/Blog

I drafted the majority of this a couple of weeks ago, in light of the recent announcement of the funding cuts. In the interim weeks, Leah Sandals and Jennifer McMackon have done better jobs than I could have in assembling related links. Also, in the past week, it became increasingly clear that Harper will call an election within the next two weeks, making these controversial cuts and copyright bill null and void unless the Conservatives return to power with another minority or, god help us, a majority.

I live in a riding with an NDP candidate, and I will with good conscious vote to reelect her. Doubly, as a citizen of Toronto, I’m in an essentially Liberal area. For this reason, it has been said over the previous two and half years (since the last election) that the Conservatives have been screwing us over. It has also been said that Harper ideally wants to destroy the Liberal party. Do we really want to have such a petty and vindictive bunch of assholes deciding things for the other 33 million of us? Equally troubling is the fact that Harper grew up in Etobicoke, which is to say, Harper hates his home town. Well, fuck him too, and the scare-mongering flyers I’ve been receiving in my mailbox.

To Take Care of Oneself

As artists, it’s not a question that society owes us a living; to use that phrase is itself problematic - to say use the word owe, suggesting a debt or some other economic transaction.

For me, I go back to my early 20s, having gone through art school and having met and befriended people who in many ways weren’t really capable of taking care of themselves. They were deficient in life skills primarily, but also in terms of coping mechanisms. It wasn’t so much that they were losers or retarded in the legitimate sense of the word, but they were just different, round pegs for society’s square holes. Myself, I’d like to live in a society of difference/variety/heterogeneity. How we deal with the challenges presented by ‘un-normal’ people is one by which we can measure the state of our civilization. Since for me civilization is about the education we provide and acquire to remove ourselves as far as possible from the states of animals (who are fearful, ignorant and cruel), a civilized society is one reflective of communities of care and of elevated compassion: a state present even in animals but which we can nurture and encourage more of as self-aware beings.

In grade school, we had a class of ’special kids’ who were the ones in wheelchairs, or were borderline blind, or whatever. One girl in particular I remember as probably having cerebral palsy. Because of the area (rural Nova Scotia) this class might have been doubling as a day care (I’m not sure what type of education was being provided) but for the most part, adapting to the needs of these children was taken for granted as the proper thing to do. It taught me that I lived in a civilized society because these people were both cared for and not to be mocked. Through this a sense of compassion was both taught and encouraged.

In my 20s, I learned that some people weren’t able to take care of themselves. And the lesson for me was just because this is so doesn’t mean people should be poor, unemployable and underemployed, nor end up homeless. It should be possible to accept these people and make sure they have homes, enough money for food and clothing and comfortable lives. There’s no need for them to suffer just because they’re different.

Like the disabled children of my community, they should to be taken care of. As a rich society not overwhelmed by the incompetent (I’d guess they’re less than 20% of the population), it should cost peanuts to make sure these people have ok lives. Considering that the real fuck-ups who end of in jail are cared for by the state, investing in keeping the annoying from becoming homeless and moochy shouldn’t be that big of a deal.

Maybe all they need is some kind of compassionate service - a councilor or a social worker. In terms of homelessness explicitly, I’ve heard it said that many are people who would be fine if they had a stable address and a social worker to help them take their medications on time. This doesn’t seem a lot to ask. If we can provide services for those who are not able-bodied, we should also accept that some people are just born different, and that they are just not ‘able-minded’ by what are thought of as society’s norms. ¹

There is room for critique as to what constitutes the able-minded, but that is for another discussion. Meanwhile we’ve had plenty of critique of society’s norms, and while that has brought to light these considerations, they haven’t done much to encourage people toward compassion.

People who aren’t capable of fitting-in (to the extent that they can’t take care of themselves in the usually accepted way) just need accommodation and consideration. It isn’t a question of being owed, but of helping people within our community. Those who are physically and congenitally disadvantaged do not argue about being owed a living, but I think they rightfully feel entitled to being treated with respect and dignity.

So, send in the artists, with century old arguments about being owed a living and expecting support from government-funded organizations. What these arguments amount to is artists saying they’re retards who can’t take care of themselves and are essentially hopeless at basic economic management. Given that it was in art school that I began to think about this (as stated), that may be case. However, unlike the trolls commenting on the newspaper-site boards, who are happy with the cuts, I didn’t consider my fellow art-students and graduated artists as losers, but simply different. And so, I’m not very sympathetic to a line of argument that plays into ignorant prejudice among those completely uneducated and insensitive to the arts. The continued begging at government coffers, based on the idea that artists are incapable of surviving without it, seems self-harming and essentially untrue.

On the one hand, artists like to argue that they’re vital to society for all sorts of reasons, but on the other hand, they’re arguing that they’re incapable of functioning within that society. Over here, arguments about the intelligence of art and the superiority of the artist over the corporate clerk, and over there, whining about capitalist exploitation in the Third World while their dealers take 50% of the price of their work. Here a sense of entitlement to government financing, while there, artists who want to be above regulation and censorship while continuing to cash the government cheques.

In a sense, artists have become the ill character of a sitcom who doesn’t want to get better because everyone has become kind and giving toward them. In that manner they’ve degraded themselves and have invited disdain, which by the end of the episode is played for laughs. One of the values of Conservatives is personal responsibility, and the ability to take care of oneself. It thus follows that Conservative governments do not see much value in funding the arts because it’s representative of coddling adults who should be able to self-manage. By arguing that they’re retarded for so long, artists have willfully invited disdain.

Canada is a hard place to live

Sixty years ago, Roberston Davies’ Fortune, My Foe was first performed in Kingston. It contains a line I’ve seen much quoted in arguments reflecting on the development of arts funding in Canada.

Everybody says Canada is a hard country to govern, but nobody mentions that for some people it is also a hard country to live in. Still, if we all run away it will never be any better. So let the geniuses of easy virtue go southward; I know what they feel too well to blame them. But for some of us there is no choice; let Canada do what she will with us, we must stay.

Davies of course did not leave, but stayed and became part of the Canadian cultural legacy. (The internationalism of the film/television and music industries meant that we can still lay claim to those stars who now live elsewhere but who began with Canadian passports). In the years leading up to the 1967 Centenary, Canadians (reflecting a post-war, mid-20th Century modernist mindset as much as anything else) invested in developing a sense of nationalism. The result of this investment is people like John Ralston Saul and Adrienne Clarkson, the only two Canadians left in the media-scape praising Canada as a nation, both old enough to have been young adults at the Centenary, and both now at an age when they just seem like old fuddy-duddies.

The children of their generation is that of my own, kids born in the ’60s and ’70s and in terms of inherited legacies, pot smoking was far more successfully passed on then the spirit of Canadian nationalism. Planted in post-war soil Canadian Nationalism flowered for 1967, was worn in the lapel of Trudeau, then withered and died as is natural for flowers and all other living things. While ambitious and certainly worth the attempt, a government funded attempt at generating an artificial trans-continental consciousness in a place so geographically varied and multicultural is retrospectively absurd and perhaps deserving of it’s demise.

But the 1950s research into this attempt was that of the Massey Commission and the result was the Canada Council. We are told legends by elders of generous funding and ‘National Gallery Biennials’, where every couple of years the National Gallery would ‘define where Canadian art was at’. (src). This was part of the Nationalistic enculturation which produced the likes of Saul and Clarkson. By this early 21st Century, the children of those boomers are much more interested in city-state politics and thinking, founding the likes of Spacing magazine, not really giving a shit about McCleans while mocking Richard Florida even as he legitimizes them to the current crop of out-of-touch establishment.

In his 1993 introduction to a reprint of Fortune my Foe, Davies describes the genesis of the play; after World War II put a stop to touring plays by independent and occasionally American theatre companies, his university friend Arthur Sutherland established a theatre company in Kingston and invited Davies to write a ‘Canadian’ play to complement the repertoire of English and American comedies. In describing this background, Davies defines an artist as ‘a person who enlarges and illuminates the lives of others.’ In commissioning a young Roberston Davies, Sutherland, although aware of the risk…

“…wanted a play about Canada. It was risky because Canada has for a long time been thought a dull country, with dull people. But there was a time when Norway was thought dull, and Ireland was thought absurd, yet both of them brought forth plays which have been acclaimed as treasures by theatres around the world.”

Which reminds me of Norman Mailer’s claim that the economic recovery of Ireland in recent years can be traced to James Joyce. In other words, the capacity of a country to see itself reflected in a work of imagination can both be an ‘enlarging’ experience and also so inspiring to bind a community together. Davies is also claiming that the difference between being considered dull and ‘interesting’ (or cool, in the present sense) is in the nature of one’s self-imagining, and the messages that puts out. If painters of the United States had confined themselves to images of the American Gothic and considered that an accurate self-representation rather than satire, would we not think of the U.S. as dull?

After offering a synopsis of his play, Davies in the ‘93 introduction goes on to say that his task was to make the play not too didactic. Within the structure of the play Davies had a character of a puppeteer, a European immigrant, who is sponsored to give a puppet show by the producer characters of Philpott and Tapscott. As Davies explains, the European puppet master was reflective of the recent wave of European immigrants and refugees from devastated Europe, who brought with them Old World sensibilities about art and culture, and were met with a homegrown New World audience who did not share those same ideas.

“Message,” Davies wrote, “was very much on the lips of Canadians like Philpott and Tapscott, the do-gooders who took up the puppet-show, without having any understanding of its special quality or its cultural background, but who were convinced that the task of art was to teach - to offer a Message, in fact, and to offer it in terms that the stupidest listener could understand. Canada was, and still is, full of such people. They think of art of all kinds as a sort of handmaid to education; it must have a Message and it must get across. The truth is that art does not teach; it makes you feel, and any teaching that may arise from the feeling is an extra, and must not be stressed too much. In the modern world, and in Canada as much as anywhere, we are obsessed with the notion that to think is the highest achievement of mankind, but we neglect the fact that thought untouched by feeling is thin, delusive, treacherous stuff”.

Is it not the idea that the Conservatives, in government and individually, are people not touched by feeling? Is this not reflected in Jose Verner’s comments that she would like cultural funding to be efficient? Myself, I like efficiency since it’s about doing as much as possible with the least effort - in other words, ‘being lazy is good’ as they say in computer programing, for just this reason.

It is in fact sensible for the government to want to do this. But it is also the case that the government appears to show a disdain for the arts that lie partially in a complacency engendered by funding. Canadian art is rather pathetic and remains so because the infrastructure was set up within a moment of forethought and generosity, and instead of igniting both the imagination and the culture of the country, merely created institutions staffed by people who take the funding for granted and feel entitled within their institutional titles. Instead of fostering culture, they see themselves as beyond petty and quaint nationalistic concerns and instead fly off to Venice every couple of years to hob-nob with the planet’s remaining arrogant aristocrats, shaking away the dirt of the stupid ‘unwashed masses’ of this country who usually live in the neighborhoods the galleries move to. Admittedly, that’s being overly cynical and ignoring the good that many artist-run centres and other galleries do within their neighborhoods (before raising the market-value of neighboring properties by their presence) but such ‘good’ is questionable as a repetition of a colonial mindset that sees certain groups as needing help: bring them civilization and culture; capital-c Culture having replaced Jesus in a secular society.

On July 17th I had no idea that the programs in question even existed, and I’m in the culture business. Which is to say that the gang of young adults who have turned Toronto’s gallery-area Queen West West into another nightclub district probably have never heard of the programs either. Why then should I or they have cared on August 17th? When I didn’t know they existed I didn’t care, and now that I know they exist and may not for much longer I still don’t care that much. In effect, the Conservatives have potentially legislated my mid-July mindset into existence.

In as much as I’ve gotten emails repeating the contents of a new Facebook group, I have a suspicion this may be a lost cause. As evinced by their artist-statements, artists in this country are rarely capable of being eloquent enough to convince Conservatives or the rest of the population of their value. The Conservatives have upset an easily ignored minority, and inspired such comments as:

“when the government stops spending money on endeavours that provide next to no value to the Canadian people it is not pandering, it is good government. Am I the only person in the god forsaken country that remembers we have a fricking health care crisis? Sure, there is an element of pandering, and there is plenty of other funding that should be pulled but will not be, but the simple act of pulling funding from people who never should have received it is a good thing. End of story.” (from)

and

“I think that is what I was getting at. I’m all for supporting the arts but I feel that people of Mr. Lewis’s status and influence should not be receiving money from the government whether he is right or left wing. A friend of mine is an artist and she maintains most of the arts grants go to people who don’t need them. The real starving artists don’t have the influence to affect awards.” (from)

and

“The government is the one entity in the country that is least likely to make an intelligent decision on how to spend money. In fact, the only reasons to access government funding over private are laziness, a desire to be unaccountable for the funds you receive, and the knowledge that the general public sees no value in your product.

The government should contribute to the arts through tax credits alone. This can amount to a large amount of support, ensures there will be a respectable amount of accountability built into the system, and will bring the arts community closer to the community it supposedly serves.” (from)

yet, there is one considered argument:

“Fund the Olympics and not artists? Artists leave something behind for future generations; athletes… well, they’re fun to watch. Someone said independent producers such as Avi Lewis should pay to find their own distributors. Maybe. But then you should be consistent and argue against ALL government economic subsidies and incentives. Let’s stop subsidizing automakers, oil companies, the aerospace industry, etc. For the most part, the organizations and individuals affected here are either completely non-ideological (such as Tafelmusik) or engaging in economic development for Canadian businesses, which employ Canadians (such as the Hot Docs festival’s Toronto Documentary Forum, which among other things, brings foreign investment into Canadian productions). Finally, what’s lost here is that arts and culture have always been an important part of international diplomacy. The Tories are letting their ideology trump the national interest. Shame on them.” (from)

But in regards to Tafelmusik, a baroque orchestra playing on period instruments, they charge between $89 to $15 dollars a ticket. Surely they work a profit margin in there somewhere? Surely those wealthy egotists so eager to have their name immortalized for the a decades on a hospital wing (or listed in platinum lettering in the lobby of retarded new ‘expansions’ ignored by people waiting in line to pay $22 to see largely empty galleries) can find a mil or two to send the Bach to China?

[Cross-posted from Goodreads 08w35:2]

Aaron Straup Cope:

Between plane-living and the Internets we may be midway through the process of distilling every place on Earth down to one of a half-dozen archetypal city-states but until that happens trying to affect a person’s relationship to the history and geography of whatever piece of dirt they call home will continue to be a source of tension.

Eighteen city-states within a global Imperial political model = late 21st Century.

I first began hearing the city-state meme in the mid-1990s. An awarness of it, or a tendency to quote it as Aaron Cope has done, is almost a marker of a generation. John Ralston Saul and his wife are part of the last generation of Canadian nationalists, always ready to write books on Canada and to talk about what it means to be Canadian. Meanwhile, people my own age, in my own city, started Spacing magazine, which is very much of the city-state mentality.

I saw the image in the blog posting, positing the fate of one of the characters. Because we know that the story takes place at a post-apocalyptic time, and thinking this was a leaked shot from an upcoming episode, I imagined the wildflowers were those of British Columbia spring, depicting some time in the far-off post-catastrophe future. The camera would rotate about it, there’d be some slow motion fluttering of cloth, angelics and whatever.

Then I Google the file name and find this. Still, on yesterday’s walk, I thought about the wild flowers, the future, and the simplicity of the character’s supposed fate. And made the image my Desktop wallpaper.

Because of the context in which I first encountered it, the image has poetic resonance. But had I found it’s Photoshoped goodness in its original context, I wouldn’t have reason to think differently of wildflowers.

With the exception of the Tragically Hip, I have excluded Canadian musicians simply because they would exaggerate the list and because Canadian music for the most part is no more culturally specific than any other (accounting for its international success). The inclusion of the Hip here reflects their use of Canadian specific content throughout their songs. Leonard Cohen is included for his work as writer more than for his work as a musician.

This list merely tried to illustrate the groupings of artists by generation, to show the progression of cultural achievers over the last century. This illustrates that at the beginning of the 21st Century we have a legacy of artists to understand a heritage around, which wasn’t so much the case even fifty years ago. Also, any name not here is more of an oversight than a judgment (suggestions welcome).

Catharine Parr Traill 1802 - 1899
Susanna Moodie 1803 - 1885

Ozias Leduc 1864-1955

J.E.H. MacDonald 1873 - 1932 (G7)
Tom Thomson 1877-1917 (G7)

Fred Varley 1881-1969 (G7)
A.Y. Jackson 1882-1974 (G7)
Lawren Harris 1885-1970 (G7)
Arthus Lismer 1885-1969 (G7)
Frank Johnston 1888 - 1949 (G7)

Franklin Carmichael 1890 - 1945 (G7)
Harold Innis 1894-1952

Paul-Emile Borduas 1905-1960
Hugh MacLennan 1907-1990

Marshall McLuhan 1911 - 1980
Northrop Frye 1912-1991
Robertson Davies 1913-1995
George Grant 1918-1988
Pierre Trudeau 1919 - 2000

Jean-Paul Riopelle 1923-2002
Oscar Peterson 1925-2007
Margaret Laurence 1926-1987

Timothy Findley 1930 - 2002
Mordecai Richler 1931-2001
Alice Munro 1931 -
Glenn Gould 1932 - 1982
Robert Fulford 1932-
Leonard Cohen 1934 -
Garry Neil Kennedy 1935 -
Margaret Atwood 1939 -
Adrienne Clarkson 1939 -

Jorge Zontal 1944 - 1994 (General Idea)
Felix Partz 1945-1994
Jeff Wall 1946 -
AA Bronson 1946- (General Idea; Solo)
John Ralston Saul 1947 -
Rodney Graham 1949 -
David Gilmour 1949 -

George Elliott Clarke 1960 -
Douglas Coupland 1961 -
Gordon Downie 1964 - (Tragically Hip)
Paul Langlois (1964 - (Tragically Hip)
Rob Baker 1962 (Tragically Hip)
Gord Sinclair (Tragically Hip)
Johnny Fay 1966 - (Tragically Hip)
Mark Kingwell 1965-
Darren O’Donnell 1965 -

(From)

Alpha Beta Gamma

I recently decided that my current website is actually version 5.2, not 4.4. This needs some explaining.

I learned web design through books on the advice of a friend. My first book (Elizabeth Castro’s HTML 4) along with View Source cut-n-paste got me writing my first rudimentary website in 2000. It wasn’t until early 2002 (through Geocities) that I learned how to FTP. It was a proud moment when I was able for the first time to see one of my jpegs on someone else’s computer via the net.

During the summer of 2002, I built my first website. It was hosted on Geocities and later moved to Instant Coffee’s server.

Version 1

This went through a number of body-colour variations (and upper-right hand graphics) before it ended up as it remains today.

The Way-Back Machine shows me a site on the Instant Coffee server from February 2003 which I called then Version 4, meaning it was the 4th design revision I’d gone through since the above # 1, before I scrapped all this alpha-draft code later that summer.

My site, Feb 2003

When, in August 2003, I tried to apply what I’d learned in the previous year by building my first complicated site, using Youngpup.net’s ypSlideOutMenus code. This page (as was proper for the time) even had a splash page.

Version 2

In August 2004, I again worked on redesigning my site, to incorporate what I’d learned in the previous year. This site used CSS and my then basic understanding of PHP Switches and MySql.

Version 3

I left this site for two years, until August 2006, when I began working on another redesign. However, while I began the basic layout during August, I backburnered it until December, and made it public in January 2007, when I acquired my timothycomeau.com domain name and new server space (until this time, the previous websites had been sub-directories of my host. The 2002-2003 sites had been found at tim.instantcoffee.org or instantcoffee.org/timothy and then the 2004-2006 site had been at goodreads.ca/timothy). For this reason, I sometimes refer to this design as ‘the 2006 one’ or ‘the 2007 one’. I’ve pretty much decided from here on to think of it as ‘the 2006 one’ since that’s how I’ve come to consistently remember it.

Version 4

Last December I began to redesign the site, to once again update it according to my expanded know-how. Because I felt I’d simply redesigned the menu and updated the logo, I felt that it was a version of #4 (most recently 4.4) and hence, until recently, I’d considered it such. But, I’ve come to think of the present site as a different ‘2008 version’ and figured I should just consider it a #5. Since the .dot numbers come somewhat arbitrarily via whatever small improvements I make here in there, I figured it’s present state is about two modifications away from where it was at in January (when I considered 4.2) hence, version 5.2.

Version 5

Sometime within the next thirty years, the area of Yonge St incorporating Sam the Record Man, Dundas Square, up to Bloor, will be preserved in all its classless glory as a heritage district of late 20th Century.

My contribution to the book Decentre: concerning artist-run culture/a propos de centres d’artistes published by YYZ Books, and which launches tonight in Toronto.

———————–

Artist-run centres developed to exhibit what at the time was unmarketable, and in so doing became the elitist arbiters of a contemporary taste, based on a reputation for taking risks and initial support of those who went on to become the academics and international art stars (and therefore the default judges of what constitutes good art). Undoubtedly without their presence we’d be culturally poorer, yet today they have become part of an economic system of which they’re in denial.

Because artists have always depended on the patronage of the rich, the artist-run centres have become essential within the overall art system, arguably the only “dealer” that really matters to patrons. To have any sense of artistic legitimacy in Canada – the type that gets you bought by institutions – one needs to somehow be affiliated with an artist-run centre.

Today’s art institution will buy based on a trendiness they equate with aesthetic and cultural merit, and their purchase perpetuates the artist’s delusion that they matter in some grander context, even while their piece lies in a crate in storage. Had they sold to a private patron, they could at least watch as this person re-sells their work to another rich person or to an institution looking for a piece of trendy action on someone once overlooked. The seller does this to a potentially large profit, a share of which the artist won’t see.

Because artist-run centres are staffed by a relatively small network of professionals, they’ve unfortunately become nests of nepotism. How many young artists new to the system send off packages bi-annually only to watch the exhibition calendar fill up with ”curated” shows featuring artists who are friends with staff and board members? This is exacerbated by allegiances to obsolete ideas and aesthetic ideologies which result in shows of boring work weakly justified with poorly written brochure essays.

The fortunate thing is that every five years an artist-run-centre is populated by a new generation of staff, exhibiting artists, and board members. This makes them highly adaptable to changing cultural conditions, and perpetually reformable.