Wall Street, Damian Hirst, Stephen Harper. What un week ou deux we've been having. But endorphins in the cultural community are back a-flowing, of course, thanks to Margaret Atwood's zingy op-ed on the importance of arts funding (and the ridonkulousness of Stephen Harper) in the Globe yesterday.
The stuff I've been publishing, isn't, admittedly, quite as exciting as Peggy's, but here you go: A review of the highly underrated Textile Museum's exhibition Close to You in NOW, and a Q&A in the National Post with Montreal Museum of Fine Arts curator Stéphane Aquin on their just-opened Warhol Live exhibition. To be honest, I've seen the catalogue and I think they have found a new spin on Warhol here, and I look forward to seeing/hearing it--even if, as AGYU curator Philip Monk pointed out some years ago, the Warhol spin machine has its own problems.
Friday, September 26, 2008
Bookending Le Week: Warhol in MTL, Textiles in TO
Monday, September 22, 2008
Talk 2.0: Pascal Grandmaison at Jessica Bradley Art & Projects
This weekend, as part of the Canadian Art Gallery Hop, I gave a brief talk at the newly renovated Jessica Bradley Art & Projects on Montreal artist Pascal Grandmaison. Grandmaison, a youngish artist, emerged in the late 90s and early 00s, breaking through to national attention with a show at artist run centre B312 in 203. Since then, he's started to do an increasing number of museum exhibitions, with a show upcoming next week at the Art Gallery of Hamilton and ones recently taken place at the National Gallery of Canada.
I found his work a little difficult to interpret at first, but as I had a chance to talk with Grandmaison and read up on his work, I drew some links together. Here are some related notes from my talk:
What made his work of that late 90s and early 00s so notable was the way he reworked photographic portraiture almost against itself. In one series from 1998, for instance, called Pres des Parcs he had friends model for him in Montreal park spaces. Something about the way they were posed and about their expressions was very fake, and almost kind of reflected that false naturalism that we see in parks themselves – as well as, to a certain extent, in most portraits.
From that point on, Grandmaison continued to rework the portrait theme. Rather than taking photos of people, for instance, he would take photos of their musical instruments, things that the people had used to express themselves passionately but which alone gave little personal insight. Rather than focusing close in on their faces, he might shoot them with a vast amount of white space above and to the sides of them—so that the person was physically dwarfed by the frame of the picture. He might also, as he did most recently in 2004 and 2005, have his sitters hold a piece of glass between themselves and the lens, making apparent the layers of distance between the viewer and the sitter, erasing or deterring any illusions of immediacy or connection.
Now given that this type of portraiture riffage is the work for which Grandmaison is perhaps best known, it’s a bit of a surprise to look around the gallery here today and see zero pictures of people. Instead, we see at first glance some kind of severe and distanced photos of machinery, crumpled paper, and other, at first more indecipherable, subjects.
But there is also similarity to Grandmaison's past work. Basically, each of these newer works broaden Grandmaison’s critical approach to media. Where before he was particularly interested in testing and questioning photographic portraiture by creating photographic portraits, here, in many of these works, he seems to question photography in general by using the tools of photography itself. Or question cinema in gneral by using the tolls of cinema. So it’s like he’s enlarged his working frame from taking and looking at and thinking about photos of people, to taking and looking at photos and films in general.
For instance, in his first work [pictured above] this one that was finished just this week, we see shots of a movie camera at work. The shots are extremely clear, so we can see a lot of the detail in the surface of the camera, we can see numbers etched into the metal and almost feel the texture of the hardened outer shell. In this way, it is very revealing, or feels like it should be. But like many Grandmaison works, it is exquisitely clear in a visual sense but the subject is extremely obscured in a conceptual sense. This is the part of the work that is turning the power of photography against itself. Everything is perfectly shot, but in some ways we can’t see anything.
If you do read the backstory on this, however, and I believe it is in some of the documentation, you find it is a kind of portrait as well…. A portrait of a technology. The camera that is being documented here is a 16mm Éclair NPR fabricated in 1963 in France. Because it was one of the first handheld film cameras with sync sound, it enabled the genre of “cinema verite” to evolve. It symbolized freedom to many filmmakers—suddenly, they could get out of the studio and capture life on the fly “as it really was.” And because so many directors are associated with cinema verite, it is in a way a portrait of them too.
Of course, however, while it may have simulated life better than studio shooting, there was always the camera and the projector between the viewer and the action. By creating a film focusing exclusively on this liberating instrument – this instrument that was almost in many ways meant to dissolve the viewer and the “real life” cinematic action into one – Grandmaison questions whether it was the technology or the spirit of discourse that surrounded it that was truly liberating. Or even whether, one could say, it was liberating at all.
Fun times! Thanks to everyone who came out. As for the rest of the day though I didn't manage to make it to the Plaskett talk, I did enjoy the conversation between Dan Adler and Nestor Kruger at Art Metropole and Sarah Milroy's talk with Reinhard Reitzenstein at Olga Korper Gallery.
Thanks to Julia at Jessica Bradley for the pic of me mid-blab
Read More......
Election Dejection: Will Arts-hating Tories sweep the Canuck vote Anyway?
It's been some time since I've posted on the Canadian election campaign and its associated forays into arts policy predictions north of the 49th. But still, strangely, the wheels of parliamentary democracy have continued to churn regardless of whether I am paying attention. Strange, that. Luckily, Jennifer McMackon at Simpleposie has been valiantly keeping fresh links posted on related news and views across the country. Here's a recap:
- The arts-fund-cutting Tories are leading in the polls for another minority government
- But the centre-left parties of Canada might consider a coalition to beat them
- Tory leader Stephen Harper thinks that by playing piano for a Globe and Mail reporter his image as an arts supporter will be sealed.
- Playwright Wajdi Mouawad says "Yeah, I don't think so..." to Harper in an open letter
- The Globe later reports that Tory claims to have boosted arts funding to never-before-seen levels is a hoax; overall spending to the Department of Canadian Heritage and related Crown Corporations has increased, but spending on the arts sector specifically within that has gone down in favour of sports and citizen participation.
- Blogger Paddy Johnson at Art Fag City comes back north of the border (at least electronically) from New York City to condemn Harper's cuts on lefty website rabble.ca
- The Department of Culture arts activism group continues accept and to post 30-second anti-Harper ads, and also coordinated a protest at a Harper appearance in Oakville recently
- And, last but not least, Dion said he would reverse the arts cuts
Photo of anti-Harper graffiti from Christian et Cie's Flickr photostream
Read More......
Update: Montreal Museums do Subscribe to Arcade Fire Model of Success after All!
Well well well. Just after posting last week on the curious matter of three different Montreal art museums showing music-themed exhibits this fall, I received an email release today from those museums--to be clear, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art, and the DHC ART Foundation--announcing a fall-long "Art Rocks in Montreal" cross-promotion. The deal, to be announced in New York later this month, will offer "three rock and roll itineraries [soon to be placed on the Tourism Montreal] website for travellers interested in visiting Montréal this fall." Does getting the package deal mean you get to trash your hotel room for free, like a real art/rock star? Dunno, but it sure looks fun either way.
Read More......Thursday, September 18, 2008
Please Don't Stop the (Montreal Museum) Music
How delighted was I this week when I found out Toronto's favourite anonymous art critic, the Artfag, had posted his latest online "cahier of criticism and witticism"? The answer is very.
Sadly, however, at least for me, Hogtown's hypercritical homosexual directed his sights in this edition mainly to the much-vaunted Quebec Triennial. Basically, I didn't get to see the show myself, so I'm missing out on some of the sarcastic fun. Still, this show won very rave reviews so it's fresh to see something a little less adulatory—even if the show does stand as quite an accomplishment. After all, as has been recorded here, the Triennial's creator, MACM head Marc Mayer, can be quite critically pointed himself. It's good to see someone dish right on back.
Now that the Triennial has ended, however, I'm struck by the upcoming slew of fall viz-arts shows in Montreal that have to do with music. These include Warhol Live opening September 25 at the Musee des beaux arts de Montreal, Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll since 1967 opening October 9 at the Musee d'art contemporain de Montreal, and Replay: Christian Marclay opening November 30 at the DHC-ART Foundation.
Has the whole town gone Arcade-Fire-model-of-success crazy? Should the major galleries rebrand themselves with the word "Wolf" somewhere in their name, as has been taken up by Montreal bands AIDS Wolf, Wolf Parade, and We Are Wolves? (Granted, the Wolf Montreal AIDS Art Parade Museum does have a certain ring to it...)
Or are these galleries simply recognizing that, in many ways, music is a more powerful, popular form than visual art will ever be?
I've been thinking about this issue lately for various reasons, and I can trace those thoughts back, surprisingly, to a documentary on Spencer Tunick that I saw some years ago. Though, like many folks, naked or otherwise, I'm less impressed by Tunick than I used to be, I remember the documentarian asking him which art form he thought was the most powerful. And Tunick said, quite sensibly, that the most powerful art form was music, simply because it was the most immediate, the most enjoyable and the easiest to distribute. Or something like that.
In general riffage on these thoughts, I'm closing this post with two things I've wanted to yoke together for a while: a video from Montreal-originated band Chromeo, and some paintings by Brooklyn-based artist Kadar Brock:
Here's another pairing of same; I think of these pairings as equivalents, though this one's a little more of a stretch:
Dang enjoyable regardless!
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Arts Cuts Continued: The Other Side of the Coin
Reverberations from the Canadian government's sudden $50-mil arts slash are nothing, I know, compared to the hell Lehman Brothers is going through today, but there are a few issues that come up for me as a result:
- As Bloomberg (via ArtsJournal) notes today, when these big boys tank, it can spell danger for the many arts nonprofits that depend upon their beneficence in the absence of adequate government funding. Though our banks in Canada are not as threatened by the US mortgage crisis, it's clear that recession-revisioned budgets at RBC (home of the Canada's most monied painting competition), Scotiabank (sponsor of Nuit Blanche), and BMO (sponsor of 1stArt!) could spell serious shrinkage, if not elimination, of these programs. This is an especially precarious set of circumstances when word-of-mouth tells me that even arts orgs as populist as the Toronto Public Library are being asked to make sure any new programs have corporate sponsors.
- It's also interesting to consider the market tumble in light of the art world folks who say that the government should get out of the funding biz and leave it to the corporations that actually have art on their walls and money in their wallets. This was opinion voiced by Newfoundland art dealer James Baird when I talked to him yesterday about his prize-juror duty for the RBC Painting Competition (article to follow in tomorrow's National Post). It would seem that asking corporations to step up the funding and government to step back is only really a great idea in a boom economy.
- In the past few days, more voices have come to the fore from artists and writers themselves that question the immediate jump to attack either (a) the Harper government or (b) funding cuts in general. One of these questioning moments came up from author Randy Boyagoda during a panel discussion on CBC's Q where he noted he'd like to see artists like himself really consider how they might explain to a neighbour why part of that neighbour's taxes should go to support his art. Another came up from (and was since partially rescinded by) critic Marissa Neave who was dismayed at what she considered to be the unilateral "attack Harper" approach offered at the Department of Culture organizing meeting (previously noted here).
- On Monday's Q, Canadian Arts Presenting Association acting ED Deb Beauregard also reinforced the need to make personal links for citizens between the newspapers, books, songs, TV shows and websites they enjoy every day and the fact that all that is part of the "culture industry.
Don't know where these different points of view might leave us all, but I'm glad they're being voiced, for the most part. I do think that the gap between an artist's perception of art and a non-artist's perception of art, as Boyagoda and Beauregard pointed out, is something that really needs to be addressed. And if Toronto-area folks want to give Harper their own 2 cents directly, you better get moving--the man's in Oakville at 5:30pm today at 1280 Dundas St West and a group is meeting there to call him out on not just cuts to the arts, but to climate change programs and income trust promises as well.
Image of Canadian pennies, excluding artists counting them, from www.canada.com
Monday, September 15, 2008
Gallery Picks: Notable Toronto Shows
- Mostly painterish artist Margaux Williamson's TIFF-related vid Teenager Hamlet 2006. Peter Goddard at the Toronto Star didn't think the experimental feature-length redo of Shakespeare was any great shakes, but I disagree. Maybe I've just got a crush on narrative/high school English classes, but I really enjoyed the way Williamson's interviews with local art scenesters [disclosure: one or two of whom are friends] unexpectedly drew out real-life thematic threads from Hamlet. Those 21st-century-meets-Elizabethan-era realities included everything from betrayed fathers to cold mothers, capitalist fantasies to crown tattoos—many of these disclosures being due to the effective prying of author Sheila Heti as interviewer. Heck, there was even a bizarre old Donahue interview with Ayn Rand which seemed relevant! Since the words "experimental feature" can strike fear into most art viewers' hearts, the watchability of this was indeed a pleasant surprise.
- The youthful Studio Gallery's exhibition related to Tim Barber's TV Books editions line is a fun little time, partly because the gallery is just plain scrappy; in a world of pristine spaces, it can be kinda nice to be in a ragged-linoleum environment for a change. I'm always a little wary about the Vice-mag subculture around their shows, seeing as how I am a teenage-boy skateboarder only in my wildest dreams, not in real life. It can be a bit of a clique too. But former Vice photo editor Barber assembles an impressive range of work here from several young artists. I most enjoyed Julia Burlingham's black and white street photography, Michael Schmelling's contact sheet of cloud photos with a cotton ball superimposed, and Kim Krans's paintings on fashion magazine pages. Many of these works of these are now available in book form via TV Books and also in offset-poster form via Studio Gallery. At around $30, either is a cheap way to own some neato art.
- Also nearby, the Artillerist at Pixel Gallery was enjoyable, if a little gimmicky. For it, viewers point toy guns at framed video screens. When they aim and fire, graphics from one of 13 different artists are deployed. Viewers can keep firing patterns from different artists until they want to (a) start over (b) upload to flickr or (c) print out a copy to take home. Very neato.
- Finally, I have to give a shout out to Dyed Roots, a vaguely titled but quite excellent show at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art to October 26. Exhibitions at the MOCCA can be hit and miss, but encouraged by my colleague Fran Schechter's NOW review, I attended and was happily quite impressed by Reeta Saeed's UK flags which she selectively unravelled certain sections. The results left gaping but still readable vacancies in the national iconography. Also fun is Rashmi Varma's performance/installation where she invites visitors to embroider her dress-cum-wallpaper. And I'm also impressed by curator Camilla Singh's personal statement of sitting and working in a large cage for the duration of the exhibition. What came up for me looking at it was the complexities encountered both within and without while working as an "exotic" curator of colour in the overwhelmingly winter-white Canadian art sector.
Still of Margaux Williamson and friend discussing Hamlet's story from Sheila Heti's website
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