Alex Livingston, Untitled Chromira Print on Dibond 2010 48in x 68in from the Leo Kaman website
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“The sketchbook tradition has pretty much died out,” he says. “The sketchbook offered a lot of portability, as you generated ideas on the go. I now travel with my drawing tablet and my laptop.”
Goddard in speaking with Livingston for his show (currently on at Leo Kamen Gallery in Toronto) explains that he’s currently using a Wacom tablet with his laptop, as opposed to paints and paper. I know myself, I looked into getting a Wacom tablet in 2009, but decided against it for the time being, as I still like using inks and brushes, and would prefer that tactility while image-making, as it’s just as easy to scan afterward as it is to create it directly through the computer.
What I wonder about though, is the measure of this shift. I came of age, and was inspired to be an artist, through the experience of 500 year old materials. Notebooks, manuscripts, paintings, and the older the better. I saw myself was working within that tradition, in effect creating things that would themselves be 500 years old one day. What then, is truly going on (what is the measure of this shift) when a professor at a prestigious art school says “the sketchbook tradition has pretty much died out”? If I were to ask, “will people in a century even understand paper?” is there an analogy which will help me understand what that experience will be like?
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Why are conceptual artists painting again?
Because they think it’s a good idea.
November 1, 6:00 – 8:00
George Ignatieff Theatre
Trinity College, University of Toronto
15 Devonshire Place (between Bloor and Hoskin)
Admission is free
Presented in conjunction with Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965-1980
September 10 to November 28, 2010
University of Toronto Galleries
Berlin-based critic Jan Verwoert has been examining the developments of art after Conceptualism. Held in conjunction with the exhibition Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965-1980, his lecture is concerned with the way in which the basic conditions of art practice have changed and what words and models might be used to open up the potentials at the heart of the developments in art after Conceptualism.
As he writes: “The dominant models no longer satisfy. It makes no sense to melodramatically invoke the “end of painting” (or any other medium-specific practice for that part) when the continuous emergence of fascinating work obviously proves apocalyptic endgame scenarios wrong. Yet, to pretend it were possible to go back to business as usual seems equally impossible because the radical expansion of artistic possibilities through the landslide changes of the 1960s leave medium-specific practices in the odd position of being one among many modes of artistic articulation, with no preset justification. How can we describe then what medium-specific practices like painting or sculpture can do today?
Likewise, it seems that we can still not quite convincingly describe to ourselves what Conceptual Art can be: An art of pure ideas? As if “pure” idea art were ever possible let alone desirable! An art of smart strategic moves and puns? We have advertising agencies for that. The social and political dimension of Conceptualism has been discussed, but often only in apodictic terms, not acknowledging the humour, the wit, the existential, emotional or erotic aspects, as well as the iconophile, not just iconoclast motives, that have always also been at play in the dialectics and politics of life-long conceptual practices.
Unfortunately, a certain understanding of conceptualism has had incredibly stifling effects on how people approach their practice, namely the idea that to have a concept in art means to know exactly why you do what you do – before you ever even do it. This assumption has effectively increased the pressure on artists to occupy the genius-like position of a strategist who would clearly know the rules of how to do the right thing, the legitimate thing. How could we invent a language that would describe the potentials of contemporary practice, acknowledge a sense of crisis and doubt, yet break the spell of the senseless paranoia over legitimation – and instead help to transform critical art practice into a truly gay science based on a shared sense of appreciation and irreverence?”
Jan Verwoert teaches art at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, works as a contributing editor to frieze magazine and writes for different publications. His book Bas Jan Ader – In Search of the Miraculous was published by Afterall/MIT Press in 2006. The collection of his essays Tell Me What You Want What You Really Really Want has just been published by Sternberg Press/Piet Zwart Institute.
The lecture is presented in advance of the international conference Traffic: Conceptualism in Canada. Organized by the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, the conference is held in conjunction with the exhibition Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965 – 1980 which is on view at the University of Toronto Galleries until November 28.
Registration opens November 1, 2010.
The exhibition and conference are made possible through the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Hal Jackman Foundation.
Justina M. Barnicke Gallery
Hart House, University of Toronto
7 Hart House Circle
Toronto, ON M5S 3H3
CANADA
A guy named Joe
Blew his stack
He was an engineer
He had a thing against the IRS
He thought the tax rates were too dear
So he flew his plane into a building
After leaving a note online
Not on Facebook though,
He was not that much of his time
The internetz wrote about it
And called him a right-wing loon
Some said had he been Muslim
There’d be another war soon
But all in all it’s just a tale
Of an engineer, a website and a plane
A fool who set his house on fire
Before he flew off never to be seen again
Apple’s secrecy produced another big open secret: they were developing a tablet, and they made it official yesterday. Steve Jobs acknowledged the hype (which one presumes wasn’t supposed to exist at all) when he showed The Wall St Journal quote. However, the resulting massive buildup of hype produced an anticlimactic ‘meh, tell us something we didn’t already know’.
The device will only be available in two months, which in turn means this press conference was little more than a means of stemming the flow of leaks – yes, we’re working on a device, but no, it’s not ready yet, and yes, we’re building on what we’ve already done with the iPhone, but no, it doesn’t use facial recogniation software to control different accounts for family members, nor does it have a tactile interface.
In a sense (and this is written in fairness to the meh) what Steve Jobs did yesterday was travel back in time and present Shakespeare with a Bic rollerball: a rather useful technological achievement, but something that in the future we won’t be too wowed over. We aren’t that wowed over it now, and that is my point.
Because we’ve been exposed to tablets in film and television for over twenty years, part of the excitement prior to the announcement came from the fact that these things were finally real. In fact, the devices in the Star Trek shows between 1987-2005 were called ‘padds’ (an acronym) and I wouldn’t be surprised at all to learn the iPad was named in recognition of this. In Greg Bear’s Queen of Angels series (set between the 2040s and the 2170s) they were called ‘slates’ and ‘pads’ alternatively. They are high tech devices, but they are like 20th Century rollerball pens. They are meant to facilitate our use of our networked high technology, and be so ubiquitous in the future that they are taken for granted.
So when Steve Jobs says this is the best thing he’s ever done, and when Jonathan Ive is on video saying ‘it’s magical’, this is where they’re coming from. The iPad would have lived up to its hype and then some were this the year 2000, but no. The iPhone announcement was a big deal in 2007 because nothing operated like it at the time, and it hinted at where the technology was going. Three years later, they’ve managed to produce extra large versions with a ten hour battery life.
Other companies will also be producing electronic tablets, but one imagines that Apple’s will be superior in ease of use and aesthetics – and these reasons are why the hype was so great. Apple makes beautiful objects. (What most people skipped was that they are now making their own chips, which is a big deal).
Jobs ended his presentation by telling us that the company seeks to exist at the intersection between technology and the liberal arts.
This was a great reminder of the importance of the liberal arts, and the statement came with embedded snarkiness. Businesses like Microsoft, in the words of Jobs, ‘have no taste’. Most businesses, for that matter, put little stock in the value of the arts. Further, most politicians put little value in the arts, and those students who wish to study the liberal arts at a post-secondary level are told they are jeopardizing their future. We have a very arts-unfriendly society, and a resulting population of imaginatively impoverished citizens. Citizens, in turn, whose imaginations are so blighted that they seem mystified by Apple’s success. They’re all like, ‘Apple, wow, how do they keep coming up with hit products?’ In producing attractive things, Apple has both ignored the academic post-modern attacks on the idea of beauty, and wowed the business world by becoming a fifty-billion dollar company.
While Jobs was introducing the iPad, Margaret Atwood was at the annual Davos conference to accept another award, and planed to deliver a speech, which was cut for time. As introduced by Jane Taber at The Globe and Mail: “Margaret Atwood was poised to tell the world’s business and political elite today that politicians have ‘done their best to finish’ off art.”
I am thankful that Apple’s example exists to counter the tasteless lack of imagination of our ruling elites.
From here, Apple now has to bring us electronic data sheets, as represented in the new series Caprica. The iPad is a twenty-five year old idea for which the technology has finally been developed. The Caprica data sheets appear to be where we go from here.
Today’s Huffington Post links to a Nypost article on “the creepy painting” of Michael Jackson in Michelangelo’s David pose, surrounded by cherubs. We are told that it was commissioned in 1999 from the artist David Nordahl.
This painting was glimpsed in the 2003 documentary by Martin Bashir, and from which I took the screencaps to compose the piece (below) I had in Zsa Zsa Gallery’sThe Michael Jackson Show show in Toronto, and which closed on Michael Jackson’s 45th birthday.
As I stated in that peice, he had delusions of godlihood. I do not know if the Nordahl work has a title, but I’d imagine it acquiring the name ‘The Apotheosis of Michael Jackson’, and considering the default longevity of oil and canvas, it may become a type of Mona Lisa image of the 26th Century – something most people are familar with, but it will be few who will have actually looked up the surviving electronic documents to see the videos.
CNBC has a slide show of work from his collection. This dates from last March, when Jackson was planning an auction to gain some cash for his troubled finances. As I’ve known about the apotheosis painting for almost seven years (Bashir’s documentary aired in January of that year) it doesn’t surprise me that Jackson’s taste was so bad. What I was surprised by were the other paintings wherein he’s a king, or a knight. I find this one (also by David Nordahl) most alarming:
And this robotic head reminds me of the end of William Gibson’s Neuromancer.
I found the slide show through a search for “David Nordahl”. The thumbnail for the following made me think he was a Mormon artist responsible for the type of images of white-Jesus amidst tanned-white-people Indians as seen in their texts. On clicking I see that instead it’s a very Socialist Realism depiction of Jackson that wouldn’t stand out from a collection of Maoist images from the Cultural Revolution. I would like to think that Nordahl is savy enough to have put Jackson in a red shirt for this reason – consider this painting “The Nordahl Code”. Herein lies coded images depicting truths about his interaction with this disturbed man, but I’ll leave that to the thriller novelists of the future.
Frank Herbert, in his last novel Chapterhouse Dune, wrote of a Van Gogh painting which had survived the millenia and was a reminder to that cohort of humanity of an element of wildness in the human imagination. It is an eloquent passage about the importance and lasting effects of artwork. Jackson in turn stands as a testament to the WTF? element in the human, but this message speaks most clearly to us, the present living who shared the world with the living figure, but a century from now, these paintings, stripped of the context that we take for granted, will be a mess of mixed messages. By this I mean that we know that Jackson’s thing for being depicted as a king comes from his marketing as ‘the king of pop’. And that the associated art is tasteless and ignorant.
Jackson as a knight, or as a king … a schoolgirl of 2110 will have no reason to think that the man depicted there was not those things. Also, these works are a reminder that while painting we call ‘contemporary’ has become a blotchy mess of shapes, colour and tube turds, there remains this underground of figurative realism that ‘tasteless’ celebrities hire for their own personal propaganda. The tradition of Queen Elizabeth I, Louis XIV, Napoleon (ancient figures from a pre-photographic world shaping their image for the present and future generations) continues for the celebrity-royalty of today. The truly wealthy and powerful (billionaires) just support the museums and keep the industrial scale works they purchase in secret storage somewhere.
What is fortunate is that Jackson’s megalomania was somewhat harmlessly channeled into a career as a song & dance man. In the history of celebrity, Jackson is perhaps unique in the use of the cult of personality, and someone attached to his organization must have studied its long history, from Rome through to Stalinist Russia. Had he been a political figure, it seems certain he would have been the worst kind of monster, a Caligula with a harem of boys. Consider how this video depicts (part of the 1997 History campaign) some kind of Roman Emperor Soviet Russia fantasy:
Michael Jackson was not a healthy man in any sense of the word. Those of us who take art seriously can see in it just how ill he was, and we can also recognize the depth of ignorance amidst his fans. That people have gotten tatoos ‘in memoriam’, that people leave glowing comments on his YouTube archive, is just another example and evidence of a failed education system. The art will echo down the centuries as a reminder that in the late 20th Century, Western soceity was totally fucked up.
Michael Ignatieff listening to Isaiah Berlin tell a story about Ludwig Wittgenstein, from his 1995 interview broadcast on BBC in 1998. (YouTube)
Taking the Go Train home on Saturday 26 February 2005 (I had been at that afternoon’s panel discussion put on by the Canadian Art Foundation which I reviewed for BlogTo) I picked up that day’s National Post lying on the seat in front of me. I came across Peter C. Newman’s article on Michael Ignatieff regarding his keynote speech at the upcoming Liberal convention. The article suggested that Ignatieff’s long-term goal was to become the party’s leader and by extension a potential Prime Minister.
The following Thursday (3 March 2005) I saw Darren O’Donnell’s A Suicide-Site Guide to the City , and afterward went to a C Magazine launch on College St. That afternoon, four RCMP had been killed in Mayerthorpe Alberta. The day was already full of Canadian content, and so perhaps I was already primed to appreciate Ignatieff’s speech & vision for the country. I had a midnight snack with CPAC on and the speech mid-way through, I later shifted to the couch to finish watching it. Before retiring I put a tape in the VCR to let it run overnight, to catch the repeat.
With that in hand, I ripped the audio and made the transcription that I posted on Goodreads. Ignatieff had first come prominently to my attention in 2000 when he delivered that year’s Massey Lectures (I remember listening to one as I drove in the November rain) but even at that time I was already vaguely aware of him, having read the Globe & Mail review of his 1998 biography on Isaiah Berlin. Through the speech and the background I thought Prime Minister Ignatieff would be a good thing.
As I’ve written previously, part of this was the idea that ‘Canada deserves to have a Massey Lecturer as Prime Minister’. But that’s just my bias for intellectual public figures asserting itself. Privately, I share the reservations of many: that he’s an expat who left only to return when it suited his ambition. That he advocated for the Iraq war (writing in The New York Times using the ‘we’ implying he was an American citizen) and that he’s been an Imperial apologist through his ‘lesser evil‘ arguments. However, it would still be nice to have a Prime Minister who thinks out loud, rather than those who do not seem to think at all, yes?
So, at some point in early 2006, I went on the Ignatieff website and sent them a note, offering to volunteer toward his campaign. I got no response whatsoever, not even a email list auto-responder message. However, on 5 September 2006, while I was browsing in Ten Editions bookstore on Spadina, my cell phone rang with a number I didn’t recognize. My hesitant hello was matched with a female voice asking me to be a delegate for Ignatieff in Montreal’s November convention. I was like, uh, ok. What does that mean?
I was told that it wouldn’t cost me a dime, and at that point they merely wanted to put my name on the ballot in my riding. The Liberals would be voting for delegates, and elected delegates would then go on to Montreal. There was some paperwork. I was like, ok, cool, whatever.
My walk to the train station that evening was filled with thoughts of destiny by way of the weirdness of out of the blue phone calls that can change your life. I had literally be called to join to Liberal party and have politics become part of my experience. I kind of wanted that happen. I had thought about joining the party the previous June in order to vote for Iggy. I’d decided against it, but now it was back as a request.
Because I had a September 13th deadline, I joined the party via the Liberal website on Monday 11 September. (What I has always seemed odd to me was that I never received any form of official documentation stating that I was a member of the Liberal party. I think my membership expired the following year, but I’m not sure). There were forms I was asked to fax. I told my contact that I could easily drop them off at the headquarters.
I did the paperwork and dropped off the forms on Wednesday the 13th at the Ignatieff campaign headquarters on Bloor St. While walking down the street I saw the poster for The Fountain against a building, put there for the film festival, and sparking my interest in seeing it when it was released later that November.
At the headquarters, the girl who I’d dealt with over the phone was pretty and polished and this further gave me thoughts that maybe my life was changing for the better – I’d start to meet really interesting people who are involved with politics rather than the cultural scene. The prospect of going to the convention seemed exciting; I’d have a chance to participate in a small moment of the country’s history, like being at the convention which elected Trudeau.
The delegate election was set for September 30th. I’d emailed my contact at the campaign headquarters asking if I needed to attend, because I had a scheduling conflict – this being that weekend’s Copy Camp at the Ryerson University Campus. I was told it wasn’t necessary.
Personal monetary issues where also on my mind. At the end of September I began what would turn out to be a year-long temp-assignment with TD Bank. With my email-list background, and with a list of Liberals in my riding provided by the campaign, I drafted a letter to them on a notepad during my first day at the bank, while waiting to get settled. I set up the email list on my server but never sent the message, realizing that it really wasn’t worth my time.
Also, I had gotten a phone call from another Ignatieff candidate in my riding who seemed a social-austic. We had a nice chat, and I told him why I was supporting Ignatieff, and when I asked him for his last name, he asked me why I wanted to know. Uh, I don’t know, because it’s polite? (This is what Ignatieff’s is attracting?!) In the end, Gerrard Kennedy’s delegates won, but I didn’t find this out for two weeks. (Professional communication, FTW).
On October 18th, I wrote a friend:
And did I mention before that I was running in the Ignatieff Liberal Leadership campaign as a delegate? The process was the Liberal party members elect delegates to go to Montreal for the convention – the election was Sept 30 and I only found out on Monday [October 16th] that I lost. I was hoping to get 0 votes but I don’t know the tally. I’m just glad I can sort of ignore the Liberal email stuff from now on. My taste of it was not impressive. I thought going to Montreal would be awesome, and was led to believe the whole thing could have been subsidized, but it turns out that wasn’t entirely true. Attending the convention alone cost $1000, and to ’subsidize it’ they suggested hosting a fundraising dinner, where you could get ‘family & friends’ to donate $500 to $25 and have Mr. Ignatieff talk to them afterward. Like any of my family & friends care! And I’d hate to hit them up that way. I got a good impression of how disorganized and unprofessional they were, which was at the same time, not a good impression.
Here it becomes easy to acknowledge the inherent corruption within the democratic process that party politics represents. It is very much a pay-to-play system than in the end cannot truly represent the citizens who do not want or cannot pay to be a part of it.
At some point between mid-October and late-November, I got another phone call from the campaign, asking if I’d still like to go to the convention. I returned the call in the lobby of my building at the TD Centre. Biopic: the scene consists of I pacing while framed by Mies Van Der Rohe’s windows with my Nokia at my right ear; my dialogue: ‘I cannot make the time nor can I afford it, so no, I am not interested in being a delegate in Montreal’. Sound of regret, (and I must say, the evident desperation that I was even being asked) on their end.
Skip now to the first days of December 2006: I watched the convention on CBC that weekend. I remember seeing Bob Rae look amazed when one of the drop-outs came over to his side. I remember seeing the two-channel shot of Ignatieff vs Dion while they awaited the final count, this shot also projected in the convention centre, and thus keeping both men pinned to their chairs while the count was being officiated; the voice-over commentary saying it was cruel. The cruelty being that Stephane Dion had won but they were awaiting the count to be formalized and the announcement prepared. It was known because it word-of-mouthed on the convention floor during the interim. I believe it was Susan Bonar who reported that Jean Chriten was seen checking his Blackberry and showing his wife, who mouthed ‘Stephane!?’
From my Journal, 2 December 2006:
5.17pm, awaiting the announcement of the fourth ballot results. The feeling seems to be that Stephane Dion has won the leadership, but we have to wait and see. I’ve had an underlying anxiety all day, I want Ignatieff to win, but at the same time recognize that he’s too much of a rookie. Dion as Liberal Leader? As a Prime Minister? I’m looking forward to this being over so that I can relax. In September I had such a sense of certainty that Ignatieff would become leader.
Back in September, after I dropped off my papers on Bloor St, I met with a friend and we had lunch. During our talk, I said to him, ‘Ignatieff is going to be the leader. I’ve seen it in my crystal ball’. My crystal ball was off by two years, but it’s evident to me that a hundred years of movies have embedded scripts into our thinking to such an extant that once you get the narrative going, it takes on a life of its own. Michael Ignatieff will be Prime Minister of Canada one day. That was decided in 2004, and the media was seeded with this idea by Peter C. Newman’s National Post piece, and an interview in April 2006 in MacLeans (also by Newman), and a profile in the Globe & Mail (which was reprinted last December).
Gerrard Kennedy and his supporters threw sand into the gears of the story when they backed Stephane Dion. Theirs was an attempt to say that democracy should work on merit and occasionally on surprise, not through elites and backroom deals. I, as a newly minted Liberal under dubious circumstances shrugged. Whatever. We have to live with it, not so bad.
6:32pm – Stephane Dion did win. They dragged out the process so that it was announced at about 6pm; Dion is giving his speech but I have the TV on mute and the left-ear bud in since I’m back to working on the transcription. I’m disappointed that the Liberals didn’t see the potential of Ignatieff but there’s nothing one can do.
Maybe it did turn out so bad. So be it, bygones being what they are. However, my crystal ball did not anticipate a Parliamentary insurrection due to the bastard-politicking of Mr. Harper. Stephane Dion, having “lost” (he did not lose, his party simply didn’t get as many members elected to Parliament as the Conservatives) the election, and bungled a coalition attempt, was forced out, and Ignatieff appointed in his place. Thus, my 2006 vision became a reality. Through a back room deal.
A lifetime of Star Trek (and this is written also in light of the release of the latest movie, which was supposed to be released last December) makes me want to speak of alternative time lines here. The Kennedy-Dion alliance in November 2006 seems to have altered history, postponing Ignatieff’s Prime Ministership by a number of years. And so, as part of this fucked-up time line, we have another election won by Conservatives (which wasn’t supposed to happen in 2008), the attempt at coalition (which is never supposed to happen because politics is so cut-throat to forgo cooperation), and the shut-down of Parliament ahead of schedule last December. That whole ‘crisis’ was a series of avoiding should-have-beens.
Which is to say: had Ignatieff become leader in 2006, I doubt Harper would have ‘won’ another election. But Harper did so in October 2008, and then played the scene wrong and brought down the wrath of Parliamentary procedure. Dion is disgraced, and Ignatieff (who should have been just another candidate this weekend, a replay of the Montreal game) is appointed by the party hierarchy. Dion was supposed to remain leader during this time. Bob Rae and Dominic LeBlanc were supposed to be candidates for the leadership. All this is swept aside. The scripts of a year ago are now trivia in light of the extensive rewrites.
And so, one evening last January while I walked down Yonge St, on my way to catch the streetcar after work, my phone rang with an unrecognized number. It was the Ignateiff campaign calling asking if I’d like to stand as a delegate in Vancouver. By this time I’d already ignored three messages left by them, calling to see if I would be interested (messages which had begun in late December). So, on this call, I told them no. When asked why, I said, because I can’t afford it, I can’t make the time, and it’s just going to be a coronation anyway, so I didn’t see the point.
