Archive for October 2007

Chomsky at the Ryerson Q&A (1988)

Take the emphasis on professional sports. It sounds harmless but it really isn’t. Professional sports are a way of building up jingoist fanaticism. You’re supposed to cheer for your home team. Just to mention something from personal experience – I remember, very well, when I was I guess, a high school student – a sudden revelation when I asked myself why am I cheering for my high school football team. I don’t know anybody on it, if I met anybody on it we’d probably hate each other. You know, why do I care if they win or if some guy a couple blocks away wins? And then you can say the same thing about the baseball team or whatever else it is. This idea of cheering for your home team -which you mentioned before – that’s a way of building into people irrational submissiveness to power. And it’s a very dangerous thing. And I think it’s one of the reasons it gets such a huge play. Or . . . let’s move to something else. The indoctrination that’s done by T.V. and so on is not trying to pile up evidence and give arguments and so on. It’s trying to inculcate attitudes. I mentioned a couple of cases but there are a lot more. Let’s take, say, the bombing of Libya. Why did the American public support the bombing of Libya? Well, the reason is that there had been a very effective, and careful, and intense inculcation of racist attitudes about Arabs. Anti-Arab racism is the one form of racism in the United States that’s considered legitimate. I mean, plenty of people are racist, but you don’t like to admit it. On the other hand, with regard to anti-Arab racism you admit it openly. You read a journal like, say, The New Republic, and the kinds of things that they say about Arabs . . . if anyone said them about Jews you’d think you were reading (Der Stern). I’m not joking. And nobody notices it because anti-Arab racism is so profound. There are novels that have a form of anti-Arab racism that’s hair-raising. The same is true of television shows and so on and so forth. An image has been created – the media are part of this, not all – of the Arab terrorist lurking out there ready to kill us. And against that background you could bomb Libya and people would cheer. Recall how effective that was, remember what was happening in 1986, there are a lot of measures of how effective this is. Remember that in 1986 when this happened the tourism industry in Europe was virtually wiped out because Americans were afraid to go to Europe, where incidentally, objectively, they would be about a hundred times as safe as in any American city. That’s no joke. But they were afraid to go to Europe because they got these Arab terrorists out there trying to kill us. Now, that was not from New York Times editorials, that was from a whole array of television and novels and soap operas and a mass of symbolism and so on and so forth and that’s effective. The anticommunist hysteria is developed that way too. The communists are out there ready to kill us – who are the communists? – I don’t know, they’re out there ready to kill us. This is introduced by the kinds of symbolism that T.V. is good at, and cheap novels are good at and so on and that’s important. These are critical means of indoctrination it’s just that I wasn’t talking about them. I was talking about the more intellectual side.

(source)

From The End of Virtuous Albion, (on the British National Character), by Theodore Dalrymple (originally published in the New Criterion, 1 September 2005):

On walking through the hospital in which I formerly practiced, I came across the husband of a patient of mine who had always accompanied her to her appointments. He was sitting down and waiting to be called for an examination. He was much thinner than I had seen him before, and he was so jaundiced that he was almost orange in color. At his age, this could mean only one thing: hepatic secondaries in the liver, and fast-approaching death.

I passed the time of day with him, and wished him and his wife well, though I knew that he was dying, he knew that he was dying, and he knew that I knew that he was dying.

“We’ll just have to do the best we can” he said.

Indeed, he died two weeks later. There had been no protest, no self-pity, no demand for special attention. He understood that I commiserated with him, though I said nothing except that I was sorry to see that he was unwell, but he understood also that my commiseration was of a degree commensurate with the degree of our acquaintance, and that demanded no extravagant and therefore dishonest expression. By controlling his emotion, and his grief at his own imminent death, so that he should not embarrass me, he maintained his dignity, and self-respect. He retained a sense of social obligation, a vital component of what used to be called character, until the very end of his life.

I mention these people not because they were in any way extraordinary–a claim they would never have made for themselves–but because they were so ordinary. They were living up to a cultural ideal that, if not universal, was certainly very widespread (as my wife would confirm). It is an ideal that I find admirable, because it entails a quasi-religious awareness of the metaphysical equality of mankind: that I am no more important than you. This was no mere intellectual or theoretical construct; it was an ideal that was lived. Unlike the claim to rights, which is often shrill and is almost so self-regarding that it makes the claimant the center of his own moral universe, the old cultural ideal was other-regarding and social in nature. It imposed demands upon the self, not upon others; it was a discipline rather than a benefit. Oddly enough, it led to a greater and deeper contentment, capacity for genuine personal achievement, and tolerance of eccentricity and nonconformity than our present, more egotistical ideals.

While Kate Blanchette in armour and on horseback, with long red hair flowing from her wigged scalp, looking a good twenty years younger than her supposed age of 55 (which in 16th Century terms is a miracle) is visually resplendent, it captures nothing of the woman who wrote Monsieur’s Departure.

Queen Elizabeth on horseback at the

Queen Elizabeth Playing the Lute, (1576)

I grieve and dare not show my discontent,
I love and yet am forced to seem to hate,
I do, yet dare not say I ever meant,
I seem stark mute but inwardly to prate.
I am and not, I freeze and yet am burned.
Since from myself another self I turned.

My care is like my shadow in the sun,
Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it,
Stands and lies by me, doth what I have done.
His too familiar care doth make me rue it.
No means I find to rid him from my breast,
Till by the end of things it be supprest.

Some gentler passion slide into my mind,
For I am soft and made of melting snow;
Or be more cruel, love, and so be kind.
Let me or float or sink, be high or low.
Or let me live with some more sweet content,
Or die and so forget what love ere meant.

– Queen Elizabeth I

_____________
“Monsieur” is identified in two MSS as the duke of Anjou, who withdrew from marriage negotiations in 1582, and in one MS as Robert Devereaux, earl of Essex, whose long-lived affection for Elizabeth ended in a rebellion that resulted in his execution on a warrant signed by Elizabeth. (source)

Goodreads | 2007 week 42 number 6 (Doris Lessing Selection)

From Doris Lessing’s introduction to The Golden Notebook (June 1971):

To get the subject of Women’s Liberation over with – I support it, of course, because women are second-class citizens, as they are saying energetically and competently in many countries. It can be said that they are succeeding, if only to the extent they are being seriously listened to. All kinds of people previously hostile or indifferent say: ‘I support their aims but I don’t like their shrill voices and their nasty ill-mannered ways.’ This is an inevitable and easily recognizable stage in every revolutionary movement: reformers must expect to be disowned by this who are only too happy to enjoy what has been won for them. I don’t think Women’s Liberation will change much though – not because there is anything wrong with its aims, but because it is already clear that the whole world is being shaken into a new pattern by the cataclysms we are living through: probably by the time we are through, if we do get through at all, the aims of Women’s Liberation will look very small and quaint.

But this novel [The Golden Notebook] was not a trumpet for Women’s Liberation. It described many female emotions of aggression, hostility, resentment. It put them into print. Apparently what many women were thinking, feeling, experiencing, came as a great surprise. Instantly a lot of very ancient weapons were unleashed, the main ones, as usual, being the theme of ‘She is unfeminine’, ‘She is a man-hater’. This particular reflex seems indestructible. Men – and many women, said that the suffragettes were de-feminized, masculine, brutalized. There is no record I have read of any society anywhere when women demanded more than nature offers them that does not also describe this reaction from men – and some women. A lot of women were angry about The Golden Notebook. What women will say to other women, grumbling in their kitchens and complaining and gossiping or what they make clear in their masochism, is often the last thing they will say aloud – a man may overhear. Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long. The number of women prepared to stand up for what they really think, feel, experience with a man they are in love with is still small. Most women will still run like little dogs with stones thrown at them when a man says: You are unfeminine, aggressive, you are unmanning me. It is my belief that any woman who marries, or takes seriously in any way at all, a man who uses this threat, deserves everything she gets. For such a man is a bully, does to know anything about the world he lives in, or about its history…

[…]

This business of seeing what I was trying to do – it brings me to the critics, and the danger of evoking a yawn. This sad bickering between writers and critics, playwrights and critics: the public have got so used to it they think, as of quarreling children: ‘Ah yes, dear little things, they are at it again.’ Or: ‘You writers get all the praise, or if not praise, at least all that attention- so why are you so perennially wounded?’ And the public are quite right. For reasons I won’t go into here, early and valuable experiences in my writing life gave me a sense of perspective about critics and reviewers … It is that writers are looking in the critics for an alter ego, that other self more intelligent than oneself who has seen what one is reaching for, and who judges you only by whether you have matched up to your aim or not. I have never yet met a writer who, faced at last with that rare being, a real critic, doesn’t lose all paranoia and become gratefully attentive – he has found what he thinks he needs. But what he, the writer, is asking is impossible. Why should he expect this extraordinary being, the perfect critic (who does occasionally exist), why should there be anyone else who comprehends what he is trying to do? After all, there is only one person spinning that particular cocoon, only one person whose business it is to spin it.

It is not possible for reviewers and critics to provide what they purport to provide – and for which writers so ridiculously and childishly yearn.

This is because the critics are not educated for it; their training is in the opposite direction.

It starts when the child is as young as five or six, when he arrives at school. It starts with marks, rewards, ‘places’, ‘streams’, stars – and still in many places, stripes. This horse-race mentality, the victor and loser way of thinking, leads to ‘Writer X is, is not, a few paces ahead of Writer Y. Writer Y has fallen behind. In his last book Writer Z had shown himself as better than Writer A.’ From the very beginning the child is trained to think in this way: always in terms of comparison, of success, and of failure. It is a weeding-out system: the weaker get discouraged and fall out; a system designed to produce a few winners who are always in competition with each other. It is my belief – though this is not the place to develop this – and the talents every child has, regardless of his official ‘IQ’, could stay with him through life, to enrich him and everybody else, if these talents were not regarded as commodities with a value in the success-stakes.

The other things taught from the start is to distrust one’s own judgment. Children are taught submission to authority, how to search for other people’s opinions and decisions, and how to quote and comply,

As in the political sphere, the child is taught that he is free, a democrat, with a free will and a free mind, lives in a free country, makes his own decisions. At the same time he is a prisoner of the assumptions and dogmas of his time, which he does not question, because he has never been told they exist. By the time a young person has reached the age when he has to choose (we still take it for granted that a choice is inevitable) between the arts and the sciences, he often chooses the arts because he feels that here is humanity, freedom, choice. He does not know that he is already molded by a system, he does not know that the choice itself is the result of a false dichotomy rooted in the heart of our culture. Those who do sense this, and who don’t wish to subject themselves to further molding, tend to leave, in a half-unconscious, instinctive attempt to find work where they won’t be divided against themselves. With all our institutions, from the police force to academia, from medicine to politics, we give little attention to the people who leave – that process of elimination that goes on all the time and which excludes, very early, those likely to be original and reforming, leaving those attracted to a thing because that is what they are already like. A young policeman leaves the Force saying he doesn’t like what he has to do. A young teacher leaves teaching, her idealism snubbed. This social mechanism goes almost unnoticed – yet it is as powerful as any in keeping our institutions rigid and oppressive.

These children who have spent years inside the training system becomes critics and reviewers, and cannot give what the author, the artist, so foolishly looks for – imaginative and original judgment. What they can do, and what they do very well, is to the writer how the book or play accords with current patterns of feeling and thinking – the climate of opinion. They are like litmus paper. They are wind gauges – invaluable. They are the most sensitive of barometers of public opinion. You can see changes of mood and opinion here sooner than anywhere except in the political field – it is because these are people whose whole education has been just that – to look outside themselves for their opinions, to adapt themselves to authority figures, to ‘received opinion’ – a marvelously revealing phrase.

It may be that there is no other way of educating people. Possibly, but I don’t believe it. In the meantime it would be a help at least to describe things properly, to call things by their right names. Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this:

‘You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others, will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself – educating your own judgment. Those that stay must remember, always and all the time, that they are being molded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.’

Like every other writer I get letters all the time from young people who are about to write theses and essays about my books in various countries – but particularly in the United States. They all say: ‘Please give me a list of the articles about your work, the critics who have written about you, the authorities.’ They also ask for a thousand details of total irrelevance, but which they have been taught to consider important, amounting to a dossier, like an immigration department’s.

These requests I answer as follows: ‘Dear Student. You are mad. Why spend months and years writing thousands of words about one book, or even one writer, when there are hundreds of books waiting to be read. You don’t see that you are the victim of a pernicious system. And if you have yourself chosen my work as your subject, and if you do have to a write a thesis – and believe me I am very grateful that what I’ve written is being found useful by you – then why don’t you read what I have written and make up your own mind about what you think, testing it against your own life, your own experience. Never mind about Professors White and Black.’

‘Dear Writer’ – they reply. ‘But I have to know what the authorities say, because if I don’t them, my professor won’t give me any marks.’

This is an international system, absolutely identical from the Urals to Yugoslavia, from Minnesota to Manchester.

The point is, we are all so used to it, we no longer see how bad it is. I am not used to it, because I left school when I was fourteen. There was a time I was sorry for this, and believed I had missed out on something valuable. Now I am grateful for a lucky escape.

[…]

You might be saying: This is an exaggerated reaction, and you have no right to it, because you say you have never been part of the system. But I think it is not at all exaggerated, and that the reaction of someone from outside is valuable simply because it is fresh and not biased by allegiance to a particular education.

But after this investigation, I had no difficulty in answering my own questions: Why are they so parochial, so personal, so small-minded? Why do they always atomize, and belittle, why are they so fascinated by detail, and uninterested in the whole? Why is their interpretation of the word critic always to find fault? Why are they always seeing writers in conflict with each other, rather than complementing each other … simple, this is how they are trained to think. That valuable person who understands what you are doing, what you are aiming for, and give you advice and real criticism, is nearly always someone right outside the literary machine, even outside the university system; it may be a student just beginning, and still in love with literature, or perhaps it may be a thoughtful person who reads a great deal, following his own instinct.

I say to these students who have to spend a year, two years, writing theses about one book: ‘There is only way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag – and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty – and vice-versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you. Remember that for all the books we have in print, are as many that have never reached print, have never been written down – even now, in this age of compulsive reverence for the written word, history, even social ethic, are taught by means of stories, and the people who have been conditioned into thinking only in terms of what is written – and unfortunately nearly all the products of our educational system can do no more than this – are missing what is before their eyes. For instance, the real history of Africa is still in the custody of black storytellers and wise men, black historians, medicine men: it is a verbal history, still kept safe from the white man and his predations. Everywhere, if you keep your mind open, you will find the truth in words not written down. So never let the printed page be your master. Above all, you should know that the fact that you have to spend one year, or two years, on one book or one author means that you are badly taught – you should have been taught to read your way from one sympathy to another, you should be learning to follow your own intuitive feeling about what you need: that is what you should have been developing, not the way to quote from other people’.

Leaks, woes a smudge on Crystal’s sparkle
VAL ROSS

From Wednesday’s Globe and Mail

October 3, 2007 at 1:00 AM EDT

Good thing it was a dry summer. The new Michael Lee-Chin Crystal at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto’s most talked-about new edifice, leaks.

At least, it did leak. Water penetrated the north end of the long window of the C5 restaurant, and puddles have appeared near windows on the third and fourth floors.

The ROM’s CEO, William Thorsell, pushed to open the new Daniel Libeskind-designed Crystal and the rest of the renovated ROM on June 1. As construction accelerated, the contractors responsible for installing the Crystal’s cladding system warned that temporary seams around windows might leak. In August, they mopped up and repaired the problems.

As winter approaches, fingers are crossed that there will be no more puddles, and that the Crystal’s cladding, designed to prevent it from turning into an avalanche-maker, will function as well in cold reality as it does in theory. But it’s clear, four months into the Crystal’s life, the new spaces pose huge challenges, and leaks are the least of them.

An unveiling concert in June shows the Crystal in Toronto. Its new spaces pose huge challenges, and leaks are the least of them.

Far more daunting are the problems of mounting exhibits in the strange new spaces, ensuring public safety and budgeting for the new reality.

There are rumours that the Crystal’s oddly shaped, difficult-to-access windows have increased window-cleaning costs by $200,000, a figure ROM’s executive director of capital development and facilities, Al Shaikoli, disputes.

“But it is considerable,” he admitted. “In the old days, our window-cleaning budget was next to nothing.”

Safety issues are a surprise. “We didn’t predict human behaviour,” Mr Shaikoli said. On the June weekend of its grand, all-night opening, ROM staffers discovered that, particularly after the bars closed, visitors seemed more interested in the Crystal as a playground than as architecture. Staff were alarmed to see people crawling out on windows slanting over Bloor Street, apparently testing their strength.

“Mind you, these galleries were naked spaces,” Mr. Shaikoli said. “Once they’re filled with artifacts, people will be more respectful.” Display cases will soon be installed in the paths of future adventurers.

Another discovery was a trail of footprints most of the way up a fourth-floor wall that rises at a 30-degree angle. “Probably a kid took a run at it,” speculates Dan Rahimi, director of gallery development. Baseboards and stainless steel barriers are being installed to signal that a wall is a wall, even if it’s not on the straight and narrow.

“One of our major bugbears was that William wanted everything open and accessible,” says Janet Waddington, assistant curator of paleontology. “But you can’t do that – the Toronto public is extraordinarily destructive.”

Even in the old dinosaur galleries, says Ms. Waddington, people used to reach across railings to pat the prosaurolophus bones. In the ROM’s Crystal dinosaur gallery, two ancient marine reptile skeletons, a pleiosaur and a mosasaur, have been suspended from an overhanging face of the Crystal (the ceiling is too high), which puts their irreplaceable old bones within arm’s reach. By the time the gallery opens in December, a plinth or base underneath, surrounded with barriers, will keep the public’s hands at bay. “It has been horrendous,” said Ms. Waddington, “but very exciting.”

The problem of installing artifacts in a space with no vertical walls challenged Hiroshi Sugimoto, the first artist to be exhibited in the ROM’s fourth-floor Institute for Contemporary Culture. So, he designed a curving wall 4.3 metres high and 27.5 metres long, fitted with special lighting, to counteract the angular architecture. Total cost to the ROM: about $200,000. The wall was recently removed to make room for a new show of aboriginal contemporary art that opens on Saturday.

Special new display cases have been bought to match the galleries, some with trapezoidal shapes. As well, the renovation has opened the entire building, old and new parts, to more daylight, which risks bleaching museum artifacts. So the museum has acquired special blinds that filter out 96 per cent of ultraviolet light, as well as blackout blinds that block exterior light.

“Daniel didn’t design this building based on the collections,” said Mr. Rahimi. “We had to design the collections to go with the building. We have an aesthetic imperative – partly because the architecture is so strong.”

At this resolution, the Monet damaged over the weekend is almost photographic.

From the Facebook group ‘Everyone’s an Art Critic: Toronto’ discussion topic.

Topic: What themes do you see in contemporary Toronto Art?

01. Gareth Bate wrote on Sep 17, 2007 at 4:56 PM
Do you notice any general themes in Toronto art? Any medium or imagery that is particularly prevelant?

02 .Martin Alonso (York University) replied to Gareth’s post on Sep 18, 2007 at 8:26 PM
Not relevant, but just annoying and utterly useless trends:

1. Birds: especially orioles and finch-like creatures.

2. Deer: to play on the ‘woodsy’ theme alongside the birds.
[Could this be a flash of modern Canadiana?]

3. Neon colours, such as bright magenta, cyan, and yellow.

4. And the act of drawing on walls. Carrie, this one’s for you!

Maybe they are relevant in one way or another; I’m sure they are somehow. But on the surface, the sheer repetitiveness of it all becomes nerve-wracking and a complete turn-off.

03. Gareth Bate replied to Martin’s post on Sep 19, 2007 at 5:51 AM
At the queen west art crawl there was an awful lot of picky little pencil drawings. Really precious stuff.

04. Kurt Rostek replied to Gareth’s post on Sep 19, 2007 at 4:20 PM
I’m seeing a lot of what I would call an almost frivolous if not cartoonish works..with toys, dolls …childlike memorabilia..

05. Stanzie Tooth (OCAD) wrote on Sep 20, 2007 at 10:17 AM
I’ve been seeing alot of micro/ macro stuff- semi-abstract thing based on: diseases, cells- general closeups of bodily fluids, etc.

06. Alex Mcleod replied to Martin’s post on Sep 20, 2007 at 10:37 AM
i see that martin has hurt my feelings 🙁

07. Martin Alonso (York University) replied to Alex’s post on Sep 20, 2007 at 3:27 PM
Hence, art criticism.

😉

08. Alex Mcleod replied to Martin’s post on Sep 21, 2007 at 4:41 AM
I’m going to fight you

09. Martin Alonso (York University) replied to Alex’s post on Sep 21, 2007 at 6:03 AM
Bring it on, dear.
I’m ready!

10. Robert Farmer wrote on Sep 21, 2007 at 12:15 PM
let’s cover it in resin!

11. Alex Mcleod replied to Robert’s post on Sep 23, 2007 at 10:17 AM
only photo collages though

12. Rachel McRae replied to Martin’s post on Sep 27, 2007 at 9:22 PM
As an artist who works with deer imagery a lot I feel I need to respond.

If the use of deer is a “trend” its one with quite a rich history. Beyond mere “Canadiana,” it recalls symbolic use stretching across a vast track of geography (across all continents except Antarctica and Australia) and time (Paleolithic cave paintings in Cave Trois Frères in southern France feature a “shaman” figure crowned with horns.) The deer figures prominently in heraldry internationally, Greek, Slavic, Hindu, Judeo-Christian, Celtic.. A whole mass of religious/cultures groups use the deer as a symbol. Deer appear frequently in classic/neo-classic still lifes and imagery of the hunt…

An animal of such widespread dispersement, a rich food source (and thus economic importance) is bound to become a weighty cultural symbol. Though you yourself may not hunt deer, wear deer skin, engage directly with the animal in any way, you do have a certain connection with it. You’re talking about “art,” practicing I can only assume, and art’s connection with the deer-as-symbol is vast and dense.

Any practice with history must dialogue with its past. (Otherwise, I would argue; it is not art. If I may express a personal opinion, art becomes art when it is engaged with its historical cannon. Otherwise it is something distinct. That being said, engagement is not synonymous with compliance or agreeance.)

(With all due respect, I wouldn’t apply the term “useless” so lightly.)

13. Martin Alonso (York University) replied to Rachel’s post on Sep 27, 2007 at 10:34 PM
So, why is deer imagery so ‘important’ (or rampant) in Toronto NOW?

14. Therese Cilia (OCAD) wrote on Sep 28, 2007 at 11:19 AM
I’m getting the impression from this board that themes and trends in art is generally a bad thing, but I’m not so sure. To me, trends are inevitable and unavoidable. We’re all questioning the same universe and have been since we’ve been on this planet. We’re going to be talking about our past and our present, we’re looking at the same things and being influenced by the same things – that’s culture! We’re seeing birds, butterflies, deer, and micro/macroscopic life because they’re HERE, and so are we. If the work is ‘authentic’, not just following a trend but actually being it and questioning it, (and I know we can all realize the difference, it’s what makes a good painting a good painting or not), then birds, cells or deer – it all doesn’t matter.

As an aside, I’d like to say that the Ann Hamilton lecture was EXCITING. It actually made me a little nostalgic to be in school again and be surrounded in that atmosphere. If you’re a graduate, you know what I mean?
I love that when I hear or read Ann Hamilton, I get the feeling that her work and her voice I can never quite grasp, but am so close to getting. She’ll say or do something really profound that leaves you wanting more because you can never quite keep it all in your head. If that makes any sense at all. I love it.

15. Carrie Cutforth-Young (OCAD) wrote on Sep 29, 2007 at 12:54 PM
Deer “heads” was reintroduced into the contemporary International art scene when much of the critical discourse centred on the Archive and the museums/institutions role of dominating/destroyer/preserver of nature…and it’s also retro–like Victorian riffed wallpaper…what goes around comes around, and it finally hit Toronto

YOU CANNOT DENY OSMOSIS

popular motifs develop organically not necessarily meaning one is “following” a trend, especially if each artist has a different critical approach and style

deer heads and birds and neon is what will mark this generation of paintings as opposed to cubic abstraction or big eyed paintings, etc. is that a bad thing? no…seriously…everyone in TO working with the same motifs should put out and imprint with essays championing the varying reasons behind the use of neon/birds/dear…with Martin writing the forward 😉

seriously…it will give Martin a topic to lecture future OCAD students about

AND AS FAR AS DRAWING ON WALLS:

for me, Dood was a mere momentary interruption of the usual really bad community arts practice with the synthesis of participatory culture theory made manifest in the physical and digital realms

😉

16. Carrie Cutforth-Young (OCAD) replied to Robert’s post on Sep 29, 2007 at 12:59 PM
covering it in resin was sooo last years TIFF 😉

it made the 3 or so resinless paintings really stand out

i swear thats the only reason I go to TIFF, is to see which trend has exhausted itself into implosion

17. Carrie Cutforth-Young (OCAD) replied to Carrie’s post on Sep 29, 2007 at 1:02 PM
we could call the book “deers, birds, neon OH MY!”

18. Gareth Bate replied to Rachel’s post on Oct 2, 2007 at 9:31 PM
Can you post a link to your work?

19. Martin Alonso (York University) replied to Carrie’s post on Oct 2, 2007 at 11:30 PM
“I’ll foreword anytime!” says the next up-and-coming art historian/editor/anthologist. I have big plans ahead, Carrie…

;P

20. Liz Pead wrote on Oct 4, 2007 at 12:19 PM
As a landscape painter, I find this thread really interesting.

Deer and birds are often around me, but like people in city scapes, I omit them in the landscape.
There’s something tacky about portraying deer and other animals in art – I grew up with string-art and velvet paintings in New Brunswick. Jacking deer was a passtimje, but also a necessity for some as a source of a winter’s worth of meat.

Depicting animals, especially by people who grew up in the suburban/ urban experience so often found here in Canada ( not that I’m making any assumtions about any of you and where you grew up!!!) is kind of sweet. I don’t see it any different =than me going up to Algonquin Park every summer and painting my idea of the pretty northern, pristine landscape. It is a potent form of nostalgia that I have for an environment I both remember from my past in New Brunswick surrounded by trees and a form of nostalgia for these natural things which are disappearing very quickly before me.

As for them being trends? Maybe we are reacting more than we know to our envirnomental breaking down…m uch more violently than we can even put into words.

A couple of years ago ( SPring 2006?) Border Crossings mag did a whole issue dealing with Animals, Im going to revisit it and see if it makes any more sense to me now than it did then ( I was finishing my thesis at that point and unless it was hockey or landsacpe it kinda went by me…)

Any thoughts?

From the perspective of space, where there is no gravity, there is also no up or down. The maps of the world that show north as up are not necessarily objective. Scan the map with the south pole on top and you see the world entirely differently. The Mediterranean basin is no longer the focal point, lost, as it is, near the bottom of the globe. North America loses its continental width – and thus its majesty – as it narrows ‘northward’ into the atrophied limb of Central America toward the center of your field of vision. South America and Africa stand out. But South America keeps narrowing toward the Antarctic nothingness to the top, insufficiently connected to the other continental bodies.

Africa, alas, is the inescapable center: Equidistant between the South and North poles, lying flat across the equator, with the earth’s warmest climate, hospitable to the emergence of life in countless forms – three quarters of its surface lies within the tropics. Africa looms large in the middle of the vision field, connected to Eurasia through the Middle East. This map, with south at the top, shows why humankind emerged in Africa, why it was from Africa that our species may have begun the settlement of the planet. Africa is the mother continent to which we all ultimately belong, from where human beings acquired their deepest genetic traits. ‘We are all Africans under the skin,’ says anthropologist Christopher Stringer. Africa is nature write large. As Ben Okri, a Nigerian novelist and poet, writes:

We are the miracles that God made
To taste the bitter fruit of Time.

From Wikipedia: ‘The term Mediterranean derives from the Latin mediterraneus, “inland” (medius, “middle” + terra, “land, earth”). To the ancient Romans, the Mediterranean was the center of the earth as they knew it.’