That's enough deep thinking for one day.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Monday, June 8, 2009
IT came from the Distillery...
If you’re heading to the Distillery soon, be advised you might run into what seems to be an apparently fierce alien guarding the entrance of Fresh & Wild.
At first glance, this three-legged piece of public art seems to simultaneously rip both Louise Bourgeois’s massive high-art metal Maman sculptures and Peter Jackson’s blazing eye of Sauron from pop-cult smash The Lord of the Rings.
The name of this monster? “IT.” And its source? California artist Michael Christian, delivered via the Distillery’s Meta Gallery.
According to the Distillery’s 2009 guide, IT “rises 40 feet tall and is constructed of 12,000 pounds of steel. Inspired by George Orwell’s [sic] War of the Worlds, IT was commissioned by Black Rock City Nevada’s 2006 Burning Man Festival and over 50,000 visitors viewed it when it was first unveiled.”
Sooo.... maybe you oughta mix a little mescaline into your next Fresh & Wild mesclun salad? God, I hate to sound so cranky about it all, but there you go.
But is it Unethical? Further thoughts on the Koffler debacle
Last week, Toronto curator Kim Simon asked in a Facebook status update why none of the media covering the recent Koffler Gallery scandal had bothered to question the ethical aspects of the Koffler receiving public funding.
I responded that I had been thinking about the ethics of this situation, and wanted to do a blog post about it. What follows are the questions and uncertainties that came up for me in considering this situation.
To recap on details from The Star, NOW, Xtra, the artist’s website and other sources: Last year the Koffler—a Jewish cultural centre—contracted curator Kim Simon and artist Reena Katz to develop an art project that would open May 20, 2009. Katz, who is of Jewish descent and has worked on projects about Judaism in the past, developed a project called Each Hand as They Are Called, which was to involve a mah-jong tournament with Jewish elders, installing scaffolding in Kensington Market linked to the artist’s Jewish history and performances of songs by the Barry Sisters, a 50s duo that sang a hybrid of jazz and klezmer. On May 8, the Koffler Centre executive director Lori Starr informed Katz and Simon that the Koffler was disassociating itself from the project due to Katz’s participation in Israeli Apartheid Week and related events. The contracted funding would still go to Katz and Simon, but not the Koffler’s logo, name or endorsements. Later that week, the Jewish elders and a voice coach for the Barry Sisters project pulled out, putting the project in limbo. A number of artists have also dropped their contracts to do further work with the Koffler. The dispute is now being handled by lawyers for both parties.
My initial reaction, posted on this blog May 11, was that the Koffler had been quite stupid and unprofessional in its decisions and actions around this whole affair. For over a year the Koffler has been trying to rebrand itself as being more “open” and “downtown” in its attitude, and the kind of toe-the-line rigidity this course of events reflects is well at odds with more flexible and liberal artworld attitudes.
So…. Dumb. But unethical? I wasn’t sure. And I’m still not, which is partly why I’m posting on this—feedback from others would be much appreciated.
Here’s why I still feel the ethical part of this situation is cloudy: Basically, when I think about how most galleries program artists and exhibitions—well, it may just be my cynicism talking, but I think most galleries do program artists who fit with their own political, aesthetic and cultural tastes.
In other words, I’d expect, say, the Japan Foundation to program artists who are of Japanese descent, or who make work about Japan. I wouldn’t expect them to program an artist who had extremely critical views of Japan or who isn’t connected to Japan in any way—and I wouldn’t expect that because artists of this type would be weeded out in the very very early stages of the curatorial process.
Similarly, and perhaps a bit closer to home, I wouldn’t expect La Centrale, a woman-focused gallery in Montreal, to program a male artist. Heck, I would also be very surprised if they curated in a woman artist who happened to be strongly pro-life or homophobic. That kind of value disparity is again the kind of thing that gets weeded out way ahead of time at the very early stages of the curatorial process—those matters of poor fit or alignment.
Even in the contemporary art world in general, I’d posit that views in general on politics are quite liberal, ambivalent and flexible. So it would be quite surprising if any contemporary museum curated an artist who did have a black and white, hardline or conservative view of politics. Again, it’s as if those types of personalities get self-selected (or perhaps just selected) out of the contemporary art world; their values just doesn’t fit with those types of institutions.
At the Koffler, now, we see basically the opposite values dynamic. It’s clear from this episode that the Koffler wants artists who reject political ambivalence and flexibility, who are willing to be hardline when it comes to Israel—or at least artists who do not express any potential difficulties with Israel, period, in their work or public life.
That’s why I labeled the Koffler’s actions dumb rather than unethical. If your programming has to be in line with certain politics and values, you flag any major conflicts (whether consciously or subconsciously) at the very beginning of the process rather than at the end. Since the public funds the Koffler was to disburse were still disbursed to the artists, there is less of a case that can be made there about ethics as well.
Does this mean in future that public funding will be withheld from the Koffler? Well, it’s hard to tell, because as a friend pointed out to me there aren’t many mechanisms for listing “all the wrong stuff we did with the grant monies you gave us” on a funding application. And further, as noted above, culturally-focused galleries do often have an inherently exclusive programming slant in the first case.
Of course, I’m puzzled by my own inability in this case to make a clear ethical judgment. If anyone else would like to express their views on the case, pose their own questions, or clarify my fuzzy thinking, I’d much appreciate it.
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Out today: Three to See on Tecumseth
Today's a beauty in Toronto--more of a park day than a gallery day, really. But enroute to picnics and ice cream stands, there's 3 shows close together on Tecumseth that are very much worth seeing. Today the National Post published my guide to all three. Enjoy along with a slurpee or 4.
Read More......Thursday, June 4, 2009
Tony Oursler dishes on art changes old and new
Toronto’s Luminato festival, launched in 2007, has often been met with skepticism in the contemporary art community. But this year the fest has tried to up its aesthetic credibility with the participation of prominent New York artist Tony Oursler. While the artist was setting up his public installations near Grange Park this week, I got to chat with him about last-minute and long-term changes in his projects. Here's an excerpt from the full chat published today at Canadianart.ca:
LS: A lot of your past work can be read as making private traumas semi-public in a gallery setting. Is moving into full-fledged public art an expansion of that practice?
TO: Well this is a voyeuristic situation so in a way it’s highlighted. It will become obvious at a certain point that this is an installation, but it’s also a private space that has a memory, and goes out into the public space. I like the idea that people have a kind of membrane that they have to choose to pierce in one way or another. That voyeuristic dynamic is important; to look in the window is to join into the piece. We’ll see how it works. It’s a new thing for me.
LS: What part is new to you?
TO: Well, there’s a lot. First of all, this house has a mosaic of flatscreens inside. So it’s not projected. It’s also completely three-dimensional too, where a lot of my previous stuff is more frontal or 180-degrees or whatever.
When I had a flatscreen TV around the studio I was thinking of how amazing they are, because they become almost architectural. Whereas TVs are more like furniture, flatscreens to me are almost like tile or bricks or something. They’re also about redesigning and redefining interior space.
So I kind of wanted to play with that. You look into the space and it becomes like a memory palace of things that have happened or that are happening in the space. We edit the characters from screen to screen so they can move around from side to side, and occasionally the whole house becomes one character. Then it breaks back up into other characters.
Image of Tony Oursler with his in-progress installation near Toronto's Grange Park from canadianart.ca
Q&A: RedBall artist Kurt Perschke
New York artist Kurt Perschke looked at the world's public spaces a few years back. And did he see the need for a bench? No. A public washroom? No. Maybe some planters or bike racks? Nah.
What Perschke identified was lacking in public spaces worldwide was this -- a massive inflatable red ball. Yep, he's shown it from Chicago to Barcelona to Busan, and now it's hitting Toronto as part of the Luminato festival.
To be honest, from the online videos, it does look like this work is pretty fun. And a far cry from good ol' bronze "plop art." So it was enjoyable to chat with Perschke by phone about the project. Today, the National Post published the condensed Q&A. Here's an excerpt:
Q Online videos do show that viewers have a lot of fun with this piece -- running into it, touching it, playing with it. But most of the time we see art in museums, where it has an aura of "do not touch" seriousness. Can something ever be too fun to be art?
A Well, actually, I make lots of the kind of "serious" work that you are describing for museums and galleries. And I think to do something funny, and in public, is much harder. It's a very different environment. When you walk into a gallery or museum you know you're supposed to be looking at art. But if you are looking at art in public space, you don't have any of the crutches one has in a museum. Out on the street you're dealing with people's innate imaginations. I think the hardest thing is to get anyone to break out of their daily routine and get them to imagine, and this piece deliberately uses a moment of whimsy to make that happen. So the work is playful -- but it's playful in a very serious way.
Image for Perschke's Red Ball project in Portland, OR from Redballproject.com
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Review: YYZ goes XXX
Holy blog break, Batman! What happened to those six days that just evaporated with nary a post? Was I wooing gondoliers in Venice? Buttering up chocolatiers in Basel? No, I was just in Montreal for a couple of days, then overwhelmed by life and such. I did eat some good pastries, though.
Getting back to the grind... Tomorrow's NOW (online today) publishes my review of YYZ's 30th anniversary show, XXX. An excerpt:
Do artists run gallery spaces differently – or better – than museum CEOs or commercial dealers? Has this changed over time? Where might it go next? And should anyone who’s not an artist give a damn?
As artist-run centre YYZ celebrates its 30th anniversary, such questions come to the fore. Now the gallery is hosting a few related exhibitions under the YYZXXX umbrella.
There also an interesting feature in the paper about the whole Reena Katz/Koffler debacle—I'm glad to see it make the cover of a local publication.
Image of Carol Conde and Karl Beveridge's Cultural Relations: Art from Now
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