This is the Mammalian Diving Reflex, a public report
Over the last 4 months, performance company Mammalian Diving Reflex has been to Mumbai, Lahore, New York, Dublin, Portland, Austria, Vancouver and Regina. We’ve walked through states of emergency, hung out in slums, met diplomats, had children cut our hair, got sick, had fights, offended powerful people and ate paan.
On Dec 21, at 7PM we’re presenting This is the Mammalian Diving Reflex, a public report. A presentation about who we are, what we do, why we do it, what we believe and where we’re going from here.
What: This is the Mammalian Diving Reflex, a public report.
Where: Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, 12 Alexander St, Toronto.
When: December 21, 2007, 7PM
How Much: PWYC
Mammalian Diving Reflex: Faisal Anwar, Stephanie Comilang, Natalie De Vito, Nick Murray, Darren O’Donnell and Rebecca Picherack.
More info: hello@mammalian.ca or 416 642 5772 – www.mammalian.ca
Margaret Atwood’s high school year book, 1957.
(From Torontoist)
I’m still at the point where I can’t even imagine fifty-years. My equivalent of this photo (fifty years after graduating from high school) is the year 2043, by which time I hope the world will be unbelievably different in a good way. Bush and Co will long be dead, there will be peace in the mid east, the most of the Boomers will be cremated ash, except for those few trillionaires who insist on injecting themselves with all sorts of weird shit to stay alive for-ever (and they will probably have a whole television station devoted to the 1960s, Woodstock, Bob Dylan, fast machines, and the emotional aftermath of the Vietnam War, and the fact that they’re all still alive and how they’re ‘revolutionizing the centenarian years’).
Event InfoName:FORUM – Paradise Lost: Romanticism’s Return
Tagline: with Max Allen, GB Jones, Katherine Lochnan & John Potvin
Host: The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery
Type: Music/Arts – Performance
Time and PlaceDate: Thursday, November 1, 2007
Time: 7:00pm – 9:00pm
Location: The Power Plant
Street: 231 Queens Quay West
City/Town: Toronto, ON
From the glam rock band Scissor Sisters to Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, contemporary culture is infatuated with ecstatic, anguished decadence. Responding to Paul P.’s interests in the dandyism of writer Marcel Proust and painter James McNeill Whistler, this forum considers the resurgence of romanticism, touching on issues of artist relationships and personae, 19th Century portraiture, pornography’s infiltration of visual culture, and images of desire and loss.
Chaired by Max Allen, producer/host of CBC’s IDEAS, speakers include GB Jones, artist/musician whose work appeared with Paul P.’s on the cover for The Hidden Camera’s The arms of his ‘ill’; Katherine Lochnan, Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Art Gallery of Ontario and curator of ‘Turner, Whistler, Monet’ which toured to Tate Britain and Musée d’Orsay; and John Potvin, author of Bachelors of a Different Sort whose research concerns the male body and intimacy in Victorian and Edwardian culture.
Chasing Transcendence: The Self – Oct 16, 2007
The Wiegand Memorial Foundation Lecture Series
Bas C. van Fraassen
Professor of Philosophy, Princeton University
Whenever we reflect upon ourselves, we quickly end up in difficulty. As the philosopher Wittgenstein quipped, “I am not a thing, but I am not nothing.” The Transcendent Self is not just a myth – but it is precisely in myths that it can be understood. By portraying human beings in the company of gods, myths express what is true about the Self and our place in nature.
640 480 Grand Gestures
Panel Discussion at Trinity Square Video
Saturday October 13, 2007 – 2 PM
401 Richmond Street West, Suite #376
Join 640 480 members Jeremy Bailey, Shanan Kurtz, Philip Lee, and Jillian Locke for a panel discussion about their current exhibition, Grand Gestures, on Saturday October 13, at 2 PM.
Reflecting on the rapid obsolescence of video technology, Grand Gestures memorializes and commemorates the vain attempts we make at preserving our memories.
People make ‘home movies’ in order to create permanent reminders of moments they might otherwise forget. More often than not, it is the video itself that replaces the actual memories, and it is only through this medium that moments can be (re)experienced at all. Pushing at the possibilities of video as a memorial object, Grand Gestures consists of three linked projects – installations at TPW, TSV, and in public spaces along Queen St West. Each project uses the aesthetics of public memorials and museums to discuss the preservation of video and its inherent value system.
Art Aloud: The Scotiabank Nuit Blanche Lecture Series 2007
In partnership with the Ontario College of Art & Design
The Scotiabank Nuit Blanche 2007 Lecture Series encourages discussions, dialogue and discourse leading up to the night of event. With participation from local and international artists from various mediums involved in Scotiabank Nuit Blanche these are sure to be lively and thought-provoking conversations.
All Scotiabank Nuit Blanche lectures are free. Admission is first-come, first-served. Space is limited. For more details email: scotiabanknuitblanche@toronto.ca
Thursday September 27
Panel Discussion
6:30-8:30 pm
Ontario College of Art & Design
100 McCaul St
Auditorium, Level 1
How does the twelve-hour duration of Nuit Blanche influence the artistic process, and what is the nature of an event that is impermanent and ephemeral? Featuring local, national and international artists and gallerists, this panel will address urban space, public art and site-specificity.
Moderated by Toronto Star urban issues reporter Christopher Hume.
Panellists include:
Sara Graham: As a Toronto-based artist Sara Graham’s practice centres on explorations of geographic fictions that blur the disciplines of art, architecture, urban design and geography.
Millie Chen: An active member of a number of artist-run organizations, Millie Chen’s practice encompasses collaborative interdisciplinary projects that engage the public and public space.
Adad Hannah: Based in Montreal, Adad Hannah works in video and photography.
Dyan Marie: Artist and gallerist Dyan Marie explores urban issues, ideas and reflections on contemporary cultural experience. Dyan Marie Projects focuses her curatorial and artistic practices on the Lansdowne and Dupont neighbourhood where she lives.
Craig Walsh: Based in Brisbane, Australia, Craig Walsh is primarily interested in hybrid / site-specific projects and the exploration of alternative contexts for contemporary art, often utilizing projection in response to existing environments and contexts.
Last night I found some French blogs, via the Paris newspaper, Liberation. Here are three entries by Pierre Haski, Liberation’s Beijing correspondent, which I translated to share.March 11 We’re done for
In the 1960s, the Club of Rome, composed of great spirits, considered a ‘zero development’ report because the planet didn’t have enough energy resource to sustain that era’s development. Four decades later, we’re already there, and another Institute is warning of the same thing, this time regarding China.
The Earth Policy Institute, based in Washington, just went through the same classic intellectual exercise: if the Chinese maintain the same rate of development, and they’d equal that of the Americans in 2031, and if they began consuming at the same rate as the Americans, what would happen? The spectacular result: there would be 1.1 billion cars in China (versus the 795 million in the world today), the Chinese would consume more gasoline/oil that the whole world today produces, they’d eat 4/5ths of the world’s production of meat, 2/3rds of the grains, and you’d need to double the world’s production of paper (thus cutting down more forests).
You might say that’s an absurd scenario, except that we see today the few million Chinese who already effectively live the ‘American lifestyle’, that is, they have one or two cars, and are active participants in a consumerist society, as identical as that we know in “the West”. The American Dream as assuredly entered the minds of the Chinese.
The real problem of this study is the conclusion: it underlines that the Western model cannot be applied to China, simply because that planet doesn’t have enough resources (especially if India applies it as well!). And it concludes that we need to invent other things. But what? And especially, why not equally reconsider the American lifestyle, or that of industrial countries in general.
If the model is a failure for the whole world, how do you tell the Chinese: you can’t have cars, the ‘clim’ or low coast companies to develop the tourist industry (to refer to a recent posting), and are forbidden to pollute? Especially when the Americans refuse to sign the Kyoto Accord … but that’s another debate.
Therefore, is this 2005 report is as absurd as that of the Club of Rome was in its time? Or is China going to drive us into the wall? I await your response this weekend of a beautiful blue sky, but very cold in this Beijing end of winter.
March 12 Cars Again
Following-up on the commentaries by Jia and Bern on ‘We’re Done For’, car licence plates are sold by auction in Shanghai. The municipality has found a hyper-elitist was of limiting to a few million the numbers of new cars one can have in a city that has already reached it’s saturation point. They can reach exorbitant prices: last year averaging around 40,000 yuans (around 4000 euros), which is almost the price of a small car itself. This explains why there are no ‘small cars’ in Shanghai (the QQ Chinese brand, that you see a lot of in Beijing, sells for 50,000 yuans, less than 5000 euros). Paradoxically, this system was judged to be illegal by a Chinese administrative tribunal, but Shanghai hasn’t hear of this decision and continues to sell it’s licence plates by auction (which is nothing compared to Hong Kong, which has used this system for a long time, where record prices have been reached like 7.1 million HK dollars, a little less than 600,000 euros for the plate number 12, which sold last month. But it’s true that the earnings of those in Hong Kong is superior to those of France, and that the extravagance of the tycoons is without limit…)
Elsewhere, there are no limits, like in Beijing, where the number of cars went up last year at the rate of about 1000 a day (500,000 more in two years!) There’s already 2.3 million cars and the municipality estimates that there’ll be 3.5 million cars in Beijing in 2008, thus there’s already the feeling that the point of saturation has already been reached.
The government has invested too much into the auto industry to pull back, and according to it’s own predictions, (not those of the Americans this time), there’ll be 140 vehicles on Chinese roads in 2020, that is 7 times more than 2004. Even if China applies the same environmental standards as Europe for locally built cars, and if it encouraged research into electric card (Dassault is ready to pounce!) the development model followed is still that of ‘The American Dream’. All you have to see is how Beijing encouraged the sale of cars that are faster then public transit, the network of which is still quite limited (it’ll be better, they say, in 2008, the new frontier of the ‘harmonious society’ of the Chinese).
Photo: At this rate, as the bicycle is already marginalized in Shanghai, it has no better use than to be used for works of art, like this one of Ai Weiwei, shown at Factory 798 in Beijing. Chinese experts – translate the Maoist slogan on the wall….)
Art is in galleries, art is in the street. This afternoon, going to an opening at the Courtyard Gallery, one of the better ones in Beijing, situation two feet from the Forbidden City, I saw an old man who was painting … the ground. Armed with an enormous paintbrush and a bucket of water, he was doing caligraphy on a esplanade, which was evaporating as he was working. He was working for his own pleasure, and for those who were passing, who stopped to watch on this springtime Sunday afternoon. The experts would call this ephemeral art.
Here, it is a part of life, an art of living that fades.
At the Courtyard Gallery, another ambience. The one we find in Paris, New York, or Tokyo. Cao Fei, a young artist from Canton, presented large format photographs, with exagerated colours, of young Chinese dressed as mythological characters in the middle of the urban setting of contemporary China. Accompanied by a whacky video of the same scenes, with a subdued audio chanel. A work that was seductive and catchy. But here, we’re no longer in the world of ephemeral art, we’re in the world of the fashionable and expensive contemporary globalised art.
These two forms were happening at the same time 200 metres from each other. But these two universes are light years apart.
Last March, Ydessa Hendeles gave this presentation to a symposium on Canadian Art History, which was broadcast on CBC’s Artstoday, and from which Sally McKay got an audio file, which she posted on her blog at the time. I got this transcription done over the past couple of days. – Timothy
The questions started with ‘does contemporary Canadian art have a history?’ Everything has a history, every object, every creature, every place, every discourse. The questions are, ‘who knows about it?’ and ‘who has the power to affect it?’
Art history is a conglomerate of narratives, from many places with many players. There are leaders and followers and an audience. Who watches from close up and who from farther away also matters. The question I believe this panel will address is, ‘who validates our several Canadian histories’, since there is no one clear national identity. There’s a different dialogue in every city, every province, and every part of the country. Regardless, as these histories unfold, a market, primary and secondary, fair or unfair, plays a critical and powerful position in proposing and conferring status on art, which affects how our history is assessed here and elsewhere.
Is it a Canadian history or a subset of international art history? Some areas of Canadian art are rooted in magazine reproductions of art and read that way as derivative, but the most consequential Canadian art provides a rich and formative history, indeed, several definitive histories across the land including a special and unique aboriginal history. Regrettably these are not histories that are known much outside the country, they have yet to be mined.
There have been exhibitions of Canadian art in Europe, but these early exposures did not yield much fruit, as prominent prosperous dealers in America or Europe did not respond and take up the causes of these artists. More widely visible is the reverse. Canadian museum acknowledgements of the action of the art world across the Atlantic, most notably in the exhibition, The European Ice Berg presented at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1985. But the cost traumatized the institution. When I approached the curator of this extravaganza, Germano Celant, a decade later and asked if he’d be willing to come up again and do something that would integrate Canadian art, he replied without missing a beat, “Sure, I’ll call it the Canadian Ice Cube”.
Canadian artists who have achieved superstar status internationally are a relatively new phenomenon. There has been the occasional Canadian artist who has succeeded globally while still living in Canada, but these cases are mainly rare. Even though resident Canadian artists have not often succeeded internationally, times are changing. It is not only possible, but critical for Canadians to make an effort to build relationships with artists and curators outside our national borders. It is the nature of expression to have urgency and seek out as large an audience as possible. There is an instinctually driven, naturally generated curiosity for dialogue. I don’t mean that artists should look for their audience in a careerist, strategic way, as has been the root taken by some artists who have developed career skills and have modest successes resulting from their manipulations. Relationships work best when works are authentic expressions that are not made for strategic purposes of capitalizing upon already existing subjects of discourse. Connections come out of spontaneous desire by two parties to connect, to learn about each other in some depth. Networking opens doors, but should not determine the content of the art. To me some of its originality is compromised if it serves a purpose to please. The best of work creates a desire rather than fulfils one.
Is international the measure of achievement for Canadian art? An art work certainly acquires an added layer of seductive appeal and prestige in any country when supported outside its national borders. Americans wooed Europeans and vice-versa to their mutual benefit. The larger an audience for work, the greater the impact that work can have on culture. But internationalism as a measure of achievement for Canadian art is only one denominator of success. It’s not the ultimate assessment of the merit of a body of work, because so much of success during an artist’s lifetime both, locally and internationally, comes from luck, in connections, timing, and promotion. These factors matter hugely in what gets seen, and supported inside and outside the country. International visibility is like a Rubic’s cube. All the components have to fit together in just the right way.
If internationalism is important, what role do our institutions play in supporting Canadian art at home? Museums are by definition conservative. They conserve, mindful of their responsibility as authenticators and keepers of history. This challenges their role at the forefront of contributions to culture because it is difficult and risky to separate what is new and interesting at any one moment from what might ultimately be influential over the long term. While museums are participants in making history by validating art, they have to maintain their position of authority by resisting minor trends and instead choose works that relate to both the individual regional vision of their collections and support works that their curators determine will ultimately affect the course of international visual history from their particular perspective. Museums in each country should not all have the same art in them. Because of the many variables that determine what enters a public collection, it is therefore not easy to define how early museums should support contemporary art. Wealth is a very critical factor in exhibitions and acquisitions. Museums mostly miss out on purchasing seminal works because financial restraints withhold them from responding when they might like to. Some collecting museums, to resolve the issue of timeliness have resorted to showing prominent private collections but this has recently backfired. Indeed, the collecting museum’s authority can easily be corrupted by the market place.
For example, the display of the Saatchi collection in the show Sensation resulted in a scandal at the Brooklyn Museum. Apart from the vitriolic objections to the content by then Mayor Rudi Guilani, who threatened to cut off the museum’s funding because of the use of elephant dung as a material component with glitters on it in a portrait of the Madonna, the persistent controversial issue is the commercial gain later won by the collector as his works were subsequently put up for sale and made huge profits. The trustees of the Museum of Modern Art and the Tate Gallery, both major collecting museums, responded by taking the position that they will not show a private collector’s art collection.
So with that form of display now off limits the context in which contemporary art is shown in further narrowed. Like the separation of Church and State, there is and should be, a boundary between commerce and art. Neither a collector nor a corporation should be able to capitalize financially from the sale of a collection that comes directly from being promoted by a public museum. There are other issues of conflict of interest that impede artists works from being exhibited in collecting institutions. Over time, with decreased funding, the museums had to function as much like a business as an educational, insightful venue for scholarship, leading to an increase in shows on design, some featuring motorcycles and celebrating fashion magnates. As well as a new breed of collectors with more dynamic social skills than art historical knowledge to enable exhibitions to be funded, further lowering the standard of insightful exhibitions. As displays of easy entertainment help the coffers of collecting museums, these then provide additional competition for serious shows of contemporary art, which is yet another compromise to the focus on the newest and most influential, provocative, and rigorous of visual artworks. This tighter financial climate makes visibility harder for artists everywhere.
Is contemporary Canadian art only for Canadians? Regardless of the challenge of changing economics, contemporary Canadian art provides a valuable heritage that provides a resource of insight into the course the country has traveled in its relatively short history. Though more submerged in the international dialog then would be preferred, it is there, and still gives those of us who seek it out a perspective on what it means to be here and indeed, where is here, an especially difficult notion to identify besides the behemoth below the border. The good news is that our history is becoming known internationally, as more and more people from here are interacting with there and sharing what has and is happening here. It is no longer necessary for artists to flee to reside in a major art centre outside the country to be visible and join into the dialogue. It is now appreciated that one can live in Canada and still be on the world’s stage, one can finally function from here. I think it is important to add to the fabric of the art world, expanding its realm, to radiate from the historical global centres. It is this that I have chosen to do.
In last night’s dream your army consisted of ducks. You were taught by your young cousins how to imitate a duck leader, and how to gather web-footed troops.
Sirens ring out now, filtering through the window, through the brick and the concrete.
What fascination is this life, and this time of year. Proliferation of wondrous literature, sparks for the new centuries’ thoughts, and more importantly, the new decade. C’est fini, c’est tous!
As Gladwell tells it, using a very good art-as-example:
The Poster Test is you get a bunch of posters in a room, you bring some college students in, and you say ‘pick any poster you want, take it home’. And they do that. Second group is brought in and you say, ‘pick any poster you want, tell me why you want it, and then go home’. Couple of months passes, and he calls up all the students, and he asks, “That poster you got a couple of months back, do you like it?’ and the kids, who is the first group didn’t have to explain their choice, all liked their poster. And the kids in the second group who did have to explain, now they hate their poster. And not only that, the kids who had to explain their poster picked a very different kind of poster then the kids who didn???t have to explain their poster.So making people explain what they want changes their preference and changes their preference in a negative way, it causes them to gravitate toward something they actually weren’t interested in in the first place.
Now, there’s a wonderful little detail in this – that there were two kinds of posters in the room, there were Impressionist prints and then there were these posters of, you know, kitten hanging by bars that said, ‘Hang in there baby’. And the students who were asked to explain their preference overwhelmingly chose the kitten. And the ones who weren’t asked to explain overwhelmingly chose the Impressionist poster. And they were happy with their choice obviously, who could be happy with a kitten on their wall after 3 months? Now, why is that?
Why when you ask someone to explain their preference do they gravitate toward the least sophisticated of the offerings? Cause it???s a language problem. You???re someone, you know in your heart that you like the Impressionists but now you have to come up with a reason for your choice, and you really don’t have the language to say why you like the Impressionist photo. What you do have the language for is to say, ‘Well, I like the kitten cause I had a kitten when I was growing up,’ and you know … so forcing you to explain something when you don’t necessarily have the vocabulary and the tools to explain your preference automatically shifts you toward the most conservative and the least sophisticated choice.
It is important to clarify the Language Problem to say that just because people can’t describe to themselves or others why the feel the way they do, does not mean those feelings are absent – language isn’t limiting their thoughts. The people who chose the Impressionists were responding to their thoughts, their inclinations, even though if they’d be asked they may not have been able to come up with an answer. I also think this experiment highlights a problem of status – status as in a concern for how one is thought of, or represents oneself. I can’t be the only one who imagines that the person who chose a kitten was a girl: and a girl may chose a kitten because it conforms to an idea of femininity. I know when I was in university, there were no kitten posters in the guy’s rooms – I seem to recall posters of big breasted women and ‘student crossing’ stick figures carrying bottles.
However, the Language Problem is another indictment toward the post-modernist gobldly-gook of academic prose. Artists have over the past few years been arguing that they have to go to school, and learn the process, the arguments, and so they don’t owe anyone easy answers. They want the audience to do their homework. Gladwell’s examples seem to make that clear, that without doing their homework, people won’t be able to like challenging works. As if doing your homework gives you the language so that you can explain your preferences to others, which is quite relevant because we hear people complaining.
They aren’t going to galleries, unconsciously liking things and keeping that to themselves. If they are unconsciously liking things, we’re hearing them complain, because they can’t speak our language. That, or they know full well what they’re saying, and the work really is shite. As Pinker points out in a chapter on language, language doesn’t define and constrain our thoughts, it communicates them. Our brains are full of concepts and reactions, and we use language to share our experience of those. The Poster Experiment shows two levels of communication – the mind communicating to itself in such a way as to direct the choice toward something they may not be able to explain, and the distortion of choice toward the familiar when they are asked to communicate their feelings to another when they don’t have a language to communicate the sophistication of their intuition.
The ‘doing your homework’ idea, which gives people that language, seems to be true for those among us who enjoy reading theories. But we are suffering from a severe lack of translations. Steven Pinker is a cognitive scientist, a linguist, who made his career at MIT and now works at Harvard. He is an academic publishing papers in peer reviewed journals. But the example I’ve borrowed above is from his trade publication, which serves as a translation of the work he does in his field, absent the jargon. As he said in an interview (PDF file):
Another invaluable bit of advice came from an editor, when I was planing my first book for a general audience. She said I should not think of my readership as the general public – truck drivers, grannies, chicken pluckers. They don’t buy books. Any attempt to reach them would lead me to write in motherease. Instead, I should write for an old college roomate – someone as smart as I was but who didn’t happen to go into my field. Respecting the intelligence of readers and acknowledging their lack of specialized knowledge are the two prerequisites for good science writing.
I’ve come to think of the Homework-Excuse as coming from those among us who want the arts to be proffesionalized and academized as if becoming an artist was somehow akin to becoming a doctor or a lawyer.
The law allusion is interesting, because law is trying to sort out the complications of our vague intuition of justice. Art too is a vague intuition, but law – at least the language used in the courts – is clear, it is understandable by everyone – as popular television shows exemplify. The language of the law, as turned into drama, is something we all understand, but the printed legal decisions are not today, nor will they be in the future, considered great literature.
Art seems to have failed in its language. Perhaps the reason there aren’t many art television shows is because art-folk in both galleries and in print aren’t speaking a language that is clear and obvious. What’s obvious in law is that someone was hurt and the other person wants justice. We’re exercising our desires for revenge, for rebalancing the scales between two people, fighting for a concept of fairness which, as recent studies with chimpanzees shows, is embedded within our genes as apes. For most of our history, art too was clearly the expression of our genetic inclination toward beauty. Beauty, and a love for the absurd. This recent video is clearly art, in the way that is revels in the uselessness of its actions. Hosted on iFilm, every video there is what anthropologists would call art, even though in our daily lives we conceptualize things as TV Shows, or Commercials, or Parodies. The important thing is that humans spend a great deal of energy imagining, make images born in the imagination, making their dreams come true.
The desire to make some of the better videos on iFilm is an expression that all artists should be familiar with. But what makes it good art for me is that it is free of the self-consciousness of current conceptual concerns. With regard to the video linked above, I can’t help but feel that a similar piece within an art gallery would be pedantic, and would try to reference the Iraqi War and or Palestine and Israel, like the pieces I saw last summer at the AGO.
When one is in a gallery, looking at something unattractive to the eye, boring in concept, and when one asks, or tried to bring this up, you encounter, “oh I think it’s great” and yet, ask that person why, and you will not get a clear answer. Invariably, the only reason to find these things wonderful today is because it’s the tip of a conceptual iceberg – it somehow relates to bigger ideas, bigger movements within the zeitgeist of the intelligentsia, things which are vague and that this art has somehow made a little bit more concrete. Already equipped with that language, they can appreciate it in a way that someone not familiar cannot. And, the way it works nowadays, is if they look to the artist statement or the press-release for clarity, they get serving of language in a potentially unfamiliar vocabulary, or, more often then not (since art has so alienated itself from those who don’t ‘do their homework’), you get a rehashing of ideas not very intriguing to begin with. You’re getting kitten art. As Pinker writes (p.416), quoting Adam Gopnik, “the political messages of most postmodernist pieces are utterly banal, like ‘racism is bad’. But they are stated so obliquely that viewers are made to feel morally superior for being able to figure them out.”
Because I have a facility with words, I find it easier to concretize the bigger vagueness by writing paragraphs than by trying to invest images or objects with those thoughts, and because of this I find myself as an artist more often than not making content-less work, which if it express anything does so unconsciously. Or I’m thinking very hard in trying to marry an idea with the appropriate form. Someone, like Tony Scherman, who identifies as a painter, will paint images based on his thoughts, his studies, in the history of Napoleon or whatever. Gerhard Richter will paint the Baader Meinhof Gang is such a way that John Ralston Saul writes about them thus in On Equilibrium:
I didn’t know of the paintings. I walked into the room and was immobilized by the atmosphere. I hadn’t yet looked at a picture. The force which he somehow put into his paintings overwelmed the space. And it remained when you examined the paintings one by one. The force is virtually impossible to describe, except to say that Richter is a great painter and he has the genius to create something like a force field which connects him with the viewer.This is not emotion. […] Richter has touched something in our imagination which is only secondarily about visual perception.
Having seen Tony Scherman’s Napoleon show at the U of T Art Centre in 2001, a year after attending a lecture he gave in the fall of 2000, I feel as if Scherman’s facility as a painter is informed by his studies. Whereas I’m much more inclined lately to write things to post on this blog to express what I’ve been thinking about, I’m under the impression that a painter like Scherman paints and saves the thoughts about his studies for his excellent presentations.
All this relates though to what art is ultimately about. In October 1999, I read a profile on Julia Kristeva in The Globe and Mail, where it said:
What she chiefly borrowed from Freud was the idea of a ‘psychic space’ inside each individual. In her view it is largely nourished by narrative, which is why she sees literature and the arts as essential to a sane life – and consumerism as gravely dangerous to it. “People become literally sick if they have no interior representation.” She also thinks that, in a world where people are spilling in vast numbers from one culture into another, it is essential to decide what a national identity should be. “I have students in my classes who literally do not know what language to dream in. The ‘psychic space’ is frozen.” (Interview with Ray Conlogue Oct 14 1999)
Later that month, I wrote down in my notebook:
Art – this is the point of art – art allows us to string together narratives. Humans are creatures dependent on narratives, and art shows us, guides us, in the construction of our own stories. Because it is necessary to conceptualize structure within the historical time frame of our lives.Lives are like pieces of music – not songs, because songs imply words and lives are structured moments resonating in the world, moments built upon moments, and having a beginning and an end.
Narration, as Kristeva was getting at, supplies the mind with examples and models that are required for it to tell itself its stories. Since, as Buddhists emphasize, we self-narrate ourselves into existence, we become more conscious the more we feed the mind with stories. Literature and art is quite literally ‘food for thought’. As John Ralston Saul tells us, in the paragraphs preceding the above quote:
What I also know is that many visual artists need music to work, as do some writers. This does not function as an image generator, but rather as a key, unlocking their imaginations. Many musicians need words. If I sit in a live concert, after almost exactly twenty minutes words and phrases will begin to tumble into my consciousness, unlocking different ongoing problems of writing. Angus Wilson felt that it was Zola’s love of the Impressionists which gave him another sense of how to write. Here truly images were producing words.David Malouf has made an even more direct connection, pointing out that, until Australian writers dropped specifically British images and took up specifically Australian, they could not imagine where they were. There were no trees, flowers, birds of Australia, in early Australian verse. “This is not because they were not there in the landscape, to be seen and appreciated, but because there was as yet no place for them in the world of verse. The associations had not yet been found that would allow them entry there. They carried no charge of emotion.” So the trees, flowers, birds, landscapes, climates had first to enter into the imagination of the immigrants. It wasn’t a question of nationalism or of excluding others, but of imaging being at home there themselves. Then it happened. And it was as if the people had “come at last into full possession of a place”.
The opposite can just as easily happen. Police and courtroom dramas set in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago have become so common around the world – they are America’s most common expression of itself – that many people in other countries now think their own legal system is like that of the United States. German youth have no other legal image, unless they are arrested. And then they ask to be read their rights and later ask for trial by jury, as if their system worked that way. There is a sentiment in Germany that more locally produced television police-court dramas are needed to create vaguely relevant images. Without the images, they cannot imagine themselves.
My own example of what I need in my environment is dialogue … while painting I like to play videos of documentaries, and while at home working each day I most often have either CBC Newsworld, CNN, or the Star Trek re-runs on the Space channel. Occasionally I’ll chose music, but not that often.
From: timothy comeau To: arts_online@scotsman.com Subject: Plagiarism or Appropriation? Date: Thursday 30 November 2000 6:02 PM
Plagiarism or Appropriation? I smirk at this case, because I see it from both sides of the argument. One the one hand, it appears to be flagrant plagiarism. One could not reproduce a text changing a few words here, and the punctuation, and make a claim to be original.
But Duchamp brought in the readymade. In *choosing* an object, he exercised artistic decision making – the process being defined as such: 1. I’m an artist, that is, I have been trained to see the world in a special way, I have “heightened aesthetic sensibility”. 2.I see a shovel, I think, wow, that looks pretty cool, we don’t have anything like over in France 3. I think the art world is too stuffy, all those boring glossy paintings, I’ll exhibit this in a gallery 4.I’ll give it an ironic, humorous title, “In advance of the broken arm”.
When I was in art school, I wanted to produce cinematic picture books, but because I was in a small town at the edge of the ocean, and because I was only a poor art student, the only way I could get access to certain pictures was to borrow them. I took photographs from the TV, from movies etc, in order to get photographs that would have been impossible for me to get otherwise. For example, I could never schedule a photo shoot with Albert Einstein, since he’s been dead for forty-five years.
I would present these books to my studio group, and I asked my studio advisor about this act of appropriation. He pointed out that there are thousands of images in a film, and to choose one or two is an artistic act in line with the history of the readymade. (One should ask, why did I the creator of this piece choose these images when I had thousands of frames to choose from)?
I also argued, that we live in a landscape dominated by created images. There was a time in the past when an image was expensive to produce, and this kept the presence of media down, but in this day and age, the cost of producing media is inconsequential. I argued that representing images from the media is similar to painting a landscape. Does God own the copyright to that view? Do all the Sunday painters of the past who have also painted that area have a say? We think nothing of looking at paintings of landscape, we think it’s interesting for example, to compare the photographs of Atget from 100 years ago to photographs taken from the same vantage point today, in order to see the changes that a century brings.
Since there seems to be an image wherever you look today, whether it be golden arches or blank faced models or sci-fi book covers, it seems almost impossible to represent contemporary reality without including what some would consider a copyright violation.
In the case of Glen Brown, its unfortunate that he wasn’t more upfront about the source, that it wasn’t clear from the beginning that this painting was his remix of that 70s song.
On Monday, 11 January 1999, I fell out of my chair in Temporal Arts Class as a performance. No one believed that I did this on purpose. I repeated the act in February, and still, no one believed it was intentional, or that it was performance art.
