The author Elah Feder interviewed me about this at the Parkdale Tim Hortons two weeks ago.
“It’s people being lazy. They’re making their problem of having to throw something away, into my problem,” said Timothy Comeau, who’s gotten pretty frustrated with the coffee cups and other scraps of garbage he keeps finding in his rear-mounted milk crate. “I just find it really insulting.”
Hello Mammal Lovers!
This Friday (February 10) at the Drake Lab (1140 Queen St. West), in coordination with our current residency, “Open Cheese Office Grilled Songwriting Sandwich,” we’ll be cooking, hosting and celebrating the FOURTH annual Timothy Comeau Award, and you are invited! Swing by at 7pm or after to eat, be merry and find out who the winner is this year! Bring yourself, your friends, your drinks, your musical instruments, and the rest (an abundance of decadent cheese-variation sandwiches) will be provided.
The Timothy Comeau Award was created to recognize individuals who have shown exceptional support, interest and love for Mammalian. Recipients of the Timothy Comeau Award have been participants in many of our activities and have also offered insights, analysis and criticism. These are people without whom our events and existence would feel incomplete.
The 2010 winner of the Timothy Comeau Award was Sanjay Ratnan. Sanjay has been hanging out with MDR and participating in Mammalian events since he was a fetus. He continues to contribute his talents, ideas and super-star personality to Mammalian as a member of The Torontonians.
The 2009 winner of the Timothy Comeau Award was Kathleen Smith. Kathleen is not only a super Mammalian supporter, but thanks to her three nominations, MDR won the Toronto Arts Foundation’s Arts for Youth Award in 2009, a $15,000 cash prize!
The 2008 winner of the inaugural Timothy Comeau Award was Timothy Comeau. Timothy is a writer and cultural worker who has a couple of blogs including (curation.ca). He has been a constant supporter of the company, writing about our work, showing up to our events, goofing around and generating the kind of vibe that is essential to us. A Mammalian event without Timothy is a Mammalian event that’s happening on another continent.
Who will it be this year?!!
Hope to see you Friday!
MAMMALIAN DIVING REFLEX
Centre for Social Innovation
Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, University of Toronto’s Graduate Geography and Planning Student Society and The Tendency Group present:
Talking Stats 1: Artists
Date: Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Time: 7pm
Place: Music Room, Hart House, Universityof Toronto, 7 Hart House Circle
14 accomplished art workers sit before you and disclose every single terrifying detail of their economic life: what they make, what they spend, where they spend it, what they’ve saved, what they own, what they owe and what they anticipate inheriting. No detail will be spared. Then we’ll crunch some of the stats, throw around a few distributions, some pie charts and then we’ll talk.
Featuring the fully disclosed economies of:
Bill Burns, Timothy Comeau, Siya Chen, Heather Haynes, Sheila Heti, Amy Lam, John McCurley, Srimoyee Mitra, Amish Morrell, Daniel Nimmo, Darren O’Donnell, Ngozi Paul, Camille Turner and Carl Wilson.
There’s a lot of discussion about the purpose and value of art. Does it make the world a better place? Does it improve the economy? Is a good social investment? Is it a good economic investment? What is the value of artistic production for cities? Can art do anything more than make the city more attractive to tourists? Can artists improve the qualities of neighborhoods?
These are all great questions. None of which we plan to answer.
Lost in this cacophony are the naked economic facts of the life of the art worker. What exactly does it mean to your bank account to be an artist? Is the starving artist stereotype an accurate one? Who is really funding the arts?
Those are the questions we will begin to answer.
Talking Stats 1: Artists
The Music Room at Hart House, University of Toronto
7 Hart House Circle, Toronto
The Tendency Group is a flexible research-based collaboration directed by Darren O’Donnell, with Eva Verity, Marney Isaac and Yi Luong. For more information: darren@tendency.ca
things don’t just happen, they tend to happen
Justina M. Barnicke Gallery
Hart House, University of Toronto
7 Hart House Circle
Toronto, ON M5S 3H3
CANADA
www.jmbgallery.ca
416-978-8398
The Timothy Comeau Award has been created to recognize individuals who have shown exceptional support, interest and love for the company. Recipients of the Timothy Comeau Award will have been both audience and participant in many of our activities and have also offered insights, analysis and criticism. These are people without whom our events would feel incomplete. The 2008 winner of the inaugural Timothy Comeau Award is…. Timothy Comeau.
Timothy Comeau is one of these so called cultural workers who uses Emacs to organize his day-job work as a file clerk in a government ministry. He has a couple of blogs, one of which is somewhat well known (Goodreads.ca) and the other of which is mainly a public archive of previously posted/published material (timothycomeau.com/blog). He just downloaded a box set of Dvorak symphonies from the iTunes store, along with Shostakovich’s 8th Symphony. Timothy has been a constant supporter of the company, writing about our work, showing up, goofing around and generating the kind of vibe that is essential to us. A Mammalian event without Timothy is a Mammalian event that’s happening on another continent.
The winner of the Timothy Comeau Award – in this case, Timothy himself – receives a life-long pass to all Mammalian presentations as well as a home-cooked dinner prepared by producer Natalie De Vito and artistic director Darren O’Donnell with preliminary snacks provided by promotions assistant Eva Verity and dessert by development assistant Sarah Milanes.
Subsequent Timothy Comeau Awards will be announced on January 31, Timothy’s birthday. Long live Timothy Comeau.
__________________
Natalie De Vito
Producer
MAMMALIAN DIVING REFLEX
@ Centre for Social Innovation
215 Spadina Ave., Suite 400
Toronto ON M5T 2C7 Canada
+001 416 642 5772 tel
+001 416 644 0116 fax
www.mammalian.ca
Resident Art Company, Parkdale Public School, Toronto
IDEAL ENTERTAINMENT FOR THE END OF THE WORLD
From Sally McKay’s blog:
Timothy Comeau’s new work “Outdoor Air Conditioning” (reproduced below) demonstrates, contra the recent humiliating announcement by PM-for-the- moment Steven Harper that Canada will not meet the Kyoto targets, that in the visual arts at least, we are doing our bit. Comeau’s work raises the bar for art within a conceptual framework, adding environmental impact awareness to create a neat tautological bundle. Not only is the work about the state of the environment (massively out of control and uncontrollable) but it is a model of environmental frugality: no materials, no crates, no shipping, no gallery, no printed matter, no mailings, no hard documentation, no archive. The work exists in the mind, and a mindful mind at that.
It leaves a child-size environmental footprint; Comeau’s computer, mine and yours (heavy metals and other hazardous materials not easily disposed of yet dutifully replaced every two years), energy consumed (see David Suzuki’s ad about the cost, in beer, of dedicated beer fridges), some miniscule part of the admittedly gargantuan infrastructure that supports the Internet. Proportionally, you have to think Comeau’s digitally-relayed concept adds hardly at all to all that, unless it is in the way it fuels the passion for ever more powerful and energy consuming digital communications.
Is it not time that every artwork include in its specifications, an environment impact assessment?
– R. Labossiere
—————————— Today is June 5th and it’s cold outside. I declare the local weather pattern on this day to be a readymade installation entitled:
Outdoor Air Conditioning.
a free cooling centre open to the public during this global warming heat wave
From the website of Darren O’Donnell’s Mammalian Diving Reflex
Good Reads Loves Diplomatic Immunities & A Video Show for the People of Pakistan and India
Critic and blogger Timothy Comeau writes on his Good Reads site of the ridiculously narrow coverage of the “war on terror”, complaining, rightly, that even the CBC can’t seem to get more than the military’s side of the story:
“…the talk of putting a human face struck me as more this meaningless political rhetoric. Why are all these human faces those from Canada? Where do we ever see the human faces of the people we’re supposedly helping? How is their humanity ever brought to our attention? The fact that Darren could undermine the agenda of Canada’s national broadcaster with a 20 minute video perhaps suggests just how under-served we are by photo-ops, predictable rhetoric, focus on soldiers, and all the other regular bullshit.”
Check out and subscribe to Timothy’s Good Reads for lots of interesting reading, great links and compelling video on a whole range of subjects. Timothy’s the guy who got an arts grant to give a bunch of artists cable television so they could learn a little bit about what was happening in the world.
This is to document a citation.
On her blog, Milena Placentile directs her readers to the last issue of Goodreads, for my comments on Thrush Holmes Empire and the links to Michael Kuchma’s reviews.
I just found a review of last night’s Trampoline Hall, where I was the second speaker:
[…]
Growing old gracefully was ideal to the night’s second speaker as well. Timothy Comeau recalled his grandfathers fondness, in later life, for tea and crackers before bed and cited it as part of his personal vision of “the good life”. Comeau offered up personal conceptions of “the good life” as a replacement for religious, set in stone morality. He shied from any hierarchical ranking of morals or enforcement of a community standard. While his own ideal life, that of a vegan cyclist, seemed firmly at odds with the thrill seeking speed boaters he suggested as embodying a different sort of “good life”, Comeau preached only understanding and tolerance in the face of difference. When pressed, he did hint towards some vague Do No Harm principle. I couldn’t help feel that this approach would have to involve banning oil dependent thrill seeking and setting morality in stone anew, if a more environmental vision were to prevail. Yet I was made to feel that if I want to steal from the rich and give to the poor, begin a round of well planned political assassinations or force people to like good music that thats something wrong with me.
[…]
Regardless, it was great fun listening to each speaker and participating in the Q&A’s that followed. The night even wrapped up early enough for me to come home and have some tea and crackers before bed.
I was quoted in Nadja Sayej’s piece in this weekend’s Globe and Mail. Nadja talked to me for a half-hour last weekend and it’s funny to see the conversation reduced to one sentence, and to see that it was edited to say that I attend this home shows, when I in fact do not. What I did tell Nadja was that I saw some things like home-shows when I was going to NSCAD – bands playing house-parties, and in particular sang the praises of my memories of the Yoko Ono cover band, the Loco Onos, featuring the cartoonist Marc Bell on vocals – which were nothing but yodeling screams that nonetheless fucking rocked.
From The Globe & Mail Saturday 10 March 2007:
[…] Coffee and Couches takes place every two months in his butter-coloured apartment. Featuring all-acoustic local performances from groups such as the Blankket, Mantler and Jon-Rae and the River, it’s an alternative to the deafening atmosphere of rock clubs. “It’s just to get out of the bar,” says Mr. Parnell, who started his event as a series of loud house parties in his previous home in the Annex. But after he moved into this second-floor storefront, they evolved into quieter sets. With advertising through message boards and e-mail, a turnout of 30 to 50 for each event is typical, as are full pots of coffee as an alternative to bottles of beer.
“It’s a private, privileged experience,” says Timothy Comeau, a 32-year-old artist who attends home shows. “They feel special. It’s a way for the indie scene to separate themselves from the lame-asses.”
Though home shows are unconventional in nature, they never used to be. Gregory Oh, a 33-year-old music professor at the University of Toronto, notes that the idea of a musical performance at home goes back to 17th-century Europe. “Harpsichords and clavichords are small instruments; they weren’t loud enough to fill a hall,” Prof. Oh says, adding that classical musicians or their patrons would invite crowds to salon recitals. “Because they belonged in small spaces, shows were held at home. Some things haven’t changed.”
Carrie Young writing for BlogTo:
Last night I was at Gallery 1313 as one of six guest panellists in The Role of the Art Critic, the first roundtable discussion (well, rectangular-table discussion) as part of Gallery 1313’s ArtSPEAK series, along with Toronto art writers and critics David Balzer, Peter Goddard, Claudia McKoy, the Editor-In-Chief of MIX, Stephanie Rogerson, Timothy Comeau, and last but not least, our moderator Nick Brown.Gallery 1313’s Director, Phil Anderson, did a fabulous job in organizing the event, which packed in a full-house despite the inclement weather of yesterday’s “perpetual snow”, and everyone involved was simply mahvelous to meet (though some were simply more mahvelous than others — saucy Timothy Comeau for instance or Stephanie Rogerson, with whom I share a fondness for Claude Cahun — but I may be biased as they were both on my end of the table).
[…] Also on the urban-culture front, Timothy Comeau’s marvellous magpie project GoodReads links in its latest edition to an Los Angeles Times piece about the “art party” issue in the L.A. scene. Timothy snappily connects it with the conversations about the nightclubbing-meets-participatory-aesthetics conundrum that have been going on in Toronto for several years, including my essay in the Coach House uTOpia 2 book.
Carl Wilson’s Zoilus January 15 2007
[…] Christopher Hutsul (or Christopher the Younger, as we like to call him) argues for ways the city can nurture its creative communities, including decriminalizing graffiti. Local “thinker” Timothy Comeau critiques this suggestion and many others on Good Reads.
Ron Nurwisah, Torontoist 17 April 2006
[…] 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
[…] 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
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
1. Timothy’s Good Reads Mailing List
Tim has started a mailing list of articles he’s found on the net which consitute “good reads,” interesting news, or at the very least, food for thought (it’s not always something easily agreed with). The articles are archived at www.goodreads.ca and to subscribe, email tim@instantcoffee.org
Rating: ten out of ten
Gary Michael Dault, The Globe and Mail, Sat. 21 Dec 2002, page R9
Broken Pencil magazine, Issue 19, July 2002 p.10
Timothy Comeau‘s The Book of Marks is about the grandeur of mark-making and the hubris inherent in our conviction that anyone else will ever understand them. The Book itself is a 192 page graph paper notebook, each square of which the artist has “filled in with a mark”. The process, Comeau says, began in 1998. For Comeau, the indeterminate shapes with which he gradually fills his pages are similar to the runic shapes making up the alphabet of a language you do not understand. “The Book of Marks appears to contain a script”, writes Comeau. But if so, it is a script anterior to his ability to read it back. In a Borges story, Comeau’s exotic script would, in fact, turn out to be crystal clear-to someone.
Gary Michael Dault
Toronto, February 6, 2001
published in Artery Summer 2001
Vol. 7 Issue 4 p.8