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With regard to the debates on right now with regard to posters and public space, I thought maybe I should share some thoughts I had last evening with regard to public space and culture. Not so much about posters, but advertising versus public art, like the Ferris wheel on the Harbourfront last summer.

To begin with, I want to borrow Simon Houpt’s report on The Gates, on now in New York’s Central Park. It was in yesterday’s Globe and Mail (the article is moneywalled, but it you want to pay, it is here, although I’m gonna try to excerpt the best).

“The most enlightening comment I’ve heard so far about The Gates came from a man who had no idea what it was,” writes Houpt, “I don’t mean he couldn’t parse the meanings of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s 7,5000 five-metre high doorframes hung with fabric around Central Park, or that he didn’t know whether to call it conceptual art or environmental art or an installation. No, this guy didn’t even know it was art. [...] He’d somehow missed all the pre-event press coverage. So as he gazed northward at the thousands of orange shower curtains flapping in the wind, he turned and asked me, ‘Are they advertising that fabric?’Christo and Jeanne-Claude call their piece ‘interventions’ because they intrude, or impose themselves and their works, on public spaces. This apparently freaks us out. [emphasis mine] We’re used to one very specific sort of intervention: commercial ones, otherwise known as advertisements. Indeed, many visitors to Central Park have quipped that it’s a shame the artists don’t accept sponsorships, since the nylon orange is a perfect match for the corporate colours of Home Depot“. [emp. mine]

I would like to now declare art officially over. That’s the temptation, but of course I shouldn’t. Nothing really ever ends, it just evolves into new forms. One of the things I hate about the discourse surrounding contemporary art and its theories is the feelings of terminality. In the 1980s thinkers went to town declaring the end of this and the end of that. From Danto to Fukuyama, suddenly you and I and everyone else are living in a perpetually post world, as if the Boomers were full of apocalyptic messiahs, for whom all history came into being.

Are we supposed to be reveling in our ‘dreadful freedom’ the keywords of existentialism? Saul reminds us in The Doubter’s Companion (sorry I’m bringing him up again, it’s just that I’m in love with him) that existentialism is an ethical philosophy, which emphasizes that we are responsible, and should be judged on, our actions. ‘We are what we do, not what we intend’, he writes, and it’s obvious that within an existentialist framework, The Gates are an ad. Christo, with his 21M budget, is advertising ‘this isn’t advertising’. Lars makes this point in his posting (linked to above, but here again).

One of the things I found really interesting about the advertising industry, five years ago after No Logo came out and I’d begun to read it, was how I’d just gone through Canada’s premiere conceptual art school, and learned all about the art of ideas, and here were ads which were successfully ‘colonizing’ our mental space. Artists are trying to shake up your perceptions and plant ideas in your head, and yet, if only they had the budget. Conceptual artists are so financially outgunned that they have no voice in this culture, so that even when the occasional big budget artwork gets displayed, it’s not even perceived as art, functioning as an ineffective adbusting. This isn’t unique to New York, or The Gates.

Last summer, when the Power Plant was exhibiting the car-ferris wheel, Sally McKay reported overhearing this conversation: “I went down to the show on the street car and a whole posse of little ballerina girls got on at the bottom of Spadina. As we pulled up to the Harbourfront stop one turned-up-nosed-nymph said to another ‘Why make a ferris wheel for cars?’ Without pause or blink or taint of scorn the second replied ‘Promotion.’” (the original was a reply to a post by Jennifer McMackon).

There’s also Montreal’s Roadsworth case, where the city is trying to bust him for vandalism and for ‘distracting’ drivers, as if the naked ladies on billboards everywhere weren’t distracting already. “The Gates is confusing some people and causing a few to foam at the mouth,” Houpt writes, “Andrea Peyser, one of the many right-wing columnists at the New York Post and a woman who gets angry before she wakes up, declared the piece to be, ‘the artistic of equivalent of a yard that’s been strewn with stained toilet paper by juvenile delinquents on Halloween’. [or, it's the equivalent of some crackers] A number of people I spoke with about the piece who described themselves as strong conservatives echoed her comment, saying they didn’t approve of public spaces such as the park being used for an art exhibit.”

Houpt goes on to comment that Times Square is the most famous public space in the world that’s devoted to advertising, one that was renamed in 1904 to promote the New York Times moving its headquarters to Long Acre Square a century ago. He notes that the City Council passed a resolution requiring the ads there to be brash and bold. When I went to the Times Square for the first time, I found it as an advertising space absolutely pointless: it was so overwhelming, to this day I can’t remember which ads I saw.

I would though, be able to imagine some future recreation of Times Square circa 2000, which could be an equivalent of visiting today’s baroque cathedrals … just overwhelming image and details absent the context by which we understand it as something to ignore. What I’m suggesting is that in the long run, as a measure of what this culture is about, it is not our artworks that are as interesting as it is our adverts. Which is depressing I admit, but what alternative are artists offering, when they can’t even break out of that paradigm? Perhaps the reason the public is so committed to painting and drawing, (the old, ‘do you paint?’ conversation when you tell someone you’re an artist) or ‘more traditional forms’, is because advertising has never co-opted it successfully.

When Jonas Mekas gave a lecture a couple of years ago, as part of the Ryerson Kodak Lecture Series, he complained about corporate culture, saying he wanted to celebrate the small, those who embrace failure in everyday life, and those who don’t want to make history. I myself hate the ‘failure discourse’ that’s grown up over the past few years, because it’s pretty retarded (’I'm gonna be successful by failing’, WTF?) but I was sympathetic to what he was saying. He was bitching about this fashion of mega-art big budget stuff. I can see now that artists are merely trying to compete with ads on their own terms, equally big-budget, equally empty of profundity. It gives me more security to continue making small paintings and drawings, since if I had 21 M dollars, I’d try to do something more socially significant than ‘redecorate a bike path‘. And, it reminds us that when you can’t compete with ads on their own terms, a photocopier can be just as effective. If the city wants to get rid of posters, they should pass a by-law requiring billboard companies (like Viacom, which owns everything) to donate the space for a certain percentage of the year.

Coming out of that lecture, I was immediately confronted with Toronto’s pathetic attempt at a Times Square, that of Dundas. The debate is valid, in my perspective, in that I don’t mind messy poles, it makes me feel that I’m walking in a living city. It’s 21million times better than the waste of money that the redevelopment on Dundas represents. The posters, and the debate, tell me that while advertising may have co-opted the imaginations of many people so that public art projects are confused with them, there is a percentage of people for whom that hasn’t happened, and that’s the city’s artists. While ad agencies have tried to even co-opt graffiti as well with their murals (which have the double effect of usually being aesthetically pleasing, so I don’t mind them as much as I do billboards) their work will never be confused with advertising.

Boy oh boy, the celebrity establishment are dropping like flies nowadays. In the past year, Brando, Miller, Carson, and now Hunter S. Thompson.

The death of Thompson this past weekend prompts me to share the one thing about him that sticks in my mind and probably always shall. I haven’t read any of his books, although I did love the Johnny Depp movie. This is a letter that was excerpted in Vanity Fair in their Dec 2000 issue, promoting the release of his book of collected correspondence at the time.

To the editor Aspen News and Times:December 14 1969
Woody Creek, Colorado

Dear Editor,

My reason for writing this letter is unfortunate, but I can no longer live in Aspen without doing something about the absence of feeling about the war in Vietnam. I am not the only one who feels this way.

Accordingly, I want to explain our action before we do it, because I realize a lot of people won’t understand. On Xmas eve we are going to burn a dog with napalm (or jellied gasoline made to the formula of napalm) on a street where many people will see it. If possible, we will burn several dogs, depending on how many we find on that day. We will burn these dogs wherever we can have the most public impact.

Anybody who hates the idea of burning dogs with napalm should remember that the American army is burning human beings with napalm every day in Vietnam. If you think it is wrong to burn a dog in Aspen, what do you think about burning people in Asia?

We think this will make the point, once people see what napalm does. It hurts humans much worse than it hurts dogs. And if anybody doubts this, they can volunteer to take the place of whatever dogs we have. Anybody who wants to try it should be standing in front of the Mountain Shop about four o’clock on Xmas eve, and he should be wearing a sign that says, ‘Napalm Dog.’ If this happens, we will put the jellied gasoline on the person, instead of the animal. Frankly, I’d rather burn a human war-monger than a dog, but I doubt if any of these will show up.

Sincerely,
‘Adolph’
(for obvious reasons I can’t state my real name).

“The most enlightening comment I’ve heard so far about The Gates came from a man who had no idea what it was,” writes Simon Houpt, in today’s Globe and Mail (the article is moneywalled, but it you want to pay, it is here, although I’m gonna try to excerpt the best). He continues:

I don’t mean he couldn’t parse the meanings of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s 7,5000 five-metre high doorframes hung with fabric around Central Park, or that he didn’t know whether to call it conceptual art or environmental art or an installation. No, this guy didn’t even know it was art.On the day the curtains were unfurled, the manager on duty at the New York Athletic Club on Central Park South escorted me to the club’s ninth-floor ballroom so I could see the piece from on high. He had no idea why I wanted to go up there: He’d somehow missed all the pre-event press coverage. So as he gazed northward at the thousands of orange shower curtains flapping in the wind, he turned and asked me, “Are they advertising that fabric?”

Christo and Jeanne-Claude call their piece ‘interventions’ because they intrude, or impose themselves and their works, on public spaces. This apparently freaks us out. [emphasis mine] We’re used to one very specific sort of intervention: commercial ones, otherwise known as advertisements. Indeed, many visitors to Central Park have quipped that it’s a shame the artists don’t accept sponsorships, since the nylon orange is a perfect match for the corporate colours of Home Depot. [emp. mine]

I would like to now declare art officially over. That’s the temptation, but of course I shouldn’t. Nothing really ever ends, it just evolves into new forms. One of the things I hate about the discourse surrounding contemporary art and its theories is the feelings of terminality. In the 1980s thinkers went to town declaring the end of this and the end of that. From Danto to Fukuyama, suddenly you and I and everyone else are living in a perpetually post world, as if the Boomers were full of apocalyptic messiahs, for whom all history came into being.

Are we supposed to be reveling in our ‘dreadful freedom’ the keywords of existentialism? Saul reminds us in The Doubter’s Companion that existentialism is an ethical philosophy, which emphasizes that we are responsible, and should be judged on, our actions. ‘We are what we do, not what we intend’, he writes, and it’s obvious that within an existentialist framework, The Gates are an ad. Christo, with his 21M budget, is advertising ‘this isn’t advertising’.

One of the things I found really interesting about the advertising industry, five years ago after No Logo came out and I’d begun to read it, was how I’d just gone through Canada’s premiere conceptual art school, and learned all about the art of ideas, and here were ads which were successfully ‘colonizing’ our mental space. Artists are trying to shake up your perceptions and plant ideas in your head, and yet, if only they had the budget. Conceptual artists are so financially outgunned that they have no voice in this culture, so that even when the occasional big budget artwork gets displayed, it’s not even perceived as art, functioning as an ineffective adbusting. This isn’t unique to New York, or The Gates.

Last summer, when the Power Plant was exhibiting the car-ferris wheel, Sally McKay reported overhearing this conversation:

I went down to the show on the street car and a whole posse of little ballerina girls got on at the bottom of Spadina. As we pulled up to the Harbourfront stop one turned-up-nosed-nymph said to another “Why make a ferris wheel for cars?” Without pause or blink or taint of scorn the second replied “Promotion.”

which was a reply to this post by Jennifer McMackon.

There’s also the Roadsworth case, where the city is trying to bust him for vandalism and for ‘distracting’ drivers, as if the naked ladies on billboards everywhere weren’t distracting already. “The Gates is confusing some people and causing a few to foam at the mouth,” Houpt writes,

Andrea Peyser, one of the many right-wing columnists at the New York Post and a woman who gets angry before she wakes up, declared the piece to be, ‘the artistic of equivalent of a yard that’s been strewn with stained toilet paper by juvenile delinquents on Halloween’.”

(or, it’s the equivalent of some crackers)

A number of people I spoke with about the piece who described themselves as strong conservatives echoed her comment, saying they didn’t approve of public spaces such as the park being used for an art exhibit.

Houpt goes on to comment that Times Square is the most famous public space in the world that’s devoted to advertising, one that was renamed in 1904 to promote the New York Times moving its headquarters to Long Acre Square a century ago. He notes that the City Council passed a resolution requiring the ads there to be brash and bold. When I went to the Times Square for the first time, I found it as an advertising space absolutely pointless: it was so overwhelming, to this day I can’t remember which ads I saw.

I would though, be able to imagine some future recreation of Times Square circa 2000, which could be an equivalent of visiting today’s baroque cathedrals … just overwhelming image and details absent the context by which we understand it as something to ignore. What I’m suggesting is that in the long run, as a measure of what this culture is about, it is not our artworks that are as interesting as it is our adverts. Which is depressing I admit, but what alternative are artists offering, when they can’t even break out of that paradigm? Perhaps the reason the public is so committed to painting and drawing, (the old, ‘do you paint?’ conversation when you tell someone you’re an artist) or ‘more traditional’ forms, is because advertising has never co-opted it successfully.

When Jonas Mekas gave a lecture a couple of years ago, as part of the Ryerson Kodak Lecture Series, he complained about corporate culture, saying he wanted to celebrate the small, those who embrace failure in everyday life, and those who don’t want to make history. I myself hate the ‘failure discourse’ that’s grown up over the past few years, because it’s pretty retarded (’I'm gonna be successful by failing’, WTF?) but I was sympathetic to what he was saying. He was bitching about this fashion of mega-art big budget stuff. I can see now that artists are merely trying to compete with ads on their own terms, equally big-budget, equally empty of profundity. It gives me more security to continue making small paintings and drawings, since if I had 21 M dollars, I’d try to do something more socially significant than ‘redecorate a bike path‘.

(a version of this also appears here)

In today’s Globe and Mail, I saw the headline for an article (same report here since The Globe’s archives are moneywalled) which read: “Vatican denounces ‘health-fiend’ madness’, with the sub-heading, “Rejecting society’s costly quest for cures, Rome says Pope’s suffering is to be admired”.

I didn’t read the article, since I felt no need. This has been the Vatican’s position on their increasingly incapacitated leader for years … the Pope wants to promote an acceptance of life as it is, rather than run from all of it’s problems. His illness is likened to the Christ’s willingness to be tortured to save the souls of humanity. It also follows in the Pope’s desire for a ‘culture of life‘ which is one that accepts the disabled and the infirm instead of a political debate on euthanasia, which he’s argued, is nothing more than the healthy desiring to eliminate and hide from things that make them uncomfortable. Those of us familiar with the arguments from the poverty-lobby know what he’s talking about here. Treat human beings as human beings no matter what their circumstance.

Unfortunately, this dismissal on medicine is too much inline with Neitzsche’s analysis of Christianity as a religion of slaves, which is quite literally was in the beginning. The Church becomes an apologist for social injustice, promoting the idea that life isn’t fair and you’d better get used to it, and better yet, find metaphorical meaning in your state of injustice.

It could be argued that the default setting of a human being is that of a religious animal - that spirituality plays a big part of our lives, since the mind naturally looks for meaning in the world, through it’s pattern recognition engine. That’s what psychology has given us, a sensible explanation for our spiritual beliefs. It doesn’t detract from them in anyway, to know how it works, and for me it encourages a healthy attitude toward spirituality as part of a balanced psychology. But we understand there’s a profound difference between spirituality and being religious. Religion has come to be seen by many as a way to keep the ignorant in line - that’s been argued for centuries now. It is a secular position. It seems to follow that if people are prone to religiosity to express their spirituality by default, education almost always eliminates that desire, and makes people in some cases atheists, but in most cases, appreciative of a secular division between religion and state. Pierre Trudeau was an ardent Catholic, but he knew better to be one in public. The USA has not been so fortunate yet, as their presidents turn going to Church into photo ops, to court the votes of their citizens who have gone through their dismal school system. That gimmick alone is probably why they refuse to reform their schools, since then their politicking would get a lot more difficult than simply showing up for photo ops and giving simplistic campaign speeches.

Martin Luther’s Reformation came about because by 16th Century, the Church, which had nurtured education, had become a nest of secular, and in some cases, atheistic individuals (which they wouldn’t have admitted, but it’s fair to say they were cynical). They were making money selling absolutions and enjoying the comforts of a high social standing. They were the CEO’s of their day, disengaged, uncaring, and doing everything they could to maintain their privileged status quo. Even after the Reformation, the Church remained corrupt, so that by the 18th Century, (in France anyway) it was a target of disdain by the Encyclopediaists and Volatire, and in the 20th Century seems to have been a haven for homosexuals well versed in the ideals of Greek Love (not so much pedophiles, but a love for pubescent teenage boys, see this Slate article for more). So, anyway, the point is that the priesthood has often been corrupted by scandal, whether sexual or idealistic. Heretics and perverts, for 2000 years, but still able to nurture culture and thought during the long fall of the Roman Empire.

As a religion of slaves, the Church is an apologist for social injustice. It propagates that injustice even today, with it’s refusal to admit condoms are a good thing. Abortion is something else entirely - as something that celebrates life, as a spiritual exercise, there’s no way it can ever condone abortion. As President Clinton said of abortion, ‘it should be safe, legal and rare’. People who turn abortion into a factor of dehumanization, and go so far as to want to kill abortionists, are clearly more on the Devil’s side than God’s. But religious opposition to abortion encourages us, and reminds us, to treat human beings as human beings no matter what their circumstance. The fact that there’s a difference between a collection of cells and a baby is what allows those of us who support abortion rights to sleep at night.

The prevalence of abortion as a convenience and form of birth control because women aren’t able to face the prospect of being a mother so young, nor being a single mom, especially under conditions of poverty, is a measure of how unjust and how unfavorable our society is toward life. So when the Pope, or even President Bush, talks about nurturing a ‘culture of life’ rather than one of death, I am sympathetic.

Writing from the perspective of the 26th Century, Richard Morgan, in Altered Carbon, describes Catholics this way:

‘Catholics,’ said Ortega, lip curling, ‘Old-time religious sect.’ [...] ‘Kovacs, I hate these goddamn freaks. They’ve been grinding us down for the best part of two and half-thousand years. They’ve been responsible for more misery than any other organization in history. You know they won’t even let their adherents practice birth control, for Christ’s sake, and they’ve stood against every significant medical advance of the last five centuries. Practically the only thing you can say in their favor is that this d.h.f thing has stopped them from spreading with the rest of humanity’.

The d.h.f thing is the central premise of the novel, that in the future you can digitize a human’s mind and transfer it from body to body, enabling practical immortality as long as the chip at the base of your skull is not destroyed. In the novel, Catholics have taken the stance that you can’t digitize a soul, and so this is all very immoral and forbidden, even though the rest of society as reformed itself around this reality, which has actually led to a retrogression, since, removing death means it is no longer an effective motivator, nor is it terrifying, so torture - the infliction of memorable pain - is now much more common and necessary, and culture stagnates because memory is so long.

The Vatican can denounce health fiend madness all it wants, and keep propping up their chief invalid, but their philosophical justifications for the most part aren’t helping anybody. It is quite probable that by the 2500s, Richard Morgan’s dialogue will be spoken in actuality by somebody, since Catholicism has too often used it’s philosophers to try and pin down the injustice of the status quo. When I wrote the other day that just because certain problems have been around since Roman times does not so much mean they are timeless as they’re indications that we’re very good procrastinators, it does occur to me now that the procrastination has been helped because the Vatican keeps feeding society’s leaders with excuses not to do anything. And hence, ‘as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end’.

Dear Pope,

Timothy

Read this today in Defamer:

Brad Pitt will star in the mind-bendingly self-referential Sony pic Chad Schmidt, where he’ll play an actor that can’t get work because he looks too much like Brad Pitt. You know, kind of like Skeet Ulrich and Johnny Depp. [Variety]

Which reminded me of the project I wanted to do last year, where I wanted to make a video that consisted of a Charlie Rose type interview with an actor, who plays me in a future biopic. Inspired by the appearance of Ed Harris on Charlie Rose when he was promoting Pollock, I basically wanted to do the same thing: interview, with clips from the film. Project didn’t get off the ground for different reasons: no money, no film equipment, too much of mind bender. But as I’ve said about another backburnered project (I have a very big stove with lots of backburners) no reason why I can’t do it in the future.

With Pitt’s movie coming out, and with my idea in mind, I’ve got to thinking about how our time has stopped moving forward, and become nothing more than a pool. Was it Derrida who wrote about this? I don’t know, who can understand him anyway? Time is always compared to a river, which is a very Western conception … time flows in a linear way. Other cultures throughout the world saw time in a cyclical nature, inspired by the regularity of the seasons. Myself, I experience a bit of both … time flows from a distant past, but as Mark Twain said, “Time doesn’t repeat itself but it sure does rhyme”, or the other saying I think about, “The more things change the more they stay the same”. Reading history can shock you into a feeling that despite lots of superficial advancements, human beings behave consistently. That’s human nature for you.

Reading the Dune novels in my early 20s though gave a me a sense for deep stretches of time. Those novels cover something like 5000 years, with the emperor Leto II having had a 3000 year reign, due to the spice and other intricacies of the storyline. It made me wonder what our world would be like had an Egyptian pharaoh achieved this type of longevity … imagine having some king who’d be around for 3000 years. In the Dune novels, there’s little cultural variation over these lengthy time periods, because of the status quo of long lived leaders. It helps make me aware that we’re only 2000 years away from the time of Christ, and we think that’s a big deal. But in reality, our species has been on the planet, and creating culture for 195,000 years. We are a very different type of human, but our history divided into centuries is actually pretty insignificant … and hence, we can see that just because social injustice has been around since the time of the Roman Empire, it’s not so much that they’re timeless problems, but that we happen to be very good procrastinators.

Our own time period encourages this procrastination by immersing us in ‘tradition traps’. Jared Diamond, in his book, Collaspe, describes how cultural stubbornness prevented the Norse from eating fish and working with the natives in Greenland, and hence, their colony collapsed. The tradition traps that we are in the midst of are held in place by advertising and all these mixed media messages - a news story on global warming and environmental degradation is followed by an SUV commercial or a TV show glamorizing a lifestyle that is inherently selfish and harmful. As much as we want to be happy in our lives and have a sort or relaxed approach to things, we don’t think that individually we matter too much, and that the sort of things we see happen in the workplace that are wrong, or the choices we make as to where to vacation, matter.

Stuck in a nostalgia loop of marketing, with previous decades being re-presented to us, with ‘greatest hits’ compilations and what not, which should be marketed, or presented, as form of history, are instead presented to us as a rebranded part of our present. In the past - in the 20th Century, the future was something that people envisioned, and planed for. They tried to guide the course of the stream. Today, for a variety of reasons beyond what I’ve already described, the future has been lost. The older generation - our establishment - have failed in the imagination of the future. Even the latest Star Trek show has fallen into re-using plots from the past franchises, and has recently been canceled. Why this generation has failed to lead, to imagine, is only because of the industry of management. John Ralston Saul is my intellectual hero because he really nailed this in the 1990s - how our society had overproduced managers, whose job it is to manage, not imagine. I also can’t help but think that this generation failed because they were blindsided by digitization. In the early 1990s, fax machines and interactive television were seen to be the wave of the future, and bam, along comes the World Wide Web and eBay, Amazon, and Google.

My recent Goodreads selections, documents from the future, show me that imagining the future hasn’t gone away. It’s only been underreported, underrepresented, because people who grew up with computers and watching science-fiction, and thinking about things in ways that reflect our experience of the late 20th Century, aren’t yet part of the establishment. Debates in this country on green-energy and gay marriage, seem pointless to us because we’ve been to the mountaintop and seen the promised land. The sci-fi of the 1980s - the last real decade of imagination - inspired us to what our world might be like as 21st Century adults. It was a world of liberal values, inclusiveness, and one that alternated between a violent dystopia and a technological utopia. In 2005 we’ve gotten both.

The dreams for the future that got us this far are now out of gas. We’ve become self-referential. Brad Pitt playing himself is part of what this decade is about, but this was already present fifty years ago, when Richard Sherman’s character in 1955’s The Seven Year Itch referred to ‘the blond in the kitchen’ as maybe being Marilyn Monroe. Seeing that movie the other night was an example of the more things change… since our lives today are still about ‘kids today’ and television, and stress, counting calories, and summer’s being too hot. What has changed is the place of women in society, no longer so domesticated to be sent off to Maine for the holidays. Thank goodness for that. That movie is not as delightful as it once was because it isn’t fair to women. Hence, the more they stay the same, the more things change.

My own project came from a desire for context. To sort-of understand my place in current events - a chance to reproduce some of my favorite scenes in biopics, where a character has a radio on or the news or whatever, contextualizing the story in history. I often felt like my life had become cinematic in that way standing next to newspaper boxes in the month immediately after September 2001. I also wanted to play with the idea that we get it wrong whenever we make these biopics, because as a re-creation of the past, liberties are taken. So I wanted to make something that used the stereotypes of our time to engage in a simulacra, stuff like have the actor playing me wearing Tommy Hilfiger stuff even though I refuse to buy anything that’s Tommy. Trying to represent how this time might be envisioned by the future by using it’s most extreme examples. I mean, a film like Pollock that was set in the 1950s, had a very different use of time-period objects than did The Seven Year Itch which was actually made during that decade.

I was also inspired by the type of delightful mindbender like Adaptation where Charlie Kauffman wrote himself into the story. But I guess a reason I didn’t really pursue it was, A) I didn’t get the grant, and B) I have a hard enough time living as I am without trying to step outside of myself to turn myself into a character … and biopics always centre around ‘the great love story’ and there hasn’t been one for me yet, so such a project is premature. Nor have there been really dramatic things to ‘excerpt’ for Mr. Rose in the 22nd Century.

Here are today’s headlines:

Christo’s ‘Gates’ draw more than 1M to Central Park

NEW YORK - In just four days, more than one million people have visited New York’s Central Park to see The Gates, the latest monumental outdoor installation by artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

http://www.cbc.ca/story/arts/national/2005/02/16/Arts/gatesvisitors050216.html

This has gotta be the stupidest newstory I’ve ever seen. It’s a fucking park. I read last week that 1 million people go to Central Park every week regardless.

Please please please CBC, get your arts coverage act together. Or, let the bloggers do your work for you.

PS: Can I have a job?
PPS: I’m not the only one who thinks so

Read this

If you’re up for spending 15 bucks to hob-knob with …. well, I won’t say it, might get in trouble. Let’s try again, if you’re willing to spend 15 bucks, to get your first glass of beer free at the Steamwhistle brewery tomorrow night, you’ll be saving not only 5 bucks or so, but you’ll also be able to watch the 2nd Annual Steamwhistle Art Awards, which were renamed the Untitled Art Awards and yay! a chance for the art community to pat-itself on the back again. Or maybe I’m just bitter because I wasn’t nominated.

“Award Show: Mechanism by which the members of a given profession attempt to give themselves the attributes of the pre-modern ruling classes - the military, aristocracy and priesthood - by assigning various orders, decorations, and medals to each other.

These shows are a superficial expression of corporatism. As with the pre-modern classes, their awards related principally to relationships within the profession. Each time the words, “I want to thank” are used by someone being decorated, they indicate a relationship based on power. The awards have little to do with that corporation’s relationship to the outside world - what you might call the public - or for that matter with quality.”

-John Ralston Saul, The Doubter’s Companion (1994)

In an interview with the Torontoist, Julia Dault, Gary Michael Dault’s daughter, says she’s never heard of Jessica Wyman, who she’s up against along with her father for best art writing. I used to work with Jessica Wyman on the board of YYZ, and I just think it’s a shame that someone nominated for art writing is unfamiliar with her work. I think it says a lot about how the art scene here is fragmented into genre interest groups.

Let’s be fair, Julia’s never heard of me either, nor have I really heard of her. She writes for the Post, which I don’t read, mostly because their online archives are moneywalled and I’m not about to buy it everyday, in addition to their editorial slant (although I hear things are changing).

Of her dad, Gary Michael, who writes for the Globe (which I do read everyday), I can say, “Some art critic, he never writes a bad review,” except for the one he wrote at the end of 2001. I know that GMD avoids shows he doesn’t like … that’s his idea of furthering art criticism and the discourse of art in this city. Not that I’ve proven myself much better, but at least Sarah Milroy calls it like she sees it, and she hasn’t been nominated.

Art writing is beset by the problem of worth: if you’re going to write about a show, you’re essentially advertising that show, so folk like the Daults are answering the worthiness of their column space by saying, ‘this is worth your time’. There’s no point wasting words on shows that aren’t worth seeing, because they can find other shows to advertise. I know myself, as someone who writes about art, that’s partially a motivation. But, there’s also answering the question of, ‘is it really worth my time? They’ve programmed such and such in this prestigious gallery/institution, should I go see it?’ and so we turn to these pages to find out. Sarah Milroy is the best at this, answering the question of whether or not the institutions are best serving the public.

In terms of catalogue writing, they’ve been paid to think up Derridian/Foucaltian/Lacanian/insertdeadfrenchwriterhere-ian things to say, so they’re basically prostitutes. I’m not so much a moralist to think prostitution is so wrong, but I do think that it is woefully inauthentic and thus not as valuable as the real deal (not to mention the whole exploitation thing, which really raises my ethical ire). Sex is so much more worth it when it’s based on real lust or love, but doesn’t follow through with its promises when it’s nothing more than a trick (not that I have experience with prostitution, that’s just what I imagine it’d be like, and why I’d never bother with it) . The same is true for sophistication - when writing about art that is based entirely on payment, and not on the desire to share what’s great about something, you aren’t helping the artist, nor are you establishing rock-solid credibility for yourself. We sophisticates end up feeling privileged to show off our book-learning rather than feel exploited. But, I have to say that’s an extreme example. Unlike the sex-industry, exploitation doesn’t really factor in, since, as a power relationship, it’s the sophisticates who are holding the cards. It’s much more of a symbiotic mutual back-scratching. ‘I’ll write for your catalogue because I like your work and you’ll pay me, so you get to seem like you’re a relevant artist and I keep some cash for the bank account’. As far as prostitution goes, it reminds most of the porn industry, where sex-maniacs get paid for their appetites. The “best art writing” in this case, most likely, represents the ‘best’ sycophantry.

Looking over the shortlist, I have to say that there are worthy nominees. Honestly, I am a little jealous that I’m not amoung them, but that’s a whole different story. The temptation is that winning one of these awards will make these artists seem a bit more prestigious, but what’s really wrong here, is that all award shows ultimately create false hierarchies. It is an honour just to be nominated, but beyond that, its becomes a popularity contest, which I hated in highschool and I hate even more as an adult. But I also question whether being nominated at all is so great - it just reveals the biases of the scene. Those who weren’t nominated, what does it say about their work? Just because art-writers don’t write about it doesn’t mean it’s bad, it only means that they probably haven’t been to the shows, or aren’t able to fit it into the last year’s fashions.

Art awards like this are merely props to support a status quo, an attempt to create a monolithic cultural identity, which is unwise, especially in a city as diverse as Toronto. It’s also unwise since monolithic cultural identities are games that Empires play, empires like USA and it’s Greek tutors, the Brits. It doesn’t fit Canada at all, and seems like another example of the Canadian streak of insecure provincialism.

I do appreciate Steamwhistle for trying this, I mean, I appreciate that they do care enough about Toronto’s art to bring this pizzazz to the scene. I figure the artists and others nominated appreciate the attention. But really, I drank Steamwhistle without variation for a year and half, and while at first I thought it tasted awful, by the end it had grown on me, but it did leave me with the worst hangovers. Getting drunk on Steamwhistle is not an experience I recommend. It does nasty things to my chemistry, that’s all I can say. They’ve made lots of money selling bad beer to the city and to the artists around town (as when they first started out they promotionally monopolized the gallery-opening market) and now they want to give something back. That’s more than we ever get from lots and lots of companies, so I think this is worthy of commendation. Give them an award for caring.

The prospect of an awards show with nothing but their strange brew in their cavernous space has little appeal for me. So thanks Steamwhistle, but no thanks. I don’t think you’re doing anyone any favors really. In fact, you’re doing nothing but fostering bitterness amongst the art community.

Saul, writing in 1994, with the Grammy’s and the Oscars, with the Genie and Junos as our Canadian knock-offs (not to the mention the East Coast Music Awards, keeping the Maritimes perpetually stereotyped) as the most relevant examples, we can now throw in the local Toronto art scene’s attempt to codify the who’s-kissing-who’s ass-power relationships, which, as he said, have nothing to do with the public. Is art, in Toronto and elsewhere, for a public, for people who walk in to galleries without having gone to art school, or is it only for those of us who have gone to art school? Award shows are bad ideas for any genre. For an arts scene which is already painfully insular, an orgy of self-congratulation does no one any good. The ‘best of” that Now Magazine prints - which is mailed in by readers - has way more legitimacy for me.

Last night, The Daily Show did one of their pseudo-reports on Christo’s The Gates, a transcription of which is below:

Stewart: Wow, what an exciting 16 days here in New York, with more I’m joined by Daily Show Senior Conceptual Art Correspondent Stephen Colbert, live in Central Park. Stephen, thank you so much for joining us.
Stephen: Yes Jon.
Stewart: It’s clearly dusk there in Central Park. Stephen, whatya think?
Stephen: Simply put, The Gates is a triumph Jon, an artistic milestone that may finally put New York on the cultural map. I don’t want to get ahead of myself here Jon, but I think this may do for the Big Apple what The West Wing has done for Washington DC, or what the band Asia did for that continent.
Stewart: Stephen, I have to say, and again, you know, I can’t help but wonder, what does all this mean?
Stephen: [begins stroking goatee silently]
Stewart: uh, Stephen…Stephen
Stephen: Hold on Jon, that’s a five stroker [continues stroking goatee silently, to the audience's laughter]. Jon, The Gates is a triumph of contemporary installation art. Each Gate redefining its section of the park as not a public place for private reflection, but a private place for public reflection, juxtaposed with the barrenness of the mid-winter, The Gates posits a chromatic orgy, this riot of colour achieves a rare re-defamilrazation with the nature of place-time, the whatness of our whereness. N0 longer framed …. I’m sorry I’ve run out of crap. [audience applauds]
Stewart: As our conceptual art critic, is this great art?
Stephen: Yes Jon, because like all great art it challenges what we thought we knew about the world. For instance, I used to think 21 million dollars could be used to achieve something noble, like, I don’t know, build a hospital wing. But The Gates has forced me to recontextualize my notion of what 21 million dollars can be used for, in this case, redecorating a bike path.
Stewart: So, you believe that shrouding these walkways in these orange curtains will somehow change our lives in New York?
Stephen: Oh, it’s happening already Jon. Just today I saw an installation artist take a sandwich and … and wrap it in a paper like substance, almost waxy in texture, and he kept wrapping it, and I’m not doing it justice here, he kept wrapping until he visually achieved ‘not-sandwich’, then, this is the genius part Jon, at the last minute he cut it in two, in a final act of ‘re-sandwichment’.
Stewart: So … so you had lunch at a deli?
Stephen: Ok, fine, I was at “a deli”. Ordering “lunch”. That’s how you need to think of it. “Jon”.

——–

Update (7 March): a reader as submited this link to the clip on the Comedy Central website. Thank you anonymous.

Notes about Istvan Kantor:

* His working name is Monty Cantsin.
* He won the Governor General’s award and the media tried to spark a national outrage but no one cared.
* He was arrested in Berlin last autumn for throwing blood on a statue, but that’s been his modus operandi for 20 years, and no one in Canada cared.
* Blood is his favorite medium; he likes dumping jars of pig’s blood over his head.
* His exhibition on now at AGYU is better than you’d expect, and it helps if you understand 1980s nihilism.
* He’s actually a really sweet guy, the father of three children, and they haven’t been taken away by child services, so that’s saying something.
* He’s romanticizes revolution, yet a performance I saw of his was a pointed critique of revolution.
* I’m under the impression that he could only be this successful in Canada, which I appreciate.

So, you go to the AGYU, and you have one room that has a remarkable installation made up of filling cabinets, with three videos projected against the wall. The pace of the video’s looping effect is determined by the distance that drawers are pulled from the three filling cabinets before the wall they’re projected onto. There’s a slide, a tent, with another monitor and another video …. in the backroom, there’s a full-length video featuring the pseudo-orgy and the pigs blood and Kantor’s usual. Now, I think because I was a fan of Nine Inch Nails during its run during the 90s some of my first thoughts seeing this show was that this show is 10 years out of date … ten years ago, Kantor would be screening calls from Trent Reznor, cause he’d want Kantor to direct his next video.

I also had the thought that a gallery wasn’t really the proper venue for these films - maybe they should be screened at Roy Thompson Hall or something, because they are simply industrial music videos. I think that’s why I found the show outstanding really - so brash, so loud, and yet rhythmic enough that it doesn’t give you a headache or is a painful experience. I’ve seen lots of videos where looped editing and quick cuts can make you a bored and nauseous, but Kantor clearly knows what he’s doing - he knows how to cut it so that it comes across visually as a beat, as a rhythm. The effect is entrancing …and I spent more time watching the video in the back room than I would have usually. Of course, that means I had to read the nonsensical bombastic sentences - I doubt Kantor even takes them seriously, they seem to be just a bunch of techno-sounding words strung together to sound magnificent. There’s lots of scrolling text in both this video and the one on the monitor in the army tent … but trust me, you don’t have to take it seriously. Don’t judge Kantor as a writer.

Ok, so that’s the good stuff I wanted to write about the show. And now, for the dirt … or the dried pig’s blood. Frankly, it’s pretty revolting, and it’s a testimony for our tolerance as artists in the community, and as Canadians with our embedded relativism and appreciation for our cultural diversity that we put up with it. But, what choice do we have? Censorship? That doesn’t work and is stupid to begin with. Adults have the capacity to decide for themselves. I’d hate to think there are lots of people out there who are into the blood thing, but I know for myself personally, I dismiss it because it seems essentially harmless and it’s more of a big joke than an actual psychological problem of Kantor’s.

When Kantor was arrested in November, the reporter writing for the Globe and Mail mistakenly credited him with a performance of Jubal Brown’s, who’s appreciation for brash video editing and disgusting subject matter is clearly inspired by Kantor’s example, who is old enough now to be looked up to and respected. If he were 25 I’d be like, what the fuck is this shit? I wouldn’t want to take Kantor seriously at all. I.K. has clearly earned this respect, and while the Governor General’s award had some controversy, it was also an understandable and respected decision.

He may seem overly successful because me and others write about him, but I’m writing about him because the show’s up and there’s nothing else to write about at the moment …. and that’s the story of Canadian art. I remember when I was just starting out I was told that basically, if you hang around long enough, they’ll start paying you. That is, an art career in Canada (over the past 40 years anyway) has been based on endurance rather than quality or anything else. You do something for long enough and suddenly the arbiters of taste’ll be all like, “oh, they’re great” and blah blah blah. Since art has such a high drop-out rate, you stick around long enough and you’ll get shows at the AGYU too, because it’s not like there’s a great pool of mature artists to cherry pick from.

I don’t think Kantor is great. Not yet anyway. Greatness is a loaded word that everyone is uncomfortable with. But one of the things I find wonderful about art is how these things are like islands in the stream of time, communications of human psychology from the past and the future … and by the future I mean, the Mona Lisa that Napoleon looked at in 1805 is the same we see in 2005 … from our perspective it’s a document from the past, but from Napoleon’s, it’s as if he borrowed a little bit of our time for his bedroom. That’s artistic greatness, when you have something that communicates to people in all time periods. Will Kantor be studied by students in 100 years? Maybe. I often say that if you do anything in art for more than a year, you’re part of art history, a lesson I learned from watching Antiques Roadshow. Kantor isn’t the type of artist to leave behind stuff for future Antiques Roadshows. His work isn’t anything I’d consider desirable.

He’s become part of the Canadian art establishment in spite of his antipathy against it, and he’ll be collected by museums now, since GG bestowed an honour. Kantor’s work may not speak to the audience of 2105, (at least the one I can imagine, but how the hell would I know?) but to the audience of 2005 he offers a reminder that a certain generation of men, like William Gibson, have had a romance with techno-dystopia, and a love for the bombast of revolution. Kantor’s work reminds me of the awfulness of the Johnny Mnenmoic movie, or an even better example, the Scientiological nonsense of Earth Final Conflict, in that a few leather straps and loose wires have become some kind of semiotic of technological menace and dehumanization, and yet Kantor, like the rest us, benefits from the ease of computer video editing and email. Technological dystopia is a nihilistic myth, and like all myths, it makes a good story and not much else. In Neuromancer, Gibson’s character Riveria grew up in the nuked wasteland of Bonn, which until the reunification of 1990, had been the capital of democratic West Germany. A quote from the write up on the Canada Council site:

Budapest, Hungary, 1956. At the height of the brutal Soviet repression of the Hungarian revolution, Istvan Kantor’s grandfather made him a toy gun out of scrap wood. The six-year-old future artist and neoist agitator then dashed out onto the rubble-strewn streets and pointed his toy gun at oncoming Soviet tanks. The tanks immediately menaced his family’s apartment building. According to Kantor, this was his first authentic work of art, and the tanks, the smashed carts and burned-out cars, the shattered windows and bullet - riddled buildings are the primal scene - frightening, ecstatic - from which his art emerged.

The army tent, the penchant for waving flags around, the revolutionary aesthetic of marching music … Reznor, Kantor, Gibson, they can begin to find expression in the punk of the 1980s, safety pins through earlobes and all that. David Bowie sings in Hereos that the proverbial couple kissed as though nothing could fall, with bullets shooting over their heads … but the wall did fall, and now it seems a foolish footnote in history, that for 28 years a wall divided two ideologies in a devastated city. When Communism collapsed, even I remember missing it circa 1992, because things were more certain then; and the fact that the Bush administration is made up of hawks who grew their feathers under definitive, ideological menaces, is one of the reasons our news is the bad dystopian movie that it is. It makes total sense to me that someone like Kantor would make the work that he makes. I see it almost with a patronizing attitude, a “there there old man, it’ll be ok. At least you’re not in politics.”And finally, the Gift thing: Kantor throws vials of his blood on the walls of art galleries, sometimes at works themselves. In December 2002, I saw him do this at the Power Plant during the opening of their show on the propangada art from China’s Cultural Revolution. Kantor shows up with a photographer and begins throwing the vials across the framed poster and text at the gallery’s entrance. Because everyone there knew what was going on, everyone politley stood and watched. I remember Phillip Monk (who was curator there at the time, and is now curator at the AGYU) taking snapshots with a disposable camera. There was no shock effect, and no big ruckuss, unlike this photo.

As Bruce Barber (a former prof of mine at NSCAD) tells it, these X’s seem to have begun as a desperate cry for art world attention, but are now taken seriously by thinkers of the Canadian establishment:

Since 1979 Kantor has been performing ritualistic blood actions in major galleries throughout Europe and North America, among them: The Ludwig Museum, Koln, MOMA and the Metropolitan in New York City, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and the Musee d’art Contemporain in Montreal. The artist’s modus operandi in this body of work consists of donating (gifting) his blood in the form of an X mark to a suitable museum collection. After choosing the institutional recipient for his ‘gift’, Kantor enters the gallery and splashes vials of his blood in a large X fashion on the wall, usually between two key works of art in the gallery collection. This action often results in his arrest or forced ejection from the gallery, with his return forever banned. Notwithstanding his declamation in the Neoism Manifesto (1979) that “Neoism has no Manifesto”, Kantor’s “neoist research project”, in typical avant-garde style, is accompanied by a press release, a letter of intent and/or manifesto.The artist’s “GIFT to Rauschenberg” (1991) for example, is described in a letter thus:

Dear Mr Rauschenberg,
I made (a) beautiful gift for you in the form of a blood-X, using my own dark and cold blood splashed on a white wall surrounded by your early works at the Ludwig museum, in Koln, where presently you have a powerful retrospective.Would you please leave GIFT on the wall, to be listed and signed as your own work, an additional piece to Erased de Kooning (1953) and Elemental Sculpture (1953), until it becomes meaningless and obsolete.

Revolutionary art is a gob of bloody spit in the face of art history, a kick in the arse to the art world, a tribute to the beauty of vandalism: the ultimate act of creation is, of necessity criminal.

My greatest regards,

signed,

Monty Cantsin.

Kantor, who romanticizes revolution, totally punctured the bubble that night at the Power Plant. Sure, we can look back on these revolutions in history with a yearning for heroes - the courage of punks who by their actions helped build a better world. Those of France and USA are seen to have been ‘glorious’, and those of 1989 sure seemed fun from the comfort of our livingrooms. But the reality is they were nightmarish times none of us would want to live through, and while I remember one art student at the PP that night wearing a red baret, I doubt he’d last long when the real shit (or blood) hit the fan. Kantor splashed his X, and held up a little red book for the documentary photographs, which for me, was an excellent reminder that Mao was a fucker, and that this exhibition was evidence of a terrible time, worth remembering, but not worth romanticizing.Istvan Kantor: Machinery Execution, runs until April 3rd.

PS: (Zeke’s Gallery in Montreal has posted an email exchange between Chris Hand of Zeke’s, and Murray Whyte of the Toronto Star, and they had a good discussion of Kantor’s work, which is here and which was a result of Whyte’s profile on Kantor here).