Reviews

So, like I mentioned in my last posting, I was at the MOCCA opening last week. I wasn’t planning to go, really – I planned on going to the latest show at YYZ, but a friend told me about the MOCCA party where she was going so we made plans to meet there. I arrived early, after checking out the show at 401 Richmond, and then my friend showed up, but she got into interesting conversations with other people, and I didn’t want to interrupt, so I wandered around introducing myself to other people for kicks (which I guess is a way to say that the art didn’t hold my attention). But I guess it never really does for very long, especially at openings, and especially at openings in the summer which also consider themselves parties. ‘Seen one, seen ’em all’ I’ve been known to say, and the thing is that’s not really unfair since artists are so invested in the idea of a series. Perhaps I’ve opened myself up to the criticism that I don’t know what I’m doing – writing about art and all – but I tend to think it’s a skill acquired from the channel surfing culture. New technologies introduce new skill sets and exploit unknown talents, n’est-ce-pas?

So, in MOCCA, taking up the main exhibition space, are a bunch of drums. Drums as sculpture, drums in videos, mechanized-robotized drums. I’m sure there’s lost here to appreciate if you like music and drums, but since I’m not passionate about either, I don’t really have anything to say. Some people like Crest, I like Colgate; this is Crest art to me. That’s all.

I suppose I should learn my lesson from my last posting and bitch about it, which would raise some ire and get everyone out to see what all the fuss is about. All I can say is that I’m still figuring out this whole art-criticism thing, which doesn’t even matter anyway since people are quite capable of making up their own minds. I guess when I started this gig I figured I’d try to weigh in with my two cents now and then, encourage people to see this and check out that, give them some ins to the scene. So, with that in mind, I’m saying: there’s a new show at MOCCA. It’s next door to a show at Edward Day which is going to have more visitors now than it would have had otherwise because I said that show was boring. Well, I find the drum show at MOCCA boring too, but for different reasons: cuz it ain’t my cup of tea is all. That’s not to say it shouldn’t have been exhibited in the first place, it’s just to say that I’m a nerd who doesn’t like the whole indie-music convergence with fine art thing, but that’s just me. It’s workin’ for everyone else. So be it.

This drum thing is called Demons stole my soul: rock n’ roll drums in contemporary art. Rock on.

The show I did appreciate at MOCCA is in the backroom, featuring Karma Clarke-Davis, Edith Dakovic, Nicholas Di Genova, Istvan Kantor, Geoffrey Pugen, Floria Sigismondi.

I like Di Genova’s pieces; I curated him into the YYZ zine last January, where he worked with that document’s newsprint to publish nice black and white drawings. Here, he’s showing large images drawn on mylar using animation ink, to give the colours a nice matte effect. I think I’m struck by his pictures because they have this relationship to Japanese animé which I spent my childhood adoring, as did many of us. Animé holds my interest because of the combination of striking rendering, unique stylization, and usually a philosophical underpinning to the story line. By tapping into these associations, Di Genova is able to produce work that holds my interest beyond my usual cursory glance.

In the same room is a video I didn’t watch by Geoffrey Pugen. Or I should say I watched it but didn’t put the headphones on to hear the soundtrack, mostly because the two available were almost always in use. Next to that is one of Istvan Kantor’s machine-sex-action videos … the point of which I always find is lost because I’m distracted by the fact that I know the people writhing around and I’m thinking ‘so-and-so has a nice body’. I think it’s all supposed to be about dehumanization, and machines, and porn, but it comes across as a fetish video of all three, with acting worse than what you usually get in a porn video. But hey, he’s famous now so who cares right? Nowadays, it’s like you’re not a real curator if you don’t take Kantor seriously, so throw him in with the kids.

Sigismondi is another one of these famous people who’s shown with the MOCCA before, when it was up in North York, and she’s got a mannequin with horn legs if I remember correctly. The show is called Hybrids, and so it makes sense under this curatorial theme of what Robert Storr would associate as grotesque. I suppose this is a polite Canadian version, extremely understated, of what he was getting at last year with his SITE Santa Fe show: artists mash things up, come and check it out how weird it all is.

Edith Dakovic has the most repellent pieces, to my Colgate mind, consisting of sphere coated with the type of silicon used to simulate skin in special effects. Little hairs here and there, and moles cover it’s healthy Caucasian surface, the illusion eliciting the reaction of it being some form of life, some deformed animal grown in the lab for organ harvesting and the usual nightmare scenario.

Karma’s video must have been between loops because I didn’t see it and don’t know what it’s about.

Ok, to summarize then: what awaits you when you cross the parking lot, currently marked by that gorgeous installation of blue tree stalks, is Edward Day on your left, who’s showing boring realist work and other stuff that didn’t catch my attention; straight-ahead in MOCCA, you’ll find a floor full of drums cast in bronze or whatever, some of them done up with robotics, along with videos and other things; in the back room at MOCCA, a show called Hybrids which is the only thing that caught my interest. There’s probably something else which I’m forgetting, but hey, I was socializing that evening, not looking for the god of the art religion.

More info: MOCCA website (which is in desperate need of redesign).

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)

If you’re up for spending 15 bucks to hob-knob with …. well, I won’t say it, might get in trouble. Let’s try again, if you’re willing to spend 15 bucks, to get your first glass of beer free at the Steamwhistle brewery tomorrow night, you’ll be saving not only 5 bucks or so, but you’ll also be able to watch the 2nd Annual Steamwhistle Art Awards, which were renamed the Untitled Art Awards and yay! a chance for the art community to pat-itself on the back again. Or maybe I’m just bitter because I wasn’t nominated.

“Award Show: Mechanism by which the members of a given profession attempt to give themselves the attributes of the pre-modern ruling classes – the military, aristocracy and priesthood – by assigning various orders, decorations, and medals to each other.

These shows are a superficial expression of corporatism. As with the pre-modern classes, their awards related principally to relationships within the profession. Each time the words, “I want to thank” are used by someone being decorated, they indicate a relationship based on power. The awards have little to do with that corporation’s relationship to the outside world – what you might call the public – or for that matter with quality.”

-John Ralston Saul, The Doubter’s Companion (1994)

In an interview with the Torontoist, Julia Dault, Gary Michael Dault’s daughter, says she’s never heard of Jessica Wyman, who she’s up against along with her father for best art writing. I used to work with Jessica Wyman on the board of YYZ, and I just think it’s a shame that someone nominated for art writing is unfamiliar with her work. I think it says a lot about how the art scene here is fragmented into genre interest groups.

Let’s be fair, Julia’s never heard of me either, nor have I really heard of her. She writes for the Post, which I don’t read, mostly because their online archives are moneywalled and I’m not about to buy it everyday, in addition to their editorial slant (although I hear things are changing).

Of her dad, Gary Michael, who writes for the Globe (which I do read everyday), I can say, “Some art critic, he never writes a bad review,” except for the one he wrote at the end of 2001. I know that GMD avoids shows he doesn’t like … that’s his idea of furthering art criticism and the discourse of art in this city. Not that I’ve proven myself much better, but at least Sarah Milroy calls it like she sees it, and she hasn’t been nominated.

Art writing is beset by the problem of worth: if you’re going to write about a show, you’re essentially advertising that show, so folk like the Daults are answering the worthiness of their column space by saying, ‘this is worth your time’. There’s no point wasting words on shows that aren’t worth seeing, because they can find other shows to advertise. I know myself, as someone who writes about art, that’s partially a motivation. But, there’s also answering the question of, ‘is it really worth my time? They’ve programmed such and such in this prestigious gallery/institution, should I go see it?’ and so we turn to these pages to find out. Sarah Milroy is the best at this, answering the question of whether or not the institutions are best serving the public.

In terms of catalogue writing, they’ve been paid to think up Derridian/Foucaltian/Lacanian/insertdeadfrenchwriterhere-ian things to say, so they’re basically prostitutes. I’m not so much a moralist to think prostitution is so wrong, but I do think that it is woefully inauthentic and thus not as valuable as the real deal (not to mention the whole exploitation thing, which really raises my ethical ire). Sex is so much more worth it when it’s based on real lust or love, but doesn’t follow through with its promises when it’s nothing more than a trick (not that I have experience with prostitution, that’s just what I imagine it’d be like, and why I’d never bother with it) . The same is true for sophistication – when writing about art that is based entirely on payment, and not on the desire to share what’s great about something, you aren’t helping the artist, nor are you establishing rock-solid credibility for yourself. We sophisticates end up feeling privileged to show off our book-learning rather than feel exploited. But, I have to say that’s an extreme example. Unlike the sex-industry, exploitation doesn’t really factor in, since, as a power relationship, it’s the sophisticates who are holding the cards. It’s much more of a symbiotic mutual back-scratching. ‘I’ll write for your catalogue because I like your work and you’ll pay me, so you get to seem like you’re a relevant artist and I keep some cash for the bank account’. As far as prostitution goes, it reminds most of the porn industry, where sex-maniacs get paid for their appetites. The “best art writing” in this case, most likely, represents the ‘best’ sycophantry.

Looking over the shortlist, I have to say that there are worthy nominees. Honestly, I am a little jealous that I’m not amoung them, but that’s a whole different story. The temptation is that winning one of these awards will make these artists seem a bit more prestigious, but what’s really wrong here, is that all award shows ultimately create false hierarchies. It is an honour just to be nominated, but beyond that, its becomes a popularity contest, which I hated in highschool and I hate even more as an adult. But I also question whether being nominated at all is so great – it just reveals the biases of the scene. Those who weren’t nominated, what does it say about their work? Just because art-writers don’t write about it doesn’t mean it’s bad, it only means that they probably haven’t been to the shows, or aren’t able to fit it into the last year’s fashions.

Art awards like this are merely props to support a status quo, an attempt to create a monolithic cultural identity, which is unwise, especially in a city as diverse as Toronto. It’s also unwise since monolithic cultural identities are games that Empires play, empires like USA and it’s Greek tutors, the Brits. It doesn’t fit Canada at all, and seems like another example of the Canadian streak of insecure provincialism.

I do appreciate Steamwhistle for trying this, I mean, I appreciate that they do care enough about Toronto’s art to bring this pizzazz to the scene. I figure the artists and others nominated appreciate the attention. But really, I drank Steamwhistle without variation for a year and half, and while at first I thought it tasted awful, by the end it had grown on me, but it did leave me with the worst hangovers. Getting drunk on Steamwhistle is not an experience I recommend. It does nasty things to my chemistry, that’s all I can say. They’ve made lots of money selling bad beer to the city and to the artists around town (as when they first started out they promotionally monopolized the gallery-opening market) and now they want to give something back. That’s more than we ever get from lots and lots of companies, so I think this is worthy of commendation. Give them an award for caring.

The prospect of an awards show with nothing but their strange brew in their cavernous space has little appeal for me. So thanks Steamwhistle, but no thanks. I don’t think you’re doing anyone any favors really. In fact, you’re doing nothing but fostering bitterness amongst the art community.

Saul, writing in 1994, with the Grammy’s and the Oscars, with the Genie and Junos as our Canadian knock-offs (not to the mention the East Coast Music Awards, keeping the Maritimes perpetually stereotyped) as the most relevant examples, we can now throw in the local Toronto art scene’s attempt to codify the who’s-kissing-who’s ass-power relationships, which, as he said, have nothing to do with the public. Is art, in Toronto and elsewhere, for a public, for people who walk in to galleries without having gone to art school, or is it only for those of us who have gone to art school? Award shows are bad ideas for any genre. For an arts scene which is already painfully insular, an orgy of self-congratulation does no one any good. The ‘best of” that Now Magazine prints – which is mailed in by readers – has way more legitimacy for me.

Notes about Istvan Kantor:

* His working name is Monty Cantsin.
* He won the Governor General’s award and the media tried to spark a national outrage but no one cared.
* He was arrested in Berlin last autumn for throwing blood on a statue, but that’s been his modus operandi for 20 years, and no one in Canada cared.
* Blood is his favorite medium; he likes dumping jars of pig’s blood over his head.
* His exhibition on now at AGYU is better than you’d expect, and it helps if you understand 1980s nihilism.
* He’s actually a really sweet guy, the father of three children, and they haven’t been taken away by child services, so that’s saying something.
* He’s romanticizes revolution, yet a performance I saw of his was a pointed critique of revolution.
* I’m under the impression that he could only be this successful in Canada, which I appreciate.

So, you go to the AGYU, and you have one room that has a remarkable installation made up of filling cabinets, with three videos projected against the wall. The pace of the video’s looping effect is determined by the distance that drawers are pulled from the three filling cabinets before the wall they’re projected onto. There’s a slide, a tent, with another monitor and another video …. in the backroom, there’s a full-length video featuring the pseudo-orgy and the pigs blood and Kantor’s usual. Now, I think because I was a fan of Nine Inch Nails during its run during the 90s some of my first thoughts seeing this show was that this show is 10 years out of date … ten years ago, Kantor would be screening calls from Trent Reznor, cause he’d want Kantor to direct his next video.

I also had the thought that a gallery wasn’t really the proper venue for these films – maybe they should be screened at Roy Thompson Hall or something, because they are simply industrial music videos. I think that’s why I found the show outstanding really – so brash, so loud, and yet rhythmic enough that it doesn’t give you a headache or is a painful experience. I’ve seen lots of videos where looped editing and quick cuts can make you a bored and nauseous, but Kantor clearly knows what he’s doing – he knows how to cut it so that it comes across visually as a beat, as a rhythm. The effect is entrancing …and I spent more time watching the video in the back room than I would have usually. Of course, that means I had to read the nonsensical bombastic sentences – I doubt Kantor even takes them seriously, they seem to be just a bunch of techno-sounding words strung together to sound magnificent. There’s lots of scrolling text in both this video and the one on the monitor in the army tent … but trust me, you don’t have to take it seriously. Don’t judge Kantor as a writer.

Ok, so that’s the good stuff I wanted to write about the show. And now, for the dirt … or the dried pig’s blood. Frankly, it’s pretty revolting, and it’s a testimony for our tolerance as artists in the community, and as Canadians with our embedded relativism and appreciation for our cultural diversity that we put up with it. But, what choice do we have? Censorship? That doesn’t work and is stupid to begin with. Adults have the capacity to decide for themselves. I’d hate to think there are lots of people out there who are into the blood thing, but I know for myself personally, I dismiss it because it seems essentially harmless and it’s more of a big joke than an actual psychological problem of Kantor’s.

When Kantor was arrested in November, the reporter writing for the Globe and Mail mistakenly credited him with a performance of Jubal Brown’s, who’s appreciation for brash video editing and disgusting subject matter is clearly inspired by Kantor’s example, who is old enough now to be looked up to and respected. If he were 25 I’d be like, what the fuck is this shit? I wouldn’t want to take Kantor seriously at all. I.K. has clearly earned this respect, and while the Governor General’s award had some controversy, it was also an understandable and respected decision.

He may seem overly successful because me and others write about him, but I’m writing about him because the show’s up and there’s nothing else to write about at the moment …. and that’s the story of Canadian art. I remember when I was just starting out I was told that basically, if you hang around long enough, they’ll start paying you. That is, an art career in Canada (over the past 40 years anyway) has been based on endurance rather than quality or anything else. You do something for long enough and suddenly the arbiters of taste’ll be all like, “oh, they’re great” and blah blah blah. Since art has such a high drop-out rate, you stick around long enough and you’ll get shows at the AGYU too, because it’s not like there’s a great pool of mature artists to cherry pick from.

I don’t think Kantor is great. Not yet anyway. Greatness is a loaded word that everyone is uncomfortable with. But one of the things I find wonderful about art is how these things are like islands in the stream of time, communications of human psychology from the past and the future … and by the future I mean, the Mona Lisa that Napoleon looked at in 1805 is the same we see in 2005 … from our perspective it’s a document from the past, but from Napoleon’s, it’s as if he borrowed a little bit of our time for his bedroom. That’s artistic greatness, when you have something that communicates to people in all time periods. Will Kantor be studied by students in 100 years? Maybe. I often say that if you do anything in art for more than a year, you’re part of art history, a lesson I learned from watching Antiques Roadshow. Kantor isn’t the type of artist to leave behind stuff for future Antiques Roadshows. His work isn’t anything I’d consider desirable.

He’s become part of the Canadian art establishment in spite of his antipathy against it, and he’ll be collected by museums now, since GG bestowed an honour. Kantor’s work may not speak to the audience of 2105, (at least the one I can imagine, but how the hell would I know?) but to the audience of 2005 he offers a reminder that a certain generation of men, like William Gibson, have had a romance with techno-dystopia, and a love for the bombast of revolution. Kantor’s work reminds me of the awfulness of the Johnny Mnenmoic movie, or an even better example, the Scientiological nonsense of Earth Final Conflict, in that a few leather straps and loose wires have become some kind of semiotic of technological menace and dehumanization, and yet Kantor, like the rest us, benefits from the ease of computer video editing and email. Technological dystopia is a nihilistic myth, and like all myths, it makes a good story and not much else. In Neuromancer, Gibson’s character Riveria grew up in the nuked wasteland of Bonn, which until the reunification of 1990, had been the capital of democratic West Germany. A quote from the write up on the Canada Council site:

Budapest, Hungary, 1956. At the height of the brutal Soviet repression of the Hungarian revolution, Istvan Kantor’s grandfather made him a toy gun out of scrap wood. The six-year-old future artist and neoist agitator then dashed out onto the rubble-strewn streets and pointed his toy gun at oncoming Soviet tanks. The tanks immediately menaced his family’s apartment building. According to Kantor, this was his first authentic work of art, and the tanks, the smashed carts and burned-out cars, the shattered windows and bullet – riddled buildings are the primal scene – frightening, ecstatic – from which his art emerged.

The army tent, the penchant for waving flags around, the revolutionary aesthetic of marching music … Reznor, Kantor, Gibson, they can begin to find expression in the punk of the 1980s, safety pins through earlobes and all that. David Bowie sings in Hereos that the proverbial couple kissed as though nothing could fall, with bullets shooting over their heads … but the wall did fall, and now it seems a foolish footnote in history, that for 28 years a wall divided two ideologies in a devastated city. When Communism collapsed, even I remember missing it circa 1992, because things were more certain then; and the fact that the Bush administration is made up of hawks who grew their feathers under definitive, ideological menaces, is one of the reasons our news is the bad dystopian movie that it is. It makes total sense to me that someone like Kantor would make the work that he makes. I see it almost with a patronizing attitude, a “there there old man, it’ll be ok. At least you’re not in politics.”And finally, the Gift thing: Kantor throws vials of his blood on the walls of art galleries, sometimes at works themselves. In December 2002, I saw him do this at the Power Plant during the opening of their show on the propangada art from China’s Cultural Revolution. Kantor shows up with a photographer and begins throwing the vials across the framed poster and text at the gallery’s entrance. Because everyone there knew what was going on, everyone politley stood and watched. I remember Phillip Monk (who was curator there at the time, and is now curator at the AGYU) taking snapshots with a disposable camera. There was no shock effect, and no big ruckuss, unlike this photo.

As Bruce Barber (a former prof of mine at NSCAD) tells it, these X’s seem to have begun as a desperate cry for art world attention, but are now taken seriously by thinkers of the Canadian establishment:

Since 1979 Kantor has been performing ritualistic blood actions in major galleries throughout Europe and North America, among them: The Ludwig Museum, Koln, MOMA and the Metropolitan in New York City, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and the Musee d’art Contemporain in Montreal. The artist’s modus operandi in this body of work consists of donating (gifting) his blood in the form of an X mark to a suitable museum collection. After choosing the institutional recipient for his ‘gift’, Kantor enters the gallery and splashes vials of his blood in a large X fashion on the wall, usually between two key works of art in the gallery collection. This action often results in his arrest or forced ejection from the gallery, with his return forever banned. Notwithstanding his declamation in the Neoism Manifesto (1979) that “Neoism has no Manifesto”, Kantor’s “neoist research project”, in typical avant-garde style, is accompanied by a press release, a letter of intent and/or manifesto.The artist’s “GIFT to Rauschenberg” (1991) for example, is described in a letter thus:

Dear Mr Rauschenberg,
I made (a) beautiful gift for you in the form of a blood-X, using my own dark and cold blood splashed on a white wall surrounded by your early works at the Ludwig museum, in Koln, where presently you have a powerful retrospective.Would you please leave GIFT on the wall, to be listed and signed as your own work, an additional piece to Erased de Kooning (1953) and Elemental Sculpture (1953), until it becomes meaningless and obsolete.

Revolutionary art is a gob of bloody spit in the face of art history, a kick in the arse to the art world, a tribute to the beauty of vandalism: the ultimate act of creation is, of necessity criminal.

My greatest regards,

signed,

Monty Cantsin.

Kantor, who romanticizes revolution, totally punctured the bubble that night at the Power Plant. Sure, we can look back on these revolutions in history with a yearning for heroes – the courage of punks who by their actions helped build a better world. Those of France and USA are seen to have been ‘glorious’, and those of 1989 sure seemed fun from the comfort of our livingrooms. But the reality is they were nightmarish times none of us would want to live through, and while I remember one art student at the PP that night wearing a red baret, I doubt he’d last long when the real shit (or blood) hit the fan. Kantor splashed his X, and held up a little red book for the documentary photographs, which for me, was an excellent reminder that Mao was a fucker, and that this exhibition was evidence of a terrible time, worth remembering, but not worth romanticizing.Istvan Kantor: Machinery Execution, runs until April 3rd.

PS: (Zeke’s Gallery in Montreal has posted an email exchange between Chris Hand of Zeke’s, and Murray Whyte of the Toronto Star, and they had a good discussion of Kantor’s work, which is here and which was a result of Whyte’s profile on Kantor here).

I bitch about art a lot; here I am, a player in the scene, and most of the time I hate art. So I’m entirely sympathetic when dealing with people who only go to openings for cheap drinks and a good time. The fairest thing to say about this is that there’s something about Toronto which doesn’t encourage good art. That’s sort of the word on the street, you know, what artists here say amongst themselves: art here sucks. But that’s obviously a question of not seeing the forest for the trees, or ‘the grass is always greener on the other side’, an allusion Kineko Ivic was getting at when he named his gallery Greener Pastures, which I haven’t been to in a while.

But I have been to Mercer Union, just down the street – went to their opening last Thursday night. Regarding Toronto’s art – I’ll let you go to the galleries and decide for yourself. It’s a generalization, but whenever out of town artists show it can make one question why we don’t see more stuff of this quality in the studios of Toronto.

Mercer’s current show is such an example. It reminds me of why I like art, you know, when it really works. When it pops stuff into your mind that wouldn’t have showed up otherwise. In my case, it brought back childhood memories I’d forgotten about. Growing up in French, rural Nova Scotia, carpentry was a hobby for so many of us. I always enjoyed fooling around with hammer and nails in my Dad’s workshop, although I have little to show for it. In an area where so many expected to build their own homes, it’s a hobby that had very practical purposes. But as kids, it resembled art in that we did it for fun. I remember digging a trench with my friend as we worked on a ‘underground fort’. Later, in highschool, some classmates built a cabin off a logging road which was dubbed the ‘Schoon Lagoon’ and became the cabin party for our weekends throughout 1993.

If you’d been to Mercer before, at first you might think they’d renovated for the new year. And, you’d think that the roof was leaking – and given Thursday night’s nasty weather, it certainly seemed that was the case. But, nein, das ist die show. An environment, a series of rooms, entered by a hidden door, has been constructed in Mercer’s space. The usual Back Gallery is unchanged, and it contains only Marianne Corless’ Fur Queen II but once you’ve seen the picture, there doesn’t seem to be much point seeing the thing in person, except for that whole Benjamin aura/object fetish thing. The BGL experience, on the other hand, cannot be reproduced.

Thin drywall rooms, pierced by a car, which also serves as steps so that one can see why the roof is leaking. There is a wood stove, and a buggy light that goes on and off. Evidence of the construction and destruction everywhere – dust and drywall chips, the doorways torn out through hammer rather than saw. The decoration consists of the plaster patching pattern of any renovation. Given my youthful experiences with shoddy construction and what seemed like the constant renovations my parents engaged in while I was growing up, this environment has a charm for me. BGL’s show is familiar and cozy, and if the opening’s crowd had been larger, I might have felt like I’d gone home for a cabin party among my high school friends.

A Quebec City based collective, they take their name from the last names of the members: Jasmine Bilodeau, Sebastien Giguere, and Nicolas Laverdiere. The only BGL-relevant website I could find at the moment is this one, which shows them working on a pool made out of recycled wood, a slide of which they showed during their presentation.

Mercer has done modified environments before. Two years ago they installed a malfunctioning revolving door, which earned my all time favorite review, when RM Vaughan wrote in Lola, “Worst show ever”. I didn’t really agree, I didn’t mind the show that much. If someone is obsessed with building an off-centre revolving door, why not? And who else will let them but an artist run centre? So, if these three boys from Quebec want to drive a car through a wall, why not?

Maybe it’s the filtering process, but it seems to me that Quebec artists rock. It’s crazy how our Canadianess is divided into two cultures who communicate with each other as if by messages in bottles – in this case, stuff in rooms. There’s a whole other aesthetic and relationship to materials coming out of Quebec, one that makes things delightful rather than the anti-formalist disgustipations or boring conceptual works rooted in concerns 20-30 years out of date. Such work seems to have infected Toronto’s local scene like a bad cold one can’t shake.

And maybe that’s just my way of saying I should get out more and meet new artists in Toronto, because that’s been my experience of the scene. If you know of anyone making work like Elizabeth Belliveau, now showing at YYZ, please let me know, or at least chastise me for my forgetfulness, because none come to mind at the moment. As this show has already been written about here, I want to weigh in to encourage you to check it out. Last week I’d been hearing about a glowing review in The Star, and it’s deserved. Belliveau takes used purses or other things left to second hand shops and charity and has turned them through vision and scissors into little animals, or whatever other creature she sees possible. The results are charming and delightful, and give me a new way to consider a baseball, a hot water bottle, or a pair of gloves. In the other gallery, Karim Zouak has a show that I’m told is supposed to be about animated paintings, the effect of which is betrayed by the clacking of the projectors, so it doesn’t really work. But, I haven’t spent that much time with the work, so I can’t rave or diss it. Whereas with Belliveau’s, one can rave with the sense of ‘how could you not like this?’, with Zouak’s work, it is much more along the lines of, ‘see it, think about it, decide for yourself’.

There is though, nothing to think about at Paul Petro’s gallery, and that’s because the gallery has magazines on display as if they were so many drawings, drawn over 20 years through the CMYK process of various print shops downtown somewhere. Boxes boxes oh my … and what do with them? Why not have a show, offer back issues for sale? The PR for this show says, “know your history” highlighting how C has had a good run of publishing on, by, or about the players of the Canadian and international art industry. Inasmuch as the art community is a community is reflected in the pages of C Magazine. So, if you’re looking for some reading material, and are interested in 20 years of graphic design and magazine formats, check out Petro’s before the magazines come down January 29th.

Greener Pastures: 1188 Queen St W, Th-Sat 12-6 (416-535-7100)
Mercer Union: 37 Lisgar St, T-Sat 11-5 (416-536-1519)
YYZ: Suit 140, 401 Richmond St W, T-Sat 11-6 (416-598-4546)
Paul Petro: 980 Queen St W, Wed-Sat 11-5 (416-979-7874)

Happy New Year everybody.

I, like many, have been hungover today, because I went to the Mercer Union “Dirtier New Year’s Eve Party” last night, the poster for which featured two humping bunnies outside a car wash. Which was apt.

Last year Mercer Union went out a limb and held this party at Studio 99 as a fundraiser. They called it the “Dirty New Year’s Eve Party” then. I say ‘out on a limb’ because they weren’t really sure how successful it would be, and they were going to invest a lot into it. Well, it turned out really well and the gallery made a killing, although there was nothing dirty about it. This year seemed much more successful. At 6am last year, the light’s went up and the place was pretty sparse, with the usual crowd of people such as myself who stay up until there’s nothing left to do (i.e my friends). This year, 6am came and there was still a crowd dancing.

Now let’s get back to the humping bunnies, because I want to tell this story. First, if you haven’t seen the poster, it’s two folk in bunny suits simulating a rear entry, or, as it could be called, “a backward hug”. It’s certainly more cutesy than erotic, but I guess that’s because of the fur. It’s very apt because it’s a bit of an inside joke. It refers to how much dry humping has been happening at art parties this past year, all because of Instant Coffee.

Like I said in my year in review, the Instant Coffee make-out parties began in November 03 in collaboration with Darren O’Donnell, a local playwright who’s interested in sociality, and the different ways strangers can interact. He’s been following a line of research over the past few years that basically involves getting strangers to meet one another and talk and whatever … and it’s always some example of friendliness that emerges. So anyway, the make-out parties was another example of the folk going out on a limb … as a member of Instant Coffee at the time, I can say that we weren’t really sure if it was going to work, or if it was going to make everything awkward. What ended up happening was that couples were more than willing to get it on in Emily Hogg’s ‘make out fort’.

Emily is an architect, and as I understand it, she began re-doing the couch forts that we’re probably all built as kids with blankets and cushions while she was still studying architecture. So Emily’s fort wasn’t considered gimmicky as much as we saw it as an art/architecture project. The thing with Instant Coffee is that you become a collective member through collaborating with them, so over the past year, Darren and Emily became members.

At the same time, Instant Coffee formed a relationship with Hive magazine, because Hive’s publisher really liked them/us and wanted to promote what I.C. was doing. So at magazine launches, I.C. was involved in helping to throw the party. Jinhan Ko, one of the collective’s founding members, had a old camping trailer that was known as “the Urban Disco Trailer” and over the past several years, went through various manifestations of what I think we can safely call pimping. I.C. pimped that ride over and over again. But since Jin moved to Vancouver last the summer, I hear the trailer’s in storage somewhere. So basically, the trailer became a make-out venue last spring, and by June they had installed the ‘bass bed’ which I think had sub-woofers built into the frame, but by that time I was no longer working with I.C. so I’m spotty on specifics. As I said in my year in review, I have fond memories of slow kisses at 4 in the morning at the Hive launch, which all happened in the trailer. My favorite kiss that night came when I walked into the trailer looking for my friend, and I was suddenly pulled into a very sweet make-out session. In the morning’s early hours, the trailer became a socially liminal space where being there meant you were only there for one reason.

Well, with the trailer out of the picture, and with Instant Coffee’s relationship with Mercer Union (which I know I haven’t clarified, but basically the whole art scene here and anywhere is incestuous, and I’ll tell that story some other time) it made sense that I.C. would have a presence at Mercer Union’s party. With the trailer out of the picture, the bass bed was re-invented and installed against a wall of the dance floor, and, as Mercer’s co-director Dave Dyment wrote in a last minute reminder/promotion email yesterday, “The Instant Coffee Make Out Bass Bed is a 12 foot by 12 foot bed with sub-woofers built into the frame, connected to the soundsystem. It’s gonna be incredible.” Standing on the platform next to the bed, you could really feel the sub-woofers, but the effect didn’t really carry over on the bed, as the mattress cushioned the effect. Nevertheless, this was designated make-out space.

Early on, to get the action started, there was lazy-susan in the middle of the mattress with a bottle on it, and I ended up having to kiss Darren. Because I’m straight this was my most awkward kiss of the whole night. But, this night is memorable for me because I sat down around 5 and started chatting with this girl next to me, and I asked, “We’re sitting on the bass bed, does that mean I should kiss you?” And she said, “Yes,” and so I began to make out with the pretty brunette for a good while. That was totally the highlight of my night.

I can’t say how much I love the fact that just by being in a certain spot means that everything is straightforward with no guessing game and risk of misinterpretation. It also becomes this way for couples to stray in a totally legitimate way. Playing spin the bottle, I kissed a girl who was engaged.

Like the first make-out party, in which lots of couples took the opportunity for public displays of affection, which did include lots of dryhumping, the make-out spaces become a venue for couples to make out, kiss other people, and for strangers to meet and kiss.

So, unlike last year, in which the moniker “dirty new year’s eve party” was simply rhetorical, this year it was aptly called ‘dirtier’ and the humping bunnies made lots of sense. I left shortly after 6, but it probably went on for another hour. So far I’ve had an memorable 2005, and if they do it again next year, that’s what I’ll mark on my calendar.

Sally McKay, who’s run an excellent Toronto arts-related blog over the past year, sent out an email last week asking for 2004 top-tens. Here is my list, which you can see on her blog here, although it’s no different there than here.

1. David Hoffos at TPW in September
2. The Fuck New York video and it’s followup
3. Hive party in June at Studio 99
4. Niagara Falls Artist Program at Mercer Union in December
5. Alyson Mitchell’s show at Paul Petro in March
6. Fastwurms with Michael Barker at Zsa Zsa at the end of August (the canon blew smoke!)
7. French bookstores in Montreal
8. Diane Landry at YYZ
9. Instant Coffee’s make out party in March
10. Realizing that the new OCAD building was great when I wanted to show it off to a visiting friend from out of town.

As the sunlight rises on the rooftops on Queen West on January 1st, few will remember K-Os’ stroll through the hood late last spring when he filmed his Crab Bucket video. Unlike Jan 1 2004, which opened on a scene unchanged from Jan 1 2003, this year will have a few more ‘for rent’ signs in gallery windows. Luft gallery has closed, The Burston Gallery is moving, and Sis Boom Bah moved at the end of the Springtime. For the most part these changes have happened without any concern, since knowing the people involved, I know that tragic stories are not part of the picture. But, what’s new here is the presence of The Drake.

My highly biased year in review – please forgive memory lapses and generalizations…
February
The Drake has gone from crack whores to those of fashion. The year began when the Drake finally opened in February. In the works throughout 2003, the opening was supposed to be in October of that year, and was continually pushed back. There was a robbery of all the computer equipment in the middle of renovations, but given the wealth of Jeff Stober, it was water off a duck’s back, and they were soon back on their behind schedule. It’s all a memory now, and K-Os advertised it’s charming bar throughout the summer with his video. There’s a love/hate thing with the Drake among the artists in the area. It’s attracted the pseudo-posh to bohemia, and artists speak of the hotel with disdain, because it’s phony for them. I myself have a fond memory of being obnoxious to the crowd trying to get in during the film festival.

Personally, I like their coffee. I used to buy coffee at Friendly’s, and while their club sandwich is decadently delicious, their coffee is awful.

The Drake staff are great. I’ve been told that the Drake’s policy is to hire folk with an arts background, which I really appreciate as a chronically underemployed art person.

The TAAFI Festival, held at the beginning of October, was wonderful for the hotel – people got to “see the rooms” and the hotel’s management have lived up to their mandate to support the arts. But I don’t want to hang out with people who have money, so I socialize elsewhere. Although I hear Misha Glouberman’s Room 101 nights are wonderful, but being a sycophantic fan of Glouberman’s I pass that on without ever having attended.

Word on the street now is that Stober has bought surrounding buildings so that they can expand up. An 8 story addition is supposedly in the works, but it’s an unsubstantiated rumour that I’m passing on. Pretty remarkable though, given that they never expected to make much money from renting rooms, everything was supposed to be about the cult-shah.

March
Instant Coffee’s makes it to Second Base – Instant Coffee, the collective I used to be a part of, held a now legendary make-out party at the Gladstone. This isn’t self promotion on my part since it was around this time that we parted ways. Now, the make-out parties began in November of last year in conjunction with the Quadrasonic party at Revival. That night, Emily Hogg built a make-out fort, people dry-humped in the darkness, and spin the bottle challenged our sexual preferences. On this night in March, it was more of the same in a bigger venue. Emily Hogg built another make out fort, Darren O’Donnell MC’d spin-the-bottle, there was a big inflatable thing, and it co-incided with the University of Toronto’s art student’s ‘Room Service’ exhibition in the rooms upstairs, which meant lots of people met for the first time with kisses before names, kind of like this video.

April
Hive Magazine launched an issue with an all-night bash, and with the presence of Instant Coffee’s Urban Disco Trailer, the party turned into another make-out venue. Or, so I hear, since I wasn’t there. I was grumpy and cat-sitting at York University, but that’s another story.

May
The Calgary Flames playing for the cup meant that even sports-phobic artists were getting drunk watching hockey. There were some Canadian themed shows happening in New York, so a bunch of scenesters went down to do what they do here, only because they’re doing in New York, they called it “a vacation” and the implication was that they were cool.

June
In June, Sis Boom Bah left its location on Queen St, and moved to McCaul St. Matt Crookshank, whom everyone knows as the proprietor of S.B.B, even though he inherited the gallery from Jenny San Martin and entrusted it to Claire Greenshaw in November of ’03, made a good go of it on McCaul, but for various reasons the gallery closed it’s doors for good at the end of August. One less venue for artists in this city. I’m not going to say it was because of the Drake, but the reason it and The Burston Gallery removed themselves from the neighborhood is because landlords are raising rents.

The Splice This! 8mm film festival moved from its usual location at the Tranzac club and used the Gladstone Hotel as a venue for its weekend of screenings.

Also in June, Hive Magazine held another all-night bash and again, with the presence of Instant Coffee’s Urban Disco Trailer featuring the Bass Bed, it became another make-out party. I myself have fond memories of slow kisses at 4 in the morning with pretty girls.

July
Jenifer Papararo, who had been co-director at Mercer Union, left town to take a job as curator at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver. Mercer Union replaces her with Dave Dyment, who had worked at Art Metropole.
August
YYZ Artists’ Outlet replaces departing co-director Justin Waddell, who moved to Calgary, with Gregory Elgstrand, who moved from Calgary.

October
The Toronto International Art Fair faces competition from the Toronto Alternative Art Fair International (TAAFI). Chris Hand of Zeke’s Gallery in Montreal suggests a name change, and Andrew Harwood writes a great letter of response, outlining why Toronto needed an alternative art fair. The Queen West Scene’s two party hotels, the Drake and the Gladstone, are used as venues, and people get to see what art looks like in a real room, and not a booth.

Also in October, Atom Egoyan opened his Camera bar/cinemateque. No one I know has gone there yet. Maybe it’s the uninviting curtain, and the fact that I’d rather hobknob with people who I’ve never heard of rather than some celebrity who’s accomplished far more than I. (It is still so much more easier to relate to people who are on their way up).

December
Selena Christo puts the ‘for rent’ sign in Luft gallery, which had moved a couple of blocks up the street so that the space at 13 Ossington could be converted into a bar. Sweaty Beaty’s opened in November. Because she and partner Pol Williams want to concentrate on this new business, and because Selena has fulfilled her ‘five year plan’, it is with little sadness that she is letting it go. However, it is another lost venue for artists in the city. Selena had done a great job promoting artists from within and outside of Toronto, supporting emerging artists , and giving Toronto audiences a chance to see work from Quebec.

Also in 2004, Mind Control continued to host what I hear are the best parties but whenever I drop in it’s too early and they aren’t crazy yet. But check out the photos on the website to see what you’ve been missing.

The Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA) has sort of moved to its new location. There have been some parties (a Halloween bash) and some shows (Royal Bank’s Painting Competition) but I don’t think they’re officially happening yet. However, a check on their website shows they have an opening on January 13, so, yeah, MOCCA are open now.

Spin Gallery opened in their new location (that was this year right?) but they have lots of bad karma.

Clint Roenisch Gallery continued to have lots of great shows, but the thing is there is that you don’t have to go into the gallery to see the art – you can size it up from the windows. If your hooked, than you’ll find Clint friendly when you go in. He opened late in 2003, and he still has the scratched out name misspelled in the window, a down to earth affectation that I find absolutely charming. The Jack Berman show in May that consisted of photos of dead bodies was awesome.

I’m on the board of YYZ Artists’ Outlet, and last night I got an advance copy of our latest publication, Caught in the Act which documents through essays and interviews, the history of Canadian women in performance art from the 70s and 80s. Sally McKay, who used to work at YYZ, writes about the book here. I’ll admit that I’m not that interested in performance art for lots of different reasons, but this book is really welcome.

As Tanya Mars writes in her preface,

“It occurred to me that I was teaching myself right out of art history, which was ironic given that I had been actively engaged in both feminist and artist-run movements of the 70s and 80s, doing my utmost to ensure that women artists were not omitted from that history. As artists women were addressing the lack of representation, but as teachers it was clear that we had been lax.I asked myself, why, despite Canada’s very rich contemporary art activity, were our images absent from the existing literature? We were prolific, our work was strong, we were vocal. Where were we?

I decided that it was time to fill the void. The concept of self-determination that had fueled my resolve as a woman artist to be a woman artist in a male-dominated arena, would now fuel my passion to give Canadian women artists the attention and profile they deserve.

It became clear that others shared my frustration with the lack of resources on Canadian artists. It became clear that writing a book would be an enormous undertaking, and that I did not want to do it alone”.

Hence, a 444 page anthology, which launches tomorrow night at YYZ, in the 401 Richmond building. Here’s the PR:

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Please join us for the launch of this important new title from YYZ Books:

Caught in the Act
An anthology of performance art by Canadian women
Edited by Tanya Mars and Johanna Householder

Thursday, December 16, 7 – 10 p.m.
YYZ Artists’ Outlet
401 Richmond Street, Suite 140, 416.598.4546

Canada’s definitive book on Canadian women in performance art, this indispensible anthology gives readers access to an important and under-recognized subject in recent Canadian art history. Edited by two seminal Canadian peformance artists, Tanya Mars and Johanna Householder, this book focuses on the 70s and 80s; a time when women made a big and noisy impact, and provides readers with insight into the profound effects that feminism and women’s work have had on the current alternative scene. Full of sass and insight, this essential collection is part survey, part critical discourse, and part reference book, containing five critical essays, thirty-four profiles on individual artists, hundreds of images, and an extensive bibliography.

444 pp. , 219 b/w photos, 19 colour plates
ISBN: 0-920397- 84-0 (softcover) $39.95

YYZ Books is online at www.yyzartistsoutlet.org

YYZ Books is distributed by ABC Art Books Canada www.abcartbookscanada.com

The support of the Canada Council for the Arts in making this book possible
is gratefully acknowledged.

— YYZ Books 401 Richmond St. W., Suite 140 Toronto, ON M5V 3A8 tel. 416.598.4546 fax 416.598.2282 www.yyzartistsoutlet.org

image courtesy of YYZ Artists’ Outlet