Bingo + No Internet = Nouveau Retro?

I'm interested in a strange juxtaposition that's developed today. Mercer Union, a hip-yo artist run centre here in Toronto, is doing bingo tonight as a fundraiser. And Eyelevel Gallery, another oft-youthful locus, this one in Halifax, is at midnight starting its Eyelevel Unplugged project, yanking all computers and Internet access from the space and (I presume) banning their staff from checking work emails otherwise.

As Eyelevel notes in a "Final Disconnection Notice!" email,

"Starting tonight at midnight, Eyelevel will fall off the digital grid and will not be responding to or sending any email communication for 35 days. As part of our upcoming project Eyelevel Unplugged, the Gallery will be going off-line from April 23-May 27th. During these 35 days, we will not be checking emails or or using any office technology that post-dates 1974."

The partial rationale for Eyelevel Unplugged is to commemorate the gallery's 35th anniversary by reverting to the technological conditions identical to its birth year. I will speculate that another partial aim might be to kick off a new retro trend, namely no Internet. You got it people, the 80s revival ain't just harem pants and Laura Ashley floral prints anymore!

Do you think they'll actually be able to do it?

Image of cyber-devoid 1970s coolness from the Eyelevel archives

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Steve McQueen Q&A Out Today

Steve McQueen's best known right know for his direction of the feature flick Hunger, but some of his art is also opening this weekend at the Banff Centre. I was fortunate to get a chance to chat with him by phone last week about this particular piece, "Once Upon A Time". Today the National Post published the condensed interview. Here's an excerpt:

Q You're best known right now for your prize-winning movie Hunger. How does one go from making somewhat obscure NASA slideshows for galleries to getting an actor like Michael Fassbender to fast for two months for a breakthrough role?

A I think art is like poetry in a kind of strange way, and film is like the novel. What you can get in a paragraph in a novel could be the whole universe in an artwork. In film it's much more about the linear, the story, where in art it's much more sort of a nucleus. There is a commonality.

Image of slides from McQueen's Once Upon a Time, 2002, from Banff Centre website. Courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery, NY

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News You Can't Use: Time-Machine Shows

Lately, it seems I'm only going to see shows on their final weekend. This is a bad habit that I hope to break, because the result is that no one can really use the resulting highlights. Dang! Still, I saw some really fun works this weekend that you should go see if you have a time machine or some such:

• William Buzzell at Paul Bright Gallery was really great. In a comic-book/dioramic style, Buzzell presents matrices of information and products that offer a kind of societal portrait. OK, so that doesn't sound so exciting, but if I say "reproductions of old Scholastic flyer stickers", that's much better, eh? Or "ersatz laptop displaying a porn site"? Or "colour wheels and theories"? After all, it's partly the range of Buzzell's subject matter as well as his intrictate informational style that makes the works so interesting.
• Toronto Free Gallery's "Presently Absent" show gave a first exhibition glimpse at Christine Swintak's latest sculpture-performance project: for it, the artist bought an antique dining room set off Craigslist, hauled it to the countryside, used it for some meals, shaved it down to woodchips, and put it back on Craigslist. Photos, video, and the transformed table all provide documentation. The documentation, especially, of Swintak taking an outdoor bath in a snowy countryside/junkyard landscape, with the dining set sitting nearby, had a nicely absurd/retro Richard Brautiganesque feel. Johanna Householder also had a fun work in this show; she dressed up as Princess Leia and reenacted the "help me Obi Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope" sequence. To this she then added footage from the 1984 Challenger explosion, Ronald Reagan's related speeches, and most notably more shots of her own princess Leia enjoying privilege in the form of martinis and stock reports. Also interesting was Jenna d. Maclellan's work as an artist-in-reisdnece with "Petits Mains," an immigrant women's charity in Montreal. 
• At Xpace's "Inner and Outer Space" show I quite enjoyed works by Matthew Williamson and Mark Pellegrino. Williamson continued the Star Wars theme with an LED display sign displaying summaries of Star Wars films, like a kind of trekkie Jenny Holzer. Pellegrino continued the mood with an installation, The Psyche-Master Chronicles, that mimicked a life-size Doctor Who-type cockpit strewn with toys, joysticks and TV monitors.
• Over at MKG127, oft-overlooked artist Ken Nicol showed a set of really interesting obsessive-process works, like a button that had been pushed 1,000,000 times, graph paper with the lines scratched off and placed in a tiny vial, and a mark-making work that used up all the ink in a single pen, and then some. I really loved how upfront this obsessive urge was.
• A University of Guelph student show at Board of Directors turned up an interesting video work by youngster Gin Murray. A split screen shows various people dancing on the right-hand side of the monitor, while a young woman (Gin, I assume) mimics their dancing on the monitor's left-hand side. Part of what makes the piece work is that you know Murray had to really practice all these different moves to shift so seamlessly between them--kind of like a human cross-fade. Also, Saffron Hodgson's paper-mache jellyfish/pinata was really fun. It made me wonder "Are we (or perhaps, just me) having a paper mache moment?" I recently got an email about artist Hannah Jickling's "MFA in Paper Mache" project, so perhaps so?
• Last but certainly not least, the combination of Janet Morton and Andrew Harwood at Paul Petro was really great. Loved, loved, Morton's huge, knitted and looping Doric column, while Harwood's sequinned pictures of Quebec psychic Jojo upstairs hit all the right kitsch notes; Harwood as a Jojo figure in black-light neon was also awesome.

Image of Mark Pellegrino's "The Psyche Master Chronicles" from Artist Bloc

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Weirdest Question Period Ever: Sarah Thornton's Lecture in Toronto

Last Thursday, Sarah Thornton, author of Seven Days in the Art World, gave a lecture in Toronto at the Art Gallery of Ontario. As I've pointed out here last fall, I really enjoyed the book—so much so it even made my top ten list for 2008. I tend to understand art objects, but not the structures and subcultures around them, and Thornton's book is all about those structures and subcultures. To boot, it's pretty well written.

But the fact is, I was wavering on going to the lecture. Part of the reason for my wavering was that the lecture was presented by the Canadian Art Foundation, which funds the Canadian Art website, where I work part-time. So attending the lecture potentially had that feel of "is this work I'm doing here?", a feeling best avoided on sunny early-spring evenings. But in the end I recalled how much the book had excited me when I first read it, so I decided to go at the last minute.

The presentation itself was a bit lacklustre, albeit in ways I can empathize with—book-related/book-shilling talks often are unfocused in terms of whether they should be introducing the book or going into more depth about its themes, and Thornton opted for the former, providing a chapter recap that was a bit dull to me. Also, as with many writerly types, Thornton proves better with the printed word than with the spoken one. Finally, Thornton spent a good deal of time expounding on the importance of using an ethnographic approach rather than a journalistic one, a kind of academic topic that was sort of interesting to me as an arts journalist but potentially just confusing or dull to many others.

Question period, however, was when things really got a bit weird—although, granted, substantially more interesting.

The first question came from an older white-haired gent who tersely said "Do you know who Charlie Pachter is?" After a moment, Thornton said "no". He said "thanks". I get the sense that the questioner was seeking to "expose" how little Thornton "really knows" about the art world she wrote about. Indeed, one of the main criticisms that can be made of Thornton's book is that she focuses exclusively on the most elite echelons of the art world—Murakami, not Michael Snow, Art Basel, not ARCO, etc. (But seeing as how Charles Pachter is really a figure only known to some Canadians—because, goldarnit, he almost exclusively works with Canadian imagery—I'm personally just fine with a London-based, even if Ontario-born, sociologist who studied the most elite echelons of the art world not knowing who Pachter is. Happy, even.)

Critical approaches got zingier when a woman, identifying herself as being from a group of Albright-Knox curators, ripped into Thornton for her exclusivity, calling her book's approach to art "all about money," and nothing more than "social diary snapshot". She also took issues with positioning the book as an ethnographic study, saying she had experience in the field herself and that this was really mere "entertainment" at most. Thornton had a measured response, probably her most together part of the evening, saying she's aware her book is an ethnography of the elite, and also that the writing was meant to be entertaining rather than deadening—the latter being the reason she left academia. There were smatterings of applause for both the curator and the author.

In there somewhere a woman identifying herself as an economist took issue with Thornton's statement that the reason economists don't understand the art market is they don't understand the subcultures that create its value. This economist argued that the real reason economists don't understand the art world is "there's no mechanism for getting rid of excess inventory." She seemed quite pissed, repeating her point several times, though I had the feel this was part of a longer legacy of economist/sociologist smackdowns.

Also, during the question period, Thornton said that she emphatically didn't want the book to be about celebrity journalism--and then told a celebrity-riffic story she didn't include in the book: namely, that Damien Hirst insisted his interview be in his messy bedroom, but he didn't whip it out as is sometimes the case, but he did promptly fall off the wagon at lunch after 6 months of sobriety.

Best question and answer, really, came at the end, when an older woman asked Thornton whether she thought things were getting any more equal for women in the art world. Thornton basically said the situation was still pretty depressing.

Overall, the evening had a bit of a strange feel. People I spoke with afterwards found it by turns dull, confusing, annoying, and lacking passion for art itself. However, a lot of people did buy the book afterwards--which I can vouch, as a former book marketing gal, makes the evening a success as far as the publisher is concerned.

For my part, I enjoyed seeing the person behind the page, as is often the case at these things. The main sore point for me as a conflict-of-interest-wary journalist was Thornton's flip-flopping on her pro-ethnography campaign. On the one hand, she seems to want arts journalists to integrate more "participant-observation" into their reportage. Yet she also recognizes that now that she's engaged in that process, there's no way she could, say, review a show at Blum & Poe, because she has a "relationship of trust" with them, and she'd feel pressured to give them a good review. Conflict of interest principles exist for good reasons in the journalistic field; so do principles around the opportunity for sources to revise quotations. (The latter is apparently used extensively in ethnography.)

Basically, I'm totally cool with sociologists such as Thornton doing more ethnography and nonfiction--and as I've made clear, I'm more than interested in reading same--but please, don't tell me I should be doing it. I also wonder how she balances these conflicts of interest in her recent art-market freelance work for the Economist and the Art Newspaper. She probably just doesn't cover the galleries she profiled/interviewed for the book?

Anyone else with thoughts/diatribes/nonsequiturs on the talk, please comment!

Image from canadianart.ca

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Martha Wilson Q&A in today's National Post

I feel like the last few months have been a gold mine for examining key feminist legacies in visual art. First WACK at the Vancouver Art Gallery, then the Judy Chicago show at the Textile Museum in Toronto, and now a Martha Wilson survey at the Dalhousie Art Gallery in Halifax. I felt lucky to chat with Wilson about her work on the phone last week; today the Post published a condensed version of the interview. Here's an excerpt (love the straightforwardness!):

Q The first phase of works in this exhibition -- the self-portraits -- were also started in Halifax in the late '60s. Where did those come from for you?

A I would say misery. Misery, unhappiness, awareness that women are held as valuable if they are beautiful, and knowing that I am not particularly beautiful. And knowing how very unfair that is, and living in a male-dominated environment. In addition to the culture at large being male dominated, the art school was, too.

There were a few female visitors at that time, one being American critic Lucy Lippard. She looked at the work I'd done and said, "Yes, you are an artist" -- which was good because no one else had said that!--and, "I know other women around the continent who are doing work in the same direction." Through those connections, I moved to New York in 1973.

Image of Martha Wilson's Male Impersonator (Butch), 1974 from the Dalhousie Art Gallery

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Union pickets at Art Gallery of Ontario

I went to the Art Gallery of Ontario this evening to hear a talk by Sarah Thornton—more on that later—and was half-surprised, half-not to see a picket line outside of the gallery. The picketers held signs like "AIG:AGO" and handed out flyers describing their concerns: namely that because the AGO received $18.6 million from the Ontario Government on April 8—a mere two days after laying off 23 full time staff—the AGO should now rescind the layoffs. The picket was organized by the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, which represents several of the laid-off staff.

According to the OPSEU, the layoff notices were served in an extremely undignified manner. Well, this may already be apparent to those who know the layoffs were announced just hours before one of the AGO's biggest fundraisers. But here's some of the quotes they offer:

"After 13 years, I was literally asked to put down my tools and was out of the building within 2 hours." - anonymous employee

"They are trying to save money and want volunteers to replace paid staff; in an institution devoted to an 'extraordinary visitor welcome' it is ridiculous to replace professional staff with volunteers." - employee with 29 years service

The OPSEU also notes that many professionals key to museum operations were laid off, including conservators, photographers, librarians, installation technicians and more. Two publicists were laid off, making me wonder how effectively the AGO will be able to spin these events. The woman I spoke to at the picket said many of these professionals are being replaced by part-time contract positions.

The OPSEU also notes that while senior management has instituted a wage freeze, it still takes up one-sixth of the wage pie in the organization. They also point out that Kirsten Ferguson, Chief of Staff at the AGO, had a $60,000 salary increase between 2007 and 2008 -- a raise of 50%. CEO Matthew Teitelbaum, for his part, had a wage increase of $20,000 from 2007 to 2008, or roughly 9%.

In my view, this is an unfortunate event for all parties—the museum, the employees, the union and the public. Who's to blame? It's a complex issue, but I would say this whole episode reeks of planning gaps at the senior level. Yes, there's a recession going on. Yes, contract employees are cheaper than permanent. But if your focus is excellence and the public trust, well, it's time to fundraise a little harder, people, and figure out the budgets to keep the organization responsible and functional. You did it for the building. Now do it for the people who make the building tick.

I'll be watching to see how the new AGO board president—announced today of all days—will affect the situation. The new prez is none other than Tony Gagliano, he of Luminato's cash-flush coffers. My first thought was, will this mean the AGO will do more Luminato stuff? My second: Well, at least Gagliano is good at raising money. We'll see what happens.

Image from OPSEU

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Q&A: Scott McFarland's Digital Gardens

Even though he recently moved to Toronto, Scott McFarland is still widely known as one of the major second-generation Vancouver photographers, that group that has emerged after Jeff Wall and Roy Arden as a force to be reckoned with. It's interesting because in many ways McFarland's images--usually of gardens--seem quite placid at first. But they can pack their own kind of conceptual punch by drawing on the process of gardening to create an image. With a show just opened at the National Gallery of Canada, I got a chance to talk with him over the phone. Today the National Post ran our interview. Here's an excerpt:

Q Is that montage process almost like gardening itself, would you say? Weeding out images you don't like, keeping some others?

A I think that, in some ways, gardens do function as a metaphor for the process. I think about gardening techniques and their relationships not just to taking pictures but developing and processing the final prints. Each body of work I do incorporates different digital techniques quite specific to the ways the gardens are constructed. Going back to Empire, I was fascinated how the Huntington garden designer took succulent plants from areas all across the world--Africa, Australia, South America, the Southwestern [United States] --and assembled them into seamless compositions, so that you didn't feel that these cacti were from different regions of the globe. I thought when I was taking these pictures and putting them together I was doing a very similar thing, putting different times of day together in a way not discernible to the viewer.

Read on here for the full text. More images here at Monte Clark Gallery.

Image of McFarland's Women Drying Laundry on the Gorse, Vale of Health, Hampstead Heath, 2007 -- one of my favourites of his -- from Monte Clark Gallery

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