/Blog

From Journal

13 October 2004
I got off at 5, walked to U of T for this lecture I was looking forward to, and quickly found it boring. It put me to sleep. It was all about the fact that radiocarbon dating is rewriting the chronologies complied by Aeagan scholars a hundred years ago, and that one branch of scholarship debates the validity of the other. This is stretched out into a Power Point presentation with the worst graphics and a monotonous delivery punctuated with a English schoolboy’s rhythms. I wanted to say, it wasn’t so bad, I fell asleep because I was tired, but my goodness. I left during question period; I decided that trying to hook up with someone for drinks and conversation wasn’t worth my time.

07 October 2005
Rain today. I awoke near quarter after 11, and have had a quiet day of words. First some writing, then, for the past hour and half, reading. Read a couple of great essays in Northrop Frye’s Divisions on a Ground and the Charles Comfort essay in the book I got from Grandmère’s in August. Almost have the feeling that I’ve got it all figured out and so I’m bored.

Last year I was motivated by what? Trudeau’s example of being a cool Canadian, his enthusiasm for the country, was infectious - this is one the highlights of his legacy for many. I guess it was thinking about Mark Kingwell, then Trudeau, then John Ralston Saul (re-reading Unconscious Civilization) and Steven Pinker and Malcolm Gladwell - questioning why it was these amazing writers and communicators all happen to be Canadian, and how great it was to be part of that culture, one that reminded me of the Scottish Enlightenment. All of this of course, contrasted with the reality of the United States, and all that abysmal writing from France that has infected the intelligentsia of my generation.

Lament for my generation - a year ago I said once to D, thinking of the example of Scotland, ‘we’re all famous in the future, yet none of us know that so we all too busy fighting one another’. I had immense enthusiasm for my generation and our ideas (I guess today I would just say I had immense enthusiasm for my ideas) and D was pessimistic about my optimism. Because of blogs, because of the idea I had for a lecture series …. and then BlogTo came along, K’s reading group - forums to see my optimism play out. The Reading Group is great, no reason to knock it, but the blog thing I’ve become disenchanted with. Because it’s not quite living up to it’s potential. What the guy at Canada25 said to me, about how it’s no different from listening to some guy at a bar … and I couldn’t really disagree with that. That last BlogTo meeting really took the wind of my sails for it - see it as superficial. This is what my generation has to offer? Perhaps a portion of my depression is part realization that I’m always going to have a hard go at it, since I was born at an awkward time - forever experiencing ‘transitional periods’ and surrounded by a generation with small and conventional ambitions. A generation I’ve come to see as very conservative, seeking to emulate their parents, not overcome them. And so, a generation of intelligent people who become disciples to dead thinkers and dead writers, born in another country and in another time, and ignoring the science that truly answers the questions asked by generations. We now know who we are, where we came from, and have a good idea of where we might be going. A generation of Foucault and Baudriallard experts are wearing the wrong clothes for this bus ride.

That being said, I’m enthralled by the writings of a dead Canadian from my grandparent’s generation. Perhaps this is a reflection of my Generation Y sympathies - a generation I’m told (a manifestation of their more apparent conservatism) that gets along more with the grandparents at than with the parents, who are seen to be selfish (the boomers, who I see that way).

I read Saul over the winter, and felt Canadian - saw how my culture and my experience was different from that of the U.S. My enthusiasm became preaching, and I introduced his thinking to the Reading Group. His thinking on our provincial predicament had me reject the art scene and its Artforum desires … most recently exemplified by that quote about October magazine in last week’s Globe and Mail. Talking with E over coffee in the spring, and her asking ‘what’s so compelling about Canadian history?’ and me countering with, ‘what’s so compelling about the American one?’

And now, thoughts of the importance of imagination … which came via Kristeva, but which was articulated by Frye, and picked up again by Saul in his last (prior to Globalism) book. The American one is compelling perhaps because it is the only one we have access too; H goes to L.A. to work with Thomas Crow, whose book explained a lot to me last year. An American story, part of the American imagination. But his book cannot alone explain the problems of contemporary art in Canadian society. And so now, thoughts on the need for a Canadian anthology of art history.

But for me the big break through this year was understanding the imagination. Of seeing how art is all about feeding the imagination, so that our days do not seem meaningless and empty, but part of a larger context. And while it’s easy for me to talk about television as a prosthetic imagination, it is also one that ties society together with a common understanding. Canada’s imagination of itself is not [only] found in a novel - it is found in Corner Gas and Trailer Park Boys and Robson Arms … as was said this week on one of the entertainment news shows, pointing out how each show imagines a different region of the country, to introduce the development of a new show set in Toronto.

12 October 2005
Candian hope followed by Canadian dispair. The country had potential and talent, and yet the talent dispairs. Mike Bullard in today’s Globe and Mail, referring to the demise of his tv show last year - here a show doesn’t work and you’re considered a failure, in L.A. it’s no big deal. But Americans are big and forgetful, and this makes them optimistic. Perhaps it also helps to account for how toxic their cultural environment is.

Waves crash on the shoreline of Lake Ontario driven by winds.

From Juxtapoz, Oct 2007 n81 (pages 60;64):

William Buzzell: A lot of people move to NYC and end up staying there the rest of their lives, but you haven’t fit that mold.

AJ Fosik: Well, I had an idealized version when I moved to NYC, too; that it would be this great artist community and that there would be so much going on. But NYC is a really, really difficult place for an artist to live. I think that whole mythology of being able to live in NYC as an artist isn’t really relevant anymore. Everyone I know there works 9-to-5 jobs and pays way too much for an apartment and can’t really function creatively.

WB: But you feel that you can function more creatively in places like San Diego or Denver?

AF: I don’t really have to have a real job here, so that’s a big part of it. It’s pretty much the same reason you live in Philly.

WB: But I also started hating NYC towards the end of living there, and not even just in terms of money. I got really burnt out on NYC, and I think you did too.

AF: Definitely. I go to NYC now and there’s lots of things I love about it, but it’s just way too scenstery there. It doesn’t feel like any organic art scene really exists.

WB: I kind of feel that all of our friends there are turning into the cast of Sex and the City.

~
From Journal, 2 August 2007:

The bar was customered by CityTV folk, and I noticed the fellow from the Space station having an afterwork drink. Hanging around Queen & John at 5.30 is a great way I guess to stalk CityTV/MM/Etc personalities. I ate fries and chicken wings since I was in no mood for something healthy. Conversation with N was nice as usual. We went to the opening at Diaz - sculpture - and I wasn’t approached by anybody friendly. That opening more than most reminded me of Sex in the City: the pretentious glamour of standing around drinking bad wine out of plastic cups, as if this is somehow superior to god knows what else. N and I escaped through the emergency exit, which I coincidentally happened to be standing in front of. Walked to the KM opening, which was also dismal.

In the end, it’s that I don’t take art that seriously anymore. I mean, I appreciate that Chris Hand wrote that ‘blogTo takes art very very seriously’ and that he linked to a bunch of my articles; but lately, having decided not to post about the Power Plant show (at least not the Lignon show) I’ve been scratching my head about it all. As an artist, I know how to take it seriously, to appreciate where artists are coming from, what they are trying to say, what they are interested in and what they are working out in their work. But that leaves it all to me seeming insubstantial when it’s very clearly personal. I’m reminded of William Gibson, two years ago, said on Richardson’s Roundup, describing the webpages that stand out as being ‘highly personal’. (And one then thinks of all the artists websites I see that are really shitty precisely for that reason). And my readings lately have me working out the history of ‘the highly personal’ and I’ve found myself agreeing with Goethe’s assessment that art is something tied to history, and that one needs to understand a history to really appreciate the artwork. What has happened has been an abandonment of historical understanding amongst artists, and it’s doubly worse in Canada because we all act as if our history is uninteresting. As Heather asked, ‘what’s compelling about Canadian history?’ And I asked in turn, ‘what do you find compelling about what you consider compelling?’ or something to that effect, getting at the heart of the matter - ‘what’s compelling about American history?

Wednesday 12 June 1996. Now the day before, with the landlord shit, I made a call for an appointment with our landlord Mr. S. So I got up at 12.30, and at 1.10 was out the door, to Duke St, where I got some money and then caught a bus to go to Fairview. The appointment was at 2pm, but at 2 I was at the mall, and since I would be a half-hour late, I called and rescheduled for the next day. So I took the number 1 bus back, getting off at Oxford, to go to the Kings College Library. What a beautiful place! I’m not really one for architecture, but that place was awesome. There, I borrowed Michelangelo’s poems, and then walked home. To class and I did a weekly brief, but it couldn’t print, and I tried and tried and gave up. After class, home with music and Michelangelo’s poems and candlelight to save power. This was a bad day, overcast, me tired, and I concluded that day with the thought that I should never have even gotten up. It was one of those days.

That night I dreamt I was in junior high school again, in Grade 7, and we had these projects we had been working on. There was a boy, we called him Artaud, and he was a silent, moody fellow, anti-social and unknown. Actually I found out a little later that Artaud was a girl, a cute one to. The day came to present her report. I was given a stop watch, to time it. I pressed the start button and dropped it to the floor. Artaud didn’t say a word - more moodiness I thought instantly, but immidately someone jumped onto her chair and applauded enthusiastically. And then I got it, and I too jumped on my chair with screams of bravo! The moodiness - it had all been a grand performance art peice, and that had been her project. Her statement was that ‘alone you are more with people than you are when you’re social,’ as was exemplified in that, after me, the whole class got it and we all cheered her and supported her. Alone she was supported. Had she been part of the crowd, she would have not been supported. Like pegs in a peg board, if one falls, the others still carry the burden and cannot help her, but alone, she is supported by the plank underneath.

So afterwards we were in the cafeteria her and I, and we talked. She was now enormously cute to me, and she had gorgeous jet black hair, straight, falling past her shoulders, and it had a silky sheen. I was facinated by her, by the genius of her project, and she was facinated also by me, saying I was intelligent and very creative. We spoke French to each other at one point. But alas , as it always happens, I woke up, her face imprinted on my mind. I also dreamt of J. that night, but I always do anyway so I don’t remember details.

~Ten years ago I sat in a dark room, reading my Michelangelo poems after class. I was alone, I put the radio on, and listened to CBC. Did I strum the guitar? Probably, trying to learn the chord positions. Was the chair a rocking chair? For some reason I think so, but then, what happened to it, and where did it come from?Ten years later it’s a day spent with the canvases that were then unpainted, a day spent with a new digital camera that I hadn’t yet heard of, snapping pictures to download and process using the techniques I learned in art school, which I would be beginning in three months. But that night I did not know any of this, and I was sad, so I wrote: ‘This was a bad day, overcast, me tired, and I concluded that day with the thought that I should never have even gotten up. It was one of those days.’I did not yet know how the memory of that afternoon’s walk would stay with me, and how by the end of the year I would return to the grounds of Kings College to take photographs of the old trees and the fa?ج�?ade of the library, which I’d been too and had appreciated. I did not know that in ten years I would glimpse one of those photographs and be reminded that I had gone back in November, having found out about it in June.Nor did I know how the memory of that afternoon’s walk would become my mental-visual marker defining the year, the leaves glistening as they were with late afternoon sunlight breaking through the otherwise gray sky of the day - this shininess signaling for me a new turn of events in my life and it the decade - it was all there, the misery of the early half of the 1990s, and the brilliance of the later part.

Found today in a 1998 notebook:

As cultural professionals, you or I should study all the things, regardless of whether they speak to us on a deep personal level. But generally speaking, you only need a couple of paintings, a couple of poems, a couple of pieces of music to last a whole lifetime. I have succeeded if a person walks away with one image, one thought, one realization, one feeling that they can use in their life, even if they can’t remember my name, the names of the pieces, or how many they say. - Bill Viola

Friday 31 January 1986

Happy Birthday! Mine. Nobody tried to spank me.¹ Fun at night.² Packed the car for gunshow. Next day.³

_______________________________
1.Getting spanked on your birthday was the tradition where I grew up, in addition to having butter put on your nose.

2. I don’t remember any of this actually. Oddly enough what I didn’t write down was seeing the space shuttle explode on television, blossoming into a cloud. This I remember most clearly, and when I heard grown-ups talking of the Kennedy assassination and where they were, at this point I could relate. I was in class, Grade 5, I sat in the third row from the right when facing the teacher. She walked in to say that the Principal’s secretary had just told her there’d been an explosion with the space shuttle. It had already been in the news due to the Christina McCaulif/teacher angle. (Note to memoralists: nothing better than public disaster to seer a name in memory). I imagined something similar to what was depicted eleven years later in the 1997 movie Contact, and at this time eleven years earlier I was about ready to be emerge from the caul. At this midpoint between two stretches of 11 years, I sat at my school desk with a vision of an explosion’s aftermath in my mind, my imagination already well trained by Hollywood movies: it had occurred within the Shuttle, which remained docked at the tower. The crew slumped in their seats overcome by shockwave and toxic gas. But back to math lessons or French grammar or whatever it was. Obviously there was a school bus ride home at the usual time. I got home, the disaster was on the television, my parents had the excitability one would expect on such a day. I took my seat at the drafting table, which my parents had bought for some unknown reason and completely unrelated to my developing talent. I worked on my drawing story, with the scenes to my right. I even molded a space shuttle out of playdoh and squished it into nothingness as I re-enacted the destruction I was seeing over and over again. It seems to me that there was a little bit of disappointment that it wasn’t more spectacular, after all those Hollywood movies…just this big cloud…you couldn’t see anything really.

I worked on my drawing story. As I recall it was about God and the Devil and the creation of life on Earth. I think it must have been around this time that I’d created characters out of the letters of the Alphabet. Gave the letter ‘A’ eyes in the triangle part, some arms, the legs obvious. My teachers and classmates had found this clever and noteworthy. What I remember most clearly, and have associated with this day was working on the drawing and having a comet come flying low over the Earth, pieces of it falling off and springing into Life. During the 90s this became a popular theory, and I remembered this and thought, ‘maybe I was onto something there?’

The only reason I was inspired to use a comet in my story was because of all the hype Halley’s Comet was receiving, 1986 being the last year of it’s return. Later in the year I thought I saw it but I now realize I’d only seen a satellite.

I sat at the drafting table, thinking of my maternal grandparents who’d recently visited, and drew my pictures of Alpha God and Zeta Satan with the television replaying disaster and news-anchor commentary. In three days I would be 11.

3. My dad was a gunsmith and gunshows were part of his trade.

I’m borderline bored today. Read some of Sources of the Self but there’s too much talk of God. Read about how he thinks we may be in a watershed time (written though in the late 1980s) and spoke of how we have a hard time imagining old ideas like the divine right of kings. I’m at the point where I have a hard time imagining God ideas - although I remember faith, I’m working with a memory of an experience, which is different than actually feeling it as real today. It’s like my thoughts last week on myth - as something we’ve overcome, or something which served us and does no longer.I must say I’m particularly animated by the idea that I live in a complicated and technologically sophisticated civilisation. This is something Firefly helped bring to my awareness, through their contextualization of humans spread out across a new solar system, having packed up everything and moved it off world, where they felt free to begin the process of ecological destruction to build complicated early 21st Century cities all over again since there was now many worlds of resources at their disposal. And how Joss Whedon talked of wanting a show that was about ‘us’ - early 21st Century Americans (including Canadians) and revisiting the Western. And so you have a future five hundred years away in which everyone is using things we’re familiar with, like keyboards (no mysterious interfaces like on Star Trek and printed tee-shirts, and everything very familiar to us, as if we have in many ways plateaued, similarly to the way the candle and travel by horse was familiar to people across the centuries before the lightbulb.

So, the idea that I’m living in an emerging global civilization, which is so complex, but which enables me to do almost anything, I find interesting and exciting. To be here when it’s all new and fresh. And what this all means opposed to the Old World, and old world art and culture.

As an artist, I’ve struggled to find my voice and my place within the culture. I’ve also been caught up in the myopia of industry - to participate in the segregation, to go to openings, to party with fellow cultural workers, to read the poorly written and poorly thought documents, all the while not seeing the forest for the trees, and all the while looking in a rear-view mirror as it were: things from the past, and cultural movements better seen through hindsight. Getting lost in what it all means.

We are cut off in the end, from the experience of our lives, what it means to be alive now and to be comfortable with our selves. I sense a great trembling before uncertainty in this regard - the Buddhists who tell us we can be happy now and who want to enlighten us, wake us up to the wonder already here in our lives, but simply getting us to pay attention to our minds and our thinking - this is all seen with a sense of skepticism, but also, I think, there is a deep nostalgia for misery. So used to complaining and to being entertained through moving picture stories, we fear the length of our lives and the prospect of being bored.

Northrop Frye’s article on boredom vs. leisure summarizes the cultural wars I’ve witnessed in my still young life, and in the end lays it all on education … which broadens our perspectives to take in more than what the narrow view offers, the narrow view being by definition limited and quickly exhausted, so we find ourselves bored. The leisured, on the other hand, move through life being productive, pursuing their interests and by default contributing to society and civilization.

But what does any of this mean? What is it to contribute to humanity or civilization or to society? Those ideas were dissected by the post-structuralists which encouraged what Waggar called credicide, draining from our lives the sense of meaning which animated our imaginations and hence our lives - gave us that sense of certainty we seem to desire.

Perhaps our need for certainty is genetic, stemming from the days when uncertainty about yonder hill could get one eaten by a leopard. If that’s the case, we need a technology to deal with it. However, like our obesity problem, we’ve fallen victim to ancient biologies - comfort foods being comforting because of their fat content, which was very useful in scavenging days, but no longer. We now know this through science, and the concept of calories can help us control what we eat, in addition we know that to burn extra calories we need to exercise. But do we have similar knowledge to help us live with uncertainty? Is Buddhism such a technology?

The question is not one of who to make art for - fellow artists and further for collectors. But how to make something so that for the next thousand years, anyone (or at least, some) can see it or read it or whatever, and know that I was a human being just like they are, that I felt as they do sometimes, and in so doing, help bridge the gap of time, help them feel like they are part of the bigger story of civilization. So today, in 2005, I can read St. Augustine’ Confessions and recognize a fellow human being, and learn something of the context of those times. Again, people are still reading Tolstoy’s War & Peace which is set two hundred years ago, and in the process are learning a greater context.

If myth has died out in our age, one sees how that narrative culture we live in has replaced it. The past century was one resembling the wipe of a movie - the fade in or the fade out, how briefly the two images are combined in one still. The Old World of horses and carriages, inkwells and candles; of killing whales for oil, was replaced by a world where we dug oil out of the ground, to fuel our combustible engines for what was at first called a horseless carriage, and inkwells disappeared into speciality shops and art supply stores. Myth died and was replaced by the novel and movie, either projected in two to three hour stories on a large screen (replacing live theatre) or was divided up into half hour to an hour segments for the television machine of living rooms. Poetry, which was exulted for so long in so many cultures, disappeared too into specialty markets, replaced by the lyrics of pop music. Firefly suggests this new world will be with us for another five hundred years.

Picking up on the rear-view-mirror comment: one thinks of the side mirrors, and this past week I was trying to imagine what vision for a rabbit must be like, with it’s eyes on the side of it’s head, forward and backward in their periphery. How would their brains assemble the picture? Our eyes both face forward, overlapping, giving us and animals like us (apes and cats and so forth) binocular vision. I imagine something of what a rabbit experiences could be seen by placing two side view mirrors in front of us, at the angle so that we see the sweep behind, and are blinded near what we experience as front.

If hindsight then, is 20/20, one should further argue that this is the case for animals. The whole point of our lives since the beginning has seemed to be better than the animals. To be human is to see what’s in front of you clearly, and to be blind to what’s behind.

From my journal at the time, where I’d copied and translated it. From my Grade 10 French Class fifteen years ago, dated December 8 1990:

Where is Santa Claus?Where is Santa Claus? To discover the answer to this question, I set about asking children. I asked nearly fifteen children when one told me where he lived really!All the others has said that Santa lived in the North Pole, but after all these answers, one walked into my interview room.

He had big red shoes on his feet and green pants, with a big yellow shirt. He had black hair and big ears.

I asked him his name. ‘Nerwin Tisslefoot,’ he answered. Then he told me…

‘I heard you were asking kids where Santa Claus lived. I’m 7 years old and I know. All the other children think he lives at the North Pole, but it isn’t true. Santa Claus (his real name in Filbert) lives everywhere in the world. In the winter, he lives in Siberia, where he catches his reindeer.

‘There (the name of the place is Northpolliqr) is a huge post office, where Filbert receives the merchandise orders and money from parents all over the world, who buy all the toys from him. On the 20 of December, he puts these great big 767 engines on the feet of his reindeer, Prancer, Dancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner, Blitzen and Rudolph. And on Rudolph, he puts a big red flashlight on his nose. On the 21st of December, he takes off from Northpolliqr, and he flies all over the world, delivering his merchandise to the parents who bought it. He buys all the VCRs, televisions, and toys in Siberia, even if everybody thinks Siberia is poor, but that idea, that is propaganda. It is really rich like the States, or Canada.

‘Anyhow, Filbert is in North America on the 24th - every year straight, never misses - and on the 25th, he flies back to Siberia. He de-hitches the 767 engines, gives his reindeer over to an old lady who looks after them during the year, and he catches the next flight to China.

‘At the beginning of January, Filbert enters his Buddhist monastery, and becomes a Buddhist monk until April, then he goes to Iraq.

You know, in Iraq, it’s the Islam religion, and they celebrate the birthday of Muhammad, like we celebrate the birthday of Jesus Christ. And, like we give presents on Christ’s birthday, they give presents on Muhammad’s birthday. This year, Filbert gave Saddam Hussein Kuwait! That’s why Saddam doesn’t want to get out! He doesn’t want to give up his present!

‘After Filbert’s done in Iraq, he goes to Florida for the fall, to party down with the old timers down there.

‘After that, he’s in Siberia again, and the cycle begins anew. In fact, he’s there at this instant!’

Nerwin Tisslefoot finished his story. I said ‘Thank you Nerwin,’ and he left. I followed, wanting to go home, take about 20,000 aspirin for the migraine he’d given me, and go to bed.

Fini

In the future, people will consult machines, which will publish ‘you are’ books. Having analyzed you inside and out, through remarkably in depth ways - you will be presented with a canon of yourself. Thus defined you will either take comfort or squirm.

Last night I dreamt I was in a gallery looking at particularly bad art, and there were two girls there - one was P-, and they were glowering at me; I was feeling defensive, and when we got to talking the subject came up, they acknowledging visible discomfort, I saying in return, ‘Yes you look like you’re ready to attack me,’ but then the conversation shifted as to how they were discussing my writing, and that while they liked the show, they couldn’t help but agree with my ideas, and were curious as to what I thought. Perhaps —– —– was one of these people (talked to her and P- last night at the openings) but then a curator was giving a tour of the work, saying that some of the work was based on memories of their childhoods, and I interrupted at this point to say, ‘I question whether work based on childhood isn’t in effect childish, and I’d prefer adult work for adults’. This silenced the curator. Later, she told me that she couldn’t think of a rebuttal, and I felt bad, as I’d humiliated her.