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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.)

San Fransisco’s Bay Stadium, 2154

Starfleet Headquarters, San Fransisco, 2154

The signing of the Federation Charter, 2161

The capital city of ShiKhar, planet Vulcan

The buildings of ShiKahr

The capital city of Romulus

The capital city of Romulus, showing the Senate chamber

The Romulan Senate Chamber

The Millenium Gate, from Voyager episode, 11:59

Paolo Soleri’s Hyperbuilding

Le Corbusier’s proposed revision of Paris

(images mostly from Enterprise Screencaps; others via Google and my archives)

Vulcan Monumentalism

Vulcan Monumentalism, The Fire Plains

Vulcan Monumentalism, The Fire Plains (scale)

(images mostly from Enterprise Screencaps; episode: Home, 2004)

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.)

Shows on at Mercer Union

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

The first letter from Edmonton has been received and posted:

goodreads.ca/edmonton

Last night I found some French blogs, via the Paris newspaper, Liberation. Here are three entries by Pierre Haski, Liberation’s Beijing correspondent, which I translated to share.March 11
We’re done for

In the 1960s, the Club of Rome, composed of great spirits, considered a ‘zero development’ report because the planet didn’t have enough energy resource to sustain that era’s development. Four decades later, we’re already there, and another Institute is warning of the same thing, this time regarding China.

The Earth Policy Institute, based in Washington, just went through the same classic intellectual exercise: if the Chinese maintain the same rate of development, and they’d equal that of the Americans in 2031, and if they began consuming at the same rate as the Americans, what would happen? The spectacular result: there would be 1.1 billion cars in China (versus the 795 million in the world today), the Chinese would consume more gasoline/oil that the whole world today produces, they’d eat 4/5ths of the world’s production of meat, 2/3rds of the grains, and you’d need to double the world’s production of paper (thus cutting down more forests).

You might say that’s an absurd scenario, except that we see today the few million Chinese who already effectively live the ‘American lifestyle’, that is, they have one or two cars, and are active participants in a consumerist society, as identical as that we know in “the West”. The American Dream as assuredly entered the minds of the Chinese.

The real problem of this study is the conclusion: it underlines that the Western model cannot be applied to China, simply because that planet doesn’t have enough resources (especially if India applies it as well!). And it concludes that we need to invent other things. But what? And especially, why not equally reconsider the American lifestyle, or that of industrial countries in general.

If the model is a failure for the whole world, how do you tell the Chinese: you can’t have cars, the ‘clim’ or low coast companies to develop the tourist industry (to refer to a recent posting), and are forbidden to pollute? Especially when the Americans refuse to sign the Kyoto Accord … but that’s another debate.

Therefore, is this 2005 report is as absurd as that of the Club of Rome was in its time? Or is China going to drive us into the wall? I await your response this weekend of a beautiful blue sky, but very cold in this Beijing end of winter.

March 12
Cars Again
Following-up on the commentaries by Jia and Bern on ‘We’re Done For’, car licence plates are sold by auction in Shanghai. The municipality has found a hyper-elitist was of limiting to a few million the numbers of new cars one can have in a city that has already reached it’s saturation point. They can reach exorbitant prices: last year averaging around 40,000 yuans (around 4000 euros), which is almost the price of a small car itself. This explains why there are no ’small cars’ in Shanghai (the QQ Chinese brand, that you see a lot of in Beijing, sells for 50,000 yuans, less than 5000 euros). Paradoxically, this system was judged to be illegal by a Chinese administrative tribunal, but Shanghai hasn’t hear of this decision and continues to sell it’s licence plates by auction (which is nothing compared to Hong Kong, which has used this system for a long time, where record prices have been reached like 7.1 million HK dollars, a little less than 600,000 euros for the plate number 12, which sold last month. But it’s true that the earnings of those in Hong Kong is superior to those of France, and that the extravagance of the tycoons is without limit…)

Elsewhere, there are no limits, like in Beijing, where the number of cars went up last year at the rate of about 1000 a day (500,000 more in two years!) There’s already 2.3 million cars and the municipality estimates that there’ll be 3.5 million cars in Beijing in 2008, thus there’s already the feeling that the point of saturation has already been reached.

The government has invested too much into the auto industry to pull back, and according to it’s own predictions, (not those of the Americans this time), there’ll be 140 vehicles on Chinese roads in 2020, that is 7 times more than 2004. Even if China applies the same environmental standards as Europe for locally built cars, and if it encouraged research into electric card (Dassault is ready to pounce!) the development model followed is still that of ‘The American Dream’. All you have to see is how Beijing encouraged the sale of cars that are faster then public transit, the network of which is still quite limited (it’ll be better, they say, in 2008, the new frontier of the ‘harmonious society’ of the Chinese).

Photo: At this rate, as the bicycle is already marginalized in Shanghai, it has no better use than to be used for works of art, like this one of Ai Weiwei, shown at Factory 798 in Beijing. Chinese experts - translate the Maoist slogan on the wall….)

March 20
Ephemeral art

Art is in galleries, art is in the street. This afternoon, going to an opening at the Courtyard Gallery, one of the better ones in Beijing, situation two feet from the Forbidden City, I saw an old man who was painting … the ground. Armed with an enormous paintbrush and a bucket of water, he was doing caligraphy on a esplanade, which was evaporating as he was working. He was working for his own pleasure, and for those who were passing, who stopped to watch on this springtime Sunday afternoon. The experts would call this ephemeral art.

Here, it is a part of life, an art of living that fades.

At the Courtyard Gallery, another ambience. The one we find in Paris, New York, or Tokyo. Cao Fei, a young artist from Canton, presented large format photographs, with exagerated colours, of young Chinese dressed as mythological characters in the middle of the urban setting of contemporary China. Accompanied by a whacky video of the same scenes, with a subdued audio chanel. A work that was seductive and catchy. But here, we’re no longer in the world of ephemeral art, we’re in the world of the fashionable and expensive contemporary globalised art.

These two forms were happening at the same time 200 metres from each other. But these two universes are light years apart.

That’s Beijing in 2005.

Somebody I know wrote me, and said this amongst other private things:

I’ve been reading your words about Canada Council on Goodreads. Every generation of emerging artists, since the mid 80’s and rise of Jesse Helms-like sentiments towards the arts, have seen a decline in opportunities and support and a rise in competition. As well we see a system stretching to help more senior artists enjoy a level of support to match their accomplishments and stages in their careers. I know that I’ve gone to conferences and see a lot of late 40 somethings and 20 somethings, but there is a definite void in the 30-40 range. I think that a lot of people from the generation of initial public cutbacks were actually forced to stop producing and participating and went on to something else outside the art world. Its a sad lesson. And I agree that the only real solution is to lobby for more money for the Canada Council.

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

dorismccarthy.com

(image courtesy of Wynick/Tuck’s website)