Even before Facebook, Twitter et al. it was hard for artists to figure out how to relate to critics, and vice versa.
It doesn't help, of course, that some critics are quite chummy in style, others more distant. For my part, I prefer to have professional, not personal, relationships with artists and gallerists. What does this mean in the real world? Liz Wylie summarized it well in her 2003 essay "An Open Letter to Artists: Confessions from a Recovering "Critic-on-Call"." (scroll down to item 2 for the piece).
As Wylie describes: "We writers on art are not so different from artists. Like artists, we have often spent years learning our craft and developing our practice. Like artists, we are dedicated professionals, often crazy about the visual arts, and have had to work at all kinds of day jobs in order to support our habit. We love to look at art and to write about the art that excites us. But, we need to see and consider an artist¹s work before we know if we want to write on it at all. A piece of critical writing is not a personal favour, neither should one be viewed as promotion. The writing may end actually up being negative, of course, so be braced for this possibility no matter what your relationship with the critic."
Thanks to Andrew Wright for the link.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Oldie but a Goodie: Critic on Call
Monday, March 30, 2009
Le plus ca change...
A still-relevant snippet from the 1970s:
“The culture of this country is a fragile thing, worth far more than the few dollars saved by the removal of the meager support funding that keeps it alive."
Sound cogent to today's circumstances? It was written by CARFAC representative Dale Amundson in a letter to the federal government in the late 70s. The cause: federal cuts to the Art Bank program and department of public works art program. The letter is part of the current Governor General's Award exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, honouring, among others, Tony Urquhart and Kim Ondaatje, two co-founders of CARFAC.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Update: Our Nat'l Photo Museum Confirmed to Close
Yesterday, there was a very good article in the Ottawa Citizen on the fate of the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, which I posted on earlier this week. The article gives full coverage to the question of whether the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, opened to great fanfare in 1992, is about to lose its building.
The answer: Most definitely. And the main culprit would seem to be the Harper government, which is taking over the site as meeting rooms and offices.
As the article makes clear, other factors did come into play such as water seepage. And it does note that the collection and programs of the CMCP will continue to exist at the National Gallery of Canada at 380 Sussex Drive. But the museum will no longer have its own standalone building.
My opinion on this-- shared by Ottawa photographer Jennifer Dickson and founding CMCP director Martha Langford, both of whom were interviewed in the article--is anger and disappointment.
As the article makes clear, the creation of the CMCP took many years, and million of dollars. In many ways was a triumph of the Mulroney Conservatives--Mulroney being a right-wing leader who, in retrospect, seems very arts-friendly compared to our current conservative PM Stephen Harper.
Given the Harper government's cancellation of the construction of our National Portrait Gallery, and the fact that he are taking over the CMCP site for the government's own purposes, this seems like just another instance of the current government's "eff you" stance towards arts and culture, both in Ottawa and elsewhere. (Remember Calgary and Edmonton submitted extensive proposals for the Portrait Gallery as well... this is not about east-west patronage tensions, just arts stuff.)
This decision to shut the gallery is also not about more theoretical questions around the validity of photography as its own medium in this multidisciplinary day and age. Were the museum to continue in its current site, I'm sure they'd continue to manage the analog-digital transitions of the medium just fine. (The exhibition they've got coming up at the NGC focuses on Scott McFarland, who uses digital techniques quite extensively.)
Relevant questions that still remain, however, might be the budgetary constraints imposed by former liberal PM Chretien's decision to build an outpost of the NGC in his home riding of Shawinigan. As well as, of course, Harper's desire to control messaging and media at all costs. (As the CBC recently reports, Harper's currently doing his second interviews with CNN and Fox in less than a month--but has refused to give national news service the Canadian Press an interview since December 2007. Pathetic.)
Image of outraged Ottawa photographer Jennifer Dickson from the Ottawa Citizen
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Last and First Chances: Mitchell, Boyle, Fafard & more
A couple of last chances that close today and that I highly recommend: Allyson Mitchell at the McMaster Museum of Art (this one will tour a bit, so if you're willing to travel you may still catch it) and Shary Boyle at Jessica Bradley Art & Projects. I've seen em both and they're both fantastic. (Update: Nick from Jessica Bradley says the Boyle show has been extended to April 4... lucky ya'll...)
In other recommendations—I wrote a little gallery hop for today's National Post. It's focused on the old-guard Yorkville area. Read on here.
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Out today: NeoHooDoo review and Chris Cran Q&A
A couple of my pieces out today: the first a review of NeoHooDoo at the Miami Art Museum on www.canadianart.ca, the other a Q&A with Calgary artist Chris Cran in the National Post. It occurs to me I need to start posting interview transcripts again. In the meantime, take a gander at Cran's website for his great images.
Image of Chris Cran's the Physics of Admiration from chriscran.com
Monday, March 23, 2009
Remedial Reading: The End of the Jews by Adam Mansbach
As was likely indicated by my previous shout out to Believing is Seeing, I've been trying to bone up on art-related reading. And though I didn't expect a fiction paperback to illuminate on this topic, one recently has. It's The End of the Jews by Adam Mansbach. What the book does is follow interactions between a few artists/writers and their families. And though Mansbach summons a lot of issues--Jewish history, white-boy hip-hop, and the fall of the Iron Curtain being just a few--what rises to the surface are questions and observations about the ways writers and artists appropriate from other individuals and other cultures.
To be truthful, part of what drew me to read this book was a smirking attitude, as in "Yay, it's not just art critics who are parasitic! It's artists themselves!" But ultimately Mansbach's book is much more complex than that, with well-drawn characters who I wanted to keep reading about in spite of (or perhaps because of) all their terrible, awkward, inappropriate impulses.
Now that I'm on the topic of fiction on artists, I should say that I also recommend The Great Man by Kate Christensen, a less epic novel than Mansbach's but just as sharp. The Great Man follows two biographers as they compete to write the definitive biography of a supposedly great artist. Along the way, truths come to light about who really painted or inspired some of the "Great Man's" defining works.
If anyone else has suggestions for fiction that can tell the truth about art, I'm all ears.
Noticed: The Art of Glamour and Vogue
In my recent browses across airport magazine racks (to me, such browsing is one of the the top benefits of air travel), I noticed that some serious art is making its way into classic beach reads like Glamour and Vogue.
In its April issue, Vogue runs an article on the Francis Bacon exhibition that is soon coming to New York. (I was wondering, as a sidenote, when these sorts of preview pieces would start appearing, given the exhibition's monthslong run in London and Madrid. Guess it's now.) But rather than just look at Bacon, writer Dodie Kazanjian does short profiles in a few different artists, asking them what they think of Bacon's work. Kazanjian also did a good profile of new Met Museum director Thomas Campbell a couple of months back for the mag, and, to be fair, has been covering art for the magazine for some time. Still, it's hard to think of Bacon's work perhaps being picked for its relevance to the "Shape Issue" -- where the focus is dressing "curves" and "petites", not shopping for "melting chunks of gnarly scary Bacon-flesh"? I don't mean to be snooty, quite the opposite. I guess I'm just wondering how Vogue decides which art to cover, what they think is appropriate to their market.
Perhaps more of a surprise, even, was opening the more mass-market mag Glamour and seeing work from Marilyn Minter, Kara Walker, Tracy Emin and other strong contemporaries. It's the mag's 70th anniversary and they asked these artists to each present one of their works on the theme of "glamour." Cheesy concept, but great to see works by these women reaching into the supermarket checkout rack audience. Also super is Walker's quote on how beauty acts as a veil over meaning, which runs alongside her sort of overtly ugly pencil sketch of a woman kissing skeletons. Must be seen and savoured in that ladymag context, for sure.
Image of Marilyn Minter's Chewing Pink 2008--which I think is the piece that ended up in Glamour--from artnet.com
