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08w08:1 Review & Preview: The Canadian Art Reel Artists Film Festival 21-24 Feb 2008

[Cross posted from Goodreads 08w08:1]

The Canadian Art Reel Artists Film Festival, 21-24 February 2008
http://www.canadianart.ca/foundation/programs/reelartists/2008/01/24/
http://www.canadianart.ca/microsites/REELARTISTS//schedule/
screening at the Al Green Theatre, Miles Nadal JCC
750 Spadina Ave (at Bloor), Toronto

In his as-yet-untranslated book Formes de Vie (1999) Nicolas Bourriaud makes the argument that Duchamp treated the gallery as a film camera, a box in which the gallery ‘recorded’ the work and in so doing made it art. Throughout the 20th Century, the dominance of film as a medium has seeped into our consciousness to such an extant that it seems that all art today works in cinematic terms. The spectacle, the grandeur, the big budgets … the gallery has become a film set and must borrow from the film-production’s capacity to make the impossible real. Take for example the open pits of crude oil shown in There Will Be Blood - accurately reflecting the lack of environmental concern of a century ago, and yet filmed in 2006 under conditions that were probably heavily controlled and legislated behind the scenes. Also consider something like Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth, where the Tate gallery undertook intentional damage to the foundations of the building and displayed it with an aloofness which makes it seem no big deal.

But the ugliness of its construction is as hidden as that which goes into the manufacture of our consumer goods by foreign wage slaves. We are only asked to marvel at the gleam, and not think of the grime.

I raise this points as an introduction to the blending of the cinematic and locational art forms, which is annually celebrated by the Canadian Art Foundation’s film series of artist documentaries. This year’s selection have a common theme of monumentalism, and the documentaries give us insight and access to the grime behind the gleam of art-stardom. Having watched previews of most of the films in this year’s series, (I was provided with all but four of the series’ screeners) what follows are reviews and reflections on them.

Jeff Wall | Jeff Wall - Retrospective 58:42 dir. Michael Blackwood (2007)

Peter Galassi (L) and Jeff Wall (R)

This film is an hour long eavesdrop as Wall walks through his 2007 retrospective exhibition at MOMA with its co-curator Peter Galassi. The format makes it a little boring at times - but it’s worth it if you’re at all interested in his work, and Wall gives wonderful insights into what inspired his classic pieces. It can be said that he’s a painter using photography to make his images, which are so composed and choreographed to assume the one-off aspect of a painting, albeit made in a medium which ensures a maximum reproducibly. Looking at Wall’s backlit images I was reminded they are precursors of the digital photographs we are all getting used to. One imagines that many HD-flat screen panels will be used to display future photography, as luminous and well resolved as a Jeff Wall. It makes his work seem almost prescient in that regard, and makes the technology behind it seem merely primitive rather than gimmicky or even as sophisticated as it appeared ten years ago.

Philip Johnson | Philip Johnson: Diary of an Eccentric Architect 55:00 dir. Barbara Wolf (1996)

Philip Johnson and Rem Koolhaas in the rain

This film is essentially a grand tour of Johnson’s sprawling estate in New Canaan, Connecticut, which was used as a literal field of experimentation by the architect. Johnson gives tours of the projects he undertook on his land over fifty years, meanwhile the film documents the construction of one such experiment, a building inspired by Frank Stella (who comes to see the work in progress), and which when completed is visited under umbrella by Rem Koolhaas. Once painted, it looked magnificent. I appreciated the inclusion of a scene where the construction workers quarrel with the managers, who are quibbling over ten-grand. ‘Ten thousand dollars is a drop in a hat. I see your place over there, you’re not working for $25/hr with guys making $12/hr, and think you’re going to live on that’. This sentence encapsulates what’s wrong with startchitecture to begin with, and for me is the key-phrase of the film.

As we go forward, this documentary may become one of those historical curiosities in which the rich playboy gives a tour of his Versailles and the interconnected social and environmental repercussions are totally ignored. Johnson (who I’ve most often seen in a suit at the office commenting in documentaries on the work of other architects) here is seen as a full resolution person, who had lived a blessed life of success and had reached an age when he couldn’t help but take it all for granted. His personal art gallery, brilliantly designed to exhibit many large paintings in a small space, consists of work that he needs explained to him by an assistant who first appears in the film sitting in the gallery in such a way that I mistook him for a Duane Hanson. Had The Simpson’s Mr Burns been written as an architect, he would have been modeled on Philip Johnson, and this Mr Burns would return the affections of his Smithers.

Bas Jan Ader | Here is always somewhere else 70:00 dir. Rene Daalder (2006)

Bas Jan Ader died the year I was born, and yet he has the best artist website I have ever seen, the result of some benefactor buying up his estate in recent years. As a part of this media revival, Rene Daalder was asked to make this film by Ader’s widow. (The trailer can be seen on the Ader website here). This film was a little slow getting started but got more interesting near the half-way mark. One of the nice things about this feature is how Daalder revisits some of the locations Ader used for his art-films, which have been so transformed in the intervening years as to have become unrecognizable.

Featuring interviews with people inspired by Ader’s work, including Tacita Dean, we learn much about his background, and the similar background of Daalder, who attempts to tell Bas Jan’s story by giving us insight into his own. Before he too immigrated to Los Angeles, Daalder began as a film-maker in Holland (one of his early films’s stared Rem Koolhaas, thirty years before getting his rainy day tour at Philip Johnson’s) before leaving after his first ‘most-expensive Dutch film ever’ failed at the domestic box-office. The result is a story of a small group of Dutch expatriates who ended up in L.A. trying and make their fame and fortune in Hollywood. With the exception of Koolhaas, they succeeded while remaining obscure. For example, one of the actors in another early Daalder film was Carel Struycken who I was familiar with as Mr. Homn, Lexanna Troi’s butler from the Star Trek episodes I watched as a teenager, and who also starred in the Adam’s Family movie as Lurch.

Wikipedia states that Ader’s work began to be revived in the early 1990s, and I first learned about him through the Phaidon Conceptual Art book, published in 1998. Richard Rorty described genius as the coincidence of one’s personal obsession meeting a public need. Throughout the 1980s, Bas Jan Ader was to a small group of Dutch men just that friend who disappeared at sea. As one says early on in the film, ‘I didn’t know I was friends with a myth’. This myth was constructed in the early 1990s, which is to say that the public need for Ader’s obsession only began then, this public being an art-world increasingly interested in the type of work Ader produced. As a video artist, his work can be seen throughout the movie (and on his website), and on the one hand it can seem both boring and absurd (what’s up with all the falling?) but on the other it can seem interesting and profound (the sea captain who had thought about it a lot). Ader’s work is a reminder to artists that there’s an potential audience for anything, but it may take twenty years after your death for the public’s interest to coincide with your obsessions.

Richard Serra | To See is to think 44:33 dir. Maria Anna Tappeiner (2006)

In Sheila Heti’s interview with Dave Hickey, he says of Richard Serra that ‘he’s totally not hip, can’t speak without drawing’. Throughout this film Serra is seen carrying a sketchbook, and only once to we see him actually using it. I’ve often thought that Serra’s work will survive for as long as there’s no iron shortage, but give us another couple of hundred years of material squandering, and then will see if this stuff is really worth something as art. Serra’s obsession with drawing allows one to see his sculpture really as a drawing in itself - only he is marking three dimensional space with the material of steel, rather than working with graphite or charcoal on two-dimensions. This image illustrates this for me: a simple line drawing, highlighting the space of the sky, consisting of one of Serra’s steel sheets seen edge-wise. (Of course, this interpretation is aided by the framing offered by the film camera).

Serra’s work makes me question wether things like Stonehenge were really about the stars and the Equinoxes. Perhaps they too liked to mark space with massive objects? I hope that Serra’s work, if it survives future material scarcity, will never be interpreted as astrological charting. That would make our culture look unimaginative. It’s worth persevering the memory of these rusted pieces of steel as attempts to mark the landscape in a creative way, although here I’m again reminded of what bothered me about Johnson’s estate. The land was fine as it was, and along came some egotistical human set about ‘improving’ it by dumping a hunks of rusted metal in it. I don’t think we’ve (as a culture) quite figured out the balance between imagination and destruction.

Anish Kapoor | Art in Progress: Anish Kapoor 27:24 dir. John Wyver (2007)

Anish Kapoor discussing the maquette for his installation of Svayambh

This documents the Kapoor retrospective which opened three months ago (Nov 2007) in Germany. Kapoor is one of the bigger names in sculpture right now, but he’s another reminder that artists these days (when they are successful) make big work that highlights vulgar industrial excess (a block of red wax weighing 45 tons and measuring 10 x 4.5 x 3.5 meters. WTF?) and it’s all ok because there’s enough money in the world, it’s affordable to these aristocrats, and besides, what else are we going to do with 45 tons of red wax? Cover cheese with it?

Kapoor emphasizes that his work is about color. The monumentalism of its material just seems like a paradoxical cheap trick: an expensively produced contrivance. Like, this is what it takes to awe people today - not fragility, not the delicate, but the heavy metal (Serra) in your face ear-bleeding loud message. The red wax is awe-some because it’s big.

In a world where the British-American Empire is guilty of war crimes while we face environmental catastrophe, this type of work just pokes my cynicism. When the process is supposed to be an important part of the work, and when that process is fictionalized (as it appears to be in this case) than what is the work but bullshit? Asking me to imagine the process just renders such installations as the set-design for an unmade film that it so often appears to be these days. With that in mind, I’d much rather walk through the set of the now-filming Star Trek movie than look at a giant block of red wax smeared against a gallery’s wall. Then again, if I saw this is person I might disagree with what I’ve just written.

Sam Wagstaff | Black White + Grey: A Portrait of Sam Wagstaff 72:15 dir. James Crump (2007)

As Philippe Garner (Director of Photography at the London Christie’s) says near the end of this documentary, ‘It horrifies me to think that there’s a generation growing up now in photography that doesn’t know who Sam is. And yet his legacy permeates the field, there’s absolutely no doubt about that.’

Featuring an extensive appearance by Patti Smith, roommate of Maplethorpe and part of the relationship wherein Maplethorpe took advantage of his wealthy sugar-daddy Sam Wagstaff, this is also a reminiscence of the New York 1970s art-scene and gay-demi-monde. What I most appreciated learning was that Wagstaff was responsible for a vast bulk of the collection of Getty Images.

There was some structural problems with this film’s editing, near the middle it became too crowded with interviews and from that point began to seem incongruous. Nevertheless a nice history of a man who helped change the direction of art through his curation and who amassed one of the most important photo collections in the world.

Phyllis Lambert | Citizen Lambert: Joan of Architecture 52.00 dir. Teri Wehn-Damisch (2006)

One scene of this I recognized as something I’d seen on TVO’s Masterworks last year - a scene where Phyllis Lambert-neé Brofman is walking through a Mies van der Rohe building and showing disgust at the curtains put up in its lobby. If I remember correctly, that scene was originally from a Mies-centered documentary. One of the fellow-architects interviewed for this portrait of Lambert (ridiculously modeled on Citizen Kane for god-knows-what reason) stated that architecture as we know it today would not have been without Lambert, primarily because when her family wanted to build their corporate phallic symbol in New York, she reviewed the initial design and convinced them to hire Mies instead, the result being the Seagram building. This resulted in a collaboration between Mies and Phillip Johnson, reputations established and architectural history writ. Considering how devastating architecture has become (the renegade architect Christopher Alexander having declared most of it ‘insane’) Lambert’s role is either a good thing or a bad thing considering which side your on.

Rodin | Rodin: The Sculptor’s View 53:00 dir. Jake Auerbach (2006)

Interviews with contemporary sculptors on the legacy of Rodin. This is really for sculpture geeks. Featuring Antony Gormley, Marc Quinn, Rachel Whiteread, Rebecca Warren, Barry Flanagan, Tony Cragg, Anthony Carro and Richard Deacon. (I just copied that from the blurb, incase those names spark any interest on your part. Honestly, this one I found the least interesting, since I’m not a sculpture geek. It’s just sculptors talking shop, with requisite cinematic close ups of Rodin’s work).

Tickets and times for the screenings available at the links listed above.

07w46:6 : Movie Review: Blade Runner: The Final Cut (1982; 2007)

1982: The first edition of Blade Runner is released on 25 June.

1992: The second edition ‘Director’s Cut‘ is released on 11 July. At the time I’m a student of history and as a pet project I’m trying to write a history of Earth from the vantage point of the year 2400. In order to conceptualize the 22nd Century, I look to Blade Runner, and the images found in magazines, which are promoting the release of the Director’s Cut. But I live in rural Nova Scotia and I only know one person in my class who’s even heard of Blade Runner.

1993: I’m in Toronto that March, and look for a copy of the movie to buy. It’s not in stores anywhere.

Which is to say, it took me a few years before I got to see it for the first time. And once I did, it wasn’t the story-line that mattered so much as the sets; for years I’ve watched this movie as a series of montages in fantastic settings, the story-line connecting the scenes seemingly incidental and not even that interesting.

1999: I watch the Director’s Cut for the first time, and I find the extreme letter-boxing distracting to the extant that makes it almost unwatchable. I had the chance to see it on the big screen that spring but decided a now forgotten ’round-table’ conversation on art-something at the Khyber was more important.

So I can’t remember when I first saw Blade Runner, but it was probably one of the CityTv broadcasts that they ran on New Year’s Eve/Day at midnight through the 1990s. Ten years ago, January 1 1998 at 12am I recorded this broadcast and brought the VHS tape back to Halifax with me, where it quickly became wall-paper. Whenever it rained that year I would on returning to my small one bedroom basement apartment at the end of the day put in this copy and let in play in the background as I went about my work.

Later I found the Director’s Cut in the video store and rented it. I think that was the last time I watched the film straight through, sometime after its release in February 1999, and with memories of the voice over in mind, I had an its interpretive slant on the images. I found the Director’s Cut version was superior in its subtlety. This film, without Harrison Ford telling you what to think, invited you to consider it on your own terms.

At the time, Blade Runner was part of my extra curricular studies which also included the novels of William Gibson. For a time I was confused and thought I’d read somewhere that Blade Runner had influenced the writing of Neuromancer, (and later read that Gibson had actually been far more influenced by Alien, and imagined Neuromancer as a bit of background to that world). Given that the 21st Century was looming on us all in the late 90s, and my excitement at seeing that s-f time become real, Blade Runner and Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy were part of a process of understanding what kind of world I’d spend the rest of my life in.

Walking up Spring Garden Road in 1999, and seeing the recently installed refurbished pay phones, I recognized their design as something ‘futuristic’ (a term that I hear less and less often these days) and something that would have looked fine in Blade Runner. There seemed to be an attempt to update our world to match the set design of 1980s s-f films, and given how such films then as now use the experimental work of industrial designers, this all made perfect sense. In that way, s-f films function as marketing for new designs. It seems to me that things like Blackberries and iPods are so successful since they were preceded by lengthy marketing campaigns in the form of s-f novels and films, so that when they arrived, we knew what they were, and had a good idea of what we could do with them.

Watching Blade Runner and reading Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy was a way of prepping myself for the life I expected in Toronto, where I knew I’d end up. In fact, Gibson’s descriptions of the Sprawl always reminded me of Scarborough, so at first, experiencing mini-mall urban decay and franchise restaurants had the excitement of visiting a film-set from the future.

(I had the same experience when I visited Ottawa in early October 2000, just after Trudeau’s funeral, and the city reminded me of San Fransisco as seen in the Star Trek Voyager episode ‘Non Sequitur‘. Ottawa had not only cleaned itself up for the new century, but it was also a giant film set, constantly on our television screens hosting those actors of Parliamentary debate. Meeting someone by the Peace Flame, I looked down at the roses laid in honour of Trudeau’s memory, the flag above the Peace Tower at half-mast, as I’d seen in on television in the days before).

So to see Deckard eating noodles in 2007 is a different experience than seeing the same in Halifax in 1998, where chopstick joints were few and far between as they say. There was a Japanese restaurant on Argyle St but I was still too much of hick to understand the menu. Of course, after these years in the Toronto, Blade Runner just seems like a rainy night on Spadina, only more congested with archaic neon logos. Our bars aren’t filled with smoke and clay pipes, and while it probably will cost $1.25 to use a pay-phone in twelve years, the real Deckards by then are much more likely to use an old fourth generation iPhone.

As Gibson was saying over this past summer’s book-tour, even imagining a future in the first half of the 1980s was an act of optimism. I’m old enough to remember television stories about the Cold War and talk of Nuclear Winter. Blade Runner too offered a vision of the future, not quite post-apocalyptic but close, based loosely on Dick’s novel, which had projected a post-nuclear envirocide where ‘real’ animals were all but extinct. The novel’s Deckard dreamed of buying a ‘real’ goat as that society’s status symbol (as I recall, but I read the novel fifteen years ago). Now the movie has eclipsed the novel and the focus on artificial animals seems out of context, and we have a different understanding of artificiality. There’s enough GMO stuff around already that doesn’t seem any less ‘real’ to us, and the idea behind the Replicants is equally strange. Today it’s comprehensible as ‘Oh, there just genetically engineered humans with a four year life-span,’ which is a different play on 1982’s confusing ‘are they robots or something? How are they fake?’ And as we approach November 2019, it’s one time cyberpunk has become steampunk. Maybe our computers will accept voice commands by then, but we won’t have CRT-television set-top scanners at work printing out Polaroids of our 600+dpi zoom.

And it’s such scanning tech which has enabled this final cut version to come out. The original print was scanned at such an extremely high resolution that watching this version of Blade Runner is a new enough experience in itself - such clarity of image and level of detail was never seen before. This ‘restoration’ reminded me of that done on Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling - we live in an era of restoration, the grand updating to reflect cinema’s recorded vision, our imaginations inhabited by visions focused through Carl Zeiss lenses. Some critics then complained that the ‘brightening’ that occurred with the Michelangelo restoration destroyed the experience, while others welcomed the return to the ‘original’ condition.

Michelangelo’s Blade Runner: The Director’s Cut, circa 1970

Michelangelo’s Blade Runner: The Final Cut, circa 2000

Which is to say that the 21st Century experience of Michelangelo’s ceiling is different from that of the 19th, when the paintings were obscured by three centuries of candle-smoke and the like. And so with Blade Runner: in twelve years time, when it’s actually November 2019. undoubtedly this version of the film will be playing in theatres, and I most likely will find myself in front of the big screen once again, remembering both the time in 2007 when I saw it and the Halifax of twenty one years before. And if the film then still has any currency with the twenty-somethings of that world, what will their experience be of a quaint steam-punk movie depicting questionable dating practices (a forty something throwing a 20 year old girl up against the wall and telling her to say ‘kiss me’, followed the next day with a ‘do you love me?’ question), congested public spaces filled with cigarette smoke, and a level of visual detail lost on the earliest versions of the movie? Will copies of the original voice-over narrated film still be watched, or as ignored as the as murky as the reproductions of the Sistine Ceiling made in the 1960s? Treated, if anything, as historical curiosities, but not invitations to historical experience.

My sense is that Blade Runner is one of those rare works of art which is a master piece despite everything. One feels watching this that no one involved in the actual production had any idea they were making a masterpiece, and watching in straight through as I did, with the scenes visually clarified to highlight how they work together gives one the sense that the plot is kind of weak, in some places (as mentioned above with the romantic scenes) nonsensical, and that this film continues to work for the special effects alone. (It’s a silent movie originally provided with two voice-overs and now only one remains. Blade Runner is probably worth watching with Vangelis’ soundtrack alone). As a masterpiece it gets away from all intentions of its creators and that is one of the reasons it rewards viewing. No one knew what the fuck was going on with it or why, but it just works.

I’m reminded here of Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘story telling problem‘: that when we are confronted with something new we may not have ready-at-hand language to describe how we think about it or how it makes us feel. This in turn can cause us to make simplistic decisions rather than go with more ambiguous and complicated ones. This is how I understand the motivation for the first version’s voice-over narration. It was felt that the film needed some language to orient the viewer. But because this movie is so much about it’s visuals, it should be thought of as a form of animated narrative painting, for which language is not necessary.

So why then record my thoughts on it as I have? Because when I come home from seeing it on the big screen again in November 2019, I’ll want to read this record of what I thought of seeing it in 2007. And for that matter, I might as well share.

Blade Runner: The Final Cut will be released on DVD (in a 2-disc or 5 disc set) on December 18th.

Goodreads | 2007 week 46 number 5 (Classic Academic Bullshit)

Worth quoting in full (after all, it is a press release) with emph mine:

What’s in a name? Initials linked to success, study shows (Link)

Do you like your name and initials? Most people do and, as past research has shown, sometimes we like them enough to influence other important behaviors. For example, Jack is more likely to move to Jacksonville and marry Jackie than is Philip who is more likely to move to Philadelphia and marry Phyllis. Scientists call this phenomenon the “name-letter effect” and argue that it is influential enough to encourage the pursuit of name-resembling life outcomes and partners.

However, if you like your name too much, you might be in trouble. Leif Nelson at the University of California, San Diego and colleague Joseph Simmons from Yale University, found that liking your own name sabotages success for people whose initials match negative performance labels.

In their first study, Nelson and Simmons investigated the effect of name resemblance on batters’ strikeouts. In baseball, strikeouts are recorded using the letter ‘K.’ After analyzing Major League Baseball players’ performance spanning 93 years, the researchers found that batters whose names began with ‘K’ struck out at a higher rate than the remaining batters. “Even Karl ‘Koley’ Kolseth would find a strikeout aversive, but he might find it a little less aversive than players who do not share his initials, and therefore he might avoid striking out less enthusiastically,” write the authors.

In a second study, the researchers investigated the phenomenon in academia. Letter grades are commonly used to measure students’ performance, with the letters ‘A,’ ‘B,’ ‘C’ and ‘D’ denoting different levels of performance. Nelson and Simmons reviewed 15 years of grade point averages (GPAs) for M.B.A. students graduating from a large private American university.

Students whose names began with ‘C’ or ‘D’ earned lower GPAs than students whose names began with ‘A’ or ‘B.’ Students with the initial ‘C’ or ‘D,’ presumably because of an unconscious fondness for these letters, were slightly less successful at achieving their conscious academic goals.

Interestingly, students with the initial ‘A’ or ‘B’ did not perform better than students whose initials were grade irrelevant. Therefore, having initials that match hard-to-achieve positive outcomes, like acing a test, may not necessarily cause an increase in performance. However, after analyzing law schools, the researchers found that as the quality of schools declined, so did the proportion of lawyers with name initials ‘A’ and ‘B.’

The researchers confirmed these findings in the laboratory with an anagram test. The result of the test confirmed that when people’s initials match negative performance outcomes, performance suffers. These results, appearing in the December issue of Psychological Science, provide striking evidence that unconscious wants can insidiously undermine conscious pursuits.

###

Author Contact: Leif Nelson ldnelson@ucsd.edu

Psychological Science is ranked among the top 10 general psychology journals for impact by the Institute for Scientific Information. For a copy of the article “Moniker Maladies: When Names Sabotage Success” and access to other Psychological Science research findings, please contact Catherine West at (202) 783-2077 or cwest@psychologicalscience.org.

The Rady School of Management at UC San Diego educates global leaders for innovation-driven organizations. A professional school within one of the top-ranked institutions in the U.S. for higher education and research, the Rady School offers a Full-Time MBA program, a FlexMBA program for working professionals, undergraduate and executive education courses. Our lineage includes 16 Nobel Laureates (former and current faculty) and eight MacArthur Foundation award recipients. The Rady School at UC San Diego transforms innovators into business leaders.

Comments: I’m thankful that the author of this press-release took the time to explain letter grades to me, and thought it was interesting that students with initials ‘a’ and ‘b’ did not perform better than students with grade-irrelevant initials, which is only the entire rest of the alphabet. This alone seems to make such a correlation absurd.

The only reason I’d understand having the scale explained is to account for the international audience, but then again, this is written in English, so it’s not like there are a ton of Chinese out there who suddenly know about how North American grading works. For the Europeans, I imagine they’ve watched enough American movies and television to already be familiar with the system.

Is the argument then that the increased ’slightly less’ performance of the world’s Cynthia Donaldsons, Charles Davies’, Duncan Camerons is based partially on their names? So you’re saying that the reason Albert Burns got an 80, whereas David Connors got a 78 is because of their names?! Is this is why Cory Doctorow believes in ‘anti-copyright policies’!?

And this from a school that considers itself an educator of global leaders! No wonder the world is so fucked up. For one thing, such a study takes for granted a measurement of success which is itself a social construction dating back a century and out-of-step with the needs of present society. For example I imagine that to graduate with top marks from an MBA school you’d need to do rather poorly in the ethics department, especially environmental ethics. Failing the Humanities would also help, since at no point should you consider your employees as human beings desiring to live full lives. They must be refered to as ‘human resources’ (which would have served as a perfectly adequate term for slavery). Their natural desire to be as richly compensated as your gang at the top of the hierarchy must be kept in check and exploited for ’superior job performance’.

The fact that they felt the need to explain to us the letter-grade system seems to be evidence of an inability to imagine another, from which the ethical disasters of capitalism naturally follow. Further, the awarding of the marks leading to grades is mostly arbitrary, and dependent on many factors, including the fact that teachers are as biased as any other human being. So Connor gets 77 while James gets 80 because the teacher likes James more and gave a slightly higher mark to his answers over Connor, who doesn’t say a lot in class.

This study is trying to suggest that Connor, Cory, Charles, Cynthia, Duncan, David, etc, have an ‘unconscious attachment’ to their initials and are thus sabotaging their ’success’ in order to see it written on their tests as a reward counterbalancing the anguish of feeling like a failure. Not to mention the subsequent mockery from the class’ ’successful’ students (a mockery which is ‘unconsciously’ endorsed by the teacher since schools are supposed to help establish the pecking order, so that the authors of this press-release and study get sorted by high grades into university; then onto Masters and PHD programs and are then able to conduct such stupid studies open to such easy mockery).

As for the quoted baseball example, it is equally absurd and subject to the same critique offered above.

In my arbitrary grading system, based on my measurements of success, this study gets an F. Or, no, no, I’ll make the system so that L and N are the lowest grades, and J isn’t much higher, to make it fit with Leif Nelson’s and Joseph Simmons’ thesis.

The Toronto Star ran a story (Luminato: Success or big disappointment?) this morning offering readers the chance to compare and contrast two opposing views with regard to the inaugural Luminato festival. I missed almost all of the festival, which is to say, I didn’t find it very visible. I’m on Christopher Hume’s side that it represented ‘A businessperson’s notion of a festival‘ but I take issue with his write up: a corporate critic’s notion of a critique. There is far more that can be said about the failure of Luminato, a failure which may not be so explicit simply because the business people involved don’t have the imagination to understand the measure of the disappointment.

Hume writes in his third paragraph, defending some of the work:

‘And who couldn’t help but love Xavier Veilhan’s enormous black balls hanging in the atrium of BCE Place? Or Max Streicher’s floating horses at Union Station? Not to mention Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s interactive light show that has been illuminating the night sky for days?’

I take issue with that first sentence ‘.. who couldn’t love …?’ which is precisely the type of stock-phrase Orwell warned writers against sixty years ago. I raise my hand … I am the Dr. Who of that phrase, he who felt nothing for the works mentioned. I didn’t see the light show, but what did I miss that can’t be seen at the end of August during the CNE or during some other corporate promotion when they beam lights into the sky? I walked by BCE last week and saw the ‘big black balls’ (is there supposed to be a pun in there?) and yawned … like I haven’t seen that kind of thing a million times before. Newsflash: every Christmas you can see a giant dead tree at the TD complex and crap hanging from the ceiling at the Eaton Centre.

Last week in conversation I argued that given current law, in which corporations are considered people, it follows that corporations should have their own inhuman art events. The result is something like Luminato, a ten-day bore-fest while the fleshy people get an insomniac’s night at the cold end of September.

L’Oreal Luminato vs. Scotiabank Nuit Blanche

The most obvious initial criticism can be aimed at the names, and the requisite corporate sponsorship which makes it seem like the bank and the make-up company had something profound to contribute to culture. For centuries, arts festivals have amounted to ‘bread and circuses’ put on by the wealthy to keep the poor from rioting but (as both these festivals have shown) that is no longer necessary in the age of internet porn, video games, and the corporate video art of movies and television.

Nuit Blanche is a French import, and in Paris, the name means ‘white night’. Luminato is a made-up word which sounds Italian or Spanish, and obviously allusive of ‘light’. In English, both of these names just come off as pretentious. Consider that for the French, having a festival named in the common language suggests the integration of art with life, whereas, in English, having it come with a pretentious name suggests the separation of art from life. Apparently culture in Toronto, is something one ‘does’ it is not something that is ‘lived’. Further, the naming problem can equally be found in the awkward acronyms that are attached to the two other cultural events - TIAF and TAAFI. Are we stupid or something? Why can’t we have a simple English name for an art fair, one that indicates the lived experience of culture?

Having said this, I acknowledge the first steps that both festivals represent in moving toward such an integration … both attempts are steps forward in bringing this city a cultural experience.

But let us now consider what we might mean by that: a cultural experience? Is not the goal of both festivals to bring the city something of what Europe has been doing for centuries - cultural events born of a time when the wealthy needed their obvious circuses as much as the poor needed their non-technological entertainments? One thinks of the great weddings and performances, the type of theatrical productions linked to the Medici, and those that Leonardo da Vinci orchestrated for the Duke of Milan; in the sixteenth century, the mystery plays which helped inspire a young Shakespeare to write theatre which is now considered the paragon of English expression. To this day, there are street battles with rotten tomatoes, the running of bulls, and town-square horse-races and matadors … Europe knows something of communal culture, which survives because of human scale, it’s simplicity, it’s emotion, and it’s deep relationship to the past.

And so in this year, there are three examples of super-famous arts festivals happening in Europe: The Venice Biennial, Documenta, and Sculpture Projects in Munster, along with the annual events mentioned above.

Luminato? Nuit Blance? Compared to these we have a long way to go before we measure up. The works highlighted by Hume (there were horses at Union Station?) are examples for the type of redecoration which passes for public art today. I’m partially borrowing from Stephen Colbert’s famous critique of Christo’s ‘The Gates’ in which he mocked the orange curtains as ‘redecorating a bike path’ but it seems to me that the big black balls, the inflated horses, the London-blitz light show only serve to highlight our fear of beautiful environments which enable truly cultured lives, and of art that is made by human beings for human beings in small scale facilities and not former warehouse spaces.

Our society is cruel and appreciates violence, anger, and killing - in short, the inhumane. It’s made stars out of so many people who’s behavior is nothing short of reprehensible. It allows people like Harper, Bush and Blair to govern it. And it aligns culture with corporate sponsorship and thinks that ‘if it’s big it’s good’. Luminato was an arts festival by Boomers for Boomers - and so it brought Philip Glass and Leonard Cohen, Eric Idle and Gore Vidal to town. Given what I said earlier about insincere language, it could have accurately been called the Hasbeenato.

In the featurettes that comes with the Lord of the Rings DVDs, the production designers makes passing comments about how beautiful the sets were, and one designer stated he would have loved to have Bilbo Bagins’ study for himself. My question is, why is this the case? Why is it that we’ve reserved beautiful environments for fantasy films? Why couldn’t buddy build himself that same study if he was able to build it for the film? How is it that beautiful environments - and the culture that goes with it - has come to be seen as a guilty pleasure not for everyday life?

When I first noticed the CGI cityscapes being done for the last Star Trek series, I couldn’t help compare that ’starchicteture’ with the actual starchitecture going up in my city. Daniel Liebskind’s so called ‘radical’ architecture seem extremely conservative when we consider what we could be building instead, inspired by those alien city-scapes.

This is the disconnect between art and life which needs to be bridged - the separation of imagination into something reserved for fantasy, and the other reserved for quotidian functionality. Liebskind and Gehry provide the example of how that does not need to be the case: the technology is there to build whatever our imagination comes up with. Why do we keep settling for boring things, and limit these starchitects to imagining the unimaginative?

The idea that greatness is expensive (funds are still be raised to pay for the ROM and the AGO) is absurd given how much money is wasted everyday. The decadence of our culture isn’t only in our vast consumption of resources, the improvishment of the 90% of the world so that we can live in a society that is disproportionally and grotesquely rich: it’s rather the squandering that takes place (which makes it seem so unjustifiable to our governments that they should introduce limits and attempt to redistribute resources - it’s easier to continue to be inefficient).

Our inefficient use of our unfairly achieved wealth is triply insulting since we aren’t building the Pyramids - some great wonder of the world which could be considered a universal cultural treasure. No, instead we’re getting The Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, Luminato, Michael Lee Chin Crystals, Frank Gehry boats, and cold nights at the end of September for people who can afford to give up a night’s sleep. Considering the money that is potentially available, couldn’t we do something better, something we deserve?

Perhaps though, this all proves that we deserve nothing. These arts festivals amounting to easily forgettable trivialities, in which imagination is not free to express itself when our culture’s true imagination is dictated by television and movies (eagerly paid for and economically self-supporting). This all proves that culturally we already have way more than we need.

If we were asked to give something up in order that people elsewhere have more, chances are we’d barely notice. I barely noticed Luminato, and if the money used for it had been used for some kind of human betterment, we’d be better off. Waterfront light shows, inflatable balloons, hasbeen concerts are worth sacrificing to social justice.

(from Goodreads)

This Goodreads is in part of confession of ignorance, and how wonderful things can be when you don’t have the full picture. Which is to say, they’re fantastic when not dulled by the acquired cynicism of ‘an inside story’. And perhaps it is by coming to the experience initially ignorant, having that wonderful first impression, that the further nuance associated with it doesn’t diminish its glow.

Two of the items discussed here refer to art exhibitions on in Toronto presently, which is to encourage any of you for whom it is possible to visit them.

These four fantastics are presented in the order in which I experienced them.

I. Fantastic One | Darren O’Donnell at CCL1

Darren O’Donnell’s work over the past couple of years has been fantastic. His Suicide Site Guide to the City wowed me when I saw it in 2005, and apparently this was because of the ignorance mentioned above, as Kamal Al-Solaylee wrote in his review at the time ‘…only audiences who haven’t been to the theatre in say, a few decades, are expected to be dazzled by the presentation’. I admitted in my review that I was one of such an audience. Yet, how could we not appreciate Haircuts by Children or Ballroom Dancing for Nuit Blanche?

In an arts scene riven by competition and jealousies, Darren’s work is something that we all seem to appreciate without such pettiness. I recently attended the latest production from his theatre company, Diplomatic Immunities: THE END and was genuinely touched: Ulysses Castellanos singing Queen’s `We are the Champions` at the end of the show almost made me cry. This was the song voted on by children at a local school to be that which they wanted to hear at the End of the World. (My vote at the present time is either The Beatles’ `Tomorrow Never Knows` or `Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)` and as I listen to them nowadays I imagine it playing over the footage of this video.)

But what is it about Darren’s work along these lines that is so generally fantastic? For me it highlights what is perhaps a greater shift in our culture, which is a movement toward an interest in ‘real life’ (and to that end, reality-tv represents this transition, by using non-actors but still tying them to some sort of narrative structure). The work of Darren’s theatre troupe, Mammalian Diving Reflex, forgoes an explicit narrative structure and seemingly let’s that emerge on it’s own.

Here, I’m most inspired by a snippet of dialogue from a Star Trek show. In the Enterprise episode ‘Dear Doctor’ which first aired in January 2002, there’s a scene depicting movie-night on the starship; while watching ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ a 1943 film being shown in that time-frame of 209 years from its creation, the character Ensign Cutler asks the alien Doctor Phlox, ‘They don’t have movies where you come from do they?’ He replied, ‘We had something similar a few hundred years ago, but they lost their appeal when people discovered their real lives were more interesting’.

Now, imagine living on Phlox’s planet during that time of transition, when people were discovering their own lives were more interesting. Wouldn’t that time resemble our own, with diminishing box office returns, reality-tv programing undermining celebrity culture, a global communications network allowing for unedited dialogue within varying degrees of privacy, and the rise of the documentary genre in popularity?

This statement was typed out initially by a scriptwriter in Los Angeles at the beginning of this decade and perhaps was meant both as an inside joke to Star Trek’s fanbase (Shatner’s ‘Get a Life‘ skit from his 1986 appearance on Saturday Night Live) and reflecting the concern of Hollywood that they would lose their market. Three years later, Enterprise was cancelled, the only franchise since its resurrection twenty years ago to not last through seven seasons.

Leaving DI: The End four weeks ago I was convinced that our own lives were definitely more interesting. The performance incorporated an element of chance in its selection of two audience members during the course of the evening for interviews by the cast and attendees; on the night I was there, I was stunned by the answers given by the second girl chosen, who told us of saving the life of one of her friends during a climbing accident years before. Also, when asked a question along the lines of ‘why are we here’ she gave such an unexpectedly Buddhist/Eastern Tradition answer that I found myself saying ‘wow’.

The point made for me was that this girl, who had simply been someone sitting in the aisle in front of me, had a much more dramatic world inside her than anything I’m ever offered by fictional constructions, and I took this knowledge onto the street, walking with my companion who was someone new in my life and hence still full of mystery, and saw everyone around me with a new appreciation for our variety, our potential, and of the unknown masterpieces of real life.

This past Thursday, I attended Darren’s opening at The Centre of Leisure and Culture No. 1, Video Show for the People of Pakistan and India which consists of an approximately twenty-minute video and chapbooks of the blog Darren kept while on tour in Pakistan and India late last year. I’ve prompted Darren to place this video online eventually, and if and when that happens I’ll follow through with the link.

At the time of Darren’s trip, I was moved to contact CBC’s The Current because I’d recently heard an interview (begins at 7:45min) with the 24 year old Afghani woman Mehria Azizi who was doing a tour through Canada showing a documentary she’d made about women’s lives in her homeland. This had been one of the more insightful things I’d been exposed to with regard to this part of the world. I imagined Anna Maria Tremonti asking Darren about his conversation with Mike the soldier on the plane, or asking for stories from Darren’s experience with the humanity of these people. I figured it would have fit into The Current’s mandate as I understood it: to educate, to inform, to bring us perspective. Darren’s work deserved this national audience. There was a bit of a followup from someone who was going to forward the info to a producer but in the end nothing came of it. Meanwhile, due to the unreliableness of the CBC’s internet stream, and what I see as too much focus on Canada’s military presence in Afghanistan, I’ve avoided listening to The Current at work for the past couple of months, preferring instead France Culture or the BBC. I did catch the broadcast the other day of their self-flagellation on under and mis-reporting the story of Global Warming. Anna Maria was somewhat bothered by a statement of one of the scientists: ‘never underestimate the illiteracy of reporters’.

The following morning, (that of March 9th) the CBC included in its news roundup the visit by Canada’s Governor General to the troops in Afghanistan, and there was something said about ‘putting a human face’ on the story (mov and realmedia). What’s unfortunate is that Michaëlle Jean, who in the past has seemed an intelligent, well informed woman, was responsible for the stupidest statements in the report. ‘There’s no future without women …’. No shit. But perhaps the real fault lies with the editors of the video, or the fact that she used to be a reporter.

The evening before I’d been to Darren’s show to see the Pakistan video, the talk of putting a human face struck me as more this meaningless political rhetoric. Why are all these human faces those from Canada? Where do we ever see the human faces of the people we’re supposedly helping? How is their humanity ever brought to our attention? The fact that Darren could undermine the agenda of Canada’s national broadcaster with a 20 minute video perhaps suggests just how under-served we are by photo-ops, predictable rhetoric, focus on soldiers, and all the other regular bullshit. My understanding of the situation and of the people involved has been greatly enhanced by Darren’s first-person and personal reporting and the fact that the CBC found him fit only for their hipster-oriented Definitely Not the Opera kind of suggests how little they take his work seriously … something silly for the kids right?

II. Fantastic Two | Monks in the lab

I watched/listened to this video on Friday at work, and it was fantastic. I especially liked the idea that the effect of mediation was to practice (and thus grow new neurons) paying attention to autonomic processes, which allows us to have greater awareness of our emotions and perceptions, so that we do not need to find ourselves ‘out of control’ or ’swept away’ by strong impulses. In my dream of the future, I want children to be taught meditation in kindergarten, as an essential life skill, just as much as doing your physical exercises and learning your maths.

Monks in the Lab | Buddhist Media.com

( Real Player Broadband Link)

( Real Player Narrowband Link/)

( Windows Media Player)

III. Fantastic Three | Zin Taylor at YYZ

As I’ve noted about Darren’s work, that it seems to miraculously inspire more admiration than jealousy, the work of Zin Taylor could be accused of inspiring more jealousy than admiration. Consider the facts as they appear: part of the Guelph university educated elite clique, he gets to be in show after show in prestigious galleries with work that is sometimes weak (the piece at The Power Plant in 2005 for example) and Taylor’s continual presence in the Toronto art scene PR seems to be attempting to break the record established by Derek Sullivan. Both artists appear to have been elevated to that collection of what seems like the less than ten artists who are overexposed in Toronto and who are continually asked to ‘represent’ this city of millions to others and to itself.

And so it was with ambivalence that I went down to the YYZ opening on Friday night; a chance to drink beer, be social, see some people I like to talk to and consider friends, and be ignored by those who used to say hi to me but now just think I’m an asshole or something. I wasn’t at all expecting Taylor’s video to win me over as it did, and it is now on my highly recommended list.

And yet, my appreciation for this work was based on my ignorance of its subject matter. I recall seeing years ago the call for submissions from the Yukon asking for artists to come on up and be inspired. I also recall hearing that Allyson and Zin, two artists I’d recently met through a friend, had been chosen to go. And so I knew over the past few years that Allyson and Zin had a connection to the Yukon and that they were making work about it.

With Put your eye in your mouth (which a friend suggested meant ‘digest what you see’) Zin has made a sort of fake documentary on a fake thing: Martin Kippenberger’s metro-net station in Dawson City. Now, my ignorance here was based on being familiar with Kippenberger’s name but not his work, so when watching the video, I thought Zin had seen this structure and made up an elaborate history for it, tying it to some art-star’s name in order to get in the trendy props to the masters. Turns out the Metro-Net was legit (also here), and yet this only diminishes by a bit the overall video, which is still fantastic. It is this type of elaborated imagination that I want to experience with art, and in as much that conceptual art usually goes for obscure one-liner cleverness, I hate it for its denial of the imagination. Now, considering Taylor’s background from Canada’s new conceptual It-School, I suppose I can say he’s showing that you can be both conceptual and imaginative, and the product is better for it.

IV. Fantastic Four | Kuchma’s Thrush Holmes reviews

The suspicions I had of Zin Taylor’s elaborate imagining of what could have been ‘the mine-shaft entrance’ follows on January’s suspicions that the opening of Thrush Holmes Empire was part of an elaborate joke.

There’s been talk in the scene of it being some kind of hoax, and personally I thought this was the case. I was trying to keep my mouth shut about it all, not wanting to ruin it, but now that I’ve been assured that this is not a masterpiece-parody on the art world constructed by Jade Rude and Andrew Harwood (the co-directors of the Empire space) (’they’re not that clever’ I was told), I guess I share my disappointment that this really is the work of a presumptuous and pretentious young man who makes terrible work. As I said at the opening in January, ‘if this work is a parody, it’s a masterpiece, but if it’s legit I feel sorry for the guy’. In other words, in my ignorance, I imagined a fantastic scenario in which Jade and Andrew had collaborated on making quick, easy, and lazy work to fill up wall space in time for the opening, and hired an actor to play Thrush Holmes (which plays too close to the great 90’s indie-rock band Thrush Hermit). No mother names their son Thrush, so whoever this guy is, his wallet certainly doesn’t contain ID linking him closely with Joel Plaskett’s 90s project.

(A Thrush Hermit Aside

Seeing Ian McGettigan cover The Wire’s ‘I am the Fly’ in 1999 was part of the reason I gave up watching live music once I moved to Toronto - nothing would ever top that, and I prefer to have my indie-music memories packaged around my experience in Halifax rather than have continued on with the ringing ears of today’s stuff. Even though that meant I missed out on seeing the shit like this live).

The only person who seems to be addressing this Thrush Holmes issue is Michael Kuchma.

As I mentioned in the last Goodreads, I was part of a panel discussion at Toronto’s Gallery 1313 on art criticism. I had a good time and it was well attended despite being both a Monday and the weather being less than conducive to a social gathering. (The event was recorded and will potentially be made available as a podcast, and if/when that happens I’ll send out a link). During the Q&A, I was asked a question from a fellow in the audience who later identified himself via a comment on the BlogTo blurb writen by fellow panelist Carrie Young the day after.

Michael Kuchma is trying to write some thoughtful criticism about the Toronto scene and I glad that I was able to learn about it through these circumstances. I appreciate his take not only on the Thrush Holmes stuff but also on the Toronto scene in general, and I also appreciate seeing the influence of the panel talk in his writing: I guess it was worth something in in the end.

In the second link (’why we Should…’) make note of point number 3:

Perhaps some fear that Holmes is orchestrating a brilliant art-stunt, and that passing judgment right now puts one in the vulnerable position of looking stoooopid and hasty on the day when Holmes comes clean with his Machiavellian master plan.

This is pretty much why I’ve kept quiet for this long, not wanting to ruin for everybody, and wanting to see Garry Michael Dault embarrassed for ‘falling for it’ as he had a positive review in the Globe & Mail on the day after the opening. (Why would I like to see Dault with egg on his face? Because Dault’s work as a critic is worthless - his reviews are almost always positive, unless he dares insinuate that someone has skills, at which point they are dismissed as being ‘illustrative’). A hoax or not, Kuchma’s thoughts on the whole matter are the most substantial I’ve come across and I’m glad he’s putting them out there.

Seenster | Michael Kuchma
http://t-dawt-seenster.blogspot.com/

Thrush Homes Walks a Razor Thin Line | Michael Kuchma (Feb 28 2007)
http://www.goodreads.ca/shorty/blogspot/seenster1/

Why we SHOULD talk about Thrust Holmes | Michael Kuchma (March 7 2007)
http://www.goodreads.ca/shorty/blogspot/seenster2/

Mr. Mee by Andrew Crumey (2000)

Proust has already come up twice - first in Taylor’s discussion, but also it the title of the Gordon Bell presentation. What better way to introduce Mr. Mee? The truth is I wanted to publish a review of Mr. Mee in the summer of 2005, and it is a novel I read in the summer of 2004, but obviously didn’t get around to it until now. Mr. Mee is a novel of three story-lines, with two of the major players being Rousseau and Proust; Rousseau as a character, and Proust as an idea. It is set a decade ago, in 1997, during the early years of the internet - which is an important element to the fiction. The eponymous character of Mr. Mee is a retired, naive academic who buys a computer in order to use the nascent World Wide Web to try and track down an obscure book. In a Borgesian allusion, Rosier’s Encyclopaedia has been referenced in the bibliography of a book he brought home from a leisurely afternoon at the used bookstore.

Andrew Crumey shifts the scene to tell us more about the Encyclopaedia by bringing us back to 18th Century Paris, and introducing us to two characters, Ferrand and Minard, two down-on-their-luck copyists who are commissioned to copy a bunch of nutty writings by a Mr. Rosier. F & M are named after two people who Rousseau wrote about in his autobiography, and Crumey’s speculation on their backstory, and its consequences were outstanding. This novel is simply intellectually delightful in that regard. Perhaps they had something to do with Rouseau’s famed paranoia? Maybe they thought Rousseau a murderer? And perhaps their paranoia was fueled by their work fair-copying this work of an 18th Century genius who’d thought up 20th Century quantum physics and binary computers in 18th Century terms? (One of my favorite parts of the book describes Minard’s construction of a digita-binary computer out of string and bits of paper, and he is heard to complain about needing more memory. It seems that even in the 1760s, it was desirable to have more RAM).

In the 1990s, a professor lies in a hospital bed, contemplating his life over the past several months, and the possibility of his death. He had been a professor of Proust, and had come to teach this work of autobiographical literature after an adolescent infatuation with the work of Rousseau. And so, as he writes his memoir, he reflects both on Rousseau and on Proust. This is the tour-de-force of the novel. I found this the most satisfying, and appreciated it’s intricate subtleties. The professor comes across as just another dime-a-dozen mediocre academic who live their quotidian lives a students and commentators of past human achievement. The Proust-bug has not yet bitten me, and it was here I learned of how Proust described his magnum opus as being ‘about an I who isn’t I’. The introduction of this thought in the professor’s memoir raises the question of how much of his text is about an I that isn’t he. The overall impression is that, faced with impending death, Dr. Petrie has at last given it a try, written his work of autobiography about and I who isn’t I, inspired by his mastery of knowledge of these two masters of the art. Dr. Petrie ignores whatever sense of failure that has brought him to this point - the broken heart, his cancer, the sense that it was his attempt to initiate an affair with a student which brought on the illness. Instead of being cowed by a sense of mediocrity in comparison to his literary heroes, he gives it a go and in so doing constructs a literature of the self. The added poignancy comes from the embarrassed recounting of the infatuation which he blames for the illness out of a sort of hubris, and it is perhaps through this honest memory that his work becomes literary and becomes the final accomplishment of his life.

And perhaps here it is worth remembering that a year ago, James Frey was in the news for his book of autobiography, and it should be an embarrassment to anyone who claims to run a book club to not understand the need to embellish, to lie, to cheat the details as (what used to be called in a more literate age) poetic license.

Crumey’s skill is seen in his ability to weave together the tale of naive Mr. Mee, the octogenarian centre of the story, with the dying professor and the story of Rouseau’s Minard and Ferrand, and in the process, imagine 20th Century theoretical physics in 18th Century terms, remind us of what the internet was like a decade ago, muse on human foibles and the nature of autobiographical literature. Perhaps an even more central thesis to the story is that consciousness comes from writing, or at least, from the type of contextualization of memory that can come from writing. If we are not telling the story, than it didn’t really have to happen. Ultimately it ties into the nature of memory in our lives and the nature of identity as a narrated self.

There’s an interview with Slavoj Zizek from the Guardian which pretty much confirms my suspicions as to why I shouldn’t take him seriously - I first heard of him a couple of years ago through a friend who was briefly infatuated with his writing; then looking into it I found it unintelligible, and then further it became Lacan inspired nonsense, and now James Harkins has laid it all out for us, in an interview subtlety designed to impress those with my prejudices, which he perhaps shares.

My highlights:

A one-man heavy industry of cultural criticism, the 58-year-old Zizek has authored more than 50 books, which have been translated into more than 20 languages, on subjects as diverse as Hitchcock, Lenin, and the terrorist attacks of September 11. His brand of social theory - a peculiar amalgam of Karl Marx, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and the trash can of contemporary popular culture - has long afforded him a cult following among fashionable young academics.

Comment: Marx and Lacan are two examples of pseudo-science, and refering to the trash can of pop culture is to say that as trash perhaps it’s not something worth dealing with. Zizek appeals to ‘fashionable young’ academics - which is to say the naive, impressionable, and shallow. Would it not be true that to build arguments out of things not really worth considering is to build an argument itself not worth considering, the equivalent of fantasy?

If I were as fame hungry and vain as Zizek, I might want to start interpreting everything through the lens of Brothers Grimm fairy tales.

No longer tethered to a single institution, Zizek spends his time roving between speaking engagements at institutions all over the world. He is leaving London first thing tomorrow, he tells me, for Paris to be profiled by the newspaper Libèration. Then he is off to headline a Design Congress in Copenhagen (”�Ǩ7,500,” he shouts to me, still under the photographer’s cosh, “first-class everything, and all that for 40 minutes selling them some old stuff”) and then it is back to Slovenia.

Comment: First class everything, eh? Not bad for a Revolutionary Marxist. The type that overthrows exploitative aristocracy to become aristocracy themselves. Some animals are more equal than others.

On April 1 this year (”a great day to get married”), he married a 27-year-old Argentinian former lingerie model and now spends one third of his time in Slovenia looking after his young son from a former marriage, a third of his time with his new wife in Buenos Aires, and the rest of his time on the road.

Comment: Here we have the degradation of men, especially of older men, who are represented as commitment phobic and chasing after women young enough to be their daughters. Here we have Zizek knocking up a ‘former lingerie model’ which is to say, she had nice tits and an exemplary body, and probably cannot converse at Zizek’s level when it comes to ideas. Zizek has a child from a former marriage, which is also to imply that the lingerie model is a home-wrecker. Zizek, being the ethical fellow we know him to be (”Come on,” he says. “I don’t have any problem violating my own insights in practice.”) could not resist the temptation offered by his new wife. In the end, one is left with thinking: what a fucking bastard.

And not to mention the whole thing about him resembling Jesus.

Geesus.

So, like I mentioned in my last posting, I was at the MOCCA opening last week. I wasn’t planning to go, really - I planned on going to the latest show at YYZ, but a friend told me about the MOCCA party where she was going so we made plans to meet there. I arrived early, after checking out the show at 401 Richmond, and then my friend showed up, but she got into interesting conversations with other people, and I didn’t want to interrupt, so I wandered around introducing myself to other people for kicks (which I guess is a way to say that the art didn’t hold my attention). But I guess it never really does for very long, especially at openings, and especially at openings in the summer which also consider themselves parties. ‘Seen one, seen ‘em all’ I’ve been known to say, and the thing is that’s not really unfair since artists are so invested in the idea of a series. Perhaps I’ve opened myself up to the criticism that I don’t know what I’m doing - writing about art and all - but I tend to think it’s a skill acquired from the channel surfing culture. New technologies introduce new skill sets and exploit unknown talents, n’est-ce-pas?

So, in MOCCA, taking up the main exhibition space, are a bunch of drums. Drums as sculpture, drums in videos, mechanized-robotized drums. I’m sure there’s lost here to appreciate if you like music and drums, but since I’m not passionate about either, I don’t really have anything to say. Some people like Crest, I like Colgate; this is Crest art to me. That’s all.

I suppose I should learn my lesson from my last posting and bitch about it, which would raise some ire and get everyone out to see what all the fuss is about. All I can say is that I’m still figuring out this whole art-criticism thing, which doesn’t even matter anyway since people are quite capable of making up their own minds. I guess when I started this gig I figured I’d try to weigh in with my two cents now and then, encourage people to see this and check out that, give them some ins to the scene. So, with that in mind, I’m saying: there’s a new show at MOCCA. It’s next door to a show at Edward Day which is going to have more visitors now than it would have had otherwise because I said that show was boring. Well, I find the drum show at MOCCA boring too, but for different reasons: cuz it ain’t my cup of tea is all. That’s not to say it shouldn’t have been exhibited in the first place, it’s just to say that I’m a nerd who doesn’t like the whole indie-music convergence with fine art thing, but that’s just me. It’s workin’ for everyone else. So be it.

This drum thing is called Demons stole my soul: rock n’ roll drums in contemporary art. Rock on.

The show I did appreciate at MOCCA is in the backroom, featuring Karma Clarke-Davis, Edith Dakovic, Nicholas Di Genova, Istvan Kantor, Geoffrey Pugen, Floria Sigismondi.

I like Di Genova’s pieces; I curated him into the YYZ zine last January, where he worked with that document’s newsprint to publish nice black and white drawings. Here, he’s showing large images drawn on mylar using animation ink, to give the colours a nice matte effect. I think I’m struck by his pictures because they have this relationship to Japanese animé which I spent my childhood adoring, as did many of us. Animé holds my interest because of the combination of striking rendering, unique stylization, and usually a philosophical underpinning to the story line. By tapping into these associations, Di Genova is able to produce work that holds my interest beyond my usual cursory glance.

In the same room is a video I didn’t watch by Geoffrey Pugen. Or I should say I watched it but didn’t put the headphones on to hear the soundtrack, mostly because the two available were almost always in use. Next to that is one of Istvan Kantor’s machine-sex-action videos … the point of which I always find is lost because I’m distracted by the fact that I know the people writhing around and I’m thinking ’so-and-so has a nice body’. I think it’s all supposed to be about dehumanization, and machines, and porn, but it comes across as a fetish video of all three, with acting worse than what you usually get in a porn video. But hey, he’s famous now so who cares right? Nowadays, it’s like you’re not a real curator if you don’t take Kantor seriously, so throw him in with the kids.

Sigismondi is another one of these famous people who’s shown with the MOCCA before, when it was up in North York, and she’s got a mannequin with horn legs if I remember correctly. The show is called Hybrids, and so it makes sense under this curatorial theme of what Robert Storr would associate as grotesque. I suppose this is a polite Canadian version, extremely understated, of what he was getting at last year with his SITE Santa Fe show: artists mash things up, come and check it out how weird it all is.

Edith Dakovic has the most repellent pieces, to my Colgate mind, consisting of sphere coated with the type of silicon used to simulate skin in special effects. Little hairs here and there, and moles cover it’s healthy Caucasian surface, the illusion eliciting the reaction of it being some form of life, some deformed animal grown in the lab for organ harvesting and the usual nightmare scenario.

Karma’s video must have been between loops because I didn’t see it and don’t know what it’s about.

Ok, to summarize then: what awaits you when you cross the parking lot, currently marked by that gorgeous installation of blue tree stalks, is Edward Day on your left, who’s showing boring realist work and other stuff that didn’t catch my attention; straight-ahead in MOCCA, you’ll find a floor full of drums cast in bronze or whatever, some of them done up with robotics, along with videos and other things; in the back room at MOCCA, a show called Hybrids which is the only thing that caught my interest. There’s probably something else which I’m forgetting, but hey, I was socializing that evening, not looking for the god of the art religion.

More info: MOCCA website (which is in desperate need of redesign).

I was at the MOCCA opening the other night (more on that later) and while there checked out the Dan Hughes show at Edward Day next door. To be absolutely honest, I was looking at the paintings while in the middle of introducing myself to a girl who turned out to be a painting student at OCAD, so we talked about it from the perspective of both being familiar with the medium. At one point I said, ‘these are too 17th Century for me,’ referring to their dark colour schemes. And I bring that up only to say straight away that the paintings weren’t absorbing 100% of my attention.

I’ve recently begun to paint again after not taking it that seriously over the past few years, and I’ve been going after this New Old Mastercism that Donald Kuspit began talking about 6 years ago. Dan Hughes’s show is just down the street from Mike Bayne’s, which just closed at Katherine Mulherin’s gallery, which I wrote about here and which mentioned Kuspit’s defence of superior craft ‘enhancing sight to produce insight’.

I’m afraid that the only immediate insight I got from Dan Hughes’s show is that varnish makes paintings very shiny. (That and what follows after a couple of days reflection …). My own recent experiences with practicing the craft of painting, in relation to rendering and toward the achievements of the Old Masters is that craft alone clearly isn’t enough.

I’m reminded of one of the more famous excerpted essays I’ve encountered reading art and literary criticism, in which R.G. Collingwood states in his 1938 book, The Principles of Art, (quoting Coleridge): ‘we know a man for a poet because he makes us poets’, as Collingwood explains, ‘the poet is a man who can solve for himself the problem of expressing it, whereas the audience can only express it when the poet has shown them how’.

Our everyday familiarity with language is enough to help us appreciate those who can use words well, and how a well turned phrase can unlock for us understanding not available by being inarticulate (hence my loathing of jargon based literary and art writing).

We don’t seem to share such a facility with images, especially crafted ones, since most of us don’t draw and paint, although most of us do take photographs. So someone like Dan Hughes, just because he can paint like that, means he gets a pass by default into a show. It also seems to mean that those who can’t draw and paint are awestruck at first impression by his ability, so much so that the impression is one of appreciation, and if they can afford it, the seduction of their chequebooks.

Some stuff, by what it represents, will grow in value - like Mike Bayne’s, whose images of today’s everyday will appear quaint in a century and will tie that time to ours, giving them a sense of where they came from. But Hughes’s images are already boring, and I’m uncertain as to how they could grow in value. Nothing represented is worth sharing, none of the images will help the future understand its past. Skulls, self-portraits, business men on stairs … been there done that and gave away the t-shirt. I don’t write this or what follows to be mean, nor to causally disregard it simply for the clichés that they are as much as I mean it as constructive criticism with hopes that Hughes will grow as an artist and that he can put his considerable skill to better use in the future.

And here I’ll acknowledge what these images must be all about: they’re studio exercises he’s trying to offload because he doesn’t want to store them somewhere. He must be thinking, ‘might as well sell them to someone who’d like to have it in their livingroom’ which is all fine and dandy, but let’s be clear about that.

I need to point out that the main thing that makes these images uninteresting is the dark colour scheme - like I said, it’s too 17th Century, when it was fashionable for paintings to be dark. There was a reason for that then, namely, the high cost of coloured pigments against the sort of mass production of images for people’s homes - for a while there, paintings were affordable for the masses. For his own reasons, Hughes has chosen to ignore the past 150 years of paint and pigment development. And part of this criticism also fits into my pet theory of Canadian painters being united via a coincidental (aka cultural) appreciation for bright pallets - something that would seem to have lots to with our being a northern latitude country. So, if he’d used bright colours, filled these paintings with light, taken advantage of the range of affordable pigments available to early 21st Century painters - then I imagine these images transformed, amazing, worth going to see.

As it is, we can do that ourselves with Photoshop. In that sense Hughes is accidentally at the cutting edge of what’s going in our culture at large. Recognizing that the form crafted in the studio (the painting as object) is ultimately only the first version and separable from the content (the image), which can be modified, and re-edited, manipulated, etc. One day, one of these images of one of these paintings will have its levels adjusted in Photoshop before being printed for a bedroom wall. And that is what it comes down to. He, nor the gallery, nor the buyer, have the final say of what these images are supposed to look like. Since they seem to be nothing more than an exercise, you wouldn’t really be re-writing their meaning because they don’t mean anything in the first place.

And hence the image I’m using to illustrate this entry - folded and torn, it’s the reproduced image of a rather large painting, once again reproduced here and modified by my use of it that evening to exchange email address and give out the address as to where we were all going afterward. It perhaps more than anything communicates what this show is all about to me - a decoration to daily life, a nice backdrop to find some common ground with a pretty stranger.

Dan Hughes at Edward Day Gallery until June 12th

(image of Dan Hughes’s invite after a night of email exchanges and note-taking)

Ah the isms, can’t live with ‘em, can’t have good arguments without them. And for the past thirty years, we’ve seen a flourishing of isms, one that could almost be said to have sprung from the fertilized soil of the World War’s dead a generation prior. To some they were flowers, to others they have been weeds.

And JRS is one who’s seen them as weeds. I’ve come to find them somewhat noxious myself, which is one of the reasons that I’ve grown fond of his thinking, and over the winter I read most of his books. It is also for that reason that I was particularly excited when I learned in March that he had a new book coming out. There was also a geeky pleasure to know that with the publication of a new text he’d be speaking in Toronto at some point, which turned out to be sooner rather than later.

JRS spoke at U of T’s MacMillan Theatre a week ago now, which I eagerly attended and like the keener I am took a seat dead centre in the third row because lectures for me are more exciting than rock concerts.

Having received a review copy of The Collapse of Globalism a week and half before, I must say that I was only able to get half way through it before seeing JRS in person. The first half of the book traces the history of the globalist ideology, which swept through the governments of the Western world over the past 30 years (which is also equivalent to my lifetime). But, even JRS conceded while presenting an overview of his arguments, ‘what could be more boring than economics’. I tried to cram last week to get ready for the talk, but found myself easily distracted by such mundane activities as mowing the lawn, because it was sunny out and I didn’t want to be stuck inside reading boring economic history, albeit written with Saul’s wonderful style. There is also the element of extreme annoyance at seeing, in the black and white of the text, at how stupid the political leadership has been, those which Saul refers to as ‘elites’ in his indiviudal way (a sort of Saul glossary is available through his 1994 book, The Doubter’s Companion).

Near the end of his talk, Saul referenced the coming democratic crisis, noting that the political energy of a critical mass of people under 40 is going into NGOs and similar enterprises, seeking influence over political decisions, and noting how that’s all they can ever hope to accomplish. (He spoke at length on this in his inaugural Lafontiane-Bladwin speech five years ago, from which I excerpted the relevant portion for my Goodreads list). But, this follows from the globalist ideology, because as he noted, what better way to drive young people away from politics than to keep telling them they don’t have power, that the whole thing is run by corporations?

That’s been the story that I grew up with. It’s also one of the reasons I find someone like Saul so refreshing, because he’s part of that generation seduced by the neo-conservative economists who call themselves neo-liberal (liberal as in ‘free trade’ etc), and yet speaks for the other side; speaks in a way that gives me hope for a better tomorrow, as soon as my generation is given the power to change things. As a traitor to the ideology of his generation, I see Saul as a potential hero to the younger ones.

He’s certainly been my intellectual hero, as he’s attacked those who’ve who constructed another an ism to be a prism: the prism of economics to explain the rainbow variety of the world’s reality. Of course, it should be obvious of how much of this is nonsense. But we’ve lived under this reality because the political leadership essentially through up their hands and said, ‘it’s inevitable, we can’t do anything about it’.

Saul has particular loathing for that word, ‘inevitable’. It’s background was a little mysterious to me when I first heard him speak 7 years ago. He’s continually bitched in his books at how the political leadership was arguing that globalization was inevitable, and there was nothing they could do except jump on the bandwagon. He explained where this came from: the apparent root of this loathing which has spurned him on to write all these books over the past while.

While he was in Paris in the early 70s (during the time I presume in which he was working on his PHD thesis on the modernization of France and basking in his own hero-worship of De Gaulle) the then president of the country, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing came on television to announce (and I paraphrase Saul’s paraphrase here): ‘thank you very much for electing me, you’re all very smart to have done so since I know everything, and I’ve studied the problem, and concluded there’s nothing I can do about it.’ It’s worth quoting the relevant passage from the book:

“Giscard came to power in the midst of those seminal crises of oil, inflation, unemployment, and no growth. He counterattacked as a technocrat could and made no impact … Giscard became bewildered. Discouraged.

“Then one night he appeared on television to address the people. He told them that great global forces were at work. These were new forces. Forces of inevitability. Forces of economic interdependence. There was little a national government could do. He was powerless.

“This historic appearance was probably the original declaration of Globalization as a freestanding force escaping controls of all men. It was also the invention of the new leader: the manager as castrato. This approach created quite a fashion among leaders at all levels. The easy answer to the most difficult problems was increasingly to lament publicly that you were powerless. Impotent. That your large budgets, your public structures, the talents and determination of your population could make little difference. These were not problems to be solved. These were manifestations of the global reality.”

Here seems to be the roots of his argument against technocratic experts and impotent political leadership and throwing one’s hands up in the face of inevitability. The crisis was an economic one, simply a lack of imaginative thinking. Saul argued in the Unconscious Civilisation that since politicians had given up leadership in favour of management, all they could ever do is manage, they didn’t have what it takes to lead society with creative solutions. I guess this is where I got my fire burning toward civic engagement, and the lingering bitterness I have toward the artworld in which I’m immersed: because if artists are the ones society trains to be creative, they’re wasting everyone’s time with these installations.

Not that I’m advocating all artists go into politics (remembering the Hitler example, I don’t think that’s such a good idea for the most part) but he argued last week that we’re in a vacuum now. Since 9/11, the castrated politicians suddenly realise they have balls and are pulling the strings, but they come from a generation who went into politics with the understanding that they would be making concessions to corporations. Now that the situation has reversed itself, and corporations are showing no respect for community infrastructure, the governments don’t really know what to do. Hence, Ottawa for past six months.

I see that whole circus as the chickens coming home to roost: the consequences of what he spoke about in his Massey Lectures ten years ago. At the same time, he’s married to the head of the government, so the chicanerie doesn’t seem so bad, since Mom and Pop have good heads on their shoulders even though they aren’t really supposed to have any influence. (I have faith that everything will turn out fine because Saul has the ear of the GG).

Now I have to bring something up which bothered me about his argument,something he opened himself up to. It’s a case of illogic, for he stated that one can recognize an idealogue by how much they won’t even admit to potentially being wrong; to the idealogue, what they believe is simply ‘true’. This got some laughter from the audience, but from then on, I wanted him to address the ‘truth’ of his arguments. He’s got it pretty good right - married to the Governor General; and he gets to write books destined to be bestsellers, he gets to work out the thoughts via lectures delivered on the ribbon-cutting itinerary, and he draws a sell-out crowd of the city’s thoughtful citizens. He gets to preach to a choir, and those unlike myself who haven’t reached the level of the sychophantic I imagine are at least impressed by His Excellent resumé.

Which is all to say that JRS is enabled in promoting his own ideology. His own ism. This one is older than most, being the one called humanism. As I see myself most influenced by those set of ideas, and operating within that history myself, it follows that Saul’s ism arm me for great arguments, and are breath of fresh air in the sickly academic atmosphere of bullshit that I’ve associated in.

I first saw Saul speak at Kings College in Halifax in 1998, and I found it very influential. It’s perhaps one the reasons I’m writing this now, on a blog I mean, since the way he disparaged the elites then as ‘not doing their job’ (in the earlier books he speaks of Canada’s elites as being the laziest in the world) prompted me to believe in the power of the public intellectual. That ideas and art and all this stuff that I was studying at the time belonged to everybody, and that it was part of a civic duty to criticize bad ideas as much as it was a duty to vote and follow politics because it’s there that decisions are made that affect our lives.

His relentlessly fair approach as well, as mocking what is foolish, and conceding his own defects now and then, is one of the reasons I find his writing extraordinary and highly influential. The belief is that we’re all in this together. We all want what’s best. There are many forces of divisiveness that we need to overcome. Perhaps his basic argument is ‘pay attention’. In that way you become conscious, and can decide for yourself. That’s the essence of a democracy, people deciding their own future, rather than giving up in the face of inevitability. That way, we emerge from being an Unconscious Civilisation.

You have the choice to read this book or not. You have the choice to buy it in a small bookshop or in a Chapters. Of course you can see that I’ll recommend that you do, since I’m a fan an all. But I can say that a knowledge of the history of this ideology from his perspective is quiet valuable, and that Saul’s work as a whole functions in the ways that education is supposed to: it empowers you in your own choice making. It helps you become a better citizen, and by becoming a better citizen, the world becomes a better place. As for the lecture - as I type this, I have TVO’s Big Ideas on in the living room, and I have a feeling this lecture will be broadcast on Big Ideas sometime in the coming months, so you’ll have the chance to see it for yourselves.

You’ll see how he began the talk by telling us of how on May 19th, the City Council of Burlington rejected an application from Wal-Mart to build a centre there, even after all the experts (the evil technocrats of Saul’s cosmology) said it would be a good thing. Here, the ‘common’ men and women of the council said something to the effect that Wal-Mart may know how to lower prices but they know nothing of fostering communities. And here is Saul’s story over the past decade’s happy ending: the collapse of an ideology of markets, when the common citizens take back the power their ancestors won from aristocrats centuries ago, to be able to say no thanks.