Archive for March 2005

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.)

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.)

Shows on at Mercer Union

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

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)

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.

————————
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)

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)