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.
This isn’t going to be a great review, only because I went out of curiosity. I haven’t read Don Quixote nor am I tempted to anytime soon. But that’s not to say that the event sucked or anything – I think if I was a Don Quixote fan I would have really liked it, but not being one, I feel that I should just be up-front about that, and I write about my experience for what it’s worth. This review is also marred by the fact that having not read it, I’m in danger of not knowing what I’m talking about, so keep that in mind. So, accept these tokens of ignorance caveat lector.
So why review it in the first place? Because I like that word – ‘re-view’. Because you missed it, and I was there, I can try to fill you in, paint a picture enabling you to ‘re-view’ it.
Of course, this reminds me of the presentation by Ellen Anderson who pointed out that the word ‘audience’ come from the same root as ‘auditory’ and how in Cervantes’s 17th Century, people talked about going to ‘hear a play’ while we say, we’re going to ‘see a movie’. The centuries then, divide themselves between listeners and spectators, and it makes me want to read Guy Dabord’s ‘Society of the Spectacle‘ which I haven’t done yet, but at least I’ll be able to tell people I was prompted to read it, and follow that curlicue of ideas after attending the Don Quixote Symposium in May 2005. So, what I’m saying here is – it wasn’t a wasted night, even if I was bored and didn’t stay for the whole thing. I did learn some things, and it caused me to have some thoughts, I feel they’re worth sharing.
Held at the Munk Centre last Wednesday evening, I show up near 6, when it’s advertised to start. I find everyone in the reception eating the usual hore-d’oeuvres. Did I miss it? Usually the grazing crowd follows the speeches. So, already I feel like they’re wasting my time, but whatever. Then the speeches begin with the usual…. I’m sorry, but something needs to be done about these introductions. Every recent lecture I’ve attended at universities in Toronto have been preceded by painfully long sycophantic introductions. It should become vogue for them to be short and humble, and free of the idea that we’ve been blessed by the presence of this important person. In this case, the important person wasn’t even alive – more words were said in the memory of a dead professor than the translator of the book they were selling in the foyer, the real guest of honour.
Mr. Professor’s name was Geoffrey Stag and he died last November. According to the dates give, he would have been 90 so it’s not like his death was tragic or anything. He had is run and shuffled off his mortal coil, but prior to that he’d retired in 1976, and taught Cervantes while he was at U of T. Not to seem callous but I don’t care. I doubt anyone cared, except of course for his daughter, who we were informed, was present. My point is I didn’t give up my evening for a memorial service for someone who’d worked in British Intelligence during World War II and then decided to come to the colonies to live out his life and his career. No disrespect intended, but I came for symposium on Don Quixote, which was published 400 years ago, a time span of which reminds us that our times here are petty, as are the works of those who spend their lives commenting on the achievements of others. I’ll grant the memorial aspect the respect that it deserves – which is small – but it also has a whiff of the celebrity about it, as if the beloved prof’s achievements were somehow on par with that of Cervantes’s (a point none would admit to, including the eulogizer Mr. Rupp, but a point that I feel stands given that actions speak louder than words).
Don Quixote has recently been translated by Edith Grossman who began the talks speaking about what it means to be a translator. Now, having French as a second language has meant that I’ve tried my hand at translation from time to time. At the moment I should be working on something I’m prepping for my reading group, but I’m intimidated by the two last chapters I need to get finished. So, I was surprised to find that what she spoke about resonated with me. She noted that being a translator is, by definition, self-effacing – one is supposed to disappear behind the intentions of the first author. She also noted that translation is not merely matching up words in a 1 to 1 relationship; doing so is a mark of a failed translator, and given the presence on the web of translation engines such as Babeflish, we are very much aware of what she’s talking about. She reminded us that translation is collaboration. She quoted Borges, who told his translator, ‘write what I intended to write, rather than what I wrote’. My own experience shows this to be a very challenging game, since you have to be careful about what you assume they meant: you don’t want to rewrite the book with your improvements, but also a translation is very much a version of an account, which is why her version competes for shelf space with John Rutherford’s.
The presentations, from my perspective at the back, were distracted by the CBC cinematographer, running about trying to get his angles so they can be edited together later for something. At the time I figured it’d be some 30 second clip on the 11 o’clock news, but as I type this maybe it’ll be for some Evan Solomon show on Newsworld.
Edith Grossman spoke first, followed by Ellen Anderson who spoke of Don Quixote’s relationship to 17th Century theatre, which seemed to imply that the novel came out of Cervantes work as a playwright. It’s narration and multitude of mini-stories the type of thing you’d get if you tried to describe a week of seeing plays to a gathering of friends at the pub. Because, and this didn’t come up, but it’s relevant, we should remember that literature in the centuries preceding our own was not only something read aloud to oneself, but also, read to the crowds who hadn’t learned to read.
Anderson was followed by Rachel Schmidt, who had a Power Point slide show, as her topic was on the ‘adventure of the visual image’, talking about how artists have illustrated Quixote over the centuries. There were a couple of things here worth noting: for one, slide shows are what make lectures fun, and I don’t have a problem with people using Power Point, and I understand that some people are still figuring out how to use the program seamlessly.
But, and this is the second thing, what drives me nuts about PP presentations is the shit design of the slides. There are like, how many different fonts on the average system? Please please please do not use Times New Roman. It is the most boring and visually banal font, its status as the default font means that its use shows a complete lack of imagination, a sense that you don’t care about the aesthetics of your presentation, that you think you can just give us the bare minimum and we’re so out of it that we won’t notice. Look, design is easy, just make it look like what you’re used to seeing everyday. That’s pretty much all there is to successful amateur design – make it look like a junkmail flyer. When’s the last time you saw a junkmail flyer that used a serif font? You know what I mean by serifs don’t you?
So besides the fact that I’m grumpy because I’ve been having a rough couple of months, I just feel the need to vent a little because it’s so systemic. You have this considered presentation on artists such as Doré, Dali, Goya, and Picasso who’ve illustrated scenes from Don Quixote, but you have this slide show which is aggravating to look at.
She connected a scene that Goya illustrated with his more famous Sleep of Reason image, but then got into the speculative diagnosis of trying to tell us that Goya encoded all this stuff into the Quixote engraving. She speculated that the fact the he drew the Quixote’s sword resting as if it were resting against the arm of a chair, an arm which isn’t there, had something to do with Quixote’s fevered fantasies, rather than what I would say, is because Goya saw no reason to be that detailed, and that the presence of the chair’s arm would distract from the overall composition. Basically, that the chair’s arm would have been graphically superfluous. Goya’s sketchy style with engravings is one of the reasons they’re so marvelous, because engraving isn’t something you’d think lends itself to sketchiness. And with sketches, you just want to summarize and hint, let the mind of the viewer fill in the missing details, work with illusions rather than meticulous detail.
As someone whose dashed off a couple of drawings now and then, I think I know what I’m talking about here, and I can tell you that back when I was in university, one of my friends referenced one of my drawings in a paper. It happens, right, this stuff is out there, and it provides an interpretive angle, so your work gets referenced in that way. I didn’t read what he actually wrote, but from what he told me it was clear that he’d used my image as a sort of inspiration toward these new ideas, based around the formula, “it’s like…”. And I tell you this because I don’t want anyone out there thinking that Goya actually intended what Ms. Schimdt told us. Sure, you can read the image that way, but I doubt that’s what Goya had in mind. Which doesn’t invalidate either – her argument or his image – but I wish the speculative and metaphorical aspects of interpretation where far more obvious rather than being presented as a great discovery by someone clever, swept up in the current fashion of seeing everything as a riddle. The world of texts and images are not Fermat theorems.
Ok, so that out of the way, I’ll say that she began her talk around the scene in the book where Don Quixote encounters monks carrying some paintings, and she talked about what those paintings meant in the context of the post-Protestant Reformation of Catholic Europe, elucidating the context that would have been familiar to the first readers. But I wasn’t that interested so that’s all I can say.
She was followed by Stephen Rupp, who finally took the podium as more than moderator, to talk on ‘having fun with the classics, Cervantes and Virgil’. He began by reiterating something that Grossman has raised, that Renaissance culture depended on translations, and began to talk about how the epic traditionally had always been written as poems. And then my mind began to wander. I was so dissatisfied with his academic puffery I’d zoned out to think about other things.
My notes from the event include the self-admonition, ‘be nice, be fair,’ because I don’t want Mr. Rupp to read this and feel insulted or humiliated. But at the same time, it’d be dishonest of me to bullshit my way through the part where I stopped paying attention. And that’s how I reacted, I was bored, and that seems worth telling as a critique of the evening’s effectiveness. Somewhere in between our experiences – his ebullient enthusiasm for the subject, combined with his feelings of self-confidence, his enjoyment of the day and of being the dean of his department – somewhere, in the space between the front of the room, and the back, where I shifted uncomfortably with my bum falling asleep, our minds clashed in peep of fireworks invisible and unheard, snowing boredom on the gray heads below.
He could not know of my recent extreme dissatisfaction with the ivory tower, which despite all critiques and attempts at humiliation – that is, to render humble – continues to be an ivory tower, a shelter in which people can nurture a sense of their self-importance, bask in their sense of celebrity and in the rapt attention of the naïve students jumping into crippling debt to sit there doodling, not to mention their comfortable salaries enabling them to indulge in luxury goods, while the rest of us contemplate going on welfare because we can’t find work in our fields.
No, in the face of such bias, there’s nothing he really could have done except maybe be as self-effacing as the whole task of translation demands. Because, in the end, isn’t this all a form of translation? Isn’t every educational enterprise about making something understandable, taking the subject to be learnt and expressing it in a language that can be grasped by the audience? But I’m not saying his (or any of the other’s) language was inaccessible – no, that was fine. I’m just annoyed by the showmanship.
But that’s not what I was thinking about during Rupp’s entertaining presentation, since other people in the audience seemed to enjoy it. I was thinking about how I’d like to have a pint at The Green Room and wondering if my friend would be willing to bike up to Bloor to join me. In the end she wasn’t up to it. Nevertheless I skipped the roundtable discussion that followed the break, since I was so bored I felt I’d just be torturing myself to stay, and I walked down Beverly St enjoying the evening of the early summer. As I walked, I did not have Don Quixote on my mind, because I’d simply been visiting a subject which so far hasn’t been of much interest.
So all in all, the event was cool but I wasn’t the ideal audience, my mind easily distracted by not having a grounding in fascination with the subject and my distaste for academic self-importance at the expense of what I consider to be something real and human. This review suffers from those biases and the fact that I didn’t even stay for the whole thing. I want to summarize by saying: if, like me, you were merely curious, you didn’t miss much. If, on the other hand, you are obsessed by Don Quixote, I’m sorry I haven’t been able to give you a better report.
Kelly Mark is everywhere right now – at YYZ, in the news because of the Glow House, and as well, she has a show on at Wynick Tuck. Last night I dreamt that I was in Wynick Tuck noticing that none of the Letraset drawings had sold, as if they were too new, too avant-garde (such a discredited idea anyway) but now as I find the memory was nothing more than a dream, it doesn’t seem important enough to fact check to see if any have. I didn’t notice the other day when I was in.
Although in my dream, it seemed a shame, because they are quite good. Looking at them I thought of Marcel Duchamp’s machinery in the Large Glass, mostly because I recently found this great website that demystifies Duchamp’s work, and last weekend I found this other website that offers animated graphics helping to explain biochemistry. The conversion of ADP into ATP, the basic molecule of cellular energy, reminded me of the animated Large Glass. My immidiate impression was that computers are so wonderful, allowing us to animate what Duchamp envisioned, and allowing us to see what our cells are doing everyday, processes that have been difficult to imagine before.
Kelly Mark’s work using Letraset seems to represent a dynamic dance and swirl of letters, moving across page and frame to frame. While the individual pieces can stand alone, they are arranged as polyptychs and the line around which the marks are organized flow from one panel to the other. There is a dynamic machinery here, and the fontography by its black and white and serifed nature reminds me of the early century’s dynamic steam machines, which inspired Duchamp to abandon paintings of traditional subject matter in favor of engineered renderings of choclate-grinders and the hormonal process of love as if mediated by particles of malic-molded matter.
In addition to these drawings, Mark, who perhaps is punning on her name with all this, has attempted to extend the idea of drawing by taking wooden forms of the usual pottery – vases, jugs, plates, etc, and covered them with graphite, giving them the nice dark gray sheen we’re familiar with from bored schoolday scribbling. As someone who likes to fool around with a pencil now and then, I couldn’t help but wonder if she just got some raw graphite at the store and used that, or if she laboriously went at the forms with pencils. Given the nature of Conceptual practice which tends to emphasize the execution of patience rather than skill, I wouldn’t be surprised if Mark had used pencils. But again, such a detail seems minor to the finished product.
Given that contemporary pencils are a form of ceramic – the lead of pencils usually something like carbon mixed with a clay, these sculptures aren’t that far fetched … complimenting the traditional form which is made pure from clay, and replacing it with the veneer – in this case, the clay mixed with carbon and preserved with a matte varnish so that you can handle the works without dealing with smudging. Since the mid-19th Century invention of electroplating, which enabled the alchemistic goal of turning base metals into gold, there has been a long history now of coating crap with a sheen of special elements; Mark has extended this by coating a form that has lent itself to admiration with an element that has also lent itself to admiration when it falls together on a page into the light and shade of a scene, reversing the usual properties by using a veneer of ceramic on our other most malleable material, wood.
Kelly’s show at YYZ is on down the hall from Wynick Tuck. As a member of YYZ’s board of directors, I don’t feel like I should review it. Although I once reviewed a show there last January, I’ve decided that I won’t anymore. But I bring it up because of the odd coincidence of titles – Mark’s show at YYZ is called horror/suspense/romance/porn/kung-fu and consists of the recorded glow from the television which had been playing films of those genres. The show opened on April 8th, a Friday, and the next Wednesday, on April 13th, the latest show at the Art Gallery of York University (AGYU) opened with the title Horror, Science Fiction, Porn.
‘Tis the season of words it seems. For some reason the zeitgeist in our city has organized the curatorial and artistic minds into a season of alphabets. Mark’s letraset drawings tease out the inherent visual geometries of what we’ve taken for granted since we learned how to spell – that we manage to communicate, share thoughts, break hearts and win them, through designed lines.
A personal aside now – ’tis also the season of graduation, and the show at the AGYU reminded me of my own graduating April, after a rather lazy semester when I pretty much cruised to the last day … such was the nature of the school. But I’d signed up for an intro to video course for my last semester, because the previous summer I’d read Bill Viola’s book and it interested me in the medium that was everywhere but which I’d never before taken much formal interest in, focused as I was on drawing and painting.
In addition, I had a hard time with stories throughout school. I always have a case of writer’s block when I have to invent a narrative. So for my last project, for this Intro to Video class, I was stuck. But, as Charlie Kaufman knows well, an old trick is to use the present condition if you can’t make one up; so I ended up making a video on my writer’s block.
But what Viola had impressed on me was that the invention of film and video had been a sort of miracle which we long ago grew used to, forgetting that for all of time previous, that immense well of forgetting and flash, images had been static. As someone who went to school to learn painting, I had been interested in those static images, in that long history of capturing milliseconds of the universe in shapes. Television and film fools us into thinking we have peepholes into other rooms, other places, other times, all due to an optical and conceptual illusion.
My reawakened interest then was in the animated image and it gave me a new appreciation for the silent film. So my film was silent, relying on the animated image, and the narration provided by text.
Ok – so lets get back to alphabetics. I remember when David Carson was the hottest thing; Raygun seemed the coolest, most innovative magazine going in the mid-90s, at the time that I was self-consciously a student of all things cultural. Raygun sort of coincided with my first studies in Heidegger, and what was really fetching about Raygun’s ‘anti-design’ was its strained, blurred, hard to read text. Because of that, you paid much more attention to it. The seemlessness of the interface was interrupted, and you became conscious of text as a visual element.
William Gibson’s preface in the Raygun book, Out of Control (1997), pointed out that learning to read is something we spend a lot of time doing. We have to learn to use this technology over years, so that eventually it becomes something you can do unconsciously, at a glance, so much so that you can’t help but understand what the alphabet-symbols mean when printed across the chest or the ass of some girl, the mixed messages of reproductive genetics and advanced civilization combined in some petty advert for one’s alma matter or allegiance to social stereotype. Text becomes as easy to process as speech after a while, and we see past the geometry of the marks that make it up.
Which brings me to the second thing about text that’s worth mentioning – everytime I get into a conversation about how I’m an artist, the person I’m talking with usually dismiss their own attempts with, ‘oh, I can’t draw anything’. What I should say, instead of cringing and wanting to talk about anything but my ‘specialness’ because I can slap some paint around now and then, is that ‘if you can write your name you can draw’. We are forced into the repetitive exercises as children of drawing triangles and squares and circles, eventually forming the triangles of A’s and the line with curves of B’s etc until we can finally draw the simple shaped alphabet and eventually put them together into words.
So, this show at the AGYU isn’t so much one of ‘nothing to see here ‘cept a bunch of writing’, as it was a reminder for me of the shape of the letters, of the visual aspect and relationship to drawing that the written word has. It was also a reminder of my experience in artschool with video and text.
Now, what the writing in this show communicates I couldn’t really tell you, besides what’s made obvious by the title of the show. These three text based works come from the genres mentioned, but I didn’t bother to read everything. Overwhelmed by the overall message of the function of letters as symbols and drawings, I didn’t really care to read what appeared to be mostly uninteresting.
The title says it all – there’s a text of pornography, by Fiona Banner, writ large, in hot pink, ‘she grabed his cock,’ etc, and the world as become so pornofied through the internet, iMovie and relatively cheap video cameras I was bored and unmoved. In the same room was a shelf with books, ‘The Nam’ which showed off a nice design, one of the books being displayed on a plinth, the text of which being some Vietnam war story in the same blocky font used for the porn story, this time printed black and single sided.
The middle room was a little more interesting. This was the sci-fi part, but here the experience is of a projected 8mm film, consisting of nothing but the words of some contrived alien drama. The cohesion of the story is pulled apart by the projector being on a robotic armature, so that it projects the text across the walls of the gallery at different times, always moving. The animation of the projection is what I appreciated by this, and at this point I was reminded of my artschool video, where I had a line that read:
‘I wanted to move you with images
Soft, subtle, sublime
But you cannot be moved by images, only silent words’
Here, you get the attempt by the artist Rosa Barba to move you with moving words, which aren’t even silent, as we have to listen to the whir of the oldschool 8mm machine.
The back room had the ‘horror video’ by Nathalie Melikian, which again consisted of sentences that I didn’t bother to read, (I know – I’m a horrible critic) the horror aspect seemingly conveyed by the ominous soundtrack.
The PR for this show states: ‘ In conjunction with this year’s Images Festival [which is now over], the AGYU presents Fiona Banner, Rosa Barba, and Nathalie Melikian, artists who look at film but project it to another end–as film experienced through language, which is why the exhibition Horror, Science Fiction, Porn includes no actual films. This international group of artists – from Britain, Germany, and Canada – looks at language’s determinant conditioning and indeterminate effects through a variety of film genres. The conventions that establish a genre (right from the start with the writing of the script) and those that manipulate the spectator, are only partly at play in this examination as these artists relate the genres of science fiction, action, horror, and pornography to their constructions, technical apparatus, and reception.’
If the PR is the recipe for how we, the audience born yesterday, are supposed to respond, I think it’s a failure. If you check out this show, there’s no way you would respond according to this formula, but at least the language the AGYU is putting out is getting better (perhaps prompted by Jennifer McMackon’s blog which has been publicizing the ‘discombobulated PR’ you get from these institutions over the past year).
It’s text … on walls. And for the PR to say that it contains no films at all is dishonest, as the sci-fi piece uses 8mm, and the back room uses video, which admittedly isn’t film, but what’s the difference?
While film seems to be all about animating images, the use of film to project text in two of these peices blends the forms in ways that seem similar to Kelly Mark’s wooden ceramics. As for the porn piece, it seems nothing more profound than Playboy wallpaper. The most generous thing I can say about it is that it reminds me of the old double-entendre, ‘You wanna come upstairs to check out my prints?’
Kelly Mark at Wynick Tuck is on until April 30 and the show at YYZ is on until May 21, both at 401 Richmond St, and both galleries are closed Sundays and Mondays.
The AGYU show continues until June 12, at York University, Ross Building. Photos courtesy of the websites of Wynick Tuck and the AGYU.
I went into Downfall with a certain reluctance; I came out with a new understanding of the history of the 20th Century. That’s no small thing, and is one of the reasons that I agree with all the good press this movie has been getting. It was not only the best World War II movie I’d ever seen, but one of the best films in general.
I wanted to see it because I’m a student of history, and I’d heard that this was based on interviews conducted with Hitler’s secretary, who was in her 20s during the last two years of the war when she worked for him. Because of this, the story is centered around her character more so than the others; but the nature of the story means we get insight into the swirl of events and the poisonous personalities involved, huddled in the underground Bunker, listening to the thunderous rumbles as the approaching Russian army shells the city.
A few years ago I was at a great talk by the painter Tony Scherman, and in his presentation he brought up the fact that in our world, with TV all over the planet, chances are there is something on the Nazis playing 24 hours a day – that at this minute, somewhere, there’s a Nazi show on. He brought it up to point out the project of ‘never forgetting’ that seems to be behind it.
At the time I was struck by the fact that, you know, history is full of atrocity, and we tend to forget them. It also seems unfair that we privilege certain stories of atrocity while ignoring others. In addition, I’ve felt that we’re living in a totally different world, so why should we keep obsessing over this stuff?
Seeing Downfall helped me understand how traumatic the war was. It’s a cliché of criticism to say that we keep getting a sanitized version of war, even now when Speilberg made Saving Private Ryan and how he made sure to have that scene of a guy looking for his arm; but that film failed in the end to make me realize the trauma because it was such a sentimental story that fundamentally seemed to insult intelligence; but similar scenes involving amputation in Downfall may have made me flinch, but this was something they experienced and took for granted, so why should I feel put upon watching it, knowing in the end it’s makeup? But the difference here, is that Downfall is a true story, an accurate recreation, filmed in a way so that by the end, I was creeped out. As I should have been. The Nazis were seriously creepy folk, which is something that isn’t usually conveyed by documentaries or by cartoon villainy.
It helped me understand that the war was such a disruptive and psychologically unsettling event, something that was the result of centuries of events, all tumbled together and out of control, that movies like this are made (that the Nazi Entertainment Industry is founded on) simply trying to understand it. The sixty years which have past seems perhaps too short a time to fully grasp what happened.
At the same time, as the recent death of the Pope reminds me, we are entering a new understanding. Because John Paul II became a priest during the Nazi occupation of Poland, and that the Cold War which he is credited with doing much to end, was a result of the epilogue of the fall of Berlin to the Red Army.
I grew up going to gun shows with my father throughout the Maritimes and saw so many Nazi artifacts that I took them for granted, artifacts being sold to collectors who wanted a piece of history more than being of the neo-variety. Such a thing to this day cannot happen in Germany – you can’t publicly display anything from that era. So, there was some controversy when this movie came out last year in Germany, because this is a German film with big-name German actors. And that was one of the things that made this so compelling – to see a film in the language in which the events actually took place, and with the historical accuracy that memory of survivors would demand. This new period of World War II studies includes films such as this, made not so much to entertain, but to document and to understand.
I’m not going to say you should go see this movie – there are lots of understandable reasons why anyone would chose not to. All I’m going to say is that I doubt you’d regret it, and thus it is highly recommended.
If you’ve been along Queen West and past the Drake this past month, you may have noticed the large target in a window. You may have thought it was a promotional display. But, no … it’s a work by Kristiina Lahde, and will be up until the end of the week. When I first saw it a couple of weeks ago, I was a little struck by it’s lack of umph. Lahde has taken advert fliers and cut concentric circles from them in order to produce the target pattern. It was only later that I began to sort of see the ideas come together; the ads, the target, the window; all these things are usually designed to suck you into the store – you are to be the arrow flying toward the door.
When I was growing up my father hated heavy metal music, and especially the videos. He ran a gun-shop out of the house, and the occasional weekend was spent at the gun range shooting at targets, developing sniper-like skills. To this day I can hit a bottle cap 100 metres away, because I spent all that time staring through sights at the bull’s eye. My Dad, back in the 80s, used to say that heavy metal musicians would make good target holders. I’m not sure bringing that up is really relevant, except to say that I don’t tend to think about targets much, and perhaps that’s why. They’re something I tend to take for granted, something meant to be shot at. My Dad turned them into a metaphor of frustration and dislike.
So it’s perhaps appropriate because Lahde has by coincidence extended that metaphor toward the junk-mail advertising industry. Lahde, in using adverts, has made the models and the products the target. As she states in her artist statement, she aims to highlight their junk-mail status by disrupting their function by cutting into them.
In his 1999 book, A Short History of the Future Warren Wagar described a future art, based around what we’d call socialism, that was a revived form of Realism. ‘Artists and writers blended meticulous realism with a reawakened sense of moral possibility,’ he wrote. ‘It made heroes and heroines out of common folk [...]. Critics occasionally drew unkind comparisons between substantialist art and the ‘socialist realism’ decreed by Joseph Stalin and Andrei Zhdanov in … Soviet Russia. But the truly creative minds went well beyond anything imagined in the sterile diatribes of these long-dead comrades.’ In trying to imagine what such paintings might be like, I thought of the work of BC’s Chris Woods, who plays on the idea that the Church was the first franchise, and from that began to see the types of ads Kristiina uses in a new way. Like Socialist Realism, these adverts are full of smiling people.
In a January 1999 article/review of the advertising industry’s Clio awards published in Harper’s, Jonathan Dee wrote:
“An evening at the Clios makes more or less inescapable the connection between this sort of sponsored art and the art of the American television commercial: an aesthetic, in the term suggested by sociologist Michael Schudson, of ‘capitalist realism.’ Of course there are important semantic differences (Soviet art glorifies the producer; American advertising, the consumer), as well as a near reversal of the values such art is commissioned to protect – except, perhaps, to the degree that power itself can be considered a value. But the central value of American capitalist realism remains, for all its staggering refinement, as old as Marx: the fetishism of commodities. Capitalist realism amounts to an insistent portrait of the world as a garden of consumption in which any need – no matter how antimaterial, how intimate, or how social – can be satisfied by buying the right things. The relationship between the human qualities with which this art animates a given commodity and the commodity itself is a wholly fictional one, and it is upon that fiction, you could say, that our economy rests.”
I can’t help but feel that this type of concern has passed, at least on the surface. We all have memories surrounding The Battle of Seattle and its like circa 1999-2001, all of which seemed to dissolve with so much else in that reverse mushroom cloud that day in Manhattan. Consumerism doesn’t seem to be as bad as the moral outrage surrounding the subsequent Iraq war, which is so current today that Paul Isaacs got his review of a bad movie read on air last week by George Stroumboulopoulos because of how he worked into it a poke at the Bush administration.
I don’t think Lahde had all this in mind when she proposed and executed target; I’m kind of just riffing here, but it’s interesting that something so insubstantial – adverts, pasted to a window, subject to an exacto-knife, sum up the Left’s social concerns over the past five years. Since wars are all about targets and as Isaacs expressed in his review, the ‘invasion under false pretenses’ is for the Right and the Left sticky enough for both side’s outrage. Everyone’s annoyed about being lied to. Advertising, we sometimes forget, is always about that. It’s always some kind of fantasy, infantalizing adults as hopelessly lost fellows who need a product to rescue them, just as the Iraqi people supposedly needed rescuing by the gun-sights of American tanks and bombers. Capitalist Realism of smiling people frolicking in savings and greeting their liberators in the streets targets us all. It’s fortunate that we’re all capable of seeing through the exaggerated artifice.
(A Short History of the Future quote from pages 194/195 of the 3rd edition. Photo courtesy of Kristiina Lahde.)
The Power Plant’s latest show opened last night; at one point I found myself saying the familiar, ‘I need to come back’ but I never do. In this case, memory alone serves – there just isn’t that much there to see, and to go back, and do the old ‘spending time with it’ would probably be a waste of time.
This show isn’t bad. My first walk through left me unimpressed, but a few more walk throughs, and after reading the brochure, I could see that it was pretty good. But, like I said, there isn’t much to look at.
This is RTFM art. The brochure essay opens with something an American artist wrote 40 years ago, which again, reminds me of how overwith Conceptualism should be at this point, and yet it keeps churning away.
Remember, 40 years ago, how science-fiction imagined that ‘in the future’ that is, around the year 2000, people wouldn’t eat food anymore, but just take pills – pill for breakfast, lunch, diner. Presumably this was going to be great – no more need to cook and clean pots – all the time that could be saved! That my friends, was Conceptual Food. Funny how it didn’t take off -the missed opportunity to critique the capitalist restaurant system and the power relationships that lead some to suicide seems a shame, doesn’t it?
Even if we could provide all the nutrition in a pill, none of us would want that. We want to feel a full belly, enjoy a meal that delights the eyes as well as our tastebuds, a meal that smells and looks delicious, and ideally, we want to share the experience with someone else. Look at this blog – restaurant reviews all over the place.
I’m one of these people who feels the same about visual art – I want something hearty, something that delights the eyes and the mind, and the sharing part comes in when after it’s seen/experienced I go home and send off an email, or write a review that says, ‘you gotta check this out’. Darren O’Donnell’s play, and Doris McCarthy’s painting show are examples of work that I felt this way about.
The show on at the Power Plant on the other hand, I don’t feel that strongly about. To continue the analogy with food, it’s a salad. It’s a nutritious appetizer, but I can’t really imagine it’s anything to write friends about. It’s clever, as all conceptual art is supposed to be, but that’s it. It’s content over form, so there’s not much to appreciate visually.
My favorite piece plays with old-school technological fetishism, but I’m not sure it would work any other way … had it been digitized, it might haven’t been as successful – this is the piece by Jonathan Monk called Searching for the Centre, with two 8mm film projections against a sheet of regular 8.5×11 paper. As the brochure says, “Jonathan Monk asked two of his commercial dealers to pinpoint, without measuring aids, the centre of a sheet of office paper. Animating their repeated attempts, Monk projects the results against one another to form a curious dance of two subjective and competing ideas.”
And then there’s the birdcage. Why is there a birdcage in the gallery? Well, the point of this piece is that a French composer named Olivier Messiaen composed a piece in 1959, inspired by birdsong. “Messiaen,” the brochure notes, “would compose in the birds’ natural habitat – fields, meadows, etc, writing his notation as he listened.” So, Dave Allen, the artist here, figured he’d reverse the process with his The Mirrored Catalogue d’Oiseaux, which the brochure elaborates: “As Allen states, ‘in the work I reverse/mirror the process of direct composition by playing back Messiaen through a stereo to an aviary housing birds … adept at mimicry’ “. The birds didn’t seem to be chirping last night, but the crowd was loud. I imagine this piece will take some time to achieve itself, so perhaps it’s best that you check it out after a couple of weeks.
The idea behind the curatorial coherence is that the pieces shown here all are relational in some way. “Dedicated to you, but you weren’t listening [the show's title] assembles a small group of works that grow from the collaborative and performative spirit of Conceptual practice, looking specifically to those transformed or composed in relation to something outside the artist’s direct control”.
There are however, two things about this that I feel the need to point out. As I’ve mentioned that I want something delightful to the eye, it’s notable that the brochure chose the two birds, sitting on a branch, from the Dave Allen piece for their cover. This mislead someone I know, a painter, to come to the opening expecting to see paintings. Then, there’s the title, ‘dedicated to you, but you weren’t listening’. They’ve anticipated a certain futility in showing these pieces, because…
No, for the most part, we haven’t been listening – you’re offering us pills on a plate.
So there’s obviously awareness from the part of the gallery that this show may not be of interest to anybody except those of us indoctrinated into its mythos.
But it terms of relational practice, the star of this show is obviously Jeremy Deller – the most recent winner of the Turner Prize. I attended the opening partially to hear a performance of his ‘Acid Brass’. I’d seen Deller give a talk late in 2003, which was really interesting. In the early 90s, he commissioned a local brass band to play acid house music, combining two segments of British society- the then kids with the elders. Last night, Toronto horn-musicians played some of these pieces, a performance which wasn’t that rousing, since acid house music has dated. Deller has a doodle-diagram called ‘The History of the World’ reproduced on one of the gallery’s walls, but the real highlight is that for the duration of the show, they will be showing his The Battle of Orgreave which used British historical re-enactors to stage a 1984 anti-Thatcherite protest that turned ugly when the police got all thuggish. The film of this reenactment will show Wednesdays at 7pm.
Dedicated to you, but you weren’t Listening on at The Power Plant until May 23rd
The Power Plant, at the Harbourfront Centre, 231 Queen’s Quay West
Tue-Sun 12-6, Wed 12-8, closed on Mondays except for Holidays
Tours: Sat-Sun 2 and 4pm, Wed 6.30p www.thepowerplant.org
(image from thepowerplant.org – Jonathan Monk’s Searching for the Centre.)
Front Gallery: Kevin Schmidt, Fog
Back Gallery: Matthew Suib, Cocked
Mercer Union has two shows on right now – a video projection in the backroom, and the front space is showing two photographs. The front space show is one of these self-indulgent pieces that demand patience from the viewer. Frankly Kevin Schmidt thought more about his show than you will. But, is that a problem? Should you want something that’s immediate and clear all the time? If you understood everything effortlessly all the time, wouldn’t that get kind of boring?
The front gallery has been painted black to accommodate the wall-size projections of ‘dvd stills’ (since slides are so 20th Century). I don’t know if this is just an innovative use of that format or if it’s a film put on pause … but the subject here is that Schmidt got a hold of some dry ice, dragged it into the woods and took pictures of the resulting fog-like effect. The point of this is supposed to be some kind of inquiry into the nature of film, and of movie making, and influenced by the Vancouver school of conceptual photography, not to mention that fact that Vancouver is the home of many television productions, especially those that want to be a bit creepy.
All I can say is go to Mercer Union, stand in the dark, stare at the pictures of the woods, and then and have your conceptual epiphanies, go home, and tell your friends that the show is great, because that’s what all parties involved would like you to do. Personally, the show made me uncomfortable because I didn’t want to suspend my judgement and be coddled into believing all this is worth my attention just because Mercer Union thinks it is, and because Schmidt found this interesting enough to do in the first place. Part of me did find it a little delightful, but at the same time, that element was drowned out by the overarching appearance of manipulation.
By that I mean, this type of work questions how the gallery and the artist collaborate into trying to make you think something is great when by all appearances it’s rather mundane. The biggest problem I have with Schmidt’s show is not quality nor the idea – all of which is fine – but the overblown execution – wall size work, painting the gallery black, there for 6 weeks – such demands for so little effect. It plays into the ideas of the heroic artist, the person whose demands are met to satisfy ambition and ego.
While I’m suggesting the Schmidt is a self-indulgent egotist, whose work plays off the back room’s video very well as a reminder of masculine energy, I need to say that this is what artist-run-centres are for. They exist so that artists can be self-indulgent and take risks. They aren’t meant to create cannons – that’s what the AGO is for. Get into the AGO – yeah, you’re part of this slender stream of an Art History – get a show at Mercer, you’re just another artist whose experiment has been allowed to be shown. My subjective response is that I’d rather Mercer’d shown another artist’s studio experiments in the front gallery, but that’s not to say that you might not get something out of it. The idea of staring at these photographs in order to appreciate the falsity of film is to me ridiculous. We know film is fake, so what’s the point of this?
I appreciated the back room’s video for it’s clever editing to delimitate a stereotype that (with luck) we are increasingly moving away from. This video by Matthew Suib, called Cocked is seen to be a good pairing with the front room, perhaps because of the fact that the front gallery, painted black and pitch dark, allows for the cinematic quality of the images to come through, with its samples the scenes from Cowboy Westerns around the classic dual. Lots of squints, shifty eyes, the hand hovering over the gun. Watching it, I thought of my own father’s appreciation for this genre, one that is deeply rooted in the 1950s. Given all the discussion over the past 15 years around gender and identity politics, you can’t help watch all these cold stares and stone faces and not see how much the Western not only embodied, but communicated the manly ideal to a generation of men. Especially all this nonsense of being heroic, of not taking crap, of taking yourself so seriously that you not only demand a gallery’s 6 weeks for your photographs, but want to shoot someone who looks at you funny over the spittoon. The title here is a obviously, a double-entendre referring to the cocking back of the revolver’s hammer, as much as it refers to the cocky bravado of the men strutting their peacock’s anatomy in the brothel, later that evening, after the pigeons have flown and some dusty fellow has ridden off into the sunset.
The shows at Mercer run until April 16th
Kevin Schmidt will give a talk on Friday, 08 April at 7:30 PM
37 Lisgar St, Tues-Sat 11-6
One of the issues I have lately with the art scene here in Toronto, and throughout Canada for that matter, is how much snobbery happens within the scene, not to mention the clichés. It’s pretty much for that reason that I only found out about Doris McCarthy last week.
Somehow, the books, the reviews here and there, all of that escaped my attention. I guess it’s because she’s a painter which for the most part isn’t considered as interesting as playing with photographs or arranging lumps of wood or styrofoam as many of my friends do. As a painter myself, I’ve also been forced into apologetics, or attempts to make it sound more philosophical than it is.
So, at this point, I’m running into the danger that you’ve heard of her. It’s probably safer for me to assume that you have. But, if you’re like me, and have been hiding under an artist-run-centre’s rock, (or that of the Sculpture Garden which is pretty cool) than, let’s talk about Doris McCarthy as if we’ve never heard of her.
She’s quite old – in her early 90s, the same age as my grandmother. And now she has a gallery named after her, but as I said, I haven’t been paying attention so I can’t tell that story. It’s in Scarborough (U of T Campus) and it’s been open for a year.
But my story here is that I was in the 401 Richmond building a couple of weeks ago for an after-hours meeting, and afterward, in the hallway, making a phonecall, the paintings in Wynick Tuck caught my eye, and I said to myself, ‘wow, I like that stuff’. A couple of days later, I see a Doris McCarthy book in the bookstore, and suddenly I’ve felt out of touch. My suspicions toward genre-interest groups really seemed driven home.
So today I dropped into the show, and I really liked it. I should say up front I’m not a real critic, I’m just an artist who’s been given the opportunity to write about art. A real critic reads lots and lots of American and French theories and then sees a show like McCarthy’s, and then finds a way to either praise it because she’s old and venerable, or pan it because it’s too pretty and it doesn’t take into account some dead French guys thoughts about our big toes or the problems we’ve had with our mothers. So I can’t, nor would I want to, give you the loaded platter of theoretical cold cuts. All I can say that I found this show to be a breath of fresh air.
I could, and perhaps I should, say that for some reason in the last 50 years, North America has decided to venerate old lady painters – Grandma Moses in the States, and Nova Scotia’s Maud Lewis. But both Moses and Lewis were ‘naïve’ painters, that is, they didn’t go to art school, so their ‘folksy’ work was seen as simply charming by wealthy and powerful people who wanted something to spend money on and to say ‘oh, that’s so great!’ Thus, through Thorstein Veblen’s theory, fueling an art market – books, magazine articles, a place in galleries. Doris McCarthy is schooled. The biography on her website tells us that she was teaching art history ‘in the mid 1900s ‘ and I think, oy vey! And that she had to go around copying famous works for her students, because prior to the days of our glossy, excellent reproductions, there was no better way of getting students examples. So, despite the fact that she’s an old lady, she doesn’t have anything in common with Moses nor with Lewis. So let’s not package her into that mythos.
The paintings aren’t egotistically sized – nothing really heroic. They seem to be sized according to the subject matter. The ice-berg painting is big enough to encompass an iceberg, that type of thing. She knows what she’s doing. But what I really liked about them was that they seemed so young and vibrant. I mean, sure, there are clear references to the Group of Seven. Some of the Northern landscapes reminded me of Lawren Harris, whose work is popularly derided by academics – and for years I found them a little too blobalicious to admire, but then one day, walking through the AGO, their uniqueness kind of hit me … that style had grown on me, and I appreciated them. Over the past year I’ve begun to really appreciate the Group of 7, and all this landscape art that it inspired over the past hundred years – McCarthy’s lifetime.
For a while it seemed so boring and cliché – and you see the photographs of McCarthy sketching in the North and you could groan – I mean, how boring can you get? The U.S. have heroic painters attacking their canvases and we get photos of people carefully painting away, sitting on a rock in the grass. At least it seems more civilized.
Trust me, I grew up in what’s considered an idyllic landscape, and while it’s gorgeous on a postcard, or even in a painting, the truth is you’re so bored because the movie theatre is a half-hour away, and you only get to see blockbuster new releases – and the bookstores – don’t get me started (a Coles in a strip mall is no bookstore). This is why I’m happy to be in the city, but why the nature art stuff has also started to grow on me – reminding me that this country is so much more than it’s urban propaganda. I mean, with something like 1/3 of Canadians living in Toronto, and the CBC headquarters downtown, and Much Music … all the reasons that we think we’re at the centre of things, this nature art stuff of McCarthy’s and the G7 remind us that there’s more to this story that what happens in our country’s cities. For one thing, there’s a lot of bored people out there living in beautiful landscapes.
The young people in rural Canada either are so used to their life there they don’t care to leave, or they yearn for some action like they see on TV, so they come to the cities. That’s the standard story. So it’s odd to me, in a sense and now that I’m thinking about it, that McCarthy can portray the landscapes with such happy energy, so that I can describe it as young and vibrant. Young people don’t paint the landscape – they paint their friends. They put their energy into that. McCarthy seems to be friends with the land. She’s clearly getting off on its shapes, on the way it falls together into an image before her eyes. Ninty years of 20th Century life have not dulled her into a sullen depression about the fate of man nor made her bemoan environmental degradation. No – to her it seems, it is all still beautiful.
I love how the images are made up of flat areas of colour. There’s the occasional flourish of paint elegantly gooped on, for the materialist crowds, but really, you’d think they’d been designed using Illustrator. The colours are wonderful, they’re all very bright, and they suit me as someone who sees so much design on the web, and who appreciates the aesthetics of design for preserving a sense of beauty as regular art went all mad with blood and guts and beating the West over the head with a message of ‘you’re bad!’.
Now, the price list for these paintings had them ranged from $33,000 – $2,300. All the watercolours seemed to be sold out, and I figured that may have something to do with affordability, since I found them the weakest. Watercolours ‘are supposed’ to be about transparency – thin washes, the whiteness of the paper shining through – some kind of evanescent image hung together out of veils of colour. The type of work that lends itself to writers typing out ‘veils of colour’, right …. but I found them a little dark. Maybe I’m remembering wrong, but the oils were just so full of light compared to the watercolours, which were relatively small compared to the canvases, and seemed uninspired. However, they were sketches – studies on which the inspiration, solid composition, and confident execution of the paintings could be based.
The Iceberg with Arch stands out in my mind as something wonderful, seen from a distance, with all colours bouncing off each other. Yawl – 2 Buildings reminded me of driving through Quebec.
This show kind of proved to me that hipness is lame. I know that somewhere there’s someone complaining about her work as being that of an old conservative, and that whoever that is probably calls themselves a video artist or something to that effect. Not that I’m dissing video art or anything like that, but it’s just that McCarthy, in her twilight years, expresses an affection for the land, and plain old joi-de-vivre, which I really appreciated today, considering it was sunny and everything, and it’s so much better than some nihilist trying to remind me that there are evil people in the world and making crappy work because they identify as cutting edge.
Doris McCarthy
New Canvases, Watercolours and Earlier Work @ Wynick/Tuck, until March 26
401 Richmond St West, Suite 128
416-504-8716 T-Sat 11-5
I’ve mentioned Darren O’Donnell before in this review I wrote on January 1st, and in the past week I’ve kept seeing his name around – you’d think he was famous or something.
His name’s on the cover of this week’s Now, he’s gotten mentioned on The Torontoist, and he was mentioned last week on blogTO regarding a certain contest. Today, his latest play A Suicide Site Guide to the City got reviewed in the Globe and Mail, where Kamal Al-Solaylee wrote, “…only audiences who haven’t been to the theatre in say, a few decades, are expected to be dazzled by the presentation”.
That sentence applies to me. I’m not a theatre person. The last play I saw was Darren’s production of pppeeeaaaccceee last September, which I didn’t appreciate as much as I loved Suicide-Site Guide, for reasons shared with Darren since he’s a friend of mine, and no point going into here. So, yeah, that’s the bias.
The truth is I’m writing this review because I said I would and I wanted free tickets since I’m broke, so I played the media card. Which might make everyone think that this review is going to be good only because he’s my friend. Well, I hope to show that isn’t the case. I hope to convince you that this is a play you should see while you have the chance, because I was dazzled, not being a theatre-going person, and I was dazzled for reasons that I want to lay out here.
Having been honest with you, dear reader, reading this sometime after I type it out on Saturday afternoon, is something I do partially because that is what Darren’s play seemed to be about for me. The expression of honesty, honesty that included telling us when and where the lines he was reciting were written, and his thoughts as he wrote them. His play is about being honest and sincere through a craft that is based on being insincere, acting being nothing more that pretending to be something else, a performance based on text composed at some point in the past.
The effect of which means that his 80 minute monologue comes across almost like a narrated journal and a letter to the audience who occupy two places in the production – the first is the imagined one Darren had in mind as he typed his script, and the second is the one you find yourself sitting in. The overlapping conceptions of something both once imagined and now real play off each other – Darren is really playing with the part of text that we almost always take for granted, that it is a communication directed forward in time, rather than the spontaneous discourse that we participate in during a conversation.
To not see this play may mean you’d watch TV instead, where you might see the Establishment reward itself by finding reasons to broadcast something on the 1960s and perhaps bring up the Camelot Kennedy Administration, lulled into nostalgia between botox advertisements and punditry on the environmental movement being a bunch of phooey and debating gay marriage. Or, you could go see a live action, real-life document of what it means to be young and locked out of being able to influence the said-same Establishment, hungry for change and the frustrations of trying to make a difference when the whole system seems designed to make us feel small, worthless, or arrogantly presumptuous if we think we can.
Darren and I are certainly on the same page when it comes to the Left Wing political slant, but while he’d love to be a violent revolutionary, I’d prefer to think that the system’s problems will disappear with the retirement of the perpetrators. I’m of the ‘violence only begets more violence’ school, so while I’m sympathetic to Darren’s anarchist leanings, I don’t share them, and am in fact glad that he’s a playwright and not a politician in which case the frustrations could be a little dangerous.
Although I’m tempted to label him ‘a voice of this generation’, that’s lame, especially since this generation can speak for itself, and is doing so through blogs. At least that’s my impression. And I bring up blogs partially to further this review down the path toward a discussion of ‘orality’. Once again I have to bring up John Ralston Saul, which I’m embarrassed to do – you’d think I’d have some original thoughts once and while, why simply be his parrot? Well, if generations can have voices speaking for them, so can individuals, voices that give others the words to express what they may intuit, and in my case John Ralston Saul has illuminated the Canadian landscape in ways that make me marvel. And I figure if Arthur Danto can work Hegel into most of his pieces, why the hell shouldn’t I be as brazen with my intellectual hero? So anyway, Saul has this whole thing about ‘orality’ and how Canada’s an oral based culture, a talking culture, one that differs from France, for example, which is a nation constructed around text – constitutions, revolutions, declarations, and les Grammaires Petite Larousse. One of the first projects of Darren’s I became aware of was The Talking Creature, where he basically got people to meet in Kensington Market’s park and chat. In light of Saul’s arguments, that seems to have been a very Canadian thing to do. And now, with Suicide Site Guide, that Canadian tradition favoring talk over text continues.
Because, as I said earlier, the play is like a recited journal it reminds me of the fact that journals are now flourishing as a literary form through blogs. I’ve kept a journal since I was a teenager, a habit that was partially inspired by the reading of biographies, but because of their influence, I was always painfully self-conscious that I was communicating mostly to a future self (as Darren does in one point in the play, accepting a phone call from his past self typing the lines two years ago) but also to posterity, since even if you live a boring mediocre life, a diary will be interesting to somebody at some point down the line (ala Samuel Pepys). Now this self-consciousness, one that for me limited the revelation of scandal, is infused in everyone as they publish what was once held under lock and key on the global networked interface, spilling secrets and bringing down trials through their indiscretions. Privacy now appears to be a choice rather than a right as people seek communication.
Saul argued ten years ago that the development of the 18th Century pamphlet and the 19th Century newspaper was a way for educated citizens to reclaim language which had fallen into the control of those who thought only in Latin. The poets Dante and Petrarch are credited with kindling the Italian Renaissance seven hundred years ago by writing their poems in the vernacular, asserting the language of the ‘common people’ worthy of beauty, and hence, we have a government system founded on the House of Commons, a talking creature based on the common language of the common people, something we all are in our supposedly classless society, and especially true when we aren’t being academics and instead human beings who share the common experiences of emotional turmoil and cultural products.
In raising these points, Saul was arguing in the pre-internet Dark Times, when language had once again fallen into the control of (what we now call) the traditional media and academics – who he labeled scholastics, after the late medieval scholars whose only aim was to tie up arguments in minutia (like those scenes in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose where they debate the minor points of Christ’s poverty).
Like the talky nature of 19th Century newspapers, today we have blogs, like the one you’re reading, the writing style of which is based on being talky rather then ‘texty’. Written as if spoken. Written with little regard for the formal constraints.
As is the case with Darren’s play.
So, now, if you’re asking yourself, why should I see this play? Well, the main reason is that I’ve turned this review into an essay on ‘why I think Darren O’Donnell’s A Suicide Sit Guide to the City is great’. I’ve done so because I don’t know enough about the theatre to be as critical as Kamal Al-Solaylee at the Globe. And, most importantly because I don’t want to give anything away. Delighted as I was by its narrative strategies and contrivances, which came as a continual surprise, I was dazzled by Darren’s turns through sincerity and sarcasm, his desire for love, and his capacity for potentially embarrassing self-revelation. And above all, I was dazzaled by the way it came across as a live action blog, a challenge to the status quo of formality and controlled language, by freeing itself to be humane, to communicate even it’s inherent lies, as being something presented long after it was conceived in front of a computer in another part of the city, some time ago. While the suicide in the title is misleading, it seems to ultimately be a play on the death of the author with all puns intended, a fact that we die constantly as our present selves morph into our future selves, and what this might mean toward everything.
So, highly recommended, ten stars or whatever, and if you see it and think I’m just biased and probably think too much, that’s what the comment form below is for.
A Suicide Site Guide to the City plays at Buddies until March 20th. Directed by Rebecca Picherack and also featuring Nicholas Murray (aka murr) and John Patrick Robichaud.
———————— THE PR:
Written and performed by Darren O’Donnell
Directed by Rebecca Picherack
A Mammalian Diving Reflex Production
A Suicide-Site Guide to the City is a stand-up essay about life’s suppressed potential. Writer/ performer Darren O’Donnell shares thoughts, musings, a little lecture and a little magic in an effort to understand the impulse of suicide, envision a better world, and of course, entertain the audience. Culled from journals, field recordings, found art, home video, air travelogues and audience participation, the piece addresses the confusion, ennui and impotence felt in response to the attacks of September 11th, the erosion of civil liberties in North America and beyond, and America’s growing imperial project, among other topical subjects. It’s an explosive comedy offering ideal entertainment for the end of the world.
Last weekend Canadian Art Magazine organized a film series and symposium on ‘artists on film’. From Friday to Sunday, a variety of films were shown, mostly by Michael Blackwood, which were documentaries on artists or artists at work within their studios. On Saturday afternoon, a panel discussion was held around the question of ‘imaging the artist’, consisting of Myfanwy MacLeod (an artist from Vancouver), Mark Kingwell (the U of T prof), Michael Blackwood (the filmmaker), and Vera Frenkel (an artist from Toronto), moderated by Richard Rhodes, editor of Canadian Art magazine.
It was an attempt to look at how artists tend to be represented in the media. Richard Rhodes introduced the topic with a little essay in which he described watching Lust for Life as a 14 year old one evening in Winnipeg during a snowstorm, and the images of the movie stars and the south of France during that winter night made an impression furthered by subsequently seeing a depiction of Michelangelo by Charlton Heston as an heroic worker in The Agony and the Ecstasy. Rhodes admitted these impressions of artists as glorious and heroic influenced and confused him for years and I think it’s fair to say that we’ve all gone through that. Sarah Milroy, in her pre-review of the film series in last Friday’s Globe and Mail, stated that she has never been flung on a filthy studio mattress and been ravaged by any of the artists she’s interviewed, and yet, year after year, artist’s biopics are made which depict them in this way.
But to be fair, the biopics are made on artists who did behave that way. Jackson Pollock really did piss in his patron’s fireplace, and Picasso really was a womanizing asshole, and Van Gogh really was a little off despite being extraordinarily intelligent and sensitive. As Vera Frenkel pointed out in her statement, keep a segment of society underpaid, underemployed, and underappreciated long enough, and it makes sense that some of them end up antisocial and crazy.
Which has been the bind artists have been in for 100 years – society likes the idea of crazy artists, and so, the economic forces that make them that way almost seem to be there by design. And the idea of a crazy artists is a romantic one. Now, it’s worth remembering what this means. The word ‘romantic’ is popularly associated with love, and to say ‘romantic artists’ seems to somehow say that they are good people to date, which isn’t the case. Like Modern Art (which was a style of art running from the 1890s-1960s) Romantic Art was a style of expression which began during the 19th Century and in many ways is still present, only it’s been degraded and to be considered that way is more synonymous with a lack of contemporary sophistication, a sign that you’re not quite with it. For this reason, the romantic idea of an artist is one which no artist likes to be associated with.
The Romantic movement, was characterized by lots of overblown ‘woe is me’ rhetoric, (and for this reason I see goths as nothing more than 21st century romantics) and the romantic ideal was also one of elitism, depicting artists as a type of imaginative aristocracy, overcome with extravagant passions which places them outside the limits of polite society, and making them so very sexy (hence, the dating thing).
So, Richard Rhodes introduced the discussions with his experience of biopics, (the heroics of which representative of the 19th Century romantic conception) Michael Blackwood merely told us how he came to make documentaries on artists, and then had nothing more to say, Myfanwy MacLeod gave us a slide show in which she critiqued the popular misconception of the romantic artist and also critiqued the contemporary fashion that confuses biography with artwork (which is perhaps best exemplified by Shakespeare in Love, which used this idea to develop it’s fictional storyline around the composition of Romeo and Juliet). Myfanwy complained, and Kingwell echoed this, that biography is often irrelevant to a created work. The biopics, and indeed the film series itself, are often centered around the idea that the artist’s life is important to understanding their work, and while I would say it is certainly not irrelevant, it is true that artists often do not consider it important. Like when you have a fight with somebody and they use something from your past against you, out of context and out of place, does it ever seem relevant?
Kingwell’s presentation restored my appreciation for him which has eroded lately since he’s been writing about fishing, whiskey, and the architecture of Shanghai, none of which particularly interest me. He began by reminding us that the 1999 adaptation of Charles Dicken’s Great Expectations, staring Ethan Hawke and Gywneth Paltrow, had Hawke aspiring to be a New York artist, as opposed to becoming a lawyer, which definitely recast the New York Chelsea-delt artist as someone with social standing worth aspiring too, an idea far more current in England and the States than it is in Canada. He then went on to his favorite lecture props, Simpsons Pez dispensers, and reminded us of two episodes of the Simpsons depicting artists – the first one where Marge painted Mr. Burns and the second, where Homer became an outsider artist after failing to build a backyard barbecue. He went one to describe 11 artistic stereotypes, from artisan to romantic genius; the artist as philosopher and as ‘artist on the make’ – those who are exploiting the ‘bankruptcy’ of the art system, and now, his 11th, most recent manifestation of the artist, as ‘disappeared’ – that is, the anonymous street-artist who treats the art world as everywhere given that artists have achieved the idea that anything can be art.
Vera Frenkel was the last to read an essay, which was considered and intelligent but I didn’t really agree with most of it. She spoke about being at a conference on creaolization on the same date 7 years before, that the language used by the Canada Council in their proposed changes platform was infantilizing, advertised her web-project in which artists assign various stereotypes around fictional characters who inhabit this virtual artist-run centre (no character of which can be under 50, so it mostly seemed to me like more Boomer self-absorption) and who’s only relevant point seemed to be that if you assigned Rorschach tests to all the artists in the room, they would be as varied as anyone else in society. Frenkel’s speech though, in raising the current Canada Council controversy, seemed to sidetrack the discussion, because in the Q&A period, statements supporting her’s were raised by the audience, and I was so annoyed by what I see as a glaring generation gap that suddenly nothing anyone on the panel said seemed relevant to anything anymore.
In addition, there was a great question from an audience member which attempted to address why none of the artist stereotypes being talked about included anyone who wasn’t white – why, in ‘imaging the artist’ artists are always of European descent? The question met with what seemed to me a stunned silence. Richard Rhodes did he best to explain that the artworld – ‘our tradition’ (that is, the cultural hegemony of Europe as inherited by its former colonies by the descendents of Europeans) – had been remarkable in adopting and accepting the cultural values of ‘other’ cultures (a type of benign colonization as it were). While the question highlighted a continuing problem of discrimination, it is a problem that is trying to be rectified. (Which is also why I think the Art Awards are a bad idea, because they unconsciously communicate that art is only done by a select group of artists from a select tradition).
Perhaps I missed something with regard to Frenkel’s arguments on creolization (that the fear of everyone turning brown is racist and that creole cultures are delightfully complex), but I was left with the impression that a desire to embrace ethnic intermixing was another desire for an homogenous culture that we can pin down and define. Not that I have anything against the idea of ethnicities and cultures intermixing, but I sort of understood her desire to be ‘mix all the colours together to get beige’ rather than appreciate the rainbow mosaic. The Canadian experience has always favored the mosaic rather than a melting pot, and yet we’re immersed in a dialog of culture which we’re not conscious of as American. It says something toward how effective the Canada Council has been, for example, that Kingwell and Myfanwy can use American films and The Simpsons to exemplify their points. We’re already in the midst of type of creolization of Western culture, dominated like everything else by the States.
In the end, I left feeling most convinced by Kingwell’s arguments toward the artist’s disappearance. His visual examples showed work that was similar to that of Roadsworth in Montreal. While much street art and tagging is so often a territorial pissing, clearly an expression of identity, I think it’s a matter of expressing identity in ways that are not connected to biography or the name on your ID. Roadsworth has now been outed as Peter Gibson only because he got arrested, but Kingwell’s point about the artworld being everywhere resonated with me, as a way of saying that there’s a new hierarchy between the white-box and the street in terms of cultural legitimization. Just as there’s a new hierarchy developing between print media and blogs.
—————————- The participants and the PR:
“Myfanwy MacLeod is a Vancouver artist whose work has shown in major exhibitions across Canada as well as at the Biennale of Sydney.
Mark Kingwell is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto and a contributing editor of Harper’s magazine.
Michael Blackwood is an independent New York filmmaker who has made more than 100 films specializing in art, architecture, music and dance.
Vera Frenkel is a Toronto-based artist currently engaged in a web-based project on the inner life of a dysfunctional cultural institution.
Imaging the Artist: The Role of the Artist in Contemporary Culture. Genius, sage, joker, subversive, madman, outsider, aesthete, avant gardist, intellectual-the image of the artist in contemporary culture is an amalgam of types from history, literature, film and academia, each offering its own role to be played, its own art to be made.
Are artists held prisoner by these images? Do audiences misplace expectations because of them? What is the role of the artist? The as-yet-unwritten identities? Can we separate Pop from Warhol cool? Abstract Expressionism from Pollock intensity? The Vancouver School from Jeff Wall’s aloof clarity?”
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.
This isn’t going to be a great review, only because I went out of curiosity. I haven’t read Don Quixote nor am I tempted to anytime soon. But that’s not to say that the event sucked or anything – I think if I was a Don Quixote fan I would have really liked it, but not being one, I feel that I should just be up-front about that, and I write about my experience for what it’s worth. This review is also marred by the fact that having not read it, I’m in danger of not knowing what I’m talking about, so keep that in mind. So, accept these tokens of ignorance 
Kelly Mark is everywhere right now – at 
I went into Downfall with a certain reluctance; I came out with a new understanding of the history of the 20th Century. That’s no small thing, and is one of the reasons that I agree with all the good press this movie has been getting. It was not only the best World War II movie I’d ever seen, but one of the best films in general.
Shows on at Mercer Union
One of the issues I have lately with the art scene here in Toronto, and throughout Canada for that matter, is how much snobbery happens within the scene, not to mention the clichés. It’s pretty much for that reason that I only found out about Doris McCarthy last week.
I’ve mentioned Darren O’Donnell before in this 
Last weekend Canadian Art Magazine organized a film series and symposium on ‘artists on film’. From Friday to Sunday, a variety of films were shown, mostly by Michael Blackwood, which were documentaries on artists or artists at work within their studios. On Saturday afternoon, a panel discussion was held around the question of ‘imaging the artist’, consisting of Myfanwy MacLeod (an artist from Vancouver), Mark Kingwell (the U of T prof), Michael Blackwood (the filmmaker), and Vera Frenkel (an artist from Toronto), moderated by Richard Rhodes, editor of Canadian Art magazine.