhile, I’m undecided. On the one hand, I feel justified in that I’m continuing a tradition of painters using cameras dating back at least to the fifteenth century and artists like Vermeer and currently practiced by artists as diverse as Richter, Close, Saville, Paul Fenniak, Rod Penner, as well as a number of others. On the other hand, I think anyone who spends eight to ten hours a day, alone, staring at a one inch by one inch square area and trying to reproduce it using vegetable oil and ground pigment would seriously question what they are doing with their life.
Do you work in any other media?
No. I did the obligatory print making, sculpture and experiments in painting required during undergrad but have never really been interested in practicing anything other than oil painting since I started using the medium at around sixteen or seventeen years of age.
What is your method? You obviously work from photographs. Projection, transfer, square-up or freehand? What’s your smallest brush size, what’s your largest? How long do you work on a painting?
First, I have my negatives blown up to eight by twelve inches. I then create a grid on a piece of mylar and lay it over the photo. I trace an identical grid on a primed piece of masonite and then draw, in graphite, the information in every square of the mylar grid in the grid on the masonite. I then remove the mylar grid from the photo and ‘block in’ the drawing on the masonite in thin washes of diluted oil paint. Once that is dry (one day), I begin the ‘over painting’. The paint is mixed thickly in this stage, using little or no medium and applied in successive layers once each underlayer has dried. There may be as little as one layer or as many as nine or ten in any one area. This entire process can take between four to six weeks and does not include time spent researching materials or artists or taking photos.
As for my materials, I use nine tubes of Stevenson’s oil paint, ‘OO’ Galleria short handle round brushs, ‘3/8’ Raphael short handle rounds, and my medium is a mixture of two thirds linseed oil, one third mineral spirits and several drops of cobalt siccative. I keep all of these materials in glass bottles and jars for longevity. As a support I use 1/8 of an inch masonite boards primed on both sides at least four times and sanded between layers with a fine sand paper.
People often ask whether I use projection or whether I print the image right onto the support and paint over it and I always tell them I never have. Although I’m not against the idea of artists working this way, I just find the grid system works well for me.
What is your relation to your subject matter? I’m tempted to take photos of my kitchen and try to paint them as you do, simply for the exercise. (I recently tried meditation for it’s relaxation benefits but have found spending time drawing to be just as good – since it seems to be all about concentrating and focus on one thing in order to give the rest of your mind a rest). I wonder if you approach the meticulousness of your paintings in the same way – that it doesn’t really matter what you paint, as long as you’re painting something, and the attention to detail must be mediatative. I read on the Galerie de Bellefeuille website about how there’s a study of natural and artificial light happening, the transformation of everyday objects, and a study of empty space … and how your most recent work at the time involved the sadness of winter. Given that the Old Masters had a neo-platonic relationship to the sun and light, does any of this enter into your work? Is your study of the past limited to the techniques or are you interested in their philosophies as well?
Firstly, I have never really experimented with meditation though from what I have heard I think the process of painting as I do could be said to be ‘meditative’ in a way. To answer, the second part of your question, you are right, it doesn’t really matter what I am painting, in one sense, and I choose as subject matter what is readily available. That being said there is a lot that is readily available that I choose not to paint. Why I choose one subject over another I’m not quite sure. It could be the lighting at that particular moment, the way objects or buildings are arranged, the combinations of colours, the general mood the scene or objects evoke or my mood at the time I decide to paint what I do. To answer the last part of your question, I wouldn’t say I’m particularly influenced by the philosophies of the old masters in the sense that I think their perspective of light would have had specific religious connotations. I have a naturalistic perspective of the light depicted in my paintings. It doesn’t represent the light of God to me personally though I wouldn’t object if someone felt that way about it. On the other hand though, I think we as a species are attracted to light on some fundamental level in the same way other biological entities are and which I’m not really capable of explaining.
Mike Bayne’s show opens Friday, May 13 7-10pm at Katherine Mulherin Gallery, 1086 Queen West. Photo from the gallery website.
[…] If you hear low moaning and tortured shrieks coming from your neighbour this week, he or she might be an artist going through cable TV withdrawal (among other types).
This time last year, multimedia artist Timothy Comeau received a grant from the Ontario Arts Council to purchase cable services for eight artists for one year. The goal, Comeau says, was to see what the artists would make if they were suddenly given access to dozens of channels.
“I feel that we’re entitled to as much media/information as possible,” Comeau tells me.
“Cable TV is a library and gallery that media artists, due to their relative poverty, don’t have access to. Painters and sculptors can go to museums on free nights, but is there free access to music videos, commercials, or news programs? All are worth knowing about if your medium is video. But most artists simply can’t afford a cable TV subscription – so this project became an experiment with one person socialism.”
Performance artist and filmmaker Keith Cole used his time in front of the box to discover that he spends way too much time in front of the box.
“I will not miss having cable! I have wasted so much time – I’m happy to see it go. Although I loved it, I will not mourn it – kind of like this guy I stalked last year.”
Cole plans to make a dance piece and “a truly horrible painting” based on what he learned from reality television about successful stalking. He’s also come up with a starring vehicle for his acting career.
“What about a show with a drag queen /actress who is slightly washed up and overweight but whose career is suddenly revived … with the adorable Paul Gross as my on again/off again boyfriend who is from the wrong side of the tracks?”
Stay tuned.
RM Vaughan, ‘The Big Picture‘ National Post Sat. May 10 2005
Date: Tuesday 14 January 2003 10:54 PM
a girl named cate
probably pronounces it sate
and writes poems about horses
a guy named tim
doesn’t go to the gym
and writes dumb poems about heroic forces
and all the while
the children smile,
the stupid couples hold hands on tv
and the sun sets
while the moon rests
and we watch Baron Munchausen starring a young Sarah Polley
Thursday 15 April 2004
Christian Boltanski walks along the street, waiting and watching for the streetcar, which has failed to arrive. Caught in the backward glances every couple of minutes, he fails to notice Leanna, who walks out of the corner store, having just purchased bubble gum and a bottle of water. He walks into her, and after the shuffling has completed itself, they both engage in apologies. Then he asks, ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’ and she replies, ‘I don’t think so.’ He squints and turns and walks away. The streetcar has still not come. The buildings frame a scene consisting almost solely of headlights.
Some guy walked into me today, she says, when she tells him about it later. He in turn tells her of the time a woman in an electric wheelchair ran over his foot. ‘I was waiting for the streetcar, ‘ he says, ‘and it was cold, I had my hood up, so I had no peripheral vision and I was reading the newspapers in the boxes, when suddenly I feel this pressure on my foot. The woman mumbles ‘shume’ and I look down to see that my right foot is pinned under her wheel. I can’t budge. I say, ‘Can you back up, my foot is stuck’. She complies. She takes off, and I’m left with a sore foot. I figured I’d at least have a bruise but I didn’t.
‘You’re lucky you didn’t lose any toes,’ she says.
A new review is up at blogTO, on the Kelly Mark show at Wynick Tuck and the show at the AGYU.
Kelly Mark is everywhere right now – at YYZ, in the news because of the Glow House, and as well, she has a show on at Wynick Tuck. Last night I dreamt that I was in Wynick Tuck noticing that none of the Letraset drawings had sold, as if they were too new, too avant-garde (such a discredited idea anyway) but now as I find the memory was nothing more than a dream, it doesn’t seem important enough to fact check to see if any have. I didn’t notice the other day when I was in.
Although in my dream, it seemed a shame, because they are quite good. Looking at them I thought of Marcel Duchamp’s machinery in the Large Glass, mostly because I recently found this great website that demystifies Duchamp’s work, and last weekend I found this other website that offers animated graphics helping to explain biochemistry. The conversion of ADP into ATP, the basic molecule of cellular energy, reminded me of the animated Large Glass. My immidiate impression was that computers are so wonderful, allowing us to animate what Duchamp envisioned, and allowing us to see what our cells are doing everyday, processes that have been difficult to imagine before.
Kelly Mark’s work using Letraset seems to represent a dynamic dance and swirl of letters, moving across page and frame to frame. While the individual pieces can stand alone, they are arranged as polyptychs and the line around which the marks are organized flow from one panel to the other. There is a dynamic machinery here, and the fontography by its black and white and serifed nature reminds me of the early century’s dynamic steam machines, which inspired Duchamp to abandon paintings of traditional subject matter in favor of engineered renderings of choclate-grinders and the hormonal process of love as if mediated by particles of malic-molded matter.
In addition to these drawings, Mark, who perhaps is punning on her name with all this, has attempted to extend the idea of drawing by taking wooden forms of the usual pottery – vases, jugs, plates, etc, and covered them with graphite, giving them the nice dark gray sheen we’re familiar with from bored schoolday scribbling. As someone who likes to fool around with a pencil now and then, I couldn’t help but wonder if she just got some raw graphite at the store and used that, or if she laboriously went at the forms with pencils. Given the nature of Conceptual practice which tends to emphasize the execution of patience rather than skill, I wouldn’t be surprised if Mark had used pencils. But again, such a detail seems minor to the finished product.
Given that contemporary pencils are a form of ceramic – the lead of pencils usually something like carbon mixed with a clay, these sculptures aren’t that far fetched … complimenting the traditional form which is made pure from clay, and replacing it with the veneer – in this case, the clay mixed with carbon and preserved with a matte varnish so that you can handle the works without dealing with smudging. Since the mid-19th Century invention of electroplating, which enabled the alchemistic goal of turning base metals into gold, there has been a long history now of coating crap with a sheen of special elements; Mark has extended this by coating a form that has lent itself to admiration with an element that has also lent itself to admiration when it falls together on a page into the light and shade of a scene, reversing the usual properties by using a veneer of ceramic on our other most malleable material, wood.
Kelly’s show at YYZ is on down the hall from Wynick Tuck. As a member of YYZ’s board of directors, I don’t feel like I should review it. Although I once reviewed a show there last January, I’ve decided that I won’t anymore. But I bring it up because of the odd coincidence of titles – Mark’s show at YYZ is called horror/suspense/romance/porn/kung-fu and consists of the recorded glow from the television which had been playing films of those genres. The show opened on April 8th, a Friday, and the next Wednesday, on April 13th, the latest show at the Art Gallery of York University (AGYU) opened with the title Horror, Science Fiction, Porn.
‘Tis the season of words it seems. For some reason the zeitgeist in our city has organized the curatorial and artistic minds into a season of alphabets. Mark’s letraset drawings tease out the inherent visual geometries of what we’ve taken for granted since we learned how to spell – that we manage to communicate, share thoughts, break hearts and win them, through designed lines.
A personal aside now – ’tis also the season of graduation, and the show at the AGYU reminded me of my own graduating April, after a rather lazy semester when I pretty much cruised to the last day … such was the nature of the school. But I’d signed up for an intro to video course for my last semester, because the previous summer I’d read Bill Viola’s book and it interested me in the medium that was everywhere but which I’d never before taken much formal interest in, focused as I was on drawing and painting.
In addition, I had a hard time with stories throughout school. I always have a case of writer’s block when I have to invent a narrative. So for my last project, for this Intro to Video class, I was stuck. But, as Charlie Kaufman knows well, an old trick is to use the present condition if you can’t make one up; so I ended up making a video on my writer’s block.
But what Viola had impressed on me was that the invention of film and video had been a sort of miracle which we long ago grew used to, forgetting that for all of time previous, that immense well of forgetting and flash, images had been static. As someone who went to school to learn painting, I had been interested in those static images, in that long history of capturing milliseconds of the universe in shapes. Television and film fools us into thinking we have peepholes into other rooms, other places, other times, all due to an optical and conceptual illusion.
My reawakened interest then was in the animated image and it gave me a new appreciation for the silent film. So my film was silent, relying on the animated image, and the narration provided by text.
Ok – so lets get back to alphabetics. I remember when David Carson was the hottest thing; Raygun seemed the coolest, most innovative magazine going in the mid-90s, at the time that I was self-consciously a student of all things cultural. Raygun sort of coincided with my first studies in Heidegger, and what was really fetching about Raygun’s ‘anti-design’ was its strained, blurred, hard to read text. Because of that, you paid much more attention to it. The seemlessness of the interface was interrupted, and you became conscious of text as a visual element.
William Gibson’s preface in the Raygun book, Out of Control (1997), pointed out that learning to read is something we spend a lot of time doing. We have to learn to use this technology over years, so that eventually it becomes something you can do unconsciously, at a glance, so much so that you can’t help but understand what the alphabet-symbols mean when printed across the chest or the ass of some girl, the mixed messages of reproductive genetics and advanced civilization combined in some petty advert for one’s alma matter or allegiance to social stereotype. Text becomes as easy to process as speech after a while, and we see past the geometry of the marks that make it up.
Which brings me to the second thing about text that’s worth mentioning – everytime I get into a conversation about how I’m an artist, the person I’m talking with usually dismiss their own attempts with, ‘oh, I can’t draw anything’. What I should say, instead of cringing and wanting to talk about anything but my ‘specialness’ because I can slap some paint around now and then, is that ‘if you can write your name you can draw’. We are forced into the repetitive exercises as children of drawing triangles and squares and circles, eventually forming the triangles of A’s and the line with curves of B’s etc until we can finally draw the simple shaped alphabet and eventually put them together into words.
So, this show at the AGYU isn’t so much one of ‘nothing to see here ‘cept a bunch of writing’, as it was a reminder for me of the shape of the letters, of the visual aspect and relationship to drawing that the written word has. It was also a reminder of my experience in artschool with video and text.
Now, what the writing in this show communicates I couldn’t really tell you, besides what’s made obvious by the title of the show. These three text based works come from the genres mentioned, but I didn’t bother to read everything. Overwhelmed by the overall message of the function of letters as symbols and drawings, I didn’t really care to read what appeared to be mostly uninteresting.
The title says it all – there’s a text of pornography, by Fiona Banner, writ large, in hot pink, ‘she grabed his cock,’ etc, and the world as become so pornofied through the internet, iMovie and relatively cheap video cameras I was bored and unmoved. In the same room was a shelf with books, ‘The Nam’ which showed off a nice design, one of the books being displayed on a plinth, the text of which being some Vietnam war story in the same blocky font used for the porn story, this time printed black and single sided.
The middle room was a little more interesting. This was the sci-fi part, but here the experience is of a projected 8mm film, consisting of nothing but the words of some contrived alien drama. The cohesion of the story is pulled apart by the projector being on a robotic armature, so that it projects the text across the walls of the gallery at different times, always moving. The animation of the projection is what I appreciated by this, and at this point I was reminded of my artschool video, where I had a line that read:
‘I wanted to move you with images
Soft, subtle, sublime
But you cannot be moved by images, only silent words’
Here, you get the attempt by the artist Rosa Barba to move you with moving words, which aren’t even silent, as we have to listen to the whir of the oldschool 8mm machine.
The back room had the ‘horror video’ by Nathalie Melikian, which again consisted of sentences that I didn’t bother to read, (I know – I’m a horrible critic) the horror aspect seemingly conveyed by the ominous soundtrack.
The PR for this show states: ‘ In conjunction with this year’s Images Festival [which is now over], the AGYU presents Fiona Banner, Rosa Barba, and Nathalie Melikian, artists who look at film but project it to another end–as film experienced through language, which is why the exhibition Horror, Science Fiction, Porn includes no actual films. This international group of artists – from Britain, Germany, and Canada – looks at language’s determinant conditioning and indeterminate effects through a variety of film genres. The conventions that establish a genre (right from the start with the writing of the script) and those that manipulate the spectator, are only partly at play in this examination as these artists relate the genres of science fiction, action, horror, and pornography to their constructions, technical apparatus, and reception.’
If the PR is the recipe for how we, the audience born yesterday, are supposed to respond, I think it’s a failure. If you check out this show, there’s no way you would respond according to this formula, but at least the language the AGYU is putting out is getting better (perhaps prompted by Jennifer McMackon’s blog which has been publicizing the ‘discombobulated PR’ you get from these institutions over the past year).
It’s text … on walls. And for the PR to say that it contains no films at all is dishonest, as the sci-fi piece uses 8mm, and the back room uses video, which admittedly isn’t film, but what’s the difference?
While film seems to be all about animating images, the use of film to project text in two of these peices blends the forms in ways that seem similar to Kelly Mark’s wooden ceramics. As for the porn piece, it seems nothing more profound than Playboy wallpaper. The most generous thing I can say about it is that it reminds me of the old double-entendre, ‘You wanna come upstairs to check out my prints?’
Kelly Mark at Wynick Tuck is on until April 30 and the show at YYZ is on until May 21, both at 401 Richmond St, and both galleries are closed Sundays and Mondays.
The AGYU show continues until June 12, at York University, Ross Building. Photos courtesy of the websites of Wynick Tuck and the AGYU.
The Crisis
Premise – 1. No one gives a shit about anything anymore. Is this true? What do people actually seem to care about?
Answer – When I say ‘people’ who do I mean? Have the generations become so stratified that one really should say:
a ‘what do old people care about’,
b ‘what do the middle aged care about?’
c ‘what do young people care about?’
d ‘what do teenagers care about?’
e ‘what do children care about?’
f ‘what do todlers care about?’
Notice how this is exactly the language of marketing research. And if you pay attention to trends, watch advertisements between the dramas and the laughs, and catch the pronouncements of the Marketeers when they make it into the news, you can answer each one.
a. What do old people care about?
Supposedly, old people care about health care. Access to medicine. The government is supposed to subsidize pills and make them easy to get a hold of. Old people are also supposed to be concerned with their retirement, and having their pensions and being able to enjoy their last years. They also supposedly have trouble getting in and out of the bathtub.
b. What do the middle aged care about?
Supposedly they care about sexual disfunction, and other medical conditions requiring the latest and greatest pill. New cars, home care, this generation seems to be the target of Canadian Tire ads for lawnmowers and power washers.
c. what do young people care about?
Supposedly, people within my age range care about bein’ kul. Too happenin to pay attention for very long, everything is zip wham flash – snappy headlines, snappy stories, George Stroumboulopoulos giving it to us straight by cutting out the fat. Dose!
Dude, I got to like get my concert tickets and shit, and I don’t watch TV because it’s stupid, and I can’t afford cable, and I don’t buy the paper cuz who cares?
So how the fuck do you know what’s going on in the world?
I don’t cuz like, who cares?
-or-
I check out Reuters on the internet, drudgereport, watch The Daily Show ….
So basically, the internet and The Daily Show is where you get your news?
Yeah.
-or-
I read the free weeklies
c. What do teenagers care about?
Apparently, teenagers have always been susceptible to vanity, self-esteem issues, and a desire to get laid. Apparently, adults have always thought this was terrible. The biological irony is that when they were teenagers, the same adults went through the same thing, only they grew up, learned why this was terrible etc – or at least that’s the old model.
Under the old model, the awfulness repeats itself and the parents are too inept at communication and memory that they give the kids a hard time, packing a suitcase full of issues for them to take into their young adulthood, and sabotaging their chances of having anything close to a fulfilling and sane relationship until they’re well into their 30s or 40s, if ever. Under the old model, the good parents can guide their kids through the process, so that they emerge mentally healthy at the end of it.
But under the New Model there are mother and daughter teams who prance around like they’re both 16. This creates the danger that the children think silly vanity is ok. I, however, imagine this scenario for that future: the horror of their botoxed parents shocks them into the awareness that unaging freakiness isn’t natural and that maybe nature’s got a good thing going with the whole ‘old folk dying to make way for the new’ thing. Eventually, the children of such people will realize this on their own and be embarrassed by the behavior of their parents who refused to grow up. (I’ve always found it more than a little weird how some people glorify immaturity since, by definition, maturity is when you’re at your prime, so why want to remain less than that? It’s like, everyone’s choosing to be ‘medium’ rather than ‘well done’. Perhaps it’s no accident that mediocre is so popular, the law of the distribution of averages withstanding).
d. What do children care about?
Apparently they can be reliably counted on to be fascinated with dinosaurs, and they like to play. Cartoons, and toys, and fanciful stories; sugar and spice and everything naughty and nice, this is what little people are made of. Especially sugar – candy fiends. Today, they are also inclined to care about weight loss.
e. What do toddlers care about?
I don’t know, learning to walk? Child development psychology is filling in those gaps for us, since no grown up alive seems able to remember their first few years outside of the womb. Probably because before we learned to speak, we had no way to organize our memories. I remember learning to spell my name one afternoon with a magic marker and a sheaf of paper, but I was past my toddler years by then.
So back to the problem – no one give a shit about anything. True or False?
T.
Because ‘no one’ doesn’t exist. Society no longer seems unified by anything except by the new language of demographics. Cultural identity is important, and people define themselves by their jobs. When you meet someone, you ask them what they do, looking to fill in the picture, looking for insight into what type of person they are. We all learn the dangers of stereotyping and prejudice, but all seem to have a feeling that a stockbroker is a different chap than a lawyer, and that the office copy girl’s life might be a bit more boring than a girl who introduces herself with the words, ‘I’m an actress’.
Interest groups, interest groups, interest groups everywhere!
So, a new question: is this a problem?
The Old School would answer that of course this is a problem. Everything is built out of the metanarratives – remember those? History, mythology, Jesus, Vitamin C …. there are problems in the world, we are citizens of a Western society, and further, citizens of a demographic nation! We have freedom of speech!
And the freedom to not give a shit.
I’m left thinking that the feeling of crisis that hangs in the air is only one under the Old Models. Under the new models, since no one cares, it’s nothing. People aren’t even paying attention. What’s the worst that could happen people ask? And what are the answers? No one can even come up with those, since everything seems to keep functioning.
Transit strike!
What transit strike, they came up with a last minute offer.
Election!
What election?
Do I really have to vote again?
Whatever, what does the government do?
As the Conservatives and the NDP keep reminding us – the Liberals haven’t done shit for 12 years and people with jobs still got their jobs, and people on welfare are still seen as poor suckers, and everywhere, Federal inaction has begun to give the impression that Ottawa isn’t necessary. They’re behind-the-scenes fellows … as long as the show keeps going on, no one thinks the stagehands are important, because razzle dazzle and …. wait, did I just see a celebrity in Yorkville? But that’s an old argument. Helicopters keep falling out of the sky because of Liberal inaction. And the broken promises, from getting rid of the GST on, it’s been Red Book dreams at election time, and the nightmare of policy review come afternoon.
Christ. I can’t help but say that the feeling of doom that I see hovering above the grave of John Paul II and the rest of the 20th Century’s cast of characters, is one exacerbated by my own dismal finances, and the irresponsibility of not even opening the bills that came in the mail because I didn’t have the money to pay them when they arrived. But now it’s all caught up with me and I’m dealing with it. I’ll get through it again; I’ll get through it for this week. I can say that a certain lack of courage of facing the problem then, because it seemed unsolvable, was out of a feeling that it’ll be solvable in the future, and in a sense that’s how it’s turned out, only the future came a little quicker than I expected. Anyway, I want to say that my behavior in this way mirrors that of the politicians and the leaders of our society. Focused on keeping the spinning machine from whirling out of control on a week by week basis – or, a quarter by quarter basis – they put off and juggle deadlines and ongoing problems. But eventually the chickens come home to roost. The Liberals are fucked because of everything John Ralston Saul warned us about ten years ago in The Unconscious Civilization. It’s all caught up to them.
The Prime Minister wanted to talk to the nation directly, because he doesn’t trust the filter of the media, and he thinks that he couldn’t do it through Parliament. Have you watched Parliament lately? There’s a call to order every few minutes. I don’t blame P.M. P.M. at all. I think it’s one of the few things he’s done that shows decisiveness. The fact that the media are all like, ‘it’s not a national crisis, what’s he thinking’ – all I can say is shame on them. The motherfuckers. They were spinning it as if the shows he was going to interrupt were a million time more important than mere politics.
Now, it’s easy to see the broadcasters as simply in the pockets of advertisers etc … of course they are … but I think what’s I found most bothersome was the visceral reaction – as if the fucking O.C. was suddenly sacred. The Globe and Mail – a print source, who is supposed to be competing with broadcasting! – took this line, printing a picture from the O.C. between politicians. Benedict the 16th – you interrupt the soap operas to show him waving to the crowd for the first time, sure – but our Prime Minister going head to head with Friends re-runs? Who does he think he is? The Pope?
Ok. Fine. I guess I have to accept that fact that whatever comes out of a Hollywood studio is in someways connected with the stringed beads and red threads of religion. Just have to face reality there. But I’m really embarrassed by a media so lacking in insight and imagination to equate speaking with your countrymen has only something you do in emergency. When actions speak louder than words, his action rose above the heckles of the Parliament and drowned out the talking heads and the Avid editors who’d have soundbited anything he’d said in Parliament to determinant of the message.
It almost makes me want to vote for the Liberals, if only Jack Layton wasn’t so damn sane and sensible. Honestly, why isn’t this guy running rings around the others? Oh, wait, I forget, because he doesn’t appeal to ‘the people’ as there are no people. Only demographics. I suppose I remain the overeducated, compassionate, bitchy demographic, which isn’t kul, and therefore, who cares what I think.
Steven Pinker writes here:
Of course, just because men and women are different does not mean that the differences are triggered by genes. People develop their talents and personalities in response to their social milieu, which can change rapidly. So some of today’s sex differences in cognition could be as culturally determined as sex differences in hair and clothing. But the belief, still popular among some academics (particularly outside the biological sciences), that children are born unisex and are molded into male and female roles by their parents and society is becoming less credible. [emphasis mine] Many sex differences are universal across cultures (the twentieth-century belief in sex-reversed tribes is as specious as the nineteenth-century belief in blood-deprived ovaries), and some are found in other primates. Men’s and women’s brains vary in numerous ways, including the receptors for sex hormones. Variations in these hormones, especially before birth, can exaggerate or minimize the typical male and female patterns in cognition and personality. Boys with defective genitals who are surgically feminized and raised as girls have been known to report feeling like they are trapped in the wrong body and to show characteristically male attitudes and interests. And a meta-analysis of 172 studies by psychologists Hugh Lytton and David Romney in 1991 found virtually no consistent difference in the way contemporary Americans socialize their sons and daughters. Regardless of whether it explains the gender disparity in science, the idea that some sex differences have biological roots cannot be dismissed as Neanderthal ignorance.
He goes on to say, after discusing the psychology of the taboo:
At some point in the history of the modern women’s movement, the belief that men and women are psychologically indistinguishable became sacred. The reasons are understandable: Women really had been held back by bogus claims of essential differences. Now anyone who so much as raises the question of innate sex differences is seen as “not getting it” when it comes to equality between the sexes. The tragedy is that this mentality of taboo needlessly puts a laudable cause on a collision course with the findings of science and the spirit of free inquiry.
Of course, this whole article has to do with the Larry Summers Affair over the winter.
Earlier in the week I dissed American intellectuals as largely all being lame, saying that the luminaries of thinking that populate American discourse tend to be Canadians working in American universities.
(Who are they you ask? Give yourself something to do and figure it out).
I forgot about Noam Chomsky. Chomsky doesn’t suffer from the mediocrity of the elites.
Andrea Dworkin at Wikipedia
Obit
In his biography of Leonardo da Vinci, Charles Nicholls argues that Bramante’s depiction of the philosopher Heraclitus is actually a portrait of Leonardo, but that the sunken eyes and tears are an affectation, as Heraclitus was seen to be a despairing philosopher, associated with melancholy.And here is Harold Bloom, with his ‘woe is me’ pose. Is Bloom really fucked up, or just using the the ‘ I’m a despairing genius!’ affectation?
While Bloom often has great perspectives and interesting things to say, I can’t help but feel this melancholic bullshit is an affectation of ‘greatness’ which Bloom projects because he wants to be seen as part of some pantheon; in reality, to me it highlights a level of mediocrity.
What the fuck is up with ‘the mediocrity of elites?’ Especially American ones, who get paraded about as if their contributions to arts and letters is something rivaling that of those from centuries past? I can count on both hands the number of truly great thinkers and contributors to the humanities in the past 50 years, and all of them are Canadian. Wait, let me think … nope, can’t come up with American names. While these thinkers may currently work in the States, they were raised in the Canadian education system.
Bloom himself credits Northrop Frye has having influenced him.
Heraclitus and Democritus by Bramante; Harold Bloom
Sunday 25 March 2001
With the acquisition of the old photo album today: As I was looking at it, weighing the idea of spending ten dollars for it, I noticed that a large number of its pages were unused. The idea occurred to me, to fill this book with contemporary photographs, to have 1910 faded black and white at the beginning, and 2001 at the end. As well, the person selling the book had Carte de Visite for sale. I had browsed through them earlier, and had a strange feeling, of looking at 19th century faces, and of course, the image of William Gibson’s imagined art work, Read us the books and the Names of the Dead.
When I got this book home, I scanned in the images of the carte de visite I had bought, and glued them into the book. I had made a sign, which read, Prelude, the 19th Century, and then, those faces, those beards, how strange they were! It is a very different world we live in. As I placed those images on the glass of the scanner, especially the one that is dated and signed, 27th August 1866, I thought of the long journey they had made, and what a strange resting place that image had found on glass between plastic and electricity. The images appear on the screen, a technology unimagined when they represented the earliest days of reproduction.
Using my Palm, I was able to determine the dates of three photographs. The first two are in the album, and are obviously taken at around the same time, since they are meant to echo one another. A picture preceding these was of a grave stone, clearly marked with a date of death of 27 May 1910. The grave is fresh, and there are flowers placed around it. I thus knew that these images were around 1910. I also noticed that the last day was a Saturday the 30th. Using my Palm, I was able to determine that it was either April 1910, September 1911, or November 1912, since those are the only months containing 30 days upon which the 30th fell on a Saturday. Closer inspection of the calendar showed that the weekends were colored differently than the weekdays, and that the first Monday was coloured differently as well. Aha! Labour day! It is September 1911. Just to make sure, I checked on the net to see when Labour Day came about, and it was established in the 1880s, so I am thus reasonably sure that these two photographs were taken that September.
The other photo, once again, a family, posed in front of a calendar. This wasn’t clear, so I scanned it in, and zoomed it up to a legible size. Manipulating the brightness and the contrast, I was able to see a clear date emerge: 1920. And, once again using the Palm, I scanned through the months for the number combination as it existed in the image: that is primarily, a Monday the 2nd, a Sunday the 8th, Sunday the 15th and a Sunday the 22nd. The Sunday the 1st wasn’t visible, so I thought that it must have been washed out by the flash. I found that August 1920 fits that description, and thus I wrote that on the back of the photo. Now regarding that grave: I want to find this grave, I want to stand where they stood and take the same photograph, only in 21st Century terms: that is, a colour snapshot, 35mm. I want to paste this in the back of the book, at roughly the same place, to provide a symmetry, and to show what 90 years does to the trees and to graves. The grave is that of a Charles Hayne, who died on “27 May 1910, at the age of 55 years 7 months”. I tried to use the net to find some records of him – this of course yielded no results and frustrated me. I now want to go to the archives downtown, and look up his death record, to find where he is buried. I think the person who sold me the book said that it came from Bridgeport, which is down around Kitchener. If I can find this information, this summer, it would be a project to accomplish.
Unrealized Moscow
Mr. Grace Kelly, His Serene Highness, lover of not only democracy and the common man, but the economics of the high-class resort, gambling, decadence, and luxury.
The King is Dead, Long Live the King!
Saul Bellow at Wikipedia
I haven’t read any of his books, but noted here because I want to keep track of the dying establishment.
Stephen Colbert on The Daily Show:
‘Do you realize that right now there is no one on Earth who is infallible? The whole thing is being run by human beings. I’m not sure if you’re aware of their track record…’
I went into Downfall with a certain reluctance; I came out with a new understanding of the history of the 20th Century. That’s no small thing, and is one of the reasons that I agree with all the good press this movie has been getting. It was not only the best World War II movie I’d ever seen, but one of the best films in general.
I wanted to see it because I’m a student of history, and I’d heard that this was based on interviews conducted with Hitler’s secretary, who was in her 20s during the last two years of the war when she worked for him. Because of this, the story is centered around her character more so than the others; but the nature of the story means we get insight into the swirl of events and the poisonous personalities involved, huddled in the underground Bunker, listening to the thunderous rumbles as the approaching Russian army shells the city.
A few years ago I was at a great talk by the painter Tony Scherman, and in his presentation he brought up the fact that in our world, with TV all over the planet, chances are there is something on the Nazis playing 24 hours a day – that at this minute, somewhere, there’s a Nazi show on. He brought it up to point out the project of ‘never forgetting’ that seems to be behind it.
At the time I was struck by the fact that, you know, history is full of atrocity, and we tend to forget them. It also seems unfair that we privilege certain stories of atrocity while ignoring others. In addition, I’ve felt that we’re living in a totally different world, so why should we keep obsessing over this stuff?
Seeing Downfall helped me understand how traumatic the war was. It’s a cliché of criticism to say that we keep getting a sanitized version of war, even now when Speilberg made Saving Private Ryan and how he made sure to have that scene of a guy looking for his arm; but that film failed in the end to make me realize the trauma because it was such a sentimental story that fundamentally seemed to insult intelligence; but similar scenes involving amputation in Downfall may have made me flinch, but this was something they experienced and took for granted, so why should I feel put upon watching it, knowing in the end it’s makeup? But the difference here, is that Downfall is a true story, an accurate recreation, filmed in a way so that by the end, I was creeped out. As I should have been. The Nazis were seriously creepy folk, which is something that isn’t usually conveyed by documentaries or by cartoon villainy.
It helped me understand that the war was such a disruptive and psychologically unsettling event, something that was the result of centuries of events, all tumbled together and out of control, that movies like this are made (that the Nazi Entertainment Industry is founded on) simply trying to understand it. The sixty years which have past seems perhaps too short a time to fully grasp what happened.
At the same time, as the recent death of the Pope reminds me, we are entering a new understanding. Because John Paul II became a priest during the Nazi occupation of Poland, and that the Cold War which he is credited with doing much to end, was a result of the epilogue of the fall of Berlin to the Red Army.
I grew up going to gun shows with my father throughout the Maritimes and saw so many Nazi artifacts that I took them for granted, artifacts being sold to collectors who wanted a piece of history more than being of the neo-variety. Such a thing to this day cannot happen in Germany – you can’t publicly display anything from that era. So, there was some controversy when this movie came out last year in Germany, because this is a German film with big-name German actors. And that was one of the things that made this so compelling – to see a film in the language in which the events actually took place, and with the historical accuracy that memory of survivors would demand. This new period of World War II studies includes films such as this, made not so much to entertain, but to document and to understand.
I’m not going to say you should go see this movie – there are lots of understandable reasons why anyone would chose not to. All I’m going to say is that I doubt you’d regret it, and thus it is highly recommended.
Downfall (Der Untergang), 2004, 148 min
Film synopsis at Tribute.ca
Film website (im Deutsch)
John Paul II 1920-2005
Pontificate 1978-2005
born: Karol Wojtyla in Wadowice, Poland
To be eventually updated with photographs when I get the digi-camera working again.
If you’ve been along Queen West and past the Drake this past month, you may have noticed the large target in a window. You may have thought it was a promotional display. But, no … it’s a work by Kristiina Lahde, and will be up until the end of the week. When I first saw it a couple of weeks ago, I was a little struck by it’s lack of umph. Lahde has taken advert fliers and cut concentric circles from them in order to produce the target pattern. It was only later that I began to sort of see the ideas come together; the ads, the target, the window; all these things are usually designed to suck you into the store – you are to be the arrow flying toward the door.
When I was growing up my father hated heavy metal music, and especially the videos. He ran a gun-shop out of the house, and the occasional weekend was spent at the gun range shooting at targets, developing sniper-like skills. To this day I can hit a bottle cap 100 metres away, because I spent all that time staring through sights at the bull’s eye. My Dad, back in the 80s, used to say that heavy metal musicians would make good target holders. I’m not sure bringing that up is really relevant, except to say that I don’t tend to think about targets much, and perhaps that’s why. They’re something I tend to take for granted, something meant to be shot at. My Dad turned them into a metaphor of frustration and dislike.
So it’s perhaps appropriate because Lahde has by coincidence extended that metaphor toward the junk-mail advertising industry. Lahde, in using adverts, has made the models and the products the target. As she states in her artist statement, she aims to highlight their junk-mail status by disrupting their function by cutting into them.
In his 1999 book, A Short History of the Future Warren Wagar described a future art, based around what we’d call socialism, that was a revived form of Realism. ‘Artists and writers blended meticulous realism with a reawakened sense of moral possibility,’ he wrote. ‘It made heroes and heroines out of common folk […]. Critics occasionally drew unkind comparisons between substantialist art and the ‘socialist realism’ decreed by Joseph Stalin and Andrei Zhdanov in … Soviet Russia. But the truly creative minds went well beyond anything imagined in the sterile diatribes of these long-dead comrades.’ In trying to imagine what such paintings might be like, I thought of the work of BC’s Chris Woods, who plays on the idea that the Church was the first franchise, and from that began to see the types of ads Kristiina uses in a new way. Like Socialist Realism, these adverts are full of smiling people.
In a January 1999 article/review of the advertising industry’s Clio awards published in Harper’s, Jonathan Dee wrote:
“An evening at the Clios makes more or less inescapable the connection between this sort of sponsored art and the art of the American television commercial: an aesthetic, in the term suggested by sociologist Michael Schudson, of ‘capitalist realism.’ Of course there are important semantic differences (Soviet art glorifies the producer; American advertising, the consumer), as well as a near reversal of the values such art is commissioned to protect – except, perhaps, to the degree that power itself can be considered a value. But the central value of American capitalist realism remains, for all its staggering refinement, as old as Marx: the fetishism of commodities. Capitalist realism amounts to an insistent portrait of the world as a garden of consumption in which any need – no matter how antimaterial, how intimate, or how social – can be satisfied by buying the right things. The relationship between the human qualities with which this art animates a given commodity and the commodity itself is a wholly fictional one, and it is upon that fiction, you could say, that our economy rests.”
I can’t help but feel that this type of concern has passed, at least on the surface. We all have memories surrounding The Battle of Seattle and its like circa 1999-2001, all of which seemed to dissolve with so much else in that reverse mushroom cloud that day in Manhattan. Consumerism doesn’t seem to be as bad as the moral outrage surrounding the subsequent Iraq war, which is so current today that Paul Isaacs got his review of a bad movie read on air last week by George Stroumboulopoulos because of how he worked into it a poke at the Bush administration.
I don’t think Lahde had all this in mind when she proposed and executed target; I’m kind of just riffing here, but it’s interesting that something so insubstantial – adverts, pasted to a window, subject to an exacto-knife, sum up the Left’s social concerns over the past five years. Since wars are all about targets and as Isaacs expressed in his review, the ‘invasion under false pretenses’ is for the Right and the Left sticky enough for both side’s outrage. Everyone’s annoyed about being lied to. Advertising, we sometimes forget, is always about that. It’s always some kind of fantasy, infantalizing adults as hopelessly lost fellows who need a product to rescue them, just as the Iraqi people supposedly needed rescuing by the gun-sights of American tanks and bombers. Capitalist Realism of smiling people frolicking in savings and greeting their liberators in the streets targets us all. It’s fortunate that we’re all capable of seeing through the exaggerated artifice.
(A Short History of the Future quote from pages 194/195 of the 3rd edition. Photo courtesy of Kristiina Lahde.)
San Fransisco’s Bay Stadium, 2154
Starfleet Headquarters, San Fransisco, 2154
The signing of the Federation Charter, 2161
The capital city of ShiKhar, planet Vulcan
The buildings of ShiKahr
The capital city of Romulus
The capital city of Romulus, showing the Senate chamber
The Romulan Senate Chamber
The Millenium Gate, from Voyager episode, 11:59
Paolo Soleri’s Hyperbuilding
Le Corbusier’s proposed revision of Paris
(images mostly from Enterprise Screencaps; others via Google and my archives)
Vulcan Monumentalism
Vulcan Monumentalism, The Fire Plains
Vulcan Monumentalism, The Fire Plains (scale)
(images mostly from Enterprise Screencaps; episode: Home, 2004)
The Power Plant’s latest show opened last night; at one point I found myself saying the familiar, ‘I need to come back’ but I never do. In this case, memory alone serves – there just isn’t that much there to see, and to go back, and do the old ‘spending time with it’ would probably be a waste of time.
This show isn’t bad. My first walk through left me unimpressed, but a few more walk throughs, and after reading the brochure, I could see that it was pretty good. But, like I said, there isn’t much to look at.
This is RTFM art. The brochure essay opens with something an American artist wrote 40 years ago, which again, reminds me of how overwith Conceptualism should be at this point, and yet it keeps churning away.
Remember, 40 years ago, how science-fiction imagined that ‘in the future’ that is, around the year 2000, people wouldn’t eat food anymore, but just take pills – pill for breakfast, lunch, diner. Presumably this was going to be great – no more need to cook and clean pots – all the time that could be saved! That my friends, was Conceptual Food. Funny how it didn’t take off -the missed opportunity to critique the capitalist restaurant system and the power relationships that lead some to suicide seems a shame, doesn’t it?
Even if we could provide all the nutrition in a pill, none of us would want that. We want to feel a full belly, enjoy a meal that delights the eyes as well as our tastebuds, a meal that smells and looks delicious, and ideally, we want to share the experience with someone else. Look at this blog – restaurant reviews all over the place.
I’m one of these people who feels the same about visual art – I want something hearty, something that delights the eyes and the mind, and the sharing part comes in when after it’s seen/experienced I go home and send off an email, or write a review that says, ‘you gotta check this out’. Darren O’Donnell’s play, and Doris McCarthy’s painting show are examples of work that I felt this way about.
The show on at the Power Plant on the other hand, I don’t feel that strongly about. To continue the analogy with food, it’s a salad. It’s a nutritious appetizer, but I can’t really imagine it’s anything to write friends about. It’s clever, as all conceptual art is supposed to be, but that’s it. It’s content over form, so there’s not much to appreciate visually.
My favorite piece plays with old-school technological fetishism, but I’m not sure it would work any other way … had it been digitized, it might haven’t been as successful – this is the piece by Jonathan Monk called Searching for the Centre, with two 8mm film projections against a sheet of regular 8.5×11 paper. As the brochure says, “Jonathan Monk asked two of his commercial dealers to pinpoint, without measuring aids, the centre of a sheet of office paper. Animating their repeated attempts, Monk projects the results against one another to form a curious dance of two subjective and competing ideas.”
And then there’s the birdcage. Why is there a birdcage in the gallery? Well, the point of this piece is that a French composer named Olivier Messiaen composed a piece in 1959, inspired by birdsong. “Messiaen,” the brochure notes, “would compose in the birds’ natural habitat – fields, meadows, etc, writing his notation as he listened.” So, Dave Allen, the artist here, figured he’d reverse the process with his The Mirrored Catalogue d’Oiseaux, which the brochure elaborates: “As Allen states, ‘in the work I reverse/mirror the process of direct composition by playing back Messiaen through a stereo to an aviary housing birds … adept at mimicry’ “. The birds didn’t seem to be chirping last night, but the crowd was loud. I imagine this piece will take some time to achieve itself, so perhaps it’s best that you check it out after a couple of weeks.
The idea behind the curatorial coherence is that the pieces shown here all are relational in some way. “Dedicated to you, but you weren’t listening [the show’s title] assembles a small group of works that grow from the collaborative and performative spirit of Conceptual practice, looking specifically to those transformed or composed in relation to something outside the artist’s direct control”.
There are however, two things about this that I feel the need to point out. As I’ve mentioned that I want something delightful to the eye, it’s notable that the brochure chose the two birds, sitting on a branch, from the Dave Allen piece for their cover. This mislead someone I know, a painter, to come to the opening expecting to see paintings. Then, there’s the title, ‘dedicated to you, but you weren’t listening’. They’ve anticipated a certain futility in showing these pieces, because…
No, for the most part, we haven’t been listening – you’re offering us pills on a plate.
So there’s obviously awareness from the part of the gallery that this show may not be of interest to anybody except those of us indoctrinated into its mythos.
But it terms of relational practice, the star of this show is obviously Jeremy Deller – the most recent winner of the Turner Prize. I attended the opening partially to hear a performance of his ‘Acid Brass’. I’d seen Deller give a talk late in 2003, which was really interesting. In the early 90s, he commissioned a local brass band to play acid house music, combining two segments of British society- the then kids with the elders. Last night, Toronto horn-musicians played some of these pieces, a performance which wasn’t that rousing, since acid house music has dated. Deller has a doodle-diagram called ‘The History of the World’ reproduced on one of the gallery’s walls, but the real highlight is that for the duration of the show, they will be showing his The Battle of Orgreave which used British historical re-enactors to stage a 1984 anti-Thatcherite protest that turned ugly when the police got all thuggish. The film of this reenactment will show Wednesdays at 7pm.
Dedicated to you, but you weren’t Listening on at The Power Plant until May 23rd
The Power Plant, at the Harbourfront Centre, 231 Queen’s Quay West
Tue-Sun 12-6, Wed 12-8, closed on Mondays except for Holidays
Tours: Sat-Sun 2 and 4pm, Wed 6.30p
www.thepowerplant.org
(image from thepowerplant.org – Jonathan Monk’s Searching for the Centre.)
Front Gallery: Kevin Schmidt, Fog
Back Gallery: Matthew Suib, Cocked
Mercer Union has two shows on right now – a video projection in the backroom, and the front space is showing two photographs. The front space show is one of these self-indulgent pieces that demand patience from the viewer. Frankly Kevin Schmidt thought more about his show than you will. But, is that a problem? Should you want something that’s immediate and clear all the time? If you understood everything effortlessly all the time, wouldn’t that get kind of boring?
The front gallery has been painted black to accommodate the wall-size projections of ‘dvd stills’ (since slides are so 20th Century). I don’t know if this is just an innovative use of that format or if it’s a film put on pause … but the subject here is that Schmidt got a hold of some dry ice, dragged it into the woods and took pictures of the resulting fog-like effect. The point of this is supposed to be some kind of inquiry into the nature of film, and of movie making, and influenced by the Vancouver school of conceptual photography, not to mention that fact that Vancouver is the home of many television productions, especially those that want to be a bit creepy.
All I can say is go to Mercer Union, stand in the dark, stare at the pictures of the woods, and then and have your conceptual epiphanies, go home, and tell your friends that the show is great, because that’s what all parties involved would like you to do. Personally, the show made me uncomfortable because I didn’t want to suspend my judgement and be coddled into believing all this is worth my attention just because Mercer Union thinks it is, and because Schmidt found this interesting enough to do in the first place. Part of me did find it a little delightful, but at the same time, that element was drowned out by the overarching appearance of manipulation.
By that I mean, this type of work questions how the gallery and the artist collaborate into trying to make you think something is great when by all appearances it’s rather mundane. The biggest problem I have with Schmidt’s show is not quality nor the idea – all of which is fine – but the overblown execution – wall size work, painting the gallery black, there for 6 weeks – such demands for so little effect. It plays into the ideas of the heroic artist, the person whose demands are met to satisfy ambition and ego.
While I’m suggesting the Schmidt is a self-indulgent egotist, whose work plays off the back room’s video very well as a reminder of masculine energy, I need to say that this is what artist-run-centres are for. They exist so that artists can be self-indulgent and take risks. They aren’t meant to create cannons – that’s what the AGO is for. Get into the AGO – yeah, you’re part of this slender stream of an Art History – get a show at Mercer, you’re just another artist whose experiment has been allowed to be shown. My subjective response is that I’d rather Mercer’d shown another artist’s studio experiments in the front gallery, but that’s not to say that you might not get something out of it. The idea of staring at these photographs in order to appreciate the falsity of film is to me ridiculous. We know film is fake, so what’s the point of this?
I appreciated the back room’s video for it’s clever editing to delimitate a stereotype that (with luck) we are increasingly moving away from. This video by Matthew Suib, called Cocked is seen to be a good pairing with the front room, perhaps because of the fact that the front gallery, painted black and pitch dark, allows for the cinematic quality of the images to come through, with its samples the scenes from Cowboy Westerns around the classic dual. Lots of squints, shifty eyes, the hand hovering over the gun. Watching it, I thought of my own father’s appreciation for this genre, one that is deeply rooted in the 1950s. Given all the discussion over the past 15 years around gender and identity politics, you can’t help watch all these cold stares and stone faces and not see how much the Western not only embodied, but communicated the manly ideal to a generation of men. Especially all this nonsense of being heroic, of not taking crap, of taking yourself so seriously that you not only demand a gallery’s 6 weeks for your photographs, but want to shoot someone who looks at you funny over the spittoon. The title here is a obviously, a double-entendre referring to the cocking back of the revolver’s hammer, as much as it refers to the cocky bravado of the men strutting their peacock’s anatomy in the brothel, later that evening, after the pigeons have flown and some dusty fellow has ridden off into the sunset.
The shows at Mercer run until April 16th
Kevin Schmidt will give a talk on Friday, 08 April at 7:30 PM
37 Lisgar St, Tues-Sat 11-6
The first letter from Edmonton has been received and posted:
goodreads.ca/edmonton
Last night I found some French blogs, via the Paris newspaper, Liberation. Here are three entries by Pierre Haski, Liberation’s Beijing correspondent, which I translated to share.March 11
We’re done for
In the 1960s, the Club of Rome, composed of great spirits, considered a ‘zero development’ report because the planet didn’t have enough energy resource to sustain that era’s development. Four decades later, we’re already there, and another Institute is warning of the same thing, this time regarding China.
The Earth Policy Institute, based in Washington, just went through the same classic intellectual exercise: if the Chinese maintain the same rate of development, and they’d equal that of the Americans in 2031, and if they began consuming at the same rate as the Americans, what would happen? The spectacular result: there would be 1.1 billion cars in China (versus the 795 million in the world today), the Chinese would consume more gasoline/oil that the whole world today produces, they’d eat 4/5ths of the world’s production of meat, 2/3rds of the grains, and you’d need to double the world’s production of paper (thus cutting down more forests).
You might say that’s an absurd scenario, except that we see today the few million Chinese who already effectively live the ‘American lifestyle’, that is, they have one or two cars, and are active participants in a consumerist society, as identical as that we know in “the West”. The American Dream as assuredly entered the minds of the Chinese.
The real problem of this study is the conclusion: it underlines that the Western model cannot be applied to China, simply because that planet doesn’t have enough resources (especially if India applies it as well!). And it concludes that we need to invent other things. But what? And especially, why not equally reconsider the American lifestyle, or that of industrial countries in general.
If the model is a failure for the whole world, how do you tell the Chinese: you can’t have cars, the ‘clim’ or low coast companies to develop the tourist industry (to refer to a recent posting), and are forbidden to pollute? Especially when the Americans refuse to sign the Kyoto Accord … but that’s another debate.
Therefore, is this 2005 report is as absurd as that of the Club of Rome was in its time? Or is China going to drive us into the wall? I await your response this weekend of a beautiful blue sky, but very cold in this Beijing end of winter.
March 12
Cars Again
Following-up on the commentaries by Jia and Bern on ‘We’re Done For’, car licence plates are sold by auction in Shanghai. The municipality has found a hyper-elitist was of limiting to a few million the numbers of new cars one can have in a city that has already reached it’s saturation point. They can reach exorbitant prices: last year averaging around 40,000 yuans (around 4000 euros), which is almost the price of a small car itself. This explains why there are no ‘small cars’ in Shanghai (the QQ Chinese brand, that you see a lot of in Beijing, sells for 50,000 yuans, less than 5000 euros). Paradoxically, this system was judged to be illegal by a Chinese administrative tribunal, but Shanghai hasn’t hear of this decision and continues to sell it’s licence plates by auction (which is nothing compared to Hong Kong, which has used this system for a long time, where record prices have been reached like 7.1 million HK dollars, a little less than 600,000 euros for the plate number 12, which sold last month. But it’s true that the earnings of those in Hong Kong is superior to those of France, and that the extravagance of the tycoons is without limit…)
Elsewhere, there are no limits, like in Beijing, where the number of cars went up last year at the rate of about 1000 a day (500,000 more in two years!) There’s already 2.3 million cars and the municipality estimates that there’ll be 3.5 million cars in Beijing in 2008, thus there’s already the feeling that the point of saturation has already been reached.
The government has invested too much into the auto industry to pull back, and according to it’s own predictions, (not those of the Americans this time), there’ll be 140 vehicles on Chinese roads in 2020, that is 7 times more than 2004. Even if China applies the same environmental standards as Europe for locally built cars, and if it encouraged research into electric card (Dassault is ready to pounce!) the development model followed is still that of ‘The American Dream’. All you have to see is how Beijing encouraged the sale of cars that are faster then public transit, the network of which is still quite limited (it’ll be better, they say, in 2008, the new frontier of the ‘harmonious society’ of the Chinese).
Photo: At this rate, as the bicycle is already marginalized in Shanghai, it has no better use than to be used for works of art, like this one of Ai Weiwei, shown at Factory 798 in Beijing. Chinese experts – translate the Maoist slogan on the wall….)
March 20
Ephemeral art
Art is in galleries, art is in the street. This afternoon, going to an opening at the Courtyard Gallery, one of the better ones in Beijing, situation two feet from the Forbidden City, I saw an old man who was painting … the ground. Armed with an enormous paintbrush and a bucket of water, he was doing caligraphy on a esplanade, which was evaporating as he was working. He was working for his own pleasure, and for those who were passing, who stopped to watch on this springtime Sunday afternoon. The experts would call this ephemeral art.
Here, it is a part of life, an art of living that fades.
At the Courtyard Gallery, another ambience. The one we find in Paris, New York, or Tokyo. Cao Fei, a young artist from Canton, presented large format photographs, with exagerated colours, of young Chinese dressed as mythological characters in the middle of the urban setting of contemporary China. Accompanied by a whacky video of the same scenes, with a subdued audio chanel. A work that was seductive and catchy. But here, we’re no longer in the world of ephemeral art, we’re in the world of the fashionable and expensive contemporary globalised art.
These two forms were happening at the same time 200 metres from each other. But these two universes are light years apart.
That’s Beijing in 2005.
Somebody I know wrote me, and said this amongst other private things:
I’ve been reading your words about Canada Council on Goodreads. Every generation of emerging artists, since the mid 80’s and rise of Jesse Helms-like sentiments towards the arts, have seen a decline in opportunities and support and a rise in competition. As well we see a system stretching to help more senior artists enjoy a level of support to match their accomplishments and stages in their careers. I know that I’ve gone to conferences and see a lot of late 40 somethings and 20 somethings, but there is a definite void in the 30-40 range. I think that a lot of people from the generation of initial public cutbacks were actually forced to stop producing and participating and went on to something else outside the art world. Its a sad lesson. And I agree that the only real solution is to lobby for more money for the Canada Council.
One of the issues I have lately with the art scene here in Toronto, and throughout Canada for that matter, is how much snobbery happens within the scene, not to mention the clichés. It’s pretty much for that reason that I only found out about Doris McCarthy last week.
Somehow, the books, the reviews here and there, all of that escaped my attention. I guess it’s because she’s a painter which for the most part isn’t considered as interesting as playing with photographs or arranging lumps of wood or styrofoam as many of my friends do. As a painter myself, I’ve also been forced into apologetics, or attempts to make it sound more philosophical than it is.
So, at this point, I’m running into the danger that you’ve heard of her. It’s probably safer for me to assume that you have. But, if you’re like me, and have been hiding under an artist-run-centre’s rock, (or that of the Sculpture Garden which is pretty cool) than, let’s talk about Doris McCarthy as if we’ve never heard of her.
She’s quite old – in her early 90s, the same age as my grandmother. And now she has a gallery named after her, but as I said, I haven’t been paying attention so I can’t tell that story. It’s in Scarborough (U of T Campus) and it’s been open for a year.
But my story here is that I was in the 401 Richmond building a couple of weeks ago for an after-hours meeting, and afterward, in the hallway, making a phonecall, the paintings in Wynick Tuck caught my eye, and I said to myself, ‘wow, I like that stuff’. A couple of days later, I see a Doris McCarthy book in the bookstore, and suddenly I’ve felt out of touch. My suspicions toward genre-interest groups really seemed driven home.
So today I dropped into the show, and I really liked it. I should say up front I’m not a real critic, I’m just an artist who’s been given the opportunity to write about art. A real critic reads lots and lots of American and French theories and then sees a show like McCarthy’s, and then finds a way to either praise it because she’s old and venerable, or pan it because it’s too pretty and it doesn’t take into account some dead French guys thoughts about our big toes or the problems we’ve had with our mothers. So I can’t, nor would I want to, give you the loaded platter of theoretical cold cuts. All I can say that I found this show to be a breath of fresh air.
I could, and perhaps I should, say that for some reason in the last 50 years, North America has decided to venerate old lady painters – Grandma Moses in the States, and Nova Scotia’s Maud Lewis. But both Moses and Lewis were ‘naïve’ painters, that is, they didn’t go to art school, so their ‘folksy’ work was seen as simply charming by wealthy and powerful people who wanted something to spend money on and to say ‘oh, that’s so great!’ Thus, through Thorstein Veblen’s theory, fueling an art market – books, magazine articles, a place in galleries. Doris McCarthy is schooled. The biography on her website tells us that she was teaching art history ‘in the mid 1900s ‘ and I think, oy vey! And that she had to go around copying famous works for her students, because prior to the days of our glossy, excellent reproductions, there was no better way of getting students examples. So, despite the fact that she’s an old lady, she doesn’t have anything in common with Moses nor with Lewis. So let’s not package her into that mythos.
The paintings aren’t egotistically sized – nothing really heroic. They seem to be sized according to the subject matter. The ice-berg painting is big enough to encompass an iceberg, that type of thing. She knows what she’s doing. But what I really liked about them was that they seemed so young and vibrant. I mean, sure, there are clear references to the Group of Seven. Some of the Northern landscapes reminded me of Lawren Harris, whose work is popularly derided by academics – and for years I found them a little too blobalicious to admire, but then one day, walking through the AGO, their uniqueness kind of hit me … that style had grown on me, and I appreciated them. Over the past year I’ve begun to really appreciate the Group of 7, and all this landscape art that it inspired over the past hundred years – McCarthy’s lifetime.
For a while it seemed so boring and cliché – and you see the photographs of McCarthy sketching in the North and you could groan – I mean, how boring can you get? The U.S. have heroic painters attacking their canvases and we get photos of people carefully painting away, sitting on a rock in the grass. At least it seems more civilized.
Trust me, I grew up in what’s considered an idyllic landscape, and while it’s gorgeous on a postcard, or even in a painting, the truth is you’re so bored because the movie theatre is a half-hour away, and you only get to see blockbuster new releases – and the bookstores – don’t get me started (a Coles in a strip mall is no bookstore). This is why I’m happy to be in the city, but why the nature art stuff has also started to grow on me – reminding me that this country is so much more than it’s urban propaganda. I mean, with something like 1/3 of Canadians living in Toronto, and the CBC headquarters downtown, and Much Music … all the reasons that we think we’re at the centre of things, this nature art stuff of McCarthy’s and the G7 remind us that there’s more to this story that what happens in our country’s cities. For one thing, there’s a lot of bored people out there living in beautiful landscapes.
The young people in rural Canada either are so used to their life there they don’t care to leave, or they yearn for some action like they see on TV, so they come to the cities. That’s the standard story. So it’s odd to me, in a sense and now that I’m thinking about it, that McCarthy can portray the landscapes with such happy energy, so that I can describe it as young and vibrant. Young people don’t paint the landscape – they paint their friends. They put their energy into that. McCarthy seems to be friends with the land. She’s clearly getting off on its shapes, on the way it falls together into an image before her eyes. Ninty years of 20th Century life have not dulled her into a sullen depression about the fate of man nor made her bemoan environmental degradation. No – to her it seems, it is all still beautiful.
I love how the images are made up of flat areas of colour. There’s the occasional flourish of paint elegantly gooped on, for the materialist crowds, but really, you’d think they’d been designed using Illustrator. The colours are wonderful, they’re all very bright, and they suit me as someone who sees so much design on the web, and who appreciates the aesthetics of design for preserving a sense of beauty as regular art went all mad with blood and guts and beating the West over the head with a message of ‘you’re bad!’.
Now, the price list for these paintings had them ranged from $33,000 – $2,300. All the watercolours seemed to be sold out, and I figured that may have something to do with affordability, since I found them the weakest. Watercolours ‘are supposed’ to be about transparency – thin washes, the whiteness of the paper shining through – some kind of evanescent image hung together out of veils of colour. The type of work that lends itself to writers typing out ‘veils of colour’, right …. but I found them a little dark. Maybe I’m remembering wrong, but the oils were just so full of light compared to the watercolours, which were relatively small compared to the canvases, and seemed uninspired. However, they were sketches – studies on which the inspiration, solid composition, and confident execution of the paintings could be based.
The Iceberg with Arch stands out in my mind as something wonderful, seen from a distance, with all colours bouncing off each other. Yawl – 2 Buildings reminded me of driving through Quebec.
This show kind of proved to me that hipness is lame. I know that somewhere there’s someone complaining about her work as being that of an old conservative, and that whoever that is probably calls themselves a video artist or something to that effect. Not that I’m dissing video art or anything like that, but it’s just that McCarthy, in her twilight years, expresses an affection for the land, and plain old joi-de-vivre, which I really appreciated today, considering it was sunny and everything, and it’s so much better than some nihilist trying to remind me that there are evil people in the world and making crappy work because they identify as cutting edge.
Doris McCarthy
New Canvases, Watercolours and Earlier Work @
Wynick/Tuck, until March 26
401 Richmond St West, Suite 128
416-504-8716 T-Sat 11-5
dorismccarthy.com
(image courtesy of Wynick/Tuck’s website)
Last year I had the pleasure of reading Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate which argues against ideology and for the recognition of an innate and genetically endowed ‘human nature’. Among the areas he explored was our ability to intuitively grasp certain concepts, while others remain abstract.
An example is a googol. Nowadays, googol – as it is pronounced – is synonymous with the search engine, and is a verb (I googled this) and I even an adjective (it’s googable). Originally, the word refereed to a very large number. After thousand (three zeroes), million (six 0s), trillion (9 0s), going up the nomenclature line, you reach a googol, a 1 with one hundred zeroes.
A number so large falls into the category of being abstract, as we cannot even conceptualize a million properly, and a thousand with difficulty. Because in our evolutionary history, we hadn’t the need to distinguish that many things at a time. A herd of grazing animals was maybe the most living things any of our ancestors saw at once, as for most of history the animals outnumbered us, until practically yesterday in the measure of millennia. A herd of animals would have simply been “awesome lot”.
As a species we’ve preferred to invent reasons for our existence. Uncomfortable facing the banal facts, instead we have invested centuries with thoughts that have deluded us into believing in ghosts and spirits and ‘supermen’ in the sky. What we are neglecting, and what we also seem to be incapable of grasping intuitively, is that we are a part of the Universe, and that we are part of the Earth, itself a part of the Universe, and that we are the result of sex which occurred not only between our grandparents but between creatures which lived millions – and billions – of years ago.
We’ve clouded the matter with the poetry of religion, which may teach that we are animated dust, but which is also uncomfortable facing the banal facts of evolution, preferring instead to discredit it as a fantasy. Beyond that, we have to deal with folk who think that panspermia (life coming from some asteroid) would somehow be more amazing than the fact that it sprang up on this stone we call Earth on its own. The Earth, far from being so special, is just a rock fostering many chemical reactions enabled by the presence of a significant amount of oxidized hydrogen. So far that fact seems unique, but it is not unreasonable to think that the universe is teeming with life of a variety we cannot imagine.
At the end of one of the chapters in Pinker’s book, he quotes Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary:
Mind, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavor to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it had nothing but itself to know itself with.
This is an apt summary of what is so strange about our science. That our bodies are the instruments of our brains, by which a brain seeks to understand what it is. Although we are a system of organs and anatomy, it has taken centuries since the invention of the scalpel for us to figure out what we look like on the inside, and even what our brains look like. Accurate anatomy dates to within the past four hundred years, and extremely precise anatomy dates to the 19th Century. And mostly because we deluded ourselves with religious hoopla, afraid that dissecting a corpse would make It and Superman mad.
The brain is an organ capable of processing information revealing it’s own structure, of it which it knows nothing. I find it odd how we are born “knowing” how to use our hands, but not how they function. This seems to be a pattern repeated by the universe at large. The brain’s inherent ignorance about itself is a microcosmic reflection of a Universe which seems to know nothing of itself either. We think this way because we have labeled the universe a thing and as such, consider it inanimate, lifeless, and incapable of thought. However, what is going on between you and I right now except some sub-process of the Universe?
The last time you glanced at Astronomy magazine on the news-shelf, or read an article on cosmology, you participated in an aspect of the Universe seeking knowledge about itself, as it has agents within it seeking that information.
We are those agents – we are the organizers of the Universe’s information, and in many ways, agents for its change. For some reason, the chain of events which began with a big bang 13.7 billion years ago has led to reassembly of elements which have propelled themselves with precision across the vastness of space to land on Mars . The 3rd sphere seeks out information on the 4th sphere by way of beings which developed out of its matrix of chemicals a few billion years ago.
So, we have this recurring pattern: the universe organizing information, by way of humans, who do it by way of their brains. And now these brains have developed a new layer in the Universe’s information structure by organizing things using alternating currents of electricity. We are all told by those who developed this technology that the computer is a digital device which runs on a series of 0s and 1s, which represent on/off switches in the micro-circuitry. What this means is that the chips alternate the voltage between high and low. Electronic whispering is precisely that which allows me to type this and for you to read it. And to point out the obvious, my thoughts interact with your thoughts through this negotiation.
Now we have Google, a search engine, seeking to “organize the world’s information” to paraphrase their PR. We cannot know if the Googlebots are conscious, but let’s ask ourselves hypothetically, “what do they think they’re doing?” Do you think they are themselves curious as to why they are compelled to extend themselves through the branches of our communication network? Are they aware that they are a part of another being’s infrastructure? They go here, go there, go back to the Google servers, and collaborate on constructing a database. So much like ourselves and our travel stories and our maps. Essentially, the meaning of a google-bot’s life is to crawl the web and experience it so that it can later be organized – categorized, filed away, assigned i.d. Sound at all familiar?
Sounds like Victorian science to me. Darwin and the Beagle and the trip to the Galapagos, and the return home to the centre of the colonial empire to say, I saw this, and I think this about it and this is the book for the database, no, I mean library.
The flowering of life on Earth may be nothing more than some form of reflection of the masses of files we find on our hardrives. The zebra may be a .dll for something – a segment of code which enables another. We are a program running on the Earth’s Operating System, an .exe file enabled by .dll’s in the flavour of plants and animals by which we manifest an omnivorous nature.
Somehow our chemical composition – the fact that we are made of stuff – does not invalidate our activities, which we have recreated in the immaterial. By organizing electrons we have bypassed the molecular to achieve physical results which resemble our own activities.
Our relationship to the immaterial raises issues of the google-bot’s metaphysics. Do the engineers at Google program their algorithms to send prophet algorithms among them to inspire them to poetry and more accurate results?
Soloman Fagan’s article on the Canada Council controversy is the clearest and sanest I’ve yet read, raising pertinent points. If I’d been able to read this back in November instead of a bunch of alarmist rhetoric and petitions, I’d probably have been more comfortable on the artist’s side than on the Canada Council’s.
I know of two other people who agree with me that the changes aren’t that bad, and we all agree that the Council rocking the boat here is a good thing – shaking up this lame scene. I’ve found myself on the C.C.’s side because basically I find the council’s programs as they are now suck and aren’t worth saving.
Fagan lays it out for us (again finally) clear-as-day as to why they’re gonna suck even more now. I’m left thinking the Council is driving itself to irrelevancy. Since I have friends who are either about to graduate, or who are recent art school grads, they already don’t care about this because they’re ineligible for Council funding for the next few years anyway. And I since I’ve only been able to apply myself for the past couple of years, I’ve developed no loyalty for their programs. I’d like to think that Canadian art is capable of sustaining itself without the beneficence of one institution. If it is not, than we should ask ourselves why, and ask ourselves what are we gonna do about it.
The most obvious point here, is that with a success rate of less than 10%, the Canada Council clearly isn’t that important. There are city and provincial arts councils, whose programs for emerging artists are easier to access, and artists find ways to make their work if it matters to them. Ninety percent clearly already don’t need to the Canada Council, so why aren’t we more honest to say that this is about nostalgia and prestige? Nostalgia from a generation who once benefited from what was once a generous endowment (one that rose from 3 million in 1965 to 24 million in 1975 – a difference of 686% – while the current budget, at 150 million, represents a rise of 652% in the last 30 years – 30%less) and prestige among those who actually pass the jury system, driving home and developing another level of unhealthy elitism in an already pretty elite bunch.
The larger discussion that Fagan raises is to why someone like Janet Cardiff is an example to them, when she isn’t even living in Canada anymore. Why is Canadian art defined as a success when someone else outside of Canada cares about it? Why do we want to play a game of wasting big bucks on megalomaniac works? Hell, if wasting money on mega-projects is what it’s about now, I’d probably support shutting down the Canada Council to put their funding into health care or the child care program.
The issue here, I think, isn’t that they’re gonna be screwing emerging artists – they already are – but that they want to support a fashion of big-budget art that probably isn’t worth supporting.
Ultimately, what I’d like to see is the Canada Council have enough money to subsidise all artists in Canada. This is something that the country can afford – you’d need less than 1 Billion dollars and the government has been running multi-billion dollar surpluses for years now. Stop working with funds that haven’t kept up with inflation, stop having to limit its support to people who are playing the game as defined by the American-European order, and to focus on supporting artists who want to live in Canada, and who want to develop a Canadian discourse.
I read all this stuff and I feel screwed not only by the Canada Council, but I feel screwed by the art establishment that gushes over the work of Cardiff.
I use her as an example because she’s who Fagan mentions, although her work isn’t as big-budget as some. Her work is worth sharing with the world, and she got famous for her audio-walks, which aren’t big budget at all.
But if it’s now about funneling money into mega-art, I have to say that I have no love for this stuff, nor do I have any love for the ‘international game’. Personally, I don’t give a fuck about the Venice Biennial. I don’t see why I should.
I used to question, well, if biennials are the game, why doesn’t Halifax start one? That was back when I was living there – and I think they tried to get one off the ground in 2000 but it didn’t quite work out. Not enough money etc.
Artists here keep chasing after the ribbons of wealthy collectors whose taste is dependent on Parkett and the biennials, because only the wealthy collectors are willing to transfer some of their funds into the hands of our country’s cultural workers. And, if it’s not the wealthy collector, it’s the MOMA, Tate, McGuggenheim, the Getty. The cultural institutions of the Anglo-American Empire. As Robert Enright said about the work of Attila Richard Lukacs:
The side of his career in which he was sort of let down – and this is because he didn’t have dealers who were powerful enough largely, was that he never got integrated into that public collecting art world. Once you’re in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney museum, the Museum of Modern Art in Los Angeles – once those guys are collecting you, in a sense they can’t afford to divest their interest in you because now you’re a part of American art history. So then once collected, forever collected basically. If you don’t do that, you’re selling lots of paintings and you’re making lots of money because collectors are buying your work in Canada and in Germany, but if you don’t have a dealer whose helping you manage your career, all you’re gonna do is sell paintings, and that’s not enough, because once people stop buying, and you’re not in the major public institutions, frankly, who gives a damn about you?
For Robert Enright to say this, to lay it out that simply, is to basically point out the truth about being a Canadian artist – we are a province of the American Empire, as populous in total as California, and that culturally, we are as American as Americans. Ok. Fine. If that’s the way it is, we should start applying to the N.E.A. All of Sheila Cops’ fucking flags and magazine wars to the contrary, there is no home-grown Canadian culture anymore. We’re assimilated. No wonder we get so upset about the Bush administration.
The Canada Council was developed to prevent that assessment. I suspect it is still wrong. There is a Canadian experience that differs from that of the United States. The Canada Council was developed to support Canadian artists and Canadian art, and to help us find out what that difference is. At least that’s how I understand it, especially when I read the Massey Report.
Set up in 1957, it was there to give us a voice different from Jackson Pollock’s and that whole American game they played of associating culture with anti-Communist foreign policy. And what happened? Isn’t fair to say they supported Jack Bush all the way to a New York dealer?
As it says here, giving a brief two sentence CV of Bush – “Senior Canada Council Grant for European and U.S.A. Study, 1962.”
So what is the mission of the Canada Council then? Is it to support Canadian artists in becoming art stars, leaving the country as a type of foreign service cultural ambassador?
Is that what’s art’s about then? National and cultural propaganda, because we’re still stuck in not only the court of Louis XIV, but in the Cold War?
If that’s what the Canada Council’s about, why hasn’t someone woken them up to the reality that in our globalized world, a national identity is important in order to distinguish one’s voice against the chorus?
I imagine this is what they hope to do – support voices loud enough to yell with the best of them at the international biennial megaphone, while forgetting that they are, and have been, doing a lousy job of helping Canada find that voice.
If the art world is one big American Idol, the role of the Canada Council seems to be a Simon Cowell figure – to tell some singers they suck, and to help those that can sing find themselves in the positions they deserve to be in. That seems to be how they justify their 8% success rate, and their desire to support the big names that are playing now.
If the artworld is American Idol, it should be reminded that art isn’t supposed to be about fashion. It could be reminded of this if Canadian Artists were good enough in spite of this international system. I think what we all hope for is that the rest of the world would take notice and say to themselves, ‘wow, look what they’re doing in Canada’. The Seattle Grunge music phenom was best summed up when I read this years ago – ‘when there’s no possibility of success, there’s no possibility of failure’. We should feel free here to do whatever, instead of chasing international validation. Expressing our reality in a vibrant way, which would result in success by default. I mean definition of sucess here is to have people from elsewhere think what we’re doing is amazing, in a way that would drive them to come here and visit our galleries.
All of Canada’s ‘successful’ artists, who don’t live in Canada anymore, or who aren’t taken seriously at home – have made work that goes against being merely trendy, and something that was unique, and whose example help younger people understand a Canadian experience.
But the question remains. Do we really need the Canada Council?
Today, a fellow on trial for rape in Atlanta grabbed the guard’s gun and shot his way out of the courtroom, killing three people. What a week for craziness! Let’s recap:
Thursday, March 3: 4 RCMP officers are killed by a nut with a rifle. The media treat this like it’s the end of Canada. The mourn-porn continues with a rebroadcast of the memorial tomorrow.
Sunday, March 6 : This evening, a man throws his daughter off a 401 overpass in an attempt to murder her, and then he jumps off and kills himself.
Tuesday, March 8: the police stop a guy with a knife on Yonge St. There is video footage, so it gets on the news. Oh, so dramatic.
Wednesday, March 9: a fellow sets himself on fire in front of Queen’s Park, after ramming some cop cars with the rented Budget van. Budget gets free advertising as the whole thing is captured on camera, because there was an farmer’s protest at Queens Park at the time. The nut didn’t know that, crashed the party, and stole the show. The farmers bitched about it.
Today, March 11: the fellow in Atlanta, and JetsGo discount airlines go belly up and strand all their potential passengers, laying off their entire workforce.
Something is happening at large, some kind of doom is prepping itself, and the shit is hitting the fan. My favorite though is this guy shooting himself out of courtroom as if he was Arnold fucking Schwarzenegger. I’m sure the Hollywood hacks are already at their keyboards prepping the drafts of that one.
On another note, today’s email from Joey Comeau asked, ‘have you seen the trailer for A Scanner Darkly yet?’ I hadn’t, so I checked it out here. Wow, 2005 – the year of the animated painting. There’s something massive right there – that we’re at the point to pull off something like that.
This image of Winnoa Ryder has a very limited palette. My self-portrait, that I made in Photoshop at the end of 2002 and now use as a logo – it was hard to reduce that to a simple palette. When I do the images today – well, I haven’t in a long while – but when I do, I try to sample the image’s colour, and just make it more blocky, and homogenize a section. A Scanner Darkly is a masterpiece of drawing, colouring, and of digitization. I’m looking forward to seeing it when it comes out in September.
To be able to essentially make a movie that is pretty much nothing more than an animated painting – and this isn’t like that movie Linklater made in 2001 that gave me a headache to watch – that says something to Danto’s ideas about the ‘End of Art’.
In today’s Maisonneuve Mediascout:
MediaScout can’t help look at the events of the past week through the prism of Canada’s near-obsession with understanding and building its sense of identity. Simply put, stories of sacrifice are the backbone of any national myth. Lives lost in the defense of values held dear bring nations together like nothing else – just look to the US, where amid bitter divisions over the war in Iraq, no Democrat would question the value of US soldiers’ sacrifice. Canada, however, doesn’t fight a war every couple of years. And when we do stand on guard for thee, we take every possible precaution to keep our men and women out of the line of fire. That’s fine, we’re not a warring people, but it does mean less death-less sacrifice, when those are the stories that define a nation’s sense of purpose. And so, when four young Mounties are taken from us so brutally, we feel it; because we are reminded of what sacrifice means; and we get to know the fallen; and we come to realize just how brave they were in simply doing their job.
Reminds me of the way Robert Thurman summarized western civilization as militaristic. Like the story that Canadian identity was born during World War I, because the joe from Alberta was in the muck with the fellow from Quebec. What’s really behind that story is people got to hang out with one another from all over the country. Kind of like these party conventions that are in the news.
I’d prefer a national myth that focuses on dialogue, rather than fucking heroic-death sacrifice bullshit.
I’d prefer that we don’t build an identity around violence. Sure, have your big national funeral and media coverage. But I have to say that I care less about this than I did about Trudeau’s funeral. I felt like I was living through something then, I could understand the line-ups to see him lie in state. This RCMP thing isn’t something I can relate too as easily.
Jennifer McMackon’s been running submitted questionnaires (mine can be found here, running previous to the that post) and last weekend she posted questions by Andy Paterson. In one, he asked a question about Post-Modernism, and in my reply, I brought up John Ralston Saul as I have been susceptible to do lately. So, ‘Cynth’ posts: ‘ oh great more john ralston saul quotes’ and I reply, ‘ I know – I rely on him too much. But, at least it’s not Foucault, Derrida, Barthes, Lacan, or Baudrillard’. And then Cynth writes, quoting me at first,
‘”I like the way that John Ralston Saul wrote a dictionary as a parody (sic), but also as a glossary to his way of thinking, basically pointing out that dictionaries are matters of opinion, and that we’re in a foolish place when we turn to them to find out if words actually exist.”sort of like Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose?
Ralston Saul’s work depends on semiotics no? Could we really have his train of thought outside that discourse? Or where do you think it came from?
So I got back to her tonight with this:
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I wouldn’t say that Ralston Saul depends on semiotics at all. I wouldn’t think to compare him to Eco. The Doubter’s Companion is not at all like Eco’s Name of the Rose. I mentioned Saul and Eco together only once, and that was to use the monks debating Christ’s poverty in the Name as an example of how Saul sees contemporary academia, where you have a lot of energy going into debating the finer points of nothing really, when instead they should be engaged in their society, combating the corporations instead of working for them, and using their tenured positions to be fearless in criticism rather than intellectually lazy.
Saul identifies as an old-fashioned humanist trying to get us to fight the sort of dead corporate language that’s everywhere, and pay more attention to politics. He’s also doing his darndest to try and get Canadians to consider what that means, to be a Canadian.
While the question of Curnoe-like nationalism doesn’t have any steam today, Canadians do have something unique that we need a language to think about, so that we can be conscious of it, because as I see it now, we’ve spent too many years longing for the sort of life that New York artists potentially have, if they manage to make it, because we watch too many American television shows, read too many of their magazines, know too much about their celebrities that we forget that we’re not American. So we get upset at their politics, when we should be getting upset about our own, and we try to define our culture around terms that were developed to serve American-Anglo art. As Curnoe wrote in 1970: ‘Clearly people from the most powerful nation in the world can afford to say that art is international because it is their art & culture which is international right now, e.g. Viet Nam’.
e.g. Iraq … and 35 years later, we have all of these artists being pumped out of art schools, and we have this artist-run centre system and all this; but it is work being created by Canadians in American-drag. How is what we’re seeing different from the dominant discourse, or even allowed to be? Why aren’t we trying to define it our own way, instead of borrowing ‘theirs’? (Or are we, and I’m just not aware of it)?
I really like Saul because he’s tried to give us a language to think about these things, and his dictionary is essentially a glossary to his idiosyncratic way of using words.
I think that a lot of the so-called problems that we face as artists might really boil down to us not having this language. The Canada Council thing, the lack of a market – perhaps it’s because by engaging in culture in American terms we aren’t registering with the public because we offer nothing to them. We get all upset and depressed and think the public doesn’t give a shit, and use self-righteous anti-market language, when in reality, we should want to practice our profession and live a middle-class lifestyle. Why would we chose poverty? Why should that be a choice? I understand choosing to live a simple Green lifestyle, but that need not be one of abject poverty.
I mean Canada is this amazing place full of different nationalities and people from everywhere in the world, so on one hand, we’re too focused on providing art for one group, in addition, we aren’t speaking a Canadian language the people understand unconsciously like they do hockey or Tim Hortons. Maybe this alone accounts for the popularity of the Tragically Hip and the Group of 7 – because we perceive that Americans don’t give a shit about them, we appreciate them as belonging to us. At least, that’s the popular idea.
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My reservations toward metro cops comes from growing up with the RCMP as the local police force. The RCMP were cool – they knew the community, knew when to look the other way, but knew how to be tough when it was required. Metro cops see crazy shit every day and that would put anyone on edge. I tend to think they’re all borderline crazy because of that. There are also those among them that failed to pass the RCMP’s high standards.
In the overblown media coverage though, no one has pointed out how unique a country we are where 4 deaths is a ‘national tragedy’. And the grow ops thing – heck even my dad sees the similarities between this type of gunslinger madness and that of the dirty 30’s prohibition.
Which also reminds me of Darren O’Donnell’s concerns about the incarceration rates of the United States, which he brings up in his play, A Suicide Site Guide to the City. The United States today puts a greater percentage of its citizens in jails than any other country in the world. A majority of these are drug charges, and most of the people in jail are black. Forget everything you think you know about why that is and consider this –
Naomi Klein, speaking on the aftereffects of the Iraq War (broadcast on November 1st last year on Ideas, Real Player File) defined fundamentalism as an ardent desire to see the world work according to your rules. So Christians and Muslims and ideologues of all stripes are basically trying to convince us all to live by their definition of reality, and when that doesn’t work, they get all self-righteous and angry. Most of us aren’t ideologues, most of us know that life doesn’t work by rules. There are accidents, we stub our toes, we don’t always behave in ways we’d like to. That’s what makes life interesting. That type of variation is a good thing.
The U.S. though, has a government of fundamentalists and ideologues. Instead of recognizing that human beings have an appetite for mind-altering substances – harmless really – they prefer to think that the world is out of kilter because people want to have a mind-altering experience every once and awhile, one that is different than getting drunk. They tried to ban that in the 1930s and all we got out of it was the legend of Eliot Ness and some good movies.
At least the Ministers in our country and waking up this reality, albeit at a glacial pace. They should legalize it, regulate it, and tax it. They should treat all drugs like they do alcohol. In the case of some of the more powerful narcotics, like cocaine, heroin, crystal meth – I agree that those are dangerous but banning them is not an answer. I question why anyone would want to use addictive substances – and I see that as a medical problem. I guess for me, the best argument to regulate drugs is to bring it into the open, to not criminally penalize people who are in many ways self-medicating. People use coke to get more work done, to stay up. Well, I’m sure there are safer stimulants out there, and if not, than get it from a clinic. Heroin – I’d basically give that to clinics to distribute to those already addicted, giving them a non-judgmental and safe place to ingest it, but also, a place where they can always decide to give it up by perhaps walking into a hallway’s different door in a environment they already feel secure in. Anyone who wants to try it could do so in a safe environment, after being strongly encouraged not to do so. And that’s important – because as long as you create a condition of ‘no’, you’re opening up someone’s else’s opportunity to say ‘yes’. You have to in principle create the conditions for experimentation so that people go to the places where they can be educated, discouraged, but in the end, can go ahead with it if they’re so determined (who knows, they might be doing legitimate research) instead of finding some sketchy drug den full of unsanitary conditions and other dangers.
So, getting back to the fact that lots of black people are in American jails. I’ve made the point that the war on drugs is a delusional war against a problem that doesn’t need to be a problem. Now, the fact that the black minorities are poor creates the conditions for them to act violently. I don’t want to say that they sell drugs to get money or use drugs to forget about their problems – while that exists of course, there’s a lot of murderers in jail too. It’s a clich?? to say that a majority of black people are on death row, perhaps unfairly because they can’t hire good lawyers as could O.J. Simpson.
Which is too say what – that you deserve to go free if you can afford brilliant legal defence? No – that anyone deserves to go free if your court appointed attorney is compotent enough to prove a case of police incompotence. Again, poverty screws you over, because the best in the United States work for big bucks.
It would be too simple for me to say that it’s a matter of those in power, who want everyone to be like them, to see things their way, be assimilated to their lifestyle – it’s too simple to say that a lack of respect for a minority’s culture is what drives those of them and everyone else to be violent, or is what ‘criminalizes’ them in the minds of those in power.
I’ve made the argument that as long as you have narrow rules, you’ll always have people falling outside those rules. With regard to drugs – that’s why the U.S. incarceration rate is at the rate it is. But, eliminate that, and you’d still have the problem of violence in all its forms.
Violence is found everywhere in American society, in every ethnicity, and as Steven Pinker argued in The Blank Slate is much more connected to status struggles. That basically when you’re poor, and you don’t have much but your honor, than your honor is worth defending by killing others. Developing a reputation for being dangerous is advantageous, because it prevents others from abusing you. Maybe I’m too privileged to say that the inner-city problems that are common and clich?? are a result of a bunch of defensive offense. Break that cycle, and things could change. We’re tempted to think that incarceration rates would then be reasonable. Is incarcerating anyone ever reasonable?
I think we need to accept that nature’s capacity for variation gives us humans with different types of minds, some of them autistic, and some of them psychopaths without empathy. In the past, the psychopaths could always be relied on to kill the competition over the hill, you know, the type of tribal warfare that encouraged the whole raping and pillaging and the stealing of women thing that has been a part of our experience. No point getting all upset about it and saying all men are bad and all that. To do so would be to start subscribing to another fundamentalist definition of reality. It’s just a fact that we have a violent history, and that humans have had a tendency to war and to war crimes, and that the majority of those actors are male. (That’s got more to do with the whole upper body strength thing, and the status arguments I’ve outlined – because men are more susceptible to them genetically as primates. What I call the ‘gray-back thing’ – gray backs being alpha male gorillas). We find this disgusting, and we are privileged to do so, because nowadays, we are increasingly moving away from the glorification of violence, but we certainly aren’t there yet. We’re at the point where we appreciate fictional violence, but are horrified by it in reality.
We want to segregate the psychopaths by putting them in jail. We should recognize that as temporary solution. If we accept the fact that psychopaths are just part of the variation of humans, it is no more fair to segregate them as it would be to do so with dwarves, transsexuals, or those born with what are considered to be defects. The difference though, is that psychopaths pose a danger to the rest of us who were born with empathy engines. We should figure out a way to give them a place in our society that’s fair to but also protects us from their potential danger.
Of course, we’re also probably going to reach a point where the genetic markers for this type of variation will be recognized, and screened for during embryonic development. I’m not sure I have a moral objection to that, and perhaps it’s too mystical, too much an evidence of the 20th Century’s lack of understanding, to say that even if we did, nature would find a way to give us lions in our midst with the aim of culling us toward carrying capacity, leaving us with the same problem of integration.
This Roszko fellow was clearly a psychopath. He seems to be evidence that screening embryos might be a good thing. Heck, Paul Bernardo is why we should screen embryos if we ever have that capacity, nevermind Roszko. As much as it seems most Canadians appreciate that we don’t have the death penalty, I’m sure most of us would look the other way when it comes to Bernardo.
Let’s be clear about this – grow ops are part of this economy – they are supplying a demand that clearly exists. If they are as popular as the media is trying to scare us into believing, than they must represent a significant contribution to our economy. But we have no way of knowing that, because of the stupid laws. Christ, for all we know, if they taxed dope we could build a subway system for every city in Canada, or do this child-care thing, or build electric windmills. People in Toronto are complaining that it costs more to ride their transit system than it does to buy a coffee and a muffin at Tim Hortons … fucking legalize it already.
Grow ops aren’t the problem. The problem is making it contraband, so only those who don’t fit into society’s patterns – psychopaths and rebels etc – see it as a way to make a living without being part of the ‘legalized system’. I mean, who wants to hire someone with a record anyway? No wonder there’s a black market. Those grow opurteneurs are responding to the right-wing’s market forces, so they shouldn’t be penalized by the right-wing itself. Instead of not fitting their limited vision of the way things should work, they actually are matching their ideas – but only because they aren’t wearing ties the right-wing can’t see it. That’s how limited their vision of the world is, and why they will always be frustrated fundamentalists trying to make others fit – their view isn’t broad enough for anyone else anyway.
Four citizens of my generation were killed by one psychopath. That’s is the news story. Blaming grow-ops is nonsense. The real story here is why this nut was allowed to have all his guns, was allowed to be living on this farm when he had a criminal record which made it clear he was a menace. The media needs to direct the conversation there, instead of this grow-opaganda. They are beginning too – the coverage is now on the ‘hows’ of the whole thing. The funerals and all that. Again, let’s remind ourselves that it’s almost a parody of how great and mostly safe our country is that 4 deaths can be considered historic.
[…] If Kantor’s work piques your interest stick around for a panel discussion on his work, Philip Monk (AGYU director and curator of the Kantor’s show Machinery Execution) will moderate and try to shed some light on Kantor’s oft-times dense pieces. And if you want to come prepared check out Timothy Comeau’s detailed post on Kantor and the AGYU show here.
Ron Nurwisah, Torontoist, 7 March 2005
This evening I posted a review of Darren O’Donnell’s latest production of A Suicide Site Guide to the City on blogTo.com
I’ve mentioned Darren O’Donnell before in this review I wrote on January 1st, and in the past week I’ve kept seeing his name around – you’d think he was famous or something.
His name’s on the cover of this week’s Now, he’s gotten mentioned on The Torontoist, and he was mentioned last week on blogTO regarding a certain contest. Today, his latest play A Suicide Site Guide to the City got reviewed in the Globe and Mail, where Kamal Al-Solaylee wrote, “…only audiences who haven’t been to the theatre in say, a few decades, are expected to be dazzled by the presentation”.
That sentence applies to me. I’m not a theatre person. The last play I saw was Darren’s production of pppeeeaaaccceee last September, which I didn’t appreciate as much as I loved Suicide-Site Guide, for reasons shared with Darren since he’s a friend of mine, and no point going into here. So, yeah, that’s the bias.
The truth is I’m writing this review because I said I would and I wanted free tickets since I’m broke, so I played the media card. Which might make everyone think that this review is going to be good only because he’s my friend. Well, I hope to show that isn’t the case. I hope to convince you that this is a play you should see while you have the chance, because I was dazzled, not being a theatre-going person, and I was dazzled for reasons that I want to lay out here.
Having been honest with you, dear reader, reading this sometime after I type it out on Saturday afternoon, is something I do partially because that is what Darren’s play seemed to be about for me. The expression of honesty, honesty that included telling us when and where the lines he was reciting were written, and his thoughts as he wrote them. His play is about being honest and sincere through a craft that is based on being insincere, acting being nothing more that pretending to be something else, a performance based on text composed at some point in the past.
The effect of which means that his 80 minute monologue comes across almost like a narrated journal and a letter to the audience who occupy two places in the production – the first is the imagined one Darren had in mind as he typed his script, and the second is the one you find yourself sitting in. The overlapping conceptions of something both once imagined and now real play off each other – Darren is really playing with the part of text that we almost always take for granted, that it is a communication directed forward in time, rather than the spontaneous discourse that we participate in during a conversation.
To not see this play may mean you’d watch TV instead, where you might see the Establishment reward itself by finding reasons to broadcast something on the 1960s and perhaps bring up the Camelot Kennedy Administration, lulled into nostalgia between botox advertisements and punditry on the environmental movement being a bunch of phooey and debating gay marriage. Or, you could go see a live action, real-life document of what it means to be young and locked out of being able to influence the said-same Establishment, hungry for change and the frustrations of trying to make a difference when the whole system seems designed to make us feel small, worthless, or arrogantly presumptuous if we think we can.
Darren and I are certainly on the same page when it comes to the Left Wing political slant, but while he’d love to be a violent revolutionary, I’d prefer to think that the system’s problems will disappear with the retirement of the perpetrators. I’m of the ‘violence only begets more violence’ school, so while I’m sympathetic to Darren’s anarchist leanings, I don’t share them, and am in fact glad that he’s a playwright and not a politician in which case the frustrations could be a little dangerous.
Although I’m tempted to label him ‘a voice of this generation’, that’s lame, especially since this generation can speak for itself, and is doing so through blogs. At least that’s my impression. And I bring up blogs partially to further this review down the path toward a discussion of ‘orality’. Once again I have to bring up John Ralston Saul, which I’m embarrassed to do – you’d think I’d have some original thoughts once and while, why simply be his parrot? Well, if generations can have voices speaking for them, so can individuals, voices that give others the words to express what they may intuit, and in my case John Ralston Saul has illuminated the Canadian landscape in ways that make me marvel. And I figure if Arthur Danto can work Hegel into most of his pieces, why the hell shouldn’t I be as brazen with my intellectual hero? So anyway, Saul has this whole thing about ‘orality’ and how Canada’s an oral based culture, a talking culture, one that differs from France, for example, which is a nation constructed around text – constitutions, revolutions, declarations, and les Grammaires Petite Larousse. One of the first projects of Darren’s I became aware of was The Talking Creature, where he basically got people to meet in Kensington Market’s park and chat. In light of Saul’s arguments, that seems to have been a very Canadian thing to do. And now, with Suicide Site Guide, that Canadian tradition favoring talk over text continues.
Because, as I said earlier, the play is like a recited journal it reminds me of the fact that journals are now flourishing as a literary form through blogs. I’ve kept a journal since I was a teenager, a habit that was partially inspired by the reading of biographies, but because of their influence, I was always painfully self-conscious that I was communicating mostly to a future self (as Darren does in one point in the play, accepting a phone call from his past self typing the lines two years ago) but also to posterity, since even if you live a boring mediocre life, a diary will be interesting to somebody at some point down the line (ala Samuel Pepys). Now this self-consciousness, one that for me limited the revelation of scandal, is infused in everyone as they publish what was once held under lock and key on the global networked interface, spilling secrets and bringing down trials through their indiscretions. Privacy now appears to be a choice rather than a right as people seek communication.
Saul argued ten years ago that the development of the 18th Century pamphlet and the 19th Century newspaper was a way for educated citizens to reclaim language which had fallen into the control of those who thought only in Latin. The poets Dante and Petrarch are credited with kindling the Italian Renaissance seven hundred years ago by writing their poems in the vernacular, asserting the language of the ‘common people’ worthy of beauty, and hence, we have a government system founded on the House of Commons, a talking creature based on the common language of the common people, something we all are in our supposedly classless society, and especially true when we aren’t being academics and instead human beings who share the common experiences of emotional turmoil and cultural products.
In raising these points, Saul was arguing in the pre-internet Dark Times, when language had once again fallen into the control of (what we now call) the traditional media and academics – who he labeled scholastics, after the late medieval scholars whose only aim was to tie up arguments in minutia (like those scenes in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose where they debate the minor points of Christ’s poverty).
Like the talky nature of 19th Century newspapers, today we have blogs, like the one you’re reading, the writing style of which is based on being talky rather then ‘texty’. Written as if spoken. Written with little regard for the formal constraints.
As is the case with Darren’s play.
So, now, if you’re asking yourself, why should I see this play? Well, the main reason is that I’ve turned this review into an essay on ‘why I think Darren O’Donnell’s A Suicide Sit Guide to the City is great’. I’ve done so because I don’t know enough about the theatre to be as critical as Kamal Al-Solaylee at the Globe. And, most importantly because I don’t want to give anything away. Delighted as I was by its narrative strategies and contrivances, which came as a continual surprise, I was dazzled by Darren’s turns through sincerity and sarcasm, his desire for love, and his capacity for potentially embarrassing self-revelation. And above all, I was dazzaled by the way it came across as a live action blog, a challenge to the status quo of formality and controlled language, by freeing itself to be humane, to communicate even it’s inherent lies, as being something presented long after it was conceived in front of a computer in another part of the city, some time ago. While the suicide in the title is misleading, it seems to ultimately be a play on the death of the author with all puns intended, a fact that we die constantly as our present selves morph into our future selves, and what this might mean toward everything.
So, highly recommended, ten stars or whatever, and if you see it and think I’m just biased and probably think too much, that’s what the comment form below is for.
A Suicide Site Guide to the City plays at Buddies until March 20th. Directed by Rebecca Picherack and also featuring Nicholas Murray (aka murr) and John Patrick Robichaud.
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THE PR:
Written and performed by Darren O’Donnell
Directed by Rebecca Picherack
A Mammalian Diving Reflex Production
A Suicide-Site Guide to the City is a stand-up essay about life’s suppressed potential. Writer/ performer Darren O’Donnell shares thoughts, musings, a little lecture and a little magic in an effort to understand the impulse of suicide, envision a better world, and of course, entertain the audience. Culled from journals, field recordings, found art, home video, air travelogues and audience participation, the piece addresses the confusion, ennui and impotence felt in response to the attacks of September 11th, the erosion of civil liberties in North America and beyond, and America’s growing imperial project, among other topical subjects. It’s an explosive comedy offering ideal entertainment for the end of the world.
Last weekend Canadian Art Magazine organized a film series and symposium on ‘artists on film’. From Friday to Sunday, a variety of films were shown, mostly by Michael Blackwood, which were documentaries on artists or artists at work within their studios. On Saturday afternoon, a panel discussion was held around the question of ‘imaging the artist’, consisting of Myfanwy MacLeod (an artist from Vancouver), Mark Kingwell (the U of T prof), Michael Blackwood (the filmmaker), and Vera Frenkel (an artist from Toronto), moderated by Richard Rhodes, editor of Canadian Art magazine.
It was an attempt to look at how artists tend to be represented in the media. Richard Rhodes introduced the topic with a little essay in which he described watching Lust for Life as a 14 year old one evening in Winnipeg during a snowstorm, and the images of the movie stars and the south of France during that winter night made an impression furthered by subsequently seeing a depiction of Michelangelo by Charlton Heston as an heroic worker in The Agony and the Ecstasy. Rhodes admitted these impressions of artists as glorious and heroic influenced and confused him for years and I think it’s fair to say that we’ve all gone through that. Sarah Milroy, in her pre-review of the film series in last Friday’s Globe and Mail, stated that she has never been flung on a filthy studio mattress and been ravaged by any of the artists she’s interviewed, and yet, year after year, artist’s biopics are made which depict them in this way.
But to be fair, the biopics are made on artists who did behave that way. Jackson Pollock really did piss in his patron’s fireplace, and Picasso really was a womanizing asshole, and Van Gogh really was a little off despite being extraordinarily intelligent and sensitive. As Vera Frenkel pointed out in her statement, keep a segment of society underpaid, underemployed, and underappreciated long enough, and it makes sense that some of them end up antisocial and crazy.
Which has been the bind artists have been in for 100 years – society likes the idea of crazy artists, and so, the economic forces that make them that way almost seem to be there by design. And the idea of a crazy artists is a romantic one. Now, it’s worth remembering what this means. The word ‘romantic’ is popularly associated with love, and to say ‘romantic artists’ seems to somehow say that they are good people to date, which isn’t the case. Like Modern Art (which was a style of art running from the 1890s-1960s) Romantic Art was a style of expression which began during the 19th Century and in many ways is still present, only it’s been degraded and to be considered that way is more synonymous with a lack of contemporary sophistication, a sign that you’re not quite with it. For this reason, the romantic idea of an artist is one which no artist likes to be associated with.
The Romantic movement, was characterized by lots of overblown ‘woe is me’ rhetoric, (and for this reason I see goths as nothing more than 21st century romantics) and the romantic ideal was also one of elitism, depicting artists as a type of imaginative aristocracy, overcome with extravagant passions which places them outside the limits of polite society, and making them so very sexy (hence, the dating thing).
So, Richard Rhodes introduced the discussions with his experience of biopics, (the heroics of which representative of the 19th Century romantic conception) Michael Blackwood merely told us how he came to make documentaries on artists, and then had nothing more to say, Myfanwy MacLeod gave us a slide show in which she critiqued the popular misconception of the romantic artist and also critiqued the contemporary fashion that confuses biography with artwork (which is perhaps best exemplified by Shakespeare in Love, which used this idea to develop it’s fictional storyline around the composition of Romeo and Juliet). Myfanwy complained, and Kingwell echoed this, that biography is often irrelevant to a created work. The biopics, and indeed the film series itself, are often centered around the idea that the artist’s life is important to understanding their work, and while I would say it is certainly not irrelevant, it is true that artists often do not consider it important. Like when you have a fight with somebody and they use something from your past against you, out of context and out of place, does it ever seem relevant?
Kingwell’s presentation restored my appreciation for him which has eroded lately since he’s been writing about fishing, whiskey, and the architecture of Shanghai, none of which particularly interest me. He began by reminding us that the 1999 adaptation of Charles Dicken’s Great Expectations, staring Ethan Hawke and Gywneth Paltrow, had Hawke aspiring to be a New York artist, as opposed to becoming a lawyer, which definitely recast the New York Chelsea-delt artist as someone with social standing worth aspiring too, an idea far more current in England and the States than it is in Canada. He then went on to his favorite lecture props, Simpsons Pez dispensers, and reminded us of two episodes of the Simpsons depicting artists – the first one where Marge painted Mr. Burns and the second, where Homer became an outsider artist after failing to build a backyard barbecue. He went one to describe 11 artistic stereotypes, from artisan to romantic genius; the artist as philosopher and as ‘artist on the make’ – those who are exploiting the ‘bankruptcy’ of the art system, and now, his 11th, most recent manifestation of the artist, as ‘disappeared’ – that is, the anonymous street-artist who treats the art world as everywhere given that artists have achieved the idea that anything can be art.
Vera Frenkel was the last to read an essay, which was considered and intelligent but I didn’t really agree with most of it. She spoke about being at a conference on creaolization on the same date 7 years before, that the language used by the Canada Council in their proposed changes platform was infantilizing, advertised her web-project in which artists assign various stereotypes around fictional characters who inhabit this virtual artist-run centre (no character of which can be under 50, so it mostly seemed to me like more Boomer self-absorption) and who’s only relevant point seemed to be that if you assigned Rorschach tests to all the artists in the room, they would be as varied as anyone else in society. Frenkel’s speech though, in raising the current Canada Council controversy, seemed to sidetrack the discussion, because in the Q&A period, statements supporting her’s were raised by the audience, and I was so annoyed by what I see as a glaring generation gap that suddenly nothing anyone on the panel said seemed relevant to anything anymore.
In addition, there was a great question from an audience member which attempted to address why none of the artist stereotypes being talked about included anyone who wasn’t white – why, in ‘imaging the artist’ artists are always of European descent? The question met with what seemed to me a stunned silence. Richard Rhodes did he best to explain that the artworld – ‘our tradition’ (that is, the cultural hegemony of Europe as inherited by its former colonies by the descendents of Europeans) – had been remarkable in adopting and accepting the cultural values of ‘other’ cultures (a type of benign colonization as it were). While the question highlighted a continuing problem of discrimination, it is a problem that is trying to be rectified. (Which is also why I think the Art Awards are a bad idea, because they unconsciously communicate that art is only done by a select group of artists from a select tradition).
Perhaps I missed something with regard to Frenkel’s arguments on creolization (that the fear of everyone turning brown is racist and that creole cultures are delightfully complex), but I was left with the impression that a desire to embrace ethnic intermixing was another desire for an homogenous culture that we can pin down and define. Not that I have anything against the idea of ethnicities and cultures intermixing, but I sort of understood her desire to be ‘mix all the colours together to get beige’ rather than appreciate the rainbow mosaic. The Canadian experience has always favored the mosaic rather than a melting pot, and yet we’re immersed in a dialog of culture which we’re not conscious of as American. It says something toward how effective the Canada Council has been, for example, that Kingwell and Myfanwy can use American films and The Simpsons to exemplify their points. We’re already in the midst of type of creolization of Western culture, dominated like everything else by the States.
In the end, I left feeling most convinced by Kingwell’s arguments toward the artist’s disappearance. His visual examples showed work that was similar to that of Roadsworth in Montreal. While much street art and tagging is so often a territorial pissing, clearly an expression of identity, I think it’s a matter of expressing identity in ways that are not connected to biography or the name on your ID. Roadsworth has now been outed as Peter Gibson only because he got arrested, but Kingwell’s point about the artworld being everywhere resonated with me, as a way of saying that there’s a new hierarchy between the white-box and the street in terms of cultural legitimization. Just as there’s a new hierarchy developing between print media and blogs.
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The participants and the PR:
“Myfanwy MacLeod is a Vancouver artist whose work has shown in major exhibitions across Canada as well as at the Biennale of Sydney.
Mark Kingwell is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto and a contributing editor of Harper’s magazine.
Michael Blackwood is an independent New York filmmaker who has made more than 100 films specializing in art, architecture, music and dance.
Vera Frenkel is a Toronto-based artist currently engaged in a web-based project on the inner life of a dysfunctional cultural institution.
Imaging the Artist: The Role of the Artist in Contemporary Culture. Genius, sage, joker, subversive, madman, outsider, aesthete, avant gardist, intellectual-the image of the artist in contemporary culture is an amalgam of types from history, literature, film and academia, each offering its own role to be played, its own art to be made.
Are artists held prisoner by these images? Do audiences misplace expectations because of them? What is the role of the artist? The as-yet-unwritten identities? Can we separate Pop from Warhol cool? Abstract Expressionism from Pollock intensity? The Vancouver School from Jeff Wall’s aloof clarity?”
(image from canadianart.ca)
I just posted my review of the Canadian Art Foundation’s Symposium on ‘imaging the artist’ here on blogTo.com, and on Tuesday I posted a review of Robert Storr speaking last week at the Harbourfront Centre on the grotesque.
The word grotesque for me most often seems synonymous with something disgusting, although its proper definition references it’s place in art history as being associated with the decorative and whimsical representaions of things that do not exist in the real world. All of this was made very interesting through Robert Storr, who curated the 2004 Biennial at SITE Santa Fe last year, subtitled ‘Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque‘.
Robert Storr appeared at the Harbourfront’s Centre’s Brigantine room last Thursday night, as part of the Power Plant’s International Lecture Series, to speak on the history of the grotesque in art, and he began by stating that when people ask him, ‘what’s your theory’, he says he doesn’t have one, that he prefers to describe, and through detailed description arrive at analysis by default. From here, he began with a brief bit of art-history, making reference to the grotesques and monsters that can be found as marginalia in the manuscripts and Bibles from the medieval era (although he didn’t name them as medieval -by the end of the lecture he’d made the argument that the grotesque representation was found in all cultures, and claimed it was found especially in Catholic cultures, and so, medieval fauns and other monstrosities are certainly a part of that tradition).
The art which he was specifically speaking about though, according to him, begins during Italy’s Renaissance period, because only then could things be labeled grotesque, a word that literally means ‘grotto-like.’ Grottos in this case were the underground crypts and chambers discovered in Rome and other Roman cities during the 1400s, when interest in reviving the excellence of the Ancient masters drove Italy’s artists toward abandoning the inept style (and it was very much a style) of the medieval era toward mathematical precision and proportional perfection. The discovery of work that went against this Ancient ideal by the Ancients themselves, was inspiring and freed up artists to work in this manner on the side in sketches or other personal projects, or when decorating the ceiling of the Uffizi or the Vatican.
Storr described this then as an expression of whimsy and playfulness. The grotesque for him means an expression of play, of satirical ugliness, of being able to deal with taboo and vulgar subjects under the umbrella of humour. One can critique horror by fictionalizing it, which brought up a response to critics who said that in his SITE Santa Fe exhibit should have included the pictures of Abu Ghraib. He said that there was a distinct difference between the record of a horror and the depiction of one, the record being much worse than anything an artist imagines. Although this example didn’t come up, we can look to the way we treat going to a horror movie as a bit of fun against actually witnessing someone get murdered to see what he’s getting at.
Central to his definition of the grotesque was an element of contradiction. The Hegelian idea of Thesis/Antithesis/Synthesis behind which debate seems to be the best way to express ourselves, to argue and counterargue in order to find and work from a common ground, is instead more often one of thesis/antithesis only. Storr argued that when you have nothing but thesis and antithesis going at each other without synthesis, you’re stuck, and his contention seemed to be that the grotesque was the art of this condition. Our current political situation – exacerbated in the United States (Storr is after all an American curator speaking about the ideas behind an American art exhibition) as a battle between Left vs. Right, or now, Red State vs Blue State, is one of thesis/antithesis situations without apparent synthesis. This condition seems to be part of the Western World as whole, as we do indeed seem stuck in nostalgic-marketing loops and relentless media campaigns designed to convince us that celebrities are important people.
So a situation of being stuck between opposing views expresses itself with the element of contradiction which he claims runs through examples of grotesque art. The old school models of a satyr with the ears of a donkey, a vampire as a human being with fangs, the monster as a representation of biological contradiction, to newer school models of Duchamp’s stool and bicycle wheel, which enabled a vast mosaic of grotesquerie in representation throughout the 20th Century. A modern master of this would include Jeff Koons, whose vacum cleaners, according to Storr, are a kind of contemporary vanitas, the immaculate preservation of which behind glass is a still life reminding us of the presence of decay in the rest of the world, and the transience of human life, as these vacuum cleaners are supposed to outlive us all, remaining perfect as we age and die, while at the same time grotesque because they are a kind of consumerist joke.
His lecture, which went about an hour, ended basically with the argument that the expression of the grotesque challenges the prevailing ideals, or as I would put it, the hegemonic discourse. So when beautiful work is an ideal, grotesque work is the rebellion against that, and since beauty has been the ideal for centuries, the expression of contradiction and ugliness has never really gone away. Some confusion was raised with his use of the word ‘universal’, which he pointed out is to say that some things can be found in all cultures, however, he pointed out that there is a misconception at work which claims that the ideal of classical beauty in the ancient Greek mode (Classicism) is a universal ambition, which found itself expressed a century ago within the language of the European Empires, who defined the cultural works of the ‘primitive’ peoples under their jackboots as ugly and uncivilized. Perhaps it is here where the popular misunderstanding of grotesque as something repellent begins. The point Storr made is that the grotesque is not a visual language of the uncivilized, it is merely an antithesis to a dominant thesis. As this website (the file linked there is provided below) summarizes the Site Sante Fe exhibition, “Curator Robert Storr pushes the envelope of good taste with ‘Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque.'” To say that the grotesque ‘challenges good taste’ is exactly Storr’s point, as we should be ever aware of what the ideas behind good taste are. As the quote from Aldoph Loos’ stupid “Ornament and Crime” pointed out, ‘good taste’ can be the repository for many intellectual ideals that degrade and belittle those who are different from us.
Related links:
1. Audio: Robert Storr is briefly interviewed in this clip and overview of the Biennial by Angela Taylor from Santa Fe last summer. The clip is an mp3 file and 6.2 MB in size. (Courtesy of Angela Taylor and Goodreads.ca)
2. Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque , The 2004 Biennial
3. How Grotesque! How Grand! review of the exhibition by Blake Gopnik, from last July in the Washington Post
(image courtesy of sitesantafe.org)
With regard to the debates on right now with regard to posters and public space, I thought maybe I should share some thoughts I had last evening with regard to public space and culture. Not so much about posters, but advertising versus public art, like the Ferris wheel on the Harbourfront last summer.
To begin with, I want to borrow Simon Houpt’s report on The Gates, on now in New York’s Central Park. It was in yesterday’s Globe and Mail (the article is moneywalled, but it you want to pay, it is here, although I’m gonna try to excerpt the best).
“The most enlightening comment I’ve heard so far about The Gates came from a man who had no idea what it was,” writes Houpt, “I don’t mean he couldn’t parse the meanings of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s 7,5000 five-metre high doorframes hung with fabric around Central Park, or that he didn’t know whether to call it conceptual art or environmental art or an installation. No, this guy didn’t even know it was art. […] He’d somehow missed all the pre-event press coverage. So as he gazed northward at the thousands of orange shower curtains flapping in the wind, he turned and asked me, ‘Are they advertising that fabric?’Christo and Jeanne-Claude call their piece ‘interventions’ because they intrude, or impose themselves and their works, on public spaces. This apparently freaks us out. [emphasis mine] We’re used to one very specific sort of intervention: commercial ones, otherwise known as advertisements. Indeed, many visitors to Central Park have quipped that it’s a shame the artists don’t accept sponsorships, since the nylon orange is a perfect match for the corporate colours of Home Depot“. [emp. mine]
I would like to now declare art officially over. That’s the temptation, but of course I shouldn’t. Nothing really ever ends, it just evolves into new forms. One of the things I hate about the discourse surrounding contemporary art and its theories is the feelings of terminality. In the 1980s thinkers went to town declaring the end of this and the end of that. From Danto to Fukuyama, suddenly you and I and everyone else are living in a perpetually post world, as if the Boomers were full of apocalyptic messiahs, for whom all history came into being.
Are we supposed to be reveling in our ‘dreadful freedom’ the keywords of existentialism? Saul reminds us in The Doubter’s Companion (sorry I’m bringing him up again, it’s just that I’m in love with him) that existentialism is an ethical philosophy, which emphasizes that we are responsible, and should be judged on, our actions. ‘We are what we do, not what we intend’, he writes, and it’s obvious that within an existentialist framework, The Gates are an ad. Christo, with his 21M budget, is advertising ‘this isn’t advertising’. Lars makes this point in his posting (linked to above, but here again).
One of the things I found really interesting about the advertising industry, five years ago after No Logo came out and I’d begun to read it, was how I’d just gone through Canada’s premiere conceptual art school, and learned all about the art of ideas, and here were ads which were successfully ‘colonizing’ our mental space. Artists are trying to shake up your perceptions and plant ideas in your head, and yet, if only they had the budget. Conceptual artists are so financially outgunned that they have no voice in this culture, so that even when the occasional big budget artwork gets displayed, it’s not even perceived as art, functioning as an ineffective adbusting. This isn’t unique to New York, or The Gates.
Last summer, when the Power Plant was exhibiting the car-ferris wheel, Sally McKay reported overhearing this conversation: “I went down to the show on the street car and a whole posse of little ballerina girls got on at the bottom of Spadina. As we pulled up to the Harbourfront stop one turned-up-nosed-nymph said to another ‘Why make a ferris wheel for cars?’ Without pause or blink or taint of scorn the second replied ‘Promotion.'” (the original was a reply to a post by Jennifer McMackon).
There’s also Montreal’s Roadsworth case, where the city is trying to bust him for vandalism and for ‘distracting’ drivers, as if the naked ladies on billboards everywhere weren’t distracting already. “The Gates is confusing some people and causing a few to foam at the mouth,” Houpt writes, “Andrea Peyser, one of the many right-wing columnists at the New York Post and a woman who gets angry before she wakes up, declared the piece to be, ‘the artistic of equivalent of a yard that’s been strewn with stained toilet paper by juvenile delinquents on Halloween’. [or, it’s the equivalent of some crackers] A number of people I spoke with about the piece who described themselves as strong conservatives echoed her comment, saying they didn’t approve of public spaces such as the park being used for an art exhibit.”
Houpt goes on to comment that Times Square is the most famous public space in the world that’s devoted to advertising, one that was renamed in 1904 to promote the New York Times moving its headquarters to Long Acre Square a century ago. He notes that the City Council passed a resolution requiring the ads there to be brash and bold. When I went to the Times Square for the first time, I found it as an advertising space absolutely pointless: it was so overwhelming, to this day I can’t remember which ads I saw.
I would though, be able to imagine some future recreation of Times Square circa 2000, which could be an equivalent of visiting today’s baroque cathedrals … just overwhelming image and details absent the context by which we understand it as something to ignore. What I’m suggesting is that in the long run, as a measure of what this culture is about, it is not our artworks that are as interesting as it is our adverts. Which is depressing I admit, but what alternative are artists offering, when they can’t even break out of that paradigm? Perhaps the reason the public is so committed to painting and drawing, (the old, ‘do you paint?’ conversation when you tell someone you’re an artist) or ‘more traditional forms’, is because advertising has never co-opted it successfully.
When Jonas Mekas gave a lecture a couple of years ago, as part of the Ryerson Kodak Lecture Series, he complained about corporate culture, saying he wanted to celebrate the small, those who embrace failure in everyday life, and those who don’t want to make history. I myself hate the ‘failure discourse’ that’s grown up over the past few years, because it’s pretty retarded (‘I’m gonna be successful by failing’, WTF?) but I was sympathetic to what he was saying. He was bitching about this fashion of mega-art big budget stuff. I can see now that artists are merely trying to compete with ads on their own terms, equally big-budget, equally empty of profundity. It gives me more security to continue making small paintings and drawings, since if I had 21 M dollars, I’d try to do something more socially significant than ‘redecorate a bike path‘. And, it reminds us that when you can’t compete with ads on their own terms, a photocopier can be just as effective. If the city wants to get rid of posters, they should pass a by-law requiring billboard companies (like Viacom, which owns everything) to donate the space for a certain percentage of the year.
Coming out of that lecture, I was immediately confronted with Toronto’s pathetic attempt at a Times Square, that of Dundas. The debate is valid, in my perspective, in that I don’t mind messy poles, it makes me feel that I’m walking in a living city. It’s 21million times better than the waste of money that the redevelopment on Dundas represents. The posters, and the debate, tell me that while advertising may have co-opted the imaginations of many people so that public art projects are confused with them, there is a percentage of people for whom that hasn’t happened, and that’s the city’s artists. While ad agencies have tried to even co-opt graffiti as well with their murals (which have the double effect of usually being aesthetically pleasing, so I don’t mind them as much as I do billboards) their work will never be confused with advertising.
Boy oh boy, the celebrity establishment are dropping like flies nowadays. In the past year, Brando, Miller, Carson, and now Hunter S. Thompson.
The death of Thompson this past weekend prompts me to share the one thing about him that sticks in my mind and probably always shall. I haven’t read any of his books, although I did love the Johnny Depp movie. This is a letter that was excerpted in Vanity Fair in their Dec 2000 issue, promoting the release of his book of collected correspondence at the time.
To the editor Aspen News and Times:December 14 1969
Woody Creek, Colorado
Dear Editor,
My reason for writing this letter is unfortunate, but I can no longer live in Aspen without doing something about the absence of feeling about the war in Vietnam. I am not the only one who feels this way.
Accordingly, I want to explain our action before we do it, because I realize a lot of people won’t understand. On Xmas eve we are going to burn a dog with napalm (or jellied gasoline made to the formula of napalm) on a street where many people will see it. If possible, we will burn several dogs, depending on how many we find on that day. We will burn these dogs wherever we can have the most public impact.
Anybody who hates the idea of burning dogs with napalm should remember that the American army is burning human beings with napalm every day in Vietnam. If you think it is wrong to burn a dog in Aspen, what do you think about burning people in Asia?
We think this will make the point, once people see what napalm does. It hurts humans much worse than it hurts dogs. And if anybody doubts this, they can volunteer to take the place of whatever dogs we have. Anybody who wants to try it should be standing in front of the Mountain Shop about four o’clock on Xmas eve, and he should be wearing a sign that says, ‘Napalm Dog.’ If this happens, we will put the jellied gasoline on the person, instead of the animal. Frankly, I’d rather burn a human war-monger than a dog, but I doubt if any of these will show up.
Sincerely,
‘Adolph’
(for obvious reasons I can’t state my real name).
“The most enlightening comment I’ve heard so far about The Gates came from a man who had no idea what it was,” writes Simon Houpt, in today’s Globe and Mail (the article is moneywalled, but it you want to pay, it is here, although I’m gonna try to excerpt the best). He continues:
I don’t mean he couldn’t parse the meanings of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s 7,5000 five-metre high doorframes hung with fabric around Central Park, or that he didn’t know whether to call it conceptual art or environmental art or an installation. No, this guy didn’t even know it was art.On the day the curtains were unfurled, the manager on duty at the New York Athletic Club on Central Park South escorted me to the club’s ninth-floor ballroom so I could see the piece from on high. He had no idea why I wanted to go up there: He’d somehow missed all the pre-event press coverage. So as he gazed northward at the thousands of orange shower curtains flapping in the wind, he turned and asked me, “Are they advertising that fabric?”
Christo and Jeanne-Claude call their piece ‘interventions’ because they intrude, or impose themselves and their works, on public spaces. This apparently freaks us out. [emphasis mine] We’re used to one very specific sort of intervention: commercial ones, otherwise known as advertisements. Indeed, many visitors to Central Park have quipped that it’s a shame the artists don’t accept sponsorships, since the nylon orange is a perfect match for the corporate colours of Home Depot. [emp. mine]
I would like to now declare art officially over. That’s the temptation, but of course I shouldn’t. Nothing really ever ends, it just evolves into new forms. One of the things I hate about the discourse surrounding contemporary art and its theories is the feelings of terminality. In the 1980s thinkers went to town declaring the end of this and the end of that. From Danto to Fukuyama, suddenly you and I and everyone else are living in a perpetually post world, as if the Boomers were full of apocalyptic messiahs, for whom all history came into being.
Are we supposed to be reveling in our ‘dreadful freedom’ the keywords of existentialism? Saul reminds us in The Doubter’s Companion that existentialism is an ethical philosophy, which emphasizes that we are responsible, and should be judged on, our actions. ‘We are what we do, not what we intend’, he writes, and it’s obvious that within an existentialist framework, The Gates are an ad. Christo, with his 21M budget, is advertising ‘this isn’t advertising’.
One of the things I found really interesting about the advertising industry, five years ago after No Logo came out and I’d begun to read it, was how I’d just gone through Canada’s premiere conceptual art school, and learned all about the art of ideas, and here were ads which were successfully ‘colonizing’ our mental space. Artists are trying to shake up your perceptions and plant ideas in your head, and yet, if only they had the budget. Conceptual artists are so financially outgunned that they have no voice in this culture, so that even when the occasional big budget artwork gets displayed, it’s not even perceived as art, functioning as an ineffective adbusting. This isn’t unique to New York, or The Gates.
Last summer, when the Power Plant was exhibiting the car-ferris wheel, Sally McKay reported overhearing this conversation:
I went down to the show on the street car and a whole posse of little ballerina girls got on at the bottom of Spadina. As we pulled up to the Harbourfront stop one turned-up-nosed-nymph said to another “Why make a ferris wheel for cars?” Without pause or blink or taint of scorn the second replied “Promotion.”
which was a reply to this post by Jennifer McMackon.
There’s also the Roadsworth case, where the city is trying to bust him for vandalism and for ‘distracting’ drivers, as if the naked ladies on billboards everywhere weren’t distracting already. “The Gates is confusing some people and causing a few to foam at the mouth,” Houpt writes,
Andrea Peyser, one of the many right-wing columnists at the New York Post and a woman who gets angry before she wakes up, declared the piece to be, ‘the artistic of equivalent of a yard that’s been strewn with stained toilet paper by juvenile delinquents on Halloween’.”
(or, it’s the equivalent of some crackers)
A number of people I spoke with about the piece who described themselves as strong conservatives echoed her comment, saying they didn’t approve of public spaces such as the park being used for an art exhibit.
Houpt goes on to comment that Times Square is the most famous public space in the world that’s devoted to advertising, one that was renamed in 1904 to promote the New York Times moving its headquarters to Long Acre Square a century ago. He notes that the City Council passed a resolution requiring the ads there to be brash and bold. When I went to the Times Square for the first time, I found it as an advertising space absolutely pointless: it was so overwhelming, to this day I can’t remember which ads I saw.
I would though, be able to imagine some future recreation of Times Square circa 2000, which could be an equivalent of visiting today’s baroque cathedrals … just overwhelming image and details absent the context by which we understand it as something to ignore. What I’m suggesting is that in the long run, as a measure of what this culture is about, it is not our artworks that are as interesting as it is our adverts. Which is depressing I admit, but what alternative are artists offering, when they can’t even break out of that paradigm? Perhaps the reason the public is so committed to painting and drawing, (the old, ‘do you paint?’ conversation when you tell someone you’re an artist) or ‘more traditional’ forms, is because advertising has never co-opted it successfully.
When Jonas Mekas gave a lecture a couple of years ago, as part of the Ryerson Kodak Lecture Series, he complained about corporate culture, saying he wanted to celebrate the small, those who embrace failure in everyday life, and those who don’t want to make history. I myself hate the ‘failure discourse’ that’s grown up over the past few years, because it’s pretty retarded (‘I’m gonna be successful by failing’, WTF?) but I was sympathetic to what he was saying. He was bitching about this fashion of mega-art big budget stuff. I can see now that artists are merely trying to compete with ads on their own terms, equally big-budget, equally empty of profundity. It gives me more security to continue making small paintings and drawings, since if I had 21 M dollars, I’d try to do something more socially significant than ‘redecorate a bike path‘.
(a version of this also appears here)
In today’s Globe and Mail, I saw the headline for an article (same report here since The Globe’s archives are moneywalled) which read: “Vatican denounces ‘health-fiend’ madness’, with the sub-heading, “Rejecting society’s costly quest for cures, Rome says Pope’s suffering is to be admired”.
I didn’t read the article, since I felt no need. This has been the Vatican’s position on their increasingly incapacitated leader for years … the Pope wants to promote an acceptance of life as it is, rather than run from all of it’s problems. His illness is likened to the Christ’s willingness to be tortured to save the souls of humanity. It also follows in the Pope’s desire for a ‘culture of life‘ which is one that accepts the disabled and the infirm instead of a political debate on euthanasia, which he’s argued, is nothing more than the healthy desiring to eliminate and hide from things that make them uncomfortable. Those of us familiar with the arguments from the poverty-lobby know what he’s talking about here. Treat human beings as human beings no matter what their circumstance.
Unfortunately, this dismissal on medicine is too much inline with Neitzsche’s analysis of Christianity as a religion of slaves, which is quite literally was in the beginning. The Church becomes an apologist for social injustice, promoting the idea that life isn’t fair and you’d better get used to it, and better yet, find metaphorical meaning in your state of injustice.
It could be argued that the default setting of a human being is that of a religious animal – that spirituality plays a big part of our lives, since the mind naturally looks for meaning in the world, through it’s pattern recognition engine. That’s what psychology has given us, a sensible explanation for our spiritual beliefs. It doesn’t detract from them in anyway, to know how it works, and for me it encourages a healthy attitude toward spirituality as part of a balanced psychology. But we understand there’s a profound difference between spirituality and being religious. Religion has come to be seen by many as a way to keep the ignorant in line – that’s been argued for centuries now. It is a secular position. It seems to follow that if people are prone to religiosity to express their spirituality by default, education almost always eliminates that desire, and makes people in some cases atheists, but in most cases, appreciative of a secular division between religion and state. Pierre Trudeau was an ardent Catholic, but he knew better to be one in public. The USA has not been so fortunate yet, as their presidents turn going to Church into photo ops, to court the votes of their citizens who have gone through their dismal school system. That gimmick alone is probably why they refuse to reform their schools, since then their politicking would get a lot more difficult than simply showing up for photo ops and giving simplistic campaign speeches.
Martin Luther’s Reformation came about because by 16th Century, the Church, which had nurtured education, had become a nest of secular, and in some cases, atheistic individuals (which they wouldn’t have admitted, but it’s fair to say they were cynical). They were making money selling absolutions and enjoying the comforts of a high social standing. They were the CEO’s of their day, disengaged, uncaring, and doing everything they could to maintain their privileged status quo. Even after the Reformation, the Church remained corrupt, so that by the 18th Century, (in France anyway) it was a target of disdain by the Encyclopediaists and Volatire, and in the 20th Century seems to have been a haven for homosexuals well versed in the ideals of Greek Love (not so much pedophiles, but a love for pubescent teenage boys, see this Slate article for more). So, anyway, the point is that the priesthood has often been corrupted by scandal, whether sexual or idealistic. Heretics and perverts, for 2000 years, but still able to nurture culture and thought during the long fall of the Roman Empire.
As a religion of slaves, the Church is an apologist for social injustice. It propagates that injustice even today, with it’s refusal to admit condoms are a good thing. Abortion is something else entirely – as something that celebrates life, as a spiritual exercise, there’s no way it can ever condone abortion. As President Clinton said of abortion, ‘it should be safe, legal and rare’. People who turn abortion into a factor of dehumanization, and go so far as to want to kill abortionists, are clearly more on the Devil’s side than God’s. But religious opposition to abortion encourages us, and reminds us, to treat human beings as human beings no matter what their circumstance. The fact that there’s a difference between a collection of cells and a baby is what allows those of us who support abortion rights to sleep at night.
The prevalence of abortion as a convenience and form of birth control because women aren’t able to face the prospect of being a mother so young, nor being a single mom, especially under conditions of poverty, is a measure of how unjust and how unfavorable our society is toward life. So when the Pope, or even President Bush, talks about nurturing a ‘culture of life’ rather than one of death, I am sympathetic.
Writing from the perspective of the 26th Century, Richard Morgan, in Altered Carbon, describes Catholics this way:
‘Catholics,’ said Ortega, lip curling, ‘Old-time religious sect.’ […] ‘Kovacs, I hate these goddamn freaks. They’ve been grinding us down for the best part of two and half-thousand years. They’ve been responsible for more misery than any other organization in history. You know they won’t even let their adherents practice birth control, for Christ’s sake, and they’ve stood against every significant medical advance of the last five centuries. Practically the only thing you can say in their favor is that this d.h.f thing has stopped them from spreading with the rest of humanity’.
The d.h.f thing is the central premise of the novel, that in the future you can digitize a human’s mind and transfer it from body to body, enabling practical immortality as long as the chip at the base of your skull is not destroyed. In the novel, Catholics have taken the stance that you can’t digitize a soul, and so this is all very immoral and forbidden, even though the rest of society as reformed itself around this reality, which has actually led to a retrogression, since, removing death means it is no longer an effective motivator, nor is it terrifying, so torture – the infliction of memorable pain – is now much more common and necessary, and culture stagnates because memory is so long.
The Vatican can denounce health fiend madness all it wants, and keep propping up their chief invalid, but their philosophical justifications for the most part aren’t helping anybody. It is quite probable that by the 2500s, Richard Morgan’s dialogue will be spoken in actuality by somebody, since Catholicism has too often used it’s philosophers to try and pin down the injustice of the status quo. When I wrote the other day that just because certain problems have been around since Roman times does not so much mean they are timeless as they’re indications that we’re very good procrastinators, it does occur to me now that the procrastination has been helped because the Vatican keeps feeding society’s leaders with excuses not to do anything. And hence, ‘as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end’.
Dear Pope,
Things aren’t as bad as you think they are.
Please die soon, so that you can enjoy your eternal rest and the conversations with Jesus, which I’m sure you’ll enjoy more than the Vatican’s bureaucracy. And could you say hi to my dead grandfathers for me?
Your little catholic sheep from Nova Scotia,
Timothy
Read this today in Defamer:
Brad Pitt will star in the mind-bendingly self-referential Sony pic Chad Schmidt, where he’ll play an actor that can’t get work because he looks too much like Brad Pitt. You know, kind of like Skeet Ulrich and Johnny Depp. [Variety]
Which reminded me of the project I wanted to do last year, where I wanted to make a video that consisted of a Charlie Rose type interview with an actor, who plays me in a future biopic. Inspired by the appearance of Ed Harris on Charlie Rose when he was promoting Pollock, I basically wanted to do the same thing: interview, with clips from the film. Project didn’t get off the ground for different reasons: no money, no film equipment, too much of mind bender. But as I’ve said about another backburnered project (I have a very big stove with lots of backburners) no reason why I can’t do it in the future.
With Pitt’s movie coming out, and with my idea in mind, I’ve got to thinking about how our time has stopped moving forward, and become nothing more than a pool. Was it Derrida who wrote about this? I don’t know, who can understand him anyway? Time is always compared to a river, which is a very Western conception … time flows in a linear way. Other cultures throughout the world saw time in a cyclical nature, inspired by the regularity of the seasons. Myself, I experience a bit of both … time flows from a distant past, but as Mark Twain said, “Time doesn’t repeat itself but it sure does rhyme”, or the other saying I think about, “The more things change the more they stay the same”. Reading history can shock you into a feeling that despite lots of superficial advancements, human beings behave consistently. That’s human nature for you.
Reading the Dune novels in my early 20s though gave a me a sense for deep stretches of time. Those novels cover something like 5000 years, with the emperor Leto II having had a 3000 year reign, due to the spice and other intricacies of the storyline. It made me wonder what our world would be like had an Egyptian pharaoh achieved this type of longevity … imagine having some king who’d be around for 3000 years. In the Dune novels, there’s little cultural variation over these lengthy time periods, because of the status quo of long lived leaders. It helps make me aware that we’re only 2000 years away from the time of Christ, and we think that’s a big deal. But in reality, our species has been on the planet, and creating culture for 195,000 years. We are a very different type of human, but our history divided into centuries is actually pretty insignificant … and hence, we can see that just because social injustice has been around since the time of the Roman Empire, it’s not so much that they’re timeless problems, but that we happen to be very good procrastinators.
Our own time period encourages this procrastination by immersing us in ‘tradition traps’. Jared Diamond, in his book, Collaspe, describes how cultural stubbornness prevented the Norse from eating fish and working with the natives in Greenland, and hence, their colony collapsed. The tradition traps that we are in the midst of are held in place by advertising and all these mixed media messages – a news story on global warming and environmental degradation is followed by an SUV commercial or a TV show glamorizing a lifestyle that is inherently selfish and harmful. As much as we want to be happy in our lives and have a sort or relaxed approach to things, we don’t think that individually we matter too much, and that the sort of things we see happen in the workplace that are wrong, or the choices we make as to where to vacation, matter.
Stuck in a nostalgia loop of marketing, with previous decades being re-presented to us, with ‘greatest hits’ compilations and what not, which should be marketed, or presented, as form of history, are instead presented to us as a rebranded part of our present. In the past – in the 20th Century, the future was something that people envisioned, and planed for. They tried to guide the course of the stream. Today, for a variety of reasons beyond what I’ve already described, the future has been lost. The older generation – our establishment – have failed in the imagination of the future. Even the latest Star Trek show has fallen into re-using plots from the past franchises, and has recently been canceled. Why this generation has failed to lead, to imagine, is only because of the industry of management. John Ralston Saul is my intellectual hero because he really nailed this in the 1990s – how our society had overproduced managers, whose job it is to manage, not imagine. I also can’t help but think that this generation failed because they were blindsided by digitization. In the early 1990s, fax machines and interactive television were seen to be the wave of the future, and bam, along comes the World Wide Web and eBay, Amazon, and Google.
My recent Goodreads selections, documents from the future, show me that imagining the future hasn’t gone away. It’s only been underreported, underrepresented, because people who grew up with computers and watching science-fiction, and thinking about things in ways that reflect our experience of the late 20th Century, aren’t yet part of the establishment. Debates in this country on green-energy and gay marriage, seem pointless to us because we’ve been to the mountaintop and seen the promised land. The sci-fi of the 1980s – the last real decade of imagination – inspired us to what our world might be like as 21st Century adults. It was a world of liberal values, inclusiveness, and one that alternated between a violent dystopia and a technological utopia. In 2005 we’ve gotten both.
The dreams for the future that got us this far are now out of gas. We’ve become self-referential. Brad Pitt playing himself is part of what this decade is about, but this was already present fifty years ago, when Richard Sherman’s character in 1955’s The Seven Year Itch referred to ‘the blond in the kitchen’ as maybe being Marilyn Monroe. Seeing that movie the other night was an example of the more things change… since our lives today are still about ‘kids today’ and television, and stress, counting calories, and summer’s being too hot. What has changed is the place of women in society, no longer so domesticated to be sent off to Maine for the holidays. Thank goodness for that. That movie is not as delightful as it once was because it isn’t fair to women. Hence, the more they stay the same, the more things change.
My own project came from a desire for context. To sort-of understand my place in current events – a chance to reproduce some of my favorite scenes in biopics, where a character has a radio on or the news or whatever, contextualizing the story in history. I often felt like my life had become cinematic in that way standing next to newspaper boxes in the month immediately after September 2001. I also wanted to play with the idea that we get it wrong whenever we make these biopics, because as a re-creation of the past, liberties are taken. So I wanted to make something that used the stereotypes of our time to engage in a simulacra, stuff like have the actor playing me wearing Tommy Hilfiger stuff even though I refuse to buy anything that’s Tommy. Trying to represent how this time might be envisioned by the future by using it’s most extreme examples. I mean, a film like Pollock that was set in the 1950s, had a very different use of time-period objects than did The Seven Year Itch which was actually made during that decade.
I was also inspired by the type of delightful mindbender like Adaptation where Charlie Kauffman wrote himself into the story. But I guess a reason I didn’t really pursue it was, A) I didn’t get the grant, and B) I have a hard enough time living as I am without trying to step outside of myself to turn myself into a character … and biopics always centre around ‘the great love story’ and there hasn’t been one for me yet, so such a project is premature. Nor have there been really dramatic things to ‘excerpt’ for Mr. Rose in the 22nd Century.
Here are today’s headlines:
Christo’s ‘Gates’ draw more than 1M to Central Park
NEW YORK – In just four days, more than one million people have visited New York’s Central Park to see The Gates, the latest monumental outdoor installation by artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude.
http://www.cbc.ca/story/arts/national/2005/02/16/Arts/gatesvisitors050216.html
This has gotta be the stupidest newstory I’ve ever seen. It’s a fucking park. I read last week that 1 million people go to Central Park every week regardless.
Please please please CBC, get your arts coverage act together. Or, let the bloggers do your work for you.
PS: Can I have a job?
PPS: I’m not the only one who thinks so
Read this
If you’re up for spending 15 bucks to hob-knob with …. well, I won’t say it, might get in trouble. Let’s try again, if you’re willing to spend 15 bucks, to get your first glass of beer free at the Steamwhistle brewery tomorrow night, you’ll be saving not only 5 bucks or so, but you’ll also be able to watch the 2nd Annual Steamwhistle Art Awards, which were renamed the Untitled Art Awards and yay! a chance for the art community to pat-itself on the back again. Or maybe I’m just bitter because I wasn’t nominated.
“Award Show: Mechanism by which the members of a given profession attempt to give themselves the attributes of the pre-modern ruling classes – the military, aristocracy and priesthood – by assigning various orders, decorations, and medals to each other.
These shows are a superficial expression of corporatism. As with the pre-modern classes, their awards related principally to relationships within the profession. Each time the words, “I want to thank” are used by someone being decorated, they indicate a relationship based on power. The awards have little to do with that corporation’s relationship to the outside world – what you might call the public – or for that matter with quality.”
-John Ralston Saul, The Doubter’s Companion (1994)
In an interview with the Torontoist, Julia Dault, Gary Michael Dault’s daughter, says she’s never heard of Jessica Wyman, who she’s up against along with her father for best art writing. I used to work with Jessica Wyman on the board of YYZ, and I just think it’s a shame that someone nominated for art writing is unfamiliar with her work. I think it says a lot about how the art scene here is fragmented into genre interest groups.
Let’s be fair, Julia’s never heard of me either, nor have I really heard of her. She writes for the Post, which I don’t read, mostly because their online archives are moneywalled and I’m not about to buy it everyday, in addition to their editorial slant (although I hear things are changing).
Of her dad, Gary Michael, who writes for the Globe (which I do read everyday), I can say, “Some art critic, he never writes a bad review,” except for the one he wrote at the end of 2001. I know that GMD avoids shows he doesn’t like … that’s his idea of furthering art criticism and the discourse of art in this city. Not that I’ve proven myself much better, but at least Sarah Milroy calls it like she sees it, and she hasn’t been nominated.
Art writing is beset by the problem of worth: if you’re going to write about a show, you’re essentially advertising that show, so folk like the Daults are answering the worthiness of their column space by saying, ‘this is worth your time’. There’s no point wasting words on shows that aren’t worth seeing, because they can find other shows to advertise. I know myself, as someone who writes about art, that’s partially a motivation. But, there’s also answering the question of, ‘is it really worth my time? They’ve programmed such and such in this prestigious gallery/institution, should I go see it?’ and so we turn to these pages to find out. Sarah Milroy is the best at this, answering the question of whether or not the institutions are best serving the public.
In terms of catalogue writing, they’ve been paid to think up Derridian/Foucaltian/Lacanian/insertdeadfrenchwriterhere-ian things to say, so they’re basically prostitutes. I’m not so much a moralist to think prostitution is so wrong, but I do think that it is woefully inauthentic and thus not as valuable as the real deal (not to mention the whole exploitation thing, which really raises my ethical ire). Sex is so much more worth it when it’s based on real lust or love, but doesn’t follow through with its promises when it’s nothing more than a trick (not that I have experience with prostitution, that’s just what I imagine it’d be like, and why I’d never bother with it) . The same is true for sophistication – when writing about art that is based entirely on payment, and not on the desire to share what’s great about something, you aren’t helping the artist, nor are you establishing rock-solid credibility for yourself. We sophisticates end up feeling privileged to show off our book-learning rather than feel exploited. But, I have to say that’s an extreme example. Unlike the sex-industry, exploitation doesn’t really factor in, since, as a power relationship, it’s the sophisticates who are holding the cards. It’s much more of a symbiotic mutual back-scratching. ‘I’ll write for your catalogue because I like your work and you’ll pay me, so you get to seem like you’re a relevant artist and I keep some cash for the bank account’. As far as prostitution goes, it reminds most of the porn industry, where sex-maniacs get paid for their appetites. The “best art writing” in this case, most likely, represents the ‘best’ sycophantry.
Looking over the shortlist, I have to say that there are worthy nominees. Honestly, I am a little jealous that I’m not amoung them, but that’s a whole different story. The temptation is that winning one of these awards will make these artists seem a bit more prestigious, but what’s really wrong here, is that all award shows ultimately create false hierarchies. It is an honour just to be nominated, but beyond that, its becomes a popularity contest, which I hated in highschool and I hate even more as an adult. But I also question whether being nominated at all is so great – it just reveals the biases of the scene. Those who weren’t nominated, what does it say about their work? Just because art-writers don’t write about it doesn’t mean it’s bad, it only means that they probably haven’t been to the shows, or aren’t able to fit it into the last year’s fashions.
Art awards like this are merely props to support a status quo, an attempt to create a monolithic cultural identity, which is unwise, especially in a city as diverse as Toronto. It’s also unwise since monolithic cultural identities are games that Empires play, empires like USA and it’s Greek tutors, the Brits. It doesn’t fit Canada at all, and seems like another example of the Canadian streak of insecure provincialism.
I do appreciate Steamwhistle for trying this, I mean, I appreciate that they do care enough about Toronto’s art to bring this pizzazz to the scene. I figure the artists and others nominated appreciate the attention. But really, I drank Steamwhistle without variation for a year and half, and while at first I thought it tasted awful, by the end it had grown on me, but it did leave me with the worst hangovers. Getting drunk on Steamwhistle is not an experience I recommend. It does nasty things to my chemistry, that’s all I can say. They’ve made lots of money selling bad beer to the city and to the artists around town (as when they first started out they promotionally monopolized the gallery-opening market) and now they want to give something back. That’s more than we ever get from lots and lots of companies, so I think this is worthy of commendation. Give them an award for caring.
The prospect of an awards show with nothing but their strange brew in their cavernous space has little appeal for me. So thanks Steamwhistle, but no thanks. I don’t think you’re doing anyone any favors really. In fact, you’re doing nothing but fostering bitterness amongst the art community.
Saul, writing in 1994, with the Grammy’s and the Oscars, with the Genie and Junos as our Canadian knock-offs (not to the mention the East Coast Music Awards, keeping the Maritimes perpetually stereotyped) as the most relevant examples, we can now throw in the local Toronto art scene’s attempt to codify the who’s-kissing-who’s ass-power relationships, which, as he said, have nothing to do with the public. Is art, in Toronto and elsewhere, for a public, for people who walk in to galleries without having gone to art school, or is it only for those of us who have gone to art school? Award shows are bad ideas for any genre. For an arts scene which is already painfully insular, an orgy of self-congratulation does no one any good. The ‘best of” that Now Magazine prints – which is mailed in by readers – has way more legitimacy for me.
Last night, The Daily Show did one of their pseudo-reports on Christo’s The Gates, a transcription of which is below:
Stewart: Wow, what an exciting 16 days here in New York, with more I’m joined by Daily Show Senior Conceptual Art Correspondent Stephen Colbert, live in Central Park. Stephen, thank you so much for joining us.
Stephen: Yes Jon.
Stewart: It’s clearly dusk there in Central Park. Stephen, whatya think?
Stephen: Simply put, The Gates is a triumph Jon, an artistic milestone that may finally put New York on the cultural map. I don’t want to get ahead of myself here Jon, but I think this may do for the Big Apple what The West Wing has done for Washington DC, or what the band Asia did for that continent.
Stewart: Stephen, I have to say, and again, you know, I can’t help but wonder, what does all this mean?
Stephen: [begins stroking goatee silently]
Stewart: uh, Stephen…Stephen
Stephen: Hold on Jon, that’s a five stroker [continues stroking goatee silently, to the audience’s laughter]. Jon, The Gates is a triumph of contemporary installation art. Each Gate redefining its section of the park as not a public place for private reflection, but a private place for public reflection, juxtaposed with the barrenness of the mid-winter, The Gates posits a chromatic orgy, this riot of colour achieves a rare re-defamilrazation with the nature of place-time, the whatness of our whereness. N0 longer framed …. I’m sorry I’ve run out of crap. [audience applauds]
Stewart: As our conceptual art critic, is this great art?
Stephen: Yes Jon, because like all great art it challenges what we thought we knew about the world. For instance, I used to think 21 million dollars could be used to achieve something noble, like, I don’t know, build a hospital wing. But The Gates has forced me to recontextualize my notion of what 21 million dollars can be used for, in this case, redecorating a bike path.
Stewart: So, you believe that shrouding these walkways in these orange curtains will somehow change our lives in New York?
Stephen: Oh, it’s happening already Jon. Just today I saw an installation artist take a sandwich and … and wrap it in a paper like substance, almost waxy in texture, and he kept wrapping it, and I’m not doing it justice here, he kept wrapping until he visually achieved ‘not-sandwich’, then, this is the genius part Jon, at the last minute he cut it in two, in a final act of ‘re-sandwichment’.
Stewart: So … so you had lunch at a deli?
Stephen: Ok, fine, I was at “a deli”. Ordering “lunch”. That’s how you need to think of it. “Jon”.
——–
Update (7 March): a reader as submited this link to the clip on the Comedy Central website. Thank you anonymous.
Notes about Istvan Kantor:
* His working name is Monty Cantsin.
* He won the Governor General’s award and the media tried to spark a national outrage but no one cared.
* He was arrested in Berlin last autumn for throwing blood on a statue, but that’s been his modus operandi for 20 years, and no one in Canada cared.
* Blood is his favorite medium; he likes dumping jars of pig’s blood over his head.
* His exhibition on now at AGYU is better than you’d expect, and it helps if you understand 1980s nihilism.
* He’s actually a really sweet guy, the father of three children, and they haven’t been taken away by child services, so that’s saying something.
* He’s romanticizes revolution, yet a performance I saw of his was a pointed critique of revolution.
* I’m under the impression that he could only be this successful in Canada, which I appreciate.
So, you go to the AGYU, and you have one room that has a remarkable installation made up of filling cabinets, with three videos projected against the wall. The pace of the video’s looping effect is determined by the distance that drawers are pulled from the three filling cabinets before the wall they’re projected onto. There’s a slide, a tent, with another monitor and another video …. in the backroom, there’s a full-length video featuring the pseudo-orgy and the pigs blood and Kantor’s usual. Now, I think because I was a fan of Nine Inch Nails during its run during the 90s some of my first thoughts seeing this show was that this show is 10 years out of date … ten years ago, Kantor would be screening calls from Trent Reznor, cause he’d want Kantor to direct his next video.
I also had the thought that a gallery wasn’t really the proper venue for these films – maybe they should be screened at Roy Thompson Hall or something, because they are simply industrial music videos. I think that’s why I found the show outstanding really – so brash, so loud, and yet rhythmic enough that it doesn’t give you a headache or is a painful experience. I’ve seen lots of videos where looped editing and quick cuts can make you a bored and nauseous, but Kantor clearly knows what he’s doing – he knows how to cut it so that it comes across visually as a beat, as a rhythm. The effect is entrancing …and I spent more time watching the video in the back room than I would have usually. Of course, that means I had to read the nonsensical bombastic sentences – I doubt Kantor even takes them seriously, they seem to be just a bunch of techno-sounding words strung together to sound magnificent. There’s lots of scrolling text in both this video and the one on the monitor in the army tent … but trust me, you don’t have to take it seriously. Don’t judge Kantor as a writer.
Ok, so that’s the good stuff I wanted to write about the show. And now, for the dirt … or the dried pig’s blood. Frankly, it’s pretty revolting, and it’s a testimony for our tolerance as artists in the community, and as Canadians with our embedded relativism and appreciation for our cultural diversity that we put up with it. But, what choice do we have? Censorship? That doesn’t work and is stupid to begin with. Adults have the capacity to decide for themselves. I’d hate to think there are lots of people out there who are into the blood thing, but I know for myself personally, I dismiss it because it seems essentially harmless and it’s more of a big joke than an actual psychological problem of Kantor’s.
When Kantor was arrested in November, the reporter writing for the Globe and Mail mistakenly credited him with a performance of Jubal Brown’s, who’s appreciation for brash video editing and disgusting subject matter is clearly inspired by Kantor’s example, who is old enough now to be looked up to and respected. If he were 25 I’d be like, what the fuck is this shit? I wouldn’t want to take Kantor seriously at all. I.K. has clearly earned this respect, and while the Governor General’s award had some controversy, it was also an understandable and respected decision.
He may seem overly successful because me and others write about him, but I’m writing about him because the show’s up and there’s nothing else to write about at the moment …. and that’s the story of Canadian art. I remember when I was just starting out I was told that basically, if you hang around long enough, they’ll start paying you. That is, an art career in Canada (over the past 40 years anyway) has been based on endurance rather than quality or anything else. You do something for long enough and suddenly the arbiters of taste’ll be all like, “oh, they’re great” and blah blah blah. Since art has such a high drop-out rate, you stick around long enough and you’ll get shows at the AGYU too, because it’s not like there’s a great pool of mature artists to cherry pick from.
I don’t think Kantor is great. Not yet anyway. Greatness is a loaded word that everyone is uncomfortable with. But one of the things I find wonderful about art is how these things are like islands in the stream of time, communications of human psychology from the past and the future … and by the future I mean, the Mona Lisa that Napoleon looked at in 1805 is the same we see in 2005 … from our perspective it’s a document from the past, but from Napoleon’s, it’s as if he borrowed a little bit of our time for his bedroom. That’s artistic greatness, when you have something that communicates to people in all time periods. Will Kantor be studied by students in 100 years? Maybe. I often say that if you do anything in art for more than a year, you’re part of art history, a lesson I learned from watching Antiques Roadshow. Kantor isn’t the type of artist to leave behind stuff for future Antiques Roadshows. His work isn’t anything I’d consider desirable.
He’s become part of the Canadian art establishment in spite of his antipathy against it, and he’ll be collected by museums now, since GG bestowed an honour. Kantor’s work may not speak to the audience of 2105, (at least the one I can imagine, but how the hell would I know?) but to the audience of 2005 he offers a reminder that a certain generation of men, like William Gibson, have had a romance with techno-dystopia, and a love for the bombast of revolution. Kantor’s work reminds me of the awfulness of the Johnny Mnenmoic movie, or an even better example, the Scientiological nonsense of Earth Final Conflict, in that a few leather straps and loose wires have become some kind of semiotic of technological menace and dehumanization, and yet Kantor, like the rest us, benefits from the ease of computer video editing and email. Technological dystopia is a nihilistic myth, and like all myths, it makes a good story and not much else. In Neuromancer, Gibson’s character Riveria grew up in the nuked wasteland of Bonn, which until the reunification of 1990, had been the capital of democratic West Germany. A quote from the write up on the Canada Council site:
Budapest, Hungary, 1956. At the height of the brutal Soviet repression of the Hungarian revolution, Istvan Kantor’s grandfather made him a toy gun out of scrap wood. The six-year-old future artist and neoist agitator then dashed out onto the rubble-strewn streets and pointed his toy gun at oncoming Soviet tanks. The tanks immediately menaced his family’s apartment building. According to Kantor, this was his first authentic work of art, and the tanks, the smashed carts and burned-out cars, the shattered windows and bullet – riddled buildings are the primal scene – frightening, ecstatic – from which his art emerged.
The army tent, the penchant for waving flags around, the revolutionary aesthetic of marching music … Reznor, Kantor, Gibson, they can begin to find expression in the punk of the 1980s, safety pins through earlobes and all that. David Bowie sings in Hereos that the proverbial couple kissed as though nothing could fall, with bullets shooting over their heads … but the wall did fall, and now it seems a foolish footnote in history, that for 28 years a wall divided two ideologies in a devastated city. When Communism collapsed, even I remember missing it circa 1992, because things were more certain then; and the fact that the Bush administration is made up of hawks who grew their feathers under definitive, ideological menaces, is one of the reasons our news is the bad dystopian movie that it is. It makes total sense to me that someone like Kantor would make the work that he makes. I see it almost with a patronizing attitude, a “there there old man, it’ll be ok. At least you’re not in politics.”And finally, the Gift thing: Kantor throws vials of his blood on the walls of art galleries, sometimes at works themselves. In December 2002, I saw him do this at the Power Plant during the opening of their show on the propangada art from China’s Cultural Revolution. Kantor shows up with a photographer and begins throwing the vials across the framed poster and text at the gallery’s entrance. Because everyone there knew what was going on, everyone politley stood and watched. I remember Phillip Monk (who was curator there at the time, and is now curator at the AGYU) taking snapshots with a disposable camera. There was no shock effect, and no big ruckuss, unlike this photo.
As Bruce Barber (a former prof of mine at NSCAD) tells it, these X’s seem to have begun as a desperate cry for art world attention, but are now taken seriously by thinkers of the Canadian establishment:
Since 1979 Kantor has been performing ritualistic blood actions in major galleries throughout Europe and North America, among them: The Ludwig Museum, Koln, MOMA and the Metropolitan in New York City, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and the Musee d’art Contemporain in Montreal. The artist’s modus operandi in this body of work consists of donating (gifting) his blood in the form of an X mark to a suitable museum collection. After choosing the institutional recipient for his ‘gift’, Kantor enters the gallery and splashes vials of his blood in a large X fashion on the wall, usually between two key works of art in the gallery collection. This action often results in his arrest or forced ejection from the gallery, with his return forever banned. Notwithstanding his declamation in the Neoism Manifesto (1979) that “Neoism has no Manifesto”, Kantor’s “neoist research project”, in typical avant-garde style, is accompanied by a press release, a letter of intent and/or manifesto.The artist’s “GIFT to Rauschenberg” (1991) for example, is described in a letter thus:
Dear Mr Rauschenberg,
I made (a) beautiful gift for you in the form of a blood-X, using my own dark and cold blood splashed on a white wall surrounded by your early works at the Ludwig museum, in Koln, where presently you have a powerful retrospective.Would you please leave GIFT on the wall, to be listed and signed as your own work, an additional piece to Erased de Kooning (1953) and Elemental Sculpture (1953), until it becomes meaningless and obsolete.
Revolutionary art is a gob of bloody spit in the face of art history, a kick in the arse to the art world, a tribute to the beauty of vandalism: the ultimate act of creation is, of necessity criminal.
My greatest regards,
signed,
Monty Cantsin.
Kantor, who romanticizes revolution, totally punctured the bubble that night at the Power Plant. Sure, we can look back on these revolutions in history with a yearning for heroes – the courage of punks who by their actions helped build a better world. Those of France and USA are seen to have been ‘glorious’, and those of 1989 sure seemed fun from the comfort of our livingrooms. But the reality is they were nightmarish times none of us would want to live through, and while I remember one art student at the PP that night wearing a red baret, I doubt he’d last long when the real shit (or blood) hit the fan. Kantor splashed his X, and held up a little red book for the documentary photographs, which for me, was an excellent reminder that Mao was a fucker, and that this exhibition was evidence of a terrible time, worth remembering, but not worth romanticizing.Istvan Kantor: Machinery Execution, runs until April 3rd.
PS: (Zeke’s Gallery in Montreal has posted an email exchange between Chris Hand of Zeke’s, and Murray Whyte of the Toronto Star, and they had a good discussion of Kantor’s work, which is here and which was a result of Whyte’s profile on Kantor here).
Mud + 3.8 Billion Years = A conversation
January 2005
Dear Colleagues,
As you know, the Visual Arts Section of the Canada Council for the Arts is working on its new program of assistance to visual artists. We would like to thank you for having taken the time to provide your feedback and ideas during the latest round of public consultations. The volume of the correspondence we received and the quality of many of the interventions once again highlight the keen interest of Canadian artists in the Council???s programs.
Before giving you an overview of the responses, we would like to reiterate the reasons that we decided to revise our Creation/Production grants to visual artists:
- a significant rise in the number of visual artists over the last decade (15,000 according to Statistics Canada);
- the very low level of annual income received by visual artists despite 45 years of investment on the part of the Council;
- the weakness of the market;
- the financial inability of our program to enable artists to devote most of their time to research and creation, or to provide real support to independent creation in Canada, when the Section receives 2,400 applications each year and can offer only 220 grants.
In light of these findings, we had to redefine the goals and terms of our Creation/Production grants to visual artists. We held a series of discussions in the fall of 2003 with more than 250 artists from across Canada (Phase 1 of the consultations). Following these talks, we developed a proposed program whose main values were:
- The focus must be on long-term professional development.
- Social recognition and greater dissemination of artists and their work must be encouraged.
- Artists should receive more encouragement at key moments in their careers.
- Artists usually work independently, but they also need to maintain close professional ties with organizations.
- A diversity of practices (regional, artistic and cultural) must be respected and encouraged.
We presented our draft program in public consultations held in 13 Canadian cities in the fall of 2004 (Phase 2). We listened to and read attentively the comments and submissions we received from you. The main points expressed were as follows:
- The primary concern deals with our proposal to link our creation grants to a confirmed exhibition. This proposal, which aimed to increase the public presentation of works that had received grants, was judged to be detrimental to the development of independent creation.
- The administrative measures that would impose a waiting period for artists who are not supported after a certain number of applications and which limit eligibility for some applicants were considered by many to be too restrictive.
- Artists support the idea of a ???professional venue??? but hope that the Section would be flexible enough to recognize the presentation of alternative practices that are not exhibited, presented or structured by artist-run centres or galleries.
Other points of our proposal were appreciated:
- Many artists agree that the current program must be revised and that the three categories (emerging, mid-career and established) should be abolished.
- The plan for a multi-year grant was generally supported, although certain people found that the amount offered was too high in comparison to other components of the program.
- Electronic processing of applications was supported, since artists see it as a method of transmission that will eventually be the standard for the presentation of grant applications.
Recognizing the importance of independent creation, the Visual Arts Section will take into account all of the comments it has received in drafting the final version of the program. Naturally, this draft program will respect the fundamental values of the Canada Council, such as excellence and peer assessment.
Our next steps:
- Update our web site with the reports on the consultation meetings of Phase 2 on January 27, 2005.
- A meeting of a Special Advisory Committee composed of artists from the community and officers from the Section in January 2005 to study the new draft of the program.
- Presentation of the final draft to the Board of the Canada Council in March 2005. This will take into consideration the reasons for the revision, the values expressed in Phase 1, the comments received in Phase 2 and the comments of the Advisory Committee.
- Announcement of the new program in the Spring of 2005, upon Board approval.
- The gradual phasing in of the new program starting in September 2005.
- Please note that in the interim, the current program and deadline of April 1, 2005, remain unchanged.
We are confident that we will find a solution that addresses the concerns of the artists as well as the values and constraints of the Council. Thank you once again for your input.
Yours sincerely,
Fran??ois Lachapelle
Head of the Visual Arts Section
Canada Council for the Arts
Last March, Ydessa Hendeles gave this presentation to a symposium on Canadian Art History, which was broadcast on CBC’s Artstoday, and from which Sally McKay got an audio file, which she posted on her blog at the time. I got this transcription done over the past couple of days. – Timothy
The questions started with ‘does contemporary Canadian art have a history?’ Everything has a history, every object, every creature, every place, every discourse. The questions are, ‘who knows about it?’ and ‘who has the power to affect it?’
Art history is a conglomerate of narratives, from many places with many players. There are leaders and followers and an audience. Who watches from close up and who from farther away also matters. The question I believe this panel will address is, ‘who validates our several Canadian histories’, since there is no one clear national identity. There’s a different dialogue in every city, every province, and every part of the country. Regardless, as these histories unfold, a market, primary and secondary, fair or unfair, plays a critical and powerful position in proposing and conferring status on art, which affects how our history is assessed here and elsewhere.
Is it a Canadian history or a subset of international art history?
Some areas of Canadian art are rooted in magazine reproductions of art and read that way as derivative, but the most consequential Canadian art provides a rich and formative history, indeed, several definitive histories across the land including a special and unique aboriginal history. Regrettably these are not histories that are known much outside the country, they have yet to be mined.
There have been exhibitions of Canadian art in Europe, but these early exposures did not yield much fruit, as prominent prosperous dealers in America or Europe did not respond and take up the causes of these artists. More widely visible is the reverse. Canadian museum acknowledgements of the action of the art world across the Atlantic, most notably in the exhibition, The European Ice Berg presented at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1985. But the cost traumatized the institution. When I approached the curator of this extravaganza, Germano Celant, a decade later and asked if he’d be willing to come up again and do something that would integrate Canadian art, he replied without missing a beat, “Sure, I’ll call it the Canadian Ice Cube”.
Canadian artists who have achieved superstar status internationally are a relatively new phenomenon. There has been the occasional Canadian artist who has succeeded globally while still living in Canada, but these cases are mainly rare. Even though resident Canadian artists have not often succeeded internationally, times are changing. It is not only possible, but critical for Canadians to make an effort to build relationships with artists and curators outside our national borders. It is the nature of expression to have urgency and seek out as large an audience as possible. There is an instinctually driven, naturally generated curiosity for dialogue. I don’t mean that artists should look for their audience in a careerist, strategic way, as has been the root taken by some artists who have developed career skills and have modest successes resulting from their manipulations. Relationships work best when works are authentic expressions that are not made for strategic purposes of capitalizing upon already existing subjects of discourse. Connections come out of spontaneous desire by two parties to connect, to learn about each other in some depth. Networking opens doors, but should not determine the content of the art. To me some of its originality is compromised if it serves a purpose to please. The best of work creates a desire rather than fulfils one.
Is international the measure of achievement for Canadian art?
An art work certainly acquires an added layer of seductive appeal and prestige in any country when supported outside its national borders. Americans wooed Europeans and vice-versa to their mutual benefit. The larger an audience for work, the greater the impact that work can have on culture. But internationalism as a measure of achievement for Canadian art is only one denominator of success. It’s not the ultimate assessment of the merit of a body of work, because so much of success during an artist’s lifetime both, locally and internationally, comes from luck, in connections, timing, and promotion. These factors matter hugely in what gets seen, and supported inside and outside the country. International visibility is like a Rubic’s cube. All the components have to fit together in just the right way.
If internationalism is important, what role do our institutions play in supporting Canadian art at home?
Museums are by definition conservative. They conserve, mindful of their responsibility as authenticators and keepers of history. This challenges their role at the forefront of contributions to culture because it is difficult and risky to separate what is new and interesting at any one moment from what might ultimately be influential over the long term. While museums are participants in making history by validating art, they have to maintain their position of authority by resisting minor trends and instead choose works that relate to both the individual regional vision of their collections and support works that their curators determine will ultimately affect the course of international visual history from their particular perspective. Museums in each country should not all have the same art in them. Because of the many variables that determine what enters a public collection, it is therefore not easy to define how early museums should support contemporary art. Wealth is a very critical factor in exhibitions and acquisitions. Museums mostly miss out on purchasing seminal works because financial restraints withhold them from responding when they might like to. Some collecting museums, to resolve the issue of timeliness have resorted to showing prominent private collections but this has recently backfired. Indeed, the collecting museum’s authority can easily be corrupted by the market place.
For example, the display of the Saatchi collection in the show Sensation resulted in a scandal at the Brooklyn Museum. Apart from the vitriolic objections to the content by then Mayor Rudi Guilani, who threatened to cut off the museum’s funding because of the use of elephant dung as a material component with glitters on it in a portrait of the Madonna, the persistent controversial issue is the commercial gain later won by the collector as his works were subsequently put up for sale and made huge profits. The trustees of the Museum of Modern Art and the Tate Gallery, both major collecting museums, responded by taking the position that they will not show a private collector’s art collection.
So with that form of display now off limits the context in which contemporary art is shown in further narrowed. Like the separation of Church and State, there is and should be, a boundary between commerce and art. Neither a collector nor a corporation should be able to capitalize financially from the sale of a collection that comes directly from being promoted by a public museum. There are other issues of conflict of interest that impede artists works from being exhibited in collecting institutions. Over time, with decreased funding, the museums had to function as much like a business as an educational, insightful venue for scholarship, leading to an increase in shows on design, some featuring motorcycles and celebrating fashion magnates. As well as a new breed of collectors with more dynamic social skills than art historical knowledge to enable exhibitions to be funded, further lowering the standard of insightful exhibitions. As displays of easy entertainment help the coffers of collecting museums, these then provide additional competition for serious shows of contemporary art, which is yet another compromise to the focus on the newest and most influential, provocative, and rigorous of visual artworks. This tighter financial climate makes visibility harder for artists everywhere.
Is contemporary Canadian art only for Canadians?
Regardless of the challenge of changing economics, contemporary Canadian art provides a valuable heritage that provides a resource of insight into the course the country has traveled in its relatively short history. Though more submerged in the international dialog then would be preferred, it is there, and still gives those of us who seek it out a perspective on what it means to be here and indeed, where is here, an especially difficult notion to identify besides the behemoth below the border. The good news is that our history is becoming known internationally, as more and more people from here are interacting with there and sharing what has and is happening here. It is no longer necessary for artists to flee to reside in a major art centre outside the country to be visible and join into the dialogue. It is now appreciated that one can live in Canada and still be on the world’s stage, one can finally function from here. I think it is important to add to the fabric of the art world, expanding its realm, to radiate from the historical global centres. It is this that I have chosen to do.
In last night’s dream your army consisted of ducks. You were taught by your young cousins how to imitate a duck leader, and how to gather web-footed troops.
Sirens ring out now, filtering through the window, through the brick and the concrete.
What fascination is this life, and this time of year. Proliferation of wondrous literature, sparks for the new centuries’ thoughts, and more importantly, the new decade. C’est fini, c’est tous!
As Gladwell tells it, using a very good art-as-example:
The Poster Test is you get a bunch of posters in a room, you bring some college students in, and you say ‘pick any poster you want, take it home’. And they do that. Second group is brought in and you say, ‘pick any poster you want, tell me why you want it, and then go home’. Couple of months passes, and he calls up all the students, and he asks, “That poster you got a couple of months back, do you like it?’ and the kids, who is the first group didn’t have to explain their choice, all liked their poster. And the kids in the second group who did have to explain, now they hate their poster. And not only that, the kids who had to explain their poster picked a very different kind of poster then the kids who didn???t have to explain their poster.So making people explain what they want changes their preference and changes their preference in a negative way, it causes them to gravitate toward something they actually weren’t interested in in the first place.
Now, there’s a wonderful little detail in this – that there were two kinds of posters in the room, there were Impressionist prints and then there were these posters of, you know, kitten hanging by bars that said, ‘Hang in there baby’. And the students who were asked to explain their preference overwhelmingly chose the kitten. And the ones who weren’t asked to explain overwhelmingly chose the Impressionist poster. And they were happy with their choice obviously, who could be happy with a kitten on their wall after 3 months? Now, why is that?
Why when you ask someone to explain their preference do they gravitate toward the least sophisticated of the offerings? Cause it???s a language problem. You???re someone, you know in your heart that you like the Impressionists but now you have to come up with a reason for your choice, and you really don’t have the language to say why you like the Impressionist photo. What you do have the language for is to say, ‘Well, I like the kitten cause I had a kitten when I was growing up,’ and you know … so forcing you to explain something when you don’t necessarily have the vocabulary and the tools to explain your preference automatically shifts you toward the most conservative and the least sophisticated choice.
It is important to clarify the Language Problem to say that just because people can’t describe to themselves or others why the feel the way they do, does not mean those feelings are absent – language isn’t limiting their thoughts. The people who chose the Impressionists were responding to their thoughts, their inclinations, even though if they’d be asked they may not have been able to come up with an answer. I also think this experiment highlights a problem of status – status as in a concern for how one is thought of, or represents oneself. I can’t be the only one who imagines that the person who chose a kitten was a girl: and a girl may chose a kitten because it conforms to an idea of femininity. I know when I was in university, there were no kitten posters in the guy’s rooms – I seem to recall posters of big breasted women and ‘student crossing’ stick figures carrying bottles.
However, the Language Problem is another indictment toward the post-modernist gobldly-gook of academic prose. Artists have over the past few years been arguing that they have to go to school, and learn the process, the arguments, and so they don’t owe anyone easy answers. They want the audience to do their homework. Gladwell’s examples seem to make that clear, that without doing their homework, people won’t be able to like challenging works. As if doing your homework gives you the language so that you can explain your preferences to others, which is quite relevant because we hear people complaining.
They aren’t going to galleries, unconsciously liking things and keeping that to themselves. If they are unconsciously liking things, we’re hearing them complain, because they can’t speak our language. That, or they know full well what they’re saying, and the work really is shite. As Pinker points out in a chapter on language, language doesn’t define and constrain our thoughts, it communicates them. Our brains are full of concepts and reactions, and we use language to share our experience of those. The Poster Experiment shows two levels of communication – the mind communicating to itself in such a way as to direct the choice toward something they may not be able to explain, and the distortion of choice toward the familiar when they are asked to communicate their feelings to another when they don’t have a language to communicate the sophistication of their intuition.
The ‘doing your homework’ idea, which gives people that language, seems to be true for those among us who enjoy reading theories. But we are suffering from a severe lack of translations. Steven Pinker is a cognitive scientist, a linguist, who made his career at MIT and now works at Harvard. He is an academic publishing papers in peer reviewed journals. But the example I’ve borrowed above is from his trade publication, which serves as a translation of the work he does in his field, absent the jargon. As he said in an interview (PDF file):
Another invaluable bit of advice came from an editor, when I was planing my first book for a general audience. She said I should not think of my readership as the general public – truck drivers, grannies, chicken pluckers. They don’t buy books. Any attempt to reach them would lead me to write in motherease. Instead, I should write for an old college roomate – someone as smart as I was but who didn’t happen to go into my field. Respecting the intelligence of readers and acknowledging their lack of specialized knowledge are the two prerequisites for good science writing.
I’ve come to think of the Homework-Excuse as coming from those among us who want the arts to be proffesionalized and academized as if becoming an artist was somehow akin to becoming a doctor or a lawyer.
The law allusion is interesting, because law is trying to sort out the complications of our vague intuition of justice. Art too is a vague intuition, but law – at least the language used in the courts – is clear, it is understandable by everyone – as popular television shows exemplify. The language of the law, as turned into drama, is something we all understand, but the printed legal decisions are not today, nor will they be in the future, considered great literature.
Art seems to have failed in its language. Perhaps the reason there aren’t many art television shows is because art-folk in both galleries and in print aren’t speaking a language that is clear and obvious. What’s obvious in law is that someone was hurt and the other person wants justice. We’re exercising our desires for revenge, for rebalancing the scales between two people, fighting for a concept of fairness which, as recent studies with chimpanzees shows, is embedded within our genes as apes. For most of our history, art too was clearly the expression of our genetic inclination toward beauty. Beauty, and a love for the absurd. This recent video is clearly art, in the way that is revels in the uselessness of its actions. Hosted on iFilm, every video there is what anthropologists would call art, even though in our daily lives we conceptualize things as TV Shows, or Commercials, or Parodies. The important thing is that humans spend a great deal of energy imagining, make images born in the imagination, making their dreams come true.
The desire to make some of the better videos on iFilm is an expression that all artists should be familiar with. But what makes it good art for me is that it is free of the self-consciousness of current conceptual concerns. With regard to the video linked above, I can’t help but feel that a similar piece within an art gallery would be pedantic, and would try to reference the Iraqi War and or Palestine and Israel, like the pieces I saw last summer at the AGO.
When one is in a gallery, looking at something unattractive to the eye, boring in concept, and when one asks, or tried to bring this up, you encounter, “oh I think it’s great” and yet, ask that person why, and you will not get a clear answer. Invariably, the only reason to find these things wonderful today is because it’s the tip of a conceptual iceberg – it somehow relates to bigger ideas, bigger movements within the zeitgeist of the intelligentsia, things which are vague and that this art has somehow made a little bit more concrete. Already equipped with that language, they can appreciate it in a way that someone not familiar cannot. And, the way it works nowadays, is if they look to the artist statement or the press-release for clarity, they get serving of language in a potentially unfamiliar vocabulary, or, more often then not (since art has so alienated itself from those who don’t ‘do their homework’), you get a rehashing of ideas not very intriguing to begin with. You’re getting kitten art. As Pinker writes (p.416), quoting Adam Gopnik, “the political messages of most postmodernist pieces are utterly banal, like ‘racism is bad’. But they are stated so obliquely that viewers are made to feel morally superior for being able to figure them out.”
Because I have a facility with words, I find it easier to concretize the bigger vagueness by writing paragraphs than by trying to invest images or objects with those thoughts, and because of this I find myself as an artist more often than not making content-less work, which if it express anything does so unconsciously. Or I’m thinking very hard in trying to marry an idea with the appropriate form. Someone, like Tony Scherman, who identifies as a painter, will paint images based on his thoughts, his studies, in the history of Napoleon or whatever. Gerhard Richter will paint the Baader Meinhof Gang is such a way that John Ralston Saul writes about them thus in On Equilibrium:
I didn’t know of the paintings. I walked into the room and was immobilized by the atmosphere. I hadn’t yet looked at a picture. The force which he somehow put into his paintings overwelmed the space. And it remained when you examined the paintings one by one. The force is virtually impossible to describe, except to say that Richter is a great painter and he has the genius to create something like a force field which connects him with the viewer.This is not emotion. […] Richter has touched something in our imagination which is only secondarily about visual perception.
Having seen Tony Scherman’s Napoleon show at the U of T Art Centre in 2001, a year after attending a lecture he gave in the fall of 2000, I feel as if Scherman’s facility as a painter is informed by his studies. Whereas I’m much more inclined lately to write things to post on this blog to express what I’ve been thinking about, I’m under the impression that a painter like Scherman paints and saves the thoughts about his studies for his excellent presentations.
All this relates though to what art is ultimately about. In October 1999, I read a profile on Julia Kristeva in The Globe and Mail, where it said:
What she chiefly borrowed from Freud was the idea of a ‘psychic space’ inside each individual. In her view it is largely nourished by narrative, which is why she sees literature and the arts as essential to a sane life – and consumerism as gravely dangerous to it. “People become literally sick if they have no interior representation.” She also thinks that, in a world where people are spilling in vast numbers from one culture into another, it is essential to decide what a national identity should be. “I have students in my classes who literally do not know what language to dream in. The ‘psychic space’ is frozen.” (Interview with Ray Conlogue Oct 14 1999)
Later that month, I wrote down in my notebook:
Art – this is the point of art – art allows us to string together narratives. Humans are creatures dependent on narratives, and art shows us, guides us, in the construction of our own stories. Because it is necessary to conceptualize structure within the historical time frame of our lives.Lives are like pieces of music – not songs, because songs imply words and lives are structured moments resonating in the world, moments built upon moments, and having a beginning and an end.
Narration, as Kristeva was getting at, supplies the mind with examples and models that are required for it to tell itself its stories. Since, as Buddhists emphasize, we self-narrate ourselves into existence, we become more conscious the more we feed the mind with stories. Literature and art is quite literally ‘food for thought’. As John Ralston Saul tells us, in the paragraphs preceding the above quote:
What I also know is that many visual artists need music to work, as do some writers. This does not function as an image generator, but rather as a key, unlocking their imaginations. Many musicians need words. If I sit in a live concert, after almost exactly twenty minutes words and phrases will begin to tumble into my consciousness, unlocking different ongoing problems of writing. Angus Wilson felt that it was Zola’s love of the Impressionists which gave him another sense of how to write. Here truly images were producing words.David Malouf has made an even more direct connection, pointing out that, until Australian writers dropped specifically British images and took up specifically Australian, they could not imagine where they were. There were no trees, flowers, birds of Australia, in early Australian verse. “This is not because they were not there in the landscape, to be seen and appreciated, but because there was as yet no place for them in the world of verse. The associations had not yet been found that would allow them entry there. They carried no charge of emotion.” So the trees, flowers, birds, landscapes, climates had first to enter into the imagination of the immigrants. It wasn’t a question of nationalism or of excluding others, but of imaging being at home there themselves. Then it happened. And it was as if the people had “come at last into full possession of a place”.
The opposite can just as easily happen. Police and courtroom dramas set in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago have become so common around the world – they are America’s most common expression of itself – that many people in other countries now think their own legal system is like that of the United States. German youth have no other legal image, unless they are arrested. And then they ask to be read their rights and later ask for trial by jury, as if their system worked that way. There is a sentiment in Germany that more locally produced television police-court dramas are needed to create vaguely relevant images. Without the images, they cannot imagine themselves.
My own example of what I need in my environment is dialogue … while painting I like to play videos of documentaries, and while at home working each day I most often have either CBC Newsworld, CNN, or the Star Trek re-runs on the Space channel. Occasionally I’ll chose music, but not that often.
Annual Goldfarb Lecture in Visual Arts
Department of Visual Arts, York University
ELIZABETH GROSZ
RUTGERS UNIVERSITY
Wednesday February 23, 2H30 pm
Seymour Schulich Building (SSB) E111 (see Map, Building No. 42) http://www.yorku.ca/web/futurestudents/map/webmap.html
York University
Chaos, Territories, Art
This talk will explore the relevance of Deleuze to rethinking the ways in which we understand the origins and impetus of art and architecture.
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why?
Romeo Dallaire was being interviewed on Hot Type, and described trying to negotiate with the fuckers who’d organized the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. He said that they had the form of a human being, but they had ceased to be human. It totally reminded me of Ann Coulter. People keep making a joke about how she’s a robot, which I don’t find funny. She’s one seriously evil bitch. One of these days, in one of these columns of her’s, she’s gonna call for something like genocide. Psychologists tell us that dehumanizing your enemy is the first step toward anything approaching genocide.
One of the haunting questions of the 20th Century is how so many ordinary people committed wartime atrocities. The philosopher Jonathan Glover has documented that a common denominator is degradation: a diminution of the victim’s status of cleanliness or both. When someone strips a person of dignity my making jokes about his suffering, giving him a humiliating appearance (a dunce cap, awkward prison garb, a crudely shaved head), or forcing him to live in filthy conditions, ordinary people’s compassion can evaporate and they find it easy to treat him like an animal or object. […]…Accompanied by tactics of dehumanization such as the use of pejorative names, degrading conditions, humiliating dress, and ‘cold jokes; that make light suffering … flip a mental switch and reclassify an individual from ‘person’ to ‘nonperson’ making it as easy for someone to torture or kill him as it is for us to boil a lobster alive.
Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate p.273/74 & 320/21
Having seen that 5th Estate documentary on the inflammatory Right Wing, my only feeling is in their dehumanization of Lefties, and their own inability to admit that they might be wrong about stuff, they are excersizing evil. And that’s not rhetoric…
But I don’t want to make their mistake by dehumanizing Coulter … at this point, yeah, she’s inhuman, but for all we know she’ll recant in a few years like George Wallace eventually did. Wallace tried to play the race card all the way to the White House, cynically exploiting the bigotry of the South. My impression is the Coulter and Bill O’Reilly have found celebrity through a similar means of cynically exploiting American ignorance and hatred for diversity. Perhaps all of their vile spit is simply a symptom that they’re having a hard time living with themselves.
Sticks and Stones, the 5th Estate the documentary is viewable here in Real Video
The 5th Estate’s Website
Ann Coulter and right-wing stupidity
Comments on the Coulter video on Metafilter
Bill O’Reilly’s pissed with the CBC
(whoopee shit, go fuck yourself O’Reilly, or just “Shut Up!”)
With news that the Pope is in hospital, CBC leads The National with that story, saying that across Churches tonight people were praying for the Pope. Why? He’s the Pope – he’s going to Heaven. After 83 years, witnessing the Nazi and then the Communist occupation of his homeland, and now wracked by disease and age, a ticket to Paradise should be welcome.
Do you think the Pope fears death? A man who’s devoted his life to trying to share his faith with others, his faith that death is nothing to be feared? As Jesus himself said, albeit Jesus a played by Willem Dafoe in the blasphemous The Last Temptation of Christ, “Death isn’t a door that closes, it opens. It opens and you go through it”. Besides, he figures he’ll be back with Christ on the Day of Resurection, which fundamentally is why I can’t consider myself too religious. I believe the dead stay dead: further, I believe the dead end up in museums. It doesn’t make any sense to me to think that one day I’ll be hanging around with a Neanderthal.
Besides, I’ve been saying for years that if Heaven’s going to be full of Christian assholes like Jerry Falwell and the fuckers who re-elected George Bush because he shares their ignorance and lack of appreciation for the world’s diversity, then they can have it. They make Hell sound better and better all the time. I mean, everyone I know’s gonna be in Hell – I’d much prefer to spend eternity with my friends.
Besides, fire and brimstone … why would God punish people like that? Some god that would be. ‘Oh worship me, I’m so insecure! If you don’t I’m gonna burn you’. Sounds more like a spoiled brat than the master of the universe. A spoiled brat that any adult would give a good spanking to if they caught him burning people because they wouldn’t kiss his ass. I mean, that’s pretty much what this whole worship thing’s about: bow down, show deference, respect etc.
I’m all in favor of reverence. I think it’s a required part of a healthy psychology. I’ve heard that the praying 5 times a day thing that Muslims do serves to remind them of their humility – the type of humility that I feel when I lay outside on a summer night and look at the stars.
But worship I find unhealthy. I hate deference. (However, if I’d ever met this Pope, or a future one, you’d bet I’d show deference. It’s part of being an ape, you know, showing respect to the grayback). I don’t want to think of myself as better than anyone, or think someone else is better than me. What I’d like is respect for our differences. An appreciation that we each bring something to the table through our diversity.
If the Pope dies this week, I’ll be happy. I’ll be happy because we’ll have some fresh blood in the tired old church. I’ll be happy because it’ll be a media event that I haven’t yet experienced. Why would I morn? I’ve already said that doesn’t make any sense for anyone familar with Catholiscim (and the fact that Catholics still do morn reveals that deep down we all know it’s bullshit). The Pope’s had a good run – and he’s earned his eternal rest. I can’t say I’ll miss him because I don’t know him, but inasmuch as he was a precence in my life as a Catholic child, I am thankful for his example. He taught me about forgiveness. For those reasons when he came to Toronto in 2002, I wanted to go to his Mass. I did, and I have a memory that I’ll always appreciate.
In my own way I will pray for the Pope – but it will be a prayer of thanks, and a prayer of godspeed.
Jan Herman reports in a posting (2005.01.30) that John Zorn:
….repeatedly stressed that his music comes from some sort of higher power. He said that it would not have been possible for him to complete over 300 of his Masadic melodies during a very short time period without some sort of supernatural help. In the program, he writes that composition is at its best “when the piece is seemingly writing itself and the composer is merely an observer. He says that some of his works, “transcend my expectations and my abilities. I cannot explain them. They are part of the Mystery.”
Here we have an example of the need for a new language, a new understanding, of the creative process, one better informed by psychology than mystic mumbo-jumbo.
Psychologists tell us today that consciousness is a story teller. As Steven Pinker tells it on page 42 of The Blank Slate :
Each of us feels that there is a single “I” in control. But that is an illusion that the brain works hard to produce, like the impression that our visual fields are rich in detail from edge to edge (in fact, we are blind to detail outside the fixation point). […] One of the most dramatic demonstrations of the illusion of the unified self comes from the neuroscientists Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Sperry, who showed that when surgeons cut the corpus collosum joining the cerebral hemispheres, they literally cut the self in two, and each hemisphere can exercise free will without the other one’s advice or consent. Even more disconcertingly, the left hemisphere constantly weaves a coherent but false account of the behavior chosen without it’s knowledge by the right. For example, if an experimenter flashes the command “WALK” to the right hemisphere (by keeping it in the part of the visual field that only the right hemisphere can see), the person will comply with the request and begin to walk out of the room. But when the person (specifically, the person’s left hemisphere) is asked why he just got up he will say, in all sincerity, “To get a Coke” – rather than, “I don’t really know” or “The urge just came over me” or “You’ve been testing me for years since I had the surgery, and sometimes you get me to do things but I don’t know exactly what you asked me to do”. Similarly, if the patient’s left hemisphere is shown a chicken and his right hemisphere is shown a snowfall, and both hemispheres have to select a picture that goes with what they saw (each using a different hand), the left hemisphere picks a claw (correctly) and the right picks a shovel (also correctly). But when the left hemisphere is asked why the whole person made those choices, it blithely says, “Oh that’s simple. The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed.”The spooky part is that we have no reason to think that the baloney-generator in the patient’s left hemisphere is behaving any differently from ours as we make sense of the inclinations emanating from the rest of our brains. The conscious mind – the self or soul – is a spin doctor, not the commander in chief. […] Often our conscious minds do not control how we act but merely tell us a story about our actions.
This coincides with Malcolm Gladwell’s reportage in his most recent book, Blink which I haven’t yet read, but in a presentation (audio file available here, a fuller transcription from where I take these quotes is here) presented last October, he says:
We don’t have access to our unconscious, [we don’t know where are thoughts] come from that bubbles up from the recesses of our brain. So what do we do? Well, we have a behavior that we just did, we just made a decision of a certain kind, we don’t really know where it came from, so we come up with an explanation, we make up a story. And we’re really really good at making up stories. I call this The Story Telling Problem. And this is something that happens over and over again.
So both arguments imply that we need language to self-narrate understanding. Zorn’s example goes back to Socrates arguing that artists were inspired. Now, at the dawn of the 21st Century, we can put aside such mystical and primitive tales. The language of inspiration has been the only one available to us since the time of Socrates, and Zorn’s lack of knowledge of contemporary psychology means that to explain his creativity to himself, he falls back on that language.
As a creative person, informed by Gladwell and Pinker, I would argue that the mind is made up of many processes, and we are only ever conscious of a brief portion of what’s going. We tell ourselves stories to explain our actions, but those actions are being processed beneath or above the threshold were the “PR person” gets a hold of them. In Zorn’s case I would say that his musical facility means that a portion of his mind has great facility with music, and when it comes time to compose, this is brought to the awareness of the PR person and the part of his mind that directs writing and all that. However, the PR person is at a loss to understand just what is happening, because it doesn’t have the language to explain it. The only thing it has available for his ‘Coke story’ is to fall back on the mystical stories inherited from the time of Socrates.
Malcolm Gladwell’s presentation at PopTech! Oct 21-23 2004 in Camden Maine
Audio file available here via IT Conversations.
[transcription beginning at 21:12/30:17]
We don’t have access to our unconscious, we don’t know what these thing are coming, where they come from that bubbles up from the recesses of our brain. So what do we do? Well, we have a behavior that we just did, we just made a decision of a certain kind, we don’t really know where it came from, so we come up with an explanation, we make up a story. And we’re really really good at making up stories. I call this The Story Telling Problem. And this is something that happens over and over again.
I spent some time when I was writing my book [ Blink] with this tennis coach Vic Brayden, and he had spent a lot time talking with world class tennis players, and one the things he noticed is that if you ask a world class tennis player how he hits a top spin forehand they will always say this, ‘Right at the moment of impact, I roll my wrist’. Well, Vic Brayden took video tapes of world class tennis players hitting top spin forehands and digitized them and broke them down to, you know, milliseconds and noticed that no one ever rolled their wrist when they hit the ball, ever, the wrist was always fixed. In fact, if you roll your wrist when you hit the ball you can’t hit a good top spin forehand. Yet all these are guys going around the country giving seminars teaching young kids how to hit a top spin forehand and saying, ‘At the critical moment or impact, you gotta roll your wrist just like that’. They had no idea. These are people who hit a top spin forehand better than anyone else in human history and yet they are fundamentally incapable of accurately describing the way in which they perform that task. And when they’re asked to describe it, what do they do? They tell a story.
Now this is a real problem, cause what it says is … that a whole assumption of this project is that we can ask people to explain what they’re feeling but then when we look at the various situations we say … that when we listen to the various stories people tell about why they think the way the do, or what they want there are no connections to reality. They’re just plucking them out of the thin air.
Problem # 3. And I think this is the most serious problems of all and that is that asking people to think about what they want causes this to change their opinion of what they want, in fact it screws up their ability to understand and recognize what they want. This problem in psychology is called the Perils of Introspection Problem, and a lot of research has been done by a guy named Tim Wilson at U.V.A and he once did this very simple experiment called the Poster Test.
And the Poster Test is you got a bunch of posters in a room, you bring in some college students in, and you say ‘pick any poster you want, take it home’. And they do that. Second group is brought in and you say, ‘pick any poster you want, tell me why you want it, and then go home’. Couple of months passes, and he calls up all the students, and he asks, “That poster you got a couple of months back, do you like it?’ and the kids, who in the first group didn’t have to explain their choice, all liked their poster. And the kids in the second group who did have to explain, now they hate their poster. And not only that, the kids who had to explain their poster picked a very different kind of poster then the kids who didn’t have to explain their poster. So making people explain what they want changes their preference and changes their preference in a negative way, it causes them to gravitate toward something they actually weren’t interested in in the first place.
Now, there’s a wonderful little detail in this – that there were two kinds of posters in the room, there where Impressionist prints and then there were these photos of, you know, kitten hanging by bars that said, ‘Hang in there baby’. And the students who were asked to explain their preference overwhelmingly chose the kitten. And the ones who weren’t asked to explain overwhelmingly chose the Impressionist poster. And they were happy with their choice obviously, who could be happy with a kitten on their wall after 3 months? Now, why is that?
Why when you ask someone to explain their preference do they gravitate toward the least sophisticated of the offerings? Cause it’s a language problem. You’re someone, you know in your heart that you prefer the Impressionists but now you have to come up with a reason for your choice, and you really don’t have the language to say why you like the Impressionist photo. What you do have the language for is to say, ‘Well, I like the kitten cause I had a kitten when I was growing up,’ and you know … so forcing you to explain something when you don’t necessarily have the vocabulary and the tools to explain your preference automatically shifts you toward the most conservative and the least sophisticated choice. Now you see this time and time again in for example, market research.
That the act of getting someone in a room and asking them to explain their preference causes them to move away from the more sophisticated, more daring, more radical ideas. The classic example is All in the Family. When the first pilot was made back in the 70s, it was taken to ABC and ABC had a big room full of people, as many people as this, and they showed them the test and they asked them to rate the pilot, asked them to rate it on a scale of 1 to 100. You need 70 to get on the air basically. This All in the Family pilot got 40. An unbelievably low score. And the comments were, ‘well, the real problem is Archie Bunker, he needs to be a little softer, more nurturing, more of a caring father.’ That was people’s response. So what did ABC do? They passed on it. Guys went to CBS, CBS tested it, did really poorly, but some guy at the top of CBS really liked it, and said, well why not, let’s just play it, they put it on the air and it was one of the most lucrative sitcom franchises in the history of television. So what does this mean?
Does this mean we can’t trust people at all? Maybe. What is really means though is that there is a class of products that are difficult for people to interpret. Some things really are ugly and when we say that they’re ugly they really are ugly and we’re always gonna think their ugly. They’re never going to be beautiful. But there’s another class of products which we see and we don’t really know what we think, they challenge us, we don’t know how to describe them, and we end up, if we’re forced to explain ourselves, in calling them ugly because we can’t think of a better was to describe our feelings. And the real problem with asking people what they think about something is that we don’t have a good way to distinguish between these two states. We don’t have a good way of distinguishing between the thing that really is ugly and the thing that is radical and challenging and simply new and unusual.
And so often when we use the evidence of what people say, to determine what we ought to do, what we ought to go forward [with], we end up throwing out not just the things that ought to be thrown out, but the very things that are most meaningful, and have the potential to be most revolutionary.
There are, I think, two important lessons in that; the first is the one I dwell on in my book, which is simply that because of this fact people who come up with new ideas and new products or radical new things need to be very careful in how they interpret the evidence of consumers, the people that they ask about, random people whose opinions they seek. That we need to be very skeptical of ‘no’ and very skeptical of ‘ugly’ and very skeptical of ‘I don’t like that’. Particularly when we’re dealing with something that is radical and in some way challenging and difficult for someone to completely explain their feelings about. That’s one implication.
But the second implication, which is really one that’s more relevant to this discussion here, is that we’ve gotten really really good in recent years at describing all kinds of things about the way that human beings work and the way the mind operates. We understand genetics, we understand physiology, we have a whole vast array of knowledge now about why we do the things we do. But there is one area, perhaps the most important area of all, where we remain really really bad, and that is interpreting the contents of our own hearts, and as we go forward and learn more and more about human beings, I think we need to remember this fact, and to be humbled, because I’m not sure this is a mystery that we’re gonna solve.
Last week, I found these two pictures on Franklin Einspruch’s Artblog.net:
While walking to YYZ that evening, I had the memory of the nude figure in mind when I thought about the materiality of painting. Through art school, I’d always hoped to become a Renaissance master, learn the techniques of glazes and sufmato. Not that I planned to paint like that for the rest of my life, but I at least wanted the ability. Of course, that ambition was a faux pas, and whenever I expressed interest in fellow painters who were good at rendering, or drafting, I usually encountered the snickers of my other painter friends. By their lack of interest in my own work, and their lack of engagement with me in terms of the craft, I knew that they thought I was a shit painter.
My best friend was the worst at this: I knew he didn’t take me seriously, but when it comes to my talents I don’t care what other people think of me.
Art has always been a form of self-entertainment, a way to kill time, a way to explore things. I create because I want something to do. After sometime doing this as a child and a teenager, you pick up some techniques, next thing you know, people are calling you an artist. So then you’re like, oh I could do this for a living, and art schools being business’ like any other, aren’t going to tell you that, no, you aren’t going to make a living as an artist. They don’t really have to, they are banking on your ambition and naivete, and there are plenty of hints that an art career is foolishness. But you think, no, I’m different, I’m good. You realize that many around you will fail, but somehow you think that you’ll succeed, even though the odds are against you. You develop a stubborn self-confidence when you go into art, because you are both na??ve and arrogant.
The stubborn self-confidence becomes really really useful. It may be one of the reasons I think art school should be a mandatory part of anyone’s education, because it humanizes you, in part because through the insecurities which you’re compensating for, you develop empathy for those around you who are also struggling towards self-confidence.
My friend, who didn’t take me seriously as a painter, never bothered to tell me why he thought my painting was shit. He dotted his professional esteem on another friend of mine, who has since decided that she’s no good as a painter and has decided to become an academic, which has led to some great conversations and some interesting and intense arguments. She and my friend shared the secret of what makes a great painting. So one night, during one these great conversations, I asked her what this was all about. A good painting, she told me, as it had been explained to her by my best friend, is about being able to represent a three dimensional image on a surface, but also about the materiality of the paint. That with a painting you can and should have both, materiality and image.
This struck me as nothing more than a 20th Century fashion, and to condemn paintings for the lack of this quality, and to hype others for it, seems shortsighted.
So these two paintings, by Tai-Shan Schierenberg, exemplify this very well. We have an image represented in space, but we also have the sensual ickyness of the paint visible. When I first saw the nude I thought it was by Lucien Freud, and a write up on his gallery’s website references that similarity. Both are British. Where Freud was born in 1922 (and will be a venerable 83 this year), Mons. Schierenberg is half that age, born in the early 1960s.
As a 20th Century fashion, we can assume that in the future historians will be able to date our paintings by this look, just as easily as we can with past centuries. We know that the 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th Centuries have style, a theme of subject matter, a look. In the 20th Century, painting became obsessed with itself as a viscous medium resting on a surface. We don’t know what 21st Century painting will look like – this century’s look has not yet developed. It seems that in a world where all of our images are perfectly rendered on screens, the human touch evident in brushstroke and viscosity is what makes painting valuable. It occurs to me then that perhaps the traditional tales of the rise of Modernism, and especially Ab-ex painting in the 1950s, ignores the concurrent development of television. These things make me think that this style has legs to go into the 21st Century.
At the same time, we 20C folk are limited to thinking of everything as ‘human touch’ and go on and on about ‘humanity’ – this vast 19th C hangover of industrialization. We’re at a point now as a society that people enjoy sex that much more when it’s filmed and public. Whenever we are tempted to use the word ‘traditional’ we should stop and ask ourselves if this tradition isn’t rooted in the 1800s or earlier. I think that by the time I’m Lucian Freud’s age (2058) folk’ll be printing paintings they design with whatever grandchild of Illustrator has been developed … which they are already doing now, but aren’t being taken seriously. I think what I find most shocking as we move into the future is how much and how many traditions are falling away, or becoming so evidently obsolete as to have no hold on the young.
Having found a porn vid on the net consisting of some girl having sex in a nightclub with a male stripper, while girls over at the other table ignore it as if they were simply making out, unsettles one’s perceptions of the world, of what’s predictable, and of the wildness that is out there in our society now. The Instant Coffee make-out parties seem chaste by comparison. Orgies have had a place in civilization throughout the centuries, but after 150 years of Victoriana, marked by health scares, this old human behavior reasserting itself reminds us that our traditions are merely fashions that pass through generations as if they were the cut of a collar.
And the point I’m trying to make here, is that I’m under the impression that the kids (those under 25) don’t care. They don’t care about our traditions, our ways of describing things. I say ‘our’ as someone born in the 70s, near the end of the Gen X scale, as a thoroughly 20th Century individual. I say that as someone who’s turning 30 at the end of the month, that age which could not be trusted 40 years ago.
The kids (18-25 and younger) grew up with Nike telling them to just do it, and it seems to be their philosophy. They’re just gonna do it. If they want to print a painting, they will. They’re not going to give a shit about a discourse on the medium, they’re not gonna give a shit about art history. Indeed, the one thing that seems significant here is how little history seems to be involved.
As a child in the ’80s, ’40 years ago’ was World War II. My first experience of the history of the world, of the century, was that there’d been this great war ’40 years ago’. As I got older, I had to modify that lesson, so now, World War II was sixty years ago, and, to my shock, the 1960s (which had been ’20 years ago’) are forty years past. History for me is a gauge of experience, a reference point for TV shows and the news. For a younger generation, 20 years ago is colour footage of Live Aid, an indistinct memory of a world run by Grandpa Reagan, and of the earliest music videos.
One can’t see past the colour film stock of the late 1960s. I’m guessing here, but I’m thinking our future adult society thinks black & white is lame. I for one think black & white, now best called ‘grayscale’, is lame most of the time. So, I’m sympathetic to these challenges to tradition, habit, and academic fashion. Far from being conservative and feeling disgust or condemnation, I’m excited about this feeling of wild possibility. I see myself living through a transitional time which is even more significant than the industrial revolution of the 19th Century. As we move into what Greg Bear called in his novels, ‘the Dataflow Culture’.
Unfortunately, these quality-of-life technologies allow a sense of irresponsibility, because you can forget phone numbers or details that can be called up from anywhere at anytime. People can fuck around and smoke and whatever, because they’ll probably have disease licked in 30 years. But let’s hope that a feeling of duty toward others is ingrained enough in our psychologies that Prada Princess monsters and Paris Hilton Aintoniettes are late 20th Century aberrations, a product (like all other 20C products) not built to last.
Just before waking the other morning, I dreamt I was in a club, it was someone’s birthday party, and I think it coincided with my own. Selena and Pol were the MC’s, so it had the feeling, revelry, and crowd of a Hive party, and people were coming on stage to read poems to the birthday person. I had a poem in my pocket and was looking forward to being called onstage. Something happened, and that didn’t actually take place … I went to the bathroom, and the stalls were divided so that one faced the other. There was a tall blonde girl in the stall in front of me … the wall that usually divided the space was missing, but I still peed nonchalantly. Then the girl punches me in the forehead, but in such a way that the effect was nothing more than a loud smack, and I was like, “What the fuck you do that for?” She then got really aggressive, and I caught her hands, and she began pushing me back. So here we are tussling and she basically saying that I was going to go on a date with her …. it wasn’t a sexual assault as much as it was a ‘dating’ assault. I’m like, sure, but calm down and can’t we talk about this without you trying to rip my hair out? Our fingers continually intertwining and mixing, hands squeezing, as I try to control her arms which want to grab me … and all the while I’m thinking, couldn’t we stop for a minute to wash our hands? I woke up thinking that my dreams are too fucked lately to write down.
I bitch about art a lot; here I am, a player in the scene, and most of the time I hate art. So I’m entirely sympathetic when dealing with people who only go to openings for cheap drinks and a good time. The fairest thing to say about this is that there’s something about Toronto which doesn’t encourage good art. That’s sort of the word on the street, you know, what artists here say amongst themselves: art here sucks. But that’s obviously a question of not seeing the forest for the trees, or ‘the grass is always greener on the other side’, an allusion Kineko Ivic was getting at when he named his gallery Greener Pastures, which I haven’t been to in a while.
But I have been to Mercer Union, just down the street – went to their opening last Thursday night. Regarding Toronto’s art – I’ll let you go to the galleries and decide for yourself. It’s a generalization, but whenever out of town artists show it can make one question why we don’t see more stuff of this quality in the studios of Toronto.
Mercer’s current show is such an example. It reminds me of why I like art, you know, when it really works. When it pops stuff into your mind that wouldn’t have showed up otherwise. In my case, it brought back childhood memories I’d forgotten about. Growing up in French, rural Nova Scotia, carpentry was a hobby for so many of us. I always enjoyed fooling around with hammer and nails in my Dad’s workshop, although I have little to show for it. In an area where so many expected to build their own homes, it’s a hobby that had very practical purposes. But as kids, it resembled art in that we did it for fun. I remember digging a trench with my friend as we worked on a ‘underground fort’. Later, in highschool, some classmates built a cabin off a logging road which was dubbed the ‘Schoon Lagoon’ and became the cabin party for our weekends throughout 1993.
If you’d been to Mercer before, at first you might think they’d renovated for the new year. And, you’d think that the roof was leaking – and given Thursday night’s nasty weather, it certainly seemed that was the case. But, nein, das ist die show. An environment, a series of rooms, entered by a hidden door, has been constructed in Mercer’s space. The usual Back Gallery is unchanged, and it contains only Marianne Corless’ Fur Queen II but once you’ve seen the picture, there doesn’t seem to be much point seeing the thing in person, except for that whole Benjamin aura/object fetish thing. The BGL experience, on the other hand, cannot be reproduced.
Thin drywall rooms, pierced by a car, which also serves as steps so that one can see why the roof is leaking. There is a wood stove, and a buggy light that goes on and off. Evidence of the construction and destruction everywhere – dust and drywall chips, the doorways torn out through hammer rather than saw. The decoration consists of the plaster patching pattern of any renovation. Given my youthful experiences with shoddy construction and what seemed like the constant renovations my parents engaged in while I was growing up, this environment has a charm for me. BGL’s show is familiar and cozy, and if the opening’s crowd had been larger, I might have felt like I’d gone home for a cabin party among my high school friends.
A Quebec City based collective, they take their name from the last names of the members: Jasmine Bilodeau, Sebastien Giguere, and Nicolas Laverdiere. The only BGL-relevant website I could find at the moment is this one, which shows them working on a pool made out of recycled wood, a slide of which they showed during their presentation.
Mercer has done modified environments before. Two years ago they installed a malfunctioning revolving door, which earned my all time favorite review, when RM Vaughan wrote in Lola, “Worst show ever”. I didn’t really agree, I didn’t mind the show that much. If someone is obsessed with building an off-centre revolving door, why not? And who else will let them but an artist run centre? So, if these three boys from Quebec want to drive a car through a wall, why not?
Maybe it’s the filtering process, but it seems to me that Quebec artists rock. It’s crazy how our Canadianess is divided into two cultures who communicate with each other as if by messages in bottles – in this case, stuff in rooms. There’s a whole other aesthetic and relationship to materials coming out of Quebec, one that makes things delightful rather than the anti-formalist disgustipations or boring conceptual works rooted in concerns 20-30 years out of date. Such work seems to have infected Toronto’s local scene like a bad cold one can’t shake.
And maybe that’s just my way of saying I should get out more and meet new artists in Toronto, because that’s been my experience of the scene. If you know of anyone making work like Elizabeth Belliveau, now showing at YYZ, please let me know, or at least chastise me for my forgetfulness, because none come to mind at the moment. As this show has already been written about here, I want to weigh in to encourage you to check it out. Last week I’d been hearing about a glowing review in The Star, and it’s deserved. Belliveau takes used purses or other things left to second hand shops and charity and has turned them through vision and scissors into little animals, or whatever other creature she sees possible. The results are charming and delightful, and give me a new way to consider a baseball, a hot water bottle, or a pair of gloves. In the other gallery, Karim Zouak has a show that I’m told is supposed to be about animated paintings, the effect of which is betrayed by the clacking of the projectors, so it doesn’t really work. But, I haven’t spent that much time with the work, so I can’t rave or diss it. Whereas with Belliveau’s, one can rave with the sense of ‘how could you not like this?’, with Zouak’s work, it is much more along the lines of, ‘see it, think about it, decide for yourself’.
There is though, nothing to think about at Paul Petro’s gallery, and that’s because the gallery has magazines on display as if they were so many drawings, drawn over 20 years through the CMYK process of various print shops downtown somewhere. Boxes boxes oh my … and what do with them? Why not have a show, offer back issues for sale? The PR for this show says, “know your history” highlighting how C has had a good run of publishing on, by, or about the players of the Canadian and international art industry. Inasmuch as the art community is a community is reflected in the pages of C Magazine. So, if you’re looking for some reading material, and are interested in 20 years of graphic design and magazine formats, check out Petro’s before the magazines come down January 29th.
Greener Pastures: 1188 Queen St W, Th-Sat 12-6 (416-535-7100)
Mercer Union: 37 Lisgar St, T-Sat 11-5 (416-536-1519)
YYZ: Suit 140, 401 Richmond St W, T-Sat 11-6 (416-598-4546)
Paul Petro: 980 Queen St W, Wed-Sat 11-5 (416-979-7874)
I sat in her kitchen
I laid on her floor
Beneath the blanket that her brother bought.
Of course I heard that story
And many others that night in November
when longing was silence, and longing was unsaid
We walked to the corner store
Up the street from where C used to live
And there we saw a dancing Santa
which she found hilarious
And I found dumb
but said nothing
Finally, told her in a moment of appropriateness
that I was annoyed that she kissed me and acted like it was a mistake
I went home, she called and was crying
Confessions begged themselves
She apologized that I knew her
“I’m so sorry that you know me”
She had fed me fish and potatoes. It was very good.
And she had fed me dried fish bits and Clare orange pop
like I used to have at Grandmère’s house.
The streets were wet, I was biking home once again
feeling bad. I was reading Heidegger when she called.
The problems of being.
I have problems being. I thought of manifestos to write.
Statements to make. Thing I must tell people.
Toronto Women’s Bookstore
CMCE / Centre for Media and Culture in Education (OISE/UT)
+ University of Toronto Cinema Studies presents
Quien es mas macho? The Abu Ghraib Photos: A Presentation by Susan Willis
Tuesday, Jan 18, 05 / 6:00 PM
Toronto Women’s Bookstore
73 Harbord Street (at Spadina)
FREE + wheelchair accessible
Reproduced here with RM’s permission.
———————————————–
Art, like rust, never sleeps
No art is worth leaving the house for in the first week of January.
I mean that.
Were Warhol himself to rise from his Brillo box tomb and offer me a stable of rent boys and a free silk screen portrait, I???d fake a headache. After a solid month of art auctions, holiday art sales, artists??? parties, all the good films Hollywood saves for December, special invitation only viewings, open houses, charity exhibitions, studio sales, and, most tiring, the slack jawed inattentions of Air Canada during the Christmas rush (has Air Canada forgotten that Christmas happens in winter, when it snows, when runways have to be ploughed and wings de-iced, that they are called Air Canada because they???re located in Canada ??? you know, the same country as the Artic?) the last thing I want to do is haul my shortbread padded backside to a gallery.
Next week, I???ll go next week.
For now, there???s the internet. When I first started wandering the internet 7 years ago, I was convinced that, like television, this new medium would be art proof ??? because any entertainment device that simultaneously connects the user to images of naked pregnant ladies eating burritos and a lengthy, heartfelt monograph on the plot possibilities of a love child between Captain Kirk and Fembot, is too democratic, too freewheeling for the art world, which relies on creating an aura of exclusion and inimitability.
Wrong again. Art, like rust, never sleeps.
Several Toronto artists have taken to the internet like ticks to a bare ankle, and us shut ins (with high speed connections) need never do the opening night shuffle-and-grin again. Among the best of the lot are those artists who use their sites to promote not only their own creations but to direct the visitor???s attention to other on-line resources, many of which, inevitably, link the visitor to even more sites. As the poet Lynn Crosbie once noted, surfing the internet is like picking an endless scab ??? a gratifying, compulsive, and joyously counterproductive experience (like the best art). The plethora of online art sites coming out of Toronto are gradually building a local and international gallery that never ends ?? a frequent nightmare of mine, granted, but you can always turn the computer off.
Multimedia artist Sally McKay???s website is easily the most informative and lively of the lot. Packed with links to everything from cyclist advocacy sites to other artist???s diatribes, as well as McKay???s own sparkling animations and photography, the site has more going on in it than most traditional print art magazines.
McKay???s seemingly limitless curiousity means that the viewer will be treated to ruminations on quantum physics??? latest fad, string theory, a brief essay on the fate of Luna/Tsux???iit (the BC-based whale determined to hang out with his human friends), and a randomly collected assortment of art show Top Tens for 2004 submitted by readers ??? all decorated with McKay???s images of DNA strands, animated particles, wacky models of the earth, and a sad but sweet set of photos of bizarre gadgets found in a Radio Shack catalogue. Beats flipping through Fuse or Art Forum.
The granddaddy of Toronto art sites is Year Zero One, an online gallery specializing in art made specifically for the internet. Headed by artist Michael Alstad, Year Zero One has been showcasing web art since 1999 ??? in fact, it helped create the movement. Recent projects include an exhibition staged in a taxicab (with interactive art triggered by GPS transmissions presented on a screen in the cab), a forum on new media art sponsored by the Banff Centre, and teleconferences on a ???microprocessor platform??? called Art Interface Device (don???t ask me to explain, ask Alstad).
If some, or all, of this sounds too much like reading your laptop owner???s manual, don???t worry. One of the guiding principles of Year Zero One is accessibility, making new media comprehensible to both practicioners and audiences. My only critique is, as a fan of Alstad???s provocative multimedia installations, there is not more of the head honcho???s art on display.
Pete Dako, on the other hand, is decidedly not shy about sharing his work with the world. His personal website offers free samples of his own videos, songs, and idiosyncratic, comics-driven art, as well as more ramblings about culture and politics than you may be able to get through in one visit.
What, I asked Dako (via email, of course) prompts him to put so much free art on his site, to create his own personal museum, when he needs, like any artist, to sell his work?
“Mainly because it’s fun! The web is a kind of on-going conversation about everything. The only drawback is that the audience has to be mildly techno-savvy or equipped to make the site work, which is not a problem in a gallery, where you can just walk in.”
And, Dako reminds me, buyers do purchase art off the web, just like clothes or groceries. If anything, he argues, having a never-ending exhibition on line means that his potential sales are not limited to a month long run in a stationary gallery.
Limitless access is also the key to painter Timothy Comeau???s on line project Goodreads. Like Readers??? Digest (without the stories of miraculous rescues by dogs or profiles of sitcom stars), Goodreads sorts through the enormous amount of culture and politics essays on line and sends the subscriber (at no charge) links to what Comeau considers the best. And he has excellent taste.
In any given week, expect dozens of articles about, for instance, voter fraud in the recent American election, the rhetorical problems inherent in trying to give a name to the first years of this century (the zeros? the O???s?), and current developments in mathematical theory. Phew!
While the majority of Comeau???s varied selections link the reader to the latest – and often choicest – bits of unintentionally hilarious art world sniping and counter bitching, Goodreads is not, oh happy day, another incestuous art world bulletin board. Rather, it???s more like a clipping service for anyone with an interest in art making, the social sciences, or the downright weird.
When, I wonder, does Comeau sleep?
www3.sympatico.ca/petedako
www.digitalmediatree.com/sallymckay
www.year01.com
www.goodreads.ca
–National Post, January 8 2005, page To5
RM Vaughan wrote about art on the internet for his article last Saturday. Goodreads got some press:
Limitless access is also the key to painter Timothy Comeau’s on line project Goodreads. Like Readers’ Digest (without the stories of miraculous rescues by dogs or profiles of sitcom stars), Goodreads sorts through the enormous amount of culture and politics essays on line and sends the subscriber (at no charge) links to what Comeau considers the best. And he has excellent taste.In any given week, expect dozens of articles about, for instance, voter fraud in the recent American election, the rhetorical problems inherent in trying to give a name to the first years of this century (the zeros? the O’s?), and current developments in mathematical theory. Phew!
While the majority of Comeau’s varied selections link the reader to the latest – and often choicest – bits of unintentionally hilarious art world sniping and counter bitching, Goodreads is not, oh happy day, another incestuous art world bulletin board. Rather, it’s more like a clipping service for anyone with an interest in art making, the social sciences, or the downright weird.
When, I wonder, does Comeau sleep?
-“Art, like rust, never sleeps”, National Post, “The Big Picture” Sat. 8 January 2005, page TO5
He also wrote about Sally McKay, Michael Alstad, and Pete Dako.
Again, Star Trek (this vast PR machine for technology) provides the model of tech as an enhancement to the quality of life. That is certainly my attitude toward it, reared as I was on it’s philosophy. But, it’s also in line with 20C sci-fi speculation, and here Greg Bear is the best promoter of quality-of-life technology. His future is the one I hope and expect to live in. But, as I want to say, his fiction itself is a 20C vision, and the 20C was delusional.
Before 2050, we’ll speak no more of “‘isms” and academic critics will have discredited themselves. I think Bear’s anticipation of Thinkers is spot on – becoming safe, kind, controlled, and respected authorities, on subjects which will be too complex for humans to fully master. The authority-human is too subject to bias and the whims of our genetic nature. The idea that we’d sell our souls to machines and that they’ll take over the world is an example of the mental illness of the 20C, a projection of our negative tendencies, rather than a sensible viewpoint. It reflects the 20C’s affair with violence, rather than a reasonable expectation. The 21C will recognize people as people as fundamentally good, rather than the 20C’s view that people were essentially shit. That negative view is everywhere in the ‘isms and has produced so many dogmatically angry and disagreeable people, who want to perpetuate the 20C’s cycles of violence. While the ‘isms articulated the nastiness we’re capable of, giving us a language to understand what we need to avoid in ourselves, beyond that they aren’t helpful, and we can’t expect the rest of the century to consists of more refined and better articulated views of our bastardry. I would think that the future will instead build on ‘quality of life’ and focus it’s attention on articulating the good things about life, helping us become good people, as opposed to beating us over the head with our shames.
This is much more easier to say now that it would have been a month ago, even two weeks ago, which was Christmas Day, of ‘joy to the world’ propaganda. We’re living through this historic moment of global consciousness, we’re everyone is talking about the tsunami, and rebuilding, and giving, and the distribution of wealth. The interview on The Current this past week on charity was really great and added to my sense of embarrassment over my actions on Wednesday. People do care about others, politicians do need to wake up to the sense of community among human beings. I suddenly do have a sense that 2005 will be a remarkable, even revolutionary year. The revolution may come at some later point, but historians could look to this year as its beginning. Since researching chronologies again last month, I’ve been taken with the Mayan problem – the well known fact that their long-count chronology ends in December 2012. One of the interpretations I read was that it would signal a change in human consciousness, as I don’t believe in the end of the world. I’d hate to think that there’s an asteroid out there with a Winter Solstice due date in 7 years. I’d think they’d have found that sucker by now. Of course, perhaps that’s the date of a nuclear war, and another environmental catastrophe …. an earthquake that devastates Central America?
Whatever, I’d like to think that we will find ourselves living in a kinder world in seven years, precipitated by the momentum initiated the past two weeks. 2005 is already supposed to be devoted to the reduction of poverty, as the letter from Bill Gates and Bono published last weekend in The Globe and Mail attested. The tsunami disaster has redefined the world’s problems, as did 9/11. Bush and oil and Iraq has been trivialized by a certain degree, and the global community reacts, the stirring of world government and culture are here.
Spent the early afternoon reading, thinking, writing, in Nanny’s bedroom. It’s too bright though, and the inside of my eyeballs are lit up like lamps, and the floaters are really distracting. Around 2 ATL I put on my new red hat and go for a walk – up the treacherous hill, past the Catholic church, and turn left into town. Go to Tim Hortons, have a double double (the second for the day, since Michelle delivered some to us earlier) and sat and thought. Two memories came to mind. First, as I sat at T.H., was the dream I had as a child in the 80s. At that time I dreamt I was in Campbellton, and bombs were falling from the sky. Soviet planes flew overhead. The explosions caused the sidewalks to come apart in their square sections. This had been a nightmare, not terrifying as I recall, but anxiety causing. I told my Dad about it the next day and he told me not to worry, we wouldn’t be bombed (this was equally true of Clare as it was of Campbellton). My thought sitting at Tim Hortons and looking over the town was that it would survive a nuclear war. There’s no reason to bomb it at all. This also means it would be a good place to hide a war criminal (though in a town like this, one would have to be careful about rumours).
As I walked back, approaching the playground by the school, I remembered the time (again in the 80s) that the plow had created a great mound of snow in the front of the school (Jean Marie-Gay) we played on that mound at recess until in melted. I lost my mitten playing on it. We would climb to the top and then jump down, and also slide on our bums, since we were all wearing snow suits.
Having been watching as this decade unravels, this time without a name (people do not speak of the decade the way they said “the 80s” and “the 90s” since no one knows what to say —> I find this quite odd, since it’ll be another 20 years before it’s truly applicable again, and thus will go out of fashion —> but then again, every century has delt with this haven’t they, and Beckett wrote in Waiting for Godot about being the first to climb the Eiffel Tower, “a million years ago, back in the 90s”. That is, the 1890s, which brought a smile to me when I first heard it in the Shakespeare by The Sea production of 1999).
Having been watching the decade unravel, watching the style of the 80s turn to the style of the 90s, and now, the style of the 90s turn into this decade, my feeling is that this time is both more prosperous and stylistically appealing, but that it is also far more vacuous. One could almost compare it to the screen of a laptop (upon which this is being typed at the moment). The liquid crystal display fades in and out depending on the angle, but also presents a rich colour when viewed dead on. But it is only an inch or less thick. The increasing defeat of those who believe there is something more than buying things, and the increasing presence of the “inauthentic” in all ways, creates a shiny mirror of what? A mirror too shows a world without depth, a world reversed from what we’d consider the actual.
At least I have this laptop here —> now with cd in the drive, headphones on, and Fischerspooner singing about hypermediocrity.
The old classic I’ve been thinking about for the past week and half:
Conversation Concerning Life and Death
MARAT:
[speaking to SADE across the empty arena]
I read in your books de Sade
in one of your immortal works
that the basis of all life is death
SADE:
Correct Marat
But man has given a false importance to death
Any animal plant or man who dies
adds to Nature’s compost heap
becomes the manure without which
nothing could grow nothing could be created
Death is simply part of the process
Every death even the cruelest death
drowns in the total indifference of Nature
Nature herself would watch unmoved
if we destroyed the entire human race
[rising]
I hate Nature
this passionless spectator this unbreakable ice-berg-face
that can bear everything
this goads us to greater and greater acts
[breathing heavily]
Haven’t we always beaten down those weaker than ourselves
Haven’t we torn at their throats
with continuos villainy and lust
Haven’t we experimented in our laboratories
before applying the final solution?
[…]
We condemn to death without emotion
and there’s no singular personal death to be had
only an anonymous cheapened death
which we could dole out to entire nations
on a mathematical basis
until the time comes
for all life
to be extinguished
MARAT:
Citizen Marquis
you may have fought for us last September
when we dragged out of the goals
the aristocrats who plotted against us
but you still talk like a grand seigneur
and what you call the indifference of Nature
is your own lack of compassion
SADE:
Compassion
Now Marat you are talking like an aristocrat
Compassion is the property of the privileged classes
When the pitier lowers himself
to give to a beggar
he throbs with contempt
To protect his riches he pretends to be moved
and his gift to the beggar amounts to no more than a kick [lute chord]
No Marat
no small emotions please
Your feelings were never petty
For you just as for me
only the most extreme actions matter
MARAT:
If I am extreme I am not extreme in the same way was you
Against Nature’s silence I use action
In the vast indifference I invent a meaning
I don’t watch unmoved I intervene
and I say that this and this are wrong
and I work to alter them and improve them
The important thing
is to pull yourself up by your own hair
to turn yourself inside out
and see the whole world with fresh eyes
– Peter Weiss, Marat/Sade (1964), translated by Geoffrey Skelton
book here and DVD here.
Happy New Year everybody.
I, like many, have been hungover today, because I went to the Mercer Union “Dirtier New Year’s Eve Party” last night, the poster for which featured two humping bunnies outside a car wash. Which was apt.
Last year Mercer Union went out a limb and held this party at Studio 99 as a fundraiser. They called it the “Dirty New Year’s Eve Party” then. I say ‘out on a limb’ because they weren’t really sure how successful it would be, and they were going to invest a lot into it. Well, it turned out really well and the gallery made a killing, although there was nothing dirty about it. This year seemed much more successful. At 6am last year, the light’s went up and the place was pretty sparse, with the usual crowd of people such as myself who stay up until there’s nothing left to do (i.e my friends). This year, 6am came and there was still a crowd dancing.
Now let’s get back to the humping bunnies, because I want to tell this story. First, if you haven’t seen the poster, it’s two folk in bunny suits simulating a rear entry, or, as it could be called, “a backward hug”. It’s certainly more cutesy than erotic, but I guess that’s because of the fur. It’s very apt because it’s a bit of an inside joke. It refers to how much dry humping has been happening at art parties this past year, all because of Instant Coffee.
Like I said in my year in review, the Instant Coffee make-out parties began in November 03 in collaboration with Darren O’Donnell, a local playwright who’s interested in sociality, and the different ways strangers can interact. He’s been following a line of research over the past few years that basically involves getting strangers to meet one another and talk and whatever … and it’s always some example of friendliness that emerges. So anyway, the make-out parties was another example of the folk going out on a limb … as a member of Instant Coffee at the time, I can say that we weren’t really sure if it was going to work, or if it was going to make everything awkward. What ended up happening was that couples were more than willing to get it on in Emily Hogg’s ‘make out fort’.
Emily is an architect, and as I understand it, she began re-doing the couch forts that we’re probably all built as kids with blankets and cushions while she was still studying architecture. So Emily’s fort wasn’t considered gimmicky as much as we saw it as an art/architecture project. The thing with Instant Coffee is that you become a collective member through collaborating with them, so over the past year, Darren and Emily became members.
At the same time, Instant Coffee formed a relationship with Hive magazine, because Hive’s publisher really liked them/us and wanted to promote what I.C. was doing. So at magazine launches, I.C. was involved in helping to throw the party. Jinhan Ko, one of the collective’s founding members, had a old camping trailer that was known as “the Urban Disco Trailer” and over the past several years, went through various manifestations of what I think we can safely call pimping. I.C. pimped that ride over and over again. But since Jin moved to Vancouver last the summer, I hear the trailer’s in storage somewhere. So basically, the trailer became a make-out venue last spring, and by June they had installed the ‘bass bed’ which I think had sub-woofers built into the frame, but by that time I was no longer working with I.C. so I’m spotty on specifics. As I said in my year in review, I have fond memories of slow kisses at 4 in the morning at the Hive launch, which all happened in the trailer. My favorite kiss that night came when I walked into the trailer looking for my friend, and I was suddenly pulled into a very sweet make-out session. In the morning’s early hours, the trailer became a socially liminal space where being there meant you were only there for one reason.
Well, with the trailer out of the picture, and with Instant Coffee’s relationship with Mercer Union (which I know I haven’t clarified, but basically the whole art scene here and anywhere is incestuous, and I’ll tell that story some other time) it made sense that I.C. would have a presence at Mercer Union’s party. With the trailer out of the picture, the bass bed was re-invented and installed against a wall of the dance floor, and, as Mercer’s co-director Dave Dyment wrote in a last minute reminder/promotion email yesterday, “The Instant Coffee Make Out Bass Bed is a 12 foot by 12 foot bed with sub-woofers built into the frame, connected to the soundsystem. It’s gonna be incredible.” Standing on the platform next to the bed, you could really feel the sub-woofers, but the effect didn’t really carry over on the bed, as the mattress cushioned the effect. Nevertheless, this was designated make-out space.
Early on, to get the action started, there was lazy-susan in the middle of the mattress with a bottle on it, and I ended up having to kiss Darren. Because I’m straight this was my most awkward kiss of the whole night. But, this night is memorable for me because I sat down around 5 and started chatting with this girl next to me, and I asked, “We’re sitting on the bass bed, does that mean I should kiss you?” And she said, “Yes,” and so I began to make out with the pretty brunette for a good while. That was totally the highlight of my night.
I can’t say how much I love the fact that just by being in a certain spot means that everything is straightforward with no guessing game and risk of misinterpretation. It also becomes this way for couples to stray in a totally legitimate way. Playing spin the bottle, I kissed a girl who was engaged.
Like the first make-out party, in which lots of couples took the opportunity for public displays of affection, which did include lots of dryhumping, the make-out spaces become a venue for couples to make out, kiss other people, and for strangers to meet and kiss.
So, unlike last year, in which the moniker “dirty new year’s eve party” was simply rhetorical, this year it was aptly called ‘dirtier’ and the humping bunnies made lots of sense. I left shortly after 6, but it probably went on for another hour. So far I’ve had an memorable 2005, and if they do it again next year, that’s what I’ll mark on my calendar.
Shows on at Mercer Union
