This week is a bit nutty with deadlines, so I just thought I'd post something that I thought was really interesting. It's "Prescription for a Healthy Art Scene" by Renny Pritikin and I came across it via a link Art Fag City had posted to the SF MOMA's blog.
The type might be too small to read on this one -- if so do look here instead. Lots of good recommendations for any city, or country for that matter.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Recommended: Renny Pritikin's Prescription for a Healthy Art Scene
Monday, March 15, 2010
Luminato Announces Vis-Arts Picks for 2010
Today, crazy interdisciplinary arts fest Luminato released its visual art highlights for 2010. Here's what I will be looking forward to come June:
1. Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. The famed duo is bringing a salvaged Chinese junk boat titled Ship O’ Fools to Trinity Bellwoods Park. Cardiff and Bures Miller impress more often than not -- and I've never seen their work in a public space, so I really look forward to this.
2. Mark Fast. Okay, this one's more fashion than art, but I'm darn intrigued. Canadian-born, London-based designer Fast has become known for his spiderweb-like knitwear, which I damn well appreciate him showing on models who are not totally stick-thin. According to Luminato's release, Fast will create a knitted sculpture/installation at Brookfield Place.
3. FriendswithYou. Another art/design mashup, the Miami-based FriendswithYou will create a colourful installation at Queen's Park. (Apparently they've done similar stuff at Art Basel Miami and in Berlin.)
Image of Cardiff and Bures Miller's Ghost Machine from their website; image of Mark Fast's fall 2010 fashion show from his website; and image of FriendsWithYou's contribution to the Art Basel Miami 2006 parade from Aesthetic Grounds
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Out today: Reviews of Romano, Pien & Cho on Tecumseth St
Yesterday, watching the livestream of a critics panel in NYC, I was struck by the comment (which I think may have been from Martha Schwendener, but I can't be sure) that when you're on a deadline and writing a review quickly, you're aware that you might feel differently about the work if you'd more time to revisit it. I guess that's how I feel a little bit about my reviews on Tecumseth Street out in today's National Post. Ah well, here's an excerpt:
Tony Romano at Diaz Contemporary
100 Niagara St.
Irony and sincerity seem to be battling it out for supremacy in Tony Romano's latest show at Diaz. Granted, tension between these two tendencies marks a lot of current art. Still, Romano ramps it up in Beautiful Monster, his documentary/mockumentary on Toronto painter Jay Isaac. Combining self-consciously solemn black-and-white shots with cheesy, synth-soundtracked colour passages, Beautiful Monster comes off as part student film and part art-doc satire. But even as it undermines its own credibility, the flick presents a few serious thoughts and images on the importance of art. A similar feeling comes across in The Imagine Band, a project where Romano had the lyrics to John Lennon's Imagine translated into 10 languages and then back into English. The song's original sentiments remain, even if the names have (somewhat humorously) been changed. Pinocchio, an aluminum sculpture cast from a clunky wooden figure, also seems to put Jeff Koons-ian polish (and related po-mo distance) on earnest rural tinkering. Overall, the show is enjoyable, but also maddening. The most immediately engaging works are absurd movie-poster collages that mash up dolphin dramedies with Apocalypse Now, while the rest keep you guessing about the artist's intentions. Is that really enough to sustain an art practice over the long term? We'll have to wait for Romano's next show to find out. To March 20.
There's also comments on Ed Pien's show @ Birch Libralato and Hyang Cho @ Georgia Scherman in the full review. (Will Gorlitz is also showing at Birch, but in my mind the show pales compared to his MoCCA survey on now -- like my NOW colleague David Jager, I really ended up loving Gorlitz's works from the 1990s.)
Installation image of Tony Romano's show at Diaz from Canadian Art
Friday, March 12, 2010
True, that.
A pervasive idea and true phenomenon is well articulated here by David Hickey:
"Since there is no absolute authority in the art world, or in the economic world either, we may presume that for every opinion, there is a contrary one. Thus, the social value of a work of art, or an art critic, or a theory, or an institution must be distinguished from its social virtue, since bad reviews, stupid acquisitions, and theoretical attacks, even as they question the social virtue of an object or investment, must necessarily invest it with social value. The raw investment of attention, positive or negative, qualifies certain works of art as "players" in the discourse. So, even though it may appear to you that nearly everyone hates Jeff Koons' work, the critical point is that people take the time and effort to hate it, publicly and at length, and this investment of attention effectively endows Koons' work with more importance than the work of those artists whose work we like, but not enough to get excited about."
Of course, I could quibble with this idea a little bit, but that would just invest it with more value. Dang!
Quote is from Hickey's essay "Dealing" in Air Guitar; Image from Seen Reading
Thursday, March 11, 2010
From Rice Bowl to Dust Bowl: Q&A with award-winning photog Benoit Aquin
In 2008, Montrealer Benoit Aquin--who had the unglamorous job of shooting for local alt-weeklies from 1989 to 2001--won the $75,000 international Prix Pictet in photography and sustainability for his documentation of Chinese dust storms. With that series of work now showing at Stephen Bulger Gallery in Toronto, I sat down for a brief chat with Aquin. Today, the National Post published our condensed Q&A. Here's an excerpt which actually kind of surprised me--on culture as a sustainability issue:
Q Is there anything else you'd want people to think about when looking at these pictures?
A Well, I wish our governments would invest more in cultural institutions and in art, because I think it creates strong bonds between people. And I think those bonds protect us from chaos. Think of Haiti, or Somalia -- these are places where cultural institutions were underestimated. I worked in Haiti recently. When I see our governments cutting into culture, I don't think it's very lucid.
Q So culture is a different kind of sustainability issue?
A Yes, it's very important. Chaos can appear very quickly, and things can change very fast. If there is creativity and bonds between people, it may take a better direction when something hard happens.
Image of one of Aquin's dust bowl pictures from photographie.com
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Good to Hear: David R. Harper to show in Toronto
Just got my April issue of Toronto Life in the mail and I'm glad to discover (thanks to David Balzer's art picks) that David R. Harper will soon be showing at the Textile Museum of Canada. I've read a lot of rave reviews of Harper's work over the past few years, and seen a lot of related images. While his combination of taxidermy, embroidery and tattooing sounds a little stomach-churning in concept, it seems to produce really eye-catching results. Harper's show opens April 9 alongside other interesting-looking contemporary showcases featuring Stephen Schofield and Lia Cook.
Image of Harper's Guild 2007 from Akimblog
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Upcoming: Keynote-riffic Appropriation Conference March 19
What the frak is it with all the Sandals-riffic events this month? Here is the fourth and final one: a keynote talky thing at the York U Art History Grad Students Association's conference on appropriation, which happens Friday, March 19.
The good part of this news, for many, is that the conference is happening downtown at 1 Dundas West, meaning no slog to Downsview station and beyond. (!) And the very, very good part of this news is that other keynoters are Montreal art historian Johanne Sloan and Toronto artist/curator/critic Jen Hutton, who has a review up at Artforum right now. Also on the slate are interesting grad student presentations on Bigfoot, Louis Riel, video game demakes and more.
The fun starts at 10am and goes to 4:30pm at 1 Dundas St West, suite 2602. For more information, email ahgsay@gmail.com.
Image of Bart Simpson as Nirvana album cover, which comes up as second google image hit for "appropriation," from Flowtv
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